Cold War (1947–1948)

[1] The list of world leaders in these years is as follows: Clement Attlee (UK); Harry Truman (US); Vincent Auriol (France); Joseph Stalin (USSR); Chiang Kai-shek (Allied China).Initially Stalin directed systems in the Eastern Bloc countries that rejected Western institutional characteristics of market economies, democratic governance (dubbed "bourgeois democracy" in Soviet parlance) and the rule of law subduing discretional intervention by the state.[18] In January 1947 Truman appointed General George Marshall as Secretary of State, and enacted JCS 1779, which decreed that an orderly and prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of "a stable and productive Germany."[19] The directive comported with the view of General Lucius D. Clay and the Joint Chiefs of Staff over growing communist influence in Germany, as well as of the failure of the rest of the European economy to recover without the German industrial base on which it previously had been dependent.Notified that British aid to Greece and Turkey would end in less than six weeks, and already hostile towards and suspicious of Soviet intentions, because of their reluctance to withdraw from Iran, the Truman administration decided that additional action was necessary.Nevertheless, he subsequently announced in a speech delivered on 5 June 1947[21] a comprehensive program of American assistance to all European countries wanting to participate, including the Soviet Union and its satellites, called the Marshall Plan.[20] Fearing American political, cultural and economic penetration, Stalin eventually forbade Soviet Eastern bloc countries of the newly formed Cominform from accepting Marshall Plan aid.[20] In Czechoslovakia, that required a Soviet-backed Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948,[22] the brutality of which shocked Western powers more than any event so far and set in a motion a brief scare that war would occur and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress.[26] It argues that "Western powers" aided Nazi rearmament and aggression, including that American bankers and industrialists provided capital for the growth of German war industries, while deliberately encouraging Hitler to expand eastward.In September 1946, disagreement arose regarding the distribution of coal for industry in the four occupation zones and the Soviet representative in the council withdrew his support of the plan agreed upon by the governments of the United States, Britain and France.