Well hey and welcome back to Heimler’s History, and welcome to Unit 8 of our AP World History curriculum. So Unit 8 is all about the Cold War and the massive movement for decolonization that occurred throughout the world in the twentieth century. Now the Cold War was an epic standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union that lasted for about forty years. Decolonization, on the other hand, was the process by which empires were broken up and former colonies gained their independence. And these two things were seemingly unrelated on the surface of things, but if you peel back the lid and look down inside that puppy, you’re gonna see there’s all sorts of intertwining causes and relationships. So in this video all we’re going to do is just set the stage for both of those events. And if you’re ready to get your brain cows milked, I sure am, let’s get to it. So let’s start with some context. So when World War II was rapidly drawing to a close, representatives from what was called the Big Three, which is to say the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, met on several occasions in order to figure out how to order the world after the war. And we’re going to focus our attention on two of those meetings. First, we’re going to look at the Yalta Conference, which occurred early in 1944. And there President Franklin Roosevelt, pressed hard for free elections in Eastern Europe after the war was over. But Stalin, on the other hand, who was representing the Soviet Union, wanted Eastern Europe under Soviet influence so that it could act as like a buffer zone between him and Europe. And you can kind of understand Stalin’s desire on this. He done had some bad luck with European despots trying to invade Russia. I mean you had Hitler, you had Napoleon. And at the prospect of another invasion from Europe, Stalin was all like, “nyet.” And so these two powers clashed big time over that disagreement. But at the end of the day, Roosevelt realized he could really do nothing to stop Stalin on this account. I mean what was he going to do, start another war with Russia in order to keep him from occupying the Eastern European countries that he wanted to have free elections in? Yeah, no. And so at the Yalta Conference Stalin gave vague assurances that free elections would occur in Eastern Europe after the war. Okay the second meeting between these three we need to look at is the Potsdam Conference in July of 1945. This was also a meeting of the Big Three, but you should know, by this point, President Roosevelt had died and now Harry Truman, the new President, had come to represent the United States. And Truman, like Roosevelt, insisted on free elections in Eastern Europe. But as it turned out Stalin’s troops had already occupied much of those Eastern European countries, and so he flatly refused Truman’s demands. And it was this act that deepened an already growing rift between these two powers. Now once World War II was over it was the United States and the Soviet Union who emerged as the two great superpowers in the world. And my question is, why those two nations? Well the United States had become a superpower because they had been singularly fortunate during World War II. What I mean is, none of the fighting had actually taken place in the United States, with the exception of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But the mainland of the United States, including its industry and it’s infrastructure, all of that remained untouched by the war. And while all the European nations were licking their wounds and picking up the rubble from all their broken down cities, Big Daddy America stood up, got his wallet out and offered $12 billion in aid for the rebuilding of European cities. This was called the Marshall Plan, but we’re going to get to that in the next video. But if that’s the reason why the United States emerged as a superpower, it surely can’t be the same reason that the Soviet Union did. The Russians lost something like 15-20 million people and sustained buttloads of damage from all the Nazi invading. So how was it the Soviet Union became a superpower in order to rival the United States? Because even with such losses, the Soviet Union was so large that they had population to spare essentially. Not only that, but for years Stalin had been aggressively building up the industrial capacity of the Soviet. Not to mention, that every other European nation that might have taken a top stop, was broke and exhausted from the war. So that’s why it was the Americans and the Soviets facing off on the world’s stage and not anybody else. And I’ve already mentioned the cracks that started emerging between these two powers before the end of the war. But there was yet another slight dealt by the Americans to the Russians at the very end of the war, and that was the dropping of the atomic bomb. When the Americans deployed this weapon, it was the first the Soviets had heard of it, which was a smack in the mustache for Stalin. How could the Americans have had such devastating technology and not tell their allies? And as we’ll see in the next video, it was precisely that explosive technology that would define the contention between these two powers for the next forty years. And to go ahead and name it, that forty year period of tension was called the Cold War. Now by definition a cold war is a state of hostility between two countries which does not result in open warfare. This kind of warfare was largely carried out through threats, and propaganda, and an arms race. Alright, so that’s enough for setting the stage for the Cold War and we’ll pick up in other videos. But for now let’s turn our attention to setting the stage for decolonization. By the start of World War I the process of empire building and colonization had reached its peak. Imperial states held colonies all over the dang world. And if you’ll recall, colonial soldiers fought in World War I on behalf of their parent countries with the hope that such sacrifice would earn them the right to become free and independent nations. In fact, after World War I was over, American president Woodrow Wilson was emphatic about allowing nations the right to self-determination, which is to say, that they should have the right to choose their own form of government. But that movement for self-determination did not occur in the period between the two World Wars. And so, once World War II springs up, the colonial soldiers came yet again to fight for their parent countries. But fighting the second world war fundamentally altered the relationship between colonies and their parent countries. You see, as the war ended and these imperial nations were out of cash and burying their dead, it was very hard for them to imagine sending troops down to all of these colonies to repress all of these calls for independence. And so colonies from all over the world began garnering support from the U.S. and the Soviet Union in order to become free of their colonial structures. And whenever it was in the interest of these two powers to intervene in these colonial disputes, they did. And thus began the wave of decolonization after World War II. Alright, I’d say that stage is set sufficiently for the Cold War and decolonization. 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