World War 2 and the Superpower Nation :: essays research papers

The second base World War gave rise to a multitude of new ideas which changed the course of modern society, the idea which has had the greatest impact on the human beings as a whole is the concept of the superpower nation. To be a superpower, a nation needs to have a strong economy, an overpowering military, enormous international political power, and related to this, a strong national ideology. It was this war (WWII), and its results that spawned the formation of superpowers and lead them to experience such a preponderance of power. To understand how the Second World War impacted birth of superpowers it is important to first understand and examine the causes of the war. The United States gained its strength in world affairs from its status as an economic power and as a heavily industrialized nation. In the years preceding the war and the Great Depression, America was the worlds largest producer and arguably had the strongest and to the highest degree stable economy. In the USSR at the same time, Stalin was implementing his five year plans to modernize the Soviet economy. From these situations, similar foreign policies resulted from widely divergent origins. Roosevelts isolationism emerged from the wide and prevalent domestic appetency to remain neutral in any international conflicts. It was widely believed that America entered the First World War simply in order to save its industrys capitalist investments in Europe. Whether this is the case or not, Roosevelt was forced to work with an inherently isolationist Congress, and expanding its horizons after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He signed the Neutrality incite of 1935, making it illegal for the United States to ship arms to the belligerent governments of any conflict. The act also stated that belligerent nations could buy only non-armaments from the US, and even these were only to be bought with cash. In contrast, Stalin was by necessity interested in European affairs, but only to the point o f concern to the USSR. Russian foreign policy was essentially Leninist in its concern to keep the USSR out of war. Stalin wanted to consolidate Communist power and modernize the countrys industry. The Soviet Union was committed to collective action for peace, as long as that commitment did not mean that the Soviet Union would take a brunt of a Nazi attack as a result. Examples of this drive out be seen in the Soviet Unions attempts to achieve a mutual assistance treaty with Britain and France.