Building a New World
How did the conferences at Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta attempt to shape the postwar world?
Before the war ended, President Roosevelt had wanted to ensure that war would never again engulf the world. He believed that a new international political organization could prevent another world war.
Creating the United Nations
In 1944, at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C., delegates from 39 countries met to discuss the new organization, which was to be called the United Nations (UN). The delegates at the conference agreed that the UN would have a General Assembly, in which every member nation in the world would have one vote. The UN would also have a Security Council with 11 members. Five countries would …show more content…
The Soviets refused to make stronger commitments to uphold the Declaration of Liberated Europe.
The presence of the Soviet army in Eastern Europe ensured that pro-Soviet Communist governments would eventually be established in the nations of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. The Communist countries of Eastern Europe came to be called satellite nations because they were controlled by the Soviets, as satellites are tied by gravity to the planets they orbit. Although not under direct Soviet control, these nations had to remain Communist and friendly to the Soviet Union. They also had to follow policies that the Soviets approved.
After watching the Communist takeover in Eastern Europe, the former British prime minister Winston Churchill coined a phrase to describe what had happened. On March 5, 1946, in a speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill referred to an “iron curtain” falling across Eastern Europe. The press picked up the term, and for the next 43 years, it described the Communist nations of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. With the Iron Curtain separating Eastern Europe from the West, the World War II era had come to an end. The Cold War was about to