The Consequences of World War II

Having faced ruinous losses in Russia and a massive allied bombing campaign at home, Germany's Thousand-Year Reich lay in ruins by May 1945. By August, Japan was devastated as well, as the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed Japan’s receding hope of carrying on its war of conquest.

The Allied victory over the Axis redistributed power and reordered borders, resulting in a new geopolitical terrain. The Soviet Union absorbed nearly 600,000 square meters of territory from the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and from Finland, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania — recovering what Russia had lost in the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk after World War I. Poland, a victim of Soviet expansionism, was compensated with land taken from Germany. Germany itself was divided into occupation zones that eventually provided the basis for its partition into East and West Germany. Finally, pro-Soviet regimes assumed power throughout Eastern Europe.In the Far East, the Soviet Union took the four Kurile Islands — or the "Northern Territories," as Japan calls them — from Japan; and Korea was divided into Soviet and U.S. occupation zones at the thirty-eighth parallel.

The end of World War II also generated uncertainty and mistrust. The agreements governing goals, strategy, and obligations that had guided the Allied effort began to erode even as victory neared. Victory only magnified the great powers’ growing distrust of one anothers' intentions in an environment of ill-defined borders, altered allegiances, power vacuums, and economic ruin.

The "Big Three" leaders — Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin — met at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 to design a new world order, but the vague compromises they reached concealed the differences percolating below the surface. Following Roosevelt's death in April and Germany's unconditional surrender in May, the Big Three (with the United States now represented by Harry Truman) met again at Potsdam in July 1945. The meeting ended without agreement, and the facade of Allied unity began to fade.

World War II, like previous great-power wars, paved the way for a new global system. The Allies' plans for a new postwar structure of peace had begun even as the war raged and as early as 1943 the Four Power Declaration advanced principles for allied collaboration in "the period following the end of hostilities." The product of the Allies' determination to create a new international organization to manage the postwar international order – the United Nations – was conceived in this and other wartime agreements. Consistent with the expectation that the great powers would cooperate to manage world affairs, China was promised a seat on the United Nations Security Council along with France and the Big Three. The purpose was to guarantee that all of the dominant states would share responsibility for keeping the global peace.

After the war, the United States and the Soviet Union were left standing tall, and their unrivaled power meant that they mattered more than all others, with the capacity to impose their will. The other major-power victors (especially Great Britain) had exhausted themselves and slid from the apex of the world-power hierarchy. The vanquished, Germany and Japan, also fell from the ranks of the great powers. Germany was partitioned into four occupation zones, which the victorious powers later used as the basis for creating the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Japan, having been devastated by atomic bombs and then occupied by the United States, was also removed from the game of great-power politics. Thus, as the French political sociologisl Alexis de Tocqueville had foreseen in 1835, the Americans and Russians now held in their hands the destinies of half of mankind. In comparison, all other states were dwarfs. In what eventually became known as the Cold War, Washington and Moscow used the fledgling United Nations not to keep the peace, but to pursue their competition with each other. As the most recent great-power war of the twentieth century, the Cold War still casts its shadow over the post-Cold War geostrategic landscape.

The Cold war

As World War II drew to a close in 1945, it became increasingly clear that a new era of international politics was dawning. Unparalleled in scope and unprecedented in destructiveness, the second great war of the twentieth century not only had brought about a system dominated by two superstates, the United States and the Soviet Union; it had also hastened the disintegration of the great colonial empires assembled by imperialist states in previous centuries, thereby emancipating many peoples from foreign rule. The emergent international system, unlike earlier ones, featured a distribution of power consisting of many sovereign states outside the European core area that were dominated by the two most powerful. In addition, the advent of nuclear weapons radically changed the role that threats of warfare would play in world politics. Out of these circumstances grew the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for hegemonic leadership.