291. Europe's Crossroads – From Victory to New World Order
40:45 Share

This Father's Day, help Dad be all he can be with a gift from the Home Depot. Because he's not just Dad, he's the handyman of the house, the plumber in a pinch, and the emergency mechanic. Upgrade his gear this Father's Day with the Husky Mechanics 270-piece tool set from the Home Depot. Now on special buy for $119, a $695 value. For every kind of Dad, find the perfect gift this Father's Day at the Home Depot.

Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird.

Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Hello and welcome to Battleground 45 with me, Patrick Bishop and Saul David.

Well, 80 years ago, the victory in Europe celebrations were just about over. The hangovers had abated and everyone was now looking around to see what happened to them. Next, for Britain's, it was the moment when the work began to start making a reality of the dreams that had sustained soldiers and civilians alike through the conflict past.

and begin to set about building a better society than the one, an unhappy memory for many, that they had left behind before the war. It was a monumental task, and even more so for the French. Britain had been united during the war by and large, France bitterly divided. It now remained to be seen how far and how fast the healing process could go, and whether the coalition forged by the nation's saviour, Charles de Gaulle, could hold on.

together. For Germany, of course, the outlook was very different. Defeat had been total and the enormity of the nation's crimes on full display.

The population waited nervously to see what sort of price they would be expected to pay and who would pay it. All had to contend with a new global order. When the smoke of battle cleared, there were two giants standing, the USA on one side and Soviet Russia on the other. The pragmatic alliance that forged victory was already fraying, and the two newly emerged superpowers seemed set on a collision course.

The imponderables were endless, but one thing was sure, the end of the war would not usher in a period of peace, stability and mutual understanding. So let's start with Britain, shall we, Patrick? Britain had had a good war, hadn't it, in the sense that there were few moral ambiguities to poison the post-war political environment and an ambience of national solidarity, the creation of which was one of the great achievements of Winston Spencer Churchill, wasn't it?

That's right. I mean, he was a great wartime leader. His pre-war record had been patchy, to say the least. He'd showed political genius in some instances and immense political stupidity and indeed military stupidity in others. But this was his finest hour. Of course, he naturally expected to reap the benefits of his wartime leadership. And so, too, did the Conservative Party that he led today.

But, and this was certainly how it looked. Now, there hadn't been an election in Britain for 10 years. So the last one had been in 1935. But during the war, elections had been suspended. And indeed, the Churchill wanted to keep this going as long as possible. He asked his deputy, who was the, Giacometto Attlee, who was the leader of the British Labour Party, the main opposition party.

if they could carry on the arrangement until the Allied defeat of Japan. Now, Attlee essentially said no. So on the 15th of June, just a few weeks, well, just over a month after VE Day, the King dissolved Parliament and called for elections, which were to be held early next month. The opinion polls, which were kind of in their infancy, but they were still a real thing even that far back,

They looked pretty favorable to Churchill. His approval rating stood at 83% at the end of war. But against that, the Labour Party had been creeping up in the polls, and they actually had an 18% lead.

as early as February 1945. Nonetheless, the results when they came through after the election on the 5th of July were a bit of a shocker, weren't they, Saul? Yeah, they were. I mean, it's a landslide to Labour. The actual percentage difference in the vote wasn't huge. But of course, our system, as we know from the recent elections, can really skew things.

And that's exactly what happened. So so Labour wins a huge election victory. And while the results are coming in, actually, Churchill's over in the Potsdam conference, isn't he? Or the Potsdam conference is still underway. And it's interesting that, of course, he was disappointed, but he he took the news really quite calmly. I mean, one of the first things he said, instead of railing against the ingratitude of the British president,

public, who's, you know, a war leader he had been for the last five years. He just made this relatively simple comment. They've had a hard time. So he's really acknowledging that to be a prime minister during wartime, you've got to make a lot of tough decisions when people are naturally going to go through the trauma of living, not just with the consequences of their relatives dying at the front, their menfolk dying, but also literally under bombs themselves. It was almost inevitable that there would be a certain amount of bad feeling and not

and a want for something better at the end of the war. And I think this is really the key to understanding why the British public did what he did, isn't it, Patrick?

I think that's right, Saul. Yeah, basically, it was a big strategic mistake by the Conservative Party to frame their election appeal along the lines of, look, we've got a great leader here. He was great in wartime. He's going to be just as good in peace, because that didn't ring very true. The Conservative Party was still very much associated in the popular mind with all the privations and the inequities humanly

huge divisions, social divisions, economic divisions that plagued Britain in the interwar years. Whereas the Labour Party very sensibly were offering a brighter future. Their manifesto is actually called Let Us Face the Future. So there are promises that they're going to nationalise

Big industries like the energy industries, the railway services, going to be state economic planning. Full unemployment is going to be their pledge, which is incredibly important because memories of the mass unemployment of the early 30s were still very fresh in people's minds. That was a social blight that descended on large areas of industrial Britain.

And of course, another massive plus was a national health service before you have to pay for your medicine. So if you were poor, basically, you died early and you died ill. And so all these things, although the Conservative Party, by and large, endorsed this social security network, they weren't nearly as hot on it, shall we say, as the Labour Party were. And that

That really was what swung it, I think, for Labour. As you say, it was still quite tight, wasn't it, given the fact that most people in Britain weren't rich. And this was a pretty tempting future that was being displayed in front of them on the electoral stall of the Labour Party. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. And of course, it all went back a few years earlier to the Beveridge report of 1942. Ernest Beveridge had compiled this report, which effectively endorsed the creation of a welfare state and a national health service free at the point of contact, so to speak. And although, as you say, Patrick, the Conservatives had paid lip service to doing something along these lines, they hadn't gone the whole hog, whereas the Labour Party had endorsed it entirely. And this was obviously a huge effort.

attraction for the many ordinary people who'd fought for Britain and wanted to come back to a better Britain, the sort of Britain, as you mentioned, Patrick, that was expected at the end of the First World War and never actually materialised. I think there's another basic philosophical difference between the two parties here, too, which still holds true today, and that is that the Labour Party are much more interested in bigger government, the government having more of a say in the welfare of its

of its citizens, whereas the Tories really wanted small government, keep taxes low. And of course, that would mean that it would be very difficult to pay for all these welfare reforms. Yeah, there's something else going on here, isn't there? So I think we're seeing the beginning of the end of deference here. Massive symbolic...

the idea that your betters knew best and all the rest of it, which of course had been eroded very much by the wartime experience. If you were in the army, you were bright, young, not particularly well-educated, but a modern young man or woman. And you look to the traditional leaders above you, public school chaps,

university educators, all the rest of it. I think pretty soon you'll be going to say, well, I used to as well as they could. And I think actually upending Churchill after all we've done and everything, all the deference that was shown to him during the war on respect and, uh,

an aberration that he'd garnered was a pretty clear pointer that things were never going to be the same. That's right. And there is one interesting thing about the Labour Party that's worth pointing out, Patrick, in the context of the world we're living in today and the sort of percentage of

GDP were spending on the armed forces. And that is that Labour, for all the sort of basic ideas of pacifism, which really lie at the heart of their political philosophy, actually, when it came to the post-World War status quo, they were very keen to keep spending high. Now, they had to do that for a couple of reasons. One, because the garrison in Germany had to be paid for. And two, because a lot of the imperial possessions, which they were now getting their hands back on,

also needed to be garrisoned. Now, of course, we're going to have India leaving the imperial sphere in just a few years' time, but the rest of empire is going to take a fair bit longer than that. And it's absolutely fascinating to me to note that in 1950, towards the end of his first government, 10% of GDP was being spent on the armed forces, which is a really extraordinary figure, isn't it, Patrick? And it sort of gives the lie to the idea that Labour have always been pretty powerful

flimsy when it comes to the defense of the country.

Yeah, they were also not that kind of enthusiastic about decolonization. They were in individual cases, but they were, in their way, as proud of the empire and the position it gave Britain and the world as the conservatives were. It was a kind of cut across the classes and the ideologies, this idea of being proud of it. And something we're going to talk about in France as well,

But, of course, hanging on to the empire is now extremely problematical, isn't it? Because you've got this new global diplomatic architecture, power architecture, should I say, which is the two big pillars of it, holding the whole thing up, dominating the whole thing, are the Soviet Union on one side and America on the other. America takes a very dim view, despite the fact there are wartime allies. FDR was...

very much opposed the idea of Britain using American lives in order to hang on to their imperial domains. And so this is carried into the post-war period. So we're not going to get much support from America when it comes to trying to hang on to our possessions in the case of a crisis. This is very much the pattern you see going forward, the Suez Crisis being a classic example where

America basically cut us loose. And that was one of the great humiliations of the post-war period for Britain. But by and large, if you're looking back, not sure quite how clear it was at the time, but certainly that is the beginning of our global greatness. It's the beginning of the decline, shall I say, in our globalization.

global greatness. Do you think they kind of sense that at the time, Saul? Yeah, I do. I think so. I think relatively quickly, there's an idea that the empire can't last forever, but we're going to sort of hold on to it for a little while. And the issue of America is really interesting, Patrick, because you're quite right, of course, by principle, they didn't agree with empire.

And sooner or later, it had to go. But there is nuance to all of this, because the other big fear the Americans had, particularly in the Far East, was the growth of communism. And we eventually see the Vietnam War every 20 years later. But that is a war that effectively began between the Vietnamese or the Viet Minh, who were communists in their political color, and the French. And it's interesting that the Americans were quite supportive of the French,

in their fighting against the Viet Minh. So that seems like a contradiction in terms, doesn't it? But the one thing that could trump their hatred of empire was their fear of communism.

Yeah, I think the big societal changes apparent everywhere, of course, in Europe, but particularly in Britain, I would say. And I would characterize that very simply as the kind of Americanization, if you like, of society. So throughout the post, well, during the process begins actually during the war with the arrival of American troops.

a kind of free and easy modern approach to socializing, to entertainment, to dress, to everything really. And this develops into the consumer society we see beginning to take hold in Britain in the 1950s, challenging existing mores,

sexual mores, deference, as I mentioned before, and so forth, particularly marked, I think, in Britain, perhaps because existing in the Anglosphere and because the idea that there's some kind of cousinship, if you like, transatlantic cousinship. So this becomes very much a feature of British cultural life immediately from the war to start during the war, and it accelerates in the immediate post-war years.

Yeah, and this is all tied in with social mobility, isn't it, Patrick, and the idea that any good society operates well when you can go from the very bottom to the top. And that was pretty much an idea that the Americans claimed worked well for them. I mean, I'm not sure all the subgroups in America would agree with that, of course. But definitely, there was a sense that if you worked hard in America, and you came from, you know, a white background, you could get on. That wasn't necessarily the case, or hadn't necessarily been the case in Britain. But that

was changing too. I mean, I think it's interesting if you move 30 or 40 years on from that,

my own father-in-law came from an incredibly poor working class background, did well at grammar school and went on to become a doctor. So that's living proof that it was possible. And that was very much part of the payoff, I think, of the Second World War, the idea that that could happen. I think the real tragedy of the last 30 years or so is I think some of that social mobility has actually gone into reverse. But we're moving a little bit too far away from the war with that sort of discussion.

Okay, we'll take a break there. That's enough chat about the UK. Do join us in a moment when we'll be hopping over the channel to discuss France in the post-war years. You may get a little excited when you shop at Burlington. What a low price! Did you see that? They have my favourite! It's like a whole new item! I like it too! I'm saving so much!

Burlington saves you up to 60% off other retailers' prices every day. Will it be the low prices or the great brands? Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow. I told you so. Styles and selections vary by store.

This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Knowing you could be saving money for the things you really want is a great feeling. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. From streaming to shopping, Prime helps you get more out of your passions. So whether you're a fan of true crime or prefer a nail-biting novel from time to time, with services like Prime Video, Amazon Music, and fast, free delivery, Prime makes it easy to get more out of whatever you're into or getting into. Visit Amazon.com slash Prime to learn more.

Okay, well, let's cross the channel to France then, Sol. And you've got a very different situation there. Whereas we had been fairly united or very united, really, considering all that had gone before, France emerged from the war with those pre-war divisions, which had been very intense.

I won't say intact, but the war hadn't done much to heal them, simply because the nature of France's war had been occupied. We have them, which made an enormous difference. There had been a collaboration of this government and the Vichy government, which

to a greater or lesser extent, was an ally of Germany. It collaborates in some of Nazi Germany's great war crimes, deporting Jews, killing its own people, its own resistance, etc. So there were a lot of skeletons in the cupboard when de Gaulle died.

declared a provisional government and basically took charge of all the various disparate elements, societal elements, political elements, even regional elements, you could say, of France after the liberation of Paris in August 1944. He's pretty much

seize his power. It's all kind of legal. But he started the war and nobody and became the towering moral authority, I suppose, and managed to parlay that into political authority during the years of exile. So

His provisional government, which he sets up, is formally recognized in October 1944, several months before the war was ended, by the Americans, by the Brits, and indeed by the Soviets as well. So politically speaking, he was untouchable, but he's inherited a very poor situation. The country had been stripped of all its war materials. It was fooled by the Germans during the occupation years.

The transportation system was very severely damaged by Allied air bombardment. There were so many Frenchmen in prison, prison war camps, and of course, conscripted workers, forced laborers, or people who had been enticed to Germany to work in German war factories. And of course, you've got all these people who have, to a greater or lesser extent, collaborated together.

with the Germans. So it's a very, very tense and volatile situation, which he manages to control some of. There's a certain amount of bloodletting as a kind of unofficial summary. Justice is dispensed in the months immediately, weeks and months immediately after the liberation, and maybe 10,000 people were killed in summary executions.

And then there's a kind of more official systematic state, they call it a cleansing with special courts set up to try people who have been participating in the worst aspects of the occupation. So 125,000 cases heard over a couple of years. But the penalties were pretty mild. Very few people were executed, maybe 700 or 800 people.

which may sound like a lot, but compared to other occupied countries, it's a very small number. And as the years went by, the enthusiasm for revenge slackened away. So do you think it was right to take that lenient approach, Sean?

Yeah, I do. I think you can see it in Germany, too, can't you? It clearly is necessary for a country to heal that, you know, you don't seize on the losers, so to speak. And in the case of France, it would be anyone who had been a supporter of Vichy and say they must pay the price because everyone in France was responsible to a certain extent for Vichy.

You know, this kind of lack of will, this lack of determination, really, to defend their country in 1940, linked, of course, to the terrible losses of the First World War. I think it was a good idea. What's always surprised me a little bit, Patrick, given the unpopularity at the end of the war of the Vichy regime and its connections to Germany, is why the communists and the left more generally didn't have more success. You've written about them in great detail. They were very influential in the Paris

during the Second World War. But come the end of the war, de Gaulle rather trumps them, doesn't he? I mean, they were, of course, untainted by the Vichy years. And you might have imagined that the electorate would have gone towards them. And I know that the left's always been a powerful element in French politics. It has been ever since the French Revolution. But clearly, they were never able to gain enough support to actually take power. And do you think that's really as simply down to de Gaulle's prestige, really, leading the Free French in the Second World War?

Yeah, I think despite the fact that the communists had been the driving force, by and large, in the resistance movement, they were the first to take up arms. They did most of the shooting. They did most of the dying. They were still, France was still, you know, essentially a conservative society, I would say. And even though there was a lot of support for the communists in the interval years, the same as it was in other industrial European countries, France

It never sort of crossed that barrier into the middle class, which would have given it an electoral momentum that was unstoppable. Yes, of course, there were plenty of

of well-educated and prosperous communists, but they tended to be what the French call today the gauche caviar. They were kind of bourgeois people who rather liked the idea of communism rather than they probably much enjoyed the reality of it. So the Communist Party did indeed do very well in the first post-war period.

So there's a complicated process, which I won't go into now, about first of all trying to establish a new constitution and then actually having elections, etc., and an assembly that would actually thrash out what sort of government system was going to succeed the Third Republic. And the communists were the major party, but they didn't have an overall majority and therefore had to team up with socialists and other parties of the left.

But I think there was another element in this. Moscow was not keen on using them as a sort of revolutionary vanguard inside France to try and bring it into Moscow's orbit. They'd sort of decided that, okay, they had enough on their plate with Eastern Europe. Things have been going pretty well there. They could afford to basically take their foot off the pedal in terms of world revolution or whatever.

And so they became a pretty sort of mainstream, but they played the games, we put it like that. And I think that meant that there was a kind of equilibrium in French politics, which is

is good in one sense in that it didn't there was no sort of tilt to the extremes but on the other it made governing very difficult because during these years the post-war years you have a failure by any one party to be able to to dominate government if you like so you get endless coalitions to keep falling apart which you know sounds unstable but it became a sort of workable system in the end de Gaulle of course was pushing for a very strong presidency this wasn't

agreed to by the existing political parties. So he basically flounced out very early on, actually, given his prestige and all the rest of it. He decided that France wasn't worthy of him, essentially, and flounced out in January 1946.

and then didn't come back into power until 10 years later. And what's interesting, if you consider its history, Patrick, about what happens next in terms of the direction France is going to go in a diplomatic sense and an economic sense, of course, ultimately, is how pro-German it becomes. Now, you know, this is the old enemy, Britain, of course, or England being an even older enemy, but certainly in the 20th century, it had all been that.

battles fought against Germany and, of course, going back into the 19th century too. So it's fascinating, isn't it, that

The sense that France had been humiliated by America and Britain, the Western allies, having to come in and liberate it, whatever the myth said about the French liberating themselves, everyone knew in reality that that wasn't the case. So there was a need to make sure that a big European war would never happen again, certainly not against Germany. And the best way to avoid that was actually to come to some kind of terms with Germany. Ultimately, this will lead to the creation of the European Community Alliance,

But quite early on, there's clearly a sense that Germany, you know, forging of bridges with Germany is the right way to go, isn't it? That's right. Yeah. Having been occupied by Germany could have gone two ways. It could either be a feeling that, OK, this is unfinished business, which was certainly the case after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, 1871.

And then when the Germans, of course, occupied large chunks of French soil without overtaking Paris in the First World War, you'd have thought, well, maybe there's a mood for round three here. But that wasn't the case. I think the appalling suffering of the Second World War created a desire to actually have a genuinely peaceful country.

Foundation, understanding with France's immediate neighbor and rival, Germany, that would really be based on the notion of forgiving and not forgetting exactly, but understanding that there could be no repeat of forgiveness.

something as dreadful as what they'd all been through. And I think this, of course, was aided by the fact that Germany had been so thoroughly defeated. I think if there'd been a similar situation to the First World War, then that would not have been possible. To what extent do you think

The unconditional surrender actually cleared the political landscape of Europe and allowed a proper rebuilding that, of course, led to the establishment, first of all, the Cold and Steel Agreement and then ultimately the European Union. Do you think that was a necessary prerequisite?

I do. Absolutely vital. Germany had to be seen to have been defeated totally. And anyone connected with the previous regime, the Nazis, even the extreme nationalists, had to have been cast into outer darkness. Patrick, I think that was absolutely fundamental. So you reset. You have a totally new way of looking at Germany and of Europe.

And those politicians who came out of that moment at the end of the Second World War, the total defeat, were very much looking towards a Germany that would not threaten the rest of Europe, that would cooperate rather than challenge. And so all of that, I think, was necessary for the French to feel that they could do business with Germany.

But they had suffered huge blows to their pride, hadn't they, Saul? I mean, the humiliations of 1940, the shame of their conduct during the occupation, I think did leave some psychological wounds there.

And I think the way they dealt with this was a rather unfortunate one, which was to put enormous stock on their overseas possessions, their colonial possessions. And in an effort to reassert France's stature in the world, its greatness, if you like, or as they would see it, then they determined to hang on to them at all costs. I'm thinking in particular of Indochina and just across the Mediterranean Sea, Algeria. So,

You get people who had been kind of leftist resistance fighters who were just as enthusiastic about hanging on to the colonies come what may.

as people of the nationalist right. So this becomes a big feature of how France's foreign policy will be conducted post-war. It leads directly, of course, into conflict because you have liberation movements, national movements springing up both in India and in Algeria pretty well immediately.

And the refusal of France to accept the idea that they had to let them go, let these colonies go, led into conflicts. In a way, you can look at the French military operations in Indochina, which end ignominiously in 1954 with the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, and then in Algeria as ways of

opportunities, I suppose, to reassert their military virility to make up for the shame of defeat of 1944. Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it, Patrick? I mean, France could have gone both ways. It could have accepted that it had been defeated in the Second World War and that actually needed to

tone down all this kind of, you know, big man on the world stage idea. But it didn't. And one of the reasons it didn't is because it is rehabilitated by 1944. Its troops fight very well in Italy under General Juin. They also, albeit in some kind of performative way, liberate in inverted commas Paris with the second attack.

Armoured Division. And they also, of course, take part in the occupation of Germany. So I think they are able to peddle the myth that in some way, they end the war on top as a victor, which of course, technically they do. But this doesn't really deal with the trauma of what had gone before this sort of fractured society. And they're going to carry that baggage with them for an awful long time. In fact, you could argue they're still carrying it with them today. And it very much manifests itself in anglophobia and a certain amount of

anti-Americanism. It's certainly true that Roosevelt was no lover of de Gaulle and humiliated him to a certain extent during the middle years of the war. But in the end, France was liberated because of American money and weapons and soldiers. And there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of acknowledgement that that was the case. Something they've never forgiven them for, or something like that.

Well, we'd better move on, Saul, because we've got a hell of a lot of ground to cover. So I think we'll put Italy to one side for this episode. But, of course, we can't ignore Germany, can we? It's a totally different scenario there. You've got us to defeat every...

is in ruins. The whole thousand-year Reich has lasted, what, how long has it lasted? It's lasted 12 years, hasn't it? Twelve years, yeah. And, of course, morally speaking, there is no question about who the bad guys are in this story, is there? After the footage of the camps, Germany finds itself looking at this mirror and the image staring back at them is

is pretty ghastly, isn't it? So they've got military collapse, they've got economic collapse, and they've got moral collapse staring them in the face. They have. And the Allies even got to the point that they were considering returning them to some kind of agricultural feudal society

the Sogel-Morgenthau plan, which was broached by the Americans in late 1944. And that's basically removing all kind of traces of heavy industry and returning them, as I say, to some kind of feudal society. Well, that was madness, really. And it became particularly unpopular or unfeasible as the Cold War, at least the early elements of the Cold War, began to manifest themselves. And it was clear that Germany would be on the front line

with what became the new Soviet bloc, with all the territories that they'd occupied in the East were now going to be allied to the Soviet Union. And you can have a face-off, really, between the free democratic nations of Western Europe and the communist nations of Eastern Europe. So it was clear that Germany was going to play an important role in that as the front line. The Americans were going to keep a lot of troops there, so were the British and the French.

And this was the beginning, I think, of the rehabilitation of Germany because it encouraged the Americans to think we need to get Germany back on its feet economically. And it was going to do that by the Marshall Plan. And the Germans, being very good at building things, engineering, a highly industrialized society before the Second World War, did get back on their feet very quickly in the same way that Japan did too. And a lot of that was down to the investment put into both those countries by the United States.

Yeah, and they were quick to learn on this, weren't they? I mean, the Orgadale plan is remarkable. It seems incredible, doesn't it? This was a real thing. But it gradually got whittled away, and by July 1947, the Truman administration basically said,

makes a fundamental strategic decision that if Europe is going to ever recover economically, it absolutely needs that German industrial muscle, all that know-how, all that scientific knowledge applied to industry, which had made them so powerful before the war. And so it gets the blessing from President Truman and all the kind of previous restrictions are lifted essentially, which

It paves the way for a massive economic boom in Germany. I've got to say that it's everywhere does pretty well in the immediate post-war years. Once the trauma of war is over, in remarkably short order, you have economic miracles in both Germany, in France, and also in Italy. So the war had an unexpected and unintended beneficial effect of actually clearing

clearing the ground again, creating a tabula rasa on which new modern industries could be built. And of course, manned by workers and industrial leaders, executives, et cetera, managers who are very keen to make peacetime work. So you get a lot of people pulling in the same direction combined with this, as we were saying earlier, and,

this new thirst for an American type consumer society. Yeah, and the US, of course, is the big winner of the Second World War, certainly in economic terms. And in terms of influence, we've already spoken about its influence in Europe, it now has most of the gold reserves of the world, the dollar is going to become the world's currency, it's trading all over the world, and it

has enormous reach. It has enormous influence. I mean, it really plays the key role in forcing the British, French and Israelis to back down over the Suez crisis in 1956. It's getting involved in Southeast Asia because of the so-called domino effect of the expansion of communism. And that's really the dominant feature in US foreign policy in the years following the Second World War.

as slowly but surely as politicians. Truman being the key one, the president he'd taken over from Roosevelt, begins to realize that the key strategic enemy is going to be the USSR. Now, of course, Roosevelt had hoped that by the creation of the United Nations and bringing the USSR into the United Nations family,

they would be able to find a way to cooperate and work alongside the USSR. But the ideological differences were clearly too big. The determination of the USSR not to withdraw from those countries that it occupied in the Second World War, in terms of influence, I mean, it set up a lot of puppet governments in places like Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, but its refusal to withdraw posed a real threat to Western Europe and to the US.

And there was a feeling in America that ultimately it needed to take on the USSR. So ushers in the Cold War. I mean, Churchill had recognized this very early on his famous speech at Fulton in Missouri, I seem to recall in 1946 about an iron curtain descending across Europe and the message eventually got home to the Americans. You have the Berlin airlift in 1948 that was necessary to keep West Berlin out of the hands of the Soviets.

and then very much kind of two armed camps with more and more men and materials being put into Germany to make sure that if the USSR did try and move further west, then NATO was going to oppose them. So there we have it. We've got the map of the world ready, redrawn, haven't we, Saul, with the terms that we still use today, east and west, but even as we speak,

That landscape is being fundamentally altered, but we deal with that on Friday. So we'll wrap it up there. Thanks very much for listening. Do join us, as I say, on Friday for the latest Battleground Ukraine and again on Wednesday for another episode of Battleground Fortify. Goodbye.