To what extent was the United States responsible for the collapse of the Grand Alliance at the end of the Second World War?

The first 200 words of this essay...

Academic Research Task - To what extent was the United States responsible for the collapse of the Grand Alliance at the end of the Second World War?

The Grand Alliance was the term given to the co-operative mutual assistance relationship between the western powers, especially the United States and Britain, and the Soviet Union, which was formed to engineer the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. For the duration of the conflict, relations between these nations were fairly good: the Americans supplied billions of dollars' worth of war material to the USSR under the Lend-Lease arrangement (though with little enthusiasm: the first shipments did not arrive until late 19421), the Allies made attempts to co-ordinate their military activity, and all were agreed on the common understanding that defeating Hitler's Germany was essential for world peace and international security. Propaganda photographs of American and Soviet troops exchanging handshakes over the ruins of a defeated Third Reich gave every impression that the era of antipathy and hatred between nations was over, and that a new order of peace and prosperity would be built on the back of a crushed swastika.2 In reality however, by the end of