User:LudicrousTripe/Stub1

The diplomatic and political history of World War II can conveniently begin with 1943, since it was at this time that military progress against the Nazis removed the single-minded focus on securing victory, permitting politics to move to the fore. And, as US historian John W. Dower observed, "[c]ontrol of territory, markets, natural resources, and other peoples always lay close to the heart of prewar and wartime planning."

The Grand Alliance
The Grand Alliance arrayed against the Axis powers was a child of war, and would be condemned to an early grave as the exigent conditions that gave it life and nurtured it began to fade.

US war aims
A key war aim of the United States was to displace Britain as the leading global power, and it attained this goal with marvellous facility:

"The British planned to protract the war longer than Germany could afford, eventually aiming at victory by the fall of 1944, only to have the Americans lengthen it well past the time London thought both prudent and essential, so that they emerged from the war virtually bankrupt."

Crucial sources of financial leverage for the US in achieving this end were cash and carry and Lend-Lease.

The US readiness to displace the British immediately implied the question of American domination in East Asia. Before the war, the US had purposefully developed hegemonic control over Japanese resources, including the most critical one of oil, and its intention to overturn Japanese pre-eminence in East Asia was obvious.

In addition to its rivals being economically shattered by war, further requirements for US global supremacy were its own economic and military might, and on these two counts the end of the war found the Americans in a position of strength without historical precedent: they possessed the most awesome military machine in history, and the immediate postwar period made them masters of half the world's wealth, two-thirds of the world's gold reserves, three-quarters of the world's invested capital, half the world's shipping vessels, and half of global manufacturing capacity.

With Britain crippled and shut out of East Asia, the German surrender in May 1945 reduced primary American concerns of an immediate nature down to two: how to end the war with Japan, and how to deal with Stalin and the Soviet Union, though these twin concerns were, as the description suggests, intimately related.

Soviet war aims
For the Soviet Union—which had suffered enormous human and economic losses, and had come back from a point, in the months after the Barbarossa onslaught got underway, where Stalin had described his nation as being in "mortal danger" —war aims unsurprisingly lacked the expansive nature of the Americans'. Rather than a master plan to spread revolution and conquer the world, the communist dictator resolved instead for the establishment of a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe within which a buffer zone of puppet regimes, euphemistically called "people's democracies", could hold sway. Although security considerations dominated Soviet thinking, Stalin recognised that a recovery in German and Japanese power was inevitable, and so sought to ensure that this proceeded in a controlled fashion.

Absent a desire to take over the whole of Europe, the Soviet relationship with Western European communists was contradictory and ambiguous.

Italy
Subsequent to the Anglo-American landings of 3 September 2013, Italy became the first European country to be liberated, and so the happenings there would set the precedent for future Allied cooperation. Could the three Great Powers set a constructive tone? Quite the opposite.

At the Moscow Conference during October–November 1943, the Allies fleshed out the basis for an Allied Control Commission that would exercise authority until postwar elections could provide Italians with a new civilian government. The Soviets, however, were not given a meaningful role in the ACC for Italy, and the United States and United Kingdom opted to use their control of it to lock the Soviet Union out of decision-making. The Anglo-Americans desperately tried to wriggle free of this precedent in their bargaining with the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, but their later complaints regarding, for example, the Soviet-controlled ACC in Hungary, whose commander, Kliment Voroshilov, regularly failed to consult them about anything, were met with a straightforward Soviet reminder of the "situation in Italy where on no occasions have the Allied representatives . .. informed the Soviet representative of important measures undertaken".