ABSTRACT
Postwar Europe was nonetheless split by an Iron Curtain not only with barbed wire, mines, guard dogs, and machine guns but also with substantial political, material, and spiritual barriers. Whereas most European leaders had been born in the nineteenth century, almost all the non-Europeans had come to political maturity during World War II and had imbibed the promises of freedom and independence in the Atlantic Charter. The Soviet Union, which had revived spectacularly after World War II as a major military and industrial power, countered the West’s appeal with its call for centralized planning and a regime that promoted social and economic justice. Beginning in 1953 Washington and Moscow, formulated rival economic development models accompanied by generous military and civilian aid packages and goodwill gestures to attract the elites in the colonial and semicolonial states of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.
