ABSTRACT

The British and Soviets sought their own exclusive spheres of influence. Washington finally made Great Britain abandon its policies of spheres, but could never force the Soviets to do so. The Grand Alliance of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and their allies was in trouble by early 1943. Franklin Roosevelt agreed to give the Soviet Union three votes in the General Assembly (in order, so Joseph Stalin urged, to offset Great Britain's half-dozen votes of the Commonwealth nations), but only if the United States might, if it wished, also have three votes. The key to postwar planning lay in Anglo-American cooperation, for before the war these two powers accounted for half the world's trade. In 1947, the Soviets claimed that the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan had divided the world into "two camps". To solidify their own camp, they announced a "Molotov Plan" to provide economic links for their East European empire.