American history questions - Essay Example

It established the notion of an international justice system that can be resorted to in cases when criminal acts are committed by a country against the citizens of another country or when they are committed by a government against its own people. The relevance of the Trials was that they served as precedent to future cases. In the subsequent cases, for example, crimes against humanity like genocide and ethnic cleansing committed in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Indonesia, the principles of the Nuremberg Trials were employed to try the accused.

At the close of the war, the threats to these freedoms were once again resuscitated by the actions of the USSR. Harry Truman who succeeded Roosevelt to office saw the Russians’ foreign policy as emphatic on the communist ideology, suspicious, aggressive and close to and of the world around it. Soviet seemed so suspiciously obsessed with its security. Truman then decided that the best way to deal with the Russians and Stalin was a hard-line approach to contain communism and defend American interests.

Thus, there was a discarding of the policy of compromise and the adoption of the policy of containment. In addition, Truman took a lesson from the past. His ‘Iron Fist’ approach was a reaction to the appeasement approach that was employed by the British towards Germany and Hitler before the outbreak of the WWII. Since the appeasement approach seemed to have goaded Hitler into being an airhead and declared war against the allies. Truman thought that from then on such an approach is not only futile but also dangerous and so he took a different tact.

Another threat that communism brought to the US is the fear that that it’s spread in Europe would curtail US trade in that market. The revival of Europe after the war was especially important to the consumer-based US and therefore it must be safeguarded from communism. Q8 Some historians argue that the