In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt formally recognized the Soviet Union. During the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s, milit
ary threats between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated, but the United States did not withdraw its recognition of that country. Why would a President want to continue recognizing a country when it has expressed hostility towards the United States?
Despite continuing commercial links between the United States and the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s, Wilson’s successors upheld his policy of nonrecognition. Roosevelt hoped that recognition of the Soviet Union would serve U.S. strategic interests by limiting Japanese expansionism in the Far East.
