The Cold War was the period of conflict, tension and competition
between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies
from the mid-1940s until the early 1990s. Throughout the period, the rivalry
between the two superpowers was played out in multiple arenas: military
coalitions; ideology, psychology, and espionage; military, industrial, and
technological developments, including the space race; costly defense spending;
a massive conventional and nuclear arms race; and many proxy wars.
There was never a direct military engagement between the US and the Soviet
Union, but there was half a century of military buildup as well as political
battles for support around the world, including significant involvement of
allied and satellite nations in proxy wars. Although the US and the Soviet
Union had been allied against Nazi Germany, the two sides differed on how to
reconstruct the postwar world even before the end of World War II. Over the
following decades, the Cold War spread outside Europe to every region of the
world, as the US sought the "containment" of communism and forged numerous
alliances to this end, particularly in Western Europe, the Middle East, and
Southeast Asia. There were repeated crises that threatened to escalate into
world wars but never did, notably the Berlin Blockade (1948-1949), the Korean
War (1950-1953), the Vietnam War (1959-1975), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962),
and the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989). There were also periods when tension
was reduced as both sides sought détente. Direct military attacks on
adversaries were deterred by the potential for mutual assured destruction
using deliverable nuclear weapons.
The Cold War drew to a close in the late 1980s following Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev's summit conferences with United States President Ronald
Reagan, as well as Gorbachev's launching of reform programs: perestroika
and glasnost.
Origins of the term
According to Luis Garcia Arias, in his work El Concepto de Guerra y la
Denominada "Guerra Fria" (1956), the term "cold war" was first used by a
thirteenth-century Spanish writer named Don Juan Manuel, who used the term "guerra
fria" ("cold war") to refer to the coexistence of Islam and Christendom in
medieval Spain.
The term Cold War was first used in a political sense on March 26, 1938,
when The Nation magazine ran the headline "Hitler's Cold War". The term first
used in a connotation that referred to the tensions of a state like the Soviet
Union and its neighbors was coined by George Orwell in an essay titled "You
and the Atomic Bomb." The essay was first published October 19, 1945 in
the London Tribune. In an excerpt from this essay Orwell wrote:
For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been
warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons,
leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who
has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least
thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many
decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of
slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as
horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory
has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological
implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the
social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once
unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its
neighbors.
In the specific sense of the Cold War referring to the post-World War II
geopolitical tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, the term
has been attributed to American financier and U.S. presidential advisor
Bernard Baruch. The Cassell Companion to Quotations cites a speech
Baruch gave in South Carolina, April 16, 1947 in which he said, "Let us not be
deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war." The Cassell Companion
notes that the phrase was actually suggested to Baruch by his speechwriter,
Herbert Bayard Swope, who had been using it privately since 1940. Columnist
Walter Lippmann also gave the term wide currency after his 1947 book titled
Cold War.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (2003) lists a slight variation on
Baruch's quote listing it as "We are in the midst of a cold war which is
getting warmer", which Baruch used in a speech before the Senate Committee in
1948 (Bartlett's also notes that Baruch first used the term cold war in 1947).
Pre-Cold War
There is some disagreement over what constitutes the beginning of the Cold
War. While most historians say that it began in the period just after World
War II, some say that it began towards the end of World War I, though tensions
between Russia/USSR and Britain and the United States date back to the middle
of the 19th century.
The ideological clash between communism and capitalism began in 1917
following the Russian Revolution, when the USSR emerged as the first major
communist power. This was the first event which made Russian-American
relations a matter of major, long-term concern to the leaders in each country.
Several events led to suspicion and distrust between the United States and
the Soviet Union: US intervention in Russia supporting the White Army in the
Russian Civil War, Russia's withdrawal from World War I in the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk with Germany, the Bolsheviks' challenge to capitalism, the US
refusal to recognize the Soviet Union until 1933. Other events in the period
immediately before WWII increased this suspicion and distrust. The British
appeasement of Germany and the German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact are two
notable examples.
World War II and Post-War (1939-1947)
During the war, the Soviets strongly suspected that the Anglo-Americans had
opted to let the Russians bear the brunt of the war effort, to insert
themselves only at the last minute so as to influence the peace settlement and
dominate Europe. Historians such as John Lewis Gaddis dispute this claim,
citing other military and strategic calculations for the timing of the
Normandy invasion. Nevertheless, Soviet perceptions (or misconceptions) of
the West and vice versa left a strong undercurrent of tension and
hostility between the Allied powers.
There was severe disagreement between the Allies about how Europe should
look following the war. Both sides, moreover, held very dissimilar ideas
regarding the establishment and maintenance of post-war security. The
Americans tended to understand security in situational terms, assuming that,
if US-style governments and markets were established as widely as possible,
countries could resolve their differences peacefully, through international
organizations. Soviet leaders, however, tended to understand security in
terms of space. This reasoning was conditioned by Russia's historical
experiences, given the frequency with which the country had been invaded over
the last 150 years.
At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies attempted to define
the framework for a post-war settlement in Europe but could not reach a firm
consensus. Following the Allied victory in May, the Soviets effectively
occupied Eastern Europe, while the US had much of Western Europe. In occupied
Germany, the US and the Soviet Union established zones of occupation and a
loose framework for four-power control with the ailing French and British.
At the Potsdam Conference, starting in late July, serious differences
emerged over the future development of Germany and Eastern Europe. At this
conference Truman informed Stalin that the United States possessed a powerful
new weapon. "Stalin’s only reply was to say that he was glad to hear of the
bomb and he hoped [the United States] would use it." One week after the end
of the Potsdam Conference, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led
to further conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. Shortly
after the attacks, Stalin protested to US officials when Truman offered the
Soviets little real influence in occupied Japan.
In February 1946, George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow helped to
articulate the growing hard line that was being taken against the Soviets.
On September 6, 1946, James F. Byrnes made a speech in Germany, repudiating
the Morgenthau Plan and warning the Soviets that the US intended to maintain a
military presence in Europe indefinitely. As Byrnes admitted one month later,
"The nub of our program was to win the German people [...] it was a battle
between us and Russia over minds. A few weeks after the release of this "Long
Telegram", former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his
famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri. The speech called for an
Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, whom he accused of establishing
an "iron curtain" from "Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic."
From "Containment" through the Korean War
(1947-1953)
By 1947, Truman's advisors were worried that time was running out to
counter the influence of the Soviet Union. In Europe, post-war economic
recovery was faltering, and shortages of food and other essential consumer
goods were common. Truman's advisors feared that the Soviet Union was seeking
to weaken the position of the US in a period of post-war confusion and
collapse.
The event which spurred Truman on to announce formally the US's adopting
the policy of "containment" was the British government's announcement in
February 1947 that it could no longer afford to finance the Greek monarchical
military regime in its civil war against communist-led insurgents. Rather
than view this war as a civil conflict revolving around domestic issues, US
policymakers interpreted it as a Soviet effort; however, the insurgents were
helped by Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia, not Moscow. Secretary of State Dean
Acheson accused the Soviet Union of conspiracy against the Greek royalists in
an effort to "expand" into the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, and in March
1947 the administration unveiled the "Truman Doctrine". It "must be the policy
of the United States," Truman declared, "to support free peoples who are
resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures."
Truman rallied Americans in his famous "Truman Doctrine" speech to spend
$400,000,000 on intervention in the civil war in Greece. In order to mobilize
an unfriendly Republican Congress, the Democratic president painted the
conflict as a contest between "free" peoples and "totalitarian" regimes, thus
dramatically heightening the rhetorical stakes of the conflict. By aiding
Greece, Truman set a precedent for US aid to regimes, no matter how repressive
and corrupt, that requested help to fight communists.
Without the assistance of huge capital resources to rebuild industry
transferred from the United States, Western European economies failed to
recover from the enormous wartime destruction of the region's infrastructure.
Communist parties, meanwhile, were winning large votes in free elections in
countries such as France and Italy. American policymakers were worried that
economic conditions in Western Europe might deteriorate to the point where
communist parties could seize power there, too, through free elections or
popular revolutions. Some US policymakers also feared that their own economy
might suffer unless effective demand for their exports in Western Europe was
restored.
For US policymakers, threats to Europe's balance of power were not
necessarily military ones, but a political and economic challenge.[14]
George Kennan helped to summaries the problem at the State Department Planning
Staff in May 1947: "Communist activities" were not "the root of the
difficulties of Western Europe" but rather "the disruptive effects of the war
on the economic, political, and social structure of Europe." According to
this view, the Communists were "exploiting the European crisis" to gain
power. In June, following the recommendations of the State Department
Planning Staff, the Truman Doctrine was complemented by the Marshall Plan, a
pledge of economic assistance aimed at rebuilding the Western
political-economic system and countering perceived threats to Europe's balance
of power, which the US had gone to war to restore, from the radical left.
After lobbying by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Generals Clay and
Marshall, the Truman administration finally realized that economic recovery in
Europe could not go forward without the reconstruction of the German
industrial base on which it had previously had been dependent.
In July, Truman rescinded, on "national security grounds", the punitive
Morgenthau plan JCS 1067, which had directed the US forces of occupation in
Germany to "take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of
Germany." It was replaced by JCS 1779, which stressed instead that "[a]n
orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and
productive Germany."
Also in July, Truman reorganized his government to fight the Cold War. The
National Security Act of 1947, signed by Truman on July 26, created a unified
Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National
Security Council. These would become the main bureaucracies for US policy in
the Cold War.
The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan led to
billions in economic and military aid to Western Europe, and Greece and
Turkey. With US assistance, the Greek military won its civil war, and the
Italian Christian Democrats defeated the powerful Communist-Socialist alliance
in the elections of 1948.
European military alliances
The US consolidated its new role as leader of the West. In retaliation to
Western moves to reunite West Germany, Stalin built blockades to block western
access to West Berlin, but Truman maintained supply lines to the enclave by
flying supplies in over the blockade from 1948 to '49.
The US formally allied itself to the Western European states in the North
Atlantic Treaty of 1949, establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO). Stalin countered by tying together the economies of the Eastern bloc
in a Soviet-led version of the Marshall Plan, the Council for Mutual Economic
Assistance (COMECON), and exploding the first Soviet atomic device in August
1949.
The US took the lead in re-establishing West Germany from the three Western
zones of occupation in 1949. To counter this Western
reorganization of
Germany, the Soviet Union proclaimed its zone of occupation in Germany the
"German Democratic Republic" in 1949. In the early 1950s, the US worked for
the rearmament of West Germany and, in 1955, its full membership to NATO.
In 1949 Mao's Red Army defeated the US-backed Kuomintang regime in China.
Shortly afterwards, the Soviet Union created an alliance with the newly formed
People's Republic of China. Confronted with the Chinese Revolution and the end
of the US atomic monopoly in 1949, the Truman administration quickly moved to
escalate and expand the containment policy. In a secret 1950 document,
NSC-68, Truman administration officials proposed to reinforce pro-Western
alliance systems and quadruple spending on defense.
US officials moved thereafter to expand "containment" into Asia, Africa,
and Latin America. At the same time, revolutionary nationalist movements,
often led by Communist parties, were fighting against the restoration of
Europe's colonial empires in South-East Asia. The US formalized an alliance
with Japan in the early 1950s, thereby guaranteeing the United States a number
of long-term military bases. Truman also brought other states, including
Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and the Philippines, into a series of
alliances.
To Stalin's surprise, Truman committed US forces to drive back the North
Koreans. Public opinion in countries such as Great Britain, usual allies of
the US, was divided for and against the war. British Attorney General Sir
Hartley Shawcross repudiated the sentiment of those opposed when he said "I
know there are some who think that the horror and devastation of a world war
now would be so frightful, whoever won, and the damage to civilization so
lasting, that it would be better to submit to Communist domination. I
understand that view - but I reject it. In 1953, the Korean War ended in
stalemate, but the US gradually got itself entangled in another civil war. The
US supported the South Vietnamese government against North Vietnam, which was
backed by the Soviet Union and China.
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