Cold War

I

Introduction

Cold War, post-1945 struggle between two blocs of nations led by the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Direct military conflict did not occur between the two superpowers, mainly because of mutual fear of nuclear warfare, but intense economic and diplomatic struggles erupted, including the extension of the contest across the world through proxy conflicts in the Third World. Different interests led to mutual suspicion and hostility in an escalating rivalry rooted in ideology. Though some historians, invoking geopolitics and other explanations, now argue that relations between the powers of the Cold War were no worse than between great powers at many other times, the ideological nature of the struggle and the threat of nuclear holocaust helped channel and mask political tensions worldwide that re-emerged once the old mould was broken. Paradoxically, the Cold War secured military peace in Europe for almost 50 years.

II

Background

The Communist seizure of power in Russia in 1917, and the subsequent creation of the Soviet Union, was regarded from the beginning with hostility by many nations including the United States. British, American, German, Japanese, and other forces all intervened in the civil war (between the Bolshevik forces and their White opponents) that followed the Russian Revolution, and the last Japanese troops were not withdrawn from Siberia until 1922. The Soviet Union was then left alone, though some countries refused to recognize it officially. Though World War II brought the United States and the Soviet Union together against the Axis powers, it also gave the Russian leader Joseph Stalin immense opportunities to extend Soviet Communist domination, while destroying the European balance of power that had held him in check. In 1944-1945, Stalin used the Red Army to subjugate Eastern Europe, on the pretext of seeking Soviet security. US President Harry S. Truman opposed Stalin’s policy and moved to unite Europe under American leadership. Mistrust grew as both sides broke wartime agreements. Stalin failed to honour pledges to hold free elections in Eastern Europe. Truman refused to honour promises to send reparations from the defeated Germany to help rebuild the war-devastated Soviet Union. By the end of the war, the positions of the two opposing superpowers, the sole members of the pre-1914 roll-call of great powers to have retained significant global strength, were already clearly defined.

III

Moves and Counter-Moves

US officials, concerned over Soviet pressures against Iran and Turkey, interpreted a 1946 speech by Stalin as declaring ideological war against the West. In 1947 the president proposed the Truman Doctrine, which had two objectives: to send US aid to anti-Communist forces in Greece and Turkey, and to create a public consensus so that Americans would be willing to oppose their former ally. He achieved both goals.

That same year, journalist Walter Lippmann popularized the term “Cold War” in a book of the same name. In Congress there was a series of highly publicized inquiries into pro-Communist activity in the United States. The best-known investigator, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, gave his name to an era of intense anti-Communism; and though the feverish “witch-hunts” of McCarthyism were not repeated after 1954, suspicion and surveillance of Communist parties in Western democracies became an abiding feature of the Cold War. In 1948 the United States launched the $13-billion European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) to rebuild Western and Central Europe. Stalin responded by installing tractable Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe. In 1948 the Soviet Union blockaded the western sectors of Berlin—placed under joint Allied administration at the end of World War II. The ensuing Berlin Blockade (1948-1949) saw the enclave saved by a massive Western airlift of vital supplies for the beleaguered sectors of the city, a demonstration of Western resolve. In 1949 the Western powers formed a military alliance—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—to secure Europe against further Soviet encroachment.

The Cold War widened in 1949, when the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb and Communists under Mao Zedong conquered China. Communist China signed an alliance with Stalin in 1950, but the United States refused to recognize the new regime. In Japan, then under US control, economic development was accelerated to counter Asian Communism. When Communist North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, precipitating the Korean War, Truman immediately committed American forces under United Nations (UN) auspices, to be followed by units from many allied countries and Chinese “volunteers”, who arrived to help the North late in 1950 when it was on the point of being overrun. The conflict ended three years later in a truce that left the pre-war border intact. Stalin’s death in 1953 eased tensions slightly, but in 1955 the Soviet bloc formed the Warsaw Pact and West Germany was admitted to NATO. The non-aligned nations gathered in a loose amalgamation opposed to worldwide superpower dominance and the heightened risk of world war it entailed.

IV

Confrontation, War, and Détente

Cold War tensions revived in the late 1950s, when both sides began development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The USSR tried to protect Communist East Germany from a haemorrhage of population to the West by building the Berlin Wall in 1961. Each superpower also attempted to gain influence over emerging nations in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. A serious crisis arose in 1962 when the USSR placed missiles in Cuba, their new ally. President John F. Kennedy threatened nuclear retaliation, and the Soviets withdrew the missiles in return for Kennedy’s promise not to invade Cuba.

Both sides were sobered by the Cuban Missile Crisis, which demonstrated their mutual reluctance to go to nuclear war, and the earlier rigid polarization somewhat slackened. The Soviets were weakened by the Chinese split from Moscow, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, and restiveness among its other Eastern European satellites. The United States engaged in the Vietnam War, a bloody military action that cost 57,000 American lives in a failed effort to retain South Vietnam for the democratic bloc. By the early 1970s the two superpowers had agreed on a policy of détente, typified by the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), in an attempt to cool the costly arms race through arms control.