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.