The defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 cleared the stage for the expansion of American-Soviet ideological conflict into a global cold war. Each side concluded, according to its own ideological dispositions, that the specter of Nazism outlasted Hitler. Americans saw the Soviet Union as totalitarian - just like Nazi Germany. And the Soviets, who saw Fascism as the logical outcome of capitalism, saw the United States as moving on the path toward Fascism most recently trodden by Germany. The resounding defeat of Nazi Germany represented, furthermore, a broader defeat for the old order of nationalism and imperialism that Wilson and Lenin had so powerfully (but unsuccessfully) attacked in the aftermath of World War I. With the final defeat of a conservative alternative, the radical and liberal visions of world order faced off against one another.
The factors making the Cold War a war related to longstanding ideological differences combined with common features ofthe two ideologies (universalism, messianism, and determinism). Believing itself the end of history, and believing that historical progress was itself inexorable, each side expected to conquer the other and the rest of the world. But what made the Cold War cold? The Cold War did not center on direct conflict between the two superpowers because the two were not focused on the immediate transformation or conquest of the other. Of course, other chilling factors went beyond the ideological: a desire to avoid total war after the devastating experience of World War II and the development of atomic weapons. But even in the earliest years of the Cold War, when the United States had a nuclear monopoly, it did not seriously contemplate an attack. And, even at their most reckless, Soviet leaders never came close to contemplating a nuclear first strike.
The emergence of two distinct worlds - the "Free World" and the "Socialist Bloc" - represented not a rejection of messianism, only the temporary reduction of its sphere of operation. While each side maintained its belief that history would eventually create the ideal global society, each side also acknowledged that such a society might be a long time in coming. Soviet authorities continued fulminating against capitalism but held few serious thoughts that the United States would soon go Communist. Recognizing the short-term viability of the capitalist world economy did not mean that Marx’s "locomotive of history" had been derailed or was running on the wrong track; it would just make an extended station stop so far as the United States was concerned. For its part, the American foreign-policy apparatus had given up, for the time being, on converting the USSR to capitalism.
World War II loomed large in American and Soviet views of each other. First, the defeat of Nazism contributed to the decline of racial nationalism and imperialist expansion as international forces. Second, the military victory of the Soviet Union over Germany demonstrated that it had become sufficiently modern and powerful to repel the Nazi war machine. The dream that the USSR was evolving toward liberal capitalism seemed all the more unrealistic after the hard-won victory in World War II. "Totalitarian" societies such as the Soviet Union, scholars argued, had reached the end of internal historical development; they were no longer susceptible to internal transformation according to the laws of history. Totalitarianism could be dislodged only through military defeat. Soviets, too, rethought the future of the capitalist world, as Eugen Varga, the influential Soviet economist, suggested that capitalism had won a temporary reprieve from imminent crisis as a result of the New Deal and the war. These modifications did not affect the ultimate ideological goals, only the timeframe for their fulfillment. Each of the two universalist ideologies still maintained the assumption that the other would end up in the dustbin of history - but also the expectation that victory would be only in the distant future.
With no hopes of transforming the antagonists themselves, the American-Soviet conflict became a bipolar one in which the poles themselves were off-limits. Cold War conflict took place over membership in the "Free World" and the "Socialist Bloc," but not over who would lead each side. Thus the story of the Cold War was the story of boundaries, establishing the outer limits of each sphere of influence and competing for those who had not yet pitched their tents in one camp or the other. This situation did not make the Cold War less ideological, but more so. The conflict was ideological precisely because the two sides measured their own positions in terms of their ability to replicate their social systems around the world. Yet, at the same time, the superpowers pursued ideological aims in the broadest possible terms. They tended to see every conflict as black and white - or perhaps as red vs. red-white-and-blue - and thus to give a great deal of leeway to allies who did not fit their ideological precepts. Soviet leaders worked with "bourgeois" or military regimes in the name of furthering Communism and world peace, while American leaders supported dictators and cartels in the name of democracy and free trade. The world became a sort of oversized scorecard measuring the relative success of each social system. The Cold War was fought on neutral ground or, more precisely, to make neutral ground less so.
As an ideological conflict, the Cold War would be defined by four features. First, it would be marked by competition to win new adherents to one or the other economic and social system. Both sides maintained empires, as John Lewis Gaddis noted, but of a very different sort. In Europe, the United States led an "empire by invitation" while the USSR ruled an "empire by imposition."29 Second, the principal locus of American-Soviet conflict would undergo geographic shifts from one region to another, as nations committed themselves to one camp or the other. The Cold War first divided Europe and then moved on to Asia, Latin America, and eventually Africa. As it did so, the distinction between empires of invitation and imposition blurred; the Soviets were often more "invited," and the Americans more "imposing," in the Third World. Third, economic production and technological advance would be key instruments in American-Soviet competition. Direct economic competition between the superpowers underwrote the expansion of influence around the world, but also demonstrated the superiority of an economic system. Finally, the Cold War revolved around understandings of the enemy (and the world) that were deeply rooted in each ideology. Soviet leaders, believing imperialism to be the highest stage of capitalism, saw American globalism as a desperate effort to stave off collapse. For their part, most American officials explained Soviet expansion as a single-minded ambition for world revolution. And with this mutual projection came the conviction, strongly held on both sides, that the antagonist was denying present realities and interfering with a future that would inevitably lead to its own demise.
World History
