The cold war is the term that defines the all-encompassing struggle during the second half of the 20th century between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Coined by financier Bernard Baruch and popularized by journalist Walter Lippmann, the term “cold war” characterized this struggle as a political, ideological, and economic conflict that rarely included direct military confrontation. Consisting of propaganda battles, economic warfare, proxy wars, and an arms race, the cold war touched virtually every corner of the globe in the years after World War II.
American participation in the cold war represented a sharp break in the history of American foreign relations. Before World War II, most American presidents followed the advice laid out in George Washington’s farewell address, and avoided political and military participation in the world. After World War II, the presidential administration of Harry S. Truman believed that global conditions demanded greater American participation. His advisers believed that world stability was predicated on peace and prosperity, and that peace and prosperity, in turn, depended on the expansion of American ideals abroad. Democracy, free enterprise, and the protection of individual liberties—together these beliefs constituted the core of the American ideology that, if adopted by other countries, would lay the groundwork for a wealthy and peaceful global economic and political system. The Truman administration also believed that the U. S. economy needed to import raw materials and export finished goods to remain healthy. At every turn, the Soviet Union represented a threat to this strategy.
Different concerns animated the conduct of Soviet foreign policy. Believing that its continued existence rested on securing its boundaries against renewed German and/or capitalist aggression, the Soviet Union focused on acquiring stable borders and friendly neighbors. Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, also sought to reconstruct the Soviet Union’s industrial base, maintain a strong army, and present the Soviet Union and communism as a shining alternative to the capitalist system. Although the Soviet Union often preached world revolution, it proved to be very cautious and pragmatic in its foreign policy.
Despite its overall caution, however, the Soviet Union, in light of its strategic objectives, sought to establish a
Buffer zone in Eastern Europe. In Poland, Stalin insisted that the new Polish government cohere around a group of communist exiles known as the Lublin Poles, claiming that Poland had served as a “corridor” for German advances in the past, proving that Soviet influence in Poland was necessary. For added protection, the Soviet Union reabsorbed the states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In 1947, the Soviet Union overthrew the democratically elected noncommunist government of Hungary. The following year, it helped communists seize power in Czechoslovakia. With communist states also in Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, the Soviets succeeded in establishing a large bloc of pro-Soviet states that was institutionalized in the Warsaw Pact of 1955.
Fearful that the Soviet Union sought to extend its sphere of influence farther, the United States attempted to rebuild Western Europe as a bulwark against communism. In February 1946, George F. Kennan, a U. S. diplomat in Moscow, wrote a “Long Telegram” that urged American policymakers to realize the severity of the communist threat, arguing that the Soviet Union blended Russia’s historic sense of insecurity with an expansive political ideology. To meet this danger, Kennan articulated what became known as the “containment” policy, which stated that the United States should “contain” the Soviet Union within its present boundaries; such a policy, Kennan believed, would ultimately enable the internal contradictions of communist ideology to unravel. In 1947, the Truman administration, in response to perceived communist aggression in Turkey and Greece, announced the Truman Doctrine, which stated that the United States would provide economic and military aid to these nations and would assist any nation attempting to resist communist subjugation. A year later, the United States offered the Marshall Plan, which outlined an aid package for reconstructing Western Europe. In 1949, the United States broke with tradition and entered the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a permanent alliance with Canada and Western European states designed to deter Soviet aggression, in which an attack against one member nation was considered an attack against all, to be met with force.
The vanquished nation of Germany became a microcosm of the burgeoning cold war. After the defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945, the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union partitioned the country into four zones, with the understanding that this division constituted a temporary military measure. Because of its special symbolic significance as the former capital of Nazi Germany, Berlin was also divided into four parts. Over time, as the Soviet Union and the United States began to pursue conflicting policies in their respective occupation zones of Germany, the division of Germany hardened and finally crystallized when the Soviet Union initiated the Berlin blockade in 1948, cutting off supply lines to the German capital. In response to the Berlin blockade, the United States and the other Western powers established the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949.
As Europe divided itself along a new ideological fault line, so too did the major powers of Asia. In Japan, Americans, despite Soviet objections, assumed sole responsibility for Japanese occupation and reconstruction. At first hoping to reform Japan, the United States switched gears as events in Europe deteriorated, moving to establish a strong Japan as an Asian bulwark against communism. Under the leadership of Douglas MacArthur, the United States abandoned efforts to break up Japanese business conglomerates, reinstated former imperial leaders, and funneled massive amounts of aid to Japan. In China, the civil war that raged between Mao Zedong’s Communist army and Jiang Jieshi’s Nationalist army came to an end in 1949, when the Nationalists fled to Taiwan (Formosa) and Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic on October 1. American aid had propped up Jiang’s regime for several years, but Jiang’s incompetence and reactionary policies finally convinced many American observers that the Nationalist cause was a lost one and the United States withdrew support.
With the fall of China to communism in 1949, the developing countries gradually emerged as the focus of the cold war. Much of the developing world had existed for centuries as colonies of Asian and European powers; with the conclusion of World War II, these colonial powers had exhausted themselves and their possessions became hotly contested areas. In such regions as the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Aerica, and even South America, the United States often sought to stem the revolutionary tide because it feared that these nationalist movements were sponsored by the Soviet Union. In the name of anticommunism, the United States found itself drawn into several civil wars in which the participants were indistinct and the issues exceedingly complex.
Such an example was the Korean War, which represented the first real military conflict of the cold war. A former colony of Japan, Korea was divided into two occupation zones that eventually became two separate states, the Republic of Korea sponsored by the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea sponsored by the Soviet Union. Both claimed representation of all Korea. After the United States withdrew its forces in 1949, North Korean forces invaded South Korea in June 1950. Believing that this invasion symbolized a test of American resolve, the United States, under the auspices of the United Nations, sent troops to help the South Koreans. The Americans and Chinese fought directly in late 1950 when the United States approached the Chinese border in its own effort to reunify the Korean Peninsula. The United States eventually settled for a draw, when the combatants signed an armistice that reestablished the 38th parallel as the dividing line between North and South Korea.
In later efforts, the American government used less overt means to ensure friendly governments. In 1953, the United States sponsored a coup against the nationalist prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh. In 1954, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped oust the democratically elected government of Guatemala because it feared that the new government was susceptible to communist influence. These successes spurred the growth of the American intelligence community and created unwarranted faith in the efficacy of covert operations.
The decision to stop short of direct warfare on the part of both the United States and the Soviet Union can in large part be attributed to the prevalence of nuclear weapons on both sides. After the United States detonated the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima in August 1945, the United States maintained a monopoly over the weapon until 1949. Once the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949, an extensive and expensive arms race began. During the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the U. S. nuclear arsenal grew from 1,000 to almost 18,000 warheads. During the administration of John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s, fears about a “missile gap” spurred American production of nuclear weapons to new levels. The number of American missiles jumped from 63 in 1961 to 424 in 1963. During the same period, NATO’s nuclear missile power increased 60 percent.
In Cuba, cold war confrontation came to a head. After Fidel Castro took power in a successful coup against the American-backed regime of Fulgencio Batista, the United States initiated a number of covert efforts to remove him from power. Although unsuccessful, and sometimes spectacularly so, as in the Bay of Pigs invasion, these attempts worried the Soviet Union and it took measures to deter any future efforts. In October 1962, the United States discovered that the Soviet Union was installing medium - and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. Acutely conscious that these missiles could reach the United States in a matter of minutes, the Kennedy administration pressed for their removal. After a tense period of time, the American and Soviet governments reached a compromise: the Soviets withdrew the missiles in exchange for an American promise that it would not invade Cuba. Secretly, the United States also agreed to withdraw nuclear missiles from Turkey. With the Cuban missile crisis, the United States and Soviet Union realized how close they had come to a hot war and agreed to take measures to reduce tension.
The biggest factor, however, in initiating the end of the cold war was the American involvement in Vietnam. In 1954, the nationalist forces of Ho Chi Minh decisively defeated the French at Dienbienphu. Unwilling to allow the communist Ho to assume control of the country, the
United States stepped in and became the primary sponsor for the South Vietnamese regime during the Vietnam War. After a number of years of gradual escalation, the American government began pumping massive amounts of aid in the mid-1960s to support the South Vietnamese government. The futility of this effort made Americans realize the limits of their power, and many began to call for better relations with communist powers. Agreements to limit the arms race eventually led to a reduction of tension with the Soviet Union.
Further reading: John Lewis Gaddis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1996 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997); Melvyn Leffler, Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992).
—Brian Etheridge
World History
