In 1945 the US and the USSR emerged from the war as supposedly close allies. In the West the hope of a peaceful, stable world was born. Roosevelt had been prepared to go to any length to keep the alliance1 between his country and the Soviet Union intact. Nothing was allowed to divert him from that end. At Yalta, in February 1945, he had willingly agreed to Stalin's proposals for territorial expansion and hegemony in eastern Europe. It is difficult to see how he could have done otherwise outside of war. To obtain Russia's willingness to enter the war against Japan, concessions were made to the Soviets in Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, in Korea and in Manchuria.2
Roosevelt was much less suspicious of the Soviets than he was of British and French postwar imperial ambitions. Churchill, with more historical insight, tried to get the US president to see things differently. He suspected that Stalin was not primarily concerned with world peace but with the postwar security of the Soviet Union. (Russia has always had a craving for security.) President Truman, however, who succeeded Roosevelt on 12 April 1945, and who represented the US at the inconclusive Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945, did not share Roosevelt's illusions about Stalin.3
Russia's marriage of convenience with the West during the war broke down once the Germans were defeated. The cultural and ideological divide between the US and the USSR was too deep for the marriage to continue. Differences had already surfaced at Allied meetings at Teheran in 1943 and Yalta, but had been patched over. Each side blamed the other for the deterioration of relations. Russia felt the West had reneged on Russia's need to have friendly governments in eastern Europe. The West accused Russia of going back on its promises about the future status of Poland and the other governments of eastern Europe, as well as about the future of Germany. Although neither the US nor the Soviet Union were about to make a bid for world domination (in 1946 the US removed most of its forces from Europe and Russia's military budget fell sharply), both sides felt threatened; relations between them became increasingly rigid and suspicious. As seen from Moscow in 1945, the capitalist West, with the atomic bomb at its disposal, was a far greater menace to Russian communism than it had been in 1918. It is ironic that Roosevelt should have died in 1945 believing that he had bequeathed to posterity the means of obtaining lasting world peace.
Churchill's premonition that the realities of power would invalidate Roosevelt's view of Stalin was soon confirmed. By the end of the war, the Soviet Union was already in occupation of the territories needed for its future defence. War to the Russian leaders was a continuum; they wanted to be prepared for every contingency. Before the United Nations had been able to devise a common and effective strategy, Stalin had consolidated his hold on East Germany, the Baltic states, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland. The 'free and unfettered elections' Poland had been promised at Yalta were rejected by the Russian-imposed communist regime. Hitler had been condemned for invading Poland; Stalin acted with impunity. Territory that Hitler had fought for, Stalin took almost without bloodshed. The Allies formally protested the Russian occupation of Poland, but did little else. The western powers had no desire to become involved in the political and military realities of eastern Europe.
By 1947 the Soviets dominated eastern Europe, but not Tito's Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which in June 1948 was denounced and expelled from the Moscow-controlled Cominform;4 Albania was already acting independently of the Kremlin. Emboldened by its successes, and convinced by now that America would not use its atom bomb against it, Moscow further tested the Allies' resolve in Greece (where in 1947-8 it went to the help of Greek communists in their attempt to overthrow the state), and again in 1948-9, when it tried to incorporate Berlin into East Germany. In 1949, having obtained critical data through espionage in the United Kingdom and the United States, Russia exploded its first atomic bomb; in 1952 it exploded its first hydrogen bomb.
The turning point in US-Soviet relations came in 1947 when the Russians began to assert pressure on Greece and Turkey. Faced by Britain's inability to protect these countries, Truman announced his policy of containment.5 Conceived at the outset as an instrument to contain Soviet expansionism, containment policy eventually became concerned with the destruction of the Soviet system. America was determined not to flee its world responsibilities as it had done after 1919. A cold war was declared against world communism. What had been Roosevelt's belief in the possibility of lasting US-Soviet cooperation was exchanged for political, military and economic confrontation. In the late 1940s the danger that parts of western Europe - France and Italy, for example - would become communist was taken very seriously in Washington. In the immediate postwar years communists were deliberately excluded from the cabinets of both countries.
On the economic front, an effort was begun in 1947, under the US Marshall Plan,6 to bolster the European economies. The Soviets' response in 1949 was Comecon, an organization which coordinated the economic policies of Soviet bloc countries in eastern Europe as well as Mongolia and Cuba (and after 1978, Vietnam). On the military front, in 1948 the United States and its allies met the Soviet Union's threat to cut off Berlin from the West with the Berlin Airlift (June 1948-May 1949).7 Also in 1949, the US was instrumental in establishing the anti-Soviet front known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).8 For the first time, the US undertook to defend countries outside its own hemisphere. NATO was not strictly a North Atlantic Alliance (Italy was a member), nor was it in defence of democracy (Portugal's presence made that claim invalid),9 nor was it a treaty among equals (the US had no intention of sharing control of its atomic and hydrogen bombs). When in 1955 West Germany was included in NATO, the Soviets responded with the Warsaw Pact,10 which henceforth formed the basis for mutual defence cooperation within the Soviet bloc. On the political front, the US, Britain and France ended the state of war with Germany in 1951. The Soviet Union did so in 1955, when the German Federal Republic (GFR) was recognized by the Allies as a sovereign state. Russia responded to the recognition of the GFR by creating a German Democratic Republic (GDR) in eastern Europe.
By the 1950s the cold war between the US and the Soviet Union had become world-wide. On 25 June 1950, North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. Assuming that the Soviets had decided to put the Truman Doctrine of containment of communism to the test, the Americans called for a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council the same day. The Council's demand for a ceasefire having been ignored, it at once called upon all member states to render assistance to the Republic of South Korea in repelling the invaders. As the Russians (who were boycotting the Council at the time) were unable to use the veto to halt American action, US troops, with token forces of other nations sympathetic to American aims, entered the war on the side of the South Koreans.
After initial North Korean successes, the Americans under General Douglas MacArthur counterattacked via Inchon and took up positions close to the Chinese frontier on the Yalu. Convinced that the US was about to invade China, in November 1950 the Chinese directly intervened in Korea, driving the Americans back into South Korea. The Americans could have ended Chinese intervention with the use of the nuclear bomb, but they hesitated to use it. The war dragged on with neither side winning a decisive victory. Not until April 1951 did the United Nations forces regain the 38th parallel; not until July 1953 was an armistice signed re-establishing conditions as they had been prior to the North's invasion of the South. In 1953, after three years of bitter fighting, and endless negotiations, Korea was partitioned (as it had been originally in 1945) between communist and non-communist forces at the 38th parallel.
The Korean War (1950-3) stimulated American efforts to complete its encircling military alliances and bases around the communist world. In 1951, while the Korean War was still being fought, the US signed a peace treaty and a mutual security pact with Japan. In the same year it concluded a mutual security pact with Australia and New Zealand (ANZUS). In April 1952 Japan's sovereignty was restored. Between 1945 and 1952 the US granted $1.7 billion of aid to Japan, which together with enormous purchases of equipment, helped its recovery. Gradually, Japan and Okinawa became American bastions in the East.11
Conscious that it was committed to a life-and-death struggle against communism, in 1953 the United States signed a ten-year military and economic agreement with fascist Spain, led by Franco. (The death of Franco in 1975 and the accession of Prince Juan Carlos, grandson of Alfonso XIII, to the Spanish throne further cemented US-Spanish relations.) In 1954, to deter possible future
Chinese aggression, the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)12 was formed; a US-Taiwan Defence Treaty was signed (rescinded in favour of mainland China in 1980). In 1959 the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO)13 replaced the Baghdad Pact of 1955. By the 1960s the US had more than 1,000 military bases in 31 countries. It also had a far larger nuclear stockpile than the USSR, and had supremacy at sea.
On 5 March 1953, Stalin died. Glorified as an omnipotent and infallible genius, he was laid to rest alongside Lenin in Red Square. So ended 25 years of despotic rule of such ruthlessness as to be unusual even in Russian history. In 1956 at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, three years after Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) denounced Stalin's wartime policies. Far from having saved the USSR, he contended that Stalin had brought the country to the brink of defeat. Khrushchev also condemned Stalin's 'brutal violence... [and his] capricious and despotic character'.14 With Khrushchev's accession to power in 1958, Stalin's body was removed from Lenin's side and buried elsewhere.
The following year, in a spirit of competitive coexistence, Khrushchev visited the United States. His friendly behaviour on that occasion contrasted sharply with the ruthlessness he had shown in putting down the revolts in East Berlin (1953), Poland (1956) and Hungary (1956). Nor did his proposed coexistence with the West discourage him from strengthening the Cominform and the Warsaw Pact, displaying his anger at President Eisenhower over the U-2 incident (1960), building the Berlin Wall (1961) or offsetting US aid to Israel by assisting the Arabs.
Khrushchev is especially responsible for changing Soviet relations with eastern Asia. Under his leadership Soviet influence in Korea, India and Vietnam grew; in China it declined. The tremendous assistance which Russia had given China during the late 1940s and early 1950s was reduced. Irked by personal taunts made against him by the Chinese for his adventurism in placing missiles in Cuba, and for his cowardice in removing them, Khrushchev cut off all aid to China and strengthened Russian defences along the Chinese border. Until his dismissal in 1964, relations between the Soviet Union and China worsened.
During Khrushchev's regime the US and the USSR came close to a nuclear confrontation over Cuba, which had become a pawn in the larger cold war. Following the failure in 1961 of a US-backed seaborne attempt to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro (the 'Bay of Pigs' landing), the Soviet Union in 1962 placed medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. Overnight, America's superiority in intercontinental ballistic missiles was neutralized. President John F. Kennedy (b. 1917, president 1961-3) responded by ordering a sea blockade of Cuba. Only by bringing the world to the brink of a nuclear war were the Russians compelled to remove their missiles the following year. Americans undertook not to invade Cuba again and to remove their missiles from Turkey.
The Cuban crisis not only caused the Russians to challenge the Monroe Doctrine under which the US had held a protectorate over the western hemisphere for 150 years, it also caused the Soviets to begin a naval building programme which by the 1970s had ended American supremacy at sea. For the first time since 1945 the Soviet Union became a superpower not only on land and in the air, but at sea as well. The Cuban missile crisis also caused a shift in emphasis for the Russians from medium-range to intercontinental ballistic missiles.
In 1964, partly because of his loss of credibility over Cuba, Khrushchev was forced to relinquish power to the collective leadership of Leonid Brezhnev (1906-82), Aleksei Kosygin (1904-81) and Nicholas Podgorny (1903-83). Within two years, Brezhnev had ousted Kosygin and Podgorny and had assumed full power in the USSR. In 1968, he enforced the Soviet Union's right to 'intervene if socialism was threatened elsewhere', by invading and imposing his will on Czechoslovakia.
Even more important than Cuba in helping to shape the postwar outlook of the American people was the war the US fought and lost in Vietnam (1964-73). Until Vietnam, all US wars had been moral, righteous and victorious. The Vietnam War proved to be an unmitigated disaster. It caused the deaths of 58,000 Americans and cost $250 billion directly; and while the threat presented by North Vietnam was never direct or vital to American interests, the war came close to splitting the nation. To some, the war was morally right and winnable; to others it was totally reprehensible and a lost cause from the start. The divisive conflict that ensued would haunt the US until its victory in 1991 in the Gulf War. The US withdrawal from southeast Asia in 1975 - precipitated by its defeat in Vietnam in 1973 - ended the Truman
Doctrine of containing communism begun 28 years earlier. Following the Vietnam War a new and more friendly chapter in US-Soviet relations opened, referred to as detente.
Since the Vietnam War, new great centres of power have appeared in Germany, Japan, communist China and (collectively) in the third world. The bipolarism of 1945 gave way to the multipolarism of the 1970s and 1980s. Not only did new centres of power appear in the West and the East, the balance of terror, existing since 1945, was greatly affected by the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Following upon American and Russian developments, Britain exploded an atomic bomb in 1952, France in 1960, China in 1964, India in 1974,15 Pakistan in May 1998. Israel has nuclear potential. In October 1989, US government sources confirmed that South Africa, aided by Israel, had successfully launched a ballistic missile. Other countries have the atomic bomb or are working to obtain it. The proliferation of ballistic missiles is affecting every region of the world. Increasingly, the danger of war lies in the actions of minor powers armed with advanced technological weapons.
US hegemony after the Second World War did not go unchallenged in the West. Canada declined US nuclear weapons, developed friendly relations with communist Cuba and China, and ignored America's trade boycott of the communist world. In the 1970s it refused to support the US in the Vietnam War. Evidence of Europe's growing sense of neutrality towards the US was its lukewarm support of US Middle East policy in 1973, at the time of the Arab-Israeli War. The United Nations (once a forum for praising the US actions) became a tribunal before which American actions were often criticized or condemned.
The Arab oil embargo of 1973 challenged US power openly. For the first time in modern history the initiative in world economic affairs was wrenched out of western hands. There also was the extraordinary economic challenge presented to the US by the resurgence of Germany and Japan. Economically, Germany became the strongest power in Europe; Japan became the leading creditor nation of the world. Increasingly since the 1950s, these two countries have helped to erode America's industrial monopoly.
By 1987, primarily because of fiscal profligacy, which began with President Lyndon B. Johnson's (b. 1908, president 1963-9, d. 1973) refusal to finance the Vietnam War through additional taxes, the US had become the world's largest debtor-nation. Rarely was the US budget and debt situation in greater disarray. In the short space of 20 years the US passed from the point where it felt it could dominate the world economy to being increasingly concerned about the effect of the world upon itself.
The postwar period also witnessed a decline of Soviet power. The Soviets experienced political setbacks in Egypt, Algeria, Somalia, Guinea, the Congo, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Romania and Berlin. The challenge presented by China to the USSR also grew. Decisions made during the 1980s by the Americans, the British and the French to sell arms to China, coupled with the visits made by Chinese leaders to Europe and the United States, added to the Soviet Union's paranoia about its security.
Despite its theoretical commitment to the destruction of capitalism, the Soviet Union's first priority after 1945 was to safeguard its own national interests. 'Russia', said Churchill in 1939, 'is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.' Except for its invasion of Afghanistan (1979-89) - in support of a communist regime - the Soviet Union undertook few direct foreign adventures. In Korea, Vietnam, Angola and the Middle East it let its communist allies do the fighting.
Between 1949 and 1973 the cold war fought between the superpowers dominated world history. The threatened political fragmentation stemming from Europe's collapse after 1945 was deferred by the increase of American and Soviet power. Major landmarks since 1949 were the Truman Doctrine of containment, the Marshall Plan and the Greek (1947), Hungarian (1956) and Czechoslovakian (1968) crises. The two superpowers also came close to war in Berlin (1949). For 40 years the cold war ensured a communist grip of eastern Europe. Landmarks in Asia were the conflicts in China, Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East. Besides the continuing struggle between the US and the USSR, there have been other conflicts in southeast Asia (China and India, Vietnam and Cambodia, China and Vietnam), in southwest Asia (Iran and Iraq), in Africa (Algeria, Kenya, Angola, Namibia, Uganda, Mozambique, the Sudan, Libya, Rwanda and Zaire), and in the Americas (Cuba, Chile, Panama, El Salvador, Grenada and Nicaragua).
Some saw the cold war as having been inevitable, a price one had to pay to rid Europe of communism; others saw it as a war that need never have been fought. The blessing about the cold war was that it did not escalate into a third world war. Faced with crude power too awesome to contemplate, neither the Russians nor the Americans pushed their interests to the point of nuclear annihilation. The balance of terror replaced the balance of power. The curse of the cold war was that it led to enormous and largely unnecessary military expenditures - particularly in nuclear weaponry - that almost bankrupted the two major contestants, and placed the welfare of the entire planet in jeopardy.
The conclusion of a Four Power Agreement on Berlin in 1971; the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in 1972, which limited the anti-ballistic systems; the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973; and the Helsinki Agreements of 1975, which in recognizing existing boundaries, confirmed the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe, coupled with the improved relations between East and West Germany, foreshadowed the end of the cold war. While new setbacks to detente between the US and the USSR would be met with in the late 1970s and the early 1980s (when the US renewed the arms race and President Ronald Reagan [b. 1911, president 1980-8] called the Soviet Union an 'evil empire'), it was the accession to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, and the subsequent unravelling of communism in eastern Europe, that carried the cold war to its conclusion.
Who won the cold war is a difficult question to answer. The Soviet Union certainly lost it. But the war having brought the US to the brink of bankruptcy, one hesitates before calling it the clear winner. The unquestioned winners of the cold war were Japan and Germany.
World History
