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Chapter Four: The Cold War
Review |
World War II and its aftermath suggested that global politics were prone to conflict as states acted to pursue their own interests, often at the expense of others. The ideological conflict between the United States and Soviet Union can be traced back to the communist revolution in Russia in 1917. However, the Cold War between the US and USSR began shortly after the end of World War II. Each side feared the other was attempting to spread its ideology and military power into the other’s sphere of influence. Each believed that military strength was necessary to halt the other’s aggression.
1. Background to the Cold War
a) Western-Soviet suspicions date back to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Western intervention in Russia to keep that country in World War I.
b) Mutual suspicion was a feature of the Western-Soviet alliance against Hitler in World War II, especially as a result of the Anglo-American delay in opening a “second front."
2. Origins of the Cold War in Postwar Europe
Initially, the Cold War conflict was limited to Europe, involving disagreements over conquered Germany and the countries of Eastern Europe.
a) The Breakdown of Soviet-American Cooperation
- Soviet violation of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements as regards the countries of Eastern Europe and Germany produced highly negative American views of the USSR.
- Initially, Americans interpreted Soviet behavior as like that of others states, driven fundamentally by power considerations.
- Disagreement over how to deal with the German economy and over access to Berlin led to a sequence of hostile actions and reactions by both sides.
b) Spiraling Mistrust
- As relations worsened, Americans began to view the USSR through the prism of the Riga Axioms which assumed that the USSR was driven by Marxist-Leninist ideology.
- In the Long Telegram, George Kennan articulated an interpretation of Soviet behavior as inherently aggressive.
- The Novikov telegram portrayed the United States as aggressive and was a mirror image of Kennan’s perceptions of the USSR.
c) Interpreting the Beginning of the Cold War
- Causes for the onset of the Cold War can be found at all levels of analysis.
- The individual level might focus on the anti-communism of Western leaders and Stalin’s paranoia.
- At the state level, one can focus on the existence of two diametrically opposed economic, social, and political systems and on interest groups in both countries that wanted their government to pursue tough policies.
- At the level of the global system, theorists could focus on the bipolar distribution of military power which created a security dilemma.
- Realists, especially neorealists, stress the existence of a power vacuum in Central Europe and East Asia that had been created by the defeat of Germany and Japan.
- Liberals focus on Soviet authoritarianism.
- Constructivists focus on the contrasting identities of the two superpowers that gave rise to conflicting interests, with the USSR identity as the vanguard of a world Marxist revolution versus an American identity as leader of “the free world.”
- Marxists viewed the policies of the U.S. and its allies as part of a transnational capitalist effort to strangle socialism in general and the Soviet state in particular, and to spread capitalism globally.
3. The Cold War Spreads and Deepens
The Cold War entered a new and more dangerous stage early in 1947 with the Truman Doctrine.
a) Containment
- In reaction to crises in Greece and Turkey, President Truman espoused the doctrine of assisting “free people” anywhere who were threatened by totalitarianism.
- In the “Mr. X” article, Kennan laid out the strategy of containment in which Soviet expansionism would be countered by economic and political means.
- In pursuit of containment, the U.S. concluded a number of alliances of which the most important was NATO.
- In 1947, the U.S. announced the Marshall Plan, a massive effort to help rebuild Western Europe by providing economic assistance, thereby reducing the attraction of communism.
- A number of crises took place, the most important of which was the 1948 Berlin blockade.
b) Militarizing the Cold War
The United States was greatly shocked when the USSR exploded its first atomic bomb.
- NSC-68
A confidential U.S. report, NSC-68, called for massive enlargement and improvement in American military capabilities to meet the Soviet threat.
- The “Loss of China”
The Cold War spread into Asia when communist forces took power in China in 1949.
- b) McCarthyism At Home
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the U.S. was the scene of “Red Scare” led by Senator Joseph McCarthy that led to the disgrace of some of America’s leading diplomats.
- The Korean War
- When the communist North Korean government invaded South Korea in 1950, U.S. leaders believed they were being tested by these communist forces and if they did not militarily resist communist expansion in Asia, the Soviets would attempt further expansion into Western Europe.
- China entered the war in late 1950, and the conflict dragged on until a ceasefire in 1953.
4. The Vietnam War
a) Following the 1954 defeat of France, the Vietnam War began in which the U.S. fought against the reunification of North and South Vietnam under a communist government.
b) Successive American presidents increased U.S. involvement which deepened rapidly in 1965 under President Lyndon Johnson.
c) Following the Tet Offensive of 1968, Johnson declared he would not seek reelection.
d) President Richard Nixon introduced a policy of “Vietnamization” and widened the war by bombing enemy supply lines in Cambodia and then invading that country in 1970.
e) The war deeply divided Americans at home and had a lasting effect on the United States.
f) U.S. forces finally left Vietnam in 1973, and the country was united under communist rule in 1975.
5. The Cold War winds down
a) The Cold War encompassed events in other parts of the Third World. Countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia that resisted being pulled into the U.S. or the Soviet alliance systems nonetheless became arenas for conflicts between the U.S. and USSR and between their local proxies.
b) The Cold War was a military, political, economic, and cultural conflict, but it never led to a direct war between the U.S. and the USSR.
c) The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis almost ended in nuclear war and proved a turning point in the Cold War.
d) The period of the missile crisis saw U.S.-Soviet détente.
e) After the missile crisis, the superpowers developed tacit rules to reduce the likelihood of hot war. These included avoiding direct military confrontation, designing weapons systems that could survive an enemy attack, not meddling in each other’s sphere of interest, and limiting competition to non-military contests.
f) Détente ended with the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
g) The early years of the Reagan administration saw a resumption of intense competition as the U.S. and USSR engaged in a new arms race and the U.S. adopted a more aggressive policy in regional conflicts.
6. The End of the Cold War
Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in the Soviet Union in 1985 was the first step in ending the Cold War.
7. The Gorbachev Reforms and the Resolution of Key Issues
a) Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the USSR economically and politically unintentionally started a process that led to the collapse of the Soviet communist party and the USSR itself.
b) Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact disbanded and East and West Germany were reunited.
8. Explaining the End of the Cold War
a) Individual-level explanations emphasize the personalities and preferences of Reagan and Gorbachev.
b) At the state level, the end of the Cold War owed much to Soviet economic weakness, technological backwardness, and social malaise.
c) At the level of the global system, the growth in U.S. power combined with a decline in Soviet power can explain the Cold War’s end.
d) Neorealists focus on the shifting balance of U.S.-Soviet power.
e) Liberals stress the triumph of democracy in Eastern Europe and the USSR and the spread of anti-war and pro-arms control sentiment in the U.S.
f) Constructivists interpret the end of the Cold War in terms of growing popularity of democratic ideals in the USSR and a decline in Soviet self-identity as leader of the global communist revolution.
9. Russia after the Cold War
After an initial period of economic crisis and political turmoil, Russia is becoming a “normal” country that enjoys generally good relations with the West.
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Focus Questions |
Q1 What caused the Cold War?
A1 Explanations for the Cold War can be found at all three levels of analysis. The vigorous anti-communist of Harry S Truman and Winston Churchill and the paranoid suspicion of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin were individual-level factors. At the state-level the different ideologies and economic systems in the United States and Soviet Union—capitalism and socialism—and the suspicions and fears that that differences caused in both societies help explain the onset of the conflict. Finally, at the system-level favored by neorealists, the emergence in 1945 of only two superpowers and the weakness of the former great powers in Europe and Asia produced fear in the United States and Soviet Union. Under the condition of bipolarity, only the United States could seriously harm the Soviet Union and only the Soviet Union threatened American interests.
Q2 What issues separated the United States and the Soviet Union?
A2 Among the key issues at the beginning of the Cold War, the most important were the future of Germany—divided among the four victorious powers—and whether Poland and then the other countries of Eastern Europe would be independent and democratic or would fall under Soviet influence. With the 1948 coup in Czechoslovakia that brought to power a pro-communist government, the Iron Curtain that Winston Churchill had warned about two years earlier seemed a reality. Part of the German question included the status of the divided city of Berlin, located deep in the Soviet zone of the country. This issue was exacerbated by Soviet attempts to interfere with Western access to the city and the onset of the 1948 Berlin crisis and airlift, which was the first of several crises over access to the city. Disagreement over Berlin culminated in 1961 with the building of the Berlin Wall to prevent the exodus of East Germans to the West. The threat of communism in Greece triggered American aid to that country, as well as Turkey, and President Truman's 1947 commitment to aid free peoples everywhere—the Truman Doctrine. And a few months later the United States offered economic aid to Western Europe to reduce communist influence in the countries of that region. In 1949 the countries of Western Europe, Canada, and the United States formed that North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) and in 1955 the Soviet Union countered by forming the Warsaw Pact. For its part, the United States pursued the policy of containment suggested first by George Kennan and given a military dimension by the Truman administration.
Q3 How did the Cold War become global?
A3 The most important event in globalizing the Cold War was the invasion of South Korea by North Korea in 1950 at the behest of Stalin. The Korea War lasted until 1953, ending in the continued division of the country under an uneasy truce that remains to this day. Then, after years of civil war, the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, fuelling anti-communist hysteria in the United States. Following the Korean invasion and the Chinese revolution, the US government was reorganized for a long struggle; US defense budgets soared; NATO was transformed from a political to a military alliance; an arms race ensued between the Soviet Union and the United States; US troops remained in Japan and South Korea; and alliances were formed around the world with and US bases were built in countries friendly to the United States. The Cold War spread from East to Southeast Asia following the defeat of French colonial forces in Indochina in 1954 by communists led by Ho Chi Minh, and the growing US intervention in Vietnam in subsequent years, especially after 1965. The Vietnam War deeply divided American society and was finally brought to an end in 1973. Two years later Vietnam was united under a communist government. After a successful communist revolution in Cuba in 1959 had brought Fidel Castro to power there, the Cold War came to the Western Hemisphere. Following an unsuccessful covert operation to overthrow Castro, the Soviet Union secretly deployed intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962, which, when discovered, triggered the most dangerous crisis of the Cold War, a crisis that persuaded American and Soviet leaders of the need to reduce the threat of a nuclear exchange.
Q4 Why did the Cold War end?
A4 Prior to the end of the Cold War, the struggle had already become routinized by a series of tacit "rules" such as the need to avoid direct Soviet-American military confrontation. Realists argue that the Cold War ended because of growing American military power and the political and economic pressure put upon the Soviet Union by the Reagan administration. The economic and political failure of the Soviet system constitutes a state-level explanation, which is complemented by the constructivist view that norms favoring democracy and capitalism evolved in the Soviet Union as Soviet citizens sought a higher standard of living and no longer saw their country as the spear carrier for world revolution or leader of the socialist bloc of states. An individual-level explanation would focus on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his desire to rejuvenate his country with the policies of perestroika and glasnost and to create a more peaceful world for Soviet citizens.
Q5 How have the relations between Russia and the West evolved since the end of the Cold War?
A5 The demise of the Soviet Union and the end of communism in that country meant that it was not longer a superpower. Nevertheless, Russia retained a large nuclear arsenal, remained the world's largest country in terms of territory, and is one of the world's leading exporters of oil and natural gas. As a result, Russia remains a powerful country with great power potential. For a time American relations with Russia then governed by President Boris Yeltsin remained warm, as the two cooperated against Saddam Hussein after his invasion of Kuwait and against international terrorism and as Russia adopted economic and political reforms. Nevertheless, Russians still regret the loss of their country's status as a superpower and resent the expansion of NATO and the European Union to include most of former Soviet bloc countries as well as the former Baltic republics of the USSR. Russia has largely recovered from the economic woes it suffered during its transition from communism and under President Vladimir Putin has begun to assert itself, sometimes in cooperation and sometimes in opposition to the United States and the European Union. |
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