Cold War

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Editing of this article by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled. If you are prevented from editing this article, and you wish to make a change, please discuss changes on the talk page, request unprotection, log in, or create an account.

Cold War map (circa 1960). The status of France within NATO would fluctuate, and China would later split with the USSR. This map is a simplification of the complex political climate of the Cold War.

The Cold War was the period of conflict, tension and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies from the mid-1940s until the early 1990s. Throughout the period, the rivalry between the two superpowers was played out in multiple arenas: military coalitions; ideology, psychology, and espionage; military, industrial, and technological developments, including the space race; costly defense spending; a massive conventional and nuclear arms race; and many proxy wars. The Cold War comprised an exchange of counter-measures and manoeuvres between the Communist East and the Democratic West, each side seeking to strengthen itself whilst weakening the other—without becoming involved in a "hot" war. It was, though, first and foremost, a conflict of ideologies and ideals.

The term "Cold War" was first used in 1947 by Americans Bernard Baruch, close adviser to president Truman, and Walter Lippmann, describing emerging tensions between the two former wartime allies.^[1] The Communist Revolution of 1917 had made the West apprehensive about Russia's expansionist aspirations. Communist development in the time from 1919 to 1939 made little progress in Europe, but misgivings, nevertheless, were still quite manifest. Even when Hitler marched into Russia in 1941, resulting in that country's teaming up with the US and Britain in a Grand Alliance, mistrust still remained. With the gradual break-up of the Grand Alliance, the Western Powers and the Soviet Union drifted apart. Although the US and the Soviet Union had been allied against Nazi Germany, the two sides differed on how to reconstruct the postwar world even before the end of World War II. There never was a direct military engagement between the US and the Soviet Union, but there was a half-century of military buildup, and political battles for support around the world, including significant involvement of allied and satellite nations. Over the following decades, the Cold War spread outside Europe to every region of the world, as the US sought the "containment" of communism and forged numerous alliances to this end, particularly in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

There were repeated crises that threatened to escalate into world wars but never did, notably the Korean War (1950–1953), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Vietnam War (1964–1975), and the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989). There were also periods when tension was reduced as both sides sought détente. Direct military attacks on adversaries were deterred by the potential for mutual assured destruction using deliverable nuclear weapons. Because of this, the Cold War made use of methods such as propaganda, by means of television, press and radio; economics and monetary hand-outs; a war of words and diplomacy; and buying friend, with Dollar Diplomacy coming up against Rouble Diplomacy. The Soviet Union used its control of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, as well as the support of the communist parties in Italy, Greece and France, to spread Communist ideology and anti-imperialist slogans. The USSR's army served as an effective instrument of political pressure, and, while both sides utilised espionage, the Soviets had the advantage of operating in the open, free-moving western countries. The USA used its economic wealth to bring relief to poverty-stricken areas threatened by Communism, and it often formed alliances with these territories, establishing naval and air bases there. American propaganda stressed the values of Christianity, freedom and capitalism in favour of the more inhumane aspects of the Soviet dictatorship.

The Cold War was fought in such diverse arenas as Europe, the Far East, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and even space, and it attracted much of the attention of the UN. The war drew to a close in the late 1980s following the launching of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's reform programs, perestroika and glasnost. The Soviet Union consequently ceded power over Eastern Europe and was dissolved in 1991.

History

Main article: Origins of the Cold War

The challenge of Nazi Germany forced the Western Allies and the Soviets into wartime cooperation. However, from the start, the alliance between the Soviet Union, the world's first Communist state, and the United States, the world's leading economic power, was marked by mutual distrust and ideological tension.

The Wisconsin School of Interpretation argues that the U.S. and the Soviet Union were economic rivals that made them natural adversaries regardless of ideology.^[2] Walter LaFeber argues the U.S. and Imperial Russia became rivals by 1900 over the development of Manchuria. Russia, unable to compete industrially with the U.S., sought to close off parts of East Asia to trade with other colonial powers. Meanwhile, the U.S demanded open competition for markets.^[3]

The ideological clash between communism and capitalism that began in 1917 following the Russian Revolution was the first event that would make Russian-American relations a matter of major concern to leaders in each country.^[4] In World War I, the U.S., Britain, and Russia had been allies for a few months from April 1917 until the Bolsheviks seized power in November. In 1918 the Bolsheviks negotiated a separate peace with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk; and the Western Allies intervened in the Russian Civil War against revolutionary forces. After the war, the U.S. had refused to recognize the Soviet Union until 1933.^[5] After winning the civil war (see Russian Civil War), the Bolsheviks proclaimed a worldwide challenge to capitalism.^[1]

The period of prewar diplomacy also left both sides wary of the other's intentions and motives in World War II. Each feared that the other might pull out of the war effort and make a separate settlement with Germany. Moscow recalled Western appeasement of Adolf Hitler after the signing of the Munich Pact in 1938. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt feared Joseph Stalin would once more make a settlement with Germany, as he had done in August 1939 with the German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact.^[5] From 1941 to 1945, the alliance was only a temporary aberration in the post-nineteenth century relationship between Russia and America.^[5]

During the war, the Soviets were deeply suspicious of U.S. military tactics and strategies. The Soviets believed at the time, and charged throughout the Cold War, that the British and Americans intentionally delayed the opening of a second front against Germany.^[6] As early as July 1941, Stalin had asked the UK to invade northern France, but the British were in no position to carry out the request.^[7] The second front was ultimately constituted on June 6, 1944, or D-Day. The Soviets suspected that the Anglo-Americans had decided to allow the Russians to bear the brunt of the war effort, but would intervene at the last minute to influence the peace settlement and dominate Europe.^[8] Historians such as John Lewis Gaddis dispute this claim, citing other military and strategic calculations for the timing of the Normandy invasion,^[9] but Soviet perceptions (or misperceptions) of the West, and vice versa, left an undercurrent of tensions and hostility between the Allied powers. That the Western Powers had their own reservations, too, is given away by the fact that they did not communicate to Russia the A-bomb formula. Winston Churchill, for example, was deeply suspicious of the Soviets' infiltration of Eastern Europe.

Moreover, both sides held very dissimilar concepts of establishing post-war security. The Americans tended to understand security in situational terms, assuming that, if US-style governments and markets were established as widely as possible, states could peacefully resolve their differences through international organizations.^[10] The key to the US vision of security was a post-war world shaped according to the principles laid out in the Atlantic Charter in 1941—a liberal international system based on free trade and open markets. This vision would require a rebuilt capitalist Europe with, at its center, a healthy Germany which could serve again as a hub in world affairs.^[5] It would also require the USA's economic and political leadership of the postwar world. Europe needed US assistance to rebuild its domestic production and to finance its international trade. The US was the only world power not economically devastated by the fighting, and, by the end of the war, it produced around fifty per cent of the world's industrial goods.^[5]

Soviet leaders, however, tended to understand security in terms of space.^[11] This reasoning was conditioned by Russia's historical experiences, given the frequency with which their country had been invaded over the previous 150 years.^[11] In order to prevent a similar assault in the future, Stalin was determined to use the Red Army to control Poland, dominate the Balkans, and destroy Germany's capacity for another war. This strategy, however, risked confrontation with the equally powerful United States.

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies attempted to define the framework for a post-war settlement in Europe. The Allies could not reach firm agreements on the crucial questions—the occupation of Germany, postwar reparations from Germany, and loans—so no final consensus was reached on what remained of Germany, other than to agree to a Soviet request for reparations totaling $10,000,000,000, "as a basis for negotiations."^[12] Debates over the composition of Poland's post-war government were also acrimonious.^[13]

Subsequent to the Allied triumph in May, Europe was dilapidated, but the US and USSR had emerged victorious, and were each of the opinion now that their own particular systems of government and ways of life had the answers to all of the world's troubles. There would have been no Cold War had there not been two adequately powerful, large densely-inhabited groups both believing in their own ideas and weapons and both after world leadership. The Soviets effectively occupied the countries of Eastern Europe, while the US and its Allies had much of Western Europe. In occupied Germany, the US and the Soviet Union (the world's two superpowers), along with the waning colonial forces of Britain and France, established zones of occupation and a loose framework for four-power control.

The moment the Russian armies had liberated Eastern Europe and the Balkans from German rule, the USSR achieved political and economic privileges in those quarters. Using dexterous tactics, it gained permanent power over the states of Eastern Europe. This was her stratagem: after liberating it, she would aid a country in setting up a provisional government in which Communist leaders would take over the army and issue forth Communist propaganda. By the end of WWII, Russia had an extra estimate of about 24,000,000 people under its control because of the subjugation of Baltic States such as Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. This added to her mounting cachet, which increased further from the meetings at Yalta, Teheran and Potsdam onwards. Although she had lost 20,000,000 people to the War, it is beyond doubt that Russia emerged with strength in the international field (with, for example, her prominent role within the UNO). This, along with her control of the Communist states of Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Albania, gave her authority over some 90,000,000 Eastern European people. To secure its say-so over these states, the USSR launched Cominform, a body formed not only for the bartering of Communist information but also to operate as a cant mechanism for Communism. Next, the Communists would outnumber the non-Communist component of the government, and all resistance would be mercilessly eliminated by the Red Army (which served as more than just an idle, present threat). Little by little, Russia took control of these Eastern European nations, and, with the exception of Yugoslavia (where Marshall Tito resisted), they became puppet or satellite states of the USSR, thus bringing down the iron curtain on Europe.

Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin meeting at the Potsdam Conference on July 18, 1945. From left to right, first row: Stalin, Truman, Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Second row: Truman confidant Harry Vaughan [3], Russian interpreter Charles Bohlen, Truman naval aide James K. Vardaman, Jr., and Charles Griffith Ross (partially obscured) [4].

At the Potsdam Conference starting in late July, serious differences emerged over the future development of Germany and Eastern Europe.^[14] At Potsdam, the US was represented by a new president, Harry S. Truman, who, on April 12, succeeded to the office following Roosevelt's death. Truman was unaware of Roosevelt's plans for post-war engagement with the Soviet Union, and he was generally uninformed about foreign policy and military matters.^[15] This is why the new president was initially reliant on a set of advisers, including Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, and his own choice for secretary of state, James F. Byrnes. This group tended to take a harder line towards Moscow than Roosevelt had.^[15] Administration officials favoring co-operation with the Soviet Union and incorporation of socialist economies into a world trade system were marginalized.

One week after the Potsdam Conference ended, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki added to Soviet distrust of the United States. Shortly after the attacks, when Truman offered the Soviets little real influence in occupied Japan, Stalin had protested vainly to US officials.^[16] It really was only a matter of time before the Grand Alliance broke up, for tensions between Russia and the West had mounted severely during the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. The collapse of this Alliance left both sides free to pursue their own policies and ideologies.

In February 1946, George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow articulated the growing hard line that was being taken against the Soviets.^[15] The telegram argued that the Soviet Union was motivated by both traditional Russian imperialism and Marxist ideology, and that Soviet behavior was inherently expansionist and paranoid, posing a threat to the United States and its allies. Later writing as "Mr. X" in his article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in Foreign Affairs (July 1947), Kennan drafted the classic argument for adopting a policy of "containment" toward the Soviet Union.

A few weeks after the release of the "Long Telegram", former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri, describing the impassible barrier which divided Soviet-occupied territory from the rest of Europe. The speech called for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, whom he accused of establishing an "iron curtain" from "Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic."^[15]

On September 6, 1946 James F. Byrnes made a speech in Germany, repudiating the Morgenthau Plan, as well as warning the Soviets that the USA intended to maintain an indefinite military presence in Europe. (see Restatement of Policy on Germany) As Byrnes admitted a month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people ... it was a battle between us and Russia over minds..."^[17]

From "Containment" through the Korean War (1947–1953)

Main article: Cold War (1947-1953)

By the end of 1947, democratic government in Eastern Europe had all but disappeared, and in its place had been established the so-called "peoples' democracies" of Communism:

• When the Red Army freed and it has begun occupation Poland from German occupation in 1945, this naturally heralded the beginning of Communism in Poland. Communists gained charge of all of the key governmental departments and obliterated all opposition groups, and a new constitution, based on the Communist dogma, was implemented in 1947.
• The Communists also gained control in Hungary, crushing all opposition. Thus, in 1948, another "peoples' democracy" was established, with a Soviet constitution.
• There was evidence of Communism in the political affairs of Czechoslovakia even prior to the Second World War. The Czech government agreed to Marshall Aid, but the Kremlin ordered Gottwald and his government to decline it. Again in 1948, a new constitution was enforced—this time on the Czech people. Again, it was based on the Soviet mould, and another once-powerful egalitarian nation disappeared behind the iron curtain.
• In November 1946, after the Russian militia arrived at Romania, a coalition government was formed in which the Communists led. King Michael was compelled to step down, and a "peoples' republic" was declared in December 1947. Russian troops were permitted to be posted in Romania, which eventually became a Communist state.
• With the throwing out of the German armed forces in Bulgaria, a coalition government (including Communists) secured the closing down of the monarchy and the proclamation of a Republic. Here, too, through vetoing certain parties, the Communists took total control.
• The Russian occupation of East Germany, as said by the Potsdam agreement, provided the Communists with a direct opening to commence work for a Communist nation. The voted-in Peoples' Council drew up a constitution, based on the Communist doctrine, and, in October 1949, the (Communist) German Democratic Republic came into being.

Domino theory

The Communist dispersion into Eastern Europe was crucial and effectual, and it posed a real danger to the continuation of a democratic Western Europe. How would the West, particularly the US, counter the communist hazard? With the gravity and velocity of the Russian thrust, some redoubtable Western retort was of the essence, and this came in the form of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.

With the 1947 institution of Cominform (pressing forward the doings of Communist parties right the way through the planet), the Western Powers appreciated the fact that the Communists' struggle for global supremacy was as steadfast as ever. The Communist forces had been trying to seize control of Greece for years. During the War, Communist and Republican armed services had fought side by side against the German occupational armies. After the War, the Communists became a party to the Greek coalition government, but, when the government tried to neutralize all Communist forces, the Communists revolted. They were, however, trounced with the assistance of British forces led by General Scobie. The monarchists won the 1946 election, and the new government took even stronger measures against the Communists. Until 1947, the Greek monarchist regime managed hold back the opposition Communist armed forces—but only with Britain's aid. When Britain found itself incapable of continuing to finance the Greek monarchical-military regime in its civil war against these Communist-led insurgents, and announced it in February 1947, the Greeks found themselves in dire Communist jeopardy.

Similar circumstances transpired in Turkey, where Communism also posed a threat. The states of Western Europe and Britain were struggling against a harsh winter and shortage of food and food. US President Truman's advisors had become worried that time was running out to counter the influence of the Soviet Union^[15] and realised that, unless Western Europe was given both economic and military aid, it, too, would fall prey to Communism. Postwar economic recovery was faltering in Europe, and shortages such as those mentioned above were common. Truman's advisors feared that the Soviet Union sought to weaken the position of the US in a period of postwar confusion and collapse.

The event which spurred Truman into formally announcing the policy of "containment" was the British government's announcement that it could no longer afford to sustain its aid of Greece. (See Greek Civil War.) This was the first of the crises in the struggle between capitalism and Communism. Rather than viewing this war as a civil conflict revolving around domestic issues, US policy-makers interpreted it as a Soviet effort. The insurgents had been helped, however, not by Moscow but by Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia.^[5] Secretary of State Dean Acheson accused the Soviet Union of conspiracy against the Greek royalists in an effort to "expand" into the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and, in March 1947, the administration unveiled the "Truman Doctrine". "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States," Truman declared in a speech to the American Congress in March 1947, "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid."

The Truman Doctrine assured countries threatened by Communism that America would offer them support and help where it could. Indirectly, it paved the way for the policy of "containment"—that is, the fixing of a point further than which the Communist influence must not spread. In his famous speech, Truman rallied Americans to spend $400,000,000 to intervene in the civil war in Greece. In order to mobilize an unfriendly Republican Congress, the Democratic president painted the conflict as a contest between "free" peoples and "totalitarian" regimes, thus dramatically heightening the rhetorical stakes of the conflict.^[5]

Without the assistance of huge capital resources to rebuild industry transferred from the United States, Western European economies failed to recover from the enormous wartime destruction of the region's infrastructure. Meanwhile, Communist parties were winning large votes in free elections in countries such as France and Italy. American policymakers worried that economic conditions in Western Europe might deteriorate to the point that communist parties could seize power through free elections or popular revolutions.^[18] Some US policymakers also feared that their own economy might suffer unless effective demand for their exports in Western Europe was restored.^[19]

For US policymakers, threats to Europe's balance of power were not necessarily military ones, but a political and economic challenge.^[15] George Kennan helped summarize the problem at the State Department Planning Staff in May 1947: "Communist activities" were not "the root of the difficulties of Western Europe" but rather "the disruptive effects of the war on the economic, political, and social structure of Europe."^[20] Instead, according to this view, the Communists were "exploiting the European crisis" to gain power.^[20] In June, following the recommendations of the State Department Planning Staff, the Truman Doctrine was complemented by the Marshall Plan, a pledge of economic assistance aimed at rebuilding the Western political-economic system and countering perceived threats to Europe's balance of power, which the US had gone to war to restore, from the radical left.^[21]

The American Congress consented to aid and abet Turkey—in terms of the Truman Doctrine, the USA had to assist all democracies in their struggles against Communism, so she came to Turkey's aid as well, admitting it to NATO to safeguard the Mediterranean—and Greece in their respective struggles against Communism, allowing these countries to contain the Communist force. It also had a say in the discharging of Communists from the French and Italian governments. The policy of aid (capital, arms and advisors) to all democracies that were endangered by Communism revealed a strategy of containing Communism through militaristic and economic weapons. By aiding Greece, Truman set a precedent for US aid to regimes, no matter how repressive and corrupt, that requested help to fight communists.^[5] Said he, "America has seved notice that the march of Communism would not be allowed to succeed."

After lobbying by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Generals Clay and Marshall, the Truman administration finally realized that economic recovery in Europe could not go forward without the reconstruction of the German industrial base on which it had previously had been dependent.^[22]

In July, Truman rescinded on "national security grounds"^[23] the punitive Morgenthau plan JCS 1067, which had directed the US forces of occupation in Germany to "take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany." It was replaced by JCS 1779, which instead stressed that "[a]n orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany."^[24]

President Truman signs the National Security Act Amendment of 1949 with guests in the Oval Office.

Also in July, Truman also reorganized the US government to fight the Cold War. The National Security Act of 1947, signed by Truman on July 26, created a unified Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Council. These would become the main bureaucracies for US policy in the Cold War.^[25]

The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan led to billions in economic and military aid to Western Europe and Greece and Turkey. With US capital, arms and advisors, the Greek military won the civil war in 1949, and the Christian Democrats in Italy defeated the powerful Communist-Socialist alliance in the elections of 1948.^[25]

European economic alliances

European military alliances

The US consolidated its new role as leader of the West. In retaliation to Western moves to reunite west Germany, Stalin built blockades to block western access to West Berlin, Truman maintained supply lines to the enclave by flying supplies over the blockade during 1948–1949. (see Berlin Blockade) The US formally allied itself to the Western European states in the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Stalin countered by tying together the economies of the Eastern bloc in a Soviet-led version of the Marshall Plan, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), and exploding the first Soviet atomic device in August 1949.^[5]

The US took the lead in establishing the West Germany from the three Western zones of occupation in 1949.^[14] To counter the Western reorganization of Germany, the Soviet Union proclaimed its zone of occupation in Germany as the German Democratic Republic in 1949.^[14] In the early 1950s, the US worked for the rearmament of West Germany and its full membership of NATO in 1955.^[14]

In 1949 Mao's Red Army defeated the US-backed Kuomintang regime in China. Shortly afterward, the Soviet Union concluded an alliance with the new People's Republic of China. Confronted with the Chinese Revolution and the end of the US atomic monopoly in 1949, some in the Truman administration moved to escalate and expand the "containment" policy.^[5] In a secret 1950 document, NSC-68, these officials proposed to reinforce pro-Western alliance systems and quadruple defense spending.^[5] Truman himself continued to push for cuts in military spending and refused to implement NSC 68. However, the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 convinced Truman that the Soviets were now willing to use force to achieve their goals. He then accepted NSC 68's recommendations.

Afterwards, US officials moved to expand "containment" into Asia, Africa, and Latin America.^[15] At the time, revolutionary nationalist movements, often led by Communist parties, were fighting against the restoration of Europe's colonial empires in Southeast Asia. The US formalized an alliance with Japan in early 1950s, guaranteeing Washington long-term military bases; and brought other states, including Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines, within a series of alliances.^[14]

To Stalin's surprise, Truman committed US forces to drive back the North Koreans.^[5] In 1953 the Korean War ended in stalemate. But the US gradually became entangled in another civil war. In Vietnam, the US supported the South Vietnamese government against North Vietnam, which was backed by the Soviet Union and China.^[14]

Crisis and escalation (1953–1962)

Main article: Cold War (1953-1962)

In 1953 changes in political leadership on both sides shifted the dynamic of the Cold War.^[25] Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated president in January 1953. During the last 18 months of the Truman administration, the US defense budget had quadrupled; and Eisenhower resolved to reduce military spending by brandishing the United States' nuclear superiority while continuing to fight the Cold War effectively.^[5] In March Joseph Stalin died, and the Soviets, now led by Nikita Khrushchev, moved away from Stalinist terror.^[25]

Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles initiated a "New Look" for the "containment" strategy, calling for a greater reliance on nuclear weapons to US enemies.^[25] Dulles also enunciated the doctrine of "massive retaliation," threatening a severe U.S response to any Soviet aggression. Possessing nuclear superiority, for example, Eisenhower curtailed Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East during the 1956 Suez Crisis.^[5]

There was a slight relaxation of tensions after Stalin's death in 1953, but the Cold War in Europe remained an uneasy armed truce.^[26] US troops seemed stationed indefinitely in West Germany and Soviet forces seemed indefinitely stationed throughout Eastern Europe. To counter West German rearmament, the Soviets established a formal alliance with the Eastern European Communist states termed the Warsaw Pact Treaty Organization or Warsaw Pact in 1955.^[14] In 1956, the status quo was briefly threatened in Hungary, when the Soviets invaded rather than allow the Hungarians to move out of their orbit (see Hungarian Revolution of 1956). Berlin remained divided and contested. In 1961, the East Germans erected the "Berlin Wall" to prevent the movement of East Berliners into West Berlin.

In the US, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy emerged as an influential proponent of a hard-line stance on the Cold War. Although the president quietly deplored his demagoguery, the senator exploited anti-Soviet sentiment when alleging a communist conspiracy to take over the US government, leading to a massive political witch-hunt.

During the 1950s, the Third World was an increasingly important arena of Cold War competition. After the Second World War, the US emerged as the predominant power in the Third World, filling the vacuum of the old imperial hegemony of its principal Cold War allies—the traditional Western European colonial powers (particularly the UK, France, and the Netherlands).^[27] However, nationalists in many postcolonial states were often unsympathetic to the Western bloc.^[28] Adjusting to decolonization, meanwhile, was a difficult process economically and psychologically for European powers; and NATO suffered, as it included all the world's major colonial empires.^[29]

Nationalist movements in some countries and regions, notably Guatemala, Iran, the Philippines, and Indochina were often allied with communist groups—or at least were perceived in the West to be allied with communists.^[25] In this context, the US and the Soviet Union increasingly competed for influence by proxy in the Third World as decolonization gained momentum in the 1950s and early 1960s. The US government utilized the CIA in order to remove a string of unfriendly Third World governments and to support others.^[25] The US used the CIA to overthrow governments suspected by Washington of turning pro-Soviet, including Iran's first democratically elected government under Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 (see Operation Ajax) and Guatemala's democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954 (see Operation PBSUCCESS) Between 1954 and 1961, the US sent economic aid and military advisors to stem the collapse of South Vietnam's pro-Western regime.^[5]

Many emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America rejected the pressure to choose sides in the East-West competition. In 1955, at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia dozens of Third World governments resolved to stay out of the Cold War. The consensus reached at Bandung culminated with the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961.^[25] Meanwhile, Khrushchev broadened Moscow's policy to establish ties with India and other key neutral states. Independence movements in the Third World transformed the postwar order into a more pluralistic world of decolonized African and Middle Eastern nations and of rising nationalism in Asia and Latin America.^[5]

Above the leaders of the major Non-Aligned states meet at the United Nations in New York in October 1960. From left to right: Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India, President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, President Sukarno of Indonesia and President Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia.

During the 1950s, the US and the USSR pursued nuclear rearmament and developed long-range weapons with which they could strike the territory of the other.^[14] The Soviets developed their own hydrogen bomb and, in 1957, launched the first earth satellite. However, the period after 1956 was marked by serious setbacks for the Soviet Union, most notably the breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance. (see Sino-Soviet Split) Before Khrushchev's ouster in 1964, the Soviets focused on a bitter rivalry with Mao's China for leadership of the global communist movement.

The nuclear arms race brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. Khrushchev formed an alliance with Fidel Castro after the Cuban Revolution in 1959. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy responded to the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba with a naval blockade—a show of force that brought the world close to nuclear war.^[30] The Cuban Missile Crisis showed that neither superpower was ready to use nuclear weapons for fear of the other's retaliation, and thus of mutually assured destruction. The aftermath of the crisis led to the first efforts at nuclear disarmament and improving relations.^[26]

From confrontation through détente (1962–1979)

Main article: Cold War (1962-1979)

On April 29, 1975, the last U.S. helicopters remove Americans and friends from Saigon as South Vietnam falls.

In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union struggled to adjust to a new, more complicated pattern of international relations in which the world was no longer divided into two clearly opposed blocs by the two superpowers.^[31] Since the beginning of the postwar period, Western Europe and Japan rapidly recovered from the destruction of World War II and sustained strong economic growth through the 1950s and 1960s, increasing their strength compared to the United States. As a result of the 1973 oil crisis, combined with the growing influence of Third World alignments such as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Non-Aligned Movement, less-powerful countries had more room to assert their independence and often showed themselves resistant to pressure from either superpower. (EB) Moscow, meanwhile, was forced to turn its attention inward to deal with the Soviet Union's deep-seated domestic economic problems. During this period, Soviet leaders such as Alexei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev embraced the notion of détente.^[25]

Nevertheless, both superpowers resolved to reinforce their global leadership. Both the Soviet Union and the United States struggled to stave off challenges to their leadership in their own regions. President Lyndon B. Johnson landed 22,000 troops in the Dominican Republic, citing the threat of the emergence of a Cuban-style revolution in Latin America. (see Operation Power Pack)^[5] In Eastern Europe, the Soviets in 1968 crushed the Prague Spring reform movement in Czechoslovakia that might have threatened to take the country out of the Warsaw Pact.

The U.S. continued to spend heavily on supporting friendly Third World regimes in Asia. Conflicts in peripheral regions and client states—most prominently in Vietnam—continued.^[30] Johnson stationed 575,000 troops in Southeast Asia to defeat the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) and their North Vietnamese allies, but his costly policy weakened the U.S. economy and, by 1975, ultimately culminated in what most of the world saw as a humiliating defeat of the world's most powerful superpower at the hands of one of the world's poorest nations. Brezhnev, meanwhile, faced far more daunting challenges in reviving the Soviet economy, which was declining in part because of heavy military expenditures.^[5]

Although indirect conflict between Cold War powers continued through the late 1960s and early 1970s, tensions began to ease, as the period of détente began.^[26] The Chinese had sought improved relations with the U.S. in order to gain advantage over the Soviets. In February 1972, Richard Nixon travelled to Beijing and met with Mao Zedong and Chou En-Lai. Nixon and Henry Kissinger then announced a stunning rapprochement with Mao's China.

Brezhnev and Nixon talk during Brezhnev's June 1973 visit to Washington—a high-water mark in détente between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Later, in June, Nixon and Kissinger met with Soviet leaders in Moscow, and announced the first of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, aimed at limiting the development of costly antiballistic missiles and offensive nuclear missiles.^[25] Between 1972 and 1974, the two sides also agreed to strengthen their economic ties.^[5] Meanwhile, these developments coincided with the "Ostpolitik" of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Other agreements were concluded to stabilize the situation in Europe, culminating in the Helsinki Accords signed by the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975.

However, the détente of the 1970s was short-lived. The U.S. Congress limited the economic pact between Nixon and Brezhnev so much that the Soviets repudiated it in 1975.^[5] Indirect conflict between the superpowers continued through this period of détente in the Third World, particularly during political crises in the Middle East (see Yom Kippur War), Chile (see Chilean coup of 1973), and Angola (see Angolan Civil War). While President Jimmy Carter tried to place another limit on the arms race with a SALT II agreement in 1979, his efforts were undercut by the other events that year, including the Iranian Revolution and the Nicaraguan Revolution, which both ousted pro-U.S. regimes, and his retaliation against Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December.^[5]

The "Second Cold War" (1979–1985)

Main article: Cold War (1979-1985)

In November 1982 American ten-year-old Samantha Smith wrote a letter to the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov expressing her fear of nuclear war, and pleading with him to work toward peace. Surprisingly, Andropov himself replied, and gave her a personal invitation to visit the country, which she accepted. Samantha Smith's visit was one of few prominent attempts to improve relations between the superpowers during Andropov's brief leadership from 1982–1984 at a dangerously low point in U.S.-Soviet relations. Above appears a cover of her book about the experience.

The term "second Cold War" has been used by some historians to refer to the period of intensive reawakening of Cold War tensions in the early 1980s.^[1] In 1980 Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, vowing to increase military spending and confront the Soviets everywhere.^[5] Both Reagan and Britain's new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, denounced the Soviet Union in ideological terms that rivaled that of the worst days of the Cold War in the late 1940s.^[14]

Reagan escalated the Cold War, accelerating a reversal from the policy of détente which began in 1979 following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.^[32]The Reagan Administration implemented new policies towards the Soviet Union, reviving of the B-1 bomber program that had been canceled by the Carter administration, and the production of the MX "Peacekeeper" missile.^[33] In response to Soviet deployment of the SS-20, Reagan oversaw NATO's deployment of the Pershing II missile in West Germany.^[34] One of Reagan's more controversial proposals was the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, a defense project.^[35] The program would use ground-based and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles.^[36] Reagan believed that this defense shield could make nuclear war impossible,^[35][37] but the unlikelihood that the technology could ever work led opponents to dub SDI "Star Wars."^[35]

U.S. domestic public concerns about intervening in foreign conflicts persisted from the end of the Vietnam War.^[38] But Reagan did not encounter major public opposition to his foreign policies. The Reagan administration emphasized the use of quick, low cost counterinsurgency tactics to intervene in foreign conflicts.^[39] In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened in the multisided Lebanese Civil War (see 1983 Beirut barracks bombing), invaded Grenada (see Invasion of Grenada), bombed Libya (see United States bombing of Libya), and backed the Central American Contras—right-wing paramilitaries seeking overthrow the Soviet-aligned Sandinista government in Nicaragua.^[40] While Reagan's interventions against Granada and Libya were popular in the U.S., his backing of the Contra rebels was mired in controversy. In 1985, the president authorized the sale of arms to Iran; later, administration subordinates illegally diverted the proceeds to the Contras. (see Iran-Contra)

Meanwhile, the Soviets incurred high costs for their own foreign interventions. Although Brezhnev was convinced in 1979 that the Soviet war in Afghanistan would be brief, Muslim guerrillas waged a surprisingly fierce resistance against the invasion.^[41] The Kremlin sent nearly 100,000 troops to support its puppet regime in Afghanistan, leading many outside observers to call the war the Soviets' Vietnam.^[42] However, Moscow's quagmire in Afghanistan was far more disastrous for the Soviets than Vietnam had been for the Americans because the conflict coincided with a period of internal decay and domestic crisis in the Soviet system. A high U.S. State Department official predicted such an outcome as early as 1980, positing that the invasion resulted in part from a "domestic crisis within the Soviet system....It may be that the thermodynamic law of entropy has...caught up with the Soviet system, which now seems to expend more energy on simply maintaining its equilibrium than on improving itself. We could," he construed, "be seeing a period of foreign movement at a time of internal decay."^[43]

End of the Cold War

Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev sign the INF Treaty in 1987.

Main article: Cold War (1985-1991)

By the early 1980s, the Soviet armed forces were the largest in the world by many measures—in terms of the numbers and types of weapons they possessed, in the number of troops in their ranks, and in the sheer size of their military-industrial base.^[44] However, the quantitative advantages held by the Soviet military often concealed areas where the Eastern bloc dramatically lagged behind the West. This led many U.S. observers to vastly overestimate Soviet power. ^[45]

By the late years of the Cold War, Moscow had built up a military that consumed as much as twenty-five percent of the Soviet Union's gross national product at the expense of consumer goods and investment in civilian sectors. ^[46] But the size of the Soviet armed forces was not necessarily the result of a simple action-reaction arms race with the United States. (Odom) Instead, Soviet spending on the arms race and other Cold War commitments can be understood as both a cause and effect of the deep-seated structural problems in the Soviet system, which accumulated at least a decade of economic stagnation during the Brezhnev years. (see Economy of the Soviet Union) Soviet investment in the defense sector was not necessarily driven by military necessity, but in large part by the interests of massive party and state bureaucracies dependent on the sector for their own power and privileges. ^[47]

By the time Mikhail Gorbachev had ascended to power in 1985, the Soviets suffered from an economic growth rate close to zero percent, combined with a sharp fall in hard currency earnings as a result of the downward slide in world oil prices in the 1980s. ^[48] (Petroleum exports made up around 60 percent of the Soviet Union's total export earnings.) ^[49] To restructure the Soviet economy before it collapsed, Gorbachev announced an agenda of rapid reform. (see perestroika and glasnost) Reform required Gorbachev to redirect the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more profitable areas in the civilian sector. As a result, Gorbachev offered major concessions to the United States on the levels of conventional forces, nuclear weapons, and policy in Eastern Europe.

Ronald Reagan recognized the real change in the direction of the Soviet leadership with Gorbachev, and shifted to diplomacy, with a view to encourage the Soviet Leader to go further with his reforms. Gorbachev agreed to meet Reagan in four summit conferences around the world: the first, in Geneva, Switzerland, the second in Reykjavík, Iceland, the third, held in Washington, D.C., along with the fourth summit, in Moscow, Russia.^[50] Reagan believed that if he could persuade the Soviets to look at the prosperous American economy, they would embrace free markets and a free society. Gorbachev, facing severe economic problems at home, was swayed.^[51]

Speaking at the Brandenburg Gate at the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987, Reagan said, "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

When Gorbachev visited Washington, D.C. for the third summit in 1987, he and Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty at the White House (they finalized it a year later), which eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons.^[52]

Ronald Reagan gives a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin and challenges Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!"

The Kremlin made major military and political concessions. The East-West tensions that had reached intense new heights earlier in the decade rapidly subsided through the mid-to-late 1980s. In 1988, the Soviets officially declared that they would no longer intervene in the affairs of allied states in Eastern Europe. In 1989, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan.

In December 1989, Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush declared the Cold War officially over at a summit meeting in Malta.^[53] In 1990, the Berlin Wall was torn down. By then, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink of collapse, and the Communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact states were losing power. In the USSR itself, Gorbachev tried to reform the party to destroy resistance to his reforms, but, in doing so, ultimately weakened the bonds that held the state and union together. By February 1990, the Communist Party was forced to surrender its 73-year old monopoly on state power. By December of the next year, the union-state also dissolved, breaking the USSR up into fifteen separate independent states. (see Dissolution of the USSR)

Legacy

Despite its rapid and relatively bloodless end, the Cold War was fought at a tremendous cost globally over the course of more than four decades. It cost the U.S. up to $8 trillion in military expenditures, and the lives of nearly 100,000 Americans in Korea and Vietnam.^[54] It cost the Soviets an even higher share of their gross national product. In Southeast Asia, local civil wars were intensified by superpower rivalry, leaving millions dead.

The end of the Cold War gave Russia the chance to cut military spending dramatically, but the adjustment was wrenching. The military-industrial sector employed at least one of every five Soviet adults.^[55] Its dismantling left millions throughout the former Soviet Union unemployed. Russian living standards have worsened overall in the post-Cold War years, although the economy has resumed growth in recent years. In the 1990s, Russia suffered an economic downturn more severe than the U.S. or Germany had undergone six decades earlier in the Great Depression after it had embarked on capitalist economic reforms.^[56]

The legacy of the Cold War continues to structure world affairs.^[1] The Cold War institutionalized the role of the United States in the postwar global economic and political system. By 1989, the U.S. was responsible for military alliances with 50 countries and 1.5 million U.S. troops were posted in 117 countries.^[30] The Cold War also institutionalized the commitment to a huge, permanent wartime military-industrial complex.^[30]

Some of the economic and social tensions that underpinned Cold War competition in parts of the Third World remain acute. The breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly ruled by Communist governments has produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia.^[1] In some countries, the breakdown of state control was accompanied by state failure, such as in Afghanistan. But in other areas, particularly much of Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War was accompanied by a large growth in the number of liberal democracies. In areas where the two superpowers had been waging proxy wars, and subsidizing local conflicts, many conflicts ended with the Cold War; and the occurrence of interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, or refugee and displaced persons crises declined sharply.^[57]

Historiography

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Soviet Union quickly abandoned its Cold War commitments as the state and Communist Party rule unraveled. By late 1991, opposition to Gorbachev's radical reforms had triggered the Soviet coup attempt of 1991, but the failure of the coup wound up accelerating the dissolution of the USSR. Above, immediately following the failure of the coup attempt, Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin spar over the events of the coup, with Yeltsin accusing Gorbachev of failing to prevent the crisis. Later, Gorbachev would accuse Yeltsin of tearing the Soviet Union apart out of a desire to advance his own personal interests.

As soon as the term "Cold War" was popularized to refer to postwar tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict has been a source of heated controversy among historians, political scientists, and journalists.^[58] In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of Soviet-U.S. relations after the Second World War; and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable, or could have been avoided.^[59] Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what the sources of the conflict were, and how to disentangle patterns of action and reaction between the two sides.^[1]

While the explanations of the origins of the conflict in academic discussions are complex and diverse, several general schools of thought on the subject can be identified. Historians commonly speak of three differing approaches to the study of the Cold War: "orthodox" accounts, "revisionism," and "post-revisionism." Nevertheless, much of the historiography on the Cold War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories.^[14]

Orthodox accounts

The first school of interpretation to emerge in the U.S. was the "orthodox" one. For more than a decade after the end of the Second World War, few U.S. historians challenged the official U.S. interpretation of the beginnings of the Cold War.^[59] This "orthodox" school places the responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion into Eastern Europe.^[30] Thomas A. Bailey, for example, argued in his 1950 America Faces Russia that the breakdown of postwar peace was the result of Soviet expansionism in the immediate postwar years. Bailey argued Stalin violated promises he had made at Yalta, imposed Soviet-dominated regimes on unwilling Eastern European populations, and conspired to spread communism throughout the world.^[59] From this view, U.S. officials were forced to respond to Soviet aggression with the Truman Doctrine, plans to contain communist subversion around the world, and the Marshall Plan.

This interpretation has been described as the "official" U.S. version of Cold War history.^[30] Although it lost its dominance as a mode of historical thought in academic discussions in 1960s, it continues to be influential.^[58]

Revisionism

U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s disillusioned many historians with the premises of "containment", and thus with the assumptions of the "orthodox" approach to understanding the Cold War.^[59] "Revisionist" accounts emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War, in the context of a larger rethinking of the U.S. role in international affairs, which was seen more in terms of American empire or hegemony.^[30]

While the new school of thought spanned many differences among individual scholars, the works comprising it were generally responses in one way or another to William Appleman Williams' landmark 1959 volume, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Williams challenged the long-held assumptions of "orthodox" accounts, arguing that Americans had always been an empire-building people, even while American leaders denied it.^[58]

Following Williams, "revisionist" writers placed more responsibility for the breakdown of postwar peace on the United States, citing a range of U.S. efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II.^[30] According to Williams and later "revisionist" writers, U.S. policymakers shared an overarching concern with maintaining capitalism domestically. In order to achieve that objective, they pursued an "open door" policy abroad, aimed at increasing access to foreign markets for U.S. business and agriculture.^[58] From this perspective, a growing economy domestically went hand-in-hand with the consolidation of U.S. power internationally.

"Revisionist" scholars challenged the widely accepted notion that Soviet leaders were committed to postwar "expansionism". They cited evidence that the Soviet Union's occupation of Eastern Europe had a defensive rationale, and that Soviet leaders saw themselves as attempting to avoid encirclement by the United States and its allies.^[30] In this view, the Soviet Union was so weak and devastated after the end of the Second World War as to be unable to pose any serious threat to the United States; moreover, the U.S. maintained a nuclear monopoly until the USSR tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949.^[59]

Revisionist historians have also challenged the assumption that the origins of the Cold War date no further back than the immediate postwar period.^[58] Notably, Walter LaFeber, in his landmark study, America, Russia, and the Cold War, first published in 1967, argued that the Cold War had its origins in 19th century conflicts between Russia and America over the opening of East Asia to U.S. trade, markets, and influence.^[58] LaFeber argued that the U.S. commitment at the close of World War II to ensuring a world in which every state was open to U.S. influence and trade, underpinned many of the conflicts that triggered the beginning of the Cold War.^[59]

Starting with Gar Alperovitz, in his influential Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (1965), "revisionist" scholars have focused on the U.S. decision to use atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the last days of World War II.^[59] In their view, the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, in effect, started the Cold War. According to Alperovitz, the bombs were not used on an already defeated Japan to win the war, but to intimidate the Soviets, signaling that the U.S. would use nuclear weapons to structure a postwar world around U.S. interests as U.S. policymakers saw fit.^[58] According to former State Department employee William Blum and others, Japan had tried to surrender for several months, but the U.S. wanted to test nuclear weapons in war and, most importantly, show its power to the Soviet Union.^[60][61]

Joyce and Gabriel Kolko's The Limits of Power: The World and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (1972) has also received considerable attention in the historiography on the Cold War. The Kolkos argued U.S. policy was both reflexively anticommunist and counterrevolutionary. The U.S. was not necessarily fighting Soviet influence, but any form of challenge to the U.S. economic and political prerogatives through either covert or military means.^[58] In this sense, the Cold War is less a story of rivalry between two blocs, and more a story of the ways by which the dominant states within each bloc controlled and disciplined their own populations and clients, and about who supported and stood to benefit from increased arms production and political anxiety over a perceived external enemy.^[1]

Post-revisionism

The "revisionist" interpretation produced a critical reaction of its own. In a variety of ways, "post-revisionist" scholarship, before the fall of Communism, challenged earlier works on the origins and course of the Cold War, and some American academics continue to deny the existence of an American empire.^[62][63]

During the period, "post-revisionism" challenged the "revisionists" by accepting some of their findings but rejecting most of their key claims.^[59] Another current attempted to strike a balance between the "orthodox" and "revisionist" camps, identifying areas of responsibility for the origins of the conflict on both sides.^[59] Thomas G. Paterson, in Soviet-American Confrontation (1973), for example, viewed Soviet hostility and U.S. efforts to dominate the postwar world as equally responsible for the Cold War.^[59]

The seminal work of this approach was John Lewis Gaddis's The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (1972). The account was immediately hailed as the beginning of a new school of thought on the Cold War claiming to synthesize a variety of interpretations.^[58] Gaddis then maintained that "neither side can bear sole responsibility for the onset of the Cold War."^[59] He did, however, emphasize the constraints imposed on U.S. policymakers due to the complications of domestic politics.^[59] Gaddis has, in addition, criticized some "revisionist" scholars, particularly Williams, for failing to understand the role of Soviet policy in the origins of the Cold War.^[58]

Out of the "post-revisionist" literature emerged a new area of inquiry that was more sensitive to nuance and interested less in the question of who started the conflict than in offering insight into U.S. and Soviet actions and perspectives.^[30] From this perspective, the Cold War was not so much the responsibility of either side, but rather the result of predictable tensions between two world powers that had been suspicious of one another for nearly a century. For example, Ernest May wrote in a 1984 essay:

After the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union were doomed to be antagonists.... There probably was never any real possibility that the post-1945 relationship could be anything but hostility verging on conflict... Traditions, belief systems, propinquity, and convenience ... all combined to stimulate antagonism, and almost no factor operated in either country to hold it back.^[64]

From this view of "post-revisionism" emerged a line of inquiry that examines how Cold War actors perceived various events, and the degree of misperception involved in the failure of the two sides to reach common understandings of their wartime alliance and their disputes.^[1]

While Gaddis does not hold either side entirely responsible for the onset of the conflict, he has now argued that the Soviets should be held clearly more accountable for the ensuing problems. According to Gaddis, Stalin was in a much better position to compromise than his Western counterparts, given his much broader power within his own regime than Truman, who was often undermined by vociferous political opposition at home. Asking if it were possible to predict that the wartime alliance would fall apart within a matter of months, leaving in its place nearly a half century of cold war, Gaddis wrote in a 1997 essay, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History:^[65]

Geography, demography, and tradition contributed to this outcome but did not determine it. It took men, responding unpredictably to circumstances, to forge the chain of causation; and it took [Stalin] in particular, responding predictably to his own authoritarian, paranoid, and narcissistic predisposition, to lock it into place.

For Stalin, Gaddis continues, "World politics was an extension of Soviet politics, which was in turn an extension of Stalin's preferred personal environment: a zero-sum game, in which achieving security for one meant depriving everyone else of it."

See also

Cold War Portal

• Timeline of events in the Cold War
• American empire - the revisionist cause of the Cold War
• Culture during the Cold War
• Domino theory

References

Further reading

External links

Find more information on Cold War by searching Wikipedia's sister projects
	Dictionary definitions from Wiktionary
	Textbooks from Wikibooks
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Images and media from Commons
	News stories from Wikinews
	Learning resources from Wikiversity

• The Cold War Museum
• The Cold War International History Project (at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars)
• The Cold War Files (from the Cold War International History Project)
• The Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security (formerly called The Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact)
• CNN Cold War Knowledge Bank comparison of articles on Cold War topics in the Western and the Soviet press between 1945 and 1991
• History of the Western allies in Berlin during the Cold War
• People's history: The cultural cold war Information on cultural elements of the conflict
• Video and audio news reports from during the cold war
• Professor Paul Kennedy on the risks of the Cold War era relative to international tensions in the C21
• Royal Engineers Museum Royal Engineers and the Cold War

• Annotated bibliography for the arms race from the Alsos Digital Library
• WWW-VL: History: The Cold War 1945–1991
• CBC Digital Archives - Cold War Culture: The Nuclear Fear of the 1950s and 1960s