Download 49.1 Origins of the Cold War

Origins of the Cold War
We last looked at the uneasy relationship between the two superpowers that emerged
from World War II from the end of the war until around 1947. In that year, the conflict became
known as the Cold War after a journalist coined the phrase. From 1945 until the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991, the superpowers squared off in a global competition between democracy
and capitalism on one side and socialist-communist authoritarianism on the other. The United
States possessed allies in western Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The Soviet Union
controlled eastern Europe and acquired allies in the Caribbean as well as in Asia, and Africa. As
you will see, the competition revolved around advancements in the space race and the nuclear
arms race, but it also involved the competition for the allegiance of small nations similar to the
competition for loyal city-states between Athens and Sparta in ancient Greece. For almost fifty
years foreign policy, military strategy, cultural initiatives, and domestic priorities in both
superpowers were all driven by the real and unreal demands and dangers of this animosity.
The former WWII allies of the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
viewed each other with growing distrust leading to profound tension. Neither side really
believed a peaceful settlement of their post-war differences was possible. Their fervent belief in
each set of ideologies led each side to view the other as natural enemies. Each country built up
extensive military-industrial complexes to protect both national security and the security of
puppet/client states. Both Washington and Moscow scrutinized the activities of both the
opposing superpower and any unaffiliated nation experiencing political change. When political
reforms in small states appeared dangerous to a superpower’s agenda, neither the US nor the
USSR hesitated to directly or indirectly overthrow questionable movements. An important
difference, however, exists in methods. The allegiance of Soviet puppet regimes was achieved
through manipulation, coercion, and force and was thus involuntary. The United States in
contrast created what could be considered an empire by invitation rather than by conquest. The
United States introduced or sustained democratic governments in its sphere of influence, and
while US motives were self-serving, progress was achieved by consent. Along the way the
covert operations of especially the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) did not come under
scrutiny as incongruous to the mission of self-determination until the middle of the 1970s.
The conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States has its origins in the fact
that US foreign policy did not recognize the communist government of the USSR as the
legitimate government of that country until Franklin Roosevelt did so in 1933. While FDR
quipped that the best way to end communism would be to air-drop the Sears Roebuck catalog
across Soviet territory, no real action was taken by either side except other similar propaganda
barbs. Not until the end of WWII when the superpowers had armies facing each other did real
tensions begin. Not a few individuals in the west wish that General George Patton’s suggestion
of pushing his army on toward Moscow had been carried out. Patton was run over by a truck,
though, and with him his hopes were also dashed. After the death of FDR, Harry Truman used
the atomic bombs dropped on Japan to intimidate Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union as well as
to end the war. When the US representative to the United Nations, Bernard Baruch, suggested in
1946 that nuclear weapons be placed under international control with the ultimate goal of the
destruction of all such weapons, a way toward peaceful coexistence seemed possible. The
Soviets, however, balked at the continued existence of a monopoly on all nuclear research and
technology in the hands of Americans. With Russian scientists working on their own bomb,
though, the monopoly lasted only four years.
In the same year and for the same reason that Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron
Curtain” speech, a US diplomat in Russia sent what became known as the “Long Telegram.”
Writing from Moscow, George F. Kennan described the Soviet Union as unstable yet bent on
expansion. He urged the United States to lead the world in standing against Soviet aggression by
maintaining firm reliance on the culture and integrity of the free world. Later, in a 1947 article
about US foreign policy, Kennan coined the term “containment” to describe America’s duty in
meeting Soviet aggression wherever our allies were threatened. Harry Truman’s support for
these ideas coalesced into the Truman Doctrine, the announcement to the world that the United
States would support any government or people assailed by communists form within or without.
The biggest expression of this doctrine came with the Marshall Plan, named after George C.
Marshall, the highest ranking US military officer of WWII, now Secretary of State. The plan
called for over $17 billion in aid to European countries attempting to rebuild after the war with
the intention of avoiding the circumstances in societies that led to the formation of communist or
socialist movements.
At home, the United States passed the National Security Act which created a Department
of Defense to coordinate the operation of America’s vast and ever more complex armed services.
The DOD created a separate US Air Force to increase the visibility of American air power in the
atomic age. The government agency that had overseen US espionage in WWII was transformed
and enlarged into the CIA to become the chief gatherer of information on Soviet capabilities and
intentions. All of these innovations were expensive, and Truman’s 1948 budget for defense was
the highest in all US history for the nation in peacetime. Truman formed the Joint Chiefs of
Staff by assembling all of the highest ranking officers from all the armed services to better
coordinate strategy. These top “brass” together hit upon a simple strategy—expand all military
capabilities. As you will see next year in US history class, the fears associated with these
developments touched off a second Red Scare in the 1950s when Senator Joseph McCarthy
claimed communists were infiltrating US society, even in the government.
The Soviets fed the push toward the US military build-up by supporting a communist
takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948. In one month Joseph Stalin drew that much-contested
country behind the Iron Curtain. This shock, more than any other, compelled the free countries
of Europe to ally with the United States and Canada in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), as you have seen. As we have also seen, Germany was formally divided while certain
NATO powers maintained their hold on West Berlin even though it was located 110 miles inside
East Germany. The Berlin Airlift in response to the Soviet blockade of West Berlin consisted of
a year of continuous transport of supplies as a first step of containment. Over against the
backdrop of two proxy wars we will study in detail, later, both the United States and the USSR
changed leadership. The Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe and the first
commander of NATO, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was elected president of the United States, a fact
which speaks for itself about American fears of Soviet aggression. Upon the death of Stalin,
Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the leader of the Kremlin. Khrushchev had also been a WWII
general.
When the Federal Republic of Germany joined NATO in 1955, the Soviet Union and its
satellites formed the Warsaw Pact military organization. While the Moscow Pact might have
been a more accurate name, a formal balancing of the two worlds offered an opportunity to
diminish tensions by achieving a stable balance. In fact, after some negotiations Soviet tanks
rolled out of a European country for the first time by withdrawing from Austria. In July of that
year Eisenhower met Khrushchev in person for the first time at the Geneva Summit, a meeting of
superpower leaders in John Calvin’s old city which had become a center for international peace.
Both the US and the USSR made significant demands, though, that stymied hopes for détente, or
a lessening of tensions. The Soviets wanted the termination of NATO, the banning of nuclear
weapons, and for all US military personnel to leave the European continent. The United States
called for the unification of Germany with free elections and Eisenhower’s proposal of an “open
skies” weapons monitoring program that would allow the flight of reconnaissance aircraft over
both countries. As you might imagine, none of these proposals was received warmly by the Cold
War combatants. The Geneva Summit was not a total waste of time, however; The Soviet Union
did recognize the existence of West Germany, and cultural exchanges were begun between the
superpowers.
After Moscow refused to share maps of its military installations, the United States
launched secret espionage flights over Russia beginning in 1956. The plane of choices was the
U-2 spy plane that used special cameras to film a 750-mile swath form twelve miles up. The U-2
flights were a chief source of surveillance keeping track of the space and arms races as you will
see when you examine ICBMs. Over two hundred U-2 missions were flown before the Russians
shot down a plane in 1960. The American pilot, Francis Gary Powers, survived the crash and
was the star of an embarrassing episode of Cold War television coverage where Khrushchev
forced Eisenhower to acknowledge the spy missions. Having caught the great general in a lie,
tension ramped up again between the superpowers causing the cancellation of a scheduled
summit meeting in Paris. The deception also opened for the first time what was known in
American society as the “credibility gap” where citizens didn’t know if they could trust their
leadership regarding a perceived missile gap.
Meanwhile, Khrushchev worked to undermine the cult of personality that had grown up
around his predecessor. In a process called de-Stalinization, the new Soviet Premier denounced
Stalin’s crimes and slackened some of the repression in satellite countries. The unintended result
of Khrushchev’s policy was to ignite independence movements in both Poland and Hungary.
New communists came to power promising reform. For the time being, the Polish Communist
Party maintained the status quo, but the reform communist leader of Hungary, Imre Nagy, lead a
revolution against the existing government in 1956. As the previous leaders fled to Moscow,
rebel Hungarians trashed secret police headquarters. Nagy announced plans to leave the Warsaw
Pact and appealed to the West for help. Washington continued to send anti-Soviet messages
through Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America, and the CIA trained East European exiles
for an insurrection, but the United States failed to provide direct assistance to Nagy and his
revolutionaries. The Soviets did react—they sent tanks and brutally suppressed the revolution.
Thirty thousand Hungarians were killed, and Imre Nagy was executed and buried without a
headstone in a cemetery for zoo animals. Two hundred fifty thousand Hungarians fled to the
west, many to the United States.
Although the United States failed to intervene where the Soviets were strong,
Washington was more assertive in areas where Soviet influence was a new threat. In the Middle
East, the United States attempted to bring Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser into their camp
by promising to assist him with building a dam on the Nile River. When Nasser resisted lending
his support to the cause of freedom, the US support for the dam dried up. Nasser angrily
nationalized the Suez Canal the British and the French had long controlled. Egypt received only
7% of the canal profits under the existing agreements, but Nasser’s move would bring all the
money to Egypt for the dam project. In retaliation France, the United Kingdom, and Israel
attacked Egypt. Eisenhower withheld any support and lambasted the governments of the
attackers for their imperial behavior fearing that the Suez Crisis war would drive Nasser into the
Soviet’s arms. The Soviet Union did capitalize on this opportunity and gave Nasser support to
build the Aswan Dam. Nasser, thankfully, took the money without the communism.
Khrushchev’s next move was to actively support what he called “wars of national
liberation” which were really left-wing nationalist struggles in Third World countries. All eyes
turned to Germany again, however, when the Soviet Union found a solution to the dwindling
population of East Germany. In 1961, workers began construction of the Berlin Wall, 28 miles
of concrete and barbed wire manned with armed guards. US forces in West Berlin responded—
by order of the new president, John F. Kennedy—by fitting American tanks with bulldozer
attachments to stop the construction. The Soviets readied their ubiquitous tanks to defend the
wall, but Kennedy and Khrushchev quickly moved to defuse the situation. JFK said, “A wall is a
hell of a lot better than a war” in a new fit of appeasement. Later, though, Kennedy traveled to
West Berlin to show his solidarity with all Berliners even going so far as to say, “Ich bin ein
Berliner.” He also made a telling observation. He said that democracy does have its problems
(wait until you study the 1960s in US history), but at least we don’t have to build a wall to keep
our people in. The United States still remained aloof from formally recognizing East Germany.
Khrushchev then upped the ante by installing missiles in communist Cuba. At the onset
of the Kennedy administration, the CIA launched a failed attempt to land trained Cuban exiles to
foment a revolution against Fidel Castro, the communist guerrilla-fighter-turned-dictator. The
crisis became known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco after all of the insurrectionists were killed or
captured. Now, Khrushchev picked Cuba as a place both to retaliate and to bolster his position
in Europe and at home. In the process of deploying forty 1,100-mile medium-range ballistic
missiles with warheads, US U-2 planes identified the missile sites before they were fully
operational. In what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy carefully practiced
the Cold War skill of brinkmanship. For thirteen days of negotiations, the world was as close to
an actual thermonuclear war as it has ever been. Fidel Castro wanted to fire the missiles on his
island deep into the United States (Cuba is only 90 miles away from Florida). Had Khrushchev
given him permission to do so, an exchange of inter-continental ballistic missiles would have
followed. Kennedy pledged not to invade Cuba to destroy the missile bases but did blockade the
island of Cuba promising to destroy any Soviet ships that attempted to enter a Cuban harbor. In
the end, Khrushchev flinched. The beginning of his end as the Soviet Premier came when he
ordered the missiles to stand down and prepare for removal. Secretly, Kennedy agreed to
remove some missiles from Turkey, the location of the US military bases closest to Soviet soil.
When Khrushchev showed weakness in Cuba, it ruined his ability to make any demands
about Berlin. The Berlin Wall remained, however, and people trying to flee over it were
routinely shot. While the Soviet’s viewed the wall as a symbol of their strength, the western
world viewed it as proof that communism did not create a “workers’ paradise.” The United
States did not recognize East Germany until 1971 under Richard Nixon in return for permanent
access to West Berlin. By then, better relations existed between Washington and Moscow, a
measure of détente. A direct telex was installed connecting the White House and the Kremlin to
prevent any further surprises. In 1963, the two superpowers signed an aboveground test-ban
treaty that was perhaps the beginning of the road toward peace. Before the end, however, there
were many hotspots in the Cold War known as proxy wars. There was also a systematic
devotion of vast resources and incredible human ingenuity toward the task of destroying life on
this planet.