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Download 49.1 Origins of the Cold War
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Transcript
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.