"Cold war" is the term given to the competition, conducted through means short of direct military conflict, between the United States and the Soviet Union since World War II. Its roots go back to the 1890s when, after a century of friendship, Americans and Russians became rivals over the development of Manchuria. Russia, unable to compete industrially, sought to close off and colonize parts of East Asia, while Americans demanded open competition for markets. In 1917, with the Bolsheviks'' triumph in Russia, the rivalry turned intensely ideological. The Soviets feared that the United States, as the most powerful capitalist nation, sought to overthrow their communist system. The communists'' success in consolidating power, their confiscation of U.S. property, and the possibility that their revolution would spread to Europe, Asia, and perhaps even the Western Hemisphere created deep American fears. Diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union did not exist between 1917 and 1933. They became allies only after both were attacked by the Axis in 1941.
The alliance was a temporary aberration in the post-1890s relationship. Even during the war the Soviets bitterly disagreed with their American and British partners over military tactics and postwar plans. President Franklin D. Roosevelt feared that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin might again make a separate settlement with Germany, as indeed the Soviets had in 1918 and 1939. The fear of such a German-Russian deal haunted, and shaped, U.S. policy during and long after the war.
Disagreements over postwar plans first centered on Central and Eastern Europe. Having lost 20 million dead in the war and twice suffered German invasion through Poland in thirty years, Stalin''s Soviet Union was determined to use its Red Army to control Poland, dominate the Balkans, and destroy Germany''s capacity to start another war. The United States, led after April 1945 by President Harry S. Truman, was equally determined to shape the postwar world according to principles laid down by Roosevelt after 1941: self-determination (in such nations as Poland), equal economic access (as in the Balkans), and a rebuilt capitalist Europe that could again serve as a hub in world affairs. Such a Europe required a healthy Germany at its center. Truman could advance these principles with an economic juggernaut that produced 50 percent of the world''s industrial goods and military power that rested on a monopoly of the new atomic bomb. Stalin nevertheless clamped his control over Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1947. Winston Churchill condemned him for cordoning off the new Russian empire with an "iron curtain." When Truman finally refused to give Stalin large amounts of West Germany''s industrial plants as war reparations, the dictator first stripped East Germany, which he controlled, and then sealed it off as a communist state.
The post-1945 cold war began in Europe, but it quickly spread. In 1945-1946 Stalin demanded some control over Turkey''s Dardanelles Strait, which would allow Soviet passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Churchill had earlier recognized Stalin''s claims, but now the British and Americans forced the Soviet leader to pull back. In 1946, when Red Army units refused to leave Iran (which the three Allies had occupied since 1942), Truman forced a showdown that some feared might lead to a military confrontation. Stalin again retreated, but he simultaneously announced his refusal to cooperate with the new international agencies - the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund - that were created to ensure an open, capitalist, international economy. In Greece, communist-led insurgents threatened to overthrow the corrupt, British-led, monarchical government. The insurgents were helped by communist Yugoslavia, not the Soviet Union. When, however, the British told Truman in February 1947 that they lacked the resources to provide more help, the president rallied Americans by warning them in his Truman Doctrine speech of March 1947 that they would have to spend $400 million immediately to protect "free" peoples against "totalitarian" regimes. By successfully helping Greece, Truman also set a precedent for U.S. aid to regimes, no matter how regressive, who pleaded that they were threatened by communism. American policy moved from State Department officer George Kennan''s argument that the Soviets had to be "contained" using "unalterable counterforce at every point," until "either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power" occurred. Kennan provided the policy and Truman the political rallying cry, to fight what columnist Walter Lippmann called in 1947 "the cold war."
The focus returned to Western Europe in 1948. The American Marshall Plan began to pump $12 billion into that part of Europe, which included a West Germany made up of the U.S., French, and British occupation zones. Stalin, fearing a revived Germany, responded by blocking western access to Berlin, which was deep within the Soviet zone although subject to four-power control. Military confrontation loomed, but Truman held West Berlin by flying supplies in over the blockade during 1948-1949. Now committed to ensuring Europe''s security, Truman joined eleven other nations in 1949 to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nato, America''s first "entangling" European alliance in 170 years. Stalin countered by tying together the economies of Eastern Europe in his version of the Marshall Plan, exploding the first Soviet atomic device in August 1949, and (after fierce negotiations) signing an alliance with the new communist China in February 1950.
Confronted by these Soviet successes and a growing Western economic crisis, U.S. officials quickly moved to escalate and expand their containment policy. In a secret 1950 document, nsc68, they proposed to strengthen their alliance systems, quadruple defense spending, and convince Americans to fight this costly cold war. Truman also ordered the development of a hydrogen bomb. In early 1950 came the first U.S. commitment to save Vietnam from communist forces, plans to form a West German army, and proposals for a peace treaty with Japan that would guarantee long-term U.S. military bases. Some observers (including Kennan) believe that the Japanese treaty led Stalin to approve a plan by communist North Korea to invade U.S.-supported South Korea on June 25, 1950. A united communist Korea could neutralize U.S. power in Japan. To Stalin''s surprise, Truman committed U.S. forces and obtained help from the United Nations to drive back the North Koreans. The Soviets, boycotting the U.N. Security Council because it would not admit communist China, could not veto Truman''s action. The president, making a historic error, allowed his forces to go to the Chinese-Korean border. China responded with human-wave attacks in November 1950 that decimated the U.N. armies. Fighting stabilized along the thirty-eighth parallel, which had separated the two Koreas, but Truman now faced an implacably hostile China, a Sino-Soviet partnership, and a defense budget that had quadrupled in eighteen months.
In 1953, the new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, moved to end the war (accomplished with a shaky armistice) and cut the federal budget. He reduced military spending by one-third but continued to fight the cold war effectively. Possessing great nuclear superiority, he faced down Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East during 1956 and in West Berlin between 1958 and 1961. He used the Central Intelligence Agency cia to overthrow governments that he suspected were turning procommunist in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954). In 1958 he sent troops into Lebanon to maintain its pro-United States stance, and between 1954 and 1961 he dispatched economic aid and 695 military advisers to build an independent South Vietnam.
In the meantime, a new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, was also broadening Moscow''s policy by establishing new relations with India and other key neutrals. He increased Soviet power by developing a hydrogen bomb and, in 1957, by launching the first earth satellite. Khrushchev formed an alliance with Cuba after Fidel Castro''s successful revolution in 1959. To stabilize his European position, Khrushchev created the Warsaw military pact in 1955 (to counter West German rearmament) and built the Berlin Wall in 1961 (to stop Germans from leaving the communist East).
Other events mark 1956 to 1962 as the first major cold war turning point. In 1956, Khrushchev had to use tanks to ensure continued control of Hungary and Poland. Sino-Soviet ties frayed to the breaking point in these years. Eisenhower''s control of his own camp was also imperiled. In 1956 he had to force his two closest allies, Great Britain and France, to retreat from a badly planned invasion with Israel intended to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt. The West Europeans developed their own nuclear forces as well as an economic Common Market (joined by the British in 1971) to be less dependent on Washington. American economic competitiveness faltered in the face of Japan''s and West Germany''s challenges. American nuclear superiority grew, but in 1962 this led Khrushchev to place missiles in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy, backed by a superior military force, induced the Soviets to retreat. In return, Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba (as he had in 1961 when his Cuban exile forces were destroyed at the Bay of Pigs). After this brush with nuclear war, the two leaders banned nuclear tests in the air and underwater after 1963. But the Soviets also undertook a huge military buildup.
The postwar world dominated by the two superpowers was now transformed into a pluralistic world of decolonized African and Middle Eastern nations and of surging nationalism in Latin America and Asia. Both superpowers tried to control this new world. President Lyndon B. Johnson landed 22,000 troops in the Dominican Republic in 1965 to prevent the unlikely emergence of another Castro. Under Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviets used force in 1968 to destroy a Czechoslovakian reform movement. But elsewhere the two leaders suffered defeats. Johnson stationed 575,000 troops in South Vietnam to prevent its supposed domination by China. He also feared that Vietnam''s fall would lead to dominolike communist successes in Southeast Asia. The president, however, not only failed to defeat communist forces, but his costly policy further weakened the U.S. economy. Brezhnev could neither stop bloody clashes between Soviet and Chinese troops along their common border nor bolster a ussr economy that was declining, in part because of heavy military expenditures.
In 1972-1973 the superpowers sought each other''s help. After making a surprise trip to China (his "China card"), President Richard Nixon signed the salt i treaty with Brezhnev to limit costly strategic weapons. They also agreed to respect newly emerging nations'' independence and to strengthen U.S.-Soviet economic ties. This détente was short-lived. During outbreaks in the Middle East, Chile, and Angola, the two nations competed with each other for influence. The economic pact was so emasculated by the U.S. Congress that Brezhnev repudiated it in 1975. President Jimmy Carter tried to place another cap on the arms race with a salt ii agreement in 1979, but his efforts were undercut by other events that year: the Iranian Revolution that destroyed a pro-United States regime; the Nicaraguan Revolution, aided by Cuban and Soviet supplies; and, above all, Brezhnev''s invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 to save a shaky pro-Moscow regime.
In 1980 Ronald Reagan defeated Carter by promising to loosen governmental restraints on the marketplace, increase military spending, and confront the Soviets everywhere. Reagan spent $2.2 trillion for the military over eight years and imposed economic sanctions to protest Brezhnev''s crackdown on Poland. Military spending and structural economic problems transformed Americans from the world''s leading creditor in 1981 to its leading debtor by 1985. Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union worsened until the tension rivaled that of the worst days of the cold war in the late 1940s.
The tension finally lessened after Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in Moscow during 1985. Realizing that the Soviet economy was collapsing, he made such major concessions in the areas of conventional forces, nuclear weapons, and removing internal controls (e.g., concerning emigration) that Reagan agreed to arms and economic agreements. In 1989 Gorbachev pulled stalemated Soviet forces from Afghanistan and announced that "the postwar period is over." After some hesitation, the George Bush administration in Washington agreed that the world had "clearly outgrown" the post-1945 superpower "clash." Both powers had actually begun losing control of the international arena in the late 1950s and, especially, the 1970s. Their competition in newly emerging areas wound down after both suffered disasters.
The ideological struggle also lessened as Gorbachev supported reforms through perestroika (economic restructuring), glasnost (openness), and more democracy within the communist bloc. George Bush meanwhile had to live, however reluctantly, with communist regimes in China, Cuba, and Angola. By 1990, Europe, long divided between Warsaw Pact and nato alliances, became fragmented and unpredictable. In the East, Gorbachev''s policies and the communists'' economic failures resulted in the sudden overthrow of communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and East Germany. In the West, policymakers were reconsidering the future of both the European Economic Community and nato in light of Germany''s reunification. Fractured by rising nationalist and ethnic demands, Europe began to spin out of the superpowers'' orbits. Forty-five years (and, indeed, more nearly a century) of costly competition was climaxing in a world that neither Russians nor Americans could control.
Thomas J. McCormick, America''s Half-Century: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Cold War (1989); Joseph L. Nogee and Robert H. Donaldson, Soviet Foreign Policy since World War II (1988).