The Cold War

Though the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union stopped short of open warfare, numerous incidents and crises demonstrated the seriousness of the rivalry, which became known as the Cold War. The hostility and mistrust that defined the relationship was all the more intense because it pitted not only two great powers against each other but also two clashing ideological systems: communism and capitalism.

Beginning in the late 19th century, a rivalry over economic development and influence in eastern Asia had evolved between the United States—then just emerging as a serious world power—and czarist Russia. When the Russian Revolution of 1917 established a new government based on communist principles, the United States stood in full opposition, especially when Vladimir Lenin, as the new leader of the Soviet Union, soon declared his ambition to export the revolution and overthrow capitalist systems everywhere. The response by the United States and Europe was to send a small expeditionary force to help Russian monarchist, counterrevolutionary forces in 1918, which was unsuccessful.

The world was soon faced with World War II, and the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom became Allies to defeat Nazi Germany. Still, the British and Americans never entirely trusted the Soviets, who had cooperated with Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler until Operation Barbarossa occurred. After the war ended, Joseph Stalin insisted that Eastern Europe come under the Soviet sphere of influence. However, the United States was unwilling to let Stalin dictate the shape of the postwar world, and U.S. president Harry Truman emerged as a more determined opponent of communism. Between 1945 and 1947, Stalin ensured the installation of pro-Soviet communist regimes in Eastern European countries heavily dependent on the Soviet Union. Those actions alarmed the United States and other Western governments, prompting Winston Churchill's "iron curtain" speech (1946).

Germany had been divided into four occupation zones, with Great Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union each governing their own sectors. As hostility between the Soviet Union and the West grew, Stalin decided to establish the Soviet zone in the East as a separate communist state with the Berlin occupation zone at the center. The situation came to a head in 1948, when Stalin set up a blockade of the western half of Berlin; Truman responded with the Berlin airlift. By 1949, Stalin had lifted the blockade. Yet Germany remained definitively divided into two separate nations.

The Greek Civil War prompted the introduction of the Truman Doctrine (1947), which publicly committed the president to a containment policy. Another U.S. initiative for the containment of communism was the Marshall Plan of 1948, which aided the recovery of Western Europe and which the Soviets saw as a direct challenge.

In Cold War politics, 1949 proved to be a pivotal year, which began with the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to counter any Soviet threat. In August, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear device, thus ending the American monopoly on such weapons and the military superiority that came with it. By the end of that year, the Chinese Communist Revolution came to an end, and the following year, the Soviet Union and China entered into an alliance.

Confronted with those communist gains, the U.S. National Security Council presented Truman with NSC-68: U.S. Objectives and Programs for National Security (1950), which argued that the Cold War had to be given a new priority. That new level of intensity was reflected in the Truman administration's response to developments on the Korean Peninsula in the spring of 1950. Korea had been divided into separate nations following the end of World War II, much as Germany had been. The two Koreas coexisted uncomfortably until the Korean War began. Truman reacted forcefully and led an effort in the United Nations to commit troops to help the South Koreans fend off the communist invasion.

U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower ended the Korean War in 1953 with the peninsula still divided and maintaining an uneasy peace. With Eisenhower scaling back American military spending and relying more on nuclear weapons for defense, the Cold War seemed to be stabilizing. Nevertheless, a second red scare dominated American political life. There had been continuous efforts to suppress communist political activity in the United States, which culminated in a very public, hysteria-filled campaign, led by U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s.

During that same period, the United States had grown wary of Soviet actions under Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1955 formed the Warsaw Treaty Organization to counter NATO. That development, the launch of Sputnik, the building of the Berlin Wall, and an ever-escalating nuclear arms race provoked fear among Americans. That fear was exacerbated by the CubanRevolution in 1959, which led to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. In October 1962, when U.S. president John F. Kennedy discovered that the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles on Cuban soil, posing a direct threat to American cities, he demanded that the Soviets remove the missiles, and the Cuban Missile Crisis very nearly developed into open war.

Another region of Cold War concern was Southeast Asia. When the French were defeated in the Indochina War in 1954, Vietnam was divided into a communist north and a U.S.-supported south. The United States was intent on preventing the spread of communism to South Vietnam based on a new ideology known as the domino theory. More than ever, U.S. leaders were convinced that communism must not be allowed to spread to other countries, a view that proved disastrous for the U.S. military in the emerging Vietnam War.

At first, very small numbers of U.S. soldiers were stationed in Vietnam in a merely advisory role, but by 1964, U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson began to commit ever larger numbers of combat troops. Johnson's presidency was ruined by his commitment to Vietnam, and by the time U.S. president Richard Nixon ended U.S. involvement in the conflict in 1973, nearly 60,000 American soldiers had died, along with millions of Vietnamese. By 1975, North Vietnamese forces finally overran South Vietnam; the U.S. government was humiliated.

The remainder of the 1970s saw relative Cold War calm as U.S. leaders pursued a policy of détente. In early 1972, Nixon visited China in a bid to normalize relations with that nation's communist government.

The Soviet Union, which had broken its alliance with China in disputes over borders and leadership of the communist world, did not want to be left out of the new spirit of "peaceful coexistence" between communist and capitalist nations. Thus, Nixon visited the Soviet Union and its leader, Leonid Brezhnev, and the two men signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972).

Despite the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II (1979), signed by Brezhnev and U.S. president Jimmy Carter, the end of the decade brought renewed tensions. The two superpowers clashed in various areas of the world as they tried to influence revolutionary movements. Particularly disturbing to the United States was Soviet and Cuban support for communist revolutionaries in Nicaragua and Brezhnev's 1979 Afghanistan invasion.

The 1980s saw an escalation of tensions that equaled those of the early Cold War. Ronald Reagan became U.S. president in 1980 and pledged to stand firm against the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union. The arms race resumed with new vigor, as Reagan spent more than $2 trillion on defense during his presidency and employed belligerent rhetoric in his public pronouncements on the Soviet Union and communism in general. The Soviets matched Reagan's hard-line policies by cracking down on dissent at home and in Eastern European countries like Poland while building up their own military.

Despite that environment of fear and mistrust, the Cold War neared its end. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union and pledged thorough reforms of the entire communist system. His policies of perestroika and glasnost responded to the need for change in a system that had never been able to compete with the West in industrial production and had stifled freedom of thought and creativity.

Those policies relaxed the iron grip the Soviet Union had maintained for 40 years over the countries of Eastern Europe. It was in that part of the world that the structures of the cold war first began to crumble. Soviet withdrawal left the communist governments in Eastern Europe isolated and vulnerable, and in 1989, they began to give way to popular democratic revolutions. The Czechoslovakian Velvet Revolution of 1989 was mostly nonviolent, and soon nearly all the Eastern European nations had new, democratic, noncommunist governments. German reunification occurred in 1990. Only one year later, nationalist movements throughout the Soviet Union destroyed the communist system, and Soviet republics became wholly independent or part of the Russian Federation. Those former communist countries commenced the slow and often painful transformation to capitalist, open-market economic systems.

The Cold War ended definitively in 1991. Communist governments remained, notably in China, Cuba, and North Korea, but they did not present the same threat to U.S. national interests, despite more or less open hostility between those nations and the U.S. government. In place of that bipolar world, in which two great superpowers confronted one another and sought to gain influence at each other's expense in various parts of the world, the United States in the post-Cold War period has been faced with a fragmented international scene, with no major ideological, military, or economic foe to challenge its domination of world affairs. That situation presents its own challenges but lacks the dramatic clash of opposing ideologies that characterized life during the Cold War.

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The Cold War Reading Questions

  1. What two ideological (philosophy) systems are clashing during the Cold War?
  1. What actions did Stalin take to spread communism between 1945 and 1949?
  1. What are the names of the two policies that were created by the United States to deal with the containment of communism in Europe?
  1. Why did the United States get involved in the war in Korea?
  1. What is the name of the theory that Eisenhower coined in reference to the danger of the spread of communism in Southeast Asia?
  1. List the names of the U.S. Presidents during the Cold War in chronological order.
  2. Harry Truman
  3. ______
  4. John F. Kennedy
  5. ______
  6. ______
  7. Gerald Ford
  8. ______
  9. ______
  10. George H. W. Bush
  1. List the names of the leaders of the Soviet Union during the Cold War in chronological order.
  2. Joseph Stalin
  3. ______
  4. ______
  5. ______
  1. What are two events that led to the end of the Soviet Union?
  1. In what year did the Cold War definitively end? ______
  1. In your own words, what is the significance of the Cold War on the world today?