Origins of the Cold War
*The beginning of the Cold War: The first stage of the cold war can be considered to have lasted from 1945 to 1949. Although there were concerns about other parts of the world, such as Japan, Korea, and China, the focus of the Cold War during these early years was primarily European and Mediterranean. For Europe itself, of course, this was a bitter comedown, From being the shaper of world events, Europe-- reduced to the superpowers’ battleground-- was now shaped by them.
The United nations
* Just as Woodrow Wilson had created the League of Nations after World War I, Franklin Roosevelt hoped to establish a new international body, stronger and more effective than the League had been. This body was to be called the league of nations.
Truman Doctrine
Until 1947, the United States had no coherent strategy for the emerging cold war. That year, however, as communist takeover threatened Greece and Turkey, President Harry Truman acted. In march, the United States assisted Greece and Turkey, proclaiming the Truman Doctrine, which promised “moral and material aid to any and all countries whose political stability is threatened by communism.
*promoted containment of communism*
*promoted containment of communism*
The Marshall Plan
Later in 1947, the United states unveiled the European Recovery Plan *Marshall Plan*. Remembering how, during the depression, economic suffering had driven many European nations to political extremism, Marshall argued that poverty and homelessness in post- World War II Europe might drive governments to communism. The Marshall plan pumped over $13 billion into europe for purposes of economic reconstruction. Even the nations of eastern europe were invited to take part in the marshall plan but the ussr forbade them to do so.
Military Alliances
In 1949, the Truman Administration made a military commitment to the Cold War with the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which bound the United States, Canada, Britain, and nine other Western European states into a formal strategic alliance. All these initiatives were elements in the United State’s overarching strategy for dealing with the USSR: containment. The soviets resisted containment. In response to the Marshall Plan, the USSR formed its own economic union, The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMCON). It also developed its own military bloc, the Warsaw Pact to oppose NATO. By the end of 1949, however, Europe ceased to be the only battleground or even the primary battleground of the Cold War.
http://www.thinglink.com/scene/505248123199684609
http://www.thinglink.com/scene/505248123199684609
Division of Germany and the Berlin Wall
Germany Divides
- Soviets took east Germany, while United States, Britain, and France took west Germany
- Berlin also divided four ways; by 1950 division seemed permanent
- Soviet closed roads, trains, tried to strangle West Berlin into submission
- Britain and United Sates kept city supplied with round-the-clock airlift
- After embargo against soviet satellites, Soviets backed down and ended blockade
- 1949-1961, flood of refugees from East to West Germany, East to West Berlin
- Soviet solution: a wall of barbed wire through the city fortified the border
- Former allied nations objected but did not risk a full conflict over the wall
Globalization of the Cold War
The People's Republic of China
The birth of a communist China further transformed the cold war, ostensibly enhancing the power of the Soviet Union and its communist allies. With the defeat of Japan in 1945, the civil war in China had resumed. By mid-1948 the strategic balance favored the communists, who inflicted heavy military defeats on the nationalists throughout 1948 and 1949, forcing the national government under Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) to seek refuge on the island of Taiwan. In the meantime, Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. This declaration brought to an end the long period of imperialist intrusion in China and spawned a close relationship between the world’s largest and most powerful socialist states.
Fraternal Cooperation
Moscow and Beijing drew closer during the early years of the cold war. This relationship was hardly astonishing, because the leaders of both communist states felt threatened by a common enemy, the United States, which sought to establish anticommunist bastions throughout Asia. Most disconcerting to Soviet and Chinese leaders was the American-sponsored rehabilitation of their former enemy, Japan, and the forming of client states in South Korea and Taiwan. The Chinese-Soviet partnership matured during the early 1950s and took on a distinct form when Beijing recognized Moscow’s undisputed authority in world communism in exchange for Russian military equipment and economic aid.
Confrontations in Korea
1950 focus shifted from the cold war from Europe to east Asia. At the end of World War II, the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States had partitioned Korea along the thirty-eighth parallel of latitude into a northern Soviet zone and a southern U.S. zone. Because the superpowers were unable to agree on a framework for the reunification of the country, in 1948 they consented to the establishment of two separate Korean states: in the south, the Republic of Korea, with Seoul as its capital, and in the north, the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, with Pyongyang as its capital. After arming their respective clients, each of which claimed sovereignty over the entire country, U.S. and Soviet troops withdrew.
On the early morning of 25 June 1950, the unstable political situation in Korea came to a head. Determined to unify Korea by force, the Pyongyang regime ordered more than one hundred thousand troops across the thirty-eighth parallel in a surprise attack, quickly pushing back South Korean defenders and capturing Seoul on 27 June. Convinced that the USShad sanctioned the invasion, the United States persuaded the United Nations to adopt a resolution to repel the aggressor. Armed with a UN mandate and supported by small armed forces from twenty countries, the U.S. military went into action, and within months had pushed the North Koreans back to the thirty-eighth parallel. However, sensing an opportunity to unify Korea under a pro-U.S. government, they pushed on into North Korea and within a few weeks had occupied Pyongyang. Subsequent U.S. advances toward the Yalu River on the Chinese border resulted in Chinese intervention in the Korean conflict. A combined force of Chinese and North Koreans pushed U.S. forces and their allies back into the south, and the war settled into a protracted stalemate near the original border at the thirty-eighth parallel. After two more years of fighting that raised the number of deaths to three million—mostly Korean civilians—both sides finally agreed to a cease-fire in July 1953. The failure to conclude a peace treaty ensured that the Korean peninsula would remain in a state of suspended strife that constantly threatened to engulf the region in a new round of hostilities.
Beyond the human casualties and physical damage it wrought, the Korean conflict also encouraged the globalization of the U.S. strategy of containment. Viewing the North Korean offensive as part of a larger communist conspiracy to conquer the world, the U.S. government extended military protection and economic aid to the noncommunist governments of Asia. It also entered into security agreements that culminated in the creation of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), an Asian counterpart of NATO. By 1954 U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), who had contemplated using nuclear weapons in Korea, asserted the famous “domino theory.” This strategic theory rationalized worldwide U.S. intervention on the assumption that if one country became communist, neighboring ones would collapse to communism the way a row of dominoes falls sequentially until none remains standing. Subsequent U.S. administrations extended the policy of containment to areas beyond the nation’s vital interests and applied it to local or imagined communist threats in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia.
On the early morning of 25 June 1950, the unstable political situation in Korea came to a head. Determined to unify Korea by force, the Pyongyang regime ordered more than one hundred thousand troops across the thirty-eighth parallel in a surprise attack, quickly pushing back South Korean defenders and capturing Seoul on 27 June. Convinced that the USShad sanctioned the invasion, the United States persuaded the United Nations to adopt a resolution to repel the aggressor. Armed with a UN mandate and supported by small armed forces from twenty countries, the U.S. military went into action, and within months had pushed the North Koreans back to the thirty-eighth parallel. However, sensing an opportunity to unify Korea under a pro-U.S. government, they pushed on into North Korea and within a few weeks had occupied Pyongyang. Subsequent U.S. advances toward the Yalu River on the Chinese border resulted in Chinese intervention in the Korean conflict. A combined force of Chinese and North Koreans pushed U.S. forces and their allies back into the south, and the war settled into a protracted stalemate near the original border at the thirty-eighth parallel. After two more years of fighting that raised the number of deaths to three million—mostly Korean civilians—both sides finally agreed to a cease-fire in July 1953. The failure to conclude a peace treaty ensured that the Korean peninsula would remain in a state of suspended strife that constantly threatened to engulf the region in a new round of hostilities.
Beyond the human casualties and physical damage it wrought, the Korean conflict also encouraged the globalization of the U.S. strategy of containment. Viewing the North Korean offensive as part of a larger communist conspiracy to conquer the world, the U.S. government extended military protection and economic aid to the noncommunist governments of Asia. It also entered into security agreements that culminated in the creation of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), an Asian counterpart of NATO. By 1954 U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), who had contemplated using nuclear weapons in Korea, asserted the famous “domino theory.” This strategic theory rationalized worldwide U.S. intervention on the assumption that if one country became communist, neighboring ones would collapse to communism the way a row of dominoes falls sequentially until none remains standing. Subsequent U.S. administrations extended the policy of containment to areas beyond the nation’s vital interests and applied it to local or imagined communist threats in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia.
Cracks in the Soviet-Chinese Alliance
Despite the assumptions of U.S. leaders, there was no one monolithic communist force in global politics, as was demonstrated by the divisions between Chinese and Soviet communists that appeared over time. The Chinese had embarked on a crash program of industrialization, and the Soviet Union rendered valuable assistance in the form of economic aid and technical advisors. By the mid-1950s the Soviet Union was China’s principal trading partner, annually purchasing roughly half of all Chinese exports. Before long, however, cracks appeared in the Soviet-Chinese alliance. From the Chinese perspective, Soviet aid programs were far too modest and had too many strings attached. By the end of 1964, the rift between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China became embarrassingly public, with both sides engaging in name-calling. In addition, both nations openly competed for influence in Africa and Asia, especially in the nations that had recently gained independence. The fact that the People’s Republic had conducted successful nuclear tests in 1964 enhanced its prestige. An unanticipated outcome of the Chinese-Soviet split was that many countries gained an opportunity to pursue a more independent course by playing capitalists against communists and by playing Soviet communists against Chinese communists.
Nuclear Arms Race
A central feature of the cold war world was a costly arms race and the terrifying proliferation of nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union had broken the U.S. monopoly on atomic weaponry by testing its own atomic bomb in 1949, but because the United States was determined to retain military superiority and because the Soviet Union was equally determined to reach parity with the United States, both sides amassed enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons and developed a multitude of systems for deploying those weapons. In the 1960s and beyond, the superpowers acquired so many nuclear weapons that they reached the capacity for mutually assured destruction, or MAD. This balance of terror, while often frightening, tended to restrain the contestants and stabilize their relationship, with one important exception.
Cuba: Nuclear Flashpoint
Ironically, the cold war confrontation that came closest to unleashing nuclear war took place not at the expected flashpoints in Europe or Asia but on the island of Cuba. In 1959 a revolutionary movement headed by Fidel Castro Ruz overthrew the autocratic Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar , whose regime had gone to great lengths to maintain the country’s traditionally subservient relationship with the United States, especially with the U.S. sugar companies that controlled Cuba’s economy. Fidel Castro’s new regime gladly accepted a Soviet offer of massive economic aid—including an agreement to purchase half of Cuba’s sugar production and arms shipments. In return for the Soviet largesse, Castro declared his support for the USSR’s foreign policy. In December 1961 he confirmed the U.S. government’s worst suspicions when he publicly announced: “I have been a Marxist-Leninist all along, and will remain one until I die.”
Bay of Pigs Invasion
Cuba’s alignment with the Soviet Union spurred the U.S. government to action. Newly elected president John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) authorized a clandestine invasion of Cuba to overthrow Castro and his supporters. In April 1961 a force of fifteen hundred anti-Castro Cubans trained, armed, and transported by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) landed on Cuba at a place called the Bay of Pigs. The arrival of the invasion force failed to incite a hoped-for internal uprising, and when the promised American air support failed to appear, the invasion quickly fizzled. Within three days, Castro’s military had either captured or killed the entire invasion force. The Bay of Pigs fiasco diminished U.S. prestige, especially in Latin America. It also, contrary to U.S. purposes, actually strengthened Castro’s position in Cuba and encouraged him to accept the deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba as a deterrent to any further invasion.