Cold War

Cold War. For almost forty‐five years (1945–1989), the Cold War dominated international relations and loomed large on the American homefront. Beginning after World War II, the Cold War arose from the interaction of a chaotic postwar international situation and the foreign policies of the United States, the Soviet Union, and other nations. Characterized by high tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, the polarization of domestic and international politics, the division of the world into economic and military spheres, conflict in the Third World, and a dangerous arms race, the Cold War left its imprint on the history of the twentieth century.

Historiography.

Historians have offered conflicting explanations of the Cold War's outbreak, its persistence, and its ultimate demise, explanations often grounded in deep, if unacknowledged, ideological and philosophical differences. Defenders of U.S. policies blame the Cold War on an expansionist and ideologically‐motivated Soviet Union, while critics argue that expansionist U.S. policies also played an important role in starting and sustaining the Cold War. Some critics, known as revisionists, stress the long history of American economic expansionism and argue that economic interests as well as ideological beliefs shaped U.S. policies. Others stress the importance of a global conception of U.S. national security interests that emerged during World War II and dominated U.S. policy throughout the Cold War. According to this view, U.S. leaders sought to prevent any power or coalition of powers from dominating Europe and/or Asia, to maintain U.S. strategic supremacy, to fashion an international economic environment open to U.S. foreign trade and investment, and to integrate the Third World nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America into the world economy in an era of decolonization and national liberation. This expansive assertion of U.S. interests clashed with Soviet security concerns.

Since the limited availability of Soviet foreign policy archives makes Soviet motives difficult to discern, the influence of the Soviet system on the Soviet Union's foreign policy remains contested. While many scholars still see Joseph Stalin and his successors as incorrigible ideologues and expansionists, others question the long‐assumed links between the Soviet Union's repressive internal regime and Moscow's foreign policy. Instead, they highlight bureaucratic differences within the Soviet decision‐making elite and security concerns rooted in Russian history and geography. Most scholars agree, however, that the Soviet Union's Cold War objectives were to maintain safeguards against future German aggression, including secure borders and a buffer zone in eastern Europe; to build up the Soviet Union's industrial base; and to maintain a powerful military. Most also concur that these objectives clashed with Western ideals, economic objectives, and security requirements.

The scholarly debates survived the Cold War's end in 1989. Some analysts argue that victory in the Cold War vindicates U.S. policies during the conflict. Others, emphasizing the Cold War's high costs, argue that less confrontational U.S. policies could have achieved the same or a better outcome earlier and less expensively. Similarly, while some scholars seize on newly released Soviet and other communist records to argue that the foreign policy of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes was ideologically motivated and aggressively expansionist, others point out that the available documents are too limited and ambiguous to draw such sweeping conclusions. (Full documentation on some aspects of U.S. Cold War policy, especially covert action, remains unavailable as well.)

Rather than rehash these debates, this essay focuses on the interaction of international systemic factors and national politics and policies and offers an international, as opposed to a national or binational, perspective. Although the Soviet‐American rivalry loomed large, the Cold War encompassed much more than U.S.–Soviet relations. It also involved changes in the global distribution of power; ideological conflict within and among states; shifts in the world economy; political, social, and economic change in the Third World; and a dangerous and destabilizing arms race. To understand the Cold War, attention to all these factors is necessary.

Global Balance of Power.

Throughout the Cold War, the global distribution of power influenced American and Soviet perceptions of their national interests and, consequently, their actions. In 1939, there were six great powers: Great Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States. By 1945, the United States stood alone, its power magnified by its wartime mobilization, its rivals' destruction, and its allies' exhaustion. In 1945, the United States had the world's most powerful navy and air force; was the sole possessor of atomic weapons; and controlled around half of the world's manufacturing capacity, most of its food surpluses, and a large portion of its financial reserves. The United States also held extensive domestic oil reserves and controlled access to vast oil fields in Latin America and the Middle East.

Despite an upsurge in Soviet military power in the 1970s and a relative decline in U.S. economic strength, the global distribution of power remained tilted against the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. If popular support, industrial infrastructure, skilled manpower, and technological prowess are factored into the definition of power, the postwar era was bipolar only in a narrow military sense. In reality, the Soviet Union remained an “incomplete superpower” throughout the Cold War.

This imbalance becomes even starker when the Western alliance is measured against the Soviet bloc. To be sure, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies maintained more ground forces in central Europe, and Soviet and Chinese communist troops outnumbered any possible opponent in northeast Asia during the 1950s. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union also achieved rough parity in strategic nuclear weapons. But the loyalty of Moscow's Warsaw Pact partners always remained in doubt, and after the Sino‐Soviet split, which began in the late 1950s and was complete by the mid‐1960s, almost a third of Soviet ground forces had to be deployed along their border with the People's Republic of China (PRC). In assessing the nuclear balance, the Soviets had to weigh the arsenals of the other nuclear powers—Great Britain, France, and the PRC—as well as that of the United States.

Although the wartime defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of Britain and France initially improved the Soviet Union's relative strategic position, these same developments left undisputed leadership of the noncommunist world to the United States. The rapid reconstruction of western Europe, facilitated by the Marshall Plan, and its incorporation into a U.S.‐led alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and Japan's economic recovery and security pact with the United States, meant that four of the world's five centers of industrial might (the United States, Great Britain, western Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan) stayed outside Soviet control. Economic recovery and political stability in Germany and Japan and their alignment with the West were huge victories for the United States. The Sino‐Soviet split had an equally important impact on the global balance of power. Chinese hostility greatly complicated Soviet strategic dilemmas and ended any possibility of communism constituting an alternative world system that could compete with the capitalist West.

Transnational Ideological Conflict.

The Cold War was a political, social, and economic as well as a military and strategic phenomenon, and a regime's internal ideological underpinnings often determined its alignment. The impact of internal politics on the global balance of power invested domestic political struggles with international strategic significance.

After Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 broke up the Nazi‐Soviet alliance, World War II, both internationally and within nations, pitted the extreme right (Germany, Italy, and Japan) against an uneasy alliance of the center (Britain and the United States) and the communist left (the Soviet Union). With the defeat of the right, the major fault line in postwar international relations, and within most industrial nations, shifted to the left, reflecting and underpinning the emerging superpower tension.

Depression and global war accentuated existing social and political divisions and generated popular demands for economic reform. Among the Western powers, only the United States failed to shift leftward after the war. But while the Republican party captured both houses of Congress in the 1946 midterm elections, it proved unable to roll back the New Deal.

While the Western economies suffered periods of stagnation and glaring inequities, they experienced unprecedented economic growth from the late 1940s to the early 1970s and functioned sufficiently well thereafter to sustain their military might, expand welfare benefits, and legitimize Western political and economic institutions. The prosperity associated with the long boom redressed the failures of prewar capitalism, undercut the appeal of anticapitalist parties, supported the ascendancy of moderate elites who associated their own well‐being with that of the United States, and sustained the cohesion of the Western alliance. The defeat of the extreme right in World War II reduced divisions among noncommunist elements, facilitating, at least in western Europe and Japan, the emergence of a consensus supporting some form of welfare‐state capitalism and alignment with the United States. In addition, the Cold War provided a justification for the repression of indigenous communist and other radical groups in the name of national security.

The Soviet Union entered the postwar era with enormous prestige because of the key role it played in defeating Nazi Germany. Within the Soviet Union, victory in the war consolidated the Communist party's control, and throughout Europe and in important parts of the Third World Communist parties gained ground thanks to their participation in wartime resistance movements and to chaotic economic, social, and political conditions. In France, Italy, Greece, China, Vietnam, and elsewhere, communists and their allies appeared poised to take power. In addition, for many in the Third World, the Soviet Union seemed to offer a model for the rapid transition from a backward agrarian society to a modern industrial power.

The appeal of communism and the Soviet model of development declined sharply as the Cold War progressed. Repression in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the PRC tarnished communism's image. In the 1960s and 1970s some reform‐minded European Communist parties attempted to divorce communism from the harsh reality of Soviet (and Chinese) practice, but these efforts failed to wrest leadership of world communism from the Soviet Union and the PRC. The faltering Soviet economy further discredited communism's appeal, as did growing international awareness of human rights and environmental abuses in the communist world.

World Economy.

Transnational ideological conflict was closely related to the development of national economies and the evolution of the global economy. Economic changes restructured power relationships among, as well as within, nations. The reconstruction, reform, and relative resilience of the world capitalist system contrasted sharply with the failure of communism. Capitalism, on the defensive in 1945 owing to the Great Depression and its association with fascism, staged a remarkable comeback. U.S. aid programs like the Marshall Plan supported the reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan, promoted European economic integration, helped forge a stable global financial order at the Bretton Woods Conference (1944), and through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) encouraged the lowering of tariffs and the removal of other impediments to the free flow of goods and capital. These changes, and high levels of military spending, helped fuel the extended period of economic growth.

Even though U.S technological and financial dominance and share of world production decreased over time, the vitality of the West German and Japanese economies and the emergence of such Western‐oriented “newly industrializing countries” as Taiwan and South Korea ensured the West's economic supremacy. While the energy crisis of the 1970s caused economic difficulties in the West, the Soviets gained no lasting advantages from it. As an oil exporter, the Soviet Union benefited briefly from higher oil prices, but the windfall distracted attention from the need for structural reforms. In the mid‐1980s, when the Soviet Union finally had a government interested in fundamental reform, international oil prices collapsed.

Although the roots of Soviet economic problems date at least to the emergence of the Stalinist system in the late 1920s, military competition with the United States and the PRC forced the Soviets to devote a much larger share of their smaller gross national product to defense, and siphoned off resources needed for economic development. The diversion of investment from productive sectors and consumer goods undermined the Soviet Union's willingness and ability to compete with the United States and to maintain its empire. Soviet bloc economic growth, which had soared in the late 1940s and the 1950s, slowed in the early 1970s and never recovered. The inability of the Soviet Union's economy to compete with the West restricted its citizens' standard of living, threatened its national security, and ultimately eroded support for the communist system.

Third World.

The Cold War overlapped the era of decolonization and national liberation in the Third World, and these two momentous processes had a profound reciprocal effect. The Cold War made decolonization more difficult and more violent, and in Latin America and other already independent societies, it polarized efforts at social, economic, and political change. Although most Third World conflicts were indigenous in origin, and their eventual outcome owed more to their internal histories and characteristics than to U.S. and Soviet policies, Soviet‐American rivalry exacerbated instability and conflict in the Third World.

Decolonization represented opportunity for the Soviet Union and vulnerability for the United States and its allies. The desire of Third World nationalist movements to liberate their countries and their economies from foreign control, to overthrow repressive internal power structures sustained by outside forces, and to challenge the West's cultural hegemony at times aligned some movements against the United States and its allies and with the Soviet Union. The diffusion of military technology lessened the power gap between the industrial nations and the Third World, and nationalist elites were able to organize Third World peasants into formidable fighting forces that could hold their own against Western armies on their home ground. This proved particularly important in Asia, where the Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese communists utilized both guerrilla tactics and large‐unit warfare against Western forces.

Western leaders feared that revolutionary nationalism in the Third World could cut off raw materials, oil, food sources, and markets needed to rebuild the economies of western Europe and Japan and to ensure continued U.S. prosperity. They also worried that the Soviet Union would form alliances with national liberation movements or benefit from the turmoil accompanying the end of Western control.

The Soviets proved unable to exploit conditions in the Third World, however. Although Communist parties eventually came to power in some Third World countries (often the poorest ones), these gains proved ephemeral as most national liberation movements resisted outside control. Soviet involvement in the Third World also galvanized Western counteractions including economic and military assistance for pro‐Western governments and groups; covert action against anti‐Western governments and groups as in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, and Chile; direct challenges to the Soviets as in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis; and massive military intervention as in the Vietnam War. As the declining competitiveness of the Soviet economy and unpromising experiences with Soviet‐style planning left Third World countries little choice but to abide by the economic rules set by the Western‐dominated International Monetary Fund and World Bank and to look to the United States and its allies for capital, technology, and markets, the threat that Third World radicalism would add to Soviet power dissipated.

Arms Race.

The arms race was one of the Cold War's most dynamic aspects, as technological advances threatened to give an edge to one superpower or the other, thereby triggering vigorous countermeasures and increasing the risk of nuclear disaster. This pattern of action and counteraction continued throughout the Cold War, resulting in ever higher levels of military spending, destabilizing technological competition, and expanding nuclear arsenals. Moreover, military expenditures created constituencies with an economic interest in perpetuating Cold War tensions.

During World War II, the systematic application of science to warfare resulted in new technologies and improved weapons—long‐range bombers, aircraft carriers, radar, the jet engine, long‐range rockets, and the atomic bomb—that extended the scale and scope of death and destruction. The atomic bomb was especially terrifying because it vastly magnified the destructive force of warfare and concentrated it in time.

The atomic bomb's potential to revolutionize warfare unleashed an arms race as the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and subsequently other nations developed their own nuclear arsenals, and the United States sought to maintain its lead. The development of hydrogen bombs and ballistic missiles exposed most of the globe to potential devastation.

Although the superpowers sporadically attempted to control the arms race, it continued until the end of the Cold War, exacerbated by the different structures of the U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces, which in turn led each side to seek different solutions to the objective of mutual deterrence: discouraging an adversary's attack by maintaining an invulnerable retaliatory capacity. Whereas the United States relied heavily on a deterrence “triad” of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine‐launched ballistic missiles, and manned bombers, Soviet planners looked to large numbers of ICBMs.

Technological change—especially improved accuracy and multiple warheads—further complicated arms control efforts by magnifying each side's ability to destroy the other's strategic forces, or at least its ICBMs, and hence its retaliatory capacity. This potential counterforce capability raised the possibility (and temptation) of a successful first strike, and thus undermined mutual deterrence.

The United States predicated its strategy of extended deterrence on overall strategic superiority. According to this view, the function of U.S. strategic forces was to deter not only a Soviet attack on the United States but also Soviet advances anywhere in the world. Nuclear superiority, U.S. strategists believed, was needed to compensate for assumed Soviet conventional superiority in Europe and to discourage Soviet “adventurism” elsewhere. Although the United States reluctantly accepted the principle of nuclear parity with the Soviets in the 1970s, U.S. strategists continued to worry that mutual deterrence at the global level would give the Soviets greater freedom on the regional level, especially in Europe. For their part, Soviet strategists, convinced that parity was necessary to discourage an attack on the Soviet Union, tried to match each and every U.S. advance.

Although some analysts have argued that nuclear weapons and the near certainty of retaliation may have prevented a war between the superpowers, these factors did not prevent dangerous crises, like the one over Cuba in 1962, or numerous nonnuclear conflicts in the Third World. In addition, the safety procedures built into the command and control systems of both superpowers were not foolproof, and the necessity of maintaining readiness to respond instantaneously to a nuclear attack pushed safety to the limit. With both sides' nuclear forces geared to “launch on warning,” an accidental nuclear war became a dangerous possibility.

In the mid‐1980s, Soviet leaders, recognizing that military expenditures were crippling the country's economy, concluded that fewer nuclear weapons would provide sufficient security. They also recognized that maintaining coercive control of eastern Europe, an imperative of a competitive security strategy, was incompatible with democratic and economic reform in the Soviet Union. Accordingly, the Soviets made concessions that led to important arms‐control agreements that reduced tensions with the West and helped end the Cold War.

The history of the arms race underscores what international relations scholars call the security dilemma. Actions taken by one nation to enhance its own security can easily be construed by its adversary as threatening, and lead to countermeasures that reduce both sides' security. The security dilemma had especially stark implications for the Soviet Union. Most of the measures the Soviets adopted to improve their security provoked countermeasures by the more powerful United States and its allies that preserved or increased Western supremacy and thus diminished Soviet security.

The Cold War's Impact.

The Cold War was central to the history of the second half of the twentieth century. It shaped the foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union and deeply affected their societies and their political, economic, and military institutions. By justifying the projection of U.S. power and influence all over the world, the Cold War facilitated the assertion of global leadership by the United States. The doctrine of containment, the overarching principle of U.S. Cold War foreign policy, not only aimed at limiting Soviet power and influence but also facilitated the expansion of U.S. power and influence. By providing Soviet leaders with an external enemy to justify their repressive internal regime and external empire, the Cold War helped the Soviet Communist party maintain its grip on power.

In addition to its impact on the superpowers, the Cold War both caused and perpetuated the post–World War II division of Europe, and, within Europe, of Germany. It also facilitated the postwar reconstruction and reintegration into the international system of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Its impact proved especially great in the Third World, where it interacted with decolonization and sweeping social and economic changes. The Cold War led to the division of Vietnam and Korea and to costly wars in both nations, and it escalated conflicts throughout the Third World. Indeed, nearly 99 percent of the more than 20 million people who died in wars between 1945 and 1990 perished in the Third World. In addition, apart from periodic crises over the flash‐point city of Berlin, most of the crises that threatened to escalate into nuclear war occurred in the Third World.

The Cold War also had a profound impact on domestic politics in the United States. Early postwar Washington's anticommunist agenda found its domestic echo in a preoccupation with subversion and disloyalty, expressed in the Rosenberg and Alger Hiss cases and the investigations of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un‐American Activities. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights movement leaders, meanwhile, effectively exploited Cold War concerns, warning that racism damaged the image of the United States abroad. Cold War preoccupations and nuclear fears pervaded 1950s popular culture, while 1960s campus protesters and New Leftists criticized their country's hegemonic ambitions and the Cold War mind-set underlying the Vietnam War.

The Cold War preoccupied every president from Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and fueled the careers of such policy‐makers as George Kennan, Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, and Henry Kissinger. It gave rise to vastly increased federal military and security institutions and stimulated levels of defense spending that energized the economies of entire regions in the South, Southwest, and Pacific Coast; produced major population shifts; and promoted the rise of think tanks and new information technologies such as computers. The interstate highway system, the space program, consumerist culture, increased religiosity, and expanded federal spending on education were all linked to the Cold War. In short, the homefront history of the United States in the later twentieth century, no less than its international role and strategic politics, can be understood only in a Cold War context.
See also Americans for Democratic Action; Anticommunism; Bay of Pigs; Berlin Blockade and Airlift; Carter, Jimmy; Central Intelligence Agency; Democratic Party; Fifties, The; Ford, Gerald; Foreign Relations; Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Atomic Bombing of; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Kennedy, John F.; Korean War; Military, The; National Security Act of 1947; National Security Council; National Security Council Document #68; Nixon, Richard M.; Nuclear Arms Control Treaties; Nuclear Strategy; Nuclear Weapons; Post–Cold War Era; Progressive Party of 1948; Sixties, The; Students for a Democratic Society; Truman Doctrine; U‐2 Incident.

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David S. Painter