Cold War (1945–91)

Cold War (1945–91) CausesExternal CourseDomestic CourseChanging Interpretations
Cold War (1945–91): Causes The Grand Alliance of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union was the indirect creation of Adolf Hitler. Only such a challenge as Nazi Germany could bring together the world's leading capitalist democracy, the world's greatest colonial empire, and the world's major Communist state. Relations between the Anglo‐Americans and the Russians, moreover, had been marked by ideological clash and distrust since the Bolshevik Revolution. The Western powers had intervened in the Russian civil war against the Bolsheviks, and the United States had refused to recognize the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1933. Prewar diplomacy, particularly Western appeasement of Hitler and rejection of collective security with the Soviet Union, followed by the Nazi‐Soviet Pact in August 1939, led each side to be wary of the other's intentions and motives.

During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set forth two parallel strategies for postwar peace. The first was the continuation of the Grand Alliance. Best symbolized by the United Nations, this path sought continued cooperation with the Soviet Union, great power control over different spheres of influence, and incorporation of socialist economies into a world trade system. The other strategy was based on American power, the “open door,” policy, and unilateral planning. It was best represented by the development of the atomic bomb, which Roosevelt refused to share with the Russians. Though Roosevelt wished for continued cooperation with the Soviets, he was also willing to hedge his bets and keep his options open. Underlying both approaches was Roosevelt's tactic of delaying the major decisions on boundaries, governments, occupation policies, and reparations and reconstruction aid until the end of the war, when American power would be at its height. With his characteristic optimism, Roosevelt believed that time would allow the conflicts in these approaches to be worked out.

The Yalta Conference in February 1945 appeared to expose the problems and contradictions of Roosevelt's two‐track approach. The Allies clashed over the composition of Poland's government, and could not reach firm agreements on the crucial questions of the occupation of Germany and postwar reparations and loans. Roosevelt, believing any truly representative government in Warsaw would be anti‐Soviet, accepted a vague compromise that allowed the Soviet‐imposed government to maintain control without technically violating the agreement. Four zones of occupation were established for Germany, and $10 billion was adopted as a working figure for German reparations to the Soviet Union, with the details to be settled later. Still, Roosevelt saw the common desire to prevent a resurgence of German power, along with Soviet needs for postwar reconstruction, to be firm roads to continued cooperation among the Big Three (the United States, the United Kingdom, and the USSR). He believed that concessions to Soviet security concerns in Eastern Europe were necessary in the short run until the West could demonstrate its good faith through American economic aid and guarantees against German remilitarization. Once Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was persuaded that the West did not intend to allow Germany again to threaten Europe's peace, and that it would assist the Soviet Union in its recovery, Moscow would no longer need to dominate its neighbors. The Soviet Union would find its security protected within the collective arrangements of the United Nations Security Council.

Roosevelt's hopes of resolving the contradictions of his policy died with him on 12 April 1945. The new president, Harry S. Truman, was by all accounts unaware of Roosevelt's plans, generally uninformed about foreign policy and military matters, and therefore initially reliant upon a set of advisers that included Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, and Truman's choice for secretary of state, James Brynes. This group tended to take a harder line toward the Soviet Union than had Roosevelt. Truman believed in cooperation, but he thought it should be on American terms. He stated that he did not expect to get his way every time, but he did believe “we should be able to get eighty‐five percent.” In his first meeting with the Soviet foreign minister, V. M. Molotov, in late April 1945, Truman used blunt language in accusing the Soviets of failing to carry out their promise of establishing a democratic government in Poland. In July, when Truman learned of the successful testing of the atomic bomb, he wrote privately that he now had an “ace in the hole,” which he could use to end the war in the Pacific and in negotiations with the Soviets. The unilateral approach was winning out over cooperation and negotiation.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did indeed add to Soviet distrust of the United States, but Soviet leaders in the Kremlin continued in 1945 to seek cooperation with the West. The reasons for this were compelling. The devastation of the Soviet Union by the Germans was unprecedented. Over 20 million Soviet citizens died during the war, and over 1,700 cities, 70,000 villages, and 31,000 factories were destroyed. To ensure more secure borders, rebuild, and prevent a future resurgence of German strength seemed to demand continued good relations with the United States. Only Washington could ensure Soviet security through its occupation policies and provide funds for reconstruction. Cooperation, for Stalin, was a means to ensure the Soviet sphere of influence, control Germany, and secure vital economic aid.

Yet, from Washington's perspective Soviet actions in Eastern Europe more and more came to be seen not as necessary steps for security but as aggressive actions that threatened American plans for postwar peace and prosperity. From the outset of World War II, officials in the Roosevelt administration were determined that the United States would seize its “second chance” (the first chance had been lost after World War I) to shape the postwar world in such a way as to promote American interests and peace. It was an article of faith for advocates of American internationalism that the United States had an obligation to accept responsibility for postwar leadership and to see to it that the world adopted American ideas of self‐determination, free trade, arms limitations, and collective security. These were not only good for the United States but beneficial to all nations. With isolationism discredited, the objective was to maintain the principles of the Grand Alliance as set out in the Atlantic Charter. The United States had fought the war in part to protect self‐determination and open trade.

It was therefore necessary to combat spheres of influence and closed trading systems. No one nation or group of powers could be allowed to establish a competing system to the one the U.S. government envisioned for the world. Truman and his advisers believed that political and economic freedoms were interrelated and necessary for American prosperity and international peace. Any restrictions of trade or exclusive economic spheres would lead to a repetition of the 1930s. As Truman declared in 1947, “peace, freedom, and world trade” were inseparable; “the grave lessons of the past have proved it.” Limiting a Soviet sphere of influence was perceived as necessary to postwar peace. This understanding led to great fears among American officials that if they did not respond to Soviet actions, the United States would find itself once again in a world of trade blocs and international competition. To compel the Soviets to accept American interpretations of agreements, the Truman administration denounced Soviet behavior in Poland, Romania, and elsewhere, threatened action over Soviet involvement in Iran, and held up economic assistance until the Soviets demonstrated their willingness to cooperate on American terms. Truman, believing he had either the power to force Soviet compliance or the ability to achieve American goals without the Kremlin's cooperation, was convinced by the end of 1945 that it was time to “stop babying the Soviets.” “Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language,” he said, “another war is in the making.”

The arrival of George F. Kennan's Long Telegram from Moscow in February 1946 served to provide coherence to the developing hard line against the Soviets. Kennan argued that the Soviet Union was motivated by a combination of traditional Russian desires to expand and by Marxist ideology that taught there could be no cooperation with capitalist states. There was therefore no room for compromise and negotiation. The Soviets would take advantage of all sincere efforts at peace and only honor agreements when it was expedient to their goals. He portrayed Stalin as acting on a coherent design, rather than as a man responding to events in the interests of his nation. The obvious conclusion for Kennan—and the one drawn by the Truman administration—was that the Soviets had no legitimate grievances. There was thus no need to try to understand and meet Soviet concerns. Rather, a policy of opposition and the containment of Soviet power was necessary.

A few weeks later in Fulton, Missouri, former British prime minister Winston S. Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech sounding the call for an Anglo‐American alliance against the Soviets, whom he said had established a dictatorial regime behind an “iron curtain” from “Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.” Problems seemed to be multiplying around the world, and from the White House it appeared that more often than not the source of the difficulties was the Soviet Union. In Asia, revolutionary nationalist movements, often headed by Communists, were fighting against the restoration of Europe's colonial empires, while civil war between the Nationalists and Communists resumed in China. In Europe, economic recovery was slow, food and other essential goods short, and Communist parties, particularly in France and Italy, were gaining ground. Truman's advisers warned him that time was running short. The Soviet strategy, they argued, was to weaken the position of the United States in Europe and Asia to create confusion and collapse. The threat was not necessarily a military one, but a political and economic challenge.

Other apparent challenges appeared in Turkey and Iran. In 1946, the Soviets pushed for access to the strategic Dardanelles Straits while simultaneously delaying the removal of troops from Iran's northern provinces.

The event that spurred Truman to action was the British government's announcement in February 1947 that it was pulling out of Greece. It could no longer afford to finance the Greek royalist forces in their civil war against a Communist‐led rebellion. Rather than viewing the war as a civil conflict revolving around Greek issues, American policymakers incorrectly interpreted it as a Soviet effort. Secretary of State Dean Acheson told congressional leaders that the “Soviet Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost” in an effort to expand into the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The United States alone could stop this. In March 1947, the president announced the Truman Doctrine. It “must be the policy of the United States,” Truman declared, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures.” This was followed in June by the Marshall Plan (1948–52), a pledge of economic assistance to Europe to stimulate recovery and trade.

By 1947, U.S. policy was predicated on the containment of the Soviet Union. In its efforts to establish a postwar order based upon American institutions and ideals, the Truman administration came to see the Soviet Union as a threat to U.S. interests. In the late 1940s, containment and anticommunism were globalized to include Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Competing security and economic demand in Europe shattered the Grand Alliance and brought about the Cold War.
[See also Russia, U.S. Military Involvement in, 1917–20; Russia, U.S. Military Involvement in, 1921–95.]

Bibliography

John Lewis Gaddis , The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947, 1972.
Daniel Yergin , Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State, 1977.
Thomas Paterson , On Every Front: The Making of the Cold War, 1979.
Fraser Harbutt , The Iron Curtain: Churchill, American and the Origins of the Cold War, 1986.
Michael Hogan , The Marshall Plan, 1987.
Melvyn Leffler , A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, 1992.
Lloyd Gardner , Spheres of Influence, 1993.
Carolyn Eisenberg , Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944–49, 1996.

David F. Schmitz

Cold War (1945–91): External Course The most famous image to emerge from the Yalta Conference in 1945 is a picture of Winston S. Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Josef Stalin seated outdoors, wearing their overcoats, Churchill with his trademark cigar and Stalin with his marshal's cap. The three look pleased, almost jovial. The war in Europe had turned decisively against Nazi Germany and the Allied leaders knew that victory was near.

When the Allied leaders next met, in July 1945, Roosevelt had died, replaced by his vice president, Harry S. Truman. A man of scant foreign policy experience, Truman arrived at the Potsdam Conference, near Berlin, with the knowledge that an atomic bomb had been successfully detonated in New Mexico. He was hopeful about a future U.S.‐Soviet detente, but the relationship was marked by suspicion and distrust on both sides. At some point before 1947, it deteriorated to the point where the two superpowers became locked in a global struggle that stopped short of direct armed conflict.

The Role of Nuclear Weapons.

By 1949, both countries possessed nuclear weapons. There has been much debate over the exact role of these weapons in the Cold War. Many historians argue that the only reason the Cold War never became “hot” was that the fear of nuclear annihilation effectively deterred each side from directly attacking the other. Others disagree, pointing to the fact that the Cold War had already reached a fever pitch before the Soviets had nuclear weapons, and that until the widespread development of hydrogen bombs in the 1950s, atomic weapons were only slightly more deadly than the most concentrated conventional attacks.

Without question, nuclear weapons were an integral aspect of the Cold War, and it is impossible to understand the history of the conflict without an appreciation for how large the threat of these weapons loomed, not just over Washington and Moscow but throughout the world. The rapid growth of nuclear arsenals altered the nature of international relations and made both nuclear superpowers far more wary of military confrontation with one another than they might otherwise have been.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, both sides made strenuous efforts to establish a modus vivendi. A period of detente continued until 1979, when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan contributed to renewed American military spending and to the election of President Ronald Reagan, who pursued what is sometimes known as the “second Cold War.” This lasted from 1979 to 1986, when Reagan and the reform‐minded Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to an agreement in Iceland. The final years, between 1986 and 1991, saw the rapid dissolution of the Soviet Union. Its collapse in December 1991 marked the end of a Cold War that had all but sputtered out in the previous five years.

Phase One: 1945–46.

After Potsdam, the United States and the Soviet Union approached each other warily. Throughout the fall of 1945, the two countries shifted attention from the European and Asian wars that had consumed them for the past five years. As they did so, they found that their visions for a post–Cold War world differed, most noticeably in Poland and occupied Germany. The United States envisioned a world dominated by democracy and free market economics, while the USSR saw that vision as a thinly veiled strategy to dominate the Soviet Union. By the end of 1946, the level of antagonism between the two nations had risen precipitously. Each viewed the other as the primary foreign policy threat, and both governments mobilized resources and planned strategy with one goal in mind: maximizing their own influence and minimizing that of the other.

Phase Two: 1947–62.

The second phase was the most intensive of the Cold War, and the most dangerous. During this period, the United States and the Soviet Union constructed formidable nuclear arsenals and enormous conventional forces, and at several points the two countries nearly came to blows.

In 1947, the U.S. government reorganized. The National Security Act created a unified Department of Defense, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and a National Security Council. These would be the primary bureaucracies for American policy in the Cold War. Responding to a Communist insurgency in Greece and to Stalin's pressure on Turkey to allow Soviet military access to the straits connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, Truman requested Congress to authorize a $400 million aid program. In order to mobilize isolationists in the Republican Congress, the Democratic president heightened the rhetorical stakes, painting the Cold War as a contest between “free institutions and representative government” and those who were forcibly ruled by “the will of the minority.” The struggle between the two sides in the Cold War was more than military, strategic, or economic; it was also profoundly ideological, with each side presenting the other as the embodiment of evil.

The Truman Doctrine was followed by an announcement of European aid by Secretary of State George C. Marshall, in June 1947. The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan led to billions in economic and military aid to Western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. With American assistance, the Greek military defeated the insurgents, and the Christian Democrats in Italy defeated the powerful Communist‐Socialist alliance in the elections of 1948.

At the same time, tension over Germany grew. Unable to agree on a partition of Germany, both Soviet and U.S. troops remained in Berlin, and in an attempt to force the Americans out, the Soviets blockaded Berlin in the summer of 1948. Rather than backing down, the United States orchestrated the Berlin airlift of supplies to Berlin, which lasted nearly a year until Stalin realized that his blockade had failed in its aims.

The year 1949 saw three developments that deepened the conflict. In April, a Western military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), was created, and it bound the United States to the defense of Western Europe. In September, the Soviet Union successfully tested a nuclear weapon; and in October, the Communist forces of Mao Zedong defeated the last remnant of the Nationalist Army and took power in China. In response to these events, the National Security Council in Washington drew up a plan in early 1950 known as NSC 68, which called for a massive buildup of American conventional and nuclear forces and an aggressive military response to Communist expansionism throughout the world.

When war erupted between North and South Korea in June 1950, Truman and his advisers barely hesitated before acting on NSC 68 and sending U.S. troops to bolster South Korea. By late fall, more than 1 million Chinese troops crossed the Yalu River in North Korea and entered the Korean War against American, South Korean, and other United Nations troops. The war turned into a stalemate that lasted until an armistice in 1953 that returned Korea essentially to its pre‐1950 dividing line.

The inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president in January 1953 and the death of Josef Stalin that March shifted the dynamic of the Cold War somewhat. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, initiated the “New Look” strategy, which called for a greater reliance on nuclear weapons to deter China and the Soviet Union. Dulles enunciated a doctrine of massive retaliation that called for a severe American response to any Soviet aggression and violence, and the “New Look” also drew the United States more closely into Third World politics. The Soviets, now led by Nikita Khrushchev, moved away from the depredations of Stalinism, but in foreign policy they remained dedicated to global competition with the United States.

The Cold War in Europe settled into an uneasy armed truce, with NATO troops stationed in West Germany and Warsaw Pact and Soviet forces stationed throughout Eastern Europe. In 1956, the Soviets invaded Hungary rather than allow the Hungarians to move out of the Soviet orbit. Berlin remained divided and contested, and in 1961, the East Germans erected a wall to prevent their citizens from fleeing to West Berlin.

The other arena for the Cold War during the 1950s was the Third World, where nationalist movements in countries such as Guatemala, Iran, and the Philippines were often allied with or led by Communist groups. The United States and the Soviet Union began to compete by proxy in the Third World, and the U.S. government utilized the CIA as well as various forms of covert operations in order to remove certain Third World governments and support others. Third World countries reacted by rejecting the impetus to choose sides in the Cold War. At Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, dozens of Third World governments gathered and resolved on staying out of the Cold War. This resolve culminated with the creation of the Non‐Aligned movement in 1961.

During the 1950s, the Soviets and the Americans created a new generation of nuclear weapons—hydrogen bombs—which magnified exponentially the potential damage of nuclear war. In the late 1950s, the Soviets launched the first of the reconnaissance satellites, Sputnik, while the United States developed U‐2 spy planes. Both innovations soon led to aerial reconnaissance, allowing Cold War adversaries to gain a clearer picture of the military strength of the other.

But in 1960, U.S. reconnaissance did not prevent the CIA and the American military from overestimating the strength of the Soviet military. During the presidential election of 1960, John F. Kennedy criticized the Eisenhower administration for allowing an alleged “missile gap” to develop with the Soviet Union, even though in reality the United States was ahead of the Soviets in missiles, in particular, intercontinental missile development. On his inauguration as president, Kennedy promised that the United States would not fall behind the Soviet Union in military strength.

Kennedy and Khrushchev held a summit in Vienna in June 1961, but it did not go well. Kennedy felt bullied, and Khrushchev felt that Kennedy was a weak man surrounded by hawkish advisers. At the same time, Khrushchev knew that the only missile gap was on the Soviet side, and he intended to redress that imbalance. In the summer of 1962, Khrushchev decided to station nuclear missiles in Cuba, where the anti‐American Fidel Castro had recently come to power and thwarted a CIA‐sponsored invasion by Cuban exiles. An American U‐2 overflight of Cuba detected these missiles, and that discovery set off what has since become known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

For thirteen days in October 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchev played a deadly game of “chicken,” each threatening to escalate the crisis to the brink of nuclear war. After a tense standoff, Khrushchev decided to withdraw the weapons from Cuba in return for a pledge from Kennedy that the United States would not invade the island. Though the crisis was a victory for Kennedy, it signaled to both the United States and the Soviet Union that the cost of direct confrontation in an era of nuclear weapons was greater than any potential gain. In 1963, the two countries agreed on a Limited Test Ban Treaty, which marked the first step toward normalization of relations.

Phase Three: 1963–79.

After 1963, the United States and the Soviet Union entered the period that came to be known as detente. Ideological passions gradually dissipated in favor of a more pragmatic approach to international politics. The United States turned its attention to the Vietnam War, and until 1973, it remained mired there. The civil war in Vietnam was part of the Cold War insofar as it was the logical outgrowth of American policies of containment and rollback, but with its military attention locked on Vietnam and beset by severe domestic unrest, the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson focused less on Moscow. President Richard M. Nixon, while disengaging from Vietnam, worked assiduously to establish a diplomatic rapport with the Soviets, aided in that task by his chief foreign policy official, Henry Kissinger.

The Soviets until the very end of this period focused on their bitter rivalry with Mao's China; after Khrushchev's ouster in 1964, the Soviet leadership turned inward to attend to the many domestic problems that plagued the Soviet Union. Soviet rulers such as Alexei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev warily embraced the notion of detente, although like the Americans they continued to expend considerable energies trying to win various Third World states to their side.

The year 1972 was the apogee of detente. Nixon and Kissinger orchestrated a stunning and secretive rapprochement with Communist China. For their part, the Chinese had sought improved relations with the Americans in order to gain advantage over the Soviets. In February, Nixon traveled to the Forbidden City in Beijing and met with Mao and Chou En‐Lai. Then, in June, Nixon and Kissinger met with Brezhnev and Soviet military officials in Moscow. The result was the first of the SALT Treaties (an acronym for Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), which pledged the United States and the USSR to limit the deployment of antiballistic missiles and set restrictions on offensive nuclear missiles as well. SALT I was followed in 1974 by SALT II, which went even further in specifying numbers of warheads each side could possess.

President Jimmy Carter came into office in 1977 with SALT II unratified, and he announced that his administration would make human rights a central concern. Carter had great success brokering a Middle East peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, the Camp David Accords (1979). However, though relations with the Soviets and the Chinese were civil, the spirit of detente began to dissipate. In December 1979, Brezhnev ordered Soviet troops to invade Afghanistan to support a tottering pro‐Moscow regime. The U.S. Embassy in Teheran, Iran, had been seized a month earlier by Islamic militant students allied with the Ayatollah Khomeini, and the American hostages were held until the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in January 1980. The dual effects of the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to a significant increase in U.S. military spending in Carter's last year, to the election of Reagan, and to the end of detente.

Phase Four: 1980–86.

Reagan arrived in office determined to restore American pride and power. He and his advisers believed that both the realpolitik of Kissinger and the weakness of Carter had sacrificed America's ideological and strategic advantage in the Cold War. Calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” Reagan embarked on a huge military buildup that ranged from new aircraft carrier groups to research for a space missile defense system known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (or “Star Wars”). The most visible manifestation of Reagan's renewed Cold War fervor was the support given to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, who were fighting a guerrilla war against the Communist Sandinista government.

The Soviets attempted to match Reagan's military spending. But the war in Afghanistan deteriorated, and Moscow discovered that the ailing industry and economy of the Soviet Union simply could not keep pace with the Americans. In 1985, a young, dynamic Mikhail Gorbachev became premier, and he instituted a series of domestic reforms known as glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring the economy).

At first, the Reagan administration saw these initiatives as a ruse. They were not. Meeting with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, Reagan made what was for him a leap of faith, agreeing to both the INF Treaty (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) and the START Treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction, the stepchild of SALT II). At Reykjavik, the Cold War began to thaw.

Phase Five: 1987–91.

Few could have predicted how quickly the ice would melt. Although glasnost was designed to save and strengthen the Soviet Union, it helped cause the Soviet system to collapse. The economy was in shambles, and the pressures of war in Afghanistan and deep structural reform were simply more than the system could bear. In 1989, taking their cue from Moscow, people throughout the Eastern bloc demanded change. In Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, Communist regimes fell and were replaced by interim governments dedicated to democracy and the free market. At the same time, in the Soviet Union itself, the Baltic states declared their independence, and Gorbachev significantly refused to authorize the use of the military to force either Eastern European or the Baltics back into the Soviet fold.

The end came in 1991. In August, Gorbachev survived a coup attempt by hard‐liners opposed to any further reforms, but he survived largely because the newly elected Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, rallied army units and crowds to oppose the coup in Moscow. Gorbachev returned, but only for a brief time, before the Ukraine, Belarus, and the Russian Federation declared their independence. In December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of the defunct Soviet Union.

Assessment.

The end of the Cold War came as a surprise to Moscow, Washington, and to the world. Almost no one had thought that the conflict would end so suddenly with one side collapsing internally. Both the Americans and the Western Europeans were unprepared for the rapid demise of Soviet military and economic power, and in the years after 1991, the major players in the Cold War tried to find a new strategic template that would organize their foreign policy. With the possible exception of China, that template proved elusive in the 1990s.

Like the Westphalian system in 1648 after the Thirty Year's War, and that of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, the Cold War was as much an international system following a major war as it was a struggle between two nuclear superpowers. It was a system that dominated all aspects of world politics between 1945 and 1991, and one that both exacerbated conflict in the Third World and prevented armed nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.
[See also Arms Control and Disarmament; China, U.S. Military Involvement in; Deterrence; Iran, U.S. Military Involvement in; Nicaragua, U.S. Military Involvement in; Russia, U.S. Military Involvement in, 1921–95.]

Bibliography

Walter Lafeber , America, Russia, and the Cold War, first publ. 1972; 7th ed. 1993.
John Lewis Gaddis , Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, 1982.
McGeorge Bundy , Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, 1988.
Gabriel Kolko , Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1990, 1988.
Walter Laqueur , Europe in Our Time: A History, 1945–1992, 1992.
Martin Walker , The Cold War: A History, 1993.
Vladislav Zubok and and Constantine Pleshakov , Inside the Kremlim's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev, 1996.
Aleksandr Fursenko and and Timothy Naftali , “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958–1964, 1997.

Zachary Karabell

Cold War (1945–91): Domestic Course It was no accident that nine days after Harry S. Truman asked Congress to enact a massive aid program to fight communism in Turkey and Greece—the Truman Doctrine—he issued Executive Order 9835 creating the Federal Employee Loyalty Program with a mandate to purge America's own government of any hint of political deviance. With these two actions in March 1947, the president put into place the twin pillars of foreign and domestic policy that would determine the structure of American political discourse for the ensuing four decades. Just as Truman made it virtually impossible for any American political leader to question fighting the “Red menace” wherever it threatened—this, after all, was a battle between freedom and slavery, atheistic communism and God‐fearing democracy—he also made deeply suspect any American politician who appeared overcritical of the nation's social and economic fabric, or who advocated reforms, such as national health insurance, that could be characterized as “socialistic.” No one, on either the foreign policy or the domestic front, could afford to be accused of being “soft on communism.” It was the ultimate political anathema, hence the boundary line of permissible political debate.

The implications of this new hegemony of anticommunism became crystal clear during 1947 and 1948, well before the vaunted rise of “McCarthyism” in the early 1950s. The chilling effect on cultural freedom became manifest when in 1947 the House Committee on Un‐American Activities (known popularly by the acronym HUAC) sought to blacklist any actors, playwrights, or producers who refused to “name names” and list Communists or “fellow travelers” they might have met in the course of their work or political activities. The HUAC's technique was insidious. Under the guise of inquiring about a Hollywood personality's own beliefs, the committee insisted that its witnesses list all other people who might have attended a meeting of a “subversive” group in the 1930s or 1940s. The only recourse for someone who wished to avoid betraying friends who could or could not have entertained a sympathy for socialism was to “take the Fifth” Amendment and refuse to answer—at which point, of course, “taking the Fifth” became synonymous with being a traitor, hence someone who could not be employed lest the contagion of disloyalty spread.

The exact same process occurred in electoral politics during the 1948 presidential election when President Truman denounced Henry Wallace—his main opponent on the left, and the former vice president—for his “Communist” sympathies. Wallace had urged a softer stance toward Russia and a bolder commitment to social welfare measures at home. It did not take other politicians long to learn from that exchange the degree to which one could be excluded from the political dialogue simply by being accused of sympathy toward communism. When Senator Joseph McCarthy turned that mode of debate into a political art form in the 1950s with his insistence that the State Department (and other agencies) was infested with Communists, he was simply carrying to its extreme a pattern already imbedded in the political process.

One major result of the politics of anticommunism, therefore, was to shrink the political spectrum in the United States. In Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia, there were political parties on the left that advocated social democratic policies such as universal health insurance, generous maternity leaves, and high unemployment benefits. Yet precisely because these political groups identified themselves with some socialist ideas, they had no counterparts in America, where expressing even toleration for such ideas was verboten. American politics thus became a dialogue between the Center and the Right, rather than the Left and the Right. Everything began with the premise of anticommunism and a faith in the virtues of capitalism as an engine of positive change. Incremental reforms in the status quo could be considered—for example, a hike in the minimum wage or in Social Security benefits—but anything more radical never made it to the negotiating table.

This shrunken political spectrum limited substantially the tactics and mobilization strategies of civil rights and labor groups. FBI agents questioned African Americans who boldly criticized the U.S. government, and interrogated whites who fraternized with such radicals. In the thirties and early forties, an alliance had begun to develop between civil rights groups and more “progressive” or radical unions such as the electrical and auto workers. Now, civil rights groups retreated to a more legalistic strategy of challenging segregation in the courts and seeking incremental reforms through modest congressional legislation—at least until the 1960s. Labor, in turn, moved away from pushing for a model of shared management/labor control toward “business unionism,” in which unions traded a share in decision making for higher wages and benefits. At the same time, organized labor purged its ranks of any Communist or Left‐leaning leadership in 1948 and 1949. Much of labor's success in organizing industrial unions—autos, rubber, the electrical industry—came from the energies of left‐of‐center activists. Now, these voices were stilled.

A similar insistence on conformity affected American family life and sexual norms during the postwar era. World War II had generated significant social changes. Millions of women, most of them married, had entered the labor force and found they enjoyed their work outside the home. Now, with the return of peace, government and civic leaders, magazine publishers and advertisers joined in a crusade to urge women back to a life of “normality” as housewives and mothers. The three‐ and four‐child suburban family became a new standard of “success” for women, with a life of segregated sexual spheres a domestic version, in the historian Elaine Tyler May's words, of the “containment” policy practiced by America toward world communism. Traditional roles for women became America's answer to the free love, antifamily, collectivist social policies of the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, Vice President Richard M. Nixon used such traditional roles as his trump card in the famous “kitchen debate” he held with Nikita Khrushchev in 1958 to celebrate America's superiority in competition with the Soviet Union.

Similarly, gay and lesbian Americans experienced a substantial increase of official and unofficial pressure to conform to heterosexual norms. During the war, increased travel, military experience, and access to more anonymous environments had made it possible for some homosexuals openly to express their sexual preference. The politics of anticommunism, on the other hand, now placed a premium on conformity to traditional masculine and feminine roles. Denunciations of “pinko queers” went hand‐in‐hand with efforts to purge the federal bureaucracy of anyone suspected of deviance, whether political or personal. Any affirmation of civil liberties or civil rights had to take place within a framework of pledging loyalty to all the ingredients of 100 percent Americanism, including total support of heterosexuality.

In the context of this narrowed political and cultural spectrum, an enormous amount of ferment continued to develop. The musical rebellion of rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues signaled a growing restlessness among the young; so too did the plays of Tennessee Williams, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the novels of Jack Kerouac, and the rising religious commitment of young people who felt called to something more than another tract house in a suburban community. But ironically, it was still the Cold War—and the fear of losing it—that prompted the most obvious social changes of the 1950s. The Interstate Highway system emerged primarily as a means of facilitating mobilization and response to a military threat; the National Defense Education Act, with its cutting‐edge role in providing government support for scholars in graduate school, responded to the terror Americans experienced after the Russians were the first to conquer space with Sputnik; and the civil rights gains of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 were at least in part a response to America's embarrassment in the face of Russia's Cold War propaganda accusing the United States of being hypocritical in its defense of freedom.

Yet, appropriately, it was the civil rights movement that provided the wedge for finally undermining the dominance of Cold War cultural politics. Based on the simple and patriotic claim to equal treatment for blacks and whites under the law, the civil rights movement insisted on dramatic change. Armed with the powerful religious appeal of the Judeo‐Christian tradition, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his colleagues mobilized millions to criticize the status quo. The ethical call to join in the quest for a better America galvanized all the other groups in America seeking a way of expressing their frustration with the doctrines of conformity and false pride in the status quo—women, Chicanos, gays, students, Vietnam antiwar activists. It may have been only a small segment of each group of critics who seized public attention; but the attention they secured focused the entire nation on a different perspective toward the values, behaviors, and political norms that had reigned unchallenged for the preceding two decades.

The Cold War remained central to American society and politics all the way through the 1980s. Arguably, it remains central today, even though the actual conflict has ended. But after the successful challenge of the civil rights movement in the early and mid‐1960s, the ubiquitous hold of Cold War culture and politics was broken, providing at least the opportunity for a different kind of individual and group expression of dissent.
[See also Culture, War, and the Military; Civil‐Military Relations: Civilian Control of the Military; McCarran Internal Security Act (1950); military‐industrial complex; Nuclear Protest Movements; Nuclear Weapons, Popular Images of; Propaganda and Public Relations, Government; Society and War; Surveillance, Domestic.]

Bibliography

David M. Oshinsky , A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, 1983;
Elaine Tyler May , Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War, 1988;
Richard M. Fried , Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective, 1990;
Thomas Byrne Edsall and and Mary D. Edsall , Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, 1991;
Kevin P. Phillips , Boiling Point: Republicans, Democrats, and the Decline of Middle‐Class Prosperity, 1993;
Charles M. Payne , I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, 1995;
David Halberstam , The Children, 1998;
Robert Dallek , Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973, 1998; and William H. Chafe , Unfinished Journey: America since 1945, 4th ed., 1999.

William H. Chafe

Cold War (1945–91): Changing Interpretations The Cold War generated two often indistinct battles: the first being the actual struggle between the West and Communism; the second being the continuing battles among historians, political scientists, and journalists—not to mention laymen—as to the origins and nature of, as well as the blame for, the Cold War. At the core of debates has been the contention that one side, either the Soviet Union or the United States (depending on one's interpretation), was primarily responsible for beginning the Cold War and the havoc it wreaked. The debates first focused on the origins of the Cold War, but the stakes were soon raised. Scholars would also blame the responsible party for the arms race and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as apportioning an overriding share of the blame for a series of local wars around the world.

Since scholars immediately after World War II did not have access to top‐secret documents from American and Soviet policymakers, almost all Western writers took as their cue Winston S. Churchill's famous declaration in 1946 that the Soviet Union had dropped an “iron curtain” over Eastern Europe, and that the West needed to do everything in its power to prevent further loss of liberty. To almost all American commentators at the time—with the noticeable exception of the journalist Walter Lippmann—the United States had no choice but to challenge this new enemy; after fighting the Nazis, the United States then had to take on the Soviet Union, now compared to the Nazis by the common use of the terms Red fascism and increasingly totalitarianism.

Scholars who argued from this perspective came to be known as the “orthodox” (or “traditional”) school and generally viewed U.S. actions as being virtuous and sincere. George F. Kennan, in his Long Telegram to the State Department and later writing as “Mr. X” in his article The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs (July 1947), remains the classic formulator of this argument. He noted that Soviet actions were inexorably expansionist, antidemocratic, and posed a very real threat to the United States and its allies. The United States therefore needed to adopt a policy of “containment” toward the Soviet Union. Kennan expanded upon this argument in his American Diplomacy (1951). To Kennan and other traditionalists, the United States was facing a new type of enemy and had to adapt accordingly. Hans Morgenthau, Jr., continued this form of interpretation in his classic In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy (1951). Herbert Feis's Roosevelt‐Churchill‐Stalin (1957) remains the best summary of this position, with its unapologetic championing of the West and its hysterical condemnation of Soviet premier Josef Stalin.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is another renowned historian who worked within this framework. His influential essay The Origins of the Cold War” (Foreign Affairs, October 1967) built on Kennan's and Morganthau's apportioning of blame, and further, argued that the Cold War emanated not only from Soviet imperialism but from Stalin's paranoid psychological profile. To Schlesinger, Stalin's adherence to Communist doctrine and his alleged mental illness combined to make the Soviet state both imperialistic and unstable. Unlike other members of this school of thought, Schlesinger acknowledged that the United States had global economic interests and was not always sensitive to the needs of peoples in the Third World. Yet he was at pains to note that the United States had almost single‐handedly ensured economic and political freedoms throughout the postwar world. In sum, the orthodox perspective viewed the United States as innocent of any political nefariousness and simply acting at the invitation of beleaguered nations. An updated version of this interpretation is Geir Lundestad's “Moralism, Presentism, Exceptionalism, Provincialism, and Other Extravagances in American Writings on the Early Cold War Years” in Diplomatic History (Fall 1989).

The orthodox interpretation remained the dominant mode of historical thought until the 1960s—and it continues in various forms to this day. Beginning in 1959, though, an alternative approach appeared when William Appleman Williams published The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. This work challenged a number of long‐held assumptions made by the orthodox interpretation and American Cold War policies in general. Williams's work became an instant classic (or a notorious act of disloyalty, depending upon one's politics). Williams argued here and later in revised editions of the book that Americans had been far from innocent actors upon the world stage and in fact had always been an empire‐building people, even as they fiercely denied it. So incendiary was this charge that Williams was accused of disloyalty and even treasonous behavior by those who saw U.S. actions in the Cold War as just. However, Williams's work deeply influenced others, and within ten years' time it generated an entire school of historical thought known as revisionism—one that sought to reexamine all aspects of American foreign relations, but was especially concerned with defining the nature of the Cold War.

One of the intriguing qualities of Williams's work was his use of lengthy quotes from American policymakers to support his interpretation. To Williams, these statements were the documented proof that these people were far more honest when they spoke among themselves about an “American Empire” than in the explanations of policy to the public. Leaders like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and their advisers were therefore seen as far‐sighted and lacking any naïveté in considering American foreign policy objectives. According to Williams and many of his followers, these policymakers shared an overriding desire to maintain capitalism at home; in order to ensure this goal, they advocated the “open door” policy abroad, which would therefore increase access to foreign markets for American business and agriculture. This in turn would create a healthy economic climate at home and the propagation of American power abroad.

Williams's overall argument gained currency throughout the 1960s as a new group of historians sought to explain the roots of American foreign policy, especially as it related to the origins of American involvement in the Vietnam War. Though a school of thought invariably contains differences between individual scholars, one of the most intriguing claims of the revisionist school is that the classic definition is mistaken in claiming that the Cold War began after World War II. Historians in such works as N. Gordon Levin's Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America's Response to War and Revolution (1968), Walter LaFeber's America, Russia, and the Cold War (1972), and David Foglesong's America's Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1920 (1995), point to the century‐old conflicts between the two powers, and especially to the conflict after the Bolshevik triumph in the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was the domestic policy of the United States—visceral anticommunism dating from the early twentieth century—that helped shape American Cold War policy as much as any foreign event.

Other revisionists have pointed out provocative Soviet actions such as installing puppet regimes in Eastern Europe. Yet Gar Alperovitz in his influential Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (1965) places much of the blame on the Cold War on President Truman's calculated use of the atomic bomb. Alperovitz's updated version, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (1995) extends his argument, while Michael Hogan's edited collection, Hiroshima in History and Memory (1996), finds problems with his analysis. According to Alperovitz, the bomb was unnecessary in defeating Japan, and was intended instead as a provocative signal to the Soviets that the United States would use such a weapon to fashion a postwar world accessible to American interests. A more moderate revisionist view of this position was put forth by Lloyd Gardner. His Architects of Illusion (1970) offered a slight modification of Williams's and Alperovitz's insistent critique of U.S. foreign policy, but still found America's overarching belief in economic expansion the key to understanding America's hostile view of the Soviet Union. An even harsher indictment of U.S. foreign policy appealed in Joyce and Gabriel Kolko's The Limits of Power: The World and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (1972), in which the United States's Cold War policy was seen as both reflexively anti‐Communist and counterrevolutionary. Any form of challenge to the American form of politics or economics was controlled by either covert or military means.

Not surprisingly, each new historical interpretation of the Cold War begat another—one that built on the earlier findings even as it contradicted them. For an early but still cogent breakdown of these historical camps, see Warren Kimball , The Cold War Warmed Over, American Historical Review (October 1974
). An example of this process at work is John Lewis Gaddis's The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (1972). It was immediately hailed as ushering in a new interpretative approach, postrevisionism, which claimed to synthesize a variety of interpretations. Gaddis's work did not simply blame the Americans or the Soviets for their postwar actions; it also mentioned the economic motives of the West in regard to Eastern Europe. But the tenor of Gaddis's argument was clear: the Soviets were definitively more responsible for the origins of the Cold War, through their aggressive and antidemocratic policies in Eastern Europe. Interestingly, Gaddis's position seems to have become more antagonistic over time; his essay, “The Tragedy of Cold War History” (in Diplomatic History [Winter 1993]), is a not too subtle attack on Williams and the revisionist school in general for refusing wholly to indict Soviet policy. Gaddis's “post‐revisionist synthesis” remains highly contentious, as indicated by the caustic critique of it in Bruce Cumings 's Revising Postrevisionism, Diplomatic History (Fall 1993)
.

The battles over the origins of the Cold War continue; but they are not as fierce, given the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Selective releases from Soviet archives have, however, continued to fuel debates. Many of these documents have been translated and can be found in the volumes of the Cold War International History Project. For a survey of differing interpretations, see Melvin Leffler and David Painter's edited collection, Origins of the Cold War: An International History (1994
). Further, Melvin Leffler 's A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War (1992),
is an important work, for it built on Gaddis's ideas but changed the focus of the debate from issues of imperialism and morality to a more searching critique of U.S. notions of national security. Howard Jones and Randall Woods believe that some kind of national security synthesis is now possible, given the United States's ability to fuse the insights of both the orthodox and revisionist interpretations. However, other historians such as Emily Rosenberg, Anders Stephanson, and Barton Bernstein continue to disagree. For an exchange on these views, see Origins of the Cold War in Europe and the Near East, and the successive commentaries in Diplomatic History (Spring 1993). Finally, Michael Hogan's edited collection, The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications (1996
), summarizes a variety of viewpoints now that the Cold War is history.

Jonathan Nashel