The Cold War had roots reaching back decades. Since the founding of the Soviet Union at the end of WWI, Soviets and Americans had been ideological adversaries with different political systems. The Soviet Union was committed to Communism and Socialism, while the US was committed to democracy and Capitalism. An alliance of convenience during World War II to bring down Hitler’s Germany was not enough to erase decades of mutual suspicions. The Cold War grew out of a failure to achieve a durable settlement among leaders from the “Big Three” Allies—the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union—as they met at Yalta and at Potsdam to shape the postwar order. Tensions between the three were already high because of wartime decisions such as the exclusion of the Soviets from the surrender of Italy and the delayed Allied invasion of France until 1944 that had left the Soviets to do most of the fighting in Europe.
Then there was the question of Poland. The Allied Powers agreed that countries should have self-determination, the ability to decide their own futures. But the Allies also agreed to spheres of influence for each of them. The tension between these two ideas came to a head in the discussion of Poland. Stalin wanted to install a Polish government loyal to him that would work as a buffer zone for future conflict. The US and Britain called for self-government. Stalin agreed to elections though he also thought he had a free hand in guiding Poland’s government. The question of Poland exemplifies the uncertainty over which political and economic system would dominate in the postwar world. And the failure to resolve these tensions set the stage for future conflict.
The result was the Cold War. “Cold” because it was never a “hot”, direct shooting war between the United States and the Soviet Union, but it nevertheless shaped the world. Tensions ran highest during the “first Cold War,” which lasted from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s, after which followed a period of relaxed tensions and increased communication and cooperation, known by the French term detente, until the “second Cold War” interceded from roughly 1979 until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, between Capitalism and Communism emerged almost immediately following the war. In a 1947 article for Foreign Affairs George Kennan warned that Americans should “continue to regard the Soviet Union as a rival, not a partner,” since Stalin harbored “no real faith in the possibility of a permanent happy coexistence of the Socialist and capitalist worlds.” He urged US leaders to pursue “a policy of firm containment.”
This statement laid the groundwork for the Policy of Containment that defined American foreign policy during the first Cold War. This policy was outlined in the Truman Doctrine in a speech by president Truman in 1947 announcing financial and military support to Greece and Turkey to combat Communism. The goal was for them to remain democratic nations and thus contain the communist threat.
As Europe struggled to rebuild, American officials worried that Europe’s impoverished masses were increasingly vulnerable to Soviet propaganda. Secretary of State General George Marshall suggested that the US pump enormous sums of capital into Western Europe. The result was the European Recovery Program (ERP), popularly known as the Marshall Plan. From 1948-1952 the US invested $13 billion toward reconstruction while simultaneously loosening trade barriers to rebuild Western Europe, open markets, and win European support for capitalist democracies.
A new chapter in the Cold War began on October 1, 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by Mao Tse-tung declared victory against “Kuomintang” Nationalists. The Kuomintang retreated to the island of Taiwan and the CCP took over the mainland. The “loss of China” contributed to a sense of panic among American foreign policymakers, whose attention began to shift from Europe to Asia.
“National Security Memorandum 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security” (NSC-68) changed the face of American policy by convincing officials that the only way to combat the Soviet threat was through massive military build-up. Issued in April 1950, the classified memo cited a growing list of threats and “the possibility of annihilation.” It called for defense resources to impose order in post-colonial areas such as Africa and Latin America and to develop more powerful weapons. The result was a quadrupling of defense spending by 1952 to $44 billion.
Test of the tactical nuclear weapon “Small Boy” at the Nevada Test Site, July 14, 1962. National Nuclear Security Administration, #760-5-NTS.
After the “loss of China” to Communism, many feared the continued spread of Communism throughout Asia. The US entered the Korean civil war as a direct result of this fear and the policy of containment. But when the US failed to unite the nation under a democratic government, the first test of the policy of Containment ended without a clear victory.
In 1954, the US began involvement in another Asian nation that would last decades and have far reaching consequences for American foreign policy. In 1954, Soviet-backed Vietnamese troops defeated the French who had attempted to regain colonial control over the country. US officials brokered a temporary settlement that split Vietnam into two, a Soviet/Chinese-backed state in the north and an American-backed state in the south. Over the next two decades, the United States would send arms, offer military advisors, prop up corrupt politicians, stop elections, and, eventually, send over 500,000 troops in an ultimately failed attempt to halt communist expansion southward.
Based on the logic of militarized containment established by NSC-68 and American Cold War strategy, interventions in Korea and Vietnam were seen as appropriate American responses to the ascent of communism in China. Unless the threat in Asia was halted, one country after another would “fall” to communism. Easily transposed onto any region of the world, the “Domino Theory” became a standard basis for the justification of US interventions abroad. National Security came to dominate American foreign policy and justified US involvement in world affairs more than ever before.
The US continued to back the South Vietnamese government throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s with military aid and advisors. In 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, granting President Johnson the authority to deploy the American military to defend South Vietnam. U.S. Marines landed in Vietnam in March, 1965, and the American ground war began.
By the late 1960s, the Vietnam War had become increasingly unpopular at home. Officials claimed that the US was winning the war. However, nothing did more to expose the reality of a losing war than the 1968 Tet Offensive. In January, communist forces engaged in a coordinated attack on more than one hundred American and South Vietnamese sites throughout South Vietnam, including the American embassy in Saigon. While U.S. forces repulsed the attack and inflicted heavy casualties on the Viet Cong, Tet demonstrated that the enemy could still strike at will anywhere in the country, despite years of war.
After Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, he assured Americans that he would withdraw from Vietnam, but another three years passed—and another 20,000 American troops died—before an agreement was reached. The Paris Peace Accords signed in January of 1973 marked the official end of U.S. force commitment to the Vietnam War. Peace was tenuous, and when war resumed North Vietnamese troops quickly overwhelmed Southern forces. By 1975, despite nearly a decade of direct American military engagement, Vietnam was united under a communist government.
Beyond just pulling the United States out of Vietnam, Nixon worked to thaw relations with America’s Cold War rivals. In 1969, he announced the Nixon Doctrine. On the one hand, Nixon asserted the supremacy of American democratic capitalism and conceded that the U.S. would continue supporting its allies financially. However, he denounced previous administrations’ willingness to commit American forces to third-world conflicts and warned other states to assume responsibility for their own defense. He was turning America toward a new strategy of “détente.” Détente sought to stabilize the international system by thawing relations with Cold War rivals and bilaterally freezing arms levels. Taking advantage of tensions between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union, Nixon pursued closer relations with both in order to de-escalate tensions and strengthen the United States’ position relative to each. Nixon became the first American president to visit communist China (1971) and the first since Franklin Roosevelt to visit the Soviet Union (1972). Diplomacy and cultural exchange programs resulted in the normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations and the signing of two U.S.-Soviet arms agreements: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks agreement (SALT I).
Nixon’s détente gave way to President Jimmy Carter’s effort to make human rights the center of American foreign policy. In May 1977 Carter proposed “a policy based on constant decency in its values and on optimism in our historical vision.” Carter’s human rights policy achieved real victories: the U.S. either reduced or eliminated aid to American-supported right-wing dictators guilty of extreme human rights abuses in places like South Korea, Argentina, and the Philippines. Carter negotiated the return to Panama of the Panama Canal. In September 1978, Carter negotiated a peace treaty between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. The Camp David Accords represented the first time an Arab state had recognized Israel, and the first time Israel promised Palestine self-government. The Accords had limits, both for Israel and the Palestinians, but they represented a major foreign policy coup for Carter.
However, American foreign policy continued to be consumed with protecting the United States and its allies from the perceived global spread of communism. The United States continued to provide support for dictatorial regimes vital to American interests, such as Shah Reza Pahlavi in Iran. When the Shah was deposed in November 1979, revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two Americans hostage, holding them for 444 days.
A month after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, a beleaguered Carter committed the United States to defending its “interests” in the Middle East against Soviet incursions, declaring that “an assault [would] be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” The “Carter Doctrine” not only signaled Carter’s ambivalent commitment to de-escalation and human rights, it testified to his increasingly desperate presidency.
When Ronald Reagan entered office in 1981, he believed it was the duty of the United States to speed the Soviet Union to its inevitable demise. His “Reagan Doctrine” declared that the United States would supply aid to anti-communist forces everywhere in the world. To give this doctrine force, Reagan oversaw an enormous expansion in the defense budget (from $171 billion in 1981 to $229 billion in 1985). He described this as a policy of “peace through strength.” Yet the irony is that Reagan, for all his militarism, helped bring the Cold War to an end through negotiation, a tactic he had once scorned.
The Reagan administration made Latin America a showcase for its newly assertive policies. When communists with ties to Cuba overthrew the government of the Caribbean nation of Grenada in October 1983, Reagan dispatched the Marines to the island. Dubbed “Operation Urgent Fury,” the Grenada invasion quickly overthrew the leftist government.
The Reagan administration took a more cautious approach in the Middle East, where its policy was determined by a mix of anti-communism and hostility to the Islamic government of Iran. When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the United States supplied Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with military intelligence and business credits.
Overt anti-communism defined Reagan’s first term. In 1985, however, the aged Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko’s unsurprising death handed leadership of the Soviet Union to Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev realized that the Soviet Union desperately needed to reform. He instituted a program of perestroika, which referred to the restructuring of the Soviet system, and of glasnost, which meant greater transparency in government. Gorbachev also reached out to Reagan in hopes of negotiating an end the arms race that was bankrupting the Soviet Union. Reagan and Gorbachev met in 1985 and in 1986. They did not reach any concrete agreements, but the two leaders developed a relationship unprecedented in the history of US-Soviet relations. This trust made possible the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, which committed both sides to a sharp reduction in their nuclear arsenal.
By the late 1980s the Soviet empire was crumbling. Some credit must go to Reagan, who successfully combined anti-communist rhetoric with a willingness to negotiate with Soviet leadership. But most significant causes of collapse lay within the Soviet empire itself. Soviet-allied governments in Eastern Europe tottered under pressure from dissident organizations like Poland’s Solidarity and East Germany’s Neues Forum. When Gorbachev made it clear that he would not send the Soviet military to prop up these regimes, they collapsed one by one in 1989—in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany. By 1991 the Soviet Union itself had vanished, dissolving into a “Commonwealth of Independent States.”
Wright, Ben and Joseph Locke, Eds.(2017). The American Yawp. Retrieved from http://www.americanyawp.com/index.html
With adjustments by Margaret Carmack.
Simpleshow Foundation. (April 30, 2015). The Main Facts About The Vietnam War. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgK2dfWHADw
In 1950, the National Security Council produced a 58-page, top-secret report proclaiming the threat of Soviet communism. In the new postwar world, the report argued, the United States could no longer retreat toward isolationism without encouraging the aggressive expansion of communism across the globe. The United States, the report said, had to mobilize to ensure the survival of “civilization itself.”
Within the past thirty-five years the world has experienced two global wars of tremendous violence. It has witnessed two revolutions–the Russian and the Chinese–of extreme scope and intensity. It has also seen the collapse of five empires–the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Italian, and Japanese–and the drastic decline of two major imperial systems, the British and the French. During the span of one generation, the international distribution of power has been fundamentally altered. For several centuries it had proved impossible for any one nation to gain such preponderant strength that a coalition of other nations could not in time face it with greater strength. The international scene was marked by recurring periods of violence and war, but a system of sovereign and independent states was maintained, over which no state was able to achieve hegemony.
Two complex sets of factors have now basically altered this historic distribution of power. First, the defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of the British and French Empires have interacted with the development of the United States and the Soviet Union in such a way that power increasingly gravitated to these two centers. Second, the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world. Conflict has, therefore, become endemic and is waged, on the part of the Soviet Union, by violent or non-violent methods in accordance with the dictates of expediency. With the development of increasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction, every individual faces the ever-present possibility of annihilation should the conflict enter the phase of total war.
The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself. They are issues which will not await our deliberations. With conscience and resolution this Government and the people it represents must now take new and fateful decisions.
… The idea of freedom … is peculiarly and intolerably subversive of the idea of slavery. But the converse is not true. The implacable purpose of the slave state to eliminate the challenge of freedom has placed the two great powers at opposite poles. It is this fact which gives the present polarization of power the quality of crisis.
… Thus unwillingly our free society finds itself mortally challenged by the Soviet system. No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours, so implacable in its purpose to destroy ours, so capable of turning to its own uses the most dangerous and divisive trends in our own society, no other so skillfully and powerfully evokes the elements of irrationality in human nature everywhere, and no other has the support of a great and growing center of military power.
In a shrinking world, which now faces the threat of atomic warfare, it is not an adequate objective merely to seek to check the Kremlin design, for the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable. This fact imposes on us, in our own interests, the responsibility of world leadership. It demands that we make the attempt, and accept the risks inherent in it, to bring about order and justice by means consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. …
Compulsion is the negation of freedom, except when it is used to enforce the rights common to all. The resort to force, internally or externally, is therefore a last resort for a free society. The act is permissible only when one individual or groups of individuals within it threaten the basic rights of other individuals or when another society seeks to impose its will upon it. The free society cherishes and protects as fundamental the rights of the minority against the will of a majority, because these rights are the inalienable rights of each and every individual.
… Practical and ideological considerations therefore both impel us to the conclusion that we have no choice but to demonstrate the superiority of the idea of freedom by its constructive application, and to attempt to change the world situation by means short of war in such a way as to frustrate the Kremlin design and hasten the decay of the Soviet system.
For us the role of military power is to serve the national purpose by deterring an attack upon us while we seek by other means to create an environment in which our free society can flourish, and by fighting, if necessary, to defend the integrity and vitality of our free society and to defeat any aggressor. The Kremlin uses Soviet military power to back up and serve the Kremlin design. It does not hesitate to use military force aggressively if that course is expedient in the achievement of its design. The differences between our fundamental purpose and the Kremlin design, therefore, are reflected in our respective attitudes toward and use of military force.
Our free society, confronted by a threat to its basic values, naturally will take such action, including the use of military force, as may be required to protect those values. The integrity of our system will not be jeopardized by any measures, covert or overt, violent or non-violent, which serve the purposes of frustrating the Kremlin design, nor does the necessity for conducting ourselves so as to affirm our values in actions as well as words forbid such measures, provided only they are appropriately calculated to that end and are not so excessive or misdirected as to make us enemies of the people instead of the evil men who have enslaved them.
National Security Council. (1950). National Security Memorandum 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security. Retrieved from: http://www.americanyawp.com/reader/25-the-cold-war/nsc-68-1950/
Stargazers Nation. (November 9, 2014). The Fall of the Berlin Wall 25th Anniversary “Tear Down This Wall.” [Video File] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnWaSAPZ_Ow
With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Cold War necessarily ended. Throughout the period America made attempts to contain the threat of an expansionist Soviet Union. However the decades of American intervention in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East under the auspices of containing the Communist threat had implications beyond just American/Soviet relations.The result was that instead of dismantling its military after World War II, as the United States had after every major conflict, the Cold War facilitated a new permanent defense establishment. The US now had a powerful military capable of asserting its strength around the globe. But this came at the expense of periods of discontent with and distrust in the government and massive increases in budget deficits.
The consequences, both positive and negative, of America’s involvement in struggles around the globe would continue to have implications for the United States and its role on the world stage into the twenty-first century. A massive standing military and an economy rooted in global trade meant that America would end the twentieth century continuing to intervene in global affairs when American diplomatic or economic interests were at play.
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