Relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union soured after World War II.
February 22, 1946: George Kennan sent the "Long Telegram" denouncing the Soviet Union, stating:
"World communism is like a malignant parasite."
"The steady advance of uneasy Russian nationalism . . . is more dangerous and insidious than ever before."
Kennan advocated for the "containment" of the Soviets.
March 5: Winston Churchill declared an "iron curtain" had descended across Europe.
The Cold War was a global, political, and ideological struggle between capitalist and communist countries.
It was a "cold" war because there was no direct shooting war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
The first Cold War lasted from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s.
Détente, a period of relaxed tensions, followed until the second Cold War (1979-1989).
The Cold War ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
II. Political, Economic, and Military Dimensions
The Cold War grew out of the failure to achieve a durable settlement among the Big Three Allies (U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union) at Yalta and Potsdam.
Stalin considered newly conquered territory part of a Soviet sphere of influence.
The Allies set terms for unconditional surrender for Germany and deliberated over reparations and occupation zones.
Franklin Roosevelt's death in April 1945 altered the political landscape.
Truman adopted a hard-line, anti-Soviet approach.
At the Potsdam Conference, the Allies debated the fate of Soviet-occupied Poland.
On July 24, Truman told Stalin about the atomic bomb, to which Stalin acknowledged and hoped for "good use."
August 14, 1941: Roosevelt and Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, establishing the creation of the United Nations.
The Soviet Union was among the fifty charter UN member-states and was given one of five seats on the Security Council.
The Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944 created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD).
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947 bolstered the Bretton Woods system.
The Soviets rejected the Bretton Woods system.
George Kennan, in a 1947 Foreign Affairs article, urged the U.S. to view the Soviet Union as a rival and pursue a policy of firm containment.
March 12, 1947: Truman announced 400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey via the Truman Doctrine to support free peoples resisting subjugation.
The Truman Doctrine became a cornerstone of American containment policy.
The Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program) invested 13 billion in Western Europe from 1948 to 1952 to rebuild and open markets.
The Soviets countered with the Molotov Plan, a symbolic aid pledge to Eastern Europe.
Stalin exercised tighter control over Soviet satellite countries.
In June 1948, the Soviet Union blockaded West Berlin, leading to a U.S.-organized airlift of supplies for eleven months.
On May 23, the western half of the country was formally renamed the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the eastern Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic (GDR) later that fall.
In the summer of 1949, American officials launched the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact.
The Soviet Union formalized its own collective defensive agreement in 1955, the Warsaw Pact.
Walter Lippmann popularized the term Cold War in his 1947 book, envisioning a prolonged stalemate.
Lippmann cautioned against open-ended commitments, favoring limited engagement in the "heart" of Europe.
October 1, 1949: The CCP, led by Mao Zedong, declared victory against Kuomintang nationalists.
August 29: The Soviet Union successfully tested an atomic bomb.
April 1950: "National Security Memorandum 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security," a national defense memo known as NSC-68, warned of increasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction.
NSC-68 urged a rapid build-up of political, economic, and military strength to roll back Soviet world domination.
On June 25, 1950, fighting erupted in Korea between communists in the north and American-backed anti-communists in the south.
After Japan surrendered in September 1945, a U.S.-Soviet joint occupation had paved the way for the division of Korea.
In November 1947, the UN passed a resolution that a united government in Korea should be created, but the Soviet Union refused to cooperate.
In the spring of 1950, Stalin endorsed Kim Il Sung’s plan to liberate the South by force.
The North Koreans launched a successful surprise attack and Seoul fell to the communists on June 28.
In July, UN forces mobilized under American general Douglas MacArthur.
On October 1, ROK/UN forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and on October 26 they reached the Yalu River.
On November 30, ROK/UN forces began a fevered retreat.
Truman dismissed MacArthur in April for insubordination.
An armistice agreement was signed on July 27, 1953.
General Dwight Eisenhower defeated Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election, and Stalin died in March 1953.
More than 30,000 Americans had died in the war.
The Vietnam War had deep roots in the Cold War world.
After French troops were defeated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, U.S. officials helped broker a temporary settlement that partitioned Vietnam in two.
Eventually, the United States would send over five hundred thousand troops, of whom nearly sixty thousand would be lost before the communists finally reunified the country.
III. The Arms Buildup, the Space Race, and Technological Advancement
The United States leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 with atomic bombs.
Soviet scientists successfully tested an atomic bomb on August 29, 1949.
The United States detonated the first thermonuclear weapon on November 1, 1952.
The irradiated debris radiated from the blast circled the earth, occasioning international alarm about the effects of nuclear testing on human health and the environment.
Each side developed increasingly advanced warheads and delivery systems.
The USSR successfully tested a hydrogen bomb in 1953.
Eisenhower announced a policy of “massive retaliation.”
Both sides would theoretically be deterred from starting a war, through the logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD).
J. Robert Oppenheimer likened the state of nuclear deterrence to “two scorpions in a bottle."
Eisenhower proclaimed at the UN that the United States would share the knowledge and means for other countries to use atomic power.
The “Atoms for Peace” speech brought about the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The United States and the Soviet Union each sought to acquire elements of the Nazi’s V-2 superweapon program.
A former top German rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, became the leader of the American space program.
The Soviet Union’s program was secretly managed by former prisoner Sergei Korolev.
The Soviets achieved success first.
They even used the same launch vehicle on October 4, 1957, to send Sputnik 1, the world’s first human-made satellite, into orbit.
In 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created as a successor to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA).
On September 13, 1959, the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 capsule became the first human-made object to touch the moon.
Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into orbit on April 12, 1961.
American astronaut Alan Shepard accomplished a suborbital flight in the Freedom 7 capsule on May 5.
The Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) began preparing citizens for the worst.
In 1958, following the humiliation of the Sputnik launches, Eisenhower authorized the creation of an Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) housed within the Department of Defense (later changed to DARPA).
ARPA was tasked with funding and otherwise overseeing the production of sensitive new technologies.
IV. The Cold War Red Scare, McCarthyism, and Liberal Anti-Communism
Joseph McCarthy fueled fears during the early 1950s that communism was rampant and growing.
McCarthyism was a symptom of a massive and widespread anticommunist hysteria.
President Truman issued his “loyalty order” in March 1947, establishing loyalty reviews for federal employees.
The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (SPSI) held hearings on communist influence in American society.
The Internal Security Act, or McCarran Act, passed by Congress in September 1950, mandated all “communist organizations” to register with the government.
Julius and Ethel Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage and executed in 1953.
Alger Hiss was convicted on two counts of perjury.
President Truman arranged a partisan congressional investigation designed to discredit McCarthy.
In June 1950, The Nation magazine editor Freda Kirchwey characterized “McCarthyism” as “the means by which a handful of men, disguised as hunters of subversion, cynically subvert the instruments of justice . . . in order to help their own political fortunes.”
The CPUSA was formed in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Lacking the legal grounds to abolish the CPUSA, officials instead sought to expose and contain CPUSA influence.
HUAC was established in 1938, then reorganized after the war and given the explicit task of investigating communism.
The Communist Control Act was passed in August 1954, effectively criminalizing party membership.
The domestic Cold War was bipartisan.
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI helped incite panic by assisting the creation of blatantly propagandistic films and television shows.
HUAC entered the fray with highly publicized hearings of Hollywood.
HUAC made repeated visits to Hollywood during the 1950s, and their interrogation of celebrities often began with the same intimidating refrain: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”
Anticommunist ideology valorized overt patriotism, religious conviction, and faith in capitalism.
Arthur Miller’s popular 1953 play The Crucible compared the red scare to the Salem Witch Trials.
The Pledge of Allegiance was altered to include the words one nation, under God in 1954.
In God We Trust was adopted as the official national motto in 1956.
Joseph McCarthy claimed that General George Marshall had fallen prey to “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”
On December 2, 1954, his colleagues voted 67–22 to “condemn” his actions.
In 1958, radical anticommunists founded the John Birch Society, attacking liberals and civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. as communists.
Movements for social justice, from civil rights to gay rights to feminism, were all suppressed under Cold War conformity.
V. Decolonization and the Global Reach of the ‘American Century’
In an influential 1941 Life magazine editorial titled “The American Century, ” publishing magnate Henry Luce outlined his “vision of America as the principal guarantor of freedom of the seas” and “the dynamic leader of world trade.”
The United States assumed responsibility for maintaining order and producing a kind of “pax-Americana.”
Interventions in Korea and Vietnam were seen as appropriate American responses to the ascent of communism in China.
The Domino Theory became a standard basis for the justification of U.S. interventions abroad.
Instead of the United States dismantling its military after World War II, as it had after every major conflict, the Cold War facilitated a new permanent defense establishment.
Federal investments in national defense affected the entire country.
During his farewell address to the nation in January 1961, President Eisenhower cautioned Americans against the “unwarranted influence” of a “permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” that could threaten “liberties” and “democratic processes.”
In Eisenhower’s formulation, the “military-industrial complex” referred specifically to domestic connections between arms manufacturers, members of Congress, and the Department of Defense.
Now American foreign policy had to secure foreign markets and protect favorable terms for American trade all across the globe.
As it took center stage in the realm of global affairs, the United States played a complicated and often contradictory role in this process of “decolonization.”
Foreign policy officials increasingly opposed all insurgencies or independence movements that could in any way be linked to international communism.
Stalin and his successors pushed an agenda that included not only the creation of Soviet client states in Eastern and Central Europe, but also a tendency to support leftwing liberation movements everywhere, particularly when they espoused anti-American sentiment.
The United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) engaged in numerous proxy wars in the Third World.
American planners felt that successful decolonization could demonstrate the superiority of democracy and capitalism against competing Soviet models.
American strategy became consumed with thwarting Russian power and the concomitant global spread of communism.
In 1948, Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act to “promote a better understanding of the United States in other countries.”
As Black Americans fought for justice at home, prominent American Black radicals, including Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, and the aging W. E. B. Du Bois, joined in solidarity with the global anticolonial movement, arguing that the United States had inherited the racist European imperial tradition.
VI. Conclusion
In June 1987, American president Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and demanded that Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev “Tear down this wall!”
Within months, the Berlin Wall was reduced to rubble by jubilant crowds anticipating the reunification of their city and their nation, which took place on October 3, 1990.
By July 1991 the Warsaw Pact had crumbled, and on December 25 of that year, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved.
The Cold War pushed American history upon a new path, one that it has yet to yield.