Introduction

• Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union soured soon after World War II

  • Aggressive anti-Soviet sentiment seized the American government and soon the American people due to the Soviet Union’s advance of Russian nationalism

• The Cold War was a global political and ideological struggle between capitalist and communist countries, particularly between the two surviving superpowers of the postwar world: the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)

• Cold” because it was never a “hot,” direct shooting war between the United States and the Soviet Union, the generations-long, multifaceted rivalry nevertheless bent the world to its whims

Political, Economic, and Military Dimensions

• 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 USSR) as they met to shape the postwar order

  • Deliberation began over reparations, tribunals, and the nature of an occupation regime that would initially be divided into American, British, French, and Soviet zones

  • The political landscape was altered drastically by Franklin Roosevelt’s sudden death in April 1945, just days before the inaugural meeting of the UN

    • Although Roosevelt was skeptical of Stalin, he always held out hope that the Soviets could be brought into the “Free World.”

    • Truman had no such illusions and committed the United States to an anti-Soviet approach

• The World War II alliance of convenience was not enough to erase decades of mutual suspicions

  • The Bolshevik Revolution had overthrown the Russian tsarists during World War I and Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin urged an immediate worldwide peace that would pave the way for world socialism

• An adaptation of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the Atlantic Charter established the creation of the United Nations

  • The Soviet Union was among the fifty charter UN member-states and was given one of five seats (alongside the United States, Britain, France, and China) on the select Security Council

  • The Soviets rejected most of the plans created in the early years of the UN

• Many officials on both sides knew that the Soviet-American relationship would dissolve into renewed hostility at the end of the war, and events proved them right

  • In 1946 alone, the Soviet Union refused to cede parts of occupied Iran, a Soviet defector betrayed a Soviet spy who had worked on the Manhattan Project, and the United States refused Soviet calls to dismantle its nuclear arsenal

• Truman, on March 12, 1947, announced $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey to fight against Communism and its “threats to democracy”

  • It was believed that the responsibility to stop the spread of Communism fell to the United States

  • The so-called Truman Doctrine became a cornerstone of the American policy of containment designed to stop Soviet expansion anywhere in the world

• The European Recovery Program (ERP), popularly known as the Marshall Plan, pumped enormous sums of capital into Western Europe

  • To avoid the postwar chaos that had followed in the wake World War I, the Marshall Plan was designed to rebuild Western Europe, open markets, and win European support for capitalist democracies

  • The Soviets countered with their rival Molotov Plan, a symbolic pledge of aid to Eastern Europe

The situation in Germany deteriorated

• Berlin had been divided into communist and capitalist zones

• Germany was broken in half

  • 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

The Korean War

• In the spring of 1950, Stalin hesitantly endorsed North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s plan to liberate the South by force, a plan heavily influenced by Mao’s recent victory in China

  • The North Koreans launched a successful surprise attack and Seoul, the capital of South Korea, fell to the communists on June 28

• That July, UN forces mobilized under American general Douglas MacArthur

  • General MacArthur, growing impatient and wanting to eliminate the communist threats, requested authorization to use nuclear weapons against North Korea and China but was denied by Truman

• On June 23, 1951, the Soviet ambassador to the UN suggested a cease-fire, which the U.S. immediately accepted

• Coming so soon after World War II and ending without clear victory, Korea became for many Americans a “forgotten war”

The Vietnam War

• The Vietnam War had deep roots in the Cold War world

  • Vietnam had been colonized by France and seized by Japan during World War II

  • The nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh had been backed by the United States during his anti-Japanese insurgency and, following Japan’s surrender in 1945, Viet Minh nationalists, quoting the American Declaration of Independence, created the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV)

  • Ho Chi Minh turned to the Soviet Union for assistance in waging war against the French colonizers in a protracted war

• 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, with a Soviet/Chinese-backed state in the north and an American-backed state in the south

The Arms Buildup, the Space Race, and Technological Advancement

• The world was never the same after the United States leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 with atomic bombs

  • The nature of warfare changed entirely

  • The Soviets accelerated their nuclear research, expedited in no small part by “atom spies” such as Klaus Fuchs, who had stolen nuclear secrets from the Americans’ secret Manhattan Project

• Soviet scientists successfully tested an atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, years before American officials had estimated they would

  • This unexpectedly quick Russian success not only caught the United States off guard but alarmed the Western world and propelled a nuclear arms race between the United States and the USSR

• The United States detonated the first thermonuclear weapon, or hydrogen bomb on November 1, 1952

  • The USSR successfully tested a hydrogen bomb in 1953, and soon thereafter Eisenhower announced a policy of “massive retaliation”

  • The United States would henceforth respond to threats or acts of aggression with perhaps its entire nuclear might

  • Both sides, then, would theoretically be deterred from starting a war, through the logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD)

• As Germany fell at the close of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union each sought to acquire elements of the Nazi’s V-2 superweapon program

  • The V-2 was a devastating rocket that had terrorized England

  • After the end of the war, American and Soviet rocket engineering teams worked to adapt German technology in order to create an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), with the Soviets achieving 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 response, the U.S. government rushed to perfect its own ICBM technology and launch its own satellites and astronauts into space

  • In 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created as a successor to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)

  • Thus, the Space Race began

The Cold War Red Scare, McCarthyism, and Liberal Anti-Communism

• McCarthyism (named after Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy, a known anti-Communist) was a symptom of a massive and widespread anticommunist hysteria that engulfed Cold War America

  • Only two years after World War II, President Truman, facing growing anti-communist excitement and with a tough election on the horizon, gave in to pressure in March 1947 and issued his “loyalty order,” Executive Order 9835, establishing loyalty reviews for federal employees

  • The Internal Security Act, or McCarran Act, passed by Congress in September 1950, mandated all “communist organizations” to register with the government, gave the government greater powers to investigate sedition, and made it possible to prevent suspected individuals from gaining or keeping their citizenship

• Anticommunist policies reflected national fears of a surging global communism

• There had, of course, been a communist presence in the United States

  • The CPUSA existed, but never attracted many Americans

  • Lacking the legal grounds to abolish the CPUSA, officials instead sought to expose and contain CPUSA influence

  • By the time the Communist Control Act was passed in August 1954, effectively criminalizing party membership, the CPUSA had long ceased to have meaningful influence

• The domestic Cold War was bipartisan, fueled by a consensus drawn from a left-liberal and conservative anticommunist alliance

  • Anticommunist ideology valorized overt patriotism, religious conviction, and faith in capitalism

  • Those who shunned such “American values” were open to attack

    • Rallying against communism, American society urged conformity and “deviant” behavior became dangerous

• Cold warriors in the United States routinely referred to a fundamental incompatibility between “godless communism” and God-fearing Americanism

  • In an atmosphere in which ideas of national belonging and citizenship were so closely linked to religious commitment, Americans during the early Cold War years attended church, professed a belief in a supreme being, and stressed the importance of religion in their lives at higher rates than in any time in American history

  • Many Americans began to believe that just believing in almost any religion was better than being an atheist

Decolonization and the Global Reach of the “American Century”

• Emerging from the war as the world’s preeminent military and economic force, the United States was perhaps destined to compete with the Soviet Union for influence in the Third World, where a power vacuum had been created by the demise of European imperialism

  • 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

  • Unless Soviet power in Asia was halted, Chinese influence would ripple across the continent, and one country after another would fall to communism

• 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

• Ideological conflicts and independence movements erupted across the postwar world

• American strategy became consumed with thwarting Russian power and the concomitant global spread of communism

  • Foreign policy officials increasingly opposed all insurgencies or independence movements that could in any way be linked to international communism

• The Soviet Union, too, was attempting to sway the world

  • 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 an anti-American sentiment

• In an attempt to gain influence, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) engaged in numerous proxy wars in the Third World

• The architects of American power needed to sway the citizens of decolonizing nations toward the United States

  • In 1948, Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act to “promote a better understanding of the United States in other countries”

    • The legislation established cultural exchanges with various nations, including even the USSR, in order to showcase American values through American artists and entertainers

    • The Soviets did the same, through what they called an international peace offensive, which by most accounts was more successful than the American campaign

Conclusion

• Amid civil unrest in November 1989, East German authorities announced that their citizens were free to travel to and from West Berlin

• By July 1991 the Warsaw Pact had crumbled, and on December 25 of that year, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved