Chapter 6: The Cold War: Global Developments

The Emergence of the Cold War

On April 5, 1945, soldiers from the US Army’s 69th Infantry Division met their Soviet counterparts from the Red Army’s 58th Guards Division on the banks of the Elbe River in eastern Germany. Yet rather than warmly embrace one another and celebrate their impending victory over the greatest foe of the century, they were deeply suspicious of one another. Worse, within hardly a year’s time, by many accounts, the Cold War had begun.

Though most point to 1946-47 as the beginning of the Cold War, the US and USSR had had very strained ties since the Russian Revolution of 1917. Washington, for example, had long refused to recognize the Bolsheviks as the rightful rulers of post-czarist Russia, and did not diplomatically recognize the USSR until Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power in 1933. Indeed, decades before the era of McCarthyism (late 1940s-early 1950s), which later came to be known as the Second Red Scare, and during which time members of US Congress led a witchhunt against thousands of Americans suspected of communist sympathies, the US had already lived through a First Red Scare (1917-1920).

Roosevelt himself had promised Stalin at Tehran in November 1943 that the US would evacuate its troops from Europe within two years of defeating Hitler. Whether or not his successors had any intention of keeping his pledge was immaterial to the Soviet position: having barely escaped a near-death situation, there was no question of Soviet troops leaving Europe anytime soon (Kimball, 1991:97-99). As such, when the victors met 15 months after Tehran at the Soviet Black Sea resort town of Yalta in February 1945 to begin negotiating the post-war status of Europe, more tangible disagreements about the future of Germany and Eastern Europe would emerge.

As often happens in human history, a crucial unforeseen event, unrelated to the war, happened between Yalta and Potsdam: the death of US President Roosevelt. While he was sympathetic to 151 History of International Relations Stalin’s demands for Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe, his successor Harry Truman was not. On May 11, barely three days after the war in Europe had ended, Truman suspended Lend-Lease aid to the USSR. In July, he managed to postpone the Potsdam Conference until after the US had detonated its first atomic bomb. Stalin, however, was undeterred by such threats. Rather than cow to American demands that he allowed democratic elections in Poland and elsewhere, he determined to develop a Soviet atomic bomb all the quicker (they would by 1949).

The stakes only grew higher after the US detonated a nuclear bomb over Hiroshima. Stalin, whose intelligence agencies had long penetrated the US nuclear facilities at Los Alamos, was not surprised when Truman announced at Potsdam that the US had conducted a successful nuclear test in the desert of New Mexico in mid-July. That said, he was far less pleased when they actually dropped one on the Japanese on August 6 and 9.

The Strategy of Containment and the Formation of the Western Alliance

It was in February 1946, however, that the mounting ideological and geopolitical divide between the US and USSR was given crystal form. Sent off hastily by a junior Foreign Service Officer at the US Embassy in Moscow, George F Kennan’s “Long Telegram” would become the single most influential document in the Cold War.

Iron Curtain

After an electoral fiasco in Hungary in November 1945 in which the anti-communist smallholding peasant party received well over 50% of the vote, compared to the communists’ 25%, Stalin decided that no such chances could be taken elsewhere, especially in Germany. Ironically, however, it was the US and Britain that made the first tactical moves to unite their zones (and thus move closer to partitioning Germany). With Britain’s post-war finances severely strained, it could no longer shoulder the burden of feeding and administering its zone, already the most densely populated of Germany. Thus, it merged its zone with that of the US in January 1947 to create the Bizonia. Though the Russians protested this maneuver, Washington and London claimed it not only did not violate Potsdam, but actively supported it.

Truman Doctrine

Barely a month after the creation of the Bizonia in Germany, Britain made the shocking announcement that it could no longer offer economic assistance to Turkey or Greece, two countries whose fates were central to that of Europe and the Middle East. Given that Stalin had recently instructed Yugoslav communists to assist Greek communists in the ongoing Greek Civil War (1946-47)— contravening his pledge to Churchill to remain neutral in that country—the timing of Britain’s retreat was critical. President Truman wasted little time in presenting what would become known as the Truman Doctrine, announcing on March 12, 1947that it was henceforth “the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” i.e. communism—starting with Turkey and Greece (Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1963: 178–79).

Marshall Plan

Newly appointed as Truman’s secretary of state, the brinkmanship was too much for former general George C. Marshall. Greatly perturbed by what he saw in Moscow— a seemingly indifferent Stalin in whose hands the fate of Europe rested— Marshall turned once again to George Kennan. If the young diplomat could diagnose the disease, went his reasoning, then surely he must prescribe a remedy. In response, Kennan gave Marshall the outline of what would soon become the European Recovery Program. Seeking nothing less than the reconstruction of a war-torn Europe, when Marshall announced his program during the Harvard Commencement speech of June 1947, it immediately became known as the Marshall Plan.

To be one of the largest assistance programs in modern history, the Marshall Plan did not distinguish between those parts of Europe under Soviet control and those that were not. The Marshall Plan would serve a two-fold purpose: first, provide a material basis that would disabuse Europeans of the promise of communism; second, force the Soviet Union to either accept American aid, thus tacitly admitting the strengths of the capitalist system—or throw up its “own wall” and thus justifying the creation and existence of a Western bloc (Gaddis, 1997).

The London Conference of Foreign Ministers in November 1947

A series of escalating crisis in 1947-48 forged the Western bloc into much more than a loose economic alliance determined to rebuild Europe. After the failed meeting in Moscow in April 1946, the four occupying powers met once again in London to discuss the fate of Germany. The Soviets favored its unification since under any partition, the rich industrial complex of the Ruhr would fall under a US-led Western European bloc, thus depriving the USSR of an important source of war reparations, which it rightly felt was its due and had been agreed upon at Potsdam.

The Brussels Pact

On March 17, 1948, in response to the Czech coup, Belgium, Britain, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands signed a mutual defense pact called the Treaty of Brussels, also known asthe Brussels Pact. Though it did not mention the USSR by name, and did not include the US, it would form the backbone of what would become the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) the following year.

Berlin Blockade

Though the Western powers were initially unsure of what to do—gravitating between doing nothing (France) and bursting the lines with anarmed brigade (US), which risked a larger military conflagration—British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin settled upon the far more sensible strategy of relieving the West Berliners via airlift. On May 12, 1949, in return for renewed talks to be held on the sidelines of the UN in New York, Stalin finally lifted the blockade.

The Creation of NATO

The Berlin blockade, in addition to the Prague coup, also did wonders for sealing the budding Western military alliance. Incidentally, talks for said alliance were inextricably tied up with those for the establishment of a West German state. And despite pushback from the French, who were understandably nervous about the creation of a strong West German state, Washington pushed on, gaining congressional backing at home and pledges of faith from European allies for the creation of both the FDR and a firmer military alliance. On April 4, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was signed in Washington by Canada, the US, the Brussels Pact powers –namely Belgium, Britain, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands-, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Italy, and Portugal. Before the end of the Cold War, Greece (1952), Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955) and Spain (1982) also entered the alliance. However, when the NATO Council first met in September, the US put these worries to rest by taking a seat on all five regional defense and military committees into which the alliance had been divided and by approving a large military assistance program to build up Western Europe’s defense forces.

The Formation of the Eastern Bloc: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

Still committed, at least in theory, to communist-led coalitions of left-liberals and socialists, it was only from 1947 that Moscow set about creating a firmly consolidated Eastern bloc in response to geopolitical developments in the west.

Stalin reacted to the Marshall Plan of June 1947 as Kennan had predicted he would: by further tightening his grip over Central and Eastern Europe. In September 1947, he launched the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), a latter-day Comintern, or Communist International, the organ that had dictated international communist party orthodoxy in the interwar years. Now billing itself as the leader of the ‘anti-imperialist and democrat’ camp within Europe against a US-led ‘imperialist’ bloc, the Soviet Union abandoned its previous policy of working with liberal and socialist parties within its sphere of influence. From mid1947 onward, an unmistakable eastern bloc was in the making.

Despite liberating Prague from Nazi occupation in May 1945—perhaps the last battle of the six-year European war—the Soviets had pulled their troops out of Czechoslovakia by December 1945. All this changed when the Marshall Plan (1947) entered the picture. After the Czech parliament voted unanimously in July 1947 to attend the Paris Conference to discuss Marshall aid, the Soviets began to push back. With Yugoslavia expelled from the Cominform, every other member state now abided by Moscow’s increasingly stringent dictates. This included Hungary, who was though largely influenced by a Soviet-dominated Allied Control Council since 1945, had had free elections in which communists and socialists only took 45% of the vote as late as August 1947. As a final institutional measure to solidify the emerging eastern bloc and counter the Marshall Plan, in January 1949 Moscow launched the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, better known as COMECON. With the aim of facilitating the economic development of the eastern bloc, the group’s original members included the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Poland. Albania joined in 1949, but would leave in 1961 after the Soviet-Albanian split.

The Cold War in the 1950s: Institutionalization and Confrontation

It should not be forgotten that the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War (1927-1949) was also one of the most decisive moments of the 20th century. As the end of a huge and immensely important saga that had first seen the country’s two most powerful political movements, the Kuomintang, i.e. Nationalists under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, and the communists, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, briefly aligned (1924-27) in their common effort to root out warlordism before turning viciously against one another (1927-onward), Mao’s victory in 1949 would shape a large part of 20th century global history.

First things first, this was because the end of World War II had also brought an end to Japanese rule over the Korean peninsula. This did not, however, bring immediate independence to the peninsula or country. As a result of the mounting Cold War rivalry between the US and Soviet Union, Korea was partitioned in two, with the North falling under the remit of the Soviet Union everywhere north of the 38th parallel, while the South Korean state was allied to the US. When the forces of communist China joined the invading North in October 1950, the Korean War became a Sino-UN war that lasted until 1953. After no territorial gains, the armistice ending the war demarcated the border between North and South Korea as once again at the 38th parallel.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet Politburo introduced a collective leadership system so that absolute power was no longer exercised by one person. The collective leadership consisted of Malenkov, Molotov, Lavrently Beria, Nikolai Bulganin, and Khrushchev. The policy of destalinization was formulated during this period, especially once Prime Minister Malenkov introduced the policy of peaceful coexistence with the West in August 1953. On May 14, 1955, immediately after the accession of West Germany to NATO, the Soviet Union created the Warsaw Pact.

The former, the Australian-New ZealandUnited States Pact (ANZUS), signed in 1951, committed Australia, New Zealand, and the United States to a nonbinding collective defense treaty in which each country considered an attack on one of them to be an attack on all. The latter, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), signed in Manila in September 1954 but to be headquartered in Bangkok, committed the United States, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan to a similarly non-binding anticommunist collective defense treaty.

The creation of the Baghdad Pact was another significant development in the institutionalization of the Cold War insofar as it extended the goal of militarily containing the Soviet Union far into the Middle East. Established in 1955 after an agreement between Turkey and Iraq, it also included Britain, Pakistan, and Iran. As a rule, the general purpose of this pact was to prevent the spread of communism into the Middle East and keep the Soviets away from vital Middle East oil.

Egypt had been under the leadership of Colonel Abdul Gamel Nasser since 1952, a hugely popular leader in the Arab world. Nasser pursued two policies to enable Egypt to gain mastery of the region. The first was to buy arms from the Eastern Bloc to strengthen itself against Israel. The second was to build the Aswan dam to economically develop Egypt. Both of these helped trigger the 1956 Suez Crisis and the Second Arab-Israeli War. When Nasser’s bid for credit from the West for the construction of the Aswan dam was rescinded by the US and Britain as punishment for having accepted Soviet arms and aid, Nasser responded by nationalizing the Suez Canal in July 1956.

These developments motivated US President Eisenhower, who launched an economic and military aid program in January 1957 to protect Middle Eastern countries from military threats and internal (communist-inspired) turmoil. Known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, this policy was a direct response to the perceived increase in Soviet influence in the region and, as such, promised aid to any Middle Eastern country “threatened by armed aggression,” i.e. communism, whether from within or without. Many Arabs, however, perceived the doctrine as an arrangement aimed at protecting Western interests in the region.

The Cold War in the 1960s and 1970s: From Confrontatıon to Détente

US covert intelligence operations behind Soviet lines were brutally brought to the fore when the USSR shot down an American U-2 spy plane in1960 barely two weeks before a proposed summit in Paris between the US and Soviet leadership. The meeting was vitally important for both camps since they along with France and Britain were going to discuss a number of critical Cold War issues, including the problem of Berlin.

By the time Soviet leader Khrushchev issued his notorious ultimatum in November 1958 for Western forces to withdraw from Berlin, 4.5 million East Germans had escaped through West Berlin en route to West Germany, some 20% of the country’s population. In order to keep East Germany in tact, the Soviets had to shut the valve that was leaking its best and brightest via West Berlin. Though Khrushchev did not threaten the use of force if the Western powers did not comply with his ultimatum, it was widely understood that the USSR meant business.

An Executive Committee was immediately assembled by President Kennedy to evaluate his policy options towards Cuba. Kennedy first put Cuba under a naval blockade, despite Cuba’s protests that the missiles deployed were purely for defensive purposes. While the Soviet Union offered to broker a diplomatic solution, Khrushchev was looking for new ways to use the Cuban Missile Crisis as its bargaining chip to resolve the Berlin issue and eliminate US ballistic missiles pointed against the USSR in Turkey.

Both France and West Germany entered into independent diplomacy with the Soviet Union, marking the beginning of a series of independently declared détentes with the USSR from 1964 onward.

The fate of Indochina was decided during the Geneva Conference of 1954. Accordingly, Indochina was divided into three states: Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. French rule was over, and Vietnam was partitioned at the 17th parallel. The US propped up South Vietnam, which was ruled by Ngo Dinh Diem (1955-1963), a Frenchspeaking Catholic and anti-communist former civil servant. As the conflict between the North, which was ruled by Ho Chi Minh’s communists, and the South began to intensify, the US gradually increased its economic and military support for the South.

One of the most significant outcomes of détente was the 1975 signing of the Helsinki Accords. The final act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), a series of negotiations first proposed by the Warsaw Pact in 1966 to settle the larger post-war questions of Europe, Helsinki was a landmark agreement between the two blocs. For starters, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act was a very wide-ranging set of accords, containing three “baskets” of separate agreements:

• the first concerning security (i.e. which bloc was granted supremacy over which country in Europe);
• the second economic, technological, and environmental cooperation;
• the third humanitarian and cultural cooperation.

The “Second” Cold War and its End

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 convinced the US policy making elite that a reversal of détente was necessary. This period is known as the Second Cold War (1979-1985) in the literatüre. Reagan’s aggressive new foreign policy was not taken lightly by the Soviet Union. Still, they followed the path of détente in the hopes of coming to terms with Reagan. Brezhnev also ramped up his talks with the European powers to show the USSR’s desire for peace with Western Europe. When Yuri Andropov became the premier of the Soviet Union in 1982, he found himself in a new arms race with the US. Determined to strike back against communism the world over, in 1983 the US overthrew the miniscule communist government on the Caribbean island of Grenada, before moving to back other anti-communist rebel groups in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and Angola.

Gorbachev’s foreign policy and domestic reforms had also a remarkable impact on the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. With the renunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, Gorbachev affirmed that the Warsaw Pact’s armies would no longer interfere in their internal affairs (Lightbody, 1999: 115). Thus, the Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe rapidly ended, and many states began the arduous journey of going it alone. Eastern European states’ reasons for the transition to ‘freemarket economy’ and ‘democracy’ at this time were threefold: economic hardship, the renunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, and the erosion of mass support for the communist idea.

The most dramatic event, however, was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which symbolized the division of the world between the two superpowers. A year later Germany was reunited, a huge piece of the unfinished puzzle of World War II was finally put in place.