The Cold War
 1949
was a key year in the globalization of
the Cold War
 In Europe, NATO was established
 In the USSR, the Soviets tested their first
atomic bomb, eliminating America’s
advantage in military technology – and
starting a four-decade arms race
 In China, the civil war between Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalists and Mao Tse-tung’s
Communists, which had been raging since
the end of the World War II, came to an end
 The Nationalists fled to the island of Taiwan
 On the mainland, Mao and the Communists
established the People’s Republic of China
(PRC)
 They
also allied with the USSR
 In a matter of months, the Cold
War had expanded unimaginably:
the two most populous nations on
earth, and the two largest nations
on the Eurasian landmass, were
now joined together under the
banner of communism
 And one of them was armed with
atomic weapons
 Increasingly,
the new arena of the Cold
War would become Asia, Africa, and Latin
America
 The first sign of this was the Korean War
(1950-1953)
 After World War II, the Korean peninsula
had been divided into two zones: a
northern communist sector and a southern
noncommunist sector
 In 1950, encouraged by Mao’s victory in
China (and promised assistance by Stalin,
and especially, Mao), the communist
dictator of North Korea, Kim Il Sung,
invaded South Korea
 America’s
policy of containment would not
allow it to stand by while South Korea was
swallowed by the communist north
 Under the auspices of the United Nations,
the United States fought the North Koreans
(as well as huge numbers of Chinese
“volunteers” who unofficially joined the
war)
 By 1953, the invasion had been turned
back, and a cease-fire provided for the
continued split of Korea at the original line
of division
 This was the first major conflict of the
postwar period, and it killed more than
1.25 million Koreans and Chinese
 Many of the Koreans were civilians
 During
the 1950s and 1960s, new realities
dominated the Cold War
 The first was a change in Soviet leadership
 Stalin died in 1953
 He was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev (19531964), then Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982)
 Although Khrushchev was not as brutal a
dictator as Stalin had been, and could be
friendly to the West (unlike Stalin, he traveled
abroad frequently and visited the United
States), he was extremely unpredictable in
foreign affairs
 Brezhnev was more predictable, but could be
more aggressive
A
second reality was the nuclear arms
race
 From 1945 to 1949, the United States
enjoyed a brief monopoly on atomic
weapons
 This changed after 1949, when the Soviets
tested their first atomic bomb
 By the mid-1960s, both superpowers had
reached a state of nuclear parity
 This situation made traditional military
planning obsolete
 It also made international diplomacy
incredibly tense
 Over time, a loose strategic arrangement
known as mutually assured destruction
(MAD) was reached
 Both
superpowers informally acknowledged
that any nuclear exchange would be equally
harmful to both sides
 With a few exceptions, this uneasy
arrangement frightened both the United
States and the USSR into keeping the peace
during most of the Cold War
 The foundation of the U.S. nuclear policy
was the concept of deterrence, whereby the
USSR would be deterred from attacking the
United States or Western Europe, because of
America’s commitment to retaliate by using
its large nuclear arsenal
 Yet
it was common during the Cold War for the
superpowers to interfere in the political and
economic affairs of nations that had recently
experienced decolonization
 It was common during the Cold War to refer to
this newly independent region, the developing
world, as the Third World because the Third
World was not inherently part of the Soviet-led
communist bloc or the U.S.-led west
 The Soviets and Chinese enthusiastically tried to
spread communism to many parts of Africa,
Asia, and Latin America
 In its effort to contain communism (the
containment policy), the United States
intervened in many of these areas
 This
gave rise to a way of thinking known as the
domino theory: the belief that if one country in
a region became communist, all countries in the
region would “fall” to communism, like a row of
dominoes collapsing
 Over time, this approach frequently led the
United States to choose unsavory allies in the
Third World
 Whether a political leader or party was
democratic or popular mattered less than
whether he or it was communist or
anticommunist
 Sadly, America supported many dictatorial or
authoritarian leaders in the Third World, simply
because they opposed communism
 And
Europe’s place of diplomatic
dominance had been clearly lost
forever to the superpowers as the
nationalization of the Suez Canal
demonstrated
 In 1956, Egypt’s nationalization (to
convert from private to government
property) of the Suez Canal resulted
in a major diplomatic crisis, in which
the French and British – who owned
the controlling shares in the Canal –
were humiliated by a SovietAmerican agreement to allow the
nationalization to proceed
 In
1957, the “space race” began, when the
USSR launched the first human-made object,
Sputnik, into space
 Because rocket technology was so intimately
connected with the nuclear arms race, the
Soviet Union’s temporary superiority in this
area greatly frightened the West
 And
in 1959, Fidel Castro and
his followers overthrew the
dictator of Cuba
 Shortly after coming to power,
Castro became a communist
and allied himself with the
USSR
 Because Cuba was only ninety
miles off the U.S. coast, this
greatly altered the strategic
equation of the Cold War
 Within months, Castro had
begun to nationalize industry
and carry out land reform
 Castro,
along with his second-incommand, the Argentine radical Ernesto
“Che” Guevara, also wanted to combat
what they considered to be U.S.
imperialism in Latin America
 Accordingly, the Cuban revolutionaries
declared themselves to be Marxists and
turned to the Soviet Union for assistance
 Because of its proximity to the United
States, Cuba became a Cold War hotspot
from 1961 onward, as demonstrated by
the Bay of Pigs incident (1961) and the
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
 The
Bay of Pigs was a failure in foreign policy
for the United States
 The U.S. had aided Cuban exiles in an
attempt to invade the island but Castro was
aware of the plan and the plan failed
 However, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a
success for American foreign policy
 The Soviets had placed missiles on the island
of Cuba and Kennedy demanded that the
missiles be removed or else war would ensue
 The Soviets withdrew the missiles
 But
domestically, the Castro
regime’s record was mixed
 It is undeniable that Cuba
modernized under Castro, and the
gap between rich and poor that
had prevailed under Batista, the
former dictator, narrowed
considerably
 Educational levels also improved,
and women (at least officially)
were treated with greater equality
than they had been earlier
 However, Castro’s regime had
been rigidly dictatorial and has
violated human rights
 The
most dangerous phase of the Cold War
came during the early 1960s
 From 1960 -1962, the superpowers came
closer to all-out war than at any other point
in time
 Because both sides had a full-scale nuclear
capacity, any such war would have been
globally devastating
 Ironically, the United States and the USSR
were preparing for major peace talks in the
summer of 1960
 In May, however, an American spy plane, the
U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers, was shot
down over the Soviet Union
 This
incident increased tensions dramatically
– although because the Soviets had known
about American spy flights for years, whether
or not they were truly upset or using the
incident as anti-American propaganda
remains unclear
 As mentioned earlier, in April 1961, the
United States’ newly elected president, John
F. Kennedy gave his approval to the Bay of
Pigs operation, in which the Central
Intelligence Agency supported an
anticommunist Cuban force’s attempts to
invade Cuba and depose Castro
 The Bay of Pigs operation failed miserably
and embarrassed the United States badly
 Also,
in April 1961, the USSR sent a
human pilot, Yuri Gagarin, into space
for the first time in history
 This triumph contrasted greatly with
the Americans’ failure at the Bay of
Pigs
 At this point, if not beforehand, the
Soviets decided to pressure America
in two ways simultaneously: by
renewing their aggression in Berlin
and installing nuclear missiles in Cuba
 In August 1961, the USSR sealed East
Berlin from West Berlin by building,
literally overnight, the infamous
Berlin Wall
 To
show American determination to keep
West Berlin free, Kennedy made a famous
visit their shortly thereafter, declaring, “I
am a Berliner”
 In early 1962, the Soviets secretly began
to ship rockets to Cuba and put them into
place
 By October, American spy planes had
discovered what the Soviets were doing
 The resulting Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
presented the U.S. government with a
painful dilemma
 Invading Cuba or trying to destroy the
missiles from the air would almost
certainly start a war with the USSR
 Allowing
the missiles to be installed was
unacceptable
 Kennedy chose to blockade Cuba with the U.S.
Navy, forbidding any Soviet ship to proceed to
the island
 The blockade was perhaps the most harrowing
moment of the entire Cold War
 For days, the entire world watched to see if a
war, and perhaps a nuclear exchange, would
result
 Instead, the Soviets backed down
Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles he
had already shipped to Cuba, in exchange for
America’s promise never to invade the island, as
well as America’s agreement to remove nuclear
missiles from Turkey
 During
the rest of the 1960s, direct relations
between the United States and the USSR
cooled down considerably, largely because
both sides were frightened at how close to
nuclear war they had come
 In 1963, both sides agreed to sign the
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
 That same year, a “hot line,” or “red
phone,” was installed between the Kremlin
and the White House to facilitate
communication
 In 1964, Khrushchev was overthrown, and
Brezhnev was more of a hard-line politician
 Blander
and less erratic than Khrushchev,
Brezhnev was more of a hard-line politician
 At home, he was less liberal
 Within the Eastern bloc, he was authoritarian
 When, during the “Prague Spring” of 1968,
Czechoslovakia embarked on a campaign of
liberalizing reforms, Brezhnev sent in a
Warsaw Pact invasion force to take over the
country
 In the process, he issued the Brezhnev
Doctrine, stating that the USSR had the right
to intervene in the affairs of its East
European allies
 It
is important to remember that from
1945 through 1948, the USSR took
over Eastern Europe
 It had installed pro-Soviet, communist
governments in the eastern half of
Germany, as well as Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria
 Yugoslavia became communist as well
 But under its charismatic leader, Josip
Tito, Yugoslavia pursued an
independent course and broke with
the USSR in 1948
 It
was in response to the rise of communism
in eastern Europe, that in March 1946,
Winston Churchill warned of the permanent
division of the continent in his famous “iron
curtain” speech
 It
is also important to remember that in
1947, as the threat of communist takeover in
Greece and Turkey worsened, Truman
decided to act
 That March, the United States began to assist
Greece and Turkey
 It also proclaimed the Truman Doctrine,
which promised moral and material aid to
any and all countries whose political stability
was threatened by communism
 Later in 1947, the United States unveiled the
European Recovery Plan or the Marshall Plan
 The Marshall Plan pumped over $13 billion
into Europe, for purposes of economic
reconstruction
 It
is also important to remember
that the formation of the North
Atlantic treaty Organization or
NATO bound the United States,
Canada, Britain, and nine other
Western European states into a
formal strategic alliance
 Taken together, all these items
were elements in the United
States’s overarching strategy for
dealing with the USSR
 This strategy was known as
containment
 Of
course, the Soviets developed
their own military bloc, the
Warsaw Pact, to oppose NATO
 By the end of the 1940s, Europe
was sharply divided between
noncommunist and communist
camps, with only a few nations
remaining neutral
 After
the Vietnamese gained independence
from the French in 1954, the United States
strongly opposed the communist, nationalist
leader, Ho Chi Minh
 When Vietnam was partitioned into a
northern communist nation and a southern
non-communist nation, the United States
helped to prop up the South Vietnam
government in its fight against the South
Vietnamese communists known as the
Vietcong
 But by1973, the United States pulled out of
the war
 By 1975, all of Vietnam was communist
 From
1969 through 1979, the Cold War entered
a more peaceful period known as détente, a
diplomatic term referring to the relaxation of
tensions
 The United States, wearied by the Vietnam
conflict and plagued by economic recession at
home, was relieved to scale back hostilities
 The USSR’s reasons included a similar economic
downturn, the need for U.S. grain shipments to
feed its population, and fears that America was
growing closer to China
 But the greatest surprise of all was yet to come
with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991