TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
2
1.Origins of the terms
3
2. .Beginnings of the Clod War ('45-'53)
7
2.1 Truman Doctrine
7
2.2. Marshall Plan
8
2.3. Berlin Blockade and Airlift
9
3. Third World Escalations
10
4. ''Second Cold War'' ('79-'85)
13
5. Final years
5.1 Gorbachev Reforms
5.2 Thaw in Relations
5.3 East Europe breaks away
5.4 Soviet republics break away
Conclusion
14
Bibliography
15
Introduction
The Cold War is the term used to describe the relations between the U.S. and the
interests of the Soviet Union (USSR), each being at the forefront of high-power alliances
between 1947-1989. War was cold "as relations between the two powers were cool, but did
not, hotheaded" never in a war armed. Besides the traditional rivalry between the two powers,
the conflict is based on a clash of ideologies (between democratic capitalist system in the U.S.
and the Soviet totalitarian system).
In this paper you will find moments, documents and important people in that time
period.
The real reason I chose to talk about this issue is primarily that I am passionate about
history and secondly I think it is very important for us to know the things of the past and the
origins of our ancestors.
I want to explain the true purpose of war: competition between superpowers, aiming
world domination.
1.
Origins of the term
At the end of World War II, English author and journalist George Orwell used cold
war, as a general term, in his essay "You and the Atomic Bomb", published October 19, 1945,
in the British newspaper Tribune. Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of
nuclear warfare, Orwell wrote:
"For forty or fifty years past we have been warned that man is in danger of destroying
himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to
take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at
least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many
decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We
may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the
slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been muchdiscussed, but few
people have yet considered its ideological implications—that is, the kind of worldview, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state
which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of "cold war" with its
neighbors." (Mr. H. G. Wells and others)
2.Beginnings of the Clod War ('45-'53)
In September 1947, the Soviets created Cominform, the purpose of which was to
enforce orthodoxy within the international communist movement and tighten political control
over.Soviet satellites through coordination of communist parties in the Eastern
Bloc.Cominform faced an embarrassing setback the following June, when the Tito–Stalin split
obliged its members to expel Yugoslavia, which remained Communist but adopted a nonaligned position.
As the world began recovering from World War II, the first General Assembly of the
United Nations met in London in January 1946, and created the United Nations Atomic
Energy Commission. Part of their charge was to eliminate all weapons of mass destruction,
including the atomic bomb.
America's first effort to define a policy on the control of atomic energy was The
Report On The International Control Of Atomic Energy (informally known as the "AchesonLilienthal" Report), and was published March 16, 1946. Its premise was that there should be
an international "Atomic Development Authority" which would have worldwide monopoly
over the control of "dangerous elements" of the entire spectrum of atomic energy.
Drawing heavily on the information in the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, the U.S.
proposal to the United Nations on international controls on nuclear material (named the
Baruch Plan for its author Bernard Baruch) was presented. It called for the establishment of
an international authority to control potentially dangerous atomic activities, license all other
atomic activities, and carry out inspections.
The Soviets rejected the Baruch Plan, since it would have left the United States with a
decisive nuclear superiority until the details of the Plan could be worked out and would have
stopped the Soviet nuclear program. They responded by calling for universal nuclear
disarmament. In the end, the UN adopted neither proposal. Seventeen days after Baruch
presented his plan to the United Nations on July 1, 1946, the United
States conducted the world's first postwar nuclear test.
2.1 Truman Doctrine
The Truman Doctrine was the name given to a policy
announced by US President Harry Truman on March 12th, 1947. The
Truman Doctrine was a very simple warning clearly made to the
USSR – though the country was not mentioned by name – that the USA would intervene to
support any nation that was being threatened by a takeover by an armed minority. The
Truman Doctrine has to be assessed against the background of what had happened in Europe
at the end of World War Two and in the immediate aftermath.
On March 12th 1947, he made a dramatic and famous speech to Congress and it was
this quote that signalled the start of the Truman Doctrine:
“I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are
resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures...
”
This meant that Truman believed that the USA should support non-Communist
countries which were coming under attack internally by Communist movements or being
faced with the threat of invasion by Communist countries. This was a declaration of proxy
war on the Soviet Union. Truman carried on with a stinging attack on the communist way of
life, saying that it was "evil", and "denied human rights" and "living standards were low".
2.2.Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was the
American program to aid Europe, in which the United States gave economic support to help
rebuild European economies after the end of World War II in order to prevent the spread of
Soviet Communism.[1] The plan was in operation for four years beginning in April 1948.[2]
The goals of the United States were to rebuild a war-devastated region, remove trade barriers,
modernize industry, and make Europe prosperous again.[3] The term "equivalent of the
Marshall Plan" is often used to describe a proposed large-scale rescue program.[4]
The initiative [5] was named after Secretary of State George Marshall. The plan had
bipartisan support in Washington, where the Republicans controlled Congress and the
Democrats controlled the White House. The Plan was largely the creation of State Department
officials, especially William L. Clayton and George F. Kennan. Marshall spoke of urgent need
to help the European recovery in his address at Harvard University in June 1947.
The reconstruction plan, developed at a meeting of the participating European states,
was established on June 5, 1947. It offered the same aid to the Soviet Union and its allies, but
they did not accept it,[7][8] as to do so would be to allow a degree of US control over the
Communist economies.[9] During the four years that the plan was operational, U.S. $13
billion in economic and technical assistance was given to help the recovery of the European
countries that had joined in the Organization for European Economic Co-operation. This $13
billion was in the context of a U.S. GDP of $258 billion in 1948, and was on top of $13
billion in American aid to Europe between the end of the war and the start of the Plan that is
counted separately from the Marshall Plan.[10] The Marshall Plan was replaced by the
Mutual Security Plan at the end of 1951.
The ERP addressed each of the obstacles to postwar recovery. The plan looked to the
future, and did not focus on the destruction caused by the war. Much more important were
efforts to modernize European industrial and business practices using high-efficiency
American models, reducing artificial trade barriers, and instilling a sense of hope and selfreliance.
2.3.Berlin Blockade and Airlift
U.S. and UK have joined the occupation on 1
January 1947, which was later associated with France
(April 1949). As part of the economic reconstruction of
Germany, in early 1948, a number of representatives governments in Western Europe and the
United States announced an agreement on the merger of western German areas into a federal
system of government.
In addition, according to the Marshall Plan, they began to re-industrialization and
rebuild German economy, including introduced a new currency, the German mark to replace
the old Reichsmark currency that the Soviets have devalued it. shortly thereafter, Stalin
instituted the Berlin Blockade between (24 June 1948 - 12 May 1949) one of the first major
crises of the Cold War, West Berlin preventing the arrival of food, raw materials United
States, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New-Zealand and several other countries have
started providing massive food and other supplies into West Berlin. the Soviets organized a
public relations campaign against the policy change.
Once again the East Berlin communists attempted to disrupt the Berlin municipal
elections (as they did in the 1946 elections), which took place on December 5, 1948 and
produced a turnout of 86.3% and a landslide victory for non-communist parties [The results
effectively divided the city into East and West version. 300 000 Berliners demonstrated and
urged the international air transport to supply the continuous, and the American pilot Gail
Halvorsen created "Operation Vittles" by throwing candy German children. In May 1949
Stalin withdrew and lifted its blockade
3.Third World Escalations
In late April 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson landed some 22,000 troops in the
Dominican Republic for a one-year occupation of the republic in an invasion codenamed
Operation Power Pack, citing the threat of the emergence of a Cuban-style revolution in Latin
America. Presidential elections held in 1966, during the occupation, handed victory to the
conservative Joaquín Balaguer. Although Balaguer enjoyed a real base of support from
sectors of the elites as well as peasants, his formally running Dominican Revolutionary Party
(PRD) opponent, former President Juan Bosch, did not actively campaign] The PRD's
activists were violently harassed by the Dominican police and armed forces
In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, Cold War participants struggled to adjust to a
new, more complicated pattern of international relations in which the world was no longer
divided into two clearly opposed blocs. From the beginning of the post-war period, Western
Europe and Japan rapidly recovered from the destruction of World War II and sustained
strong economic growth through the 1950s and 1960s, with per capita GDPs approaching
those of the United States, while Eastern Bloc economies stagnated
As a result of the 1973 oil crisis, combined with the growing influence of Third World
alignments such as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the NonAligned Movement, less-powerful countries had more room to assert their independence and
often showed themselves resistant to pressure from either superpower.Meanwhile, Moscow
was forced to turn its attention inward to deal with the Soviet Union's deep-seated domestic
economic problems.During this period, Soviet leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei
Kosygin embraced the notion of détente.
4.''Second Cold War'' ('79-'85)
The term second Cold War refers to the period of intensive reawakening of Cold War
tensions and conflicts in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Tensions greatly increased between
the major powers with both sides becoming more militaristic. Diggins says, "Reagan went all
out to fight the second cold war, by supporting counterinsurgencies in the third world."
Cox says, "The intensity of this 'Second' Cold War was as great as its duration was
short.
In April 1978, the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)
seized power in Afghanistan in the Saur Revolution. Within months, opponents of the
communist government launched an uprising in eastern Afghanistan that quickly expanded
into a civil war waged by guerrilla mujahideen against government forces countrywide.
In September 1979, Khalqist President Nur Muhammad Taraki was assassinated in a
coup within the PDPA orchestrated by fellow Khalq member Hafizullah Amin, who assumed
the presidency
In January 1977, four years prior to becoming president, Ronald Reagan bluntly
stated, in a conversation with Richard V. Allen, his basic expectation in relation to the Cold
War.
A senior US State Department official predicted such an outcome as early as 1980,
positing that the invasion resulted in part from a "domestic crisis within the Soviet system. ...
It may be that the thermodynamic law of entropy has ... caught up with the Soviet system,
which now seems to expend more energy on simply maintaining its equilibrium than on
improving itself. We could be seeing a period of foreign movement at a time of internal
decay".
5.Final years
Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) began to
implement a new approach to international relations. Instead of viewing the world as a hostile,
"bi-polar" place, he suggested, why not use diplomacy instead of military action to create
more poles? To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist
Chinese government and, after a trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations
with Beijing. At the same time, he adopted a policy of "détente"–"relaxation"–toward the
Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear
missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war.
Despite Nixon’s efforts, the Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan
(1911-2004). Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of
communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, he worked to provide
financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world.
This policy, particularly as it was applied in the developing world in places like Grenada and
El Salvador, was known as the Reagan Doctrine.
Even as Reagan fought communism in Central America, however, the Soviet Union
was disintegrating. In response to severe economic problems and growing political ferment in
the USSR, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-) took office in 1985 and introduced two
policies that redefined Russia's relationship to the rest of the world: "glasnost," or political
openness, and "perestroika," or economic reform. Soviet influence in Eastern Europe waned.
In 1989, every other communist state in the region replaced its government with a
noncommunist one. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall–the most visible symbol of the
decades-long Cold War–was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had
challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: "Mr. Gorbachev,
tear down this wall." By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was
over
5.1 Gorbachev Reforms
By the time the comparatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary
in 1985, the Soviet economy was stagnant and faced a sharp fall in foreign currency earnings
as a result of the downward slide in oil prices in the 1980s. These issues prompted Gorbachev
to investigate measures to revive the ailing state.
An ineffectual start led to the conclusion that deeper structural changes were necessary
and in June 1987 Gorbachev announced an agenda of economic reform called perestroika, or
restructuring Perestroika relaxed the production quota system, allowed private ownership of
businesses and paved the way for foreign investment. These measures were intended to
redirect the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more
productive areas in the civilian sector.
Despite initial skepticism in the West, the new Soviet leader proved to be committed
to reversing the Soviet Union's deteriorating economic condition instead of continuing the
arms race with the West Partly as a way to fight off internal opposition from party cliques to
his reforms, Gorbachev simultaneously introduced glasnost, or openness, which increased
freedom of the press and the transparency of state institutions. Glasnost was intended to
reduce the corruption at the top of the Communist Party and moderate the abuse of power in
the Central Committee. Glasnost also enabled increased contact between Soviet citizens and
the western world, particularly with the United States, contributing to the accelerating détente
between the two nations.
5.2 Thaw in Relations
In response to the Kremlin's military and political concessions, Reagan agreed to
renew talks on economic issues and the scaling-back of the arms race. The first was held in
November 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland. At one stage the two men, accompanied only by an
interpreter, agreed in principle to reduce each country's nuclear arsenal by 50 percent. A
second Reykjavík Summit was held in Iceland. Talks went well until the focus shifted to
Reagan's proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, which Gorbachev wanted eliminated. Reagan
refused.The negotiations failed, but the third summit in 1987 led to a breakthrough with the
signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). The INF treaty eliminated all
nuclear-armed, ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and
5,500 kilometers (300 to 3,400 miles) and their infrastructure.
East–West tensions rapidly subsided through the mid-to-late 1980s, culminating with
the final summit in Moscow in 1989, when Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush signed the
START I arms control treaty.During the following year it became apparent to the Soviets that
oil and gas subsidies, along with the cost of maintaining massive troops levels, represented a
substantial economic drain.
In addition, the security advantage of a buffer zone was recognised as irrelevant and
the Soviets officially declared that they would no longer intervene in the affairs of allied states
in Eastern Europe.
In 1989, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan and by 1990 Gorbachev consented
to German reunification, the only alternative being a Tiananmen scenario.When the Berlin
Wall came down, Gorbachev's "Common European Home" concept began to take shape.
On December 3, 1989, Gorbachev and Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush,
declared the Cold War over at the Malta Summit; a year later, the two former rivals were
partners in the Gulf War against Iraq.
5.3 East Europe breaks away
By 1989, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink
of collapse, and, deprived of Soviet military support, the
Communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact states were losing power.[265] Grassroots
organizations, such as Poland's Solidarity movement, rapidly gained ground with strong
popular bases. In 1989, the Communist governments in Poland and Hungary became the first
to negotiate the organizing of competitive elections. In Czechoslovakia and East Germany,
mass protests unseated entrenched Communist leaders. T
he Communist regimes in Bulgaria and Romania also crumbled, in the latter case as
the result of a violent uprising. Attitudes had changed enough that US Secretary of State
James Baker suggested that the American government would not be opposed to Soviet
intervention in Romania, on behalf of the opposition, to prevent bloodshed.[270] The tidal
wave of change culminated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which
symbolized the collapse of European Communist governments and graphically ended the Iron
Curtain divide of Europe.
The 1989 revolutionary wave swept across Central and Eastern Europe peacefully
overthrew all the Soviet-style communist states: East Germany, Poland, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria,[271] Romania was the only Eastern-bloc country to topple its
communist regime violently .
5.4 Soviet republics break away
In the USSR itself, glasnost weakened
the bonds that held the Soviet Union together
and by February 1990, with the dissolution of the USSR looming, the Communist Party was
forced to surrender its 73-year-old monopoly on state power. At the same time freedom of
press and dissent allowed by glasnost and the festering "nationalities question" increasingly
led the Union's component republics to declare their autonomy from Moscow, with the Baltic
states withdrawing from the Union entirely.
Gorbachev's permissive attitude toward Eastern Europe did not initially extend to
Soviet territory; even Bush, who strove to maintain friendly relations, condemned the January
1991 killings in Latvia and Lithuania, privately warning that economic ties would be frozen if
the violence continued. The USSR was fatally weakened by a failed coup and a growing
number of Soviet republics, particularly Russia, who threatened to secede from the USSR.
The Commonwealth of Independent States, created on December 21, 1991, is viewed as a
successor entity to the Soviet Union but, according to Russia's leaders, its purpose was to
"allow a civilized divorce" between the Soviet Republics and is comparable to a loose
confederation. The USSR was declared officially dissolved on December 25, 1991.
Conclusion
In looking back at the Cold War the Four pillars of American Foreign policy,
Deterrence, Containment, Commitment to intervention and establishment and maintenance of
the international economic system, as used in practice, often eroded before their subsequent
policy inspirations were dismantled. That is to say that these four pillars became obsolete in
that they were never really pillars rather ideological constructs that represented traditional
East- West confrontations, superimposed along a North South Axis of economic integration,
laying the foundations for globalization.
These historical processes of confrontation had long historical precedents in the
historical global political economy that has been a part of history since the invasions of the
Muslim hordes and the Khan's. This traditional ideology maintained a system of bipolar
opposition and it consummated in the 20th century via the effect and dissolution of
colonialism at which point these 1st and 2nd world superpowers competed for control of
regional economic blocs via political and economic ideologies that centered on the notion of
core and peripheral states. After relatively consolidating power in the W. European bloc
American foreign policy leaders turned to the Third World in which various tests of resolve,
often at the behest of corporate investment, were undertaken during various hotspots during
the Cold War.
Bibliography
Bacevich, Andrew J., ed. The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy
Since World War II (2007)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War#cite_note-Gaddis7><http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war>
Orwell, George, The Observer, March 10, 1946
Strobe Talbott: The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the
Quest for a Global Nation (2009)
A New History by John Lewis Gaddis
The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick
A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War
(Stanford Nuclear Age Series) by Melvyn P. Leffler
The Red Flag: A History of Communism by David Priestland
TIMEMagazineNovember 6, 1989 | Vol. 134 No. 19