Table of contents
1. Origins of the term
2.Beginnings of the Clod War ('45-'53)
2.1 Truman Doctrine
2.2.Marshall Plan
2.3.Berlin Blockade and Airlift
3.Third World Escalations
4.''Second Cold War'' ('79-'85)
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
Bibliography
Introduction
The term “Cold War” refers to the period of Soviet-American antagonism that dominated the
international system from approximately 1945 to 1991. While different scholars emphasize
different facets of this competition, the Cold War was at once an ideological, political,
economic, cultural, military, and strategic contest between the United States and its allies on
one hand, and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other.
Recent studies have done much to complicate the once dominant bipolar understanding of this
struggle. Scholars increasingly, and quite rightly, highlight the many ways in which Asian,
African, and Latin American states in particular attempted to transcend the apparent strictures
imposed by Soviet-American hostility. Indeed, our understanding of the Cold War is
constantly subject to reinterpretation, revision, and modification, as new evidence, new
methodologies, and new actors emerge from obscurity. There is a vast and continually
expanding literature on the Cold War, offering much of value to international-relations
scholars.
The studies and resources included in this bibliography are designed to guide the new and
experienced international-relations researcher through a selection of resources that reveal the
myriad complexities, nuances, and contingencies of this seminal and contentious period. A
great deal of this literature analyzes the evolution of the international system in the decades
after World War II, while providing insights into policy formulation and diplomacy. Scholars
have also been particularly interested in questions of responsibility and blame, especially
regarding the origins and end of the Cold War. Many questions remain unresolved, and the
boundaries of scholarly inquiry are continually expanding, making it an especially rich field
of research for new and experienced researchers alike.
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, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us 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 much discussed, but few people have yet considered its
ideological implications—that is, the kind of world-view, 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."(1)
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.(60)
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
On June 5, 1947 in a speech at Harvard University Hall, Secretary of State George Marshall
announces Amarican a vast program of economic assistance for the recovery of European
economies in order to stop the expansion of communism, a phenomenon which he considers
issues related to economic.
On 19 June 1947 the Foreign Ministers of France (Georges Bidault) and the UK (Ernest
Bevin), signed a statement calling on the 22 European countries to send representatives to
Paris to outline a plan for European reconstruction. Labeling the Marshall Plan as "American
economic imperialism", Moscow banned the satellite countries to attend the conference in
Paris. The Soviets believed that accepting the plan would lead to the separation of USSR
countries in its sphere of influence and the loss of political and strategic advantages gained by
the Kremlin in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. The Marshall
Plan is the economic extension of the Truman Doctrine.
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). [72]
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. [73]
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. [74] 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 [75] United
States, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New-Zealand and several other countries have
started providing massive food and other supplies into West Berlin. [76]
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), [72] which took place on December 5, 1948 and produced a turnout of 86.3%
and a landslide victory for non-communist parties [77] 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, [78] and the American pilot Gail Halvorsen created
"Operation Vittles" by throwing candy German children. [79] 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.[16] 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.[187] 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.[72] 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.[72][177]
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.[101] Meanwhile,
Moscow was forced to turn its attention inward to deal with the Soviet Union's deep-seated
domestic economic problems.[72] 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.[12] Diggins says, "Reagan went all out to
fight the second cold war, by supporting counterinsurgencies in the third world."[216] 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.
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 (19112004). 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,[224] 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.[252] These issues
prompted Gorbachev to investigate measures to revive the ailing state.[252]
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.[253] 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.[253]
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.[120][254] 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.[255] Glasnost was
intended to reduce the corruption at the top of the Communist Party and moderate the abuse
of power in the Central Committee.[256] 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.[258] The first was held in
November 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland.[258] At one stage the two men, accompanied only
by an interpreter, agreed in principle to reduce each country's nuclear arsenal by 50
percent.[259] 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.[260] 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.[261]
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.[262] 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.[263] 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.[264]
In 1989, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan[265] and by 1990 Gorbachev
consented to German reunification,[263] the only alternative being a Tiananmen
scenario.[266] When the Berlin Wall came down, Gorbachev's "Common European
Home" concept began to take shape.[267]
On December 3, 1989, Gorbachev and Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush,
declared the Cold War over at the Malta Summit;[268] 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. The 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[264] 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.[273] 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.
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
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<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War#cite_note-Gaddis-7>
<http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war> .Web.
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Strobe Talbott: The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the
Quest for a Global Nation, (2009). Print.
A New History by John Lewis Gaddis. Print.
The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick. Print.
A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and The Cold
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TIME Magazine
November 6, 1989 | Vol. 134 No. 19