Cold War
The term “Cold War” did not come into common use until it was used by Bernard Baruch, who was an adviser on
foreign affairs to President Harry S. Truman and had also been an adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Woodrow
Wilson before that. In a speech to the South Carolina Legislature on 16 April 1947, Baruch said:
Let us not be deceived — we are today in the midst of a cold war. Our enemies are to be found abroad and
at home. Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success. The peace of the world is the hope and the
goal of our political system; it is the despair and defeat of those who stand against us.
The phrase “Cold War” was then picked up by U.S. media to describe the relationship between the USA and the
USSR: a war without fighting but still a battle. The widely respected journalist en essayist Walter Lippmann played
an important role in popularizing the term through a series of articles on the Cold War. –
Historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the Cold War, and whether the conflict was
inevitable or could have been avoided.
Why did the conflict emerge?
1.
The traditionalist vision Until the 1960s, the traditionalist vision was predominant. The traditionalists
placed the responsibility for the Cold War on the expansionist policy of the Soviet Union under Stalin,
shortly after the Second World War. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union tried to dominate
its neighbors and set up a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. The aggressive intentions of the Soviet
Union were, among other things, reflected by the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin Blockade
and the attack by North Korea on South Korea in 1950. According to the traditionalists, it was this Soviet
expansionist policy that forced the United States to intervene, which subsequently led to the Cold War.
2. The revisionist vision However, a new account emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War. U.S. involvement
in Vietnam disillusioned some historians and created antipathy towards the American position. In the 1960s
and 1970s, the revisionists stressed that American expansionism was the cause of the Cold War. They
pointed out that, at the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union was severely weakened, whereas
the United States prospered and possessed a monopoly on the atomic bomb. According to the revisionists,
Stalin’s main priority was to recover from the devastating war years. They placed the cause of the Cold
War in the nature of capitalism and viewed Marshall Aid as a way of seeking new markets and expanding
the U.S. economy. The Soviet Union thus correctly understood that their sphere of influence in Eastern
Europe was in danger
3. The post-revisionist vision The revisionist vision produced a critical reaction of its own. In the 1970s and
1980s, a group of historians called the post-revisionists argued that the foundations of the Cold War were
neither the fault of the U.S. nor the Soviet Union. They viewed the Cold War as something inevitable.
According to the post-revisionists, the Cold War emerged from the power vacuum after World War II,
when the European countries were severely weakened by the war. The multipolar situation that had existed
before the war had given way to a bipolar world. For both the United States and the Soviet Union it was
unacceptable to let the other superpower dominate Europe, as this would seriously disrupt the balance of
power. Conflict over spheres of influence was therefore an inevitable result of considerations of national
security.
How did this conflict evolve?
The Greek civil war and the Truman Doctrine
After the evacuation of German forces from Greece in 1944, there were two groups in that country that wanted to
take power: the monarchists and the Communists. A civil war soon developed. The Communists were supported by
the Soviet Union, and, after the end of the Second World War, also by Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria. Britain
and the United States supported the monarchists. The involvement of the United States in the Greek civil war
marked a new era in their attitude towards world politics. The new approach became known as the “Truman
Doctrine” and it would guide U.S. diplomacy for the next forty years. The doctrine was established on 12 March
1947, when President Harry S. Truman delivered a speech before Congress in which he called for the allocation of
$400 million in military and economic assistance for Greece and Turkey. In his speech, Truman declared: ”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.”
The Marshall Plan and Czechoslovakia In accordance with the Truman Doctrine, the United States enacted the
“Marshall Plan.” Officially entitled the European Recovery Program (ERP), the initiative was soon named after the
American General George C. Marshall who had been sent to assess the economic state of Europe after WWII. In
June 1947, Marshall suggested that about $17 billion was needed to rebuild Europe’s prosperity. He stated that:
“Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its
purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and
social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” The Marshall Plan did not only offer monetary support to the
western European states, but also to the Soviet Union and its allies. However, Stalin looked upon the reconstruction
plan with suspicion and prevented the eastern European states from applying for Marshall Aid. In Stalin’s view,
economic integration with the West would weaken his hold on Eastern Europe. Upon his return from a meeting with
Stalin on the matter of Marshall Aid, Czechoslovak foreign minister Jan Masaryk stated: “I went to Moscow as the
foreign minister of an independent sovereign state. I returned as a lackey of the Soviet government.”
Initially, the U.S. Congress refused to grant the necessary $17 billion for the Marshall Plan, but the American
attitude changed when the Communists took over Czechoslovakia in March 1948. Up until then, Czechoslovakia
had retained democratic structures and pursued policies independent of Moscow. The brutality of the Communist
coup shocked the Western powers. Foreign minister Jan Masaryk was found dead below his open window.
Communist investigators concluded that he had committed suicide, but the American’s assumed he was pushed.
Immediately, the American Congress approved the Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan in Belgium
The Berlin Blockade and the Berlin Airlift Late 1946, Britain and the United States had combined their
German occupation zones in “Bizonia.” When, in June 1948, they introduced currency reforms in the
western zones of Germany, Stalin responded by instituting the Berlin Blockade. Berlin was deep in the
Soviet zone and was linked to the western zones by vital roads, railways and canals. Stalin blocked all
these supply lines, preventing food and materials from arriving in West Berlin.
The only way into Berlin was by air. The Truman administration therefore reacted to the Berlin Blockade
with a continual daily airlift that brought food and supplies to the people in West Berlin. Ten months
later, it was clear that the Western Allies would not give up Berlin. On 12 May 1949, Stalin backed down
and lifted the blockade.
In April 1949, France merged their occupation zone with those of Britain and the United States in what
now became “Trizonia.” Soon after the Berlin Blockade was lifted, two separate German states were
created: the Federal Republic of Germany (or West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (or
East Germany).
Formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO At the height of the Berlin Blockade, the
United States, Canada, and ten West European countries met in Washington and signed an agreement
to work together. The new organization they formed on 4 April 1949 became known as the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). One of the key points was the principle included in Article 5.
“An armed attack against one or more of [the member states] in Europe or North America shall be
considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs,
each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of
the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith,
individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of
armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”
How is/was this conflict perceived at the time and since?
George Kennan’s Long Telegram, 22 February 1946 On 22 February 1946, George F. Kennan, the chargé
d’affaires at the American Embassy in Moscow and an expert on Russia, sent the longest telegram in State
Department history. In the “Long Telegram,” as it became known, Kennan presented an analysis of Soviet policy
that, over the next year, heavily influenced the Truman administration’s Cold War policies
“In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with U.S. there can be
no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted,
our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be
secure. This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of the world’s greatest peoples
and resources of the world’s richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian
nationalism. In addition, it has an elaborate and far-flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an
apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground
methods are presumably without parallel in history.”
Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech
5 March 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at
Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. This is an excerpt of the Iron Curtain speech: From Stettin in the Baltic to
Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the
ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and
Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are
subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing
measure of control from Moscow. (…) The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of
Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain
totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia,
there is no true democracy. (…) Whatever conclusions may be drawn from these facts – and facts they are – this is
certainly not the Liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent
peace.
Stalin’s reaction to Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech Ten days after Winston Churchill spoke of an Iron Curtain
having descended across Eastern Europe, the Soviet daily Pravda published an interview in which Stalin criticized
the former prime minister’s though stance: As a result of the German invasion, the Soviet Union has irrevocably lost
in battles with the Germans, and also during the German occupation and through the expulsion of Soviet citizens to
German slave labour camps, about 7,000,000 people. In other words, the Soviet Union has lost in men several times
more than Britain and the United States together. (…) One can ask therefore, what can be surprising in the fact that
the Soviet Union, in a desire to ensure its security for the future, tries to achieve that these countries should have
governments whose relations to the Soviet Union are loyal? How can one, without having lost one’s reason, qualify
these peaceful aspirations of the Soviet Union as ‘expansionist tendencies’ of our government? (…) Mr. Churchill
wanders around the truth when he speaks of the growth of the influence of the Communist parties in Eastern Europe.
(…) The growth of the influence of Communism cannot be considered accidental. It is a normal function. The
influence of the Communists grew because during the hard years of the mastery of fascism in Europe, Communists
showed themselves to be reliable, daring and self-sacrificing fighters against fascist regimes for the liberty of
peoples.
The Soviet Ambassador to the United States on post-war American policy On 27 September 1946 (seven
months after George Kennan had sent the Long Telegram to his colleagues in Washington), Soviet Ambassador to
the United States Nikolai Novikov presented his analysis of American policy: The foreign policy of the United
States, which reflects the imperialist tendencies of American monopolistic capital, is characterized in the post-war
period by a striving for world supremacy. This is the real meaning of the many statements by President Truman and
other representatives of American ruling circles; that the United States has the right to lead the world. All the forces
of American diplomacy – the army, the air force, the navy, industry, and science – are enlisted in the service of this
foreign policy. For this purpose broad plans for expansion have been developed and are being implemented through
diplomacy and the establishment of a system of naval and air bases stretching far beyond the boundaries of the
United States, through the arms race, and through the creation of ever newer types of weapons.
The Warsaw Pact reconsidered Stigmatized as a ‘cardboard castle’ by NATO officials upon its conception in 1955,
the Warsaw Pact has long been viewed as a mere transmission belt of the Soviet Union. However, recent archival
research has shown that whereas the Soviet Union still determined Warsaw Pact dynamics in the early 1960s, it was
no longer positioned at centre-stage from 1965 onwards. The period between 1961 and 1964 witnessed the
emancipation of several individual non-Soviet-Warsaw-Pact (NSWP) leaders. This document is a transcript of a
speech by Bulgarian First Secretary Todor Zhivkov at the 1961 Political Consultative Committee (PCC) meeting in
Moscow. Two themes dominate his speech: the state of Bulgaria's defense capabilities and the criticism directed
toward the Albanian government for failing to inform the Warsaw Pact member states about the alleged attack on
Albanian territory at the Vlorë naval base by NATO forces. The period from 1965 to 1968 heralded the
emancipation of the Warsaw Pact as an alliance in its own right. These Romanian minutes of the 1965 Political
Consultative Committee (PCC) meeting in Warsaw address Romania's disagreement with the possible deployment
of a multilateral nuclear force in Western Europe. Contrary to all other participants, the first secretary of the
Romanian Workers' Party, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, opposes the idea of a nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaty.
He fears that certain countries could easily use a non-proliferation treaty to condemn China's nuclear arsenal. The
PCC meeting in 1969 contained the simultaneous culmination of all the conflicts that had dominated the Warsaw
Pact in the second half of the 1960s, such as Warsaw Pact reforms and the appeal for a European Security
Conference. On 18 March 1969, at a meeting of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party,
Romanian leaders Nicolae Ceausescu and Emil Bodnaras inform their colleagues of the proceedings of the 1969
PCC meeting held in Budapest.
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