Britain in the Cold War
During the Cold War, Britain played a significant role as a key ally of the United States in containing the spread of communism. The period was marked by heightened tensions, nuclear arms race, and ideological conflicts between the Western bloc led by the US and the Eastern bloc led by the Soviet Union. Britain's involvement in the Cold War had far-reaching political, social, and economic implications.
7 Key excerpts on "Britain in the Cold War"
eBook - ePubInternational Relations since 1945
East, West, North, South
- Geir Lundestad(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
...Czechoslovakia was an example of this type of expansion. A number of events during the winter and spring of 1948 contributed to the impression that Western Europe was threatened. The attitude of Western Europe itself was important; as we have seen (pp. 18–20), there was fairly constant pressure on the United States to play a more active role in European politics. This involved first economic assistance, then political and moral support, and finally direct military guarantees. The influence of Britain was especially important. This country had the best relations with the United States and worked most actively to draw the United States closer to Western Europe. Another important consideration was the fact that it was less necessary for the United States to play a new role in foreign policy as long as others could represent US interests. Washington and London did not see eye to eye on all matters. They disagreed as to colonial policy, international trade, the question of Palestine, and a number of other issues. Nevertheless, they had an important mutual interest in containing Soviet influence. As long as Britain was able to fulfill this function, there was less need for the United States to do so. However, the position of the United Kingdom changed dramatically in the years immediately after the war. The British had to retreat on a number of fronts. In India, the colonial system began to collapse. The British withdrew from Palestine when the political problems piled up and their economy did not allow them to be actively present. Even more important in terms of the Cold War was the reduced presence of the British in Greece and Turkey and in Germany. The economic problems of the United Kingdom were the immediate cause of the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947...
- Richard J. Aldrich, Richard J. Aldrich(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Examination of this ideological element leads to a review of British policy towards the Soviet Union in the early stages of the Cold War. Who formed that policy: the Cabinet, the Foreign Secretary (Ernest Bevin), the military, the permanent officials in Whitehall, or a combination of these? Did British defence of her interests prescribe partnership with the USA or could she rely upon her influence in the Commonwealth, Empire, and other areas of the world to pursue her own ‘grand strategy’, either unilaterally or as part of Western Europe? How did Britain, with her limited resources, contemplate confrontation with Moscow? Was British policy, supported by propaganda, ‘defensive’, by projecting British values and institutions, ‘offensive’, by criticizing the Soviet system and its ideology and actions, or even ‘subversive’, by attempting to loosen the Soviet hold on areas outside her borders? Almost every participant in policy-making, minister and civil servant alike, agreed on the need to maintain British prestige and influence in the reshaping of the post-war world. They also recognized, however, that Britain's physical power had been diminished. She could not match the military personnel of the Soviet Union or the technological advantages of the United States, and demobilization would test the British ability to fulfil existing commitments, let alone accept new ones. Britain had used or lost more than 25 per cent of her assets during the war; the demands of post-war reconstruction, social and industrial, prohibited substantial expenditure overseas. Therefore, propaganda became essential to the maintenance of Britain's status. In the short term, it would mask British weakness; in the long term, it would encourage other countries to look to London for moral and ideological leadership and to resist incorporation into the Soviet bloc, without demanding a significant increase in British military and economic commitments...
eBook - ePubThe Cold War
An International History
- David Painter(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...7 Understanding the Cold War This study has analyzed the Cold War as a product of the domestic histories of the great powers and of the structure and dynamics of international relations. Following World War II, changes in the global distribution of power, weapons technology, the balance of political forces within and among nations, the world economy, and relations between the industrialized nations and the underdeveloped periphery led to the Cold War. Further changes in these areas perpetuated it, and eventually brought about its end. Throughout the Cold War, the global distribution of power influenced US and Soviet perceptions of their respective national interests and consequently their actions. Despite the upsurge in Soviet military power in the 1970s and a relative decline in US economic strength, the global distribution of power remained tilted against the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. If popular support, industrial infrastructure, skilled manpower, and technological prowess are factored into the definition of power, the postwar era was bipolar only in a narrow military sense. By any broad definition of power, the Soviet Union remained throughout the Cold War an “incomplete superpower.” 1 This imbalance emerges even more starkly when the strength of the Western alliance is measured against that of the Soviet Bloc. Even in military terms the Soviet position had as many elements of weakness as of strength. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies possessed numerical superiority in ground forces along the central front in the heart of Europe. In addition, Soviet and Chinese Communist ground forces outnumbered any possible opponent in Northeast Asia during the 1950s...
eBook - ePubWar, Peace and International Relations
An introduction to strategic history
- Colin S. Gray(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...14 The Cold War, I Politics and ideology Reader's guide : The legacy of World War II. The onset of the Cold War. The course of the conflict. Soviet and US performance. Soviet failures. Introduction: from war to peace – the consequences of World War II The Cold War has passed into history, but the nuclear bomb and the nuclear revolution are here to stay, prospectively for ever. Between them, the bomb and the political context of the Cold War nearly brought strategic history to an abrupt full stop. The human experience in its entirety might well have been concluded violently. How did this happen? And, more to the point, why? This chapter offers a fresh look at the Soviet–American Cold War of 1947–89, while the chapter that follows pays particular attention to its historically novel nuclear dimension. The events and non-events, but possible events, of the Cold War years comprise a contested history among scholars today (Westad, 2000; Herrman and Lebow, 2004). Almost everything about the Cold War is uncertain; at least, it is uncertain if one focuses on issues of motivation and causation. There is no solid consensus on why the Cold War began, who was most responsible for it, or why it concluded with barely a whimper with the loss of the will to power of the Soviet ruling elite in the late 1980s. Fortunately, the historical record provides some compensation for the deeper uncertainties. Even if one cannot be sure exactly why particular decisions were taken, one can secure an adequate grasp of who did what and when. Furthermore, one can proceed to ask and answer the strategist's question: so what? Deeds and their consequences are less mysterious than are motives. One of the themes of this text is the intimate connection between war and peace, and indeed between peace and war. Peace, at least some semblance thereof, follows war. Moreover, peace of a particular character is what a war is all about...
eBook - ePubSpheres of Influence in International Relations
History, Theory and Politics
- Susanna Hast(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 5 The Burden of the Cold War The historical memory of spheres of influence points strongly to the era which started after the Second World War and ended in early 1990s. When we think of spheres of influence we remember the divisions, the superpowers and their blocs, the ideological battle, and the Cuban Missile Crisis; and we remember how Russia lost its sphere of influence and the United States could freely pursue its universalist ambitions. The purpose of this chapter is not to tell the story of Cold War spheres of influence in its entirety or even comprehensively; it is to raise questions on Cold War spheres of influence by discussing them on the conceptual level. Examples from the Cold War have already been illustrated in the chapters on the English School, and the historical setting is clearly visible in the School’s work, but this chapter goes into the period in more detail. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: 1. To look at the conceptual insights of Keal, Kaufman and Vincent, as well as Bull, on the consolidation of spheres of influence with means such as interventions. Keal and Kaufman offer perspectives on the formality and legitimacy of influence, which help to problematise the current pejorative associations of the concept. 2. In order to reflect on actual Cold War practices, I present the Cuban Missile Crisis as an example of a collision of spheres of influence. Again Keal and Kaufman provide much of the material because of their theoretical focus, but as discourses of justification, speeches of Kennedy and Khrushchev are explored as well. In its simplicity, the Cold War understanding of a sphere of influence is that of a foreign policy aimed at controlling smaller states for the sake of position, prestige and the balance of power. It is influence for its own sake: any increase in the quality and quantity of influence is that much influence taken away from the rival power...
eBook - ePubReinterpreting the End of the Cold War
Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations
- Silvio Pons, Federico Romero, Silvio Pons, Federico Romero(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Often, in fact, that blindingly obvious conclusion generates the putative premise of the argument, and not the other way around. I have polemicized against this way of looking at the problem elsewhere and will only point out now that a simple, ‘epochal’ conception, all-encompassing as it tends to be, occasions serious problems of demarcation. What exactly is the Cold War and where did it take place? After a metaphorical while, it turns out to be everything and nothing: suburban life in Los Angeles (why not?), educational reform in rural Australia, and decisional intrigue in the Pentagon. For better or worse, my argument goes in the opposite direction, towards, in the spirit of a delimiting critique, ever greater specificity. The Cold War as a concept, for one thing, should be kept analytically distinct from origins and effects. As initially a peculiar projection of US power, it was never everything that happened between the United States and the USSR in the post-war period up to 1963 (or 1989); it was a dominant, an overdetermining structure whose effects cut synchronically across a range of other levels and terrains. Similarly, from a diachronic perspective, its effects do not all come to an end in 1963. Thus, for example, the US escalation in Vietnam in 1965 was a residual (and catastrophically misconceived) Cold War policy; the massive intervention on behalf of the forces of violent reaction in the Dominican Republic that same year was, by contrast, Great Power management of a line already drawn. My chapter begins with a summary of the first (taxonomic) moment in the evolution of my view of the Cold War, followed by a reconsideration of the second moment, wherein I trace anew the genealogy of the Cold War through the decisive succession of non-dialectical outlooks, strategies and policies that came to characterize the US ‘way of being’ towards the world during and after World War II...
eBook - ePub- Geir K. Almlid(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...The country’s global outreach and responsibilities had to be cut down. The UK’s inability to continue to support the anti-communist government in Greece forced the USA to take over this role in March 1947. 14 Britain also lost India in 1947, followed by independence for Ceylon and Burma. Nonetheless, the UK continued to have a global foreign-policy perspective. Bevin said in the House of Commons in 1947: “We regard ourselves as one of the Powers most vital to the peace of the world and we still have our historic part to play”. 15 But Britain had for decades been losing its relative power position in international politics, not least to the USA. The liberation of Norway in 1945 was more straightforward than in any other enemy-occupied territory in Europe—and Britain played a vital role. 16 The considerable German forces in the country, about 400,000 strong, surrendered on 8 May without firing a shot. Immediately after, a large part of Norway was occupied by British, American and Norwegian contingents under the command of a UK general. The allies’ principal tasks were the disarmament and evacuation of the German troops and repatriation of displaced persons of all nationalities. Moreover, they assisted in the apprehension, detention, trial and punishment of war criminals and the importing and delivery of food and other sorely needed supplies. Soviet troops had entered Norway in the north as early as October 1944 and were hailed as liberators there. 17 The Soviets withdrew at the end of the summer of 1945, the Americans in October and British troops were progressively evacuated towards the end of the year. The remaining British personnel then consisted of a small military naval and air mission. Strong UK influence on Norwegian defence continued in many areas in the subsequent years...
