The Cold War 1949-2016

Martin McCauley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351818186
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Covering the development of the Cold War from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, The Cold War 1949–2016 explores the struggle for world domination that took place between the United States and the Soviet Union following the Second World War. The conflict between these two superpowers shaped global history for decades, and this book examines how this conflict developed into a nuclear arms race, spurred much of the wider world towards war and eventually resulted in the collapse of the Soviet empire.

In this accessible yet comprehensive volume, Martin McCauley examines not only the actions of the United States and the Soviet Union but also the effects upon and involvement of other regions such as Africa, Central America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Key themes include the Sino-Soviet relationship and the global ambitions of the newly formed People's Republic of China, the rise and fall of communism in countries such as Cuba, Angola and Ethiopia, the US defeat in Vietnam, the gradual unravelling of the Soviet Union and the changing shape of the post–Cold War world.

Providing a wide-ranging overview of the main turning points of the conflict and illustrated throughout with photographs and maps, this is essential reading for all students of the Cold War and its lasting global impact.

1
Origins of the Cold War

A static power declines but a dynamic power expands. Is this statement a sophism, in other words false, or does it reveal the underlying causes of the monumental conflict which engulfed the Soviet Union and the US for over four decades after 1945? Both the US and Russia were revolutionary powers. They possessed universal visions of how to improve the lot of humankind. From a Marxist perspective, to be a static power meant that one’s state was in decline. The goal of communism required an expansionary policy and this would continue until the goal of a communist society had been achieved worldwide. Likewise, the US understood that its prosperity depended on what happened outside its borders. President Harry Truman put it very succinctly:

If communism is allowed to absorb the free nations then we would be isolated from our sources of supply and detached from our friends. Then we would have to take defense measures which might really bankrupt our economy, and change our way of life so that we couldn’t recognize it as American any longer.

(Leffler 1992: 13–14)

Was this just rhetoric to gain popular support for higher taxes to fund the Marshall Plan, extend military help to states facing a communist threat and promote business opportunities abroad, or was it a core belief of the Truman administration? The thrust of this book is that the Americans linked liberty, justice and freedom to a liberal market economy and the right of the individual to self-betterment. By the same token, a communist society was collectivist. The Soviet version had almost eliminated private property and private trade. The state dominated the economy. A small group of decision makers enjoyed the right to decide how the economy developed. In ideology, there was a ruling party and a ruling ideology. This party had a monopoly of political power. No dissenting voices were permitted. Where the American way was pluralistic and there were myriad economic decision makers, the Soviet way was to mobilise the population from the top down.

In 1945 no one could say for certain which revolutionary path, the Soviet or the American, would prove victorious. Europe was in ruins. Germany, its leading economy, was in total collapse. The same applied to Japan. Korea and South East Asia were economic cripples. There was a widespread feeling in Europe that old-style capitalism was finished. It had led the continent into a disastrous, fratricidal war. The new order would have to attend to the people’s demands for economic and social change. President Truman was warned in 1945 that if actions were not taken to alleviate the suffering in Europe, the whole region could fall to communism. Desperate people were willing to adopt desperate solutions. However, it was only in 1947 that large-scale economic programmes, such as the Marshall Plan, got under way. Likewise, in Japan, in 1947, the US switched from nurturing reform of political and economic institutions to reviving the Japanese economy. This was based on securing raw materials (Japan is a resource-poor country) in East and South East Asia and markets in the US. Hence, we can say that in 1947 key economic decisions were taken which conditioned political and military policy decisions. In order for the market economy to develop, stability and security were essential. The task of the politicians and military was to provide this. The Americans perceived that political and military actions would be ineffective without rising living standards. Marx and his latter-day apostle Lenin had recognised this decades before. What became known later as consumerism would decide the titanic battle between the two revolutionary models. It was only in the 1970s that the Americans could feel that they had won the contest economically.

The opening of the archives in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China has resulted in a flood of publications. Has recent scholarship solved problems such as who was responsible for the Cold War; why it broke out; whether it was an accident or entirely predictable; whether it could have ended in the 1950s or the 1960s had the opportunities been grasped, given the massive arsenals on both sides; why a nuclear war did not break out; and why it ended as it did? Did the military confrontation between the superpowers destroy the Soviet Union or was its collapse due to other factors? The answer is that the more there is published, the more opaque the problems become. Monocausal answers are no longer acceptable. What is clear is that the conflict was immensely complex and worldwide. Asia came into the equation in the 1950s, Africa in the 1960s, and Latin America was embroiled in the same decade with Castro’s revolution in Cuba.

Euphoria consumed the Soviet Union in 1945 as it had won a titanic struggle with Germany which few observers in 1941 had thought possible; the Soviet Union was now the most powerful country in Europe. Stalin held to the old concept that the more territory one controlled the more secure one was. The Red Army had fought its way through Eastern Europe to Berlin, and there was a Soviet zone of Germany and a Soviet sector in Berlin. The Soviet Union had no intention of retreating from these territories. Churchill thought of launching an attack on the Soviet Union on 1 July 1945, in alliance with the German Wehrmacht, to force it back to its own frontiers. It was labelled Operation Unthinkable, and it proved to be unthinkable as President Truman would have none of it. Stalin could feel secure in what was soon labelled his Soviet Empire because he believed President Roosevelt had recognised Eastern Europe as a Soviet sphere of influence. The Soviet vozhd sought two objectives in his dealings with the Allies: to be recognised as an equal and for Soviet security needs to be met. Access to the Soviet zone of Germany ran through Poland so the government there had to be well disposed towards Moscow. Roosevelt thought Eastern Europeans would have to learn to live with the new reality.

Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945 at a critical juncture in relations between Moscow and the Allies. A post-war settlement had to be agreed upon which satisfied all the victors. Roosevelt might have pulled off this difficult balancing act but his successors could not. First of all, President Truman, a newcomer to foreign affairs, did not regard Stalin as an equal and did not regard Eastern Europe as war booty for the Soviet Union. On these two vital questions he was poles apart from Roosevelt.

There are many theories about the reasons for the Cold War (Halliday 1983: 24–28):

• The Soviet threat. All the conflicts and crises originated with the Soviet Union and were caused by Soviet expansionism. This in turn was part and parcel of Marxist-Leninist ideology which envisaged the world victory of socialism over capitalism. Hence, one state is blamed for all the problems that arise in international relations.
• American imperialism. This is the mirror image of the previous view, with Washington the root of all evil, emanating from predatory, expansionist capitalism. Again responsibility is ascribed to the actions of one state with the other trying to avoid armed conflict. Capitalism is viewed as requiring confrontation and military production to survive.
• The superpowers theory. Developed by the Chinese in the 1960s to demonstrate that Moscow had departed from the true Marxist-Leninist path, this view regards the superpowers as colluding and competing in an attempt to rule the world. This underlines the break between Beijing and Moscow and reveals Chinese insecurity. In the 1970s there is rapprochement with the US, which in turn alarms Russia.
• The theory of the arms race. The build-up of nuclear weapons had reached proportions where it appeared to be out of control. Both East and West were responsible. Hence, the stopping and reversing of the arms race was of paramount importance. This theory was especially popular among those in the peace movement.
• North-South theory. Proponents of this view perceive the main conflict in the world as that between North and South, between rich and poor nations and between dominant and dominated states. The contest for the leading position in the Third World is the motive behind all conflict.
• West-West theory. World politics is dominated by conflicts among rich capitalist states. The Russian-American conflict is a smoke screen for the real conflict: that between the US, Japan and the European Union. The origins of Cold War II are to be found in the increasingly sharp conflicts among rich capitalist states. These, in turn, promote and exacerbate conflicts within the Third World.
• Intrastate theory. The domestic policies of states determine their foreign policy. Changes in foreign policy are related to movements in internal power relations, new economic weaknesses and alterations in social composition. Politicians use international events to resolve internal tensions and overcome domestic competitors.
• Class conflict. This is based on the Marxist analysis of class conflict as the motor of change. Tension is the product of the ebb and flow of social revolution. The conflict between capitalism and communism is expressed in tensions between the superpowers. The revolutionary movement in the Third World inevitably sucks in the superpowers.

There are three main explanations for the origins of the Cold War:

1. The orthodox or traditional
2. The revisionist
3. The post-revisionist.

The orthodox or traditional

The expression ‘Cold War’ first appeared in 1946 and became common currency in 1947, and from 1950 was taken over by both sides of the Iron Curtain and used worldwide. The term originated with Herbert B. Swope who joined Bernard M. Baruch in the US delegation to the UN atomic energy commission in 1946 (he borrowed it from George Orwell). The objective of the commission was to prevent the spread of atomic weapons. During the negotiations Swope concluded that East and West were already in a Cold War and the danger was that it could become a nuclear war.

On 9 August 1945, after the second atomic bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, President Truman warned of the danger of a Third World War and it would be a nuclear war.

Truman was unaware that Stalin knew of the Manhattan Project, hence Stalin was not surprised when the US president informed him at the Potsdam Conference of the successful test explosion. His spies were providing vital intelligence about nuclear research. On 20 August 1945, eleven days after Nagasaki, Stalin signed a decree appointing Lavrenty Beria, his feared secret police (NKVD) chief, as head of the nuclear programme.

Map 1.1 The Soviet Union in Eastern Europe

In the US, the first plan for a nuclear war was drafted in December 1945, and Operation Totality envisaged that a Soviet conventional attack would lead to thirty atomic bombs being dropped on Soviet cities. This would provide enough time for the US to mobilise its conventional forces. Several more plans to counter a Soviet conventional attack were drafted between 1946 and 1948. By 1947, the US had thirteen atomic bombs, but this rose to 700 in 1949, and the Strategic Air Command was formed in March 1946.

In the Soviet Union, most resources went into atomic bomb research and the air force. As in the US, air power was regarded as primary in a future conflict. In 1947, a biological weapons facility was set up at Zagorsk, near Moscow, and the State Committee on Defence established a nuclear weapons department, headed by the brilliant physicist Igor Kurchatov. The first atomic explosion occurred in August 1949 (almost a carbon copy of Fat Boy dropped on Nagasaki) with twenty-two kilotonnes of explosives, near Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan.

Truman thought he had two aces up his sleeve: the atomic bomb and credits to rebuild the shattered Soviet economy. These could be deployed to force concessions and allow American policy to prevail. Even before the war was over Moscow had asked for credits, and the point was made that this would provide markets for post-war US industry. The Soviet view was that peace would be accompanied by an economic crisis as millions of servicemen and women would have to be found jobs. Capitalism would spawn conflict as countries fought for markets, and the task for the Soviet Union was not to become enmeshed in these wars but to benefit from the fallout.

Soviet ideology was accorded great significance in Western analyses of Soviet aims. Marxism-Leninism envisaged the whole world becoming communist. Hence it was aggressive and eager to expand, and this was regarded as the main reason for the Cold War. Stalin’s speech of 9 February 1946 blamed the capitalist powers for the war – an orthodox Marxist analysis – and warned the Soviet people that the way ahead would be hard. He talked of three five-year plans (fifteen years) to restore Soviet economic and military power, but the speech was misread by some as hostile. In reality, Stalin was saying that every sacrifice had to be made to rebuild the country. The inability of Western negotiators to achieve their aims led to frustration, and this fuelled the belief that Moscow was to blame. Some intellectual respectability was provided by George F. Kennan in his ‘Long Telegram’ of 22 February 1946, followed by his ‘Mr X’ article in Foreign Affairs, in July. The Soviet response soon appeared and Nikolai Novikov, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, sent a 4,000-word report to Stalin concluding that ‘American monopoly capitalism’ was aiming at world domination.

Winston Churchill weighed in with his Iron Curtain speech of 5 March 1946. President Truman was in the audience in Fulton, Missouri, and had seen some drafts of the speech. However, it did not resonate with the American public at the time but the old warrior, out of office, knew how to shock his listeners.

The concept of containment and then rollback emerged, but because nuclear war was unthinkable, the only weapons which could be used were words. In the propaganda war, the Soviets proved themselves past masters of the art but the Americans did have an ace: jazz. It was a winner everywhere, and the Soviet Army even had a jazz band. Not surprisingly, Louis Armstrong took France by storm.

Another indication of the coming Cold War was the exchanges in the UN Security Council on the Iran Crisis of early 1946. The Soviets had to leave Iran by 2 March 1946 but had promoted the appearance of Azeri and Kurdish autonomous republics in the north west of Iran, and they also wanted a large oil concession in 1946. Exchanges were relatively polite but the divisions between the Soviet Union and the US and UK became evident. France and China, the other permanent members of the Security Council, tended towards neutrality. The autonomous republics were crushed by the Iranian army, and this episode drove Iran into the American camp. A similar scenario was played out in Turkey, where Moscow demanded territorial concessions and, as a result, Turkey turned to the US for support. An attempt by the Soviet Union to acquire a foothold in Libya was rebuffed by the West.

The capital of the Kurdish autonomous republic was Mahabad; Qazi Mohammad was president and its military commander was Mullah Mustafa Barzani, whose son, Masoud Barzani, was born in Mahabad, in August 1946. He is now the president of Iraqi Kurdistan. Mustafa Barzani and others fled north, across the Araks river, into the Soviet Union, where they remained until 1958. Barzani thanked Khrushchev for the assistance they had received. While in the Soviet Union, Kurdish language newspapers appeared in Erevan, Tbilisi, Moscow and Leningrad and radio broadcasts began in Erevan. Messages of ‘Leninist internationalism’ and ‘equality of peoples’ found considerable resonance in Kurdish communities, especially in Turkey.

Had the UK not intervened in Greece after the war the communists almost certainly would have come to power by military means. The economic weakness of the UK led to appeals to Washington to intervene and stem the communist tide, and the Truman Doctrine was the response. Any country threatened by communism would receive American aid. The Soviets were seen as helping the Greek communists but, in reality, it was the Yugoslavs who were extending aid. Stalin opposed this policy. Truman had to use apocalyptic language to get his message across: if Greece and then Turkey went communist, the world would soon be going red. The same rhetoric was applied to Western Europe which was running out of US dollars to pay for vital imports. The European Recovery Programme, or Marshall Plan, had to be couched in language which would exclude the Soviet Union, and Moscow ensured that no satellite country joined. As the Soviets had opted out of the Bretton Woods agreement (1944), which had established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, they cut themselves off from Western loans. To compensate they took enormous amounts of war reparations from their German zone and the other countries under their control.

The communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 – masterminded by a Soviet official, Valerian Zorin – appeared to confirm the belief that the Soviet Union was an expansionary, aggressive power.

Stalin regarded Germany as the acid test of Allied cooperation. He assumed that it would go communist in the long term so there was no need to force events in the short term. His main objective was not ideology but security as the vozhd feared a resurgent Germany might seek revenge for its defeat in 1945. The first objective, therefore, was to ensure that the country was not remilitarised, and second, for the country to remain neutral. Western frustration at the lack of progress in agreeing to a pan-German government led to the decision to issue a new currency, the Deutsche Mark, in the western zones and in the western sectors of Berlin. Restrictions on Western access to Berlin began in March 1948 and a full blockade was proclaimed in June 1948. The Soviet commandant informed Stalin that Berlin could not be provisioned from the air; preliminary US and British analyses agreed with this, but President Truman refused to accept it, and the airlift began. At first, it brought in goods for the garrisons and then for the West Berlin public. It transformed his political fortunes and portrayed him as a strong leader capable of standing up to Stalin. Without it he would probably have failed to be re-elected. The airlift turned the Amis (as the Berliners called the Americans) and the British into heroes. By the time the blockade was lifted in May 1949 the decision had been taken to set up a separate West German state and a military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Without the blockade the latter might not have come into being as many Americans opposed such a military commitment to Europe.

So why did Stalin allow the blockade to last so long? The longer it lasted the greater the damage caused to the Soviet position in Europe and internationally. First, he did not think the city could survive, and he also had the Tito affair to deal with. The Yugoslav leader wanted to proceed rapidly to a socialist economy; Stalin regarded this as inopportune but the main point was that Tito was promoting a Balkan confederation. He declared himself a loyal follower of Stalin but this availed him nothing, and he was expelled from the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in June 1948. A witch hunt for alleged Tito-ists in Eastern Europe began and show trials were held.

In the Soviet Union there was the Leningrad affair. Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s deputy for party affairs and head of the Central Co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of maps
• Foreword
• 1 Origins of the Cold War
• 2 Cold War: 1949–53
• 3 To the brink and back: 1953–62
• 4 The US and the Soviet Union in the Third World
• 5 The Sino-Soviet schism
• 6 Cuba, Vietnam and Indonesia
• 7 The war of cultures
• 8 The Prague Spring
• 9 Détente: 1969–79
• 10 The Islamic challenge: Iran and Afghanistan
• 11 Cambodia-Kampuchea
• 12 Post-détente: 1979–85
• 13 Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War
• 14 The judgement
• 15 The post–Cold War world
• Further reading
• References
• Index