The Cold War

A Post-Cold War History

Ralph B. Levering

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118848449
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Now available in a fully revised and updated third edition, The Cold War: A Post-Cold War History offers an authoritative and accessible introduction to the history and enduring legacy of the Cold War.

• Thoroughly updated in light of new scholarship, including revised sections on President Nixon's policies in Vietnam and President Reagan's approach to U.S.-Soviet relations
• Features six all new "counterparts" sections that juxtapose important historical figures to illustrate the contrasting viewpoints that characterized the Cold War
• Argues that the success of Western capitalism during the Cold War laid the groundwork for the economic globalization and political democratization that have defined the 21st century
• Includes extended coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most dangerous confrontation of the nuclear age thus far

1
Downward Spiral during the Truman–Stalin Years, 1945–1953

Beginning with post-Yalta acrimony over the fate of Eastern Europe in March and April 1945, Soviet relations with America and Britain deteriorated gradually and fitfully during 1945, and then more sharply and steadily after the turn of the year. Occasionally productive negotiations between the two sides continued in the Council of Foreign Ministers from the fall of 1945 until early 1947, when mutual distrust undermined any effort at compromise. For the next five years, the Cold War—as the Soviet–American rivalry soon became known—dominated international politics amid fears that it would erupt into a “hot war.”

Especially in 1945, President Harry Truman (who took office when Roosevelt died on April 12), Secretary of State James Byrnes, and other US officials wanted to work with Soviet leaders to build a peaceful, cooperative postwar world order. Indeed, Truman and Byrnes negotiated diligently for more than two weeks at the final wartime summit conference in Potsdam, Germany, in July–August 1945, and Byrnes held many meetings with top Soviet officials during the rest of 1945 and 1946 in order to try to work out a mutually acceptable, durable peace. But, as Soviet documents released since 1990 have made clear, the ever suspicious, self-centered Joseph Stalin blocked his foreign minister’s efforts to reach agreement on the disarmament of Germany and other issues. “Stalin … couldn’t accept that his allies meant what they said about postwar goodwill,” historian Robert Dallek noted in 2010. “He could not imagine a world without conflict … The [postwar] era would not be a time for continued collaboration with the West but a new struggle between capitalism and communism, which Stalin was preparing to meet by seizing all the advantages he could.”¹ It is now evident that, because of Stalin’s rigid ways of thinking and acting, western efforts to resolve key issues through negotiations were basically futile.

A modest Midwesterner with no more than a high-school education and no political ambitions beyond being a US senator, President Truman lacked FDR’s self-confidence, public-speaking skills, and knowledge of and experience in foreign relations. Truman’s intemperate comments about other people, both in private meetings and in letters, appear to reflect deep-seated insecurities. He often referred to critics as “prima donnas,” for example, and commented that the Russian negotiators at the Potsdam Conference were “pig-headed.” But he largely made up for his shortcomings by choosing capable, far-sighted associates—notably Secretaries of State James Byrnes (1945–1947), George Marshall (1947–1949), and Dean Acheson (1949–1953)—and then by following their advice on specific issues. One of many praiseworthy lower-ranking officials during these years was George Kennan, a brilliant analyst of the Soviet government and its foreign policies.

Issues in the Emerging Cold War

Of the major issues in dispute, none was more bitter than that of Eastern Europe, which Stalin believed had been settled in his favor in negotiations before and during the Yalta Conference. Perhaps partly to compensate for the insecurity he felt upon assuming office, Truman strongly criticized Soviet actions in Poland in a meeting with Foreign Minister Molotov on April 23. But then, realizing that Stalin intended to dominate postwar Poland no matter what western leaders thought, Truman quietly recognized the Russian-dominated Polish government in June. A believer in Woodrow Wilson’s ideal of national self-determination, Truman tried numerous tactics, including a proposal for the internationalization of the Danube River and hard bargaining over peace treaties for Rumania and Bulgaria that was intended to weaken Russian influence in the region. These efforts had little if any effect.

In the early postwar period Stalin did not insist on completely subservient governments in all of the Eastern European nations; Hungary was relatively independent internally until 1947, and Czechoslovakia until 1948. But, because he viewed Eastern Europe as vital to Russia’s security, the Soviet leader was determined to prevent any nation in the region from developing close economic or military ties with the West. By the late 1940s, handpicked leaders were installed by means of political purges and show trials of dissidents, until most of Eastern Europe, including all six countries that would join the Soviet Union to form the Warsaw Pact, were fully subservient to Stalin.

Besides Eastern Europe, another frequently acrimonious issue involved policy toward defeated Germany. This was actually an even more important issue in the Cold War than the fate of Eastern Europe, historian Steven Casey commented in 2014, because “German power was the key to Europe.”² During the war, official US thinking on this issue had been confused and contradictory, wavering between a desire to impose a harsh peace that would end once and for all the threat of German militarism and a desire to rehabilitate Germany as the cornerstone of future European prosperity. Russia, having suffered the most at the hands of Germany, was determined to keep it as weak as possible, partly by forcing it to pay substantial reparations in order to help rebuild Soviet industry. The Soviet leaders’ deep fears of a possible German revival contributed to their determination to maintain a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

At Yalta Stalin got Roosevelt to agree, as a basis for negotiations, that Germany would have to pay $20 billion in reparations, half of it to Russia. At the Potsdam Conference (Truman and Clement Atlee now leading the US and British delegations, respectively), Stalin pressed his demand for $10 billion in reparations, to be collected primarily in Germany’s industrialized western zones. But Truman and Byrnes, convinced of the need to rebuild German industry and fearful that US aid dollars in effect would be used to pay for reparations from the western occupation zones, refused to agree to a dollar figure on reparations for Russia and suggested that the Soviets remove whatever equipment they could locate from their own zone in the east. Russian leaders complained that their western counterparts had repudiated the spirit of Yalta and had shown insensitivity to Russia’s legitimate needs for recovery. The failure at Potsdam to develop a common policy on Germany contributed to the gradual evolution of two Germanys, one allied with the West and one with the Soviet state.

A third issue that produced tensions, especially in 1946 and 1947, related to three nations in southeastern Europe and western Asia: Greece, Turkey, and Iran. This was a region of traditional British–Russian rivalry and America was becoming increasingly involved, as it assumed the role of the economically weakened Britain. Due to their internal instability, their increasing importance as sources of oil, and their proximity to important trade routes in the Middle East, these countries offered an inviting target for machinations among the great powers. Russia had long wanted a guaranteed outlet through the Dardanelles strait to the Mediterranean, and national minorities in the mountainous regions in eastern Turkey and northern Iran were susceptible to Soviet influence. Moreover, Stalin did not see why the West should claim exclusive rights to Iran’s huge oil reserves. Finally, despite Stalin’s acceptance of Britain’s dominant position in Greece, the right-wing Greek government was engaged in a bitter guerrilla war against communist-led opponents supplied by Yugoslavia and other communist nations to the north.

In the view of some western leftists, Stalin callously abandoned the Greek rebels in exchange for British concessions in Eastern Europe. While Greece was in fact an example of Stalin’s emphasis on pursuing Russia’s self-interest rather than always supporting communist-led revolutionary movements abroad, the rebels were still able to mount a strong campaign against the British-backed government.

The first public Cold War crisis occurred in March 1946, in relation to Iran. When the Iranian government refused to grant Russia an oil concession equal to that given to Britain, the Soviets supported a revolt in northern Iran, and, contrary to a previous Big Three agreement, refused to withdraw their troops on March 2. (Britain and Russia had jointly occupied Iran during the war in order to ensure that the oil-rich nation did not fall into German hands.)

Byrnes, whom Truman privately and others publicly had labeled as “soft” on Russia, now moved forcefully to demonstrate his resolve. On March 5 he sent a message to Moscow demanding the removal of Soviet troops from Iran, informed the press of his strong stand even before receiving a reply, and encouraged Iran to take the issue to the UN Security Council. After hearing of alleged Russian troop movements, Byrnes angrily told an associate: “Now we’ll give it to them with both barrels.”

Even though the Soviets declared in late March that their army was leaving Iran, Byrnes refused to remove the issue from the agenda of the UN Security Council. A week later, Russia and Iran announced an agreement on Soviet troop withdrawal, coupled with oil concessions for Russia. After the Russian troops were withdrawn, Iran, with US support, reneged on the oil agreement and settled back into the western sphere of influence.

Fourth, economic issues other than those relating specifically to Germany and Iran separated Russia and the West. Needing to rebuild their economy and at the same time arguing that they could help prevent unemployment in the United States after the war, in January 1945 the Soviets requested a $6 billion loan at low interest. The request stirred debate within the administration, but Russia received no answer at either Yalta or Potsdam. In August the Soviets requested a $1 billion loan from the Export–Import Bank, but the State Department stalled on the issue, finally telling the Russians in February 1946 that the loan request was “one of a number of outstanding economic questions” between the two nations. By then relations had cooled so markedly that the administration almost certainly could not have obtained congressional approval for a loan even if it had asked for one. Russia, for its part, chose not to join the two US-dominated organizations designed to ensure postwar prosperity, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Stalin thus had decided that there would not be one cooperative world economy, as western leaders had hoped, but rather two competing ones.

A fifth issue that harmed US–Soviet relations was social instability and the related rise of the political left throughout Europe in the early postwar years. The devastation caused by the war, combined with the leading role of communist and socialist parties in opposing right-wing dictators like Hitler and Spain’s Francisco Franco, led to the growing influence of left-wing parties in much of Western and Southern Europe. Russia was not responsible for the social instability and contributed only modestly to the rise of the left, but US leaders feared that the Soviets might benefit from these trends and that such key western countries as France and Italy might end up with governments dominated by communists with close ties to Moscow.

Another important issue was US–Soviet rivalry in East Asia, especially in regard to Japan and China. At Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill had acceded to Stalin’s demands for territorial concessions from Japan—notably the Kurile Islands and the southern half of Sakhalin Island—but Russia never achieved an effective voice in the occupation of Japan. “I was determined that the Japanese occupation would not follow in the footsteps of our German experience,” Truman recalled. “I did not want divided control or separate zones.” Soviet leaders negotiated vigorously in the early postwar period to try to increase their influence on Japan’s reconstruction, but to no avail. Although American unilateralism in postwar Japan angered Stalin, there was little he could do about it short of starting a war.

Under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur, America dominated Japan, transforming the former enemy into a close and increasingly prosperous ally. Over Soviet objections, the United States and fifty other nations signed a peace treaty with Japan in September 1951; and in a separate security treaty the United States ensured that its armed forces and weapons could continue to be deployed there. As Edwin O. Reischauer, an eminent scholar of Japanese history, noted in 1950: “Our position there is not very different from that of Russia in the smaller countries of Eastern Europe, however dissimilar our motives may be.”

US policy was not as successful in China, and this is to put it mildly. Truman and most other US officials wanted China to continue to be America’s ally, but they recognized that Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government was corrupt and might not be able to win the long-standing Civil War with the communists, led by Mao Zedong. Partly for its own reasons and partly because of pressure from Republicans, the Truman administration briefly sent fifty thousand US troops to North China in 1945 to assist Chiang’s forces in keeping Japanese-held land from being occupied by the Chinese communists, and continued to send substantial military and economic aid to Chiang’s government through 1948. At the same time, especially during General George Marshall’s mission to China in 1946, US leaders urged Chiang to negotiate a compromise settlement with Mao. Sporadic negotiations between the two sides failed, and by 1948 the communists clearly were winning the civil war.

Frustrated by America’s “failure” in China, conservative critics blamed Roosevelt for “selling out” Chi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Uneasy Allies, 1941–1945
• 1 Downward Spiral during the Truman–Stalin Years, 1945–1953
• 2 The Institutionalized Cold War, 1953–1962
• 3 The Shift toward Relative Détente, 1963–1972
• 4 The Roller-Coaster Years, 1973–1984
• Epilogue: The Cold War Ends, 1985–1991
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index
• Photo Essay: The Cold War at Midpassage, 1957–1973
• End User License Agreement