Cold War

12 Key excerpts on "Cold War"

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  America in the World

  The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941

  • Frank Costigliola, Michael J. Hogan(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  105 The Cold War came to an abrupt and rather surprising end in 1991, at least considering what might have been. In the twenty years henceforth, the historiography of the conflict has grown immensely, shedding new light on all aspects of the Cold War. The opening of former communist bloc archives, those of other nations that were inescapably drawn into the superpower struggle, and the continued wealth of access to American and Western European sources have made this growth possible. In addi- tion, the “cultural turn” in historical studies of the last two decades has broadened the array of topics that historians consider under Cold War history. This essay highlights some of the trends and work on the his- tory of the Cold War since roughly 1995 with primary emphasis on rela- tions between the war’s two main antagonists – the United States and the Soviet Union. Though necessarily not inclusive of all of the works on the Cold War, it strives to provide an overview that will aid future research. Origins of the Cold War: 1945–1953 The first phase of Cold War historiography was characterized by heated debate between “orthodox” historians, 1 who laid blame for the Cold War almost entirely at the feet of Stalin and the Soviet Union, and “revisionist” historians, 2 who contended that the Cold War was largely the responsibil- ity of the United States. The result was one of the most contentious histo- riographical clashes in U.S. history. 3 Over the ensuing decades historians put forth innumerable works and various interpretations – among them postrevisionism, 4 national security, 5 corporatism, 6 and world-systems analysis 7 – in an effort to move beyond the orthodox-revisionist divide 6 The Cold War Curt Cardwell Curt Cardwell 106 concerning the origins of the Cold War. However, despite the increased knowledge of the Cold War that this scholarship produced, no satis- factory overarching synthesis ever emerged.

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  War, 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. It is easy to forget this fundamental fact amid the stress, excitement and difficulties of waging war. The Cold War was a consequence of the changes in context produced by World War II. It is vital to recognize the complex authority of context. It is not quite everything, because individuals matter. But the Stalins, Kennedys and Gorbachevs must exercise their judgement, their somewhat free will, in political, socio-cultural, economic, technological, military–strategic, geographical and historical contexts for which they are largely not responsible.

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  Return to Cold War

  • Robert Legvold(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  Like any large, complex phenomenon, there are multiple ways to understand the Cold War. Two, however, help better than others to unscramble the tangle of interpretations vying to explain the new Cold War. The first is the venerable and widely accepted conviction that the Cold War was a battle between political and economic systems, underpinned by fundamentally different values, goals, and ontologies. Within this argument the principal contention was over the latter, over the ideological element, and whether it played a primary or secondary causal role. Less conspicuously, a second area of disagreement eventually emerged related to the primary sphere within which the inter-systemic rivalry took place. Scholars looking back over the whole of the Cold War charged that mainstream analysts, particularly international relations theorists, had gotten it wrong by stamping it Euro-centric – that is, as a strategic contest between the United States and the Soviet Union over the fate of the international system’s European fulcrum – when, in fact, the Cold War’s active theater was the Third World (Westad, 2007).

  If the Cold War, as Fred Halliday (1999) argued, was as much a socio-economic contest for the hearts and minds of much of the globe as an ideological and geopolitical test of wills, then the fluid environment where it raged and, indeed, the point from which it ricocheted back into the anxiety-ridden consciousness of US and Soviet leaders was the vast expanses of a roiling postcolonial world. Halliday, to put a fine point on it, suggested that US “national security doctrines – from Truman to Reagan – were less about responding to Soviet geopolitical maneuvering and more concerned with responding to the geopolitical consequences of localized revolutionary crises” (Saull, 2011).

  That was inside the argument. Outside of it, the opposing school insisted that the clash of political and economic systems mattered less than a simple, classical slugfest over power. The clash was merely the tissue covering the real muscle controlling events. Beginning with this elemental argument, all of these contested byways echo today. Thus, some argue that the trouble traces back to the wildly different assumptions motivating the two sides. From the Western perspective, everything begins with the red in tooth and claw determination of Russian leaders to reverse the loss of place and power following the collapse of the Soviet Union. From a Russian perspective, the root cause is in the (unexplained) determination of US leaders to diminish Russia and put it in a box. It is a simple struggle for power, and these are its terms.

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  Comprehensive Book on Cold War, A

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Learning Press

    (Publisher)

  ______________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ______________________________ Chapter- 4 Cold War (1953–1962) 1962 World map of alignments: NATO member states Other allies of the USA Colonized countries Warsaw Pact member states Other allies of the USSR Non-aligned nations The Cold War (1953–1962) discusses the period within the Cold War from the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953 to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Following the death of Stalin unrest occurred in the Eastern Bloc, while there was a calming of international tensions, the evidence of which can be seen in the signing of the Austrian State Treaty reuniting Austria, and the Geneva Accords ending fighting in Indochina. However, this thaw was only partial with an expensive arms race continuing during the period. ______________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ______________________________ Eisenhower and Khrushchev When Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in as U.S. President in 1953, the Democrats lost their two-decades-long control of the U.S. presidency. Under Eisenhower, however, the United States' Cold War policy remained essentially unchanged. Whilst a thorough rethinking of foreign policy was launched (known as Operation Solarium), the majority of emerging ideas (such as a rollback of Communism and the liberation of Eastern Europe) were quickly regarded as unworkable. An underlying focus on the containment of Soviet communism remained to inform the broad approach of U.S. foreign policy. An important strand in American politics of this period was McCarthyism. Named after Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, this was a period of intense anti-communism which lasted from 1948 to about 1956. The government of the United States prosecuted the leadership of the Communist Party USA as well as other individuals suspected of being communists. McCarthy's career faltered in 1954 as his hearings were televised for the first time, allowing the public and press to view his tactics.

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  Handbook of Cold War and Proxy Warfare

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • College Publishing House

    (Publisher)

  ______________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ______________________________ Chapter 4 Cold War (1953–1962) 1962 World map of alignments: NATO member states Other allies of the USA Colonized countries Warsaw Pact member states Other allies of the USSR Non-aligned nations The Cold War (1953–1962) discusses the period within the Cold War from the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953 to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Following the death of Stalin unrest occurred in the Eastern Bloc, while there was a calming of international tensions, the evidence of which can be seen in the signing of the Austrian State Treaty reuniting Austria, and the Geneva Accords ending fighting in Indochina. However, this thaw was only partial with an expensive arms race continuing during the period. Eisenhower and Khrushchev When Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in as U.S. President in 1953, the Democrats lost their two-decades-long control of the U.S. presidency. Under Eisenhower, however, the United States' Cold War policy remained essentially unchanged. Whilst a thorough rethinking of foreign policy was launched (known as Operation Solarium), the majority of emerging ideas (such as a ______________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ______________________________ rollback of Communism and the liberation of Eastern Europe) were quickly regarded as unworkable. An underlying focus on the containment of Soviet communism remained to inform the broad approach of U.S. foreign policy. An important strand in American politics of this period was McCarthyism. Named after Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, this was a period of intense anti-communism which lasted from 1948 to about 1956. The government of the United States prosecuted the leadership of the Communist Party USA as well as other individuals suspected of being communists. McCarthy's career faltered in 1954 as his hearings were televised for the first time, allowing the public and press to view his tactics.

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  The End of the Cold War and the Causes of Soviet Collapse

  • N. Bisley(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  While the confrontation – socio-economic, geopolitical and ideologi- cal conflict – of this time was pre-eminently visible in domestic terms, it also had clear international aspects. The confrontation during this period was pre-dominantly between the USSR and the European powers, particularly Britain in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s. That said, Soviet–American relations are illustrative of the underlying acrimony and ideological competition which in time underpinned the Cold War. For example, the reason why the United States did not recognise the Soviet government until 1933 was due, not only to the Soviet repudia- tion of debt and confiscation of property, but also due to the Soviet government’s failure to adhere to the norms of the international system, particularly the non-interference norm, and most specifically its overt revolutionary aims and practices. 25 The language of US State Department officials prior to the recognition was clear: ‘the fundamen- tal obstacle in the way of the establishment with Russia of the relations usual between nations in diplomatic intercourse is the world revolu- tionary aims and practices of the rulers of that country’. 26 William C. Bullitt, the US ambassador to Moscow, writing to the Secretary of State in July 1935 makes clear the sense of international The Cold War and the Soviet State 11 confrontation: ‘it is my conviction that there has been no decrease in the determination of the Soviet government to produce world revolu- tion’. 27 For Bullitt the peaceful international political posture of the 1930s was merely a tactical respite, as he puts it ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’. 28 The following year, he wrote to the Secretary of State regarding the broad direction of US policy towards the Soviet Union.

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  America in the World

  A History in Documents since 1898, Revised and Updated

  • Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Andrew Preston, Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Andrew Preston, Mark Lawrence, Jeffrey A. Engel, Andrew Preston(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  7 The Beginning of the Cold War The Soviet-American alliance against Nazi Germany fractured within a few months after the end of the Second World War, and the two superpowers settled into a bitter rivalry that American newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann dubbed a “Cold War.” This deterioration resulted from numerous sources of disagreement, some of them rooted long before 1945. The two nations had regarded each other warily ever since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had brought communists to power in Russia and established a national ideology opposed to the American creed of free enterprise and democracy. The outbreak of global war in 1941 thrust Washington and Moscow together as partners against fascism, yet old resentments festered. The Cold War resulted not just from past disagreements, however, but also from conflicting visions of the future. U.S. and Soviet leaders advanced contrasting ideas about how to remake the world once the fighting came to an end. For Joseph Sta- lin, ensuring the physical security of the Soviet Union was paramount. He aimed to destroy German power, assert control over eastern Europe, and extend Soviet influence toward the Mediterranean, oil-rich Southwest Asia, and the Far East. This desire for territorial domination, rooted in a profound sense of insecurity honed by repeated invasions of the Soviet Union, contrasted sharply with U.S. plans for the postwar order. Convinced that global catastrophe—first the Great Depres- sion and then the Second World War—had resulted from nations pursuing nar- row economic and territorial advantages, U.S. leaders hoped to establish an open world order based on free trade, self-determination, and international cooperation. Like Woodrow Wilson in an earlier day, U.S. officials believed that the universal application of such principles would serve the interests not only of the United States but also of the whole international community.

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  A World Safe for Commerce

  American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China

  • Dale C. Copeland(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  By securing a strong economic and political Second World War and Cold War 243 position on the periphery, the United States would be able to direct the post- war recovery of most of the globe and keep the Soviets from drawing large parts of it to its side. If the Soviets decided to work with Washington and keep order within their own smaller sphere, great. But if not, then the United States would have the power base needed to deal with anything that arose in the future, and with the problems on the ground in the present. I will be talking about the causes of the Cold War and the way it played out over forty-five years for the next three chapters. Before I proceed, therefore, I need to briefly address what might seem to be a self-evident truth: that eco- nomic interdependence could have had little to do with either the Cold War’s origins or with the crises and tensions that pockmarked its history until the late 1980s. After all, U.S.-Soviet trade from late 1945 onward remained at very low levels given what seemed to be strong geopolitical reasons for not trading, particularly American fears that trade would promote Soviet relative economic growth within the new more zero-sum, bipolar world Washington now faced. It would thus seem that economic interdependence drops out as a causal vari- able that might explain both the start of the Cold War and its dynamics over some four decades. Indeed, both realists and liberals usually completely ignore the economic aspects of the U.S.-Soviet relationship from 1945 to the 1980s, presuming that low or almost nonexistent trade could not possibly have had much of a role in the Cold War struggle.

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  Consumed by War

  European Conflict in the 20th Century

  • Richard C. Hall(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 12 ORIGINS OF THE Cold War The origins of the settlement of the Second World War began during the actual fighting. This settlement is inseparable from the beginning of the Cold War, the third phase of the twentieth-century European conflict. The Cold War began as the Second World War concluded and prevented a formal resolution of that war for some time. German war aims were fairly straightforward, though they tending toward the fantastical. The Germans wanted to dominate Europe eco- nomically and politically as far as the Ural Mountains. This involved the defeat of France in western Europe and the conquest of Soviet Russia for the acquisition of lebensraum in eastern Europe. This lebensraum was partly economic, intended to ensure that Germany would never have to endure economic travails because of a British blockage. It was also partly political: Hitler wanted to ensure German domination of Europe for a thousand years. Mussolini sought the realization of a new Roman Empire in the Med- iterranean region. Germany's eastern European subordinates were mainly interested in realizing their national objectives, usually at their neighbors' or one another's expense. Both the Finns and the Romanians wanted to regain and expand territories previously ceded to Soviet Russia. The Allied objectives were more problematic. Britain and France ini- tially went to war to protect Poland, but after the first month of the con- flict, the German-Russian victory over Poland made this goal unrealistic. German successes throughout Europe in 1940 further obscured Allied war aims. For Britain, the sole remaining enemy of German expansion plans, simple survival became paramount in the face of German domina- tion of the European continent. Origins of the Cold War 191 Stalin had two major objectives. One was ideological: he sought to preserve and spread his version of accelerated Marxist Leninism. The other was political: he wanted Soviet power to survive.

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  The Rise of the American Security State

  The National Security Act of 1947 and the Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy

  • M. Kent Bolton(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Both case studies come from the George H. W. Bush administration. The reader will discover that those who created the Cold War machinery—those who were Present at the Creation, as Dean Acheson fa- mously coined the phrase—did not claim to know how long the Cold War might last. They simply believed that the USSR presented a grave threat 42 The Rise of the American Security State to the capitalist-democratic West and had to be opposed, whatever the cost. They, therefore, created the institutions and machinery to accomplish what they believed was an imperative of U.S. foreign policy. No claims about their motivations are imputed here, other than they were reacting to the threat of the Soviet Union as they perceived it. Nevertheless, few who created the said machinery believed then that the United States ought to become a world hegemonic power or empire. On the contrary, they believed, as did many Americans, that the United States preferred to stay aloof of the European system it eventually supplanted. None of them, as far as was discovered herein, believed the American Se- curity State was permanent. (Indeed, as President Eisenhower famously lamented in his farewell address, the United States had become world power with a military-industrial complex second to none and that cir- cumstance presented challenges for America’s democracy.) Thus, once the Cold War ended (between 1989 and 1991), there was at least a potential for the United States to return to its previous position in world politics, while not exactly isolationist, one in which the United States was not the domi- nant hegemonic actor in world politics. The post-Cold War era thus becomes an important part of the chronol- ogy for purposes of the main thesis. In Chapter 5, cases from the transition to the post-Cold War and the post-Cold War era are presented giving the reader the opportunity to compare the three periods.

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  A People and a Nation

  A History of the United States

  • Jane Kamensky, Carol Sheriff, David W. Blight, Howard Chudacoff(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  The “cold peace” that had prevailed from the revolu- tion in 1917 through World War II could conceivably have been maintained into the postwar years as well. Neither side’s leadership wanted war. Both hoped—at least in the initial months—that a spirit of cooperation could be maintained. The Cold War resulted from decisions by individual human beings who might well have chosen differently, who might have done more, for example, to maintain diplomatic dia- logue, to seek negotiated solutions to complex international problems. For decades, many Americans would wonder if the high price they were paying for victory in the superpower confrontation was necessary. 24-2 Containment in Action ▶ ▶ How did the United States implement containment in western Europe? ▶ ▶ What domestic and international organizations were created to assist the United States in the area of national security? ▶ ▶ How did the Soviet Union respond to American containment efforts? Having committed themselves to countering Soviet and communist expansion, the Truman team had to figure out just how to fight the Cold War. The policy they chose, containment, was in place before the term was coined. George Kennan, having moved from the U.S. embassy in Moscow to the State Department in Washington, published an influential statement of the containment doctrine. Writing as “Mr. X” in the July 1947 issue of the magazine Foreign Affairs, Kennan advocated a “policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable coun- terforce at every point where they show signs of encroach- ing upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.” Such counterforce, Kennan argued, would check Soviet expansion and eventually foster a “mellowing” of Soviet behavior. Along with the Truman Doctrine, Kennan’s “X” article became a key manifesto of Cold War policy.

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  War, Peace and International Security

  From Sarajevo to Crimea

  • Jan Eichler(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  It was a typical application of hard power and an act of giving up on soft power; it was an expansion of the sphere of influence of the USSR and an enforcement of negative peace directly within it (Kramer 1998). 3.2.7 The Second Phase of the Cold War in Light of the Major Theories This stage was overwhelmingly characterized by a predominance of strat- egy over diplomacy. The USA escalated its nuclear armament, and the USSR focused on both nuclear and conventional arms. Following NSC- 68, the USA managed to exhaust the USSR through the arms race and the continuing technological embargo. Meanwhile, the USSR and its satellite states spent twice as much of their GDP on defense. Militarization was much costlier and more painful for them than for the USA and its client states. Considering the criteria of Aron, the USSR conquered the popula- tions and resources of its satellites at this stage, and regardless of any his- torical and cultural traditions that the satellites might have had, it forced its ideology, its values and its way of life on them. The Berlin crisis provoked by Stalin and the subsequent establishment of NATO as a response to a serious security threat institutionalized nega- tive peace on a global level, while NSC-68 and the Lisbon Strategy became the symbols of its acceptation in 1952. Neither of the documents laid out a goal to start a war and achieve victory in it. On the contrary, both emphasized that the USA and NATO were to use their qualitative and technological superiority to step up pressure on the USSR and increase the effectiveness of the US nuclear deterrence in the face of the conventional quantitative superiority of the USSR. They opened the way for contin- ued increases in military spending to maintain high numbers of soldiers and build other gigantic military bases for improving the preparedness of the armed forces and plans for preemptive military strikes on countries deemed threats to peace. THE Cold War 95

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