The Global Cold War

12 Key excerpts on "The Global Cold War"

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  Palgrave Advances in Cold War History

  • Geraint Hughes, S. Dockrill(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  introduction: the cold war as history geraint hughes and saki ruth dockrill the cold war world The cold war dominated the international system for nearly 45 years, and exerted a significant influence over the nature and scope of the many military and political conflicts that occurred during those years. In retrospect, the cold war was the major theatre for the West’s struggle against communist ideas and about regime change in, and the democratisation of, the communist bloc. The cold war was fought very much on the assumption that ‘if your are not with us, you are against us’, an assumption that figured more prominently in American society than in its Western European counterparts. While the Soviet leadership in its final years accepted it would be impossible to create a non-Islamic Afghanistan, Mikhail Gorbachev nonetheless believed that a pro-US/Pakistan regime in Afghanistan would be ‘totally unacceptable’ both to India and to the USSR. 1 Thus, the main tenet of the cold war can be seen as the East–West competition in ideas, arms and spheres of influence. Propaganda activities, information gathering and spying were part and parcel of winning the hearts and minds of allies and potential allies. The cold war became, to varying degrees, an integral part of the domestic politics of many countries, such as in the form of McCarthyism in the USA during the 1950s or anti-nuclear movements in Europe in the early 1980s. The Western alliance was supposed to have been united during cold war crises, but Europe was seen by the USA as likely to succumb to pitfalls like ‘Finlandisation’, as America’s European allies were often keen to reduce cold war tensions by means of détente, cultural exchanges, or negotiations. 2 In the mid-1970s, American right-wing politicians and intellectuals voiced their concern about détente, and about the wisdom of Henry Kissinger, who encouraged the US policy of détente during the 1 2 palgrave advances in cold war history Nixon years.

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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 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)

  Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. CHAPTER 24 The Cold War and American Globalism | 1945–1961 698 makers in the United States successfully cultivated a Cold War consensus that stifled debate and shaped the mind-set of millions of Americans. ■ Why did relations between the Soviet Union and the United States turn hostile soon after their victory in World War II? ■ When and why did the Cold War expand from a struggle over the future of Europe and central Asia to one encompassing virtually the entire globe? ■ By what means did the Truman and Eisenhower administrations seek to expand America’s global influence in the late 1940s and the 1950s? 24-1 From Allies to Adversaries ▶ ▶ What were the respective postwar goals of the Soviet Union and the United States? ▶ ▶ What issues contributed to escalating tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States and the emergence of the Cold War? ▶ ▶ How did the personalities of Joseph Stalin and Harry S Truman shape the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States? The Second World War had a deeply unsettling effect on the international system. At its end, Germany was in ruins. Great Britain was badly overstrained and exhausted; France, having endured five years of Nazi occupation, was rent by internal division. Italy also emerged drastically weakened and, in Asia, Japan was decimated and under occupation and China was headed toward a renewed civil war. Throughout Europe and Asia, factories, transportation, and communica- tions links had been reduced to rubble. Agricultural produc- tion plummeted, and displaced persons wandered about in search of food and family. How would the devastated eco- nomic world be pieced back together? The United States and the Soviet Union, though allies in the war, offered very different answers and models.

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

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

    (Publisher)

  Each of these played a role in inducing the Cold War and perpetuating the conflict. The view of the Cold War as the second half of a larger conflict implies that the only way in which the Cold War was going to end was for one side to renounce that which it was fighting over, that is, its socio- economic system. While the fluctuation in the level of hostility during the Cold War was produced by changing levels of intensity of the five dynamics, the demise of the Cold War was the product of a shift not simply in these dynamics, but in the underlying goals of the struggle; a shift away from international confrontation between socio-economic systems. Between 1917 and 1988–1990 a condition of international confronta- tion existed between the USSR and Western capitalism. In the first phase the competition was more evident in ideological and socio-systemic terms. In the second phase, once the old order had been pushed aside – a process beginning with the Depression in the West and industrialisa- tion in the East and ending with the Potsdam conference – political will, material capability and fear produced the Cold War. From around 1947 until 1988–1990 the Cold War persisted, it was characterised by socio- economic and geostrategic rivalry between the two blocs, and was driven by the international and domestic commitments of the USSR and the American-led West. One episode of the early 1980s serves to illustrate some key aspects of the international confrontation. At a meeting between Gromyko and Reagan on 28 September 1984, Reagan claimed that Soviet policy had always been designed to promote world revolution. He went on to say that the United States viewed the USSR as a revolutionary power, an expansionist state, and that while they did not wish to change 14 End of the Cold War and Causes of Soviet Collapse the Soviet social system, they were willing to recognise and respect their status as a superpower.

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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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  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)

  Young, “Western Europe and the End of the Cold War,” CHCW 3, 289–310. 39 Westad, The Global Cold War; Odd Arne Westad, “The Cold War and the International History of the Twentieth Century,” CHCW 1, 1–19; Michael E. Latham, “The Cold War in the Third World, 1963–1975,” CHCW 2, 258–80; Mark Philip Bradley, “Decolonization, the Global South, and the Cold War, 1919–1962,” CHCW 1, 464–85; Kathryn C. Statler and Andrew Johns (eds.), The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, MR, 2006); Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York, 2002); Peter Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss (eds.), Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World since 1945 (Columbus, OH, 2001); Zachary Karabell, Architects of Intervention: The United States, the Third World, and the Cold War, 1946–1962 (Baton Rogue, LA, 1999); Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York, 2005); Sergey Mazov, A Distant Front in the Cold War: The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1956– 1964 (Stanford, CA, 2010); Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Curt Cardwell 124 Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York, 2002); Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); David C. Engerman et al. (eds.), Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and The Global Cold War (Amherst, MA, 2003); David F. Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999); David F. Schmitz, The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1965–1989 (New York, 2006); Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Robert J.

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  World Politics since 1945

  • Peter Calvocoressi(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  PART ONE The Cold War Page Intentionally Left Blank CHAPTER 1 The Cold War Beginnings T he Cold War of the two postwar superpowers was not an episode like other wars of modern times. The term ‘cold war’ was invented to describe a state of affairs. The principal ingredient in this state of affairs was the mutual hostility and fears of the protagonists. These emotions were rooted in their several historical and political differences and were powerfully stimulated by myths which at times turned hostility into hatred. The Cold War dominated world affairs for a generation and more. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had believed, or perhaps only hoped, that he could persuade Joseph Stalin not to create a separate Soviet sphere of influence over eastern Europe but to co-operate instead with the United States in creating a global economic order based on free trade and beneficial to all involved, not least the USSR. Wartime Lend-Lease to the USSR had been a first step; the postwar Marshall Plan was to be a somewhat forlorn last hope, for even after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 there were some in Washington who preferred a policy of resuscitating western Europe without military confrontation with the USSR. But to most Americans the USSR seemed dedic- ated to the conquest of Europe and the world for itself and for communism and was capable of achieving, or at least initiating, this destructive and evil course by armed force abetted by subversion. On this view the necessary riposte by the United States was military confrontation in alliance with Europeans and others and on the assumption that Soviet hostility was ineradicable. Seen from Moscow, the western world was inspired by capitalist values which demanded the destruction of the USSR and the extirpation of communism by any means available, but above all by force or the threat of irresistible force.

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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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  Superpowers in the Post-Cold War Era

  • K. Aldred, Martin A. Smith(Authors)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  44 The second and, to some extent at least, complementary inter- pretation of the sources of Soviet weakness places the emphasis on the Soviet Union’s relatively limited superpower scope and role when compared to the United States. It has been argued that the Soviet Union was unable to fully compete with the United States in terms of power projection because it ultimately lacked the econ- omic resources to underwrite such a competition. Some have argued from a longer historical perspective that the Soviet Union, as the successor to Imperial Russia, remained locked into traditional Russian strategic thinking which focused on building up influence over ter- ritories close to its existing borders rather than further afield across the seas. In this vein, Jan Nijman, in 1993, compared the Cold War spheres of influence of the US and the USSR and concluded that they confirmed ‘the notions of the Soviet Union as a regional land power, and the United States as a global sea power’. 45 The initial tenor of Soviet policy and outlook in the Cold War period was, of course, determined by Stalin. It has frequently been argued since his death in 1953, not least by some of his successors, The Two Cold War Superpowers 33 that he overestimated the importance of military strength as the single most important factor of power. There is evidence, however, that Stalin did believe that the economic and political aspects of power were important too. During the 1930s in particular he had been especially preoccupied with the forced development of Soviet heavy industry. Although this produced a narrow and limited in- dustrial base, and the social costs which the Soviet people had to pay for Stalin’s industrialisation drive were exceedingly heavy, econ- omists have conceded that some impressive statistical results were achieved.

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  Major Problems in American History, Volume II

  • Elizabeth Cobbs, Edward Blum, Jon Gjerde, , Elizabeth Cobbs, Edward Blum, Jon Gjerde(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. NSC-68 proved to be the American blueprint for waging the Cold War. It began with two assumptions that governed the rest of the document. First, the global balance of power had been “ fundamentally altered ” since the nineteenth century so that the Americans and Russians now dominated the world: “ What is new, what makes the continuing crisis, is the polarization of power which inescap-ably confronts the slave society with the free. ” It was us against them. Second, “ the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority, ” initially in “ the Soviet Union and second in the area now under [its] control. ” Then the crucial sentence: “ In the minds of the Soviet leaders, however, achievement of this design requires the dynamic extension of their authority and the ultimate elimination of any effective opposition to their authority … . To that end Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass.

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