Cold War

1. Introduction
Cold war, the open yet restricted rivalry that developed after World War II between the United States
and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. The Cold War was waged on political, economic, and
propaganda fronts and had only limited recourse to weapons. The term was first used by the English
writer George Orwell in an article published in 1945 to refer to what he predicted would be a nuclear
stalemate between "two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which
millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds."

2. Causes of Cold War

a) West Hostile to the Idea of a Communist State
The long-term causes of the cold war are clear. Western democracies had always been hostile to the idea
of a communist state. The United States had refused recognition to the USSR for 16 years after the
Bolshevik takeover.

b) Americans Feared Domination of Soviets in Eastern Europe

After a long history of enemy invasions, Soviet leader Josef Stalin wanted to expand its territory and
build a buffer between the Soviet Union and Europe. He also wanted control in Central and Eastern
European countries that the Soviets had helped liberate. As a result, Stalin quickly established strong
communist parties that took power in Central and Eastern Europe (the Eastern Bloc). They took orders
from the USSR. Meanwhile, the United States provided over $12 billion in aid for rebuilding Western
European nations who agreed to open trade.

c) Soviets Wanted to Spread Communism

As such, the final cause of the Cold War was the American fear of the spread of communism around the
world. The United States, led by Harry S. Truman feared that communism as an ideology would spread
throughout Europe and the rest of the world. For example, after World War II both Greece and Turkey
were facing financial crisis. Due to their proximity to Soviet territory and the rise of communism in
recent decades it was feared that the two countries might fall into the Soviet sphere of influence and
become communist.

3. President Harry S. Truman’s Foreign Policy

President Harry S. Truman confronted unprecedented challenges in international affairs during his
nearly eight years in office. Truman guided the United States through the end of World War II, the
beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the dawning of the
atomic age. Truman intervened with American troops in the conflict between North Korea and South
Korea and he supported the creation of the state of Israel in the Middle East. In sum, Truman's foreign
policy established some of the basic principles and commitments that marked American foreign policy
for the remainder of the twentieth century.
 a) Truman Doctrine
With the Truman Doctrine, President Harry S. Truman established that the United States would provide
political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or
internal authoritarian forces. The Truman Doctrine effectively reoriented U.S. foreign policy, away from
its usual stance of withdrawal from regional conflicts not directly involving the United States, to one of
possible intervention in faraway conflicts.

b) Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, was a U.S. program providing aid to
Western Europe following the devastation of World War II. It was enacted in 1948 and provided more
than $15 billion to help finance rebuilding efforts on the continent. The brainchild of U.S. Secretary of
State George C. Marshall, for whom it was named, it was crafted as a four-year plan to reconstruct cities,
industries and infrastructure heavily damaged during the war and to remove trade barriers between
European neighbors—as well as foster commerce between those countries and the United States.

c) NATO and Warsaw Pact

In 1949, the prospect of further Communist expansion prompted the United States and 11 other
Western nations to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Soviet Union and its
affiliated Communist nations in Eastern Europe founded a rival alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955. The
alignment of nearly every European nation into one of the two opposing camps formalized the political
division of the European continent that had taken place since World War II (1939-45). This alignment
provided the framework for the military standoff that continued throughout the Cold War (1945-91).

d) The Korean War

The Korean war began on June 25, 1950, when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People’s
Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was
the first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had entered the war on South Korea’s
behalf. As far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international
communism itself. After some early back-and-forth across the 38th parallel, the fighting stalled and
casualties mounted with nothing to show for them. Meanwhile, American officials worked anxiously to
fashion some sort of armistice with the North Koreans. The alternative, they feared, would be a wider
war with Russia and China–or even, as some warned, World War III. Finally, in July 1953, the Korean War
came to an end. In all, some 5 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives in what many in the U.S. refer
to as “the Forgotten War” for the lack of attention it received compared to more well-known conflicts
like World War I and II and the Vietnam War. The Korean peninsula is still divided today.

4. Eisenhower’s New Look

The New Look was the name given to the national security policy of the United States during the
administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It reflected Eisenhower's concern for balancing the
Cold War military commitments of the United States with the nation's financial resources. The policy
emphasised reliance on strategic nuclear weapons as well as a reorganization of conventional forces in
an effort to deter potential threats, both conventional and nuclear, from the Eastern Bloc of nations
headed by the Soviet Union.
 a) Emphasized on Nuclear Weapons to Reduce Spending
The policy focused on the use of nuclear weapons and was intended as a way for the United States to
meet its Cold War military obligations without putting too much strain on the country’s economy. The
New Look strategy decreased expenditures for the army and navy in favour of increased expenditures
for the air force and for nuclear weaponry.

b) CIA
Eisenhower prosecuted the Cold War vigorously even as he hoped to improve Soviet-American relations.
He relied frequently on covert action to avoid having to take public responsibility for controversial
interventions. He believed that the CIA, created in 1947, was an effective instrument to counter
Communist expansion and to assist friendly governments. CIA tactics were sometimes unsavory, as they
included bribes, subversion, and even assassination attempts. But Eisenhower authorized those actions,
even as he maintained plausible deniability that is, carefully concealing all evidence of U.S. involvement
so that he could deny any responsibility for what had happened.

c) Suez Canal Crisis

The Suez Crisis began on October 29, 1956, when Israeli armed forces pushed into Egypt toward the
Suez Canal after Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-70) nationalized the canal, a valuable
waterway that controlled two-thirds of the oil used by Europe. The Israelis were soon joined by French
and British forces, which nearly brought the Soviet Union into the conflict and damaged their
relationships with the United States. In the end, Egypt emerged victorious, and the British, French and
Israeli governments withdrew their troops in late 1956 and early 1957. The event was a pivotal event
among Cold War superpowers.

d) U2 Incident
An international diplomatic crisis erupted in May 1960 when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR) shot down an American U-2 spy plane in Soviet air space and captured its pilot, Francis Gary
Powers (1929-77). Confronted with the evidence of his nation’s espionage, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower (1890-1969) was forced to admit to the Soviets that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) had been flying spy missions over the USSR for several years. The Soviets convicted Powers on
espionage charges and sentenced him to 10 years in prison. However, after serving less than two years,
he was released in exchange for a captured Soviet agent in the first-ever U.S.-USSR “spy swap.” The U-2
spy plane incident raised tensions between the U.S. and the Soviets during the Cold War (1945-91), the
largely political clash between the two superpowers and their allies that emerged following World War
II.

5. John F Kennedy
a) Cuban Missile Crisis
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day
political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on
Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy
(1917-63) notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a naval
blockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary to
neutralize this perceived threat to national security. Following this news, many people feared the world
was on the brink of nuclear war. However, disaster was avoided when the U.S. agreed to Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev’s (1894-1971) offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the U.S. promising
not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.

6. Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North
Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by
the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million people
(including over 58,000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were
Vietnamese civilians. Opposition to the war in the United States bitterly divided Americans, even after
President Richard Nixon ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973. Communist forces ended the war
by seizing control of South Vietnam in 1975, and the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of
Vietnam the following year.

7. Watergate Scandal
The Watergate scandal began early in the morning of June 17, 1972, when several burglars were
arrested in the office of the Democratic National Committee, located in the Watergate complex of
buildings in Washington, D.C. This was no ordinary robbery: The prowlers were connected to President
Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign, and they had been caught wiretapping phones and stealing
documents. Nixon took aggressive steps to cover up the crimes, but when Washington Post reporters
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein revealed his role in the conspiracy, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.
The Watergate scandal changed American politics forever, leading many Americans to question their
leaders and think more critically about the presidency.

8. Collapse of Communism
On December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time.
Representatives from Soviet republics (Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) had already announced that they would
no longer be part of the Soviet Union. Instead, they declared they would establish a Commonwealth of
Independent States. Because the three Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) had already
declared their independence from the USSR, only one of its 15 republics, Kazakhstan, remained. The
once-mighty Soviet Union had fallen, largely due to the great number of radical reforms that Soviet
president Mikhail Gorbachev had implemented during his six years as the leader of the USSR. However,
Gorbachev was disappointed in the dissolution of his nation and resigned from his job on December 25.
It was a peaceful end to a long, terrifying and sometimes bloody epoch in world history.