Start Cold War

10 Key excerpts on "Start Cold War"

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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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  America in the World

  A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror

  • Jeffrey Engel, Mark Lawrence, Andrew Preston(Authors)
  • 2014(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 Stalin, 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 Depression and then the Second World War—had resulted from nations pursuing narrow 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. Soviet leaders took a dim view of U.S. intentions, echoing earlier critics of U.S. foreign policy by charging that American preferences amounted to a new form of imperialism designed to open the world to capitalist penetration.

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  The Last Decade of the Cold War

  From Conflict Escalation to Conflict Transformation

  • Olav Njolstad(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Certainly, in disciplinary terms, political scientists and international relations theorists have been more inclined to believe that if the Cold War came to an end, then it did so for good reasons: historians, in the main, have been more apt to conceive of what happened in terms of contingency. ‘Yes’, they argue, one should always look for the causes of the end of the Cold War—but ‘No’, they continue, we should not then conclude that it had to happen. International factors and changing relative capabilities might have made the end possible. However, anybody studying the documents cannot seriously insist that what occurred was the only possible outcome. Indeed, according to some of them, the end of the Cold War was not so much the product of structures but the actions, conscious or otherwise, of just one man, and one man alone: Mikhail Gorbachev. Take him out of the historical narrative, they argue, and one ends up with a quite different outcome. 24 This, then, leads to the issue of definition. Here we confront an even greater intellectual conundrum. Historians might write about something called the ‘Cold War’. However, they have not always used the term in a consistent fashion. Certainly, given their regular pairing of these two words together one might have assumed that there would be some level of agreement about what the term means. But this is far from being the case. Indeed, the more one looks in detail at the way in which the concept of ‘Cold War’ has been used, the more one is struck by the fact that analysts are quite often talking about subtly different things. Thus a few employ it to suggest an almost century-long period of suspicion between the United States and Russia, stretching right back to the late nineteenth century. Others take it to mean the years between 1917 and 1991, the full life-span of the Soviet Union as an integrated communist system. One or two see the ‘war’ as stretching from 1941 to 1991

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  The Cold War

  An International History

  • David Painter(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 The Cold War begins, 1945–50

  Following World War II, the foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union interacted with the chaotic and fluid state of international relations to produce the Cold War. Understanding the impact of World War II on the international system and its members is crucial to understanding the origins of the Cold War. World War II accelerated fundamental changes in the global distribution of power, in weapons technology, in the balance of political forces among and within nations, in the international economy, and in relations between the industrial nations and the Third World. In addition, the diplomatic and military decisions made during the war had a profound impact on the shape of the postwar world.

  THE WORLD IN 1945

  World War II was the culmination of a series of events that profoundly changed the global distribution of power. As National Security Council Paper No. 68, the seminal statement of US Cold War policies, pointed out in April 1950, “within the past thirty-five years the world has experienced two global wars of tremendous violence…two revolutions—the Russian and the Chinese—of extreme scope and intensity …the collapse of five empires—the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Italian, and Japanese—and the drastic decline of two major imperial systems, the British and the French.” The result was the end of the European era and the rise to dominance of two continental-size superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.1

  Before World War II there were six great powers: Great Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States. The United States entered the postwar era in a uniquely powerful position, its relative standing greatly increased by its mobilization and war effort, its allies exhausted, and its rivals defeated. Around 410,000 US citizens lost their lives in the war, but US farms, factories, mines, and transportation networks escaped unscathed. Wartime mobilization and production lifted the United States out of the depression, and during the war the US economy almost doubled in size. In 1945, the United States controlled around half the world’s manufacturing capacity, most of its food surpluses, and a large portion of its financial reserves. The United States also held the lead in a wide range of technologies essential to modern warfare. Possession of extensive domestic energy supplies and control over access to the vast oil reserves of Latin America and the Middle East further contributed to the US position of global dominance.

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  The Cold War and After

  Capitalism, Revolution and Superpower Politics

  • Richard Saull(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  For Realists 2 the Cold War is understood as the bipolar (superpower) relationship based on strategic competition, which was a consequence of the geopolitical arrangements brought about by the Second World War. In this understanding the Cold War is classified as a typical great power conflict based on the utility of military power and distinguished by the strategic currency of nuclear weapons. 3 From this perspective ideological and socio-economic factors are seen as largely subordinate to the material (military and economic) interests of each superpower; having more explanatory significance for accounts of the domestic political relations of each rather than their respective international relations. 4 Consequently, the end of the Cold War occurred because the USSR was forced to make strategic concessions (withdrawal from east-central Europe, arms control concessions and ending political-military support for allies) to preponderant US material power. Following this explanatory logic, the social and political developments within the Soviet bloc that altered the domestic socio-economic, ideological and political character of communist states are seen as being of secondary import. Ideational approaches 5 share with Realist-informed scholars some key theoretical assumptions about the Cold War: that it was a post-war conflict derived from the consequences of the Second World War, and that it was a conflict centred on the conflicting post-war objectives of the superpowers. Both, then, understand the Cold War as the diplomatic history of the post-1945 Soviet–US relationship. However, in contrast to Realists, ideational approaches emphasise the importance of domestic political ideas, values and ideology on superpower behaviour and, consequently, take much more seriously the ideological character of the Cold War conflict and the way in which domestic political factors (and change) conditioned the bipolar relationship

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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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  Over the Horizon

  Time, Uncertainty, and the Rise of Great Powers

  • David M. Edelstein(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 5

  The Origins of the Cold War

  This chapter examines the dynamics of emerging threats in an environment where other threats were absent. During World War II, the pressing threat of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan produced short time horizons and the mutual benefits of cooperation for the Allied powers. At the end of World War II, time horizons became elongated, and competition resulted. The United States was by any measure the most powerful country in the world after World War II. Given the small short-term rewards for cooperation, the absence of alternative threats, and growing concern about long-term Soviet intentions, the United States transitioned from the cooperation that characterized World War II to the competition that characterized the Cold War. As much as emerging bipolarity set the stage for the Cold War, it was U.S. beliefs about long-term Soviet intentions that explain the timing and emergence of the conflict. While the United States might have preferred to come home after the conclusion of World War II, growing concern about Soviet intentions made that impossible.1 To be clear, U.S. behavior was not blameless in the origins of the conflict, but this chapter aims to provide a better understanding of how the United States came to regard the threat posed by an emerging postwar Soviet Union.

  This chapter serves a different purpose than the other empirical chapters. It is not surprising that the United States and the Soviet Union found value in a marriage of convenience to defeat Hitler’s Germany. What this case does allow for is a more careful examination of the role that beliefs about intentions, rather than simply capabilities, play in resolving uncertainty about the threat posed by a rising power. While there is no denying that the structural environment of bipolarity after World War II made Soviet-U.S. competition more likely, this chapter demonstrates that it was increasing evidence of Soviet intentions that was the driving force behind the evolution of U.S. strategy toward Moscow. The United States was not overly concerned by the immediate military threat that Moscow posed to Western Europe. In fact, Washington’s inclination was to pull back and come home once the war had concluded. But ominous signals of Soviet intentions added to the weight of the evidence supporting a reasonable probability that the Soviets did, indeed, pose a threat. It was beliefs about intentions and the transformation of uncertainty into risk that generated the Cold War.

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  The United States And The Ussr In A Changing World

  Soviet And American Perspectives

  • Andrei Bochkarev, Don L Mansfield(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part One The Evolution of Soviet-American Relations in the Post-War Era Passage contains an image

  Section 1 The U.S.-Soviet Rivalry in Perspective

  Who could mourn the passing of the Cold War? While the world was divided into two conflicting camps, there was the ever-present danger of nuclear war between the superpowers. Defense spending was at such high levels that the economies of both the Soviet Union and the U.S. were adversely effected. The conflict was on a global scale, with the "zero-sum game" approach to Soviet-American relations evident even in the Third World. The result was that both superpowers had the propensity to impose their conflict upon local conflict throughout the world. It was an ideological struggle that isolated the two nations from one another and produced xenophobia among their citizens. It was a hostile, risky, and wasteful period in the history of both nations. We welcome its demise and are already questioning the causes of such an odious relationship.

  Despite this euphoria as the superpowers enter a new era of relations, political commentators and strategists have been quick to point out that the Cold War did have its positive features. In fact, some have gone so far as to suggest that the Cold War was actually a blessing, or at least a very useful thing. There is some logic to this view: During the Cold War there was a tested method of maintaining the semblance of world order by means of the bipolar rivalry, of dividing the world into two blocs headed by two military superpowers. It was a crude but effective device, which, John Gaddis argues, could be credited with maintaining the "long peace." These "benefits" of the Cold War are now being compared to the possible consequences of its demise—the disintegration of stable alliances,

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  Engaging Geopolitics

  • Kathleen E Braden, Fred M Shelley(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3

  The Cold War

           

  KEYWORDS

  blocs, domino theory, containment,

  détente ,

  glasnost, shatterbelt, non-alignment

  KEY PROPOSITIONS

  • New war-fighting technologies and the Soviet/American rivalry dominated post-World War II geopolitical discourse through the 1980s.

  • The locus of this conflict increasingly shifted to a third world stage and to four major shatterbelt areas.

  • Europe perceived itself as a buffer between two superpowers, a fact that helped the formation of a European Union.

  3.1   Introduction

  The end of World War II in 1945 brought about substantial and profound changes in international relations. Since the Renaissance, the world economy had been centered in Europe, and geopolitical theory was concerned primarily with European states and their interrelationships. The conclusion of World War II signified that Europe was no longer at the center of the global political economy. After the war, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics emerged as the world’s leading powers, while the countries of Europe were dependent on American and Soviet aid to rebuild their war-torn and devastated economies.

  Conflict between the Americans and the Soviets soon dominated geopolitical thought. Within a very few years, geopolitical and ideological differences between America and Russia were to divide Europe and initiate the Cold War. Sir Winston Churchill’s famous phrase, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent” came to symbolize Europe’s position in post-World War II geopolitics. Europe was no longer in a position to initiate geopolitical change; rather it was a potential battleground, both militarily and economically, between the competing interests of the United States and the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, Western Europe had become incorporated into the American-dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and thousands of American troops were stationed in Germany and elsewhere in Europe with the intention of protecting Western Europe from potential Russian attacks. Similarly, the Warsaw Pact symbolized the incorporation of Eastern Europe into the Soviet sphere of influence.

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  The Longman Companion to America, Russia and the Cold War, 1941-1998

  • John W. Young(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Section One

  Chronology

  1. Origins of the Cold War, 1917–41

  7 November 1917.   (25 October under old calendar.) The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, seize power in Russia.

  c. April 1918-November 1920.   Period of Allied intervention in Russian civil war in opposition to Bolsheviks: British, French, US and Japanese forces side with the ‘Whites’ against Lenin.

  15 March 1919.   Formation of Communist International, by Lenin, to encourage Communist revolution worldwide.

  21 January 1924.   Death of Lenin.

  January 1928.   Stalin becomes the dominant leader in USSR.

  17 November 1933.   US opens diplomatic relations with USSR for first time.

  23 August 1939.   Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact made, dividing Poland between Germany and USSR and establishing ‘spheres of influence’ in Eastern Europe.

  1 September 1939.   Hitler invades Poland.

  3 September 1939.   Britain and France declare war on Germany.

  17 September 1939.   USSR joins in invasion of Poland, and seizes half the country.

  30 November 1939–12 March 1940.   ‘Winter War’ fought between USSR and Finland. The war is hard-fought, but results in Soviet territorial gains.

  15–16 June 1940.   Soviet forces occupy Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania (independent since 1918), claiming there is a military threat to the Soviet Union; formally annexed on 1–8 August.

  22 June 1940.   France agrees to armistice with Germany, after German advances since May; Britain faces Germany alone; Italy allied to Germany.

  11 March 1941.   US begins ‘lend-lease’ economic and military aid to Britain (to USSR in November).

  22 June 1941.   Germany launches invasion of USSR.

  11 August 1941.   After meeting at sea off Newfoundland, Roosevelt and Churchill issue Atlantic Charter, promising restoration of independence to conquered states.

  August–September 1941.   British and Soviet forces occupy Iran, needed as a supply route from the West to Russia.

  2. The ‘Big Three’, 1941–45

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