The Origins of the Cold War

8 Key excerpts on "The Origins of the Cold War"

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  Experiencing War

  • Christine Sylvester(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  fait accompli , a universally accomplished historical reality. The question of the end has no room for diversity and generates no such positive interpretative controversies as those about the origin. The story of the cold war we tell ourselves today, therefore, has an open-ended beginning and a closed ending.

  The term “cold war” refers to the prevailing condition of the world in the second half of the twentieth century, divided into two separate paths of political modernity and economic development. In a narrower sense it means the contest of power and will between the two dominant states, the United States and the Soviet Union, that (according to George Orwell, who coined the term in 1945) set out to rule the world between them under an undeclared state of war, being unable to conquer one another.1 In a broad definition, however, the global cold war also entails the unequal relations of power among the political communities, which pursued or were driven to pursue a specific path of progress within the binary structure of the global order, and the actions taken by the powerful states to maintain the hierarchy and to police the resistance from the weaker states and communities against the hierarchical order. The former “contest of power” dimension of the cold war has been an explicit and central element in existing cold war historiography; the latter “relation of domination” aspect a relatively marginal, implicit element. The debates about The Origins of the Cold War contribute to disclosing how complex the great bifurcation in the project of modernity has been for nations and communities. The origin of the cold war is not merely a question of time but also, in significant measure, a moral question – the question of which side of the bipolarized human community was more responsible for bringing about the order and engendering political and military crises. The moral aspect of the question is intertwined with the chronological one and their connectedness is more apparent in places where the bipolar conflict was waged in a violent form.

  Imagining the political future of Korea, for example, is inseparable from where to locate the origin of the Korean War. For people who date the origin to 1950, the culpability for the devastating civil war rests unquestionably with the northern communist regime, which launched, with endorsement and support from Mao and Stalin, an all-out surprise offensive against the southern territory in June of that year. For those who trace the war’s origin to the earlier years, the blame is shared with the strongly anti-communist southern regime, which instigated a series of border skirmishes and also crushed domestic radical nationalist forces in a ruthless manner from 1947 to 1950. The latter measure provoked the outbreak of armed partisan activities in parts of the southern territory, which were effectively in a state of war from 1948. For those who associate the origin of the Korean War with the end of the Pacific War in 1945, however, the main responsibility for the civil war lies instead with the United States and the Soviet Union, which partitioned and separately occupied the postcolonial nation after the surrender of Japan. These diverse perspectives on the origin of one of the first violent manifestations of the bipolar global order are not merely matters of scholarly debate. The perspectival diversity is deeply ingrained in the society that endured what was at once a civil war and an international war, provoking heated public debate and developing to conflicting political voices and forces. In this context, the origin of the cold war is largely about the origin of the war-induced wounds felt in the society, thereby making the very concept of the “cold” war somewhat contradictory, and claiming a particular version of the origin is simultaneously an act of asserting a particular vision of the nation’s future.

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  American–Soviet Relations

  From the Russian Revolution to the Fall of Communism

  • Peter G. Boyle(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 The Origins of the Cold War, 1945–50

  The hope that wartime US–Soviet co-operation could be sustained in the post-war years turned to ashes in the late 1940s. Instead of the dream of One World and reconciliation between nations with different social systems, a relationship of deeply bitter hostility developed between the United States and the Soviet Union, bringing on the Cold War and the arms race. Why did the wartime alliance break down and the Cold War ensue? Broadly, two answers have been given – namely, the traditional and the revisionist interpretations of The Origins of the Cold War. According to the traditional interpretation, which was advanced in the memoirs of participants such as Harry Truman and Dean Acheson and by the majority of contemporary commentators and by historians until the 1960s, the onset of the Cold War was due quite simply to Soviet failure to adhere to wartime agreements and to Soviet ambition to expand Communism as far as possible and the American need to prevent such expansion. The revisionist view, which was put forward by some contemporary dissidents such as Henry Wallace and by a number of historians writing in the 1960s, holds that the causes of the Cold War are by no means so black and white and that the United States was as responsible for the Cold War as the Soviet Union. Revisionists argue that Soviet objectives were largely defensive and were misinterpreted by American policy-makers. American objectives were not so innocent and idealistic as simply the defence of freedom and democracy . . . but, revisionists suggest, included also the goal of global economic imperialism. How convincing is the traditional or the revisionist interpretation? An assessment can be made by an examination in some detail of each in turn.

  Traditionalists argue that the Soviet goal of world-wide expansion of Communism had not altered since 1917. There had been changes of tactics, it is suggested, to adjust to Soviet weakness in the inter-war years and to the Second World War threat from Hitler, but underlying objectives did not change. With the Nazi defeat and the build-up of the Red Army, Stalin exploited the opportunity at the end of the war to expand Communism into Eastern Europe and was bent on the expansion of Communism into Western Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. The Cold War was brought on by the resistance to Soviet ambitions on the part of the Western powers, especially by the only Western nation with sufficient strength to hold back the Communist tide, namely the United States. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, put it, the Cold War was ‘the brave and essential response of free men to Communist aggression’.1

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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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  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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  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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  The Cold War and After

  Capitalism, Revolution and Superpower Politics

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

    (Publisher)

  7

  Conclusions: Tracing the ParadoxicalEnds of the Cold War andthe Origins of ContemporaryConflict in World Politics1

  INTRODUCTION

  The collapse of Soviet communism and disintegration of the USSR ushered in a systemic transformation in the structure and political character of the international system. The socio-economic and ideological challenge to capitalism and the capitalist great powers that had originated in 1917, and the geopolitical and strategic arrangements that had emerged after 1945, were replaced with the termination of the USSR’s strategic and geopolitical challenge to the US, and the extinguishing of the social and political forces that had fuelled the flames of communist-inspired revolution. Whilst the US was no longer subject to a geopolitical check on its projection of military force, the further (global) entrenchment and spread of the social relations of capitalism – and those social and political forces that most benefited from the spread of capitalism – no longer faced a challenge in the form of the revolutionary guerrilla or communist cadre. The consequences of this came to dominate international relations during the 1990s: the US and its Western allies were able to use military power free from the threat of igniting a major war,2 and these same states were able to promote the expansion of capitalism in former communist states and elsewhere through what became known as the ‘Washington Consensus’.

  At first glance, then, the 1990s did appear promising for the realisation of a ‘New World Order,’ based on the promotion of the US-sponsored harmonious triad of liberal democracy, economic liberalisation and human rights, into which states outside of the ‘victorious’ liberal zone of peace and prosperity – with the US at its centre – could be incorporated and integrated. The key assumption that informed the hopes of a New World Order was that the end of the Cold War had come about through the triumph of the combined forces of liberal democracy and capitalism, and that the forces of ‘freedom’ over ‘totalitarianism’ could provide the foundations for a new, more harmonious international order.3

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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 Russians Are Coming, Again

  The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce

  • Jeremy Kuzmarov, John Marciano(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Monthly Review Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 3 Provoking Confrontation: The United States and The Origins of the Cold War

  I

  n his June 24, 2015, Times column, “Cold War Without the Fun,” Thomas L. Friedman lamented that the new confrontation between the United States and Russia has so far lacked some of the drama of the twentieth-century version, such as “Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe-banging, a race to the moon or a debate between American and Soviet leaders over whose country has the best kitchen appliances.”

  According to Friedman, the new “post-post-Cold War has more of a W.W.E.—World Wrestling Entertainment—feel to it, and I don’t just mean President Vladimir Putin of Russia’s riding horses barechested, although that is an apt metaphor. It’s just a raw jostling for power for power’s sake—not a clash of influential ideas but rather of spheres of influence.”1 Friedman’s remarks promote a nostalgic view of the twentieth-century Cold War characteristic of the U.S. political establishment. Cast aside is the horrific human costs that led Mikhail Gorbachev to conclude that the Cold War “made losers of us all.” These costs include the millions of deaths in Korea and Vietnam, the destabilization of Third World countries, the overmilitarization of the U.S. political economy, abuse of civil liberties, and wide inequality.

  Carl Marzani, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA) and State Department employee convicted of lying about involvement with the Communist Party, described in his 1952 book We Can be Friends how the United States became thrust into “semi-hysteria” amid a manufactured “war psychosis” with “dog tags on children, airplane spotters on twenty-four-hour duty … roads marked for quick evacuations, buildings designated as air raid shelters, air raid drills everywhere in streets, in stores, in schools.”2

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