Origins of the Cold War

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History of the Cold War
Origins
1947–1953
1953–1962
1962–1979
1979–1985
1985–1991

The Origins of the Cold War are widely regarded to lie most directly within the immediate post-World War II relations between the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union in the years 1945–1947, leading to the Cold War that endured for nearly half a century.

Events preceding the Second World War, and even the Russian Revolution of 1917, are also considered by many historians as underlying postwar tensions between the two superpowers.

Contents 1 Tsarist Russia and the West 2 The Russian Revolution 3 Interwar diplomacy (1918-1941) 4 The wartime alliance (1941-1945) 5 The breakdown of postwar peace (1945-1947) 5.1 Wartime conferences 5.2 Challenges of postwar demilitarization 5.3 Conflicting visions of postwar reconstruction 5.4 The "Long Telegram" and "Mr. X" 5.5 The "Iron Curtain" speech 6 Disagreement over the beginning of the Cold War 7 See also 8 External links 9 References 10 Further reading

[edit] Tsarist Russia and the West

Differences between the political, and economic systems of Russia and the West predated the Russian Revolution of 1917. From the neo-Marxist World Systems perspective, Russia differed from the West as a result of its late integration into the capitalist world-economy in the 19th century. Struggling to catch up with the industrialized West as of the late 19th century, Russia upon the revolution in 1917 was essentially a semi-peripheral or peripheral state whose internal balance of forces, tipped by the domination of the Russian industrial sector by foreign capital, had been such that it suffered a decline in its relative diplomatic power internationally. From this perspective, the Russian Revolution represented a break with a form of dependent industrial development and a radical withdrawal from the capitalist world-economy.

Other scholars have argued that Russia and the West developed fundamentally different political cultures shaped by Eastern Orthodoxy and rule of the tsar. Others have linked the Cold War to the legacy of different heritages of empire-building between the Russians and Americans. From this view, the United States, like the British Empire, was fundamentally a maritime power based on trade and commerce, Russia was a bureaucratic and land-based power that expanded from the center in a process of territorial accretion.

Imperial rivalry between the British and Tsarist Russia preceded the tensions between the Soviets and the West following the Russian Revolution. Throughout the 19th century, improving Russia's maritime access was a perennial aim of the tsars' foreign policy. Despite Russia's vast size, most of its thousands of miles of seacoast was frozen over most of the year or access to the high seas was through straits controlled by other powers, particularly in the Baltic and Black Seas. The British, however, had been determined since the Crimean War in the 1850s to slow Russian expansion at the expense of Ottoman Turkey, the "sick man of Europe." With the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, the prospect of Russia seizing a portion of the Ottoman seacoast on the Mediterranean, potentially threatening the strategic waterway, was of great concern to the British. British policymakers were also apprehensive about the close proximity of the Tsar's territorially expanding empire in Central Asia to India, triggering a series of conflicts between the two powers in Afghanistan dubbed The Great Game.

The British long exaggerated the strength of the relatively backward sprawling Russian empire, which according to the Wisconsin school was more concerned with the security of its frontiers than conquering Western spheres of influence.^[1] British fears over Russian expansion, however, subsided following Russia's stunning defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.

Historians associated with the Wisconsin school of interpretation, which argues that the U.S. and the Soviet Union were economic rivals that made them natural adversaries regardless of ideology and views the U.S. as the primary causing agent for the Cold War, see parallels between 19th century Western rivalry with Russia and the Cold War tensions of the post-World War II period. ^[2] From this view, Western policymakers misinterpreted postwar Soviet policy in Europe as expansionism, rather than a policy, like the territorial growth of imperial Russia, motivated by securing vulnerable Russian frontiers.

Strategic rivalry between the United States and Russia—both huge, sprawling nations—goes back to the 1890s when, after a century of friendship, Americans and Russians became rivals over the development of Manchuria^{[citation needed]}. Tsarist Russia, unable to compete industrially, sought to close off and colonize parts of East Asia, while Americans demanded open competition for markets.

[edit] The Russian Revolution

Main article: Russian Revolution

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, tensions between Russia and the West turned intensely ideological. The landing of U.S. troops in Russia in 1918, which became involved in assisting the anti-Bolshevik Whites in the Russian Civil War (see North Russia Campaign) helped solidify lasting suspicions among Soviet leadership of the capitalist world.

Contributing to American mistrust of the Soviets, the Soviet government negotiated a separate peace with Germany in the First World War in 1917, leaving the Western Allies to fight the Central Powers alone.

[edit] Interwar diplomacy (1918-1941)

Following the postwar Red Scare, many in the U.S. saw the Soviet system as a threat. Differences between the political and economic systems of the United States and the Soviet Union—capitalism versus socialism, models of autarky versus trade, state planning versus private enterprise—became simplified and refined in national ideologies to represent two ways of life. The atheistic nature of Soviet communism also concerned many Americans.

Up until the mid-1930s, both British and U.S. policymakers commonly assumed the communist Soviet Union to be a much greater threat than disarmed and democratic Germany and focused most of their intelligence efforts against Moscow. The United States did not establish relations with the Soviet government until 1933.

Even after U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union, each side retained suspicions of the other's intentions and motives. The Soviets resented Western appeasement of Adolf Hitler after the signing of the Munich Pact in 1938. Following the signing of Munich Pact, Stalin reached his own settlement with Germany, the August 1939 German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact, which similarly shocked the West.

[edit] The wartime alliance (1941-1945)

Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviets and the Western Allies were forced to cooperate, despite their past tensions. The U.S. shipped vast quantities of Lend Lease material to the Soviets. Britain and the Soviets signed a formal alliance, but the U.S. did not join until after the Attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

During the war, both sides disagreed on military tactics, especially the question of the opening of a second front against Germany in Western Europe.

Stalin had asked the Anglo-American Allies to open a second front since the early months of the war—around two years before the second front was ultimately constituted on D-Day, June 6, 1944. U.S. and UK strategists cited a number of military and strategic calculations for the timing of the Normandy invasion. The Soviets suspected that the delay in opening a second front was an intentional policy aimed at allowing the Russians to bear the brunt of the war effort. The Western allies, the Soviets suspected, would only intervene at the last minute to influence the peace settlement and dominate Europe themselves.^[3] In the meantime, the Russians suffered heavy casualties, with as many as twenty million dead.

[edit] The breakdown of postwar peace (1945-1947)

[edit] Wartime conferences

A number of postwar disagreements between U.S. and Soviet leaders were related to their differing interpretations of wartime and immediate post-war conferences.

The Tehran Conference in late 1943 was the first Allied conference in which Stalin was present. At the conference the Soviets expressed frustration that the Western Allies has not yet opened a second front against Germany in Western Europe. At the Tehran, the Allies also considered the political status of Iran. At the time, the British had occupied southern Iran, while the Soviets had occupied an area of northern Iran bordering the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. Nevertheless, at the end of the War, tensions emerged over the timing of the pull out of both sides from the oil-rich region.

The February 1945 Yalta Conference, the Allies attempted to define the framework for a postwar settlement in Europe. The Allies could not reach firm agreements on the crucial questions: the occupation of Germany, postwar reparations from Germany, and loans. No final consensus was reached on Germany, other than to agree to a Soviet request for reparations totaling $10 billion "as a basis for negotiations." (Gaddis, 164) Debates over the composition of Poland's postwar government were also acrimonious.^[4]

At the Potsdam Conference starting in late July 1945, the Allies met to decide how to administer the defeated Nazi Germany, which had agreed to unconditional surrender nine weeks earlier on May 8-9, 1945, Victory Day. At Potsdam, the U.S. was represented by the new president Harry S. Truman, who on April 12 succeeded to the office upon Roosevelt's death. The UK was represented by a new prime minister, Clement Attlee, who had replaced Churchill after the Labour Party's defeat of the Conservatives in the 1945 general election. At the conference, serious differences had emerged over the future development of Germany and Eastern Europe.

Truman, unaware of Roosevelt's plans for postwar engagement with Soviet Union, was initially reliant upon a set of advisers, including Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, and his own choice for Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes. This group tended to take a harder line toward Moscow than had Roosevelt. (Schmitz) Administration officials favoring cooperation with the Soviet Union and incorporation of socialist economies into a world trade system were marginalized.

One week after the Potsdam Conference ended, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki added to Soviet distrust of the United States; and shortly following the attacks, Stalin protested to U.S. officials when Truman offered the Soviets little real influence in occupied Japan. (LaFeber 2002, p. 28)

[edit] Challenges of postwar demilitarization

The formal accords informal, tacit agreements at the Yalta Conference, attended by U.S President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was key in shaping Europe's balance of power in the early postwar period. In the words of Immanuel Wallerstein, "When the war ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, Soviet and Western (that is, U.S., British, and French) troops were located in particular places line in the center of Europe that came to be called the Oder-Neisse Line. Aside from a few minor adjustments, they stayed there. In hindsight, Yalta signified the agreement of both sides that they could stay there and that neither side would use force to push the other out. This tacit accord applied to Asia as well, as evidenced by U.S. occupation of Japan and the division of Korea. Politically, therefore, Yalta was an agreement on the status quo in which the Soviet Union controlled about one third of the world and the United States the rest."^[5]

However, toward the end of the war, the prospects of an Anglo-American front against the Soviet Union seemed slim from Stalin's standpoint. Despite U.S. power, Stalin viewed the reemergence of Germany and Japan as the military chief threats to the Soviet Union, not the United States.^{[citation needed]} First, at the end of the war, Stalin assumed that the capitalist camp would soon resume its internal rivalry over colonies and trade, giving opportunity for renewed expansion at a later date, rather than pose a threat to the USSR. Second, Stalin expected the United States to bow to domestic popular pressure for postwar demilitarization. Soviet economic advisers such as Eugen Varga predicted that the U.S. would cut military expenditures, and therefore suffer a crisis of overproduction, culminating in another great depression. Based on Varga's analysis, Stalin assumed that the Americans would offer the Soviets aid in postwar reconstruction, needing to find any outlet for massive capital investments in order to sustain the wartime industrial production that had brought the U.S. out of the Great Depression.^[6] However, to the surprise of Soviet leaders, the U.S. did not suffer a severe postwar crisis of overproduction. As Stalin had not anticipated, capital investments in industry were sustained by maintaining roughly the same levels of government spending.

In the United States, a conversion to the prewar economy nevertheless proved difficult. America's military-industrial complex that was created during the Second World War was not scaled back following the war. Pressures to "get back to normal" were intense. Congress wanted a return to low, balanced budgets, and families clamored to see the soldiers sent back home. The Truman administration worried first about a postwar slump, then about the inflationary consequences of pent-up consumer demand. The GI Bill of Rights, adopted in 1944, was one answer: subsidizing veterans to complete their education rather than flood the job market and probably boost the unemployment figures. Also, on July 20, 1948, President Truman issued the first peacetime military draft in the U.S. history in the early years of the Cold War. In the end, the postwar U.S. government strongly resembled the wartime government, with the military establishment, along with military-security industries, heavily funded. The postwar capitalist slump predicted by Stalin was averted by domestic government management, combined with he U.S. success in promoting international trade and monetary relations (see Bretton Woods system).

[edit] Conflicting visions of postwar reconstruction

There were fundamental contrasts between the visions of the United States and the Soviet Union, between the ideals of capitalism and communism. Those contrasts had been simplified and refined in national ideologies to represent two ways of life, each vindicated in 1945 by previous disasters. Conflicting models of autarky versus exports, of state planning against private enterprise, were to vie for the allegiance of the developing and developed world in the postwar years.

U.S. leaders, following the principles of the Atlantic Charter, hoped to shape the postwar world by opening up the world's markets to trade and markets. Administration analysts eventually reached the conclusion that rebuilding a capitalist Western Europe that could again serve as a hub in world affairs was essential to sustaining U.S. prosperity.

World War II resulted in enormous destruction of infrastructure and populations throughout Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, with almost no country left unscathed. The only major industrial power in the world to emerge intact—and even greatly strengthened from an economic perspective—was the United States. As the world's greatest industrial power, and as one of the few countries unravaged by the war, the United States stood to gain enormously from opening the entire world to unfettered trade. The United States would have a global market for its exports, and it would have unrestricted access to vital raw materials. Determined to avoid another economic catastrophe like that of the 1930s, U.S. leaders saw the creation of the postwar order as a way to ensure continuing US prosperity.

Such a Europe required a healthy Germany at its center. The postwar U.S. was an economic powerhouse that produced 50 percent of the world's industrial goods and an unrivaled military power with a monopoly of the new atom bomb. It also required new international agencies: the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which were created to ensure an open, capitalist, international economy. The Soviet Union opted not to take part.

The American vision of the postwar world conflicted with the goals of Soviet leaders, who, for their part, were also motivated to shape postwar Europe. The Soviet Union had, since 1924, placed higher priority on its own security and internal development than on Leon Trotsky's vision of world revolution. Accordingly, Stalin had been willing before the war to engage non-communist governments that recognized Soviet dominance of its sphere of influenced and offered assurances of non-aggression. In September, 1947, the Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov declared that the Truman Doctrine "intended for accordance of the American help to all reactionary regimes, that actively oppose to democratic people, bears an undisguised aggressive character."

After the war, Stalin sought to secure the Soviet Union's western border by installing Communist-dominated regimes under Soviet influence in bordering countries of Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Having lost 20 million dead in the war, suffered German invasion through Poland twice in 30 years, and suffered tens of millions of casualties due to onslaughts from the West three times in the preceding 150 years, the Soviet Union was determined to destroy Germany's capacity for another war. U.S. aims were ostensibly opposed since they would require a healthy Germany at the center of Europe.

On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill, while at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, gave a speech declaring an "iron curtain" has descended across Europe. From the standpoint of the Soviets, the speech was an incitement for the West to begin a war with USSR.^[7]

The dispute over Germany escalated after Truman refused to give the Soviet Union reparations from West Germany's industrial plants because he believed it would hamper Germany's economic recovery further. Stalin responded by splitting off the Soviet sector of Germany as a communist state. (see Berlin Blockade)

At other times there were signs of caution on Stalin's part. The Soviet Union eventually withdrew from Northern Iran, at Anglo-American behest; Stalin observed his 1944 agreement with Churchill and did not aid the communists in the struggle against the British-supported monarchial regime in Greece; in Finland he accepted a friendly, noncommunist government; and Russian troops were withdrawn from Czechoslovakia by the end of 1945.

[edit] The "Long Telegram" and "Mr. X"

In February 1946, George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow helped articulate the growing hard line against the Soviets. (Schmitz) The telegram argued that the Soviet Union was motivated by both traditional Russian imperialism and by Marxist ideology; Soviet behavior was inherently expansionist and paranoid, posing a threat to the United States and its allies. Later writing as "Mr. X" in his article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in Foreign Affairs (July 1947), Kennan drafted classic argument for adopting a policy of "containment" toward the Soviet Union.

[edit] The "Iron Curtain" speech

On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill, while at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, gave a speech declaring an "iron curtain" has descended across Europe. From the standpoint of the Soviets, the speech was an incitement for the West to begin a war with USSR.^[8]

[edit] Disagreement over the beginning of the Cold War

The usage of the term "cold war" to describe the postwar tensions between the U.S.- and Soviet-led blocs was popularized by Bernard Baruch, a U.S. financier and an adviser to Harry Truman, who used the term during a congressional debate in 1947.^[9]

Since the term "Cold War" was popularized in 1947, there has been extensive disagreement in many political and scholarly discourses on what exactly were the sources of postwar tensions.^[10] In the American historiography, there has been disagreement as to who was responsible for the quick unraveling of the wartime alliance between 1945 and 1947, and on whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable or could have been avoided. ^[11] Discussion of these questions has centered in large part on the works of William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, and John Lewis Gaddis. (Brinkley, 798-799)

Williams, in his 1959 The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, challenged the "official" version of U.S. foreign policymakers on the causes of the Cold War. ^[12] Officials in the Truman administration placed responsibility for postwar tensions on the Soviets, claiming that Stalin had violated promises made at Yalta, pursued a policy of "expansionism" in Eastern Europe, and conspired to spread communism throughout the world. (Brinkley, 798-799) Williams, however, placed responsibility for the breakdown of postwar peace mostly on the U.S., citing a range of U.S. efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II. According to Williams and later writers influenced by his work, such as Walter LaFeber, author of the popular survey text America, Russia, and the Cold War (recently updated in 2002), U.S. policymakers shared an overarching concern with maintaining capitalism domestically. In order to ensure this goal, they pursued a policy of ensuring an "open door" to foreign markets for U.S. business and agriculture across the world. From this perspective, a growing economy domestically went hand-in-hand with the consolidation of U.S. power internationally. ^[13]

Williams and LaFeber also complicated the assumption that Soviet leaders were committed to postwar "expansionism." They cited evidence that Soviet Union's occupation of Eastern Europe had a defensive rationale, and Soviet leaders saw themselves as attempting to avoid encirclement by the United States and its allies. (Calhoun) From this view, the Soviet Union was so weak and devastated after the end of the Second World War as to be unable to pose any serious threat to the U.S., which not only emerged after 1945 as the sole world power not economically devastated by the war, but also as the sole possessor of the atomic bomb until 1949. (Brinkley, 798-799)

Gaddis, however, argues that the conflict was less the lone fault of one side or the other and more the result of a plethora of conflicting interests and misperceptions between the two superpowers, propelled by domestic politics and bureaucratic inertia. While Gaddis does not hold either side as entirely responsible for the onset of the conflict, he has argued that the Soviets should be held at least slightly more accountable for the problems. According to Gaddis, Stalin was in a much better position to compromise than his Western counterparts, given his much broader power within his own regime than Truman, who was often undermined by vociferous political opposition at home. Asking if were possible to predict if the wartime alliance would fall apart within a matter of months, leaving in its place nearly a half century of cold war, Gaddis wrote in a 1997 essay, "Geography, demography, and tradition contributed to this outcome but did not determine it. It took men, responding unpredictably to circumstances, to forge the chain of causation; and it took [Stalin] in particular, responding predictably to his own authoritarian, paranoid, and narcissistic predisposition, to lock it into place." ^[14]

[edit] See also

• Western betrayal

[edit] External links

• The division of Europe Portal to topic documents
• The beginning of the Cold War Portal to topic documents
• James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly The division of Germany
• The Sinnews of Peace Recording of Winston Churchill's speech in 5, March, 1946, warning about the advance of communism in central Europe.
• Dividing up Europe The 1944 division of Europe between the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom into zones of influence.

[edit] References