A history of the Cold War
Lasting from 1947–1991, the Cold War is called cold because the two main belligerents, the United States and the Soviet Union, never directly fought each other. The superpowers were caught in a stalemate as George Orwell predicted would happen in an article in 1945. Orwell is the creator of the term Cold War. He wrote of a 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” (Encyclopedia Britannica). Even though the superpowers were cold toward each other in a stalemate, they precipitated hot proxy wars in nations in the continents of Asia and Latin America.
The weapon that Orwell refers to is the nuclear weapon. The nuclear stalemate consisted of several events. Examples of the events include that the US had developed and used the weapon in World War II. The Soviets tested their first nuclear weapon in 1949. A little more than a decade later, in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis concerned the placement of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba where they could target US cities. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) and their agreements in 1972 and 1979, reached by presidents Nixon and Carter respectively, limited missiles that could carry nuclear weapons. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev, banned short and intermediate range nuclear weapons.
The ideology of “mutual atomic annihilation,” writes the encyclopedia, began to complement the mindset of containment that had become popular among western, liberal democracies in response to the Soviet bloc of nations that formed with the Soviet, satellite states in 1948 and the Warsaw Pact in 1955.
History.com relates the famous “Long Telegram” (1946) by the diplomat George Kennan as emblematic of the post-World War II, western, liberal, democratic agreement for containment of communist expansion. The lines “no permanent modus vivendi” (the belief among the Soviets that communist and liberal democratic nations could not find a feasible arrangement) and containment “of Russian expansive tendencies” indicate the contours of the ideology.
The Cold War saw nine US presidents, from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush, and many of those presidents had doctrines that outlined the stance of the nation in relation to the war, often framed as the offer of defense to other nations against a threat to a nation from communism. For example, the Truman Doctrine in 1947 pledged aid to any nation threatened by communism, and the Reagan Doctrine in 1985 vowed to “defy Soviet-supported aggression.” By protecting other nations from Soviet invasion without threatening the sovereignty of the Soviet Union, these doctrines combined the ideologies of containment and mutual atomic annihilation.
Throughout the war, the doctrines and a popular opposition to communism, continues the encyclopedia, led to the US military intervention in multiple nations including the overthrow of “a left wing government in Guatemala” in 1954, the support for the “unsuccessful invasion of Cuba” in 1961, the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, the invasion of Grenada in 1983, and the Vietnam War from 1964–1975.
The Vietnam War started a year after the collapse of the French colonial regime in 1954. The war from 1964–1975 concerned the American-backed nationalists against the communist and nationalist Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong.
Wikipedia also notes the Korean War, 1950–53, when, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, Soviet and Chinese support for the invasion of South Korea by the North Koreans, prompted the US and the western bloc to respond militarily, leading to some million deaths on each side.
These are examples of the proxy wars that were fought between the US and the Soviets during the Cold War.
There were periods of diplomatic hostility and cooperation between the western and eastern blocs. An example of diplomatic hostility is the 1961 meeting in Vienna between President Kennedy and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Krushchev. Krushchev, in a “combative tone,” according to the JFK Presidential Library and Museum online, “threatened to cut off Allied access to Berlin.”
Examples of the democratic cooperation between the two blocs include the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty in 1963 that banned above ground testing of nuclear weapons, the visit by President Nixon to China in 1972, the aforementioned SALT agreements, the meeting between President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985 “to discuss reductions in nuclear weapons” (Encyclopedia Britannica), and the aforementioned Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed in 1987.
Encyclopedia Britannica cautions against a historical consideration of the geopolitics of the Cold War as always bipolar. The Sino-Soviet Split in 1960 and the economic prosperity of the western liberal democracies and of Japan in the 1950s — 1960s, created a multipolar world where international negotiation saw many nations argue for their national interests.
A jaunty and affable actor and orator with a folksy charm, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, President Reagan is known as the “Great Communicator.” During his tenure from 1981–1989, President Reagan took a tough stand on Soviet communism. He declared the regime an “evil empire” in 1983. He spent more on the military in peacetime than any president before him. He developed the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983 though critics claim the program was unrealistic. And President Reagan applied the Reagan Doctrine in Latin America, both in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The encyclopedia notes that his “policies have been credited with contributing to the demise of Soviet communism.”
In 1989, President Reagan gave a famous speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. He implored General Secretary Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Gorbachev was a sympathetic counterpart for President Reagan because he had initiated glasnost “openness” of dialogue in 1985 and perestroika “reorganization” of the economy to include some free market aspects in 1987, signaling a lessening of tension between the superpowers.
The Soviet nation was undergoing a crisis during the late 1980s. The Office of the Historian of the US Department of State, writes that “Gorbachev’s decision to allow elections with a multi-party system and create a presidency for the Soviet Union began a slow process of democratization that eventually destabilized Communist control and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
The Revolutions of 1989 added further strain to the Soviet Union. Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania revolted, replacing the Soviet constitution with constitutions that recognized the independence of the nations. Other countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia later gained independence with the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Wikipedia writes that in total, 15 republicans gained independence from the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991 when the Soviet Union officially dissolved.
Encyclopedia Britannica notes that although the Soviet economy was arguably the second largest in the world in 1990, nonetheless it faced the problems of frequent shortages of consumer goods and the result of hoarding. “Wage hikes were supported by printing money,” the encyclopedia continues, “fueling an inflationary spiral.” The “mismanagement of fiscal policy” made the Soviet Union “vulnerable to external factors” such as drops in the international price of oil.
In terms of other factors of the Soviet collapse, the encyclopedia notes the high military spending even during difficult, economic years, antiwar sentiment against the Afghan-Soviet War in 1979–1989, common disgust with “widespread corruption endemic to the Soviet state,” and Chernobyl as centrifugal factors of state formation, to borrow a term from the historical sociologist Norbert Elias.
Even though the end of the Cold War left the US as the sole superpower in the world, Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union, has been a contender in the top 10 economies of the world, and the nation stocks nuclear weapons. Even today, Dr. Cornel West, the Green Party candidate for the presidency in 2024, warns that the Russo-Ukrainian War risks a nuclear war.
Another important trend of the Cold War that left its impression on the geopolitics of the post-1990s era, was the development of nuclear weapons by other nations. Britain developed nuclear weapons in 1952, France in 1960, China in 1964, and India in 1974. The multipolar world introduced mutual atomic annihilation among six players during the Cold War. (Later other countries developed nuclear weapons: Pakistan in 1998 and North Korea in 2006.)
The end of the Cold War left a multipolar world where previous Soviet republics took on new economic and political ideologies. With the largest economy, the US continues to influence nations internationally, and the nation eventually developed some 800 military bases throughout the continents of the world while seven other nations acquired nuclear weapons. Not an empire, without sovereignty over another nation, the US remains today an economic and military superpower, with China in a close second economically.
