What was the Cold War and why did it end?

                    One of the main reasons that caused the Cold War was the ideological differences. The USA feared the increased influence that the Soviet Union had over Eastern Europe believing that the ideas of Communism were a threat to America’s national security. These differences in ideologies lead to an “aggressive” American policy of Containment from the Truman Doctrine which started with the U.S. support of Greece and Turkey to prevent their falling into the Soviet influence and also because after the end of the Second World War, Stalin was accused of deliberately plotting a consistent communist conspiracy beginning with his refusal to allow free elections in Poland in contraventions of the agreement made at the Yalta Conference in 1945. Communist control expanded the communist regime which included the majority of Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria) and probes were made against Iran, Turkey and Greece. For Americans the Cold War “was a brave and essential response of free men to communist aggression”, however for the Soviets, writers agreed on the importance of the Truman Doctrine in contributing to the conflict between East and West singling out “American imperialism as the cause of the Cold War”. Therefore, the United States introduced measures such as the Marshall Aid in order to control the Soviet Union and this increased the hostility between the two countries. The Marshall Plan and the Truman doctrine, was a form of aid that was provided by American to all European countries that were facing economic difficulties. General Marshall saw the effects of stagnation and economic declines, as it led to the rising support for Communist parties within European countries, thus he believed that if aid were provided then the influence of the Communists would be decreased. “The Marshall Plan was in large part a humanitarian gesture for which many Europeans expressed their gratitude”. Moreover, the United States was willing to extend this Plan aid to Eastern Europe including the Soviet Union but with the condition that this money would have to be administered there by the United Stated themselves. Several Eastern Europeans were receptive to the plan such as Czechoslovakia. However, this further angered the Soviet Union as they considered the move as a clear attack since its implementation would involve the presence of US officials on East Europe and Soviet soil and would therefore impose upon their country’s national sovereignty. The Soviet Union then successfully pressured Czechoslovakia and Poland to refuse the Marshal Plan. This shows that the Soviet Union felt that the USA was planning to use economic aid as weapon against them by breaking down the defences that they had built. Other than that, it meant that East European countries would have to rebuild their war-torn economies with their own limited resources without the US aid and Western Technology. 

                    Going back to Germany’s division issue, Britain, America and France introduced a new deutschmark to bring financial unity to their three zones. The USSR was offended. This led to the Berlin blockade, the first major confrontation of the cold war that took place in June 1948.The Russians struck at what they thought was the west’s weakest point and Berlin was accessible because it was surrounded on all sides by communists. On June 1948 (in the night) the USSR closed the Elb Road Bridge and then blocked all road, rail and canal transport into Berlin, and they withdrew from their joint control of the city. In time the West realised that the USSR did not want direct warfare but wanted to banish the West from Berlin by siege tactics. As a result, the West sent supplies by air. They delivered food, clothing, medicines, drink and fuel, West Berliners accepted rationing and to increase their chances of survival they built a new airfield and extended two others. The siege ended in May 1949 and the West claimed a victory, but they knew that the USSR could strike the same blow on Berlin at any time in the future. The West united its three zones as the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The Soviets responded by naming their zone the German Democratic Republic (DDR). However, the use of “democratic” by communists was seen as just propaganda. Additionally, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was then set up to bring military unity to the west giving the USA the right to base its troops in Western Europe. To respond to this, USSR created the Warsaw Pact giving them the right to base its troops in the satellite countries. Another important factor that contributed to the Cold War was the introduction of nuclear weapons as the possession of a weapon was the main cause for its fear and distrust. The US possession of the atomic bomb following the use during the WWII in Hiroshima and Nagazaki (Japan) has affected attitudes on both sides that contributed to Cold War mistrust. “US possession of the bomb caused its leaders to be more demanding and less flexible in dealing with the Soviet Union, and the US possession and use of the bomb surely caused the Soviet leaders, in turn, to increase their suspicions of the West and the US.” The atom bomb has no doubt played a significant role, as America was now both economically and militarily stronger than the Soviet Union. After the end of WWII, Russia was economically unstable as the war left considerable effects and exhausted Russia’s military. However, the Soviet Union’s desire to compete with America, led to an Arms Race in which both countries competed leading to unimproved conditions between the two countries. Four years later after the US’s possession of the Atomic Bomb, the USSR had developed theirs.

                    While the origins of the cold war were in Europe, events and conflicts in Asia and elsewhere were also important. A quite separate development in Asia, a civil war between the nationalist and communist Chinese, resulted in a communist victory in 1949 that led to a Sino-Soviet alliance (Sino means “Chinese”). This brought to power a government which effectively unified China and restored it to a position of complete independence after a century of European colonial domination. Because the United States had, by 1949, defined all Communist governments as the enemy, the relations between China and the US quickly weakened. The United States intervened in the Chinese civil war by interposing a US fleet in the Taiwan straits, thus protecting the Nationalist Chinese, who had fled to the island, from invasion by the mainland Chinese. The “Loss of China” to Communism has led America in ever more concerned to check the spread of Communism to other parts of Asia, and when, soon afterward, faced with Communist threat in Korea and the prospect of “losing” Korea consequently led the US to respond immediately and forcefully. 

                    At the end of World War II, the Korean peninsula was divided at the 38th parallel agreed in the Postdam Conference in July 1945 by the United States military forces in the south and Soviet forces in the north. Both powers supported client states in their respective areas, and both of these client states sought to unite Korea and last until a unified Korean government could be established. This led to the outbreak of war in June 1950 because the United States had not given extensive military aid to South Korea, and the Soviets had done so in the north giving them the advantage and therefore invaded the south.  The Korean War broke out when the communist North Korea attacked and overran most of US-allied South Korea. The United States and its allies counterattacked and overran most of North Korea. “Korea thus became the first real battleground of the Cold War and the first major threat of an all-out war between the East and West”. The United States intervened with it own forces and reversed the tide of the war. The approach of U.S. military forces to the Yalu River border with China provoked Chinese involvement. The war dragged on between the United States and China for three years. President Truman limited the war to the Korean peninsula, where immense destruction took place. The fighting ended with a cease fire in place, but no permanent peace treaty. The effect of the war was to create a heavily fortified border zone still closely guarded by both sides through the end of the twentieth century. The war greatly intensified the tension in the Cold War, accelerated the arms race and led to a change in US policy towards Vietnam.  The Vietnamese found themselves in a struggle for independence from France in the years 1946-1954. The United States began to provide an extensive aid to the French in 1950, when, after the beginning of the Korean War and the end of the Chinese civil war, American leaders believed that Communism was spreading throughout Asia. The “Domino Theory” that was a foreign policy of the US in which they believed that if Vietnam fell so would Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Philippines and Hawaii. The Geneva conference then allocated Vietnam between communist North and non-communist South. “The Vietnam War, like the Korean was in first instance, a civil one”. In the event North Vietnam, economically assisted by USSR and China endured the USA and in 1975 invaded South Vietnam. This victory was accompanied by communist take-over in Laos and Cambodia. In addition, the fall of South Vietnam divided US citizens and appeared of signal its weakness especially combined with US difficulties in the Middle East – “the 1973 Arab oil embargo against the United States and the 1979 over thrown of the US backed Shah of Iran by Islamic fundamentalists.”   Other than that, prior to these events, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was regarded as one of the major confrontations together with the Berlin Blockade in which it was seen as the moment in which the Cold War came closest to escalating into a Nuclear War. It was a confrontation between the US, the Soviet Union and Cuba. This started when the Soviet Union’s nuclear missiles were discovered in the Island of Cuba. The Soviet’s objective were to reduce the Soviet Union’s strategic nuclear inferiority, to counter the deployment of US missiles on Soviet borders in Turkey and to deter another invasion of Cuba. As this was extremely threatening to both superpowers, the Soviet Union backed out from the missiles and the United States promised not to invade Cuba in the future. This lead to both parties signing the “Limited Test Ban Treaty 1963” in which they agree in prohibiting atmospheric nuclear tests and later on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1968), which is an international  to limit the spread of . From 1968 there was this period known as “détente” that represented an attempt by both superpowers to manage their relations with each other with negotiation and agreement.

                    However, the relations between the Superpowers worsened in the years after 1979 because the agreement which was to take place in the SALT II talks never came into force because, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, a conflict involving Soviet forces supporting the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan government against the Mujahideen resistance, the Americans refused to approve the treaty. In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected as President, he loathed communism and in the first four years of his presidency he increased spending “over 2 trillion US dollars to build up US conventional and nuclear forces”. These years are sometimes called the new or the Second Cold War. Both Superpowers opposed so-called intermediate nuclear missiles. Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative, known as SDI or “Star Wars”, started in 1983. He announced that American scientists were developing laser weapons to shoot down Soviet missiles from space. The USA did this because they knew that the Soviet Union couldn’t compete with this project as it would turn out too costly and they knew that it was a losing situation for the Soviets, so threatened to use it against them. Nevertheless, the fall of Soviet Union was one of the major contributions to the end of the Cold War, the war on Afghanistan in 1979 that lasted until 1988, a nine years conflict had weakened the Soviet Union the same way the Vietnam War had done to America, and the war was seen as “pointless”. Their population was divided and yet they struggled economically.

                   Gorbachev and Reagan were able to improve relations between the Superpowers from 1985 to 1989, because the Soviet economy was in difficulty by the mid 1980s and the Soviet government found it hard to compete with the West. When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he was committed to the idea of peace with the non-communist world. He was keen to end the Cold War and to bring economic and political reform to the Soviet Union. He initiated dramatic new agreements with the United States, involving unilateral concessions in the armaments race. His arrival almost immediately transformed superpower relations and led to the Intermediate Nuclear Weapons Treaty in 1987. This involved substantial disarmament as all intermediate nuclear missiles were to be removed from Europe within three years. He also brought an end to Soviet support of client governments in Eastern Europe and in Cuba. He relaxed the police state repression in the Soviet empire and took steps to introduce a democratic political process. Gorbachev’s speech signalled the end of the arms race. The removal of the Soviet threat contributed to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.

          Gorbachev tried to end the Cold War by introducing also a new détente with the West by economic restructuring also know as the aid perestroika. His reforms undermined the position of old-style pro-Soviet leaders in other countries. He replaced the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’ with the “Sinatra Doctrine”. The whole of communist Europe was swept with revolution in 1989. One by one the communist authorities were overthrown and he did nothing to stop this. As stated by Dunbabin, “such attitudes underline the extent to which the ending of the Cold War was dependent on the internal transformation of the Soviet Union”. Lastly but not least, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was a significant symbol of the end of the Cold War.
                  All in all, the effects of the Cold War have no doubt shaped international relations in so many possible ways. The Cold War involved more than just the two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union. The superpowers were engaged in proxy wars, where they aid and train another side in the fight to indirectly keep the other occupied. These were the ways in which the Cold War would lead to “hot wars” such as the Korean War, The Vietnam War and the Soviet-Afghan War. Therefore, in my opinion the term “cold” could only be applied to the US and the Soviet Union as they were using their involvement in other countries that struggled after WWII to spread their own thinking and to attack their only rival, whilst blood shed in those other nations. These differing ideologies between the West and the East that was also known as the “Iron Curtain” had once led to a possible Third World War in which never in history there was any confrontation between countries as close to a nuclear war as the United States and the Soviet Union was. Ultimately, having lasted for decades it had finally came to an end under the George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev’s administration with a “New World Order” which includes the German reunification, the disarmament treaties and cooperation at the UN on conflicts as well as the formation of the SOC in 2001 and the emergence of new potential alliances such as China and India. However, this raises the questions: do the changes since the end of the Cold War really means a new world order or more an adjustment among existing powers?  Has the Cold War really ended?  I believe there are still degrees of mistrust which have never gone away.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baylis, John and Smith, Steven, (2006), 3rd edition, The Globalization of World Politics, New York, Oxford University Press

Dunbabin, J.P.D. (1994) The Cold War, The Great Power and their Allies, New York, Longman Group Limited

Goldstein, Joshua, (2003), 5th edition, International Relations, United States, The Lehigh Press, Inc

McWilliams, Wayne C., Piotrowiski, Harry (2001) The World Since 1945 A history of International Relations, United States, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.

Painter, David S(1999), The Cold War An International History, London, Routledge

Smith, Joseph (1998), The Cold War 1945-1991, 2nd edition, Oxford, Blackwell

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