Cold War

Term that refers to the hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1991, a contest that pitted the capitalist West against the Communist East following the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Though the tensions between the two dissipated during the era of glasnost (openness) ushered in after Mikhail Gorbachev became the general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR in 1985, the formal end of the Cold War coincided with the demise of the Soviet Union in December 1991. The defeat of Nazi Germany, the common enemy of the United States and the USSR,rift gold led to the rapid emergence of fundamental differences concerning the administration of occupied Germany and the future of central, eastern and southeastern Europe, regions that had been occupied by the Soviet Army as it drove out the Germans. The United States and the USSR avoided direct military action against each other during the Cold War, but there were three major conflicts between the main protagonists and surrogate forces: the Korean War (1950–53), in which the United States and United Nations forces supported South Korea against an invasion by Communist North Korea (later supported by Communist China); the Vietnam War (1955–74), in which the United States stepped in after France gave up its effort to restore French control over Vietnam in 1955 and provided support to South Vietnam in its struggle against the Communist Viet Cong in the south and, eventually, against the forces of Communist North Vietnam; and the Afghanistan War (1979–89), in which the Soviet Union attempted to preserve the Communist regime in Afghanistan against an anti-Communist guerrilla movement. In addition to these three conflicts, in which one or the other of the superpowers was directly involved, the United States and the USSR supported surrogates in a number of less intense conflicts around the world. Perhaps the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the United States reacted to the placement by the Soviet Union of mediumrange nuclear missiles in Cuba by imposing a naval quarantine around the island. Had Nikita Khrushchev of the USSR not agreed to withdraw the missiles, nuclear war might well have occurred between the United States and the USSR. Khrushchev’s successor as general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, determined that the USSR would not back down again, began a program to establish military parity with the United States. He simultaneously pursued a policy of détente, through which the USSR and the United States would respect each other’s essential interests.

Some historians date the beginning of the Cold War from the dispute between the United States and the USSR over the composition of the Polish government following the Yalta Conference of February 1945. Winston Churcill, the former British prime minister, used the term “Iron Curtain” to signal the divide between the West and the Sovietdominated East in a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in March 1946. Bernard Baruch, the U.S. presidential advisor, used the term “Cold War,” which had been suggested to him by the journalist Herbert Bayard Swope, in a speech in April, 1946,rift gold and the journalist Walter Lippmann published a book entided The Cold War in 1947. The Cold War was definitely operative in 1947 as the Soviet Union pressed for a monopoly of Communist power in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, and the United States replaced Great Britain as the supporter of the conservative government in Greece against Communist guerrillas, U.S. President Harry Truman’s called for military assistance and aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947 (the so-called Truman Doctrine) in an effort to contain the expansion of the Soviet Union. Following the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine, the Communists in Hungary moved against their coalition government partners and established a monolithic Communist government. With the threat of an extension of U.S. influence through Marshall Plan aid (1948), the Communists in Czechoslovakia consolidated their power and formed a clearly Communist dominated government (1948). Historians have debated the cause of the Cold War. One group, often labeled “orthodox,” place the blame on Stalin and Soviet aggression. They believe that he had a predetermined plan to impose monolithic Communist regimes on the states occupied by the Soviet Army, and that this led inevitably to a conflict with the West led by the United States “Revisionist” historians believe that the Cold War stemmed from mutual suspicions and mistakes made by both sides. “Radical revisionists” have argued that the actions of the United States, specifically the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, which were regarded by the Soviets as a challenge to the sphere of influence they had gained in Eastern and Central Europe, were the primary causes of the Cold War.