Modern History

Home > Modern History > International Studies in Peace and Conflict > The Cold War 1945-1991 > Overview of US-Soviet relations and the Cold War

The Cold War 1945-1991

Overview of US-Soviet relations

and the Cold War

David Mclean
Charles Sturt University

Principal Focus: Students investigate key features and issues in the history of the Cold War 1945 - 1991

Outcomes

Students:

H1.1 describe the role of key features, issues, individuals, groups and events of select twentieth-century studies
(Extract from Modern History Stage 6 Syllabus Board of Studies NSW 2004.)

Key features and issues:

This is the transcript of a talk given at a seminar co-sponsored by the History Teachers’ Association of New South Wales and the US Information Service in Sydney on 2 September 1995.

From this tutorial you will learn about:

Contents

Notes
Suggestions for further reading

1. US – Soviet relations were not synonymous with the Cold War

While the Cold War was central to post-1945 United States-Soviet relations, it does not follow that an understanding of those relations tells us all we need to know about the Cold War. The crises of the 1950s over Korea and Taiwan, and the Vietnam War of the 1960s, were all, it is true, issues in the conflict between Washington and Moscow, but to see the superpower relationship as central to any of these crises would be to perpetuate an illusion from which at times both governments suffered. Bi-polar conflict lay at the heart of the Cold War, but the global struggle was more complicated.

Although in their public rhetoric American leaders treated world communism as monolithic, in private, at least by the early 1950s, they drew distinctions between communist powers. The Yugoslav case of 1948, in which Tito’s departure from the Soviet bloc underlined the potential for further divisions in the communist world, encouraged such distinctions. By the end of 1950s Washington regarded China as more fanatical and dangerous than Russia. By then the latter was seen as a relatively respectable communist power. At the very least the two superpowers had a common interest in avoiding nuclear war and in restraining their allies, especially over the question of nuclear proliferation. There is even strong evidence of a proposal by the Kennedy administration to take joint action with the Soviets against Chinese nuclear facilities (though it is not clear whether this proposal was actually presented to Moscow). [1]

Questions to consider:

a) Describe how US-Soviet relations had changed by the end of the 1950's.

Go To Top

2. Chronology of the Cold War

Because the term ‘Cold War’ refers to a state of hostility rather than a real war, there is no consensus on when it started or ended. If we see the Cold War as a single event lasting from the mid-1940s to the late 1980s, we must at least recognise that levels of tension fluctuated, and that there were times during this period when degrees of accommodation or cooperation characterised relations between Washington and Moscow. The conflict was at its height from 1947 to 1953. Relations improved between 1953 and 1958, only to be followed by increased tension between 1958 and 1962, centring especially on Berlin and Cuba (the most dangerous point of the Cold War occurred with the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962). Yet even then hostility was not consistently at a high level; it was during these years that Kennedy seriously considered joint action with the Soviets against China’s nuclear facilities. In the following years, despite the Vietnam War, US-Soviet relations improved. The period of detente, from 1969 to 1979, seemed to promise an end to the Cold War but gave way to renewed tensions between 1980 and 1985.

Some historians find it helpful to use terms like ‘First Cold War’ (to refer to the period 1947-53) and ‘Second Cold War’ or ‘New Cold War’ (for the 1980-85 period). Whatever terminology we use, the whole period 1945-89 is usefully seen as one of American-Soviet rivalry. It was a discrete era, brought to an end by the break-up of the Soviet empire in Europe and the Soviet Union itself between 1989 and 1991.

Questions to consider:

b) Define what you understand by the term ‘Cold War’.

c) Explain why there is no consensus on when the Cold War started and ended.

Go To Top

3. Influence of ideologies of communism and capitalism on the Cold War

The ideological character of the Cold War is something often not well understood. The conflict had important strategic, political and economic dimensions, and superpower diplomacy was often cautious and pragmatic. Thus, for example, the United Slates made no vigorous response to the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, while in Western Europe after 1949 Moscow was similarly careful to avoid challenging the status quo. Nonetheless, ideology shaped each side’s image of the other, its assessment of the threat it posed, and its conclusions on the appropriate response to that threat. With rare exceptions (Yugoslavia in the case of American policy), ideology identified the enemy. Alliance or cooperation with ideologically antithetical powers (as, for example, Britain and France had allied themselves with Tsarist Russia before 1914) was out of the question. We know that American determination to join conflict with Russia and communism throughout the globe stemmed from the assumption that the United States was threatened by an ideologically driven and expansionist world communism.

d) How does Mclean describe the ideological differences between The United States and Soviet Russia?

Go To Top

4. Soviet objectives

Russian objectives are central to controversy about the origins and development of the Cold War. For the Cold Warriors of the 1950s and 1960s the Soviet Union was a messianic and predatory power, as threatening to the Western democracies as Nazi Germany had been in the 1 930s and 1 940s. For others, including ‘revisionist’ scholars from the late 1960s, Soviet Russia was an insecure empire preoccupied with internal matters and, in its external relations, concerned only with security. Problems of evidence prevent a firm answer, but this is a case in which the truth probably lies somewhere between two extremes. No serious scholar now argues that Russia after 1945 aimed at world conquest or military invasion of Western Europe. Even the construction of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe was marked by hesitation and caution. While Stalinist regimes were imposed on Poland and Rumania from 1945, Hungary and Czechoslovakia avoided this fate until 1947 and 1948, while Finland was permitted to retain its independence on the condition of its acceptance of a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in 1948. We also know that Stalin, the architect of ‘socialism in one country’, showed a marked lack of enthusiasm for the revolutionary causes of the Greek and Chinese communists. None of this is to suggest, however, that the West Europeans and Americans did not have legitimate concerns about the extension of Russian power into Western Europe in the late 1940s and after. The disruption of European economies by the Second World War, the strength of communist parties in France and Italy, and the size of Russia’s conventional armed forces all suggest that, even without a Soviet blueprint for aggression, the Marshall Plan and NATO were reasonable precautions. They were, moreover, fully supported by the West Europeans.

It is often argued that in Europe and the Middle East, Stalin and his successors acted in the tradition of the Tsars - with insecurity and imperial expansion both important impulses - and that this continuity, rather than communist ideology or even the experience of German invasion in 1941 in itself, gives the clue to Moscow’s behaviour. Beyond Europe and the Middle East there may well be a useful analogy between Russian policies and those of pre-1914 Germany. As Michael Howard has pointed out, both the Soviet Union and the Germany of Wilhelm II represent cases of a recently emerged great power determined to assert its equal status with the leading power of the day, first by building up its military and naval power and then by using it. [2] This insight helps account for Soviet adventurism in Africa in the 1970s, when nuclear parity and detente should have helped the USSR feel more, not less secure.

Questions to consider:

e) In what ways did ‘revisionist’ scholars differ in their analysis of Russia’s objectives to traditional analysts of the 1950s and 1960s?

Research the ‘post revisionist’ historians’ conclusions.

Some useful references to begin your research:

Go To Top

5. American objectives

Although it is not helpful to see the Cold War as a conflict between freedom and tyranny (both American and Russian policies were too often inconsistent with such an interpretation), it was nonetheless the case that American leaders often saw the contest in these terms. Internationalist aims were central to American policy. After 1945, with the isolation of the inter-war period no longer an option for the United States, Washington sought to replace the old European order (based on alliances, spheres of influence and the balance of power) with a new order based on American leadership through the United Nations Organisation, one true to the principles of democracy and self-determination. The initial Cold War clash over Eastern Europe arose from Russia’s failure to accept American internationalist values. The image of the USSR as an expansionist, ideologically motivated power had much to do with this clash. From this image, in turn, sprang the doctrine of containment. Originally containment reflected assumptions about the essential unity of the communist world. When recognition grew of divisions in the communist bloc, it continued to be the case that American officials saw ideology as more important than national interest in accounting for the behaviour of communist governments.

American policy remained one of containment rather than ‘liberation’ or ‘rollback’, despite the Republicans’ rhetoric in the presidential elections of 1952. By the mid-1950s there was no serious hope of undoing the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, and at least by the 1970s it could even be said that American leaders welcomed the stability afforded by Soviet control of Eastern Europe.

Two other important influences on American policy were ‘lessons of history’ and a preoccupation with prestige. Ernest May and other scholars have pointed to the role played by experience of the 1930s in persuading American policymakers to compare the totalitarian features of the USSR and the People’s Republic of China with those of Nazi Germany, to jump to the conclusion that in its international behaviour ‘red fascism’ would act as Hitler had done, and to apply the lessons of geopolitics to the post-war world.[3] Many scholars have emphasised the influence of a psychology of ‘prestige’ and ‘credibility’ in convincing policymakers to regard as vital American interests in areas which possessed relatively little tangible strategic or economic importance.

Something must also be said about the role of economics in American policy. For the New Left school of history which arose in the 1960s, the internationalist rhetoric associated with American foreign policy amounted to no more than a guise behind which American corporate interests were able to spread their control and influence abroad. Of this it can be said that while American governments have always sought to protect what they regard as the nation’s economic interests (this is, after all, a normal function of national governments), American economic interests simply cannot explain the extent of United States involvement in the post-war world. This is especially the case in the Third World, where the American economic stake was far less important than in advanced industrial countries. And if we look not at the needs of the American economy but at policymakers’ own understanding of what they were doing, it is clear that economic concerns were subordinate to political and military interests, even to the point where the United States, in its support for the economies of Japan and Western Europe, was prepared to sacrifice its own trade interests in order to create Asian and European bulwarks against communism.

Question to consider:

g)  How had the United States’ policy to the Soviet Union changed between 1945 and the 1970s? Provide examples to support your answer.

Go To Top

6. The Arms Race

There are two points to be stressed here. First, the arms race did not cause superpower conflict; rather, the reverse: the arms race stemmed from and was sustained by political and ideological conflict. When that political conflict ended, Russia and America found it relatively easy to reach agreement on dismantling arsenals. Second, the arms race was not essential to the Soviet- American conflict. That is, there is no reason to believe that in the absence of nuclear weapons the Cold War would not have occurred.

Overall, nuclear weaponry played a paradoxical role in the Cold War. On the one hand the destructive potential of such weapons gave the conflict an especially dangerous dimension. A crisis in political relations between the superpowers, such as occurred over the question of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, carried the risk of escalation to the point of nuclear warfare. We should not assume that this risk was never real. It is true that both Moscow and Washington, at all stages of the Cold War, regarded the avoidance of war with the other superpower as a high priority. Ever during the Cuban missile crisis President Kennedy, despite a clear American advantage in nuclear weapons, was constrained from using such weapons against Russia by the fear that some Soviet missiles, even as few as two or three, might get through to land on American cities. Yet there was no guarantee that such a war could not occur as a result of an accidental breakdown in command and communication systems. On the other hand, rational considerations did prevail, and in this way the nuclear arsenals maintained at great cost by both Moscow and Washington help to explain why the Cold War did not become a hot war. Even before 1945, wartime experience of the destructive capacities of conventional weapons had fostered a general belief that the costs of war between modern great powers were out of all proportion to the possible benefits. The advent of atomic weapons (acquired by America in 1945 and Russia in 1949), followed by the development of hydrogen or thermonuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them by missile from one continent to another (something both superpowers possessed by the early 1960s), intensified such beliefs. War between the great powers by now appeared not only too costly to be acceptable but tantamount to national suicide on the part of any power that participated in such a war.

Question to consider:

h) Explain why nuclear weaponry played a paradoxical role in the Cold War.

Go To Top

7. The Third World was important for the Cold War

Both superpowers were prepared to use force where they could do so without unacceptable risk of war with the superpower rival. While Europe was remarkably stable, crises arose in grey areas, that is, areas in which there existed no mutually shared agreement on the area’s status in the context of the superpower confrontation. Korea in 1950, Cuba in the early 1960s, Vietnam in the 1960s and Afghanistan in 1979 are the main examples. In three of these cases America and Russia fought hot wars by proxy.

Both powers viewed developments around the world in terms of their relationship to the Cold War struggle. They tended to ignore indigenous developments: specific characteristics of different societies and different nationalisms were considered irrelevant. It was assumed that nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America were all part of an undeveloped monolith, that these nations might be built, rebuilt or restructured with appropriate injections of American or Soviet resources, and that they would then take their places in an American or Soviet-designed international order. Both superpowers, then, had a distorted view of what was happening in the Third World, and part of this distortion was an illusion of control. By the 1980s such illusions were to be deflated. Here the Vietnam experience was crucial in the American case, Afghanistan for the Soviet Union.

Question to consider:

i) Why did Third World countries become the focus of tensions between the US and Soviet Russia? Use evidence to support your answer.

Go To Top

8. Why did the Cold War not end earlier?

Tensions between America and Russia decreased at various stages of the post-war period because there existed no consistent conviction that United States-Soviet confrontation was in the interests of the governments concerned. Both the economic burden of the Cold War and the dangers of nuclear proliferation encouraged a degree of collaboration between Washington and Moscow. Significantly, detente arose at a time when American power was in decline and the costs of continuing the Cold War were all the more apparent. There were by now a number of clear signs that the world had changed greatly since the 1940s-1950s: Russia’s achievement of nuclear parity with the United States by the early 1970s, America’s first trade deficit of the twentieth century in 1971, the increasing assertiveness of undeveloped countries, especially the members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the rapid growth of the economies of Japan and of the European Economic Community, and the decline of America’s influence within the United Nations Organisation. Detente represented in part an attempt by President Richard Nixon to adjust American policies to these changes. As a result of detente the end of the Cold War seemed to many to be in sight in the early 1970s. That it did not end at that stage stemmed partly from the opposition to detente of many Americans, partly from the Soviet government’s actions in that decade: its suppression of dissidents within the Soviet Union, its interventions in Angola in 1975- 76 and Ethiopia in 1977-78, and above all its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

Questions to consider:

j) What does détente mean?

k) Make a list of the factors that contributed to the adoption of the détente policy.

Go To Top

9. Did the United States win the Cold War?

The end of the Cold War represented not so much a victory for one side as a matter of the other side declining to continue to take part in the contest. The Soviet empire collapsed because of its own weaknesses. Russian leaders, notably Mikhail Gorbachev, recognised how badly Soviet policies had failed, both internally and externally. Russia’s attempt to keep pace with American defence spending may have contributed to the weakness of the Soviet economy, but we cannot say more than that. At least as important seems to have been a loss of faith in the system by the very people who might have been most expected to defend it to the bitter end, namely Soviet leaders and East European communist leaders. It is likely that a similar outcome would have resulted even without the ‘Reaganite’ defence increases of the 1980s, and it is possible that the Soviet Union would have collapsed earlier had it not been for the Cold War, which had come to provide the chief rationale for the Soviet command economy and national security edifice. The success of West Germany’s Ostpolitik from 1970 demonstrated that it was possible to further Western interests in Eastern Europe through a course of negotiation rather than confrontation with the Soviets.

The events of 1989-91 created little genuine sense of Cold War victory in the United States. Thirty years earlier the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire would undoubtedly have caused widespread rejoicing. That this did not happen at the end of the 1980s can be explained by two points. First, the United States itself faced intractable economic and social problems which it had not experienced thirty years before. These problems, which did not disappear with the end of the Cold War, seemed to many to be more important to the nation’s future than the outcome of continuing political competition with the USSR. Concerns about the nation’s capacity to maintain its relative power, especially in competition with the successful economies of Japan and Western Europe, gave rise to widespread talk of American ‘decline’, reflected in the best-seller status of the English-born, Yale historian, Paul Kennedy’s 1987 study of the rise and fall of empires [4] Second, the American-Soviet contest had long since lost much of its ideological intensity. In the 1950s the United States and USSR could convince themselves that they were competing for the loyalties of mankind, and that the world’s long-term future hinged on the question of which side would prevail in the Cold War. Such illusions were deflated by Vietnam in the American case and in the Soviet case by a less than successful experience in the Third World. The superpowers’ inability to influence the course of events to more than a minor extent in large areas of the globe was demonstrated by problems of terrorism (both state-sponsored and otherwise), the escalation of violent conflict in South Africa, the Iran-Iraq war, chronic tension between India and Pakistan, and the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East. Despite the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, it could not be seriously maintained by more than a few Americans that the end of the Cold War represented a triumph for American institutions. Moreover, events since 1991 in Eastern Europe have served to dampen much of the initially optimistic reaction to the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Question to consider:

l) What ideological changes had been forced upon the ‘superpowers’ by the end of the 1980s?

Go To Top

Notes

Go To Top

Suggestions for further reading

The literature on the Cold War is vast. Extensive bibliographies may be found in most of the books listed here.

John W. Young (ed.), The Longman Companion to Cold War and Detente 1941-91. (London: Longman, 1993) is a valuable reference work and includes a good bibliography.

Most general histories of the twentieth century give ample attention to the Cold War. A good recent example, available in a reasonably priced paperback, is Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1 991 (London: Abacus, 1995).

Students might be introduced to the state of scholarly debate on the Cold War through Michael Dockrill, The Cold War 1945-1963 (London: Macmillan, 1988), which is intended specifically for senior school students.

There are many surveys of the Cold War and of post-1945 international relations. The following are accessible works which offer the added advantage of taking events up to the 1990s:

The early years of the Cold War have been the subject of many detailed studies, of which the most important in recent years have been Wilfried Loth, The Division of the World 1941-1955 (London: Routledge, 1988); and Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). A much briefer introduction to Leffler’s views (147 pages) is his The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 191 7-1 953 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994).

For the years beyond the early 1950s there are many monographs on particular areas but, as yet. an absence of works which combine the fruits of archival research with the breadth of the Loth and Leffler studies. Some of the results of recent research may be found in essays in two useful collections:

Finally, students of the Cold War should have some acquaintance with the work of John Lewis Gaddis, who in his emphasis on the pragmatism of American post-war policies has played the leading role in the development of a dominant ‘post-revisionist’ interpretation of the Cold War. See especially his Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States: An Interpretive History (New York: McGraw Hill, 1990).

Go To Top


Neals logo | Copyright | Disclaimer | Contact Us | Help