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Chapter 27: Origins of the Cold War

CHAPTER 27: Objectives

o We will study the development of the

cold war during the final phase of

World War II amongst the allies.

o We will explore the various foreign

policy measures developed by the

United States during the early phase

of the cold war both internationally

and domestically.

(Mat 24:6) And ye shall hear of

wars and rumours of wars: see

that ye be not troubled: for all

these things must come to pass,

but the end is not yet.

Sources of Soviet-American Tension:

o At the heart of the rivalry between the

United States and the Soviet Union in

the 1940s was the fundamental

difference in the ways the great powers

envisioned the postwar world.

o One vision openly outlines in the

Atlantic Charter in 1941.


o Was of a world which nations abandoned

their traditional beliefs in military alliance

and spheres of influence and governed

their relations with one another through a

democratic process,

o With an international organization serving

as the arbiter of disputes and protector of

every nation’s right of self determination.


o The other vision was that of the Soviet Union and to some extent Great Britain.

o Britain had always been uneasy about the implications of the self-determination ideal for its own enormous empire.

o And the Soviet Union was determined to create a secure sphere for itself in central and Eastern Europe as protection against possible future aggression from the west.


o Both Churchill and Stalin, therefore,

tended to envision a postwar structure

in which the great power would control

areas of strategic interest in them.

o In which something vaguely similar to

the traditional European balance of

power would reemerge.

Wartime Diplomacy:

o There was serious strains in the alliance with the Soviet Union in 1943 when Roosevelt and Churchill met in Casablanca to discuss Allied Strategy.

o Stalin declined Roosevelt's invitation to attend.

o The two leaders could not accept Stalin’s most important demand the immediate opening of a second front in western Europe.

Wartime Diplomacy:

o But they tried to reassure Stalin by

announcing that they would accept

nothing less than unconditional

surrender of the Axis powers.

o Thus indicating that they would not

negotiate a separate peace with Hitler

and leave the Soviets to fight on alone.

Wartime Diplomacy:

o In November 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill traveled to Teheran, Iran, for their first meeting with Stalin.

o It was seen as a success as Roosevelt and Stalin established a cordial relationship.

o Stalin agreed to an American request that the Soviet Union enter the war in the Pacific soon after the end of hostilities in Europe.

o Roosevelt in turn promised that an Anglo-American second front would be established within six months.

Yalta:

o More than a year later, in February 1945, Roosevelt joined Churchill and Stalin for the great peace conference in the Soviet city of Yalta-a resort on the Black Sea that was once a summer palace for the Tsars.

o On a number of issues, the Big Three Reached agreements.

o In return for Stalin’s renewed promise to enter the pacific war, Roosevelt agreed that the Soviet Union should receive some of the territory in the Pacific that Russia had lost in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War.

Yalta:

o The negotiations also agreed to a plan for a new international organization, a plan that had been hammered out the previous summer at a conference in Washington D.C. at the Dumbarton Oaks Estate.

o The new United Nations would contain a General Assembly, in which every member would be represented.

o And a Security Council, with permanent representatives of the five major powers (The U.S., Britain, France, The Soviet Union, and China) each of which would have veto power.

Yalta:

o The Security Council would also have temporary delegates from several other nations.

o These agreements became the basis of the United Nations charter drafted at a conference of fifty nations beginning April 25, 1945, in San Francisco.

o The U.S. Senate ratified the charter in July by a vote of 80 to 2 (in striking contrast to the slow and painful defeat it had administered to the charter of the League of Nations twenty-five years before).

Yalta:

o On other issues the Yalta Conference

produced no real accord.

o Basic disagreement remained about

the postwar Polish government.

o Stalin, whose armies now occupied

Poland, had already installed a

government composed of pro-

communist Lubin Poles.

Yalta:

o Roosevelt and Churchill insisted that the pro-Western forces would win.

o Stalin agreed only to a vague compromise by which an unspecified number of pro-Western Poles would be granted a place in the government.

o He reluctantly consented to hold “free and unfettered elections” in Poland on an unspecified future date.

o They did not take place for almost fifty years.

Yalta:

o Nor was there agreement about the future of Germany.

o Roosevelt seemed to want a reconstructed and reunited Germany.

o Stalin wanted to impose heavy reparations on Germany and to ensure a permanent dismemberment of the nation.

o The final agreement was, like the Polish accord, vague and unstable.

o The decision on reparations would be referred to a future commission.

Yalta:

o The United States, Great Britain,

France, and The Soviet Union would

each control its own “Zone of

occupation” in Germany.

o The zones to be determined by the

position of troops at the end of the

war.

Yalta:

o Berlin, the German capital was

already well inside the Soviet zone,

but because its symbolic

importance, it would itself be

divided into four sections one for

each nation to occupy.

o At an unspecified date, Germany

would be reunited.

Yalta:

o In the weeks following the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt watched with growing alarm as the Soviet Union moved systematically to establish pro-communist governments in one central or Eastern European nation after another.

o Stalin refused to make the changes in Poland that the president believed he had promised.

Yalta:

o But Roosevelt did not abandon hope still believing the differences could be settled, he left Washington early in the spring for a vacation at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia.

o There, on April 12 1945 he suffered a sudden massive stroke and he died.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE PEACE:

o Harry S. Truman who succeeded

Roosevelt in the presidency had little

familiarity with international issues.

o Truman did not share Roosevelt’s

apparent faith in the flexibility of the

Soviet Union.

The Failure of Potsdam:

o Truman had been in office only a

few days before he decided to, as

he put it “get tough” with the Soviet

Union.

o Truman met on April 23 with the

Soviet foreign minister Molotov and

sharply chastised him for violations

of the Yalta accords.


o Truman conceded first on Poland.

o When Stalin made a few minor concessions to the pro-Western exiles, Truman recognized the Warsaw government.

o Truman hoped that noncommunist forces might gradually expand their influence there.

o Until the 1980s, they did not.


o Other questions remained above all the question of Germany.

o To settle them, Truman met in July at Potsdam, in Russian-occupied Germany with Churchill and Stalin.

o Truman reluctantly accepted the adjustments of the Polish-German border that Stalin had long demanded.


o Truman refused to permit the Russians to claim any reparation from the American, French and British Zones in Germany.

o This would confirm that Germany would remain divided, with the western zones united into one nation, friendly to the United States.

o And the Russian zone surviving as another nation, with a Soviet dominated, Communist government.

The China Problem:

o Central to American hopes for an open,

peaceful world “policed” by the great

powers was a strong independent China.

o But even before the war ended, the

American government was aware that

those hopes faced a major obstacle with

the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-

Shek.

The China Problem:

o Chiang was generally friendly to the

United States, but his government

was corrupt and incompetent with

feeble popular support.

o Chiang was himself unable or

unwilling to face the problems that

were threatening to engulf him.

The China Problem:

o Mao Zedong and the Communist forces were engaged in a bitter rivalry and ultimately a civil war with Chiang.

o Mao was in control of one-fourth of the population in 1945.

o After General George Marshall was sent to study the China issue.

o Marshall concluded that nothing short of all-out war with China would be necessary to defeat the communists and Marshall was unwilling to recommend that the president should accept such a war.

The China Problem:

o Instead, the American government was beginning to consider an alternative to China as the strong pro-Western force in Asia: a revived Japan.

o Lifting the strict occupation policies of the first years of the war when general Douglas MacArthur governed the nation.

o The United States lifted restrictions on industrial development and encouraged rapid economic growth in Japan.

o Like Europe the vision of an United Asia gave way to a divided world with a strong, pro-American sphere of influence.

The Containment of Doctrine:

o By the end of the 1945,any realistic hope of a postwar world constructed according to the Atlantic charter ideals that Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed upon was in shambles.

o Instead, a new American policy, known as containment, was slowly emerging.

o Rather than attempting to create a unified, “open” world, the United States and its allies would work to “contain” the threat of further Soviet Expansion.


o Containment was the basis for

American foreign policy that would

survive for more than forty years.

o In 1947 the Soviet Union was making

inroads in attempting to take over

Turkey and Greece which had vital sea

lanes in the Mediterranean.


o Influential American diplomat George F. Kennan warned that the only appropriate diplomatic approach to dealing with the Soviet Union was “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

o This became a basis for the Truman doctrine.

o This policy asserted that the United States would support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”


o Truman also requested $400 million

part of it to bolster the armed forces of

Greece and Turkey, another part to

provide economic assistance to Greece.

o Congress quickly approved the measure.

o The American commitment ultimately

helped ease Soviet pressure on Turkey

and helped the Greek government

defeat the communist insurgents.

The Marshall Plan:

o An integral part of the containment policy was a proposal to aid in the economic reconstruction of Western Europe.

o There were many motives: humanitarian concern for the European people;

o A fear that Europe would remain an economic drain on the United States if it could not quickly rebuild and begin to feed itself; a desire for a strong European market for American goods.

The Marshall Plan:

o But above all, American

policymakers believed that unless

something could be done to

strengthen the shaky pro-American

governments in Western Europe,

those governments might fall under

the control of rapidly growing

domestic communist parties.

The Marshall Plan:

o In June 1947, Secretary of State George

C. Marshall announced a plan to provide

economic assistance to all European

nations (including the Soviet Union) that

would join in drafting a program for

recovery.

The Marshall Plan:

o Although Russia and its eastern Satellites quickly and predictably rejected the plan, sixteen western European nations eagerly participated.

o The program that lasted three years, ended in 1950 with over $12 billion of American aid into Europe helping spark a substantial economic revival.

Mobilization at Home:

o The U.S. was continuing its commitment

to the containment policy in 1947 and

1948 through a series of measures,

designed to maintain American military

power at near wartime levels.


o In 1948, Truman requested and Congress approved, revived the Selective Service System.

o In the meantime, the United States, having failed to reach agreement with the Soviet Union on international control of nuclear weapons.

o Redoubled its own efforts in atomic research, elevated nuclear weaponry to a central place, in its military arsenal.


o The Atomic Energy Commission established in 1946, became the supervisory body charged with overseeing all nuclear research, both civilian and military.

o In 1950, Truman administration approved the development of the hydrogen bomb, a nuclear weapon far more powerful than the bombs the U.S. used in 1945.


o The National Security Act of 1947

reshaped the nation’s major

military and diplomatic institutions.

o It created a new Department of

Defense to oversee all branches of

the armed services, combining

functions previously performed

separately by the War and Navy

Departments.


o A National Security Council (NSC), operating out of the White House, would oversee foreign and military policy.

o A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) would replace the wartime Office of Strategic Services and would be responsible for collecting information through both open and covert methods;


o As the Cold War continued and the

CIA would also engaged secretly in

political and military operations.

o The National Security Act, in other

words, gave the president expanded

powers with which to pursue the

nation’s international goals.

The Road To NATO:

o About the same time, the United States was moving to strengthen the military capabilities of Western Europe.

o Convinced that a reconstructed Germany was essential to the hopes of the West, Truman reached an agreement with England and France to merge the three western zones of occupation into a new West Germany republic.

o (Which would include the former American, British, and French sectors of Berlin, even though that city lay well within the East German zone).

The Road To NATO:

o Stalin responded quickly when he imposed a tight blockade around the western sectors of Berlin.

o If Germany was to be officially divided, Stalin was implying then the country’s western government would have to abandon its outpost in the heart of the Soviet-controlled eastern zone.

o Truman refused to do so.

o Unwilling to risk war through a military challenge to the blockade, he ordered a massive airlift to supply the city with food, fuel and other needed goods.

The Road To NATO:

o West Berlin became the symbol of West’s resolve to resist Communist expansion.

o In the Spring of 1949, Stalin lifted the now ineffective blockade.

o And in October, the division of Germany into two nations, the Federal Republic in the west and Democratic Republic in the east became official.

The Road To NATO:

o The crisis in Berlin accelerated the consolidation of what was already in effect an alliance among the United States and the countries of Western Europe.

o On April 4, 1949, twelve nations signed an agreement establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and declared that an armed attack against one member would be considered an attack against all.

The Road To NATO:

o NATO would maintain a long standing

military force to counteract the

threat of Soviet invasion.

o The Soviets responded by forming an

alliance of their own with Communist

governments in Eastern Europe

called the WARSAW pact.

Reevaluating Cold War Policy:

o In 1949 the Soviet Union successfully exploded its first atomic weapon years earlier than predicted.

o The entire mainland of China came under the control of the Communist government that many Americans believed to be an extension of the Soviet Union.

o Chiang Kai Shek and his followers fled to Formosa to establish Taiwan.


o With this escalation, Truman called for a thorough review of American foreign policy.

o The result was a National Security Council report, issued in 1950 and commonly known as NSC-68 which outlined a shift in the American position.

o The document produced in April of 1950 argued that the United States could no longer rely on other nations to take the initiative in resisting Communism.


o It must itself establish firm and active leadership of the noncommunist world.

o And it must move to stop communist expansion virtually anywhere it occurred, regardless of the intrinsic strategic or economic value of the lands in question.

o Among other things, the report called for a major expansion of American military power, with a defense budget almost four times the previously projected figure.

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