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Causes of the Cold War
Soon after World War II ended, cracks in the alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States became apparent. Allied against Germany during the war, mutual distrust and wildly different postwar goals and ideologies soon set the stage for a new conflict. The United States and Western European allies sought a peaceful, capitalist, postwar world centered on democratic government; the Soviet Union sought to protect its communist economic system and rebuild its war-ravaged society (more than 20 million Soviet men, women, and children perished during World War II). At the Yalta Conference in 1945, Josef Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, pledged to allow for “self-determination” across Eastern Europe for all the nations it had freed from Nazi rule. They were able to choose their own form of government and economic system; however, Soviet ideas of “self-determination” were very different, and most Soviet Bloc nations found themselves with only one choice on the ballot, communist support. Very soon a metaphoric “Iron Curtain” settled across Europe, separating the East from the West, communist from democratic, and socialist from capitalist, for the next 40 years. The Soviet satellite nations remained in the grip of the Soviet government and economy, with everything from their music to their food to their government systems controlled by the Politburo in Moscow.
Containment
Fearful of Soviet expansion and distrustful of its leader Josef Stalin, American policy makers decided on a policy of containment to try to prevent the spread of communism in Europe and beyond. The Truman Doctrine outlined a strategy where the United States promised support for non-communist governments against any perceived communist aggression, and anti-communist efforts in Greece and Turkey were quick to take advantage of that support. The first true test of the will to stop the spread of communism, however, would take place in Berlin. Nazi Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany as part of the postwar conferences between the United States, France, Great Britain, and the USSR. To complicate matters, the former capital city of Berlin was located deep in Soviet-controlled East Germany, and the city itself was also subdivided—creating a small democratic island in the middle of the communist bloc. In the summer of 1948, Stalin attempted to seize the entire city by blockading it from outside sources of food and supplies, hoping to force the democratic nations to abandon it.
The Berlin Airlift
The crisis of the Berlin blockade resulted in the first bloodless conflict of the new Cold War—a conflict between the United States and its capitalist, democratic allies versus the USSR and its communist, authoritarian, satellite nations. To avoid direct conflict, which both sides knew could escalate into nuclear war, the United States accomplished an impressive feat: the Berlin Airlift saw American planes and pilots fly in enough supplies to support West Berlin for nearly 11 months. At the height of the Airlift, one plane landed in Berlin every 45 seconds. After nearly a year, Stalin realized the democratic nations were not going to give up, and he lifted the blockade. The first “battle” of the Cold War was over, and it was considered a victory for the policy of containment.
Marshall Plan and NATO
Having learned the hard lessons of World War I, America sought to ensure that the economies of its European allies were rebuilt to avoid another Great Depression. Proposed by Secretary of State George Marshall, the European Recovery Act (also known as the Marshall Plan) provided billions of dollars to America’s allies to rebuild their infrastructures, with the added benefit of providing readymade markets for American products as factories returned to making consumer goods. As a response to the perceived threat of the Soviet Union as it gained atomic weapons, and due to its aggression in Berlin, the defensive NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) alliance was formed between the United States, Canada, and most Western European nations. Considered a hostile act by the USSR, their Warsaw Pact was formed in 1955 as a counterbalance.
Korean War
The first “hot” engagement of the Cold War did not occur in Europe but in Asia. After World War II, the Korean peninsula, like Germany, was divided between communist forces in the north and non-communists in the south. In 1950, with the support of the USSR and the newly-formed People’s Republic of China, the communist North Korean military invaded South Korea. During the Korean War, the United States and its allies responded by defending South Korea, fighting a bloody three-year war to an eventual stalemate. By 1953, the borders of North Korea and South Korea had barely moved, but there had been no communist takeover of South Korea. About 36,000 Americans lost their lives in Korea, with Korean and Chinese casualties tallied in the hundreds of thousands.
HUAC and McCarthyism
The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was established during World War II to investigate disloyal or “subversive” (anti-American) ideas in American public life. By the late 1940s, the growing fear of the spread of communism mushroomed into a hysteria, with clashes in Berlin and Korea heightening the fears of potential nuclear war or communist invasion. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, a Republic senator who claimed to have a list of “card-carrying” (dedicated) members of the Communist Party working for the federal government, capitalized on this fear for his own political gain. Though groundless, the Red Scare, the hysterical fear of the spread of communism in America, defined the early Cold War. Worries about communist infiltration cast doubt on politicians, movie stars, and average people alike.
