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The Cold War

By Dr David Williamson

new perspective Vol 6,  No 2

As early as 1893 the German Socialist Eduard Bernstein described the arms race between Germany and its neighbours as ‘a kind of ‘‘cold war’’ where there is no shooting but bleeding’. It was not, however, until after 1945 that the term ‘Cold War’ became an everyday expression to describe the rapidly deteriorating relations between the USSR and the United States. In an article written in October 1945, George Orwell argued that the invention of the atom bomb brought a ‘peace that is no peace’ in which the United States and USSR would be both ‘unconquerable and in a permanent state of cold war with each other’.

As it was used after 1945 the term ‘Cold War’ described not only a situation of intense mutual hostility and suspicion, but also a fundamental clash of ideologies and interests. The American historian, Anders Stephanson, has defined the Cold War as possessing the following characteristics:

a) It was essentially a bipolar conflict involving two great blocs that appeared to ‘superimpose’ their rivalry on the rest of the world. Thus, the Cold War spread to the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America.

b) It was a struggle carried on by all means short of war. There was a massive arms build up and nuclear weapons made both sides virtually impregnable. Diplomacy was turned into a kind of ‘militarised thinking’ that concentrated on building and strengthening alliances.

c) Each side denied the other’s right to exist. The USSR, following Marx’s and Lenin’s teaching, was convinced that coexistence between Capitalism and Communism was impossible as capitalism was immoral and doomed to collapse, while the capitalist West saw the USSR in the words of President Reagan as an ‘evil empire’.

d) Each side conducted ferocious propaganda attacks against the other and suppressed internal dissidence. Stalin’s paranoid reaction to opposition is well documented, but a milder form of repression also took place in the West. In the United States, for example, Senators Nixon and McCarthy led a campaign against alleged Soviet agents in the US government forcing President Truman to set up a commission to review the loyalty of American civil servants. In many ways the Cold War was similar to the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The two opposing ideologies of the Cold War were already in place in 1918. While Lenin was establishing Bolshevism with its doctrine of world revolution in Russia, President Wilson’s 14 Points presented a rival global programme of self-determination, free trade and collective security through the League of Nations. Yet it was to take the defeat of Nazi Germany to create the political context for the Cold War. Traditionalist Western historians have tended to blame Stalin for starting the Cold War, while American revisionist research in the 1960s and 1970s attributes the blame to the United States. Gabriel Kolko, for instance, argued that the Americans wished ‘to restructure the world so that American business could trade, operate and profit without restrictions everywhere’. With the partial opening of the Soviet archives, historians have begun to grasp that early post-war Russian foreign policy was much more cautious and pragmatic than seemed at the time. Was the Cold War inevitable? Given Stalin’s extreme intolerance of opposition and pluralism on the one side and on the other the American conviction that the United States had fought a crusade for liberal democracy and free trade, it is hard to see how the Cold War could have been avoided. The United States and USSR were, to quote Louis Halle, a ‘scorpion and a tarantula together in a bottle’.

The term Cold War is often used to describe the whole post-Second World War epoch from 1945-1990. Yet in the course of the 1950s and after 1962 the nature of the Cold War changed radically. The years of acute tension between East and West, 1947-53, are sometimes called the First Cold War. After Stalin’s death there were tendencies towards a détente or ‘thaw’ between the super powers, but the second Berlin crisis, 1958-61 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 marked a fresh wave of intense hostility, which is sometimes called the Second Cold War. The solution of the Cuban crisis marked a turning point in the Cold War, which changed its nature.

Such agreements as the Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and the Helsinki Treaties of 1975 produced a détente between the super powers, and they now recognised each other’s legitimacy and spheres of influence. Arguably, the ‘Cold War proper’, to quote Stephanson, was over, but at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s the USSR’s construction of medium-range nuclear missiles and invasion of Afghanistan triggered a renewal of tension, sometimes called the Third Cold War, which lasted until Gorbachev came to power in the mid-Eighties and initiated a new period of détente. When Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe in 1989/90 it was not so much the Cold War that came to an end as the whole post-war era dominated by the two super powers.

Dr David Williamson is the author of several texts including War and Peace. International Relations, 1914-45, Hodder & Stoughton, 1994, and Bismarck and Germany, Longman, 1997.