The Origins of the Cold War involves disturbing relations between the Soviet Union versus the United States, Great Britain and their allies in 1945-1949. From an American-British perspective, the first came a diplomatic confrontation that spanned several decades, followed by the problem of political boundaries in Central Europe and Eastern non-democratic political control by the Soviet Army. Then came the economic problems (especially Marshall Plan) and then the first major military confrontation, with the threat of hot war, at the Berlin Block 1948-1949. In 1949, the lines were sharply withdrawn and the Cold War mostly took place in Europe. Outside Europe, the starting point varied in the late 1940s or early 1950s.
Events that preceded World War II and even the Russian Revolution of 1917, underlie the older tensions between the Soviet Union, European countries and the United States. A series of events during and after World War II exacerbated tensions, including the Soviet-German pact in 1939, the Anglo-American reiterated the postponement of German-occupied German amphibious invasions, the support of Western allies of the Atlantic Charter, the Soviet rejection of decisions on Eastern European democracy made at the conference wartime and control of the Kremlin of the Eastern Bloc of Soviet satellite states.
Video Origins of the Cold War
Revolusi Rusia
In World War I, Britain, France and Russia had become allies since early 1914, and the United States joined in April 1917. The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in November 1917 but the Germans advanced rapidly to Russia. In early March 1918, they agreed with the harsh terms of the German peace in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Russia now helps Germany win the war by releasing a million German soldiers for the Western Front and by "releasing most of Russia's food supplies, industrial base, fuel supply, and communications with Western Europe." According to the historian Spencer Tucker, the Allies felt, "The agreement is the ultimate betrayal of the cause of the Allies and sowing the seeds for the Cold War.With Brest-Litovsk, the specter of German domination in Eastern Europe threatened to come true, and the Allies are now beginning to think seriously about military intervention Russia]. "The Bolsheviks see Russia only as a first step - they plan to incite a revolution against capitalism in every western country.
In 1918 the British sent money and some troops to support the counter-revolutionary "Anti-Bolshevik". France, Japan and the United States also sent troops to help sever the Russian Civil War. However, the Bolsheviks, who run unified orders from a central location, defeat all oppositions one by one and take full control of Russia, as well as breakaway provinces such as Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Bainbridge Colby, US Secretary of State, in 1920 announced the American policy of refusing to deal with the new regime. Colby states:
Soviet Russia finds itself isolated in international diplomacy. Dictator Vladimir Lenin declared that the Soviet Union was surrounded by a "hostile capitalist siege" and he viewed diplomacy as a weapon to make the Soviet enemy split, beginning with the formation of the Soviet Comintern, which called for revolutionary upheaval abroad. Communist revolutions failed in Germany, Bavaria and Hungary, as the United States spilled billions of dollars of food aid into eastern Europe strictly to curb unrest.
Maps Origins of the Cold War
Intergroup diplomacy (1918-1939)
Differences in the political and economic systems of Western democracies and the Soviet Union ---- dictatorship by one party versus pluralistic competition between parties, mass arrests and dissident executions versus free press and independent courts, state ownership of all agriculture and business versus capitalism, an autarky economy versus free trade, state planning versus private enterprise - becomes simplified and perfected in a national ideology to represent two ways of life. After the postwar Red Scare, many people in the US see the Soviet system as a threat.
In 1933, the United States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt formally recognized the Soviet Union. The long delay was caused by Moscow's rejection of the Tsar's debt, the undemocratic nature of the Soviet government, and its threat to overthrow capitalism using local Communist Parties. By 1933, these issues had faded and the opportunity for greater trade appealed to Washington.
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the beginning of the War World II (1939-1941)
Moscow was angered by Western pardon Adolf Hitler after the signing of the Munich Pact in 1938 that gave Germany partial control over Czechoslovakia after a conference in which the Soviet Union was not invited.
In 1939 after negotiating with British and French and German groups on the potential of military and political agreements, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a Commercial Agreement governing the trade of certain German military and civilian equipment in exchange for Soviet and Molotov raw materials. The Pact -Ribbentrop, commonly named from the secretary of state's foreign affairs (Molotov-Ribbentrop), which includes a secret agreement to divide Poland and Eastern Europe between the two countries.
One week after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Polish partition began with the German invasion of western Poland. The relationship between the Soviet Union and the West grew worse when, two weeks after the German invasion, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in coordination with the German forces. The Soviet Union then invaded Finland, which was also handed over to the country under the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which resulted in heavy losses and the entry of a temporary peace agreement which gave it part of eastern Finland. In June, the Soviets issued an ultimatum demanding Bessarabia, Bukovina and the Hertza region of Romania, after Romania succumbed to Soviet demands for occupation. That month, the Soviets also annexed the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia
From August 1939 to June 1941 (when Germany violated the Pact and invaded the Soviet Union), relations between the West and the Soviets grew worse as the Soviet Union and Germany became involved in broad economic relations in which the Soviet Union sent Germany's essential oils, rubber, manganese and other materials as replace German weapons, manufacturing machinery and technology. In the late 1940s, the Soviets also engaged in talks with Germany about potential membership in Poros, culminating in countries that traded written proposals, although no agreement was reached for the Axis Soviet entry ever achieved.
Postwar relationship
In 1945, the Soviet Union conducted a trial against 16 Polish resistance leaders who had spent the War against the Nazis with the help of Britain and America. In six years, 14 of them died.
At the Nuremberg Trials, the Soviet chief prosecutor filed false documents in an attempt to sue German defendants for the killing of some 22,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest near Smolensk. However, suspecting Soviet errors, other Allied prosecutors refused to support German indictments and lawyers pledged to launch an embarrassing defense. No one was prosecuted or found guilty in Nuremberg for the Katyn Forest massacre. In 1990, the Soviet government recognized that the Katyn massacre was done, not by Germany, but by the Soviet secret police.
From September 1945, Polish fighter fighters and Witold Pilecki the Good sent by General Anders to spy against communists in Poland. In 1948, he was executed for spying and 'serving the interests of foreign imperialism'.
Wartime conference
Some of the postwar disagreements between western and Soviet leaders relate to their different interpretations of wartime and post-war conferences soon.
The Tehran Conference at the end of 1943 was the first Allied conference in which Stalin was present. At the conference, the Soviet Union expressed frustration that the Western Allies had not opened a second front against Germany in Western Europe. In Tehran, the Allies also considered Iran's political status. At that time, Britain had occupied southern Iran, while the Soviets occupied the northern Iran region bordering the Soviet Republic, Azerbaijan. Nevertheless, at the end of the war, tensions arose over the time of the withdrawal of the two sides of the oil-rich region.
At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies sought to define a framework for a postwar settlement in Europe. The Allies were unable to reach a firm agreement on important questions: German occupation, postwar warfare from Germany, and Polish fate. No final consensus was reached in Germany, in addition to approving Soviet requests for reparations of $ 10 billion "as a basis for negotiations." The debate over the composition of the post-war government of Poland is also fierce. The Yalta conference concluded with "a declaration of liberated Europe that promises a form of democracy and provides a diplomatic mechanism for forming a generally acceptable Polish government".
Following the Allied victory in May, the Soviets effectively occupied Eastern Europe, while the United States had much of Western Europe. In occupied Germany, the US and the Soviet Union established a zone of occupation and a loose framework for the control of four forces with disheartened French and English.
At the Potsdam Conference beginning in late July 1945, the Allies met to decide how to manage the defeated Nazi Germany, who had approved unconditional surrender nine weeks earlier on May 7 and May 8, 1945, the day of VE. Serious differences emerged over the future development of Germany and Eastern Europe. In Potsdam, the US was represented by the new president, Harry S. Truman, who on April 12 made it to the office after Roosevelt's death. Truman was unaware of Roosevelt's plans for postwar engagement with the Soviet Union, and more generally did not know about foreign policy and military issues. The new president, therefore, initially relied on a set of advisors (including Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman and Navy Secretary James Forrestal.This group tended to take a tougher line against Moscow than Roosevelt did.Government officials favored cooperation with the Soviet Union and the incorporation of socialist economies into the world's marginalized trade system, Britain was represented by the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, who had succeeded Churchill after the Conservative Party's Labor Party defeat in the 1945 general election.
One week after the Potsdam Conference ended, atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki added Soviet distrust to the United States, shortly after the attack, Stalin protested to US officials when Truman offered little real influence to the Soviets in occupied Japan.
The immediate end of the delivery of war material from America to the Soviet Union after the surrender of Germany also angered a number of politicians in Moscow, who believe this shows the US does not intend to support the Soviet Union more than it should.
Creation of East Block
After the war, Stalin tried to secure the western border of the Soviet Union by installing a communist-dominated regime under Soviet influence in adjacent countries. During and in the immediate postwar years, the Soviet Union annexed several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Many of them were originally countries that were effectively handed over by Nazi Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The later annexed areas include Eastern Poland (incorporated into two different SSRs), Latvian (being Latvian SSR), Estonian (being Estonian SSR), Lithuanian (being Lithuanian SSR), parts of eastern Finland (Karelo-Finland SSR and annexed to Russia SFSR) and northern Romania (to Moldavia SSR).
Other countries were transformed into Soviet satellite states, such as East Germany, the Polish People's Republic, the Hungarian People's Republic, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the People's Republic of Romania and the Albanian People's Republic, which aligned themselves in the 1960s from the Soviet Union and headed to the Republic Chinese people.
The peculiarity of Stalinist communism implemented in the Eastern Bloc countries is a unique symbiosis of the state with society and economy, which has resulted in politics and economy losing their distinctive features as autonomous and distinguishable domains. Initially, the Stalin system directed that rejected the institutional characteristics of Western market economy, democratic governance (dubbed "bourgeois democracy" in Soviet language) and the rule of law subjected to discretional intervention by the state. They were economically communist and dependent on the Soviet Union for a large amount of material. While in the first five years after World War II, massive emigration from these countries to the West took place, the restrictions imposed then halted most of East-West migration, except under limited bilateral and other agreements.
More divisions in the 1940s
"Long Telegram" and "Mr. X"
In February 1946, Long Telegram by George F. Kennan of Moscow helped articulate the growing hard line against the Soviets. The telegram argued that the Soviet Union was motivated by traditional Russian imperialism and by Marxist ideology; Soviet behavior is essentially expansionist and paranoid, a threat to the United States and its allies. Then writing as Mr. X in his article "The Source of Soviet Conduct" in Foreign Affairs (July 1947), Kennan devised a classic argument for adopting a policy of "detention" against the Soviet Union..
"Iron Curtain" talk
On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill, while at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, gave his speech "The Sinews of Peace," stating that the "iron curtain" had fallen across Europe. From a Soviet point of view, the speech was an incitement for the West to start a war with the Soviet Union, for calling for Anglo-American unity against the Soviets "
Morgenthau and Marshall Plans
After losing 20 million people in the war, experiencing a German invasion twice in 30 years, and suffering tens of millions of victims from Western incursions three times in the previous 150 years, the Soviet Union was determined to destroy Germany's ability to fight another. This is in line with US policy that has foreseen returning Germany to a grazing country without a heavy industry (Morgenthau Plan). On September 6, 1946, James F. Byrnes addressed Germany, rejected the Morgenthau Plan and warned the Soviets that the United States intends to maintain a military presence in Europe indefinitely. (see i) Restatement of the Policy on Germany) As Byrnes received one month later, "The essence of our program is to win the Germans [...] it is a battle between us and Russia over the mind [.... "Due to the rising cost of importing food to avoid mass starvation in Germany, and with the danger of losing the entire nation to communism, the US government abandoned the Morgenthau plan in September 1946 with Secretary of State James F Speech Byrnes's speech on Policy on Germany.
In January 1947, Truman appointed General George Marshall as Secretary of State, annulled the Directors of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) 1067, who embodied the Morgenthau Plan and replaced it with JCS 1779, stipulating that a well-ordered and prosperous Europe needs economic contribution from Germany stable and productive. "Administrative officials met with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and others to urge economically sufficient Germany, including detailed calculations of good industrial plants and infrastructure that had been eliminated by the Soviets." After six weeks of negotiations, Molotov dismissed the demands and the conversation was postponed, Marshall was particularly discouraged after meeting personally with Stalin, who expressed little interest in the solution to the German economic problem, the United States concluded that the solution could not wait any longer June 5, 1947 speech, Comporting with Truman Doctrine, Marshall announced a comprehensive program of American aid to all European countries wishing to participate, including the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, called the Marshall Plan.
With initial planning for Marshall's plan in mid-1947, plans reliant on the German economy being reactivated, the restrictions placed on German production were reduced. Roofs for steel production are allowed for example lifting from 25% of pre-war production levels to 50% of pre-war level. The abolition of JCS 1067 paved the way for a 1948 currency reform that halted widespread inflation.
Stalin opposes the Marshall Plan. He has built a protective belt of the Eastern Bloc from Soviet-held countries on his western border, and wants to defend the buffer zones of these countries combined with the weak Germans under Soviet control. Fearful of American political, cultural, and economic penetration, Stalin finally banned Soviet Eastern bloc countries from the newly formed Cominform from receiving Marshall Plan aid. In Czechoslovakia, it required a Soviet-backed Czechoslovak coup d'état in 1948, a brutality that shocked the Western powers more than events so far and made a brief fear movement that war would occur and swept the last remnants against Marshall's Plan in the United States Congress. In September 1947, the secretary of the Central Committee of Andrei Zhdanov stated that the Truman Doctrine "intended in accordance with American aid to all reactionary regimes, actively opposed to democratic people, has an aggressive character that is not hidden."
Greece and Italy
In Greece, during the civil war involving the communist-led partisan movement of ELAS-EAM, the British Special Forces halted the supply of weapons to ELA-ELAM, the pro-monarchy armed forces were strengthened. On the political front, America, with the impetus of Britain, sought to dismantle ELAS-EAM's socialist structures in the countryside, and anti-communist swings gradually took place.
The Western Allies held a meeting in Italy in March 1945 with a German delegation to prevent the takeover by Italian communist opposition forces in northern Italy and to deter potential there for the post-war influence of the civil communist party. The affair led to a major crackdown between Stalin and Churchill, and in a letter to Roosevelt on April 3 Stalin complained that secret talks did not work to "defend and increase trust between our countries."
Nazi-Soviet Relations and Falsifiers of History < i> i>
The relationship worsened when, in January 1948, the US State Department also published a collection of documents entitled "The Nazi-Soviet Relationship, 1939-1941: Documents from the German Foreign Office Archive , containing the documents found from the German Foreign Office of Nazi Germany disclosed Soviet conversations with Germany on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, including its secret protocols that divided eastern Europe, the 1939 German-Soviet Commercial Treaty, and discussions of the Soviet Union with the potential to become the fourth Axis. In response, one month later, the Soviet Union published the Falsifiers of History, this book, edited and partially rewritten by Stalin, attacking the West.
Berlin block and airlift
The first major crisis in the Cold War that emerged was the Berlin Blockade of 1948-1949. Historian Carol K. Fink argues that this crisis, "occupies a special place in Cold War historiography, as a symbol of Soviet aggression and Anglo-American resistance." Following the decline of the Soviet plan through the Marshall Plan, the introduction of a successful new currency into West Germany, and the great loss to communist parties, Moscow decided to cut land access to West Berlin by train and highway, thus starting the Berlin Blockade. Since Berlin is located within the Soviet-occupied German zone, the only method available to supply the city is the three limited air corridors.
In February 1948, due to the post-war large-scale military strike, all US forces had been reduced to 552,000. Military forces in the non-Soviet Berlin sector accounted for only 8,973 Americans, 7,606 English and 6,100 French. Soviet military forces in the Soviet sector surrounding Berlin amounted to one and a half million people. Two US regiments in Berlin will provide little resistance to Soviet attacks. Therefore, a massive air supply campaign was initiated by the United States, Britain, France and other countries, the success that led Stalin to lift their blockade in May 1949. At that time the Soviet military or the Politburo contemplated the military escalation of the Berlin crisis.
The United States, the Berlin crisis underscored the need to reverse the demobilization of the Army. On July 20, 1948, President Truman reopened the military draft. He called on nearly 10 million men to register for military service in the next two months.
The dispute over Germany increased after Truman refused to provide reparations to the Soviet Union from Western German industrial plants because he believed it would hamper Germany's further economic recovery. Stalin responded by separating the Soviet sector of Germany as a communist state. The demolition of the West German industry was finally stopped in 1951, when Germany agreed to put its heavy industry under the control of the European Coal and Steel Community, which in 1952 took over the role of the International Authority for Ruhr.
At other times there are warning signs. Stalin observed his 1944 treaty with Churchill and did not help the communists in the struggle against the British-backed anti-communist regime in Greece. In Finland, he received a friendly and non-communist government; and Russian troops withdrew from Austria in late 1955.
Soviet military perspective
The Soviet military focused on its central mission, the defense of the Soviet Union. From that perspective, the formation of NATO in 1949 was a decisive threat, and a starting point for the Cold War. Historian David Glantz argues that: Military, the Soviets consider themselves threatened by, first, the US atomic monopoly (split in 1949) and, secondly, with the emergence of the US-dominated alliance of military, the most threatening is NATO. The Soviet Union responded strategically by preserving large and expandable peace-building positions, maintaining a large military force in the conquered Eastern Europe, and enveloping these powers in the political guise of an alliance (Warsaw Pact), which could compete with NATO on a multilateral basis. The main thrust of the Soviet military strategy is to have conventional military forces whose offensive capabilities can examine conventional Western nuclear and military powers.
Other regions
The Cold War is happening all over the world, but has a somewhat different time and trajectory outside of Europe. In Africa, decolonization occurs first; it was mostly done in the 1950s. The major competitors then seek a support base in the new national political alignments.
Latin America
During World War II, United States military operations received widespread support in Latin America, except Argentina. After 1947, with the Cold War emerging in Europe, Washington made a recurring effort to encourage all Latin American countries to take anti-Communist Cold War positions. They were reluctant to do so - for example, only Colombia sent troops to the United Nations contingent in the Korean War. The Soviet Union is quite weak in Latin America. It was not until the late 1950s that Moscow reached diplomatic or commercial ties with most Latin American countries, before it had only two trade agreements (with Argentina and Mexico.) The communist movements that had existed in Brazil and elsewhere in the 1930s had dissolved or prohibited. Washington exaggerates the danger, and breaks a preliminary assault against a possible communist threat. It sought an anti-communist resolution at the annual Pan American Union meeting (renamed Organization of American States (OAS) in 1948) and paid particular attention to the growth of left-wing forces in Guatemala. A compromise was reached in which Latin American countries agreed on a vague support statement for the position of the Cold War of America, and the United States granted an expanded financial and lending grant to stimulate economic growth. In 1954, at the 10th Inter-American Conference in Caracas, Washington demanded a resolution that the formation of communist rule in any American country poses a threat to peace in the hemisphere. Guatemala gives the only negative vote. The Guatemalan military, with CIA encouragement, toppled his left-wing government later that year. Fidel Castro designed his revolutionary takeover of Cuba in 1957-58 with very little Soviet support. The United States and the smaller Latin states, lost votes with greater power by a two-thirds majority needed in 1962 to identify Cuba as a communist regime and suspend it from the OAS.
Far East and Pacific
After the war ended, Malaya plunged into emergency as British and Commonwealth forces fought against the counter-insurgency war against former communist-led MPAJA allies, who have fought against Japan and are now demanding independence from Britain. In Hong Kong, England, who had surrendered to Japan in December 1941, civil unrest came after Britain quickly rebuilt power at the end of the war.
The entry of Australia into the Cold War took place in 1950, when it pushed the air and sea air combat into the Korean War, two days after the Americans did it. The Prime Minister of Australia received a welcome speech as a hero in Washington. ANZUS military alliance with New Zealand and the United States was signed in July 1951; it is a plan for consultation and does not involve military planning such as NATO. Public opinion in Australia was very hostile to Japan after its wartime atrocities, but Japan is now an ally in the Cold War, so Australia accepted a very generous peace treaty with Japan in 1951. Rather than worrying about Japan's rise, Australia is now worried. more on possible Chinese threats.
China
After decades of struggle, in 1949 the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong defeated the Chiang Kai-shek Nationalist forces and took over the land. Nationalist leaders and many of China's top class fled to Taiwan where they had American patronage. Stalin had long supported Chiang Kai-shek, while also providing assistance to the Communists. The United States had tried in 1945-1948 to unite the Nationalists and Communists in a coalition, but to no avail. The conflict was not part of the Cold War until 1949-1959. In the late 1950s, however, China and the Soviet Union were at the point of the sword, and became the arch-rivals of the ideological control of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Both established competing communist organizations in countries around the world. The Cold War then became a three-way conflict.
France for many years has been dealing with a nationalist uprising in Vietnam where the communists, led by Ho Chi Minh, played a prominent leadership role. In 1949, Communist Mao took control of the northern side of the China-Vietnam border, and began to support the rebels, especially by providing protection from the French attack. Mark Lawrence and Frederik Logevall suggest that "revived French colonialism became closely associated with the Cold War tension, especially in the years after 1949." American pressure on France after 1949 tried to force France to prioritize combat communism, rather than against Vietnamese nationalism.
Middle East
The political situation in Iran was a flash point between the major players in 1945-46, with the Soviet Union sponsoring two separating provinces in northern Iran, adjacent to the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Soviet troops stationed in northwestern Iran during the war. Not only did they refuse to resign in 1945 but supported a revolt that formed short-lived, pro-Soviet pro-Soviet separatist countries called the Azerbaijan People's Government and the Kurdistan Republic. This issue was disputed at the United Nations, and in 1946 Moscow abandoned its position, and the conflict was settled permanently peacefully, with the pro-western government continuing its control. Iran is not the main battlefield of the Cold War, but has a history of confrontation with Britain and the United States.
The old conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Mandatory Palestine region continued after 1945, with Britain and in an increasingly unlikely situation as mandate holders. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 called for a homeland for Jews supported in 1947 by the Soviet Union and the United States. The two countries immediately recognized the independent state of Israel in 1948. The Soviet Union then severed ties with Israel to support its Arab enemies. This region is more of an independent problem zone than the Cold War playground, and not the originator of the Cold War.
In 1953, Arab nationalism based in Egypt was a neutralizing force. The Soviet Union is increasingly leaning towards Egypt. Ehe USA based its Cold War coalition especially on the Baghdad Pact of 1955 which formed the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO ), which includes Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey and Britain.
Historians at the beginning of the Cold War
While most historians trace their origins to the period immediately after World War II, others argue that it began with the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 when the Bolsheviks took power. In 1919 Lenin declared that his new state was surrounded by a "hostile capitalist siege", and he regarded diplomacy as a weapon to be used to keep the Soviet enemy divided. He started with the new Communist International ("Komintern"), based in Moscow, designed to plan a revolutionary upheaval abroad. It was ineffective - the Communist Rebellion all failed in Germany, Hungary and elsewhere. Historian Max Beloff argues that the Soviets saw "no prospect of permanent peace", with the 1922 Soviet Constitution stating:
- Since the time of the establishment of the soviet republic, the countries of the world have been divided into two camps: the stronghold of capitalism and the camp of socialism. There - in the camp of capitalism - national hatred and inequality, colonial slavery, and chauvinism, national oppression and pogroms, imperialist brutality and war. Here - in the camp of socialism - mutual trust and peace, national freedom and equality, a place to live together in peace and collaboration of fraternities of people.
According to the British historian Christopher Sutton:
- In what some have called the First Cold War, from British intervention in the Russian Civil War of 1918 to its unfavorable alliance with the Soviet Union against the Axis powers in 1941, British distrust of the revolutionary and regisidal Bolsheviks resulting in domestic, foreign, and colonial policies aimed at countering the spread of communism. This conflict after 1945 took a new battlefield, new weapons, new players, and greater intensity, but it was still basically a conflict against Soviet imperialism (real and imagined).
The idea of ​​long-term continuity is a challenged scientific view of minorities. Frank Ninkovich writes:
- As for the two cold war theses, the main problem is that two periods can not be compared. To be sure, they were joined together by long-lasting ideological hostilities, but in the post-World War I era, Bolshevism was not a geopolitical threat. After World War II, on the other hand, the Soviet Union was a superpower that combined ideological antagonism with the kind of geopolitical threat posed by Germany and Japan in the Second World War. Even with more friendly relations in the 1920s, it was conceivable that the post-1945 relationship would produce much the same.
The use of the term "cold war" to describe postwar tensions between US-led and Soviet-led blocs was popularized by Bernard Baruch, US financier and adviser Harry Truman, who used the term during a speech before South Carolina. the state legislature on April 16, 1947.
Since the term "Cold War" was popularized in 1947, there has been much disagreement in much of the political and scientific discourse about what exactly the sources of postwar tensions are. In American historiography, there is disagreement over who is responsible for decaying wartime alliances between 1945 and 1947, and whether the conflict between the two superpowers is unavoidable or inevitable. The discussion on these questions largely centers on the work of William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, and John Lewis Gaddis.
Officials in the Truman government placed responsibility for postwar tensions in the Soviets, claiming that Stalin had broken the promises made in Yalta, pursued a policy of expansionism in Eastern Europe, and conspired to spread communism around the world. New Left-related historians such as Williams, however, place the responsibility for postwar mostly postwar conflicts in the US, citing US efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union long before the end of World War II. According to Williams and later writers influenced by his work - such as Walter LaFeber, author of the popular survey texts America, Russia, and the Cold War (updated 2002) - US. policy makers share a thorough concern by maintaining domestic capitalism. To ensure this goal, they pursue policies to ensure "Open Doors" to overseas markets for US businesses and agriculture worldwide. From this perspective, economic growth in the country goes hand in hand with the consolidation of US forces internationally.
Williams and LaFeber also dismissed the notion that Soviet leaders are committed to postwar "expansionism". They cite evidence that the occupation of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe had defense reasons, and Soviet leaders saw themselves as an attempt to avoid a siege by the United States and its allies. From this view, the Soviet Union was so weak and devastated after the end of the Second World War that it could not pose a serious threat to the United States, which emerged after 1945 as the only world power not destroyed economically by war, and also as the sole owner of the atomic bomb until 1949.
Gaddis, however, argues that the conflict is less one-sided or another and more the result of a number of conflicting interests and misperceptions between the two superpowers, fueled by domestic politics and bureaucratic inertia. While Gaddis does not consider both parties to be fully responsible for the onset of the conflict, he argues that the Soviets should be held at least a little more responsible for the problem. According to Gaddis, Stalin was in a much better position to compromise than his Western counterparts, given his far wider regime in his own regime than Truman, who had to compete with Congress and was often undermined by intense political opposition at home. Asked if it was possible to predict whether wartime alliances would fall apart in a matter of months, leaving its place almost half a century of cold war, Gaddis wrote in a 1997 essay, "Geography, demography and tradition contribute to this result, but do not specify it; , responding to unpredictable circumstances, for forcing the chain of cause and effect, and in particular [Stalin], responding to authoritarian, paranoid, and narcissistic predictions, to lock it. "
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