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Cold War
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The Cold War (1947-1991) was the open yet restricted rivalry that developed after World War II between groups of nations practicing different ideologies and political systems. On one side was the Soviet Union and its allies, often referred to as the Eastern bloc. On the other side were the United States and its allies, usually referred to as the Western bloc. The struggle was called the Cold War because it did not actually lead to direct fighting between the superpowers (a "hot" war) on a wide scale. The Cold War dominated U.S. and Soviet foreign policy from 1947 (when the term was first used) until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
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In the later years of the Cold War, there were attempts to forge a post-revisionist synthesis by historians. Since the end of the Cold War... the post-revisionist school has come to dominate. Prominent post-revisionist histroians include John Lewis Gaddis and Robert Grogin. Rather than attributing the beginning of the Cold War to either superpower, post-revisionist historians focused on mutual misperception, mutual reactivity, and shared responsibility between the superpowers. Borrowing from the realist school of international relations, the post-revisionists essentially accepted US European policy in Europe, such as US aid to Greece in 1947 and the Marshall Plan.
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The Cold War widened in 1949, when the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb and Communists under Mao Zedong conquered China. Communist China signed an alliance with Stalin in 1950, but the United States refused to recognize the new regime. In Japan, then under US control, economic development was accelerated to counter Asian Communism. When Communist North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, precipitating the Korean War, Truman immediately committed American forces under United Nations (UN) auspices, to be followed by units from many allied countries and Chinese “volunteers”, who arrived to help the North late in 1950 when it was on the point of being overrun. The conflict ended three years later in a truce that left the pre-war border intact. Stalin’s death in 1953 eased tensions slightly, but in 1955 the Soviet bloc formed the Warsaw Pact and West Germany was admitted to NATO.
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![[picture: President Kennedy on a platform overlooking the Berlin Wall, June 1963]](http://retrieverimages.lycos.com/images/c/o/l/cold-war/i/001.jpg)
Interestingly, for the first few years of the early Cold War (between 1945 and 1948), the conflict was more political than military. Both sides squabbled with each other at the UN, sought closer relations with nations that were not committed to either side, and articulated their differing visions of a postwar world. By 1950... certain factors had made the Cold War an increasingly militarized struggle. The communist takeover in China, the pronouncement of the Truman Doctrine, the advent of a Soviet nuclear weapon, tensions over occupied Germany, the outbreak of the Korean War, and the formulation of the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as rival alliances had all enhanced the Cold War's military dimension. U.S. foreign policy reflected this transition when it adopted a position that sought to "contain" the Soviet Union from further expansion. By and large, through a variety of incarnations, the containment policy would remain the central strategic vision of U.S. foreign policy from 1952 until the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
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By the mid-1970s the Cold War in its original form can be said to have died away. The arms race between East and West had all the characteristics of a classic ‘action-reaction’ model of international conflict in which each side reacts to an earlier step by the other side. The explanation of the origins of the conflict is more complex, though three broad categories of explanation can be identified. First, some analysts have emphasized that the Cold War occurred primarily as a result of the destruction of German power, the resulting ‘power vacuum’ in Central Europe and the new bipolar balance of power between the superpowers. From this perspective, the Cold War was a traditional great power conflict in which ideological rivalry was essentially secondary and the structural constraints of bipolarity crucial in throwing the two sides apart. A second explanation, sometimes called the orthodox or liberal interpretation, stresses the American desire for a return to a much more limited international role after the Second World War.
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The Cold War was characterized by mutual distrust, suspicion, and misunderstandings by both the United States and the Soviet Union, and their allies. At times, these conditions increased the likelihood of a third world war, which was widely considered to probably escalate to nuclear war. The United States accused the Soviet Union of seeking to expand their version of communism throughout the world. The Soviets, meanwhile, charged the United States with practicing imperialism and attempting to stop revolutionary activity in other countries.
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