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Read the following selection. On a separate sheet of paper, make a list of key dates and events.

 

Introduction to The Origins of the Cold War

 

Be prepared to share your list in a class discussion,

 

The Second World War alliance of the United States, the Soviet Union,

and Great Britain crumbled quickly in 1945 after the defeat of Germany

and Japan. Soon a different kind of war—the Cold War—troubled international relations. The United States and the Soviet Union, the primary

adversaries in this new contest for world power, entered a bitter. decades-long competition for spheres of influence, economic and strategic advantage,

nuclear-weapons supremacy, control of international organizations, and

ideological superiority.

 

The two competitors never sent their troops into battle directly against

one another but instead engaged in an intense, expensive armaments race,

armed and aided their allies and client states, intervened in civil wars by

supporting different factions, built rival alliance systems, sponsored exclusionist foreign economic programs, and initiated noisy propaganda

campaigns—all of which divided much of the world into rival blocs or

empires (popularized too simply as "the West" and "the East"). If the Soviets

came to fear "capitalist encirclement," Americans complained against an

"international communist conspiracy." Each side, in mirror image, saw the

other as aggressive and intransigent. The Cold War contest became the

dominant feature of international relations. From the start, however, many

newly independent nations in the southern half of the globe—eventually

called the Third World—preferred not to choose sides. They became the

objects of keen superpower attention as they created another pole of power

in the already volatile international system.

 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s. as stunning political changes were

sweeping the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of Soviet

Premier Mikhail S, Gorbachev's new policies of glasnost and perestroika,

many people began exulting that the United States had won the Cold War.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991 and the widespread

discrediting of communist ideology that accompanied its demise, some

commentators in the United States assumed an air of triumph. They

attributed their nation's seeming victory in its near half-century struggle

with the Soviet Union to the inherent superiority of American values and

institutions, Other observers remained more skeptical. They pointed to the

huge military arsenals that remained in the United States and Russia, each

of which maintained enough nuclear weapons to destroy people and property in awesome numbers. Other analysts pointed to America's daunting

domestic problems to argue that the Cold War had no winners. These

questions of Cold War demise and Cold War victory cannot be answered

without knowing what the Cold War was and how and why it began...

 

For those contemporaries who knew their history, the escalating Soviet

American friction after the Second World War was not unexpected. Indeed,

prolonged antagonism had marked the Soviet-American relationship since

the Russian or Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Virulent anticommunism had

long coursed through domestic American politics, much as a deep suspicion

of capitalist nations like the United States had typified Soviet leadership.

The Bolshevik government that took power in 1917 espoused a Marxist

anti-capitalist ideology, championed the world revolution. repudiated czarist

debts (much owed to Americans), and confiscated American-owned property.

President Woodrow Wilson's goal of a liberal, capitalist international order

seemed threatened by what he called the "poison of Bolshevism." In 1918

many Americans found another reason to dislike Moscow's new regime when

Soviet leaders withdrew their weary nation from the First World War by accepting a harsh peace from Germany. Wilson worked to topple or at least

to contain the Soviets by refusing to recognize the new government, aiding

anti-Bolshevik forces, restricting trade, sending thousands of American

troops into Soviet Russia, and excluding the upstart nation from the

postwar peace conference in Paris. At home, the Wilson administration

further demonstrated its vigorous anticommunism by suppressing radicals

in the Red Scare of 1919—1920. From the birth of the Soviet experiment,

then, Soviet-American relations suffered deep fissures...

 

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, he reasoned

that the nonrecognition policy had failed and that improved relations would

stimulate trade (helping to pull America out of the Great Depression) and

deter Japanese expansion in Asia. He subsequently struck several agreements with the Soviets, including United States recognition, The first

American embassy in the Soviet Union opened in 1934. But relations

remained strained. Official and public opinion in the United States registered sharp disapproval of Joseph Stalin's bloody purges, collectivization

of agriculture, and brutal efforts to modernize the Soviet economy. Ameri-

cans, moreover, feared that the Soviets were fomenting revolution through

the Comintern.

 

Especially upsetting to the United States was the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact,

which stamped the Soviet Union as one of the aggressors (indeed, it soon

seized part of Poland and attacked Finland) responsible for the outbreak

of the Second World War. Americans rejected the Soviet argument that

Great Britain and the United States, by practicing appeasement toward

Adolf Hitler's Germany had left the Soviet Union little choice but to make

peace with Berlin to buy time to prepare for an expected German

 

Lend-Lease aid to the beleaguered Soviets (by war's end the assistance would

total $11 billion), calculating that they could hold down scores of German

divisions in the east and hence ease German pressure against Britain in

the west.

 

After the United States, itself entered the Second World War in December

1941. it formed a Grand Alliance with the Soviet Union and Great Britain.

Always tension-ridden, this coalition of convenience for national survival

was held together by the common objective of defeating the Axis. The Allies

differed frequently over the timing for the opening of a second or western

front. Numerous American promises. followed by delays. angered Moscow,

Roosevelt, Stalin, and Winston S. Churchill—the Big Three—met at several

wartime conferences to devise a military strategy and to map plans for the

postwar era, At Teheran (1943) they agreed to open the second front in early

1944 (it finally came in June in France); at Bretton Woods (1944) they

founded the World Bank, and at Dumbarton Oaks {1944) they planned the

United Nations Organization, granting only the United States, the Soviet

Union, and three other nations veto power in the Security Council.

 

In February 1945, as the Red Army was fighting through Eastern Europe

into Germany, the three leaders met again at the Yalta Conference. In a

series of trade-offs. which included a coalition government in Soviet-

dominated Poland, the division of Germany into zones, and Soviet agreement

lo negotiate a treaty with United States ally Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek)

in China, the Big Three seemed to have reached an accord on major postwar

issues...)

 

Define the italicized words on the previous handout and in the following reading. Write only short

 

An Analysis

 

definitions. Use your textbook and a dictionary to help you.

 

. . . Hopes for continued Soviet-American cooperation were soon

dashed. , as the Allies jockeyed for international influence at the war's

close. The Potsdam Conference of July 1945, after the defeat of Germany

and just before the collapse of Japan. saw as much disagreement as

agreement. Nor did the Soviets' fulfillment in August of their Yalta pledge

to enter the war against Japan improve relations, because it came after the

American atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a point when United States leaders

no longer desired Soviet participation.

 

Disputes broke out with alarming frequency on a wide range of issues

in the early postwar years. The American destruction of two Japanese cities

by atomic bombs posed a significant diplomatic question: Would international control follows, or would the United States retain its atomic monopoly

to gain negotiating advantage on postwar issues? How and by whom

the economies of war-ravaged nations would be reconstructed also divided

the victors. Eastern Europe became a diplomatic battleground as Soviet

influence solidified in the region. So did Iran, where American influence

had grown to challenge Soviet influence in a nation bordering the Soviet

Union. Unstable politics and economic distress rocked Western Europe.

where left and right faced off. The French. British, Americans, and Soviets

squabbled over how to extract reparations from a hobbled Germany and over

whether Germany's economy should be revived. The division of Germany

became permanent as the occupying powers created separate economic and

political institutions in their zones. In the new United Nations and World

Bank, Americans quickly established domination, prompting the Soviets to

use their veto in the first and to turn down membership in the second.

 

European imperialists against native independence movements, a full-scale

the civil war in China, the American-directed occupation and ultimate restoration of Japan, and widespread economic dislocation produced further

instability in world politics. The turmoil also shook the Middie East, sparked

by the Arab-Israeli dispute and lingering resentments against European

imperialism and fueled by American-Soviet competition for access to rich

oil reserves and strategic sites. The Truman Doctrine (1947), Rio Pact

(1947), Marshall Plan (1948). and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1949)

stood as hallmarks of the American containment doctrine designed to

thwart, if not roll back, Soviet power and influence. For their part. the

Soviets knitted together into an empire several Eastern European states,

first in the Molotov Plan (economic} and then through the Warsaw Pact

(military). As well. a war of hyperbolic words echoed through diplomatic

chambers. Each side characterized the other as the world's bully; each side

blamed the other for the deterioration of the Grand Alliance and the

beginning of the Cold War.

 

. . . [Within the two major schools of thought—the traditional and

the revisionist—disagreement abounds, although historians have narrowed

some of their interpretive differences over time. Much of the debate still

centers on one question: Whose fault was the Cold War? Scholars are

moving beyond that simple query to examine shared responsibility for the

Cold War, the contributing role of nations other than the United States

and the Soviet Union, and the nature of the conflict-ridden international

system. Bul the question of blame remains at the forefront of the debate.

 

Until the 1960s the traditional or orthodox interpretation of the origins

of the Cold War prevailed. This point of view held that the Soviets, with

unlimited ambitions for expansion. an uncompromising ideology and a

paranoid dictator bent on world domination and the elimination of demos-

racy and capitalism, wrecked the postwar peace. Moscow caused the Cold

War, pure and simple. This view goes on to explain that the United States,

lacking self-interest and committed to democracy and high ideals, rejected

a spheres-of-influence approach in favor of an open world, passed up

opportunities to grab power after the war, and sought continued friendly

relations with the Soviet Union. As the Cold War emerged, traditionalists

have argued. negotiations with the Soviets and their communist allies

elsewhere, as in China, proved useless. Forced by communist hostility and

aggression to take defensive measures, the Harry S Truman administration

declared the ultimately successful containment doctrine and blunted com-

communist aggression. The Soviets acted: the Americans reacted. Moscow exploited;

Washington saved. Not only did policymakers like President Truman explain

events this way; until the 1960s most historians did as well.

 

In the early 1960s, three important changes coincided to invite a very

different interpretation—the revisionist—of the origins of the Cold War.

First, in the late 1950s the decline of McCarthyism, a virulent version of

the Cold War anticommunism, calmed the repressive atmosphere whipped

up by the Wisconsin senator and by the Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower

administrations. That atmosphere had stymied discussion of alternative

interpretations, for the Cold War consensus treated dissent as something

close to disloyalty, Indeed, unorthodox opinion sometimes earned a scholar

a trip to the intimidating hearings of the House Un-American Activities

Committee. With the decline of McCarthyism came more questioning of

traditional assumptions, as when William Appleman Williams published his

provocative book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959). which depicted

 

the United States not as an innocent simph_reacting_ts-overseas-events

 

but rather as a self-conscious, expansionist nation with imperial drives.

 

The second source for revisionism was the Vietnam War. By the mid-

In the 1960s that tragic conflict had stimulated debate not only on the origins

and conduct of the war but on the Cold War assumptions that compelled

American intervention in Vietnam and around the globe. What was the

precise nature of the threat posed by communism? Who exactly was the

enemy? Was the containment doctrine too vaguely defined and indiscriminately applied? How did Americans get started in their Cold War globalism?

Were the foreign-policy assumptions judged by many to be wrong-headed

in the 1960s also wrong-headed in the 1940s? To question the Vietnam War

was to question American ideas and behavior in the early Cold War.

 

The third factor that inspired doubts about the Cold War consensus

was the declassification and opening to scholars in the 1960s and later of

documents from the early Cold War period—National Security Council

reports, presidential memoranda, briefing papers, telegrams from embassies,

diaries, and more. Historians could now test their questions against the

rich documentary record: they would no longer have to rely upon the often

inaccurate and self-serving memoirs of policymakers. The once-secret pa-

pers examined at a time of questioning permitted by the decline of McCarthyism

and stimulated by the Vietnam War. revealed a picture of the 1940s that

did not resemble that sketched by the traditionalists.

 

Although revisionists, like traditionalists, have not always agreed among

themselves, the basic outline of their interpretation became clear by the

late 1960s and early 1970s. Revisionists have held that the traditional

interpretation is too one-sided, blaming alt trouble on the Soviets and

ignoring the United States' own responsibility for the conflict. The United

States was not simply reacting to Soviet machinations; rather, it was acting

on its own needs and ideas in a way that made American behavior alarm

not just the Soviets but some of America's allies as well. The United States.

Argue the revisionists, was not an innocent defender of democracy but a

self-consciously expansionist power in search of prosperity and security.

Americans were determined to mold a postwar world that corresponded to

their own needs. They projected their predominant power again and again.

and they too often abandoned diplomacy in favor of confrontation. Nor

should analysts apply a double standard, say the revisionists, because the

The United States was itself building spheres of influence. And if "free elections"

were good for Eastern Europe, as Americans insisted. why were they not

also good for Latin America, where the United States nurtured dictators

like Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican

Republic?

 

Revisionists have written too that Americans exaggerated the Soviet/

the communist threat, imagining an adversary possessing more power and

ambition than the postwar Soviet Union had. The Soviets actually suffered

serious weaknesses in their economy and military, and they were often

driven not by an unbridled thirst for an empire or ideological fervor but by

concern for security after suffering at least 20 million dead in the Second

World War. The postwar American refusal to acknowledge Soviet security

fears helped bring down the "iron curtain" in Eastern Europe. Finally. a

rigid way of thinking—globalist containment—blinded Americans so much

that they overlooked the indigenous sources of conflict {religious political.

 

and ethnic, for example) and failed to grasp the complexities of the world

politics.

 

The revisionist-orthodox debate was exciting and important because it

focused on the fundamental question of what kind of people Americans

were. Were they exceptional? selfless. anti-imperialist, acting on high principle in the face of ugly challenges to democracy? Or were they something

else, perhaps not that much different from other great nations through

history—seeking hegemony at the expense of others? Or were they a mix?

because nothing can be so simply defined?. . .!

 

Traditionalist and Revisionist Views

 

Part A.

Refer to Handouts 3 and 4 to answer the following questions.

 

1. What does a traditionalist believe about the Cold War?

 

2. What does a revisionist believe about the Cold War?

 

3. What are two causal (hemes that underlie Cold War relations?

 

Part B.

 

Complete the chart like the one shown below. Indicate the causal themes and the facts that

traditionalists and revisionists would use to justify (their interpretation of the events. Some of these

 

ideas are not readily found in the handout readings. Thus. you will have to do some original and

creative thinking to complete the chart.

 

Events Causal Themes Traditionalist Views Revisionist Views

 

1. 1917 Revolution

through 1933

 

2.Soviet relations with Hitler

 

3. D-Day and the

opening of a second

front in WWII

 

4. USSR going to war

with Japan

 

5. Dropping of the

A-bomb

 

6. Control of Germany

and Berlin

 

7. Control of Eastern

Europe

 

8. Control of Greece

and Turkey