Cold War and Evolution of Post-Cold War World – Peu Ghosh

INTRODUCTION

• Soon after the conclusion of the Second World War, the international system was drawn into a new struggle for global leadership between the two former allies, the United States and the Soviet Union.

• Both states emerged as superpowers immediately after the Second World War, while Great Britain was exhausted and no longer capable of maintaining its status as a global power.

• Germany, having been partitioned, and Japan, devastated by atomic bombings, failed to re-emerge as great powers in the post-war period.

• This situation left only the United States and the Soviet Union to play a decisive role in shaping the international political order.

• Relations between the two superpowers soon became strained due to multiple political, ideological, and strategic factors, giving rise to the Cold War, a conflict short of direct or hot war.

• The Cold War led to the bifurcation of the world into two hostile and rival blocs, accompanied by the formation of military alliances and counter-alliances.

• Although there was a temporary easing of tensions known as Détente, this phase was short-lived.

• The breakdown of détente resulted in renewed tensions and strained relations, often described as the New Cold War.

• The Cold War finally came to an end in 1990 with the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, marking the close of a major phase in post-war international relations.

MEANING

• The term Cold War was popularized by the columnist Walter Lippmann and came into common usage by 1947.

• The concept acquired a specific meaning, indicating that relations between the East and the West were hostile, tense, and war-like but had not escalated into a hot war.

• It denoted intense rivalry and competition on political, economic, and ideological fronts without culminating in direct armed conflict between the two opposing blocs.

• The Cold War thus represented sustained confrontation and hostility rather than actual warfare.

• Peter Calvocoressi observed that the Cold War was not an episode like conventional wars, which have clear beginnings, endings, winners, and losers.

• Instead, the Cold War signified a state of affairs, characterized by prolonged tension and structured rivalry in international relations.

ORIGIN OF COLD WAR

• Tracing the origin and development of the Cold War is an arduous task, as noted by John W. Young and John Kent, who point out that innumerable debates about its nature and origins have profoundly shaped how historians and social scientists interpreted the international system up to 1989.

• The origin of the Cold War remains a subject of long-standing historical dispute with no single, universally accepted explanation.

• Orthodox theories argue that alleged Soviet aggression or expansionism provoked American counter-reactions, turning the Cold War into a struggle for global influence because Stalin and the Soviet system made cooperation impossible.

• According to the orthodox view, Joseph Stalin and Soviet Communism had to be confronted and contained by Western capitalist states to preserve international peace, security, and liberal democratic values.

• This perspective holds that an expansionist Soviet Union threatened the national security of the United States and Western Europe, necessitating economic and military responses.

• The orthodox explanation broadly reflects a realist or neo-realist understanding of superpower rivalry, emphasizing power and security and the external requirements of capitalist and communist systems rather than ideology or internal structures.

• In the 1960s, revisionist historians challenged the orthodox view by focusing less on power struggles within the international system and more on the requirements of international capitalism, particularly those of the United States in the 1940s.

• Revisionists argued that US foreign policy was designed to serve the expansionist needs of capitalism, prompting the Soviet Union to seek security by resisting capitalist expansion that threatened the survival of Soviet Communism.

• From this perspective, responsibility for the Cold War lies primarily with aggressive US policies, to which the Soviets reacted defensively.

• Revisionists thus contend that US commitment to capitalist expansion generated Soviet insecurity, rather than Soviet expansionism creating insecurity for the United States.

• Post-revisionist scholars shifted attention to a wider range of factors, including geo-politics, cultural traits, elite perceptions and psychology, bureaucratic politics, security needs, misunderstandings, and misperceptions, treating these causes as non-mutually exclusive.

• Geopolitically, the pre-1917 development of two land-based empires in Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere made conflict between these expansive systems almost inevitable.

• Despite differing interpretations, it is generally agreed that the Cold War emerged from ideological confrontation, post–Second World War complications, and the irreconcilability of vital interests between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Causes of Cold War

• The earliest major cause of antagonism between the two superpowers was the delayed opening of the Second Front during the Second World War, as the Soviet Union had been pressurizing for it since June 1941, but it was finally opened only in June 1944 by Dwight D. Eisenhower, creating deep Soviet suspicion about Western intentions.

• After the end of the Second World War, serious differences emerged between the former allies over the Polish and German questions, which further strained their relations.

• In the Polish case, although the Potsdam Conference of July 1945 accepted the Oder–Neisse line as the de facto boundary between Poland and Germany, the issue of Poland’s future political system remained unresolved.

• Considering Eastern Europe as falling within their sphere of influence, the Soviets installed a Polish government dominated by communists, which was opposed by the Harry S. Truman, supported by Winston Churchill, who demanded equal representation for communists and the London-based Polish government-in-exile.

• In response, Washington suspended lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union, but Joseph Stalin refused to compromise, and Poland remained firmly aligned with the Soviet Union.

• The German question became another major stumbling block at the Potsdam Conference, particularly over the issue of post-war reparations.

• The Soviet Union demanded reparations worth 20 billion dollars, with half allocated to itself and the remainder to be shared by the USA and the UK, but this demand was met with suspicion by the Western powers.

• The USA and the UK insisted on fixing reparations independently within their own occupation zones and, by spring 1946, suspended further reparation payments to the Soviet Union from West Germany.

• Soviet activities in Iran, Turkey, and Greece after the war heightened Western fears and deepened mistrust, gradually transforming wartime tensions into the Cold War.

• Over time, the Cold War intensified due to misconceptions, misperceptions, threats to spheres of influence, an escalating arms race, and perceived threats to vital interests, causing the rivalry to spread across different regions of the world.

• The ideological and strategic antagonism became explicit with the Long Telegram, sent by George F. Kennan from Moscow, which portrayed the Soviet Union as fundamentally hostile to coexistence with the United States.

• Kennan argued that Soviet policy sought to disrupt American society and global influence, concluding that US policy must be based on long-term, patient but firm containment of Soviet expansionist tendencies.

• These ideas gained wide influence after Kennan published them anonymously as the famous “X Article” in Foreign Affairs.

• Developments in Greece and Turkey soon reinforced Kennan’s views, leading President Truman to formally adopt containment as the cornerstone of US foreign policy.

• In March 1947, Truman announced that the United States would support free peoples resisting subjugation by armed minorities or external pressures, a declaration later known as the Truman Doctrine.

• The policy of containment aimed to prevent the spread of Soviet influence by encircling the Soviet Union and deterring it through political, economic, and military pressure.

• The consolidation of rival blocs was further reinforced by the Marshall Plan announced on 5 June 1947.

• Earlier, on 5 March 1946, Winston Churchill’s Fulton Speech had symbolically marked the beginning of the Cold War by declaring that an Iron Curtain had descended across Europe from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.

• The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan reaffirmed Churchill’s warning and established a new foreign policy paradigm for the United States, solidifying the division of the world into two antagonistic blocs by the late 1940s.