But after the German Army invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 and declared war on the United States in December 1941, the Soviet Union and the Allied powers worked together to fight Germany. He ultimately responded to the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba with a naval blockade, and he presented an ultimatum to the Soviets. He called on cities to prepare fallout shelters for nuclear war. [80] The US government responded to this announcement by adopting a policy of containment,[81] with the goal of stopping the spread of communism. It was strongly supported by the Pentagon (the US military leadership), and weakly opposed by President Truman; the State Department was ambivalent. [92] Under the leadership of Alcide De Gasperi the Italian Christian Democrats defeated the powerful CommunistSocialist alliance in the elections of 1948. [23], In June 1940, the Soviet Union forcibly annexed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Historians now acknowledge that the two Koreas already were waging a civil conflict when North Korea's attack opened the conventional phase of the war. [105][106], Based on the amount of top-secret Cold War archival information that has been released, historian Raymond L. Garthoff concludes there probably was parity in the quantity and quality of secret information obtained by each side. It stood opposed to NATO. Holodkov to Interior Minister N. P. Dudorov (15 November 1956)", "U.S. Military Deployment 1969 to the present", "Cambodia: U.S. bombing, civil war, & Khmer Rouge", "Measures which the United States Government Might Take in Support of a Successor Government to Mosaddegh", "Interview to "Pravda" Correspondent Concerning Mr. Winston Churchill's Speech", Bibliography of Stalinism and the Soviet Union, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, The Cold War International History Project (CWIHP), Select "Communism & Cold War" value to browse Maps from 19331982 at the Persuasive Cartography, The PJ Mode Collection, CBC Digital Archives Cold War Culture: The Nuclear Fear of the 1950s and 1960s, Annotated bibliography for the arms race from the Alsos Digital Library, "30 years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War", 19471948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, North Yemen-South Yemen Border conflict of 1972, Struggle against political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, List of Eastern Bloc agents in the United States, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Greenhouse gas emissions by the United States, Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cold_War&oldid=1095422496, Wikipedia indefinitely semi-protected pages, Wikipedia indefinitely move-protected pages, Articles using infobox templates with no data rows, All articles with broken links to citations, Articles with unsourced statements from October 2019, Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from September 2015, Articles with unsourced statements from October 2017, Pages using Sister project links with hidden wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. [19], In the late 1930s, Joseph Stalin had worked with Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov to promote popular fronts with capitalist parties and governments to oppose fascism. [67] Washington's opposition to the Soviets accumulated after broken promises by Stalin and Molotov concerning Europe and Iran. [83], Many emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America rejected the pressure to choose sides in the EastWest competition. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used presidential authority to normalize relations in November 1933. [373], An ineffectual start led to the conclusion that deeper structural changes were necessary, and in June 1987 Gorbachev announced an agenda of economic reform called perestroika, or restructuring. The Soviet leader also dismissed the accusation that the USSR was exerting increasing control over the countries lying in its sphere. [351] For example, the Persian Gulf War demonstrated how the armor, fire control systems and firing range of the Soviet Union's most common main battle tank, the T-72, were drastically inferior to the American M1 Abrams, yet the USSR fielded almost three times as many T-72s as the US deployed M1s. It is often referred to in popular culture, especially with themes of espionage and the threat of nuclear warfare. [171][I], In spite of these threats, there were substantial hopes for dtente when an upswing in diplomacy took place in 1959, including a two-week visit by Khrushchev to the US, and plans for a two-power summit for May 1960. [368] In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened in the multisided Lebanese Civil War, invaded Grenada, bombed Libya and backed the Central American Contras, anti-communist paramilitaries seeking to overthrow the Soviet-aligned Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Kremlin promptly created an alliance with the newly formed People's Republic of China. [371] However, Moscow's quagmire in Afghanistan was far more disastrous for the Soviets than Vietnam had been for the Americans because the conflict coincided with a period of internal decay and domestic crisis in the Soviet system. Kennan. A senior US State Department official predicted such an outcome as early as 1980, positing that the invasion resulted in part from a "domestic crisis within the Soviet system. [168] As part of a new campaign of de-Stalinization, he declared that the only way to reform and move away from Stalin's policies would be to acknowledge errors made in the past. [321] These developments coincided with Bonn's "Ostpolitik" policy formulated by the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt,[271] an effort to normalize relations between West Germany and Eastern Europe. [40], The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 occurred shortly after Khrushchev arranged the removal of Hungary's Stalinist leader Mtys Rkosi. As nearly all the colonial states achieved independence in the period 19451960, they became Third World battlefields in the Cold War.

[206] Jagan again won the colonial elections in 1957 and 1961, despite Britain's shift to a reconsideration of its view of the left-wing Jagan as a Soviet-style communist at this time. Once again the East Berlin communists attempted to disrupt the Berlin municipal elections (as they had done in the 1946 elections),[123] which were held on 5 December 1948 and produced a turnout of 86.3% and an overwhelming victory for the non-communist parties. [349] The Soviet Armed Forces became the largest in the world in terms of the numbers and types of weapons they possessed, in the number of troops in their ranks, and in the sheer size of their militaryindustrial base. [207], Worn down by the communist guerrilla war for Vietnamese independence and handed a watershed defeat by communist Viet Minh rebels at the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the French accepted a negotiated abandonment of their colonial stake in Vietnam. Soviet investment in the defense sector was not driven by military necessity, but in large part by the interests of massive party and state bureaucracies dependent on the sector for their own power and privileges. "[5], The first use of the term to describe the specific post-war geopolitical confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States came in a speech by Bernard Baruch, an influential advisor to Democratic presidents,[6] on 16 April 1947. [160] General Douglas MacArthur then advanced across the 38th Parallel into North Korea. [167], In 1953, changes in political leadership on both sides shifted the dynamic of the Cold War. In addition to capitalism and communism, Italians and Slovenes, monarchists and republicans as well as war winners and losers often faced each other irreconcilably. After this, Khrushchev made many desperate attempts to reconstitute the Sino-Soviet alliance, but Mao considered it useless and denied any proposal. Instead, Nixon and Kissinger sought to downsize America's global commitments in proportion to its reduced economic, moral and political power. We will bury you", shocking everyone present. The counteroffensive was planned at the command level by Soviet advisers attached to the Ethiopian general staff, and bolstered by the delivery of millions of dollars' of sophisticated Soviet arms. Other agreements were concluded to stabilize the situation in Europe, culminating in the Helsinki Accords signed at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975. [270] The invasion sparked intense protests from Yugoslavia, Romania, China, and from Western European communist parties. [93] Cominform faced an embarrassing setback the following June, when the TitoStalin split obliged its members to expel Yugoslavia, which remained communist but adopted a non-aligned position and began accepting money from the United States. America's withdrawal from the war led it to embrace a policy of dtente with both China and the Soviet Union. [296][297][298], On 24 April 1974, the Carnation Revolution succeeded in ousting Marcello Caetano and Portugal's right-wing Estado Novo government, sounding the death knell for the Portuguese Empire. It may be that the thermodynamic law of entropy has caught up with the Soviet system, which now seems to expend more energy on simply maintaining its equilibrium than on improving itself. Shortly after the attacks, Stalin protested to US officials when Truman offered the Soviets little real influence in occupied Japan. Meanwhile, Brezhnev attempted to revive the Soviet economy, which was declining in part because of heavy military expenditures.

The Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 in Hungary finally started a peaceful movement that the rulers in the Eastern Bloc could not stop. [83] In NSC 68, a secret 1950 document, the National Security Council instituted a Machiavellian policy [151] while proposing to reinforce pro-Western alliance systems and quadruple spending on defense. "It is this: We win and they lose. After the initial desire "to root out the reds" came a realization that massive punishment is wrong and finding only some guilty is hardly justice. The KMT moved to Taiwan. [92] Dulles also enunciated the doctrine of "massive retaliation", threatening a severe US response to any Soviet aggression. The neutral buffer state Free Territory of Trieste, founded in 1947 with the United Nations, was split up and dissolved in 1954 and 1975, also because of the dtente between the West and Tito. [K], From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly and repeatedly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. According to John Lewis Gaddis, Khrushchev rejected Stalin's "belief in the inevitability of war," however. [90] The plan also stated that European prosperity was contingent upon German economic recovery. [291] About 11,000 Cuban troops spearheaded the primary effort, after receiving a hasty training on some of the newly delivered Soviet weapons systems by East German instructors. A number of self-proclaimed Marxist governments were formed in the second half of the 1970s in the Third World, including Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Nicaragua. After 4570 years of communist rule, nearly every family has members associated with the state.

[61] In Asia, the Red Army had overrun Manchuria in the last month of the war, and it went on to occupy the large swathe of Korean territory located north of the 38th parallel. [378], In response to the Kremlin's military and political concessions, Reagan agreed to renew talks on economic issues and the scaling-back of the arms race. The breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly ruled by communist governments produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia. Britain and other Western powersexcept the United Statesdid business and sometimes recognized the new Soviet Union. [175] In response to a popular uprising,[J] the new regime formally disbanded the secret police, declared its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and pledged to re-establish free elections. [125] The US had secretly decided that a unified and neutral Germany was undesirable, with Walter Bedell Smith telling General Eisenhower "in spite of our announced position, we really do not want nor intend to accept German unification on any terms that the Russians might agree to, even though they seem to meet most of our requirements. The first phase of the Cold War began shortly after the end of the Second World War in 1945. The Americans and British refused to fix a dollar amount for reparations, but they permitted the Soviets to remove some industry from their zones. [63][133], In 1952, Stalin repeatedly proposed a plan to unify East and West Germany under a single government chosen in elections supervised by the United Nations, if the new Germany were to stay out of Western military alliances, but this proposal was turned down by the Western powers. Dtente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the SovietAfghan War in 1979. [254], Officially claiming to be neutral, Finland lay in the grey zone between the Western countries and the Soviet Union.

Independence movements in the Third World transformed the post-war order into a more pluralistic world of decolonized African and Middle Eastern nations and of rising nationalism in Asia and Latin America. [citation needed], Although indirect conflict between Cold War powers continued through the late 1960s and early 1970s, tensions were beginning to ease. Pressures for national sovereignty grew stronger in Eastern Europe, and Gorbachev refused to militarily support their governments any longer. [365] As such, he has been credited as "the man who saved the world". [40] In May 1953, Beria, by then in a government post, had made an unsuccessful proposal to allow the reunification of a neutral Germany to prevent West Germany's incorporation into NATO. The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in November 1917 and fulfilled their promise to withdraw from WWI, and German armies advanced rapidly across the borderlands. [409], Holmes suggests the following reasons for the failure of decommunization:[409], The Cold War continues to influence world affairs. The speech, written by a journalist Herbert Bayard Swope,[7] proclaimed, "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war. 6579. The communist regimes in Bulgaria and Romania also crumbled, in the latter case as the result of a violent uprising. [95] The public brutality of the coup shocked Western powers more than any event up to that point, set in motion a brief scare that war would occur, and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress.

pp. "[18] Roosevelt named William Bullitt as ambassador from 1933 to 1936. [339] Both Reagan and new British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher denounced the Soviet Union and its ideology. [242] Accused of rudeness and incompetence, John Lewis Gaddis argues that Khrushchev was also credited with ruining Soviet agriculture, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war[243] and that Khrushchev had become an 'international embarrassment' when he authorized construction of the Berlin Wall. Distrusted by the Soviets, Amin was assassinated by Soviet special forces during Operation Storm-333 in December 1979. However, it no longer included a plan to partition the country into several independent states. That April, the administration of newly elected American President John F. Kennedy mounted the unsuccessful CIA-organized ship-borne invasion of the island at Playa Girn and Playa Larga in Santa Clara Provincea failure that publicly humiliated the United States. During the last 18months of the Truman administration, the American defense budget had quadrupled, and Eisenhower moved to reduce military spending by a third while continuing to fight the Cold War effectively. In June 1950, after years of mutual hostilities,[F][154][155] Kim Il-sung's North Korean People's Army invaded South Korea at the 38th parallel. These measures were intended to redirect the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more productive areas in the civilian sector. The memorandum drafted by Churchill provided for "eliminating the warmaking industries in the Ruhr and the Saar looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character." Tet showed that the end of US involvement was not in sight, increasing domestic skepticism of the war and giving rise to what was referred to as the Vietnam Syndrome, a public aversion to American overseas military involvements. The Truman administration's fear that Rhee would launch an invasion prompted it to limit South Korea's military capabilities, refusing to provide tanks, heavy artillery, and combat planes. [369] The Reagan administration's backing of the military government of Guatemala during the Guatemalan Civil War, in particular the regime of Efran Ros Montt, was also controversial.[370]. Other critiques of the consensus policy came from anti-Vietnam War activists, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the anti-nuclear movement.[88]. The United States pressured the British to withhold Guyana's independence until an alternative to Jagan could be identified, supported, and brought into office. [43], Following the war, the United States and the United Kingdom used military forces in Greece and Korea to remove indigenous governments and forces seen as communist. [citation needed], Following his visit to China, Nixon met with Soviet leaders, including Brezhnev in Moscow.

They rejected "idealism" as impractical and too expensive, and neither man showed much sensitivity to the plight of people living under Communism. In 1955, at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, dozens of Third World governments resolved to stay out of the Cold War. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, a new phase began that saw the Sino-Soviet split between China and the Soviet Union complicate relations within the Communist sphere, while France, a Western Bloc state, began to demand greater autonomy of action. Records of the Department of State, Policy Planning Staff, Director's Files (Winston Lord), 19691977, Box 373", "The 1983 War Scare in US-Soviet Relations", "War Games: Soviets, Fearing Western Attack, Prepared for Worst in '83", "Stanislav Petrov - the man who quietly saved the world - has died aged 77", After socialism: where hope for individual liberty lies, "Justice Betrayed: Post-1945 Responses to Genocide", The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, "Twentieth-Century Genocides Underlying Ideological Themes from Armenia to East Timor", "The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives", "History Accelerates: The Diplomacy of Co-operation and Fragmentation", "The Cominform and the Greek Civil War, 194749", "Chapter 5: "Industrial repression" and Operation Condor in Latin America", "Cold War (194591): Changing Interpretations (entire chapter)", "Cold War (194591): Causes [entire chapter]", "First Progress Report on Paragraph 5-1 of NSC 136/1, "U.S. Policy Regarding the Current Situation in Iran", "What the United States Did in Indonesia", "Newly released documents reveal U.S. Cambodia would become bogged down in a guerrilla war led from refugee camps located on the border with Thailand. Politics: The True Meaning of the Iron Curtain Speech", "It's Called the Vietnam Syndrome, and It's Back", "Southern Partnership: James F. Byrnes, Lucius D. Clay and Germany, 19451947", "The Soviet-led Intervention in Czechoslovakia", "Address given by Mikhail Gorbachev to the Council of Europe", Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l'Europe, "Bernard Baruch coins the term "Cold War", "Milestones: 19451952 Office of the Historian", "Milestones: 19691976 Office of the Historian", "Report by Soviet Deputy Interior Minister M.N. [34], At the Second Quebec Conference, a high-level military conference held in Quebec City, 1216 September 1944, Churchill and Roosevelt reached agreement on a number of matters, including a plan for Germany based on Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s original proposal. These would become the main bureaucracies for US defense policy in the Cold War. [323][citation not found] Instead of a Cold War they wanted peace, trade and cultural exchanges. [282][283] A top-secret CIA report stated that the massacres "rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s. [citation needed] Although pre-Sadat Egypt had been the largest recipient of Soviet aid in the Middle East, the Soviets were also successful in establishing close relations with communist South Yemen, as well as the nationalist governments of Algeria and Iraq. [268], In answer to the Prague Spring, on 20 August 1968, the Soviet Army, together with most of their Warsaw Pact allies, invaded Czechoslovakia. [288] Indirect Soviet assistance to the Palestinian side of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict included support for Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Now tens of thousands of media-informed East Germans made their way to Hungary, which was no longer willing to keep its borders completely closed or to oblige its border troops to use armed force. [368] The Reagan administration emphasized the use of quick, low-cost counterinsurgency tactics to intervene in foreign conflicts. [372], By the time the comparatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985,[340] the Soviet economy was stagnant and faced a sharp fall in foreign currency earnings as a result of the downward slide in oil prices in the 1980s. ", National Research Council Committee on Antarctic Policy and Science, p. 33, Ello (ed. [367], American domestic public concerns about intervening in foreign conflicts persisted from the end of the Vietnam War.