The Cold War

I. Hegemonic War Strategy


A. Uneasy Allies--while the war was ostensibly fought to keep the “free world” from the iron fist of Nazi domination, it was also fought--perhaps largely fought--to ensure that the “great powers” maintained control of strategic locations. The “Three Great Powers” were very suspicious of one another, and each hoped to enhance their position in the postwar world.

1. Soviet Union--made several treaties with Nazi Germany before 1941 to gain territory on its western border (particularly the Ribbentrop-Molotov Treaty, where the two countries divided Poland between them). These deals left the Soviet Union vulnerable to attack, however, because Stalin misjudged Hitler’s ultimate intent--and ill-prepared for the Nazi attack when it came in 1941. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the war from 1941 to 1944, when Allied forces launched the D-Day attack.

a) German SS forces were particularly savage, murdering Polish and Soviet political leaders in German-controlled territories; the Red Army paid back this debt in full in its 1944-1945 counterattack.




2. Great Britain --from the debacle at Dunkirk, Churchill concentrated most British efforts on maintaining control of the Mediterranean--and the Suez Canal, its link to the crown jewel of Britain’s colonial possessions.

a) Battle for North Africa (with US assistance)

b) “The Soft Underbelly of Europe”--Churchill insisted that before a second front was opened in western Europe that what he called the “soft underbelly”of the continent--though mountinous Italy, then attempt to attack Germany through the Alps--be exploited. This strategy had the effect of prolonging the conflict in Europe, I would argue. This campaign was undertaken despite pleas from the allied Soviet Union, which had been promised that the western front campaign would begin in early 1943.

3. United States--drawn into the conflict by the “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the US left much of the campaign planning in Europe to Great Britain, while it carried on against the Japanese in the Pacific.

a) US partially controlled Great Britain through supplying the country through the Lend-Lease Act, providing Great Britain with war material, food, and other provisions in exchange for naval bases and easy terms for other considerations

b) US also supplied Soviet Union with material through the Lend-Lease program, but not in the quantities or the favorable terms granted Great Britain.

B. Hegemonic Peace: Dividing the World--first at Tehran, and confirmed at Yalta and Potsdam, much of the world was divided into “spheres of influence,” where either the Soviet Union, Great Britain, or the United States would dominate. The “hot war” devolved in the postwar era into a “cold war” that each side tried to undermine through economic power and proxy wars.

1. Soviet Union--Stalin’s main objective was to create a “sphere of influence”--buffer states that would bear the brunt of any conventional attack on the Soviet Union from the West.

2. Great Britain--worked to maintain the antebellum status quo--but the two World Wars in the 20th century changed the financial landscape, shifting the balance of power from London to the United States. Great Britain never recovered from the destruction of the war--despite the Marshall Plan--and has largely served since the end of the war as a junior partner to the ambitions of the United States.

3. United States--the US emerged from the war as the dominant financial and industrial power in the world, with the ability to use this prowess (as well as its military might) to bend other to its will.


a) Marshall Plan--offered to countries of Europe to help them rebuild and recover from the war, introduced in1948; by 1952, every country that was a member of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation except had a GDP higher than its pre-war level except for Germany.

4. Big Three Conferences

a) Tehran (November 1943)--Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill met to discuss war strategy and postwar Europe. Stalin pressed his demand for a western front; Churchill and Roosevelt claimed casualties would be prohibitive, but promised an offensive by spring 1944.


b) Yalta (February 1945)--clear that Germany would shortly be defeated, as the Red Army was rolling westward. It was agreed that Germany would be divided among the Allies; but the Big Three leaders were also aware that the country that took control of Germany would be in the strongest position.


c) Potsdam (July 1945)--Roosevelt died in April 1945, and Churchill was turned out as prime minister after Germany’s defeat in May. Truman distrusted--and disliked--Stalin; when Truman received word of the successful Trinity test, he became more determined to keep the Soviet Union out of Asia.



C. Dropping the Bomb--numerous factors went into Truman’s decision to attack Japan with nuclear bombs

1. Revenge

a) Pearl Harbor “sneak attack”

b) Bataan and other wartime atrocities committed against prisoners of war.

2. Spare American lives that would be lost in attacking Japan

3. Racist feelings against Japan, exacerbated by the revenge factor

4. Keep Soviet Union out of Asia--and demonstrate the fate of the Soviet Union should it come into conflict with the US.

II. The Super Power Struggle

A. The Lone Super Power--as long as the US maintained sole possession of nuclear weapon technology, the US saw world relations in balance, because the “Soviet threat” could remain “contained.”


B. Soviet Union as a Nuclear Power--the US only remained the sole nuclear power until 1949, when the combination of independent work by Soviet scientists and espionage, the Soviets developed an atomic bomb of their own--resulting in near-panic in the US, and touching off a second Red Scare and marginalization of the left (again)



C. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)--the ability of the Soviet Union to create a nuclear weapon--and the reaction of the United States to that event--touched off the arms race, where each country attempted to manufacture enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the other if every attacked. This eventually led to a sort of stabilization of the situation, called Mutually Assured Destruction.


D. The Proxy Wars--while reaching this stabilized point, both the Soviet Union and the United States attempted to undermine the other by encouraging proxy battles involving client states.

1. China (1949)

2. Korea (1950)

3. Vietnam (1947-1975)

4. Poland (1953/1983)

a) Radio Free Europe

b) Solidarity

5. Hungary (1956)

6. Cuba (1960-1989)

7. Czechoslavakia (1968)

8. Afghanistan (1979-1983)

E. Cold War Blinders--because the two antagonists saw other conflicts as proxy wars, they tended to overlook the internal or anti-colonial caused that really lay behind these disputes