Ideas at Odds, Essay Example

Ideas at Odds: The Relationship Between the United States and The Soviet Republic 1945-1965

The fall of the Nazi regime and the dropping of the first atomic bomb marked the official beginning of what became known as The Cold War.  While some historians date the Cold War as far back as 1917, public awareness and acknowledgement began shortly following the advent of nuclear weapons and the dispute over the power vacuum left on the European sub-continent.  The decades of 1945-1965 marked some of the most frightening and difficult times during the Cold War.  The Korean War and Communist expansion into China and Cuba fueled American fears that the Soviet Union was planning an attack on the United States.  The arms race, spurred by the development of nuclear weapons, fueled the fire as both sides prepared for what could potentially be the war that would end civilization. However, recent studies have shown that both sides were quite reluctant to actually engage the other, that both sides talked a tough line but blinked when face to face, and that, contrary to popular opinion, the Cold War was not primarily about nuclear weapons and an arms race.  “It was not centrally about power or about the military, nuclear, or economic balance–or the distribution of capabilities–between the East and the West. Nor was it about Communism as a form of government, the need to move the world toward democracy and/or capitalism, or, to a degree, Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. The Cold War was not about these concerns because it came to an end before any of them was really resolved (Mueller, 2004).”  The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States, The Korean War, the rise of Communism in China and the Cuban Missile Crisis all help to illustrate the fact that it was not nuclear arsenals that drove the Cold War, but rather bold talk and conflicts of ideas.

World War II left had a devastating toll on the world physically, economically and spiritually.  Timothy J. White writes that countries, particularly the United States and the Soviet Union were looking for ways to establish a new sense of peace and stability in the aftermath of the Great War.  That being said, each side had differing ideas and the instability of the world following the war created an atmosphere of fear and resentment between the two most powerful nations.  Public and government fear of the Communist world agenda had been partially inspired by George P. Kennan.  “Seldom has a single individual done so much to shape American foreign policy as George Kennan in his characterization of the Soviet Union as a paranoid and insecure power that exaggerated the external threats to justify internal repression and cautious expansion. His article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” profoundly affected how policy-makers, the American people, and scholars viewed the Soviet Union. Kennan almost single-handedly transformed a former wartime ally into a nervous enemy that needed to be contained. Government officials quickly adopted Kennan’s analysis in formulating U.S. foreign policy, and his ideological argument struck a familiar chord with many Americans (White, 2000).”  In all fairness, however, the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin in particular, did everything in his power to promote the expansionist fears as they actively assisted in the Communist overthrows in several other countries including China and Cuba. “U.S. and other Western leaders did not misperceive either the actions or the intentions of the Soviet Union and other communists in the early Cold War. Much of the newly available evidence confirms many traditionalist analytical assumptions about bloc expansion, in particular that there was a system-wide Soviet bloc threat with a significant amount of unity, and that this bloc was both held together and driven to expand its sphere of influence by the shared totalist ideological tenets of Marxism-Leninism, largely as defined in Moscow (MacDonald, 1995).”

The Soviets and Stalin however, were also fearful of the United States.  The United States’ dropping of the atomic bomb left a fear in Communist Russia, already greatly weakened from its war with Germany, that the unrivaled American power would result in American, A-bomb backed, expansion.  “To the already deep fears of Russia for her own security, thrice justified, since 1914, was added a new and dreadful fear of a fourth Western attack, backed by the atomic bomb….  In the course of containment, ‘negotiation from strength’ and liberation, we revivified fully the machinery of totalitarian rule in Russia (Tierney, Kagan, Williams, 670-671).”  The dropping of the bomb on Japan was largely seen as a dire warning to the Soviet Union and indication of American superior muscle being flexed.  Little known to Stalin, there was actually a push in the United States to give the bomb technology to Russia to ease any fears they may have had.  Dean Gooderham Acheson advocated sharing the technology and gained the support of Colonel Stimson and one of the developers of the bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer.  Acheson felt that one- on- one negotiation with Russia would allay the fear that one nation possessed a monopoly on the bomb.  “As long as the United States possessed the atomic bomb, Stalin was determined that the Soviet Union would also have it.  In August 1945 he told his leading nuclear physicist, Igor Kurchatov, to ‘provide us with atomic weapons in the shortest possible time.  You know that Hiroshima has shaken the whole world.  The equilibrium has been destroyed.  Provide the bomb—it will remove a great danger from us.’ (Chace, 1996).”  Ultimately, Acheson’s push for sharing secrets was dismissed in favor of Truman’s Communist containment policies, and, arguably, continued the descent into the Cold War.

Much of the expansionist fears were based in Communist slogans and propaganda that called for the workers of the world to unite and was further fueled by the Soviet Union’s support for Communist uprisings, particularly in North Korea and China.  “World events right after the war made it easier to build up public support for the anti-Communist crusade at home.  In 1948, the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia ousted non-Communists from the government and established their own rule.  The Soviet Union that year blockaded Berlin, which was a jointly occupied city isolated inside the Soviet sphere of East Germany, forcing the United States to airlift supplies into Berlin.  In 1949, there was the Communist victory in China and in that year also, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb.  In 1950 the Korean War began.  These were all portrayed to the public as signs of a world Communist conspiracy (Zinn, 429).”  The Soviet Union achieved their bomb far ahead of U.S. predictions and aided McCarthy’s fears of Communist infiltration and espionage in the United States.  These fears were confirmed with the arrest and prosecution of the Rosenbergs in 1950, the same year as the outbreak of war in Korea.  “Following each of the World Wars of the twentieth century, American politics shifted from progressive to conservative and went through a Red Scare.  While there were real reasons that provoked America’s confrontation with the Soviet Union, this readiness to attribute all evil, perhaps all social change, to a malevolent force emanating from Moscow remains one of the mysteries of American life…  And Truman pursued a foreign policy of unparalleled aggressiveness against the Soviet Union (Marcus & Burner, 245).”

The Soviet Union may have seen the American foreign policy as “unparalleled aggressiveness” but the United States was not without reason to be concerned about the Soviet Union’s advances.  Firstly, they developed the atomic bomb far ahead of schedule in 1949.  Immediately following that development, the Korean War began.  While many liberal interpretations of the Cold War state that the United States misperceived the uprising of Communism around the world as being influenced by the Soviet Union.  However, the Soviet Union did influence and support many of the Communist uprisings and, at times, the Cold War almost became hot, particularly during the Korean War.  While the Soviets were initially reluctant to outwardly support China’s Communist uprising, however when they saw that the United States was not going to interfere they became more supportive.  “Stalin continued to fear that the United States might intervene, and he believed that any aid had to be sent clandestinely to avoid provoking the capitalist powers. The surprising lack of a U.S. military response to the communist victory in China gradually allayed those fears (MacDonald, 1995).”  Once the bomb had been developed, the Soviet began to push its influence into Korea.  “The new evidence demonstrates conclusively that North Korea was a satellite of the Soviet Union. Soviet control over Kim’s revolutionary policy was such that it could prevent him from attacking the South or allow him to do so at will: the North Koreans had wanted to attack as early as the spring of 1949 but had to wait until the Soviets gave their permission and material support in the spring of 1950 (MacDonald, 1995).”

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a culmination of both American and Soviet expansion of power that finally came to a head in the Western Hemisphere.  If the Cold War was rooted in a nuclear arms race and had nuclear deterrence worked, than the Cuban Missile Crisis would have never happened.  Rather, the Cold War was made up of fears for security in a post- World War II world, where the worldwide sense of security had been destroyed.  When finally faced with the real possibility of nuclear or conventional war in the Cuban Missile Crisis, both sides conceded.  “For many years, Americans portrayed the crisis as an unalloyed American triumph. Kennedy’s concession on the Jupiters and his willingness on Saturday night to consider making that concession public indicate that, when the superpower leaders were “eyeball to eyeball,” both sides blinked (Lebow & Stein, 1995).”

Neither side wanted war but each was spurned by fears of the other’s expansionist goals.  The ideas behind the Cold War moved it forward.  Americans feared a “Workers of the World Unite!” communist global expansion, while Russia, severely weakened by WWII and out-gunned by American nuclear superiority felt the need to flex muscle and build allies in third-world countries as a matter of self-preservation.  “The absence of superpower war is puzzling only if at least one of the superpowers was expansionist and aggressive. On the basis of the evidence now available, the image that each superpower held of the other as opportunity-driven aggressors can be discredited as crude stereotypes. Khrushchev and Brezhnev felt threatened by what they considered the predatory policies of their adversary, as did American leaders by Soviet expansionist policies. For much of the cold war, Soviet leaders were primarily concerned with preserving what they had, although like their American counterparts, they were not averse to making gains that appeared to entail little risk or cost (Lebow & Stein, 1995).”  It wasn’t until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and began to tone down the expansionist language and concede to U.S. policies that the Cold War officially ended.  It was a war of ideas, rather than nuclear arms, the idea of a communist world or a capitalist one.  In the end, neither side succeeded.  As John Dulles said, “ The basis change we need to look forward to isn’t necessarily a change from Communism to another form of government.  The question is whether you can have Communism in one country or whether it has to be for the world.  If the Soviets had national Communism we could do business with their government (Mueller, 2004).”

Works Cited

Lebow, Richard Ned, and Janice Gross Stein. “Deterrence and the Cold War.” Political Science Quarterly 110.2 (1995).

Macdonald, Douglas J. “Communist bloc expansion in the early Cold War: challenging realism, refuting revisionism.” International Security 20.3 (1995).

Marcus, Robert D., Burner, David.  America Firsthand: Readings from Reconstruction to the Present 4^th Ed.  Bedford Books, Boston; 1997.

Mueller, John. “What was the Cold War about? Evidence from its ending.” Political Science Quarterly 119.4 (2004).

Tierney, Brian; Kagan, Donald; Williams, Pearce L..  Great Issues in Western Civilization Volume II: From Louis XIV through the Cold War 4^th Ed.  McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, 1992.

White, Timothy J. “Cold War Historiography: New Evidence Behind Traditional Typographies.” International Social Science Review (2000).

Zinn, Howard.  A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present.  Harper Collins, NY; 1980.