The Cold War

by Robert J. McMahon

  In 1948, the Truman administration, seeking to extricate itself gracefully from its Korean commitment, began withdrawing US military forces from the peninsula. American defence planners believed not only that US military personnel had become overextended worldwide, necessitating this pullback, but that Korea, in fact, possessed minimal strategic worth. The North Korean invasion two years later brought a different calculus to the fore. Although it might have lacked great intrinsic strategic value, Korea stood as a potent symbol, especially in view of America’s role as midwife and protector of the Seoul regime. Further, the North Korean attack, sanctioned and backed by the Soviet Union and China, each of whom sensed a chance for a significant geostrategic and symbolic win at a relatively low risk, threatened America’s credibility as a regional and global power every bit as much as it threatened the survival of the South Korean government. To Truman, Acheson, and other senior decision-makers, the stakes at risk in Korea appeared enormous.

  Consequently, without any dissenting voices being raised, the president quickly authorized US military intervention. ‘If the United Nations yields to the force of aggression’, Truman declared publicly on 30 November, ‘no nation will be safe or secure. If aggression is successful in Korea, we can expect it to spread throughout Asia and Europe to this hemisphere. We are fighting in Korea for our own national security and survival.’

  That statement came right after the entry of Chinese communist ‘volunteer’ forces into the fray, a development that changed the character of the Korean conflict—and, arguably, the Cold War as well. Truman and his military advisers grew overconfident after MacArthur turned the tide of battle in September 1950 by outflanking the North Koreans with his legendary Inchon landing. The UN forces under his command crossed into North Korean territory on 7 October; by 25 October, some advance units reached the Yalu River, along the North Korean–Chinese border. As they inched closer to Chinese territory, Mao informed Stalin that he had decided to send Chinese troops across the Yalu. ‘The reason’, he explained, ‘is that if we allow the United States to occupy all of Korea and Korean revolutionary strength suffers a fundamental defeat, then the Americans will run more rampant to the detriment of the entire East.’ Mao, too, saw broad regional and global implications in the Korean outcome. MacArthur, who had so cavalierly underestimated the Chinese military threat and whose forces were almost completely driven out of North Korea by the end of November, informed the Joint Chiefs of Staff: ‘We face an entirely new war.’

  The world faced an entirely new Cold War by that time as well, one whose boundaries reached well beyond Europe. The emergence of Mao’s regime in China, the Sino-Soviet alliance, Soviet and Chinese support for North Korean adventurism, the intervention of US and UN forces in Korea, the subsequent entry of Chinese troops, the presence of communist elements within Southeast Asia’s nationalist movements—all ensured that the Cold War would remain a commanding presence in post-war Asia for a long time to come. The Korean War itself dragged on inconclusively until July 1953, when the warring parties signed an armistice that achieved little more than an exchange of prisoners-of-war and a return to the status quo ante bellum. The 38th parallel remained an ominous line of division—not just between North and South Korea, but between the Eastern and Western blocs (Map 2).

  Map 2. The Korean War, 1950–3.

  Chapter 4

  A global Cold War, 1950–8

  With the Korean conflict, the Cold War became increasingly global in scope. In the decade that followed the onset of the Korean fighting, few corners of the world managed to escape the ensnaring web of superpower rivalry, competition, and conflict. Indeed, the principal international flashpoints of the 1950s and 1960s—Iran, Guatemala, Indo-China, the Taiwan Strait, Suez, Lebanon, Indonesia, Cuba, the Congo—lay well beyond the Cold War’s original boundaries. Only Berlin, whose contested status triggered Soviet–American crises in 1958 and again in 1961–2, belongs to the set of immediate post-Second World War disputes that precipitated the East–West breach in the first place.

  The Cold War, during this period, essentially moved from the centre of the international system to its periphery. The Americans and the Soviets each identified crucial strategic, economic, and psychological interests in the developing areas of Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, and sought to gain resources, bases, allies, and influence there. By the 1950s, those areas had emerged at the very heart of the Soviet–American struggle, a position they would retain throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The East–West division in Europe, by way of contrast, achieved a remarkable degree of stability; the very idea of a military conflict there became increasingly unpalatable to Soviet and American leaders, who recognized that any major confrontation in the centre would almost certainly turn nuclear. It is particularly telling that virtually all of the wars that erupted during the Cold War era were waged on developing world soil—and that all but 200,000 of the estimated 20 million people who died in wars fought between 1945 and 1990 were felled in conflicts that raged across various parts of the developing world.

  Yet a fearsome nuclear armaments race between the United States and the Soviet Union also picked up steam in the Cold War’s second decade, raising the spectre of a miscalculation or an uncontrollable escalation that could result in appalling devastation and the loss of untold millions of lives. These themes—the geographical expansion of the Cold War into the periphery, the achievement of relative peace and stability in Europe, and the steady build-up of nuclear arsenals on both sides—form the main emphases of this chapter.

  Stabilizing East–West relations

  Although the Korean War spurred the militarization and globalization of the Cold War, it also, ironically, set in motion forces that helped stabilize US–Soviet relations while institutionalizing the East–West division of Europe in a manner that decreased the likelihood of war between the superpowers. Convinced in the wake of the North Korean attack that they now faced a more aggressive and more dangerously opportunistic foe, and increasingly concerned about the vulnerability of Western Europe to a Soviet military thrust, American policy-makers redoubled their efforts to strengthen NATO. By late 1950, Truman had sent four US divisions to Europe, despite significant opposition from prominent House and Senate Republicans; begun the transformation of NATO into a real military alliance with an integrated command structure; appointed popular Second World War General Dwight D. Eisenhower as NATO’s first supreme commander; and initiated plans for the rearmament of Germany.

  West German rearmament stood as the Truman administration’s highest priority. American strategists considered German manpower essential to the defence of Europe; they also believed that a rearmed Germany, with fully restored sovereignty, was needed in order to lock the Federal Republic into the Western orbit and to shore up the government of pro-American Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Yet the spectre of a militarily revived Germany so soon after the demise of a regime that had brought such unparalleled horrors to Europe terrified France and other European allies. To ease their fears, the United States agreed to the concept of a European Defence Community (EDC), first advanced by the French, which proposed an intricate set of arrangements that would permit the build-up of limited West German military forces that were then to be subsumed within a broader Western European army.

  The Soviets tried in vain to derail the process of German rearmament, presenting the Western allies in the spring of 1952 with a set of diplomatic notes calling for the establishment of a unified, neutralized Germany. Once again, the prospect of a resurgent Germany, its latent economic-military power co-opted by and harnessed to the West, haunted Stalin and the Soviet Politburo, prompting their effort to find a less threatening, if still risky, solution to the German problem. But Washington dismissed Moscow’s demarche out of hand. A unified, neutralized Germany represented a strategic nightmare for the United States; such a state might over time tilt towards the Soviet sphere, thereby upsetting the European power balance. That was precisely what the
Truman administration was determined to prevent. The Soviets soon resigned themselves to the fait accompli of a permanently divided Germany and took steps, in response, that resulted in their recognition of East Germany, the so-called German Democratic Republic, as a sovereign state in March 1954. Stalin and his successors recognized that the integration of a rearmed, sovereign West Germany into the US-led sphere would tip the balance of economic and military power significantly toward the West; yet they also realized that such an outcome at least carried fewer risks than that of a reunited, autonomous German state emerging once again as the balance wheel in European politics and potential future menace to Soviet security.

  A surprising convergence actually developed in the thinking of Soviet and Western strategists towards the German question by the early and mid-1950s, a convergence that facilitated the stabilization of Europe and permitted a modest reduction in East–West tensions. As British Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd privately put it in June 1953: ‘To unite Germany while Europe is divided, if practical, is fraught with danger for all. Therefore everyone—Dr. Adenauer, the Russians, the Americans, the French and ourselves—feel in our hearts that a divided Germany is safer for the time being. But none of us dare say so openly because of the effect upon German public opinion. Therefore we all publicly support a united Germany, each on his own terms.’

  When the French Assembly rejected the EDC treaty in the summer of 1954, the British expeditiously devised an alternative means to accomplish the goal of a remilitarized, reintegrated West Germany. Their plan, which the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration concurred in, called for utilizing NATO as the constraining framework within which German rearmament should proceed. Later that year, during a pomp-filled conference in Paris, the NATO powers agreed to this new formula for rearming West Germany, restoring its sovereignty, and terminating the US–British–French occupation. In May 1955, a fully sovereign Federal Republic of Germany entered NATO.

  Despite numerous bumps along the way, the United States achieved its core European policy objectives with the negotiation of the German contractual agreements, securing a strengthened, reinvigorated NATO in tandem with a sovereign, rearmed West Germany. It had succeeded as well in encouraging a reconciliation between Paris and Bonn and promoting a more politically integrated and economically vibrant Western Europe.

  ‘The American design was to create a prosperous, non-Communist Europe,’ notes historian Melvyn P. Leffler. ‘Its goal was to thwart any attempt by the Kremlin to seize Western Europe in wartime, intimidate it in peacetime, or lure West Germany into its orbit anytime.’ Almost exactly ten years after the end of the war in Europe, that essential goal appeared close to realization.

  In early 1953, the first leadership changes since the onset of the Cold War took place in both Washington and Moscow. But new men at the top did little to diminish the mutual mistrust and suspicion that lay at the heart of the superpower impasse. Eisenhower and his chief foreign policy adviser, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, were, in fact, determined to prosecute the Cold War with even greater vigour than had their Democratic predecessors. The Republican Party platform of 1952, in a passage authored by Dulles, blasted the Democrats’ ‘tragic blunders’ in foreign affairs and condemned the Truman administration’s strategy of containment as a ‘negative, futile, and immoral’ policy that ‘abandons countless human beings to a despotic and godless communism’. Not even the death of Stalin in March 1953 and the advancement of vague peace proposals from the collective leadership that had replaced the long-serving Russian dictator dented the conviction of Eisenhower and his top strategists that they faced an implacable, devious enemy. They were certain that the Soviet Union posed a military, a political, and an ideological threat of the first order; it was an adversary that appeared impervious to traditional diplomatic give-and-take and thus could only be dealt with from a position of overpowering strength. ‘This is an irreconcilable conflict,’ Dulles told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his confirmation hearings. The venerable Winston Churchill, serving once again as Britain’s prime minister, called for a summit meeting to test the possibility of diplomatic compromise with Moscow, but Eisenhower rejected his appeal, privately judging it a foolishly premature lurch towards appeasement.

  For their part, the new Soviet rulers responded to the rearming of Germany and strengthening of NATO by consolidating their own hold over Eastern Europe. An outbreak of widespread strikes, demonstrations, and other forms of resistance to Soviet rule in East Germany in June 1953, coupled with the increasingly independent path being blazed by Yugoslavia’s Joseph Broz Tito, drove home the tenuousness of Moscow’s control within its own putative sphere of influence. On 14 May 1955, the Soviets formalized their security ties to their Eastern European ‘allies’—the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania—with the formation of the Warsaw Pact. A loose military alliance best understood as a defensive reaction to the West’s initiatives in Germany and within NATO, the Warsaw Pact symbolized the hardening of the continent’s lines of division. Just one day later, the Soviets joined with the allies in signing a peace treaty with Austria which allowed for the termination of the allied occupation there in exchange for the creation of a sovereign, neutral state. Moscow also offered the West new proposals to halt the arms race, sought to reach a modus vivendi with Yugoslavia, and launched a series of bold diplomatic initiatives in the developing world.

  Those moves, undertaken by the rambunctious but flexible Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Communist Party boss who had emerged as the dominant figure in the post-Stalinist leadership, helped facilitate the summit meeting long craved by Churchill. In July 1955, Soviet, American, British, and French heads of government met at Geneva, the first such meeting since the Potsdam Conference a decade earlier. Although no breakthroughs occurred with regard to Germany, disarmament, or any other major issues in dispute, the very fact that the conference took place seemed to herald the dawning of a more cooperative and conciliatory chapter in East–West relations. In the broadest sense, the Geneva Conference confirmed both sides’ tacit recognition of the existing status quo in Europe—along with the implicit understanding that neither would risk war to overturn it. Significantly, two months after the conference closed Moscow extended diplomatic recognition to West Germany.

  In a momentous speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow in February 1956, Khrushchev harshly denounced the domestic crimes and foreign policy mistakes of Stalin. The Soviet leader’s secret, four-hour speech called for ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the capitalist powers and conceded that there were different paths towards socialism. The speech, whose contents were soon widely disseminated, shocked communists and non-communists alike. Would-be reformers in Eastern Europe were heartened by the prospect of a loosening Soviet grip. Intellectuals, students, and workers soon tested the limits of the Kremlin’s tolerance for diversity and national independence. In June, labour disputes in long-restive Poland quickly turned into expressions of outright resistance to the Soviet Union. After using the Red Army to quell nationalist riots in Warsaw, Khrushchev reversed course and assented to the installation of former prime minister Wladyslaw Gomulka, a reformer who had been ousted earlier in a Stalinist purge, as the new Polish Communist Party chairman.

  Similar agitation in Hungary yielded a more tragic outcome. On 23 October, student-led demonstrations throughout the country escalated into an outright insurrection against the Soviet military presence. When, at the end of the month, the reformist government of Imre Nagy announced Hungary’s decision to leave the Warsaw Pact, declared itself a neutralist nation, and appealed for UN support, Khrushchev reached the limits of his tolerance for political change within Eastern Europe. To do nothing, the Soviet ruler privately ruminated, ‘will give a great boost to the Americans, English, and French’. The simultaneous Anglo-French invasion of Egypt on 31 October, together with Eisenhower’s re-election campaign, then entering its final days, provided the Rus
sian leader with what he saw as a ‘favourable moment’ to use military force. Consequently, on 4 November, 200,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops, backed by 5,500 tanks, moved to suppress the Hungarian rebels with overwhelming force. The unequal clash that ensued claimed approximately 20,000 Hungarian and as many as 3,000 Soviet lives (see Figure 4). By 8 November, the rebellion had been crushed. The Eisenhower administration, whose pro-liberation rhetoric and provocative Radio Free Europe broadcasts had done much to encourage the anti-Soviet resistance, could do little but wring its hands about Russian brutality. Plainly, the Americans were no more willing to tempt a global conflagration over events in the Soviet sphere of influence than the Soviets would have been in response to developments in Western Europe. By the mid-1950s, a form of great power order was emerging in Europe; a few scholars have, in fact, employed the term ‘Long Peace’ to characterize post-Second World War Europe. For some, though, as Hungarians painfully learned, that order came at a very high price.