The USSR and its communist allies in Europe, 1950
From 1945 to 1989 international power politics were defined by the stand-off between a communist bloc led by the Soviet Union and an anti-communist bloc led by the United States. This confrontation was military, political, ideological, cultural and economic.
The Cold War spanned the world and, with the race to land the first man on the Moon, even extended into space. It was motivated by incompatible ideologies and views about the the best way for humanity to flourish. Communist commentators presented an image of Soviet-led equality as the standard of progress, while opposing voices argued that communism was inherently totalitarian, and capitalism was the true path to freedom. Both sides were paranoid: Americans feared a domino effect that would turn more and more states communist, while Stalin’s control of Eastern Europe, which was partly a revival of the Tsarist ideal of a Greater Russia, also reflected a desire to create a military buffer zone to protect the ‘motherland’ from any more invasions like that of the Nazis, which had killed some 20 million Soviet citizens.
The end of the Second World War, in which the West and the Soviet Union had cooperated to defeat Nazi Germany, had broadly divided Europe into areas that had been liberated by Soviet and by Western Allied armies respectively. This division became known as the Iron Curtain, and took the form of a heavily militarized line that divided Western and Eastern Europe for over four decades. In 1945, Germany, and its capital Berlin, were divided into military occupation zones with the Western Allies (Britain, France and the USA) controlling the west and the Soviets controlling the east. West and East Germany became separate states in 1949, while the division of Berlin was reinforced in 1961 with the building of the Berlin Wall.
At the Yalta conference in February 1945, the Western Allies had effectively granted Eastern Europe (bar Greece) to the Soviet Union as a sphere of influence. Elsewhere, communists tried but failed to take power in Iran, Greece, Malaya and the Philippines. Soviet expansionism led in 1949 to the foundation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a defence alliance of a number of North American and West European countries intended to combat further Soviet advances in Europe. The USSR responded with the Warsaw Pact of 1955, which allied the Soviet Union with Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania.
In China, the communists under Mao Zedong won the civil war of 1946–9. The Japanese had occupied Korea, and the postwar settlement divided the peninsula. The Korean War of 1950–3 began when the communist North Korea invaded the US-allied South. A large-scale US-led United Nations military commitment drove back the North and its Chinese allies, and ended with an armistice that has never become a peace. In this fraught climate, military expenditure rose greatly in North America and Western Europe in the early 1950s.
‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.’
President Dwight D. Eisenhower (16 April 1953)
The Cold War witnessed many other confrontations and conflicts, from the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race to wars in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and Central America. These regional wars were all at least partially products of the Cold War, although there were also more local issues at stake. In Vietnam the USA intervened in a long proxy war but failed to prevent victory by the communists. The consequences of failure were lessened by a diplomatic realignment in the early 1970s that led to cooperation between America and China and marked a further weakening in Soviet power, following the ideological break between the USSR and China in the early 1960s.
Tensions flared again between the USA and the Soviet Union following the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 and the suppression of a popular reform movement in Poland in 1981. President Ronald Reagan launched a massive increase in US spending on projects such as the neutron bomb, and his ‘Star Wars’ satellite defence system.
From 1985, however, tensions eased under a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev saw that the Soviet Union could not possibly match its rival’s military spending and that the Soviet economy was becoming overstretched. However, his policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), inadvertently led to the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 and finally to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. Once Gorbachev let it be known that the USSR would not intervene militarily in the affairs of Eastern-bloc countries, the communist regimes there were left unable to resist popular pressure for change. Huge crowds demonstrated for change, and in November 1989 the opening of the Berlin Wall enabled East Germans to flood into the West. This sign that the East German regime was tottering brought other popular movements onto the streets of Eastern Europe. The resulting transitions to non-communist governments were largely peaceful, except in Romania, where the regime violently, but unsuccessfully, resisted change. By contrast, in China, the communist government retained control. A mass pro-democracy movement had been suppressed with much bloodshed earlier in 1989. But the Cold War had come to an end.