History of Cold War

1. (1945-1989)
RP Pamplona

2. • After World War II
• Obvious concern was avoiding another war
• Before World War II
• Relationship of US and Soviet Union had been strained
• During the war (indications of future trouble)
• Manhattan Project (US atomic bomb program)
• Britain and US decided not share the information with the Soviet
Union
• Stalin knew about the project through spying
• Disagreements about the postwar fate of Eastern Europe
• Declaration on Liberated Europe (1945)

3. • US-Soviet relations deteriorated
• Stalin moved to impose communist governments
• No intention of abiding the democratic provisions of Declaration on Liberated
Europe
• Policy of containment
• US’s policy of resisting the expansion of communist influence during the Cold
War
• Marshall Plan
• Program of economic assistance to rebuild the nations of Western Europe in
the aftermath of WWII.
• Truman Doctrine
• Expansive vision of containment
• US to assist foreign gov’t threatened by communist forces

4. • Truman Doctrine was unclear
• Expanding the scope of containment well beyond Europe
• Fall of China(1949)
• North Korean attack on South Korea (1950)
• US decided to take military action
• Domino Theory
• The belief and fear that the spread of communism to one country
threatened its expansion to neighboring countries
• North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
• Decolonization
• Achievement of political independence by European colonies

5. • Détente
• Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger
• A policy and period of relaxed tensions between the US and Soviet
Union during 1970s
• US possessed tools that could be used as leverage to moderate
Soviet behavior
• The promised benefits of détente FAILED to materialize
• Soviet Union’s invasion of Latin America and Afghanistan

6. • Ronald Raegan
• Was convinced that détente allowed the Soviet Union to surge
ahead of the United States in military power and expand its
political influence in the Third World while the US naively waited
for Soviet moderation.
• The administration increased assistance to
anticommunist governments and insurgency movements
• Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982.

7. • Mikhail Gorbachev
• Impressed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain as
someone she could “do business with”
• People realized this was a new type of Soviet leader
• Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness)
• Late 1980s, Gorbachev faced a dilemma
• Glasnost was a smashing success, whereas perestroika was a
dismal failure
• Berlin wall was being torn down
• By 1991, the Soviet Union itself joined the list of former
communist nations when Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s

8. • Long peace
• The “peace” or absence of war between the US and Soviet Union
during the Cold War
• For more than 40 years, two of the greatest military powers in history,
divided by an intense ideological rivalry, struggled against each other
across the globe. But despite the intensity of the conflict, they never
went to war.
• Why did the Cold War never turn hot?
• John Mearsheimer
• a) the presence of only two major powers (bipolarity)

9. What changed since the end of the
Cold War?
• Germany was unified again
• Former allies of the Soviet
Union are now members of
NATO
• Division of Europe has
ended
• The iron curtain, lifted
What remained
unchanged?
• American influence

10. • Ian Clark
• “essential continuity in the role of American power… there
are institutions that were created during the Cold War, and which
were almost defining attributes of it, [that] still endure into the post-
Cold War era.”
• The greatest economic challenge to the US is now more
likely to emerge from Asia