1945-1975 international relations: the Cold War and relations with the USSR and China; the Vietnam War Flashcards
Why did the USA become involved in a Cold War in the years 1945-51?
In 1945, the USA had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. By the end of the decade, this was to end. While after 1945 there was concern that the USSR was spreading its rule into Eastern Europe, by 1950 there was the realisation that Communism was a worldwide issue. If the USA was to prevent the spread of Communism, it was therefore making a global commitment. China fell to the Communists in
1949. In 1950, the USA became involved in a full-scale war in Korea.
What were Post-war relations Like for the US?
The USA had been an unlikely ally of the USSR during the Second World War. Once the common enemy of Nazi Germany was defeated, their differences began to emerge.
The Soviet leader, Stalin, could argue that his country had suffered grievously during the war: possibly as many as 27 million dead, with 25 million homeless and 6 million buildings destroyed. Nazi Germany, with whom it had a treaty of non-aggression, had invaded the USSR without warning. Nine of its fifteen republics had been fought over during the war. The USSR wanted the security of knowing that it could not be attacked without warning again. The best way to ensure this was to control its neighbours, so that they might act as a buffer zone between the USSR and the rest of Europe.
By invading Eastern European countries such as Poland in the latter stages of the war, it demonstrated that it would maintain a considerable influence on them in the future.
At a series of meetings with Allied leaders towards the end of the war, Stalin presented this as a done deal. At Yalta in February 1945, Roosevelt, visibly ill, seemed to sympathise with Stalin. It was agreed, for example, that Germany should be divided and forced to pay war reparations, half of which would go to the USSR. The USSR should gain land from Poland and in turn Poland should be compensated with land from Germany.
What was the Truman Doctrine?
In 1947, Truman had offered the support of the USA to countries struggling against Communism. In a speech Truman said:
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support peoples who resist being enslaved by armed minorities or by outside pressure. I believe that we must help free peoples to work out their own destiny in their own way.
The policy was known as the Truman Doctrine or containment because it seemed to imply the USA would stem the spread of Communism. The doctrine was first applied in Greece to give aid to the non-Communist forces. Greece did not become Communist; hence the first intervention appeared successful.
How did Truman treat the Cold War?
In April, Roosevelt died. His successor, Harry S. Truman, seemed more critical of Stalin. Unlike Roosevelt, and indeed Churchill, Truman had not had the experience of co-operating with Stalin to defeat a common enemy. The USA had not suffered during the War in any way commensurate with the USSR. It had endured less than two per cent of the human losses of the USSR. Roosevelt had considered this fact in his responses to Soviet demands; Truman did not. The next meeting at Potsdam in July, in which Britain also had a new leader, was less amicable although the Yalta agreements were confirmed. In an extensive poll, 50 per cent of Americans still felt that wartime co-operation between the two superpowers should continue.
By this time Stalin was imposing Communist regimes on many of the countries liberated’ from Nazi influence or occupied by the Soviets. In Romania, for example, at a meeting with the Soviet deputy foreign minister, the King was given two hours to introduce a pro-Communist government.
While Truman was clearly worried about this forcing of Communism on Eastern European countries, he could do little about what had already happened in areas where there were still Soviet armies of occupation. However, he was increasingly concerned that Communism should not spread to countries not currently under Soviet control.
To Truman it seemed that the USSR was seeking not just to protect its borders from any future invasion, but rather to control the whole of Europe. In 1946, Winston Churchill, visiting Fulton, Missouri, spoke of an Iron Curtain descending through the middle of Europe. This seemed even more pertinent when the Soviets forced Czechoslovakia to adopt Communism in 1948.
Countries such as Romania, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia were now governed by Communists. Only Greece, where a civil war was taking place between Communist and non-Communist forces, held out against Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. People said a state of Cold War had developed between the USA and USSR.
What Marshall Aid did the US provide to Eastern European countries?
In the following year the USA went further, offering a $13 billion package to help European countries to recover from the effects of the Second World War.
This was Marshall Aid, named after the US Secretary of State General George Marshall. A conference of 22 nations was set up to assess the economic needs of the affected countries. The USSR did not attend and refused permission for countries under its sphere of influence to do so. Eventually sixteen Western European nations formed the Organisation of European Economic Cooperation (OFEC) to spend this money. The aid was in part intended to help countries to recover their prosperity so that Communism would lose any appeal. The aid did help Western European countries to recover economically and fears of Communism in countries such as Italy and France receded.
In the ensuing years, however, two crises emerged in which direct confrontation between the USA and USSR seemed likely.
What Happened in Berlin in 1948-49?
Germany had been divided into four zones of occupation following the end of the war. The capital, Berlin, was also divided although it physically lay within the Soviet zone. The Western occupying powers, the USA, Britain and France, relied on Soviet goodwill to travel through its zone to their sectors in Berlin.
By 1948, it was clear that the three Western sectors were co-operating and recovery was well on the way through Marshall Aid. In contrast, the Soviet zone remained poor. Increasingly, it was having Communism imposed upon it.
In June 1948, the Western zones introduced a new common currency, the Deutschmark. When their leaders tried to introduce it into their sectors of Berlin, Stalin ordered all transport links with the West cut. He believed he could blockade Berlin into accepting Communist rule and therefore make the capital part of the future Communist East German state.
In retaliation Britain and the USA organised an airlift of essential supplies to the city under siege. By March 1949, 8,000 tons of supplies per day were being delivered despite Soviet threats to the aircraft, which were of course flying through Communist-controlled airspace. On 9 May, Stalin called off the blockade and things returned to normal. It appeared that in the first great confrontation, the USA had won.
What led to the development of NATO and what did NATO state?
The Berlin Crisis had confirmed Truman’s commitment to containment in Europe and highlighted the Soviet threat to Western Europe. Western European states, even joined together, were no match for the Soviet Union and needed the formal support of the USA. In April 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was signed. Although a defensive alliance, its main purpose was to prevent Soviet expansion.
The countries agreed that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America would be considered an attack against them all.
What led to the US involvement in the Korean War, 1950-53, and what took place?
Korea is a country in Asia that shares a border with both the USSR and China.
Following the Second World War it was divided into North and South with a border at the 38th parallel (a line of latitude). While the government of the South supported the USA, that of the North was Communist and hostile. In March 1950, North Korea invaded the South. The UN sent forces to stop this invasion; the vast majority were American under an American Commander, General Douglas MacArthur.
UN forces succeeded in liberating South Korea. However, on MacArthur’s urging, they then went on to invade the North, ignoring China’s warnings of the consequences. President Truman faced tremendous hostility within the USA when he fired MacArthur for going beyond his instructions. To many it seemed he was soft on Communism. Some felt UN troops should have finished off North Korea and then invaded China itself to reverse the Communist threat.
In the meantime, China became involved in the war, sending thousands of troops to help the North Koreans. The war effectively became a stalemate for three years. The USA alone lost 27,000 troops and one million Korean civilians died. In 1953, a peace of sorts was agreed in which Korea remained divided into a Communist North and non-Communist South. It is known now that the Soviets secretly sent air forces to help the North Koreans. Had this been known at the time, the consequences could have been profound, with the confrontation between the USA and the USSR possibly spreading to Europe.
What was the result of the Korean War?
The USA had learned that Communism was a global issue and if they were to prevent its spread then a global commitment was necessary. In the early 1950s, President Eisenhower spoke of the domino theory. While the policy may appear incredibly simplistic, it was nevertheless a deeply held view and was later used to justify full-scale US involvement in the Vietnam War.
In its second phase, the war had been in effect a Sino-American war. Sino-American hostility was greatly increased, and the United States gave increased support to Taiwan. Moreover, it helped to sustain McCarthyism and generally worsened the Cold War antagonism. However, the three leading powers showed that they were unwilling to risk World War Ill. The sacking of MacArthur signalled that America planned to stick to containment.
To what extent was there a thaw in the Cold War during Eisenhower’s presidency?
President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, appeared to be real ‘Cold Warriors. They had attacked Truman and the Democrats for being soft on Communists’ in the presidential election campaign of 1952. America was very much in the grip of McCarthyism and Eisenhower and Dulles talked about a ‘roll back’ (of Communism) and ‘massive retaliation’ as they planned to base American defence on nuclear weaponry.
What was Eisenhower and Krushchevs relationship like?
In 1955, Nikita Khrushchev succeeded Stalin as leader of the Soviet Union. His response to Eisenhower was a mixture of conciliation and provocation. He tried to stir up the West Europeans to halt German rearmament and to win friends in the Middle East. In order to tighten the Soviet bloc militarily, he created the Warsaw Pact.
On the other hand, Khrushchev returned a naval base to Finland and decreased the Red Army by half a million men. He agreed to talks on agriculture and the peaceful use of atomic energy with the USA. In May 1955, he signed the Austrian peace treaty, under which the four occupying powers at last got out of Austria, which became an independent and neutral state. The Soviet Union had thus surrendered territory for the first time since the Second World War.
However, Eisenhower was not convinced by these policies, believing that this was simply a new style of leadership rather than a change in their basic aim of expansion. This seemed to be confirmed by events in Hungary.
What Happened in Hungary in 1956?
In 1956, Khrushchev began a policy of relaxing the controls Stalin had imposed on Eastern Europe. However, when moderate Communists in Hungary, led by Imre Nagy, threatened to leave the Warsaw Pact, Khrushchev sent in tanks to quell the rebellion. Nagy was removed and shot, and a more acceptable leader, Janos Kadar, took over. In spite of appeals by the rebels, the US government did not intervene. A more moderate government in Hungary might have helped the USA ‘contain’ the Soviet Union, but the risks of intervention were thought to be too high. Moreover, the USA was preoccupied with the Suez crisis.
What happened in Berlin in 1959/60?
Khrushchev faced problems over Germany. First, the West refused to recognise the legitimacy of the East German state. Secondly, America, Britain and France used West Berlin for espionage and sabotage. Khrushchev tried to force the West to recognise East Germany, by threatening to give East Germany control of the West’s access routes to West Berlin. Then he gave the West an ultimatum that they must do something about West Berlin within six months, or face dire consequences (November 1958). However, when it became clear that the West would stand firm, Khrushchev backed down in March 1959.
Khrushchev and Eisenhower had their first ever summit meeting in September 1959. Although the atmosphere was surprisingly relaxed, they made no progress on Berlin. Khrushchev hoped for a Berlin agreement at the Paris summit in May 1960. However, this summit failed as, just before the meeting, the Soviet Union shot down a U-2 American spy-plane and captured the pilot, Gary Powers. Eisenhower was forced to admit the plane’s intent and
Khrushchev refused to attend the summit.
What was the Suez crisis?
In July 1956, the Egyptian leader, Gamal Nasser, took control of the Suez Canal, the important trade waterway that gave a quicker route from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. Britain and France were particularly angered and with Israel’s help, invaded the Canal Zone. They were not supported by the USA who forced them to withdraw by the use of financial sanctions. Eisenhower wanted to keep in with the Arab nations, believing the Western world needed their oil and friendship against the Communist bloc. In addition, Eisenhower was furious that Britain, France and Israel had acted without keeping him informed.
What were the results of the Suez crisis?
The crisis illustrated that Britain and France were no longer world powers and were heavily dependent on the USA. Moreover, it increased American involvement in the Middle East. In January 1957, Eisenhower asked Congress for military and economic aid for any Middle East country that was threatened by aggression or subversion. This became known as the Eisenhower Doctrine and was an extension of containment to the Middle East.
However, Egypt and Syria turned increasingly to the USSR, as the Anglo-French actions had reminded them of the Western ‘colonial’ mentality. Both the USA and the USSR gave and/or sold increasing amounts of armaments to their allies in this area.
