Introduction

One of the key historical debates regarding the Cold War has to do with the nature of the Cold War within the context of global history. There are a number of views. Lawrence Freedman has identified the key issue as one of interpretation, however. Was the Cold War at its core an ideological conflict, or was it a power struggle? If the first, the conflict between Communism and Capitalism, as it were, over world domination and the future of human social organization, then the Cold War becomes a period of history, encapsulating everything that occurred between 1945 and 1989, when the USSR collapsed. If the later, then the Cold War must be seen as one of many events within the “Post War” period, all of which are related, but none of which was the single defining factor of the era. This is interesting from a historical point of view since those who see the conflict as ideological also tend to subordinate everything that occurred within the period to that disagreement. The most common narrative strategy within this view sees the USSR as an evil empire with designs on world domination which was ultimately thwarted by a heroic United States sacrificing blood and treasure to keep the world safe for us all. On the other hand, the advocates of the power struggle model easily fall into a view of the Cold War as an example of diplomatic realism – Kissinger Style neo-brinksmanship in which the potential military conflict was only one in a whole gamut of world realities, and in which the United States and the Soviet Union were self-interested actors who happened to have a lot of power. In other respects, this view sees the other actors in the world more clearly as states with interests and directions independent of the two superpowers, sometimes coinciding with them, and sometimes at odds.]
While Freedman sees the conflict as ideological, I tend to be more in the power struggle camp. However, where Freedman and I agree is in the subtle space where we can see that the immediate conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union had ideological causes and overtones (as Freeman says, to an ever decreasing degree), but the struggle itself did not fully define the period between 1945-1999. Instead, the Cold War was one rather extended and important event within a constellation of events, ideas, and realities in the Post War world.]
So, what happened that the United States and the Soviet Union, allies during the Second World War, became such implacable enemies after it? To begin to understand that is the goal of this lecture.
As the world recovered from the Second World War, the only two powers still able to maintain significant military power and global political influence were the United States and the Soviet Union.] Great Britain, until 1947, still held on to its empire, but that situation was becoming financially and politically more and more difficult. France was attempting to recreate, at least in part, its empire by reclaiming Vietnam (French Indochina) and Algeria. Germany had lost its colonial possessions, as had Japan. Italy was stripped of its small empire as well. Most of the other participants in the Second World War were economically and physically devastated, and unable to concentrate on more than their own recovery. The geopolitical realities of the prewar world, which included multiple power centers, shifting alliances, and multiple ideological approaches to political reality was simply not possible because most of the former world players were out of the game. In this situation, the multipolar world came to be limited to two poles of power, and those two poles, the United States and the Soviet Union, allies during the war, increasingly became rivals. The power of these two nations was so much greater than others that for many, aligning with one or the other seemed to be the safest diplomatic course. For others, after the Cold War began in earnest, the bi-polar situation provided an opportunity to play both powers off against the other in an attempt to minimize their influence, and reap the benefits of aid from both sides.

The Atlantic Charter & Wartime Alliance

In the first years of the 1940’s the United States entered the Second World War on the side of the allies after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. In 1942, the United States joined Germany’s major enemies in Europe, the Soviet Union and Great Britain in an alliance known as the Atlantic Charter initiated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on board a ship in the Atlantic Ocean in early 1942. The agreement made was simply to cooperate in the effort to defeat the Third Reich in Europe. Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, would join later in 1942, as Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began in earnest. As it turns out, this pact had consequences far beyond the end of the war.
In the start the Atlantic Charter was based upon the principles enunciated by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, known as the “Fourteen Points,” that had contributed so much to the willingness of Germany to consider a peace in 1918. The alliance between the three powers, despite the high principles which they enumerated as their reasons for working together against the Axis, was no more than a military alliance with a relatively short term goal – to defeat Germany and Japan in the Second World War. There was no inkling at this point in time that the seeds were being sewn for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the Warsaw Pact.
The three powers began to recognize that simple military cooperation would not be sufficient to win the war, and especially to create a successful and lasting peace afterword, during the first summit of their leaders, in Teheran, Iran, between November 28 and December 1, 1943. At this meeting, after significant pressure from Stalin to open a second front in Europe to relieve the Soviet Red Army (at the time, the Soviets were the only ones fighting the Germans directly, and they had begun to turn the tide). The United States and Great Britain agreed at this meeting to open the second front in France in the summer of 1944. In exchange, Stalin agreed to join his two allies in the fight against Japan in the Pacific once Hitler was defeated.
There were ulterior motives here in the case of all three of the leaders. Stalin wanted to relieve pressure on the Red Army, but was not happy with the idea of an allied assault up the boot of Italy, and then possibly through Eastern Europe to Germany. This route would mean that the Americans and British would be able to occupy East European nations as they moved through, a strategy which Stalin hoped to reserve to himself, knowing that occupation at the end of the war would mean a powerful influence on the political structure of those nations in the post-war periond. Stalin wanted Eastern Europe as a buffer zone for the Soviet Union, and so wanted to be sure the Allies stayed in the West, attacking from France, and allowing him to occupy the territory he felt he needed.
Franklin Roosevelt was not unaware of this situation, but he had a motive of his own – he began talking about the strategy of the Four Policemen, in which the United States, Great Britain, The Soviet Union, and a reconstituted France would act as international policemen to protect the world from aggression. To get agreement to go forward on talks about this idea (which eventually combined with Wilsonian ideas to become the United Nations), Roosevelt was willing to make many concessions.
Churchill appears to have been desperate enough for continued assistance from the United States and USSR that he was willing to accept these backroom political deals to keep the alliance together, despite his suspicions of Stalin.

Rebuilding the World

By 1944, confidence among the allies in victory over Germany was high, and the endgame over the “new world order” began. Each of the allies began to assert their own plans for dealing with Germany and reconstituting Europe. In many ways, Stalin had an upper hand here, as Russia was at the time in the process of liberating Poland, the Balkans, and the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Soviet occupation of these territories gave Stalin a free hand in rebuilding them to suit Soviet needs. All three agreed that their goals would include disarming Germany, denazifying Germany, and the division of Germany into four occupation zones, one each for Great Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, which would each administer, police, and help to rebuild its respective zone.
However, Stalin also had plans to dismember Germany – to take it apart into smaller pieces and avoid reunification. Stalin also wanted to require reparations of up to $20 billion, which would have been impossible for Germany to repay. The United States and Great Britain refused to go along with these plans. This is where we can begin to see a fraying of the allies’ relationship – the roots of the Cold War that would break out soon after the end of World War II. The United States and Great Britain were interested in creating a new world order that would bring Germany back into the community of nations, to restore a normal situation as soon as possible. Stalin, on the other hand, was interested primarily in preventing even the possibility that Germany could ever attack the Soviet Union again. For lack of a better term, this was a ‘kick ‘em while they’re down’ strategy for global security.
At the Yalta Conference in February of 1945, the big three allies continued their negotiations on the postwar order. By this time, as the leaders were meeting in the Crimean resort town of Yalta, hosted by Stalin, Germany was clearly losing the war. Roosevelt was therefore pushing for the Soviets to get into the war against Japan, to take the pressure off the United States in Asia and the Pacific. Roosevelt had also begun to suspect that Churchill’s strategy included the idea of expanding the British Empire, which he did not support at all. There is evidence that Great Britain was still, in 1945, hoping to hold onto its empire, but expansion was probably not an aim. However, Roosevelt’s chief concern was that any concession the Great Britain in the way of expanding its empire would encourage Stalin to seek more territory for the USSR, as well. So Roosevelt’s policy included a get tough approach with Churchill, and an attempt to buddy up to “Uncle Joe” Stalin, whom he characterized as a moderate, interested in peace, but forced to behave brutally by the Communist Party.]
At Yalta, Roosevelt proposed the creation of the United Nations. Churchill proposed the restoration of France to Great Power status to balance Germany, and Stalin attempted to consolidate Soviet control of Poland and the Balkans region. Ultimately, among the agreements made at Yalta were a guarantee by the United States and Great Britain that Russia’s 1941 Borders would be accepted (thus guaranteeing Russian gains in 1939 at the expense of Finland, Poland, and the Baltic states Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. In exchange, Stalin agreed to hold free elections, and to accept democratic governments, in Eastern Europe.]
In July, 1945, just after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the three allies held one more conference, this time at Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. Roosevelt was absent – he had died in April of 1945 of a massive stroke – so the United States was represented by its new President, Harry S. Truman. Churchill was also forced to stay home, having lost an election to Clement Attlee and the Labour Party. So Stalin was the only one of the original three left at the Potsdam Conference. There, the three allies agreed to move Poland’s border’s west as they recreated that state, in order to accommodate the agreement to allow Russia to keep its 1941 borders. This meant taking chunks out of Germany to give to Poland. The allies also divided Germany into 4 occupation zones, and set up a council of ministers to draft the peace treaties to end the war in Europe.
One of the key questions in the decisions on how to deal with Germany (and Japan) after the allied victory in 1945 was how best to deal with the defeated nations so as to prevent a recurrence of aggression in the future. This concern arose from the fact that the Second World War had come so soon on the heals of the First, which itself had been a disastrous and brutal conflict. The fear was that somehow it could happen again.

The End of World War II

There is a lot of truth to the cliché that World War II began with a bang, but ended with a whimper. In an interesting sideline, the end of the war also created one of the great historical myths of our time: that going to war creates a booming economy. In fact, nearly all of the nations that participated in the Second World War were economically, physically, and politically devastated by its end. Only the United States, which was not a battlefield, and had been the supplier of much of the Allied war materiel and financing as well as sending soldiers ended the war with a substantially better economic situation than it had when it entered. The United States, in its unique position, came to control nearly 60% of all world trade, and American manufacturing was producing about 50% of the manufactured goods produced globally in the late 1940’s.

European and Asian countries who had participated in, or been victims of, the war, on the other hand, were in very precarious circumstances. To begin with, Europe at the end of the war was a continent of refugees. During the war, huge numbers of people had been moved out of their original circumstances. German occupiers had moved Jews and Slavs, Gypsies and the handicapped to concentration camps, where they worked until they died or were exterminated. Most of them perished, but large numbers also survived. In addition, the citizens of occupied countries such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Unkraine had been moved to work camps, where they provided labor for the Nazi war machine. In the Ukraine, Georgia, parts of Southern Russia and Poland, in accordance with Hitler’s goal of Lebensraum, the residents had been forcibly displaced to make room for new German settlers. All of these people were moving back to where they came from after the German surrender. In addition, the reverse was also true – in most of these territories, Germans who had settled in during the war were unwelcome, and either voluntarily or forcibly repatriated to Germany. Finding transportation and housing for all of these people was a near impossibility in bombed-out Europe.]

In Asia, similar problems of dislocation and large numbers of refugees complicated the problem of a peaceful settlement. Japanese settlers in Manchuria left or were driven from their farms and businesses with only the possessions they could carry. Transportation systems were not working, and Manchuria is a huge space, making the walk to a port city arduous at best. Japanese civilian refugees trying to find a way back to Japan (which many of them had never seen, having been born between 1931 and 1945 in Manchuria) were often randomly and brutally attacked by Manchurians and Chinese seeking retribution for the brutality of the Japanese military (and civilians) during and before the war. Large numbers of these civilians were killed or died of starvation and disease along the way. Many were orphaned and remained in China as pariahs, unable to get back to Japan, lost in Chinese society for the remainder of their lives. Japanese repatriation from the Pacific and other parts of Asia was similarly difficult, and complicated further by the lack of ships available (Japan had only one working naval transport left at the end of the war).]

Worldwide, starvation and disease were rampant. In Europe, the feeding of the German population during the war had taken place at the expense of the populations of the occupied countries. This meant that at the end of the war, reconstruction was slowed by the fact that people had not only to deal first with their own personal and family needs for shelter and food, but that they were severely malnourished and unable to work very hard or for sustained periods. Food production in Europe remained well below the needs of the population for years, and the only nation able to supply large quantities of food aid was the United States.

Again, in Asia, similar problems existed. Food production was low, and the nutritional health of most of the occupied populations was also poor because of the sacrifices that had been required of them by their Japanese occupiers. In Japan, as well, food production was at a level that could not sustain the population. Japanese use of nearly all metal available, including plows, kitchen knives, and garden tools, for military use during the war had left the farming population with substandard tools and an ability to farm only small portions of the land available to them. Arial bombing campaigns had destroyed farms, fields, and left unexploded bombs in many places, making farming impossible until removal could be effected. So in Asia, as well, starvation and disease were out of control, and reconstruction began as a slow and painful process.

The cities of nearly all the belligerents (fighting countries) and the occupied countries were also devastated, as were the transportation infrastructures of both Europe and Asia. Bridges had been destroyed. Roads bombed out. Airfields rendered unusable. Rail systems wrecked. In Germany and England, nearly every city was devastated by bombing and left in ruins, with the exceptions of Oxford, Cambridge, and Heidelberg – university towns whose historic and cultural value had been considered too important to destroy by both sides. In Japan, Kyoto was the only city of first or second degree importance left untouched. In this situation, moving goods around within any country was nearly impossible. Local areas had little or no contact with regional or national political and economic centers, and had to function autonomously. This made food distribution and medical services very difficult to provide.

The Standoff in Europe

One of the first goals for both the United States and the Soviet Union at the end of the war was to discharge and bring home as many of the soldiers who had fought as possible. Both powers needed to reduce expenditures by minimizing the number of soldiers in uniform, and “bringing the boys home” was politically popular. In addition, until September of 1945, the United States continued to fight the war in Asia and the Pacific, and the Soviet Union joined that effort in August. In Europe, the United States reduced its forces from 7.5 million to 1.3 million within six months after the surrender of the Germans, and the Soviet Union reduced its troop strength in the West from 13 million to about 2.6 million. Clearly, even though the superpowers made significant reductions, there was an imbalance of forces, and the Soviet Union continued to occupy and control most of Eastern Europe. It was already becoming clear, as Churchill warned, that without American soldiers on the ground in Europe, there was nothing to stand between the Soviet army and a march to the English Channel. Still, in the last months of 1945, despite British fears, and differences between the Soviet and U.S. governments on implementation of the peace, the alliance held firm. This was in part because the greatest differences had yet to surface, and in part because U.S. commanders, aware of the fact that the Soviet Union had taken on 2/3 of the German Army without allied assistance during WWII, were concerned that such experience made Soviet soldiers more effective on the battlefield – this concern, along with the fact that Soviet troops outnumbered U.S. forces, seemed to make contemplation of a confrontation with Stalin’s war machine a very risky proposition.]

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]Lawrence Freedman, “The Confrontation of the Superpowers, 1945-1990,” in The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century, ed. Michael Howard and WM. Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 154.
]Ibid.
]David Clay Large and Felix Gilbert, The End of the European Era: 1890 to the Present, ed. Felix Gilbert, 4 ed., The Norton History of Modern Europe (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991), 362.
]Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers : Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, NY: Random House, 1987).
]Ibid.
]Gilbert, The End of the European Era: 1890 to the Present, 355-58.
]Ibid.
]Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

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