Cold War

The Cold War is the name given to the conflict between the Western powers, led by the United States of America, and the so-called Eastern bloc, led by the Soviet Union, which they fought from 1947 to 1989 with almost all means at their disposal. There was never a direct military confrontation between the superpowers USA, the Soviet Union and their respective military blocs, but there were proxy wars, such as the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the war in Afghanistan. The Cold War appeared as a systemic confrontation between capitalism and communism and determined foreign and security policy worldwide in the second half of the 20th century. For decades, political, economic, technical and military efforts were made on both sides to contain or push back the influence of the other camp worldwide. The term East-West conflict is also used as a synonym for this era of the 20th century, in which the different phases of the constantly changing relations between the blocs are better taken into account.

The conflict took on an extremely threatening character on three occasions, bringing the possibility of a "hot" war between the superpowers closer: in the Berlin Blockade of 1948/49, in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and in the dispute over intermediate-range missiles from 1979 to 1982/83. In between these phases there were periods of lesser conflict intensity or even of détente.

Where they feared the defection of a state to the enemy camp, the US and its allies intervened with covert operations by their intelligence services by organising or securing military coups, such as Operation Ajax in Iran, the US intervention in Chile, in Guatemala or in other states of South and Central America. The Soviet Union used its armed forces in the suppression of a popular uprising in East Germany (June 17, 1953), as well as to occupy Hungary (1956) and the CSSR (1968) in order to remove incumbent governments in these two countries. With reference to the Monroe Doctrine practised by the USA since the 19th century, the Brezhnev Doctrine developed in 1968 was also intended to justify such action by the Soviet Union within the "socialist camp" in the future.

The competition between the two systems was evident in the dissemination of ideological propaganda by the superpowers and their allies, in their arms races, in economic development, and in developments in the fields of culture, sports, science, and technology, such as the elaborate space programs of both sides.

The duration of the Cold War is generally considered to be the post-war period from 1945 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In his memoirs, Mikhail Gorbachev refers to the summit meeting with US President George Bush, who replaced Ronald Reagan, in Malta in December 1989 as the "beginning of the end of the Cold War".

Term History

The term Cold War dates back to 1945, when English author George Orwell used it in the essay You and the Atomic Bomb on October 19, 1945, in the general sense of a confrontation between superpowers under the threat of nuclear war. In the Observer of March 10, 1946, Orwell wrote: "After the Moscow conference last December, Russia began to make a 'cold war' on Britain and the British Empire."

In addition, reference is made to the American financier and long-time political advisor Bernard Baruch, who used the term in a 1947 speech written to him by journalist Herbert Swope. Baruch and Swope were members of the US delegation to the UN's "Commission for the Study of International Control of Atomic Energy". The term was eventually popularized by journalist Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) through the book The Cold War. When asked about the origin of the term, Lippmann referred to the French expression la guerre froide from the 1930s. In the years that followed, "Cold War" became common as a political buzzword, and not just for nuclear confrontation between superpowers. Confrontation between two states or alliances of states is so called when it is characterized by combat measures below the threshold of overt military action against each other. These combat measures include military alliances, arms races, diplomatic-political pressure up to threats of war, economic pressure through embargoes, military intervention in regional conflicts outside one's own territories, ideological infiltration, promotion of coups and coups d'état in the other "camp", international propaganda to the disadvantage of the adversary and to one's own advantage.

Overview

Origin

The Cold War was the culmination of a world conflict that began in 1917 with the Russian October Revolution led by Lenin, followed by the Russian Civil War in which Western forces participated on the counter-revolutionary side, and continued through the revolutionary export of the Communist International in the 1920s and 1930s. The anti-Hitler coalition from 1941 onward temporarily obscured the conflict. In the postwar period, the different goals and interests of the superpowers in reordering the world emerged and led to the division of Europe into two hostile power blocs with associated military alliances: NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries. In Southeast Asia, the United States created a similar alliance, SEATO (founded on September 8, 1954, dissolved in 1977), which the Soviet Union saw as a provocation.

The starting point of the Cold War was the proclamation of the so-called Truman Doctrine by US President Harry S. Truman on 12 March 1947, the background to which was the Iran crisis: in 1945 and 1946 the Soviet Union attempted to split off the provinces of Iran inhabited by Kurds and Azeris in order to establish pro-Soviet states there. Joseph Stalin also planned to install a communist government in Tehran. Truman, in the spring of 1946, threatened Stalin with serious consequences, including the use of nuclear weapons, if he did not withdraw his troops from Iran. For Truman, there was no question that Soviet control of Iranian oil would lead to a shift in the balance of power in the world and could cause massive damage to the emerging Western economy.

Bipolar World

The alliance systems were highly armed against each other and for decades shaped a bipolar world with incompatible ideologies and political concepts that defined each other against each other. From the Western perspective, freedom and democracy stood against totalitarian dictatorship, and market economy against planned economy. From the Eastern perspective, the "all-round development of the socialist personality" guided by the state party in the transition to communism stood against the so-called wolf law of systematic exploitation under imperialist capitalism.

Arms race

The superpowers avoided open warfare with the use of weapons against each other, but since the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they have pursued an unprecedented arms race, including a nuclear one. The mutual threat of nuclear war under the term "deterrence" for the first time conjured up the possible self-extinction of mankind ("overkill"). The conflict of interests threatened to escalate militarily several times: in the Berlin blockade in 1948, during the Korean War in 1950, during the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and especially during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, as well as in 1983 in the course of the NATO manoeuvre Able Archer.

Dialogue and relocation to third countries

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USA and the USSR regulated the conflict through crisis dialogue and bilateral arms control, but continued the arms race and the struggle for zones of influence unabated, also militarily. Thus the USA was directly involved in the Vietnam War, the Soviet Union in its intervention in Afghanistan with its own troops, while its rival supported the other side with money, weapons, logistics and information. In addition, both superpowers supported numerous civil wars and armed conflicts in Africa, Central and South America, either rebel groups against governments they did not like or vice versa.

The United States has regarded the states of Central America as its backyard since the 18th century; it perceived the Cuban Revolution in 1959 as a threat (which was confirmed in the Cuban Missile Crisis in the autumn of 1962).

German division as a core element of the block political division of Europe

The Cold War was particularly evident in the division of Germany and Europe along the "Iron Curtain", and similarly in the division of Korea along the 38th parallel, which still exists today. The two German states, founded in 1949, had a particularly precarious relationship until the peaceful revolution in the German Democratic Republic. The Federal Republic of Germany did not recognize the GDR as a state until the new Ostpolitik under Chancellor Willy Brandt, and even after the Basic Treaty in 1972 it did not officially maintain an embassy but a permanent representation. In contrast, the GDR referred to the Federal Republic as the "FRG" and East Berlin as the capital of the GDR, although this violated the four-power status of all of Berlin.

Despite the integration of the two German states into opposing political, military and economic systems, there was a stable bond between the Federal Republic and the GDR for over 40 years during the Cold War: intra-German trade (idH). Despite the ideological opposites, intra-German trade enabled "a large number of contacts, cooperations, etc. in divided Germany". As a result, intra-German trade had a positive effect on the political climate between the two German states. "In contrast, in divided Korea, where neither state developed anything comparable to intra-German trade, the dividing border remained basically impassable during the period of comparison."

Role of the intelligence services

Intelligence actions such as espionage, covert operations, targeted disinformation and propaganda, sabotage, hostage-taking, and even assassinations of disliked individuals characterized the Cold War between both superpowers and their allies. It is known that the GDR provided logistical and financial support to terrorist and separatist groups in Western Europe (such as the Ralf Forster group).

Proxy wars in the Third World

In addition, so-called proxy wars or "secret wars" took place, often in less developed countries: In the 1980s, for example, the Reagan administration illegally supported the Contra rebels' war against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua against the wishes of the U.S. Congress. In the Angolan Civil War, groups supported by the United States, Cuba, and the Soviet Union confronted each other. Through friendly services, the CIA sponsored the Afghan resistance. Especially in the 1970s and 1980s, the US supported numerous right-wing military dictatorships in South America - which it had helped to power with the US intervention in Chile and also made their opponents disappear in a so-called dirty war. In the process, the US military also trained death squads in Latin America and other countries and trained them, among other things, in physically undetectable torture methods (see, for example, School of the Americas). An example of the effects of this policy is El Salvador, where the US-backed military dictatorship murdered about 40,000 opposition members in the early 1980s, about 0.8% of the population.

Effects and end

The arms race also continuously drove technological development in civilian fields such as space and missile technology. The development of B and C weapons created new fields of research in biology and chemistry. The Cold War set the course for today's electronics, computer technology and current aircraft construction.

Only with the creeping collapse of the economy in the Eastern bloc and the change of leadership in the Kremlin in 1985 did serious opportunities for military disarmament and political rapprochement between the blocs open up. Mikhail Gorbachev's abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine made possible the increasing self-determination of the peoples of Central Eastern Europe. This led to the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and, in 1991, of the Soviet Union. The Cold War thus came to an end.

Not all European countries belonged to either of the military alliances ...


US intercontinental ballistic missile (1958)


... they were, however, mostly economically linked to one side.