Abbott, Carl Urban America in the Modern Age: 1920 to the Present, 2d ed.
Aldridge, Daniel W. Becoming American: The African American Quest for Civil Rights, 1861–1976
Barkan, Elliott Robert And Still They Come: Immigrants and American Society, 1920s to the 1990s
Bartlett, Irving H. The American Mind in The Mid-Nineteenth Century, 2d ed.
Beisner, Robert L. From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900, 2d ed.
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee American Consumer Society, 1865–2005: From Hearth to HDTV
Borden, Morton Parties and Politics in the Early Republic, 1789–1815
Carpenter, Roger M. “Times Are Altered with Us”: American Indians from Contact to the New Republic
Carter, Paul A. The Twenties in America, 2d ed.
Cherny, Robert W. American Politics in The Gilded Age, 1868–1900
Conkin, Paul K. The New Deal, 3d ed.
Doenecke, Justus D., and John E. Wilz From Isolation to War, 1931–1941, 4th ed.
Ferling, John Struggle for a Continent: The Wars of Early America
Ginzberg, Lori D. Women in Antebellum Reform
Griffin, C. S. The Ferment of Reform, 1830–1860
Hess, Gary R. The United States at War, 1941–1945, 3d ed.
Iverson, Peter, and Wade Davies “We Are Still Here”: American Indians since 1890, 2d ed.
James, D. Clayton, and Anne Sharp Wells America and the Great War, 1914–1920
Kraut, Alan M. The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880– 1921, 2d ed.
Levering, Ralph B. The Cold War: A Post–Cold War History, 3d ed.
Link, Arthur S. and Richard L. McCormick Progressivism
Martin, James Kirby, and Mark Edward Lender “A Respectable Army”: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763–1789, 3d ed.
McCraw, Thomas K. American Business Since 1920: How It Worked, 2d ed.
McMillen, Sally G. Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, 2d ed.
Neu, Charles E. America’s Lost War: Vietnam, 1945–1975
Newmyer, R. Kent The Supreme Court under Marshall and Taney, 2d ed.
Niven, John The Coming of the Civil War, 1837–1861
O’Neill, William L. The New Left: A History
Pastorello, Karen The Progressives: Activism and Reform in American Society, 1893–1917
Perman, Michael Emancipation and Reconstruction, 2d ed.
Porter, Glenn The Rise of Big Business, 1860–1920, 3d ed.
Reichard, Gary W. Deadlock and Disillusionment: American Politics since 1968
Reichard, Gary W. Politics as Usual: The Age of Truman and Eisenhower, 2d ed.
Remini, Robert V. The Jacksonian Era, 2d ed.
Riess, Steven A. Sport in Industrial America, 1850–1920, 2d ed.
Simpson, Brooks D. America’s Civil War
Southern, David W. The Progressive Era and Race: Reaction and Reform, 1900–1917
Storch, Randi Working Hard for the American Dream: Workers and Their Unions, World War I to the Present
Turner, Elizabeth Hayes Women and Gender in the New South, 1865–1945
Ubbelohde, Carl The American Colonies and the British Empire, 1607–1763, 2d ed.
Weeks, Philip Farewell, My Nation: American Indians and the United States in the Nineteenth Century, 3d ed.
Wellock, Thomas R. Preserving the Nation: The Conservation and Environmental Movements, 1870–2000
Winkler, Allan M. Home Front U.S.A.: America during World War II, 3d ed.
Wright, Donald R. African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution, 3d ed.
Third Edition
This third edition first published 2016
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Edition History: Harlan Davidson, Inc (1e, 1994; 2e, 2005)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levering, Ralph B.
The Cold War: a post-Cold War history / Ralph B. Levering. – Third edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-118-84840-1 (paper)
1. United States–Foreign relations–1945–1989. 2. United States–Foreign relations–1989– 3. Cold War. 4. United States–Foreign relations–1933–1945. 5. World politics–1945–1989. I. Title.
E840.L435 2016
327.73009′04–dc23
2015031832
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Mikhail Gorbachev (L) and U.S. President Ronald Reagan at a summit meeting November 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland. Photo © Dirck Halstead / Getty Images.
To Patty
Counterpart 0.1 FDR. Photo by Elias Goldensky. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Counterpart 0.2 Joseph Stalin. Source: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Counterpart 1.1 George F. Kennan, 1947. Source: Harris & Ewing, photographer, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.
Counterpart 1.2 Nikolai Novikov. Source: ITAR-TASS/TopFoto.
Counterpart 2.1 J. William Fulbright, 1968. Source: Congressional Portrait Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.
Counterpart 2.2 Barry Goldwater. Photo by Marion Trisosko. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2009632121.
Counterpart 3.1 Daniel Ellsberg. Credit: Susan Wood/Getty Images.
Counterpart 3.2 Henry Kissinger. Photo by David Hume Kennerly. Source: Courtesy Gerald R. Ford Library.
Counterpart 4.1 Jeane Kirkpatrick. Source: Damian Strohmeyer/The Denver Post via Getty Images.
Counterpart 4.2 Christopher Dodd. Source: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Counterpart 5.1 Soviet Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev during the Geneva Summit in Switzerland, 1985. Source: White House photo office.
Counterpart 5.2 Ronald Reagan. Source: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Why, one may ask, should today’s college-level students be assigned a book on the history of the Cold War and the role of the United States in it?
The answer is: more than ever before, we live in a globalized world, and the Cold War, which lasted from the end of World War II to 1990, was one of the three most important developments in the second half of twentieth-century history—all of which shaped the nation as well as the world in which we live today. Moreover, the determination and staying power of the US-led coalition in contesting Soviet and Soviet-inspired expansionism—the essence of the Cold War from an anticommunist perspective—was the factor that made the other two formative developments possible.
These two other developments are (1) economic globalization—which, economists agree, has increased overall prosperity and median per capita incomes, has greatly accelerated international travel, and, in scores of nations worldwide, has increased people’s ability to purchase automobiles, personal computers, cellular phones, and other consumer products; and (2) political democratization—which, the respected nongovernmental organization Freedom House notes, has more the doubled the number of the world’s “free” nations from forty-one in 1975 to ninety in 2012.
Because the stakes were so high in the ideological and territorial struggle between communists and anticommunists, one could easily argue that the Cold War was the fulcrum of global history after 1945. For without growing economic integration and political freedom—central, albeit unevenly realized goals of the US-led coalition during and after the Cold War—today’s world would not have materialized. When it became apparent to the communist leaders of China (in the late 1970s) and of the Soviet Union (in the late 1980s) that government-regulated capitalism and international economic integration generally worked much better than communism in promoting economic growth, these leaders stopped trying to spread communism to other nations and helped end the Cold War.
Like almost all historical developments, the victory of the US-led coalition in the Cold War was not inevitable. Roughly ten nations became communist between 1945 and 1960, and at least six more did so between 1960 and 1980. In contrast, only one or two nations abandoned communist rule during those thirty-five years. In other words, the ability of communists to seize control of governments during the Cold War was impressive, especially considering that the US-led coalition was stronger overall than the one led by the Soviet Union.
The Cold War ended by 1990, but economic globalization—along with generally rising living standards—has continued. And so has political democratization, though the slight drop from ninety “free” nations in 2012 to eighty-eight in 2013 is a reminder that personal freedom, free elections, and the rule of law are fragile achievements, easily undone.
No comprehensive, single-volume history of the Cold War is about to appear—nor is one likely to be published in the future. Such a book would probably comprise at least five thousand pages, were it to discuss adequately the differing government policies relating to the forty-five-year-long East–West struggle—as well as the differing domestic contexts—in at least fifty nations (including colonies that became nations) between 1945 and 1990.
Because this much shorter book is part of a series designed to increase students’ understanding of American history, it is appropriate to focus here largely on US actions and attitudes and on relations between the Cold War’s two leading actors, the United States and the Soviet Union. It also makes sense to give substantial attention to the two large-scale but limited wars that grew out of the conflict—the Korean War and the Vietnam War—and to the most dangerous confrontation of the nuclear age thus far: the Cuban missile crisis. Above all, this book seeks to explain the Cold War’s beginnings in the mid-1940s, the alternating tendencies in US–Soviet relations between the late 1940s and the mid-1980s toward increased hostility, then toward reduced tensions, and then back again, and the conflict’s rapid and surprising ending in the late 1980s.
I hope that this text reflects the four values that I admire most in the work of fellow scholars: readability; accuracy within the limits of current scholarship; willingness to make judgments, however tentative and open to subsequent revision; and fairness to all the individuals and governments involved.
Perhaps because the last value listed above is the one that academics equipped with 20/20 hindsight and ideological agendas most often violate, I consider fairness the noblest virtue in writing history. In seeking to exercise this virtue, one should avoid self-righteous criticisms of leaders, who often were forced to make decisions in the midst of uncertainty and conflicting pressures. One should also bear in mind an observation made by the eminent British historian C. V. Wedgwood: “History is written backward but lived forward. Those who know the end of the story can never know what it was like at the time.”1
Benefiting from valuable new scholarship produced during the past ten years, I have revised significantly this third edition. In particular, the sections on the Vietnam War have been extensively revised, and there is an entirely rewritten section on President Richard Nixon’s policies in Vietnam. The sections on President Ronald Reagan’s policies toward the Soviet Union are also completely new.
The six “Counterparts,” designed to bring important historical actors to life and to emphasize the contrasting viewpoints that epitomized the Cold War, are new to this edition as well. I hope that they will stimulate student discussion and debate, starting perhaps with the seemingly narrow question: “Could s/he really have believed that?
Also new to this edition are endnotes. Partly in order to limit the total number, I normally reference only quotations by other scholars (secondary sources), and not quotations by officials and others at the time events occurred (primary sources), which can be easily accessed in such online sources as presidential papers and newspaper or magazine articles. I regret not being able to locate—and thus include—some references to secondary sources.
One other question—a broad one—deserves a brief answer here: What was the Cold War about? In other words, what were some of the main beliefs, goals, fears, and concerns on both sides that underlay the surface manifestations of the conflict? Five underlying factors—each of which could be the subject of a separate, longer book—come to mind immediately.
First, America and Russia had fundamentally different ideologies that affected virtually every aspect of their approaches to both domestic affairs and international relations. US officials (and most voters) believed in personal freedoms protected by law, elected government, regulated capitalism at home, and the desirability of spreading similar forms of democracy and capitalism abroad. Soviet leaders, in contrast, rejected personal freedoms, elected government, and capitalism as outdated, “bourgeois” concepts, both domestically and internationally, and sought instead the spread of communist beliefs and institutions. Writing in 1999, historian Frank Ninkovich captured the essence of the conflict:
The cold war was a historical struggle over which ideology or way of life would be able to form the basis of a global civilization. It was intended to be a peaceful struggle, but it would be a war to the finish: Whichever side emerged triumphant, it would be impossible for the other to survive with its ideology intact.2
Because foreign policies are based on perceived national interests as well as on ideologies, however, occasionally the two nations were able to work together to a considerable extent. Their informal alliance in World War II and the period of relative détente in the early 1970s are the best examples.
Second, both US and Soviet leaders had deep-seated concerns about national security throughout the Cold War. For Americans, these concerns largely began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which prompted feelings of vulnerability that continued throughout the wartime and postwar years. The Cold War competition—and especially Russia’s testing of a nuclear weapon in 1949, which was followed by a nuclear arms race—helped maintain these feelings throughout the conflict.
Beginning with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in 1917, Soviet leaders feared intervention by capitalist (“imperialist”) nations with the intention to destroy the communist experiment in Russia. Small-scale interventions by Allied forces between 1918 and 1920 enhanced these fears, as did the tenet of Marxist–Leninist ideology that capitalist nations would try to end communism by military means. That belief appeared to come true on June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany violated a 1939 nonaggression pact and attacked the Soviet Union. The all-out German effort to conquer Russia left lasting feelings of vulnerability and a determination to protect Russia’s security in the future at all costs.
Third, America and Russia—largely for reasons relating to ideology, prestige, and security—undertook continuing efforts during the Cold War to expand the number of allies they each had and to prevent losses to the other ideology, whether by choice or by conquest. Examples of the seriousness with which each side sought to avoid losing allies include the US interventions in Korea and Vietnam and the Soviet interventions in Hungary and Afghanistan.
Fourth, US and Soviet leaders repeatedly sought to avoid substantial fighting between their two nations’ forces that could easily have led to a third world war. In other words, whether the top leaders were Harry Truman and Joseph Stalin, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, or Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov, during periods of high tension there was a strong commitment on both sides to avoiding war between America and Russia. Avoiding a third world war was the greatest achievement of US and Soviet leaders during the Cold War.
Fifth, because domestic politics and foreign policies are inextricably intertwined, the Cold War involved struggles for power and the exercise of power domestically as well as internationally. Scholars of the Soviet Union frequently argue that Stalin’s determination to maintain total control over the Russian people contributed to his decision, shortly after World War II, to have the Soviet news media portray western nations as implacably hostile. This alleged hostility, in turn, justified political repression and large-scale military spending at a time when most Russians wanted more consumer goods and greater individual freedom. Both during Stalin’s time and later, disagreements over foreign policy were used to justify demotions and other shifts in power within Soviet leadership.
In America, with congressional elections every two years and presidential elections every four, the struggle for power between Democrats and Republicans is virtually constant. Not surprisingly, US relations with Russia and other communist nations—the central foreign policy issue after 1945—quickly became a staple of electoral politics throughout the nation and of partisan jockeying for advantage in Washington. In the late 1940s, prominent Republicans and Democrats also worked to end the influence of members of the Soviet-directed American Communist Party and their supporters in government agencies, labor unions, and other areas of American life. Although talk of “communists in government” largely disappeared by the mid-1950s, the question of which party or candidate could handle relations with Russia and other communist nations more effectively continued to be a major issue in elections until the late 1980s.
One simply cannot understand important US Cold War policies—for example, why America did not establish diplomatic relations with communist China for thirty years after 1949, or why President John Kennedy believed that his only realistic choice was to insist upon the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba in 1962—without knowledge of the domestic political context in which these policies were made.
For this edition four well-known scholars of US foreign relations kindly agreed to read the entire manuscript and offer detailed suggestions: Steven Casey, Justus D. Doenecke, Gary R. Hess, and Wilson D. Miscamble. I am truly grateful for their help. Three other able scholars—Russell Crandall, C. Earl Edmondson, and Scott Kaufman—read portions of the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions, as did a close friend, Charles Raynal.
I also wish to thank all those who read and commented on previous editions of the book: Aleine Austin, William Burr, Wolfgang Christian, Andrew J. Davidson, Robert A. Divine, C. Earl Edmondson, A. S. Eisenstadt, John Hope Franklin, John Lewis Gaddis, Maureen Hewitt, Wallace Irwin, Jr., Walter LaFeber, Patricia W. Levering, Arthur S. Link, Elizabeth Morgan, Thomas R. Maddux, Charles Neu, Louis Ortmeyer, David Patterson, Jack Perry, Harry Stegmaier, Jr., J. Samuel Walker, and Robert C. Williams.
I am also grateful to my students at George Mason University, Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College), Earlham College, and, from 1986 to 2013, Davidson College. They helped me keep learning about the past and caring about our common future. Special thanks to Sharon Byrd, a superb librarian at Davidson College, who helped me locate countless sources and references; and to Manuela Tecusan, the book’s copy-editor, who greatly improved the writing. Finally, I wish to thank Andrew J. Davidson of Wiley Blackwell for asking me to undertake this new edition and Andrew, Julia Kirk, and other capable editors at the press for helping to complete it.
This book is dedicated to Patricia Webb Levering, my wife of forty-eight years and my best friend since we met in tenth-grade algebra class. During all these years Patty has made real and life-giving such words as commitment, equality, faith, mutuality, trust, and—above all—love.
Ralph B. Levering