First written by assignment in HIS-605, SNHU, 10-17-2021
One of the most momentous moments in human history is war. But of all the conflicts so far, perhaps the one that had the greatest effect on the people of Earth was the Cold War. The nations of the world divided up into two camps, one led by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the other by the United States (US). Instead of peace and rebuilding after World War II, the world found itself in constant conflict and with an unrelenting threat of nuclear war. How this situation came into existence has been the topic of study for many years.
One of the possible causes of the Cold War was money between the US and the USSR. Thomas Paterson discusses the friction between the two parties over a loan guarantee to the USSR from the US.[1] The USSR endured great devastation from World War II. It is estimated that 27 million Soviet citizens died from the fighting, starvation, and disease during the war.[2] Many billions of factories, farmland, and infrastructure was also destroyed. The USSR needed to rebuild and asked for credit from the US. The US ended up refusing the loan to the USSR. This appears to be odd as the US made extensive lend-lease loans to the various allies during the war. But the enthusiasm for a loan to the USSR was low in Washington. Although the US did not suffer the economic destruction that Europe and the USSR faced, it made huge expenditures in wealth, material, and manpower during the conflict. The USSR asked for materials needed to rebuild in a way that seemed more of a demand rather than a request. This attitude was not appreciated in Washington and officials in the state department had counseled against the loan as it would cause the US to give up a political position of leverage over the USSR. [3] However, the results of a grateful USSR may have been an opening to a free exchange of ideas and may have helped to reverse the totalitarianism that General Secretary Josef Stalin instituted in the USSR in the 1930s. The increasing hard line that the USSR adopted towards the US may also have been a result of the loans that the US made to Britain, France, and other aspects of the Marshall Plan. The US reluctance may also have been conditioned by traditional American isolationism and fear of economic decline from a lack of military spending in the post-war period. [4]
There also seemed to be a great level of distrust between both the US and the USSR in the Cold War. Although the two nations fought together against the Nazi threat, both countries drifted apart from each other rather quickly as the war concluded. A major source of tension was Stalin’s insistence that the countries that were occupied in repelling the German Army would remain under the control of the USSR. The US was not totally opposed to the USSR developing “legitimate Soviet interests” in the region, this plan upset British plans for establishing a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.[5] Britain wanted to regain its position of dominance in Europe and saw the USSR as a threat to their position. Using their special relationship with the US, the British used the US to try and establish a position of power in Europe in opposition to the USSR. This seemed to be true with the change in positions of the western allies between the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. The turn of positions by the western allies gave Stalin the opportunity to harden his position towards the US and Britain.
The Cold War has often been portrayed as an ideological struggle between the USSR and the US. The different ideals of communism and capitalism stood in opposition to each other for what appeared to be the domination of the world. The Great Depression gave the communist position as an alternative to the capitalist banking system in the minds of some. The repression of Stalin’s reprisals in Ukraine were proof to the west that the Soviets were brutal. This coupled with the fact that World War I and World War II were only 20 years apart from each other. “A whole generation of Europeans learned that killing, destroying, and hating you neighbors were regular, normal of aspects of life, and that the moral certainties of the nineteenth century were mainly empty phrases.” [6] Two massively destructive wars, two decades apart, set the tone in international politics that aggressive national positions were not to be trusted. The mutual distrust that the US and the USSR had for each other made cooperation nearly impossible as each side tried to position itself to best the other. This distrust led to aggression and to open warfare. There were certain moments of thawing but both sides seemed to revel in the various defeats that each suffered (the US in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan, for example). Until the collapse of the USSR, the Cold War dominated international political thought and relations between nations worldwide. The remnants of the Cold War are still seen in the geopolitical structure of the world today and the results of the Cold War will still be apparent for a long time into the future.
Bibliography
Gaddis, John Lewis. 2005. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin.
Mark, Eduard. 1981. "American Policy Toward Eastern Europe and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1946:." The Journal of American History 68 (2): 313-336.
Patterson, Thomas G. 1969. "The Abortive American Loan to Russia and the Origins of the Cold War, 1943-1946." The Journal of American History 56 (1): 70-92.
Westad, Odd Arne. 2017. The Cold War: A World History. New York: Hachette Book Group.
[1] Patterson 1969
[2] Gaddis 2005, 9
[3] Patterson 1969, 10
[4] Gaddis 2005, 9
[5] Mark 1981, 318
[6] Gaddis 2005, 25