The cold war was a war of ideologies.
The post WW11 period was dominated by two main political ideologies that is the Communist Ideology and the Capitalist ideology. The entire world was divided into two distinct and opposing camps that is the Communist camp led by the Soviet Union and the capitalist camp led by the USA. Every country in the world became a member of one camp or the other as both sides competed for domination of the world. The world became a battleground between the two super powers with the sword of a nuclear Armageddon hanging over the world community.
The Cold War originated from the post-World War II power vacuum, ideological clash between U.S. capitalism and Soviet communism, and mutual distrust between the two superpowers. Key outcomes include the division of Europe, the creation of opposing military alliances (NATO and the Warsaw Pact), proxy wars in various countries, a nuclear arms race, and eventually, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the bipolar world order. The USA and the YSSR were allies against Germany in the Second World War the wartime alliance quickly crumbled, with both sides viewing each other with suspicion. The USSR began installing communist regimes in Eastern Europe, while the U.S. feared Soviet expansionism and sought to contain communism. The breakdown of cooperation was solidified by events like the Potsdam Conference, the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, and the U.S. suspension of Lend-Lease aid to the Soviets. One of the earliest effect of the Cold War was the division of the continent of Europe which was divided into two blocs that is the Western European bloc allied with the USA and the Eastern European bloc allied with the USSR this division was symbolized by the famous Churchill speech “an iron curtain has descended across the continent of Europe”
Two major military pacts or alliances were formed. The USA formed The North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO in 1949 and the USSR responded with the formation of the Warsaw Pact and the arms race was escalated with both sides producing weapons of mass destruction and nuclear arms at alarming speed. Both superpowers engaged in a dangerous arms race, amassing vast nuclear arsenals and bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation on several occasions. Both sides engaged in proxy wars such as the Vietnam War, the Korean War and the Arab Israel conflict in the Middle East. The Cold War officially ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, leading to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the bipolar world order. The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension marked by competition and confrontation between communist nations led by the Soviet Union and Western democracies including the United States.
During World War II, the United States and the Soviets fought together as allies against Nazi Germany. However, U.S./Soviet relations were never truly friendly: Americans had long been wary of Soviet communism and Russian leader Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical rule. The Soviets resented Americans’ refusal to give them a leading role in the international community, as well as America’s delayed entry into World War II, in which millions of Russians died. These grievances ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity that never developed into open warfare (thus the term “cold war”). Soviet expansionism into Eastern Europe fueled many Americans’ fears of a Russian plan to control the world. Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what they perceived as U.S. officials’ bellicose rhetoric, arms buildup and strident approach to international relations. In such a hostile atmosphere, no single party was entirely to blame for the Cold War; in fact, some historians believe it was inevitable.The stakes of the Cold War were perilously high. The first H-bomb test, in the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed radioactive waste into the atmosphere.The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life as well. People built bomb shelters in their backyards. They practiced attack drills in schools and other public places. The 1950s and 1960s saw an epidemic of popular films that horrified moviegoers with depictions of nuclear devastation and mutant creatures. In these and other ways, the Cold War was a constant presence in Americans’ everyday lives.
In the early 1960s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial “Third World.”Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the region, and by the early 1960s it seemed clear to American leaders that if they were to successfully “contain” communist expansionism there, they would have to intervene more actively on Diem’s behalf. However, what was intended to be a brief military action spiraled into a 10-year conflict. This was the time when the American policy planners believed in the “Dominoes Theory” they believed that if one country in the third world fell to communism the country next to it will fall too creating a dominoes effect resulting in a communist takeover of an entire continent.
—The writer is Professor of History, based in Islamabad.
