THE COLD WAR IS NOT OVER

 

 

RETURN TO  BASE OR EXPLORE OUR NAVAL A-Z

 

 

 

 

 

At least the USA and Russia were honest during this period of distrust. Then the Soviet Union got smart, pretending to soften policies to lure the West into believing that it was safe to do business with the communists, despite the fact it was still a dictatorship under Boris Yeltsin. And then Vladimir Putin saw his opportunity.

 

Quoting a line from 'The Hunt for Red October' - "Son, a Russian doesn't take a dump without a plan."

 

The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, that started in 1947 and lasted to 1991.

The term cold war is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two superpowers, but they each supported opposing sides in major regional conflicts known as 'Proxy Wars.'

The conflict was based on the ideological and geopolitical struggle for global influence by these two superpowers, following their roles as the Allies of World War II that led to victory against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945. Aside from the nuclear arms race and conventional military deployment, the struggle for dominance was expressed indirectly, such as psychological warfare, propaganda campaigns, espionage, far-reaching embargoes, sports diplomacy, and technological competitions like the Space Race. The Cold War began with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, started a gradual winding down with the Sino-Soviet split between the Soviets and the People's Republic of China in 1961, and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The Western Bloc was led by the United States, as well as a number of First World nations that were generally Capitalist and liberal democratic but tied to a network of often authoritarian Third World states, most of which were the European powers' former colonies. The Eastern Bloc was led by the Soviet Union and its Communist party, which had an influence across the Second World and was also tied to a network of authoritarian states. The Soviet Union had a command economy and installed similarly Communist regimes in its satellite states. United States involvement in regime change during the Cold War included support for anti-communist and right-wing dictatorships, governments, and uprisings across the world, while Soviet involvement in regime change included the funding of left-wing parties, wars of independence, revolutions and dictatorships around the world. As nearly all the colonial states underwent decolonization and achieved independence in the period from 1945 to 1960, many became Third World battlefields in the Cold War.

 

 

 

 

 HMS Ledbury, Royal Navy mine hunter, Sardinia, NATO countermeasures

 

 

HMS Ledbury, Royal Navy mine hunter, Sardinia, NATO countermeasures

 

 

 

 

 

NATO DURING THE COLD WAR

 

 Belgium

 Canada

 Denmark

 France

 Iceland

 Italy

 Luxembourg

 Netherlands

 Norway

 Portugal

 United Kingdom

 United States

 

Countries that joined after the foundation during the Cold War

 

Greece (18 February 1952)

Turkey (18 February 1952)

Germany (9 May 1955 as West Germany; East Germany reunited with it on 3 October 1990)

Spain (30 May 1982)

 

Former Eastern Bloc states that joined after the Cold War

 

12 March 1999:

 

 Czech Republic

 Hungary

 Poland

 

29 March 2004:

 

 Bulgaria

 Estonia

 Latvia

 Lithuania

 Romania

 Slovakia

 Slovenia

 

 

 

 

NATO E-3A and US F-16s

 

 

NATO E-3A flying with American F-16s in NATO exercise

 

 

 

 

 

At present, and in terms of NATO requirements, the British Royal Navy is under funded, and unprepared. The situation in Ukraine, with Russia knocking at the door of other European countries, with the backing of the CRINKs (China, Russia, Iran & North Korea), represents a diabolical lack of judgment on the part of the United Kingdom and the European Union. They virtually opened the door and invited Vladimir Putin in. Saying here, take it, we don't have the army or navy to stop you. Where China was saying the same thing. Xi Jinping was backing Russia, along with Iran and North Korea. Knowing that 'INK' of CRINK would be supplying armaments, in sufficient quantities to exhaust those of NATO. Hardly surprising that Donald Trump was vocal about NATO not honoring their commitments. The good news being that Joe Biden, and the US Senate is more practical.

 

If it was not for the guts of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Russia would be knocking on the door of Norway and Poland by now. In more of his series of Special Operations. And if not prevented, he will not stop. So three cheers for Ukraine, having the wherewithal to stand up to the communist bullies. It's as if the Cold War had never ceased. For indeed, the free democratic world were rather foolishly duped by the Adolf Hitler like, CRINK dictators.

 

We have been entering a new era of warfare, where drones rule the skies, and will almost assuredly rule the waves, in any World War Three scenario. Typically, the UK and other NATO allies are unprepared, standing beside their extremely vulnerable ocean going tanks. Where Russian tanks in Ukraine are being wiped out by lost cost drones. The same methods are sure to be operated on the high seas to take out aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines. First proposed before 2012, by a British inventor, and roundly dismissed by MOD contractors who were more concerned about preserving their monopoly. Hence, little or no development has taken place. Despite the fact the technology exists. And war is looming large.

 

 

 

 

ORP Kontradmiral Xawery Czernicki , Polish Navy mine hunter

 

 

ORP Kontradmira Xawery Czernicki 2013, Polish Navy ship 78m, 2390 tons

 

 

 

 

 

COLD WAR PHASES

The first phase of the Cold War began shortly after the end of World War II in 1945. The United States and its Western European allies sought to strengthen their bonds and used the policy of containment against Soviet influence; they accomplished this most notably through the formation of NATO, which was essentially a defensive agreement in 1949.

 

The Soviet Union countered with the Warsaw Pact in 1955, which had similar results with the Eastern Bloc. As by that time the Soviet Union already had an armed presence and political domination all over its eastern satellite states, the pact has been long considered superfluous. Although nominally a defensive alliance, the Warsaw Pact's primary function was to safeguard Soviet hegemony over its Eastern European satellites, with the pact's only direct military actions having been the invasions of its own member states to keep them from breaking away; in the 1960s, the pact evolved into a multilateral alliance, in which the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact members gained significant scope to pursue their own interests. In 1961, Soviet-allied East Germany constructed the Berlin Wall to prevent the citizens of East Berlin from fleeing to West Berlin, at the time part of United States-allied West Germany.

 

Major crises of this phase included the Berlin Blockade of 1948–1949, the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1945–1949, the Korean War of 1950–1953, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Suez Crisis of that same year, the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the Vietnam War of 1964–1975. Both superpowers competed for influence in Latin America and the Middle East, and the decolonising states of Africa, Asia, and Oceania.

Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fourth phase of the Cold War saw the Sino-Soviet split between China and the Soviet Union's complicated relations within the Communist sphere, leading to the Sino-Soviet border conflict, while France, a Western Bloc state, began to demand greater autonomy of action. The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress the Prague Spring of 1968, while the United States experienced internal turmoil from the civil rights movement and opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War. In the 1960s–1970s, an international peace movement took root among citizens around the world. Movements against nuclear weapons testing and for nuclear disarmament took place, with large anti-war protests. By the 1970s, both sides had started making allowances for peace and security, ushering in a period of détente that saw the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the 1972 visit by Richard Nixon to China that opened relations with China as a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union. A number of self-proclaimed Marxist–Leninist governments were formed in the second half of the 1970s in developing countries, including Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua.

Détente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. Beginning in the 1980s, the fifth phase of the Cold War was another period of elevated tension. The Reagan Doctrine led to increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, which at the time was undergoing the Era of Stagnation. The sixth phase of the Cold War saw the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introducing the liberalizing reforms of glasnost ("openness", c. 1985) and perestroika ("reorganization", c. 1987) and ending Soviet involvement in Afghanistan in 1989. Pressures for national sovereignty grew stronger in Eastern Europe, and Gorbachev refused to further support the Communist governments militarily.

The fall of the Iron Curtain after the Pan-European Picnic and the Revolutions of 1989, which represented a peaceful revolutionary wave with the exception of the Romanian Revolution and the Afghan Civil War (1989–1992), overthrew almost all of the Marxist–Leninist regimes of the Eastern Bloc. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself lost control in the country and was banned following the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt that August. This in turn led to the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the collapse of Communist governments across much of Africa and Asia. The Russian Federation became the Soviet Union's successor state, while many of the other republics emerged from the Soviet Union's collapse as fully independent post-Soviet states. The United States was left as the world's sole superpower.

The Cold War has left a significant legacy. Its effects include references of the culture during the war, particularly with themes of espionage and the threat of nuclear warfare. The Cold War is generally followed by the categorization of international relations since 1989 and post–Cold War era to underline its impact. 

 

 

 

 

Astute class submarine, British Royal Navy

 

 

 

 

RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

While most historians trace the origins of the Cold War to the period immediately following World War II, some argue that it began with the 1917 October Revolution in the Russian Republic when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian Provisional Government. In World War I, the British, French and Russian Empires had composed the major Allied Powers from the start, and the US joined them as a self-styled Associated Power in April 1917. After the Bolsheviks' seizure of power, the bloody Red Terror was initiated to shut down all opposition, both perceived and real. In December, the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Central Powers, though by February 1918 fighting had resumed. In March, the Soviets ended involvement in the war and signed the separate peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. As a result, German armies advanced rapidly across the borderlands. The Allies responded with an economic blockade against the new Russian regime. In the eyes of some Allies, Russia now was helping Germany to win the war by freeing up a million German soldiers for the Western Front and by relinquishing much of Russia's food supply, industrial base, fuel supplies, and communications with Western Europe. According to historian Spencer Tucker, the Allies felt, "The treaty was the ultimate betrayal of the Allied cause and sowed the seeds for the Cold War. With Brest-Litovsk the spectre of German domination in Eastern Europe threatened to become reality, and the Allies now began to think seriously about military intervention," and proceeded to step up their "economic warfare" against the Bolsheviks. Some Bolsheviks saw Russia as only the first step, planning to incite revolutions against capitalism in every western country, but the need for peace with Germany led Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin away from this position.

In 1918, Britain provided money and troops to support the White movement, a loose confederation of anti-Bolshevik forces. This policy was spearheaded by Minister of War Winston Churchill, a committed anti-communist. A long and bloody Civil War ensued between the Reds and the Whites, starting in 1917 and ending in 1923 with the Reds' victory. It included foreign intervention, the execution of the former Emperor and his family, and the famine of 1921, which killed about five million people. Soviet Russia sought to re-conquer all newly independent nations of the former Empire, although their success was limited. Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania all repelled Soviet invasions, while Ukraine, Belarus (as a result of the Polish–Soviet War), Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia were occupied by the Red Army. 

Large scale food relief was distributed to Europe after the war through the American Relief Administration run by Herbert Hoover. In 1921, to ease the devastating famine in the Russian SFSR that was triggered by the Soviet government's war communism policies, the ARA's director in Europe, Walter Lyman Brown, began negotiating with the Russian People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, in Riga, Latvia (at that time not yet annexed by the USSR). An agreement was reached on 21 August 1921, and an additional implementation agreement was signed by Brown and People's Commissar for Foreign Trade Leonid Krasin on 30 December 1921. The U.S. Congress appropriated $20,000,000 for relief under the Russian Famine Relief Act of late 1921. Hoover strongly detested Bolshevism and felt the American aid would demonstrate the superiority of Western capitalism and thus help contain the spread of communism.

At its peak, the ARA employed 300 Americans, more than 120,000 Russians and fed 10.5 million people daily. Its Russian operations were headed by Col. William N. Haskell. The Medical Division of the ARA functioned from November 1921 to June 1923 and helped overcome the typhus epidemic then ravaging Russia. The ARA's famine relief operations ran in parallel with much smaller Mennonite, Jewish and Quaker famine relief operations in Russia.

The ARA's operations in Russia were shut down on 15 June 1923, after it was discovered that Russia under Lenin renewed the export of grain.

Western powers proceeded to diplomatically isolate the Soviet government. Lenin stated that Russia was surrounded by a "hostile capitalist encirclement" and he viewed diplomacy as a weapon to keep Soviet enemies divided. He set up an organization to promote sister revolutions worldwide, the Comintern. It failed everywhere; it failed badly when it tried to start revolutions in Germany, its province of Bavaria, and Hungary. The failures led to an inward turn by Moscow.

Leaders of American foreign policy remained convinced that the Soviet Union, which was founded by Soviet Russia in 1922, was a hostile threat to American values. Republican Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes rejected recognition, telling labor union leaders that, "those in control of Moscow have not given up their original purpose of destroying existing governments wherever they can do so throughout the world." Under President Calvin Coolidge, Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg warned that the Kremlin's international agency, the Communist International (Comintern) was aggressively planning subversion against other nations, including the United States, to "overthrow the existing order." Herbert Hoover in 1919 warned Woodrow Wilson that, "We cannot even remotely recognize this murderous tyranny without stimulating action is to radicalism in every country in Europe and without transgressing on every National ideal of our own." Inside the U.S. State Department, the Division of Eastern European Affairs by 1924 was dominated by Robert F. Kelley, a dedicated opponent of communism who trained a generation of specialists including George Kennan and Charles Bohlen.

Rather stupidly, Britain and other Western powers - unlike the United States - did business and sometimes recognized the new Soviet Union. Outside Washington, there was some American support for renewed relationships, especially in terms of technology. Henry Ford, committed to the belief that international trade was the best way to avoid warfare, used his Ford Motor Company to build a truck industry and introduce tractors into Russia. Architect Albert Kahn became a consultant for all industrial construction in the Soviet Union in 1930. By 1933, the American business community, as well as newspaper editors, were calling for diplomatic recognition. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used presidential authority to normalize relations in November 1933. However, there was no progress on the Tsarist debts Washington wanted Moscow to repay. Expectations of expanded trade proved unrealistic. Historians Justus D. Doenecke and Mark A. Stoler note that, "Both nations were soon disillusioned by the accord." Roosevelt named William Bullitt as ambassador from 1933 to 1936. Bullitt arrived in Moscow with high hopes for Soviet–American relations, but his view of the Soviet leadership soured on closer inspection. By the end of his tenure, Bullitt was openly hostile to the Soviet government, and he remained an outspoken anti-communist for the rest of his life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Evil Empire"

 

 


WORLD WAR TWO

In the late 1930s, Joseph Stalin had worked with Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov to promote popular fronts with capitalist parties and governments to oppose fascism, although their primary enemy was the so-called "social fascism" of rival socialist parties, which in part paved the way for the rise of the Nazis in Germany. In 1939, after attempts to form a military alliance with Britain and France against Germany failed, the Soviet Union made a dramatic shift towards Nazi Germany. Almost a year after Britain and France had concluded the Munich Agreement with Germany, the Soviet Union made agreements with Germany as well, both militarily and economically during extensive talks. Unlike the case of Britain and France, the Soviet Union's agreement with Germany, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (signed on 23 August 1939), included a secret protocol that paved the way for the Soviet invasion of Eastern European states and occupation of their territories. The pact made possible the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the Hertsa region, and eastern Poland.

In late November 1939, unable to coerce the Republic of Finland by diplomatic means into moving its border 25 kilometres (16 mi) back from Leningrad, Stalin ordered the invasion of Finland. On 14 December 1939, the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations for invading Finland. In June 1940, the Soviet Union forcibly annexed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Germany broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, starting what is known in Russia and some other post-Soviet states as the Great Patriotic War. The Red Army stopped the seemingly invincible German Army at the Battle of Moscow. The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from late 1942 to early 1943, dealt a severe blow to Germany from which they never fully recovered and became a turning point in the war. After Stalingrad, Soviet forces drove through Eastern Europe to Berlin before Germany surrendered in 1945. The German Army suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front. Though operational cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union was notably less than that between other allied powers, the United States nevertheless provided the Soviet Union with huge quantities of weapons, ships, aircraft, rolling stock, strategic materials, and food through the Lend-Lease program. In total, the U.S. deliveries through Lend-Lease amounted to $11 billion in materials: over 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks, about 1,386 of which were M3 Lees and 4,102 M4 Shermans); 11,400 aircraft (4,719 of which were Bell P-39 Airacobras) and 1.75 million tons of food. 

Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May 1945. It has been estimated that American deliveries to the USSR through the Persian Corridor alone were sufficient, by US Army standards, to maintain sixty combat divisions in the line.

The USSR, in fulfillment of its agreement with the Allies at the Yalta Conference, broke the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1945 which Japan had been honoring despite their alliance with Germany, and invaded Manchukuo and other Japan-controlled territories on 9 August 1945. This conflict ended with a decisive Soviet victory, together with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. contributing to the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II

 

 

 

 

 

 

BEGINNING OF THE COLD WAR - TRUMAN DOCTRINE 1947 TO 1953

IRON CURTAIN: IRAN, TURKEY, GREECE & POLAND


In late February 1946, George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow to Washington helped to articulate the US government's increasingly hard line against the Soviets, which would become the basis for US strategy toward the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. The telegram galvanized a policy debate that would eventually shape the Truman administration's Soviet policy. Washington's opposition to the Soviets accumulated after broken promises by Stalin and Molotov concerning Europe and Iran. Following the World War II Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, the country was occupied by the Red Army in the far north and the British in the south. Iran was used by the United States and British to supply the Soviet Union, and the Allies agreed to withdraw from Iran within six months after the cessation of hostilities. However, when this deadline came, the Soviets remained in Iran under the guise of the Azerbaijan People's Government and Kurdish Republic of Mahabad. Shortly thereafter, on 5 March, former British prime minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri. The speech called for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, whom he accused of establishing an "iron curtain" dividing Europe from "Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic".

A week later, on 13 March, Stalin responded vigorously to the speech, saying that Churchill could be compared to Adolf Hitler insofar as he advocated the racial superiority of English-speaking nations so that they could satisfy their hunger for world domination, and that such a declaration was "a call for war on the USSR." The Soviet leader also dismissed the accusation that the USSR was exerting increasing control over the countries lying in its sphere. He argued that there was nothing surprising in "the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its future safety, were trying to see to it that governments loyal in their attitude to the Soviet Union should exist in these countries."

Soviet territorial demands to Turkey regarding the Dardanelles in the Turkish Straits crisis and Black Sea border disputes were also a major factor in increasing tensions. In September, the Soviet side produced the Novikov telegram, sent by the Soviet ambassador to the US but commissioned and "co-authored" by Vyacheslav Molotov; it portrayed the US as being in the grip of monopoly capitalists who were building up military capability "to prepare the conditions for winning world supremacy in a new war". On 6 September 1946, James F. Byrnes delivered a speech in Germany repudiating the Morgenthau Plan (a proposal to partition and de-industrialize post-war Germany) and warning the Soviets that the US intended to maintain a military presence in Europe indefinitely. As Byrnes stated a month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people ... it was a battle between us and Russia over minds ..." In December, the Soviets agreed to withdraw from Iran after persistent US pressure, an early success of containment policy.

By 1947, US president Harry S. Truman was outraged by the perceived resistance of the Soviet Union to American demands in Iran, Turkey, and Greece, as well as Soviet rejection of the Baruch Plan on nuclear weapons. In February 1947, the British government announced that it could no longer afford to finance the Kingdom of Greece in its civil war against Communist-led insurgents. In the same month, Stalin conducted the rigged 1947 Polish legislative election which constituted an open breach of the Yalta Agreement. The US government responded to this announcement by adopting a policy of containment, with the goal of stopping the spread of communism. Truman delivered a speech calling for the allocation of $400 million to intervene in the war and unveiled the Truman Doctrine, which framed the conflict as a contest between free peoples and totalitarian regimes. American policymakers accused the Soviet Union of conspiring against the Greek royalists in an effort to expand Soviet influence even though Stalin had told the Communist Party to cooperate with the British-backed government. (The insurgents were helped by Josip Broz Tito's Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia against Stalin's wishes.)

Enunciation of the Truman Doctrine marked the beginning of a US bipartisan defense and foreign policy consensus between Republicans and Democrats focused on containment and deterrence that weakened during and after the Vietnam War, but ultimately persisted thereafter. Moderate and conservative parties in Europe, as well as social democrats, gave virtually unconditional support to the Western alliance, while European and American Communists, financed by the KGB and involved in its intelligence operations, adhered to Moscow's line, although dissent began to appear after 1956. Other critiques of the consensus policy came from anti-Vietnam War activists, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the anti-nuclear movement.

MARSHALL PLAN

In early 1947, France, Britain and the United States unsuccessfully attempted to reach an agreement with the Soviet Union for a plan envisioning an economically self-sufficient Germany, including a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure already taken by the Soviets. In June 1947, in accordance with the Truman Doctrine, the United States enacted the Marshall Plan, a pledge of economic assistance for all European countries willing to participate, including the Soviet Union. Under the plan, which President Harry S. Truman signed on 3 April 1948, the US government gave to Western European countries over $13 billion (equivalent to $189.39 billion in 2016) to rebuild the economy of Europe. Later, the program led to the creation of the OECD.

The plan's aim was to rebuild the democratic and economic systems of Europe and to counter perceived threats to the European balance of power, such as communist parties seizing control through revolutions or elections. The plan also stated that European prosperity was contingent upon German economic recovery. One month later, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947, creating a unified Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Council (NSC). These would become the main bureaucracies for US defense policy in the Cold War.

Stalin believed that economic integration with the West would allow Eastern Bloc countries to escape Soviet control, and that the US was trying to buy a pro-US re-alignment of Europe. Stalin therefore prevented Eastern Bloc nations from receiving Marshall Plan aid. The Soviet Union's alternative to the Marshall Plan, which was purported to involve Soviet subsidies and trade with central and eastern Europe, became known as the Molotov Plan (later institutionalized in January 1949 as the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance). Stalin was also fearful of a reconstituted Germany; his vision of a post-war Germany did not include the ability to rearm or pose any kind of threat to the Soviet Union.

In early 1948, following reports of strengthening "reactionary elements", Czech Communists executed a coup d'état in Czechoslovakia (resulting in the formation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (9 May 1948)), the only Eastern Bloc state that the Soviets had permitted to retain democratic structures. The public brutality of the coup shocked Western powers more than any event up to that point, set in motion a brief scare that war would occur, and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress.

In an immediate aftermath of the crisis, the London Six-Power Conference was held, resulting in the Soviet boycott of the Allied Control Council and its incapacitation, an event marking the beginning of the full-blown Cold War and the end of its prelude, as well as ending any hopes at the time for a single German government and leading to formation in 1949 of the Federal Republic of Germany and German Democratic Republic.

OPEN HOSTILITY

The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan led to billions in economic and military aid for Western Europe, Greece, and Turkey. With the US assistance, the Greek military won its civil war. Under the leadership of Alcide De Gasperi the Italian Christian Democrats defeated the powerful Communist–Socialist alliance in the elections of 1948.

 

 

 

 

 

A simplified map of the Cold War alliances between 30 April and 24 June 1975. The Soviet and Chinese blocs are grouped together as one for illustrative purposes, but note that historically they were not allied during the time represented. The grey region does not represent an alliance, but rather encompasses all countries that were not aligned with the Soviet Union, the USA, or China. This map is based on File:First second third worlds map.svg, but it is modified to display a grouping of countries that is verifiable and accurately reflects the caption of Three Worlds. Rationale: The map is dated immediately after the Fall of Saigon. The next change to the map would be the independence of Mozambique from Portugal on 25 June 1975. Western-aligned: NATO member states Military alliances with NATO member states CENTO member states Five Power Defence Arrangements Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance Mutual Defense Treaty (United States–South Korea) SEATO member states Simonstown Agreement Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty Thanat–Rusk Communiqué Treaty of London US–Israel Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement US-Japan alliance Pact of Madrid Associated states of NATO member states Eastern-aligned: Warsaw Pact member states Military alliances with Warsaw Pact member states Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance Hostile to the west Cambodia Cuba Ethiopia Guinea-Bissau Mongolia North Korea Somalia South Yemen Syria Vietnam.

 

 

 


ESPIONAGE

All major powers engaged in espionage, using a great variety of spies, double agents, moles, and new technologies such as the tapping of telephone cables. The Soviet KGB ("Committee for State Security"), the bureau responsible for foreign espionage and internal surveillance, was famous for its effectiveness. The most famous Soviet operation involved its atomic spies that delivered crucial information from the United States' Manhattan Project, leading the USSR to detonate its first nuclear weapon in 1949, four years after the American detonation and much sooner than expected. A massive network of informants throughout the Soviet Union was used to monitor dissent from official Soviet politics and morals. Although to an extent disinformation had always existed, the term itself was invented, and the strategy formalized by a black propaganda department of the Soviet KGB.

Based on the amount of top-secret Cold War archival information that has been released, historian Raymond L. Garthoff concludes there probably was parity in the quantity and quality of secret information obtained by each side. However, the Soviets probably had an advantage in terms of HUMINT (human intelligence or interpersonal espionage) and "sometimes in its reach into high policy circles." In terms of decisive impact, however, he concludes:

We also can now have high confidence in the judgment that there were no successful "moles" at the political decision-making level on either side. Similarly, there is no evidence, on either side, of any major political or military decision that was prematurely discovered through espionage and thwarted by the other side. There also is no evidence of any major political or military decision that was crucially influenced (much less generated) by an agent of the other side.

According to historian Robert Louis Benson, "Washington's forte was 'signals' intelligence--the procurement and analysis of coded foreign messages." leading to the Venona project or Venona intercepts, which monitored the communications of Soviet intelligence agents. Moynihan wrote that the Venona project contained "overwhelming proof of the activities of Soviet spy networks in America, complete with names, dates, places, and deeds." The Venona project was kept highly secret even from policymakers until the Moynihan Commission in 1995. Despite this, the decryption project had already been betrayed and dispatched to the USSR by Kim Philby and Bill Weisband in 1946, as was discovered by the US by 1950. Nonetheless, the Soviets had to keep their discovery of the program secret, too, and continued leaking their own information, some of which was still useful to the American program. According to Moynihan, even President Truman may not have been fully informed of Venona, which may have left him unaware of the extent of Soviet espionage.

Clandestine atomic spies from the Soviet Union, who infiltrated the Manhattan Project at various points during WWII, played a major role in increasing tensions that led to the Cold War.

In addition to usual espionage, the Western agencies paid special attention to debriefing Eastern Bloc defectors. Edward Jay Epstein describes that the CIA understood that the KGB used "provocations", or fake defections, as a trick to embarrass Western intelligence and establish Soviet double agents. As a result, from 1959 to 1973, the CIA required that East Bloc defectors went through a counterintelligence investigation before being recruited as a source of intelligence.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, the KGB perfected its use of espionage to sway and distort diplomacy. Active measures were "clandestine operations designed to further Soviet foreign policy goals," consisting of disinformation, forgeries, leaks to foreign media, and the channeling of aid to militant groups. Retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, former head of Foreign Counter Intelligence for the KGB (1973–1979), described active measures as "the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence."

During the Sino-Soviet split, "spy wars" also occurred between the USSR and PRC.

BEGINNINGS OF NATO & RADIO FREE EUROPE

Britain, France, the United States, Canada and eight other western European countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty of April 1949, establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). That August, the first Soviet atomic device was detonated in Semipalatinsk, Kazakh SSR. Following Soviet refusals to participate in a German rebuilding effort set forth by western European countries in 1948, the US, Britain and France spearheaded the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany from the three Western zones of occupation in April 1949. The Soviet Union proclaimed its zone of occupation in Germany the German Democratic Republic that October.

Media in the Eastern Bloc was an organ of the state, completely reliant on and subservient to the communist party. Radio and television organizations were state-owned, while print media was usually owned by political organizations, mostly by the local communist party. Soviet radio broadcasts used Marxist rhetoric to attack capitalism, emphasizing themes of labor exploitation, imperialism and war-mongering.

Along with the broadcasts of the BBC and the Voice of America to Central and Eastern Europe, a major propaganda effort begun in 1949 was Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, dedicated to bringing about the peaceful demise of the communist system in the Eastern Bloc. Radio Free Europe attempted to achieve these goals by serving as a surrogate home radio station, an alternative to the controlled and party-dominated domestic press in the Soviet Bloc. Radio Free Europe was a product of some of the most prominent architects of America's early Cold War strategy, especially those who believed that the Cold War would eventually be fought by political rather than military means, such as George F. Kennan. Soviet and Eastern Bloc authorities used various methods to suppress Western broadcasts, including radio jamming.

American policymakers, including Kennan and John Foster Dulles, acknowledged that the Cold War was in its essence a war of ideas. The United States, acting through the CIA, funded a long list of projects to counter the communist appeal among intellectuals in Europe and the developing world. The CIA also covertly sponsored a domestic propaganda campaign called Crusade for Freedom.

KOREAN WAR

One of the more significant examples of the implementation of containment was the United Nations US-led intervention in the Korean War. In June 1950, after years of mutual hostilities, Kim Il Sung's North Korean People's Army invaded South Korea at the 38th parallel. Stalin had been reluctant to support the invasion[H] but ultimately sent advisers. To Stalin's surprise, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 82 and 83 backed the defense of South Korea, although the Soviets were then boycotting meetings in protest of the fact that Taiwan (Republic of China), not the People's Republic of China, held a permanent seat on the council. A UN force of sixteen countries faced North Korea, although 40 percent of troops were South Korean, and about 50 percent were from the United States.

The US initially seemed to follow containment when it first entered the war. This directed the US's action to only push back North Korea across the 38th Parallel and restore South Korea's sovereignty while allowing North Korea's survival as a state. However, the success of the Inchon landing inspired the US/UN forces to pursue a rollback strategy instead and to overthrow communist North Korea, thereby allowing nationwide elections under U.N. auspices. General Douglas MacArthur then advanced across the 38th Parallel into North Korea. The Chinese, fearful of a possible US invasion, sent in a large army and defeated the U.N. forces, pushing them back below the 38th parallel. Truman publicly hinted that he might use his "ace in the hole" of the atomic bomb, but Mao was unmoved. The episode was used to support the wisdom of the containment doctrine as opposed to rollback. The Communists were later pushed to roughly around the original border, with minimal changes. Among other effects, the Korean War galvanised NATO to develop a military structure. Public opinion in countries involved, such as Great Britain, was divided for and against the war.

After the Korean Armistice Agreement was approved in July 1953, North Korean leader Kim Il Sung created a highly centralized, totalitarian dictatorship that accorded his family unlimited power while generating a pervasive cult of personality. In the South, the American-backed dictator Syngman Rhee ran an authoritarian regime that engaged in anti-communist mass killings. While Rhee was overthrown in 1960, South Korea continued to be ruled by a military government of former Japanese collaborators until the re-establishment of a multi-party system in the late 1980s. Subsequently, South Korea experienced an economic boom and became one of the most advanced countries on the planet.

AMERICAN MILITARY BUILDUP

John F. Kennedy's foreign policy was dominated by American confrontations with the Soviet Union, manifested by proxy contests. Like Truman and Eisenhower, Kennedy supported containment to stop the spread of Communism. President Eisenhower's New Look policy had emphasized the use of less expensive nuclear weapons to deter Soviet aggression by threatening massive nuclear attacks on all of the Soviet Union. Nuclear weapons were much cheaper than maintaining a large standing army, so Eisenhower cut conventional forces to save money. Kennedy implemented a new strategy known as flexible response. This strategy relied on conventional arms to achieve limited goals. As part of this policy, Kennedy expanded the United States special operations forces, elite military units that could fight unconventionally in various conflicts. Kennedy hoped that the flexible response strategy would allow the US to counter Soviet influence without resorting to nuclear war.

To support his new strategy, Kennedy ordered a massive increase in defense spending. He sought, and Congress provided, a rapid build-up of the nuclear arsenal to restore the lost superiority over the Soviet Union—he claimed in 1960 that Eisenhower had lost it because of excessive concern with budget deficits. In his inaugural address, Kennedy promised "to bear any burden" in the defense of liberty, and he repeatedly asked for increases in military spending and authorization of new weapons systems. From 1961 to 1964, the number of nuclear weapons increased by 50 percent, as did the number of B-52 bombers to deliver them. The new ICBM force grew from 63 intercontinental ballistic missiles to 424. He authorized 23 new Polaris submarines, each of which carried 16 nuclear missiles. Kennedy also called on cities to construct fallout shelters.

THIRD WORLD COMPETITION

Nationalist movements in some countries and regions, notably Guatemala, Indonesia and Indochina, were often allied with communist groups or otherwise perceived to be unfriendly to Western interests. In this context, the United States and the Soviet Union increasingly competed for influence by proxy in the Third World as decolonization gained momentum in the 1950s and early 1960s. Both sides were selling armaments to gain influence. The Kremlin saw continuing territorial losses by imperial powers as presaging the eventual victory of their ideology.

The United States used the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to undermine neutral or hostile Third World governments and to support allied ones. In 1953, President Eisenhower implemented Operation Ajax, a covert coup operation to overthrow the Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. The popularly elected Mosaddegh had been a Middle Eastern nemesis of Britain since nationalizing the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. Winston Churchill told the United States that Mosaddegh was "increasingly turning towards Communist influence." The pro-Western shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, assumed control as an autocratic monarch. The shah's policies included banning the communist Tudeh Party of Iran, and general suppression of political dissent by SAVAK, the shah's domestic security and intelligence agency.

In Guatemala, a banana republic, the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état ousted the left-wing President Jacobo Árbenz with material CIA support. The post-Arbenz government—a military junta headed by Carlos Castillo Armas—repealed a progressive land reform law, returned nationalized property belonging to the United Fruit Company, set up a National Committee of Defense Against Communism, and decreed a Preventive Penal Law Against Communism at the request of the United States.

The non-aligned Indonesian government of Sukarno was faced with a major threat to its legitimacy beginning in 1956 when several regional commanders began to demand autonomy from Jakarta. After mediation failed, Sukarno took action to remove the dissident commanders. In February 1958, dissident military commanders in Central Sumatra (Colonel Ahmad Husein) and North Sulawesi (Colonel Ventje Sumual) declared the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia-Permesta Movement aimed at overthrowing the Sukarno regime. They were joined by many civilian politicians from the Masyumi Party, such as Sjafruddin Prawiranegara, who were opposed to the growing influence of the communist Partai Komunis Indonesia. Due to their anti-communist rhetoric, the rebels received arms, funding, and other covert aid from the CIA until Allen Lawrence Pope, an American pilot, was shot down after a bombing raid on government-held Ambon in April 1958. The central government responded by launching airborne and seaborne military invasions of rebel strongholds at Padang and Manado. By the end of 1958, the rebels were militarily defeated, and the last remaining rebel guerilla bands surrendered by August 1961.

In the Republic of the Congo, also known as Congo-Léopoldville, newly independent from Belgium since June 1960, the Congo Crisis erupted on 5 July leading to the secession of the regions Katanga and South Kasai. CIA-backed President Joseph Kasa-Vubu ordered the dismissal of the democratically elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and the Lumumba cabinet in September over massacres by the armed forces during the invasion of South Kasai and for involving Soviets in the country. Later the CIA-backed Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko quickly mobilized his forces to seize power through a military coup d'état, and worked with Western intelligence agencies to imprison Lumumba and hand him over to Katangan authorities who executed him by firing squad.

In British Guiana, the leftist People's Progressive Party (PPP) candidate Cheddi Jagan won the position of chief minister in a colonially administered election in 1953 but was quickly forced to resign from power after Britain's suspension of the still-dependent nation's constitution. Embarrassed by the landslide electoral victory of Jagan's allegedly Marxist party, the British imprisoned the PPP's leadership and maneuvered the organization into a divisive rupture in 1955, engineering a split between Jagan and his PPP colleagues. Jagan again won the colonial elections in 1957 and 1961, despite Britain's shift to a reconsideration of its view of the left-wing Jagan as a Soviet-style communist at this time. The United States pressured the British to withhold Guyana's independence until an alternative to Jagan could be identified, supported, and brought into office.

Worn down by the communist guerrilla war for Vietnamese independence and handed a watershed defeat by communist Viet Minh rebels at the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the French accepted a negotiated abandonment of their colonial stake in Vietnam. In the Geneva Conference, peace accords were signed, leaving Vietnam divided between a pro-Soviet administration in North Vietnam and a pro-Western administration in South Vietnam at the 17th parallel north. Between 1954 and 1961, Eisenhower's United States sent economic aid and military advisers to strengthen South Vietnam's pro-Western government against communist efforts to destabilize it.

Many emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America rejected the pressure to choose sides in the East–West competition. In 1955, at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, dozens of Third World governments resolved to stay out of the Cold War. The consensus reached at Bandung culminated with the creation of the Belgrade-headquartered Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. Meanwhile, Khrushchev broadened Moscow's policy to establish ties with India and other key neutral states. Independence movements in the Third World transformed the post-war order into a more pluralistic world of decolonized African and Middle Eastern nations and of rising nationalism in Asia and Latin America.

SINO-SOVIET SPLIT

After 1956, the Sino-Soviet alliance began to break down. Mao had defended Stalin when Khrushchev criticized him in 1956 and treated the new Soviet leader as a superficial upstart, accusing him of having lost his revolutionary edge. For his part, Khrushchev, disturbed by Mao's glib attitude toward nuclear war, referred to the Chinese leader as a "lunatic on a throne".

After this, Khrushchev made many desperate attempts to reconstitute the Sino-Soviet alliance, but Mao considered it useless and denied any proposal. The Chinese-Soviet animosity spilled out in an intra-communist propaganda war. Further on, the Soviets focused on a bitter rivalry with Mao's China for leadership of the global communist movement. Historian Lorenz M. Lüthi argues:

The Sino-Soviet split was one of the key events of the Cold War, equal in importance to the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Second Vietnam War, and Sino-American rapprochement. The split helped to determine the framework of the Second Cold War in general, and influenced the course of the Second Vietnam War in particular.

 

 

 

 

Pol Pot was a political leader whose communist Khmer Rouge government led Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. During that time, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died of starvation, execution, disease or overwork. One detention center, S-21, was so notorious that only seven of the roughly 20,000 people imprisoned there are known to have survived. The Khmer Rouge, in their attempt to socially engineer a classless communist society, took particular aim at intellectuals, city residents, ethnic Vietnamese, civil servants and religious leaders. Some historians regard the Pol Pot regime as one of the most barbaric and murderous in recent history.

 

 

Pol Pot was a political leader whose communist Khmer Rouge government led Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. During that time, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died of starvation, execution, disease or overwork. One detention center, S-21, was so notorious that only seven of the roughly 20,000 people imprisoned there are known to have survived. The Khmer Rouge, in their attempt to socially engineer a classless communist society, took particular aim at intellectuals, city residents, ethnic Vietnamese, civil servants and religious leaders. Some historians regard the Pol Pot regime as one of the most barbaric and murderous in recent history.

 

 


SPACE RACE

On the nuclear weapons front, the United States and the Soviet Union pursued nuclear rearmament and developed long-range weapons with which they could strike the territory of the other. In August 1957, the Soviets successfully launched the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and in October they launched the first Earth satellite, Sputnik 1. The launch of Sputnik inaugurated the Space Race. This led to the Apollo Moon landings by the United States, which astronaut Frank Borman later described as "just a battle in the Cold War." The public's reaction in the Soviet Union was mixed. The Soviet government limited the release of information about the lunar landing, which affected the reaction. A portion of the populace did not give it any attention, and another portion was angered by it. A major Cold War element of the Space Race was satellite reconnaissance, as well as signals intelligence to gauge which aspects of the space programs had military capabilities.

Later, however, the US and USSR pursued some cooperation in space as part of détente, such as Apollo–Soyuz.

THE CUBAN REVOLUTION

In Cuba, the 26th of July Movement, led by young revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, seized power in the Cuban Revolution on 1 January 1959, toppling President Fulgencio Batista, whose unpopular regime had been denied arms by the Eisenhower administration. Although Fidel Castro's first refused to categorize his new government as socialist and repeatedly denying being a communist, Castro appointed Marxists to senior government and military positions. Most significantly, Che Guevara became Governor of the Central Bank and then Minister of Industries.

Diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States continued for some time after Batista's fall, but President Eisenhower deliberately left the capital to avoid meeting Castro during the latter's trip to Washington, D.C. in April, leaving Vice President Richard Nixon to conduct the meeting in his place. Cuba began negotiating for arms purchases from the Eastern Bloc in March 1960. The same month, Eisenhower gave approval to CIA plans and funding to overthrow Castro.

In January 1961, just prior to leaving office, Eisenhower formally severed relations with the Cuban government. That April, the administration of newly elected American President John F. Kennedy mounted the unsuccessful CIA-organized ship-borne invasion of the island by Cuban exiles at Playa Girón and Playa Larga in Santa Clara Province - a failure that publicly humiliated the United States. Castro responded by publicly embracing Marxism–Leninism, and the Soviet Union pledged to provide further support. In December, the US government began a violent campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians in Cuba, and covert operations and sabotage against the administration, in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government.

BERLIN CRISIS 1961

The Berlin Crisis of 1961 was the last major incident in the Cold War regarding the status of Berlin and post–World War II Germany. By the early 1950s, the Soviet approach to restricting emigration movement was emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc. However, hundreds of thousands of East Germans annually emigrated to free and prosperous West Germany through a "loophole" in the system that existed between East Berlin and West Berlin.

The emigration resulted in a massive "brain drain" from East Germany to West Germany of younger educated professionals, such that nearly 20% of East Germany's population had migrated to West Germany by 1961. That June, the Soviet Union issued a new ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of Allied forces from West Berlin. The request was rebuffed, but the United States now limited its security guarantees to West Berlin. On 13 August, East Germany erected a barbed-wire barrier that would eventually be expanded through construction into the Berlin Wall, effectively closing the loophole and preventing its citizens from fleeing to the West.

CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

The Kennedy administration continued seeking ways to oust Castro following the Bay of Pigs invasion, experimenting with various ways of covertly facilitating the overthrow of the Cuban government. Significant hopes were pinned on the program of terrorist attacks and other destabilization operations known as Operation Mongoose, that was devised under the Kennedy administration in 1961. Khrushchev learned of the project in February 1962, and preparations to install Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba were undertaken in response.

Alarmed, Kennedy considered various reactions. He ultimately responded to the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba with a naval blockade, and he presented an ultimatum to the Soviets. Khrushchev backed down from a confrontation, and the Soviet Union removed the missiles in return for a public American pledge not to invade Cuba again as well as a covert deal to remove US missiles from Turkey. Castro later admitted that "I would have agreed to the use of nuclear weapons. ... we took it for granted that it would become a nuclear war anyway, and that we were going to disappear."

The Cuban Missile Crisis (October–November 1962) brought the world closer to nuclear war than ever before. The aftermath led to efforts in the nuclear arms race at nuclear disarmament and improving relations, although the Cold War's first arms control agreement, the Antarctic Treaty, had come into force in 1961.

The compromise embarrassed Khrushchev and the Soviet Union because the withdrawal of US missiles from Italy and Turkey was a secret deal between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and the Soviets were seen as retreating from circumstances that they had started. In 1964, Khrushchev's Kremlin colleagues managed to oust him, but allowed him a peaceful retirement. He was accused of rudeness and incompetence, and John Lewis Gaddis argues that he was also blamed with ruining Soviet agriculture, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, and becoming an "international embarrassment" when he authorized construction of the Berlin Wall. According to Dobrynin, the top Soviet leadership took the Cuban outcome as "a blow to its prestige bordering on humiliation".

VIETNAM WAR

Under President John F. Kennedy, US troop levels in Vietnam grew under the Military Assistance Advisory Group program from just under a thousand in 1959 to 16,000 in 1963. South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem's heavy-handed crackdown on Buddhist monks in 1963 led the US to endorse a deadly military coup against Diem. The war escalated further in 1964 following the controversial Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which a US destroyer was alleged to have clashed with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave President Lyndon B. Johnson broad authorization to increase US military presence, deploying ground combat units for the first time and increasing troop levels to 184,000. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev responded by reversing Khrushchev's policy of disengagement and increasing aid to the North Vietnamese, hoping to entice the North from its pro-Chinese position. The USSR discouraged further escalation of the war, however, providing just enough military assistance to tie up American forces. From this point, the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), also known as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), engaged in more conventional warfare with US and South Vietnamese forces.

The Tet Offensive of 1968 proved to be the turning point of the war. Despite years of American tutelage and aid, the South Vietnamese forces were unable to withstand the communist offensive and the task fell to US forces instead. Tet showed that the end of US involvement was not in sight, increasing domestic skepticism of the war and giving rise to what was referred to as the Vietnam Syndrome, a public aversion to American overseas military involvements. Nonetheless, operations continued to cross international boundaries: bordering areas of Laos and Cambodia were used by North Vietnam as supply routes, and were heavily bombed by US forces.

At the same time, in 1963–1965, American domestic politics saw the triumph of liberalism. According to historian Joseph Crespino:

It has become a staple of twentieth-century historiography that Cold War concerns were at the root of a number of progressive political accomplishments in the postwar period: a high progressive marginal tax rate that helped fund the arms race and contributed to broad income equality; bipartisan support for far-reaching civil rights legislation that transformed politics and society in the American South, which had long given the lie to America's egalitarian ethos; bipartisan support for overturning an explicitly racist immigration system that had been in place since the 1920s; and free health care for the elderly and the poor, a partial fulfillment of one of the unaccomplished goals of the New Deal era. The list could go on.

THIRD WORLD ESCALATIONS

Under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, which gained power after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the US took a more hardline stance on Latin America - sometimes called the "Mann Doctrine". In 1964, the Brazilian military overthrew the government of president João Goulart with US backing. In late April 1965, the US sent some 22,000 troops to the Dominican Republic in an intervention, codenamed Operation Power Pack, into the Dominican Civil War between supporters of deposed president Juan Bosch and supporters of General Elías Wessin y Wessin, citing the threat of the emergence of a Cuban-style revolution in Latin America. The OAS also deployed soldiers to the conflict through the mostly Brazilian Inter-American Peace Force. Héctor García-Godoy acted as provisional president, until conservative former president Joaquín Balaguer won the 1966 presidential election against non-campaigning Juan Bosch. Activists for Bosch's Dominican Revolutionary Party were violently harassed by the Dominican police and armed forces.

In Indonesia, the hardline anti-communist General Suharto wrested control of the state from his predecessor Sukarno in an attempt to establish a "New Order". From 1965 to 1966, with the aid of the United States and other Western governments, the military led the mass killing of more than 500,000 members and sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party and other leftist organizations, and detained hundreds of thousands more in prison camps around the country under extremely inhumane conditions. A top-secret CIA report stated that the massacres "rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s." These killings served US strategic interests and constitute a major turning point in the Cold War as the balance of power shifted in Southeast Asia.

Escalating the scale of American intervention in the ongoing conflict between Ngô Đình Diệm's South Vietnamese government and the communist National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) insurgents opposing it, Johnson deployed some 575,000 troops in Southeast Asia to defeat the NLF and their North Vietnamese allies in the Vietnam War, but his costly policy weakened the US economy and sparked domestic anti-war protests, which lead to the US withdrawal by 1972. Without American support, South Vietnam was conquered by North Vietnam in 1975; the US reputation suffered as a result, as most of the world saw the events in Vietnam as the defeat of the world's most powerful superpower at the hands of one of the world's poorest nations.

The Middle East remained a source of contention. Egypt, which received the bulk of its arms and economic assistance from the USSR, was a troublesome client, with a reluctant Soviet Union feeling obliged to assist in both the 1967 Six-Day War (with advisers and technicians) and the War of Attrition (with pilots and aircraft) against pro-Western Israel. Despite the beginning of an Egyptian shift from a pro-Soviet to a pro-American orientation in 1972 (under Egypt's new leader Anwar Sadat), the Soviets supported Egypt and Syria during the Yom Kippur War the following year, as the United States supported Israel. Although pre-Sadat Egypt had been the largest recipient of Soviet aid in the Middle East, the Soviets were also successful in establishing close relations with communist South Yemen, as well as the nationalist governments of Algeria and Iraq. Iraq signed a 15-year Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union in 1972. According to historian Charles R. H. Tripp, the treaty upset "the US-sponsored security system established as part of the Arab Cold War. It appeared that any enemy of the Baghdad regime was a potential ally of the United States." In response, the US covertly financed Kurdish rebels led by Mustafa Barzani during the Second Iraqi–Kurdish War; the Kurds were defeated in 1975, leading to the forcible relocation of hundreds of thousands of Kurdish civilians. Indirect Soviet assistance to the Palestinian side of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict included support for Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

In East Africa, a territorial dispute between Somalia and Ethiopia over the Ogaden region resulted in the Ogaden War. Around June 1977, Somali troops occupied the Ogaden and began advancing inland towards Ethiopian positions in the Ahmar Mountains. Both countries were client states of the Soviet Union; Somalia was led by self-proclaimed Marxist military leader Siad Barre, and Ethiopia was controlled by the Derg, a cabal of military generals loyal to the pro-Soviet Mengistu Haile Mariam, who had declared the Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia in 1975. The Soviets initially attempted to exert a moderating influence on both states, but in November 1977 Barre broke off relations with Moscow and expelled his Soviet military advisers. He then turned to the China and Safari Club - a group of pro-American intelligence agencies including those of Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia - for support and weapons. While declining to take a direct part in hostilities, the Soviet Union did provide the impetus for a successful Ethiopian counteroffensive to expel Somalia from the Ogaden. The counteroffensive was planned at the command level by Soviet advisers attached to the Ethiopian general staff, and bolstered by the delivery of millions of dollars' of sophisticated Soviet arms. About 11,000 Cuban troops spearheaded the primary effort, after receiving a hasty training on some of the newly delivered Soviet weapons systems by East German instructors.

In Chile, the Socialist Party candidate Salvador Allende won the presidential election of 1970, thereby becoming the first democratically elected Marxist to become president of a country in the Americas. The CIA targeted Allende for removal and operated to undermine his support domestically, which contributed to a period of unrest culminating in General Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état on 11 September 1973. Pinochet consolidated power as a military dictator, Allende's reforms of the economy were rolled back, and leftist opponents were killed or detained in internment camps under the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA). The socialist states—with the exception of China and Romania—broke off relations with Chile. The Pinochet regime would go on to be one of the leading participants in Operation Condor, an international campaign of political assassination and state terrorism organized by right-wing military dictatorships in the Southern Cone of South America that was covertly supported by the US government.

On 24 April 1974, the Carnation Revolution succeeded in ousting Marcello Caetano and Portugal's right-wing Estado Novo government, sounding the death knell for the Portuguese Empire. Independence was hastily granted to a number of Portuguese colonies, including Angola, where the disintegration of colonial rule was followed by a violent civil war. There were three rival militant factions competing for power in Angola: the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), and the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA). While all three had socialist leanings, the MPLA was the only party with close ties to the Soviet Union. Its adherence to the concept of a Soviet one-party state alienated it from the FNLA and UNITA, which began portraying themselves as anti-communist and pro-Western in orientation. When the Soviets began supplying the MPLA with arms, the CIA and China offered substantial covert aid to the FNLA and UNITA. The MPLA eventually requested direct military support from Moscow in the form of ground troops, but the Soviets declined, offering to send advisers but no combat personnel. Cuba was more forthcoming and began amassing troops in Angola to assist the MPLA. By November 1975, there were over a thousand Cuban soldiers in the country. The persistent buildup of Cuban troops and Soviet weapons allowed the MPLA to secure victory and blunt an abortive intervention by Zairean and South African troops, which had deployed in a belated attempt to assist the FNLA and UNITA.

During the Vietnam War, North Vietnam used border areas of Cambodia as military bases, which Cambodian head of state Norodom Sihanouk tolerated in an attempt to preserve Cambodia's neutrality. Following Sihanouk's March 1970 deposition by pro-American general Lon Nol, who ordered the North Vietnamese to leave Cambodia, North Vietnam attempted to overrun all of Cambodia following negotiations with Nuon Chea, the second-in-command of the Cambodian communists (dubbed the Khmer Rouge) fighting to overthrow the Cambodian government. Sihanouk fled to China with the establishment of the GRUNK in Beijing. American and South Vietnamese forces responded to these actions with a bombing campaign and a brief ground incursion, which contributed to the violence of the civil war that soon enveloped all of Cambodia. US carpet bombing lasted until 1973, and while it prevented the Khmer Rouge from seizing the capital, it also accelerated the collapse of rural society, increased social polarization, and killed tens of thousands of civilians.

After taking power and distancing himself from the Vietnamese, pro-China Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot killed 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians in the killing fields, roughly a quarter of the Cambodian population (an event commonly labelled the Cambodian genocide). Martin Shaw described these atrocities as "the purest genocide of the Cold War era." Backed by the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, an organization of Khmer pro-Soviet Communists and Khmer Rouge defectors led by Heng Samrin, Vietnam invaded Cambodia on 22 December 1978. The invasion succeeded in deposing Pol Pot, but the new state would struggle to gain international recognition beyond the Soviet Bloc sphere. Despite the previous international outcry at the Pol Pot regime's gross human rights violations, representatives of the Khmer Rouge were allowed to be seated in the UN General Assembly, with strong support from China, Western powers, and the member countries of ASEAN. Cambodia would become bogged down in a guerrilla war led from refugee camps located on the border with Thailand. Following the destruction of the Khmer Rouge, the national reconstruction of Cambodia would be severely hampered, and Vietnam would suffer a punitive Chinese attack. Although unable to deter Vietnam from ousting Pol Pot from Cambodia, China demonstrated that its Cold War communist adversary, the Soviet Union, was unable to protect its Vietnamese ally. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote that "China succeeded in exposing the limits of...[Soviet] strategic reach" and speculated that the desire to "compensate for their ineffectuality" contributed to the Soviets' decision to intervene in Afghanistan a year later.

NIXON, BREZHNEV DETENTE

Although indirect conflict between Cold War powers continued through the late 1960s and early 1970s, tensions were beginning to ease.

Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of collective leadership ensued, consisting of Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary, Alexei Kosygin as Premier and Nikolai Podgorny as Chairman of the Presidium, lasting until Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent Soviet leader.

Following his visit to China, Nixon met with Soviet leaders, including Brezhnev in Moscow. These Strategic Arms Limitation Talks resulted in two landmark arms control treaties: SALT I, the first comprehensive limitation pact signed by the two superpowers, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which banned the development of systems designed to intercept incoming missiles. These aimed to limit the development of costly anti-ballistic missiles and nuclear missiles.

Nixon and Brezhnev proclaimed a new era of "peaceful coexistence" and established the groundbreaking new policy of détente (or cooperation) between the two superpowers. Meanwhile, Brezhnev attempted to revive the Soviet economy, which was declining in part because of heavy military expenditures. The Soviet Union's military budget in the 1970s was gigantic, forming 40–60% of the entire federal budget and accounting to 15% of the USSR's GDP (13% in the 1980s). Between 1972 and 1974, the two sides also agreed to strengthen their economic ties, including agreements for increased trade. As a result of their meetings, détente would replace the hostility of the Cold War and the two countries would live mutually. These developments coincided with Bonn's "Ostpolitik" policy formulated by the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, an effort to normalize relations between West Germany and Eastern Europe. Other agreements were concluded to stabilize the situation in Europe, culminating in the Helsinki Accords signed at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975.

The Helsinki Accords, in which the Soviets promised to grant free elections in Europe, has been called a major concession to ensure peace by the Soviets. In practice, the Soviet government significantly curbed the rule of law, civil liberties, protection of law and guarantees of property, which were considered examples of "bourgeois morality" by Soviet legal theorists such as Andrey Vyshinsky. The Soviet Union signed legally-binding human rights documents, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1973 and the Helsinki Accords in 1975, but they were neither widely known or accessible to people living under Communist rule, nor were they taken seriously by the Communist authorities. Human rights activists in the Soviet Union were regularly subjected to harassment, repressions and arrests.

The pro-Soviet American business magnate Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum often mediated trade relations. Author Daniel Yergin, in his book The Prize, writes that Hammer "ended up as a go-between for five Soviet General Secretaries and seven U.S. Presidents." Hammer had extensive business relationship in the Soviet Union stretching back to the 1920s with Lenin's approval. According to Christian Science Monitor in 1980, "although his business dealings with the Soviet Union were cut short when Stalin came to power, he had more or less single-handedly laid the groundwork for the [1980] state of Western trade with the Soviet Union." In 1974, Brezhnev "publicly recognized Hammer's role in facilitating East-West trade." By 1981, according to the New York Times in that year, Hammer was on a "first-name basis with Leonid Brezhnev."

Kissinger and Nixon were "realists" who deemphasized idealistic goals like anti-communism or promotion of democracy worldwide because those goals were too expensive in terms of America's economic capabilities. Instead of a Cold War they wanted peace, trade and cultural exchanges. They realized that Americans were no longer willing to tax themselves for idealistic foreign policy goals, especially for containment policies that never seemed to produce positive results. Instead, Nixon and Kissinger sought to downsize America's global commitments in proportion to its reduced economic, moral and political power. They rejected "idealism" as impractical and too expensive, and neither man showed much sensitivity to the plight of people living under Communism. Kissinger's realism fell out of fashion as idealism returned to American foreign policy with Carter's moralism emphasizing human rights, and Reagan's rollback strategy aimed at destroying Communism.

 

NEW COLD WAR 1979 - 1985

The term new Cold War refers to the period of intensive reawakening of Cold War tensions and conflicts in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Tensions greatly increased between the major powers with both sides becoming more militant. Diggins says, "Reagan went all out to fight the second cold war, by supporting counterinsurgencies in the third world." Cox says, "The intensity of this 'second' Cold War was as great as its duration was short."

SOVIET INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN 1978

In April 1978, the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in the Saur Revolution. Within months, opponents of the communist regime launched an uprising in eastern Afghanistan that quickly expanded into a civil war waged by guerrilla mujahideen against government forces countrywide. The Islamic Unity of Afghanistan Mujahideen insurgents received military training and weapons in neighboring Pakistan and China, while the Soviet Union sent thousands of military advisers to support the PDPA government. Meanwhile, increasing friction between the competing factions of the PDPA - the dominant Khalq and the more moderate Parcham—resulted in the dismissal of Parchami cabinet members and the arrest of Parchami military officers under the pretext of a Parchami coup. By mid-1979, the United States had started a covert program to assist the mujahideen.

In September 1979, Khalqist President Nur Muhammad Taraki was assassinated in a coup within the PDPA orchestrated by fellow Khalq member Hafizullah Amin, who assumed the presidency. Distrusted by the Soviets, Amin was assassinated by Soviet special forces during Operation Storm-333 in December 1979. Afghan forces suffered losses during the Soviet operation; 30 Afghan palace guards and over 300 army guards were killed while another 150 were captured. Two of Amin's sons, an 11-year-old and a 9-year-old, died from shrapnel wounds sustained during the clashes. In the aftermath of the operation, a total of 1,700 Afghan soldiers who surrendered to Soviet forces were taken as prisoners,[383] and the Soviets installed Babrak Karmal, the leader of the PDPA's Parcham faction, as Amin's successor. Veterans of the Soviet Union's Alpha Group have stated that Operation Storm-333 was one of the most successful in the unit's history. Documents released following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s revealed that the Soviet leadership believed Amin had secret contacts within the American embassy in Kabul and "was capable of reaching an agreement with the United States"; however, allegations of Amin colluding with the Americans have been widely discredited. The PDBA was tasked to fill the vacuum and carried out a purge of Amin supporters. Soviet troops were deployed to put Afghanistan under Soviet control with Karmal in more substantial numbers, although the Soviet government did not expect to do most of the fighting in Afghanistan. As a result, however, the Soviets were now directly involved in what had been a domestic war in Afghanistan.

Carter responded to the Soviet invasion by withdrawing the SALT II treaty from ratification, imposing embargoes on grain and technology shipments to the USSR, and demanding a significant increase in military spending, and further announced the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, which was joined by 65 other nations. He described the Soviet incursion as "the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War".

 

 

 

 

 

 


REAGAN & THATCHER

In January 1977, four years prior to becoming president, Ronald Reagan bluntly stated, in a conversation with Richard V. Allen, his basic expectation in relation to the Cold War. "My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic," he said. "It is this: We win and they lose. What do you think of that?" In 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election, vowing to increase military spending and confront the Soviets everywhere. Both Reagan and new British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher denounced the Soviet Union and its ideology. Though Thatcher was selling off the UK in her great Garage Sale, making financial slaves of the British poor and the rich, richer. Reagan labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and predicted that Communism would be left on the "ash heap of history," while Thatcher inculpated the Soviets as "bent on world dominance." In 1982, Reagan tried to cut off Moscow's access to hard currency by impeding its proposed gas line to Western Europe. It hurt the Soviet economy, but it also caused ill will among American allies in Europe who counted on that revenue. Reagan retreated on this issue.

By early 1985, Reagan's anti-communist position had developed into a stance known as the new Reagan Doctrine - which, in addition to containment, formulated an additional right to subvert existing communist governments. Besides continuing Jimmy Carter's policy of supporting the Islamic opponents of the Soviet Union and the Soviet-backed PDPA government in Afghanistan, the CIA also sought to weaken the Soviet Union itself by promoting Islamism in the majority-Muslim Central Asian Soviet Union. Additionally, the CIA encouraged anti-communist Pakistan's ISI to train Muslims from around the world to participate in the jihad against the Soviet Union.

EVIL EMPIRE SPEECH

The "Evil Empire" speech was a speech delivered by U.S. President Ronald Reagan to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983 at the height of Cold War and Soviet-Afghan War. In that speech, Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and as "the focus of evil in the modern world". Reagan explicitly rejected the notion that the United States and the Soviet Union were equally responsible for the Cold War and the ongoing nuclear arms race between the two nations; rather, he asserted that the conflict was a battle between good and evil.
Background

Reagan's chief speechwriter at the time, Anthony R. Dolan, coined the phrase "evil empire" for Reagan's use. Dolan included similar language in a draft for Reagan's June 1982 speech before the British House of Commons in London, but reviewers flagged and struck the phrasing. Dolan included the phrase "evil empire" in drafts for Reagan's speech at the National Association of Evangelicals' 41st annual convention. White House staffers who saw drafts of the speech, including David Gergen, repeatedly struck the "evil empire" portion; the speech eventually reached Regan with the "evil empire" portion included, staffer critics concluding the event would be minor and unlikely to attract attention.

When Reagan reviewed and edited the draft himself, he extended the material on domestic matters. Dolan had included a reference to "abortion on demand" as a "great moral evil"; Reagan cut the line and added a remark asserting that "until it can be proven that the unborn child is not a living entity" its "right to life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness must be protected". Regan left the "evil empire" phrase and did not substantially alter the draft's strongly anti-communist tone.
Speech

Reagan spoke at the 41st annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983, in the Citrus Crown Ballroom of the Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel in Orlando, Florida. The speech, marking his first recorded use of the phrase "evil empire" to refer to the Soviet Union, has become known as the "Evil Empire" speech. In that speech, Reagan said:

" Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world .... So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."

The audience applauded Reagan's speech.

In the "Evil Empire" speech, which also dealt with domestic issues, Reagan made the case for deploying NATO nuclear-armed intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Western Europe as a response to the Soviets installing new nuclear-armed missiles in Eastern Europe. Eventually, the NATO missiles were set up and used as bargaining chips in arms talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who took office two years and three days after Reagan's speech, on 11 March 1985. At the Washington Summit in 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to go further than a nuclear freeze. In an Atomic Age first, they signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, agreeing to reduce nuclear arsenals. Intermediate- and shorter-range nuclear missiles were eliminated.

Historian John Lewis Gaddis called the speech the "completion of a rhetorical offensive designed to expose what Reagan saw as the central error of détente: the idea that the Soviet Union had earned geopolitical, ideological, economic, and moral legitimacy" and argued that it "could not have been better calculated to feed the anxieties" afflicting Soviet leadership at the time.

USA AND USSR MILITARY AND ECONOMIC ISSUES

The Soviet Union had built up a military that consumed as much as 25 percent of its gross national product at the expense of consumer goods and investment in civilian sectors. Soviet spending on the arms race and other Cold War commitments both caused and exacerbated deep-seated structural problems in the Soviet system, which experienced at least a decade of economic stagnation during the late Brezhnev years.

Soviet investment in the defense sector was not driven by military necessity but in large part by the interests of the nomenklatura, which was dependent on the sector for their own power and privileges. The Soviet Armed Forces became the largest in the world in terms of the numbers and types of weapons they possessed, in the number of troops in their ranks, and in the sheer size of their military–industrial base. However, the quantitative advantages held by the Soviet military often concealed areas where the Eastern Bloc dramatically lagged behind the West. For example, the Persian Gulf War demonstrated how the armor, fire control systems, and firing range of the Soviet Union's most common main battle tank, the T-72, were drastically inferior to the American M1 Abrams, yet the USSR fielded almost three times as many T-72s as the US deployed M1s.

By the early 1980s, the USSR had built up a military arsenal and army surpassing that of the United States. Soon after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter began massively building up the United States military. This buildup was accelerated by the Reagan administration, which increased the military spending from 5.3 percent of GNP in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 1986, the largest peacetime defense buildup in United States history. The American-Soviet tensions present during 1983 was defined by some as the start of "Cold War II". Whilst in retrospective this phase of the Cold War was generally defined as a "war of words", the Soviet's "peace offensive" was largely rejected by the West.

Tensions continued to intensify as Reagan revived the B-1 Lancer program, which had been canceled by the Carter administration, produced LGM-118 Peacekeeper missiles, installed US cruise missiles in Europe, and announced the experimental Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars" by the media, a defense program to shoot down missiles in mid-flight. The Soviets deployed RSD-10 Pioneer ballistic missiles targeting Western Europe, and NATO decided, under the impetus of the Carter presidency, to deploy MGM-31 Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe, primarily West Germany. This deployment placed missiles just 10 minutes' striking distance from Moscow.

After Reagan's military buildup, the Soviet Union did not respond by further building its military, because the enormous military expenses, along with inefficient planned manufacturing and collectivized agriculture, were already a heavy burden for the Soviet economy. At the same time, Saudi Arabia increased oil production, even as other non-OPEC nations were increasing production. These developments contributed to the 1980s oil glut, which affected the Soviet Union as oil was the main source of Soviet export revenues. Issues with command economics, oil price decreases and large military expenditures gradually brought the Soviet economy to stagnation.

On 1 September 1983, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 with 269 people aboard, including sitting Congressman Larry McDonald, an action which Reagan characterized as a massacre. The airliner was en route from Anchorage to Seoul but owing to a navigational mistake made by the crew, it drifted from its original planned route and flew through Russian prohibited airspace past the west coast of Sakhalin Island near Moneron Island. The Soviet Air Force treated the unidentified aircraft as an intruding U.S. spy plane and destroyed it with air-to-air missiles. The Soviet Union found the wreckage under the sea two weeks later on 15 September and found the flight recorders in October, but this information was kept secret by the Soviet authorities until after the country's collapse. The incident increased support for military deployment, overseen by Reagan, which stood in place until the later accords between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. During the early hours of 26 September 1983, the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident occurred; systems in Serpukhov-15 underwent a glitch that claimed several intercontinental ballistic missiles were heading towards Russia, but officer Stanislav Petrov correctly suspected it was a false alarm, ensuring the Soviets did not respond to the non-existent attack. As such, he has been credited as "the man who saved the world". The Able Archer 83 exercise in November 1983, a realistic simulation of a coordinated NATO nuclear release, was perhaps the most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the Soviet leadership feared that a nuclear attack might be imminent.

American domestic public concerns about intervening in foreign conflicts persisted from the end of the Vietnam War. The Reagan administration emphasized the use of quick, low-cost counterinsurgency tactics to intervene in foreign conflicts. In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened in the multisided Lebanese Civil War, invaded Grenada, bombed Libya and backed the Central American Contras, anti-communist paramilitaries seeking to overthrow the Soviet-aligned Sandinista government in Nicaragua. While Reagan's interventions against Grenada and Libya were popular in the United States, his backing of the Contra rebels was mired in controversy. The Reagan administration's backing of the military government of Guatemala during the Guatemalan Civil War, in particular the regime of Efraín Ríos Montt, was also controversial.

Meanwhile, the Soviets incurred high costs for their own foreign interventions. Although Brezhnev was convinced in 1979 that the Soviet war in Afghanistan would be brief, Muslim guerrillas, aided by the US, China, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, waged a fierce resistance against the invasion. The Kremlin sent nearly 100,000 troops to support its puppet regime in Afghanistan, leading many outside observers to dub the war "the Soviets' Vietnam". However, Moscow's quagmire in Afghanistan was far more disastrous for the Soviets than Vietnam had been for the Americans because the conflict coincided with a period of internal decay and domestic crisis in the Soviet system.

A senior US State Department official predicted such an outcome as early as 1980, positing that the invasion resulted in part from a:

"...domestic crisis within the Soviet system. ... It may be that the thermodynamic law of entropy has ... caught up with the Soviet system, which now seems to expend more energy on simply maintaining its equilibrium than on improving itself. We could be seeing a period of foreign movement at a time of internal decay."

1985 - 1991

GORBACHEV'S REFORMS


By the time the comparatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985, the Soviet economy was stagnant and faced a sharp fall in foreign currency earnings as a result of the downward slide in oil prices in the 1980s. These issues prompted Gorbachev to investigate measures to revive the ailing state.

An ineffectual start led to the conclusion that deeper structural changes were necessary, and in June 1987 Gorbachev announced an agenda of economic reform called perestroika, or restructuring. Perestroika relaxed the production quota system, allowed cooperative ownership of small businesses and paved the way for foreign investment. These measures were intended to redirect the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more productive areas in the civilian sector.

Despite initial skepticism in the West, the new Soviet leader proved to be committed to reversing the Soviet Union's deteriorating economic condition instead of continuing the arms race with the West. Partly as a way to fight off internal opposition from party cliques to his reforms, Gorbachev simultaneously introduced glasnost, or openness, which increased freedom of the press and the transparency of state institutions. Glasnost was intended to reduce the corruption at the top of the Communist Party and moderate the abuse of power in the Central Committee. Glasnost also enabled increased contact between Soviet citizens and the Western world, particularly with the United States, contributing to the accelerating détente between the two nations.

GEORGE BUSH - THAW IN RELATIONS

In response to the Kremlin's military and political concessions, Reagan agreed to renew talks on economic issues and the scaling-back of the arms race. The first summit was held in November 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland. At one stage the two men, accompanied only by an interpreter, agreed in principle to reduce each country's nuclear arsenal by 50 percent. A second summit was held in October 1986 in Reykjavík, Iceland. Talks went well until the focus shifted to Reagan's proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which Gorbachev wanted to be eliminated. Reagan refused. The negotiations failed, but the third summit (Washington Summit (1987), 8–10 December 1987) led to a breakthrough with the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). The INF treaty eliminated all nuclear-armed, ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (310 and 3,420 mi) and their infrastructure.

During 1988, it became apparent to the Soviets that oil and gas subsidies, along with the cost of maintaining massive troops levels, represented a substantial economic drain. In addition, the security advantage of a buffer zone was recognised as irrelevant and the Soviets officially declared that they would no longer intervene in the affairs of satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe. George Walker Bush and Gorbachev met at the Moscow Summit in May 1988 and the Governors Island Summit in December 1988.

In 1989, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan without achieving their objectives. Later that year, the Berlin Wall, the Inner German border and the Iron Curtain fell. On 3 December 1989, Gorbachev and Bush declared the Cold War over at the Malta Summit. In February 1990, Gorbachev agreed with the US-proposed Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany and signed it on 12 September 1990, paving the way for the German reunification. When the Berlin Wall came down, Gorbachev's "Common European Home" concept began to take shape. The two former adversaries were partners in the Gulf War against Iraq (August 1990 – February 1991). During the final summit in Moscow in July 1991, Gorbachev and Bush signed the START I arms control treaty.

REVOLUTIONS OF 1989 - EASTERN EUROPE BREAKS AWAY

Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. Kenneth S. Deffeyes argued in Beyond Oil that the Reagan administration encouraged Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil to the point where the Soviets could not make a profit selling their oil, and resulted in the depletion of the country's hard currency reserves.

Brezhnev's next two successors, transitional figures with deep roots in his tradition, did not last long. Yuri Andropov was 68 years old and Konstantin Chernenko 72 when they assumed power; both died in less than two years. In an attempt to avoid a third short-lived leader, in 1985, the Soviets turned to the next generation and selected Mikhail Gorbachev. He made significant changes in the economy and party leadership, called perestroika. His policy of glasnost freed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship. Gorbachev also moved to end the Cold War. In 1988, the USSR abandoned its war in Afghanistan and began to withdraw its forces. In the following year, Gorbachev refused to interfere in the internal affairs of the Soviet satellite states, which paved the way for the Revolutions of 1989. In particular, the standstill of the Soviet Union at the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 then set a peaceful chain reaction in motion, at the end of which the Eastern Bloc collapsed. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and with East and West Germany pursuing re-unification, the Iron Curtain between the West and Soviet-occupied regions came down.

By 1989, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink of collapse, and, deprived of Soviet military support, the communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact states were losing power. Grassroots organizations, such as Poland's Solidarity movement, rapidly gained ground with strong popular bases.

The Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 in Hungary finally started a peaceful movement that the rulers in the Eastern Bloc could not stop. It was the largest movement of refugees from East Germany since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 and ultimately brought about the fall of the Iron Curtain. The patrons of the picnic, Otto von Habsburg and the Hungarian Minister of State Imre Pozsgay, saw the planned event as an opportunity to test Mikhail Gorbachev's reaction. The Austrian branch of the Paneuropean Union, which was then headed by Karl von Habsburg, distributed thousands of brochures inviting the GDR holidaymakers in Hungary to a picnic near the border at Sopron. But with the mass exodus at the Pan-European Picnic the subsequent hesitant behavior of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of East Germany and the non-interference of the Soviet Union broke the dams. Now tens of thousands of media-informed East Germans made their way to Hungary, which was no longer willing to keep its borders completely closed or to oblige its border troops to use armed force. On the one hand, this caused disagreement among the Eastern European states and, on the other hand, it was clear to the Eastern European population that the governments no longer had absolute power.

In 1989, the communist governments in Poland and Hungary became the first to negotiate the organization of competitive elections. In Czechoslovakia and East Germany, mass protests unseated entrenched communist leaders. The communist regimes in Bulgaria and Romania also crumbled, in the latter case as the result of a violent uprising. Attitudes had changed enough that US Secretary of State James Baker suggested that the American government would not be opposed to Soviet intervention in Romania, on behalf of the opposition, to prevent bloodshed.

The tidal wave of change culminated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which symbolized the collapse of European communist governments and graphically ended the Iron Curtain divide of Europe. The 1989 revolutionary wave swept across Central and Eastern Europe and peacefully overthrew all of the Soviet-style Marxist–Leninist states: East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria; Romania was the only Eastern-bloc country to topple its communist regime violently and execute its head of state.

DISSOLUTION OF THE SOVIET UNION

At the same time, the Soviet republics started legal moves towards potentially declaring sovereignty over their territories, citing the freedom to secede in Article 72 of the USSR constitution. On 7 April 1990, a law was passed allowing a republic to secede if more than two-thirds of its residents voted for it in a referendum. Many held their first free elections in the Soviet era for their own national legislatures in 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to produce legislation contradicting the Union laws in what was known as the 'War of Laws'. In 1989, the Russian SFSR convened a newly elected Congress of People's Deputies. Boris Yeltsin was elected its chairman. On 12 June 1990, the Congress declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and proceeded to pass laws that attempted to supersede some of the Soviet laws. After a landslide victory of Sąjūdis in Lithuania, that country declared its independence restored on 11 March 1990, citing the illegality of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. Soviet forces attempted to halt the secession by crushing popular demonstrations in Lithuania (Bloody Sunday) and Latvia (The Barricades), as a result, numerous civilians were killed or wounded. However, these actions only bolstered international support for the secessionists.

A referendum for the preservation of the USSR was held on 17 March 1991 in nine republics (the remainder having boycotted the vote), with the majority of the population in those republics voting for preservation of the Union in the form of a new federation. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost. In the summer of 1991, the New Union Treaty, which would have turned the country into a much looser Union, was agreed upon by eight republics. The signing of the treaty, however, was interrupted by the August Coup—an attempted coup d'état by hardline members of the government and the KGB who sought to reverse Gorbachev's reforms and reassert the central government's control over the republics. After the coup collapsed, Russian president Yeltsin was seen as a hero for his decisive actions, while Gorbachev's power was effectively ended. The balance of power tipped significantly towards the republics. In August 1991, Latvia and Estonia immediately declared the restoration of their full independence (following Lithuania's 1990 example). Gorbachev resigned as general secretary in late August, and soon afterwards, the party's activities were indefinitely suspended—effectively ending its rule. By the fall, Gorbachev could no longer influence events outside Moscow, and he was being challenged even there by Yeltsin, who had been elected President of Russia in July 1991. 

Later in August, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist party, and Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered the seizure of Soviet property. Gorbachev clung to power as the President of the Soviet Union until 25 December 1991, when the USSR dissolved.In summing up the international ramifications of these events, Vladislav Zubok stated: 'The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological, and economic significance.'

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania consider themselves as revivals of the three independent countries that existed prior to their occupation and annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940. They maintain that the process by which they were incorporated into the Soviet Union violated both international law and their own law, and that in 1990–1991 they were reasserting an independence that still legally existed.

Communist parties outside the Baltic states were not outlawed and their members were not prosecuted. Just a few places attempted to exclude members of communist secret services from decision-making. In some countries, the communist party changed its name and continued to function.

 

Fifteen states emerged from the Soviet Union, with by far the largest and most populous one (which also was the founder of the Soviet state with the October Revolution in Petrograd), the Russian Federation, taking full responsibility for all the rights and obligations of the USSR under the Charter of the United Nations, including the financial obligations. As such, Russia assumed the Soviet Union's UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council, nuclear stockpile and the control over the armed forces; Soviet embassies abroad became Russian embassies.

In his 1992 State of the Union Address, US President George H. W. Bush expressed his emotions: "The biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: By the grace of God, America won the Cold War." Bush and Yeltsin met in February 1992, declaring a new era of "friendship and partnership". In January 1993, Bush and Yeltsin agreed to START II, which provided for further nuclear arms reductions on top of the original START treaty.

AFTERMATH - EFFECTS OF THE COLD WAR

In summing up the international ramifications of these events, Vladislav Zubok stated: 'The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological, and economic significance.'

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia drastically cut military spending, and restructuring the economy left millions unemployed. According to Western analysis, the neo-liberal reforms in Russia culminated in a recession in the early 1990s more severe than the Great Depression as experienced by the United States and Germany. Western analysts suggest that in the 25 years following the end of the Cold War, only five or six of the post-communist states are on a path to joining the rich and capitalist world while most are falling behind, some to such an extent that it will take several decades to catch up to where they were before the collapse of communism.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania consider themselves as revivals of the three independent countries that existed prior to their occupation and annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940. They maintain that the process by which they were incorporated into the Soviet Union violated both international law and their own law, and that in 1990–1991 they were reasserting an independence that still legally existed.

Communist parties outside the Baltic states were not outlawed and their members were not prosecuted. Just a few places attempted to exclude members of communist secret services from decision-making. In some countries, the communist party changed its name and continued to function.

THE FAILURE OF DE-COMMUNIZATION

Stephen Holmes of the University of Chicago argued in 1996 that decommunization, after a brief active period, quickly ended in near-universal failure. After the introduction of lustration, demand for scapegoats has become relatively low, and former communists have been elected for high governmental and other administrative positions. Holmes notes that the only real exception was former East Germany, where thousands of former Stasi informers have been fired from public positions.

Holmes suggests the following reasons for the failure of decommunization:

- After 45–70 years of communist rule, nearly every family has members associated with the state. After the initial desire "to root out the reds" came a realization that massive punishment is wrong and finding only some guilty is hardly justice.

- The urgency of the current economic problems of post-communism makes the crimes of the communist past "old news" for many citizens.

- Decommunization is believed to be a power game of elites.

- The difficulty of dislodging the social elite makes it require a totalitarian state to disenfranchise the "enemies of the people" quickly and efficiently and a desire for normalcy overcomes the desire for punitive justice.

- Very few people have a perfectly clean slate and so are available to fill the positions that require significant expertise.

Compared with the decommunization efforts of the other former constituents of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union, decommunization in Russia has been restricted to half-measures, if conducted at all. Notable anti-communist measures in the Russian Federation include the banning of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (and the creation of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation) as well as changing the names of some Russian cities back to what they were before the 1917 October Revolution (Leningrad to Saint Petersburg, Sverdlovsk to Yekaterinburg and Gorky to Nizhny Novgorod), though others were maintained, with Ulyanovsk (former Simbirsk), Tolyatti (former Stavropol) and Kirov (former Vyatka) being examples. Even though Leningrad and Sverdlovsk were renamed, regions that were named after them are still officially called Leningrad and Sverdlovsk oblasts. 

Nostalgia for the Soviet Union is gradually on the rise in Russia. Communist symbols continue to form an important part of the rhetoric used in state-controlled media, as banning on them in other countries is seen by the Russian foreign ministry as "sacrilege" and "a perverse idea of good and evil". The process of decommunization in Ukraine, a neighbouring post-Soviet state, was met with fierce criticism by Russia, who regularly dismisses Soviet war crimes. The State Anthem of the Russian Federation, adopted in 2000 (the same year Vladimir Putin began his first term as president of Russia), uses the exact same music as the State Anthem of the Soviet Union, but with new lyrics written by Sergey Mikhalkov.

Conversely, decommunization in Ukraine started during and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 With the success of the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, the Ukrainian government approved laws that outlawed communist symbols.

On 15 May 2015, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko signed a set of laws that started a six-month period for the removal of communist monuments (excluding World War II monuments) and renaming of public places named after communist-related themes. At the time, this meant that 22 cities and 44 villages were set to get new names. Until 21 November 2015, municipal governments had the authority to implement this; if they failed to do so, the Oblasts of Ukraine had until 21 May 2016 to change the names. If after that date the settlement had retained its old name, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine would wield authority to assign a new name to the settlement. In 2016, 51,493 streets and 987 cities and villages were renamed, and 1,320 Lenin monuments and 1,069 monuments to other communist figures removed. Violation of the law carries a penalty of a potential media ban and prison sentences of up to five years.

On 24 July 2015, the Ministry of the Interior stripped the Communist Party of Ukraine, the Communist Party of Ukraine (renewed), and the Communist Party of Workers and Peasants of their right to participate in elections and stated it was continuing the court actions that started in July 2014 to end the registration of communist parties in Ukraine. By 16 December 2015, these three parties had been banned in Ukraine; the Communist Party of Ukraine appealed the ban to the European Court of Human Rights.

IT'S NOT OVER - WORLD WAR THREE IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER

The invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin is a visible reminder of the failure of politicians in the Free Word, not to take their eyes off the ball. Or show weakness. All praise to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for his fortitude in standing up to communism.

China is an emerging super-power, with India also making gains on that front, though not a direct communist threat, Narendra Modi continues to purchase oil and gas from the former Soviet Union, refine it, and sell it on to Europe. Thus in effect, arming Russia as a back-door ally. Whereas, Chinese Xi Jinping openly supports Russia, as another dictator looking to expand globally.

It's only over, when it's over. The battle continues Democracy Vs Communism. The smartest nations will win, with the smartest weapons and the most economically sound policies. Smart does not necessarily mean nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Possibly, very cheap weapons that do not cost human lives, and only absorb a small proportion of GDP. In other words; aerial drones, robotic infantry and autonomous vessels. All of which rely on secure computer programs, to prevent Cyber Wars. With any attempt to hack such systems, being a declared act of war. With immediate reprisals authorised by NATO.

 

The world has bounced back into a Cold War situation, that is hotting up considerably. World War Three is said by many to have already begun. If we are not careful. A rhetoric that allegedly includes Lord Cameron and Grant Shapps in the UK.

 

INDIA ECONOMIC TIMES FEBRUARY 21 2024

 

A European think-tank revealed that over one-third of India's oil product exports to the G7-led coalition countries came from Russian crude. While the coalition imposed price caps on crude but not on refined products, India's Jamnagar refinery, operated by Reliance Industries Ltd, played a significant role, exporting EUR 5.2 billion of oil products to the coalition. Despite restrictions on Russian crude, India imported EUR 3.04 billion of it to supply the sanctioned countries. Additionally, the Vadinar refinery, operated by Nayara Energy and partly owned by Rosneft, exported EUR 469 million of oil products to the coalition, with the USA being a major importer. Should this/these refineries be fined and exports blocked on moral grounds, or the owners and shareholders added to the list of war criminals aiding and abetting the war criminal: Vladimir Putin. Or, should Indian imports be banned in Europe, the Americas and other democracies?

 

One way of disarming Russia is to increase the installation of solar farms and wind farms, to generate renewable electricity and produce green hydrogen. EV manufacturer's should be forced by law to include solar panels on the roofs and bonnets of newly manufactured electric vehicles.

 

Simple changes in policy like this might devalue oil as a currency to wage war. Like Blood Diamonds. Cheap Chinese imports, especially of EV's should be banned in NATO countries. NATO nations should promote manufacturing of solar panels, and EV batteries to include grants and subsidies where necessary, to reduce the threat from China.

 

Hit them where it hurts. In their wallets and bank accounts.

 

All the while waving the olive branch of peace, for those who demilitarize and decommission nuclear arms. Including not building any more nuclear submarines or aircraft carriers. As in increasing their numbers. And not stockpiling munitions. While at the same time, reducing the numbers of military staff. Hence, spending on war.

 

A show of good faith, and a step in the right direction, might be Russia ceasing aggression towards Ukraine. To include a return to borders before declaring war. And, officially liberating Crimea.

 

If that were to happen, then NATO members could begin to build relations with the former USSR. Leaving China to come to terms with, as to their aggressive financial takeover of the world. That must stop, with overseas investments in NATO nations being banned from non-NATO members.

 

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/india-exported-usd-6-65-bn-oil-products-derived-from-russian-oil-to-sanctioning-nations-report/

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 This website is Copyright © Cleaner Oceans Foundation Ltd., March 2024. Asserted as per the Berne Convention.

In this fictional story, the characters and events are the product of the author's imagination.

 

 

 

 

THE COLD WAS WAS A PERIOD OF POLITICAL TENSION BETWEEN THE SOVIET UNION, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - WESTERN AND EASTERN BLOCS OF EUROPE - INVOLVING PROXY WARS