Cold War 1947-1953 and its origins: Encyclopedia II - Cold War 1947-1953 and its origins - The breakdown of postwar peace

Cold War 1947-1953 and its origins - The breakdown of postwar peace

When the war ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, Soviet and Western (US, British, and French) troops were located in particular places, essentially, along a line in the center of Europe. Aside from a few minor adjustments, this would be the "Iron Curtain" of the Cold War. In hindsight, Yalta signified the agreement of both sides that they could stay there and that neither side would use force to push the other out. This tacit accord applied to Asia as well, as evidenced by US occupation of Japan and the division of Korea. Politically, therefore, Yalta was an agreement on the postwar status quo in which Soviet Union hegemony reigned over about one third and the United States over two thirds.

There were fundamental contrasts between the visions of the United States and the Soviet Union, between capitalism and communism. Those contrasts had been simplified and refined in national ideologies to represent two ways of life, each vindicated in 1945 by previous disasters. Conflicting models of autarky versus exports, of state planning against private enterprise, were to vie for the allegiance of the developing and developed world in the postwar years. Even so, however, the Cold War was not obviously inevitable in 1945.

Despite the wherewithal of the United States to advance a different vision of postwar Europe, Stalin viewed the reemergence of Germany and Japan as Russia's chief threats, not the United States. Stalin assumed that the capitalist camp would soon resume its internal rivalry over colonies and trade and not pose a threat to the USSR. Economic advisers such as Eugen Varga reinforced this view, predicting a postwar crisis of overproduction in capitalist countries, which would culminate by 1947-1948 in another great depression. He believed that America's prosperity in 1945 was not so much a triumph of free enterprise as the result of the government bankrolling business.

What would be the result of massive postwar demilitarization? Stalin predicted overproduction and depression. Stalin thus assumed that the Americans would need to offer him economic aid, needing to find any outlet for massive capital investments just to maintain the wartime industrial production that brought the US out of the Great Depression. Thus, the prospects of an Anglo-American front against him seemed slim from Stalin's standpoint. However, there would be no postwar crisis of overproduction. And, as Stalin anticipated, this was averted by maintaining roughly the same levels of government spending. It was just maintained in a vastly different way.

But the whole role of government was not set in stone and was in question once again. Although America's military-industrial complex was born in World War II, it could have been scaled back. Pressures to "get back to normal" were intense. Congress wanted a return to low, balanced budgets, and families clamored to see the soldiers sent back home. The Truman administration worried first about a postwar slump, then about the inflationary consequences of pent-up consumer demand. The GI Bill of Rights, adopted in 1944, was one answer: subsidizing veterans to complete their education rather than flood the job market and probably boost the unemployment figures. Moreover, on July 20, 1948 President Harry S. Truman issued the first peacetime military draft in the United States amid increasing tensions with the Soviet Union.

Thus, a conversion to the prewar economy would be extremely difficult, and in the end, it did not happen. In the end, the postwar government would look a lot like the wartime government, with the military establishment, along with military-security dominant. The postwar capitalist slump predicted by Stalin would not be averted by domestic management, supplemented perhaps by a greater role in promoting international trade and monetary relations. In fact, President Roosevelt in 1941 hoped that after the war, the world's largest building, the huge, mile-circumference Pentagon complex in northern Virginia, would be converted into a storage facility. It was not; the military-industrial complex dominated postwar life, largely the result of the Cold War.

Cold War 1947-1953 and its origins - Two visions of the world

The United States hoped to shape the postwar world by opening up the world's markets to capitalist trade - a rebuilt capitalist Europe that could again serve as a hub in world affairs. The Atlantic Charter was publicized regarding this with principles such as self-determination - the right of nations to choose their own government - but was in practice abrogated by both the West as by the East. Franklin D. Roosevelt had never forgotten the excitement with which he had greeted the principles of Wilsonian idealism during World War I, and he saw his mission in the 1940s as bringing lasting peace and genuine democracy to the world.

This vision was equally a vision of national self-interest. World War II resulted in enormous destruction of infrastructure and populations throughout Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, with almost no country left unscathed. The only major industrial power in the world to emerge intact—and even greatly strengthened from an economic perspective—was the United States, which moved swiftly to consolidate its position. As the world's greatest industrial power, and as the only world power unravaged by the war, the United States stood to gain more than any other country from opening the entire world to unfettered trade. The United States would have a global market for its exports, and it would have unrestricted access to vital raw materials. Determined to avoid another economic catastrophe like that of the 1930s, Roosevelt saw the creation of the postwar order as a way to ensure continuing US prosperity.

Truman could advance these principles with an economic powerhouse that produced 50 % of the world's industrial goods and military power that rested on a monopoly of the new atom bomb. These aims were at the center of what the Soviet Union strove to avoid as the breakdown of the wartime alliance went forward. It also required new international agencies: the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which were created to ensure an open, capitalist, international economy. The Soviet Union opted not to take part.

Cold War 1947-1953 and its origins - The fate of postwar Europe

The withdrawal of the United States to advance a different vision of the postwar world conflicted with Soviet interests, which motivated their determination to shape postwar Europe. The Soviet Union had, since 1924, placed higher priority on its own security and internal development than on Trotsky's vision of world revolution. Accordingly, Stalin had been willing before the war to engage non-communist governments that recognized Soviet control of the former Tsarist Empire and offered assurances of non-aggression. Germany's betrayal of its non-aggression promise convinced Stalin that he could no longer rely on non-communist governments.

After the war, Stalin sought to secure the Soviet Union's western border by installing Communist-dominated regimes under Soviet influence in bordering countries of Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. This decision was a response to a 150-year history of repeated Western assaults on Russia, including World War I, World War II and Napoleon's 1812 invasion. Stalin considered it essential to destroy Germany's capacity for another war, which conflicted with the US desire to rebuild Germany as the economic center of a stable Europe. Thus, much of the heavy industry was uprooted to the U.S.S.R. The West viewed these developments as violations of those nations' basic rights and a clear disregard of the Yalta agreement. Winston Churchill accused Stalin of cordoning off a new Russian empire with an "Iron Curtain." The dispute over Germany escalated after Truman refused to give the Soviet Union reparations from West Germany's industrial plants because he believed it would hamper Germany's economic recovery further. Stalin responded by splitting off the Soviet sector of Germany as a communist state.

Russia's historic lack of direct, year-round maritime access, a perennial concern of Russian foreign policy well before the Bolshevik Revolution, was also a focus for Russia where interests diverged between East and West. Stalin pressed the Turks for improved access out of the Black Sea through Turkey's Dardanelles Strait, which would allow Soviet passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Churchill had earlier recognized Stalin's claims, but now the British and Americans forced the Soviet Union to pull back.

There were other signs of caution on Stalin's part. The Soviet Union eventually withdrew from Northern Iran, at Anglo-American behest; Stalin did observe his 1944 agreement with Churchill and did not aid the communists in the struggle against a weak government in Greece that was supported by the UK; in Finland he accepted a friendly, non-communist government; and Russian troops were withdrawn from Czechoslovakia by the end of 1945. However, a communist coup in 1948 made Czechoslovakia an effective Soviet satellite.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The breakdown of postwar peace", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki