Cold War (1962-1991)

Threats in both blocs in the mid- to late-1960s

The years between the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the arms control treaties of the 1970s marked growing efforts for both the Soviet Union and the United States to keep control over their spheres of influence. U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson landed 22,000 troops in the Dominican Republic in 1965, claiming to prevent the emergence of another Cuban Revolution. The period from 1962 until Détente saw no incidents as dangerous as the Cuban Missile Crisis, but saw an increasing loss of legitimacy and good will worldwide for both the Soviet Union and United States.

The Soviet Union crushed the " Prague Spring" in 1968. Troops from the Warsaw Pact Allies - the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, and Hungary - intervened in Czechoslovakia in accordance with the "Brezhnev Doctrine," a new Soviet doctrine about the "international duty" of socialist countries to protect the gains of socialism, wherever they may be threatened. The international image of the Soviet Union suffered considerably, especially among Western student movements inspired by the "New Left" and non-Aligned Movement states. Mao's China, for example, condemned both the Soviets and the Americans as imperialists.

The Vietnam War

For details see the main article Vietnam War.

U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson landed 22,000 troops in the Dominican Republic in 1965 to prevent the emergence of another Castro.

More notable, however, was the intervention in Southeast Asia. In 1965 Johnson stationed 22,000 troops in South Vietnam to prop up the faltering anticommunist regime. The South Vietnamese government had long been allied with the United States. The North Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh were backed by the Soviet Union and China. North Vietnam, in turn, supported the National Liberation Front, which drew its ranks from the South Vietnamese working class and peasantry. Seeking to contain "Communist expansion," Johnson increased the number of troops to 575,000 in 1967.

Neither the Soviet Union or China intervened directly in the conflict, but they did supply large amounts of aid and materiel to the North and supported them diplomatically.

While the early years of the war saw significant American casualties the administration assured the public that the war was winnable, and would in the near future result in an American victory. American public's faith in the "light at the end of the tunnel" was shattered, on January 30, 1968, when the enemy, supposedly on the verge of collapse, mounted the Tet Offensive (named after Tet Nguyen Dan, the lunar new year festival which is the most important Vietnamese holiday) in South Vietnam. Although neither of these offensives accomplished any military objectives, the surprising capacity of an enemy that was supposedly on the verge of collapse to even launch such an offensive convinced many Americans that victory was impossible.

A vocal and growing peace movement centered on college campuses became a prominent feature as the counter culture of the 1960s adopted a vocal anti-war position. Especially unpopular was the draft that threatened to send any young person to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Nixon was elected President and began his policy of slow disengagement from the war. The goal was to gradually build up the South Vietnamese Army so that it could fight the war on its own. This policy became the cornerstone of the so-called "Nixon Doctrine." As applied to Vietnam, the doctrine was called "Vietnamization." The goal of Vietnamization was to enable the South Vietnamese army to increasingly hold its own against the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese Army.

The morality of U.S. conduct of the war continued to be an issue under the Nixon Presidency. In 1969, it came to light that Lt. William Calley, a platoon leader in Vietnam, had led a massacre of Vietnamese civilians (including small children) at My Lai a year before. In 1970, Nixon ordered illegal military incursions into Cambodia in order to destroy Viet Cong sanctuaries bordering on South Vietnam.

The Americans pulled out in 1973 and the conflict finally ended in 1975 when the North Vietnamese took Saigon. Millions of Vietnamese died as a consequence of the Vietnam War. The lowest casualty estimates, based on the now-renounced North Vietnamese statements, are around 1.5 million Vietnamese killed. Vietnam released figures on April 3, 1995 that a total of one million Vietnamese combatants and four million civilians were killed in the war. The accuracy of these figures has generally not been challenged. Around 58,000 U.S. solders also died.

Sino-Soviet Split

For details see the main article Sino-Soviet Split.

In the People's Republic of China, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution had both been challenges to Soviet-style socialism, and signs of the USSR's influence over the socialist countries. As "de-Stalinization" went forward in the Soviet Union, Communist China's revolutionary founder, Mao Zedong, condemned the Soviets for "revisionism." The Chinese also were growing increasingly annoyed at being constantly in the number two role in the communist world. The 1960s saw an open split develop between the two powers, leading to a series of border skirmishes on the PRC-USSR border.

The Sino-Soviet split had important ramifications in Southeast Asia. Despite having received substantial aid from China during their long wars the Vietnamese communists aligned themselves with the Soviet Union against China. The communist Khmer Rouge had taken control of Cambodia in 1975 and became one of the most brutal regimes in world history. The newly unified Vietnam and the Khmer regime had poor relations from the outset as the Khmer Rouge began massacring ethic Vietnamese, and then launched raiding parties into Vietnam itself. The Khmer Rouge allied itself with China, but this was not enough to prevent the Vietnamese from invading them and destroying the regime in 1979. While unable to save their Cambodian allies the Chinese did respond to the Vietnamese invading the north of Vietnam on a punitive expedition later in that year. After a few months of heavy fighting and casualties on both sides the Chinese announced the operation was complete and ended the fighting.

The United States played only a minor role in these events, unwilling to get involved in the region after the debacle in Vietnam. The extremely visible disintegration of the communist block played an important role in the easing of Sino-American tensions and in the progress towards east-west Détente.

Détente

The oil shock of 1973 saw dramatic shift in the economic fortunes of the superpowers . The rapid increase in the price of oil devastated the U.S. economy leading to "stagflation" and slow growth. The oil-rich USSR benefited immensely and the influx of oil wealth helped disguise the many systemic flaws in their economy.

During the same period of time, the Soviet Union improved living standards by doubling urban wages and raising rural wages by around 75%, building millions of one-family apartments, and manufacturing large quantities of consumer goods and home appliances. Soviet industrial output increased by 75%, and the Soviet Union became the world's largest producer of oil and steel.

In 1972-1973 the superpowers sough each other's help. Détente had both strategic and economic benefits for both superpowers. President Richard Nixon signed the SALT I treaty with Leonid Brezhnev to limit the development of strategic weapons. Détente had both strategic and economic benefits for both superpowers. Arms control enabled both superpowers to slow the spiraling increases in their bloated defense budgets. At the same time divided Europe began to pursue closer relations. The Ostpolitik of German chancellor Willy Brandt lead to the recognition of East Germany.

This new spirit was made manifest by the important Helsinki Conference that lead to a number of agreements on politics, economics and human rights. A series of arms control agreements such as SALT I and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty were created limit the development of strategic weapons and slow the arms race. The period also saw a rapprochement between China and the United States. The People's Republic of China joined the United Nations and trade and cultural ties were initiated, most notably Nixon's groundbreaking trip to China in 1972.

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Mao Zedong meets Richard Nixon, 1972

During Détente competition still continued, especially in the Middle East and Southern and Eastern Africa. The two nations continued to compete with each other for influence in the resource-rich Third World, most notably in Chile. The 1970s also saw increasing criticism of U.S. support for the Suharto regime in Indonesia, Augusto Pinochet's regime in Chile, and Mobuto Sese Seko's regime in Zaire.

The 1970s inflicted damaging blows to the American confidence characteristic of the 1950s and early 1960s. The War in Vietnam and the Watergate crisis shattered confidence in the presidency. International frustrations, including the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, the hostage crisis in Iran in 1979, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the growth of international terrorism, and the acceleration of the arms race raised fears over the country's ability to control international affairs. The energy crisis, unemployment, and inflation, derided as "stagflation," raised fundamental questions over the future of American prosperity.

The end of Détente and the Reagan administration

U.S. President Jimmy Carter, however, tried to move beyond these setbacks for peace and place another cap on the arms race with a SALT II agreement in 1979, but his efforts were undercut by three surprising developments: the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Nicaraguan Revolution, and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

The Iranian Revolution was an embarrassment for the United States and Carter inability to get American hostages freed cost him the 1980 election. While the United States was mired in recession and the Vietnam quagmire, pro-Soviet governments were making great strives abroad, especially in the Third World. Socialist Vietnam had defeated the United States, becoming a united, independent state under a Communist government. Other socialist insurgencies were spreading rapidly across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

And the Soviet Union seemed committed to the Brezhnev Doctrine, sending troops to Afghanistan at the request of its Communist government. The Afghan invasion in 1979 marked the first time that the Soviet Union sent troops outside the Warsaw Pact since the inception of the Eastern counterpart of NATO. This prompted a swift reaction from the west, the boycotting of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and the heavy funding for the Afghani resistance fighters.

Worried by Soviet deployment of nuclear SS-20 missiles (commenced in 1977), the NATO allies had in 1979 agreed to invite to continued Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to constrain the number of nuclear missiles for battle field targets, threatening to deploy some 500 cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles in West Germany and the Netherlands in case the negotiations were unsuccessful. The negotiations were taken up in Geneva, November 30 1981, were bound to fail. In the countries in question, the planned deployment of Pershing II met intense opposition from the public opinion in a divisive debate. Pershing II missiles were deployed in Europe from January 1984. They were, however, soon withdrawn beginning in October 1988. The shooting down by Soviet fighters of civilian airliner Korean Air Flight 7 also increased tensions.

The "new conservatives" or "neoconservatives" rebelled against the Democratic Party's leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s, especially after the nomination of George McGovern in 1972, blaming blaming "liberal Democrats" for U.S. international setbacks. Many clustered around Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat, but then they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront charges of "Soviet expansionism."

Newly elected U.S. President Ronald Reagan, promising to restore his nation's military strength, called for massive increases in military spending. The increases amounted to about $1.6 trillion over five years. Enormous deficits to pay for the bloated defense budgets, inducing high levels of government borrowing, resulted in high interest rates and an overvalued dollar, which stifled economic growth, resulted in a very unfavorable balance of trade, and depressed the U.S. steel and automotive sectors.

The Reagan administration was committed to stemming the advance of socialism in the Third World. The Reagan administration actively supported the anti-Communist dictatorships of Augusto Pinochet, Ferdinand Marcos, and white-minority ruled South Africa. Reagan, however, did not move toward protracted, long-term interventions like the Vietnam War to stem social revolution in the Third World. Instead, he favored quick campaigns to attack or overthrow leftist governments, such as the attacks on Grenada, and military aid to right-wing militias in Central America seeking to overthrow leftist governments, such as the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. In 1985 Reagan authorized the sale of arms in Iran in an unsuccessful effort to free U.S. hostages in Lebanon; he has since claimed to not know that subordinates were illegally diverting the proceeds to right-wing death-squads in Central America.

The end of the Cold War

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Gorbachev has accused Boris Yeltsin, his old rival and Russia's first post-Soviet president, of tearing the country apart out of a desire to advance his own personal interests.

While the Soviets had enjoyed great achievements on the international stage before Reagan entered office in 1981, such as the unification of their socialist ally, Vietnam (1976), and a string of socialist revolutions in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the country's strengthening ties with Third World nations in the 1960s and 1970s only masked utter weakness next to the United States.

The Soviet economy suffered severe structural problems. Reform stalled between 1964-1982 and supply shortages of consumer goods were becoming notorious. The 1980s saw weak leadership in the Soviet Union. In 1982 Leonid Brezhnev died to be replaced by the short-lived Yuri Andropov and then Konstantin Chernenko who also quickly died.

East-West tensions eased rapidly after the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev. After the deaths of three elderly Soviet leaders in a row since 1982, the Politburo elected Gorbachev Soviet Communist Party chief in 1985, marking the rise of a new generation of leadership. Under Gorbachev, relatively young reform-oriented technocrats, who had begun their careers in the heyday of "de-Stalinization" under reformist leader Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964), rapidly consolidated power, providing new momentum for political and economic liberalization, and the impetus for cultivating warmer relations and trade with the West.

On October 11, 1986 Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland, in an effort to continue discussions about scaling back their intermediate missile arsenals in Europe. The talks broke down in failure. Afterwards, Soviet policymakers increasingly accepted Reagan administration warnings that the U.S. would make the arms race a huge burden for them. The twin burdens of the Cold War arms race on one hand, and the provision of large sums of foreign and military aid, which their socialist allies had grown to expect, on the other possibly left Gorbachev's efforts to boost production of consumer goods and reform the stagnating economy all but impossible.

The result in was a dual approach of cooperation with the west and economic restructuring (perestroika) and democratization (glasnost) domestically, which eventually made it impossible for Gorbachev to reassert central control and influence over Warsaw Pact member states. Reaganite hawks have since argued that pressures stemming from increased U.S. defense spending was an additional impetus for reform.

The regimes of the Eastern bloc were slowly collapsing. Grassroots organization in both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe began to challenge the status quo. The "Solidarity" movement formed in the Gdansk shipyards in 1980 rapidly gained ground; the Communists were ousted in Poland in 1989. The "fall of the Berlin Wall" was a symbol of the fall of Eastern European Communist governments in 1989. Agitation in the Baltic States for independence lead to first Lithuania and then the other two states declaring independence. Disaffection in the other republics were met by promises of greater decentralization. More open elections lead to the election of candidates opposed to Communist rule.

In August 1991 in an attempt to halt the rapid changes to the system a group of Soviet hard-liners represented by Vice-President Gennadi Yanayev launched a coup overthrowing Gorbachev. Russian President Boris Yeltsin rallied the people and much of the army against the coup and the effort collapsed. In September the Baltic states were granted independence. On December 1, Ukraine pulled out of the USSR. On December 26, 1991 the USSR was officially disbanded, breaking up into fifteen constituent parts. The Cold War was over.

Legacy

Today, over half the population in the former Soviet Union is now impoverished in a country where severe poverty had been largely non-existent; life expectancy has dropped drastically; and GDP has halved.

In the West the reaction to the collapse of the Soviet Union led some to speak of a "short twentieth century" framed by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, marking the "end of history."

Some have argued that as the "world's policeman," the United States is left to fill the imperial role of nineteenth century colonial powers, quelling instability or threats to its geopolitical interests wherever they arise much like Britain when it was building up its formal and informal empire in the Victorian era.

Prominent sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein expresses a less triumphalist view, arguing that the end of the Cold War is a prelude to the breakdown of US hegemony. In his recent essay "Pax Americana is Over," Wallerstein argued, "The collapse of communism in effect signified the collapse of liberalism, removing the only ideological justification behind U.S. hegemony, a justification tacitly supported by liberalism's ostensible ideological opponent."

The world's five remaining Communist states are the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and Laos. Cuba and North Korea were hit hard by the collapse of Soviet and Eastern bloc economic assistance, trade, and military support. The world's three remaining Communist states in Asia, following the lead of China under Deng Xiaoping, have moved from the Soviet-style planned economy to "market socialism." The ruling Communist parties of China, Vietnam, and Laos argue that a planned economy is not synonymous to socialism, thus maintaining their rationale for one-party Communist rule.

The collapse of the Eastern European Communist regimes has lead to a number of wars around the globe, especially ethnic and religious conflict, such as in the former Yugoslavia. The post-Cold War era saw a period of unprecedented prosperity in the West, especially in the United States, and a wave of democratization throughout Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe.

Cold War institutions such as North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have found new roles, while other products of the Cold War-era such as the European Union have gone on to great success. The space exploration has petered out in both the United States and Russia without the competitive pressure of the space race.