Roberto Gramajo Teacher of English

Origins of the term
The term "Cold War" used in a sense that referred to the tensions of a state like the Soviet Union and its neighbors was coined by George Orwell in an essay titled "You and the Atomic Bomb." The essay was first published October 19, 1945 in the London Tribune. In an excerpt from this essay Orwell wrote:

“ For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbours. ”

The term "cold war" had been used before in a political sense. On March 26, 1938, The Nation ran the headline "Hitler's Cold War". According to Luis Garcia Arias, in his work El Concepto de Guerra y la Denominada "Guerra Fria" (1956), the term was first used by a thirteenth-century Spanish writer named Don Juan Manuel, who used the term "guerra fria" ("cold war") to refer to the coexistence of Islam and Christendom in medieval Spain.

The term "Cold War" was originally thought to have been coined by Bernard Baruch. The Cassell Companion to Quotations cites a speech Baruch gave in South Carolina, April 16, 1947 in which he said, "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war." The Cassell Companion notes: "The phrase was suggested to Baruch by his speechwriter, Herbert Bayard Swope, who had been using it privately since 1940. The columnist Walter Lippmann gave the term wide currency and is sometimes mistakenly credited with coining it. Swope clearly coined it: Baruch gave it currency. "

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations lists a slight variation on Baruch's quote listing it as "We are in the midst of a cold war which is getting warmer", which Baruch used in a speech before the Senate Committee in 1948 (Bartlett's says he first used the term in 1947).


Pre-Cold War
There is some disagreement over what constitutes the beginning of the Cold War. While most historians say that it began in the period just after World War II, some say that it began towards the end of World War I, though tensions between Russia/USSR and Britain and the United States date back to the middle of the 19th century.

The ideological clash between communism and capitalism began in 1917 following the Russian Revolution, when the USSR emerged as the first major communist power. This was the first event which made Russian-American relations a matter of major, long-term concern to the leaders in each country.

Several events led to suspicion and distrust between the United States and the Soviet Union: US intervention in Russia supporting the White Army in the Bolshevik Revolution, the separate peace treaty which led to Russia's withdrawal from World War I, the Bolsheviks' challenge to capitalism[4], the US refusal to recognize the Soviet Union until 1933[5]. Other events in the period immediately before WWII increased this suspicion and distrust. The British appeasement of Germany and the German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact[5] are two notable examples.


World War II and Post-War (1939-1947)
During the war, the Soviets strongly suspected that the Anglo-Americans had opted to let the Russians bear the brunt of the war effort, to insert themselves only at the last minute so as to influence the peace settlement and dominate Europe. Historians such as John Lewis Gaddis dispute this claim, citing other military and strategic calculations for the timing of the Normandy invasion. Nevertheless, Soviet perceptions (or misconceptions) of the West and vice versa left a strong undercurrent of tension and hostility between the Allied powers.

There was severe disagreement between the Allies about how Europe should look following the war. Both sides, moreover, held very dissimilar ideas regarding the establishment and maintenance of post-war security. The Americans tended to understand security in situational terms, assuming that, if US-style governments and markets were established as widely as possible, countries could resolve their differences peacefully, through international organizations.Soviet leaders, however, tended to understand security in terms of space.This reasoning was conditioned by Russia's historical experiences, given the frequency with which the country had been invaded over the last 150 years.

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies attempted to define the framework for a post-war settlement in Europe but could not reach a firm consensus. Following the Allied victory in May, the Soviets effectively occupied Eastern Europe, while the US had much of Western Europe. In occupied Germany, the US and the Soviet Union established zones of occupation and a loose framework for four-power control with the ailing French and British.


Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin meeting at the Potsdam Conference on July 18, 1945. From left to right, first row: Stalin, Truman, Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Second row: Truman confidant Harry Vaughan, Russian interpreter Charles Bohlen, Truman naval aide James K. Vardaman, Jr., and Charles Griffith Ross (partially obscured) .At the Potsdam Conference, starting in late July, serious differences emerged over the future development of Germany and Eastern Europe. One week after the end of the Potsdam Conference, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki added to Soviet distrust of the United States. Shortly after the attacks, Stalin protested to US officials when Truman offered the Soviets little real influence in occupied Japan.

In February 1946, George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow helped to articulate the growing hard line that was being taken against the Soviets. On September 6, 1946, James F. Byrnes made a speech in Germany, repudiating the Morgenthau Plan and warning the Soviets that the US intended to maintain a military presence in Europe indefinitely. (see Restatement of Policy on Germany) As Byrnes admitted one month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people [...] it was a battle between us and Russia over minds [....]"A few weeks after the release of this "Long Telegram", 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" from "Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic."


From "Containment" through the Korean War (1947-1953)
Main article: Cold War (1947-1953)
By 1947, Truman's advisors were worried that time was running out to counter the influence of the Soviet Union.[13] In Europe, post-war economic recovery was faltering, and shortages of food and other essential consumer goods were common. Truman's advisors feared that the Soviet Union was seeking to weaken the position of the US in a period of post-war confusion and collapse.

The event which spurred Truman on to announce formally the US's adopting the policy of "containment" was the British government's announcement in February 1947 that it could no longer afford to finance the Greek monarchical military regime in its civil war against communist-led insurgents. (See Greek Civil War.) Rather than view this war as a civil conflict revolving around domestic issues, US policymakers interpreted it as a Soviet effort; however, the insurgents were helped by Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia, not Moscow.[5] Secretary of State Dean Acheson accused the Soviet Union of conspiracy against the Greek royalists in an effort to "expand" into the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, and in March 1947 the administration unveiled the "Truman Doctrine". It "must be the policy of the United States," Truman declared, "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures."

Truman rallied Americans in his famous "Truman Doctrine" speech to spend $400,000,000 on intervention in the civil war in Greece. In order to mobilize an unfriendly Republican Congress, the Democratic president painted the conflict as a contest between "free" peoples and "totalitarian" regimes, thus dramatically heightening the rhetorical stakes of the conflict.[5] By aiding Greece, Truman set a precedent for US aid to regimes, no matter how repressive and corrupt, that requested help to fight communists. [5]

Without the assistance of huge capital resources to rebuild industry transferred from the United States, Western European economies failed to recover from the enormous wartime destruction of the region's infrastructure. Communist parties, meanwhile, were winning large votes in free elections in countries such as France and Italy. American policymakers were worried that economic conditions in Western Europe might deteriorate to the point where communist parties could seize power there, too, through free elections or popular revolutions.[15] Some US policymakers also feared that their own economy might suffer unless effective demand for their exports in Western Europe was restored.[16]

For US policymakers, threats to Europe's balance of power were not necessarily military ones, but a political and economic challenge.[13] George Kennan helped to summarise the problem at the State Department Planning Staff in May 1947: "Communist activities" were not "the root of the difficulties of Western Europe" but rather "the disruptive effects of the war on the economic, political, and social structure of Europe."[17] According to this view, the Communists were "exploiting the European crisis" to gain power.[17] In June, following the recommendations of the State Department Planning Staff, the Truman Doctrine was complemented by the Marshall Plan, a pledge of economic assistance aimed at rebuilding the Western political-economic system and countering perceived threats to Europe's balance of power, which the US had gone to war to restore, from the radical left.[18]

After lobbying by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Generals Clay and Marshall, the Truman administration finally realised that economic recovery in Europe could not go forward without the reconstruction of the German industrial base on which it had previously had been dependent.[19]

In July, Truman rescinded, on "national security grounds",[20] the punitive Morgenthau plan JCS 1067, which had directed the US forces of occupation in Germany to "take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany." It was replaced by JCS 1779, which stressed instead that "[a]n orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany."[21]


President Truman signs the National Security Act Amendment of 1949 with guests in the Oval Office.Also in July, Truman reorganised his government to fight the Cold War. The National Security Act of 1947, signed by Truman on July 26, created a unified Department of Defence, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Council. These would become the main bureaucracies for US policy in the Cold War.[22]

The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan led to billions in economic and military aid to Western Europe, and Greece and Turkey. With US assistance, the Greek military won its civil war, and the Italian Christian Democrats defeated the powerful Communist-Socialist alliance in the elections of 1948.[22]


European economic alliances
European military alliancesThe US consolidated its new role as leader of the West. In retaliation to Western moves to reunite West Germany, Stalin built blockades to block western access to West Berlin, but Truman maintained supply lines to the enclave by flying supplies in over the blockade from 1948 to '49. (see Berlin Blockade)

The US formally allied itself to the Western European states in the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Stalin countered by tying together the economies of the Eastern bloc in a Soviet-led version of the Marshall Plan, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), and exploding the first Soviet atomic device in August 1949.[5]

The US took the lead in re-establishing West Germany from the three Western zones of occupation in 1949.[11] To counter this Western reorganisation of Germany, the Soviet Union proclaimed its zone of occupation in Germany the "German Democratic Republic" in 1949.[11] In the early 1950s, the US worked for the rearmament of West Germany and, in 1955, its full membership to NATO.[11]

In 1949 Mao's Red Army defeated the US-backed Kuomintang regime in China. Shortly afterwards, the Soviet Union created an alliance with the new People's Republic of China. Confronted with the Chinese Revolution and the end of the US atomic monopoly in 1949, the Truman administration quickly moved to escalate and expand the containment policy.[5] In a secret 1950 document, NSC-68, Truman administration officials proposed to reinforce pro-Western alliance systems and quadruple spending on defence.[5]

US officials moved thereafter to expand "containment" into Asia, Africa, and Latin America.[citation needed] At the same time, revolutionary nationalist movements, often led by Communist parties, were fighting against the restoration of Europe's colonial empires in South-East Asia. The US formalised an alliance with Japan in the early 1950s, thereby guaranteeing Washington a number of long-term military bases. Truman also brought other states, including Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and the Philippines, into a series of alliances.[11]

To Stalin's surprise, Truman committed US forces to drive back the North Koreans.[5] Public opinion in countries such as Great Britain, usual allies of the U.S., was divided for and against the war. British Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross repudiated the sentiment of those opposed when he said "I know there are some who think that the horror and devastation of a world war now would be so frightful, whoever won, and the damage to civilization so lasting, that it would be better to submit to Communist domination. I understand that view - but I reject it. [23] In 1953, the Korean War ended in stalemate, but the US gradually got itself entangled in another civil war. The US supported the South Vietnamese government against North Vietnam, which was backed by the Soviet Union and China.[11]


Crisis and escalation (1953-1962)
Main article: Cold War (1953-1962)

The United States was the leading superpower of the capitalist west.
The Soviet Union was the leading superpower of the communist east.In 1953 changes in political leadership on both sides shifted the dynamic of the Cold War.[22] Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated president in January 1953. During the last 18 months of the Truman administration, the US defense budget had quadrupled; and Eisenhower resolved to reduce military spending by brandishing the United States' nuclear superiority while continuing to fight the Cold War effectively.[5] In March Joseph Stalin died, and the Soviets, now led by Nikita Khrushchev, moved away from Stalin's policies.[22]

Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles initiated a "New Look" for the "containment" strategy, calling for a greater reliance on nuclear weapons to US enemies.[22] Dulles also enunciated the doctrine of "massive retaliation," threatening a severe U.S response to any Soviet aggression. Possessing nuclear superiority, for example, Eisenhower curtailed Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East during the 1956 Suez Crisis.[5]

There was a slight relaxation of tensions after Stalin's death in 1953, but the Cold War in Europe remained an uneasy armed truce.[24] US troops seemed stationed indefinitely in West Germany and Soviet forces seemed indefinitely stationed throughout Eastern Europe. To counter West German rearmament, the Soviets established a formal alliance with the Eastern European Communist states termed the Warsaw Pact Treaty Organization or Warsaw Pact in 1955.[11] In 1956, the status quo was briefly threatened in Hungary, when the Soviets invaded rather than allow the Hungarians to move out of their orbit (see Hungarian Revolution of 1956). Berlin remained divided and contested. In 1961, the East Germans erected the "Berlin Wall" to prevent the movement of East Berliners into West Berlin.

In the US, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy emerged as an influential proponent of a hard-line stance on the Cold War. Although the president quietly deplored his demagoguery, the senator exploited anti-Soviet sentiment when alleging a communist conspiracy to take over the US government, leading to a massive political witch-hunt.

During the 1950s, the Third World was an increasingly important arena of Cold War competition. After the Second World War, the US emerged as the predominant power in the Third World, filling the vacuum of the old imperial hegemony of its principal Cold War allies—the traditional Western European colonial powers (particularly the UK, France, and the Netherlands).[25] However, nationalists in many postcolonial states were often unsympathetic to the Western bloc. [26] Adjusting to decolonization, meanwhile, was a difficult process economically and psychologically for European powers; and NATO suffered, as it included all the world's major colonial empires.[27]

Nationalist movements in some countries and regions, notably Guatemala, Iran, the Philippines, and Indochina were often allied with communist groups—or at least were perceived in the West to be allied with communists.[22] In this context, the US and the Soviet Union increasingly competed for influence by proxy in the Third World as decolonization gained momentum in the 1950s and early 1960s. The US government utilized the CIA in order to remove a string of unfriendly Third World governments and to support others.[22] The US used the CIA to overthrow governments suspected by Washington of turning pro-Soviet, including Iran's first democratically elected government under Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 (see Operation Ajax) and Guatemala's democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954 (see Operation PBSUCCESS) Between 1954 and 1961, the US sent economic aid and military advisors to stem the collapse of South Vietnam's pro-Western regime.[5]

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 reach at Bandung culminated with the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961.[22] Meanwhile, Khrushchev broadened Moscow's policy to establish ties with India and other key neutral states. Independence movements in the Third World transformed the postwar order into a more pluralistic world of decolonized African and Middle Eastern nations and of rising nationalism in Asia and Latin America.[5]


Above the leaders of the major Non-Aligned states meet at the United Nations in New York in October 1960. From left to right: Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India, President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, President Sukarno of Indonesia and President Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia.During the 1950s, the US and the USSR pursued nuclear rearmament and developed long-range weapons with which they could strike the territory of the other.[11] The Soviets developed their own hydrogen bomb and, in 1957, launched the first earth satellite. However, the period after 1956 was marked by serious setbacks for the Soviet Union, most notably the breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance. (see Sino-Soviet Split) Before Khrushchev's ousting in 1964, the Soviets focused on a bitter rivalry with Mao's China for leadership of the global communist movement.

The nuclear arms race brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. Khrushchev formed an alliance with Fidel Castro after the Cuban Revolution in 1959. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy responded to the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba with a naval blockade—a show of force that brought the world close to nuclear war. [28] The Cuban Missile Crisis showed that neither superpower was ready to use nuclear weapons for fear of the other's retaliation, and thus of mutually assured destruction. The aftermath of the crisis led to the first efforts at nuclear disarmament and improving relations. [24]


From confrontation through détente (1962-1979)
Main article: Cold War (1962-1979)

On April 29, 1975, the last U.S. helicopters remove Americans and friends from Saigon as South Vietnam falls.In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union struggled to adjust to a new, more complicated pattern of international relations in which the world was no longer divided into two clearly opposed blocs by the two superpowers.[29] Since the beginning of the postwar period, Western Europe and Japan rapidly recovered from the destruction of World War II and sustained strong economic growth through the 1950s and 1960s, increasing their strength compared to the United States. As a result of the 1973 oil crisis, combined with the growing influence of Third World alignments such as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Non-Aligned Movement, less-powerful countries had more room to assert their independence and often showed themselves resistant to pressure from either superpower. (EB) Moscow, meanwhile, was forced to turn its attention inward to deal with the Soviet Union's deep-seated domestic economic problems. During this period, Soviet leaders such as Alexei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev embraced the notion of détente.[22]

Nevertheless, both superpowers resolved to reinforce their global leadership. Both the Soviet Union and the United States struggled to stave off challenges to their leadership in their own regions. President Lyndon B. Johnson landed 22,000 troops in the Dominican Republic, citing the threat of the emergence of a Cuban-style revolution in Latin America. (see Operation Power Pack)[5] In Eastern Europe, the Soviets in 1968 crushed the Prague Spring reform movement in Czechoslovakia that might have threatened to take the country out of the Warsaw Pact.

The U.S. continued to spend heavily on supporting friendly Third World regimes in Asia. Conflicts in peripheral regions and client states—most prominently in Vietnam—continued.[28] Johnson stationed 575,000 troops in Southeast Asia to defeat the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) and their North Vietnamese allies, but his costly policy weakened the U.S. economy and, by 1975, ultimately culminated in what most of the world saw as a humiliating defeat of the world's most powerful superpower at the hands of one of the world's poorest nations. Brezhnev, meanwhile, faced far more daunting challenges in reviving the Soviet economy, which was declining in part because of heavy military expenditures.[5]

Although indirect conflict between Cold War powers continued through the late 1960s and early 1970s, tensions began to ease, as the period of détente began.[24] The Chinese had sought improved relations with the U.S. in order to gain advantage over the Soviets. In February 1972, Richard Nixon traveled to Beijing and met with Mao Zedong and Chou En-Lai. Nixon and Henry Kissinger then announced a stunning rapprochement with Mao's China.


Brezhnev and Nixon talk during Brezhnev's June 1973 visit to Washington—a high-water mark in détente between the United States and the Soviet Union.Later, in June, Nixon and Kissinger met with Soviet leaders in Moscow, and announced the first of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, aimed at limiting the development of costly antiballistic missiles and offensive nuclear missiles.[22] Between 1972 and 1974, the two sides also agreed to strengthen their economic ties.[5] Meanwhile, these developments coincided with the "Ostpolitik" of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Other agreements were concluded to stabilize the situation in Europe, culminating in the Helsinki Accords signed by the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975.

However, the détente of the 1970s was short-lived. The U.S. Congress limited the economic pact between Nixon and Brezhnev so much that the Soviets repudiated it in 1975.[5] Indirect conflict between the superpowers continued through this period of détente in the Third World, particularly during political crises in the Middle East (see Yom Kippur War), Chile (see Chilean coup of 1973), and Angola (see Angolan Civil War). While President Jimmy Carter tried to place another limit on the arms race with a SALT II agreement in 1979, his efforts were undercut by the other events that year, including the Iranian Revolution and the Nicaraguan Revolution, which both ousted pro-U.S. regimes, and his retaliation against Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December.[5]


The "Second Cold War" (1979-1985)
Main article: Cold War (1979-1985)

In November 1982 American ten-year-old Samantha Smith wrote a letter to the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov expressing her fear of nuclear war, and pleading with him to work toward peace. Surprisingly, Andropov himself replied, and gave her a personal invitation to visit the country, which she accepted. Samantha Smith's visit was one of few prominent attempts to improve relations between the superpowers during Andropov's brief leadership from 1982-1984 at a dangerously low point in U.S.-Soviet relations. Above appears a cover of her book about the experience.The term "second Cold War" has been used by some historians to refer to the period of intensive reawakening of Cold War tensions in the early 1980s.[4] In 1980 Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, vowing to increase military spending and confront the Soviets everywhere.[5] Both Reagan and Britain's new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, denounced the Soviet Union in ideological terms that rivaled that of the worst days of the Cold War in the late 1940s.[11]

Reagan spent $2.2 trillion for the military over eight years. Military spending, combined with the legacy of the economic structural problems of the 1970s, transformed the U.S. from the world's leading creditor in 1981 to the world's leading debtor.[5] Tensions intensified in the early 1980s when Reagan installed U.S. cruise missiles in Europe and announced his experimental "Strategic Defense Initiative," nicknamed "Star Wars," to shoot down missiles in mid-flight. Reagan also imposed economic sanctions to protest the suppression of the opposition Solidarity movement in Poland.

U.S. domestic public concerns about intervening in foreign conflicts persisted from the end of the Vietnam War.[30] But Reagan did not encounter major public opposition to his foreign policies. The Reagan administration emphasized the use of quick, low cost counterinsurgency tactics to intervene in foreign conflicts.[31] In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened in the multisided Lebanese Civil War (see 1983 Beirut barracks bombing), invaded Grenada (see Invasion of Grenada), bombed Libya (see United States bombing of Libya), and backed the Central American Contras—right-wing paramilitaries seeking overthrow the Soviet-aligned Sandinista government in Nicaragua.[32] While Reagan's interventions against Grenada and Libya were popular in the U.S., his backing of the Contra rebels was mired in controversy. In 1985, the president authorized the sale of arms to Iran; later, administration subordinates illegally diverted the proceeds to the Contras. (see Iran-Contra)

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 waged a surprisingly fierce resistance against the invasion.[33] The Kremlin sent nearly 100,000 troops to support its puppet regime in Afghanistan, leading many outside observers to call the war the Soviets' Vietnam.[34] 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 high U.S. 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," he construed, "be seeing a period of foreign movement at a time of internal decay."[35]


End of the Cold War
Main article: Cold War (1985-1991)

In a famed address, United States President Ronald Reagan challenges Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, 12 June 1987By the early 1980s, the Soviet armed forces were the largest in the world by many measures—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.[36] However, the quantitative advantages held by the Soviet military often concealed areas where the Eastern bloc dramatically lagged behind the West. This led many U.S. observers to vastly overestimate Soviet power. (LaFeber 2002, 340)

By the late years of the Cold War, Moscow had built up a military that consumed as much as twenty-five percent of the Soviet Union's gross national product at the expense of consumer goods and investment in civilian sectors (LaFeber 2002, 332). But the size of the Soviet armed forces was not necessarily the result of a simple action-reaction arms race with the United States (Odom). Instead, Soviet spending on the arms race and other Cold War commitments can be understood as both a cause and effect of the deep-seated structural problems in the Soviet system, which accumulated at least a decade of economic stagnation during the Brezhnev years (see Economy of the Soviet Union). Soviet investment in the defense sector was not necessarily driven by military necessity, but in large part by the interests of massive party and state bureaucracies dependent on the sector for their own power and privileges (LaFeber 2002, 335).

By the time Mikhail Gorbachev had ascended to power in 1985, the Soviets suffered from an economic growth rate close to zero percent,[citation needed] combined with a sharp fall in hard currency earnings as a result of the downward slide in world oil prices in the 1980s. (LaFaber 2002, 331-333) (Petroleum exports made up around 60 percent of the Soviet Union's total export earnings.) (LaFeber 2002, 332) To restructure the Soviet economy before it collapsed, Gorbachev announced an agenda of rapid reform (see perestroika and glasnost). Reform required Gorbachev to redirect the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more profitable areas in the civilian sector. As a result, Gorbachev offered major concessions to the United States on the levels of conventional forces, nuclear weapons, and policy in Eastern Europe.

Many U.S. Soviet experts and administration officials doubted that Gorbachev was serious about winding down the arms race (LaFeber, 2002), but the new Soviet leader eventually proved more concerned about reversing the Soviet Union's deteriorating economic condition than fighting the arms race with the West. (Palmowski) The Kremlin made major military and political concessions; in response Reagan agreed to renew talks on economic issues and the scaling-back of the arms race. The East-West tensions that had reached intense new heights earlier in the decade rapidly subsided through the mid-to-late 1980s. In 1988, the Soviets officially declared that they would no longer intervene in the affairs of allied states in Eastern Europe. In 1989, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan.

In December 1989, Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush declared the Cold War officially over at a summit meeting in Malta. [37] But by then, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink of collapse, and the Communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact states were losing power. In the USSR itself, Gorbachev tried to reform the party to destroy resistance to his reforms, but, in doing so, ultimately weakened the bonds that held the state and union together. By February 1990, the Communist Party was forced to surrender its 73-year old monopoly on state power. By December of the next year, the union-state also dissolved, breaking the USSR up into fifteen separate independent states. (see Dissolution of the USSR)


Legacy
Despite its rapid and relatively bloodless end, the Cold War was fought at a tremendous cost globally over the course of more than four decades. It cost the U.S. up to $8 trillion in military expenditures, and the lives of nearly 100,000 Americans in Korea and Vietnam.[38] It cost the Soviets an even higher share of their gross national product. In Southeast Asia, local civil wars were intensified by superpower rivalry, leaving millions dead.

The end of the Cold War gave Russia the chance to cut military spending dramatically, but the adjustment was wrenching. The military-industrial sector employed at least one of every five Soviet adults.[39] Its dismantling left millions throughout the former Soviet Union unemployed. Russian living standards have worsened overall in the post-Cold War years, although the economy has resumed growth in recent years. In the 1990s, Russia suffered an economic downturn more severe than the U.S. or Germany had undergone six decades earlier in the Great Depression after it had embarked on capitalist economic reforms.[40]

The legacy of the Cold War continues to structure world affairs.[4] The Cold War institutionalized the role of the United States in the postwar global economic and political system. By 1989, the U.S. was responsible for military alliances with 50 countries and 1.5 million U.S. troops were posted in 117 countries.[28] The Cold War also institutionalized the commitment to a huge, permanent wartime military-industrial complex.[28]

Some of the economic and social tensions that underpinned Cold War competition in parts of the Third World remain acute. The breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly ruled by Communist governments has produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia.[4] In some countries, the breakdown of state control was accompanied by state failure, such as in Afghanistan. But in other areas, particularly much of Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War was accompanied by a large growth in the number of liberal democracies. In areas where the two superpowers had been waging proxy wars, and subsidizing local conflicts, many conflicts ended with the Cold War; and the occurrence of interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, or refugee and displaced persons crises declined sharply.[41]