The Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s
This article is part ofCold War series. |
Causes of the Cold War |
| The 1950s and 1960s era |
The Cold War since 1970 |
In early 1950 came the first US commitment to form a peace treaty with Japan that would guarantee long-term US military bases. Some observers (including George Kennan) believed that the Japanese treaty led Stalin to approve a plan to invade US-supported South Korea on June 25, 1950. Fearing that a united communist Korea could neutralize US power in Japan, Truman committed US forces and obtained help from the United Nations to drive back the North Koreans to Stalin's surprise. In a historic diplomatic blunder, the Soviets, boycotted the UN Security Council, and thus its power to veto Truman's action in the UN, power, because it would not admit the People's Republic of China.
However, Truman would offset this with his own monumental, historic error: allowing his forces to go to the Chinese-Korean border. Communist China responded with human-wave attacks in November 1950 that decimated US-led forces. Fighting stabilized along the thirty-eight parallel, which had separated the Koreas, but Truman now faced a hostile China, a Sino-Soviet partnership, and a bloated defense budget that quadrupled in eighteen months.
Thus in 1953, the new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, moved to end the Korean War (accomplished with a shaky armistice that lasts to this day) and cut the federal budget. He reduced military spending by one-third but continued fighting the Cold War effectively. As an aside, however, North Korea remains a pressing geopolitical annoyance for the US, labeled a part of George W. Bush's so-called "Axis of Evil" an enduring conflict that still has the Asia Pacific on the brink of war.
In another exercise of the new "rollback" polices, acting on the doctrines of Dulles, Eisenhower thwarted Soviet intervention wielding US nuclear superiority and used the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow unfriendly governments.
And the roots of the ongoing US "war on terrorism" and 2003 "Operation Iraqi Freedom" can be traced through the 1950s. Since the region contained the world's largest oil reserves, the US was concerned about the stability and friendliness of the Arab regimes in the area, which the health of the US economy grew to depend. US companies had already invested heavily in the region.
Thus the United States reacted with alarm as it watched Mohammed Mossadegh, the nationalist prime minister of Iran, begin to resist the neocolonial presence of Western corporations in his nation. In 1951 he nationalized his nation's British-owned oil wells. Convinced that Iran, a Western client state, was shifting toward an independent foreign policy, Eisenhower used the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), joining forces with Iran's military leaders, to overthrow Iran's government. To replace him, the US favored elevating the young Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, from his position as that of a constitutional monarch to that of an absolute ruler. In return, the Shah allowed US companies to share in the development of his nation's reserves. He remained a close US ally for 25 years, even as his regime was becoming increasingly hated and despotic. As another aside, Iran is yet another example of the parallels between 1950s and contemporary US foreign policy. Popular anger, seething and repressed for a generation, eventually culminated in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which led to a hostage crisis that would perhaps later bring down the Carter administration. Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran, which, from the standpoint of the US, had the audacity to overthrow CIA-imposed absolutist regime, is a part of President Bush's so-called "Axis of Evil" along with North Korea. Korea is a focus of George W. Bush's administration, another administration, like Reagan's, notable for its striking affinity with the "massive retaliation" polices of John Foster Dulles.
The US used the CIA to overthrow other governments suspected of turning procommunist, such as Guatemala in 1954, another multiparty democratizing government. In 1958 the US sent troops into Lebanon to maintain its pro-US regime (now, Lebanon's government is a close ally of Syria, touted as a target for another "pre-emptive US attack"), and between 1954 and 1961 the Eisenhower dispatched economic aid and 695 military advisers to South Vietnam, which would later be absorbed by its communist counterpart amid one of history's greatest popular-based insurrections against a corrupt client state. Vietnam remains one of the world's five remaining Communist states.
The American offensive in the Third World was very effective in the short-run, but failed to install pro-US regimes that would be enduring and stable. But some setbacks were evident even in the 1950s. In particular, the first strain among the NATO alliance shattered the concept of the West as a united monolith. Less effective in dealing with the nationalist government in Egypt, in 1956 Eisenhower had to force Britain and France to retreat from a badly planned invasion with Israel intended to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt, a sign that the interest of the United States in the Middle East was much more than its strong support of Israel. The Eisenhower administration opposed French and British imperial adventurism in the region due to sheer prudence, out of fear that Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser's bold standoff with the region's old colonial powers would inspire greater pro-Soviet sentiment in the region. In yet another example of how foreign interventionism of the Eisenhower administration resonates to this day, the United States in 2003 deposed the Iraqi regime, which was inspired by Nasser's secular pan-Arab nationalism and populist social policies.
Thus, the Suez stalemate was a turning point heralding an ever-growing rift between the Atlantic Cold War allies over US hegemony, which was becoming far less of a united monolith than it was in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The West Europeans, with the exclusion of the British until 1971, also developed their own nuclear forces as well as an economy Common Market to be less dependent on Washington. Such rifts mirror changes in global economics. American economic competitiveness faltered in the face of the challenges of Japan and West Germany, which have recovered rapidly from the wartime decimation of the industrial bases. The late nineteenth- and twentieth-century successor to Great Britain as the "workshop of the world," the United States now finds its competitive edge dulled in the international markets while at the same time faced with intensified foreign competition at home.
The 1950s left the pro-Soviet bloc in a precarious position. In 1956, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary which was in a state of revolution. While this revolution was not anti-communist, it was anti-Soviet. Other events left the Soviet Government with little popular or international support at a period when the Soviet programme of international insitutions and peace projects was popular. Sino-Soviet relations were deteriorating and the Communist world would never again be a monolith.
Leading up to the Sino-Soviet Split, the new, dynamic and reformist Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, was broadening Moscow's policy by establishing new relations with India and other key non-aligned, noncommunist states in the Third World. Nikita Khrushchev increased Soviet power by developing a hydrogen bomb and, in 1957, by launching the first earth satellite. To stabilize his European position, Khrushchev created the Warsaw Pact in 1955 (to counter West German rearmament) and built the Berlin Wall in 1961 (to stop the Germans from leaving the communist East).
In the short-run, however, the Berlin Wall was a propaganda setback. And the Soviets garnered a huge victory when Khrushchev formed an alliance with Cuba after Fidel Castro's successful revolution in 1959. Also to the annoyance of the United States the revolution lives on to this day 90 miles from the shore of the greatest hegemonic power in world history.
President John F. Kennedy inherited a growing nuclear superiority from the Eisenhower era of "massive retaliation." But this encouraged the Soviet Union to place missiles in Cuba. Kennedy, backed by superior military force, induced the Soviets to retreat in return for promises not to invade Cuba (as he had in 1962 when CIA-backed Cuban exiles were thwarted at the Bay of Pigs). After this brush with nuclear war, the two leaders banned nuclear tests in the air and underwater after 1962. The Soviets were also forced to begin a huge military buildup.
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 kept an iron-gripped control over their spheres of influence.
President Lyndon Johnson landed 22,000 troops in the Dominican Republic in 1965 to prevent the unlikely emergence of another Castro. Under Leonid Brezhnev, troops from the Warsaw Pact Allies—the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, and Hungary—intervened in Czechoslovakia in accordance with a new Soviet doctrine about the "international duty" of socialist countries to protect the gains of socialism, wherever they may be threatened. In the same year Johnson stationed 575,000 troops in South Vietnam to prop up the faltering anticommunist regime and curb Chinese influence in the region.
The American public's faith in the "light at the end of the tunnel" was shattered, however, 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 (and, to a lesser degree, in the 1969 Post-Tet Offensive). 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.
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 NLF and the North Vietnamese Army.
The morality of US 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. The massacre was only stopped after two American soldiers in a helicopter spotted the carnage and intervened to prevent their fellow Americans from killing any more civilians. Although many were appalled by the wholesale slaughter at My Lai, Calley was given a light sentence after his court-martial in 1970, and was later pardoned by President Nixon.
Aside from this massacre, 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 US solders also died.
The casualties inflicted by the US-backed, Khmer Rouge were even higher. Though adherents to a twisted form of Maoism, the Khmer Rouge were anti-Soviet. In 1970, Nixon ordered a military incursion into Cambodia in order to destroy Viet Cong sanctuaries bordering on South Vietnam. Many feel that the Khmer Rouge would probably not have come to power and killed so many (from 900,000 to 2 million) of their people without the destabilization of the war, particularly of the American bombing campaigns to "clear out the sanctuaries" in Cambodia.The Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s
The Korean War
For details see the main article Korean War.
A committed Marxist and Vietnamese nationalist, Ho Chi Minh was never willing to compromise on dreams for a united, independent Vietnam.\De-colonization, the Third World, and superpower rivalry
The Korean War marked a shift in the focal point of the Cold War, from postwar Europe to East Asia. After this point, proxy battles in the Third World would become an ever-important part of Cold War strategic rivalries. Due to several waves of African and Asian de-colonization following the Second World War, a world that had been dominated for over a century by Western imperialist powers was now transformed into a pluralistic world of de-colonized African, Middle Eastern, and Asian nations and of surging resistance to "Yankee imperialism" in Latin America. Amid postwar de-colonization, the Soviet Union relished in its role as the leader of the "anti-imperialist" camp, winning great favor in the Third World for being a stauncher opponent of colonialism than many independent nations in Africa and Asia. And it did not go unnoticed in the Third World that the so-called "free world" consisted by and large of North Atlantic imperialist powers.The Eisenhower administration and "massive retaliation"
Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was the dominant figure in the nation's foreign policy in the 1950s. A patrician, visceral anticommunist closely tied to the nation's financial establishment, Dulles was obsessed with communism's challenge to US corporate power in the Third World. He denounced the "containment" of the Truman administration and espoused an active program of "liberation," which would lead to a "rollback" of communism. The most prominent of those doctrines was the policy of "massive retaliation," which Dulles announced early in 1954, eschewing the costly, conventional ground forces characteristic of the Truman administration in favor of wielding the vast superiority of the US nuclear arsenal and covert intelligence. Dulles defined this approach as "brinksmanship"—pusing the Soviet Union to the brink of war in order to exact concessions.The Cuban Missile Crisis
For details see the main article Cuban Missile Crisis.
US Slaughter of civilians at My LaiThe Vietnam quagmire
For details see the main article Vietnam.
