The ‘Cold War’ was the war waged by the U.S. against the Soviet Union and its allies and the workers’ movement, by means of economic pressure, selective aid, diplomatic manoeuvre, propaganda, assassination, low-intensity military operations and full-scale war from 1947 until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The term was coined by the American political adviser and financier Bernard Baruch in April 1947 during a debate on the Truman Doctrine.
At a series of Conferences in Teheran, Moscow, Yalta and Potsdam between November 1943 and August 1945, Stalin, Churchill and US Presidents Roosevelt and Truman made an agreement dividing the world between "east" and "west". However Stalin proved unable to deliver his side of the bargain, with many countries such as Yugoslavia and Hungary refusing to accept the right-wing regimes imposed on them under the pact. Ultimately, it was the decision of the Greek Communist Party in October 1946, to defy Stalin and launch a campaign against British troops and US-backed Royalists still holding one-third of the country, that triggered the beginning of the "Cold War".
In late 1946 US President Harry Truman abruptly terminated aid to the Soviet Union and a policy paper written by George Kennan spelt out the strategy to be followed:
“... we have in Russia today a population which is physically and spiritually tired ... There are limits to the physical and nervous strength of people themselves. These limits are absolute ones and are binding even for the cruellest dictatorship. ... [thus the USSR could be] sensitive to contrary force ... and flexible in its reaction to political realities. [Thus the US should commit itself to] longterm, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies ... [through] the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.”
In a speech on 12 March 1947, Truman proposed a new global role for the United States as “policeman of the world”. $400m of aid for Greece was followed up by the Marshall Plan and was virtually a declaration of war on the Soviet Union.
U.S. military power was combined with U.S. financial power to systematically destroy anti-capitalist, pro-worker movements and install right-wing, dictatorial governments wherever possible: – massive economic and military support to “friendly” governments in every part of the world, while economically isolating the USSR, China and Eastern Europe behind an ‘iron curtain’ (a term first used by Churchill in March 1946), backed up by a massive nuclear arsenal, and waging all-out covert war against the workers’ and national liberation movements.
Marshall Aid was used systematically to pressure governments and voters in countries like Britain, France and Italy into rejecting communism in exchange for aid, while Keynesian economic policies were used to provide welfare and jobs for the workers.
The most significant military actions of the Cold War were the invasion of Korea in July 1950 which led to three years of bitter warfare, the invasion of Vietnam which began in July 1955 leading to twenty years of warfare, ending in defeat for the U.S. in 1975. But altogether between the dropping of the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima on 6th August 1945, and the 11th September 2001 when the first blow at mainland USA was struck, the US bombed 21 different countries, installed right-wing, military governments in countless others and forced still more into submission by mounting blockades depriving unfriendly countries of trade.
The Cold War, in which the most powerful state the world had ever known waged an all-out war against the working class, using techniques ranging from thermonuclear extermination to bribery on a vast scale to MacCarthyite witchhunting, had a profound effect on politics during this period. Communism was fought for either with machine guns and Soviet support, or through ‘Mothers Clubs’ and other ‘front’ organisations where the participants pretended that they were not communists at all.
Although the Cold War continued up until the fall of the USSR, it was the Tet Offensive of January 1968 in Vietnam, which struck US bases in the heart of Saigon and dealt a mortal blow to the seeming invincibility of the US, which ended the dominance of anti-communism in the West.
