{"id":1596,"date":"2015-08-20T05:33:42","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T05:33:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.candelalearning.com\/americanyawphist118x15x1\/?post_type=chapter&p=1596"},"modified":"2015-08-20T05:33:42","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T05:33:42","slug":"political-economic-and-military-dimensions-2","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/sanjacinto-atdcoursereview-ushistory2-1\/chapter\/political-economic-and-military-dimensions-2\/","title":{"raw":"Political, Economic, and Military Dimensions","rendered":"Political, Economic, and Military Dimensions"},"content":{"raw":"The Cold War grew out of a failure to achieve a durable settlement among leaders from the \u2018Big Three\u2019 Allies\u2014the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union\u2014as they met at Yalta in Russian Crimea and at Potsdam in occupied Germany to shape the postwar order. The Germans had pillaged their way across Eastern Europe and the Soviets had pillaged their way back across it at the cost of millions of lives. Stalin considered within the Soviet \u2018sphere of influence.\u2019 With Germany\u2019s defeat imminent, the Allies set terms for unconditional surrender, while deliberating over reparations, tribunals, and the nature of an occupation regime that would initially be divided into American, British, French, and Soviet zones. Even as plans were made to end the fighting in the Pacific, and it was determined that the Soviets would declare war on Japan within ninety days of Germany\u2019s surrender, suspicion and mistrust were already mounting. The political landscape was altered drastically by Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s sudden death in April 1945, just days before the inaugural meeting of the United Nations (UN). Roosevelt had remained skeptical of Stalin but held out a trusting hope that the Soviets could be brought into the \u201cFree World,\u201d but Truman, like Churchill, had no illusions of Stalin\u2019s postwar cooperation and was committed to a hardline anti-Soviet approach.\r\n\r\nAt the Potsdam Conference, held on the outskirts of Berlin from mid-July to early August, the allies debated the fate of Soviet-occupied Poland. Toward the end of the meeting, the American delegation received word that Manhattan Project scientists had successfully tested an atomic bomb. On July 24, when Truman told Stalin about this \u201cnew weapon of unusual destructive force,\u201d the Soviet leader simply nodded his acknowledgement and said that he hoped the Americans would make \u201cgood use\u201d of it.\r\n\r\nThe Cold War had long roots. An alliance of convenience during World War II to bring down Hitler\u2019s Germany was not enough to erase decades of mutual suspicions. The Bolshevik Revolution had overthrown the Russian Tsarists during World War I. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin urged an immediate worldwide peace that would pave the way for world socialism just as Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into the war with promises of global democracy and free trade. The United States had intervened militarily against the Red Army during the Russian civil war, and when the Soviet Union was founded in 1922 the United States refused to recognize it. The two powers were brought together only by their common enemy, and, without that common enemy, there was little hope for cooperation.\r\n\r\nOn the eve of American involvement in World War II, on August 14, 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill had issued a joint declaration of goals for postwar peace, known as the Atlantic Charter. An adaptation of Wilson\u2019s Fourteen Points, the Atlantic Charter established the creation of the United Nations. The Soviet Union was among the fifty charter UN member-states and was given one of five seats\u2014alongside the US, Britain, France, and China\u2014on the select Security Council. The Atlantic Charter, though, also set in motion the planning for a reorganized global economy. The July 1944 United Nations Financial and Monetary Conference, more popularly known as the Bretton Woods Conference, created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the forerunner of the World Bank, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). The \u201cBretton Woods system\u201d was bolstered in 1947 with the addition of the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), forerunner of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Soviets rejected it all.\r\n\r\nMany Soviet and American officials knew that the Soviet-American relationship would dissolve into renewed hostility upon the closing of the war, and events proved them right. In a 1947 article for Foreign Affairs<\/i>\u2014written under the pseudonym \u201cMr. X\u201d\u2014George Kennan warned that Americans should \u201ccontinue to regard the Soviet Union as a rival, not a partner,\u201d since Stalin harbored \u201cno real faith in the possibility of a permanent happy coexistence of the Socialist and capitalist worlds.\u201d He urged US leaders to pursue \u201ca policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians\u201d wherever they threaten the interests of peace and stability.\r\n\r\nTruman, on March 12, 1947, announced $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey, where \u201cterrorist activities\u2026led by Communists\u201d jeopardized \u201cdemocratic\u201d governance. With Britain \u201creducing or liquidating its commitments in several parts of the world, including Greece,\u201d it fell on the US, Truman said, \u201cto support free peoples\u2026resisting attempted subjugation by\u2026outside pressures.\u201d The so-called \u201cTruman Doctrine\u201d became a cornerstone of the American policy of \u201ccontainment.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn the harsh winter of 1946-47, famine loomed in much of continental Europe. Blizzards and freezing cold halted coal production. Factories closed. Unemployment spiked. Amid these conditions, the Communist parties of France and Italy gained nearly a third of the seats in their respective Parliaments. American officials worried that Europe\u2019s impoverished masses were increasingly vulnerable to Soviet propaganda. The situation remained dire through the spring, when Secretary of State General George Marshall gave an address at Harvard University, on June 5, 1947, suggesting that \u201cthe United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health to the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.\u201d Although Marshall had stipulated to potential critics that his proposal was \u201cnot directed against any country, but against hunger, poverty\u2026and chaos,\u201d Stalin clearly understood the development of the ERP as an assault against Communism in Europe; he saw it as a \u2018Trojan Horse\u2019 designed to lure Germany and other countries into the capitalist web.\r\n\r\nThe European Recovery Program (ERP), popularly known as the Marshal Plan, pumped enormous sums into Western Europe. From 1948-1952 the US invested $13 billion toward reconstruction while simultaneously loosening trade barriers. To avoid the postwar chaos of World War I, the Marshall Plan was designed to rebuild Western Europe, open markets, and win European support for capitalist democracies. The Soviets countered with the Molotov Plan, a symbolic pledge of aid to Eastern Europe. Polish leader J\u00f3zef Cyrankiewicz was rewarded with a five-year, $450 million dollar trade agreement from Russia for boycotting the Plan. Czechoslovakia received $200 million of American assistance but was summoned to Moscow where Stalin threatened Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk. Masaryk later recounted that he \u201cwent to Moscow as the foreign minister of an independent sovereign state,\u201d but \u201creturned as a lackey of the Soviet Government.\u201d Stalin exercised even tighter control over Soviet \u201csatellite\u201d countries in Central and Eastern Europe.\r\n\r\nThe situation in Germany meanwhile deteriorated. Berlin had been divided into communist and capitalist zones. In June 1948, when the US, British, and French officials introduced a new currency, the Soviet Union initiated a ground blockade, cutting off rail and road access to West Berlin (landlocked within the Soviet occupation zone) to gain control over the entire city. The United States organized and coordinated a massive airlift that flew essential supplies into the beleaguered city for eleven months, until the Soviets lifted the blockade on May 12, 1949. Germany was officially broken in half. On May 23, the western half of the country was formally renamed the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the eastern Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic (GDR) later that fall. Berlin, which lay squarely within the GDR, was divided into two sections (later famously separated from August 1961 until November 1989 by walls).\r\n
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_917\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1000\"]\"A<\/a> The Berlin Blockade and resultant Allied airlift was one of the first major crises of the Cold War. Photograph, U.S. Navy Douglas R4D and U.S. Air Force C-47 aircraft unload at Tempelhof Airport during the Berlin Airlift, c. 1948-1949. Wikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nIn the summer of 1949, American officials launched the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO), a mutual defense pact in which the US and Canada were joined by England, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. The Soviet Union would formalize its own collective defensive agreement in 1955, the Warsaw Pact, which included Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany.\r\n\r\nLiberal journalist Walter Lippmann was largely responsible for popularizing the term \u201cthe Cold War\u201d in his book, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy<\/i>, published in 1947. Lippmann envisioned a prolonged stalemate between the US and the USSR, a war of words and ideas in which direct shots would not necessarily be fired between the two. Lippmann agreed that the Soviet Union would only be \u201cprevented from expanding\u201d if it were \u201cconfronted with\u2026American power,\u201d but he felt \u201cthat the strategical conception and plan\u201d recommended by Mr. X (George Kennan) was \u201cfundamentally unsound,\u201d as it would require having \u201cthe money and the military power always available in sufficient amounts to apply \u2018counter-force\u2019 at constantly shifting points all over the world.\u201d Lippmann cautioned against making far-flung, open-ended commitments, favoring instead a more limited engagement that focused on halting the influence of communism in the \u2018heart\u2019 of Europe; he believed that if the Soviet system were successfully restrained on the Continent, it could otherwise be left alone to collapse under the weight of its own imperfections.\r\n\r\nA new chapter in the Cold War began on October 1, 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by Mao Tse-tung declared victory against \u201cKuomintang\u201d Nationalists led by the Western-backed Chiang Kai-shek. The Kuomintang retreated to the island of Taiwan and the CCP took over the mainland under the red flag of the People\u2019s Republic of China (PRC). Coming so soon after the Soviet Union\u2019s successful test of an atomic bomb, on August 29, the \u201closs of China,\u201d the world\u2019s most populous country, contributed to a sense of panic among American foreign policymakers, whose attention began to shift from Europe to Asia. After Dean Acheson became Secretary of State in 1949, Kennan was replaced in the State Department by former investment banker Paul Nitze, whose first task was to help compose, as Acheson later described in his memoir, a document designed to \u201cbludgeon the mass mind of \u2018top government\u2019\u201d into approving a \u201csubstantial increase\u201d in military expenditures.\r\n
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_920\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1000\"]\"A<\/a> The communist world system rested, in part, on the relationship between the two largest communist nations\u2014the Soviet Union and the People\u2019s Republic of China. This 1950 Chinese Stamp depicts Joseph Stalin shaking hands with Mao Zedong. Wikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n\u201cNational Security Memorandum 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,\u201d a national defense memo known as \u201cNSC-68,\u201d achieved its goal. Issued in April 1950, the nearly sixty-page classified memo warned of \u201cincreasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction,\u201d which served to remind \u201cevery individual\u201d of \u201cthe ever-present possibility of annihilation.\u201d It said that leaders of the USSR and its \u201cinternational communist movement\u201d sought only \u201cto retain and solidify their absolute power.\u201d As the central \u201cbulwark of opposition to Soviet expansion,\u201d America had become \u201cthe principal enemy\u201d that \u201cmust be subverted or destroyed by one means or another.\u201d NSC-68 urged a \u201crapid build-up of political, economic, and military strength\u201d in order to \u201croll back the Kremlin\u2019s drive for world domination.\u201d Such a massive commitment of resources, amounting to more than a threefold increase in the annual defense budget, was necessary because the USSR, \u201cunlike previous aspirants to hegemony,\u201d was \u201canimated by a new fanatic faith,\u201d seeking \u201cto impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.\u201d Both Kennan and Lippmann were among a minority in the \u2018foreign policy establishment\u2019 who argued to no avail that such a \u2018militarization of containment\u2019 was tragically wrongheaded.\r\n\r\nOn June 25, 1950, as US officials were considering the merits of NSC 68\u2019s proposals, including \u201cthe intensification of\u2026operations by covert means in the fields of economic\u2026political and psychological warfare\u201d designed to foment \u201cunrest and revolt in\u2026[Soviet] satellite countries,\u201d fighting erupted in Korea between communists in the north and American-backed anti-communists in the south.\r\n\r\nAfter Japan surrendered in September 1945, a US-Soviet joint occupation had paved the way for the division of Korea. In November 1947, the UN passed a resolution that a united government in Korea should be created but the Soviet Union refused to cooperate. Only the south held elections. The Republic of Korea (ROK), South Korea, was created three months after the election. A month later, communists in the north established the Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Both claimed to stand for a unified Korean peninsula. The UN recognized the ROK, but incessant armed conflict broke out between North and South.\r\n\r\nIn the spring of 1950, Stalin hesitantly endorsed North Korean leader Kim Il Sung\u2019s plan to \u2018liberate\u2019 the South by force, a plan heavily influenced by Mao\u2019s recent victory in China. While he did not desire a military confrontation with the US, Stalin thought correctly that he could encourage his Chinese comrades to support North Korea if the war turned against the DPRK. The North Koreans launched a successful surprise attack and Seoul, the capital of South Korea, fell to the communists on June 28. The UN passed resolutions demanding that North Korea cease hostilities and withdraw its armed forces to the 38th<\/sup> parallel and calling on member states to provide the ROK military assistance to repulse the Northern attack.\r\n\r\nThat July, UN forces mobilized under American General Douglass MacArthur. Troops landed at Inchon, a port city around 30 miles away from Seoul, and took the city on September 28. They moved on North Korea. On October 1, ROK\/UN forces crossed the 38th parallel, and on October 26 they reached the Yalu River, the traditional Korea-China border. They were met by 300,000 Chinese troops who broke the advance and rolled up the offensive. On November 30, ROK\/UN forces began a fevered retreat. They returned across the 38th<\/sup> parallel and abandoned Seoul on January 4, 1951. The United Nations forces regrouped, but the war entered into a stalemate. General MacArthur, growing impatient and wanting to eliminate the communist threats, requested authorization to use nuclear weapons against North Korea and China. Denied, MacArthur publicly denounced Truman. Truman, unwilling to threaten World War III and refusing to tolerate MacArthur\u2019s public insubordination, dismissed the General in April. On June 23, 1951, the Soviet ambassador to the UN suggested a cease-fire, which the US immediately accepted. Peace talks continued for two years.\r\n
\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_921\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1000\"]\"A<\/a> With the policy of \u201ccontaining\u201d communism and at home and abroad, the U.S. pressured the United Nations to support the South Koreans, ultimately supplying American troops to fight in the civil war. Though rather forgotten in the annals of American history, the Korean War caused over 30,000 American deaths and 100,000 wounded, leaving an indelible mark on those who served. Wikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\nGeneral Dwight Eisenhower defeated Truman in the 1952 presidential election and Stalin died in March 1953. The DPRK warmed to peace, and an armistice agreement was signed on July 27, 1953. Upwards of 1.5 million people had died during the conflict.\r\n\r\nComing so soon after World War II and ending without clear victory, Korea became for many Americans a \u2018forgotten war.\u2019 Decades later, though, the nation\u2019s other major intervention in Asia would be anything but forgotten. The Vietnam War had deep roots in the Cold War world. Vietnam had been colonized by France and seized by Japan during World War II. The nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh had been backed by the US during his anti-Japanese insurgency and, following Japan\u2019s surrender in 1945, \u201cViet Minh\u201d nationalists, quoting Thomas Jefferson, declared an independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). Yet France moved to reassert authority over its former colony in Indochina, and the United States sacrificed Vietnamese self-determination for France\u2019s colonial imperatives. Ho Chi Minh turned to the Soviet Union for assistance in waging war against the French colonizers in a protracted war.\r\n\r\nAfter French troops were defeated at the \u2018Battle of Dien Bien Phu\u2019 in May 1954, US officials helped broker a temporary settlement that partitioned Vietnam in two, with a Soviet\/Chinese-backed state in the north and an American-backed state in the south. To stifle communist expansion southward, the United States would send arms, offer military advisors, prop up corrupt politicians, stop elections, and, eventually, send over 500,000 troops, of whom nearly 60,000 would be lost before the communists finally reunified the country.","rendered":"

The Cold War grew out of a failure to achieve a durable settlement among leaders from the \u2018Big Three\u2019 Allies\u2014the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union\u2014as they met at Yalta in Russian Crimea and at Potsdam in occupied Germany to shape the postwar order. The Germans had pillaged their way across Eastern Europe and the Soviets had pillaged their way back across it at the cost of millions of lives. Stalin considered within the Soviet \u2018sphere of influence.\u2019 With Germany\u2019s defeat imminent, the Allies set terms for unconditional surrender, while deliberating over reparations, tribunals, and the nature of an occupation regime that would initially be divided into American, British, French, and Soviet zones. Even as plans were made to end the fighting in the Pacific, and it was determined that the Soviets would declare war on Japan within ninety days of Germany\u2019s surrender, suspicion and mistrust were already mounting. The political landscape was altered drastically by Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s sudden death in April 1945, just days before the inaugural meeting of the United Nations (UN). Roosevelt had remained skeptical of Stalin but held out a trusting hope that the Soviets could be brought into the \u201cFree World,\u201d but Truman, like Churchill, had no illusions of Stalin\u2019s postwar cooperation and was committed to a hardline anti-Soviet approach.<\/p>\n

At the Potsdam Conference, held on the outskirts of Berlin from mid-July to early August, the allies debated the fate of Soviet-occupied Poland. Toward the end of the meeting, the American delegation received word that Manhattan Project scientists had successfully tested an atomic bomb. On July 24, when Truman told Stalin about this \u201cnew weapon of unusual destructive force,\u201d the Soviet leader simply nodded his acknowledgement and said that he hoped the Americans would make \u201cgood use\u201d of it.<\/p>\n

The Cold War had long roots. An alliance of convenience during World War II to bring down Hitler\u2019s Germany was not enough to erase decades of mutual suspicions. The Bolshevik Revolution had overthrown the Russian Tsarists during World War I. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin urged an immediate worldwide peace that would pave the way for world socialism just as Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into the war with promises of global democracy and free trade. The United States had intervened militarily against the Red Army during the Russian civil war, and when the Soviet Union was founded in 1922 the United States refused to recognize it. The two powers were brought together only by their common enemy, and, without that common enemy, there was little hope for cooperation.<\/p>\n

On the eve of American involvement in World War II, on August 14, 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill had issued a joint declaration of goals for postwar peace, known as the Atlantic Charter. An adaptation of Wilson\u2019s Fourteen Points, the Atlantic Charter established the creation of the United Nations. The Soviet Union was among the fifty charter UN member-states and was given one of five seats\u2014alongside the US, Britain, France, and China\u2014on the select Security Council. The Atlantic Charter, though, also set in motion the planning for a reorganized global economy. The July 1944 United Nations Financial and Monetary Conference, more popularly known as the Bretton Woods Conference, created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the forerunner of the World Bank, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). The \u201cBretton Woods system\u201d was bolstered in 1947 with the addition of the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), forerunner of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Soviets rejected it all.<\/p>\n

Many Soviet and American officials knew that the Soviet-American relationship would dissolve into renewed hostility upon the closing of the war, and events proved them right. In a 1947 article for Foreign Affairs<\/i>\u2014written under the pseudonym \u201cMr. X\u201d\u2014George Kennan warned that Americans should \u201ccontinue to regard the Soviet Union as a rival, not a partner,\u201d since Stalin harbored \u201cno real faith in the possibility of a permanent happy coexistence of the Socialist and capitalist worlds.\u201d He urged US leaders to pursue \u201ca policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians\u201d wherever they threaten the interests of peace and stability.<\/p>\n

Truman, on March 12, 1947, announced $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey, where \u201cterrorist activities\u2026led by Communists\u201d jeopardized \u201cdemocratic\u201d governance. With Britain \u201creducing or liquidating its commitments in several parts of the world, including Greece,\u201d it fell on the US, Truman said, \u201cto support free peoples\u2026resisting attempted subjugation by\u2026outside pressures.\u201d The so-called \u201cTruman Doctrine\u201d became a cornerstone of the American policy of \u201ccontainment.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the harsh winter of 1946-47, famine loomed in much of continental Europe. Blizzards and freezing cold halted coal production. Factories closed. Unemployment spiked. Amid these conditions, the Communist parties of France and Italy gained nearly a third of the seats in their respective Parliaments. American officials worried that Europe\u2019s impoverished masses were increasingly vulnerable to Soviet propaganda. The situation remained dire through the spring, when Secretary of State General George Marshall gave an address at Harvard University, on June 5, 1947, suggesting that \u201cthe United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health to the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.\u201d Although Marshall had stipulated to potential critics that his proposal was \u201cnot directed against any country, but against hunger, poverty\u2026and chaos,\u201d Stalin clearly understood the development of the ERP as an assault against Communism in Europe; he saw it as a \u2018Trojan Horse\u2019 designed to lure Germany and other countries into the capitalist web.<\/p>\n

The European Recovery Program (ERP), popularly known as the Marshal Plan, pumped enormous sums into Western Europe. From 1948-1952 the US invested $13 billion toward reconstruction while simultaneously loosening trade barriers. To avoid the postwar chaos of World War I, the Marshall Plan was designed to rebuild Western Europe, open markets, and win European support for capitalist democracies. The Soviets countered with the Molotov Plan, a symbolic pledge of aid to Eastern Europe. Polish leader J\u00f3zef Cyrankiewicz was rewarded with a five-year, $450 million dollar trade agreement from Russia for boycotting the Plan. Czechoslovakia received $200 million of American assistance but was summoned to Moscow where Stalin threatened Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk. Masaryk later recounted that he \u201cwent to Moscow as the foreign minister of an independent sovereign state,\u201d but \u201creturned as a lackey of the Soviet Government.\u201d Stalin exercised even tighter control over Soviet \u201csatellite\u201d countries in Central and Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n

The situation in Germany meanwhile deteriorated. Berlin had been divided into communist and capitalist zones. In June 1948, when the US, British, and French officials introduced a new currency, the Soviet Union initiated a ground blockade, cutting off rail and road access to West Berlin (landlocked within the Soviet occupation zone) to gain control over the entire city. The United States organized and coordinated a massive airlift that flew essential supplies into the beleaguered city for eleven months, until the Soviets lifted the blockade on May 12, 1949. Germany was officially broken in half. On May 23, the western half of the country was formally renamed the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the eastern Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic (GDR) later that fall. Berlin, which lay squarely within the GDR, was divided into two sections (later famously separated from August 1961 until November 1989 by walls).<\/p>\n

\n
\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

The Berlin Blockade and resultant Allied airlift was one of the first major crises of the Cold War. Photograph, U.S. Navy Douglas R4D and U.S. Air Force C-47 aircraft unload at Tempelhof Airport during the Berlin Airlift, c. 1948-1949. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In the summer of 1949, American officials launched the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO), a mutual defense pact in which the US and Canada were joined by England, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. The Soviet Union would formalize its own collective defensive agreement in 1955, the Warsaw Pact, which included Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany.<\/p>\n

Liberal journalist Walter Lippmann was largely responsible for popularizing the term \u201cthe Cold War\u201d in his book, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy<\/i>, published in 1947. Lippmann envisioned a prolonged stalemate between the US and the USSR, a war of words and ideas in which direct shots would not necessarily be fired between the two. Lippmann agreed that the Soviet Union would only be \u201cprevented from expanding\u201d if it were \u201cconfronted with\u2026American power,\u201d but he felt \u201cthat the strategical conception and plan\u201d recommended by Mr. X (George Kennan) was \u201cfundamentally unsound,\u201d as it would require having \u201cthe money and the military power always available in sufficient amounts to apply \u2018counter-force\u2019 at constantly shifting points all over the world.\u201d Lippmann cautioned against making far-flung, open-ended commitments, favoring instead a more limited engagement that focused on halting the influence of communism in the \u2018heart\u2019 of Europe; he believed that if the Soviet system were successfully restrained on the Continent, it could otherwise be left alone to collapse under the weight of its own imperfections.<\/p>\n

A new chapter in the Cold War began on October 1, 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by Mao Tse-tung declared victory against \u201cKuomintang\u201d Nationalists led by the Western-backed Chiang Kai-shek. The Kuomintang retreated to the island of Taiwan and the CCP took over the mainland under the red flag of the People\u2019s Republic of China (PRC). Coming so soon after the Soviet Union\u2019s successful test of an atomic bomb, on August 29, the \u201closs of China,\u201d the world\u2019s most populous country, contributed to a sense of panic among American foreign policymakers, whose attention began to shift from Europe to Asia. After Dean Acheson became Secretary of State in 1949, Kennan was replaced in the State Department by former investment banker Paul Nitze, whose first task was to help compose, as Acheson later described in his memoir, a document designed to \u201cbludgeon the mass mind of \u2018top government\u2019\u201d into approving a \u201csubstantial increase\u201d in military expenditures.<\/p>\n

\n
\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

The communist world system rested, in part, on the relationship between the two largest communist nations\u2014the Soviet Union and the People\u2019s Republic of China. This 1950 Chinese Stamp depicts Joseph Stalin shaking hands with Mao Zedong. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cNational Security Memorandum 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,\u201d a national defense memo known as \u201cNSC-68,\u201d achieved its goal. Issued in April 1950, the nearly sixty-page classified memo warned of \u201cincreasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction,\u201d which served to remind \u201cevery individual\u201d of \u201cthe ever-present possibility of annihilation.\u201d It said that leaders of the USSR and its \u201cinternational communist movement\u201d sought only \u201cto retain and solidify their absolute power.\u201d As the central \u201cbulwark of opposition to Soviet expansion,\u201d America had become \u201cthe principal enemy\u201d that \u201cmust be subverted or destroyed by one means or another.\u201d NSC-68 urged a \u201crapid build-up of political, economic, and military strength\u201d in order to \u201croll back the Kremlin\u2019s drive for world domination.\u201d Such a massive commitment of resources, amounting to more than a threefold increase in the annual defense budget, was necessary because the USSR, \u201cunlike previous aspirants to hegemony,\u201d was \u201canimated by a new fanatic faith,\u201d seeking \u201cto impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.\u201d Both Kennan and Lippmann were among a minority in the \u2018foreign policy establishment\u2019 who argued to no avail that such a \u2018militarization of containment\u2019 was tragically wrongheaded.<\/p>\n

On June 25, 1950, as US officials were considering the merits of NSC 68\u2019s proposals, including \u201cthe intensification of\u2026operations by covert means in the fields of economic\u2026political and psychological warfare\u201d designed to foment \u201cunrest and revolt in\u2026[Soviet] satellite countries,\u201d fighting erupted in Korea between communists in the north and American-backed anti-communists in the south.<\/p>\n

After Japan surrendered in September 1945, a US-Soviet joint occupation had paved the way for the division of Korea. In November 1947, the UN passed a resolution that a united government in Korea should be created but the Soviet Union refused to cooperate. Only the south held elections. The Republic of Korea (ROK), South Korea, was created three months after the election. A month later, communists in the north established the Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Both claimed to stand for a unified Korean peninsula. The UN recognized the ROK, but incessant armed conflict broke out between North and South.<\/p>\n

In the spring of 1950, Stalin hesitantly endorsed North Korean leader Kim Il Sung\u2019s plan to \u2018liberate\u2019 the South by force, a plan heavily influenced by Mao\u2019s recent victory in China. While he did not desire a military confrontation with the US, Stalin thought correctly that he could encourage his Chinese comrades to support North Korea if the war turned against the DPRK. The North Koreans launched a successful surprise attack and Seoul, the capital of South Korea, fell to the communists on June 28. The UN passed resolutions demanding that North Korea cease hostilities and withdraw its armed forces to the 38th<\/sup> parallel and calling on member states to provide the ROK military assistance to repulse the Northern attack.<\/p>\n

That July, UN forces mobilized under American General Douglass MacArthur. Troops landed at Inchon, a port city around 30 miles away from Seoul, and took the city on September 28. They moved on North Korea. On October 1, ROK\/UN forces crossed the 38th parallel, and on October 26 they reached the Yalu River, the traditional Korea-China border. They were met by 300,000 Chinese troops who broke the advance and rolled up the offensive. On November 30, ROK\/UN forces began a fevered retreat. They returned across the 38th<\/sup> parallel and abandoned Seoul on January 4, 1951. The United Nations forces regrouped, but the war entered into a stalemate. General MacArthur, growing impatient and wanting to eliminate the communist threats, requested authorization to use nuclear weapons against North Korea and China. Denied, MacArthur publicly denounced Truman. Truman, unwilling to threaten World War III and refusing to tolerate MacArthur\u2019s public insubordination, dismissed the General in April. On June 23, 1951, the Soviet ambassador to the UN suggested a cease-fire, which the US immediately accepted. Peace talks continued for two years.<\/p>\n

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With the policy of \u201ccontaining\u201d communism and at home and abroad, the U.S. pressured the United Nations to support the South Koreans, ultimately supplying American troops to fight in the civil war. Though rather forgotten in the annals of American history, the Korean War caused over 30,000 American deaths and 100,000 wounded, leaving an indelible mark on those who served. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

General Dwight Eisenhower defeated Truman in the 1952 presidential election and Stalin died in March 1953. The DPRK warmed to peace, and an armistice agreement was signed on July 27, 1953. Upwards of 1.5 million people had died during the conflict.<\/p>\n

Coming so soon after World War II and ending without clear victory, Korea became for many Americans a \u2018forgotten war.\u2019 Decades later, though, the nation\u2019s other major intervention in Asia would be anything but forgotten. The Vietnam War had deep roots in the Cold War world. Vietnam had been colonized by France and seized by Japan during World War II. The nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh had been backed by the US during his anti-Japanese insurgency and, following Japan\u2019s surrender in 1945, \u201cViet Minh\u201d nationalists, quoting Thomas Jefferson, declared an independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). Yet France moved to reassert authority over its former colony in Indochina, and the United States sacrificed Vietnamese self-determination for France\u2019s colonial imperatives. Ho Chi Minh turned to the Soviet Union for assistance in waging war against the French colonizers in a protracted war.<\/p>\n

After French troops were defeated at the \u2018Battle of Dien Bien Phu\u2019 in May 1954, US officials helped broker a temporary settlement that partitioned Vietnam in two, with a Soviet\/Chinese-backed state in the north and an American-backed state in the south. To stifle communist expansion southward, the United States would send arms, offer military advisors, prop up corrupt politicians, stop elections, and, eventually, send over 500,000 troops, of whom nearly 60,000 would be lost before the communists finally reunified the country.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t

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Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t
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