HIST 102 #38 - The Cold War

Hello, welcome back to our lecture series for Western Civilization 102. We have, of course, discussed World War II, and now we'll turn our focus on the aftermath and what's happening post-World War II.

Europe was devastated. Um, you know, war is never, um, great, of course, especially if it's being fought on your soil. Um, it was in ruins after World War II. There were food shortages, and there was a breakdown in transportation. A lot of countries, not just in Eastern Europe but Western Europe as well, were suffering economically after World War II. And to top it off, of course, you had these two superpowers that emerged after World War II. You have the United States, and you have the Soviet Union, and they are two very different superpowers. The United States is capitalist; the Soviet Union is communist. They're, their political philosophies do not go together, and there's no way to make them fit at all. And so we start to see the development of a Cold War.

Now, there's a mistrust between the United States and the Soviet Union. Uh, you know, America emerged out of World War II in a great position, great economy. The fighting didn't happen on our soil. Actually, World War II had helped end our Great Depression, and so, uh, the United States was in a good place, unlike, of course, Europe after World War II. We, uh, will have a policy in the United States. It's called a policy of containment, and Truman, who was the president after Franklin Roosevelt died in his fourth term in office, wanted a get-tough strategy with Russia, with Stalin. And we see the United States promoting this containment where we did not want to see the Soviet Union spreading their philosophy into other countries in Europe. And what results in this are things that you'll hear about in this lecture, for example, the Truman Doctrine, where the United States will give aid money to places like Greece and Turkey in order for them to, uh, to try and rebuild their economies because it seems that we find that when times are really hard and people are suffering, that the communist philosophy is more appealing. And so, what the goal was with this containment and this Truman Doctrine, and specifically, was to rebuild these economies so that communism wasn't that appealing anymore.

There was also the Marshall Plan, to where we would help reconstruct Western Europe. A healthier Europe was would be less likely to succumb to Communism. There's a lot of different other events that are happening in the Cold War post-World War II. You have the Berlin Airlift, where the Soviets tried to blockade Western powers from access to the city of Berlin because Berlin was was in the middle of the Soviet sphere in Germany. The Allies had had broken up Germany into different spheres between the four, and Berlin was in the Soviet Eastern side. It was not successful. Truman was determined not to let Berlin go, and there was this huge airlift operation, and the Soviets finally had to back down.

We also, of course, and you'll hear about this as well in this upcoming lecture, we have the creation of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And this was a military defense, I guess you can say, the United States and the Western European states said that an attack against one would be an attack against all. And so it's basically the Western areas of Europe and the United States. Well, the Soviets, as we see during the Cold War, will quite quickly respond, and they create their own alliance system in the East. It's called the Warsaw Pact. You'll hear about that as well. That was in the mid-1950s.

Things will heat up. It will not just remain cold; it will they will heat up in the post-World War II during the Cold War. In 1950, which was five years after World War II ended, we have the Korean War or the Korean conflict. That will also be a part of this whole containment doctrine or policy because North Vietnam was communist, South Vietnam was nationalist. Um, and you have, of course, a very famous American General during this time frame who is actually in Japan helping rebuild Japan after World War II. His name was Douglas MacArthur. Um, very much a hero from World War II. We'll see that during the Korean War, he will be removed, fired, if you will, by Truman for insubordination. The two men did not see things the same way.

Now, we also, of course, have quite a lot of other events taking place during the Cold War time period. We have still, of course, dealing with the Soviet Union. We have another ruler in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s. His name was Khrushchev. Nikita Khrushchev was his name, and he will also try and, um, get the West to remove their forces from West Berlin within six months. He, of course, has to back down as well. The Soviets were not successful in this. We have the Berlin Wall is built in 1961, from people trying to escape from the East into the West. And of course, West Berlin was democratic in nature. The wall is finally torn down, by the way, in the late 1980s, so it was it stood for quite a while, and it was assembled a very important symbol there of the Cold War.

We, of course, are involved in Vietnam during the Cold War. We have had lectures that specifically focused on our involvement in Vietnam and what's happening there. Um, Vietnam was separated at the 17th parallel, and the North Vietnamese were communists, the South, of course, nationalists. The French had been there. You learned about Vietnam and Indochina in previous lectures. The French, that was their colony, and they lose it in 1954 at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, is what it's called, and the French pull out. And I guess you could say the United States kind of stepped in, and we, of course, are starting the whole again, containment, because the the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, will attack the South Vietnamese. And even though the South Vietnamese leader was very corrupt, he was democratic in nature, and will notice that the United States will support democratic figures, not necessarily popular figures, in some of these countries. Well, what ends up happening is the Vietnam Quagmire, as it's sometimes called, and it was the United States' longest and probably most unpopular war, and it's not over until the early 1970s for the United States. And what happens is the North Vietnamese will overrun the South Vietnamese in the mid-1970s, and you know, the United States had pulled out a few years previous to that overrunning.

So we have, of course, a lot of events happening in the Middle East, of course, also during the Cold War. So let's, let's see, um, some of what's happening during the Cold War.

Hello. Today we're going to talk about the Cold War. The Cold War was a period of hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union from the end of World War II in 1945 until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It's often referred to as the Cold War because even though there was a period of hostility and there was a potential for war, even nuclear war, there was never any direct combat.

Now, the Cold War resulted in really kind of a dividing up of the world into two camps with the United States and the Soviet Union as two superpowers. The United States and the Soviet Union had fought together as allies during World War II to defeat the Axis powers, the fascist powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy. But at the end of World War II, with the fascist powers defeated, suddenly there were only two major powers in the world, and so it was really rather predictable that they would become rivals. So the United States and the Soviet Union entered this period of rivalry and even adversarial competition, and that lasted until the Soviet Union fell in 1991.

Now, how did the Cold War develop? Well, the Cold War really started in Europe with Germany. Germany was an area of conflict for the United States and the Soviet Union, and the rest of Western Europe was as well. What happened was that the United States was trying to help Europe rebuild. The United States felt that we really needed to have trading partners in order to increase our economic prosperity, and in order to increase the potential for capitalism. Capitalism depends on more trading partners; it depends on a supply of goods and services that flows from many different nations. And so the United States really wanted to expand our trading partners into Europe.

Of course, the Soviet Union had a totally different type of system. The Soviet economic system is not based on supply and demand. It was not based on free trade or free markets. The Soviet system was based on a centrally planned economy or a command market, as it's sometimes called, because everything economic was planned from the central headquarters. There was no creating of 40,000 tractors and deciding if more tractors would be needed based on supply and demand. Instead, the Soviet headquarters would decide how many tractors would be produced, and if there weren't enough tractors, then they simply didn't have enough. If there were too many tractors, then the excess ones rotted or were disassembled for their parts. So it wasn't a very efficient economic model, and it was incompatible with the capitalist economic model. So with two mutually exclusive and incompatible economic systems at work, it's not hard to see that they would be competing to, you know, extend their influence into Europe, into Asia, Africa, Latin America, and to compete for allies throughout the world.

Now, at the end of World War II in 1945, one of our allies, Prime Minister British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, gave a speech, and he warned about the Iron Curtain of Soviet influence that he saw spreading across Europe. And of course, once the Soviets took over a nation, they would extend a sort of Iron Curtain preventing people from leaving that country, preventing defectors from fleeing to the West. And in his speech, Winston Churchill talked about how the Soviet Union was really a threat to the West, not just a threat to Britain or a threat to the United States, but a threat to the entire Western Hemisphere, its democratic political institutions, and its capitalist free market economy.

Now, in that speech, when Churchill talked about the Iron Curtain of the Soviet borders, he also warned against Soviet expansion. He was very concerned that the Soviets seemed to be extending their tentacles into Eastern Europe, and he feared that eventually they would reach Western Europe and even Britain. And so Churchill pleaded for some type of defense alliance. He wanted the United States, which had emerged as the dominant democratic nation in the world, he wanted the United States to head that defense alliance, and he wanted there to be some kind of partnership in the North Atlantic area. He felt that if you had the United States and Canada and the nations of Western Europe together, if they all agreed that an attack against one was an attack against all, and that they would act collectively against any kind of enemies, they would be safer from Soviet influence and from Soviet invasion or attack.

Now, Britain was really no longer able to, uh, to maintain its forces in many parts of the world, and that's one of the reasons why it shifted a lot of that military and political responsibility to the United States. In fact, by 1947, just two years after the end of the war, Britain could no longer maintain troops in Greece and Turkey. Now, Greece and Turkey are very important because geographically they are much nearer to the Soviet Union, and so if you can control access to, to Europe through Greece and Turkey, then you can better protect Western Europe from Soviet invasion. But Britain had been bombed, had suffered, uh, you know, during World War II, had suffered, um, you know, an economic devastation. Their infrastructure, meaning their markets, their government institutions, their social institutions, you know, the very framework of their society had been shattered during World War II. And of course, many other nations had suffered even worse. France had been invaded by, by the Nazi powers. Other nations had been taken over, such as Czechoslovakia and Poland. And so there was a very real fear there that the, the Soviets would kind of con, would would repeat what Hitler had done with the fascist powers and would invade Western Europe. And so, uh, this idea of a defense alliance became very important.

Now, Britain, as the former ruling power of the world, Britain had declined significantly at the end of World War II. Britain had been what we call a hegemon. The hegemon is the dominant global power, and Britain's hegemony had peaked during World War I, from 1914 to 1918. That's when the British Empire was so large that if the sun was setting in one part of it, it was rising in another, and that's why we often hear the expression, "The sun never set on the British Empire," because it was just so vast and so large. But like all empires, eventually the British Empire became too large to maintain. World War I took its toll, and World War II really was the death knell of the British Empire and British hegemony.

Of course, the United States was rising in power at the same time that Britain was declining, and so the United States took over that role of hegemon. And in taking over the role of hegemon, the United States also became an important force in protecting democracy, democratic political institutions, and capitalist economic markets. So essentially, the United States was Britain's little brother that was growing to become even more powerful and more strong than Britain would be, and Winston Churchill realized this, and he wanted the United States to lead this defense alliance.

Now, at the end of World War II, inside the United States, other things were occurring. Franklin Roosevelt, the president, passed away in 1945 after four terms. And after this four-term period, it was hard to have a president who could really step into the role of such a powerful leader. But Vice President Harry Truman automatically became president upon President Roosevelt's death. Now, this was problematic for President Truman because President Truman had really been shut out and isolated from a lot of the secret decision-making that President Roosevelt had participated in. For example, President Truman didn't even know about the Manhattan Project, the nuclear weapons project that the United States had when he became president. So he was really thrust into this role of leadership right at the end of World War II, and between April and August, he had to make the decision of whether or not to use nuclear weapons to end World War II. And of course, ultimately, he did decide that it was necessary to use nuclear weapons on Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to save more Allied lives and end the war more quickly.

Some people argue that another reason that President Truman used nuclear weapons in Japan was not just to save American and Allied lives, but also to make sure that the Soviets didn't have a chance to finish up the war in Europe in the spring and then move on into Asia and expand their influence there. But whatever the reason might be, the fact remains that Truman became president and had to make decisions very quickly and without all the information that he might have wanted.

Now, in such an insecure position, it's not surprising that Truman might take rather harsh stances with the Soviets, and that's what he did. Truman said, "What we have to do is we have to contain Communism. We have to stop it where it is. We cannot let it expand any farther than it already has. The Soviets have already expanded into Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. We have to stop communism in its tracks." And so the Truman Doctrine, as it became known, was really a containment policy, trying to contain the spread of Communism, and that containment policy would continue throughout subsequent presidents, and the idea was that America and its allies would use containment to keep the Free World safe from communism and to keep capitalist markets safe from the centrally planned command markets of the Communist Soviet Empire.

Now, those matter that comes up, and that's the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan is also known as the European Recovery Plan, and the Marshall Plan really played a pivotal role in the Cold War. At the end of World War II, the United States realized that Europe needed to be rebuilt. And at the end of two years, in 1947, Europe had suffered two devastating winters, very harsh winters, two terrible years of droughts, and they had suffered very poor agricultural output. And so the Europeans were really not able to rebuild quite as quickly or as powerfully as they had hoped. And of course, the European nations had suffered dreadfully during World War II. The United States had been bombed in Pearl Harbor, but the continental United States had not been bombed. We had not been invaded. Yet many European nations had, and so they were really starting from scratch. They had to build their industrial base from nothing. They had to rebuild their electric grids. They had to rebuild their stock markets, their marketplaces, their democratic political institutions, had to write new constitutions. And so they were really starting from a blank slate, from the ground up.

And the United States was very anxious to help them do that. Part of that was simply wanting to help our allies. Another aspect of our benevolence was that we also wanted to make sure that the political institutions and economic institutions of the new post-war Europe would be compatible with our own. Democratic nations rarely go to war against each other, and we wanted democratic nations in Europe that would be our allies. Capitalist nations generally trade with each other and and cause each other to prosper, and we wanted that post-war prosperity. It hadn't been that long since the Great Depression, and the United States remembered what that was like, and we wanted to make sure that we took advantage of this post-war economic boom.

So, the Secretary of State, George Marshall, gave a speech where he introduced the idea of an economic aid plan to Europe. Now, at first, some people said, "Oh, wait a minute, you know, we already helped Europe by, you know, entering the war, by, um, you know, by sacrificing American lives, by spending American money on World War II and winning the war, so we don't need to do anything else for the Europeans." But one of the things that George Marshall and President Truman argued to the American public was that this would not just be for the Europeans. The Marshall Plan would help the United States as well. Essentially, what happened is that the United States gave 13 billion dollars in economic aid to Western Europe, and with that aid, the Europeans had to buy their products from the United States. They bought cement, steel, coal, all kinds of other industrial products that would help them rebuild, but that also helped American markets. They also used that money to buy enormous amounts of agricultural products from the United States. The United States has a vast Midwestern plain that produces enormous amounts of grain and other types of agricultural products, and we knew that the Europeans needed those products, and so we gave them the money to buy those products from us. It was a win-win situation for the Europeans and for the United States.

The United States also also extended the offer of the Marshall Plan to the Soviet Union, but Stalin, the premier of the Soviet Union at the time, saw this as some type of conspiratorial plot to try and insidiously creep into the Soviet economy and spread capitalism. And so, so Stalin rejected the Marshall Plan. He would not accept economic aid from the capitalist United States to help rebuild the Soviet Union after World War II.

Now, Stalin's refusal to accept aid really kind of made Truman even more suspicious of the Soviet Union, and of course, the offer of the Marshall Plan aid made Stalin more suspicious of Truman. So we really have this this increasing hostility, this growing mistrust between the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States, and perhaps that mistrust was well-placed, but it certainly didn't help to diminish the growth of the Cold War. So, as a result, the, the Marshall Plan helped restore the major powers of Britain, France, and Germany, and it helped reduce the economic crisis in Western Europe, and it also helped reduce communist influence in Western Europe. At the end of World War II, with so much economic devastation, so many people hungry and out of work, there were a lot of people who started to turn to communist political parties, even in Western Europe. And so the Marshall Plan helped convince many of those people that democracy and capitalism could work and would work, and that they should not try and pursue communist political institutions in Western Europe. And in fact, the Marshall Plan really kind of helped create a common economic foundation for Europe that would eventually lead to the European Union's formation.

Now, other things were going on in the Cold War as well. For one thing, in Yugoslavia, in Eastern Europe, you had a leader, Joseph Tito. And Tito was a communist, but he was not a puppet of the Soviet leader, Stalin. Tito was his own kind of communist; he was his own man. He believed in Yugoslavian communism, not Soviet communism, and he believed in this kind of nationalist idea that Yugoslavians should make decisions for Yugoslavians and should not bow to the pressure of the huge Soviet Union and its leader, Joseph Stalin.

Now, of course, this idea of having Yugoslavian nationalist communism really stuck in Stalin's craw. He didn't like that idea that he would not have someone who would simply obey his orders and do what he was told. And so this conflict between Tito and Stalin made Stalin even more paranoid about this conflict of the Cold War. He was even more worried, you know, about losing influence throughout the world.

Then, of course, in Czechoslovakia, you also had problems in Czechoslovakia. Stalin felt that, you know, Czechoslovakia was was really kind of a danger, that it was somewhat like Yugoslavia in the sense that Czechoslovakia had been the least communist of the Eastern Bloc nations, and Czechoslovakia really tried not to go along with a lot of Soviet policies. In fact, in 1948, Czechoslovakia was really considered to be kind of on the borderline between democracy and and communism, between capitalism and communism. And before World War II and the, the bombing that Czechoslovakia suffered, it had been the most advanced economically and industrially in Eastern Europe. And so it was really kind of a prize for Stalin to be able to have Czechoslovakia under his control. So in February of 1948, um, a Soviet-backed coup took place in Czechoslovakia, and Stalin orchestrated this coup in Czechoslovakia, this change of leadership, and he did that as a sign to the West, as a threat to the United States and its allies, of the heavy Soviet control that could be exerted in the rest of Eastern Europe.

Now, it wasn't long after the, the Czech coup in 1948 that you started to have conflict in the Cold War over Berlin. At the end of World War II, Germany, as a major losing power, had been divided among the allies. The Soviet Union had received 40 percent of the territory in Germany, and the remaining 60 percent had been divided up among the United States, France, and Britain. Now, eventually, France and Britain would be so concerned about trying to rebuild themselves and trying to maintain some of their colonies in other parts of the world that they would withdraw from Germany, and they would give their portions over to U.S. control. So the United States would control 60 percent of Germany, and the Soviet Union would control 40 percent. But the 40 percent that the Soviet Union controlled contained Berlin, the capital. And so, in order to get into Berlin, you had to pass through Soviet-controlled East Germany, communist East Germany.

Now, Berlin itself was also divided into East and West. East Berlin was under Soviet communist control, and West Berlin was under U.S. influence with democratic political institutions and a capitalist free market economy. So it was not really surprising that you would have some kind of conflict here. One of the things that happened was that people were in such close proximity in East and West Berlin that East Berliners would see the economic prosperity in West Berlin. They would talk to their neighbors; they would have contact with their family in West Berlin, and they saw how West Berlin, under a capitalist economy, was prospering, growing, rebuilding, and really thriving. And yet, in East Berlin, people were being subjected to food rations, to shoe rations, to other types of, you know, restrictive policies, just like they had suffered under during World War II, and they were ready for a break from that. They wanted to share in that prosperity of the capitalist markets in West Berlin.

So you started to have a huge flow of people fleeing the East. They would leave East Berlin and sneak into West Berlin, and, you know, they were seeking economic prosperity and political freedom. And pretty soon, people from other parts of East Germany started to sneak into East Germany so that they could then sneak across the border into West Berlin and then have an avenue out into the rest of Western Europe and even the United States and the rest of the western world and its capitalist markets. So it didn't take long for the Soviets to realize what was happening, that there was a leak in Berlin, and they were determined to stop that leak.

So Stalin, in 1948, established what became called the Berlin Blockade. He blockaded all of Berlin. He said, "I am not going to let the Westerners into Berlin, and I am not going to let the Easterners out of Berlin." And of course, one of the things that happened was that if you're not letting Westerners into Berlin, is that you're not getting market goods, you're not getting food, you're not getting other kinds of supplies into Berlin. And so Stalin knew that, and his strategy was really kind of a starvation strategy, you know, control them, starve them into submission. And that's a very old strategy that's been used for thousands of years. And so there was really no reason for Stalin to think that it wouldn't work again.

But the United States realized what he was doing. Now, of course, this was problematic for the United States because, after all, it was happening in Europe, not in our own backyard. So it was more difficult for us to handle this. And, you know, by 1948, the American public was not ready for another war. And so essentially, the United States had two obvious options: go to war with the Soviet Union over the control of Berlin and perhaps all of Eastern Europe, or just give in and allow the Soviets to take all of Berlin. And of course, if they took all of Berlin, it wouldn't be long until they also took West Germany and would have control over all of Germany. And once Germany had fallen, who knew how far they would expand into Western Europe? So our Western European allies were also concerned, and they wanted the United States to act. But of course, no one really wanted to have a nuclear conflict; no one really wanted to go into another World War over this.

So the United States and President Truman came up with a third option. That third innovative option was to have an airlift. The United States would fly massive amounts of food products and other kinds of consumer products into Britain, and Britain would then transfer those items to smaller planes, and those planes would take off and fly into Berlin. They would land, and they wouldn't have any kind of contact with the Soviet blockade because they were in the air. Now, the Soviets could have tried to shoot those British planes out of the air, and possibly even shoot American planes out of the air in Britain, if, you know, if they had tried. But they knew that that would, you know, indefinitely create a long-term problem, and that that would inevitably lead to a global war.

So this went on, you know, for a number of months, and the Soviets finally realized that it was futile. The United States was spending a lot of money, so were the British, on this airlift, but it didn't matter because the United States economy was booming; we could afford to do it. So it wasn't really hurting the United States, and it wasn't helping the Soviets to maintain this blockade. So the, the Soviets abandoned the idea of the blockade, and when they abandoned this idea of the blockade in May of 1949, really what it did was it showed the weakness of the Soviet Union and the strength of the United States. But it made Stalin even angrier at the United States and even more convinced that he had to maintain a strong stance with the United States and with its Western allies, and the dividing line between East and West in the Cold War became even more rigid, you know, even more pronounced because of the Berlin Blockade and the ensuing Airlift.

Now, by 1949, a few months after the airlift had ended, the defense alliance that Winston Churchill had asked for was finally forming. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, as it became known, started to emerge in 1949, and it ended up really kind of motivating the Allies to work together better, you know, to have a defense alliance in which if one nation were attacked, all of its other Allied nations would come to its defense. And so with this creation of NATO, this new defense alliance, we really had more cooperation and, and really an end of isolationism in the United States. The United States had been known for being reluctant to get involved in foreign wars, like World War I and World War II. You know, in fact, we didn't get involved in World War I until one of our ships was bombed; we didn't get involved in World War II until Pearl Harbor was bombed. And so really, joining NATO or creating NATO and becoming the, the driving force behind it, signaled the end of American isolationism, the end of that desire to kind of pull our ourselves, our heads and our legs into our shell like a little military turtle and just kind of, you know, try to to live out the war. We decided that we needed to become much more interventionist and much more active.

And NATO is important too, because that really signaled the transfer of hegemony from Britain to the United States. That the United States, now as leader of NATO, became responsible for global peace and stability. We became truly the hegemon. In fact, there's a book entitled "The Reluctant Sheriff" that's about this idea of the United States becoming responsible for global peace, and the idea is that whether we wanted to or not, someone had to fill that power vacuum, and the United States was determined that the Soviet Union would not fill that power vacuum and become leader of the world. And so we had to step into that position and become the sheriff that would maintain global stability.

Now, of course, the Cold War didn't just exist in Europe; it began there, but it extended quickly throughout other parts of the world, and the Cold War quickly spread to Asia. The Cold War is often discussed as European-based, but it was particularly important in China as well. After World War II, there was a civil war in China that had actually been going on for some decades, but the civil war heightened it, intensified, and that civil war was between two basic groups: the Communists of Mao Zedong, who were being advised by the Soviet Union, and the nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek. Now, the nationalists weren't necessarily democratic; they were kind of a corrupt, repressive regime, but they were capitalists, and more importantly, they weren't communist; they weren't Soviet allies. And so the United States preferred for the nationalists to win; we were on the nationalist side rather than the communists.

Well, in 1949, that long ongoing civil war between the nationalists and the communists in China finally drew to a close, and the communists won. China became communist under the leadership of Mao Zedong, and as a communist nation, China automatically became a Soviet ally, at least for some time. Eventually, there would be a rift between the two, but initially, China cooperated with the Soviet Union, you know, used its, its advisors, its, its leaders' policies, copied many of its models of agriculture and industrialization. And so the United States was particularly concerned about this massive nation with its huge population becoming communist.

Now, the United States had tried to aid the nationalists somewhat, but they really weren't able to, to help them win the war. So once the war is over, the fear emerges that communism is indeed spreading, that perhaps we have stifled communism in Western Europe, but we have not been able to control it in China.

Now, after China's fall to Communism in 1949, you have yet another problem emerging, and that is that there are many nations that had formerly been colonies, generally colonies of the British, colonies of the French, colonies of the Dutch. And after World War II, the British, the French, the Dutch simply weren't strong enough to maintain control of those colonies that were spread throughout the world. You know, they were trying to do all they could just to rebuild themselves. So, for example, the British let many of their colonies in Africa go. The French let some of their colonies go in, you know, in Asia and North Africa. But, you know, those colonies, the French really tried to hold on to for quite a while. One of those colonies was Vietnam. What we used to call French Indochina is today Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. And there were independence rebels in Vietnam who wanted to overthrow French colonial rule, who wanted Vietnam to be independent. And among those different groups that were trying to push Vietnamese independence, one of those groups were the communists. And the communists kind of took over this independence movement, took over this revolutionary movement. And the United States might have supported an independence movement, but the French were our allies at the end of World War II, and so it's unlikely that we would have supported any movement against the French. And more importantly, these independence movements were now communist, and there is no way that the United States would support communist rebels for independence during the Cold War.

So in 1954, when the French were trying to maintain control over Vietnam, the United States helped our ally France, and we started sending advisors to Vietnam. Pretty soon, we were sending more than advisors; we were sending military aid. Eventually, we started sending military troops, U.S. military troops, and that began our true involvement, our military involvement in the Vietnam conflict. And so, and many times people look back and say, "Why would we have entered this conflict that was, you know, seemingly so impossible to win?" And the reason was, it was the Cold War. The United States was fighting against any communist insurgency. It didn't matter if the alternative was a dictatorship; it didn't matter if the alternative was a corrupt regime, a repressive regime, at least they weren't communist. And so, you know, this, this very simplistic division of the world into democratic and capitalist on one side, and communist and a command market on the other, really dictated our decisions in foreign policy for many years, from the end of World War II until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Now, another issue that extended the Cold War into Asia was Korea. And Korea, like Germany, had been divided at the end of World War II among the allies. The United States had influence in the South, and the Soviet Union had influence in the North. And that's how Korea came to be divided into North and South. So you have the North Korean communists and the South Koreans, who are not necessarily totally democratic, but they're anti-communist. And so this division was made along the 38th parallel, and again, the 38th parallel is going to be this dividing line that still remains today in dividing North and South Korea.

Now, the Koreans initially wanted unity, much like the Germans did, but the United States and the Soviets couldn't agree on how to hold elections because each side was concerned about losing influence. The United States didn't want to have elections where a lot of communists would be elected to power, and the Soviets didn't want to have elections where you might have a lot of democratic opposition leaders elected to power. So essentially, the decision was to just divide up Korea into North and South.

Now, Kim Il-sung, who was the father of Kim Jong-il, who is the current leader of North Korea, Kim Il-sung was the leader of the new Korean communist government in the North, and, uh, and he ruled until 1994, which is longer than almost any other leader. But the Soviets, you know, were very confident in him as a puppet ruler, so they actually withdrew from Korea by January of 1949. The United States was pressured to withdraw from the South by that same period, but we didn't really trust that the Soviets wouldn't pour back into North Korea, and we certainly didn't trust that the Communist Chinese would not influence North Korea. So it was a reluctant withdrawal, and that's for good reason, because by June of 1950, the North Korean communists had launched a massive attack on South Korea, a massive surprise attack, and that was a major threat to Western democracy. The United Nations authorized a coalition of U.S.-led forces to go to the Korean Peninsula and to try and push back this communist onslaught, to push it back up into the North, if possible, and to free South Korea.

The U.N. forces were led by U.S. General MacArthur. They landed at Busan and and started to, you know, to trap North Korean troops, and MacArthur wanted to really to push the troops back into China all the way and to take the entire Korean Peninsula, if possible. But Truman, President Truman, would not allow that. He felt that that would be too much of an overreaction and that that could incite a global conflict. And it's interesting to look back at some of Truman's memoirs and some of his, you know, his cabinet members' memoirs, because there was actually serious discussion of using nuclear weapons to stop the Korean War. So this was not just some small little isolated conflict on an Asian peninsula across the world; this could have escalated into World War III. And that's why the Cold War is so important because there are so many opportunities for World War III to occur.

Now, Korea was important to the Cold War because it really prompted the build-up of U.S. and NATO military forces. That's why we felt that we needed to have more nuclear weapons, different types of nuclear weapons, different ways to deliver those weapons by submarine, by plane, by being launched from land-based silos, because of this conflict in Korea. And it also stimulated U.S. involvement in Asia. The United States had been involved in Latin America for a long time fighting communism after World War II, but this really kind of pushed our involvement into Asia. And the, the Soviets really felt that, you know, the United States was overstepping its bounds. And so it kind of solidified what we call a bipolar structure, which means the United States and the Soviet Union as the two poles of power, the two superpowers. And so this limited war, as it became known in Korea, even though it was a limited war because you really didn't have any nuclear weapons used, it was still very important and crucial in the development of the Cold War.

Now, of course, in addition to the extension into Asia, you also have other areas of the Third World that become pivotal in the Third World, for example, the Middle East. In some nations like Egypt, you have leaders who kind of play the United States and the Soviet Union off against each other, you know, going to one and saying, "What will you give us in economic and military aid to be your ally?" Then they go to the other and say, "They'll give us this, what can you give us to top that offer?" So the Cold War really expands throughout the rest of the world, you know, not just Europe and Asia, but into the rest of the world.

Now you have the expansion into the into the Latin American region as well. In 1962, U.S. intelligence forces spotted Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, and of course, you know, that's a great concern to have nuclear missiles aimed at the United States, 60 miles off our coast. And so this created what became known as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. That was a period of 13 days in October where John F. Kennedy, our president of the United States, and Soviet Premier Brezhnev were really, I'm sorry, Khrushchev were really at, um, at odds. It was kind of a standoff between them. And, uh, Soviet Premier Khrushchev had established a naval blockade around Cuba, saying, "You know, Cuba is our communist ally under its leader, Fidel Castro, and we have the right to have missiles here if Castro lets us, you know." And of course, the Soviet Union was providing a lot of financial aid to Cuba to pay for those missiles being there. And the, the United States was saying, "You simply cannot have nuclear missiles this close to the United States." And so the United States threatened to break that, that blockade. And so you have this conflict that lasts for 13 days, and at the end of that 13 days in October, Khrushchev backed down.

Now, of course, this simply reaffirmed the United States' belief in a harsh stance with the Soviet Union. It reaffirmed that idea of the Truman Doctrine for President Kennedy, and it led to the end of Soviet Premier Khrushchev's career only two years later. He was really drummed out of office because of his failure to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Now, the United States also began to support a lot of, a lot of what we call anti-communist or contras in Latin America, and that really kind of heated up in the 1980s. In 1980, President Reagan became president, and he was elected for another term in 1984. So he served from 1980 to 1988, and during that time, President Reagan was a staunch anti-communist, and of course, it was still the Cold War from '80 to '88. And so President Reagan used a lot of, a lot of his influence to encourage Congress to fund what we call contras. Contra means against, and so the contras were the anti-communists in Latin America. And so we had U.S. funding of the anti-communist rebels in Latin America to fight against the spread of communism.

Now, that also became rather problematic with what we call Iran-Contra, because one of the things that happened, and was that Congress eventually decided they didn't want to continue funding the contras, and so they stopped; they voted to stop. Well, different forces within the administration of the U.S. secretly continued that funding. For example, Oliver North, Admiral Poindexter, were secretly selling weapons to our enemy, Iran, and they were using the funds from that money to to buy weapons and to provide training for the contras in Latin America. So even until the end of the Reagan administration, you have the Cold War continuing until 1988.

Now, one of the things that really kind of brought the Cold War to an end, though, was that Premier Gorbachev was chosen to lead the Soviet Union. And Gorbachev had two components to his platform. Every Soviet premier is known for a certain kind of plan for his country, and Soviet Premier Gorbachev had two. He had Glasnost, which is openness, or kind of a democratization process, and Perestroika. Perestroika is economic restructuring. If you have a command market and you economically restructure, you're probably going to restructure towards capitalism, and that's what Gorbachev was doing. So even though he said he was really just trying to kind of tweak communism to make it work better, he was really instituting democratic political institutions and capitalist economic structures.

And once you have Gorbachev come in, in 19, come to power in 1985, and start to make those changes, and then in the United States, you have President Reagan at the same time spending more money on defense, spending more money on anti-communist forces in Latin America, you have these two forces kind of coming together to work to bring about the decline of communism. And so by the time you get to the end of the 1980s, really the communist economic model has been seen as a faulty one. Many people believe it simply doesn't work. You have rations; you have a poor industrial base; it's just not working for the Soviets, and it's really not working for the Chinese as well. The Chinese had started to adopt capitalist economic market structures back in 1979. Now, of course, they still argue that it's communist, but it's not; it's capitalist; it's a dictatorship, but it's a capitalist dictatorship. So, you know, with the loss of credibility for communism, the Cold War really kind of grinds to a close.

And in Eastern Europe, as the Soviet Union's power is failing, many of these Eastern European groups start to say, "We want more economic prosperity; we want the capitalist economic model." And so in 1989, the Berlin Wall comes down. People start to to rally for more freedoms, both economically and politically, and you have many revolutions throughout these nations. And at that point, the Cold War really kind of dies, not with a bang, but with a whimper.