The Roots of the Cold War

The Cold War was rooted in competition between the communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union and the democratic, capitalist government in the United States. The first signs of this adversarial relationship came near the end of WWII at the Yalta Conference when the Allies struggled over what to do with Eastern Europe and Germany. Both sides distrusted each other to some extent, which led the Soviets to seek a buffer zone to the east of the country.

With the Soviet Union firmly in control of the satellite states in Eastern Europe, President Truman gave money and support to governments in Greece and Turkey to defeat communist insurgencies in those countries. This established the Truman Doctrine, which stated that the U.S. would support governments in the fight against communist takeovers. The policy of containment whereby the U.S. and its allies would work to limit the spread of communism to new countries, was firmly established and would come to dominate U.S. foreign policy for decades. It would draw the country into the Korean War, and later the Vietnam War.

Western Europe and the U.S. created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to counter the threat of Soviet aggression. In response, the Soviet Union created the Warsaw Pact with its satellite nations.

The Blockade of Berlin by the Soviets was one of the first conflicts of the Cold War. Airlifts by the Americans and British alleviated the situation and, eventually, the Soviets ended the blockade. Later, in the 1960s, the communists built the Berlin Wall which surrounded West Berlin in order to keep East German citizens and to prevent others from defecting to the West. The Cold War reached its most dangerous phase during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. When the Soviets started installing nuclear missiles just 90 miles off the coast of Florida in newly-communist Cuba, the Americans responded by blocking Soviet ships. After two weeks of tension in which the threat of nuclear war seemed a distinct possibility, the Soviets finally removed their missiles from Cuba in return for U.S. pledges not to invade Cuba, and a secret agreement to remove missiles from Turkey.

The Cold War was not over yet. It would continue to influence the course of events over the next 25 years, reaching into almost every corner of the Earth.