Cold War

The Western Allies organized the Berlin airlift (26 June 1948 – 30 September 1949) to carry supplies to the people of West Berlin, a difficult feat given the city’s population. Aircrews from the United States Air Force, the British Royal Air Force, the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Royal Australian Air Force, the Royal New Zealand Air Force, and the South African Air Force flew over 200,000 flights in one year, providing to the West Berliners up to 8,893 tons of necessities each day, such as fuel and food. The Soviets did not disrupt the airlift for fear this might lead to open conflict.

In 1949, the popular communist armies under the leadership of Mao Zedong captured the Chinese capital of Peking (Beijing), defeating the Nationalist leader Jiang Jieshi. Jiang Jieshi and his followers set up a provisional government in exile on the island of Taiwan. The United States was shocked by the fall of China to communism, and this furthered the government’s resolve to prevent the further spread of communism in Asia. This resolve was illustrated by the efforts to defeat the communist leader Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Beginning in 1954, the United States began providing assistance to the anticom- munist government in Vietnam, and after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1963, the United States began the long-term military escalation that became the Vietnam War. Deng Xiaop-ing came into power in China in 1981. He adopted some progressive reforms for China, highlighted by the Four Modernizations, which focused on agriculture, industry, science, and defense, and allowed for limited ownership of private property and some free market policies. Kim Il Sung was the leader of North Korea through much of the Cold War. He forged alliances with both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. In the 1950s, his military invaded the democratic South Korea, sparking the Korean War.

The Kitchen Debate was a series of impromptu exchanges (through interpreters) between then U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the opening of the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow on July 24, 1959.

George F. Kennan was a diplomat, stationed in Moscow, who wrote what has become known as the Long Telegram in 1946. In this telegram and a later essay entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (1947), he argued that the Soviet Union was expansionist and its influence needed to be contained.
He especially stressed the containment of Soviet influence in areas that were of strategic importance to the United States. Kennan’s idea of containment became the basis for the Truman Doctrine, issued in February 1947, and the Marshall Plan, announced in June of the same year. His notion of containment also influ- enced the formation of NATO in 1949, American military activities during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, U.S. policy toward Cuba after the rise of Castro, and other defining aspects of U.S. diplomacy throughout the Cold War.

On Friday, February 21, 1947, the British Embassy informed the U.S. State Department officials that Great Britain could no longer provide financial aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey. American policymakers had been monitoring Greece’s crumbling economic and political conditions, especially the rise of the Communist-led insurgency known as the National Liberation Front, or the EAM/ELAS. The United States had also been following events in Turkey, where a weak government faced Soviet pressure to share control of the strategic Dardanelle Straits. When Britain announced that it would withdraw aid to Greece and Turkey, the responsibility was passed on to the United States. Addressing a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947, President Harry S. Truman asked for $400 million in military and economic assistance for Greece and Turkey and established a doctrine, aptly characterized as the Truman Doctrine, that would guide U.S. diplomacy for the next 40 years. President Truman declared, “It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” The sanction of aid to Greece and Turkey by a Republican Congress indicated the beginning of a long and enduring bipartisan cold war foreign policy.