Fundamental Factors versus Events

There were two overwhelmingly important fundamental factors in explaining the Cold War: the Second World War had ended with only two powers capable of shaping the post-war world, and these two powers had an ideological divide too wide to allow for any accommodation of each other.

The war had ended with the Soviet Union proving itself as a military power. By sheer weight of numbers (both in its workforce and its military) it had pushed the Germans back from the doors of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad, all the way to Berlin. And it ended the war with fifteen million troops in Eastern Europe. America had ended the war as the undisputed economic power in the world and the only nuclear power. Its conventional military was not in bad shape either. So, we have two major military powers (we would soon come to use the term: “superpowers”). Whilst at the same time there really wasn’t any room for liberal democracy to work in peace time with a single-party authoritarian state. Nor was there any way for capitalism to work side-by-side with communism. So, with the two strongest military powers ever assembled facing each other and an unbridgeable ideological divide, some kind of future conflict seemed on the cards.

As for the events, they were bound to link to the fundamental factors. That the war ended in Berlin meant that Berlin and Germany would be at the centre of post-war deliberations (deliberations that, of course, had already begun). And that the Red Army was occupying Eastern Europe at all points meant that they were going to be very difficult to budge. So, for the Soviet Union, it was a matter of consolidating their hold on what they had, and in Poland and the rest of what would soon become the Eastern Bloc that is precisely what the Soviet Union set about doing. America’s attempt to thwart them, without recourse to war (never an option) was the Marshall Plan, using economic power to thwart military power, and so the Cold War became a lot chillier. And so we get to the first act of the Cold War (as I see it): the Belin Blockade. We are back to where the armies had met but in a Germany already divided with Berlin deep into the Soviet half of the country. Again, the fundamentals link with the events.

And so it continued into containment: Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam. How the Second World War ended continued to have a significant influence on events, and military strategic advantage continued to be overwhelmingly important in the ideological conflict which could only be won from the Soviet perspective, if the world was won, and from the American perspective, if Communism was contained.