What was the Cold War?

It seems a good idea to have a clear understanding of just what the Cold War was if you are going to study three topics that deal with it. So here goes:

The Cold War was a number of things (don’t you just love history?). It was a good old fashioned battle to be the world’s dominant power, just like say Britain and France in the eighteenth century, spilling over into the nineteenth century. WW2 had left two major powers in the world: America and the Soviet Union. They would spend the next fifty years or so vying to seek influence if not dominance over as many other of the world’s nations as possible. It also led to the nuclear arms race and the two most powerful military regimes the world had ever known (with China later adding a third).

Of course there was a deep ideological divide between these two powers: capitalism and liberal democracy on the one side and communism on the other. Capitalism, an economy based on individual enterprise and the profits and losses that occur. Liberalism and its focus on the individual – individual rights and individual responsibilities – so that the individual should be left to construct their own lives, benefiting from their own achievements but responsible for their own shortcomings of failures. And democracy which gives each individual the same right to elect a government of their choice from any number of alternatives. At least that’s the theory. And then there is communism with its different set of values: an economy without private ownership and without a profit motive, the community over the individual and a democracy that having swept away the ‘ruling class’ and special interests leaves everybody represented by a single party. At least that’s the theory. So, the Cold War was an ideological war.

This led to the propaganda war. Evidence that “our” side is best. This showed itself in the race to land the first man on the moon as well as the races, and other competitions, in the Olympics. Who won the most gold medals was surely the best. Even chess got into the act as Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky fought it out in 1972 to be the best in the world. But it would also spill out into more serious events and issues: Berlin, on repeated occasions, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the Hungarian Uprising or the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and in the issue of Human Rights.

And it was, on occasion, a hot war with the two sides facing each other head-on: over Berlin, again on repeated occasions or the Cuban Missile Crisis (a head-to-head was avoided in Korea and Vietnam), or with proxy powers doing the fighting but backed by the super powers, for example in Africa, the Middle East or Central America.

So, the Cold War was all these things, usually all three at the same time. Be aware of that when you look at both causes and consequences of events that unfold in our study of the Cold War.