Stages of the Cold War (complete, with examples)

The Cold War It was a conflict of a political, military, economic, cultural, informative and even sporting nature that took place after the end of the Second World War, and that divided the whole world in two: the western-capitalist bloc, led by the United States of America (USA), and the eastern-communist bloc, led by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

East confrontation It was motivated by political and ideological reasons, and although it did not trigger a frontal global conflict between the opposing powers, it did not go to war or war. That their armies faced each other directly (hence the name "cold" war), did involve scores of other countries to the extent that both the United States and the Union Soviets financed dictatorships and insurgent guerrillas to tip the world scale to their respective favors, trying to implant their forms of government throughout the planet.

In this sense, the inhabitants of these nations, mainly from Latin America, the Balkans and Asia, suffered the cruelties of one system or another, or even of both, as is the case of the old Yugoslavia. The

price in human lives and in war material it was, despite everything, extremely high during the more than forty years that this conflict lasted (1945-1991).

The Cold War also plays An important paper in the configuration of human mentalities of the twentieth century, with a notorious impact on the emergence of hopeless currents of thought and pessimists, born out of deep fear of the destruction of the human race through an atomic war that during the 70s seemed imminent.

Stages of the Cold War

The Cold War was a complex and protracted conflict, which spanned numerous stages and various conflict scenarios, namely:

1. First stage. The formation of the bipolar world (1947-1953)

This first stage comprises the uprising of europe of the bloody World War II, financially supported by the Marshall Plan of the United States, to whom the European recovery was convenient to deal with Soviet interference in the Europe of the East. This doctrine of economic support had its Soviet version in the Molotov Plan and then the COMECON, a series of subsidies and commercial channels controlled from Moscow for the nations under its control: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria.

In this framework, the Berlin blockade: the closing of the borders of communist Germany, separated from western Germany since the end of the Second World War and subjected to Soviet control, of all kinds of transit with the countries capitalists. This gesture will announce the coming separation of the communist and capitalist world, between which there will be little or no contact.

To face this panorama, in the West the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), committed to the defense of Western Europe. Thus was born also the Cominform, an institution of international ideological and political control that sought to preserve the union of the communist republics.

In 1950, however, a year after the USSR detonated its first atomic bomb, the Chinese Civil War It ends with the triumph of Mao Tse Tung and a Communist Revolution is established in that country. This new scenario gave the communist regime in North Korea the courage to invade Korea. South, thus initiating the Korean War in which the US took direct participation, with the permission of the United Nations. United. The conflict ended in 1953 with the victory of the pro-Western side and the reestablishment of the border between the two nations, whose tensions persist until today.

1. Second stage. Escalating Tension, Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1953-1962)

The second stage of the conflict begins with the change of international political actors after the election of Dwight Eisenhower as president of the United States and the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, both in 1953. The inauguration of the new Secretary General of the USSR, Khrushchev, led to a break between the communist models of Russia and China.

In this framework, the arms race and the space race began, the fruits of which will define technological and culturally from the late twentieth century.

However, in this period the two powers made efforts to add to their respective sides the more decolonized countries in Asia, Africa and America, which among other things led to the Vietnam War (1955-1975), in which the US troops were finally defeated in 1973 and their claims to stop the communist advance in the area were broken. Vietnam was reunited two years later under the communist leadership of Ho Chi Minh, while Cambodia was the government of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge was erected in 1960 and in Laos the same happened under the command of Pathet Lao.

Another communist triumph was that of the Socialist revolution led by Fidel Castro, who would depose the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and establish his own until the beginning of the 21st century. This gesture would initially be applauded by numerous Latin American intellectuals and politicians and would become a symbol of the Latin American leftist insurgency, fiercely repressed. during the following decades by countless military dictatorships financed by the United States in countries such as Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia or Panama.

The Cuban Revolution allowed the USSR to position itself very closely to North American territory, which was perceived as an intolerable threat by President John F. Kennedy, who sentenced Cuba to a total economic blockade. The highest point in this region took place in 1962, when the USSR tried to place its nuclear missiles in Cuba, in an identical situation to those that the US had in Turkey. The tension of the conflict, which included threats of massive retaliation, culminated in the withdrawal of the missiles from both Cuba as of Turkey and Kennedy's commitment not to invade the island, although the blockade was maintained until the beginning of the century XXI.

This crisis established the "Red phone", a direct line between Washington and Moscow, through which the Soviet and American leaders could negotiate in cases of extreme gravity.

The paranoia of the impending atomic war would reign in the world for the next decade.

1. Third stage. The stop (1962-1979)

At this stage the world polarization became much more complex, as the economies of Japan and Europe managed to re-establish themselves from the debacle of World War II and the third World countries They knew how to organize themselves in institutions such as OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) and the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, which allowed them to escape from world dynamics.

Facing this panorama, the USSR, in the midst of tensions As a result of economic stagnation, it promoted a relaxation or détente (stop her) in his international policies, which did not prevent Soviet troops from entering Czechoslovakia to crush the so-called Prague Spring, a momentary political liberalization that began in January 1968.

Similarly, in May of the same year, a series of student protests and civil strikes led to the fall of General de Gaulle in France, in what was called the "May 68". Although the left-wing parties and unions that promoted these protests did not manage to seize power, this The event had an enormous social impact in the West and marked the beginning of a new liberal, modern and respectful morality. the human rights.

In 1969, the relationship breakdown between Maoist China and the USSR led to a military conflict and, paradoxically, to a rapprochement between China and the US, which allowed a trip by President Richard Nixon to Beijing.

1. Fourth stage. The Second Cold War (1979-1991)

This last stage of the conflict began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, putting an end to the so-called “peaceful coexistence” that politicians like Jimmy Carter had tried in previous years. Warlike movements like this one, or the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, or the Iranian Revolution, however, involved an economic effort that sentenced the USSR to invest 25% of its GDP in military expenditures, which led to a deep economic crisis in the early 1990s. 80.

When Mikhail Gorbachev assumes the General Secretariat of the USSR in 1985, the economy The Soviet Union was completely stagnant and the fall in oil prices forced it to undertake a series of reforms, which in 1987 were announced more profound under the name of Perestroika (restructuring). This was followed by the "Glásnost" or the unfreezing of relations between the two world powers.

Thus began a process of talks that culminated in 1989, with the proclamation of Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev at the Malta Summit of the end of the Cold War.

That same year the Berlin Wall and the following year German reunification was signed, while the USSR became increasingly concerned with its own survival. On December 25, 1991, after an attempted coup d'état and with numerous republics clamoring for their independence from the Soviet system, the USSR is completely dissolved and the last remnants of the Cold War buried by the triumph of the capitalism.

Causes of the Cold War

The determining factors at the beginning of the Cold War are gestated during the end of World War II, when the western allied countries (France, Great Britain, United States) agreed with Soviet Russia to jointly confront the German III Reich (Germany Nazi).

This alliance brought the war to an end in 1945 and it left a Europe devastated and in need of economic aid, incapable of continuing to occupy the political vanguard of the world. That role was then filled by the two new superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union.

However, existing differences and irreconcilable between the western capitalist regime, the cultural values ​​it upheld, its interference policies inherited from imperial times, and those of the communist system. The Soviet Union, product of the October Revolution of 1917 that proclaimed the first socialist nation in history, quickly became a source of tensions and confrontations on a scale. world.

It should, however, be noted the background of this conflict, dating back to the reluctance of the United States and Great Britain to recognize post-revolutionary Russia as a legitimate nation until 1933, and even to the Non-aggression pact signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (Ribbentrov-Molotov Pact) signed in 1939, broken in 1941 by the German invasion of the territory Soviet. So these two political and ideological poles had been in the making since before counting on the common enemy of European fascism.

In fact, the Germany division in two (and its capital, Berlin, with the famous wall that separated it into two halves) served as a local example of the growth of these tensions, as citizens tried to flee from East to West Germany in search of better life chances. The drama of the two Germanies became a symbol of the bipolar model of the Cold War, until its reunification in 1990.

Consequences of the Cold War

The main consequences of the Cold War point to the triumph of capitalism over communist ideologies and its entry into a planetary phase, which led to the recent globalization and building a global market. This especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 90s and its loss of international influence.

Similarly, the arms race between the two political and military colossi it reached alarming heights that, at certain times, raised the world's alarm at the threat of an atomic war. Paradoxically, this technological escalation, driven by competitiveness in the fields of engineering and propaganda, resulted in unprecedented achievements for the humanity such as the incursion into space, the arrival to the moon, the development of the Internet and the signing of regional political treaties still in force, such as the NATO.

Another important consequence has to do with the enormous amount of regional conflicts that the Cold War caused and whose economic cost and in human lives is incalculable. Virtually no corner of the earth was immune to the bipolar landscape into which the world was organized during the second half of the 20th century. Some of these conflicts, such as the Vietnam War, in turn had important consequences for American politics and are still remembered by film and television. literature as a traumatic event in that culture.

Follow with: