USII.21

 media type="custom" key="29582669" align="right" =Analyze how the failure of communist economic policies as well as U.S.-sponsored resistance to Soviet military and diplomatic initiatives contributed to ending the Cold War.=

[|Crash Course on the Cold War Part 1] and [|Crash Course on the Cold War Part 2]


 * Topics on the Page **
 * ** The Military-Industrial Complex **
 * ** Failure of Communist Economic Policies **
 * ** U.S. sponsored resistance to Soviet initiatives **
 * **SALT Treaties**
 * **The Soviet-Afghan War**
 * ** Truman Doctrine **
 * ** Marshall Plan **
 * ** Collapse of the Soviet Union **
 * ** Fall of the Berlin Wall **
 * ** Dramatic Event page on The Berlin Airlift and the Berlin Wall **
 * ** End of the Cold War **
 * ** Geneva Summit **
 * ** Malta Summit **

The Military Industrial Complex
**Eisenhower Warns Us of the Military Industrial Complex (1961)** on this video segment from YouTube.
 * [|This Day in History: Jan 17] the History Channel gives a brief explanation.

For the entire text in words and audio, click on **Dwight D. Eisenhower Farewell Address**
 * In summer 2010, the Eisenhower Presidential Library obtained some 21 previously unknown drafts of the speech that showed that Eisenhower's famous warning about the military-industrial complex was a key theme from the beginning of the drafting of the speech.
 * President Eisenhower wrote: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex" (quoted from "Ike's Speech," Jim Newton, //The New Yorker//, December 20 & 27, 2010, p. 44.

//Seminal Primary Documents to Consider//: **President Ronald Reagan, Speech at Moscow State University (1988)**


 * [[image:Screen Shot 2017-02-21 at 10.27.35 AM.png link="http://gamejolt.com/games/military-industrial-complex/123918"]][|Military Industrial Complex Game]**

**Failure of communist economic policies**
For the entire span of the Cold War (mid 1940s-early 1990s), the Soviet Union employed economic policies that went against the western world's free market system. By the early to mid-1960s many in the Soviet leadership realized that the USSR's economy was in serious trouble.
 * Starting with Joseph Stalin in 1928, economic plans were drafted in short five-year intervals. Planning ministries developed goals that were to be met for each period, which were intended to solely help the Communist Party.
 * These goals focused heavily on industrialization and the improvement of nuclear weapons.
 * While these issues were at the forefront of political concern during this era, this intense focus left civilian needs largely unmet.
 * The vast majority of resources were going to the invention and production of weapons to compete with the U.S. during the Nuclear Arms Race . It is also interesting to note that the U.S. and its allies severely curtailed Soviet technological espionage in the 1980s.
 * Lacking money for expensive Research and Development, the USSR had been relying on technology spies and the information that they provided to aid it in the construction of oil pipelines, weapons systems, and various advancements.
 * Reforms were proposed. Some reforms were even initiated, but Leonid Brezhnev quashed these reforms after solidifying his power base in the late 1960s.
 * The Soviet Economy entered a period of stagnation in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.
 * During these years there was little to no growth in sectors of the Soviet economy that were not related to non-agricultural raw natural resources.
 * The high oil prices of the 1970s essentially floated the Soviet economy in this period.
 * Despite its growing economic problems, the Soviet Union did achieve many of its national goals in the late 1960s and early 1970s such as landing robotic rovers (Lunokhod 1 and 2) on the surface of the moon and achieving rough nuclear parity with the U.S.

Oil plunged prices in the 1980s, and this, in concert with Soviet Union's inability to expand its energy production sector, had negative effects on the Soviet Economy.
 * The areas of agriculture and domestic production for everyday life were lacking for decades and eventually led to the breakdown of their society.

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced some free market ideals into the Soviet economy.
 * This meant less control from the central planning agency that dictated the economic goals for the USSR. Although these changes encouraged managers to make more decisions in the workplace, the damage to the Soviet economy was irreversible and ultimately was a major factor in the breakup of the USSR on December 31, 1991.
 * Perestroika, the restructuring policy enacted during Gorbachev's reign, sowed the beginnings of a free market economy in the USSR ( the actual document can be seen here as well).
 * Click here to learn more from excerpts from David Adams's Economic Collapse of the Soviet Union.
 * Click [|here] for a closer look at why communism really failed.

[|Article About The Collapse of Communist Economic Theory From 1961]

**U.S.-sponsored resistance to Soviet military and diplomatic initiatives**
The U.S. was reluctant to accept the Soviet Union's promise for certain military and diplomatic initiatives without definitive proof that they would be accomplished. Most notably was the U.S.'s refusal to support the USSR until they physically removed their troops from Afghanistan.

**SALT Treaties (Strategic Arms Limitations Talk/Treaties I and II**

 * Not all policies by the US and USSR were of an adversarial nature.
 * These arms reduction talks were aimed at limiting and even dismantling nuclear weapon stockpiles on both sides.
 * Both sides did not trust the other so it was hard to agree on which weapons, how many and when they should be dismantled
 * The mistrust between the two nations caused a lot of tensions and fostered a big sense of non-cooperation
 * Although these tensions persisted both sides were able to come to an agreement, twice! (SALT I and SALT II)
 * The treaties took years to be agreed on but they were a part of the rare instances when both sides cooperated for a mutual goal

[|Brief Explanation of the SALT Treaties]
 * ==== More info here ====

The Soviet-Afghan War
For more, including primary documents, see The Origins of the Soviet-Afghan War: Revelations from the Soviet Archives.



The Soviet-Afghan war is a perfect example of how the US tried to subvert the Soviets without directly intervening
 * The US funded and supplied weapons to the Afghan forces that fought and opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
 * This proxy war said the US supplying the Mujahedin (Afghan freedom fighters) with money, weapons and training. All used to resist the Soviets
 * The US initially wasn't all that involved, the CIA only providing minimal support to the Afghans
 * The big turning point in the CIA's operation was them supplying the Afghans with Stinger Missiles (Anti-Aircraft Weapons)
 * This was a huge step in support because it gave the Afghans a way to shoot down Soviet Planes and Helicopters which were some of the most effective weapons the Soviets used against the Afghans
 * Second, it signaled the US's commitment to containing and stopping the spread of Communism and Soviet influence.
 * It also showed the Soviets that the US was really supporting the Afghans because these missiles are expensive, highly protected technology that could only have come from the US

The Soviet Union attempted to convince the U.S. that they would make good on their promise, but the U.S. refused to trust them until they actually did so. This policy was extended for all military and diplomatic promises made by the Soviet Union to the point that until the USSR mirrored a more democratic society, the U.S. refused it aid and friendship, which eventually led to the breakdown of the USSR and the end of the Arms Race and Cold War. Click here for a timeline on the Soviet-Afghan War

And click here for a two minute summary of the war



[[image:Multimedia.png]] **The Truman Doctrine** (video from YouTube)

 * See also World History II.31 and United States History II.18**

By 1947, President Harry Truman's advisers were worried that time was running out to counter the influence of the Soviet Union. In Europe, post-war economic recovery was faltering, and shortages of food and other essential consumer goods were common.

Truman's advisers feared that the Soviet Union was seeking to weaken the position of the U.S. in a period of post-war confusion and collapse.

The United States National Security Council issued NSC-68 in September 1950. The document outlined the strategy Truman and his successors would use to win the Cold War.

The event which spurred Truman on to formally announce the policy of "containment" was the British government's declaration in February 1947 that it could no longer afford to finance the Greek monarchical military regime in its civil war against communist-led insurgents. Truman rallied Americans in his famous "Truman Doctrine " speech to spend $400,000,000 on intervention in the civil war in Greece.
 * Rather than view this war as a civil conflict revolving around domestic issues, U.S. policymakers interpreted it as a Soviet effort; however, the communist insurgents were helped by Josip Broz Tito and Yugoslavia, not Moscow.
 * Secretary of State Dean Acheson accused the Soviet Union of conspiracy against the Greek royalists in an effort to "expand" into the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
 * In March 1947 the administration unveiled the "Truman Doctrine".
 * It "must be the policy of the United States," Truman declared, "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures."
 * In order to mobilize an unfriendly Republican Congress, the Democratic president painted the conflict as a contest between "free" peoples and "totalitarian" regimes, thus dramatically heightening the rhetorical stakes of the conflict.
 * By aiding Greece, Truman set a precedent for U.S. aid to regimes, no matter how repressive and corrupt, that requested help to fight communism.

According to historian Lloyd C. Gardner (//Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East after World War II//, The New Press, 2009, pp. 3-4), the Truman Doctrine had three primary impacts: Truman Doctrine.
 * "The Truman Doctrine was the essential rubric under which the United States projected its power globally after World War II--casting this as a global ideological struggle and enabling the kind of massive, unquestioned military/foreign policy spending we still take for granted. . . ."
 * "It was understood at the time by the key players that what was in fact at stake was not the need to fend off the Soviets but to shore up friendly governments in strategic areas."
 * ". . . the doctrine addressed a process that had already been under way for some time: U. S. maneuvers to replace the British in the region of signal importance, the Middle East."

The National Security Act Amendment of 1949.

For U.S. policymakers, threats to Europe's balance of power were not necessarily military ones, but a political and economic challenge. George Kennan helped to summarize the problem at the State Department Planning Staff in May 1947: "Communist activities" were not "the root of the difficulties of Western Europe" but rather "the disruptive effects of the war on the economic, political, and social structure of Europe." According to this view, the Communists were "exploiting the European crisis" to gain power.

Click here to read Kennan's Long Telegram from 1946

**The Marshall Plan**
> In June, following the recommendations of the State Department Planning Staff, the Truman Doctrine was complemented by the Marshall Plan, a pledge of economic assistance aimed at rebuilding the Western political-economic system and countering perceived threats to Europe's balance of power, which the U.S. had gone to war to restore, from the radical left.[|[17]]
 * ** see also World History II.31 and World History II.36 **
 * **United States History II.18**



News clip of approval of Marshall Plan

The Truman administration finally realized that economic recovery in Europe could not go forward without the reconstruction of the German industrial base on which it had previously been dependent.[|[18]] In July, Truman rescinded, on "national security grounds",[|[19]] the punitive Morgenthau plan JCS 1067, which had directed the US forces of occupation in Germany to "take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany." It was replaced by JCS 1779, which stressed instead that "[a]n orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany."[|[20]] Also in July, Truman reorganized his government to fight the Cold War. The National Security Act of 1947, signed by Truman on July 26, created a unified Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Council. These would become the main bureaucracies for U.S. policy in the Cold War.[|[21]]

**European economic alliances and European military alliances**
The U.S. consolidated its new role as leader of the West. In retaliation to Western moves to reunite West Germany, Stalin built blockades to prevent western access to West Berlin, but Truman maintained supply lines to the enclave by flying supplies in over the blockade from 1948 to '49.

**Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989**

 * See the Berlin Airlift and the Berlin Wall**

**The "Nationalities Problem" and the Collapse of the Soviet Union**
From it's birth in the October Revolution of 1917, the Soviet Union (formally established with the Treaty on the Creation of USSR in late 1922, and legitimated in 1924 with the first Soviet Constitution), struggled with what has been termed “the Nationalities Problem.”
 * How could so many different groups that all possessed distinct religious and/or ethnic identities, and many of which had long harbored nationalistic aspirations, be made to cooperate and participate in such a large political entity?
 * Though Lenin himself had, at times, cautioned against Russification (The Revolution had been instigated and largely led by urban Russians) of the different peoples contained within the Soviet Union, Russification became the USSR's de facto policy.
 * Baltic peoples, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians, Crimean Tartars, and others found themselves and their cultural identities the subject of active measures of repression by the Soviet government.
 * Upon the loosening of these repressive measures in the 1980s, various peoples throughout the Soviet Union sought to express their cultural, ethnic, and religious identities. Many long-repressed peoples clamored and agitated for independence from the USSR, and this, naturally, contributed to the Soviet Union's eventual dissolution.

**End of the Cold War**
By the early 1980s, the Soviet armed forces were the largest in the world by many measures—in terms of the numbers and types of weapons they possessed, in the number of troops in their ranks, and in the sheer size of their military-industrial base. However, the quantitative advantages held by the Soviet military often concealed areas where the Communist bloc dramatically lagged behind the West. This led many U.S. observers to vastly overestimate Soviet power.

By the late years of the Cold War, Moscow had built up a military that consumed as much as twenty-five percent of the Soviet Union's gross national product at the expense of consumer goods and investment in civilian sectors. But the size of the Soviet armed forces was not necessarily the result of a simple action-reaction arms race with the U.S.(Odom). Instead, Soviet spending on the arms race and other Cold War commitments can be understood as both a cause and effect of the deep-seated structural problems in the Soviet system, which accumulated at least a decade of economic stagnation during the Brezhnev years. Soviet investment in the defense sector was not necessarily driven by military necessity, but in large part by the interests of massive party and state bureaucracies dependent on the sector for their own power and privileges.

By the time Mikhail Gorbachev had ascended to power in 1985, the Soviets suffered from an economic growth rate close to zero percent, combined with a sharp fall in hard currency earnings as a result of the downward slide in world oil prices in the 1980s. (Petroleum exports made up around 60 percent of the Soviet Union's total export earnings.) To restructure the Soviet economy before it collapsed, Gorbachev announced an agenda of rapid reform(perestroika and glasnost). Reform required Gorbachev to redirect the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more profitable areas in the civilian sector. As a result, Gorbachev offered major concessions to the U.S. on the levels of conventional forces, nuclear weapons, and policy in Eastern Europe.

Click here for information and documents from the Geneva Summit

In December 1989, Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush declared the Cold War officially over at the Malta Summit.

Click here for more on foreign policy in the first Bush administration including relations with the Soviet Union from American President: An Online Resource at the University of Virginia.

But by then, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink of collapse, and the Communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact states were losing power. In the USSR itself, Gorbachev tried to reform the party to destroy resistance to his reforms, but, in doing so, ultimately weakened the bonds that held the state and union together. By February 1990, the Communist Party was forced to surrender its 73-year old monopoly on state power. By December of the next year, the union-state also dissolved, breaking the USSR up into fifteen separate independent states.

Click [|here] and [|here] to watch a short videos about the end of the Cold War.

Correct Answer: D
=**[|Check Out This Article on Women During the Cold War]**=

Works Cited:
Hoffmann, Erik P. The Soviet Union in the 1980s. New York: Academy of Political Science, 1984. Kostine, Serguei. Bonjour, Farewell: La Vérité Sur La Taupe Française Du KGB. Paris: R. Laffont, 1997. Nahaylo, Bohdan, and Victor Swoboda. Soviet Disunion: A History of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR. New York: Free Press, 1990. The Nuclear Arms Race. Retrieved April 26, 2007, from The History Learning Site Web site: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nuclear_arms_race.htm Cold War Chronology. Retrieved April 26, 2007, from The History Learning Site Web site: http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/cold%20war%20chronology.htm Gorbachev. Retrieved April 26, 2007, from CNN Web site: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/kbank/profiles/gorbachev/ The Origins of the Soviet-Afghan War. Retrieved April 26, 2007, from Alternative Insight Web site: http://www.alternativeinsight.com/Afghan_War.html Biography and Photos of Joseph Stalin. Retrieved April 26, 2007, from Stalin Biographical Chronicle Web site: http://www.stel.ru/stalin/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War