1.2 The Legacy of World War II

The brutality and destructiveness of World War II set the stage for the Cold War. The conflict devastated nations, crippled societies, and shattered the international system beyond recognition. The war left 60 million people dead; more than half of those—36 million—were Europeans. The Soviet Union lost 24 million people, or 14 percent of its population. An estimated 1.3 million Chinese soldiers died, along with as many as 15 million civilians. Japan lost 3 million people.

With typically vivid prose, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill described postwar Europe as “a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate.” Allied bombing had leveled entire cities. The Germans had destroyed many of the cities they occupied. “The odor of death,” recalled an American diplomat, “was everywhere.” Tens of millions of people had no shelter. Everywhere farmlands had been despoiled, animals slaughtered. In Poland almost three-fourths of all horses and two-thirds of all cattle were gone.

The war produced the most sweeping changes in the international power structure in history. For the previous 500 years, Europe had dominated the international system. Not anymore. European nations that had been among the most powerful in the world before the war—Germany, Britain, Italy, and France—were either defeated and occupied, or crippled and nearly bankrupt. Unable to feed their own people, these nations could no longer preside over colonial empires, providing an opportunity for nationalist movements in the Middle East and in Asia to break away from their former masters.

As a result, the next few decades witnessed the creation of hundreds of new, independent nations. In 1947, after years of struggle, Britain gave up control of India and Pakistan. Other European powers followed suit, relinquishing control of many of their colonies in Africa and Indonesia.

Only two nations emerged with the ability to project power beyond their borders: the United States and the Soviet Union. Both nations agreed that a new international order needed to be created; otherwise anarchy and chaos would follow. They, however, had very different ideas about the structure of the new order and their role in it. Their visions of the future were shaped by memories of the recent past.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, shaped American views of the postwar world. Before the attack, many policymakers were convinced that geographical distance protected the United States from foreign threats. The surprise Japanese offensive made American military planners recognize that advances in technology, especially air power, meant that the two oceans no longer guaranteed security from potential adversaries. “If you imagine two or three hundred Pearl Harbors occurring all over the United States,” an official warned in 1944, “you will have a rough picture of what the next war might look like.”

Technology made the world smaller. For the first time, American planners believed the nation needed a network of defense bases around the world to respond quickly to potential trouble spots. Instability anywhere in the world posed a potential threat to American security. “We are now concerned with the peace of the entire world,” General George C. Marshall warned.

Many American officials were also convinced that the policy of trying to appease Hitler during the 1930s had only produced greater suffering and sacrifice. Never again would the United States allow a potential adversary to gain control of such a large part of Europe. Hitler used the captured manpower and factories of Europe to unleash his war machine against the United States. The United States needed to guarantee that no future adversary would have access to the same resources.

The key was to maintain open markets and free trade to sustain the global economy. The belief in free trade and open markets meshed with American faith in individual rights and democracy. Policymakers assumed that open markets would produce prosperity, and a more prosperous world would also be more stable and peaceful.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, no American policymakers worried about a direct Soviet assault on the United States, and few believed the Soviets could muster the resources—military, financial, or psychological—for an invasion of Western Europe. The danger was that the Soviets would extend their influence politically by capitalizing on social and economic chaos in Europe, which created a fertile breeding ground for communism.

Americans also emerged from the war with a newfound optimism, not only in the righteousness of their ideals but also in their ability to impose them on the rest of the world. On V-J day the United States had 12.5 million people serving in the armed forces. The U.S. Navy was larger than the combined fleets of all the nations in the world. Washington, not London, was now the capital of finance and power.

Power bred grand expectations. In 1945, the influential publisher Henry R. Luce coined the term “The American Century,” to describe the heightened expectations for the postwar period. “America,” he proclaimed, “must be the elder brother of the nations in the brotherhood of man.”

There was one obstacle to this American vision of the future. In 1945, Life Magazine cautioned that the Soviet Union “is the number one problem for Americans because it is the only country in the world with the dynamic power to challenge our own conceptions of truth, justice, and the good life.”

At the end of the war, the Soviets had one overriding goal: to secure their borders from foreign invaders. They had been as shocked by Hitler’s surprise attack in June 1941 as Americans were by the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor a few months later.

The German attack revived old memories of past invasions. In 1812, Napoleon’s armies reached the gates of Moscow. Twice in the twentieth century, German armies swept over Russia like hungry locusts. The Soviets, determined to head off another attack, insisted on defensible borders and friendly regimes on their western flank. The sheer size of the Soviet Union—three times larger than the United States and covering one-sixth of the world’s landmass—made that task more difficult. Blocking the Poland invasion route, or “gateway,” was the top Soviet priority. Poland, Stalin declared, was “a matter of life or death” to his country. To minimize the potential threat, Stalin insisted that pro-Soviet governments be installed in Poland and other key Eastern European states, that Soviet borders be expanded as far as possible, and that Germany be permanently crippled with severe reparations. With its army in control of most of Eastern Europe, the Soviets were in a position to enforce their will.

The deeply rooted hostility and suspicion between the United States and the Soviet Union proved too much to overcome. By 1945, the battle lines were clearly drawn. Stalin interpreted U.S. calls for free elections and democratic reform in Eastern Europe as part of a capitalist plot to surround the Soviet Union. The Americans viewed the Soviet Union’s effort to consolidate its control over Eastern Europe as the first step of a larger plan of global conquest. Moscow and Washington became ensnarled in a “security dilemma”: each step taken by one side to enhance its security appeared an act of provocation to the other.