Cold War Beginning

You’ve all heard of first-world problems like having to use milk instead of half-and-half in your coffee, being too cold in your house because of the air conditioner, or getting judged because you only have the iPhone X and not the 11. And I’m sure that you’ve heard of lower-income and developing countries referred to as third-world countries, but have you ever stopped to ask where those terms (first-world and third-world) came from and what happened to the second-world?

Tensions were running very high right after WW2. It was Western capitalism versus Soviet communism. But there was another group of countries. Many of them were former colonies. None of them were squarely in either the Western or the Soviet camp. Thinking of these three factions, French demographer Alfred Sauvy wrote of “Three worlds, one planet” in an article published in 1952.

The first-world consisted of the U.S., Western Europe and their allies. The second-world was the so-called Communist Bloc: the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and friends. The remaining nations, which aligned with neither group, were assigned to the third-world. This was just one of the many ways that capitalism and communism were pitted against one another in the staring contest that gripped the globe from 1945-1991.

You can trace the animosity between capitalism and communism much further back than the Cold War, but since their tenuous partnership to defeat Nazi Germany was over, suspicions were running high with neither side trusting the other. They each thought that the economic systems of their opponents were inconsistent and poisonous, and if left unchecked would spill into and corrupt the ideals that they held dear. Add to this stress the fact that the Americans has shown the world that they had the power to level cities with a single bomb and you can begin to see why the tensions were high.

Berlin Blockade

Many see the creation of the Deutschmark on June 20, 1948, as a new currency for West Germany to replace the Reichsmark as the first shot fired. The introduction of this new currency was intended to protect western Germany from a second wave of hyperinflation and to stop the rampant black market trade, where American cigarettes were being treated as currency. However, this move angered the Soviet authorities, who regarded it as a threat. 

On June 24, 1948, Stalin turned this misunderstanding into the first serious international crisis of the Cold War by announcing a blockade of West Berlin. This was the group of three sections of Berlin controlled by the Western Allied powers. It was positioned about 100 miles into Soviet-controlled Eastern Germany. This was essentially a siege without the army at the gates.

After a matter of days, the United States began flying in supplies to the citizens of West Berlin. The blockade continued for nearly a year, but Truman was giving a clear signal that the United States had no intention of withdrawing from European affairs.

NATO

Even before the start of the blockade, European nations including Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg had discussed some sort of mutual security arrangement to resist possible future German aggression. However, in the wake of the Berlin blockade the Soviet Union seemed far more menacing than Germany, and they knew full well that even their combined armed forces would be no match for the military might of the Red Army, which at the time was the largest in the world.

They therefore sought some guarantee that the United States would intervene to defend them against a Soviet invasion, and the Truman administration provided this by signing on to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April 1949. Truman then followed up on this in July by asking Congress for $1.45 billion in military aid for Western Europe. For the first time in its history, the United States had formally committed itself during peacetime to the defense of other nations.

In September 1949, Russia tested its own atomic bomb and made everyone nervous. Many thought that these two superpowers were destined to face off in a battle which, in this new atomic age, might mean death and destruction the likes of which no one had ever dreamed.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union (and the Warsaw Pact) in the 1990s, what was the purpose of NATO? Why is it still around today? Let me know your thoughts on this and on the tension between these two superpowers.

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