Cold War

The First Stage: 1945–1953

In the first stage, the Grand Alliance during World War II was transformed into the Cold War. Signs of impending East-West conflict emerged immediately after World War II ended. With Joseph Stalin's Bolshoi Theater speech (February 1946), Winston Churchill's “Iron Curtain” Speech (March 1946), and the Truman Doctrine (March 1947), conflict became intense, and differences widened. At the core of this conflict were divergent ideologies and misperceptions that each held about the motivations of the other side. In his Long Telegram (March 1946) and “Mr. X” article in Foreign Affairs (July 1947), George Kennan formulated a strategy of containment that became the foundation of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. But the Cold War did not begin until the Marshall Plan in 1947. Viewing the Marshall Plan as the West's challenge to the Soviet Union, Moscow responded by creating the Cominform in 1947, and Andrei Zhdanov proclaimed that the world was now divided into two hostile camps, socialist and imperialist. From then on, the break was complete, and neither side expected to gain from negotiations. Germany became a focal point of the East-West conflict. Stalin's gamble of the Berlin blockade, countered by the Western airlift in 1948, eventually led to the division of Germany into the Federal Republic Germany (West German) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1949. After 1947, Stalin began transforming the East European states into communist satellites, precluding the possibility of “Finlandization” of Eastern Europe. To prevent Soviet expansion into Western Europe, the West formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Soviet Union responded by forming the Warsaw Treaty Organization (Warsaw Pact) in 1955, as a reaction not to the formation of the NATO but to the rearmament of West Germany. The East-West conflict thus came to bear military confrontation with nuclear weapons pointed at the other side.

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