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The Cold War: Crash Course US History #37

From: U.S. History by Crash Course

In which John Green teaches you about the Cold War, which was the decades-long conflict between the USA and the USSR. The Cold War was called cold because of the lack of actual fighting, but this is inaccurate. There was plenty of fighting, from Korea to Viet Nam to Afghanistan, but we'll get into that stuff next week. This week we'll talk about how the Cold War started. In short, it grew out of World War II. Basically, the Soviets occupied eastern Europe, and the US supported western Europe. This setup would spill across the world, with client states on both sides. It's all in the video. You should just watch it.

Full Transcript

The Cold War Crash Course US History 37

speaker01 00:00:00

Hi I'm John Green, this is Crash Course us history and today we're going to talk about the Cold War. The Cold War is called cold because it supposedly never heated up into actual armed conflict, which means, you know that it wasn't a war Mr Green Mr Green, but if the war on Christmas, this is a war and the war on drugs is a war, you're not going to hear me say this often in your life, me from the past, but that was a good point. At least the Cold War was not an attempt to make war on a noun which almost never works, because nouns are so resilient to be fair war did involve quite a lot of actual war, from Korea to Afghanistan.

speaker01 00:32:00

As the world's two superpowers, the United States and the USSR, sought ideological and strategic influence throughout the world. So perhaps it's best to think of the Cold War as an era roughly from 1945 to 1990, discussions of the Cold War 10 center on international and political history.

speaker01 00:47:00

And those are very important, which is why we've talked about them in the past. This, however, is United States history. So let us heroically gaze, as Americans so often do, at our own navel. Stan, why did you turn the globe to the green parts of Not America? I mean, I guess to be fair, we were a little bit obsessed with this guy. So the Cold War gave us great spy novels, independence movements and arms race, cool movies like Doctor Strange love and war games, one of them most evil mustaches in history. But it also gave us a growing awareness that the greatest existential threat to human beings is ourselves. It changed the way we imagined the world and humanity role in it.

speaker01 01:27:00

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner famously said our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question, when will I be blown up? So today we're going to look at how that came to be the dominant question of human existence and whether we can ever get past it.

speaker01 01:57:00

So after World War Two, the us and the USSR were the only two nations with any power left.

speaker01 02:02:00

The United States was a lot stronger. We had atomic weapons, for starters, and also the Soviets had lost 20 million people in the war, and they were led by a sociopathic, mustachioed Joseph Stalin. But the us still had worries. We needed a strong, free market oriented Europe and to a lesser extent Asia, so that all the goods we were making could find happy homes. The Soviets, meanwhile, were concerned with something more immediate, a powerful Germany invading them. Germany, and please do not take this personally. Germans was very, very slow to learn the central lesson of world history. Do not invade Russia unless you're the Mongols.

speaker01 02:37:00

So at the end of World War Two, the USSR encouraged the creation of proto-communist governments in Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland, which was a relatively easy thing to encourage because those nations were occupied.

speaker01 02:49:00

Soviet troops report the idea for the Soviets was to create a communist buffer between them and Germany, but to the us, it looked like communists might just keep expanding, and that would be really bad for us, who would buy all of our sweet, sweet industrial goods. So America responded with the policy of containment as introduced in diplomat George f.e. kennon's. Famous long telegram communists could stay where it was, but it would not be allowed to spread. Ultimately, why but very real wars in both Korea and Vietnam, as a government report from 1950 put it, the goals of containment were one block further expansion of Soviet power to exposed the falsities of Soviet pretensions. 3 induce a retraction of the Kremlin's control and influence, and for in general, foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system.

speaker01 03:34:00

Harry Truman, who, as you'll recall, became president in 1945 after Franklin Delano Prez for Life Roosevelt died, was a big fan of containment. And the first real test of it came in Greece and Turkey in 1947. This was a very strategically valuable region because it was near the Middle East. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but the United States has been just smily interested in the Middle East the last several decades. Oil, glorious oil, right? So Truman announced the so-called Truman Doctrine because, you know, why not name a doctrine after yourself in which he pledged to support, quote, freedom loving in peoples against communist threats, which is all fine and good, but who will protect us against peoples the pluralization of an already pral Now anyway, we eventually sent $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey, and we were off to the Cold War races. The Truman Doctrine created the language through which Americans would view the world with America as free and communists as tyrannical, according to our old friend Eric foner the speech set a precedent for American assistance to antique communist regimes throughout the world, no matter how undemocratic, and for the creation of a set of global military alliances directed against the Soviet Union, also led to the creation of a new security apparatus, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, all of which were somewhat immune from government oversight and definitely not democratically elected and the containment policy, and the Truman doctrine also led the foundations for a military buildup, an arms race, which would become a key feature of the Cold War, but it wasn't all about the military, at least at first, like the Marshall Plan was first introduced at Harvard's commencement address in June 1947 by get this, George Marshall in what turned out to be like the second most important commencement address in all American history.

speaker01 05:15:00

Yes, yes, Stan OK, it was a great speech, thank you for noticing all right, let's go the thought bubble, the Marshall Plan was a response to economic chaos in Europe, brought on by a particularly harsh winter that strengthened support for communists in France and Italy, the plan sought to use us aid to combat the economic instability that provided fertile fields for communist. As Marshall said, our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos, basically it was a new deal for Europe and it worked Western Europe was rebuilt so that by 1950 production levels in industry had eclipsed pre war levels in Europe was on its way to becoming AUS style capitalist mass consumer society, which it still is kind of Japan, although not technically part of. The Marshall plan was also rebuilt. General Douglas MacArthur was basically the dictate there, forcing Japan to adopt a new constitution, giving women the vote and pledging that Japan would force Square war in exchange for which the United States effectively became Japan's defense force, allowed Japan and to spend its money on other things like industry, which worked out really well for them.

speaker01 06:18:00

Meanwhile, Germany was experiencing the first Berlin crisis. At the end of the war, Germany was divided into East and west, and even though the capital Berlin was entirely in the east, it was also divided into east and West, this meant that West Berlin was dependent on shipments of goods from West Germany through East Germany. And then in 1948, so cut off the roads to West Berlin. So the Americans responded with an 11 month long airline of supplies that eventually led to Stalin lifting the blockade in 19948 and building the Berlin Wall, which stood until 1991 when kuwa got no way, way, way.

speaker01 06:51:00

Wait, that wasn't when the Berlin Wall was built. That was in 1000 and 961. I just wanted to give thought bubble the opportunity to make that joke, thanks thought bubble. So right, the wall wasn't until until 2009, 1000 and 960 two-one, but 1000 and 940 eight-nine did see Germany officially split into two nations. And also the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb and NATO was established and the Chinese revolution ended in communist victory. So by the end of 1950, the contours of the Cold War had been established west versus east, capitalist freedom versus communist totalitarianism, at least from where I'm sitting.

speaker01 07:20:00

Although now apparently I'm going to change where I'm sitting. It's time for the mystery document. The rules here are simple. I guess the author of the mystery document, and about 55% of the time I get shocked by the shock pen. We must organize and enlist the energies and resources of the free world in a positive program for peace, which will frustrate the Kremlin design for world domination by creating a situation in the free world to which the Kremlin will be compelled to adjust without such a cooperative effort led by the United States, we will have to make gradual withdrawals under pressure until we discover one day that we have sacrificed positions of vital interest. It is imperative that this trend be reversed by a much more rapid and concerted buildup of the strength of both the United States and the other nations of the free world.

speaker01 08:04:00

I mean, all I can say about it is that it sounds American and like it was written in like 1951. And it seems kind of like a policy paper or something really boring. I mean, yeah. I'm just going to have to take the shocks.

speaker01 08:18:00

National Security Council report, NSC 68, Are you kidding me Stan? Not not 64, 81, 68, ridiculous. I call inju thee anyway as the apparently wildly famous NSC 68 shows, the us government cast the Cold War as a rather epic struggle between freedom and tyranny, and that led to remarkable political consensus. Both Democrats and Republicans supported most aspects of Cold War policy, especially the military buildup part.

speaker01 08:44:00

Now, of course, there were some critics like Wal Lippman, who worried that casting foreign policy in such stark ideological terms would result in the us getting on the wrong side of many conflicts, especially as former colonies sought to remove the bonds of empire and become independent nations.

speaker01 08:59:00

But yeah, no, nothing like that ever happened. Like that happened in Iran or Nicaragua or Argentina or Brazil or Guatemala or Stan. Are you really going to make me list all of them fine or Haiti or Paraguay or the Philippines or Chile or Iraq or Indonesia or Zaire? I'm sorry, there are a lot of them. OK, but these interventions were viewed as necessary to prevent the spread of communist, which was genuinely terrifying to people.

speaker01 09:22:00

And it's important to understand that like national security agencies pushed Hollywood to produce antique communist movies like the Red Menace, which scared people, and the cia-funded magazine's news broadcasts, concerts, art that gave examples of American freedom. It even supported painters like Jackson Pollock and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, because American Expressionism was the vanguard of artistic freedom and the exact opposite of Soviet socialist realism. Have you seen Soviet paintings? Look at the hardy ankles on these socialist comrade peasants. Also, because the Soviets were atheists, at least in theory. Congress in 1954 added the words under God, the Pledge of Allegiance, as a sign of America's resistance to communist.

speaker01 10:03:00

The Cold War also shaped domestic policy. Anti communist sentiment, for instance, prevented Truman from extending the social policies of the New Deal, The program that he dubbed the Fair Deal would have increased the minimum wage, extended national health insurance, and increased public housing, social security, and aid to education, But the American Medical Association lobbied against trueman's plan for national health insurance by calling it socialized medicine, and Congress was in no mood to pay money for socialized anything. That problem goes away, but the government did make some domestic investments as a result of the Cold War in the name of national security. The government spent money on education, research and science technology like computers and transportation infrastructure. In fact, we largely have the Cold War to thank for our marvelous interstate highway system, although part of the reason Congress approved it was to set up speedy evacuation routes in the event of nuclear war. And speaking of nuclear war, it's worth noting that a big part of the reason the Soviets were able to develop nuclear weapons so quickly thanks to espionage, like for instance, by physicist and spy Klaus Fuchs, that I'm pronouncing that right. Fuchs worked on the Manhattan Project and leaked information to the Soviets and then later helped the Chinese to build their first bomb. Julius Rosenberg also gave atomic secrets to the Soviets and was eventually executed, as was his less clearly guilty wife Ethel.

speaker01 11:18:00

And it's important to remember all that when thinking about the United States is obsessive fear that there were communists in our midst. This began in 1947 with Truman's loyalty review system, which required government employees to prove their patriotism when accused of disloyalty. How do you prove your loyalty right out your coworkers as communist? No, seriously, though, that program never found any communists. This all culminated, of course, with the Red Scare and the rise of Wisconsin Senator Joseph Mccarthy, an inveterate wire who became enormously powerful after announcing in February 1950 that he had a list of 205 communists who worked in the State Department. In fact, he had no such thing, and Mccarthy never identified a single disloyal American. But the fear of Communist continued in 1950 one's. Versus United States, the Supreme Court upheld the notion that being a communist leader itself was a crime.

speaker01 12:06:00

In this climate of fear, any criticism of the government and its policies, or the U in general was seen as disloyalty. There was only one question, when will I be blown up? And it encouraged loyalty because only the government could prevent the spread of communist and keep us from being blown up.

speaker01 12:23:00

We've talked a lot about different ways that Americans have imagined freedom. This year was a new definition of freedom. The government exists in part to keep us free from massive destruction, so the Cold War changed America profoundly, the us has remained a leader on the world stage and continued to build a large, powerful, and expensive national state. But it also changed the way we imagine what it means to be free and what it means to be safe.

speaker01 13:00:00

Our subbable subscribers make this show possible thanks to them. If you value Crash Course, please check out our sellable. There are great perks there. And thanks to all of you for watching. As we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome. Wait, wait, wait, wait, is that, is that music copyrighted? All right, not, let's say this $1000.