(2) COLD WAR (1945-1991)

 

Cold War? Can I get a Cool War instead?

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union that defined much of the twentieth century, where the logic of avoiding directly fighting each other was reinforced by the mutually assured destruction of nuclear weapons.

Cold wars are a recurring theme in history. Even before modern firepower or nuclear weapons, states often sought to avoid outright war with other states, particularly where they were evenly matched. Wars are costly and destructive, especially big or long wars of attrition, and even when you win, you often still lose. There’s a reason Pyrrhic victory is a term.

Of course, the majority of wars in history have been hot wars, in which states have actively fought each other, but even those have often been preceded or punctuated by periods of cold war, albeit where the participants often maneuvered against each other for advantage.

The period from 1933 to 1939 might be regarded as a three-sided cold war before the biggest hot war in history, in which Nazi Germany and other fascist states, the western democracies, and the Soviet Union all maneuvered with or against each other.

The Great Game between the British and Russian empires in the nineteenth to twentieth centuries might be regarded as another cold war. Indeed, in many ways the Cold War replayed much of the same territory, literally and metaphorically.

The Roman-Persian Wars obviously did not persist for six centuries entirely as active fighting or hot war, but were punctuated by cold war. Indeed, the Romans and Persians might well have paid more heed to cold war logic of avoiding directly fighting each other, since their exhaustion from war led to their defeat or conquest by the new antagonist of the Arabs under the banner of Islam.

The Greek-Persian Wars offer a better example of cold war, although there the cold war logic for the Persians arose from their costly defeats at the hands of the Greeks. Indeed, the Persians arguably did much better in their cold war strategy of supporting the Greek city states fighting each other.

Of course, that might be said of cold war strategies in general, with states doing better than they would directly fighting their antagonists. Imperial Germany would have done better if it had waged cold war rather than world war, as would have any successor that showed more restraint or strategy than the Nazi regime.

But of course, there’s no cold war like the Cold War.

The narrative of the Cold War could be the subject of its own top ten (or several) and is well known even through the lens of popular culture. Its origins extend all the way back to 1917 with the formation of the first communist regime that would remain one of its two principal antagonists, the Soviet Union.

However, its immediate origin and primary front was in Europe after the Second World War, once the defeat of Germany removed the common enemy of the two powers left standing as superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The former allies preserved some of their wartime cooperation until the defeat of Japan, which then saw Asia open as the second and far more active front in the Cold War, particularly after the victory of the communist regime in China in 1949.

Ironically, while Europe remained the primary front, that took the form of the two rival alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, besieging each other while deterred from making the cold war hot by the mutually assured destruction of nuclear war – that is, apart from the Soviet Union’s military intervention to suppress rebellions in or by its Warsaw Pact allies.

From Europe (and the Middle East) and Asia, the arenas of Cold War contest spread throughout the world, far more pervasively than the world wars ever did in every way but for direct and open military combat between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The Cold War might further be divided into phases, with one of the more common proposing the last part of the Cold War from the 1970s or 1980s as the Second Cold War. That last part, from the 1970s or 1980s to 1991 saw the United States regain the upper hand or superiority in the Cold War, not least by a de facto alliance with China after the Sino-Soviet split, ultimately to win it with the collapse of communist regimes throughout the Warsaw Pact as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

The upper hand of the United States at the end of the Cold War mirrored the upper hand or superiority it had at the start, broadly speaking from the 1940s to the early 1960s. The nadir of American Cold War fortunes came in the 1960s and 1970s, when the United States was at more of a disadvantage and the Soviet Union achieved strategic nuclear parity. Those decades were also the high-water mark for the Soviet Union and the extent or reach of its global influence.

 

ART OF WAR

 

Ironically, cold war strategy is the essence of the art of war of winning without fighting. Which the Americans and their allies did, although not without some lapses on their part – most notably land wars in Asia. Indeed, it might be said the Second World War and Cold War were the peak of the American art of war.

Although I’m not sure what Sun Tzu would have thought of his art of war being applied from the logic of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction.

 

WORLD WAR

 

Not least in how pervasive it was, both in the forms of its conflict, including hot wars by proxy, and its extent (as well as its stakes, that threatened the world itself). The Cold War extended through more of the world than the Second World War, which had largely left sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America unaffected, although ironically not so much Europe, despite the masses of military force the opposing sides gathered there

 

FOREVER WAR – STILL FIGHTING THE WAR

 

We’re all Cold Warriors now. Not against the Soviet Union of course but pundits always seem to be declaring the new or next cold war.

Also the same logic of avoiding direct fighting has persisted even after the end of the Cold War, such that it might be regarded as the default standard of modern conflict. Of course it looms largest between nuclear-armed states, but also arises from just how costly it is to deploy modern firepower, or even to engage in low-level conflicts against insurgencies or guerilla combatants.

 

ALTERNATE WAR

 

The Cold War is something of an alternate history scenario paradox. On the one hand, its historical outcome of American victory also seems the most plausible, particularly with American superiority at the start and end of the Cold War.

On the other hand, the Cold War offers a plethora of alternative history scenarios. Even in terms of its outcome of American victory, in a conflict extending for half a century (or longer if you calculate it from the formation of the Soviet Union in 1917), there’s a lot of scope for American miscalculations or mistakes, more or greater than those that occurred in history, to potentially affect that outcome.

That’s particularly so for the middle of the Cold War in the 1960s and 1970s, when the United States was at its greatest disadvantage relative to the Soviet Union, but also applies even for American superiority at the start or end of the Cold War – at least as to whether the United States could have improved upon the historical outcome, or whether the Soviet Union could have avoided collapse.

Some pose the question of whether either or both the United States and Soviet Union could have avoided the Cold War altogether.

Uniquely among my top ten entries (and for all but a handful of wars in contemporary history), the Cold War also has those alternate history scenarios where everybody loses – the scenario of the Cold War turning hot with a nuclear exchange.

 

JUST WAR – GOOD GUYS VS BAD GUYS

 

I’ve always been a Cold Warrior – as in believing in the morality of its cause and the necessity of its purpose as a war that needed to be fought, although not necessarily in all aspects of the way that it was fought.

So…USA! USA! USA!

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)