Chapter 36

In February 1945, with victory over Germany nearly assured, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met at Yalta in the Soviet Crimea to plan the postwar world. The "Big Three" agreed to divide defeated Germany into occupation zones, to found the United Nations, and to have the Soviets enter the war against Japan. Stalin also pledged to permit free elections in the Eastern European nations his armies had overrun.

That pledge quickly proved hollow. As the Red Army consolidated control over Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, Stalin installed loyal communist governments and crushed independent political opposition. In 1946 Churchill warned in a Fulton, Missouri speech that an "iron curtain" had descended across the continent, sealing off the Soviet-dominated East from the democratic West and setting the stage for a Cold War that would last more than four decades.

Vice President Harry S. Truman, a plainspoken former Missouri senator with little foreign-policy experience, suddenly became president upon Roosevelt's death in April 1945. Truman grew increasingly convinced that the Soviet Union intended to expand communism wherever it could, and diplomat George F. Kennan's influential "long telegram" argued that the United States must patiently but firmly resist Soviet pressure wherever it appeared — a strategy that came to be known as containment.

In March 1947, alarmed that Greece and Turkey might fall to communist pressure, Truman asked Congress for aid to both nations and declared what became known as the Truman Doctrine: the United States would support "free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." The doctrine committed America to a global, open-ended struggle against the spread of communism.

Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed a massive program of American economic aid to rebuild the shattered economies of Europe. The Marshall Plan, enacted in 1948, ultimately funneled some $13 billion into Western European recovery, reviving industry and agriculture and, not incidentally, undercutting the appeal of local communist parties that fed on postwar poverty and despair.

Though the offer of aid was technically extended to the Soviet Union and its satellites as well, Stalin denounced the plan as capitalist interference and forbade Eastern European governments from participating. The Marshall Plan thus deepened the economic and political split between a recovering, American-aligned Western Europe and an impoverished, Soviet-dominated East.

When the Western powers moved to merge their German occupation zones and introduce a new currency in 1948, Stalin retaliated by cutting off all land and water routes into West Berlin, an island of Western control deep inside Soviet-occupied East Germany. Stalin hoped hunger and cold would force the Western Allies to abandon the city.

Instead, for nearly eleven months American and British pilots flew round-the-clock supply flights in the Berlin Airlift, delivering food, fuel, and medicine to more than two million West Berliners. The remarkable logistical feat forced Stalin to lift the blockade in May 1949 without a shot fired, but it also hardened the division of Germany into the separate nations of West Germany and communist East Germany.

In April 1949 the United States joined Canada and ten Western European nations in signing the North Atlantic Treaty, creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Its members pledged that an armed attack against any one of them would be treated as an attack against all — the first peacetime military alliance the United States had ever joined, a striking break from the nation's historic wariness of "entangling alliances."

The Soviets answered years later with their own Warsaw Pact, formally splitting Europe into two hostile armed camps. The Cold War's stakes rose further in August 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb years earlier than American experts had predicted, ending the brief U.S. nuclear monopoly and touching off a dangerous new arms race.

NATO's creation reflected a fundamental shift in American foreign policy: rather than retreating into isolationism after the Second World War as it had after the First, the United States now accepted permanent, entangling commitments to the defense of Western Europe. This new posture of collective security would define American strategy for the rest of the Cold War.

In China, a long civil war between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government and Mao Zedong's communist forces resumed after Japan's defeat. Despite billions of dollars in American aid, Chiang's corrupt and demoralized regime collapsed, and in October 1949 Mao proclaimed the People's Republic of China. Chiang and his followers fled to the island of Taiwan, where they maintained a rival Nationalist government under continued American protection.

The communist triumph in the world's most populous nation stunned Americans and ignited a bitter political debate over "who lost China," fueling accusations that communist sympathizers within the U.S. government were to blame. In 1950 the secret policy paper NSC-68 called for a dramatic, sustained buildup of American military strength to contain communism on a global scale, reshaping U.S. defense spending for the rest of the Cold War.

In June 1950, communist North Korea invaded pro-Western South Korea across the 38th parallel. Truman, determined to honor the logic of containment, committed American forces under a United Nations banner without asking Congress for a formal declaration of war, calling it a "police action." General Douglas MacArthur's daring amphibious landing at Inchon outflanked the North Koreans and pushed deep toward the Chinese border along the Yalu River.

Alarmed by the approach of UN forces, communist China intervened in force in late 1950, driving the Allies back and turning the conflict into a grinding stalemate near the original border. When MacArthur publicly criticized Truman's limited-war strategy and pushed for escalation against China, Truman fired him in 1951 — a controversial but historic assertion of civilian control over the military.

Fear of Soviet expansion abroad fed a corrosive fear of communist subversion at home. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated alleged communist influence in Hollywood and government, producing a blacklist that ended many careers, while the perjury conviction of State Department official Alger Hiss and the espionage trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg convinced many Americans that communist spies had penetrated the highest levels of government.

Into this climate of anxiety stepped Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who claimed in a February 1950 speech to possess a list of known communists working in the State Department. Though he never produced credible evidence, McCarthyism — the practice of making sweeping, unsubstantiated accusations of disloyalty — ruined reputations and chilled political dissent for years. McCarthy's power finally collapsed during the televised 1954 Army–McCarthy hearings, after which the Senate formally censured him.