Analyse the origins, key crises and end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, 1945-1991.

What this dot point is asking

The Cold War grew out of the breakdown of the wartime alliance against Nazi Germany. At the Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July to August 1945) conferences, the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union agreed on defeating Germany but disagreed over the future of eastern Europe. As the Red Army occupied the region, Stalin installed communist governments, creating a sphere of influence that Winston Churchill described in 1946 as an iron curtain dividing Europe. Mutual suspicion deepened: the West feared the spread of communism, while the Soviets feared encirclement and wanted a buffer zone after suffering enormous wartime losses.

In 1947 the United States committed to containment, the policy of resisting Soviet expansion. The Truman Doctrine pledged support to nations threatened by communism, beginning with Greece and Turkey, and the Marshall Plan offered large-scale economic aid to rebuild western Europe and resist communist appeal. The Soviets rejected this aid for their bloc. The first major crisis came in 1948 to 1949, when Stalin blockaded West Berlin and the Western powers responded with the Berlin Airlift, flying in supplies. In 1949 the West formed the NATO military alliance, the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, and communists led by Mao Zedong won the Chinese Civil War, greatly widening the conflict.

The rivalry turned hot in Asia. The Korean War (1950-1953) saw United Nations forces, led by the United States, defend South Korea against the communist North backed by China and the USSR, ending in a stalemate at roughly the original border. In Europe the Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955 and crushed risings in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956). The German question produced the most visible symbol of division when East Germany built the Berlin Wall in August 1961 to stop its population fleeing to the West.

The most dangerous moment was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. After the Soviet Union secretly placed nuclear missiles in communist Cuba, President John F. Kennedy imposed a naval blockade and demanded their removal. For thirteen days the world stood close to nuclear war until Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba and the quiet removal of United States missiles from Turkey. The crisis led to a hotline between Washington and Moscow and the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty.

From the late 1960s the superpowers pursued detente, an easing of tensions. The two sides signed arms-control agreements including SALT I (1972), and President Richard Nixon visited both China and the Soviet Union in 1972, exploiting the Sino-Soviet split between the communist giants. Detente was strained by continued conflict, above all the long Vietnam War, in which the United States failed to prevent a communist victory by 1975. Detente effectively collapsed after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, which prompted a Western boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics and a renewed arms build-up under President Ronald Reagan, who called the USSR an evil empire and proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative.

The Cold War ended faster than almost anyone predicted. Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader in 1985 and introduced glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) to reform a stagnant system. He renounced the use of force to prop up communist regimes in eastern Europe. In 1989 those regimes fell in a wave of mostly peaceful revolutions, climaxing with the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. Germany reunified in 1990. Reform unleashed forces Gorbachev could not control: after a failed hardline coup in August 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved on 26 December 1991, leaving the United States as the sole superpower.

Historians have long debated who was responsible for the Cold War. The orthodox view, dominant in the early West, blamed Soviet expansionism and Stalin's ambitions. Revisionists from the 1960s, such as William Appleman Williams, emphasised American economic interests and aggressive policy. Post-revisionists, notably John Lewis Gaddis, argue that mutual misperception, security fears and the power vacuum left by 1945 made conflict likely, sharing responsibility between the two sides. After 1991, access to Soviet archives renewed interest in the role of ideology and Stalin's intentions.

There is also a debate about why the Cold War ended so suddenly and peacefully. Some historians credit Reagan's renewed arms build-up and pressure for forcing the Soviet Union, with its stagnant economy, to give way. Others stress Gorbachev's own reforming choices, his willingness to renounce the use of force in eastern Europe and to pursue arms control, as the decisive factor. Still others point to long-term Soviet economic decline and the pressure of nationalism within the bloc. A strong TASC answer recognises that the end of the Cold War is contested and uses these interpretations to weigh external pressure against internal reform and decay.