Contention Between Communalist and Capitalist Inhabitants Escort to the Cold War

Abstract

In retrospect, the question, (what was the cold war about?), seems to a great extent harder to answer than it probably did to contemporaries, some of whom would probably shake their head in wonderment at the above analysis. Yet if we address each of its putative justifications singly, any clear answer seems to fade into the ether. First, from the U.S. side, was the cold war about fighting communism? As long as the Soviet Union remained the sole Communist state, this was a fairly simple proposition, because communism and Russian/Soviet power amounted to the same thing. After 1948, however, with the emergence of independent centers of Communist power in Yugoslavia and then in China, the ideological simplicity of the cold war disappeared. The United States found itself supporting communism in its national variety precisely in order to complicate the projection of Soviet power. The Yugoslav case has been mentioned; and although the U.S. opening to China would be delayed by two, decades of tragic ideological blindness, the United States did undertake, after 1956, to encourage and cultivate national communism in Eastern Europe in the form of the policy of differentiation. Therefore, communism as such was not necessarily inimical to U.S. interests and cannot prove sufficient as an explanation for the course of the cold war.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n2p437