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John: 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.

Past John: Mr. Green, Mr. Green, but if the war on Christmas is a war and the war on drugs is a war...

Present John: 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.

And to be fair, the Cold War did involve quite a lot of actual war, from Korea to Afghanistan 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 lasting roughly from 1945 to 1990.

Discussions of the Cold War tend to center on international and political history, 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, an arms race, cool movies, like " Doctor Strange Love" and " War Games", one of the 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's role in it.

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.

(Intro plays)

So after World War II the US and the USSR were the only two nations with any power left. The United States was a lot stronger. We had atomic weapons for starters, and also the Soviets had lost twenty million people in the war, and they were lead 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, again. 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. [Mongoltage]

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

The idea for the Soviets was to create a communist buffer between them and Germany, but to the US it looked like communism might just keep expanding, and that would be really bad for us because who would buy all of our sweet, sweet industrial goods?

So America responded with the policy of containment, as introduced in diplomat George F. Kennan's famous Long Telegram. Communism could stay where it was, but it would not be allowed to spread. And ultimately this was why we fought 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, two: expose the falsities of Soviet pretensions, three: induce a retraction of the Kremlin's control and influence, and four: in general, foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system.

Harry Truman, who as you'll recall became president in 1945 after Franklin Delano pres-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 like a smidge interested in the Middle East the last several decades because of 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 "Freedom loving peoples against Communist threats." Which is all fine and good, but who will protect us against "peoples," the pluralization of an already plural noun.

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 anti-communists regimes throughout the world no matter how undemocratic, and for the creation of a set of global military alliances directed against the Soviet Union."

It 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 lay the foundations for a military build up, 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 of American history.

Yes, yes Stan, okay, it was a great speech, thank you for noticing.

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Nerdfighteria Wiki - The Cold War: Crash Course US History #37

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John: 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.

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