The Cold War: Crash Course US History #37

Hi I’m John Green; this is Crash Course U.S. history and today we’re gonna 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. Mr. Green, Mr. Green, but if the War on Christmas

is a war and the War on Drugs is a war… 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 U.S.S.R., 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

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. (Libertage.)

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 Dr. Strangelove 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 imagine 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 gonna look at how that came

to be the dominant question of human existence, and whether we can ever get past it.

intro So after WWII the U.S. 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 20 million people in the

war and they were led by a sociopathic mustachioed Joseph Stalin.

But the U.S. 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