R2.9 The Americas during the Cold War (1945–1991)

The Cold War was the global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the political, economic and military systems each led, from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. In the Americas it was fought less by the superpowers directly than through US policy towards its neighbours, the response of Latin American governments and movements, and Canada’s attempts to be both a loyal ally and an independent voice.

The timeline of the Cold War in the Americas shows the pattern of the period. Under Truman and Eisenhower the United States built an anti-communist alliance in the hemisphere and intervened once, in Guatemala. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, interventions, coups and crises followed one another in almost every decade until the Soviet Union collapsed.

Truman, containment and the Americas, 1945–1953

The policy of containment

At the end of the Second World War the United States and the Soviet Union were the two strongest powers in the world, but their wartime alliance quickly broke down over the future of Germany and Eastern Europe. In February 1946 George Kennan, a diplomat at the US embassy in Moscow, sent the "Long Telegram" to Washington. He argued that Soviet leaders saw the outside world as hostile and would expand wherever they met no resistance. In an article in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, signed only "X", he called for "a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies".

President Harry S. Truman turned containment into public policy. When Britain announced in February 1947 that it could no longer support the governments of Greece and Turkey, Truman asked Congress for US$400 million in aid to both countries.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.

Harry S. Truman, address to a joint session of Congress (the Truman Doctrine), 12 March 1947. Truman spoke to a Republican-controlled Congress that wanted lower spending, so he presented the aid as part of a world struggle between two ways of life. The open-ended promise to support "free peoples" anywhere later justified US action in the Americas, even though Latin America was not mentioned and the "free peoples" the United States supported there were often military governments.

Containment was soon built into institutions. The Marshall Plan (1948–1952) gave about US$13 billion to rebuild Western Europe. The National Security Act of July 1947 created the National Security Council, a unified Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was soon given the power to carry out covert operations abroad. In April 1949 the United States and Canada joined ten Western European states in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). After the Soviet atomic test and the communist victory in China in 1949, a secret policy paper, NSC-68 (April 1950), called for a large military build-up; the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 made it policy.

Latin America: a low priority

For Latin America, containment meant something different from what it meant in Europe. Washington believed the region was safe from Soviet attack and in its own sphere of influence, as it had been since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Latin American governments had hoped that their wartime support, which gave the United States bases, raw materials and (in Brazil and Mexico) troops, would be rewarded with a Marshall Plan of their own. Instead, Truman’s Secretary of State, George Marshall, told the Bogotá conference of 1948 that the region would have to rely mainly on private investment.

The only aid programme of the Truman years was the Point Four Program of technical assistance, announced in Truman’s inaugural address of January 1949, which was small compared with aid to Europe. Many Latin Americans concluded that the United States wanted their loyalty without paying for it, a grievance that grew through the 1950s.

The Rio Pact and the Organization of American States

The United States did, however, turn the wartime cooperation of the Act of Chapultepec (1945) into a permanent alliance. At a conference near Rio de Janeiro in 1947 the American republics signed a mutual defence treaty.

The High Contracting Parties agree that an armed attack by any State against an American State shall be considered as an attack against all the American States and, consequently, each one of the said Contracting Parties undertakes to assist in meeting the attack in the exercise of the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations.

Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (the Rio Pact), Article 3, signed 2 September 1947. As a treaty, the text records formal obligations, not the motives of those who signed it. It was the first of the Cold War collective-defence treaties and a model for NATO two years later. Article 6 also allowed joint action against aggression "which is not an armed attack", wording that the United States later used to argue that communist subversion was a threat to the whole hemisphere.

The Ninth International Conference of American States at Bogotá created the Organization of American States (OAS), whose charter was signed on 30 April 1948. The charter promised non-intervention in the internal affairs of member states, which Latin American governments valued as protection against the United States. The conference was interrupted by the Bogotazo, days of rioting in the Colombian capital that followed the assassination of the Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on 9 April 1948. Marshall and the US delegation blamed communists, though the riots grew mainly out of Colombia’s own political conflicts; the conference then passed a resolution condemning "international communism".

Canada stayed outside the inter-American system: it did not join the OAS until 1990, preferring to work through NATO, the Commonwealth and the United Nations.

Containment also reached into Latin American domestic politics. With US encouragement, Brazil banned its Communist Party in 1947, and Chile’s Law for the Permanent Defence of Democracy (1948), which its opponents called the "Damned Law", banned the Chilean Communist Party until 1958. Several governments broke off relations with the Soviet Union in 1947–1952. In much of the region the language of anti-communism was used by elites and armies against reformers, trade unions and peasant movements that had little to do with Moscow.

The Korean War and the Americas

The Korean War (1950–1953) tested the new alliance. The United States led a United Nations force to defend South Korea; the war itself is a study in its own right in the Cold War in Asia. Canada sent about 26,800 troops, of whom 516 died. Colombia was the only Latin American country to send combat forces: about 5,100 soldiers and sailors served in rotation between 1951 and 1954. Puerto Ricans served in large numbers in the US 65th Infantry Regiment. Other Latin American governments offered words and raw materials but not troops, an early sign that their governments shared Washington’s anti-communism without wanting to be drawn into its wars.

McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the United States

Fear of communism abroad was matched by fear of communist subversion at home. The Second Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s is usually called McCarthyism, after Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, but it began before him and was much wider than one man.

Origins: loyalty, spies and the shock of 1949

The Truman administration itself started the search for disloyal officials. Executive Order 9835 of March 1947 created a loyalty programme under which millions of federal employees were investigated; a few hundred were dismissed and thousands more resigned. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a committee of the House of Representatives, held hearings on communist influence in the film industry in October 1947; the "Hollywood Ten", writers and directors who refused to answer its questions, were jailed for contempt of Congress, and studios drew up a blacklist of people they would not employ.

A run of events between 1948 and 1950 made the danger seem real. Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, was accused of spying for the Soviet Union and convicted of perjury in January 1950. In 1949 the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb years earlier than expected and the communists won the civil war in China. In January 1950 the physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed in Britain to passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union; his arrest in February led to the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed for espionage in June 1953. To many Americans, only treachery at home could explain such setbacks.

Joseph McCarthy

McCarthy was a little-known first-term senator when he spoke to a Republican women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, on 9 February 1950.

The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this Nation. It has not been the less fortunate, or members of minority groups who have been traitorous to this Nation, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest Nation on earth has had to offer.

Joseph McCarthy, speech to the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club, Wheeling, West Virginia, 9 February 1950, from the text later given to a Senate committee. No recording survives, and McCarthy later disputed what he had said; reporters recorded that he claimed to hold a list of 205 State Department employees known to be communists, a number he changed to 57 within days. The extract shows the appeal of his message: it blamed a privileged, educated elite for America’s failures, which explains why it found support among many ordinary voters and Republicans out of power since 1933.

McCarthy never identified a single communist in government. A Senate subcommittee under Millard Tydings found his charges unfounded in July 1950, but the Korean War, which began in June, made his accusations seem urgent and Tydings lost his seat that November. Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act (1950) over Truman’s veto, requiring communist organisations to register with the government. As chair of a Senate investigations subcommittee from 1953, McCarthy attacked the State Department, the Voice of America and finally the US Army.

His fall came through television. In the Army–McCarthy hearings of April–June 1954, millions of viewers watched him bully witnesses. On 9 June 1954 McCarthy attacked Fred Fisher, a young lawyer at the law firm of the Army’s chief counsel, Joseph Welch. Welch replied, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" The Senate censured McCarthy on 2 December 1954 by 67 votes to 22; he lost his influence and died in 1957.

The effects of McCarthyism

McCarthyism had a lasting effect on foreign policy as much as on domestic life. Democratic presidents, above all, feared being blamed for "losing" a country as Truman had been blamed for the "loss of China". Johnson told his advisers soon after taking office in November 1963 that he would not be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China had gone, and the same fear of being blamed helps to explain the readiness to intervene in Latin America after 1959.

The extent of Soviet espionage is part of the debate. Decrypted Soviet cables from the Venona project, released in 1995, showed that several hundred Americans had passed information to Soviet intelligence in the 1930s and 1940s, mostly before 1950. Historians therefore agree that espionage was real, but most argue that McCarthy’s accusations were reckless and that the wider campaign punished thousands of people for their political beliefs, not for spying.

Eisenhower, the New Look and covert action, 1953–1961

The New Look

Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former general, became president in January 1953 determined to fight the Cold War without bankrupting the United States. His New Look policy, set out in the National Security Council paper NSC 162/2 of October 1953, relied on nuclear weapons, which were cheaper than large conventional armies; critics and supporters summed it up as "more bang for the buck".

In January 1954 Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced that the United States would deter aggression by "a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing". This policy of massive retaliation went with brinkmanship, the willingness to take a crisis to the edge of war to force the other side to back down. In April 1954 Eisenhower explained the stakes in Asia with the image of a row of dominoes: if one country fell to communism, its neighbours would follow. The domino theory was applied to the Americas as well.

Covert action was the third part of the New Look. It was cheap, it avoided open war with the Soviet Union, and it suited Eisenhower’s preference for working behind the scenes. Allen Dulles, the Secretary of State’s brother, led the CIA from 1953 to 1961. In August 1953 the CIA and British intelligence helped organise the coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq of Iran, who had nationalised the country’s oil industry. Its apparent success made it the model for Guatemala a year later.

Guatemala, 1954

The Guatemalan revolution, 1944–1954

In 1944 a popular uprising overthrew the dictator Jorge Ubico in Guatemala, a country dominated by coffee and banana exports, in which a small elite owned most of the land and the Maya majority lived in poverty. Juan José Arévalo, elected in December 1944, introduced a labour code and social security. His successor, Colonel Jacobo Árbenz, elected in 1950, promised to turn Guatemala into a modern capitalist economy. His central reform was Decree 900 (17 June 1952), an agrarian reform law that expropriated uncultivated land on large estates and distributed it to about 100,000 peasant families, with compensation in government bonds.

The largest landowner in the country was the US-owned United Fruit Company, which also controlled the main railway and the Caribbean port. Most of its land was uncultivated, held in reserve, and about 400,000 acres were expropriated in 1953–1954. Guatemala offered compensation based on the value the company had itself declared for tax purposes, a little over US$600,000 for the first expropriation; the State Department, acting for the company, demanded almost US$16 million.

Árbenz also legalised the communist Guatemalan Party of Labour (PGT) in 1952. It had only four deputies in Congress, but its leaders were among Árbenz’s closest advisers and ran the agrarian reform. To the Eisenhower administration, a government that seized American property and relied on communists was a Soviet beachhead in Central America, even though the Soviet Union had no diplomatic relations with Guatemala and gave it no aid.

Operation PBSUCCESS

Eisenhower approved Operation PBSUCCESS in August 1953. The United States first isolated Guatemala diplomatically. At the Tenth Inter-American Conference in Caracas in March 1954, Dulles pressed the OAS to condemn communism in the hemisphere.

That the domination or control of the political institutions of any American State by the international communist movement, extending to this Hemisphere the political system of an extracontinental power, would constitute a threat to the sovereignty and political independence of the American States, endangering the peace of America, and would call for a meeting of consultation to consider the adoption of appropriate action in accordance with existing treaties.

Tenth Inter-American Conference, Caracas Declaration of Solidarity, 28 March 1954. Seventeen states voted for it; Guatemala voted against and Mexico and Argentina abstained. The wording does not name Guatemala, but everyone at the conference knew whom it was aimed at. Latin American delegates added a paragraph protecting the right of each state "freely to choose its own form" of government, which shows their unease at giving the United States a licence to intervene.

When a Swedish ship, the Alfhem, delivered a cargo of Czechoslovak arms to Guatemala in May 1954, Washington presented it as proof of Soviet involvement. On 18 June 1954 Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas crossed from Honduras with a force of a few hundred exiles armed and trained by the CIA. Militarily the invasion was weak, but CIA aircraft bombed Guatemala City and a CIA radio station, the "Voice of Liberation", spread reports of a large rebel army. The Guatemalan army refused to fight for Árbenz or to arm the peasant unions, and he resigned on 27 June 1954. Castillo Armas became president.

The consequences

• For Guatemala: the agrarian reform was reversed and almost all the land returned; unions and peasant leagues were broken up and thousands arrested; a series of military governments followed. A civil war from 1960 to 1996 between the army and left-wing guerrillas killed or caused the disappearance of about 200,000 people, most of them Maya; the UN-backed Historical Clarification Commission (1999) attributed 93 per cent of the human-rights violations it documented to state forces.

• For the United States: the operation seemed a cheap success and strengthened the belief that covert action could solve problems in the hemisphere, which led directly to the plan to overthrow Castro. The CIA used several of the same officers for the Bay of Pigs.

• For Latin America: many Latin Americans saw the coup as proof that the United States would not allow even moderate reform. A young Argentine doctor, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, was in Guatemala City in 1954 and drew the lesson that a revolution had to destroy the old army to survive, a lesson Castro’s government applied in Cuba.

Latin American discontent and a change of course, 1958–1960

Through the 1950s the Eisenhower administration worked closely with dictators who were reliably anti-communist, among them Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela and Fulgencio Batista in Cuba; in 1954 Pérez Jiménez received the US Legion of Merit. Latin Americans resented this support and the lack of economic aid. When Vice-President Richard Nixon toured South America in 1958, his motorcade was attacked by an angry crowd in Caracas on 13 May, a few months after Pérez Jiménez had been overthrown.

The Caracas attack shocked Washington into a partial change of policy. President Juscelino Kubitschek of Brazil proposed an "Operation Pan-America" of development aid for the whole region in 1958. The United States agreed to help found the Inter-American Development Bank (1959) and in 1960 promised US$500 million for social programmes under the Act of Bogotá. The Cuban Revolution of January 1959 turned this slow shift into an urgent one.

The Cuban Revolution and its impact on the Americas, 1959–1962

On 1 January 1959 the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba and the guerrillas of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement took power. The causes of the revolution and the way Castro ruled Cuba are a separate study from its impact on the hemisphere. Cuba had been a near-protectorate of the United States since 1898: the Platt Amendment allowed US intervention until 1934, US companies owned much of the sugar industry, utilities and banks, and the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay remained. A revolution there was therefore a direct challenge to US power in its closest sphere.

From revolution to confrontation

Castro’s first measures were nationalist and reformist more than communist. The Agrarian Reform Law of May 1959 broke up large estates, including US-owned sugar plantations. When Castro visited the United States in April 1959, Vice-President Nixon met him and concluded that he was either a communist or naive about communism. Relations then deteriorated in a spiral of action and reaction, shown in the timeline of 1959–1962.

Historians still debate who was responsible for the break. One view holds that Castro was moving towards communism from the start and used US hostility to justify it; another that the United States, by cutting the sugar quota and planning an invasion in early 1960, pushed a nationalist revolution into the arms of the Soviet Union. Most now argue that both governments made choices: Castro wanted a radical revolution that could not be achieved without conflict with US interests, and Washington was not willing to accept one in Cuba.

The Bay of Pigs, April 1961

The plan inherited by John F. Kennedy, who became president in January 1961, was for about 1,400 Cuban exiles of Brigade 2506, trained by the CIA in Guatemala, to land in Cuba and spark a popular uprising. Kennedy approved it but, to keep the US role deniable, moved the landing to the remote Bay of Pigs and cancelled a second air strike. The brigade landed on 17 April 1961; within three days it was defeated by the Cuban army and militia. More than 100 exiles were killed and about 1,200 captured; they were released in December 1962 in exchange for about US$53 million in food and medicine.

The failure had several causes: the CIA’s belief that Cubans would rise against Castro, when his land reform and nationalism had made him popular and his security forces had arrested thousands of suspected opponents; poor security, since the training camps were reported in the press; and Kennedy’s refusal to commit US forces openly. Its consequences were wide:

• Castro declared the revolution "socialist" on the eve of the landing (16 April 1961) and in December 1961 announced that he was a Marxist-Leninist; Cuba moved closer to the Soviet Union for protection.

• Kennedy, humiliated, authorised Operation Mongoose (November 1961), a CIA campaign of sabotage, propaganda and plots to assassinate Castro; the US military also drew up invasion plans. Cuban and Soviet leaders took these as signs that a real invasion was coming.

• Khrushchev concluded that Kennedy was weak and inexperienced, which shaped his decisions in Berlin and Cuba in 1961–1962.

• In Latin America the failure damaged US prestige and showed that the United States was willing to break the OAS principle of non-intervention.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962

In the summer of 1962 the Soviet Union secretly began to install medium-range and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, along with about 40,000 Soviet troops. Khrushchev’s reasons were to defend Cuba against a US invasion, to correct the strategic balance (the United States had far more long-range missiles and had placed Jupiter missiles in Turkey, on the Soviet border), and perhaps to strengthen his hand over Berlin.

On 14 October 1962 a US U-2 spy plane photographed missile sites under construction. Kennedy formed an Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) of advisers, who debated an air strike, an invasion and a blockade. Kennedy chose a naval quarantine of Cuba, announced in a televised address on 22 October.

It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

John F. Kennedy, radio and television address to the American people, 22 October 1962. Kennedy spoke to Americans, to Khrushchev and to the governments of Latin America at once. By extending his threat to an attack on "any nation in the Western Hemisphere", he presented the missiles as a danger to the whole region, in the language of the Rio Pact, which helped him win the support of the OAS, without a vote against, for the quarantine the next day.

The crisis was resolved between 26 and 28 October. After a U-2 was shot down over Cuba on 27 October and pressure for an air strike grew, Robert Kennedy secretly told the Soviet ambassador that the Jupiter missiles in Turkey would be removed within months if this was not made public. On 28 October Khrushchev announced that the missiles would be withdrawn in return for a US pledge not to invade Cuba. The Jupiters were removed in April 1963.

The crisis was the closest the world came to nuclear war. Both superpowers drew back: a direct "hotline" between Washington and Moscow was installed in 1963 and the Partial Test Ban Treaty was signed the same year. In the Americas it fixed the shape of the next three decades: Cuba stayed communist and dependent on the Soviet Union, the United States accepted Castro’s survival but redoubled its efforts to stop any "second Cuba", and Latin American governments learned that their security depended on decisions taken in Washington and Moscow.

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Regional reactions and the diplomatic impact

Latin American reactions to the revolution were divided. Among students, intellectuals, trade unionists and the poor, Castro’s victory over a US-backed dictator and his land reform and literacy campaigns made him a hero, and many young radicals tried to copy his guerrilla methods. Governments were more cautious. Some were dictatorships that feared Cuban subversion, such as Somoza’s Nicaragua and Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes’s Guatemala, which provided bases for the Bay of Pigs. Others were democracies that disliked Castro’s methods but defended the principle of non-intervention.

Venezuela’s president Rómulo Betancourt, a social democrat elected in 1958, became one of Castro’s fiercest opponents after Cuba supported guerrillas against his government; he broke relations in 1961. Mexico, by contrast, followed its tradition of non-intervention (the Estrada Doctrine) and kept diplomatic relations with Havana throughout the Cold War. Brazil under Jânio Quadros and João Goulart pursued an "independent foreign policy" and opposed sanctions; Quadros decorated Che Guevara in August 1961. Argentina’s president Arturo Frondizi met Guevara secretly the same month, which angered the Argentine military, who overthrew him in March 1962.

Canada, outside the OAS, also kept diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba, so the two countries that shared the continent with the United States both refused to isolate Havana.

Cuba answered isolation by trying to spread revolution. It trained and armed guerrillas from Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru and elsewhere, and in January 1966 hosted the Tricontinental Conference, which brought together revolutionary movements from Africa, Asia and Latin America. In a message to the Tricontinental’s new organisation, published in April 1967, Che Guevara called for "two, three, many Vietnams" to stretch US power. Guevara himself was captured and executed in Bolivia on 9 October 1967, by Bolivian troops advised by the CIA and US Special Forces, and most of the rural foco insurgencies of the 1960s were crushed.

The most important impact of the revolution was on US policy. From 1959 the overriding aim in Latin America became the prevention of "a second Cuba". That aim had two sides: reform to remove the poverty that bred revolution, and force to defeat revolutionaries and the governments that tolerated them. Both sides were visible under Kennedy and Johnson.

Kennedy and Johnson: reform and intervention, 1961–1969

The Alliance for Progress

Kennedy believed that poverty, inequality and dictatorship made Latin America vulnerable to revolution, and that the United States had to offer a peaceful alternative to the Cuban model. In March 1961 he set out his answer to Latin American diplomats at the White House.

Therefore I have called on all people of the hemisphere to join in a new Alliance for Progress—Alianza para Progreso—a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools—techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuela …

John F. Kennedy, address at a White House reception for members of Congress and the Latin American diplomatic corps, 13 March 1961. The speech was given a month before the Bay of Pigs, when the administration was preparing both to reform and to overthrow. Its use of Spanish and its promise that "political freedom must accompany material progress" were aimed at Latin American democrats, whose support Kennedy needed against Castro; it states intentions, so it cannot show what the Alliance achieved.

At Punta del Este in August 1961 every OAS member except Cuba signed the charter; Che Guevara, who led the Cuban delegation, criticised it as an attempt to head off revolution with aid. The United States promised to provide much of the US$20 billion of outside capital the plan expected over ten years, and Latin American governments promised reforms. The goals were ambitious: growth in income per head of at least 2.5 per cent a year, an end to adult illiteracy, land reform, fairer taxes and wider access to housing, health care and clean water.

The Alliance failed in its larger aims for several reasons. Latin American elites, whose cooperation was essential, opposed land and tax reform; US business opposed controls on investment; and the Alliance’s promises raised expectations it could not meet. Most important, its reform aims conflicted with its security aims. Kennedy’s administration also expanded counter-insurgency training for Latin American armies and police, and when reforming governments seemed unstable or too tolerant of the left, Washington accepted or encouraged the military that removed them.

Kennedy himself refused to recognise some coups at first, such as the one in Peru in 1962, but recognised the new governments within weeks. After his assassination in November 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Thomas Mann to run Latin American policy. In March 1964 Mann told US diplomats that the United States would no longer try to punish military governments for overthrowing elected ones; the Mann Doctrine put economic growth, the protection of US investment and anti-communism ahead of democracy.

Brazil, 1964

Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, showed the change. President João Goulart, who took office in 1961, was a reformer from the populist tradition of Getúlio Vargas. He restricted the profits foreign companies could send home, proposed land reform, appealed to trade unions and sergeants, and kept relations with Cuba. The United States cut aid to his government while sending money to state governors who opposed him, and the CIA funded opposition candidates in the 1962 elections.

On 31 March–1 April 1964 the army overthrew Goulart. The United States had prepared Operation Brother Sam, a naval task force with fuel and arms that could be sent to support the coup if it met resistance; it was not needed, because Goulart left without a fight. On 2 April Johnson sent warm congratulations to the new leaders, before Goulart had even left the country. The military ruled Brazil until 1985. Its first president, Marshal Humberto Castelo Branco, broke relations with Cuba, aligned Brazil with the United States and sent troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965. Brazil’s army based its rule on a National Security Doctrine that treated the "internal enemy", communist subversion, as the main threat to the nation, and it later helped other South American militaries against the left.

The Dominican Republic, 1965

The Dominican Republic had been ruled by Rafael Trujillo from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. The United States first supported democracy there as a showcase for the Alliance for Progress, then accepted the military coup that overthrew the elected president Juan Bosch in 1963. In April 1965 young officers and Bosch’s supporters, the "Constitutionalists", rose to restore him, and fighting broke out in the capital, Santo Domingo, against conservative military units. The chain of events from 1961 to 1966 shows how the United States moved from reform to intervention.

On 28 April 1965 Johnson sent in the Marines, at first to protect US citizens. Within days he gave a different reason.

And what began as a popular democratic revolution, committed to democracy and social justice, very shortly moved and was taken over and really seized and placed into the hands of a band of Communist conspirators. … The American nations cannot, must not, and will not permit the establishment of another Communist government in the Western Hemisphere.

Lyndon B. Johnson, radio and television report to the American people on the situation in the Dominican Republic, 2 May 1965. Johnson was speaking to a domestic audience as the war in Vietnam escalated, and he presented the landing as a hemispheric decision ("the American nations") when it had been taken by Washington alone. The US embassy’s published lists of communists among the rebels proved to contain errors and duplicate names, and later investigation found no evidence that communists controlled the revolt; the speech therefore shows the fear of "a second Cuba" more than the situation in Santo Domingo.

This principle, that the United States would intervene to stop any communist takeover in the hemisphere, became known as the Johnson Doctrine. About 23,000 US troops were sent. To give the intervention multilateral cover, the OAS voted narrowly in May 1965 to create an Inter-American Peace Force, commanded by a Brazilian general, with troops from Brazil, Honduras, Paraguay, Nicaragua and Costa Rica; Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador and Peru voted against. A provisional government was set up and in June 1966 Joaquín Balaguer, a former aide of Trujillo, defeated Bosch in an election held under occupation. The last US troops left in September 1966.

The intervention achieved its immediate aim, and Balaguer, a conservative ally, ruled the Dominican Republic for twelve years. Its costs were high. It was the first open US military intervention in Latin America since the occupations of Nicaragua and Haiti ended in 1933–1934, and it broke the OAS Charter’s principle of non-intervention; it divided the OAS; and in the United States Senator J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, attacked it as an overreaction based on false information, an early sign of the "credibility gap" that Vietnam would widen.

Vietnam: the domestic impact in the United States

The Vietnam War was the largest application of containment outside Europe and Korea; its military history belongs to the study of the Cold War in Asia. Its impact on the Americas came through its effects on American society and politics and on the United States’ relations with its neighbours. Kennedy had increased the number of US military advisers in South Vietnam to about 16,000 by late 1963. After a disputed clash with North Vietnamese boats in August 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (7 August 1964) by 416 votes to 0 in the House and 88 to 2 in the Senate, giving Johnson authority to use force without a declaration of war. In March 1965 he began the bombing campaign Rolling Thunder and sent the first combat troops.

The bar chart of US troop numbers shows the scale of Johnson’s escalation. More than 2.5 million Americans served in Vietnam, and about 58,000 died. Its domestic consequences can be grouped into four areas.

The economy and the Great Society

Johnson tried to pay for the war and for his Great Society programmes of welfare, health care and anti-poverty spending at the same time, a policy his critics called "guns and butter". He delayed asking for higher taxes until 1967, and a 10 per cent income-tax surcharge was passed only in 1968. Federal deficits and inflation rose: consumer price inflation increased from under 2 per cent in 1965 to more than 5 per cent by 1969. Congress cut spending on the War on Poverty, and Martin Luther King Jr. argued in 1967 that the war was draining money from the poor at home. The domestic reforms of the 1960s are part of the study of political developments in the USA and Canada.

The draft and protest

The war was fought largely by conscripts. Deferments for university students and the system of local draft boards meant that working-class, Black and Hispanic young men were more likely to be drafted and to serve in combat. Opposition grew from university teach-ins in 1965 to mass demonstrations, such as the March on the Pentagon in October 1967, draft-card burning and resistance. The Chicano Moratorium of 29 August 1970 in Los Angeles protested against the high death rate of Mexican American soldiers. The anti-war movement as a social movement is a separate study; for foreign policy its importance lay in the pressure it put on Johnson and Nixon.

The credibility gap and the fall of Johnson

Official statements that the war was being won were contradicted by television reports and by rising casualties, producing what journalists called a credibility gap between what the government said and what people believed. The Tet Offensive of January 1968, when communist forces attacked cities across South Vietnam, was a military defeat for the North but a political turning point in the United States. On 31 March 1968 Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election. The Democratic convention in Chicago in August 1968 was marked by violent clashes between police and protesters, and the Republican Richard Nixon won the presidency in November promising "peace with honor".

Nixon, withdrawal and limits on presidential power

Nixon reduced US troop numbers through "Vietnamisation", handing the fighting to the South Vietnamese army, but extended the war into Cambodia in 1970. During protests against the invasion, National Guardsmen shot dead four students at Kent State University in Ohio on 4 May 1970, and police killed two students at Jackson State College in Mississippi on 15 May. The publication of the Pentagon Papers, a secret official history of the war, in June 1971 showed that successive administrations had misled the public. After the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, the draft ended and Congress passed the War Powers Resolution (November 1973) over Nixon’s veto, requiring the president to consult Congress and withdraw forces within 60 days unless Congress approved.

The war’s long-term domestic legacy was a loss of trust in government and a reluctance, called the "Vietnam syndrome", to send US troops into long wars abroad. This mattered for the Americas: in the 1980s Congress and public opinion limited Reagan’s policy in Central America to aid, advisers and covert action, not combat troops.

Regional support for, and opposition to, the war

Canada

Canada’s position was ambiguous. As a member of the International Control Commission set up by the Geneva Accords of 1954 (with India and Poland), Canada was officially neutral and Canadian diplomats carried messages between Washington and Hanoi in 1964–1965. Canada did not send troops, and Prime Minister Lester Pearson favoured "quiet diplomacy". However, Canadian companies sold the United States hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment under the Defence Production Sharing Agreement of 1959, and thousands of Canadians volunteered for the US armed forces.

On 2 April 1965, in a speech at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pearson suggested that a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam might help bring about negotiations. Johnson was furious that a foreign leader had criticised his policy on American soil and told Pearson so angrily when they met the next day. Under Pearson’s successor, Pierre Trudeau, Canada admitted American draft resisters and, from May 1969, military deserters; estimates of the number of Americans who moved to Canada to avoid the war range from about 20,000 to more than 50,000. For many Canadians, opposition to the war became part of a national identity defined in contrast to the United States.

Latin America

No Latin American government sent troops to Vietnam. Most governments, especially the military regimes in Brazil and Argentina, said little and supported the United States in principle; Mexico, true to its tradition of non-intervention, avoided endorsing the war. Opposition came mostly from students, the left and intellectuals, for whom Vietnam joined Guatemala, Cuba and Santo Domingo as evidence of US imperialism. Anti-war slogans appeared in the student movements of 1968 in Mexico City and elsewhere, and Cuba presented Vietnam as the model of a small nation defeating a superpower. Puerto Ricans, as US citizens, were drafted, which strengthened the island’s independence movement’s opposition to the war.

US policy and its impact, 1968–1988

Between 1968 and 1988 US policy towards Latin America swung between three approaches. Nixon and his National Security Adviser (later Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger worked with military regimes and used covert action against the left; Carter tried to put human rights at the centre of policy; Reagan returned to confrontation, above all in Central America. Throughout, the region’s armies were trained, armed and connected with each other in ways that outlasted any one administration.

Nixon’s covert operations and Chile

Nixon’s general approach was set out in the Nixon Doctrine of 1969: the United States would keep its treaty commitments, but allies would have to provide the troops for their own defence. In Latin America this meant relying on friendly governments, many of them military, to contain the left. Chile tested the policy.

Chile had one of the longest democratic traditions in Latin America. The United States had already intervened covertly in its politics: the CIA helped fund the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei to defeat the Marxist Salvador Allende in the presidential election of 1964, and Frei’s government became a showcase of the Alliance for Progress. In 1970 Allende, leading the Popular Unity coalition of Socialists, Communists and smaller parties, won the presidential election with 36.6 per cent of the vote, a narrow plurality. Since no candidate had a majority, Congress had to choose between the top two, and by tradition it chose the leader.

Nixon and Kissinger feared that a freely elected Marxist government in Chile would be more dangerous than Cuba, because it could become a model for the left in Latin America and in Western Europe. On 15 September 1970 Nixon met the CIA director, Richard Helms.

1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile! / worth spending / not concerned risks involved / no involvement of embassy / $10,000,000 available, more if necessary / full-time job—best men we have / game plan / make the economy scream / 48 hours for plan of action

Richard Helms, handwritten notes of a meeting with President Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell and Henry Kissinger, 15 September 1970 (line breaks shown by slashes). Notes taken for the CIA director’s own use were not meant to be read by anyone else, which makes them strong evidence of what Nixon ordered; they were made public by the Senate’s Church Committee in 1975. They record instructions, not what was done, and they are compressed: "make the economy scream" became a short-hand for the whole programme of economic pressure.

The CIA pursued two tracks. Track I tried to persuade the Chilean Congress or President Frei to block Allende by political means. Track II, hidden even from the US ambassador, sought a military coup before Allende took office. The CIA made contact with Chilean officers who planned to kidnap the commander-in-chief of the army, General René Schneider, who insisted that the army respect the constitution. Schneider was shot in a kidnap attempt on 22 October 1970 and died three days later. The killing turned opinion in favour of the constitution, and Congress confirmed Allende on 24 October. The Church Committee later found that the CIA had given weapons to one group of plotters but that those used in the attack came from another group, which it had stopped encouraging.

From 1970 to 1973 the United States followed what critics called an "invisible blockade". It used its influence to stop new loans to Chile from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank and cut US government credit, while continuing military aid and training for the Chilean armed forces. The CIA spent about US$8 million on covert action between 1970 and 1973, funding opposition parties and the newspaper El Mercurio. Allende’s government nationalised the US-owned copper mines in July 1971, with the unanimous support of Congress, and refused compensation on the grounds that the companies had made excessive profits.

Chile’s economy collapsed in 1972–1973: inflation reached several hundred per cent, shortages spread and middle-class protests and strikes, including the truck owners’ strike of October 1972, paralysed the country. On 11 September 1973 the armed forces, led by General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew Allende, who died in the presidential palace. The United States quickly recognised and aided the military government, which killed or caused the disappearance of more than 3,000 people and imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands. The dictatorship itself is part of the study of political developments in Latin America.

The School of the Americas and Operation Condor

The US Army had trained Latin American officers in the Panama Canal Zone since 1946; in 1963 the school was renamed the US Army School of the Americas. After the Panama Canal Treaties it moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984, and it was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001. More than 60,000 Latin American soldiers and police passed through it, studying counter-insurgency, intelligence and military skills alongside a strong anti-communist message.

Some of its graduates were among the worst human-rights abusers of the period, including the Argentine junta leader Leopoldo Galtieri, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and Salvadoran officers involved in the El Mozote massacre of 1981 and the murder of six Jesuit priests in 1989. In 1996 the Pentagon released training manuals used at the school in the 1980s that recommended methods including blackmail, coercion, false imprisonment and the execution of guerrillas. Supporters of the school argue that it trained many thousands who committed no abuses and that it cannot be blamed for the choices of individuals; critics, who nicknamed it the "School of Assassins", argue that it spread a doctrine that treated political opponents as enemies in a war.

Condor was a Latin American creation, led by Manuel Contreras, head of Chile’s secret police (DINA), but the United States knew of it. The CIA and FBI reported on it from 1976, and US-supplied communications links in the Panama Canal Zone were used by its members. Its best-known crime took place in Washington itself: on 21 September 1976 a car bomb planted by DINA agents killed Orlando Letelier, Allende’s former ambassador and minister, and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt. In August 1976 the State Department had drafted a warning to Condor governments against assassinations, but it was not delivered. Estimates of the number of people killed or disappeared through Condor operations range from several hundred to several thousand, depending on what is counted; in 1992 documents discovered in a police station in Paraguay, the "archives of terror", confirmed its workings.

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Carter: human rights and the Panama Canal Treaties

Jimmy Carter became president in January 1977 after Vietnam, Watergate and the Church Committee’s revelations had damaged the reputation of US foreign policy. He promised a policy based on American values, and in his first major foreign-policy speech he explained what that meant.

Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. I’m glad that that’s being changed.

Jimmy Carter, address at the commencement exercises of the University of Notre Dame, 22 May 1977. Carter spoke to a Catholic university audience and to a public tired of Vietnam, and the speech was a deliberate break with the policies of Nixon and Kissinger. As a statement of intentions, it shows what Carter hoped to do; whether he did it has to be judged from his actions.

The human-rights policy

Carter created a Bureau of Human Rights in the State Department, led by the civil-rights activist Patricia Derian, and the State Department began publishing annual reports on human rights in every country receiving US aid. Military aid and arms sales were cut or ended to several military regimes, including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Guatemala and El Salvador. Brazil, Guatemala and El Salvador rejected US military aid in protest at the reports, and Brazil ended its military assistance agreement with the United States in 1977. Pressure from Carter’s officials helped save the lives of some political prisoners, especially in Argentina, and encouraged the regimes in the Dominican Republic (1978) and Ecuador and Peru to allow elections or hand power back to civilians.

The policy had clear limits. It was applied inconsistently: strategic allies elsewhere, such as the Shah of Iran, were treated more gently than small Latin American states. Bank loans and trade continued, so the regimes found other sources of arms and money; Argentina, for example, sold grain to the Soviet Union in 1980 when Carter tried to impose an embargo after the invasion of Afghanistan. As revolution spread in Central America, security concerns returned. In January 1981, in his last days in office, Carter resumed military aid to the government of El Salvador, despite the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero in March 1980 and of four American churchwomen by Salvadoran soldiers in December 1980.

The Panama Canal Treaties, 1977

Since 1903 the United States had controlled the Panama Canal and a ten-mile-wide Canal Zone across Panama, with the rights it would have held if it had been the sovereign power. The zone was a source of Panamanian anger: riots over the right to fly the Panamanian flag in the zone in January 1964 left more than twenty dead. Negotiations for a new treaty had begun under Johnson. On 7 September 1977 Carter and Panama’s military leader, General Omar Torrijos, signed the Panama Canal Treaties. The Panama Canal Treaty handed the canal to Panama on 31 December 1999; the Neutrality Treaty guaranteed that the canal would remain open to ships of all nations and gave the United States the right to defend its neutrality.

The treaties were bitterly opposed by conservatives, among them Ronald Reagan, who argued that the United States was giving away its own property. The Senate approved them in March and April 1978 by 68 votes to 32, one more than the two-thirds majority needed, after adding a reservation that allowed the United States to act, if necessary by force, to keep the canal open. Latin American governments of every political colour welcomed the treaties as the end of a symbol of US domination, and they were Carter’s clearest success in the region.

Nicaragua and El Salvador

The test of Carter’s policy came in Central America. In Nicaragua the Somoza family had ruled with US support since the 1930s. The murder of the opposition newspaper editor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro in January 1978 turned much of the country against Anastasio Somoza Debayle, and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a guerrilla movement named after the anti-American rebel leader Augusto Sandino, led a national uprising. Carter cut aid to Somoza but also tried to prevent a Sandinista victory, proposing an OAS peace force in June 1979 that the OAS rejected. The Sandinistas took power on 19 July 1979. Carter at first offered the new government economic aid, but suspended it in January 1981 because of evidence that Nicaragua was sending arms to the guerrillas in El Salvador.

To his critics on the right, Carter had "lost" Nicaragua. In an influential article, "Dictatorships and Double Standards" (Commentary, November 1979), the political scientist Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that his policy had undermined friendly "authoritarian" governments, which might reform over time, only to allow hostile "totalitarian" communist ones, which never would. Reagan read the article and made Kirkpatrick his ambassador to the United Nations. To critics on the left, Carter had not gone far enough: he never broke with the military regimes and returned to supporting the Salvadoran army.

Reagan and the Contras in Nicaragua

Ronald Reagan became president in January 1981 convinced that the Soviet Union and Cuba were using Nicaragua to spread revolution through Central America, and that Carter’s weakness had allowed it. His administration adopted Kirkpatrick’s distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and, from 1985, the Reagan Doctrine of supporting anti-communist rebels against Soviet-backed governments, in Nicaragua as in Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia.

The Sandinistas did receive Soviet and Cuban weapons, advisers and aid, built up a large army and sent arms to Salvadoran guerrillas, especially in 1980–1981. They also carried out a literacy campaign and land reform, won elections in 1984 that most foreign observers judged fair despite an opposition boycott, and restricted the press and the Church. Whether they were a Soviet outpost or a nationalist revolutionary government with ties to the Soviet bloc was the central question of the debate in the United States.

The chain of events from 1981 to 1986 shows how the Contra war became the most divisive foreign-policy issue of the Reagan years. Congress, controlled in the House by the Democrats and influenced by the memory of Vietnam, restricted aid with the Boland Amendments of 1982 and 1984. The CIA’s mining of Nicaragua’s harbours in early 1984 damaged ships of several countries, including a Soviet tanker, and angered even Republican senators. Nicaragua took the United States to the International Court of Justice, which ruled on 27 June 1986 that by training, arming and financing the Contras and mining the harbours the United States had broken international law. The United States refused to accept the judgment.

Reagan argued his case directly to the American people.

I must speak to you tonight about a mounting danger in Central America that threatens the security of the United States. … Will we permit the Soviet Union to put a second Cuba, a second Libya, right on the doorstep of the United States?

Ronald Reagan, address to the nation on the situation in Nicaragua, 16 March 1986. Reagan spoke days before a vote in Congress on US$100 million of aid to the Contras, whom he called "freedom fighters". The comparison with Cuba and Libya was designed to make a small Central American country seem a direct threat to Americans; the House narrowly rejected the aid that March but approved it in June 1986.

In November 1986 it was revealed that members of the National Security Council staff, including Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, had secretly sold arms to Iran, in the hope of freeing American hostages in Lebanon, and diverted some of the profits to the Contras in defiance of the Boland Amendment. The Iran–Contra affair led to congressional hearings and criminal convictions, some later overturned or pardoned. Reagan’s popularity fell, and Congress ended military aid to the Contras in 1988.

The war cost about 30,000 lives in Nicaragua and wrecked its economy, which was also hit by a US trade embargo from 1985. Peace came from Central American diplomacy. The Contadora Group (Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and Panama) from 1983, and then President Óscar Arias of Costa Rica, worked for a regional settlement. The Esquipulas II agreement of 7 August 1987, signed by the five Central American presidents, provided for ceasefires, amnesties, an end to support for rebel forces and free elections; Arias received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987. In elections in February 1990 Violeta Chamorro, widow of the murdered editor, defeated the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, and the Sandinistas handed over power.

El Salvador, Grenada and the Falklands

Reagan’s policy elsewhere in the region followed the same logic. In El Salvador the United States gave the government several billion dollars in economic and military aid during a civil war (1980–1992) against the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) that killed about 75,000 people. The UN-sponsored Truth Commission of 1993 found that most of the violence was committed by the army and the death squads linked to it, including the massacre of hundreds of villagers, many of them children, at El Mozote in December 1981 by a US-trained battalion.

In Grenada, a small Caribbean island, a left-wing government close to Cuba had taken power in 1979. When a more radical faction killed Prime Minister Maurice Bishop in October 1983, Reagan sent about 7,000 troops on 25 October, at the request of neighbouring eastern Caribbean states and citing the safety of American medical students. The invasion was popular in the United States and among many Grenadians, but the UN General Assembly condemned it and even Britain, Grenada’s former colonial power, objected.

The Falklands War of 1982 exposed the limits of the inter-American system. When Argentina’s military government occupied the British-ruled Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) in April 1982, the United States first tried to mediate, then supported Britain with intelligence and supplies. Most Latin American governments backed Argentina and argued that the Rio Pact obliged the United States to do the same; its refusal convinced many that the treaty protected US interests, not Latin American ones.

The end of the Cold War in the Americas, 1989–1991

The Cold War in the Americas ended with the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from the region. Under Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet Union cut aid to Nicaragua and Cuba and supported the Central American peace process. In December 1989 President George H. W. Bush sent about 27,000 troops into Panama in Operation Just Cause to remove Manuel Noriega, a former CIA informant turned dictator who had been indicted in the United States for drug trafficking. Noriega surrendered on 3 January 1990. The invasion was justified with arguments about democracy and drugs, not communism, a sign that the Cold War framework had faded; the OAS deplored it, and estimates of Panamanian deaths range from a few hundred to several thousand. The end of Soviet aid in 1991 plunged Cuba into the economic crisis known as the Special Period, and the Salvadoran peace agreement was signed in January 1992.

The impact of the Cold War on Canada

Canada entered the Cold War as a close ally of both Britain and the United States, with a small population, a large territory between the two superpowers and an economy increasingly tied to its southern neighbour. Its leaders, especially Louis St. Laurent (prime minister 1948–1957) and Lester Pearson (foreign minister 1948–1957, prime minister 1963–1968), saw Canada as a middle power: a country too small to act alone, but able to influence world affairs through alliances and international organisations. The Cold War tested that idea in four ways.

Domestic anti-communism

Canada’s Cold War arguably began before anyone else’s. On 5 September 1945 Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, defected with documents showing that Soviet military intelligence ran a spy network in Canada that had sought atomic secrets. The Gouzenko affair was revealed in February 1946. A Royal Commission (the Kellock–Taschereau Commission) held suspects in secret and questioned them without lawyers, and several people were convicted, including Fred Rose, the only Communist member of Parliament.

The affair alerted the United States and Britain to the scale of Soviet espionage and helped create the climate of the Red Scare. In Canada it led to security screening of civil servants by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the surveillance of thousands of left-wing activists, and, from the 1950s, purges of gay men and lesbians from the public service as supposed security risks. Communist influence in trade unions was attacked: the Canadian Seamen’s Union was broken in 1949 and communist-led unions were expelled from the main labour federations.

Canadian anti-communism was less extreme than McCarthyism. There was no Canadian HUAC, the Communist Party (then called the Labour-Progressive Party) remained legal, and in 1957 the Supreme Court struck down Quebec’s "Padlock Law", which had allowed the province to close premises used to spread communism (Switzman v. Elbling). McCarthyism also reached Canada directly: in 1957 the Canadian ambassador to Egypt, Herbert Norman, killed himself after a US Senate subcommittee repeated old accusations that he had been a communist, an episode that angered Canadians against their ally.

NATO and NORAD

Canada was one of the strongest supporters of NATO. Pearson and St. Laurent hoped an Atlantic alliance would bind the United States to Europe and give Canada a voice through a group of allies rather than alone with Washington. Canada pressed for Article 2 of the treaty, the "Canadian article", which committed members to economic and political cooperation as well as defence. From 1951 Canada stationed an army brigade group and an air division in Western Europe, and during the Korean War defence spending rose to about 7 per cent of gross national product.

The defence of North America was more difficult, because the main Soviet threat in the 1950s, long-range bombers, would cross Canadian airspace. Canada and the United States built three lines of radar stations across the country, the last and most northerly being the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, completed in 1957 and paid for by the United States. In 1957–1958 the two countries placed their air defences under a joint command, the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), with an American commander and a Canadian deputy.

NORAD exposed the limits of Canadian independence. In February 1959 the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker cancelled the Avro Arrow, an advanced Canadian-designed interceptor jet, because it was too expensive, and about 14,000 workers at the Avro company lost their jobs. Canada instead bought American aircraft and Bomarc anti-aircraft missiles, which were designed to carry nuclear warheads. Diefenbaker’s cabinet was divided, with his foreign minister Howard Green leading opposition to nuclear weapons, and the government delayed accepting the warheads for years, leaving the missiles without them.

The dispute came to a head after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Diefenbaker, resentful of Kennedy and of not being consulted, delayed putting Canadian forces on alert for two days; his defence minister, Douglas Harkness, quietly ordered the alert himself. In January 1963 Pearson, as Liberal leader, announced that Canada should honour its commitments and accept nuclear warheads. When Diefenbaker told Parliament that negotiations were continuing, the US State Department issued a public statement on 30 January contradicting him. Harkness resigned, and the government lost a vote of confidence in February. In the election of April 1963 the Liberals won, and Pearson’s government accepted nuclear warheads for Canadian forces that year.

UN peacekeeping

Canada’s most distinctive contribution to the Cold War was peacekeeping. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt, Pearson proposed at the United Nations that an international force be sent to separate the armies and allow the invaders to withdraw without humiliation. The General Assembly approved the plan in November 1956, and the UNEF (United Nations Emergency Force) was led by a Canadian general, E. L. M. Burns. Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957.

Peacekeeping served Canada’s Cold War aims. It kept local conflicts, such as Suez, from drawing in the superpowers; it repaired a dangerous split between the United States and its British and French allies; and it gave a middle power a role that the superpowers could not play. Canadian troops took part in almost every UN peacekeeping mission of the Cold War, including the Congo (1960–1964) and Cyprus (from 1964), and in the international commissions in Indochina. Peacekeeping became part of Canadian national identity, although historians debate how far the "golden age" of Pearsonian diplomacy was real and how far it was later idealised.

Cooperation and tension with the United States

Canadian governments agreed with the United States about the Soviet threat but disagreed often about how to meet it. Trudeau later described the relationship in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington in March 1969: living next to the United States was "like sleeping with an elephant", and "one is affected by every twitch and grunt".

Cuba was the clearest case of Canadian independence. Canada refused to join the US embargo or to break relations after 1959, partly from the principle that recognition did not mean approval, partly to protect trade and partly to show that Ottawa made its own foreign policy, though it agreed not to sell strategic goods. Trudeau’s visit to Havana in January 1976, when he cheered Castro before a large crowd, alarmed Washington, especially as Cuban troops had just gone to Angola.

The balance changed over time. In the 1940s and 1950s Canada’s interests and the United States’ largely coincided, and cooperation dominated. From the late 1950s nuclear weapons, Vietnam and nationalism produced open tensions, which peaked under Diefenbaker and Trudeau. Under Mulroney cooperation returned, but the Canadian economy was now so integrated with the American that independence in foreign policy was limited mainly to style and to issues such as Cuba and the Arctic.

The impact of the Cold War on one Latin American country: Cuba

Cuba was the Latin American country most transformed by the Cold War, and the one that did most to shape it. Its experience can be examined through four themes: its place in the inter-American system, the domestic political impact of the Cold War, and its relations with each superpower. The repression, social policies and economic record of Castro’s government are examined in the study of political developments in Latin America; the Cold War shaped all three.

Cuba, the Rio Pact and the OAS

Under Batista, Cuba signed the Rio Pact and the OAS Charter and was a reliable member of the US-led system. After 1959 the system was turned against it. The Caracas Declaration of 1954 provided the principle, and the OAS meetings of 1962 and 1964 excluded the Cuban government and imposed sanctions, using the Rio Pact’s provision for collective action against aggression "which is not an armed attack". Castro dismissed the OAS as an instrument of the United States and turned instead to the Non-Aligned Movement, whose summit Havana hosted in 1979, and to the revolutionary networks of the Tricontinental.

The isolation was never complete and did not last. Mexico and Canada kept relations throughout. In the 1970s, as governments in Peru, Panama, Venezuela, Argentina and elsewhere restored relations, the OAS voted in July 1975 to allow each member to decide its own relations with Cuba. Cuba refused to return to the organisation; when the OAS lifted the 1962 exclusion in 2009, Cuba declined to rejoin.

The domestic political impact

The Cold War shaped the form of the Cuban state. Hostility from the United States and the need for Soviet support pushed the revolution from radical nationalism towards Soviet-style communism. The old pro-Moscow Communist Party (the Popular Socialist Party) merged with the 26th of July Movement and the student Directorate, a process completed with the founding of the Communist Party of Cuba in October 1965. After the failure of the campaign for a 10-million-ton sugar harvest in 1970, Cuba adopted Soviet methods of planning and administration, held its first party congress in 1975 and approved a socialist constitution in 1976, closely modelled on Soviet practice.

The external threat also gave the government its main justification for one-party rule and the control of dissent, and the open door to emigration to the United States removed many opponents; how these worked as methods of control is examined in the study of authoritarian states. The Cold War militarised Cuban society: with Soviet weapons, the Revolutionary Armed Forces became one of the largest armies in Latin America, and from 1975 hundreds of thousands of Cubans served in Angola, Ethiopia and other countries as soldiers, doctors and teachers.

Cooperation and tension with the United States

Relations with the United States were hostile throughout, but not unchanging. The period of open conflict from 1959 to 1962 (the embargo, the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose and the Missile Crisis) was followed by a long stand-off in which each side accepted the other’s existence. There were moments of practical cooperation: an agreement on aircraft hijackers in 1973, secret talks under Ford and Kissinger in 1974–1975, and, under Carter, the opening of "interests sections" (embassies in all but name) in Havana and Washington in 1977. Each thaw ended over Cuba’s role in Africa or migration crises, above all the Mariel boatlift of 1980, when about 125,000 Cubans left for Florida. Reagan tightened the embargo and created Radio Martí (1985) to broadcast to the island. The US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, held under a 1903 lease that Cuba regarded as invalid, remained throughout.

Cooperation and tension with the Soviet Union

Soviet support allowed the revolution to survive the US embargo. The Soviet Union bought Cuban sugar, usually at prices well above the world market, and sold Cuba oil, machinery and weapons on easy terms. Cuba joined the Soviet-led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) in 1972. Estimates of the total Soviet subsidy vary widely, because they depend on how the sugar and oil prices are valued, but by the 1980s it was commonly put at several billion US dollars a year.

The relationship was not one of simple obedience. Castro was furious at being left out of the deal that ended the Missile Crisis and refused to allow UN inspections of Cuban territory. In the mid-1960s Cuba challenged Soviet policy: Guevara criticised Soviet trade terms in a speech in Algiers in February 1965, and Cuba backed armed revolution in Latin America while Moscow and the pro-Soviet parties preferred a peaceful road. In 1968 Moscow slowed oil deliveries, and Castro then publicly endorsed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which began a closer alliance. Even then, Cuba acted on its own initiative in sending troops to Angola in 1975, with the Soviet Union following later. In the late 1980s Castro rejected Gorbachev’s reforms and launched his own "rectification" campaign; Soviet aid ended in 1991, and the loss of about 80 per cent of Cuba’s foreign trade led to the Special Period.

A second case: Chile

Chile shows the impact of the Cold War on a country that stayed inside the US system. Under the same four headings:

• The inter-American system: Chile signed the Rio Pact and the OAS Charter but defended non-intervention, abstaining on Cuba’s exclusion in 1962. Allende restored relations with Cuba in November 1970 in defiance of the 1964 sanctions. After 1973 the military government hosted the OAS General Assembly in Santiago in 1976, where its human-rights record was criticised.

• Domestic politics: the Cold War polarised a stable democracy. The Communist Party was banned from 1948 to 1958; the United States funded the centre to keep the left out of power in 1964; Allende’s election in 1970, US destabilisation and the coup of 1973 brought a dictatorship that justified itself as a defence against international communism and lasted until 1990.

• The United States: from support for Frei to hostility to Allende, then close support for Pinochet under Nixon and Ford. Tension followed the Letelier murder: Congress cut military aid in 1976 and Carter pressed for the extradition of the DINA officers responsible. In the 1980s the Reagan administration, after first restoring ties, pressed Pinochet to accept the plebiscite of 1988, which he lost.

• The Soviet Union: Chile restored relations with Moscow under Frei in 1964. The Soviet Union welcomed Allende but gave him limited credits and little hard currency, wary of the cost of supporting a second Cuba; after the coup it broke off relations. The weakness of Soviet support for Allende shows how unequal the two superpowers’ power in the hemisphere was.

Comparing the impact across Latin America

The diagram of consequences shows the common pattern behind these different national stories. In each country the Cold War gave local elites, armies and revolutionaries an international ally and a language to justify their struggle, and it raised the stakes of conflicts over land, wages and power that had existed long before 1945.

Perspectives and debates

Why did the United States act as it did?

Historians disagree first about the motives of US policy. Orthodox historians of the early Cold War, such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ("Origins of the Cold War", Foreign Affairs, 1967), saw US policy as a defensive response to Soviet expansion. Revisionist historians such as William Appleman Williams (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1959) and Gabriel and Joyce Kolko (The Limits of Power, 1972) argued that the United States was driven by the need for open markets and access to raw materials, which made it hostile to economic nationalism anywhere. Post-revisionist historians, led by John Lewis Gaddis (The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947, 1972, and later work using Soviet sources), combined both, stressing security fears and misperception on both sides, and after the opening of Soviet archives laid more weight on Soviet responsibility.

Applied to Latin America, the debate is sharpest over Guatemala. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer (Bitter Fruit, 1982) stress the influence of the United Fruit Company and its links with the Eisenhower administration. Richard Immerman (The CIA in Guatemala, 1982) argues that anti-communist ideology, not the company, was the main motive. Piero Gleijeses (Shattered Hope, 1991) shows that Árbenz really was close to the Guatemalan communists, but argues that the threat to the United States was greatly exaggerated.

Who made the Cold War in Latin America?

Historians also disagree about agency: who drove the Cold War in Latin America. Walter LaFeber (Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, 1983) argues that the US system of support for local elites and dictators created the inequality that made revolution in Central America inevitable. Stephen Rabe (The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America, 2012) emphasises the violence of the regimes Washington supported, and Greg Grandin (The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, 2004) presents the Cold War in the region as a campaign against social democracy and popular movements more than against Soviet power.

Since the 2000s, historians using Latin American archives have stressed the role of Latin Americans themselves. Hal Brands (Latin America’s Cold War, 2010) argues that the region’s Cold War was a set of overlapping conflicts in which local governments, armies and revolutionaries pursued their own aims and often drew the superpowers in. Tanya Harmer (Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, 2011) shows that Cuba and Brazil’s military government were active players in the struggle over Chile, not only the United States. This "inter-American" approach does not excuse US actions, but it explains why the Cold War took different forms in different countries.

Debates on particular episodes

These perspectives can be weighed against each other. Those focused on Washington explain the pattern of interventions and the persistence of anti-communism across administrations; those focused on Latin America explain why the same policy produced a coup in Brazil, a civil war in Guatemala and a revolution in Nicaragua. The evidence from both US and Latin American archives supports a combined view: US power set the limits of what was possible, but Latin American actors decided much of what happened within them.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: the motives of US intervention

Paper 3: the impact of the Cuban Revolution

Paper 3: Carter’s policy

Paper 3: Canada

Paper 3: one Latin American country

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain containment, the Truman Doctrine and NSC-68, and why Latin America was a low priority for the United States before 1959.

• To do:

  I can explain the purpose of the Rio Pact, the OAS and the Caracas Declaration, and how they were used.

• To do:

  I can describe the origins, course and effects of McCarthyism, and weigh how far it went beyond Joseph McCarthy.

• To do:

  I can explain the New Look, massive retaliation, brinkmanship, the domino theory and the role of covert action.

• To do:

  I can explain why the United States overthrew Árbenz in 1954 and weigh the historians’ explanations.

• To do:

  I can explain how US–Cuban relations broke down in 1959–1962, why the Bay of Pigs failed and how the Missile Crisis was resolved.

• To do:

  I can describe Latin American reactions to the Cuban Revolution and the diplomatic impact on the OAS.

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  I can weigh the aims and results of the Alliance for Progress and explain the Mann and Johnson Doctrines.

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  I can explain the US role in Brazil in 1964 and in the Dominican Republic in 1965.

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  I can explain the domestic impact of the Vietnam War in the United States and the reactions of Canada and Latin America.

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  I can explain Nixon’s covert operations against Allende and weigh how far they caused his fall.

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