4 - New Leaders and New Arenas in the Cold War

Summary

The new Soviet leadership inherited a world in which the dominant power, the United States, had just undertaken a rapid military buildup and had demonstrated its ability to project its power many thousands of miles from its shores. Stalin was gone. First under Georgii Malenkov's leadership, then Nikita Khrushchev's, the apparatus of terror was being dismantled. Eisenhower and Dulles, the American people, were constrained by the intensity of anticommunism in the United States and persuaded that even after Stalin, the Soviet Union would be a dangerous adversary. The Soviet Union and the United States were preparing to arm themselves with thermonuclear weapons. One issue that plagued Eisenhower and Dulles was the shape of the security relationship with the Republic of China, Chiang Kai-shek's rump regime on Taiwan. From Washington's perspective, it had won an important victory over communism, an important victory in the Cold War, at minimal cost and almost without showing its hand.