As early as 1919, the newly-formed Soviet Union, which was still fighting a civil war to stabilize its existence, was organizing covert activities inside the United States – activities designed to destabilize and eventually overthrow the government. The communists in America hoped to do away with the Constitution, with personal freedom, and with political liberty.
Although this espionage network had already existed for several decades, it was not until 1946 that the period known as the ‘Cold War’ began. The start of this era was marked by the end of World War II, and by the USSR’s procurement of atomic weapon technology.
The end of WW2 was also the end of an uncomfortable but necessary cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Socialists. With the pretense of an alliance gone, the communists could unabashedly pursue their goal of dominating nations in Europe and Asia, and eventually, their goal of placing American under a communist dictatorship, as historian Robert Maginnis writes:
World War II ended in 1945, and America’s leaders anticipated that the Soviet Union would continue the level of cooperation enjoyed during the war years. After all, President Franklin Roosevelt, an ideological progressive, believed the partnership that defeated the Axis Powers, which included Russia, would coalesce around his vision of a United Nations that would prevent future world wars. Roosevelt’s dream for the United Nations is traceable to his progressive ideological brother, President Woodrow Wilson, a man who shared a similar ambition after World War I in the form of the League of Nations.
History repeats itself: two American presidents, both at the end of a world war, blinded by the illusion that a group of international ambassadors would be able to prevent future wars. Roosevelt and Wilson posed a noble and idealistic goal, but impractical and impossible one.
If we believe that both of these presidents were sincere in wanting a world parliament to preclude wars, then we can conclude that both were blinded to the risks that such well-intentioned efforts could prove to be a facade behind which subtle influences would actually work to erode national sovereignty instead of strive toward world peace. Instead of preventing war, the League of Nations and the United Nations could serve as cover to hide the work of agents who wanted to undermine the United States Constitution.
Other leaders shared the desire for peace, but saw that these gatherings of diplomats were not the mechanism to ensure peace. It became clear that these conventions would in fact attempt to override the will of the American voters.
Free citizens can remain free only if no external powers violate the results of free and fair elections. Once the people have spoken, no gathering of foreign diplomats has the right to overturn their vote.
But the League of Nations was headed in that direction, and the United Nations has in fact reached the point at which it sees itself as authorized to ignore the expressed will of the people. The USSR hoped to use the United Nations to dissolve personal freedom and individual political liberty.
The League failed, thanks to Republican senators suspicious of international entanglements, and Roosevelt’s grand hope for a “true war-preventing organization” really never materialized after the Second World War, because Roosevelt’s United Nations ultimately became little more than a toothless, empty-headed debating forum on the Hudson River in Manhattan, New York.
After the concept of the United Nations proved to be unrealistic, the tensions which fueled the Cold War took another turn. In the postwar years, as the Soviet Socialists expanded into country after country, establishing their communist military dictatorships, the Americans and the nations of western Europe used the word ‘containment’ to describe their response: they hoped to stop Soviet expansion.
The United States inherited from the Second War the global leadership mantle, a role it was ill prepared to fulfill. It quickly saw a rising Soviet Union that must be stopped, and therefore it embraced containment as the only viable strategy. But that containment strategy was primarily a military power exercise that created mutual defense alliances that became little more than an anti-communist alliance and spurred an arms race.
The Cold War created a bipolar paradigm, in which most of the world’s nations allied themselves either with the West or the East. The West promoted free market economics, personal political liberty, property rights, a respect for the individual, and the freedoms of speech, religion, and the press.
The East looked to the state, the government, to control and own property, and to manage industrial production and the economy. The state imposed its own education with no alternatives, imposed atheism, and imposed socialist dogma. Individuals were told that they could not make any significant choices, whether in matters of the economy or in the field of politics. There was no free speech or free press; instead, all aspects of life were saturated with socialist propaganda.
A small number of the world’s nations did not fit comfortably into this East-West pattern. The Islamic despots of the Near East and Middle East, for example, did not embrace Soviet socialism because of its strictly enforced atheism and because Islam was not interested in the USSR’s economic agenda. These Muslim regimes, however, also did not like the personal freedom which the West promoted.
