The Cold War was a war because of the Red Scare

The argument

The term “war” can be abstract, and a formal declaration of war is not needed for it to be considered a war. In the present age, the US is fighting a “war” against multiple enemies who are not entirely visible. Many nations have come out with campaigns coining the war on terror or the war on crime and these various other social issues. The war on communism was no different at the time of the cold war. The red scare faced by America is clear in the legislation of the time. For example, a foreign policy of “massive retaliation” was adopted during the Eisenhower administration to counter the threat of communist soviets and further established that America was prepared to use their tactical nuclear weapons to blunt any soviet attacks. President Harry S. Truman also signed Executive Order 9835, which created the "Federal Employees Loyalty Program". This established political loyalty review boards within federal government offices who would maintain an acceptable level of Patriotism within the workforce while also recommending termination of those who were suspected or had confessed of being "Un-American" or even worse, a Soviet spy. Although there was no formal declaration of war, the US government, through the employment of these aggressive foreign policies, was clearly instigating one. The Cold War was a war fought on a bloody ideological battleground where Western thought fought for salvation against communism.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The Cold War/War on Communism should not be equated to initiatives such as the War on Terror, considering there were direct "boots on the ground" involvement in those examples. There were none during the War on Communism.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Extending 'war' by analogy to the war on terror and the war on crime concedes the point rather than establishing it. Those phrases are widely understood as metaphors for policy campaigns, not descriptions of armed conflict — which is why nobody counts a war on drugs among the wars of the twentieth century. Borrowing a rhetorical usage does not show that the Cold War was literally a war. [Rejecting P2] Loyalty boards and a declaratory nuclear posture are domestic security policy and deterrence doctrine. Executive Order 9835 operated on federal employment, not on an enemy force, and 'massive retaliation' was explicitly a threat framed to make war unnecessary. Both are consistent with an intense rivalry that never became a war. [Rejecting P3] The counter-argument on record makes the decisive distinction: the campaigns the argument compares itself to involved direct 'boots on the ground', while the US and the Soviet Union never fought each other's forces. Proxy conflicts in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan were wars in their own right, and treating them as episodes of a single superpower war obscures rather than clarifies what happened. [Rejecting C] On this view the Red Scare shows how far a rivalry can reshape domestic politics without becoming a war, so it supports calling the Cold War something other than a war.