Global Cold War

11 Key excerpts on "Global Cold War"

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  Experiencing War

  • Christine Sylvester(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  fait accompli , a universally accomplished historical reality. The question of the end has no room for diversity and generates no such positive interpretative controversies as those about the origin. The story of the cold war we tell ourselves today, therefore, has an open-ended beginning and a closed ending.

  The term “cold war” refers to the prevailing condition of the world in the second half of the twentieth century, divided into two separate paths of political modernity and economic development. In a narrower sense it means the contest of power and will between the two dominant states, the United States and the Soviet Union, that (according to George Orwell, who coined the term in 1945) set out to rule the world between them under an undeclared state of war, being unable to conquer one another.1 In a broad definition, however, the Global Cold War also entails the unequal relations of power among the political communities, which pursued or were driven to pursue a specific path of progress within the binary structure of the global order, and the actions taken by the powerful states to maintain the hierarchy and to police the resistance from the weaker states and communities against the hierarchical order. The former “contest of power” dimension of the cold war has been an explicit and central element in existing cold war historiography; the latter “relation of domination” aspect a relatively marginal, implicit element. The debates about the origins of the cold war contribute to disclosing how complex the great bifurcation in the project of modernity has been for nations and communities. The origin of the cold war is not merely a question of time but also, in significant measure, a moral question – the question of which side of the bipolarized human community was more responsible for bringing about the order and engendering political and military crises. The moral aspect of the question is intertwined with the chronological one and their connectedness is more apparent in places where the bipolar conflict was waged in a violent form.

  Imagining the political future of Korea, for example, is inseparable from where to locate the origin of the Korean War. For people who date the origin to 1950, the culpability for the devastating civil war rests unquestionably with the northern communist regime, which launched, with endorsement and support from Mao and Stalin, an all-out surprise offensive against the southern territory in June of that year. For those who trace the war’s origin to the earlier years, the blame is shared with the strongly anti-communist southern regime, which instigated a series of border skirmishes and also crushed domestic radical nationalist forces in a ruthless manner from 1947 to 1950. The latter measure provoked the outbreak of armed partisan activities in parts of the southern territory, which were effectively in a state of war from 1948. For those who associate the origin of the Korean War with the end of the Pacific War in 1945, however, the main responsibility for the civil war lies instead with the United States and the Soviet Union, which partitioned and separately occupied the postcolonial nation after the surrender of Japan. These diverse perspectives on the origin of one of the first violent manifestations of the bipolar global order are not merely matters of scholarly debate. The perspectival diversity is deeply ingrained in the society that endured what was at once a civil war and an international war, provoking heated public debate and developing to conflicting political voices and forces. In this context, the origin of the cold war is largely about the origin of the war-induced wounds felt in the society, thereby making the very concept of the “cold” war somewhat contradictory, and claiming a particular version of the origin is simultaneously an act of asserting a particular vision of the nation’s future.

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  The Cold War and After

  Capitalism, Revolution and Superpower Politics

  • Richard Saull(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  For Realists 2 the Cold War is understood as the bipolar (superpower) relationship based on strategic competition, which was a consequence of the geopolitical arrangements brought about by the Second World War. In this understanding the Cold War is classified as a typical great power conflict based on the utility of military power and distinguished by the strategic currency of nuclear weapons. 3 From this perspective ideological and socio-economic factors are seen as largely subordinate to the material (military and economic) interests of each superpower; having more explanatory significance for accounts of the domestic political relations of each rather than their respective international relations. 4 Consequently, the end of the Cold War occurred because the USSR was forced to make strategic concessions (withdrawal from east-central Europe, arms control concessions and ending political-military support for allies) to preponderant US material power. Following this explanatory logic, the social and political developments within the Soviet bloc that altered the domestic socio-economic, ideological and political character of communist states are seen as being of secondary import. Ideational approaches 5 share with Realist-informed scholars some key theoretical assumptions about the Cold War: that it was a post-war conflict derived from the consequences of the Second World War, and that it was a conflict centred on the conflicting post-war objectives of the superpowers. Both, then, understand the Cold War as the diplomatic history of the post-1945 Soviet–US relationship. However, in contrast to Realists, ideational approaches emphasise the importance of domestic political ideas, values and ideology on superpower behaviour and, consequently, take much more seriously the ideological character of the Cold War conflict and the way in which domestic political factors (and change) conditioned the bipolar relationship

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  Return to Cold War

  • Robert Legvold(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  Like any large, complex phenomenon, there are multiple ways to understand the Cold War. Two, however, help better than others to unscramble the tangle of interpretations vying to explain the new Cold War. The first is the venerable and widely accepted conviction that the Cold War was a battle between political and economic systems, underpinned by fundamentally different values, goals, and ontologies. Within this argument the principal contention was over the latter, over the ideological element, and whether it played a primary or secondary causal role. Less conspicuously, a second area of disagreement eventually emerged related to the primary sphere within which the inter-systemic rivalry took place. Scholars looking back over the whole of the Cold War charged that mainstream analysts, particularly international relations theorists, had gotten it wrong by stamping it Euro-centric – that is, as a strategic contest between the United States and the Soviet Union over the fate of the international system’s European fulcrum – when, in fact, the Cold War’s active theater was the Third World (Westad, 2007).

  If the Cold War, as Fred Halliday (1999) argued, was as much a socio-economic contest for the hearts and minds of much of the globe as an ideological and geopolitical test of wills, then the fluid environment where it raged and, indeed, the point from which it ricocheted back into the anxiety-ridden consciousness of US and Soviet leaders was the vast expanses of a roiling postcolonial world. Halliday, to put a fine point on it, suggested that US “national security doctrines – from Truman to Reagan – were less about responding to Soviet geopolitical maneuvering and more concerned with responding to the geopolitical consequences of localized revolutionary crises” (Saull, 2011).

  That was inside the argument. Outside of it, the opposing school insisted that the clash of political and economic systems mattered less than a simple, classical slugfest over power. The clash was merely the tissue covering the real muscle controlling events. Beginning with this elemental argument, all of these contested byways echo today. Thus, some argue that the trouble traces back to the wildly different assumptions motivating the two sides. From the Western perspective, everything begins with the red in tooth and claw determination of Russian leaders to reverse the loss of place and power following the collapse of the Soviet Union. From a Russian perspective, the root cause is in the (unexplained) determination of US leaders to diminish Russia and put it in a box. It is a simple struggle for power, and these are its terms.

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  Ideology and International Relations in the Modern World

  • Alan Cassels(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9 IDEOLOGY AND GLOBAL POLITICS

  The Cold War

  From 1945 until 1989 international relations revolved around the resumed quarrel between the Stalinist version of Marxism-Leninism and the forces of capitalist liberal democracy. Scarcely an international episode in this period escaped the imprint of the East-West altercation. Since international politics as the result of two world wars had ceased to be Eurocentric, the ideologies of the conflict, to which the American journalist Walter Lippmann attached the phrase ‘Cold War’, were transported around the globe.

  The extension of ideology to a universal diplomatic terrain was furthered by the invention of the atomic bomb. The failure of the USA and USSR to agree on an international atomic energy control system left the West in sole possession of nuclear weaponry until 1949 when the Soviets exploded their first nuclear device and then, some years later, acquired a missile-delivery capability. The frightening power of nuclear weapons imposed a bar on their use, a ‘self-deterrence’ that operated even when the West enjoyed a monopoly.1 Furthermore, once both superpowers came to possess the ultimate weapon, parity was less important than mutually assured destruction (the sardonic acronym MAD seemed appropriate), some degree of which was guaranteed and constituted an even greater inhibition. On several occasions the USA threatened to drop the bomb, but there was always a strong element of bluff involved. One historian has facetiously suggested that the atomic weapon deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.2 Fearful of an armed clash with each other, then, Washington and Moscow were compelled to turn to twin surrogates. First, they had recourse to proxy wars in the Third World fought, initially at least, by clients of the superpowers guided by American or Russian ‘advisers’. These were contests for the political allegiance of Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, and involved promotion of the capitalist and communist ways of life in an either/or ideological fashion. The second alternative to a nuclear Armageddon was to conduct the Cold War with words, using ideological slogans as a substitute for bombs and missiles—by psychological warfare within a ‘balance of ideologies’.3 Much of the propaganda so generated can be dismissed as rhetorical froth. None the less, the constant depiction of an apocalyptic struggle between pure and impure ideologies could not fail to create certain expectations and apprehensions, a belief system or ‘operational code’ that found expression in diplomatic behaviour.4

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  America, Amerikkka

  Elect Nation and Imperial Violence

  • Rosemary Radford Ruether(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  America's Global Mission: The Cold War Era, 1945-89

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315711201-6

  For more than forty years two rival empires, identified with two rival ideologies, confronted one another across bristling shields of deadly weapons capable of destroying the peoples of the earth many times over. Each defined themselves in messianic terms as saviors of the world’s peoples against a deadly foe. The U.S. saw itself as the leader of the ‘free world,’ champion of freedom and democracy, against an evil system of totalitarian repression and slavery. The Soviets saw themselves as the leader of an ‘inevitable’ process of world transformation from capitalist exploitation of the workers to socialist equality, over against a United States that had taken up the banner of European imperialism at a time when that system was dying.

  Stages in the Cold War

  The period from 1945 to 1989 was not one of uniform hostility. It took several years after the end of the Second World War for the wartime alliance of the U.S. and Western Europe with the Soviet Union to be redefined as one of unrelenting antagonism. After the death of Stalin in 1953 until the late sixties there was some relaxing of tensions followed by renewed periods of hostility. The period from 1969–1979 was one of détente in which both sides pursued negotiations to resolve major issues of dispute, particularly the nuclear arms race. SALT I, (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) signed by President Nixon and Soviet leader Brezhnev in 1972, ended the race to develop defensive antiballistic missile systems (AMBs) and froze the number of nuclear missiles to 1,600 on the Soviet side and 1,054 on the U.S. side. This agreement actually left the U.S. two to one ahead, since the U.S. MIRVs (multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles) contained multiple warheads on one missile capable of hitting widely separated areas.1

  1 Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945–1992

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  War, Peace and International Relations

  An introduction to strategic history

  • Colin S. Gray(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Nothing in history is strictly inevitable. However, history, for all its non-linearities, is by no means a random sequence of happenings. It is plausible to argue that the Soviet– American Cold War was an inevitable or, if preferred, a highly probable outcome of the war against Germany. The old European balance of power had just been destroyed utterly – not that it had been at all healthy in the 1930s, one might add. Only two states were still standing as truly great powers. Britain, France and China were treated as great powers, but that was more attributable to habit, courtesy, convenience and interests than to real strength. In the traditional logic of international politics, when two polities stand far above the rest, sooner or later they are bound to be rivals. Much of the history of the Cold War is debatable, but there are no convincing grounds for believing that the conflict was a mistake, an accident or an avoidable product of misunderstanding. This is not to argue that Moscow and Washington understood each other at all well; they did not. But in its essentials the conflict emerged, and was prosecuted, for sound enough reasons, given the ideologies and geopolitical interests of the two potential rivals. The Cold War may have been pursued overenthusiastically, even recklessly, at times by one or both parties, but each side quite accurately viewed the other as an enemy. In terms of capabilities broadly understood – which is to say grand-strategically, not narrowly militarily – the United States and the Soviet Union correctly regarded each other as their only serious enemy on the planet. Grand strategy refers to the purposeful employment of all of the assets of a state, not only to the use of the military instrument.

  Why did the Cold War happen? The most convincing answer must eschew any mono-causal determinant. Instead, three structural reasons can be identified and one of human agency. The structural reasons can be summarized thus: each superpower was, globally, the sole major threat to the other; they were deadly ideological rivals; and their political differences, especially with respect to East–Central Europe, which is where the Cold War began, were non-negotiable. As for human agency, the Soviet Union was led by the immensely paranoid Joseph Stalin. For a terse forensic summary of the Cold War, it would be difficult to improve on the judgement of former British senior intelligence official Gordon S. Barrass: ‘It was a toxic mix of history, ideology, geography and strategy’ (Barrass, 2009: 2). When one adds the personal human element to that deadly cocktail, one is in the realm of high plausibility.

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  Engaging Geopolitics

  • Kathleen E Braden, Fred M Shelley(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3

  The Cold War

           

  KEYWORDS

  blocs, domino theory, containment,

  détente ,

  glasnost, shatterbelt, non-alignment

  KEY PROPOSITIONS

  • New war-fighting technologies and the Soviet/American rivalry dominated post-World War II geopolitical discourse through the 1980s.

  • The locus of this conflict increasingly shifted to a third world stage and to four major shatterbelt areas.

  • Europe perceived itself as a buffer between two superpowers, a fact that helped the formation of a European Union.

  3.1   Introduction

  The end of World War II in 1945 brought about substantial and profound changes in international relations. Since the Renaissance, the world economy had been centered in Europe, and geopolitical theory was concerned primarily with European states and their interrelationships. The conclusion of World War II signified that Europe was no longer at the center of the global political economy. After the war, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics emerged as the world’s leading powers, while the countries of Europe were dependent on American and Soviet aid to rebuild their war-torn and devastated economies.

  Conflict between the Americans and the Soviets soon dominated geopolitical thought. Within a very few years, geopolitical and ideological differences between America and Russia were to divide Europe and initiate the Cold War. Sir Winston Churchill’s famous phrase, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent” came to symbolize Europe’s position in post-World War II geopolitics. Europe was no longer in a position to initiate geopolitical change; rather it was a potential battleground, both militarily and economically, between the competing interests of the United States and the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, Western Europe had become incorporated into the American-dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and thousands of American troops were stationed in Germany and elsewhere in Europe with the intention of protecting Western Europe from potential Russian attacks. Similarly, the Warsaw Pact symbolized the incorporation of Eastern Europe into the Soviet sphere of influence.

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  The Cold War

  An International History

  • David Painter(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 The Cold War begins, 1945–50

  Following World War II, the foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union interacted with the chaotic and fluid state of international relations to produce the Cold War. Understanding the impact of World War II on the international system and its members is crucial to understanding the origins of the Cold War. World War II accelerated fundamental changes in the global distribution of power, in weapons technology, in the balance of political forces among and within nations, in the international economy, and in relations between the industrial nations and the Third World. In addition, the diplomatic and military decisions made during the war had a profound impact on the shape of the postwar world.

  THE WORLD IN 1945

  World War II was the culmination of a series of events that profoundly changed the global distribution of power. As National Security Council Paper No. 68, the seminal statement of US Cold War policies, pointed out in April 1950, “within the past thirty-five years the world has experienced two global wars of tremendous violence…two revolutions—the Russian and the Chinese—of extreme scope and intensity …the collapse of five empires—the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Italian, and Japanese—and the drastic decline of two major imperial systems, the British and the French.” The result was the end of the European era and the rise to dominance of two continental-size superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.1

  Before World War II there were six great powers: Great Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States. The United States entered the postwar era in a uniquely powerful position, its relative standing greatly increased by its mobilization and war effort, its allies exhausted, and its rivals defeated. Around 410,000 US citizens lost their lives in the war, but US farms, factories, mines, and transportation networks escaped unscathed. Wartime mobilization and production lifted the United States out of the depression, and during the war the US economy almost doubled in size. In 1945, the United States controlled around half the world’s manufacturing capacity, most of its food surpluses, and a large portion of its financial reserves. The United States also held the lead in a wide range of technologies essential to modern warfare. Possession of extensive domestic energy supplies and control over access to the vast oil reserves of Latin America and the Middle East further contributed to the US position of global dominance.

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  The Last Decade of the Cold War

  From Conflict Escalation to Conflict Transformation

  • Olav Njolstad(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Certainly, in disciplinary terms, political scientists and international relations theorists have been more inclined to believe that if the Cold War came to an end, then it did so for good reasons: historians, in the main, have been more apt to conceive of what happened in terms of contingency. ‘Yes’, they argue, one should always look for the causes of the end of the Cold War—but ‘No’, they continue, we should not then conclude that it had to happen. International factors and changing relative capabilities might have made the end possible. However, anybody studying the documents cannot seriously insist that what occurred was the only possible outcome. Indeed, according to some of them, the end of the Cold War was not so much the product of structures but the actions, conscious or otherwise, of just one man, and one man alone: Mikhail Gorbachev. Take him out of the historical narrative, they argue, and one ends up with a quite different outcome. 24 This, then, leads to the issue of definition. Here we confront an even greater intellectual conundrum. Historians might write about something called the ‘Cold War’. However, they have not always used the term in a consistent fashion. Certainly, given their regular pairing of these two words together one might have assumed that there would be some level of agreement about what the term means. But this is far from being the case. Indeed, the more one looks in detail at the way in which the concept of ‘Cold War’ has been used, the more one is struck by the fact that analysts are quite often talking about subtly different things. Thus a few employ it to suggest an almost century-long period of suspicion between the United States and Russia, stretching right back to the late nineteenth century. Others take it to mean the years between 1917 and 1991, the full life-span of the Soviet Union as an integrated communist system. One or two see the ‘war’ as stretching from 1941 to 1991

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  Spheres of Influence in International Relations

  History, Theory and Politics

  • Susanna Hast(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5The Burden of the Cold War

  The historical memory of spheres of influence points strongly to the era which started after the Second World War and ended in early 1990s. When we think of spheres of influence we remember the divisions, the superpowers and their blocs, the ideological battle, and the Cuban Missile Crisis; and we remember how Russia lost its sphere of influence and the United States could freely pursue its universalist ambitions. The purpose of this chapter is not to tell the story of Cold War spheres of influence in its entirety or even comprehensively; it is to raise questions on Cold War spheres of influence by discussing them on the conceptual level. Examples from the Cold War have already been illustrated in the chapters on the English School, and the historical setting is clearly visible in the School’s work, but this chapter goes into the period in more detail. The purpose of this chapter is twofold:

  1. To look at the conceptual insights of Keal, Kaufman and Vincent, as well as Bull, on the consolidation of spheres of influence with means such as interventions. Keal and Kaufman offer perspectives on the formality and legitimacy of influence, which help to problematise the current pejorative associations of the concept.

  2. In order to reflect on actual Cold War practices, I present the Cuban Missile Crisis as an example of a collision of spheres of influence. Again Keal and Kaufman provide much of the material because of their theoretical focus, but as discourses of justification, speeches of Kennedy and Khrushchev are explored as well.

  In its simplicity, the Cold War understanding of a sphere of influence is that of a foreign policy aimed at controlling smaller states for the sake of position, prestige and the balance of power. It is influence for its own sake: any increase in the quality and quantity of influence is that much influence taken away from the rival power. Spheres of influence were interpreted through ‘imperialist geopolitics’ and a realist worldview. They implied not only an ideological divide but also military superiority or inferiority and resources for prosperity. Looking more closely at the Cold War reveals that fundamentally, despite the realist power calculations, spheres of influence were an aspect of international order: the threat of universalism if the balance of power should fail, great power management, questions of sovereignty and intervention, tacit understandings, stability of possessions, and even considerations of justice. Yet, we lack theoretical studies on Cold War spheres of influence, just like we lack interest in the relationship between spheres of influence and international institutions after the Cold War.

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  The remnants of war

  • John Mueller(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  It even began to be possible that the United States and the USSR could again become allies as they had been during World War II. In 1988, in his last presidential press conference, Ronald Reagan was specifically asked about this, and, stressing the ideological nature of the contest, he responded essentially in the affirmative: “If it can be definitely established that they no longer are following the expansionary policy that was instituted in the Communist revolution, that their goal must be a one-world Communist state…[then] they might want to join the family of nations and join them with the idea of bringing about or establishing peace.” In the spring of 1989, his successor, George Bush, was repeatedly urging that Western grand strategy should change, moving “beyond containment” to “integrate the Soviet Union into the community of nations.” 35 Thus, judging from the rhetoric and actions of important observers and key international actors like these two presidents, the Cold War ended in the spring of 1989. 36 This timing strongly suggests that the Cold War was principally an ideological conflict in which the West saw the Soviet Union as committed to a threateningly expansionary doctrine. Once this menace seemed to vanish with the policies of Gorbachev, Western leaders and observers began to indicate that the conflict was over. Thus the Cold War was not about the military, nuclear, or economic balance between the East and the West, nor was it about Communism as a form of government, the need to move the world toward democracy and/or capitalism, or, to a degree, Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. * The Cold War was not about these issues because it came to an end before any of them was really resolved. The process can be neatly summarized with some public opinion data. Figure 2 (p

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