The Global Cold War

10 Key excerpts on "The Global Cold War"

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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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  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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  War, Peace and International Relations

  An introduction to strategic history

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

    (Publisher)

  14  The Cold War, I

  Politics and ideology

  Reader's guide: The legacy of World War II. The onset of the Cold War. The course of the conflict. Soviet and US performance. Soviet failures.

  Introduction: from war to peace – the consequences of World War II

  The Cold War has passed into history, but the nuclear bomb and the nuclear revolution are here to stay, prospectively for ever. Between them, the bomb and the political context of the Cold War nearly brought strategic history to an abrupt full stop. The human experience in its entirety might well have been concluded violently. How did this happen? And, more to the point, why? This chapter offers a fresh look at the Soviet–American Cold War of 1947–89, while the chapter that follows pays particular attention to its historically novel nuclear dimension.

  The events and non-events, but possible events, of the Cold War years comprise a contested history among scholars today (Westad, 2000; Herrman and Lebow, 2004). Almost everything about the Cold War is uncertain; at least, it is uncertain if one focuses on issues of motivation and causation. There is no solid consensus on why the Cold War began, who was most responsible for it, or why it concluded with barely a whimper with the loss of the will to power of the Soviet ruling elite in the late 1980s. Fortunately, the historical record provides some compensation for the deeper uncertainties. Even if one cannot be sure exactly why particular decisions were taken, one can secure an adequate grasp of who did what and when. Furthermore, one can proceed to ask and answer the strategist's question: so what? Deeds and their consequences are less mysterious than are motives.

  One of the themes of this text is the intimate connection between war and peace, and indeed between peace and war. Peace, at least some semblance thereof, follows war. Moreover, peace of a particular character is what a war is all about. It is easy to forget this fundamental fact amid the stress, excitement and difficulties of waging war. The Cold War was a consequence of the changes in context produced by World War II. It is vital to recognize the complex authority of context. It is not quite everything, because individuals matter. But the Stalins, Kennedys and Gorbachevs must exercise their judgement, their somewhat free will, in political, socio-cultural, economic, technological, military–strategic, geographical and historical contexts for which they are largely not responsible.

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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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  International Relations since 1945

  East, West, North, South

  • Geir Lundestad(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  2 The Cold War in Europe, 1945–1949

  Political Science and History

  In political science the study of international relations has been dominated by two basic general approaches, realism and liberalism. Realism was long the dominant approach. Its starting point was the anarchic nature of the international system, in the sense that the predominant consideration of each state was to protect its own security. You could never be certain what other states would do in the future. Therefore you had to prepare for the worst contingencies. In a world of sovereign states, international institutions mattered only on the margins. The international community differs from the domestic situation within individual nations in that there is no effective central power having more or less a monopoly of the use of force.

  No state was really willing to leave its primary security requirement to an international authority. The United Nations could perform some useful functions, but the Great Powers all insisted on having a veto to stop the new organization from undertaking actions contrary to their interests. The Soviet Union came to use its veto quite frequently. Since the Western powers dominated the UN, they long had less of a need to use their vetos.

  Conflicts are therefore inevitable in the international system. The normal state is rivalry rather than cooperation. Of course major powers can cooperate, but when they do so it is most often to face a joint threat. When the threat no longer exists, cooperation normally dissipates. In this perspective the antagonism between East and West is a new variation on a familiar theme. The coalition between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom was dissolved after Germany and Japan were defeated in 1945. A similar situation pertained after the Napoleonic wars and after the First World War. But the objection can be raised that the tension between East and West after the Second World War reached a higher level than after earlier, corresponding conflicts.

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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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  Over the Horizon

  Time, Uncertainty, and the Rise of Great Powers

  • David M. Edelstein(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 5

  The Origins of the Cold War

  This chapter examines the dynamics of emerging threats in an environment where other threats were absent. During World War II, the pressing threat of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan produced short time horizons and the mutual benefits of cooperation for the Allied powers. At the end of World War II, time horizons became elongated, and competition resulted. The United States was by any measure the most powerful country in the world after World War II. Given the small short-term rewards for cooperation, the absence of alternative threats, and growing concern about long-term Soviet intentions, the United States transitioned from the cooperation that characterized World War II to the competition that characterized the Cold War. As much as emerging bipolarity set the stage for the Cold War, it was U.S. beliefs about long-term Soviet intentions that explain the timing and emergence of the conflict. While the United States might have preferred to come home after the conclusion of World War II, growing concern about Soviet intentions made that impossible.1 To be clear, U.S. behavior was not blameless in the origins of the conflict, but this chapter aims to provide a better understanding of how the United States came to regard the threat posed by an emerging postwar Soviet Union.

  This chapter serves a different purpose than the other empirical chapters. It is not surprising that the United States and the Soviet Union found value in a marriage of convenience to defeat Hitler’s Germany. What this case does allow for is a more careful examination of the role that beliefs about intentions, rather than simply capabilities, play in resolving uncertainty about the threat posed by a rising power. While there is no denying that the structural environment of bipolarity after World War II made Soviet-U.S. competition more likely, this chapter demonstrates that it was increasing evidence of Soviet intentions that was the driving force behind the evolution of U.S. strategy toward Moscow. The United States was not overly concerned by the immediate military threat that Moscow posed to Western Europe. In fact, Washington’s inclination was to pull back and come home once the war had concluded. But ominous signals of Soviet intentions added to the weight of the evidence supporting a reasonable probability that the Soviets did, indeed, pose a threat. It was beliefs about intentions and the transformation of uncertainty into risk that generated the Cold War.

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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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  Europe and America

  The End of the Transatlantic Relationship?

  • Bindi(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Brookings Institution Press

    (Publisher)

  PART II The Cold War Superpowers in a Hot World Passage contains an image   ELEVEN Russia’s Staunch Foreign Policy in a Wavering Landscape SERENA GIUSTI

  F or centuries Russian foreign policy has been marked by expansion, militarization, and border defense. The identity of Russia itself has been forged by the country’s capacity to spread out and conquer new territories. While Russia under the czars was long one of the key players in European diplomacy (and also had a strong interest in expanding eastward), under Soviet rule it became a superpower whose ideological and geopolitical influence extended throughout the world. Soviet foreign policy took on a global dimension due to the bipolar nature of the international system, within which Russia and the United States struggled for dominance. The system revolved around the two superpowers, and it relied for its survival on the doctrine of nuclear deterrence based on mutual assured destruction. There were, however, several shifts in alliances as some countries passed from one sphere of influence to the other; other countries were able to maintain nonaligned status.

  The Kremlin, following the centuries-old strategic logic of Russian imperialism, kept strict control over the Eastern European countries (the so-called satellites) in order to use the region as a buffer against possible military attack by the major Western powers.1 Unlike other empires, the Soviet Union did not fall because it was defeated in war but because the political and economic model on which it was based failed. The bipolar system crashed after the satellites rejected the Soviet legacy for full sovereignty, and the Soviet Union itself imploded quite unexpectedly.

  Even the international relations theory of realism failed to forecast the end of the rivalry between the great powers, the unilateral Soviet withdrawal from its sphere of influence, and the rise of nationalism. Russia no longer controlled an imperial hinterland in Europe, and it no longer was confronted with a zero-sum relationship with the United States. As Ilya Prizel pointed out, “Within the short space of three years the Russian people have seen the ideology that dominated their polity for seven decades de-legitimized. Worse still, they have lost the vast territories that for centuries [they] considered their own and have witnessed the disappearance of an imperial status that has been part and parcel to Russia’s national being since at least the sixteenth century.”2

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  Explaining War and Peace

  Case Studies and Necessary Condition Counterfactuals

  • Jack Levy, Gary Goertz(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  We proceed in four sections. We begin by specifying our treatment of the case and its relation to ongoing theoretical controversies. In the second section, we provide new evidence and analysis of the effects of Soviet relative decline on Moscow’s decision to retrench internationally in the 1980s. The third section establishes how changes in the structure of global production shifted the underlying terms of the Cold War rivalry and generated incentives for a Soviet policy of retrenchment and engagement with the West. In the fourth section, we bring these two material pressures together in the context of examining recent evidence on Soviet old thinkers. In the conclusion, we sum up the results of our analysis and outline the repercussions for future research.

  The Cold War’s end as a case study

  International relations scholarship on the end of the Cold War has been hamstrung by lack of evidence as well as by poor specification of the relationship between case and theory.2 In this section, we clarify our treatment of the case. We then turn to an examination of the evidence.

  The ideational models

  Dozens of scholars – some explicitly inspired by constructivism, others following psychological, institutional, or organizational approaches – have proposed numerous pathways through which various kinds of ideas affected the course of events. These models identify both a process by which ideas are generated and transmitted to decision-makers and a causal mechanism through which ideas affect choices.

  Concerning the origins and transmission of ideas, two generic processes do most of the work. The first is intellectual entrepreneurship. A crisis creates a window of opportunity by discrediting old policies and the ideas associated with them. Idea entrepreneurs then fill the gap by showing how novel ideas resolve strategic dilemmas. These entrepreneurs may be intellectuals in the various bureaucracies who feed their ideas to leaders eager for new concepts, as many scholars argue was the case in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s (e.g., Herman 1996; Checkel 1997; Mendelson 1998; English 2000). Or the true intellectual entrepreneurs may be the top leaders themselves, as many others contend was the case with Mikhail Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War (e.g., Wendt 1992; Koslowski and Kratochwil 1994; Brown 1996; Larson 1997, chap. 6; Breslauer and Lebow 2004). Either way, these scholars maintain that although the crisis that opens the policy window may be a necessary condition of change, the response is a creative, fundamentally intellectual act that switches history onto new rails and whose explanation requires specific models. Many accounts add an important transnational element to the entrepreneurship process. Here, the origins of the ideas lie in substate intellectual communities that transmit new concepts across national borders (e.g., Knopf 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994; Evangelista 1999).

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