America in the Cold War
The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union from the end of World War II until the early 1990s. America played a central role in the Cold War, engaging in a variety of strategies to contain the spread of communism and promote its own interests. This era was characterized by intense political, military, and ideological rivalry between the two superpowers.
8 Key excerpts on "America in the Cold War"
eBook - ePubThe Cold War
An International History
- David Painter(Author)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...7 Understanding the Cold War This study has analyzed the Cold War as a product of the domestic histories of the great powers and of the structure and dynamics of international relations. Following World War II, changes in the global distribution of power, weapons technology, the balance of political forces within and among nations, the world economy, and relations between the industrialized nations and the underdeveloped periphery led to the Cold War. Further changes in these areas perpetuated it, and eventually brought about its end. Throughout the Cold War, the global distribution of power influenced US and Soviet perceptions of their respective national interests and consequently their actions. Despite the upsurge in Soviet military power in the 1970s and a relative decline in US economic strength, the global distribution of power remained tilted against the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. If popular support, industrial infrastructure, skilled manpower, and technological prowess are factored into the definition of power, the postwar era was bipolar only in a narrow military sense. By any broad definition of power, the Soviet Union remained throughout the Cold War an “incomplete superpower.” 1 This imbalance emerges even more starkly when the strength of the Western alliance is measured against that of the Soviet Bloc. Even in military terms the Soviet position had as many elements of weakness as of strength. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies possessed numerical superiority in ground forces along the central front in the heart of Europe. In addition, Soviet and Chinese Communist ground forces outnumbered any possible opponent in Northeast Asia during the 1950s...
eBook - ePubAmerica's Other War
Terrorizing Colombia
- Doug Stokes(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Zed Books(Publisher)
...2 | US objectives in Latin America during the Cold War Orthodox historical interpretations of US foreign policy have become dominant within IR, and are regularly adopted as unproblematic and uncontested modes of historical analysis by neo-realist, liberal and even more critically inclined IR theorists. Broadly speaking, these orthodox accounts view US Cold War foreign policy as having been reactive to Soviet expansionism, with the USA’s primary grand strategy in the developing world being containment of the Soviet Union. US intervention is thus predominantly interpreted as defensive and driven by a bipolar security logic. Counterposed to this interpretation, and yet almost entirely absent from conventional understandings, are revisionist accounts. These argue that US Cold War foreign policy was primarily driven by the desire to construct, defend and extend a liberal capitalist international order while maintaining the US position as the dominant state within that order. Revisionists argue that US interests within the Third World were primarily economic with concomitant strategic and ideological considerations. Specifically, these interests were the maintenance of access to raw materials, the continued flow of capital from the developing world to the developed, access to cheap labour and the destruction of social forces or states that followed a path of development independent of US control. Orthodox interpretations of US Cold War foreign policy: East versus West Realist and liberal analysts of US foreign policy tend to view the Cold War in bipolar terms and work with an orthodox historical interpretation of its origins and operation. 1 An orthodox historiography views the Soviet Union as having had expansionist tendencies in the Third World during the Cold War and as fundamentally hostile to Western security...
eBook - ePubA World Without Meaning
The Crisis of Meaning in International Politics
- Zaki Laidi, June Burnham, Jenny Coulon(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In other words, by osmosis as much as from necessity, the American federal government played a central role during the build-up of American power during the Cold War and its projection in the world. Even in this reputedly liberal country, the state played its full part in ensuring the coherence of meaning and power. 26 The fundamental origins of the Cold War What gave the Cold War so much coherence was its capacity, as a teleological system, to make not only the contemporary world but also its history objects of debate. In hindsight it seems to have succeeded in compacting—while at the same time sifting—the successive strata of what is called the philosophy of History. Through debates on the comparative merits of free enterprise and the socialization of the means of production, and on the relevance of Soviet or American models to deprived countries, the great issues of the philosophy of History acquired a realist political expression, an intelligibility that went beyond philosophy circles and the geographic boundaries of the West, a practical and political translation to an ‘horizon of meaning’. It seemed possible to reduce the philosophical incompatibility between theodicy and praxis, between theory and practice. 27 With the emergence of two superpowers saturated with universalism and animated by what Leibniz called ‘consequential will’—in other words, the ambition to ‘do everything at the same time’—issues in the philosophy of History gave at times the impression of interacting with those of contemporary history. 28 For example, to call yourself ‘progressive’ in the 1960s not only had more or less the same political significance in Paris and Conakry but, moreover, referred back to a clearly identifiable past, that of the Enlightenment. Through mechanisms for joining or identifying, a meaning could be found immediately for individual or collective action. The reserves of meaning were available, and it was ‘convenient’ to capture them to make use of them...
eBook - ePub- Robert Legvold(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...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...
eBook - ePubWar, 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...
eBook - ePubReinterpreting the End of the Cold War
Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations
- Silvio Pons, Federico Romero, Silvio Pons, Federico Romero(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Often, in fact, that blindingly obvious conclusion generates the putative premise of the argument, and not the other way around. I have polemicized against this way of looking at the problem elsewhere and will only point out now that a simple, ‘epochal’ conception, all-encompassing as it tends to be, occasions serious problems of demarcation. What exactly is the Cold War and where did it take place? After a metaphorical while, it turns out to be everything and nothing: suburban life in Los Angeles (why not?), educational reform in rural Australia, and decisional intrigue in the Pentagon. For better or worse, my argument goes in the opposite direction, towards, in the spirit of a delimiting critique, ever greater specificity. The Cold War as a concept, for one thing, should be kept analytically distinct from origins and effects. As initially a peculiar projection of US power, it was never everything that happened between the United States and the USSR in the post-war period up to 1963 (or 1989); it was a dominant, an overdetermining structure whose effects cut synchronically across a range of other levels and terrains. Similarly, from a diachronic perspective, its effects do not all come to an end in 1963. Thus, for example, the US escalation in Vietnam in 1965 was a residual (and catastrophically misconceived) Cold War policy; the massive intervention on behalf of the forces of violent reaction in the Dominican Republic that same year was, by contrast, Great Power management of a line already drawn. My chapter begins with a summary of the first (taxonomic) moment in the evolution of my view of the Cold War, followed by a reconsideration of the second moment, wherein I trace anew the genealogy of the Cold War through the decisive succession of non-dialectical outlooks, strategies and policies that came to characterize the US ‘way of being’ towards the world during and after World War II...
eBook - ePubSpheres of Influence in International Relations
History, Theory and Politics
- Susanna Hast(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...What is more, spheres of influence helped to maintain the pluralist system against a single sovereign, although, as I have argued above, this particular pluralist system was not a strong one in defending freedom. Cold War pluralism did not give states the possibility to do things their way. Keal (1983, 199–200) also argues that not only did the system of spheres of influence maintain peace between the superpowers but hierarchical relationships maintained order within the blocs and spheres of influence shielded the influenced areas from external challenges. All this is not to idealise the Cold War or to say that Cold War spheres of influence were not that bad after all. I was only eight years old when the Berlin Wall fell, and I cannot possibly understand how people lived and felt during those years. Superpower politics affected millions of people, and Orwell foresaw that spheres of influence entail totalitarianism, violence, war, suppression and manipulation of people. But this should not mean that the concept of sphere of influence has no history, that it is fixed within its Cold War uses. If a sphere of influence expresses a relationship between the influencing and the influenced, and if it affects international order and its rules and institutions, then it is necessary to take a historically and theoretically broader view on spheres of influence than the Cold War alone can offer. The Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, constitutes much of our understanding of spheres of influence. Just like the Monroe Doctrine, it is a beacon signalling spheres of influence at work. The events of the era comprise a memory that makes spheres of influence understandable. The Cuban Missile Crisis is a manifestation of, a concrete reference to, what a sphere of influence is and, more specifically, what spheres of influence have meant for the relations between the influencing and influenced powers...
eBook - ePubThe American Century
A History of the United States Since the 1890s
- Walter LaFeber, Richard Polenberg, Nancy Woloch(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...C HAPTER E LEVEN 1947—1952 The America of the Cold War General Douglas MacArthurin Manila, Philippine Islands, 1945. (Library of Congress) Two events in March 1947—the announcement of the Truman Doctrine and the institution of a federal loyalty program—set the tone for American foreign and domestic affairs in the early Cold War era. President Truman, who won reelection in 1948, managed to turn Cold War tensions to his own advantage when he helped create the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. With the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, however, the Truman administration became a victim of its own policies. In the president's view the North Korean attack closely resembled the fascist aggression of the 1930s, but he found that waging a long, limited war imposed strains on society quite unlike those of World War II. Those strains—political, economic, social, and military—nourished a mood of hysteria in which the Truman administration could itself be charged, by Senator Joseph McCarthy and others, with being "soft on communism" at home and overseas. It seemed odd for the globe's greatest superpower to be so insecure. The Physique of a Superpower: The American Economy By the late 1940s, as the battlefields cooled, the war dead were buried, and the world faced the unknown nuclear age, Americans were the richest people on the globe—indeed, the richest in recorded history. In merely five years after 1940, their gross national product (GNP, the sum of all goods and services they produced) doubled from $100 billion to $200 billion. With 6 percent of the world's population, the United States produced 50 percent of the world's goods. In 1946, the average American received $1,262 in annual income, compared with $653 in Great Britain and $45 in India. Half the world's population clustered around India's level. Several reasons explained this remarkable superiority. Two former competitors, Western Europe and Japan, had been largely destroyed by war...
