Global Cold War

12 Key excerpts on "Global Cold War"

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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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  America in the World

  A History in Documents since 1898, Revised and Updated

  • Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Andrew Preston, Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Andrew Preston, Mark Lawrence, Jeffrey A. Engel, Andrew Preston(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  7 The Beginning of the Cold War The Soviet-American alliance against Nazi Germany fractured within a few months after the end of the Second World War, and the two superpowers settled into a bitter rivalry that American newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann dubbed a “cold war.” This deterioration resulted from numerous sources of disagreement, some of them rooted long before 1945. The two nations had regarded each other warily ever since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had brought communists to power in Russia and established a national ideology opposed to the American creed of free enterprise and democracy. The outbreak of global war in 1941 thrust Washington and Moscow together as partners against fascism, yet old resentments festered. The Cold War resulted not just from past disagreements, however, but also from conflicting visions of the future. U.S. and Soviet leaders advanced contrasting ideas about how to remake the world once the fighting came to an end. For Joseph Sta- lin, ensuring the physical security of the Soviet Union was paramount. He aimed to destroy German power, assert control over eastern Europe, and extend Soviet influence toward the Mediterranean, oil-rich Southwest Asia, and the Far East. This desire for territorial domination, rooted in a profound sense of insecurity honed by repeated invasions of the Soviet Union, contrasted sharply with U.S. plans for the postwar order. Convinced that global catastrophe—first the Great Depres- sion and then the Second World War—had resulted from nations pursuing nar- row economic and territorial advantages, U.S. leaders hoped to establish an open world order based on free trade, self-determination, and international cooperation. Like Woodrow Wilson in an earlier day, U.S. officials believed that the universal application of such principles would serve the interests not only of the United States but also of the whole international community.

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  Essays on Twentieth-Century History

  • Michael Adas(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Temple University Press

    (Publisher)

  By some accounts, this ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet THE TECHNOPOLITICS OF COLD WAR • 273 Union in 1991. Many historians date the cold war’s end to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, following the collapse of the East German communist regime, part of a wave of democratic quasi-revolutions in Eastern Europe dur-ing that year. Recently, historians have called for reexamining the cold war from perspec-tives that reduce the centrality of the superpower struggle. The dominance of cold war politics probably led contemporaries to focus too closely on its largest military actors, namely the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union. From other points of view—especially that of the global South—processes such as decolonization and development were more salient. Historians have begun to move beyond treating the South merely as proxy sites for cold war conflicts, instead exploring how national politics and culture in places like Vietnam and Algeria shaped cold war practices “from below.” This approach is becoming known as the “new international history.” 4 It provides important new perspec-tives, but still does not examine the role of technology in global conflict. One area of social science scholarship has endeavored to include techno-logical change as an object of analysis: “science and technology studies,” or STS. This field includes historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and others in-terested in understanding technological systems and their relationship to so-cial, political, and cultural dynamics. STS has devoted considerable attention to cold war science and technology, but this too has generally centered on the United States, Europe, or the Soviet Union. Because they seek to unpack the inner political and social workings of technology, these scholars tend to focus on case studies and microprocesses. The macroview offered by global and transregional history is nearly nonexistent in this literature.

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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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  Winning the World

  Lessons for America's Future from the Cold War

  • Thomas Nichols(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  At the least—with the notable exception of national missile defenses, which many Americans mistakenly assume already exist— such measures are politically unpopular. 11 Central to the whole issue of learning from the Cold War, then, is the question of what actually constitutes a "cold war" and whether it can happen again. If the conflict of 1945-1991 was sui generis and ended for natural, even mechanical reasons (or because Mikhail Gorbachev ended it), then the failures of the academy and the understandable wishes of the public are pretty much irrelevant to the future. Revisionist scholars could well argue that they should be spared further embarrassment and with a clear conscience press to close the books on five decades of confrontation and move on. Politicians, for their part, can reassure their constituents that despite the occasional miscreants like the late Timothy McVeigh or Theodore Kaczynski, or even the imported psychopaths of September 2001, America is still relatively safe from ultimate destruction. But what if the Cold War was only the first—even if the biggest—of its kind? THE COLD WAR A N D "COLD WARS" The Cold War of 1945-1991, like all wars, was the contingent result of a sequence of historical events and accidents. Great interstate con- flicts usually have abiding causes, of course, but the actual eruption of war is often only a product of circumstance. The ancient Hellenic world expected that Athens and Sparta sooner or later would settle scores with each other, but it took a squabble between two smaller cities in a far-off corner of northwestern Greece to bring the two major players into direct conflict. Germany was set on a collision course with the rest of Europe before 1914, even if it took an event primarily of importance to Austri- 8 Winning the World ans and Serbians to ignite war between the Kaiser and his neighbors. Even wars of outright aggression, like those of Napoleon and Hitler, often take place in environments ripe for conflict.

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  The End of the Cold War and the Causes of Soviet Collapse

  • N. Bisley(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  While the confrontation – socio-economic, geopolitical and ideologi- cal conflict – of this time was pre-eminently visible in domestic terms, it also had clear international aspects. The confrontation during this period was pre-dominantly between the USSR and the European powers, particularly Britain in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s. That said, Soviet–American relations are illustrative of the underlying acrimony and ideological competition which in time underpinned the Cold War. For example, the reason why the United States did not recognise the Soviet government until 1933 was due, not only to the Soviet repudia- tion of debt and confiscation of property, but also due to the Soviet government’s failure to adhere to the norms of the international system, particularly the non-interference norm, and most specifically its overt revolutionary aims and practices. 25 The language of US State Department officials prior to the recognition was clear: ‘the fundamen- tal obstacle in the way of the establishment with Russia of the relations usual between nations in diplomatic intercourse is the world revolu- tionary aims and practices of the rulers of that country’. 26 William C. Bullitt, the US ambassador to Moscow, writing to the Secretary of State in July 1935 makes clear the sense of international The Cold War and the Soviet State 11 confrontation: ‘it is my conviction that there has been no decrease in the determination of the Soviet government to produce world revolu- tion’. 27 For Bullitt the peaceful international political posture of the 1930s was merely a tactical respite, as he puts it ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’. 28 The following year, he wrote to the Secretary of State regarding the broad direction of US policy towards the Soviet Union.

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  A People and a Nation, Volume II: Since 1865

  • Jane Kamensky, Carol Sheriff, David W. Blight, Howard Chudacoff(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. CHAPTER 24 The Cold War and American Globalism | 1945–1961 698 makers in the United States successfully cultivated a Cold War consensus that stifled debate and shaped the mind-set of millions of Americans. ■ Why did relations between the Soviet Union and the United States turn hostile soon after their victory in World War II? ■ When and why did the Cold War expand from a struggle over the future of Europe and central Asia to one encompassing virtually the entire globe? ■ By what means did the Truman and Eisenhower administrations seek to expand America’s global influence in the late 1940s and the 1950s? 24-1 From Allies to Adversaries ▶ ▶ What were the respective postwar goals of the Soviet Union and the United States? ▶ ▶ What issues contributed to escalating tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States and the emergence of the Cold War? ▶ ▶ How did the personalities of Joseph Stalin and Harry S Truman shape the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States? The Second World War had a deeply unsettling effect on the international system. At its end, Germany was in ruins. Great Britain was badly overstrained and exhausted; France, having endured five years of Nazi occupation, was rent by internal division. Italy also emerged drastically weakened and, in Asia, Japan was decimated and under occupation and China was headed toward a renewed civil war. Throughout Europe and Asia, factories, transportation, and communica- tions links had been reduced to rubble. Agricultural produc- tion plummeted, and displaced persons wandered about in search of food and family. How would the devastated eco- nomic world be pieced back together? The United States and the Soviet Union, though allies in the war, offered very different answers and models.

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  America in the World

  The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941

  • Frank Costigliola, Michael J. Hogan(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Young, “Western Europe and the End of the Cold War,” CHCW 3, 289–310. 39 Westad, The Global Cold War; Odd Arne Westad, “The Cold War and the International History of the Twentieth Century,” CHCW 1, 1–19; Michael E. Latham, “The Cold War in the Third World, 1963–1975,” CHCW 2, 258–80; Mark Philip Bradley, “Decolonization, the Global South, and the Cold War, 1919–1962,” CHCW 1, 464–85; Kathryn C. Statler and Andrew Johns (eds.), The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, MR, 2006); Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York, 2002); Peter Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss (eds.), Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World since 1945 (Columbus, OH, 2001); Zachary Karabell, Architects of Intervention: The United States, the Third World, and the Cold War, 1946–1962 (Baton Rogue, LA, 1999); Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York, 2005); Sergey Mazov, A Distant Front in the Cold War: The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1956– 1964 (Stanford, CA, 2010); Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Curt Cardwell 124 Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York, 2002); Salim Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); David C. Engerman et al. (eds.), Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst, MA, 2003); David F. Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999); David F. Schmitz, The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1965–1989 (New York, 2006); Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Robert J.

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  A World Safe for Commerce

  American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China

  • Dale C. Copeland(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  By securing a strong economic and political Second World War and Cold War 243 position on the periphery, the United States would be able to direct the post- war recovery of most of the globe and keep the Soviets from drawing large parts of it to its side. If the Soviets decided to work with Washington and keep order within their own smaller sphere, great. But if not, then the United States would have the power base needed to deal with anything that arose in the future, and with the problems on the ground in the present. I will be talking about the causes of the Cold War and the way it played out over forty-five years for the next three chapters. Before I proceed, therefore, I need to briefly address what might seem to be a self-evident truth: that eco- nomic interdependence could have had little to do with either the Cold War’s origins or with the crises and tensions that pockmarked its history until the late 1980s. After all, U.S.-Soviet trade from late 1945 onward remained at very low levels given what seemed to be strong geopolitical reasons for not trading, particularly American fears that trade would promote Soviet relative economic growth within the new more zero-sum, bipolar world Washington now faced. It would thus seem that economic interdependence drops out as a causal vari- able that might explain both the start of the Cold War and its dynamics over some four decades. Indeed, both realists and liberals usually completely ignore the economic aspects of the U.S.-Soviet relationship from 1945 to the 1980s, presuming that low or almost nonexistent trade could not possibly have had much of a role in the Cold War struggle.

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  Consumed by War

  European Conflict in the 20th Century

  • Richard C. Hall(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 12 ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR The origins of the settlement of the Second World War began during the actual fighting. This settlement is inseparable from the beginning of the Cold War, the third phase of the twentieth-century European conflict. The Cold War began as the Second World War concluded and prevented a formal resolution of that war for some time. German war aims were fairly straightforward, though they tending toward the fantastical. The Germans wanted to dominate Europe eco- nomically and politically as far as the Ural Mountains. This involved the defeat of France in western Europe and the conquest of Soviet Russia for the acquisition of lebensraum in eastern Europe. This lebensraum was partly economic, intended to ensure that Germany would never have to endure economic travails because of a British blockage. It was also partly political: Hitler wanted to ensure German domination of Europe for a thousand years. Mussolini sought the realization of a new Roman Empire in the Med- iterranean region. Germany's eastern European subordinates were mainly interested in realizing their national objectives, usually at their neighbors' or one another's expense. Both the Finns and the Romanians wanted to regain and expand territories previously ceded to Soviet Russia. The Allied objectives were more problematic. Britain and France ini- tially went to war to protect Poland, but after the first month of the con- flict, the German-Russian victory over Poland made this goal unrealistic. German successes throughout Europe in 1940 further obscured Allied war aims. For Britain, the sole remaining enemy of German expansion plans, simple survival became paramount in the face of German domina- tion of the European continent. Origins of the Cold War 191 Stalin had two major objectives. One was ideological: he sought to preserve and spread his version of accelerated Marxist Leninism. The other was political: he wanted Soviet power to survive.

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  Major Problems in American History, Volume II

  • Elizabeth Cobbs, Edward Blum, Jon Gjerde, , Elizabeth Cobbs, Edward Blum, Jon Gjerde(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. NSC-68 proved to be the American blueprint for waging the Cold War. It began with two assumptions that governed the rest of the document. First, the global balance of power had been “ fundamentally altered ” since the nineteenth century so that the Americans and Russians now dominated the world: “ What is new, what makes the continuing crisis, is the polarization of power which inescap-ably confronts the slave society with the free. ” It was us against them. Second, “ the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority, ” initially in “ the Soviet Union and second in the area now under [its] control. ” Then the crucial sentence: “ In the minds of the Soviet leaders, however, achievement of this design requires the dynamic extension of their authority and the ultimate elimination of any effective opposition to their authority … . To that end Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass.

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  Superpowers in the Post-Cold War Era

  • K. Aldred, Martin A. Smith(Authors)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  44 The second and, to some extent at least, complementary inter- pretation of the sources of Soviet weakness places the emphasis on the Soviet Union’s relatively limited superpower scope and role when compared to the United States. It has been argued that the Soviet Union was unable to fully compete with the United States in terms of power projection because it ultimately lacked the econ- omic resources to underwrite such a competition. Some have argued from a longer historical perspective that the Soviet Union, as the successor to Imperial Russia, remained locked into traditional Russian strategic thinking which focused on building up influence over ter- ritories close to its existing borders rather than further afield across the seas. In this vein, Jan Nijman, in 1993, compared the Cold War spheres of influence of the US and the USSR and concluded that they confirmed ‘the notions of the Soviet Union as a regional land power, and the United States as a global sea power’. 45 The initial tenor of Soviet policy and outlook in the Cold War period was, of course, determined by Stalin. It has frequently been argued since his death in 1953, not least by some of his successors, The Two Cold War Superpowers 33 that he overestimated the importance of military strength as the single most important factor of power. There is evidence, however, that Stalin did believe that the economic and political aspects of power were important too. During the 1930s in particular he had been especially preoccupied with the forced development of Soviet heavy industry. Although this produced a narrow and limited in- dustrial base, and the social costs which the Soviet people had to pay for Stalin’s industrialisation drive were exceedingly heavy, econ- omists have conceded that some impressive statistical results were achieved.

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