US Soviet Relations

11 Key excerpts on "US Soviet Relations"

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  Russian Foreign Policy

  • Eric Shiraev, Konstantin Khudoley(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  152 Russia’s Policies toward the United States and military tension between the powers aligned with the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and the countries aligned with the United States and the West, on the other� The confrontation was global� It touched practically all areas of life, military, eco-nomic, political, ideological, and social� The two countries were the leading forces of two seemingly irreconcilably antagonistic social-political systems� The Cold War for more than forty years had a substantial and continuous impact on the entire international order� The two opposing military and political blocs – NATO headed by the United States and the Warsaw Pact headed by the Soviet Union – emerged as two major global forces� They were called the super-powers because of their global military and economic strength that at that time could not be matched by other states� Several times during this period the world was on the brink of a global war� Fortunately, every time the Soviet Union and the United States were able to find a way to avoid it� The Cold War was also a period of massive nuclear arms buildup� In the 1950s the United States maintained a policy of massive nuclear retaliation against the Soviet Union should it attack America or its allies in Europe� From the 1960s and later both the Soviet Union and the United States realized that they had reached strategic parity in terms of the quality and quantity of their nuclear weapons� Yet the massive nuclear arms race continued (Zubok, 2007 )� One of the most dramatic events of recent history, which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear confrontation, took place in October 1962� The Caribbean Crisis , as Russians tend to call it (in British and American sources it is called the Cuban Missile Crisis), unfolded after Moscow secretly deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba� In response Washington imposed a naval blockade

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  The United States And The Ussr In A Changing World

  Soviet And American Perspectives

  • Andrei Bochkarev, Don L Mansfield(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  ... Following the end of World War II, in which the USSR and the United States were allies, the Cold War, marking an extended period of Soviet-American confrontation, began almost immediately. Once the defeat of fascist Germany and militaristic Japan had been completed, the narrowness of the mutual basis for political cooperation became apparent. The Soviet Union's development into a real power and serious rival in the international arena resulted in a decisive parting of the ways, something that had been delayed solely by the inertia of the countries' having had a common strategic goal in World War II. Other objective causes of the sharp deterioration in Soviet-American relations include the time it took to recognize the consequences and realities of the nuclear age and the mutual inertia of established military and political concepts and doctrines (the thesis of the inevitability of a military confrontation between capitalism and socialism; the idea that it was possible to wage a nuclear war and obtain unilateral military advantages; the notion that a new world war, by analogy to the results of Worlds Wars I and II, would inevitably have revolutionary consequences). Undoubtedly, subjective circumstances, such as the views of specific leaders, a distorted interpretation of the other side's actions, also played a negative role.

  ...In contrast to the United States, the Soviet Union was prepared, of course, to continue cooperation in the postwar period. But the concept of such cooperation that we put forward had been rejected previously, in the 1930s, and it did not move Washington to abandon its policy of hard-line confrontation.

  ... The Cold War was probably unavoidable. At the same time, it could have taken on somewhat more moderate forms if the sides had not teen guided exclusively by the tug-of-war concept that constantly led to an impasse.

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  From Antagonism to Partnership

  The Uneasy Path of the U.S.-Russian Cooperative Threat Reduction

  • Togzhan Kassenova(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Ibidem Press

    (Publisher)

  The decade and a half following the end of the Cold War demonstrates that the legacy of antagonism between the two countries per-sisted on many levels – it is also deeply embedded in the organisational cul-ture of the U.S. and Russia. The U.S. and Russia have faced a number of complicated international policy-related issues, which had a substantial impact on the overall state of bi-lateral relations. The main issues of that nature included: disagreements over NATO enlargement, the wars in Kosovo and Chechnya, the U.S. military pres-ence in Central Asia during the operation in Afghanistan and beyond, the U.S. position on several key non-proliferation agreements, and Russia’s nuclear cooperation with Iran. These issues reflect the transitional character of U.S.-Russian relations, as the two countries seek to define and develop their strategic partnership. Despite commitment at the top to develop their political and strategic relations on a partnership basis, the political elite in Russia have been slow to absorb and internalise the conceptual framework of international relations based on shared norms, principles and common security. Communist ideas have been replaced not just by Western ideals, but by a melee of notions including vi-sions of Russia as a Great Power, nationalism, and Slavic solidarity. More-over, there remains an echo in many people’s minds of the old adversarial, zero-sum relationship between the two countries that makes them reluctant to fully embrace a strategic partnership. The recurring tensions between the United States and Russia, which seem to defy the stated common interest, can be explained as a consequence of the inability of people and institutions to keep up with the very rapid changes in the international system. U.S.-Russian disagreements surrounding NATO enlargement are a good example of the contradictions that arise as both states are trying to adjust to

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  Isolate or Engage

  Adversarial States, US Foreign Policy, and Public Diplomacy

  • Geoffrey Wiseman(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Stanford University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 SOVIET UNION/RUSSIA US Diplomacy with the Russian “Adversary” Robert D. English

  THE ISSUES THAT THIS CHAPTER ADDRESSES—THE historical lessons of US diplomacy with Russia—are surely more complex than those of other adversarial states. This is because there is no self-evident single adversary in these relations, nor are we even dealing with a single state . Russia is not North Korea, a unitary, uniform regime that for some six decades has maintained a deeply hostile posture toward the West and its political norms. The revolutionary-era Leninist state differed significantly from that of the 1920s, including in opportunities for diplomatic engagement with the West, just as the possibilities of such interchange varied considerably from the Stalinist 1930s through the years of the World War II alliance and up to the early Cold War. Arguably even more significant were political and social changes—and improved diplomatic prospects—from the “thaw” era through the late Cold War, and from the epoch of perestroika through communism’s collapse and aftermath. We are dealing with at least three qualitatively different political regimes, and sweeping socioeconomic transformation over nearly a century of tumultuous international change in which any presumption of consistent US probity or diplomatic “correctness—and Russian hostility or adversariness—simply does not hold.

  This chapter will examine the practice and prospects of US diplomacy with Russia, beginning with the period before and during the 1917 Revolution; through several distinct phases of relations with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from the revolution until 1991; and subsequent relations with Russia after the demise of the USSR. One key lesson can be stressed at the outset, which is to endorse the general proposition or “norm” that this book advances: the importance of active, multifaceted diplomatic engagement even in periods, and with regimes, of greatest hostility. A lack of such engagement has led to stereotypes and ignorance—and consequent lost opportunities—while its presence contributed much to the most momentous diplomatic breakthrough of the twentieth century, namely the Cold War’s end. One underappreciated facet of that engagement has been public diplomacy, which I see as outreach—partly though not exclusively orchestrated during the Cold War by the US State Department, and implemented by the US embassy in Moscow—to elites and citizens beyond the rarified diplomatic corps in Moscow. This view is essentially but by no means exclusively consistent with the traditional “State Department” approach to public diplomacy outlined in the book’s Introduction. As will be seen, such outreach even in times of hostility has borne vital fruit in subsequent periods of relative openness. Sadly, at a time of greatest receptivity at the outset of relations with post–Soviet Russia, it fared poorly, in part due to clumsy “salesmanship,” but even more because the “product” proved disappointing.

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  The Politics of Trade Pressure

  American-Soviet Relations, 1980-88

  • Mohammed Ishaq(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  7 This term was used to describe the extreme state of tension and hostility that developed between the Western powers led by the United States, and the Communist bloc of Eastern Europe led in turn by the Soviet Union. The ‘Cold War’ in fact became the norm by which Soviet-American (and East-West relations which were naturally closely interconnected) were governed, and was characterised for much of the post-war period by: political manoeuvring; diplomatic wrangling, psychological warfare; ideological hostility; economic warfare; a major arms race; peripheral wars; and other power contests; falling short of an actual ‘hot war’.

  It can be said that the Cold War which emerged between the United States and the USSR was waiting to happen long before major developments in Europe after the Second World War made it a reality. The fact is that suspicion and dislike between the two countries could be traced as far back as the Russian Revolution. American troops had took part in the abortive ‘White’ counter revolution against the Bolsheviks during 1918 -19. The U.S. as a major capitalist state was in ideological terms in clear conflict with the communist ideology of the Bolsheviks. The Americans continued to oppose diplomatic links with the USSR, and it was only the mutual objective to defeat Hitler’s Germany that brought the Soviets and Americans together during the Second World War.

  However, once Germany had been defeated the uneasy American -Soviet cooperation soon began to disintegrate and the two faced each other suspicious of each other’s motives and intentions. Could the Cold War have been avoided? From the point of view that there existed a dislike between the two well before 1945 maybe not. However, having fought alongside each other could have acted as a catalyst towards a possible reconciliation. This did not materialize because the traditional hatred resurfaced, and hopes of rapprochement were dashed by a series of events and developments which took place in the years immediately after the Second World War.

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  OSCE Yearbook 2013

  Yearbook on the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)

  • Bloomsbury Publishing(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Nomos/Bloomsbury

    (Publisher)

  37 Victor Mizin Russian-US Relations: Beyond the Reset Policy Relations between Russia and the United States have always had their ups and downs. In my view, the interaction of the Soviet Union and the USA – the leading powers in the political blocs that confronted each other in the Cold War – shaped the entire structure of world political processes in the second half of the twentieth century. Their standoff was not only an embodi-ment of competition between two ideologies, ways of life, and forms of gov-ernment, but also a struggle between geopolitical giants for global influence. Back in the 18th century, Russia actively aided the American colonists in their fight against the British empire, as exemplified by Catherine the Great’s “Declaration of Armed Neutrality” of 1780. After Russia gave up its Californian settlements in 1841 and sold Alaska to the US in 1867, the two nations maintained sound diplomatic ties. Among other things, Washington was interested in investing in Russian railroad construction, especially in the Far East and Siberia, and in entering the booming Russian banking sector at the end of 19th century. The USA helped to negotiate the Treaty of Ports-mouth, bringing to an end the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, which Russia lost. After the advent of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the short Ameri-can interventions in Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok, the USA became the major provider of technology, know-how, and industrial hardware to the So-viet Union’s industrialization endeavour. This not only turned the devastated and impoverished Stalinist state into the leading world power that was later able to defeat the Nazi juggernaut, but also helped to save the US economy during the Great Depression, leading to the rise of the US as the world’s leading economy in the aftermath of the Second World War.

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  Soldiers and the Soviet State

  Civil-Military Relations from Brezhnev to Gorbachev

  • Timothy J. Colton, Thane Gustafson, Timothy J. Colton, Thane Gustafson, Timothy Colton, Thane Gustafson(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  But the key question is, just how does the U.S.-Soviet relationship influence civil-military relations in Moscow? There are two possible approaches to this question. One is to chronicle the key events and changes in U.S.-Soviet rela- tions since 1965—the Vietnam years and the weakening of U.S. foreign pol- icy, the rise and fall of detente, the evolution of the arms control process, the Carter-Reagan rearmament and the new U.S. assertiveness, and so forth. But structuring the subject in this way prejudges the conclusion, namely, that the shifting policies of successive American administrations are a major indepen- dent variable in civil-military relations. Another approach, however, is to start from the realization that the Ameri- can factor, as it actually impinges on the Soviet military sector, is almost in- dependent of specific administrations and their policies, because it is much more long term. Thus, for example, the continuous pressure of the U.S.-So- viet rivalry on the economy and the technological system, as well as the Soviet responses to it, are best measured over decades. The practices and institutions developed to deal with that pressure have remained recognizably the same since they first arose in response to the rivalry with Germany in the 1930s. Finally, if the Soviet system has begun to change since the late Brezhnev pe- riod, it is not because of the briefly applied pressure of a particular American 9 See Peter Hauslohner, "Gorbachev's Social Contract," Soviet Economy 3, 1 (1987), 54-85. 340 THANE GUSTAFSON administration, but rather because of the cumulative strain of five decades of competition with the world's most powerful economy and technology. In short, while there is no denying the importance of the American factor in Soviet civil-military relations, there is much to be said for breaking it up into its long-term political, technological, and economic aspects.

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  Power Relations in the Twenty-First Century

  • Donette Murray, David Brown(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 The US and Russia An exceptional power relationship? Robert Singh Introduction Power relations between the US and Russia insistently affirm Tolstoy’s claim in Anna Karenina that unhappy families possess myriad forms of expressing their unhappiness. Despite periodic outbreaks of misplaced optimism and the more general historic tendency of great power relations to ebb and flow from suspi- cion to formal or informal alliance, relations between Washington and Moscow have rarely evinced closeness. No matter their relative power or whether the world order has been bipolar, multipolar, unipolar or otherwise, a rudimentary and reflexive oppositionism has characterized Russo-American geopolitics, which must always be borne in mind when considering the likely future trajec- tory of US–Russia relations under President Trump (and which seems even clearer in the light of the US bombing in Syria without consultation with the Russian government in April 2017). Even the wartime alliance of 1942–1945 and the rapprochement of Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush from 1985 to 1991 offered no enduring exceptions to this basic rule. Although the nature of their particular security dilemma and reasons for mutual antipathy varied, rarely have the two states been able to overcome historic ten- sions. For several decades in the first half of the twentieth century, during which they served as influential poles in a multipolar system in which conflict fre- quently turned to war and latterly as twin poles in a bipolar system wherein a cold war sustained a ‘long peace’ punctuated by superpower crises and proxy conflicts, mutually assured enmity appeared unavoidable. That antipathy has ultimately not altered since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Much recent debate about the ‘end’ of ‘American world order’ has focused on questions of polarity, shared assumptions about state centrality and Eurocentric conceptions of the very notion of polarity itself.

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  From Adversaries to Partners?

  Chinese and Russian Military Cooperation after the Cold War

  • Ming-Yen Tsai(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  These developments led to an uneasy military-security relation- ship between China and Russia, swinging from geopolitical rivals, military cooperation, armed clashes, active confrontation, military containment, to detente. In a friendly political climate, the two parties undertook arms transfers and technology cooperation to display fraternity and good-neighborliness. However, the close military ties of the 1950s did not help to consolidate their political relations. On the contrary, coupled with the split in political relations, disputes over issues relevant to military cooperation became a source of tension. In the conflicted political atmosphere of the late 1950s, Soviet proposals to strengthen military cooperation were rejected by China and were perceived as an attempt to bring China under Soviet military control. The historical lessons of an overreliance on the USSR led to a recognition in China that overdependence on a single supplier of weapons and defense technology was a political and security danger. If anything, this discussion has highlighted the uneasy nature of the two states' military relationship and the importance of positive political foun- dations for military cooperation between the two states. Moreover, history has shown that the Sino-Russian military relationship reflected changes in their political relations as well as the wider political environment. NOTES 1. "Document: Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance between the People's Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Feb. 14,1950," in Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 260. 2. Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, Russia and the New States of Eurasia (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 23. 3. Ibid. 4. Tien-fong Cheng, A History of Sino-Russian Relations (Washington, D.C: Public Affairs Press, 1957.), p.

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  Concise History of Indian Economy

  Perspectives on Economy and International Relations,1600s to 2020s

  • Rohit Majumdar(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge India

    (Publisher)

  Part IX US-Soviet Relations and its Global Impact – 1956–1991: Historical and Cultural Perspectives Passage contains an image

  14 Khrushchev Thaw, Escalating Tensions, Blunders, and Soviet Collapse

  Christopher Roper Schell

  DOI: 10.4324/9781032630618-23

  Reader’s Brief

  The death of Stalin brought new leadership to the USSR and greater engagement with the world, but those developments also led to tension and a period of superpower conflict. How that would play out, and what forms that would take, were both varied and, at times, unexpected. The Cold war was marked by an international competition between the US and the Soviet Union but also by programs of greater cultural exchange. Oscillations between comity and antipathy would also characterize these years.

  Spies, crises, and potential nuclear war hung over American films at the time, while the Soviets paraded propaganda back home. Along the way, self-inflicted geopolitical and domestic wounds had profound implications in this simmering match, and overreactions and standoffs led to misunderstandings and mistakes. In the end, the Soviet system would end with a whimper and not a bang.

  14.1 New Direction

  Just three years after Stalin’s death, and as the former Soviet leader’s body lay next to that of Lenin, Khrushchev inveighed against the “cult of personality” that he claimed had defined Stalin’s rule. In his “Secret Speech”1 at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, Khrushchev spared no criticism. Forcefully denouncing Stalin’s “grave abuse of power” which had caused “untold harm” to the party, Khrushchev began a campaign of loosening Soviet restrictions. While shocking to many, this vigorous reassessment of Stalin’s legacy set the conditions for a new direction and leadership under the purported banner of restoring Lenin’s vision of Soviet governance.

  Although welcomed in the West, de-Stalinization did not sit well with all. In Khrushchev’s vocal denouncement of Stalin’s approach, China heard both a willingness to coexist with the West and a betrayal of the tenets of orthodox Marxism. Both of these were unacceptable to Chairman Mao Zedong, who had borrowed much in style and substance from Stalin. Increasingly distrustful also of India’s relationship with the USSR, China began to distance itself from the Soviet Union. This distancing accelerated in the wake of the Soviet stance of neutrality in the 1959 Sino-Indian border dispute and the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Reciprocally, the Soviet Union came to mistrust China’s hardline bellicosity and cavalier attitude towards nuclear confrontation.

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  Reagan and the World

  • David E. Kyvig(Author)
  • 1990(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  2 The Reagan Administration and Soviet-American Relations JOHN LEWIS GADDIS The task of the historian is, very largely, one of explaining how we got from where we were to where we are today. To say that the Reagan administration's policy toward the Soviet Union is going to pose special challenges to historians is to understate the matter. Rarely has there been a greater gap between expecta- tions held for an administration at the beginning of its term and the results it actually produced. The last thing one would have expected at the time Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 was that he would use his eight years in the White House to rebuild the domestic base of support for detente with the USSR. I am not at all sure that Reagan himself expected this result. And yet, that is what happened, with—admittedly—some help from Mik- hail Gorbachev. The question of how this happened—and to what extent it was the product of accident or of conscious design—is one that is likely to preoccupy scholars for years to come. The comments that follow are a rough first attempt to grapple with that ques- tion. Because we lack access to the archives or even to very much memoir material as yet, they are, of necessity, prelimi- nary, incomplete, and almost certainly in several places dead wrong. Those are the hazards of working with contemporary This essay is adapted from John Lewis Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990), and appears here by permission. 18 REAGAN AND THE WORLD history, though; if historians are not willing to run these risks, political scientists and journalists surely will. That prospect in itself, for a historian, provides sufficient justification for plung- ing ahead. EARLY REAGAN-SOVIET RELATIONS It is a bit difficult, now, to recall how far Soviet-American relations had deteriorated at the time Ronald Reagan entered the White House.

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