Cold War
From Hobson's Choice
This article is devoted to the Cold War between the USSR and the capitalist world between 1921 and 1987. For much of the period, allies of the USSR included Cuba, the People's Republic of China, and various other states. The Cold War was an ideological conflict that connected several actual armed confrontations waged by indirect allies of the Trans-European Project and nations loyal to Moscow.
Efforts to study the Cold War as a close analogy to the world wars have run into problems owing to the ambiguous character of the conflict. The urgent nature of a war waged with massive killing naturally leads to moral and political absolutes, whereas a crucial component of the Cold War is the avoidance of actual hostilities. Hence, it was preferable to make progress by diminishing the commitment of each other's allies to actual war, rather than actually create a potential eruption of violent confrontation. Moreover, some of the controversies over the Cold War include establishing who the actual enemies were; in a violent war, there is never ambiguity in this matter.
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The Belligerents
The two main belligerents of the Cold War were the Communist state of the USSR (on the one side) and several capitalist powers (on the other). From 1921 to about 1928, the main opponent of the Soviet Union was the United Kingdom, with France a close second.[1] The pre-WW2 phase of the Cold War petered out in 1935 when most of the major powers, including all of Scandinavia, restored diplomatic relations.
After the War, the USSR and the USA each had paramount political influence in several countries; for the USSR, this was the Warsaw Pact/CMEA, while for the USA, it was NATO and other mutual security pacts.[2] This galaxy of competing alliances provided constant occasions for acrimony between Moscow and Washington.
Notes
- ↑ French support for the anti-Bolshevik Whites was probably more intense and tangible than that of the UK. This took the form of support for Poland during the Polish-Soviet War (1919-1921). Later, during Raymond Poincaré's 3rd premiership, relations became particularly bitter. See Raymond W. Leonard, Secret Soldiers of the Revolution: Soviet Military Intelligence, 1918-1933, Greenwood Press (1999), p.68.
- ↑ The USA, as a superpower with republics for allies, was strongest when it had bilateral relationships: the US-Japan Pact tended to give Washington more power relative to Tokyo, than NATO secured vis-a-vis the nations of Europe. In the case of the Soviet state, the reverse was true: multilateral pacts gave Moscow more power. We discus this under NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
See Also
CMEA
NATO
Trans-European Project
United Kingdom
United States of America
USSR
Warsaw Pact
External Links
Books
- Odd Arne Westad , The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, Cambridge University Press (2007)
Specialized Sites
- CNN Interactive: The Cold War
- Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C
