War, Peace, and International Relations. An Introduction to Strategic History

Questions

1. Who or what caused the Cold War?


2. Why did the Cold War last for forty years?


3. Why did the Cold War not conclude with World War III?


4. Did the Soviet Union expire mainly for internal reasons or was external pressure
   a factor?

Further reading

R. Crockatt The Fifty Years War: The United States and the Soviet Union in World Politics,
1941–1991(New York: Routledge, 1995).
N. Friedman The Fifty-Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War(Annapolis, MD: Naval
Institute Press, 2000)
A. Fursenko and T. Naftali ‘One Hell of a Gamble’: Khrushchev, Castro, Kennedy, and the
Cuban Missile Crisis, 1958–1964(London: John Murray, 1997).
J. L. Gaddis Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National
Security Policy(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
—— We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
—— The Cold War(London: Allen Lane, 2006).
M. P. Leffler A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the
Cold War(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).
V. Mastry The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years(New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996).
J. A. Nathan (ed.) The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited(New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992).
M. Trachtenberg A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
O. A. Westad (ed.) Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory(London:
Frank Cass, 2000).
V. Zubok and C. Pleshakov Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

204 War, peace and international relations

Key points

1. Cold War history is hotly contested today.


2. World War II had revolutionary consequences for all the contexts of
   international relations.


3. The Cold War emerged slowly, by a process of interaction between rivals, from
   1944 until 1947, or even 1950 (the war in Korea).


4. Because of geopolitics and ideology, the conflict was unavoidable.


5. The Soviet Union was fatally outclassed in economic strength by the United
   States.


6. Although it was inevitable that the Soviet Union would lose the competition,
   it was not inevitable that it would accept defeat peacefully.