Since 1945, as Ruth Sivard has reminded us, a series of long and short wars has cost the world 21 million dead. Four million died during the thirty-year Vietnam conflict. Others have noted that the United States has deployed forces for combat on the average of once every eighteen months since the close of World War II. That statistic does not include U.S. military advisers, CIA covert operatives, and combat troops in such long-running conflicts as the Salvadoran civil war and the contraversus-Sandinista struggle in Nicaragua.¹

How this fifty-year-plus legacy is affecting the quite different world of the 1990s has...

Although a divided Germany was the central front of the Cold War world, there have been surprisingly few efforts either to chronicle or to explain its emergence.¹ The scholarly vacuum reflects the longstanding tendency of commentators of diverse political persuasion to regard a partitioned Germany as part of the European landscape. Over decades the existence of East and West Germany assumed an aura of such permanence that the split began to seem less a historical creation than a fact of nature.

The sudden reunification of the country in 1989 challenged this mind-set by demonstrating how forced and artificial the partition...

An important convergence of themes in postrevisionist thinking about the early Cold War requires clarification and in some instances considerable modification. These themes involve the arguments of John Gaddis, Melvyn Leffler, and Geir Lundestad regarding the role of credibility in U.S. policy, the nature and consequences of power relationships in the international system, the differentiation of vital and peripheral interests, and the Korean War as the event that introduced global notions of containment.¹ Gaddis has seen unfounded or irrational worries over credibility, especially in relation to policy in Asia, as the factor blocking a realistic policy in the early Cold...

It is now widely accepted that the Cold War is over and that a new era of international relations is emerging. Over the 1945–90 period the study of international relations was dominated by a focus on the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and the consequences of their competition in Europe and the non-European world. As a result, the bipolar paradigm became the central prism through which international affairs were analyzed. The term “Cold War” was itself coined to portray the deep-seated conflict between the two superpowers and the European alliances—NATO and the Warsaw Pact—...

In considering the influence of the Cold War and anticommunism on Latin America, most people think of the intervention of U.S. troops in the Dominican Republic and Grenada; of U.S. support for military coups in Brazil, Chile, and elsewhere; of intense U.S. pressure on the Sandinista government in Nicaragua; of U.S. support for counterinsurgency efforts throughout the region; and, of course, of the unremitting U.S hostility toward the Cuban Revolution. Important though they are, however, these actual—overt or covert—interventions are but part of the story of the ways in which the Cold War influenced Latin America. Its impact...

The Cuban Revolution’s significance for Latin American history is unquestioned. Historians also recognize its salience in the study of the Kennedy years and its impact on the Nonaligned Movement among emerging states. Scholars less commonly understand that the revolution represents a watershed in the Cold War’s impact on U.S. society. The Cuban issue joined foreign and domestic policy considerations, helped keep U.S. race relations on the international docket, and contributed to fundamental social and political change in the American South.

This essay examines the intersection of domestic and foreign priorities at the point where U.S. policymakers confronted African American political...

Whatever else might be said about the Cold War, the one thing it cannot be accused of is having failed to engage the interest and attention of the Western intellectual community. As a problem, it very likely generated more discussion and controversy than any other single topic in the postwar period. The reason is clear: It was a system from which none of us could escape. From the Third World to the countries of Eastern Europe, from the front line of a once divided Germany to the American Midwest, the Cold War constantly made its presence felt. In the process...

The Cold War has only recently vanished from the international scene, yet many observers look back on it with unabashed nostalgia. Most center their attention on the fact that for nearly fifty years the great powers managed to contain their protracted conflict without a single instance of war among them. To them, the Cold War was really a “long peace”;¹ with its death, war among the great powers is likely to reemerge.

To prevent future great-power disputes from becoming violent, it is important to uncover the true character of the Cold War. By becoming more reflective in our ways of...

One way of explaining the Cold War is in terms of the emergence of new state forms in the aftermath of World War II. The bloc system can be said to have prefigured new methods of political organization which arose because of the limitations of the nation-state.

The postwar period is often considered the apogee of the nation-state. It was only after 1945 that the entire globe was parceled off into separate nation-states. Yet from the early twentieth century the nation-state was becoming inadequate to cope with growing social, economic, and military pressures in advanced industrial countries. In the early...

In this essay I argue that tensions within the Soviet bloc became fatal because of the disintegrative effects of trade and debt relations with the West. Bloc cohesion was undermined in the 1970s and 1980s when the USSR and East European countries entered capitalist markets in money, energy, and grain. The courageous popular movements that toppled one ruling Communist Party after another took advantage of political spaces opened by economic realignments between the Soviet Union and East European countries, including internal use of Western currencies, as the bloc adjusted to ties to the West. The permeability of Soviet bloc boundaries...

The conclusion of the Cold War was instantly proclaimed as a great historical event. The image of the dawning of a “new world order,” promulgated by Mikhail Gorbachev and eagerly adopted by George Bush, appeared to have captured the new direction of American foreign policy. To some, such as Francis Fukuyama, the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to have removed the last serious obstacle to a universal liberal peace. Others, however, point to some alarming trends that may destroy this great vision of world peace and prosperity. Ironically, as the debate on the new world order progressed, it became...

Any evaluation of the extent to which the end of the Cold War may change the nature of American society and politics necessarily depends upon our impressions of the domestic as well as the global impact of the era of superpower confrontation. We need to know how the Cold War affected not only political parties and major political actors but also economic development and competitiveness, political discourse, racial and ethnic strife, gender relations, and more. Just how deeply the Cold War made its way into the interstices of American life may in large part determine the potential for contemporary change....

Hannah Arendt is an enigmatic figure. As one of the principal shapers of postwar academic political philosophy she is known primarily as a classical thinker whose conception of politics is drawn from the ancient Greeks and Romans. Yet she was wholly a creature of the twentieth century, preoccupied with the problems of totalitarianism, revolution, and mass politics.¹ Intellectual historians of the Cold War have properly situated Arendt amidst those “New York intellectuals” who journeyed from anti-Stalinist radicalism to liberal anticommunism after World War II. The consensus among these historians is that Arendt’s books “became the canonic texts of American exceptionalism...

William A. Williams remains the preeminent critic of empire in the second half of the twentieth century, casting a long shadow over the attempted recuperation of Cold War rationale by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and many others.¹ As the cumulative effects of the planetary arms race and accompanying ecological degradation diminish hopes of dignified escape from the Cold War’s aftereffects and underline an infrastructural economic decline, the tragedy of lost opportunities becomes increasingly apparent.² But a paradox also lurks here. Williams devoted only a minor fraction of his work to the Cold War, and even his critique of empire presupposed an...