28. Threats to the Existing Global Order: Challenges from the East

2020 ◽  
pp. 687-708
Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
The United States ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
The West ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Policy ◽  
Military Strength ◽  
International Role ◽  
Geopolitical Risks

This chapter considers challenges from Russia, North Korea, and China. The first section describes Vladimir Putin’s acquisition and retention of power, and his antagonistic approach towards former members of the Soviet Union. Russia’s rift with the West was exacerbated by its annexation of Crimea and military intervention in Syria. The second section discusses tensions arising from North Korea’s nuclear policy, and attempts by Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un to achieve a lasting peace agreement. The third section examines the economic growth of China, the development of its international role since joining the WTO, its increasing military strength, and its foreign policy. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the opportunities and the geopolitical risks for Asia and China while the influence of the United States, European Union, and Russia wanes.

India and Russia

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajan Menon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
The West ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Alignment Strategy ◽  
Trade And Investment

Pragmatism defined the partnership between India and the Soviet Union. What sustained it was the overlap between India’s non-alignment strategy and the USSR’s objective of countering the American policy of containment. The Soviet leadership sold India substantial amounts of arms and helped build its state-run industrial sector; India’s leaders saw the Soviet connection as a counterbalance against Pakistan, China, and the United States. Pragmatism also defines the India–Russia relationship. Russia remains India’s largest arms supplier. Their views on sovereignty, the dangers of unilateral military intervention, and the threats posed by terrorism converge. But Russia’s salience for India’s trade and investment has been surpassed by the West, even China. India is diversifying its arms purchases; the West and Israel are eager to oblige. Russia’s relative power is declining as China’s is rising; in response, India has forged new security ties with East Asia and the United States.

Choice in the West

1953 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-167
Author(s):  
S. Bernard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Working Out

The advent of a new administration in the United States and the passage of seven years since the end of World War II make it appropriate to review the political situation which has developed in Europe during that period and to ask what choices now are open to the West in its relations with the Soviet Union.The end of World War II found Europe torn between conflicting conceptions of international politics and of the goals that its members should seek. The democratic powers, led by the United States, viewed the world in traditional, Western, terms. The major problem, as they saw it, was one of working out a moral and legal order to which all powers could subscribe, and in which they would live. Quite independently of the environment, they assumed that one political order was both more practicable and more desirable than some other, and that their policies should be directed toward its attainment.

The Communist Contest for Status

2019 ◽  
pp. 82-133
Author(s):  
Deborah Welch Larson ◽  
Alexei Shevchenko
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Competition ◽  
The West ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
The Us ◽  
Catch Up

This chapter argues that both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (PRC) pursued social competition with the Western states while at the same time seeking recognition from the states they were trying to subvert. Stalin sought to increase the power and prestige of the Soviet state through coerced industrialization, and Khrushchev made an effort to “catch up and surpass” the West in economic production. The PRC sought to improve its status by allying with the Soviet Union, but the Chinese chafed under their status as “younger brothers” to their senior ally, and eventually Mao challenged the Soviets for leadership of the international communist movement. In the 1970s, China took advantage of the US need to balance Soviet military power by putting aside communist ideology to become a tacit ally of the United States, part of a “strategic triangle.”

Prokofiev, Soviet Influence, and the Music World in Stalinist Central Europe

2020 ◽  
pp. 405-422
Author(s):  
David G. Tompkins
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sergei Prokofiev ◽  
The West ◽  
Central European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Red Army ◽  
Definition Of

In the aftermath of World War II, the Red Army as a symbol of power was supported in many other arenas so as to counteract the rival influence of the United States on Central Europe. The Soviet Union brought new urgency to these efforts from 1948, with music—and culture more broadly—providing a case for Russia’s attractiveness and superiority with respect to the West. This chapter discusses the nature and scope of Soviet influence in the Central European music world through the examples of East Germany and Poland, and through the prism of the music and persona of Sergei Prokofiev. After his return to the USSR in 1936, Prokofiev, along with Shostakovich, became associated with the very definition of what made music Soviet and thus worthy of emulation. And even more than Shostakovich, Prokofiev and his music functioned as powerful but malleable symbols that could be appropriated by all Soviet actors for their own ends.

Holy War Redux: The Crusades, Futures of the Past, and Strategic Logic in the “Clash” of Religions

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (2) ◽  
pp. 422-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geraldine Heng
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
War On Terrorism ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
The West ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Osama Bin Laden

[G]reat devastation [was] inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance. …—World Islamic Front[T]here is a Zionist Crusader war on Islam. … I call on mujahedin and their supporters … to prepare for long war against the Crusader plunderers. …—Osama Bin Laden, “Bin Laden”This war is fundamentally religious. … the most ferocious, serious, and violent Crusade campaign against Islam ever since the message was revealed to Muhammad. …—Osama Bin Laden, “West”[T]his Crusade, this war on terrorism, is gonna take a while.—George W. BushThis is no less than a clash of civilizations—the … reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.—Bernard Lewis, “Roots”In a lead 1990 article for the atlantic monthly, bernard lewis, a well-known historian of islamic studies, conjured the catchphrase “clash of civilizations” to narrate what he saw as fundamental relations of enmity between Islamicate societies and the countries of “the West”—“the West” being shorthand for polities that bear the legacies of Christendom, the Crusades, and the European Enlightenment—since the seventh-century emergence of Islam. Three years later, Samuel Huntington, a well-known political scientist, picked up Lewis's theme and, in an article for Foreign Affairs, embroidered it into a theory of global relations to fill what Huntington saw as the political vacuum that had materialized after the cold war's closure (“Clash”). (In 1945–90, the rhetoric of civilizational clash seemed to have been adequately, if temporarily, filled by superpower contests between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies/surrogates.)

New War, Old Law: Can the Geneva Paradigm Comprehend Computers?

2000 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-51
Author(s):  
Jason Beckett
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Information Warfare ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
The West ◽  
Service Employees ◽  
Military Industrial Complex ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Military

Strategic Information Warfare (SIW) has recently begun to garner significant interest among the military and strategic defence communities. While nebulous and difficult to define, the basic object of SIW is to render an adversary's information systems inoperative or to cause them to malfunction. While information is the key, the means, and the target of SIW, real world damage is the intention and effect. It is, nonetheless, an area which has been almost completely ignored by positive international law. The purpose of the present article is to begin to resolve this lacuna by analysing the applicability to, and effect of, international humanitarian law (IHL) on SIW. The author makes recommendations as to possible alterations and improvements to IHL to resolve this lacuna. [In] 1956 when Khrushchev said: “We will bury the West.” What he was really saying was that the military industrial complex of the Soviet Union would win out over the military industrial complex of the West – and note that it's industrial. What Khrushchev didn't understand was that 1956 was the first year in the United States that white-collar and service employees outnumbered blue-collar workers. […] The industrial complex, military or not, was at its end point.Alvin Toffler, Novelist and Social Theorist

America in 1959 — as Seen from Moscow

1960 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick C. Barghoorn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Gradual Increase ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Political Forces

InSpite of a continued gradual increase of American-Soviet contacts, the official Soviet image of the United States in 1959 was shaped, as before, largely by a combination of preconcert tion and contrivance. The massive Soviet machinery of communication continued to present to the peoples of the Soviet Union a picture of America based less on empirical judgment than on the application to changing circumstances of unchanging attitudes. As in the past, the Kremlin's image of America and of the West in general appeared to be as much an instrument for the manipulation of foreign and Soviet public opinion as it was a reflection of Moscow's appraisal of international political forces. The official doctrine of irreconcilable struggle between Soviet “socialism” and Western “capitalism” held undiminished significance for the rationalization and legitimization of Kremlin power and policy.

The Soviet Union and the Antarctic Regime

1984 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 834-858 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boleslaw A. Boczek
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Social Science Literature ◽  
Antarctic Treaty ◽  
The Antarctic

Ever since the Antarctic regime began the third, crucial decade of its existence following the entry into effect of the Antarctic Treaty in 1961, interest in the frozen continent has escalated. This interest has spawned an immense social science literature, which analyzes the diverse legal, political and economic aspects of Antarctica and the surrounding oceans. The Antarctic regime has been universally and deservedly hailed both in the West and, especially, in the East as an unprecedented example of peaceful cooperation among states professing conflicting ideologies and, one might add, belonging to adversary alliances—as witnessed especially by the participation in the regime of the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet much of the pertinent scholarly writing devotes primary or exclusive attention to the position of the United States within this regime; except for incidental references in some works, not one study has appeared anywhere that deals with the position of the Soviet Union on major substantive issues arising within the context of the Antarctic regime. This study will attempt to fill this gap by comprehensively examining the topic of Soviet participation in the affairs of the southern continent.

scholarly journals INTRODUCTION by Co-editors and Contributors of the Special Section Elena Chebankova and Piotr Dutkiewicz

2021 ◽  
pp. 8-13
Author(s):  
Elena Chebankova ◽  
Petr Dutkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Special Section ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Virtual Currency ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Western Idea ◽  
Global Discourse

The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the twentieth century ended the pre-existing bipolar Cold War system and resulted in a unipolar moment in which the United States enjoyed a position of almost unchallenged global and civilizational leadership [Krauthammer 1991; Waltz 1993; Wohlforth 1999]. However, despite the initial elation of some Western politicians and analysts [Fukuyama 1992; Brooks, Wohlforth 2008; Kagan 2008], who hoped to see the triumph of the Western idea universally, this situation was relatively short-lived. Global dialogue soon moved beyond this moment of unipolarity toward its more conventional form, in which states struggle for power and influence and search for areas of mutually beneficial co-operation. At the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, we see a qualitatively different world. There have been profound political changes since the post-Cold War unipolarity. In this world, the idea of civilization has become a virtual currency of international relations and global dialogue. Many analysts [Coker 2019; Acharya 2020; Stuenkel 2016; Higgott 2019] discuss the rise of civilizations in world affairs as the new sociopolitical reality. Countries such as Russia, China, India, Turkey, and Brazil are often considered civilizational states – challengers to the West. Historically, philosophers have oscillated between the idea of multiple civilizations, with the West being one civilization of many (Spengler, Huntington, Danilevsky), and a single and universal Western civilization (Hayek, Kant). The former approach became a cardinal frame of reference of the global discourse during the past decade.

Russian Security and Nuclear Policies: Successor to the Superpower Arsenal?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariya Y. Omelicheva
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Attractive Alternative ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Policy ◽  
Nuclear Arms Race ◽  
The Cold War

The Cold War was a period of hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union as the two superpowers engaged in a nuclear arms race. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, some scholars perceived that Russia’s military-industrial complex has deteriorated considerably, and that the country has fallen behind the United States and Europe in the area of information technologies and other strategically important sectors of national economy. Others insist that the image of Russia’s political irrelevancy and demotion of the country to a status of a “small” or even “medium” power is mistaken. The new Russia, they argue, has never surrendered its claims as a great power. Discussions about Russia’s global role have been fueled by its continuing nuclear standoff with the United States, along with growing concerns about its plans to develop more robust nuclear deterrents and modernize its nuclear arsenals. There is substantial scholarly literature dealing with Russia’s foreign, security, military, and nuclear policy, as well as the role of nuclear weapons in the Russian security framework. What the studies reveal is that the nuclear option remains an attractive alternative to Russia’s weakened conventional defense. Today, as before, Russia continues to place a high premium on the avoidance of a surprise attack and relies on its nuclear capabilities for strategic deterrence. There are a host of issues that deserve further investigation, such as the safety of Russia’s nuclear sites and the regional dimension of its nuclear policy.

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