Reluctant Cold Warriors

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Kontorovich
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Soviet Economy ◽  
Accurate Analysis ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Us ◽  
Comprehensive Survey ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The academic study of the Soviet economy in the US was created to help fight the Cold War, part of a broader mobilization of the social sciences for national security needs. The Soviet strategic challenge rested on the ability of its economy to produce large numbers of sophisticated weapons. The military sector was the dominant part of the economy, and the most successful one. However, a comprehensive survey of scholarship on the Soviet economy from 1948-1991 shows that it paid little attention to the military sector, compared to other less important parts of the economy. Soviet secrecy does not explain this pattern of neglect. Western scholars developed strained civilian interpretations for several aspects of the economy which the Soviets themselves acknowledged to have military significance. A close reading of the economic literature, combined with insights from other disciplines, suggest three complementary explanations for civilianization of the Soviet economy. Soviet studies was a peripheral field in economics, and its practitioners sought recognition by pursuing the agenda of the mainstream discipline, however ill-fitting their subject. The Soviet economy was supposed to be about socialism, and the military sector appeared to be unrelated to that. By stressing the militarization, one risked being viewed as a Cold War monger. The conflict identified in this book between the incentives of academia and the demands of policy makers (to say nothing of accurate analysis) has broad relevance for national security uses of social science.

The Soviet Factor in the US-China Military-Technical Cooperation during the Cold War

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 12-47
Author(s):  
Yinan Li
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Technical Cooperation ◽  
Arms Sales ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The development of the PRC’s armed forces included three phases when their modernization was carried out through an active introduction of foreign weapons and technologies. The first and the last of these phases (from 1949 to 1961, and from 1992 till present) received wide attention in both Chinese and Western academic literature, whereas the second one — from 1978 to 1989 —when the PRC actively purchased weapons and technologies from the Western countries remains somewhat understudied. This paper is intended to partially fill this gap. The author examines the logic of the military-technical cooperation between the PRC and the United States in the context of complex interactions within the United States — the USSR — China strategic triangle in the last years of the Cold War. The first section covers early contacts between the PRC and the United States in the security field — from the visit of R. Nixon to China till the inauguration of R. Reagan. The author shows that during this period Washington clearly subordinated the US-Chinese cooperation to the development of the US-Soviet relations out of fear to damage the fragile process of detente. The second section focuses on the evolution of the R. Reagan administration’s approaches regarding arms sales to China in the context of a new round of the Cold War. The Soviet factor significantly influenced the development of the US-Chinese military-technical cooperation during that period, which for both parties acquired not only practical, but, most importantly, political importance. It was their mutual desire to undermine strategic positions of the USSR that allowed these two countries to overcome successfully tensions over the US arms sales to Taiwan. However, this dependence of the US-China military-technical cooperation on the Soviet factor had its downside. As the third section shows, with the Soviet threat fading away, the main incentives for the military-technical cooperation between the PRC and the United States also disappeared. As a result, after the Tiananmen Square protests, this cooperation completely ceased. Thus, the author concludes that the US arms sales to China from the very beginning were conditioned by the dynamics of the Soviet-American relations and Beijing’s willingness to play an active role in the policy of containment. In that regard, the very fact of the US arms sales to China was more important than its practical effect, i.e. this cooperation was of political nature, rather than military one.

Cold War diplomacy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverley Hooper
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Communist China ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Foreign Ministries

From the early 1970s, the US-China relationship was central to diplomatic reporting, with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s visit to Peking in October 1971, President Nixon’s historic visit in February 1972, and the establishment the following year of small liaison offices in Peking and Washington. Following each of Kissinger’s further visits in 1973 and 1974, senior diplomats virtually queued up at the liaison office to find out what progress, if any, had been made towards the normalization of US-China relations. Peking’s diplomats, like some of their colleagues elsewhere in the world, did not always see eye-to-eye with their foreign ministries. There was little chance of their becoming overly attached to Communist China, as the Japanologists and Arabists were sometimes accused of doing for Japan and Arab countries. At the same time, living and breathing the PRC led some diplomats to regard Chinese Communism as being rather more nuanced—and the government somewhat less belligerent—than the Cold War images portrayed in the West, particularly the United States.

Turkey: The Rise and Fall of the Influence of the Military in Politics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Acar Kutay
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Constitutional Order ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The continued influence of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) on politics characterized the political history of the Turkish Republic, until such influence was first bridled and then ultimately broken by the Justice and Development Party governments during the 2000s. When the new regime was established in 1923, the military identified itself with its founding ideology, namely Kemalism, which was built on the ideas of modernism, secularism, and nationalism. Because the TAF assumed the roles of guardian of the regime and vanguard of modernization, any threat to the foundational values and norms of the republican regime was considered by the military as a threat to the constitutional order and national security. As a self-authorized guardian of the regime and its values, the TAF characterized itself as a non-partisan institution. The military appealed to such identity to justify the superiority of the moral and epistemological foundations of their understanding of politics compared with that of the elected politicians. The military invoked such superiority not only to intervene in politics and take power (1960, 1971, 1980, 1997, and 2007). They also used such identity to monitor and control political processes by means of the National Security Council (established after the 1960 military intervention) and by more informal means such as mobilizing the public against the elected government’s policy choices. In the context of the Cold War, domestic turmoil and lasting political polarization helped legitimate the military’s control over security issues until the 1980s. After the end of the Cold War, two threats to national security drew the TAF into politics: the rising power of Islamic movements and the separatist terrorism of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which posed threats to the constitutional order. Turkey’s EU membership bid is one of the most important aspects that bridled the influence of the TAF on politics. Whereas the democratic oversight of the military and security sector constituted a significant dimension of the EU reforms, events that took place around the nomination of the Justice and Development Party’s candidate, Abdullah Gül, for the presidency created a rupture in the role and influence of the military on politics. Two juristic cases against members of the TAF in 2008 and 2010 made a massive impact on the power of the military, before the ultimate supremacy of the political sphere was established after the coup attempt organized by the Gülenist officers who infiltrated the TAF during the 2000s.

Defining–Redefining Security

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Buzan ◽  
Lene Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Military Technology ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
Political Rivalry ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military ◽  
Strategic Studies

International security studies (ISS) has significantly evolved from its founding core of “golden age” strategic studies. From the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s through to the 1970s, strategic studies virtually was ISS, and remains a very large part of it. The fact that it continues to stand as the “mainstream” attacked by widening/deepening approaches further speaks to its status as a “core.” This core consists of those literatures whose principal concern is external military threats to the state, and the whole agenda of the use of force which arises from that. This core was originally focused on nuclear weapons and the military-political rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union, but has since adapted its focus to changes in the salience and nature of military threats caused by the end of the Cold War and 9/11. It includes literatures on deterrence, arms racing, arms control and disarmament, grand strategy, wars (and “new wars”), the use of force, nuclear proliferation, military technology, and terrorism. Debates within ISS are structured, either implicitly or explicitly, by five questions: (1) which referent object to adopt, (2) whether to understand security as internally or externally driven, (3) whether to limit it to the military sector or to expand it, (4) what fundamental thinking about (international) politics to adopt, and (5) which epistemology and methodology to choose.

scholarly journals Doomed to Repetition? Havana, Washington, Miami, and Moscow, from the Cold War to Today

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Radoslav Yordanov
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
Competitive Coexistence ◽  
The Us ◽  
Comprehensive Survey ◽  
The Cold War

This paper offers a broad historical overview of US economic sanctions against Cuba, starting with the imposition of the partial trade embargo on 19 October 1960, taking the story up to the present day. Additionally, it develops a comprehensive survey of the numerous scholarly and policy debates which closely follow the changes in United States’ post-Cold War attitudes and actions towards its southern neighbor and which demonstrate the thinking behind centers of power in Washington and Miami related to US’ Cuba policies. The paper also glances over the latest developments under Cuba’s new President Miguel Díaz-Canel and the notable return to the harsh Cold War rhetoric, which transcends the boundaries of the localized Washington-Miami-Havana axis of the past thirty years. Referring to historic patterns, the paper concludes that the conjecture between the recent complication in the US-Cuba relations and Moscow’s ambition to reinstate its erstwhile position as an unavoidable international factor would afford Havana with the opportunity to reclaim once again the dubious honor of becoming one of the focal points in the renewed competitive coexistence between the United States and Russia.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 207-212
Author(s):  
Ingo Trauschweizer
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Historical Drama ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Military Planning ◽  
The Us ◽  
Operational Art ◽  
National Security State ◽  
The Cold War

Maxwell Taylor’s experience in the Cold War highlights four interrelated themes that have defined the US national security state and also shed light on the nature of strategy. First, the warfare state will guide decision-makers to seek military solutions to political problems. Sometimes that is appropriate, but at other times, as in Vietnam, it can drown out other approaches. Second, strategy and bureaucracy often work at cross-purposes. Again, decisions leading to the Vietnam War offer an illustration: instead of aligning means, ends, and political objectives, US strategy suffered from the collision of politics and policy with operational art and military planning. The various bureaucracies, though linked in the National Security Council, sought separate solutions. Third, strategy in general has increasingly become the fault line between operational art and politics and policy. It should be the connective tissue. Fourth, powerful and influential individuals served as contingent actors in the historical drama, but their options were limited by Cold War structures, ranging from bureaucracies that channeled possible actions to mind-sets that made it difficult not to view the problem at hand through the lens of the wider conflict and recent experiences. As they say in military and policy circles, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But what if you had several different hammers all trying to strike the nail at once?...

Removing the Mask of Sanity: McCarthyism and the Psychiatric–Confessional Foundations of the Cold War National Security State

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (04) ◽  
pp. 1066-1094
Author(s):  
ROBERT GENTER
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Sexual Behaviors ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Psychiatric Discourse ◽  
National Security State ◽  
The Cold War

In the early Cold War, the US government institutionalized a national security program, centered on the investigation into the political beliefs of federal employees, to safeguard the nation from Communist subversion. Often interpreted as the result of a partisan battle between New Deal Democrats and conservative Republicans, the national security program had deeper origins, reflecting the influence of psychiatric discourse on public understandings of deviancy. Framed by a metonymical logic that linked radical political beliefs, deviant sexual behaviors, and other illicit behaviors under the category of psychopathology, the security program sought to guard against the threat posed by potentially dangerous individuals, a form of protection that necessitated the public disclosure by those deemed security risks of all aspects of their personal lives.

Strategies of Decolonization: Economic Sovereignty and National Security in Libyan–US Relations, 1949–1971

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Christopher R. W. Dietrich
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
International Law ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Oil Industry ◽  
Deep Foundations ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Arab League ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This article examines Libyan–US relations through the historical lenses of decolonization, international law, the Cold War, and the international political economy. The Libyan government exercised its newfound sovereignty in the postwar era through the negotiation of ‘base rights’ for the US government and ‘oil rights’ for corporations owned by US nationals. They did so in conjunction with other petrostates and through international organizations such as the United Nations, the Arab League, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Libyan leaders’ strategy of using sovereignty to promote corporate competition relied on connections with similarly situated nations, and it was through global circuits of knowledge that they pressed the outer limits of economic sovereignty. At the same time, the US government consistently accommodated Libyan policies through Cold War arguments that linked the alliance with Libya to US national security. Those deep foundations of sovereignty and security created the conditions for the transformation of the global oil industry after Libya’s 1969 revolution.

The Politics of Removing Children: The International Tracing Service's German Foster Homes Investigation of 1948

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Dan Stone
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Foster Homes ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Missing Children ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military ◽  
Second World

Abstract After the Second World War, the International Tracing Service's Child Search Branch (CSB) responded to inquiries for missing children and, until 1950 when funding was stopped, searched for children ‘in the field’. As the Cold War set in, the US military authorities restricted the opportunities for such children, mostly Eastern European, to be removed from their German foster parents and returned to their countries of origin. In the spring of 1948, when tensions between the CSB fieldworkers and the military authorities were at their height, ITS appointed an experienced fieldworker, Charlotte Babinski, to investigate cases of children in German foster homes with a view to streamlining policy regarding child removal. Despite her findings, as monetary and geopolitical pressures increased, the CSB had to accept that many children of Eastern European origin would remain in Germany. Children were thus a battleground in the early Cold War, in which politics triumphed over ethics.

Security dilemmas and the end of the Cold War

1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 721-725 ◽  
Author(s):  
JASON RALPH
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
Security Community ◽  
The Us ◽  
Common Identity ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military ◽  
Liberal Individualism ◽  
The Way

Alan Collins is to be congratulated for highlighting the role Gorbachev’s strategy of Graduated Reciprocation in Tension Reduction (GRIT) played in ending the military conflict between East and West. By offering an alternative view to the conservative opinion that America’s material strength forced the Soviets into submission, it suggests that statesmen caught in security dilemmas have real options and are not simply forced to compete for power. As a policy that fostered transparency which assisted the creation of security regimes, GRIT undoubtedly played a role in the way the military conflict ended. Yet the Cold War was not simply about the military balance. Collins’ account of this period is restricted by his bias towards state-centric and rationalist explanations of state behaviour. He underestimates the role ideology played in ending the Cold War and as such only offers half a Cold War story. The influence of the US during this period, as a cautious agent of liberal individualism, is completely ignored, yet, as this reply demonstrates, it is crucial to understanding the way the US reciprocated Soviet policies. Moreover, if ‘debate over what the Cold War was is part of the politics of deciding what the post-Cold War is’, the significance of this criticism is not merely academic. The implication of Collins’ unwritten assumption that state’s identities are egoistic is that a security community based on a common identity is impossible. The lesson that the Cold War, as opposed to the military conflict, only ended when a common identity based on liberal individualism was instituted, suggests that a transatlantic security community including Russia was and still is a possibility.

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