Freedom’s Just Another Word . . .

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
The United States ◽  
Student Movements ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Tiananmen Square ◽  
Conceptual Apparatus ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit. If successful, this conceptual apparatus becomes so embedded in common sense as to be taken for granted and not open to question. The founding figures of neoliberal thought took political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom as fundamental, as ‘the central values of civilization’. In so doing they chose wisely, for these are indeed compelling and seductive ideals. These values, they held, were threatened not only by fascism, dictatorships, and communism, but by all forms of state intervention that substituted collective judgements for those of individuals free to choose. Concepts of dignity and individual freedom are powerful and appealing in their own right. Such ideals empowered the dissident movements in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union before the end of the Cold War as well as the students in Tiananmen Square. The student movements that swept the world in 1968––from Paris and Chicago to Bangkok and Mexico City––were in part animated by the quest for greater freedoms of speech and of personal choice. More generally, these ideals appeal to anyone who values the ability to make decisions for themselves. The idea of freedom, long embedded in the US tradition, has played a conspicuous role in the US in recent years. ‘9/11’ was immediately interpreted by many as an attack on it. ‘A peaceful world of growing freedom’, wrote President Bush on the first anniversary of that awful day, ‘serves American long-term interests, reflects enduring American ideals and unites America’s allies.’ ‘Humanity’, he concluded, ‘holds in its hands the opportunity to offer freedom’s triumph over all its age-old foes’, and ‘the United States welcomes its responsibilities to lead in this great mission’. This language was incorporated into the US National Defense Strategy document issued shortly thereafter.

The Anti-Aryan Moment: Decolonization, Diplomacy, and Race in Late Pahlavi Iran

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-702
Author(s):  
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Cold War

In 1946, the entertainer and activist Paul Robeson pondered America's intentions in Iran. In what was to become one of the first major crises of the Cold War, Iran was fighting a Soviet aggressor that did not want to leave. Robeson posed the question, “Is our State Department concerned with protecting the rights of Iran and the welfare of the Iranian people, or is it concerned with protecting Anglo-American oil in that country and the Middle East in general?” This was a loaded question. The US was pressuring the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops after its occupation of the country during World War II. Robeson wondered why America cared so much about Soviet forces in Iranian territory, when it made no mention of Anglo-American troops “in countries far removed from the United States or Great Britain.” An editorial writer for a Black journal in St. Louis posed a different variant of the question: Why did the American secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, concern himself with elections in Iran, Arabia or Azerbaijan and yet not “interfere in his home state, South Carolina, which has not had a free election since Reconstruction?”

“New Cold Wars Have Begun”

2021 ◽  
pp. 47-67
Author(s):  
Rush Doshi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gulf War ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
American Power ◽  
Tiananmen Square ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Balance Of Forces ◽  
The Cold War

Chapter 3 uses Party texts to explore China’s changing view of the United States at the end of the Cold War and the ends, ways, and means of its subsequent grand strategy to blunt American power. It demonstrates how China went from seeing the United States as a quasi-ally against the Soviet Union to seeing it as China’s greatest threat and “main adversary” in the wake of three events: the traumatic trifecta of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Gulf War, and the Soviet collapse. It traces how Beijing launched its blunting strategy under the Party guideline of “hiding capabilities and biding time,” which it tied to perceptions of US power captured in phrases like the “international balance of forces” and “multipolarity.” The chapter also introduces China’s effort to asymmetrically weaken American power in Asia across military, economic, and political instruments, which are discussed in greater detail in subsequent chapters.

6. Maintaining the Spheres of Influence

2020 ◽  
pp. 159-177
Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spheres Of Influence ◽  
Nikita Khrushchev ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This chapter examines how the United States and the Soviet Union tried to maintain their respective spheres of influence during the Cold War, especially in three regions: Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Latin America. The death of Joseph Stalin and the assumption of power by the triumvirate of Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, and Georgi Malenkov resulted in a fresh approach to domestic issues and to the nature of Soviet control over its European satellites. The apparent change produced a new Soviet approach to East–West relations. The chapter first considers how the new Soviet leadership addressed the crisis in East Germany before analysing American influence in Western Europe and US relations with Latin America. The discussion covers themes and events such as the Soviet policy on Hungary and Poland, the Messina Conference and the Spaak Committee, nuclear cooperation and multilateral force, and the US response to the Cuban Revolution.

scholarly journals Science Diplomacy and Soviet-American Academic and Technical Exchanges

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 398-408
Author(s):  
Olga Krasnyak
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Policy Goals ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Science Diplomacy ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
American Academic

Summary The 1958 Lacy-Zarubin agreement on cultural, educational and scientific exchanges marked decades of people-to-people exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union. Despite the Cold War tensions and mutually propagated adversarial images, the exchanges had never been interrupted and remained unbroken until the Soviet Union dissolved. This essay argues that due to the 1958 general agreement and a number of co-operative agreements that had the status of treaties and international acts issued under the authority of the US State Department and the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the exchanges could not proceed without diplomatic supervision. This peculiarity puts academic and technical exchanges specifically into the framework of science diplomacy, which is considered a diplomatic tool for implementing a nation state’s foreign policy goals determined by political power.

The ‘New Cold War’ in ‘critical International Relations studies’

1986 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 163-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Kubalkova ◽  
A. A. Cruickshank
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Relations ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Cold War

In the historiography of the Cold War a small but active group of American historians influenced by New Left radicalism rejected the view prevailing in the USA at the time in regard to the assignation of responsibility for the beginning and continuation of the Cold War.1 Although their reasoning took them along different routes and via different perceptions as to key dates and events, there were certain features all US revisionists had in common (some more generally recognized than others). Heavily involved as they were in the analysis of the US socio-economic system, the Soviet Union was largely left out of their concerns and it was the United States who had been found the ‘guilty’ party. The revisionists, of course inadvertently, corroborated Soviet conclusions, a fact gratefully acknowledged by Soviet writers.2

The Accidental Political Advantages of a Nonpolitical Book Program

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria M. Grieve
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Written Word ◽  
The Cold War

In the early years of the Cold War, the US government devoted substantial energy and funds to using books as weapons against the Soviet Union. Books and the principles they represented were to counter Soviet accusations of American materialism and spread American ideals around the globe. Founded in 1952, Franklin Books Program, Inc. was a gray propaganda program that operated at the nexus of US public–private cultural diplomacy efforts. USIA bureaucrats believed Franklin successfully carried out diplomatic objectives by highlighting the positive aspects of American culture and those who ran Franklin emphasized the “nonpolitical” aspects of cultural diplomacy, many of which directly targeted children. Franklin’s textbooks and juvenile science books cultivated a literate population friendly to the United States, reaching out to foreign young people through books, which like art, seemed to transcend the written word and represent abstract ideals of freedom and democracy.

6. Maintaining the Spheres of Influence

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spheres Of Influence ◽  
Nikita Khrushchev ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This chapter examines how the United States and the Soviet Union tried to main their respective spheres of influence during the Cold War, especially in three regions: Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Latin America. The death of Joseph Stalin and the assumption of power by the triumvirate of Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, and Georgi Malenkov resulted in a fresh approach to domestic issues and to the nature of Soviet control over its European satellites. The apparent change produced a new Soviet approach to East–West relations. The chapter first considers how the new Soviet leadership addressed the crisis in East Germany before analysing American influence in Western Europe and US relations with Latin America. The discussion covers themes and events such as the Soviet policy on Hungary and Poland, the Messina Conference and the Spaak Committee, nuclear cooperation and multilateral force, and the US response to the Cuban Revolution.

Cuba and the Soviet Bloc: Searching for the Last Guardians of Socialism

2020 ◽  
pp. 002200942094991
Author(s):  
Radoslav Yordanov
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
East European ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Common Enemy ◽  
The Us ◽  
Revolutionary Ideology ◽  
The Cold War

Based on a wide array of original documents from over 20 archives in Eastern Europe, the US, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, this paper traces the complex interplay between Havana’s revolutionary ideology and pragmatic state instincts which governed Cuba’a relations with the Soviet bloc from the ouster of Fulgencio Batista until the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It overviews their relations by hearing the candid voices of Moscow’s closest East European allies (Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia) regarding Cuba’s continuous transformations. Additionally, the views of the other East European socialist states, which were not among Moscow’s closes backers, namely Albania, Yugoslavia and Romania, are also taken into account. In so doing, this paper seeks to enrich our understanding of the complex trajectory Cuba, the Soviet Union and the remaining East European socialist states underwent in their struggle against the common enemy, the United States. It also seeks to paint a more nuanced picture of the interplay between the realist imperative of state survival and the ideological drive of revolutionary expansionism, which marked Havana’s relations with the East, the West and the South throughout the Cold War.

Messengers of Death

2021 ◽  
pp. 224-241
Author(s):  
Evan Renfro
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Mass Shootings ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Lone Wolf ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter analyzes the cyber environment of mass violence and terrorism globally. More specifically, it uncovers the role of cyberspace at the root of terror. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and conclusion of the Cold War, the United States (US) has been perceived both domestically and globally as the single super power capable of anything, but it remains vulnerable to a not-so-new tactic of destruction. 9/11 made that clear and spawned an immense architecture of countering terrorism, which as of this writing has been successful in the limited sense of defending the country from the sort of catastrophic wreckage that occurred that September morning. From mass shootings to “lone wolf” terrorist attacks, the US and the international community remain quite vulnerable to terror. While the role of cyber is not deterministic, its importance is as overwhelming as it is overlooked by policymakers and scholars alike.

Scandinavia–US Relations since 1940

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olof Kronvall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

Relations between the British colonies in North America and the three Scandinavian countries—Norway, Denmark, and Sweden—predate American independence. Government-level interaction was rather limited until WWII, but cultural links emerged through the extensive settlement of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish immigrants in mid- and later nineteenth-century America, especially in the American Midwest. During WWII, the United States and Norway became allies in 1941, Denmark became a de facto Allied nation in 1944, and Sweden remained formally neutral while becoming a non-belligerent on the Allied side in 1944–1945. By the end of the war, the United States emerged as a superpower. After initial disinterest, America strived to integrate Scandinavia into the US–led Western security system. Norway and Denmark became US allies and joined NATO as founding members in 1949. Sweden remained non-aligned, but formed close military ties to the United States in 1949–1952. Throughout the Cold War, US–Scandinavian relations were characterized by ambivalence. America and Scandinavia shared the perception of the Soviet Union as a threat and cooperated militarily, but the Scandinavian countries limited the cooperation in important respects. For example, Sweden never joined NATO, and Denmark and Norway did not allow foreign bases or nuclear weapons on their territories in peacetime. America was often frustrated with these limitations but nevertheless accepted them. The Scandinavian restrictions were partially founded on a desire to reduce the risk of a Soviet attack, but there were also fears of being controlled or dominated by the American superpower. Broader ideological factors also played a role. Mainstream Scandinavian attitudes to America, both among policymakers and the general public, ranged from strongly pro-American to highly skeptical. Americans and Scandinavians shared democratic values, but they organized their societies differently in important respects. Scandinavians were exposed to American ideas and products, of which they rejected some and accepted some. After the Cold War, US–Scandinavian relations were increasingly defined by issues outside Western Europe. Denmark abandoned its Cold War reservations toward America and aligned itself closely with the United States when it came to participation in expeditionary military operations. Norway and Sweden have also participated, but to a more limited extent than Denmark. For Sweden, cooperating closely and openly with the United States and NATO nevertheless contrasted with its non-aligned tradition and often conflicted Cold War relations with the United States. After the Russian invasion of Crimea, questions about territorial defense again became more prominent in US–Scandinavian relations. Under the Trump administration, US–Scandinavian relations have been characterized by turbulence and great uncertainty, even though cooperation continues in many areas.

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