The Geopolitics of European Security and Cooperation

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Rojansky

At the present moment of obvious tension between Moscow and Washington, it may be tempting to dismiss the likelihood of progress on any diplomatic front, let alone in the complex multilateral format of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Yet the 1972–75 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (csce) itself took place against a backdrop of intense rivalry between the u.s. and Soviet-led blocs, suggesting that reasoned dialogue and consensus on core issues of shared security in the osce space is possible, despite—or perhaps even because of—the looming threat of conflict between geopolitical rivals. Despite some superficial similarities, relations between Russia and the United States today are sufficiently different from the past that they cannot accurately be described as a conflict in the same category as the Cold War. The u.s.-Russia relations have been severely strained over the crisis in Ukraine, but management of the crisis alone will not be enough to restore productive relations between Washington and Moscow or to repair the damage to European security. The best hope is likely a return to the principles of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, and through a similarly inclusive region-wide dialogue. Today, the United States, Europe, and Russia all share an interest in renewal of just such a dialogue, although what will not—indeed what must not—return is the Cold War “balance of terror” that exerted pressure on all sides to participate seriously in the original Helsinki process.

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-614
Author(s):  
Gordon Fraser

Sherman Alexie's widely taught short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistight in Heaven (1993) ofers a largely unrecognized critique of the apocalyptic temporalities of United States militarism. War planners in the United States have frequently looked to the unrealized, potential holocausts of the future for a justiication of violence in the present. Alexie's collection—like much contemporary literature by Indian writers—unsettles this military logic by revealing how First Nations in North America and peoples around the world live with the consequences of a militarism that continually envisages impending antiAmerican violence as a means of justifying violence by the state. Alexie's writing provides a way of replacing the violent, futureoriented temporality of United States militarism with a “slow” temporality that acknowledges the un folding consequences of the past. Ultimately, this essay suggests a method for rereading “ethnic studies” literature with a view toward the interventions these texts make in mainstream United States culture.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Radoslav Yordanov

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.


Worldview ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-7
Author(s):  
James Greene

The speed with which economics has sped to the front of the Cold War over the past four years has caught the West-used to diplomatic maneuvering and “little wars”-off guard. We have, as yet, no adequate answer to what may well prove to be Communism's most devastating weapon-a Soviet economy producing at a greater per capita rate than the United States. No nation of free men ever rallied round a column of statistics, and yet, clearly, that is where the current battle between East and West has moved.The change, it now seems, was inevitable. When they continue for any period of time, “total” wars, both hot and cold, slip more and more from the grasp of those charged with diplomacy and come to rest upon the impersonal powers of clashing armies, armies either on the battlefields or in the factories.


2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-475
Author(s):  
ASA MCKERCHER ◽  
TIMOTHY ANDREWS SAYLE

AbstractFor the past two decades, Canadian international historians have largely missed the Cold War, or at least a significant portion of it. Certainly, there has been no shortage of studies of Canadian foreign policy featuring the bipolar struggle, and yet historians have largely confined their attention to Canada's admittedly crucial relationship with the United States, while Canadian–Soviet relations have been ignored. Indeed, in the historiography of Canada's Cold War international relations, the communist powers are largely missing. Hoping to challenge this limited focus, we frame our article around two Canada–US air defence exercises held in 1959 and 1960. While historians have viewed these exercises within the context of Canada's relationship with the United States, we highlight the wider Cold War framework in which Canadian policy was formed. After all, these exercises occurred during the mini-détente of the late 1950s and the collapse of the Paris summit in May 1960. As we demonstrate, the failure to take full account of the Cold War is a shortcoming of much of the writing on Canadian international relations, and so we offer an example of the need to take seriously Canada's foreign policy toward the communist bloc.


2016 ◽  
pp. 161-175
Author(s):  
Jurij Latysh

The article deals with the campaign of Senator B. Sanders for the nomination for the post of President of the United States Democratic Party, analyzes the causes of the rapid growth in popularity of socialist ideas among young people and Democrats, highlights the challenges faced by the only senator-socialist. With the departure of the past stereotypes of the Cold War in the United States there has been a change of attitude towards socialism. Among young people aged 18-29 support socialism than capitalism support. The basis of his election program Sanders put the request “political revolution” in the US. It offers a choice between his progressive economic program that creates jobs, increases wages, protects the environment and provides medical care for all, and the conversion to US economic and political oligarchy. Despite a significant increase Sanders rating so far inferior to Clinton, who enjoys the support of the party establishment, party donors and “superdelegates”. However, in competition with Trump Sanders has a much better chance through an excellent reputation. Despite high ratings, the majority of voters do not believe Clinton Trump reliable and honest candidates. Sanders – one of the candidates who most respondents think good person.


2006 ◽  
Vol 100 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-550 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Michael Reisman ◽  
Andrea Armstrong

The claim by the United States to a right of what has come to be known as “preemptive selfdefense” has provoked deep anxiety and soul-searching among the members of the college of international lawyers. Some have feared that the claim signaled a demand for the prospective legitimation of “Pearl Harbor” types of actions, that is, sudden, massive, and destructive military actions “out of the blue,” by one state against another in the absence of a state of war, with the objective of militarily neutralizing or even eliminating a latent or potential adversary. Since some public intellectuals within the American political system had recommended such a strategy with respect to the People’s Republic of China in the midst of the Cold War, the anxiety could not be dismissed as entirely unfounded or even hysterical. Nor could it be ignored as if it were some sort of exclusively American aberration that could be tolerated as the idiosyncrasy of one state. From the earliest unilateral claims to a continental shelf, a copycat or mimetic dynamic in modern international law has taken shape whenever an enhancement of state power has become available, so that the possibility of similar claims to an expanded notion of preemptive self-defense by many other states could not be excluded. Indeed, while the United States may now have retreated somewhat from its 2002 broad claim to preemption, various other states (including some with nuclear weapons) have adopted the preemptive self-defense claim as their own. If the U.S. claim posed potentially destabilizing consequences for world order, how much more so would proliferation of the claim?


2018 ◽  
pp. 13-39
Author(s):  
William Cloonan

Henry James’ The American, influenced by de Tocqueville’s studies of American democracy, creates a paradigm of Franco-American images of each other which will persist, with variations and reversals, until almost the end of the Cold War. Simply put, the French see the Americans as wealthy, yet culturally naïve, while the Americans see the French as highly cultivated but duplicitous. The United States is the present and the future, while France is the past.


2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Terrence Hopmann

Ever since negotiations on the Helsinki Final Act opened in Helsinki in 1973, the United States has regarded the Conference (later Organization) on Security and Co-operation in Europe with some ambivalence. The role of the Helsinki Final Act in establishing a normative regime that contributed significantly to undermining the authoritarian regimes in the former Warsaw Pact countries, eventually bringing an end to the Cold War, is widely recognized and appreciated in the United States. However, the expanded post-Cold War role of the osce has received less attention in us foreign policy and, with respect to issues of European security, has clearly been assigned a secondary role in that policy behind the nato Alliance. Those knowledgeable about the osce in the United States widely regard its role in positive terms on issues such as human rights, rights of persons belonging to minorities, rule of law, election monitoring and other “soft” security issues. However, the osce role in “hard” security issues has been given little attention and receives only limited support, due largely to its inability to achieve consensus on most serious security problems and its lack of resources to effectively implement those decisions that it takes. Nevertheless, the recent crisis in Ukraine has awakened us interest in the osce as the institutional framework best able to manage that crisis. The challenge for the German Chairmanship in 2016 will be to build upon this renewed us attention to the osce’s role in “hard” security issues, in promoting negotiated resolutions to this and other stalemated conflicts, in rebuilding the badly damaged regime of confidence-building measures and conventional arms control, as well as responding, within the multilateral osce framework, to new security threats, such as cyber warfare and countering violent extremism.


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