The leaders of the victors of World War II—Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill; the United States’ president, Franklin Roosevelt; and the Soviet Union’s premier, Joseph Stalin—planned during the war for a postwar order. Indeed, the Atlantic Charter of August 14, 1941, called for collaboration on economic issues and prepared for a permanent system of security in a “united nations.” These plans were consolidated between 1943 and 1945. The final conference in Potsdam, concluded weeks before the war officially ended, divided Germany into zones. This division, along with several other outcomes of World War II, help explain the emergence of what we now call the Cold War.
Origins of the Cold War
The first and most important outcome of World War II was the emergence of two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—as the primary actors in the international system. The second outcome of the war was the intensification over time of fundamental incompatibilities between these two superpowers in both national interests and ideology. Differences surfaced immediately over geopolitical national interests. Having been invaded from the west on several occasions, including during World War II, the USSR used its newfound power to solidify its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, specifically in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania. The Soviet leadership believed that ensuring friendly (or at least weak) neighbors on its western borders was vital to the country’s national interests. In the United States, there raged a debate between those favoring an aggressive rollback strategy—pushing the USSR back to its own borders—and those favoring a less aggressive containment strategy. The diplomat and historian George Kennan published in Foreign Affairs the famous “X” telegram, in which he argued that because the Soviet Union would always feel military insecurity, it would conduct an aggressive foreign policy. Containing the Soviets, Kennan wrote, should therefore become the cornerstone of the United States’ postwar foreign policy.11 What Kennan meant was that the United States should devise policies that restrained the power of that hostile nation, keeping it under control, but not necessarily using military force.
The United States put the notion of containment into action in the Truman Doctrine of 1947. Justifying material support in Greece against the communists, President Harry Truman asserted, “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.”12 Containment as policy—essentially, the use of espionage, economic pressure, and forward-deployed military resources—emerged from a comparative asymmetry of forces in Europe. After the Third Reich’s surrender, U.S. and British forces rapidly demobilized and went home, whereas the Soviet army did not. In 1948, the Soviets blocked western transportation corridors to Berlin, the German capital—which had been divided into sectors by postwar agreement. The United States then realized that even as the sole state in possession of atomic weapons, it did not possess the power to coerce the Soviet Union into retreating to its pre–World War II borders. And, in August 1949, the Soviets successfully tested their first atomic bomb. Thus, containment, based on U.S. geostrategic interests and a growing recognition that attempting rollback would likely lead to war, became the fundamental doctrine of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War.
The United States and the Soviet Union also had major ideological differences. The United States’ democratic liberalism was based on the ideals of a social system that accepted the worth and value of the individual; a political system that depended on the participation of individuals in the electoral process; and an economic system, capitalism, that provided opportunities to individuals to pursue what was economically rational with minimal government interference. At the international level, this translated into support for other democratic regimes and for liberal capitalist institutions and processes, including, most critically, free trade.
Soviet communist ideology also influenced the USSR’s conception of the international system and state practices. The failure of the Revolutions of 1848 cast Marxist theory into crisis; Marxism insisted that peasants and workers would spontaneously rise up and overthrow their capitalist masters, but this had not happened. The crisis in Marxist theory was partly resolved by Vladimir Lenin’s “vanguard of the proletariat” amendment, in which Lenin argued that the masses must be led or “sparked” by intellectuals who fully understand socialism. But the end result was a system in which any hope of achieving communism—a utopian vision in which the state withered away along with poverty, war, sexism, and the like—had to be led from the top down. This result meant that to the United States and its liberal allies, the Soviet system looked like a dictatorship, bent on aggressively exporting that system under the guise of worldwide socialist revolution. Popular sovereignty vanished in every state allied to the Soviet Union (e.g., Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland). For their part, Soviet leaders felt themselves surrounded by a hostile capitalist camp and argued that the Soviet Union “must not weaken but must in every way strengthen its state . . . if that country does not want to be smashed by the capitalist environment.”13
These “bottom up” versus “top down” differences between the United States and Russia were exacerbated by mutual misperceptions. Once each side became distrustful, it tended to view the other side’s policies as necessarily threatening. For example, the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 became a contentious worldwide issue. NATO’s twelve founding members sought to defend Western Europe from the fully mobilized Soviet Army, while from the Soviet perspective, NATO seemed clearly an aggressive military alliance aimed at depriving the USSR of the fruits of its victory over the Third Reich. In 1955, Russia formed its own postwar alliance—the Warsaw Pact—together with six Eastern European states. When the USSR reacted in ways it took to be defensive, Britain and the United States interpreted these actions as dangerous escalations.
The third outcome of the end of World War II was the collapse of the colonial system, a development few foresaw. The defeat of Japan and Germany meant the immediate end of their respective empires. The other colonial powers, faced with the reality of their economically and politically weakened position, and confronted with newly powerful indigenous movements for independence, were spurred by the United Nations Charter’s endorsement of the principle of national self-determination. These movements were equipped with leftover small arms from World War II, led by talented commanders employing indirect defense strategies such as “revolutionary” guerrilla warfare, and inspired by the ideals of nationalism. Victorious powers were forced—by local resistance, their own decline, or pressure from the United States—to grant independence to their former colonies. This started with Britain, which granted India independence in 1947. It took the military defeat of France in Indochina in the early 1950s to bring decolonization to that part of the world. African states, too, became independent between 1957 and 1963.
Europe during the Cold War
The fourth outcome was the realization that the differences between the Soviet Union and the United States would be played out indirectly, on third-party stages, rather than through direct confrontation. Both rivals came to believe that the risks of a direct military confrontation were too great and that the “loss” of any potential ally, no matter how poor or distant, might begin a cumulative process leading to a significant shift in the balance of power. Thus, the Cold War resulted in the globalization of conflict to all continents.
Other parts of the world developed new ideologies or recast the dominant discourse of Europe in ways that addressed their own experiences. The globalization of post–World War II politics thus meant the rise of new contenders for power. Although the United States and the Soviet Union retained their dominant positions, new ideas acted as powerful magnets for populations in independent and developing states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—the new so-called Third World. The Non-Aligned Movement, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism, and Third World socialism developed as reactions to the dominant U.S.-Soviet Union confrontation.
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Key Developments in the Cold War
Two superpowers emerge—the United States and the Soviet Union. They are divided by national interests, ideologies, and mutual misperceptions. These divisions are projected into different geographic areas.
A series of crises occur—Berlin blockade (1948–49), Korean War (1950–53), Cuban missile crisis (1962), Vietnam War (1965–73), and Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan (1979–89).
A long peace between superpower rivals is sustained by mutual deterrence.
The Cold War as a Series of Confrontations
We can characterize the Cold War (1945–89) as 45 years of overall high-level tension and competition between the superpowers but with no direct military conflict. The advent of nuclear weapons created a stalemate in which each side acted, at times reluctantly, with increasing caution. As nuclear technology advanced, both sides realized that a nuclear war would likely result in the destruction of each power beyond hope of recovery. This state of affairs was called “mutual assured destruction”—aptly underlined by its acronym: MAD. Though each superpower tended to back down from particular confrontations—either because its national interest was not sufficiently strong to risk a nuclear confrontation, or because its ideological resolve wavered in light of military realities—several confrontations very nearly escalated to war.
Most Cold War conflicts were between proxies (North Korea versus South Korea, North Vietnam versus South Vietnam, Ethiopia versus Somalia). But there were also confrontations between two blocs of states. The non-communist bloc consisted of the NATO allies (the United States, Canada, Australia, and most of Western Europe), South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines; and the communist bloc consisted of the Warsaw Pact states (the Soviet Union with its allies in Eastern Europe), North Korea, Vietnam, the People’s Republic of China, and Cuba. Over the life of the Cold War, these blocs loosened, and states sometimes took positions different from that of the dominant power, but bloc politics persisted. Table 2.1 shows a timeline of major events related to the Cold War.
One of the high-level, direct confrontations between the superpowers took place in Germany. Germany had been divided immediately after World War II into zones of occupation. The United States, France, and Great Britain administered the western portion; the Soviet Union, the eastern. Berlin, Germany’s capital, was similarly divided but lay within Soviet-controlled East Germany. In 1948, the Soviet Union blocked land access to Berlin, prompting the United States and Britain to airlift supplies for 13 months. In 1949, the separate states of West and East Germany were declared. In 1961, East Germany erected the Berlin Wall around the West German portion of the city to stem the tide of East Germans trying to leave the troubled state. U.S. president John F. Kennedy responded by visiting the city and declaring, “Ich bin ein Berliner” (improper German for the sentiment “I am a Berliner”), committing the United States to the security of the Federal Republic of Germany at any cost. Not surprisingly, the dismantling of that same wall in November 1989 became the most iconic symbol of the end of the Cold War.
TABLE 2.1
Important Events of the Cold War
1945–48
Soviet Union establishes communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
1947
Announcement of Truman Doctrine; United States proposes Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of Europe.
1948–49
Soviets blockade Berlin; United States and Allies carry out airlift.
1949
Soviets test atomic bomb, ending U.S. nuclear monopoly. Chinese communists under Mao win civil war, establish People’s Republic of China. United States and Allies establish NATO.
1950–53
Korean War.
1957
Soviets launch the satellite Sputnik, causing anxiety in the West and catalyzing superpower scientific competition.
1960–63
Congo crisis and UN action to fill power vacuum.
1962
Cuban missile crisis; nuclear war narrowly averted.
1965
United States begins large-scale intervention in Vietnam.
1967
Israel defeats Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the Six-Day War. Glassboro summit signals détente, loosening tensions between the superpowers.
1968
Czech government liberalization halted by Soviet invasion. Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) signed.
1972
U.S. president Nixon visits China and Soviet Union. United States and Soviet Union sign Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT I).
1973
Yom Kippur War between Israel and Arab states leads to global energy crisis.
1975
Proxy and anticolonial wars fought in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Somalia. South Vietnam falls to communist North Vietnam.
1979
United States and Soviet Union sign SALT II (but U.S. Senate fails to ratify it). Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. Shah of Iran (a major U.S. ally) is overthrown in Islamic revolution. Israel and Egypt sign a peace treaty.
1981–89
Reagan Doctrine provides basis for U.S. support of “anticommunist” forces in Nicaragua and Afghanistan.
1985
Gorbachev starts economic and political reforms in Soviet Union.
1989
Peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe replace communist governments. Berlin Wall is dismantled. Soviet Union withdraws from Afghanistan.
1990
Germany reunified.
1991
Resignation of Gorbachev. Soviet Union collapses.
1992–93
Russia and other former Soviet republics become independent states.
The Cold War in Asia and Latin America
China, Indochina, and especially Korea became the symbols of the Cold War in Asia. In 1946, after years of bitter and heroic fighting against the Japanese occupation, communists throughout Asia attempted to take control of their respective states following Japan’s surrender. In China, the wartime alliance between the Kuomintang (non-communist Chinese nationalists) and Mao Zedong’s “People’s Liberation Army” dissolved into renewed civil war, in which the United States attempted to support the Kuomintang with large shipments of arms and military equipment. By 1949, however, the Kuomintang had been defeated, and its leaders fled to the island of Formosa (now Taiwan). With the addition of mainland China (one-fourth of the world’s population) to the communist bloc, U.S. interests in Japan and the Philippines now seemed directly threatened.
In 1946, in what was then French Indochina (an amalgamation of the contemporary states of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam), Ho Chi Minh raised the communist flag over Hanoi, declaring Vietnam to be an independent state. The French quickly returned to take Indochina back, but they proved unable to defeat the communists, the Viet Minh. In 1954, the French were defeated in a town called Dien Bien Phu. A peace treaty was signed in Geneva that same year dividing Indochina into Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, with Vietnam being divided into two zones: North Vietnam and South Vietnam.
After having spent years seeking support from the USSR to unify the Korean peninsula under communist rule, North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung finally persuaded Joseph Stalin to lend him the military equipment needed to conquer non-communist South Korea. On June 25, 1950, communist North Korean forces crossed the frontier into South Korea and rapidly overwhelmed the South’s defenders. The North Korean offensive quickly captured Seoul, South Korea’s capital, and then forced the retreat of the few surviving South Korean and American armed forces to the outskirts of the southern port city of Busan. In one of the most dramatic military reversals in history, U.S. forces—fighting for the first time under the auspices of the United Nations because of North Korea’s “unprovoked aggression” and violations of international law—landed a surprise force at Inchon. Within days, the U.S. forces cut off and then routed the North Korean forces. By mid-October, UN forces had captured North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, and by the end of the month, the destruction of North Korea’s military was nearly complete.
Yet the war did not end. Against the wishes of U.S. president Harry Truman, U.S. general Douglas MacArthur ordered his victorious troops to finish off the defeated North Koreans, who were encamped very close to the border with communist China. The Chinese had warned they would intervene if their territory was approached too closely, and in November, they did. The relatively poorly equipped but more numerous and highly motivated Chinese soldiers attacked the UN forces, causing the longest retreat of U.S. armed forces in American history. The two sides then became mired in a stalemate. With numerous diplomatic skirmishes over the years—provoked by the basing of U.S. troops in South Korea and North Korean attempts to become a nuclear power—the peninsula remains a source of conflict today.
The 1962 Cuban missile crisis was a high-profile direct confrontation between the superpowers in another area of the world. The United States viewed the Soviet Union’s installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba as a direct threat to its territory. Once the crisis became public, neither side could back down and global thermonuclear war became a very real possibility. The United States chose to blockade Cuba—another example of containment strategy in action—to prevent the arrival of additional Soviet missiles. The U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, rejected the more aggressive actions the U.S. military favored, such as a land invasion of Cuba or air strikes on missile sites. Through behind-the-scenes, unofficial contacts in Washington and direct communication between Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviets agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba and the United States agreed to remove similarly capable missiles from Turkey. The crisis was defused, and war was averted.
Vietnam provided a test of a different kind. Communist North Vietnam and its Chinese and Soviet allies were pitted against the “free world”—South Vietnam, allied with the United States and assorted supporters, including South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand. To most U.S. policy makers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Vietnam was yet another test of the containment doctrine: communist influence must be stopped, they argued, before it spread like a chain of falling dominos through the rest of Southeast Asia and beyond (hence the term domino effect). Thus, the United States supported the South Vietnamese dictators Ngo Dinh Diem and later Nguyen Van Thieu against the rival communist regime of Ho Chi Minh in the north, which was underwritten by both the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. But, as the South Vietnamese government and military faltered on their own, the United States stepped up its military support, increasing the number of its troops on the ground and escalating the air war over the north.
In the early stages, the United States was confident of victory; after all, a superpower with all its military hardware could surely beat a poorly trained Vietcong guerrilla force. American policy makers were quickly disillusioned, however, as communist forces proved adept at avoiding the massive technical firepower of U.S. forces, and a corrupt South Vietnamese leadership siphoned away many of the crucial resources needed to win its more vital struggle for popular legitimacy. As U.S. casualties mounted, with no prospects for victory in sight, the U.S. public grew disenchanted. Should the United States fight until victory to prevent the domino from falling or should it extricate itself from this unpopular quagmire? Should the United States fight for liberalism and capitalism or capitulate to the forces of ideological communism? These questions, posed in both geostrategic and ideological terms, defined the middle years of the Cold War, from the Vietnam War’s slow beginning in the late 1950s until the dramatic departure of U.S. officials from the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, in 1975— symbolized by U.S. helicopters leaving the U.S. embassy roof while dozens of desperate Vietnamese tried to grab on to the boarding ladders and escape with them.
For the United States, Vietnam became a symbol of the Cold War rivalries in Asia. The United States supported the South Vietnamese forces against the communist regime in the north. Here, North Vietnamese soldiers stand atop a downed U.S. B-52 bomber.
The U.S. effort to avert a communist takeover in South Vietnam failed, yet contrary to expectations, the domino effect did not occur. Cold War alliances were shaken on both sides: the friendship between the Soviet Union and China had long before degenerated into a geostrategic fight and a struggle over the proper form of communism, especially in Third World countries. But the Soviet bloc was left relatively unscathed by the Vietnam War. The U.S.-led Western alliance was seriously jeopardized, as several allies (including Canada) strongly opposed U.S. policy toward Vietnam. Confidence in military alternatives was shaken in the United States, undermining the United States’ ability to commit itself militarily for more than a decade.
Was the Cold War Really Cold?
It was not always the case that when the United States or the Soviet Union acted, the other side responded. In some cases, the other side chose not to act, or at least not to respond in kind. Usually this was out of concern for escalating a conflict to a major war. For example, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, both sovereign states and allies in the Warsaw Pact. These aggressive Soviet actions went unchecked. In 1956, the United States, preoccupied with the Suez Canal crisis, kept quiet, aware that it was ill prepared to respond militarily. In 1968, the United States was mired in Vietnam and beset by domestic turmoil and a presidential election. The Soviets likewise kept quiet when the United States took aggressive action within the U.S. sphere of influence, invading Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. Thus, during the Cold War, even blatantly aggressive actions by one of the superpowers did not always lead to a comparable response by the other.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the reaction was different. Some states boycotted the 1980 summer Olympics scheduled for Moscow. The U.S. response went further, secretly providing money and materials to the mujahideen, Islamic guerrilla rebels defending Afghanistan. Between 1981 and 1983, that assistance amounted to about $60 million annually. By 1985, it had increased to $250 million annually. The objective was clear: push the Soviets out, an objective achieved in 1989.
Many of the events of the Cold War involved the United States and the Soviet Union only indirectly; proxies often fought in their place. Nowhere was this so true as in the Middle East. For both the United States and the Soviet Union, the Middle East was a region of vital importance because of its possession of an estimated one-third of the world’s oil, its strategic position as a transportation hub between Asia and Europe, and its cultural significance as the cradle of three of the world’s major religions. The establishment of Israel itself in 1948 was a controversial act. At the end of World War II, Britain had concluded that it could no longer manage Palestine, referring the issue to the United Nations. The UN recommended the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab; the Jews accepted the proposal, and the Arabs did not. Thus, when British control terminated in 1948, Israel announced the formation of a new state, to which the United States immediately gave diplomatic recognition.
The region thus became the scene of a superpower confrontation by proxy between the U.S.-supported Israel and the Soviet-backed Arab states of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel crushed the Soviet-equipped Arabs in six short days, seizing the strategic territories of the Golan Heights, Gaza, and the West Bank. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which the Egyptians had planned as a limited war, the Israeli victory was not so overwhelming, because the United States and the Soviets negotiated a ceasefire before more damage could be done. But throughout the Cold War, these “hot” wars were followed by guerrilla actions supported by all parties. As long as the basic balance of power was maintained between Israel and the United States on one side and the Arabs and the Soviets on the other, the region was left alone; when that balance was threatened, the superpowers acted through proxies to maintain the balance.
Other events during this time also proved critical, though their importance was realized only later. In 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini led the Iranian Revolution, creating a Shiite theocracy eager to export its ideas. Students supporting that revolution subsequently overran the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held American citizens hostage. Over 400 days later, 52 hostages were released, but those events changed U.S.-Iran relations. And in the same year, the takeover of the Great Mosque of Mecca led Saudi Arabia to reassert Wahhabism, a puritanical form of Sunni Islam. That act would set up the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia for domination in the Islamic world. The repercussions of these events, little understood during the tensions of the Cold War, would be felt in the twenty-first century.14
In parts of the world that were of less strategic importance to the two superpowers, confrontation through proxies was even more regular during the Cold War. Africa and Latin America present many examples of such events. When the colonialist Belgians abruptly left Congo in 1960, civil war broke out as various contending factions sought to take power and bring order out of the chaos. One of the contenders, the Congolese premier Patrice Lumumba (1925–61), appealed to the Soviets for help in fighting the Western-backed insurgents and received both diplomatic support and military supplies. However, Lumumba was dismissed by the Congolese president, Joseph Kasavubu, an ally of the United States. Still others, such as Moïse Tshombe, leader of the copper-rich Katanga province, who was also closely identified with Western interests, fought for control. The three-year civil war could have become another protracted proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union. However, the United Nations averted such a confrontation by sending in peacekeepers, whose primary purpose was to stabilize a transition government and prevent the superpowers from making Congo yet another violent arena of the Cold War.
In Latin America, too, participants in civil wars were able to transform their struggles into Cold War confrontations by proxy, thereby gaining military equipment and technical expertise from one of the superpowers. In most cases, Latin American states were led by governments beholden to wealthy elites who maintained a virtual monopoly on the country’s wealth. When popular protest against corruption and injustice escalated to violence, communist Cuba was often asked to support these armed movements, and in response, the United States tended to support the incumbent governments—even those whose record of human rights abuses against their own citizens had been well established. In Nicaragua, for example, after communists called Sandinistas captured the government from its dictator in 1979, the Ronald Reagan administration supported an insurgency known as the “Contras” in an attempt to reverse what it feared would be a “communist foothold” in Latin America. Such proxy warfare enabled the superpowers to project power and support geostrategic interests and ideologies without directly confronting one another and risking major or thermonuclear war.
In sum, the Cold War was really only relatively cold in Europe, and very warm, or even hot, in other places. In Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, over 40 million people lost their lives in superpower proxy wars from 1946 to 1990.
But the Cold War was also “fought” and moderated in words, at summits (meetings between leaders), and in treaties. Some Cold War summits were relatively successful: the 1967 Glassboro summit between U.S. and Soviet leaders began the loosening of tensions known as détente. Others, however, did not produce results. Treaties between the two parties placed self-imposed limitations on nuclear arms. For example, the first Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT I), in 1972, placed an absolute ceiling on the numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed nuclear warheads, and multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs); and limited the number of antiballistic missile sites each superpower maintained. So the superpowers did enjoy periods of accommodation, when they could agree on principles and policies.
Check Your Understanding
What is correct about colonies during the Cold War?
The vast majority of colonial lands gained independence during the Cold War.
The United States and the Soviet Union competed to claim new colonies in Africa and Asia.
British and French colonial holdings sided with the United States, whereas German and Italian colonial lands sided with the Soviet Union.
Colonies had to wait until after the end of the Cold War to gain independence.
a foreign policy designed to prevent the expansion of an adversary by blocking its opportunities to expand through foreign aid programs or through use of coercive force; the major U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War era
the economic system in which the ownership of the means of production is in private hands; the system operates according to market forces whereby capital and labor move freely
an economic and social system that relies on intensive government intervention or public ownership of the means of production in order to distribute wealth among the population more equitably; in radical Marxist theory, the stage between capitalism and communism
military and political alliance between Western European states and the United States established in 1948 for the purpose of defending Europe from aggression by the Soviet Union and its allies; post–Cold War expansion to Eastern Europe
the military alliance formed by the states of the Soviet bloc in 1955 in response to the rearmament of West Germany and its inclusion in NATO; permitted the stationing of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe
a metaphor that posits that the loss of influence over one state to an adversary will necessarily lead to a subsequent loss of control over neighboring states, just as dominos fall one after another
the easing of tense relations; in the context of this volume, détente refers to the relaxation and reappraisal of threat assessments by political rivals, for example, the United States and Soviet Union during the later years of the Cold War
Endnotes
George F. Kennan [“X”], “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25 (July 1947): 566–82. Return to reference 11
Quoted in Charles W. Kegley Jr. and Eugene R. Wittkopf, World Politics: Trend and Transformation, 5th ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), p. 94. Return to reference 12
See Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2020). Return to reference 14
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Answer
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