THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES

ST. AUGUSTINE
FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

GOVT 3053 INTRODUCTION TO INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

Fall 2016

TOPIC 3: The Cold War And Its Aftermath

• Origins of Cold War

• Communism / USSR versus Capitalism / US

• End of Cold War

• New World Order

• Actual present world order

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Course content
Nine Inter-Related Topics:
THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS:
• The Inter-Paradigm debates
↓
HOW THE PRESENT INTERNATIONAL ORDER WAS CONSTRUCTED:
• The Theoretical Evolution of International Politics
• The Cold War and Its Aftermath
↓
HOW THE PRESENT INTERNATIONAL ORDER WORKS*:
• Diplomacy in International Politics
*You should take courses in Int. Law, Int. Political Economy and Strategic Studies
↓
HOW THE PRESENT INTERNATIONAL ORDER IS CHALLENGED:
STRUCTURAL POLITICAL-STRATEGIC
(SOCIAL-ECONOMIC) CHALLENGES
CHALLENGES • The War on Terror
• Globalization and Development • Politics of the Middle East
• The Network Society • China: Challenging Unipolarity

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READINGS:
Frédéric Bozo et al (Eds.) Europe and the End of the Cold War: A reappraisal. New York: Routlege, 2008.

Gilbert M. Joseph and In from the Cold: Latin America’s new encounter with
Daniela Spenser the Cold War. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

Herb Addo “A third world perspective on global justice and New World order.” In Restructuring for World Peace: On the threshold of
the twenty-first century. Edited by K. Tehranian & M Tehranian. New Jersey: Hampton Press, 1992 pp 256-281.

Ian Clark The Post-Cold War Order: The Spoils of Peace. Oxford University Press, 2002.

I. Wallerstein “The Cold War and the Third World.” In After Liberalism. New York: New Press, 1995. (Chapter One) and pp 10-24

I. Wallerstein “World System after the cold war.” Journal of Peace Research 30, no.: 1, 1993 pp 1-6.

J. Ihonubere “The third word and the New World Order in the 1990s.” Futures 24, No. 10, 1992 pp 987-1002.

Joseph S Nye “What new World Order?” Foreign Affairs Vol. 71, No.2 Spring 1992.

Joseph S. Nye Understanding international conflicts: an introduction to theory and history. New York : Pearson Longman, 2009.

Mark T Berger After the Third World. London: Routledge, 2009.

Rashid Khalidi Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East. Boston: Beacon Press, 2009.

Robert Harvey Global Disorder. Carroll & Graf Publishers; Reprint edition (January 1, 2004)

S David “Why the Third World Still Matter” International Security 17.3 (1992/93) pp 127-59.

Stephen Gill Power and resistance in the new world order. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
+
READING at Hazar Denizin Universitesi (Caspian Sea University):
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B1_Z5ACd6MBPN056Ykx6QVE5c1E?usp=sharing
Juliet Kaarbo and James Lee Ray, Global Politics (2011), Ch. 3 The Modern Era, pp.53-89.

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 The Cold War
1947-1989
indirect US-USSR conflict = no direct fighting
primarily 'ideological war'
(Communism vs. Capitalism)

Origins of the Cold War

How did the Soviets cause the Cold War? How did the US cause the Cold war?

US = upset: • 1917 Russian Revolution → US

• 1939 Soviet-German non-aggression pact recognition of the communist government
→ WWII = 1933

• 1945 Central and Eastern Europe →
Soviet satellite nations = Soviet
domination + buffer zone
• Soviet Union → spread communism
• US = atomic bomb; informed UK, left the
Soviets out
• US → spread democracy, liberty, equality

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The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, 1939 (Nazi Germany-USSR non-aggression pact)
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German and Soviet forces meet in central Poland after Common parade of Wehrmacht
invading its Western and Eastern parts, respectively and Red Army in Brest at the
(1939) end of the Invasion of Poland. At
the center Major General Heinz
Guderian and Brigadier Semyon
Krivoshein

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David Low's cartoon, published in the Evening Standard on 20 September 1939, shows
Hitler greeting Stalin, following their joint invasion of Poland, with the words, "The scum
of the earth, I believe?". To which Stalin replies, "The bloody assassin of the workers, I
presume?"
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 1939-1945 WWII

Soviet occupation and annexation of

- a region of Finland
- the Baltic states
- half of Poland
- half of Eastern Prussia (German)
- Ruthenia (Czechoslovak)
- Bessarabia (Romanian)
- South Sakhalin and Kuril Islands
(Japanese)

Occupation and satellization of Central and

Eastern Europe

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 Conflicting postwar goals
American Goals Soviet Goals
liberated European nations • rebuild Europe → help the Soviet Union
↓ recover from WWII huge losses
• American values = democracy and • establish satellite nations under Soviet
economic opportunities domination
• strong capitalist economies = markets for • spread of communism
American products

Key factors of Cold War

• complete lack of trust
• building up huge armed forces
• using the media to criticize the other side
• supporting any enemy of the other side

Fighting the Cold War

The Iron Curtain
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has
descended across the [European] Continent"
(Churchill, 1946 → geographical and political division between
communist and capitalist Europe)
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 US:
Containment Truman Doctrine
→ set out the US aim for the Cold War (applying the principles of containment)
→ justified US actions
= block Soviet attempts to form communist - help nations that are resisting conquest by
governments anywhere armed minorities
- accept that Central and Eastern Europe is - help free people to stay free
under Communist control
Greek civil war (1946-1949)
British ↔ anti-communists
1947 call for American aid
Marshall Plan ↓
Truman Doctrine
1947 US Secretary of State George Marshall ↓
→ the Marshall Plan massive US aid
↓
= massive economic aid plan for Europe → 1949 defeat of communists
recover from WWII
↓ Truman Doctrine
prosperous Europe ↓
→ resist the spread of communism US = prepared to resist the spread of
→ markets for American goods communism

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Marshall Plan expenditures by country

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 Berlin blockade

Berlin

1945 four occupation zones

1948 merger of US, British and French zones → 1949 Federal Republic of Germany
Soviets = blockaded land access to Berlin
24 June 1948 - 12 May 1949 US = massive airlift of supplies (7,000 tons a day)
Stalin lifted the blockade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gpYsK90aio
↓ Video: The Berlin Airlift Explained in 5 Minutes
West Germany = Federal Republic of Germany (capitalist)
East Germany = German Democratic Republic (communist)
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North Atlantic Treaty Organization - Warsaw Pact
military means to contain USSR: 1955 West Germany joined NATO
↓
1949 US, Canada, UK, France, Belgium, the USSR → the Warsaw Pact (USSR + Central
Netherlands, Luxembourg, Portugal, Italy, and Eastern European states)
Norway, Denmark and Iceland = NATO = a
mutual defence pact

an attack against one = an attack against all

(collective security)

NATO flag Emblem of the Warsaw Treaty Organization

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NATO and the Warsaw Pact

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NATO and the Warsaw Pact European member states
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NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in Europe (1973)
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The Warsaw Pact

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 VIDEO : Warsaw Pact troops on attack http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9YUaKynXy8
Soviet Military Strategy
The goal of Soviet military strategy in Europe is a
quick victory over NATO in a nonnuclear war. The Soviet
Union would attempt to defeat NATO decisively before its
political and military command structure could consult and
decide how to respond to an attack. Under this strategy,
success would hinge on inflicting a rapid succession of
defeats on NATO to break its will to fight, knock some of its
member states out of the war, and cause the collapse of the
Western alliance. A quick victory would also keep the United
States from escalating the conflict to the nuclear level by
making retaliation against the Soviet Union futile. A rapid
defeat of NATO would preempt the mobilization of its
superior industrial and economic resources, as well as
reinforcement from the United States, which would enable
NATO to prevail in a longer war. Most significant, in a
strictly conventional war the Soviet Union could conceivably
capture its objective, the economic potential of Western
Europe, relatively intact.
In the 1970s, Soviet nuclear force developments
increased the likelihood that a European war would remain on
the conventional level. By matching the United States in
intercontinental ballistic missiles and adding intermediate-
range SS-20s to its nuclear forces, the Soviet Union undercut
NATO's option to employ nuclear weapons to avoid defeat in
a conventional war. After the United States neutralized the
Soviet SS-20 IRBM advantage by deploying Pershing II and
cruise missiles, the Soviet Union tried to use its so-called
"counterdeployments" of SS-21 and SS-23 SRBMs to gain a
Wheeler Soper, Karl (1989) 'The Warsaw Pact', http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/czechoslovakia/cs_appnc.html
nuclear-war fighting edge in the European theater. At the same
time, the Soviet Union made NATO's dependence on nuclear
weapons less tenable by issuing Warsaw Pact proposals for
mutual no-first-use pledges and the establishment of nuclear-free
zones.
The Soviet plan for winning a conventional war quickly to
preclude the possibility of a nuclear response by NATO and the
United States was based on the deep-strike concept Soviet
military theoreticians first proposed in the 1930s. After 1972 the
Soviet Army put deep strike into practice in annual joint Warsaw
Pact exercises, including "Brotherhood-in-Arms," "Union,"
"Friendship," "West," and "Shield." Deep strike would carry an
attack behind the front lines of battle, far into NATO's rear areas.
The Soviet Union would launch simultaneous missile and air
strikes against vital NATO installations to disrupt or destroy the
Western alliance's early warning surveillance systems, command
and communications network, and nuclear delivery systems.
Following this initial strike, the modern-day successor of the
World War II-era Soviet mobile group formations, generated out
of the SGFs in Eastern Europe, would break through and encircle
NATO's prepared defenses in order to isolate its forward forces
from reinforcement. Consisting of two or more tank and
motorized rifle divisions, army-level mobile groups would also
overrun important NATO objectives behind the front lines to
facilitate the advance of Soviet follow-on forces, which would
cross NSWP territory from the westernmost Soviet military
districts.
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 Tutorial questions
1. Discuss the evolution of peace and security post 1945.
2. What is the Cold War and how did it affect the global system?
3. “The end of the Cold War caused a shift in the international balance of power”. Analyze
this statement and illustrate your answer using current examples.
4. Is there a new world order? If yes, how is it defined?

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