Review of Norman A. Graebner, Richard Dean Burns, and Joseph M. Siracusa. America and the Cold War, 1941-1991: A Realist Interpretation, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010). H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Forum 1:6 (2010), 17-28. (original) (raw)
Rethinking early Cold War United States foreign policy : the road to militarisation
2016
This thesis rethinks the foundations of US foreign policy determination in the early Cold War period. In opposition to approaches in IR which privilege an ‘external’ realm of causation, it focuses on the domestic bases for foreign policy formation. Having started by reviewing historiographical debates on US foreign policy and US foreign economic policy, the thesis moves on to critique some of the existing ways the US foreign policy has been theorised in IR. The thesis then develops a theoretical and conceptual stance, drawing on a range of different literatures. Within IR, it places itself within the tradition of Marxist Historical Sociology. At the level of macro-history, this places the reconstruction of US foreign policy within broader world historical process of the development of capitalism within the political form of the nation-state and state system, and ongoing spatialisation strategies that states form in order to manage capitalist spatial politics. This macro perspective ...
Realism and the End of the Cold War
International Security, 1994
as a reaction to the breakdown of the post-World I M o d e r n realism began War I international order in the 1930s. The collapse of great-power cooperation after World War I1 helped establish it as the dominant approach to the theory and practice of international politics in the United States. During the Cold War, efforts to displace realism from its dominant position were repeatedly thwarted by the continued salience of the US.-Soviet antagonism: although indirect, the connection between events and theory was undeniable. Now, the U.S.-Soviet antagonism is history. Suddenly, unexpectedly, and with hardly a shot fired in anger, Russian power has been withdrawn from the Elbe to the Eurasian steppe. A central question faces students and practitioners of international politics. Do the rapid decline and comparatively peaceful collapse of the Soviet state, and with it the entire postwar international order, discredit the realist approach?
TED HOPF. Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945-1958
The American Historical Review, 2013
Why would the Soviet government consider the Marshall Plan more threatening than the Truman Doctrine? How could Yugoslavia move from being a stalwart of socialism in Europe to a renegade pariah, expelled from the Soviet sphere of inºuence a few months after states in Western Europe signed the Brussels defense pact? Why would Yugoslavia be welcomed back into the socialist family, with profuse acknowledgments of previous mistakes, when the country's defense contribution was much less needed? Why would the USSR allow its most important alliance with China to falter? Why would Iosif Stalin completely neglect the de-colonizing world as a potential ally in the global power competition? Why did the USSR start an offensive global power strategy in the Third World only after de-Stalinization? Ted Hopf answers these puzzles by suggesting that instead of realist theories of international relations (IR) or personality-centered diplomatic history, a constructivist take provides a more promising path. Developing his earlier approach to "societal constructivism," Hopf argues that Soviet identity discourses at home explain relations abroad. For each of these puzzles, he shows that Soviet external policy was driven by a particular way the Soviet Union came to understand itself. Once an identity "discourse of difference" was empowered, relations with Yugoslavia, the Eastern bloc, China, and the Third World were redeªned. Covering 1945-1958, the book is the ªrst of a planned trilogy that will cover Soviet foreign policy through the end of the Cold War. In today's environment of overwhelming academic output, Hopf stands out as a scholar whose research one is always inspired to read and reºect upon. This book is no exception. It is a must-read for its combination of IR theory and history, precisely because history is not used simply for quick theoretical points. Instead, Hopf devises a theoretical framework for understanding the history of Soviet foreign policy. In return, his meticulous historical analysis feeds back to IR theory, especially constructivist foreign policy analysis (FPA)-in content and methodology. His contribution to FPA lies precisely in his careful distinction between his approach and what FPA has come to mean. Whereas FPA has become centered on the analysis of individual decisions, thereby harnessing a multitude of factors from stan
The Tragedies of American Foreign Policy: Further Reflections
Journal of Cold War Studies, 2005
Cox and Kennedy-Pipe offer a staunch defense of their article, arguing that the commentators generally missed the point of what the article was supposed to accomplish.Rather than providing an exhaustive account of the early Cold War and all the complications posed by Germany, the article sought to distill the essence of U.S.and Soviet strategies.The basic problem, as highlighted in the article, is that the United States would not accept the extension of Soviet in fluence into Eastern Europe and that, in opposing and seeking to roll back Soviet in fluence, U.S.of ficials sealed the fate of the East European countries.
THEORIES OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE COLD WAR
The deferred effort in trying to understand international relations is something that has taken place centuries ago. The use of theories that – through the use of certain methodologies previously defined – would have meant making reality more easily intelligible is part of that effort. Thus, the goal of this work is, through the confrontation between four of these theories, expose their points of conflict and convergence of ideas, which would allow me to establish more clearly the scope of each one, consequently, better understand how they would be adequate to understand the 20th century Cold War. In this work, I use two theories that always had significance in academia and which even today are reference to the analysis of international relations: realism and Marxism, as well as their new and latest developments. At first I expose, in general, the major formulations of each one in order to demonstrate the theoretical content and later confront them. Finally, I present the conclusions.
The Turkish Yearbook of International Relations (Milletlerarası Münasebetler Türk Yıllığı), 2018
Neorealism is certainly the most analyzed and criticized theoretical approach. This study is no exception. The Cold War was unexpectedly ended in the 1989-1991 period. One of the main criticisms of neorealism is that it failed to predict an end to the Cold War. In international relations discipline, theories have rarely predictive ability. For the neorealist theorists, especially Waltz claims that the prediction issue is not a major criticism because neo-realism does not aim to predict the behavior of individual states at any given time. The main objective of neorealism is to explain the logic of individual relationships in the international state system. This article aims to offer new ideas whether neorealism tells us about the Cold War in terms of explanation about the events that may re-emerge in global political scene almost twenty-five year later. Another important contribution of this article is to analyze the success and failure of the neorealist explanation and understanding of the Second Cold War of 1979-1985 in order to shed lights on the future the Third Cold War that is a political reality in terms of a Russian threat and a West response after the 2014 Crimean Crisis. It should be stressed that neorealism has the explanatory rather than the predictive power. Keywords Cold War, Neorealism, Kenneth Waltz, Soviet Union, United States, Third Cold War