Nichols, Thomas M. Winning The World: Lessons for America's Future from the Cold War (original) (raw)
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The downturn of the East: The end of the Cold War and the American triumph
This paper seeks to answer the following questions: “Can the outcome of the Cold War be characterised as a triumph of US or “Western” liberalism? Alternatively, is there a more convincing interpretation?”. These questions are a broad and a deep argument to cope with at the same time. This work would try to give an attestable response based on the historical contingencies characterising the end of the Cold War and its long-term consequences: the victory of the West and the advent of its model of civilisation. The range of literature on the topic is extremely diverse. Amongst the scholarship, John Ikenberry, Sergio Fabbrini and Geir Lundestad contributed with excellent interpretations of the pivotal historical changes provoked by the end of the Cold War. They demonstrated how the Western model of civilisation not only affected but also shaped the Eastern hemisphere of the World. The choice of literature has been very mindful: considering the different schools of thoughts in the discipline of International Relations, the interpretations of these historians are constructivist, in the sense that they think leadership as the key factor to describe the outcome of the Cold War. The main matter of this research then would be to what extent they were right by verifying whether History gives greenlight to them or not.
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York) As the title of this short edited volume indicates, the three decades since the Cold War ended have provided opportunities for scholars to examine new perspectives on transformations that may or may not have been-as the subtitle asks-unexpected. The publication of this volume suggests that the historiography of the end of the Cold War has advanced beyond stale debates over "win-
Introduction: Forgetting the Cold War
How We Forgot the Cold War, 2019
In 1991, only a few hours aft er the USSR collapsed, Congress began making plans for organizing the offi cial memory of the Cold War. Th e 1991 Defense Appropriations Act included $10 million for the creation of a "Legacy Resource Management Program" that would "inventory, protect and conserve the physical and literary property" of the Cold War so that future generations could understand and appreciate its meaning and signifi cance. 1 Conservatives dominated the proceedings that followed. Th eir eff ort to shape public memory of the Cold War deployed powerful tools of political and cultural persuasion. Th e ideological apparatus engaged in this eff ort was famously infl uential and eff ective: Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Heritage Foundation, an endless stream of op-eds and opinion pieces, and of course the voices of leading senators and congressmen as well as that of the Republican president. Th eir message: the Cold War was a good war, like World War II. George W. Bush explained it in his 2003 State of the Union address, in which he drew an analogy between defeat of the Soviets and defeat of the Nazis: both the Nazi and Soviet regimes had been led by "small groups of men [who] seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world. In each case, their ambitions of cruelty and murder had no limit. In each case, the ambitions of Hitlerism, militarism, and communism were defeated by the will of free peoples, by the strength of great alliances, and by the might of the United States of America." 2 Th e history of the twentieth century is thus a history of the battle between freedom and totalitarianism, good and evil, and it has two chapters: in the fi rst, FDR led the Allies to victory over Nazi Germany; in the second, Reagan led the Free World to victory over the Soviet Union.
An overview of the myriad circumstances that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the de facto victory of democracy over communism in the geopolitical arena.
Power, Ideas, and New Evidence on the Cold War's End: A Reply to Brooks and Wohlforth
International Security, 2002
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'Was the Cold War Avoidable? Did the West Seek to Win It?: A Contribution to the Debate'
This article tackles two of the major questions in later twentiethcentury international history, the origins and the end of the Cold War. Historians traditionally assumed that Moscow was determined from the outset to Sovietise Eastern Europe, once liberated from Nazism, and that this made the later confrontation with the Western powers inevitable. It will be shown here that the idea to install Moscow-friendly regimes in a Europe destroyed by war had been formulated by Kremlin officials already a decade earlier. The article also argues that the Western alliance became comfortable with the status quo it had previously denounced, and that it was reluctant to upset the East-West equilibrium of later years. In the aftermath of 1989, several Western politicians have claimed the laurels of victory over Communism, but it was the Soviet bloc countries who liberated themselves, despite pleas of officials in London, Washington, Paris, and Bonn to slow down or even suspend their reforms.