Are we about to start a new Cold War? Relations between the USA and China have worsened recently. Since the Covid-19 epidemic, nations have engaged in “vaccine diplomacy,” using the Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca vaccines alongside Sputnik, Sinovac, and Covaxin as vehicles of global influence. If you want to grab more resources like books on history of mankind, reach out to us.
Commentators have questioned whether we might be seeing a return to the US-Russia relations that predominated in the decades following the Second World War since Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its intervention in Syria in 2015.
Observers could object to these comparisons to the Cold War. Even though China and the United States compete, their economies are more intertwined than ever with the Soviet Union. China or Russia is not offering a truly universalist philosophy equivalent to Marxism-Leninism or Maoism. The distribution of geopolitical power is also more balanced than during the Cold War. While nations like Turkey, India, Iran, or the United Arab Emirates don’t have the same influence as the United States or China, crises like Libya or Nagorno-Karabakh show how “middle-tier” actors may have a big impact on world politics. A substantially different international political economy than the Cold War is also the result of the pace of financial globalization during the past three decades. Whether or not it is accurate, the Cold War continues to be a popular metaphor for those who study geopolitics in the twenty-first century.
However, it is vital to comprehend what the Cold War was and what it wasn’t for this reason. Fortunately, three recent Cold War histories released within the last three years provide a variety of viewpoints on that issue. Paul Thomas Chamberlain, a historian at Columbia University, describes the Cold War as “three catastrophic violent waves of violence that killed more than fourteen million people,”, particularly in a “rimland” spanning from Beirut to Pyongyang. Chamberlain’s book, Cold Wars: Asia, The Middle East, Europe by historian Lorenz Lüthi presents the Cold War as a worldwide battle whose effects were felt far beyond Berlin, Prague, or Budapest. However, Lüthi’s focus on middle-tier players and the moment when the Cold War as a global framework penetrated regional arenas provides an interesting contrast with Chamberlain’s focus on waves of revolutionary violence.
Last but not least, while Chamberlain and Lüthi concentrate on the consequences of the Cold War, LSE historian Kristina Spohr’s 2019 book Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World After 1989 explores the Cold War’s conclusion in Eastern Europe and East Asia. After the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Spohr focuses her analysis on Bush’s time in the White House and his ambitions to establish a “new world order.” The emphasis Spohr places on statesmanship and inter-state diplomacy, particularly in East Asia and Eastern Europe, contrasts with that of Lüthi and Chamberlain. They favor structures and a more comprehensive understanding of the Cold War. When read together, the three books provide a helpful overview of the condition of a field right now. They showcase the successes of academics decades after the opening of some archives around the world and their closure in others. They indicate prospective directions for further study. Additionally, they contribute to the problematic use of the Cold War paradigm in present discussions of world affairs.
Humanity has planned a forum featuring the opinions of various early career scholars who have made their impact on the field of international history and fetch to the table a diversity of regional and area studies perspectives to spark discussions about the contribution of Chamberlain’s, Lüthi’s, and Spohr’s books. International security issues, alliance politics, and strategy are of interest to Susan Colbourn, a historian of diplomacy and international relations. Colbourn has a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and is the author of the upcoming book Euromissiles: A Transatlantic History. He will also be the next Triangle Institute for Security Studies Associate Director. Writer of Foreign Policy as Nation Making: Turkey and Egypt in the Cold War and Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics of the Middle East at SOAS University of London, Reem Abou el-Fadl, specializes in Middle Eastern politics. She has also edited books on Egyptian history and is currently working on an English translation of the memoirs of Egyptian Africanist Helmi Sharawi. At Bern University in Switzerland, Stella Krepp is an assistant professor of Iberian and Latin American history. She co-edited Latin America and the Third World: An International History with Thomas Field and Vanni Pettinà, and her book The Decline of the Western Hemisphere: The History of Inter-American Relations 1941 is currently being reviewed by Cambridge University Press.
Ending Notes
There were many new publications on the historical events surrounding the fall of communism in Eastern Europe on its twentieth anniversary. Timothy Garton Ash lamented that despite all the effort put into explaining the changes of that year, “we have learned little new about the causes and social dynamics of the mass, popular actions that gave 1989 a claim to be a revolution, or chain of revolutions” in an essay for the New York Review of Books. Footnote1 However, from the perspective of 2016, what stands out about that older literature is not the predominant concentration on high politics but rather the experts’ confident writing in 2009 about the onward motion from communist collapse to liberal democracy and European integration.
Both nationalism and socialism were perceived as (mainly) outdated ideologies. Most of the former Warsaw Pact had been absorbed into NATO. The international shift away from authoritarianism and toward democracy was made possible by the Arab Spring. Putin may not have been pleased with the situation of the globe in 2009, but he appeared to be adjusting to it.
