THE COLD WAR

The Cold War

The Cold War

Introduction

George Orwell first used the term cold war in a 1945 article entitled “ You and the Atom Bomb,” which described the United States, Russia, and China as postwar “superstates” whose nuclear arsenals would involve them in a “permanent state of the cold war.” Orwell borrowed this phrase from the French la guerre froide (“ the cold war”), which he translated as a state of war that lacked the overt conditions of war. The term entered the American lexicon in 1947 following the publication of the political commentator Walter Lippmann's The Cold War. Lippmann had written the book in response to “ The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” an essay that the diplomat George Kennan had published that year in the journal Foreign Affairs under the signature Mr. X. It was in this essay that Kennan recommended that the United States adopt a policy of containment to curb the threat of Russian expansionism. This paper discusses the Cold War including the origin and the end. It also covers important events such as Bay Of Pigs, Cuban Missile crisis and effect of the cold war on American society.

Discussion

Lippmann invoked historical evidence to disagree with Kennan's contention that Russia posed a danger to the international order. Arguing that Russian nationalism was far more important to Soviet policymakers than international communism, Lippmann concluded that the United States could not afford to police the world. But, the atmosphere of mutual suspicion and fear then enveloping the globe favored Kennan's recommendations over Lippmann's refutations of them, and for the next half century the world's geography was separated along a symbolic East-West divide, which transformed the West into an imaginary community of democratic states united in their defense of “ universal” values against the incursions of world communism. (Crockatt, 2005) The policy of containment tacitly empowered the United States and Russia to remap the borderlines of territories according to ideological rather than spatial coordinates. Throughout the cold war, developing countries acquired significance through their alignment on one or the other side of these opposed ideological systems. The global hegemons subsequently supplanted the political arrangements of the complex societies they occupied with the systems of representation through which they administered and controlled their territories. As evidenced by their placement of the Asian nations of Japan, Korea, and Vietnam within the symbolic geography of the West and the Central and South American nations of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Chile within that of the East, however, the efforts of the cold war cartographers to redraw the world map at times produced highly disorienting effects. (Gaddis, 1997)

The political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s left the cold war in a moribund condition. But, the cold war would undergo an eight-year revival during Ronald Reagan's presidency and just before the dismantling of the Berlin wall in November 1989. Recalling eschatological themes from the Book of the Apocalypse, Reagan claimed the Bible as the ultimate authority for the United States's possible use of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. This final event dismantled the narrative of containment on which the cold war had been ...