Detente and the Arms Race in the Cold War Term Paper

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Cold War Q’s1To say that the Cold War was won is to speak simplistically about what the Cold War was. Yes, the Soviet Union collapsed, but the animosity between the US and Russia persists even to today. There is still conflict between Russia, the US and their proxies in the Middle East. The alliance between Russia and China is viewed with hostility by the US, partly because of American distrust of China and partly because of the threat that a multi-polar world order poses to the hegemonic interests of the US (Lieberthal & Jisi, 2012). The ideological conflict between Russia and the Cold War was not really settled after 1991. It simply has changed. In fact, many Soviet principles, such as collectivism, are now embraced by and embedded in American institutions and organizations, while Russia has pivoted toward promoting traditional values like church and family in its nation. The conflict between Russia and the West, however, is and was more about geopolitics than ideologies. Ideological rhetoric simply masked underlying geopolitical tensions and realities.The US sought a policy of containment and still does more or less. Yet Russia still exerts influence in various spheres—from the Middle East, particularly with respect to Syria and Iran, to South America and Asia. Russia has ties with Germany via a gas pipeline that the US does not want to support and is using Ukraine to thwart. The US also wants to pry apart the relationship between Russia and China because it prefers to be at the head of a unipolar world order. Russia’s military technology, particularly with missiles and missile defense systems, has excelled in recent years, however, presenting a new challenge for the US. Thus, even the arms race has been renewed in a way and cannot be said to have been terminated for once and for all in the 1990s.2The Cuban Missile Crisis was caused by a number of factors: a report that Soviet missiles were installed in Cuba riled the Joint Chiefs, who urged Kennedy to take swift, direct, pre-emptive action against Cuba (Donaldson, 2000). Kennedy sought to de-escalate the situation so as to avoid a conflict with the USSR; however, the Chiefs were pressing him to act before it was too late. Khrushchev also played a part, indicating that the Soviet Union would not remove its missiles from Cuba until the US removed its missiles from Turkey. So both sides really caused the Cuban Missile Crisis as there was very little diplomacy between the two states and a great deal of hawkishness coming from the Joint Chiefs.The US ultimately did well under Kennedy to avoid war, as Kennedy sought détente with Khrushchev and reached a mutual agreement with the Soviet leader to remove missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets pulling their missiles out of Cuba. Kennedy did not want a nuclear war and his later focus on nuclear non-proliferation shows the extent to which he was committed to preventing such fallout in the future.

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Both states really benefited from the resolution of the crisis: the USSR was made to feel more secure on its borders when the US removed its missiles from Turkey, and the US was made to feel more secure on its own borders as well when the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba. However, not everyone was happy with the outcome in the US, and Kennedy’s critics accused him of being “soft” on Communism ever after, fueling speculation that he was killed for that same reason.3Yugoslavia was formed out of the collapse of Austria-Hungary at the end of WW1. During the Cold War, Finland and Austria were neutral and Yugoslavia was non-aligned. The countries nonetheless worked together to help overcome some of the divisions that existed in Europe during the Cold War. Finland and Austria opted for neutrality for security reasons—they did not want to end up making one of the superpowers on either side of them angry. Yugoslavia and Finland, meanwhile, saw themselves as mediators of peace in Europe. Yugoslavia, as a Non-Aligned Movement country, was proud of its independence, but the NATO countries viewed the Non-Aligned Movement as a Third World Movement.Austria was closer to NATO while Finland was closer to the Warsaw Pact, but both collaborated with Yugoslavia to bridge the gap between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. With the Warsaw Pact serving as the Soviet bloc and NATO as the Western alliance, the countries in the middle had a special role to play in mediating between the two, as it was especially dangerous for the whole of Europe to be torn apart by two superpowers making alliances with weaker states (Eerola, 2012)Austria, Finland and Yugoslavia were able to retain their domestic institutions while accommodating the foreign policy preferences of the superpowers by asserting their independence (in the case of Yugoslavia) or by asserting their neutrality (in the cases of Finland and Austria). Thus, by not submitting to the Soviet bloc or to NATO, yet by leaning one way or other (apart from Yugoslavia), the countries could handle their own sovereignty and make decisions internally without committing wholly to one side. They were in effect buffer states and go-betweens, operating in a way that gave them some dexterity in the diplomatic field.4The Soviet Union chose to intervene to end the “Prague Spring” because it feared losing influence in the Soviet bloc. Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in 1956 had already created quite a stir and many saw it as….....

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