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Ideas have consequences: The Cold War and today

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Abstract

In this essay, I make the case that the Cold War was caused by a competition of ideas rather than by a struggle for power or a failure of international institutions. The Cold War started when two sets of ideas diverged sufficiently – capitalism and communism – that they precluded either a realist – spheres of influence – or liberal – United Nations – solution to postwar differences in Europe. It ended when one set of ideas prevailed, and democracy and markets spread throughout the whole of Europe, eclipsing realist and liberal outcomes. The Soviet Union disappeared, which realists never expected; whereas the United Nations, which functioned briefly as a classic liberal collective security operation in the first Persian Gulf War, was quickly replaced by a democratic NATO in Bosnia and Kosovo. The competition of ideas did not end in the 1990s, however. It continues today in other forms and will shape the contours of military conflict and international cooperation in tomorrow's world, no less that it did during the Cold War.

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Notes

  1. National ideational orientations or identities, as I call them in my work, are multi-dimensional and not the same as national interests. Cultural, religious, moral, ethnic and ideological factors shape and define national interests. Free societies, for example, have national interests in open markets, democratic institutions, independent civil society and inalienable human rights, regardless of their geopolitical situation or institutional affiliations.

  2. For a more social constructivist approach, see Thomas Risse's essay in this volume.

  3. There is abundant evidence that other US leaders saw the relationship in ideological terms. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes concluded as early as the end of 1945: ‘There is too much difference in the ideologies of the US and Russia to work out a long term program of cooperation’ (Trachtenberg, 1999, p. 16). And, as Colin Dueck argues, the liberal democratic culture in the United States was so strong that practically all American policy makers rejected a spheres of influence policy that involved closed, authoritarian domestic systems in eastern Europe (Dueck, 2006). Whether these beliefs were exaggerated or not is not the issue; they had consequences and were subsequently tested against moral and material realities, which is the heart of the ideational argument.

  4. The Cuban Missile Crisis had many causes, but one was Khrushchev's dilemma about how to defend Cuba in face of American nuclear superiority (Khrushchev, 1970, p. 493).

  5. For different assessments, see other essays in this special issue by Daniel Deudney, John Ikenberry and Matthew Evangelista.

  6. See Mary Sarotte's essay in this special issue.

  7. As Reagan wrote in his dairy already in April 1983, ‘Some of the N.S.C. staff are too hard line and don’t think any approach should be made to the Soviets. I think I’m hard-line and will never appease but I do want to try and let them see there is a better world if they show by deed they want to get along with the free world’ (Reagan, 2007, p. 142). The Reagan Diaries, together with other voluminous writings by the former president, put to rest the partisan canard that Reagan was nothing more than a lightweight Hollywood actor. As George Shultz writes in the foreword of the Andersons’ book, ‘the act of writing is fundamentally an act of thinking. Reagan was a thinker as well as a doer’ (Shultz, 2009b, p. x).

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Dan Deudney and John Ikenberry for perceptive comments on earlier drafts.

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Nau, H. Ideas have consequences: The Cold War and today. Int Polit 48, 460–481 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2011.19

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