Cold War Era and Post-Cold War World Politics
Cold War Era and Post-Cold War World Politics
The exam tests whether you can explain the Cold War as a system of rivalry, not just a list of events: origins, alliances, proxy conflicts, nuclear risk, decolonisation, and the transition after 1991 to a different distribution of power.
Core rules and concepts
- The Cold War was US-Soviet rivalry from about 1945 to 1991, fought through ideology, arms racing, alliances, espionage and proxy wars rather than direct full-scale war.
- Bipolarity; containment and the domino theory; Marshall Plan and COMECON; NATO (1949) and Warsaw Pact (1955).
- NAM was founded at Belgrade in 1961. Non-alignment meant independent judgment, not neutrality or an anti-Western bloc.
- Crises: Berlin blockade 1948-49, Korean War 1950-53, Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, Vietnam, Afghanistan 1979.
- Détente in the 1970s; the Second Cold War under Reagan; Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika; Eastern Europe 1989; USSR dissolved 1991.
- Post-Cold War: US preponderance, the unipolar moment, 9/11 and the War on Terror, China's rise, and the multipolarity debate.
Worked example
Why is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 treated as a turning point? The USSR placed nuclear missiles in Cuba; the US imposed a quarantine and threatened invasion. A secret withdrawal deal avoided war. Reasoning: the crisis exposed mutual vulnerability, produced the Moscow-Washington hotline and the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, and pushed superpower management toward arms control, while Cuba's interests were sidelined.
Traps
Calling NAM pro-Soviet or simply neutral; treating the Cold War as only US-USSR and ignoring proxy wars and decolonisation; dating its end at the Berlin Wall (1989) rather than the USSR's dissolution (1991); assuming unipolarity meant no rivals.