Abstract
At first glance, to study superpower cooperation during the Cold War may seem strange, even absurd. There is a strong conviction among both scholars and practitioners that the Cold War is a classical example of a zero-sum game where the gain (perceived as real) of one is viewed as a loss by the other. Indeed, the Cold War, during which several crises arose that nearly led to war, appears to be the antithesis of cooperation. Although there are evident cases of cooperation — for example, the Geneva conferences of 1953 and 1954 and the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 — these were largely regarded as exceptions from the norms of the late 1940s and 1950s. In the historical analysis of that period, they were largely discounted as anomalies or disregarded or overlooked. The so-called traditional rationale of the Cold War makes the study of superpower cooperation essentially irrelevant.
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Notes
Michael Mandelbaum, ‘Ending the Cold War’, Foreign Affairs, vol. LXVIII, no. 4 (Spring 1989), pp. 16–36.
Graham T. Allison, W. L. Ury, and B. J. Allyn (eds) Windows of Opportunity: From Cold War to Peaceful Competition in US—Soviet Relations (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1989), pp. 9–39.
V. A. Kremenyuk, ‘SSR, SSHA i Razvivayushchiyesya Strany’ (USSR, USA and Developing Countries), in Sovetsko-Amerikanskiye Otnosheniya v Sovremennom Mire (Soviet-American Relations in the Contemporary World) (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), pp. 235–9.
Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games and Debates (Ann-Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960).
George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925–1950 (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), pp. 401–2.
Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and US Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 607.
For example: Marshall D. Shulman (ed.), East-West Tensions in the Third World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986)
W. Raymond Duncan (ed.), Soviet Policy in Developing Countries (Huntington, NY: Robert E. Krieger, 1981)
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Daniel S. Papp (ed.), Soviet Policies Toward the Developing World During the 1980s: The Dilemmas of Power and Presence (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1986).
One of the best accounts of the consequences of the Korean War for US foreign policy is in Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969).
Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 253.
Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).
Robert S. McNamara, Blundering into Disaster: Surviving the First Century of the Nuclear Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), p. 154.
Cora Bell, Conventions of Crisis: A Study in Diplomatic Management (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 2.
Herman Kahn, On Escalation (New York: Praeger, 1965).
Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency; 1963–1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 303.
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George F. Kennan, The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), pp. 156–162.
Anthony Lake (ed.), The Vietnam Legacy: The War, American Society and the Future of American Foreign Policy (New York: New York University Press, 1976), p. 1.
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Cited in Yu. P. Davydov, V. V. Shurkin and V. S. Rudnev (eds), Doktrina Niksona (The Nixon Doctrine) (Moscow: Nauka, 1972).
Later accounts on this issue see: Joan Gowa and N. H. Wessel, Ground Rules: Soviet and American Involvement in Regional Conflicts (Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1982).
Michael Mandelbaum and Strobe Talbott, Reagan and Gorbachev (New York: Vintage Books — A Division of Random House, 1987), p. 4.
M. S. Gorbachev, Perestroika and New Thinking For Our Country and For The Whole World (Moscow: Novosti Press, 1987).
See, for example, Edward A. Kolodziej and Roger E. Kanet (eds), The Limits of Soviet Power in the Developing World: Thermidor in the Revolutionary Struggle (London: Macmillan, 1989).
See, for example, L. Wolfsy (ed.), Before the Point of No Return: An Exchange of Views on the Cold War, the Reagan Doctrine, and What Is to Come (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986)
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© 1991 Roger E. Kanet and Edward A. Kolodziej
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Kremenyuk, V.A. (1991). The Cold War as Cooperation: A Soviet Perspective. In: Kanet, R.E., Kolodziej, E.A. (eds) The Cold War as Cooperation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11605-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11605-8_2
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