This is an excerpt from American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters by Anders Stephenson, available now from Verso Books.
My view, shared by very few, is that the Cold War was distinctly a US project that began in 1946–47 and ended in 1963. Its original impetus was to make internationalism — a euphemism for a worldwide scope of potential intervention — an unshakeable shibboleth of bipartisan foreign policy. Thus it denied the legitimacy of the Soviet regime and banished sustained diplomacy as appeasement and moral dissipation.
It was a frame as well as a policy — though officialdom was notably reluctant to embrace the term itself. Dean Acheson, when he thought about it, preferred the term “cold peace” and, though it was axiomatic that the Soviet Union embodied war (as overdetermined by the more fundamental dedication to world conquest) and the United States, peace, there was a sense that the duality of a war somehow spilled over into mutuality, to oneself as well.
My view, shared by very few, is that the Cold War was distinctly a US project that began in 1946–47 and ended in 1963.
At the same time, auxiliary, partly alternative notions such as the Free World and national security did not have the same suggestive power as “the Cold War.” In the former case, the phrase worked as a general appeal, as a collective name for the natural state of humankind, lamentably under constant threat from enslaving agents such as the Soviet Union. Thus it was easily invoked. Still, it was unclear who was properly included. “Free” indeed came to be everything that was not under totalitarian, communist control.
National security, meanwhile, was certainly irreproachable as an expression of…
Auteur: Anders Stephanson
