Is there any sense in which this is true? What makes them hold this belief? To answer this question, it helps to pose a different question: what would you expect to happen if the Cold War had really ended? Surely the answer is that both sides would stop doing all the enormously expensive, dangerous, and ultimately disastrous things they were doing in the period when the common assumption was that at any minute the Cold War might turn hot. There are those who maintain that the Cold War, despite what happened in 1989–1990, has not ended. Two all-too familiar examples these days are the so-called wars against drugs and poverty, ill-defined but real phenomena that have more than a little to do with each other. Hardly anyone is likely to dispute this statement of the facts.īut the term war is used in other senses as well, particularly as a loose synonym for almost any kind of conflict, usually with the implication that it involves or could involve violence. It ended when the Soviet side threw in the towel in 1989–1990. In this sense the relation that has existed during most of the second half of the twentieth century between the United States and its allies on one side and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other is a classic (perhaps better the classic) case of cold war. The war is called “cold” if the conflict stops short of shooting and killing. The primary meaning of “war” is an armed conflict between two or more nations, or more generally, power centers. Has the Cold War ended? In one sense of course it has.
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