Bipolarity

The Cold War

One of the key questions about the concept of polarity is to do with how stable the international system is/was during a certain power dynamic. In particular, historians have debated how stable the international system was during the Cold War. The Cold War provides a classic example of a bipolar system, in which there were two key and equally matched superpowers competing for global influence. During this period, the UN became largely redundant, since the Soviet Union and the US, as permanent members of the UNSC, would veto any perceived threats to their own interests. Each superpower also had its own military alliances and client states whose support it could rely upon. The US was the leading member of NATO and the Soviet Union dominated the Warsaw Pact. In addition, Israel had close ties with the US and Cuba with the Soviet Union, while both superpowers continually sought to reduce the other’s influence in non-aligned states, such as Egypt, India, and Indonesia.

Liberals and realists have very different opinions on whether or not this system of Cold War bipolarity created global stability. According to realists such as Kenneth Waltz, the Cold War promoted peace, since the existence of two evenly balanced powers meant that neither side was capable of eliminating the other. As a result, both sides appreciated the limits of what they could achieve, so a balance of power was established, which was not in either side's interests to try to undermine. If one side had risked war, the results for both would have been catastrophic.

Therefore, this created an equilibrium that neither side was prepared to break, since destabilizing the equilibrium would have created conflict due to the threat of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Indeed, some political commentators have even argued that Cold War bipolarity actually encouraged understanding and conflict resolution, since both sides understood that often the best way of advancing their own interests was by working with the other. For example, following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, diplomatic relations briefly improved between the secretary-general of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, and President Dwight Eisenhower.

One consequence of this was the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (1972), which slowed the arms build-up between the two powers. The 1975 Helsinki Accords, which were signed between Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, and Leonid Brezhnev, provide the best example of the sort of cooperation that can be achieved in a bipolar world. Not only did Helsinki involve each side, guaranteeing the borders of the other, it even included commitments to increase economic, technical and cultural relations between them.

However, according to liberals, bipolarity is destabilising and dangerous. This is because both sides will continually be advancing their military, diplomatic and economic interests at the expense of the other, so creating fear, suspicion, and latent hostility. It, therefore, does not provide the conditions for lasting or meaningful peace. According to the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides, it was the inherent dangers of bipolarity that led to the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431 BCE–404 BCE), since ‘what made the war inevitable was the growth of the Athenian power and the fear which this caused Sparta’. Therefore, liberals claim that the Cold War was much more defined by very long periods of mutual distrust and antagonism, as illustrated by US paranoia about a ‘missile gap’ in the 1950s or the ease with which the Cuban Missile Crisis could have provoked nuclear war as the Soviet Union sought to pull ahead in the arms race by placing nuclear missiles in Cuba.

The early 1980s were also profoundly unstable as President Ronald Reagan dramatically increased spending on nuclear weapons to prove US superiority over the Soviet Union. In 1983, as we have seen, the Soviet Union shot down a South Korean airliner, which could have provoked a military response from the US. In the same year, the Soviets came close to a military strike on the West when they made the mistake of thinking that the NATO military exercise Operation Able Archer was the real thing. How both events came very close to provoking direct military confrontation was, of course, due to the profound distrust between the two adversaries. Indeed, according to Robert S. McNamara, who served as US defense secretary from 1961 to 1968, ‘Cold War: hell it was a hot war!’

During the Cold War, both sides also tried to extend their global influence at the expense of the other through ‘hot wars’. In the Vietnam War (c.1963–75), the Soviet Union and the US were not in direct combat, but they took opposing sides and backed these sides (North Vietnam and South Vietnam respectively) to win. Each saw a victory as furthering their position in the superpower rivalry.