Category: USH: Cold War

Iran and the United States in the Cold War

Few outside countries have more at stake in the evolution of Iran’s political situation than the United States, which has been in a state of open enmity with the Islamic Republic for more than three decades. Threats of Iran-backed terrorism, Tehran’s apparent nuclear ambitions, and its evident aim of destabilizing American allies—chiefly Israel—are perpetually high on the list of US concerns in the region. Why is Iran so important to the US? What explains the enduring animosity between the two countries? Answers to these and other questions about the United States’ position in the region today can be found by looking back to the Cold War.

Read more about US Cold War Policy in Iran (4 pages)

1945-1998 Nuclear Explosions

“This piece of work is a bird’s eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second.  No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier.  The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted.  I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world.”

See this display of the history of nuclear explosions.

Re-Examining The Cold War Arms Race

Journalist David E. Hoffman’s new book The Dead Hand revisits the high stakes maneuvering that took place during the Cold War arms race and details the inner-workings of the Soviet nuclear program.

Hoffman had access to secret Kremlin documents while researching his book, which chronicles the Soviets’ internal deliberations, offers new insight into the roles of Mikhail Gorbachev and President Reagan, and describes the urgent search for nuclear and biological hazards left behind after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Hoffman, a Washington Post contributing editor, spent six years as the paper’s Moscow bureau chief. He is also the author of The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia.

Listen to his interview with Terry Gross (40 minutes)

Opposing Perspectives: The Impact of the Collapse of the USSR on the Global Balance of Power

The Breakup of the USSR Makes the US the Leader of the World (Elliot Abrams)

The Breakup of the USSR Signals the End of US World Leadership (Zoltan Grossman)

Write a 1-2 page, single-spaced position paper which adheres to the following:

I. Short Intro with a Thesis (specific, complex and refutable)
II.  Summarize the ideas of the author with whom you do NOT concur and explain why his ideas are disagreeable (clearly demonstrate that you have read and understood this author’s ideas). Do not feel compelled to disagree with this author entirely as there surely is some truth to his argument.
III.  Summarize the ideas of the author with whom you DO concur and explain how his ideas are superior to the other author (clearly demonstrate that you have read and understood this author’s ideas).
IV. Conclude by restating your thesis and exploring the significance thereof.
Please bear in mind that your goal is to illustrate that you have read BOTH documents and that you have thought about them. Be prepared for a healthy debate in class.

Opposing Perspectives on Reagan's Role in the Dissolution of the USSR

Reagan’s Presidency DID cause the collapse of the USSR (Edwin Meese III)

Reagan’s Presidency did NOT cause the collapse of the USSR (Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry)

Write a 1-2 page, single-spaced position paper which adheres to the following:

I. Short Intro with a Thesis (specific, complex and refutable)
II. Summarize the ideas of the author with whom you do NOT concur and explain why his ideas are disagreeable (clearly demonstrate that you have read and understood this author’s ideas). Do not feel compelled to disagree with this author entirely as there surely is some truth to his argument.
III. Summarize the ideas of the author with whom you DO concur and explain how his ideas are superior to the other author (clearly demonstrate that you have read and understood this author’s ideas).
IV. Conclude by restating your thesis and exploring the significance thereof.

Please bear in mind that your goal is to illustrate that you have read BOTH documents and that you have thought about them. Be prepared for a healthy debate in class.

"Korea" from Ambrose's "Rise to Globalism"

Read “Korea” from Ambrose’s “Rise to Globalism”

Here are the responses

Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon. He received his Ph.D. in 1960 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ambrose served as a professor of history at several universities from 1960 until his retirement in 1995, having spent the bulk of his time at the University of New Orleans. Eisenhower chose Ambrose as his biographer.

Ambrose also wrote a highly regarded three-volume biography of Richard Nixon, also generally positive, but his Band of Brothers (1993) and D-Day (1994), about the lives and fates of individual soldiers in the World War II invasion, catapulted him out of the ranks of academic history and into mainstream American culture.

In 2002, Ambrose was found to have plagiarized several passages in his book The Wild Blue. Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard reported that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers. Ambrose  released an apology as a result. Ambrose had only footnoted sources and did not enclose in direct quotes significant passages taken from Childers’ book.

While Ambrose downplayed the incident, stating that only a few sentences in all of his numerous books were the work of other authors, Forbes’ investigation of his work found similar cases of plagiarism involving entire passages in at least six books and found a similar pattern of plagiarism going all the way back to his doctoral thesis.

He offered this defense to the New York Times:

“I tell stories. I don’t discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation.”

“I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn’t. I am not out there stealing other people’s writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people’s writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from.”

A study by George Mason University, however, detailed how 7 of 12 major works of Ambrose had instances of plagiarism

[note: I plagiarized this from Wikipedia.]

Slate’s David Plotz goes on the attack, calling Ambrose a vampire. His point, so far as I see it, is irrefutable, “Ambrose’s assertion that he’s not a thief is ludicrous. One plagiarism is careless. Two is a pattern. Four, five, or more is pathology.” Plotz concludes that “The plagiarist is, in a minor way, the cop who frames innocents, the doctor who kills his patients. The plagiarist violates the essential rule of his trade. He steals the lifeblood of a colleague. A few paragraphs have made Stephen Ambrose a vampire.”

Dick Cheney's Song of America: Drafting a Plan for Global Dominance

“The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.”

Dick Cheney’s Song of America: Drafting a Plan for Global Dominance

Response to Song of America

Socratic Dialogue Questions for class session in response to the reading

Primary Sources: Excerpts from Various Drafts of the DPG from NY Times (1992)

A List of US Military Involvements 1945-2005

Lazar on Growing up in the Cold War of the 1980's

Caveat: as ridiculous as it now seems, what follows was very real to me during my formative years. In not-so-subtle ways, what you are about to see shaped my world view.

On my eight birthday my parents ordered “Wrestlemania” from Pay-Per-View television. The party consisted of my buddies and I sitting around and jeering at wrestlers like Nikolai Volkoff and The Iron Sheik, from the USSR and Iran respectively. It was a classic struggle of good versus evil and each blow to the evil ones resonated with us. This video opens as the Soviet National Anthem is interrupted by our good guy, Hulk Hogan. On other occasions Volkoff would slowly sing “his” national anthem while the crowd verbally assaulted him.

A few points of interest:

  • In real life, Volkoff is Croatian
  • His tag team partner is Canadian, but was billed as a Russian. He never spoke.
  • Volkoff soon partnered with the Iron Sheik. They were attacked in a parking lot by pro-American fans
  • One of the announcers later became the Governor of the State of Minnesota!

You have to see this:

Somewhat to my chagrin, the following video would have got me “all pumped up” 25 years ago. Listen to the lyrics and find out why…

When Ronald Reagan passed, Slate magazine wrote an article about the relationship between the Cold War and professional wrestling. Please read Hammers, Sickles, and Turnbuckles. Soviet wrestlers mourn Ronald Reagan

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Throughout the Cold War, and to an extent still today, Americans felt that they had an enemy within their borders as well. African-Americans, especially those who were particularly outspoken or “uppity”, were likewise seen by many as a threat. In Rocky I and II, our American hero Rocky Balboa (who was our rags to riches story) defeated Apollo Creed (who was akin to Muhammad Ali in his audacity). In Rocky III, Rocky defeats an even more audacious Black man played my none other than Mr. T (who killed Rocky’s manger, Mickey). By the time Rocky IV rolls around, Creed and Balboa are friends who have united against a new enemy, Ivan Drago. You guessed it, he’s a Soviet. Drago’s symbolic evil is represented by his blatant steroid abuse, his underhanded tactics in the boxing ring and, ummm, that he killed Apollo Creed in a fight.

So, our hero, Balboa, GOES TO THE USSR to avenge his best friend’s death. Balboa, after training hard in Siberia while eluding the KGB following him in a Mercedes, wins the fight in a true barn burner. At the end of the film, as the real life Cold War comes to an end, Balboa tells a stadium full of Russians (who by this time he won over and they are cheering wildly for him!) tells the crowd that we can all get along. Poetic.

Here’s Apollo’s last fight (from Rocky IV). The introduction matters most:

And here is Rocky’s Final speech, given to the Soviets on Christmas Day 1985 (just months before Gorbachev announced the glasnost and perestroika policies). Either control your emotions or get your tissues out.

In 1982, nine years after US troops left, Sylvester Stallone, in the Film Rambo (yes Rambo), dealt with his Vietnam War Syndrome by laing siege to a town. This film was released the same year that the Vietnam War Memorial in DC was unveiled. Between Stallone and artist Maya Lin (whose parents fled from China in 1949 when Mao Zedong’s Communists took control of China), the US was able to overcome “Vietnam Syndrome”. This is seminal scene from the end of Rambo I. It is a MUST watch:

In Rambo II, John Rambo went back to Vietnam to find all of the prisoners of war and, in the process, won the war singlehandedly (yes, he also found and saved the POWs). You heard me right: he defeated an entire nation full of Commies with his own two hands. See it for yourself:

I regret to inform you that the fourth Rambo film, the first in two decades, is scheduled to be released in 2008. This time it seems that he will pacify war-torn Burma. You don’t have to watch this per the assignment but, should you be interested, here’s the trailer:

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Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA was deemed to be a patriotic anthem of epic proportions. A whole generation heard this song and felt damn proud to be American (which, of course, was a reminder that we were, by extension, superior to the Soviets). Alas, the twist is that this song is one of protest–protesting the fallout of the Vietnam War, protesting the receding economy, protesting empty promises, etc. Read the lyrics here.

Along the same lines, John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses” made us all proud to be Americans. We heard the part that we wanted to hear, this being the chorus and the groovy beat, and we ignored the lyrics.

Last but not least, a more well-balanced perspective, in respectful memory of the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a video montage to the Sting song, Russians (lyrics here):

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Note: in any of the above videos are not available on the website (you know YouTube…) please simply search for them at www.youtube.com (it won’t be hard to find). Sorry for any inconvenience.

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Your assignment is to use evidence from the above as a means to constructing an essay which clearly describes how film and music illustrate how propaganda helped Americans to cope with the insane (MAD) mentality of the Cold War in the 1980’s.

A well-organized one page, single-spaced Times New Roman font will suffice.

20 Point Rubric:

___/5 Organization & Clarity of Style
___/10 Use of Evidence (demonstrate that you have watched the videos)
___/5 Analysis (demonstrate that you have thought about the videos)