NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War re-examines the origins and implementation of NSC 68, the massive rearmament program that the United States embarked upon beginning in the summer of 1950. Curt Cardwell reinterprets the origins of NSC 68 to demonstrate that the aim of the program was less about containing communism than ensuring the survival of the nascent postwar global economy, upon which rested postwar US prosperity. The book challenges most studies on NSC 68 as a document of geostrategy and argues instead that it is more correctly understood as a document rooted in concerns for the US domestic political economy.

DIVExplains the basis in domestic politics of the political consensus in support of large defense spending in the early stages of the Cold War /div

A masterful account of the global Cold War’s decisive influence on Soviet economic reform, and the national decay that followed. What brought down the Soviet Union? From some perspectives the answers seem obvious, even teleological—communism was simply destined to fail. When Yakov Feygin studied the question, he came to another conclusion: at least one crucial factor was a deep contradiction within the Soviet political economy brought about by the country’s attempt to transition from Stalinist mass mobilization to a consumer society. Building a Ruin explores what happened in the Soviet Union as institutions designed for warfighting capacity and maximum heavy industrial output were reimagined by a new breed of reformers focused on “peaceful socioeconomic competition.” From Khrushchev on, influential schools of Soviet planning measured Cold War success in the same terms as their Western rivals: productivity, growth, and the availability of abundant and varied consumer goods. The shift was both material and intellectual, with reformers taking a novel approach to economics. Instead of trumpeting their ideological bona fides and leveraging their connections with party leaders, the new economists stressed technical expertise. The result was a long and taxing struggle for the meaning of communism itself, as old-guard management cadres clashed with reformers over the future of central planning and the state’s relationship to the global economic order. Feygin argues that Soviet policymakers never resolved these tensions, leading to stagnation, instability, and eventually collapse. Yet the legacy of reform lingers, its factional dynamics haunting contemporary Russian politics.

The end of the Cold War dramatically - and unexpectedly - transformed international politics toward the end of the 20th century. At the heart of this change was the struggle over new and old ideas.

Essay from the year 2005 in the subject Politics - Region: USA, grade: 72%, Lancaster University, course: POL 320 American Foreign Policy, language: English, abstract: In the period after the end of World War II, America struggled to find a sustainable, coherent strategy to address the Soviet threat. It is without doubt that both NSC-68 and NSC-162/2 were important documents of their time. It is the aim of this essay to examine the circumstances of their creation, their differences and ultimately, assess which was a more coherent and effective analysis of the early Cold War Period, placing particular emphasis on the perception of international order in the papers. NSC 68 was produced in 1949 by a study group from the Departments of State and Defense under the leadership of Paul Nietze. Its primary concern were the implications of the Soviet possession of the atomic bomb, the uncovering of the spy ring around Fuchs that had infiltrated the Manhattan Project, the recent creation of the German Democratic Republic and the fall of China to Communism. The paper rested on the premise that the decisive struggle in foreign affairs was between the United States and Soviet Russia, and that there could only be one winner. One of the main arguments put forward was that the totalitarian nature of Soviet Russia allowed nothing but an expansionist foreign policy, “driven to follow this policy because it cannot (...) tolerate the existence of free societies.” According to the paper, the Soviets were motivated by “a new, fanatic faith, antithetical to our own”, seeking to “impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” Wolfe makes the point inThe Rise and Fall of the Soviet Threatthat NSC 68 denied that the Russians were capable of acting like other great powers, unable to strike a balance between maximizing their power in some places and minimizing their losses in others, instead expanding everywhere driven by their internal character.3The policy of NSC 68 was, in its own terms, a “policy of calculated and gradual coercion” in order to “check and roll back the Kremlin’s drive