Good morning, everyone. This is Hadid again, procrastinating like I haven’t done in a year and a half and thus avoiding writing my 10-page Comparative Politics paper. Basically, I have to try to explain the end of the Cold War in a post-behavioralist context. For those of you who don’t know what post-behavioralism is, it’s a theory of international relations that researches and attempts to constructively develop values, and calls for the politicization of the field itself. It’s derived from behavioralism, in that the latter masquerades as liberal while concealing its true ideology of empirical conservatism, detaches itself from reality in its conservative view on international relations, and conducts research so sophisticated as to actually hinder understanding thereof by laypeople.
In other words,
behavioralism =
with
on the inside.
Yeah.
So, anyway, that Cold War. I really don’t know why it ended. Gorbachev, with his sweeping reforms of perestroika (economic and political restructuring), on the one hand, shocked the entire region into economic and bureaucratic destabilization; on the other, with glasnost, destroyed the political capital of the entire Communist party. Seems that when an incredibly corrupt, secretive and criminal government lets loose its secrets to its terrified, hungry and angry citizens, things tend to go wrong. Complete undermining of the Communist Party’s power, increasing governmental delegitimization and ultimate dissolution of the entire USSR, to name a few. All painful and very, very expensive—for the Soviets, anyway. They lost everything.
Could the Cold War happen again? True, Russia and the former Soviet republics still aren’t in as high economic straits as the US currently is (but that’s not saying much nowadays), but with Bush publicizing plans for a missile defense system to be placed in Europe and Medvedev threatening to fire short-range missiles at—no, I’m sorry, near Poland—and with Russian paranoia already escalating in reaction, could history possibly repeat itself? Top five causes factoring into the Cold War’s development: security-related paranoia, tension, hostility, postwar environment, and lack of honest diplomacy (arguably detrimental if used, yes, but with the Cold War, you never really know). Let’s see—pre-emptive war (“If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Guess who said that? I’ll give you a hint, he can’t talk with or without a teleprompter), Russian officials perpetually intense distrust in US defense and overall security claims, sustainedly negative US-Russian relations since the alleged end of the Cold War in ≈1991—if you believe your professors, all you PoliSci majors out there; if you don’t, you could say it’s still going on, just with Russia trapped in the 90s and the US trying to understand why—Obama’s attempts to pull troops out of Iraq, and Bush’s total refusal to “negotiate with terrorists.” Hopefully I’m wrong. I’m just a PoliScier, trying to make some sense out of the world. It’s not like I’m reading about this stuff in painstaking detail or anything.
Oh, wait.
