May Book Club: The U.S. Lost the War w/ Immanuel Wallerstein
May Book Club: The U.S. Lost the War w/ Immanuel Wallerstein
Two readings on the Cold War and the common misconceptions regarding the world order it constructed.
The United States lost the Cold War.
This is the argument that Immanuel Wallerstein lays out in various lectures and writings.
For example, in a 2013 lecture at Yale University, Wallerstein states,
The United States lost the Cold War because the point of the Cold War was not to win it but to keep it going. Keeping it going was a great benefit to the United States in two essential ways. One, was that it created a mythical danger with which they could always menace Western Europe and tell them that you have to stick in line… And the second is that part of the deal with the Soviet Union is we’ll keep our guys in check, you keep your guys in check and then nothing will hurt the commitment that there’s not going to be any kind of nuclear war… When the Soviet Union, we lose both of those.
To understand this claim and its implications, we need to review two Immanuel Wallerstein articles that tell us what the Cold War was, and what resulted from the collapse of this global arrangement.
These two essays work together to challenge the Cold War narrative by describing what the Cold War arrangement actually was in institutional and historical terms. Wallerstein places the Cold War, and U.S. post-Cold War power, within the grand arc of the capitalist world economy. Beginning in 1450, the capitalist world economy is the proper context for understanding geopolitics.
Understanding capitalism as a world system enables Wallerstein (and consequently his readers) to analyze and reliably predict political actions/dynamics as they unfold. Wallerstein’s analytical approach is a powerful tool for engaging the question of a New Cold War between China and the United States, or even the matter of the War in Ukraine. We will be returning to these ideas in the coming weeks.
Let us know what you think.