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The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Prospects for Peacekeeping

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

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Extract

When the United Nations Charter was drafted in 1945 the provisions for keeping the peace had to be drawn up in the abstract. There was no tangible enemy, crises were in the future, and commitments were made in a vacuum. It was only when it became clear what the world was really like that “peacekeeping” was invented. It turned out that in most conflict situations there was no definable aggressor or victim, that the danger was uncontrolled escalation of local conflicts into the nuclear realm, and that the real enemy was a fantastically complex set of instabilities, inequities, and passions to which 1945 international ground rules were inadequately related.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1970

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References

1 See Bloomfield, Lincoln P. and Leiss, Amelia C., Controlling Small Wars—A Strategy for the 1970's (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969)Google Scholar.

2 See ibid.

3 Controlling Conflict in the 1970's (A report of a national policy panel established by the United Nations Association of the United States of America, 1969)Google Scholar.

4 New York Times, June 19, 1967.

The raging flames of these fires together with other hot spots in the world present an extremely

serious threat to the interests of universal peace.

Izvestia, November 26, 1969.

5 Andro Gabelić, “New Accent in Soviet Strategy,” Review of International Affairs, reprinted in Survival, February 1968 (Vol. 10, No. 2), pp. 45–46.

6 Ibid. (Emphasis added.)

7 See, e.g., Wakaizumi, Kei, “Japan Beyond 1970,” Foreign Affairs, 04 1969 (Vol. 47, No. 3), p. 514CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Quoted in New York Times Book Review, October 12, 1969.

9 Elaborated on in Bloomfield, Lincoln P., “The U.N. and National Security,” Foreign Affairs, 07 1958 (Vol. 36, No. 4), pp. 597610CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 My associates and I have documented the “reverse curves” of, on the one hand, multiple options available for conflict-prevention in early stages of conflict when great-power leadership is uninterested, and, on the other hand, the dramatically shrunken options that are by then available when those leaders do finally notice an explosive situation. See Controlling Small Wars: A Strategy for the 7970's.

11 I refer to the well-known proposal by V. Molotov to Hitler in 1940 that Germany recognize as the focal point of the aspirations of the Soviet Union “[the area] south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf.” Reprinted in Raymond James Sontag and James Stuart Beddie (ed.), Nazi-Soviet Relations 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of the German foreign Office (Washington: Department of State, 1948), p. 259.

12 I have changed my mind about this since writing Law, Politics, and International Disputes,” International Conciliation, 01 1958 (No. 516)Google Scholar.