Ideology In The Cold War

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In the ever changing nature of International politics Ideology is not a relative term; it has a fixed meaning so as to reflect the needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class or culture. But the context which it comprises of tends to evolve in the international arena. With this in mind it let us look at the first half of the question. Cold War, to be explained in the words of Samuel Huntington was “one group of relatively wealthy and mostly Democratic societies, led by the United States engaged in a pervasive ideological, political, economic and at times military conflict with another group of somewhat poorer Communist societies led by Soviet Union” . Much of the conflicts during Cold War occurred in the ‘Third World’ outside the two camps of the ‘Free World’ and ‘Communist Block’ which comprised of countries which were often poor, lacked political stability, were recently independent or claimed to be non-aligned. Set with the predefined condition (due to the question) of ideology being central to the Cold War, we have to analyse it. In my understanding Ideology played a major role in the Diplomatic…show more content…
This paved way for a lot of diplomatic ties between these Major Powers and Third World Nations. This ideological rivalry was even used as a source of funding by many states. Certain states only had to separate from the Soviet’s influence while keeping their Communist ideology intact like Yugoslavia where “Tito established his independence from Moscow. He did not, however, move into the capitalist camp. He accepted aid from the West, but always maintained a position of neutrality between East and West” .Even allies like Japan got to free ride during the 1970’s since U.S wanted to keep the defence spending of its allies low and under its control making sure they would not shift
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