Revisiting Cold War Concepts and Interpretations: The State of the Art Among the Echoes of a New Cold War

Conceptos e interpretaciones de la Guerra Fría en revisión: El estado actual de la cuestión entre los ecos de una Nueva Guerra Fría

José Manuel SÁENZ ROTKO jmsaenz@comillas.edu

Universidad Pontificia de Comillas, Spain

Carlos SANZ DÍAZ carlos.sanz@ghis.ucm.es

Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Few descriptions are as condensed and accurate as that of the German historian Bernd Stöver (2017), when he depicts the Cold War1 as a “radical era”.2 The statement encapsulates in a single adjective many of the realities and truths that characterised global society between 1947 and 1991.

In the third decade of the 21^st century, the shadow of the Cold War is once again darkening Europe’s skies and its vicinity, radicalising relations between the main global powers, and placing the international system under tension. The United States and its allies in the Old Continent, on the one hand, and Russia on the other, once again perceive each other as a vital threat; the wars in Syria and the military confrontations in Libya, among others, have in the last decade updated the concept of proxy wars, which threaten to spread to other scenarios; the narratives of spheres of influence and peaceful coexistence, cornerstones of the Cold War worldview, are being resurrected from Moscow in a calculated attempt to force a return to the prevailing rationale of a time when a superpower was run from the Kremlin. The threat of nuclear war has even resurfaced in collective memory to occupy a real place in the imagination of the European population.

If there were doubts among Western leaders until February 2022, Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated the currency of one of the former country’s traditional foreign policy guidelines: to exert pressure on Central Europe with the aspiration of dominating it directly or indirectly, with both geopolitical security reasons and a desire for imperial grandeur as part of its justification. As a result, NATO is, in the words of French President Emmanuel Macron (2019), re-emerging from its brain-dead state to revive Euro-Atlantic military, economic, and cultural loyalty through the essence of its original founding identity: the defence of the so-called free world against Moscow’s expansionism.

The war in Ukraine has also radically updated the concept of the Cold War, paradoxically at a time in which an armed conflict with Russia that began in 2014 has resulted in large scale open warfare. Politicians, analysts, and journalists have returned to the idea of systemic confrontation to be applied as an analytical category for current situations. The fact that it is Russia, heir to the USSR, confronting the West – and the excessive force with which it is doing so in Ukraine – makes for more explicit analogies between the present and the period that seemed to have ended in 1991. In reality, it is the multifaceted rivalry between the United States and China which looks more likely to evolve into a cold war, especially afer president Xi Jinping opted to make his country a great power in the military arena as well, and set a clear time-frame for reunification with Taiwan by whatever means necessary. The indefatigable Henry Kissinger (2021) views this bilateral relationship as the greatest problem of the modern age, with potential for an economic, technological, and military Armageddon.

Since the – perhaps false – end of the conflict in 1991, historiography of the Cold War has undergone a profound renovation (LEFFLER; WESTAD, 2010; KALINOVSKY; DAIGLE, 2014; MUNHOZ, 2020). The progressive opening of the main powers’ oficial archives, and the gathering of memoires, personal testimonies, and other historical sources has allowed historians to confirm and refute hypotheses, refine their approaches, unravel previously unknown or poorly studied events and, as a result, propose new interpretation paradigms. With the aim of enabling a comparative analysis between the periods marked by the milestones of 1947, 1991, and 2022, highlight lines of continuity, describe new variables, and, ultimately, draw an interpretive framework from a historical perspective in which to situate the current evolution of East-West relations and the deep shif glimpsed in the international system, it is essential to revisit the concepts, lines of interpretation, physical and mental spaces, and systemic structures of the Cold War and present an exhaustive and up-to-date historiographical state of the art about the question of what the Cold War really was. Tis text should be understood as a contribution to the idea that, in the words of Brands and Gaddis (2021, p. 10),

the greatest unfought war of our time – the Soviet-American Cold War – (…) might expand experience and enhance resilience in a Sino-American rivalry [without disregarding the Russo-American one] whose future, hot or cold, remains unclear. Tat history provides a framework within which to survive uncertainty, and possibly even thrive within it, whatever the rest of the twenty-first century throws our way.

It was the English writer George Orwell3 who, just weeks afer the end of the Second World War, used the term “cold war” in an article for the London Tribune magazine to refer to a theoretical confrontation between superpowers under the threat of a nuclear war. In April 1947, the US financier and presidential advisor Bernard Baruch used the concept to refer specifically to the post-war geopolitical confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union (GRANT, 1997). The same year Walter Lippmann (1947), an influential North American journalist, popularised the term in his volume The Cold War. A Study in US Foreign Policy, applying it to the dynamic that the relationship between his country and the Soviet Union was acquiring. In this way, since 1947 a concept which had been previously used to refer to, among others, tense relations between Germany and the United Kingdom in the 1890-1914 period, became indelibly linked to the systemic clash between the United States and the Soviet Union during the second half of the 20^th century.

Since then, Cold War studies, a melting pot of multi and interdisciplinary studies on the cold war, of varied epistemological and methodological focuses, has attempted to delimit a term whose use has proliferated despite being what Holger Nehring (2012, p. 948) describes as a “conceptual fuzziness” due to the lack of analytical and conceptual precision. Also complicating its use is the polysemy of the term: it identifies both a concept and a time period, as well as a system (NEHRING, 2012, p. 923-924). For the historian Odd Arne Westad (2010, p. 1-19) this complexity and plurality are precisely the defining elements of the Cold War. In recognition of this situation, Federico Romero (2014, p. 685) has urged historians to “(re)define their object of inquiry and strive for at least a minimum of conceptual clarity”. John L. Gaddis, the historian who has had the greatest influence on the interpretation of the Cold War, hints that the debate on the meanings of the concept will perhaps never be unequivocally resolved, laying out the intrinsic polysemy of the term:

The cold war was many things to many people. It was a division of the world into two hostile camps. It was a polarization of Europe in general, and of Germany in particular, into antagonistic spheres of influence. It was an ideological contest, some said between capitalism and communism, others between democracy and authoritarianism. It was a competition for the allegiance of, and for influence over, the so-called Third World. It was a game of wits played out by massive intelligence organizations behind the scenes. It was a struggle that took place within each of its major adversaries as supporters and opponents of the confrontation confronted one another. It was a conflict that shaped culture, the social and natural sciences, and the writing of history. It was an arms race that held out the possibility - because it generated the capability - of ending civilisation altogether. And it was a rivalry that even extended, at one point, beyond the bounds of earth itself, as human beings for the first time lef their planet, but for a set of reasons that are likely to seem as parochial to future generations as those that impelled Ferdinand and Isabella to finance Columbus when he first set out for the New World five hundred years ago. (GADDIS, 1992, p. 234-235).

The very conceptualisation of the Cold War as a “war” is problematic and begs the question of what kind of war it was. Undoubtably, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union between 1947 and 1989 were marked by confrontation and conflict, but Gaddis (1986) paints this conflict, in a systemic perspective, as a “long peace”, analogous to the international system prevailing in the 19^th century. After the Congress of Vienna, which produced a long period of relative peace, wars were not infrequent, but they were localised and did not plunge Europe into general war. In the same way, the Cold War opened up fronts and trenches on all continents, although at the same time it contributed to maintaining a state of peace understood as the absence of a new world war. Zbigniew Brzezinski (1992, p. 31), however, based on the Clausewitzian concept of war as a continuation of politics through other means, proposed that the Cold War be understood as war by other (non-lethal) means, without forgetting that “nonetheless, warfare it was”. Seeking to situate the Cold War in a novel angle on the war-peace dichotomy, Bernd Stöver (2017, p. 20) has convincingly conceptualised the Moscow-Washington confrontation as a permanent “non-peace”.4

Similarly, the characterisation of bipolar rivalry as “cold” must be problematised in light of the constant proxy wars that punctuated the four decades of conflict, fought in various parts of the Third World at the behest of the superpowers or with their explicit consent and support. Tere were real “hot” conflicts – some 150 of them –, fought fiercely, claiming millions of victims. For a good part of humanity, and in particular the Global South, the Cold War was nothing more than the continuation of colonial liberation struggles waged with new actors (WESTAD, 2017). The Third World, which emerged in the wake of the decolonisation process, found it extremely difficult to articulate foreign policies outside the superpowers’ spheres of influence. The logic of nuclear deterrence – which guaranteed mutual destruction – avoided a direct war between the United States and the Soviet Union only in the Global North.

Despite the multiplicity of settings, the proliferation of actors and the global dimension of the conflict, the Cold War ultimately always had a two-state leadership. The main actors in the process, the United States and the Soviet Union, emerged from the Second World War as the only superpowers – a new category of analysis and a distinctive feature of the nuclear era – and aspired to consolidate their ideological systems in the geographical areas which they considered to be priorities for the interest of their respective states. Convinced of the universal validity and applicability of state communism and liberal capitalism they progressively embarked on a process of ideological expansion, which culminated in the division of the world into two opposing blocs, led directly or indirectly by the new metropolises. London, Paris, and Berlin were replaced by Washington and Moscow as centres of gravity in the political world. The traditional multipolarity and eurocentrism gave way to bipolarity and the displacement of the seats of power to the peripheries. Constrained by this international power structure, the United Nations, as a universal agent, became a public arena for bipolar confrontation, rather than an instrument for resolving international differences (KENNEDY, 2007). At the same time, the Cold War was of a multidimensional – i.e., total – character, encompassing all aspects of social and human life: military conflict was joined by a clash of economiccommercial and technological-scientific interests and competition in political-ideological, social, and cultural fields worldwide – and even in outer space through the space race.

It is worth recalling – particularly as we have witnessed in the last five years a revival of the concept of the Cold War as an interpretative category of the present – that in the first decade and a half of the 21^st century academic debate was generated around an “overvaluation” of the concept of the Cold War for the interpretation of international reality in the second half of the 20^th century. Most historiography has – and continues to do so – situated the Cold War as the hegemonic international dynamic of its time, which, even if it did not determine all contemporary developments, had an impact on many of them. But globalisation, the shif in the centres of international power, constructivist debates in international relations, and the cultural turn have made possible the emergence of publications by eminent authors which relativise the general importance of the Cold War. As an extreme case, Walter L. Hixson (2008, p. 166) questions the existence of the Cold War by defining it as a mere “cultural construction devoid of ontological status”, as a narrative discourse, not a reality. Other researchers, expanding the range of vision and incorporating newly accessible archival sources, propose that it not be conceived as an omnipotent and absolute truth. Matthew Connelly (2000, p. 769) calls for historiography, as well as political science to “remove the Cold War lens” and try to explain the world beyond the rivalries between superpowers and analyse the struggle for political, economic, and cultural influence between the United States and the Soviet Union in terms other than the axiom of bipolar rivalry. Along the same lines, Westad (2017, p. 6) predicts that “it is therefore quite possible that the Cold War will be reduced in significance by future historians” when interpreting the international history of the second half of the 20^th century. The multipolarity of international relations in the 21^st century and the return to the international politics of the great powers in a world which is now increasingly deglobalized (TOVAR RUIZ, 2021) draw interpretive frameworks ever further from the old diagrams conceived in the 1947-1991 period.

From the very beginning of the bipolar conflict, analysis of its origins and reasons has generated deep controversies and heated debate, neither devoid of ideological foundations. The different perspectives and visions form three main interpretive schools: traditionalist, revisionist and post-revisionist.

The traditionalist interpretation, also called orthodox or realist, was predominant in the West during the years the two blocs were formed. Its exponents blamed the Soviet Union for provoking the Cold War due to Stalin’s expansionist policy and aggressive attitude in Eastern Europe afer 1945. According to these authors, the Soviet leader used any means possible to achieve his objectives, including trickery, lying, and false promises towards his former allies. The forced Sovietisation of the Governments of European countries occupied by the Red Army as well as support for pro-Soviet forces and parties from Greece to France, with the aim of subverting the political order in the rest of the continent, made it impossible to maintain the Grand Alliance, and put the West on the defence. The commitments made at the Yalta conference were nothing more than a diplomatic manoeuvre of trickery by the Soviet dictator, a betrayal. Some traditionalists identify ideological intransigence and the aspiration for the global reach of Marxist-Leninist tenets as the underlying explanation for the Cold War, while others, in line with classical Realpolitik, put geopolitical interests comparable to those of imperial Russia first.

Authors of the traditionalist school usually share the interpretation of the American policy of containment as a legitimate and necessary defensive response to a Soviet Union that in both its moral turpitude and threat potential was, in their view, comparable to National Socialist Germany. Between 1943 and 1946, Franklin D. Roosevelt and then Harry Truman attempted to negotiate an agreement on the new world order but the adverse realities created by the Soviets pushed Washington towards confrontation. In this sense, the realists consider the Cold War to have been inevitable. The analysis by the US diplomat George Kennan (1947) on the nature and intentions of the Soviet Union was the basis for the traditionalism systemically developed in the ffies and sixties by Kennan himself (1951), William McNeil (1963), Herbert Feis (1957; 1960; 1970), Tomas Bailey (1950), Louis Halle (1959; 1967), Adam Ulam (1960; 1969), Norman Graebner (1962), Martin Herz (1966) and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1970), among others. Kennan, however, over time would distance himself from the way in which his doctrine of the containment was distorted by several representatives of this perspective.

In 1959, William A. Williams postulated an interpretation that broke with the vision of the United States as an anti-imperialist, peaceful and disinterested power. With emphasis placed on American economic interests, the revisionist school started by this author accused the North American political and economic system of unleashing a series of reactions and counterreactions which resulted in the Cold War. For US leaders, freedom, and trade freedom in particular formed part of their identity and mission, and coalesced with the need to open new markets to maintain the high levels of economic activity of the war years. Williams (1959) placed the origins of this policy in the last decade of the 19^th century, with the victory over Spain in the Cuban War of Independence (1898) and the “Open Door Policy” starting from 1899-1900. From 1940 onwards, Washington managed to break the trade monopoly of the British Empire with the conditions of the Lend-Lease programme, and from 1945 on it was able to impose its views on its old ally from a position of supremacy. American liberal principles were also to govern economic reconstruction throughout Europe and thus benefit the business and trade network of the United States.

Other prominent revisionists include Denna Fleming (1961), Christopher Lasch (1962), Gar Alperovitz (1965), David Horowitz (1965) – an exponent of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, and an ultra-conservative and anti-liberal activist in the 1980s –, Walter LaFeber (1968), Gabriel Kolko (1969), Joyce and Gabriel Kolko (1972), Tomas McCormick (1989), and Lloyd Gardner (1993). According to them, the Soviet Union, whose economy had been greatly weakened by the enormous efort of the “Great Patriotic War”, perceived the attempted expansion of American economic influence as a threat not only from an ideological point of view, but also as a challenge to its internal security and stability. Stalin interpreted the Marshall Plan, also offered by the United States in 1947 to the countries liberated by the Red Army, as an instrument to extend American reign to the very borders of the Soviet Union, and therefore, as a serious threat for the security of the country, his regime, his ideology, and himself. The American attitude – defant and aggressive in the eyes of the Soviets – led the Kremlin, according to these authors, to give a free pass for revolutionary forces, that until then had been on a short leash in Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria, to transform those countries in pro-Moscow directions.

Nor, according to the revisionist school, was the creation of political and economic ties between the Sovietised states anything other than a reaction to the dynamic of building blocs and spheres of influence that the United States had initiated in Western Europe through the unilateral application of instruments of economic cohesion: monetary reform in the Trizone – i.e., the western parts of Germany – and the creation of the EOEC (European Organisation for Economic Cooperation, since 1961 the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development: OECD).

If revisionism reached its high point between 1965 and 1975, to a large extent driven by the new European and North American intellectual lef, since the 1970s to the present day a “third way” of interpretation, between the orthodox and revisionist positions, has emerged. Favoured by the atmosphere of détente of the 1970s, post-revisionism abandoned the search for parties to blame and a certain tendency towards simplification, to move towards an understanding of the Cold War as a result of complex interactions. Beyond politics and diplomacy, internal questions such as public opinion, the dynamics between stakeholders and parties, and economic aspects were incorporated into the analysis. In this globalizing approach, Stalin appears more as a pragmatic statesman than a revolutionary. A central element, provided by Gaddis in The United States and the Origins of the Cold War: 1941-1947 (1972), a publication which makes the first step towards post-revisionism, is the erroneous or distorted perception by both superpowers of the needs and interests of the adversary, which led Washington and Moscow to adopt foreign policy decisions based on incorrect assumptions. Both powers made errors when assessing the movements of the adversary as offensive instead of aimed at meeting vital needs, which in reality were not irreconcilable with each other. It was basically an issue of communication failure, leading another major contributor to post-revisionism, Wilfried Loth (2000, p. 388-389), to deduce that the Cold War was the result of a probable but not necessary evolution.

Other influential authors in this movement, also fed by the key contributions of Robert Jervis (1976) on the role of perceptions and misperceptions in international relations are Melvyn Lefer (1986) and Marc Trachtenberg (1999). Also within the context of revisionism, Geir Lundestad (1986) formulated the concept of “empire by invitation”, also adopted by Gaddis (1997) According to this interpretation, the United States is not an intrinsically imperial power and, if in the post-war period it adopted imperial politics form time to time, it was against its will and at the request of Western democracies that felt threatened by the USSR and asked for Washington’s protection (LUNDESTAD, 1986, p. 263-277; 1999, p. 52-91; GADDIS, 1997, p. 285-286). Tis argument has been criticised based on the evidence of US interventions to overthrow democratic governments in Latin America and other parts of the world (MUNHOZ, 2020, p. 46, 168).

In dialogue with and, in part, in opposition to these three main interpretations, the so-called corporatist interpretation, of which Michael Hogan (1987) is the leading exponent, also developed. The corporatists emphasise the influence of US economic groups and the internal social and ideological factors as an explanation for major US policies throughout the 20^th century, which would have been guided by the project to plan a world order based on the domestic model of corporate neocapitalism. After the Second World War, the confuence of Soviet expansion with endogenous factors fostered the US construction of this order based on a global power structure supported on the Bretton Woods Agreement, the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tarifis and Trade (GATT), to which the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and regional alliances (NATO, SEATO, ANZUS, etc.) were subsequently added. Soviet leaders perceived the US strategy as a threat and responded with measures which Washington, in turn, considered aggressive, which increased the climate of tension and led to the Cold War (HOGAN 1987; 1991). The economy was also the basis for the analysis of Fred Halliday, who in 1983 developed his concept of a Second Cold War from a post-Marxist theoretical framework of a world system as a system of interrelations on a global scale.

Access to Russian archives afer the 1990s added new nuances to the theses of different schools, but especially to those of the post-revisionists. Although these nuances could lead one to speak of a fourth (or fifth) interpretative model, which has been tentative called the post-cold war school, it seems more coherent to understand it as an updated version of the previous one, given that the Soviet sources have not modified the fundamental post-revisionist tenets. At the present time, with the historiographical debate stripped of the passionate and ideological overtones typical of the time of the conflict and most of the archival sources evaluated, the contemporary post-revisionist school is consolidated as hegemonic. One should bear in mind, in any case, the many differences between authors who usually ascribe to this school, as well as the sharp criticisms directed at its postulates by corporatist historians such as Hogan (1991) and revisionists such as Cumings (1981; 1990). From the updated studies of John Gaddis (1997; 2000; 2005), Melvyn Lefer (1999; 2008; 2017) and Wilfried Loth (2000; 2016), and the new contributions by Vojtech Mastny (2006) and Vladislav Zubok (1997; 2008), Zubok and Konstantin Pleshakov (1996), Vladimir Pechatnov (2002, 2010a, 2010b) and Geofrey Roberts (2006) – who also co-authored a study with Folly and Rzheshevsky (2019) –, a few conclusions can be drawn.

Firstly, ideological motivations contributed only to a very limited extent to triggering the Cold War. Both Truman and Stalin used liberal and communist ideals more as a justification for their policies than as an inspiration for them. Stalin did not attempt to expand the communist revolution, and Truman did not want to fight for Europe’s freedom as a value in itself. Secondly, security concerns were a key factor. Stalin did not repress the regimes of Central and Eastern European countries until it became clear that their former Western allies were unwilling to consider this geopolitical space as a zone of Soviet influence. Thirdly, perceptions of the respective opponent’s expectations and those regarding security were far from reality. Fourthly, the paranoic personality of Stalin led him to making personal decisions based on irrational analyses which could not be comprehended by Washington and resulted in erroneous interpretations of the USSR leader’s intentions. Fifthly, the personality of Roosevelt/Truman and Stalin and their leadership styles play a key role in deciphering their foreign policy decisions, decisions that brought the two countries irrevocably into conflict. The importance of this personal factor is equal to or even exceeds that of ideological precepts and national interest.

Although the Allies had negotiated and agreed in Tehran, Yalta, and San Francisco on the principles and governing structures of a new international system, the cohabitation from 1945 onwards of two incompatible international orders (KRIEGER, 2006, p. 29) made it impossible for such system to function fully. The guiding principle of international cooperation, which was to be embodied by the United Nations, was not heeded by the hegemonic members of the system; the absence of coercive means, which its designers did not assign to the UN, ended up – resorting to the neo-realistic conceptual structure of Kenneth Waltz (1979) – in an anarchic configuration of the system, dominated by two superpowers and marked by the rivalry between them. Tanks to a combination of elements, the rivalry resulted in a balance of power that gave the system relative stability.

An identifying feature of the system was its bipolar character, with two blocs functioning as “full-service security communities” (IKENBERRY, 2018, p. 10), with their own principles, structures, and institutions, in which only the respective members of the blocs participated and which were not incompatible in their objectives with the general principles that inspired the United Nations through its Charter. Kissinger conceptualises two sets of balances, “which for the first time in history were largely independent of each other: the nuclear balance between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the internal balance within the Atlantic Alliance, whose operation was, in important ways, psychological” (KISSINGER, 2015, p. 90). It was precisely bipolarity, along with mutual independence, which gave the system a certain stability. In his influential 1986 article, which is still relevant today, Gaddis stresses that the simple bipolar structure was less prone to imbalances than a multipolar system, and did not require particularly skilful leaders to make constant adjustments. Also contributing to stability was the realistic character of the Cold War international system in that it accurately portrayed the distribution of power produced by the Second World War. In addition, the geographical independence of the two superpowers, added to their limited interrelation in economic and social terms, contributed, in the author’s opinion, to the stability of their relations (GADDIS, 1986).

Apart from these structural considerations, there are, in Gaddis’ (1986) analysis, other powerful arguments in terms of the behaviour of the main actors that catalysed systemic stability: their low propensity for warlike confrontation, in other words, a policy of calculated risk, based on nuclear deterrence; and mutually assured destruction. The ideological moderation deployed throughout the conflict also contributed to stability. Both poles adjusted the universalist ideological discourse to make it compatible with basic respect for the status quo, i.e., the coexistence of two international orders in their respective spheres of influence. As a consequence, a pattern of implicit norms emerged that served as mutually accepted rules of the game: respect for spheres of influence, a veto on direct military confrontation, the use of nuclear weapons only as a last resort, and a preference for maintaining anomalies over forcing change with unpredictable consequences; examples include Castro’s Cuba or the Berlin enclave. Within these rules of the game, the bipolarity of the system was made more flexible and relativised by the possibility of moderate dissent within the blocs, within certain limits: European autonomy led by de Gaulle’s France and Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, or the particular course of Ceaușescu’s Romania and the dissidence of Mao Zedong’s China – leading to the Sino-Soviet schism – marked the transition, in the 1960s and 1970s, towards a multipolar tendency compatible with the basic bipolarity of the system. Similarly, smaller actors in the system often extracted what they could from the two hegemonic superpowers, either by swinging between the blocs – such as Nehru’s India or Nasser’s Egypt – or by profting from their allegiance – such as Castro’s Cuba or Sukarno and Suharto’s Indonesia (WESTAD, 2017).

Despite the tensions, crises, and proxy wars, the international system of the Cold War was also characterised by “a remarkable story of negotiations and institution-building through the Iron Curtain” (KRIEGER, 2006, p. 35). Initiatives such as the Baruch Plan, Atoms for Peace and the Open Skies proposal during the first phase of the Cold War relate the interest of Washington and Moscow in reaching global agreements; a series of important treaties on arms controls, with the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty leading the list, as well as agreements about the decolonisation process and the structures and policies for development aid, encapsulated in resolutions and new agencies within the framework of the United Nations – and of course the Helsinki accords – attest the ability, albeit limited, of the international system to manage the evolution of international society and confront fundamental challenges.

The very evolution of the international system cautions against any static conception of the Cold War. Many authors have identified a pattern of cyclical evolution beneath the apparent continuity, with moments of maximum tension followed by periods of détente, which frequently culminated in international understandings or agreements, which then made way for new escalations until leading to proxy wars or severe diplomatic tensions (SANZ DÍAZ; SÁENZ ROTKO, 2022, p. 21). Of particular importance in this formulation is the conceptualisation of the détente phases, for which various chronologies have been proposed. It is possible to identify a mini détente in 1963 afer the missile crisis of the year before (SANZ DÍAZ; SÁENZ ROTKO, 2022, p. 126) and a more substantial and prolonged détente between that year and 1975 (SANZ DÍAZ; SÁENZ ROTKO, 2022, p. 151-178). Westad (2007, p. 194-206) places the détente stage between the superpowers between 1968 and 1975, while Halliday (1983) extends it from 1969 to 1979, as the stage afer the First Cold War (1946-1953) and the oscillatory balance phase (1953-1969), and before what he conceptualises as a Second Cold War (since 1979). In view of this plurality, Munhoz and Rollo (2014) have convincingly proposed that there was not just one but several détentes with diferentiated rationale.

Tree decades afer the end of the bipolar conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cold War has experienced an unexpected revival as a concept of choice for the analysis of the present, as a historical reference category and as a basic metaphor through which to understand the current situation of international relations. In the third decade of the 21^st century, the Cold War is thus no longer understood as a finished historical period locked in a closed past, but threatens to become a “new” present, an open historical process with an unpredictable end.

The flexibility with which the term Cold War is applied today, whether to the systemic rivalry between the US and China, or to the current tension between the US and other Western countries and Russia – under formulations such as New Cold War, Cold War II, Cold War 2.0 or Cold War Redux – is illustrative both of the complexity of a multiple and multi-faceted concept, and of the intentions with which it is invoked. The term has come to occupy a preeminent place in the repertoire of historical analogies and its use can both illuminate and complicate the creation of an intelligible image of international relations (KORNPROBST, 2007). Specifically, it is worth pointing out, as Yin (2020) does, how the use of analogies taken from the Cold War and applied to the post-1991 international system both simplifes and distorts reality. Such analogies resort more often to the construction of mental frameworks and self-interested narratives than to the quest for historical rigour, a risk against which the search for clarity of concepts and historiographical criticism proves to be an effective and necessary escape route.

The brief analysis and overview outlined in these pages allows us to assess more clearly and precisely the spaces that the Cold War analogy projected onto the present illuminates and those that it leaves in shadow. The essentially bipolar nature of the “historic” Cold War is poorly adjusted to the multipolarity of the present, as evidenced in the dificulty in defining two single nuclei of rivalry, which leads us to consider in the multilevel power equation, along with Washington, Moscow, and Beijing, also New Delhi, Brussels, and Tokyo (a reality, moreover, already evident in the times of Sino-Soviet split and the Gaullist and Ostpolitik “dissidences” in Western Europe). The aspect of ideological rivalry with universal pretensions of that time has no comparable equivalent today (LEGVOLD, 2016; TSYGANKOV, 2016; KARAGANOV, 2018), with a USA prone to withdrawal, a Russia whose ethno-nationalist project is exhausted in its borders and neighbouring regions, and a pragmatic China with little interest in exporting its model to the world, no matter how discursively fronts of democracies against autocracies and other similar configurations are invoked. Similarly, the poor relations between the Cold War blocs contrast with the interdependence that defines today’s world: while trade between the US and the USSR never exceeded one percent of their respective GDPs, China and the US are now major trading partners. Although the economic sanctions imposed on Russia in 2022 show the reversibility of trade as historical processes, and de-globalisation is an upward trend accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic and international instability, relations between the economic giants remain characterised by exchange rather than hermetic closure. In hindsight, the Cold War of 1947-1991 is increasingly seen, rather than as a mirror of the present, as a peculiar parenthesis between earlier and later periods characterised by multipolar rivalry between several great powers.

The rigorous historiographical discussion of the meanings and scope of the Cold War constitutes the unavoidable basis on which valid comparative analyses can be built, lines of continuity can be highlighted, new variables can be described and, in short, interpretative frameworks can be drawn about that era of bipolar conflict and our present era of systemic rivalry (SANZ DÍAZ; SÁENZ ROTKO, 2022). At the same time, the changes in the international relations of our times, along with the possibility of consulting previously inaccessible sources, and the creation of new conceptualisations, shine a new light which helps to reconstruct and reformulate the historiography of the Cold War, in a dialogue between the present and the past that is the basis of the historian’s work.

The authors wish to express their thanks to the two anonymous revisors who, through their comments and suggestions, contributed to the improvement of the original text of this article.