The Cold War as cooperation: Superpower cooperation in regional conflict management

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union began in co-operation to defeat the Axis powers and Japan. Despite profound splits over ideology and national interests, magnified by the nuclear and conventional arms race, the United States and the Soviet Union have learned to co-operate with each other in regulating their rivalry in regions around the world. Within a common framework of analysis, twelve regional experts, joined by Dr. Victor Kremenyuk, Deputy Director of the Soviet Institute of the USA and Canada, sketch the complex web of tacit and explicit rules of engagement observed by Moscow and Washington to limit the scope and intensity of their regional conflicts and the reasons for their adjustments, often reluctant and reserved, to compromised outcomes, such as the 1971 Quardripartite agreement on Berlin. The analysis highlights the power of regional states to constrain and manipulate both the United States and the Soviet Union for local advantage and to assert national and regional interests over superpower designs. This volume provides study of superpower co-operation since World War II. The analysis suggests that, even before the emergence of the economic and political reforms sweeping the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the superpowers had already learned to co-operate in pursuing common interests in the midst of their sustained conflicts. This finding reinforces the historical basis for policies aimed at exploiting the opportunities occasioned by "glasnost" and "perestroika" to further improve U.S - Soviet and East-West relations. The mutually frustrating experience of the Cold War for both superpowers, during which neither side fully got its way, has itself proved to be learning process that contributed to the thaw and break up of the Cold War as superpower relations move from tacit to open and enlarged co-operation across the range of their principal political, economic, and security concerns.