COLD-WAR MYTHS AND THE NEW INTERNATIONAL REALITIES - RECONSIDERING THEORETICAL PREMISES

This article precedes from the premise that how scholars and policymakers think theoretically about the Cold War's lessons will shape their theories of post-Cold War international politics. Six such popular but, the author argues. questionable theoretical lessons are presently being advanced: that the long great-power peace was made possible by bipolarity, militant containment, preparations for war, alliances, nuclear deterrence, and hegemonic U.S. leadership. These propositions, it is submitted, should not be accepted in the absence of evidence, inasmuch as they rest on fallacious logic and misrepresentations of the Cold War's history. Asking scholars to suspend faith in their validity, the article concludes by putting forward some prescriptions for building a new hybrid realist and neo-liberal model for understanding world politics in the wake of the Cold War.