The United States and Russia: Did the Cold War Ever End?

The United States and the Soviet Union combined during the Second World War to beat Nazi Germany, yet even before victory, serious differences began to tug these allies apart. Could their eventual enmity have been avoided, or was their wartime cooperation an expedient blip in a relationship hardwired for mutual adversity and distrust?
 
This course covers the onset of the post-war struggle between the two powers, their sporadic moments of cooperation in an otherwise increasingly bipolar world, the far more frequent and long-lasting phases of deep and dangerous antagonism, and the sudden (maybe not-so-sudden) end of the Cold War...which may or may not have actually happened.
 
One of the few definite things we know about the world since the early 1990s is that when the flag of the Soviet Union was lowered for the last time and the Russian flag rose in its place, it wasn't long before the rivalry between Washington and Moscow resumed. The 80 years since victory over the Nazis have seen a wide array of leaders and leadership styles in both these countries and elsewhere, cataclysmic events, and tectonic changes internationally - we will see how all of these affected the US-Russian relationship...or were affected by it.
With some periodic forays examining how international relations are perceived and foreign policy is actually conducted, we will dissect various overlapping periods of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia, looking at themes as much as events that actually transpired. Most sessions have a famous - or infamous - reading assigned, each chosen to provide context to the simultaneously changing and fixed relationship.

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