Cold War flashpoints

These last events occurred in a decade where ‘peaceful co-existence’ between the superpowers supposedly governed, and thus this definition of international relations will be considered. Two of the defining events of the Cold War – the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War – are then discussed, as the focus moves to the crucial decade of the 1960s. The course will then turn to détente in the 1970s and the changing nature of international politics in the 1980s with the emergence of a ‘second Cold War’. The revolutions in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Berlin Wall will be the focus of the last part of the course, as we question why the Cold War ended.