International Relations 250CW - Imagining Cold War Competition

The development of nuclear weapons and the ascendance of the Soviet Union following World War II led to the rise of an influential class of professionals tasked with managing the contours of American Empire. This course seeks to answer three questions: first, how did these thinkers understand the dynamics of world order and the place of the United States in superpower competition? Second, what were the social, cultural, and political contexts that influenced and underwrote these theories of global domination? And finally, how were these theories put into practice in American foreign policy and with what consequences for competition with the Soviet Union and the rest of the world?