the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

great power politics: the cold war and bipolarity 69Athens and Sparta, and Rome and Carthage? If bipolarity was unstable,then only the fear of national obliteration posed by nuclear weaponsstopped it from spiralling into war.There was some challenge to the bipolar framing from China afterMao’s break with Moscow in the late 1950s, with some thinking of Chinaas a third power, at least in Asia, because of its willingness to challenge bothsuperpowers (Hinton, 1975; Segal, 1982). Yet the bipolar framework heldfirm throughout the more than four decades of the Cold War. Japan andWestern Europe were closely allied with the US and accepted its militarydominance and leadership. Even when they surpassed the Soviet Unioneconomically, both remained politically weak, and the US remained verymuch the dominant partner in both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization(NATO) and the bilateral alliance with Japan. With the brief exceptionof the ‘Japan as number 1’ flourish in the late 1980s, neither sought to, norwas thought able to, challenge bipolarity. The huge superpower militaryestablishments and arsenals of nuclear weapons sustained it even after theeconomic challenge from the Soviet Union (which seemed formidable inthe 1950s and 1960s) had faded into palpable backwardness and decline.This meant that right to the end of the Cold War, bipolarity stood asthe general framing for nearly all strategic theorising. Whether it wasabout deterrence, arms racing, arms control or alliances, the underpinningassumption of Cold War Strategic Studies was bipolarity (Buzan,1987a: 173–177). This assumption is extraordinarily prominent in deterrencetheory, and goes some way to explaining the attractions of gametheory, especially ‘chicken’ and ‘the prisoner’s dilemma’ (Snyder, 1971).These two games depend on two-player assumptions (without which theyquickly get too complicated) and thus mirror bipolarity. Bipolarity alsoexplains US and Soviet sensitivity to nuclear proliferation, which morethan anything else could threaten their status and privileges as the onlymembers of ‘the big two’ club.The bipolar framing of the Cold War manifested itself in the geostrategicpolicy of containment. The rivalry between the US and the SovietUnion developed from the ceasefire lines of the Second World War, andquickly settled into a US attempt to ring the Soviet bloc with allies (NATO,Japan, Iran, Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, etc.) to prevent furtherexpansion of the communist world. The Soviet response was to tryto breach, or jump over, these containment barriers. This strongly territorialformation explains the significance of crises in Berlin, Korea, Cuba,the Middle East and Vietnam, all of which were seen as crucial to maintainingor breaching the lines of containment. Once China emerged as a