James Baquet

The “Quasi War” was one of the many wars that were never officially declared. Today’s war is even stranger: a war in which the two opposing world powers never battled openly.

The Cold War was a direct result of World War II, involving two allies of that war who were united in their opposition to Hitler’s Germany: the Soviet Union and her satellites (collectively called the “Eastern Bloc”) and the United States and her post-war allies (the “Western Bloc”).

This latter group was once referred to as the “First World,” with the Eastern Bloc designated the “Second World.” Any nonaligned developing countries were then called “Third World.” This nomenclature has fallen out of favor; for a while “First World” was used to describe any developed nation, regardless of alignment, and “Third World” came to be considered disparaging. There was even a “Fourth World” proposed, composed of peoples living completely outside of the “Three-World System,” such as hunters and gatherers, or disenfranchised people in one of the three.

The Cold War started around 1946 or ‘47, when an American diplomat in Moscow proposed that the United States should try to limit Soviet expansionism. The Cold War began to de-escalate in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989, and became completely moot with the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991.

The parties to the Cold War never directly battled each other, hence the term “cold” (as opposed to a “hot,” or shooting, war). The words “cold war” were used by George Orwell, author of “1984,” to describe any non-shooting war; they were first applied to the Soviet-American Cold War in a 1947 speech by American presidential advisor Bernard Baruch, who said, “Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war.”

This is not to say there was no fighting between the sides, but they often supported regional conflicts, which were called “proxy wars.”

While tensions still exist, the threat of “mutually assured destruction” presented by the nuclear stand-off of the two sides has abated in recent decades.

Vocabulary:

Which word above means:

1. lessen, become less intense

2. system of naming something

3. of no importance or relevance

4. balanced and therefore static situation

5. insulting, belittling

6. group united for a purpose

7. not favoring one side or the other

8. policy of adding to a country’s territory

9. substitute or representative

10. countries under the influence of another