![]() ![]() At the same time, both the United States and the Soviet Union defined themselves in different ways as outsiders to the traditional European system of power politics, which they regarded as alien to their respective values as well as detrimental to international order. ![]() The other was a one-party dictatorship ruled by a self-perpetuating oligarchy accountable only to itself. One was a pluralistic democracy with a government accountable to the people. While the superpower status of the United States and the Soviet Union derived from what the two countries had in common, the understanding of their diplomatic interaction requires constant attention to the differences that distinguished them from each other. Although such predictions proved wrong, the overriding concern with the management of that power left indelible marks on diplomacy, making it difficult to adjust to an era in which nuclear weapons continued to exist but bipolarism no longer applied. The dependence tended to impose oversimplification upon a profession traditionally known for its subtlety, sometimes raising questions about whether diplomacy may not have outlived its usefulness because of the limitations placed on it by the crudeness and excess of the new power it wielded. The subsequent survival of the United States as "the world's only superpower" evolved in a radically different international environment, where bilateralism had ceased to exist and the concept of superpower diplomacy therefore lost its original meaning.ĭespite its uniqueness and limited life span, superpower diplomacy was important because it altered and distorted previously established diplomatic practices by making the conduct of diplomacy dependent, to an unaccustomed degree, upon a new kind of weaponry that carried with it the threat of universal annihilation. The age of the superpowers began in 1945 with the appearance of nuclear weapons and ended in 1991 with the disappearance of one of the superpowers, the Soviet Union. Historically, such circumstances were highly unusual. Superpower diplomacy was a product of particular historical circumstances, characterized by bipolarism -the domination of the international system by two exceptionally powerful states locked in an adversarial relationship. These relationships nevertheless influenced the manner in which Washington and Moscow dealt with one another. During the years when the United States and the Soviet Union were in superpower positions in relation to their allies and clients in different parts of the world, their respective relations with those countries were of a different order and are therefore usually not considered under the rubric of superpower diplomacy. –Soviet diplomatic intercourse its distinct character. Superpower diplomacy is thus closely related to nuclear weapons. It came to be widely, though by no means universally, accepted that the very possession of these weapons, regardless of their actual use, made the two nations immensely more powerful than any other. Although the word appeared, according to Webster's dictionary, as early as 1922, its common usage only dates from the time when the adversarial relationship of the United States and the Soviet Union became defined by their possession of nuclear arsenals so formidable that the two nations were set apart from any others in the world. The concept of a superpower was a product of the Cold War and the nuclear age. ![]()
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