Cold War Research Paper

A grand design for peace

“War never changes”, since our first ancestors discovered the power of rocks and bones, war has shaped our human civilization and changed it into an infernal cycle of death and destruction. The 21th century Man has not changed much compared to his caveman ancestor, he might be using more sophisticated devices to bring death and chaos, but he is still ignited by the same destructive flame. The human race has always based its development on war, from the Roman Empire to the post-modern globalized world, and such a fundamental element of the human nature can hardly be changed without radical measures.
Peace is an ideal, it has haunted numerous thinkers and philosophers over the ages, but even after more than two millennia,
it still only exists in the minds of those who believe in it. Ideas, theories and utopias have failed to change the human nature and create a peaceful word, and only a global peace movement as advocated by the Oughtopian theory could eventually vanquish the enemy within. Such an enterprise might seem impossible to achieve considering the disastrous state of our world, but with the help of our civilization’s technological and spiritual developments, a fair chance can be given to such a movement to rise.
The appeasement of the cold war during the late 80s and the debut of peace movements over the world have been first steps toward peace.
The two conflicting blocks realized the madness of their actions and the imminence of a destructive nuclear war, and decided to work toward a peaceful global environment. The end of the cold war and the sharp decrease of inter-state conflict can be seen as a direct repercussion of this appeasement period, but even the efforts of the two hegemonic superpowers have shown to be insufficient to truly establish a new world based on peace and cooperation. The conclusion of the cold war might have terminated the nuclear war terror, but wars and conflicts have only increased in number and intensity since the beginning of the new
millennia.
Many thinkers, including Y.S Choue and Francis Fukuyama, saw in the post-cold war period a chance for global peace. The two superpowers were appeasing their relations and ending more than 40 years of cold war, the relations between conflicting countries in the Asia-Pacific region were improving, the UN started playing its role as a peace creator and democratization movement began to flourish around the globe. However, the beginning of the new millennia turned out to be grimmer than initially anticipated. The 9/11 attacks introduced the world to a new era of terror and war, the Middle East fell under the weight of conflict, the United States started a global war on terror, religious conflicts tore the world apart, the western societies increasingly embraced xenophobia and the global common society as anticipated by the Oughtopian dream was terminated before its genesis.
As Ibn Khaldun envisioned more than six centuries ago in his Philosophy of history, the world and the human civilization are bound to follow the same paths and repeat the same mistakes.
In other words, war cannot be avoided or vanquished because of its essential place in the creation of history. Even when the world is at the brink of peace, like the post-cold war period, events rise and plunge the world back into its destructive history. The 9/11 attacks and the ensuing war on terror proved once again the theory of historical cyclicity right, and showed us the stark reality of our civilization. In its endless cycle and with the help of the increasing destructive capability of modern weaponry, war will surely bring about the “end of history” as John F. Kennedy puts into words “if man fails to conquer war, war will conquer
man”
The Oughtopian dream as imagined by Y.S Choue might give us a proper framework to start our long journey toward peace. The formation of a global common society and the renouncement of war as a conflict solver are prerequisite pillars if peace is ought to be established. However difficult the adoption of peace might seem, it is an essential step toward reshaping our civilization and the purpose of our lives. Only when humans will be able to break free from their minds and organic nature, history would change and war will become a memory long forgotten.