1995/07/01 by David S. Painter · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics #Painting #Third world #Art history #International relations #History #Political science #Economic history #Media studies #Art #Sociology #Law #Politics
paper · doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.1995.tb00648.x
openalex publication_date 1995/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The Third World was often the focus of international tension and conflict during the Cold War. Almost all of the major violence of the Cold War era took place in the Third World: Of the twenty million people who died in wars between 1945 and 1990, all but two hundred thousand were casualties in the more than one hundred wars that took place in the Third World in this period.1 In addition, most of the crises that threatened to escalate into nuclear war occurred in the Third World.2 The Third World was also central to U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. U.S. leaders believed that controlling access to the resources, markets, and labor of the Third World was crucial not only to containing the Soviet Union but also to U.S. leadership of the Western alliance and to the economic reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan. These objectives clashed with the rising tide of Third World nationalism, and, not surprisingly, the only wars and armed conflicts since 1945 that have involved U.S. military forces were in the Third World. Bruce Cumings is thus not far from the mark when he argues that “what the Cold War was really about for Americans [was] interventions in the Third World, from Korea through Iran, Guatemala and Cuba, to the debacle in Vietnam.”3