Contemporary Global Politics

It is common, but improper, to classify the Cold War world system as a bipolar system rather than as a hegemonic system. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had more important roles than the other states, but only the United States exerted the role of leader of the governmental structure since most states conformed to the rules and the policies of the economic and security institutions created under US leadership. The Soviet challenge to the US role was in the military and ideological-political sphere, and not in the economic. Military strength and, in particular, nuclear equality allowed the Soviet Union to contain some of the goals of the United States by using the framework of rules of the game, as we shall see later. The ideological conflict was supposed to undermine the capitalist market and put an end to US hegemony thanks to societal change, as a growing number of states moved from a free market and pluralist society to a planned economy and the dictatorship of the communist party. However, the number of such socialist states remained low, and the expected change of the domestic regime in other states never materialized. Nevertheless, cooperation with states governed by communist or other friendly parties gave the Soviet Union the opportunity of creating a fairly cohesive anti-US coalition.