Confronting Capitalism: The US Started the Cold War

Jacobin Radio

Jacobin

Socialism, History, News, Left, Jacobin, Alternative, Socialist, Politics

4.7 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Cold War is often portrayed as a great power struggle between the forces of democracy and a spreading communist threat. But what if the conventional story gets it exactly backwards?

In this episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber and Melissa Naschek discuss the rise of the American empire and how the US used the Cold War to spread capitalism across the globe.

Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, and published by Jacobin. Music by Zonkey.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to another episode of Confronting Capitalism.
0:21.6	I'm Melissa Nashak and I'm here, as always, with Vecbber, a professor of sociology at NYU
0:27.5	and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy.
0:32.6	V, this is a very special episode because we're recording today in our big beautiful new location.
0:39.5	Yeah, we just moved to a new building, the NYU Sociology. So we're in my new office,
0:44.3	which is actually much nicer than the old one. So I'm happy. Yeah. I also has an amazing view.
0:49.4	Pretty good. So of the many things that have been in the news, you know, not just recently, but really for the past few years, is this notion that we're entering a new Cold War.
1:04.0	And this is based particularly on the rising conflict with China that has both a military dimension and an economic dimension.
1:14.6	Do you think that we are on the verge of a new Cold War?
1:18.1	No, we're in it. There's no doubt about that. The United States has been stoking an absolutely
1:22.6	needless conflict with China. Luckily, it's still a Cold War, but the level of insanity that we see now
1:29.3	in the foreign policy people, it could turn into something of a semi-hot war, for sure.
1:34.8	I think this is kind of a good opportunity to examine what a Cold War actually is, and specifically
1:42.2	to look back at recent history to examine the 20th century Cold War actually is, and specifically to look back at recent history, to examine the 20th century
1:46.8	Cold War. We've sort of already touched on this in a couple of episodes. We talked about the
1:52.4	Vietnam War and we've talked about the NATO alliance. But now we can kind of look at the Cold War
1:59.8	as a whole and really examine what international conflict
2:04.0	looks like during a Cold War. Yeah, I think that's very, it's a very helpful thing to do at this
2:08.8	stage. To start us off, what exactly was the Cold War? Well, the Cold War was a particular
2:16.9	historical rivalry between the United States and the
2:20.2	Soviet Union. But why was it called a Cold War? Well, it's because it was contrasted to a hot war.
2:27.4	A hot war is when people are actually fighting and dying and there's armies involved and they're
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 16 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jacobin, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Jacobin and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.