How did the idea of war change during the twentieth century?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: At one level, contending superpowers dominated the story of global politics in the rest of the twentieth century. At another, it was a tale of ideological conflicts, in which democracy contended with rival kinds of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. If catastrophically violent and destructive warfare had punctuated the first half of the century, cold war between irreconcilably opposed antagonists dominated most of the second half, waged in local or regional conflicts and in economic, diplomatic, and ideological competition. If the great wars of the first half of the century were civil wars of Western and Eastern civilizations, the Cold War was the conflict of an increasingly globalized world—a struggle to decide the common culture of the world, its shared assumptions about politics and economics.