This puts far too much emphasis on weapons and far too little on the diplomatic soft power that made the threat of these weapons effective.
I don’t think we would have had decades of stability without the Marshall plan investing in western Europe. Similarly the US investment in post-WWII Japan and South Korea gave the US strong allies that had common purpose.
It’s not separate; soft diplomacy made the extensive network of US military bases palatable to foreign governments.
I think pointing to nukes as the only factor neglects a lot of other important work. Stability requires the status quo to be another intolerable for governments and their people. The mutually-assured destruction of nuclear deterrence alone doesn’t give you that.
Another factor is economic inter-dependence. Heck, Europe has been buying energy from Russia to fund the war in Ukraine. China has contained the US not through war or diplomacy but through US economic dependency (yet having enough of their own internal markets to ignore economic pressure).
I don’t think we would have had decades of stability without the Marshall plan investing in western Europe. Similarly the US investment in post-WWII Japan and South Korea gave the US strong allies that had common purpose.
It’s not separate; soft diplomacy made the extensive network of US military bases palatable to foreign governments.
I think pointing to nukes as the only factor neglects a lot of other important work. Stability requires the status quo to be another intolerable for governments and their people. The mutually-assured destruction of nuclear deterrence alone doesn’t give you that.