Cold War

For my book club this week, we are reading Globalization or the Age of Transition? by Immanuel Wallerstein. The essay says this about the agreements that came out of the Yalta Conference between the United States and the USSR:

…both sides were free, indeed encouraged, to engage in vigorous, reciprocally hostile rhetoric, whose chief function seemed to be to consolidate the political control of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. over their respective zones.

Holy crap…that is a pretty serious claim but now that I think about it, it is pretty plausible. I’ll ask the book club about that one to see if they can offer any insight.