Lessons of the Cold War

Archie Brown, The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher and the End of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. xi + 499 pp.Looking back, it is not easy to recall what the first decade after the Cold War was like. Memories of the Soviet Union's political transformation and ultimate disintegration remained vivid, and the prospects for a "new world order" based on the spread of democracy still seemed promising, despite the security risks posed by conflicts in various part of Eurasia. Today, with the world mired in a pandemic, many democratic regimes deeply embattled, and U.S. conflicts with China and Russia on the rise, that first decade after the Cold War and the hopes that existed back then seem especially remote. Equally alarming, these developments have become entangled with what is arguably the gravest domestic political crisis in the United States since the Civil War.For students of international affairs, this turn of events has made certain questions unavoidable. Did U.S. officials misunderstand the end of the Cold War and draw the wrong conclusions from it? Might a review of the experience yield fresh lessons to help the country deal with the domestic and international crises it now faces? In recent decades, thoughtful scholars have shown how easy it is to transmute formative historical experiences into mistaken policy prescriptions.1 What, if anything, might we do to avoid "learning" mistaken lessons once again? These questions are not entirely new, but they have acquired new urgency in the past decade or so.The publication of Archie Brown's splendid new book provides a welcome opportunity to explore such issues. The Human Factor makes a major contribution to scholarship and policy analysis. Brown is the leading Western authority on Soviet politics in the late Soviet era, about which he has written extensively.2 In addition, he has produced a massive, authoritative study of Communism as an international movement.3 Always interested in comparative issues, he has moved in recent years beyond Communist studies to reflect broadly on the nature of political leadership—a topic long neglected by most U.S. political scientists but one whose centrality has been made obvious by adverse trends in the United States and elsewhere.4 Brown, a shrewd analyst and indefatigable researcher, has been examining these topics in one form or another for nearly five decades.To appreciate the value of Brown's new study, it is worth reflecting on the scholarly pitfalls of analyzing the interactions among states. In such research, two key questions for scholars are where to stand, intellectually speaking, and where to begin the story. These choices are frequently complicated by scholars' national loyalties, which incline them to favor their own country's perspective, and by the academic division of labor between specialists on foreign relations and specialists on domestic politics.5 That division of labor tends to reproduce the divergent explanatory frameworks summed up in the classic distinction between observers who view international relations primarily through the prism of Aussenpolitik and those whose perspective emphasizes Innenpolitik.Along with national identities, this scholarly division of labor encourages the adoption of questionable assumptions encapsulated in the unobtrusive phrase "other things being equal"—a phrase that is hardly innocent. Assuming all else to be equal simplifies analysis, but it invites misunderstanding of the complex political dynamics among states. Politics is nearly always interactive, and one state's policies are often reactions to the initiatives of other states, even when the other states do not perceive them as such. Hence when and where to start to tell each country's story is a fundamental intellectual choice.That is why we should not be satisfied to examine one state's approach to a conflict by assuming that we can hold other states' behavior constant. The national "two-level games" linking domestic politics and foreign relations are often shaped by fluctuations and unforeseen contingencies that make assigning fixed priority to one level or the other a mistake, and those games are typically being played on every side of the board.6 To put the matter concretely: only by examining the domestic-foreign nexus in both the United States and the Soviet Union across time can we adequately assess the political dynamics that long sustained the Cold War but also finally ended it. By analyzing the interactions among the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain alongside the political interactions inside each country, Brown's pathbreaking book offers a sophisticated explanation of that outcome.The Cold War represented a struggle between the two superpowers for control of the global future, on both the imaginative and the geopolitical levels. It was not simply a struggle for geopolitical advantage—although it certainly was that. It was a struggle in which states based on antithetical universalist ideologies sought to spread their own models of social organization across the world while fearing the spread of the rival model as a grave danger.7 In that sense, the Soviet Union was the ubiquitous Communist "other" against which the United States defined itself. Similarly, the United States was the omnipresent capitalist "other" that Soviet leaders felt compelled to defeat in the long term. This dynamic ensured that each country's policies toward its own internal political and economic organization became entangled with its international objectives. The leaders of each superpower were determined to resolve the twentieth century's "Great Dichotomy," a struggle fought over the proper role of the state, in their own system's favor.8 In the words of one historian, the United States viewed itself as the "empire of liberty," whereas the Soviet Union saw itself as the "empire of justice."9This type of combined geopolitical-ideological struggle was not new; European history has many precedents. Initially, those conflicts centered on the rival branches of Christianity championed by contending European states. Later on, they centered on rival political ideologies, such as monarchism and republicanism.10 These conflicts represented a form of hybrid competition that Odd Arne Westad has called "geoideological." But these previous rivalries were perhaps not as stark insofar as they did not usually explicitly posit the long-term global victory of one side over the other. In any case, none of the previous rivalries raised the possibility of each side's complete physical annihilation by the other, a possibility that became all too real after the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945. For the United States, the emergence of the USSR as a rival superpower combined a decades-old ideological challenge with an unprecedented military threat to U.S. physical security.11 Neither of the contestants stood for preserving the international status quo—nor could either have succeeded in achieving this goal had it wanted to.12Under these circumstances, each country viewed the other with the deepest trepidation, despite their temporary alliance against Nazi Germany during World War II. The Red Army, as Brown notes, "played the most decisive part in the Allied response to Nazi aggression, bearing the brunt of the land war in Europe" and inflicting three-quarters of German military fatalities.13 U.S. news coverage of the Soviet military effort during the war was strikingly favorable.14 Soon afterward, however, that coverage was supplanted by diffuse images of totalitarian dangers lurking outside and inside the United States. More than any other single U.S. act, President Harry Truman's declaration of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 merged Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in American minds as embodiments of totalitarianism, and U.S. postwar accounts understated the extraordinary hardships and destruction suffered by Soviet citizens during the war.15 The mass media in the United States overlooked the reality that the Soviet Union emerged from the war as "the defeated victor," as Mark Harrison aptly put it.16Western public misunderstanding of this reality occurred partly because, for strategic reasons, Joseph Stalin wanted to obscure the true extent of the wartime damage to the Soviet Union. The pervasive secrecy of the Stalinist system certainly contributed to this misunderstanding.17 But U.S. postwar minimization of the cataclysmic struggle on the Eastern Front also stemmed from the intuitive U.S. need to dispel severe cognitive dissonance about the nature of the "good war" the United States had waged. Although the United States had fought the war as a champion of democracy, a decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi totalitarianism had come from the prodigious exertions of the equally totalitarian USSR. That awkward reality was incompatible with the U.S. ideological needs that emerged in the wake of the conflict, especially the growing inclination of U.S. officials to incorporate the western parts of Germany into a new political-economic alignment against Moscow.18There were, of course, many authentic examples of the Stalinist regime's murderous treatment of its own citizens and its harsh subjugation of East European countries. This alarming evidence made it seem logical to assimilate the Soviet Union into a comprehensive image of totalitarianism, which elided the distinctions often drawn between Communism and Fascism before World War II. Yet this conflation of the Nazi and Soviet systems came at a serious intellectual price. The emerging image of totalitarianism implicitly equated the USSR's international behavior with that of Nazi Germany, just as it equated Stalin with Adolf Hitler, and this parallel created a misleading picture of Soviet foreign conduct.19 From the late 1940s onward, Western academic writing about totalitarianism centered almost entirely on the domestic structure of totalitarian regimes, not on their external policies, and this omission encouraged a common-sense analogy between Nazi military aggression and Soviet international behavior.20 Drawing this parallel was all the easier because Hitler and Stalin had colluded on the eve of the war to carve up Eastern Europe under the secret terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But to achieve this aggressive goal, the two regimes had pursued very different strategies and taken fundamentally different military risks.21The net effect of these ideological developments was to obscure the possibility that postwar Soviet military-political policy in Eastern Europe was in part a defensive response to the shattering effects of Nazi Germany's assault on the USSR.22 After all, that war had been fought in substantial measure on Soviet soil at the price of enormous human losses and material destruction—sacrifices that vastly exceeded any that U.S. civilians were required to make—as Brown notes.23 On the other hand, Moscow's postwar resumption of Marxist-Leninist proclamations about international revolutionary action and the ultimate worldwide victory of socialism made a defensive interpretation of Soviet motives increasingly difficult for Western observers to credit.24 After the war, Stalin tried to preserve "the veneer of international legitimacy on his expansionism," but the unveiling of the Marshall Plan forced his hand.25 Despite Stalin's hard-nosed diplomacy, Soviet military planning in the second half of the 1940s was mostly defensive rather than offensive. By the end of the decade, however, U.S. policymakers believed the Soviet Union was actively pursuing a "design for world domination" and seeking "to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world."26Soviet postwar images of Western imperialism evolved in a roughly similar manner. During the war Soviet leaders and ideologists had drawn a clear contrast between the democratic capitalist systems of their U.S. and British allies and the predatory regimes that ruled Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.27 In the second half of the 1940s, however, growing U.S.-Soviet tensions and Stalin's domestic political crackdown changed the dominant outlook in the ruling organs of the Soviet Union. Following a signal from Stalin, Soviet commentators revived expectations of the inevitability of future war, asserted that the USSR still faced "capitalist encirclement," and sometimes equated the United States with Nazi Germany.28 Together with the ingrained Soviet habit of regarding "imperialism" as a homogeneous phenomenon, the shocking impact of the war on the USSR and the subsequent course of international events probably made this fearful outlook seem quite logical.These were the dominant worldviews that guided U.S. and Soviet decision-makers as they contemplated the vast array of geopolitical uncertainties created by the war and its immediate aftermath. The United States and the Soviet Union had emerged as the main contenders for international primacy in a world utterly transformed. The war had left the other great powers, victors as well as vanquished, politically prostrate. The United States and the USSR had both been drawn into the war as a result of enemy surprise attacks—albeit attacks on two entirely different scales of destructiveness—and the new competition to create and deploy nuclear weapons added even greater uncertainty. For a time, the U.S. monopoly on the bomb heightened the confidence of U.S decision-makers, but the Soviet Union's test of its first nuclear device in 1949 sharpened U.S. fears—much more, incidentally, than the test bolstered the confidence of Stalin and his lieutenants. Evidence of the first Soviet nuclear bomb test was announced by Washington rather than by Moscow, possibly because Soviet leaders feared that revealing it might elicit a preemptive U.S. attack.29 Given the stark Soviet experience of the Nazi onslaught in June 1941, this fear, although misplaced, is not hard to understand.Under these conditions, the emergence of a bipolar international system based on intense ideological competition induced both sides to view international relations as a zero-sum conflict. From opposite sides of the table, each superpower worried in its own way about the possibility of falling dominoes. Although the domino metaphor is commonly mentioned in connection with the U.S. worldview, it was applicable to the Soviet worldview as well. Each regime, after all, saw history in linear terms and hoped its own political-economic system would ultimately triumph over the other. This made it difficult to think in terms of other relevant metaphors for international relations, such as the balance of power, and therefore very difficult to dismiss secondary regions and conflicts as irrelevant.30 Each side hoped that the dominoes would fall in its favor but feared, despite its public expressions of confidence, that they might topple in the other direction. Soviet commentators rarely discussed this possibility, but it was unmistakably on the minds of policymakers in Moscow.Thanks partly to the offensive cast of Stalinist ideological pronouncements, the United States experienced these worries early in the postwar contest against the USSR. The Truman Doctrine laid out in stark terms the importance of the struggle of "free peoples" everywhere against totalitarian subversion and military aggression. The doctrine, despite its rhetorical sweep, initially centered on Europe, where it found institutional expression in the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty. Soon, however, the Truman administration's geographical attention was broadened by the one-two punch of the Soviet nuclear bomb test and the Communist victory in China's civil war. These events contributed to the U.S. shift from a "hard-point" geopolitical strategy focused on certain vital regions—above all Europe and Japan—to a sweeping "perimeter" strategy intended to counter Stalin's forays all around the Soviet periphery.31A watershed in the adoption of this new strategy was Truman's decision to embark on military operations in Korea to defend South Korea against North Korea's invasion. During the preceding twelve months, the United States had withdrawn its remaining military forces from South Korea, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson had publicly excluded the South from the Asian territories he defined as affecting U.S. military security. In the spring of 1950, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts had warned the White House that the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from the peninsula would likely be followed by a North Korean military attack on South Korea.32 When the attack came, however, Truman viewed it as a global test and feared that it might be repeated in Central Europe or the Middle East unless the United States thwarted the North Koreans.33 As one of his advisers characterized it, "the real basis of the decision had almost nothing to do with Korea. It was about aggression."34 A North Korean initiative that Stalin had underwritten, in part as a means of hemming in the new Communist regime in China, was interpreted in Washington as the possible prelude to a new Soviet military challenge in Europe and elsewhere. The resulting mood of West-East confrontation was a watershed in the militarization of the Cold War.35Moscow's fears about falling dominos were especially focused on Eastern Europe. Precisely because Soviet ideologists came to view East European regimes as clones of the Soviet political-economic model and proof of the world's ineluctable movement toward socialism, the potential collapse of any of those regimes carried domestic political risks for other socialist countries, including the USSR itself. Arguably the first potential domino of this kind was Hungary in 1956.36 The Soviet Union's unhindered suppression of the Hungarian revolution showed that Soviet leaders would use force to maintain orthodox East European regimes. It also suggested that the United States, despite the Eisenhower administration's rhetorical endorsement of "rollback" and "liberation," would not intervene militarily.The issue arose again in connection with Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring in 1968. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 was triggered partly by disturbing echoes of the Czechoslovak reformers' unorthodox ideas inside the USSR itself, coupled with a determination to thwart perceived U.S. efforts to undermine Soviet control of Eastern Europe through economic "bridge-building."37 Still, even with the United States mired in the Vietnam War, Leonid Brezhnev was fearful that the invasion might provoke a response by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that would escalate into a European war.38 That is, he was not fully certain that the Hungarian precedent of U.S. military non-intervention would hold. A dozen years later, the Polish domestic crisis triggered by the rise of Solidarity provoked a different kind of worry in Moscow. It showed that the general European settlement under the 1975 Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe did not ensure the stability of the USSR's satellite states in Eastern Europe. Even more this time than in earlier cases, Soviet leaders feared that the Polish domestic upheaval might spill over and affect the deteriorating political situation inside the USSR itself.39 Moscow was lucky to be able to compel an internal Polish crackdown by threatening to invade without actually having to carry out the threat.40The superpower military balance—more specifically, the perceived military balance—was always a touchstone of the U.S.-Soviet relationship. In the 1950s each superpower worried about the implications of the correlation of strategic weaponry for its survival, as well as for its position in the global political competition with its main opponent. Before the 1960s, Moscow derived a substantial psychological advantage from its closed political system. Soviet secrecy made the country's actual strategic capabilities extremely difficult for the West to gauge accurately and rendered its opaque decision-making especially hard for outsiders to influence. In 1955, the Soviet Union's exploitation of this informational asymmetry contributed to U.S. intelligence reports that exaggerated the size of the Soviet fleet of strategic bombers and provoked fears of a supposed "bomber gap" favoring the USSR—fears that were deepened by the unexpectedly early explosion of the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb the same year.41Two years later, capitalizing on the launch of the USSR's Sputnik-1 satellite into low earth orbit, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev again exploited this informational asymmetry to exert military-psychological pressure on the West over the status of Berlin. His actions in this regard were part of his broader effort to demonstrate that global political alignments were shifting decisively in favor of the USSR and its East European allies. By highlighting Soviet advances in technology for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), Sputnik ignited public alarm in the United States, which was reinforced by the Gaither Committee report completed shortly afterward. The committee expressed concern that the United States was lagging dangerously behind Soviet ICBM development and deployment. Although the Eisenhower administration by then possessed aerial U-2 intelligence suggesting that the purported "missile gap" did not exist, Eisenhower was unwilling to release that information, and the Gaither Committee was not given access to it.42The political advantages provided by the closed Soviet system, however, were a dwindling asset. Unfortunately for Khrushchev, rapid advances in U.S. reconnaissance technology—first in the form of U-2 overflights and then of surveillance satellites—showed that his sweeping claims about Moscow's overwhelming offensive and defensive capabilities were false.43 Soviet deployments of ICBMs at that point remained very small. Soviet tests of fifty-megaton hydrogen bombs might temporarily intimidate Western publics, but U.S. surveillance technology showed that the post-Sputnik "missile gap" that supposedly favored the USSR was in actuality a yawning gap in deliverable nuclear weapons that favored the United States. Nonetheless, Senator John F. Kennedy made the specter of the missile gap a centerpiece of his campaign for the presidency, even though President Eisenhower privately assured him that recent intelligence showed a large U.S. advantage. No matter how much Kennedy actually learned about Soviet ICBM capabilities before the election, he followed through as president with a major expansion of the U.S. defense budget and the Minuteman ICBM program, without acknowledging that his claims during the campaign had been false.44These developments helped set the stage for the Berlin crisis of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year. In Berlin, the central issue was not the status of the city per se but rather the unsettled geopolitical situation in Central Europe, especially the future roles of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). At this time, the two German states still did not recognize each other diplomatically (an issue that was not resolved until the early 1970s). The FRG was ideologically committed to German unification, and it still claimed sovereignty over nominally German territory beyond the Oder-Neisse line in western Poland. From the other side, none of the Warsaw Pact states—with the notable exceptions of the USSR in 1955 and Romania in 1967—recognized the existence of the FRG.Perhaps most important from Moscow's standpoint, the Eisenhower administration had taken steps to facilitate the creation of multinational nuclear forces in Western Europe—a policy it expected to include the FRG. Aiming ultimately to remove U.S. armies from Europe, Eisenhower believed that NATO's European members required their own nuclear forces for self-defense.45 Given Soviet leaders' memories of World War II, they swiftly condemned the prospect of a multinational West European nuclear force that included West Germany, and Khrushchev plainly believed that a great deal was at stake in the confrontation over Berlin. At one point during the crisis, he expressed concern about a reverse-domino cascade that could ultimately destroy the whole Soviet bloc.46 Setting the end of 1961 as a deadline for Western compliance with Soviet demands, Khrushchev seemed ready to push the confrontation with the United States to the verge of nuclear war. To back up his bellicose public stance, he resumed tests of massive hydrogen bombs and emphasized their potential to devastate Great Britain and France.47Khrushchev's pugnacious conduct during the crisis spurred a U.S. decision to broadcast what it knew about the real strategic balance between the United States and the USSR. In October 1961, the Kennedy administration publicly declared that it had acquired definitive evidence showing that Soviet strategic claims were unfounded, that the United States still enjoyed overwhelming strategic nuclear superiority, and that the administration was therefore confident the Soviet Union would not initiate a major nuclear conflict.48 This revelation resonated with the worries of the Soviet military high command, which was acutely aware of the USSR's real nuclear capabilities, and it may have affected Khrushchev's subsequent tactics over Berlin.49 Within a few months, he withdrew his threat to close down Western access rights to the city. Having authorized the construction of a wall that bisected Berlin in August 1961—a wall that stanched the flow of talented East Germans to the West and thus shored up the GDR politically—Khrushchev evidently felt that pressure to resolve the German question was no longer as urgent.The outcome of the Berlin confrontation helped set the stage for the Cuban missile crisis the next year. Khrushchev had multiple motives for secretly installing ballistic missiles in Cuba. Most immediate was concern about U.S. intervention in Cuba to oust Fidel Castro's Communist regime—a firm goal Washington had already attempted to achieve through the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. Both superpowers saw Cuba as a domino in a high-stakes global contest. Khrushchev viewed Castro's regime as a major opportunity to breach U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. From a strategic military standpoint, he sought to compensate quickly and cheaply for the fact that the Kennedy administration had publicly deflated his hyperbolic boasts about the growth of Soviet military capabilities and had confronted him over Berlin. He highlights this motive in the recollections he published after his ouster.50 In addition, he and other Soviet leaders remained worried about the possibility that West Germany would acquire nuclear weapons under the auspices of the United States, and they did not realize that the Kennedy administration was in the process of reversing this long-standing policy.51 Khrushchev also believed that a dramatic public victory in the contest over Cuba would help counter Communist China's claims that he had become timid in dealing with the leading power of the imperialist camp, in Asia and elsewhere.52Fortunately, in October 1962 both Kennedy and Khrushchev realized in the nick of time that the U.S.-Soviet clash over Cuba was about to spin completely out of control. As Brown emphasizes, the chances of nuclear escalation during the Cuban crisis were quite high—much higher than suggested by the carefully tailored accounts of the Kennedy administration's "crisis management" that circulated in the immediate aftermath of the confrontation. Thanks to artful media manipulation, the crisis gave the United States and Kennedy a reputational victory in the superpower contest for political primacy and decisiveness.53Ultimately, these geopolitical adventures came back to haunt Khrushchev. In October 1964, when Khrushchev was ousted from power, his political associates claimed that they had strongly disapproved of his handling of the Berlin and Cuban crises, even though they had not been brave enough to say so at the time. The ruling Presidium (as the Politburo was called at the time) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) adopted a memorandum saying that Khrushchev's threats over Berlin had failed to intimidate Washington, and that Khrushchev had backed down, thereby administering a "palpable blow to the authority and prestige of the country, our policy, and our armed forces." Khrushchev's conduct in the case of Cuba had been even more egregious, according to the memorandum. In the lead-up to the Cuban crisis, he had boasted of his ability to penetrate the Western Hemisphere—something Stalin had never managed to do. This attitude, said the CPSU Presidium, amounted to dangerous "adventurism." By engaging in a gross overextension of the USSR's military reach, Khrushchev's gambit in Cuba had produced the deepest possible crisis and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. . . . With no other way out, we had to accept all the demands and conditions dictated by the United States, including a shameful inspection of our ships by the Americans. The missiles, as well as a large part of the army units, were taken out of Cuba, as the United States demanded. This episode . . . caused damage to the international prestige of our state, our party, [and] to the armed forces . . . at the same time it helped raise the authority of the United States.54Soviet reputational damage was intensified in the wake of the confrontation by many U.S. commentators' inclination to underscore the USSR's political defeat and extol Kennedy's handling of the episode as an example of can-do crisis management. The self-congratulatory confidence of the Kennedy administration may have helped pave the way for U.S. embroilment in a new crisis—the Vietnam War—just a few years lat