The Cold War

by John Lewis Gaddis

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin sought to accelerate history in 1917 by seizing control of Russia and imposing Marxism on it, even though that state failed to fit Marx’s prediction that the revolution could only occur in an advanced industrial society. Stalin in turn fixed that problem by redesigning Russia to fit Marxist-Leninist ideology: he forced a largely agrarian nation with few traditions of liberty to become a heavily industrialized nation with no liberty at all.

According to official statistics, 36,568 Americans died in combat. No such specificity is possible in calculating other losses, but it is likely that some 600,000 Chinese troops and well over 2 million Koreans, civilians and military personnel, perished during the three years of fighting.3 The only decisive outcome of the war was the precedent

McNamara, characteristically, transformed this reliance on irrationality into a new kind of rationality in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. He now repudiated his earlier idea of targeting only military facilities: instead each side should target the other’s cities, with a view to causing the maximum number of casualties possible.70 The new strategy became known as “Mutual Assured Destruction”—its acronym, with wicked appropriateness, was MAD.

This was what Eisenhower had in mind when, in 1954, he invoked the most famous of all Cold War metaphors: “You have a row of dominos set up, you knock over the first one, and… the last one… will go over very quickly. So you could have… a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.”

Defying the logic of balancing power within the international system, Mao sought a different kind of equilibrium: a world filled with danger, whether from the United States or the Soviet Union or both, could minimize the risk that rivals within China might challenge his rule.

The United Nations General Assembly did manage to pass, in December of 1948, a “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” But it did so without the support of the Soviet Union and its allies as well as Saudi Arabia and South Africa—all of whom abstained—and without providing any enforcement mechanisms.

That gave Havel the motive and the time, through his essays and plays, to become the most influential chronicler of his generation’s disillusionment with communism. He was, it has been said, “a Lennonist rather than a Leninist.”

It was no source of strength for the U.S.S.R. to be sustaining a defense burden that may well have been three times that of the United States by the end of the 1970s, when its gross domestic product was only about one-sixth the size of its American counterpart.