The Cold War: A New History

by John Lewis Gaddis

“faith in the ability of the United Nations as presently constituted to protect, now or hereafter, the security of the United States would mean only that the faithful have lost sight of the vital security interest of the United States.”

“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.

After his overwhelming victory, Johnson authorized the escalation he had promised not to undertake, apparently in the belief that he could win the war quickly before public opinion could turn against it.

the nation would not simultaneously support major expenditures for both “guns” and “butter.” So he sacrificed public trust instead.

Tet turned out to be a military defeat for the North Vietnamese: the mass uprising they had hoped to provoke did not occur. But it was also a psychological defeat for the Johnson administration, and that at the time was more important.

One of the most geopolitically adept leaders of modern times, he also happened to be the American president least inclined—ever—to respect constraints on his own authority.

Where Nixon went wrong was not in his use of secrecy to conduct foreign policy—diplomacy had always required that—but in failing to distinguish between actions he could have justified if exposed and those he could never have justified.

his reliance on secrecy became so compulsive that he employed that tactic in situations for which there could never be a plausible justification.

The decision was militarily justifiable, but Nixon made no effort to explain it publicly. Instead he authorized the falsification of Air Force records to cover up the bombing,

Nothing in this history compromised national security or criticized Nixon’s handling of the war, but he regarded the leak as a dangerous precedent and a personal affront.

NOR DID the law itself remain static. The president’s behavior provoked Congress into reclaiming much of the authority over the conduct of national security policy that it had abdicated during the early Cold War.

Washington’s role in Chile’s horrors remains a hotly contested issue among both historians of these events and participants in them.

that the United States Congress was passing laws—always blunt

instruments—to constrain the use of United States military and intelligence capabilities. It was as if the nation had become its own worst enemy.

Kissinger was the most thoughtful advocate of this position. Legitimacy, he had written in 1957 of the post-1815 European settlement, “should not be confused with justice.”

As Ambassador Dobrynin later admitted, “the Kremlin was afraid of emigration in general (irrespective of nationality or religion) lest an escape hatch from the happy land of socialism seem to offer a degree of liberalization that might destabilize the domestic situation.”

However much détente might have improved relations with the West, Brezhnev and his colleagues seemed determined to control everything—even ideas—within their sphere of influence. They justified this not through an appeal to morality or law, but to ideology:

WITHIN THE UNITED STATES, liberals and conservatives alike denounced Ford and Kissinger for having abandoned the cause of human rights. Brezhnev’s motives in wanting the Helsinki agreement, they argued, were all too transparent: pursuing détente was hardly worth it if it meant perpetuating injustice by recognizing Soviet control in Eastern Europe.

Kissinger had advised Ford not to receive Solzhenitsyn—by then an involuntary exile from the Soviet Union and a bitter critic of détente—at the White House: this came across as excessive deference to Moscow.

briefed to deny the existence of the “Sonnenfeldt Doctrine,” he instead denied that the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe.81 That ensured Carter’s election,

the Helsinki process became instead the basis for legitimizing opposition to Soviet rule.

When John Paul II kissed the ground at the Warsaw airport on June 2, 1979, he began the process by which communism in Poland—and ultimately everywhere else in Europe—would come to an end.

the Cold War itself was a kind of theater in which distinctions between illusions and reality were not always obvious. It presented great opportunities for great actors to play great roles.

Real power rested, during the final decade of the Cold War, with leaders like John Paul II, whose mastery of intangibles—of such qualities as courage, eloquence, imagination, determination, and faith—allowed them to expose disparities between what people believed and the systems under which the Cold War had obliged them to live.

It was an age, then, of leaders who through their challenges to the way things were and their ability to inspire audiences to follow them—through their successes in the theater that was the Cold War—confronted, neutralized, and overcame the forces that had for so long perpetuated the Cold War. Like all good actors, they brought the play at last to an end.

THEY COULD hardly have done this had the stage not been set by the collapse of détente.

another global trend—the advent of mass communications—was making it possible to mobilize movements in ways that leaders did not always anticipate, and could not always control.

it became harder to defend the idea that a few powerful leaders at the top, however praiseworthy their intentions, still had the right to determine how everyone else lived.

They legitimized the logic of Mutual Assured Destruction: that remaining defenseless against a nuclear attack was the best way to keep one from happening.

In a joint statement of “Basic Principles,” Nixon and Brezhnev promised that their countries would seek to avoid “efforts to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other.”

It soon became clear, though, that the “Basic Principles” were not to be taken literally. Like SALT, they papered over cracks.

When Nixon and Kissinger ignored him, even after Sadat expelled some 15,000 Soviet military advisers from Egypt, he found a way to get their attention by launching a surprise attack across the Suez Canal in October, 1973. It was a war Sadat expected to lose, fought for a political objective he shrewdly calculated he would win. For would the Americans let Israel humiliate a leader who had already diminished Soviet influence in the Middle East?

if the United States could be defeated in Southeast Asia and deterred in southern Africa, then how credible could American strength be elsewhere?

Dobrynin has argued,

The efforts the superpowers expended on Africa during the 1970s, Dobrynin concluded in the 1990s, were “almost entirely in vain. . . . Twenty years later no one (except historians) could as much as remember them.”31

it seemed an inopportune time to invade a country known for its skill in repelling invaders as far back as Alexander the Great.

Kosygin explained to Taraki. “[O]ur troops would have to fight not only with foreign aggressors, but with a certain number of your people. And people do not forgive such things.”

Significantly, this crisis did not lead Moscow to invoke the Brezhnev Doctrine: instead Soviet leaders ordered an increase in the production of consumer goods—and they approved imports of food and technology from Western Europe and the United States. This made stability in the region contingent not on the use of military force, but rather on the willingness of capitalists to extend credit, a striking vulnerability for Marxist-Leninist regimes.

He had already by then turned the tables on his predecessor by claiming that Mao had been right seventy percent of the time and wrong thirty percent: this now became party doctrine.46 Among the “right” things Mao had done were reviving China as a great power, maintaining the Communist Party’s political monopoly, and opening relations with the United States as a way of countering the Soviet Union. Among the “wrong” things was Mao’s embrace of a disastrously administered command economy.

That too was a blow to Marxism, for if capitalism really did exploit “the masses,” why did so many among them cheer the “iron lady”?

Reagan was as skillful a politician as the nation had seen for many years, and one of its sharpest grand strategists ever.

it strains credulity to suggest that the Bulgarians would have undertaken an operation of this importance without Moscow’s approval.

This was a remarkable decision in two respects. It meant, first, the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine, and hence of the Soviet Union’s willingness—extending all the way back through Hungary in 1956 and East Germany in 1953—to use force to preserve its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. But it also acknowledged that the world’s most powerful Marxist-Leninist state no longer represented proletarians beyond its borders, for in Poland at least the workers themselves had rejected that ideology. Had these conclusions become known at the time, the unraveling of Soviet authority that took place in 1989 might well have occurred eight years earlier.

Ever the actor, Lech Wałęsa had his line ready for the occasion. “This is the moment of your defeat,” he told the men who came to arrest him. “These are the last nails in the coffin of Communism.”

The improbable motive behind this near-fatal act suggests the importance

and vulnerability of individuals in history, for had Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, succeeded him at that point, the Reagan presidency would have been a historical footnote and there probably would not have been an American challenge to the Cold War status quo.

definitely did not.63

The reason was that stability in Soviet-American relations had come to be prized above all else.

Reagan, however, thought in evolutionary terms. He saw that the Soviet Union had lost its ideological appeal, that it was losing whatever economic strength it once had, and that its survival as a superpower could no longer be taken for granted. That made stability, in his view, an outmoded, even immoral, priority. If the U.S.S.R. was crumbling, what could justify continuing to hold East Europeans hostage to the Brezhnev Doctrine—or, for that matter, continuing to hold Americans hostage to the equally odious concept of Mutual Assured Destruction? Why not hasten the disintegration?

This last theme reflected something else about Reagan that almost everybody at the time missed: he was the only nuclear abolitionist ever to have been president of the United States. He made no secret of this, but the possibility that a right-wing Republican anti-communist promilitary chief executive could also be an anti-nuclear activist defied so many stereotypes that hardly anyone noticed Reagan’s repeated promises, as he had put it in the “evil empire” speech, “to keep America strong and free, while we negotiate real and verifiable reductions in the world’s nuclear arsenals and one day, with God’s help, their total elimination.”