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the war had been won by a coalition whose principal members were already at war—ideologically and geopolitically if not militarily—with one another.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union had been born in revolution. Both embraced ideologies with global aspirations: what worked at home, their leaders assumed, would also do so for the rest of the world.
The stark fact that the Americans and the British could not have defeated Hitler without Stalin’s help meant that World War II was a victory over fascism only—not over authoritarianism and its prospects for the future.
Stalin’s postwar goals were security for himself, his regime, his country, and his ideology, in precisely that order.
Stalin’s goal, therefore, was not to restore a balance of power in Europe, but rather to dominate that continent as thoroughly as Hitler had sought to do.
Soviet leaders had to treat the outside world as hostile because this provided the only excuse “for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand.”
American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War.
The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe.
“The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us,” Kennan told students at the National War College in 1947. “It is only the cheerful light of confidence and security which keeps this evil genius down. . . . If confidence and security were to disappear, don’t think that he would not be waiting to take their place.”69
They reach backward beyond the frontiers of western civilization, to the concepts of warfare which were once familiar to the Asiatic hordes. They cannot really be reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying, the lives of the adversary. They fail to take into account the ultimate responsibility of men for one another, and even for each other’s errors and mistakes. They imply the admission that man not only can be but is his own worst and most terrible enemy.
Power into will, will into appetite And appetite, a universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce a universal prey And last eat himself up.
If the object of war was to secure the state—how could it not be?—then wars had to be limited: that is what Clausewitz meant when he insisted that war is “a continuation of political activity by other means. . . . The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.”
Contrary to the lesson Thucydides drew from the greatest war of his time, human nature did change—and the shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began the process by which it did so.
He reversed a pattern in human behavior so ancient that its origins lay shrouded in the mists of time: that when weapons are developed, they will be used.
That great strategist had indeed insisted that war had to be the rational instrument of policy, but only because he knew how easily the irrationalities of emotion, friction, and fear can cause wars to escalate into meaningless violence.
That, however, was simply a restatement of what Eisenhower had long since concluded: that the advent of thermonuclear weapons meant that war could no longer be an instrument of statecraft—rather, the survival of states required that there be no war at all.
The Cold War could have produced a hot war that might have ended human life on the planet. But because the fear of such a war turned out to be greater than all of the differences that separated the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies, there was now reason for hope that it would never take place.
At stake was the issue that had divided Disraeli’s two nations: how best to govern industrializing societies in such a way as to benefit all of the people who lived within them.
Lenin, following Marx, assumed the incompatibility of class interests: because the rich would always exploit the poor, the poor had no choice but to supplant the rich. Wilson, following Adam Smith, assumed the opposite: that the pursuit of individual interests would advance everyone’s interests, thereby eroding class differences while benefiting both the rich and the poor.
“We have, on the whole, more liberty and less equality than Russia has,” one observer wrote in 1943. “Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or of equality is a source of unending debate.”
To succeed as an alternative, the American ideology could not simply show that communism suppressed freedom. It would also have to demonstrate that capitalism could sustain it.
And Watergate was just the tip of an iceberg, for over the next two decades the course of the Cold War itself would be driven by a force that went beyond state power: the recovery, within an international system that had long seemed hostile to it, of a common sense of equity. Morality itself, in the evolving Alice-in-Wonderland-like Cold War game, was becoming a mallet.
They came as well now from a growing insistence that the rule of law—or at least basic standards of human decency—should govern the actions of states, as well as those of the individuals who resided within them.
“The greatest problem for the human species,” the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, as early as 1784, “is that of attaining a civil society which can administer universal justice.”
And so the Cold War transformed American leaders into Machiavellians. Confronted with “so many who are not good,” they resolved “to learn to be able not to be good” themselves, and to use this skill or not use it, as the great Italian cynic—and patriot—had put it, “according to necessity.”
THE YEAR 1989 marked the 200th anniversary of the great revolution in France that swept away the ancien régime, and with it the old idea that governments could base their authority on a claim of inherited legitimacy. Even as the celebrations were taking place, another revolution in Eastern Europe was sweeping away a somewhat newer idea: that governments could base their legitimacy on an ideology that claimed to know the direction of history.
But the currents that cause historical drift will carry a certain meaning, since they will partly shape what is to come. So will drifters who hoist sails, rig rudders, and thereby devise the means of getting themselves from where they are to where they hope to go.
for the first time in history no one could be sure of winning, or even surviving, a great war. Like the barbed wire along the Hungarian border, war itself—at least major wars fought between major states—had become a health hazard, and therefore an anachronism.
For all of these reasons, then, the world came closer than ever before to reaching a consensus, during the Cold War, that only democracy confers legitimacy. That too was a break from the determinisms of empires, imposed ideologies, and the arbitrary use of force to sustain authoritarian rule.
The binoculars of a distant future will confirm this, for had the Cold War taken a different course there might have been no one left to look back through them. That is something. To echo the Abbé Sieyès when asked what he did during the French Revolution, most of us survived.
