History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.
—Dwight David Eisenhower
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side.
—Nikita Khrushchev
For readers in the twenty-first century, even those who experienced some of the events described in this book, the Cold War has taken on a patina of antiquity. Scarcely had the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Soviet Empire headed toward dissolution when the world faced new challenges in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Africa, culminating in the shock of September 11, 2001. Suddenly the Cold War was transformed from the dynamic reality of everyday life during almost five decades into a closed episode with a seemingly definitive outcome.
This short book brings a new perspective to the history of the Cold War. I examine the US-Soviet rivalry as part of a global contest that began with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and ended seventy-four years later when the world’s first communist state collapsed. Although the conflict between the two Superpowers was the Cold War’s principal element, this study also includes the crucial role of allies, rivals, and bystanders, and it stresses the linkage between personalities, ideas, and events around the globe.
In earlier cold wars, among them the Anglo-Spanish conflict in the sixteenth century, the Anglo-French contest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Anglo-Russian clash in the nineteenth century (labeled the Great Game), the chief combatants faced each other directly on the battlefield but also indirectly, using espionage, propaganda, economic pressure, political subversion, and proxy wars. What made the twentieth-century Cold War unique were three key elements: the enormous nuclear arsenals accumulated by both sides; the role of political ideology,* which permeated almost every aspect of the combatants’ policies toward the other; and the solidification of Cold War institutions that provided leaders with unprecedented power but also limited their options.
Although the use of lethal weaponry predated the Cold War—in Europe’s imperial wars and in World Wars I and II there was mass killing of civilians and warriors—the advent of the atomic bomb utterly transformed international relations. Once both sides possessed weapons capable of not only destroying the other’s territory and population but also contaminating large parts of the earth, the Cold War developed into a rigid struggle driven by fear and a costly arms race. While nuclear weapons intensified several major Cold War crises, the threat of atomic warfare also served as a brake on the Superpowers.
The ideological chasm separating the USSR from the capitalist world was substantial. The Cold War began as a messianic contest. One side presented itself as a regime dedicated to removing economic and political exploitation and ushering in an era of international peace and brotherhood. The other side presented itself as dedicated to individual freedom, political democracy, and unfettered national and international markets. And both sides claimed that the other was a menace to their security and way of life. However, when the Cold War spread to the former colonial world in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and to Latin America, these core ideological principles became blurred. Vying for influence over near and far away clients, all with their own distinctive histories, political goals, and ancient quarrels, the Superpower rivalry was transformed into a conventional military struggle. And even in Europe—the Cold War’s heartland—the ideological Iron Curtain was permeable: orthodox socialism and capitalism continuously faced the challenges of religion and ethnic nationalism.
Although individual leaders’ decisions ultimately molded the course of the Cold War, these were subject to several internal and external factors. In the Soviet Union the Communist Party was the motor for political and international action, and in the United States there were two national political parties, but in both capitals economic interests exerted considerable influence. The leadership on both sides was also affected by a burgeoning military and intelligence apparatus as well as by the press and the intellectual elite. On the other hand, both sides were constrained by a web of sometimes competing domestic pressures and by their mounting international obligations.
Historical memories also played an important role in shaping Cold War decision making. The leaders of large and small states were intent on replicating past triumphs and avoiding (or undoing) earlier setbacks, and not unexpectedly these memories diverged sharply. For Western leaders the “lessons of Munich”* reinforced their reluctance to appease the Soviet Union, but for Moscow, Munich was a reminder of Western betrayal. Similarly, the early events of the Cold War, like the 1948–1949 Berlin blockade, handed down mixed messages to the next generation over the virtues of assertiveness over conciliation.
Studying the history of the Cold War offers us broader historical insights. Despite its unique characteristics this period was replete with instances of continuity in human affairs. For example, Russia’s rivalry with the Western powers dates back to the eighteenth century, America’s dominant relationship toward Latin America started at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the policy of forming coalitions against heavily armed rivals was practiced by Britain in the decades before World War I.
Cold War history also teaches us the importance of unanticipated events. Mao’s victory in China, Castro’s ascension in Cuba, and North Vietnam’s victory over the United States remind us of the powerful role of human agency in political affairs, as do the fierce resistance to the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, the rise of a national trade union in Poland, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Moreover, these events reveal the limits of wealth and military power, and even of the most sophisticated intelligence gathering.
Finally, the Cold War left its mark on global culture. Some of its political iconography, rhetoric, and practice had historical roots—for example, the embalmed communist leaders in Moscow, Beijing, and Hanoi. But there were also new words, sounds, images, and occurrences—ranging from “hawks” and “doves,” to the beeps of the Soviet space-satellite Sputnik in 1957 and the wondrous earth photograph taken by an Apollo 8 astronaut on December 24, 1968, to the massacre in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and the euphoria of Czechoslovakia’s peaceful “Velvet Revolution” later that year. In this way the Cold War produced its own legacy for the twenty-first century, one still to be understood from new perspectives.
Underlying this work is the old-fashioned conviction that history still greatly matters. Although we lack the ability to replicate yesterday’s events or fully comprehend the conditions under which our forerunners operated, historians have the obligation and the capacity to interrogate the past in order to increase our understanding of the world we inhabit today. In the case of the Cold War, our challenge is to sift a welter of testimonies and analyses in complete awareness that this effort will reap only preliminary conclusions but may nonetheless bring a measure of clarity.
* To be sure, the sixteenth-century Anglo-Spanish conflict, pitting a Protestant against a Catholic power, may be considered a forerunner in this respect.
* The September 1938 four-power conference, in which Britain and France, capitulating to Hitler’s threats, ceded strategic areas of Czechoslovakia to the Third Reich.