Homework answers / question archive / The World the Cold War Made Odd Arne Westad As an international system of states, the Cold War ended on that cold and gray December day in Moscow when Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Soviet Union out of existence

The World the Cold War Made Odd Arne Westad As an international system of states, the Cold War ended on that cold and gray December day in Moscow when Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Soviet Union out of existence

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The World the Cold War Made Odd Arne Westad As an international system of states, the Cold War ended on that cold and gray December day in Moscow when Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Soviet Union out of existence. But the ideological Cold War, which predated this state system by almost two generations, disappeared only in part. Granted, Communism in its Marxist-Leninist form had ceased to exist as a practical ideal for how to organize society. But on the US side, not so much changed on that day in December 1991. American foreign policy rolled on, unperturbed by any significant adjustments in strategic vision or political aims. The Cold War was over, and the United States had won it. But most Americans still believed that they could only be safe if the world looked significantly more like their own country and if the world’s governments abided by the will of the United States. By almost every measure, the ideas and assumptions built up over generations stayed wholly unreformed, despite the disappearance of a major external threat. Instead of a more limited and therefore achievable US foreign policy, the majority of policy-makers from either party believed this was a unipolar moment, where the United States could, at minimal cost, act on its urges. US post–Cold War triumphalism came in two versions. One could be called the Clinton version, which emphasized US-style capitalist prosperity and market values on a global scale. Its lack of specific purpose in international affairs was striking, as was its lack of discipline in achieving even its economic aims. Instead of building broad and stable frameworks for the conduct of US foreign policy, through the UN, the international monetary institutions, and long-term agreements with other Great Powers (in general China and Russia), the Clinton Administration concentrated on its prosperity agenda. Its political instincts in doing so, at home at least, were probably right: Americans were tired of the international campaigns of the past and wanted to enjoy what some called “the peace dividend.” But internationally the 1990s was a lost opportunity for institutionalizing cooperation, as it was for using the peace dividend globally to combat disease, poverty, and inequality. The most glaring examples of these omissions were former Cold War battlefields like Afghanistan, Congo, or Nicaragua, where the United States—or most others for that matter—could not have cared less about what happened immediately after the Cold War was over. The second form of US post–Cold War triumphalism could be called the Bush version. Where Clinton emphasized prosperity, Bush emphasized predominance. In between, of course, stands 9/11. It is possible that the Bush version would never have come into being if it were not for the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington carried out by Islamist fanatics—in fact by a renegade faction of one of the US Cold War alliances. What is clear is that the Cold War experience conditioned the response of the United States to these atrocities. Instead of a combination of targeted military strikes and global police cooperation, which would have been the most sensible reaction, the Bush Administration chose to use the unipolar moment to lash out at its enemies and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. These actions had no meaning in a strategic sense, in effect creating two twenty-first-century colonies under the rule of a Great Power with no appetite for or interest in colonial rule. Most independent observers with any experience of the two countries told Washington that the occupations would lead to more Islamist activity, not less. But the United States did not act out of strategic purpose. It acted because its people, understandably, were angry and fearful. And it acted because it could. The direction of the actions were decided by Bush’s foreign policy advisers, people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, who all thought of the world mainly in Cold War terms. They stressed power projection, territorial control, and regime change, in cases where the combination of regional alliance-building, strict economic embargos, international policing, and punitive air strikes would have done the job more effectively. Put together, the 1990s and 2000s were as if the United States had lost a global purpose—the Cold War—and not yet found a new one. In the meantime, old habits and ways of thinking remained in place, more or less unchanged. There are those, of course, who would insist that the United States cannot behave internationally in any other manner. Because of its distinctly ideological character as a nation, founded on values and political principles rather than on a long heritage of common culture and language, it is in itself a kind of permanent Cold War against all opponents. The United States cannot get a Gorbachev moment of introspection and doubt, it is claimed, because such questioning of the purpose of the nation would go against the very being of America. The post–Cold War era was therefore not an aberration but a confirmation of an absolute historical purpose for the United States, in which the Cold War was just one episode and where global hegemony or defeat are the only two possible outcomes. Those who claim such consistency in the international role of the United States are almost certainly wrong. Its foreign policies have, after all, shifted over time, dependent on domestic concepts of political purpose, military capabilities, and actual foreign threats. It could be argued, and I would agree, that the democratic promise of the United States—unfulfilled as it has often been—negates such a determinism. But the lack of self-reflection and specific debate, which Cold War triumphalism gave rise to, meant that necessary changes in policy after the Cold War were more difficult to carry out. Such a view is not arguing against the long-term significance of ideology in US foreign policy, which I have written about at great length in this book and elsewhere. But it is to see US post–Cold War rudderlessness as a consequence of a lack of imaginative leadership, not as something essential or predetermined. Some people would say that asking for a post–Cold War reorientation of US foreign policy was asking too much, and that critiques of triumphalism are too easy. The United States, after all, won the Cold War, and therefore would have little demand for altering its course. The USSR needed Gorbachev’s reforms, and collapsed when they failed. But the United States had no use for such wholesale changes. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But such a position takes far too narrow a view of the US Cold War experience. Like its enemy, the United States had its portion of Cold War successes and failures. It is just that the balance sheet came out differently, and better, than that of the other side. Post–Cold War mythologies, often employed, for instance, with regard to Iraq and Afghanistan, and, I am sure, other conflicts in the future, stress Reagan’s military buildup and willingness to confront the USSR as the root cause of the US Cold War victory. This book has stressed, even (or maybe especially) for the Reagan era, long-term alliances, technological advances, economic growth, and the willingness to negotiate as more important weapons in the US arsenal. Whatever direction the thinking goes in, it is clear that the United States failed to use the better lessons of how it conducted the Cold War in order to get a grip on its role in the post–Cold War era. This book has shown that the main reason the Cold War ended was that the world as a whole was changing. From the 1970s on, global economic transformations were taking place, which first privileged the United States but then provided increasing advantages for China and other Asian countries. Gradually, over the course of the generation that has passed since the Cold War, the United States can less and less afford global predominance. Increasingly, it has to position itself to work with others within a multipolar constellation of states. The self-indulgence of the 1990s and the failed attempts at rearranging the Islamic world by force of the 2000s meant that the United States squandered many chances to prepare for a new century in which its relative power will be reduced. Lessons from the Cold War indicate that its main aim should have been to tie others into the kinds of principles for international behavior that the United States would like to see long term, especially as its own power diminishes. Instead the United States did what declining Superpowers often do: engage in futile, needless wars far from its borders, in which short-term security (or even convenience) is mistaken for longterm strategic goals. The US preoccupation with absolute security (which cannot be had) and cheap oil, which was, at best, a limited fix, led it to disregard the broader picture, especially as far as Asia was concerned. The consequence is a United States that is less prepared than it could have been to deal with the big challenges of the future: the rise of China and India, the transfer of economic power from West to East, or systemic tests such as climate change and epidemics. If the United States won the Cold War, as I think it did, then the Soviet Union, or rather Russia, lost it, and lost it big. The main reason this happened was that its political leaders, in the Communist Party, did not give its own population a political, economic, or social system that was fit for purpose. The Soviet peoples had sacrificed immensely during the twentieth century in an attempt at building a state and society of which they could be proud. The vast majority of citizens had believed that their hard work and defense of their achievements had created both a Superpower with a global reach and a better future for themselves. The ability to believe in improvement under Soviet rule, which would also be the pinnacle of Russian achievement, kept doubts away for the majority, even for those who ought to have known better. The crimes of the Soviet state were ignored by rulers and ruled alike, in a mutual conspiracy of silence. Then, in the 1980s, it all came crashing down. Conditions at home got worse, not better. The state, which many had thought to be near omnipotent, failed at carrying out even the simplest tasks. Afghanistan and the cost of international isolation deprived the young of the future they wanted. And when necessary reform set in under Gorbachev, it too failed to deliver the progress that citizens craved. Although many Soviets embraced the freedom to speak openly, to vote, to form organizations, to practice their religion, or to watch films and read literature that had been banned, there was a gaping hole at the core of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Without bread, what freedom?, some of them asked, increasingly often.1 And then the Communist Party self-destructed and the Soviet government suddenly was no more. With the exception of the Baltic states, independence came to the Soviet republics not as a preexisting demand from below, but more as an effect of the ongoing Soviet collapse. After December 1991 fifteen republics, all former parts of the USSR, suddenly had to find their own way in the world. Nationalism came to most of them as a justification for national independence, not the other way around. In that way the collapse of the Soviet Union was indeed a case of decolonization, reminiscent of what had happened to the British or French empires. No wonder that almost all of the post-Soviet states struggle with high levels of ethnic and political tension even after a generation of sovereignty. It was worst for Russia itself. The collapse left Russians feeling déclassée, robbed of their position, whether they lived in Russia itself or were among the many who inhabited other new post-Soviet states. One day they had been the elite in a Superpower. The next they had neither purpose nor position. Materially things were bad, too. Old people did not get their pensions. Some starved to death. Malnutrition and alcoholism reduced the average life span for a Russian man from sixty-six in 1985 to less than fifty-eight ten years later. To Russians used to a remarkable degree of (sometimes depressing) stability, theft, violence, and pornographic movies seemed to be the greatest achievements of post-Soviet freedom. Among the thefts was one that will safely qualify as the raid of the century. This was the privatization of Russian industry and of its natural resources. Privatization had to come, some of its defenders say. After the USSR collapsed, its planned economy was moribund. But even if one accepts this argument, the way privatization happened was indefensible. As the socialist state was being dismantled, ownership of Russia’s riches was taken over by a new oligarchy emerging from party institutions, planning bureaus, and centers of science and technology. Instead of being used to cure some of the country’s many ills, resources were given away to the well-connected, especially among the friends and supporters of President Boris Yeltsin. Value created by generations was transferred to individuals who had no connection with the local community (but plenty of connections with those in power). Very often the new owners stripped their possessions of what they could sell and closed down whatever production was left. Unemployment rose from zero to 30 percent within three years. And all this happened while the West applauded Yeltsin’s economic reform. In hindsight, at least, it is clear that the economic transition to capitalism was a catastrophe for most Russians. It is also clear that the West should have dealt with post–Cold War Russia better than it did. It is hard, however, to specify what alternative paths would have looked like. The key, I think, would have been the realization, so often lacking in the 1990s, that Russia would under all circumstances remain a crucial state in any international system because of its sheer size. It would therefore have been in the interest of the West, and especially the Europeans, to begin integrating the country into European security and trade arrangements as soon as possible after 1991. Such an approach would have demanded a lot of money and even more patience, given the chaos that reigned in Russia. Some argue that it would have been politically impossible, both within the West and within Russia itself. An effort the size of the Marshall Plan was certainly not in the offing. But both the West and Russia would have been considerably more secure today if the chance for Russia to join the European Union and possibly also NATO in some form had at least been kept open in the 1990s. Instead Russia was kept out of the processes of military and economic integration that eventually extended all the way to its borders. It has given Russians the sense of being outcasts and has left the country sulking at Europe’s door. In turn, this has given credence to Russian jingoists and bigots, such as its current president Vladimir Putin, who see all the disasters that have befallen the country over the past generation as part of some preconceived US plan to reduce and isolate it. Putin’s authoritarianism and bellicosity have been sustained by genuine popular support. Most Russians would like to believe that all that has happened to them is someone else’s fault, instead of dealing with the immense problems in Russian society and in the Russian state themselves. The shocks of the 1990s have given way to a peculiar Russian form of uninhibited cynicism, which not only encompasses a deep distrust of their fellow citizens, but sees long-term, effective conspiracies against themselves everywhere in the world, often contrary to fact and reason. Over half of all Russians now believe Leonid Brezhnev was their best leader in the twentieth century, followed by Lenin and Stalin. Gorbachev is at the bottom of the list.2 For others around the world, the end of the Cold War undoubtedly came as a relief. With the threat of global nuclear annihilation gone, one of the big challenges to human existence had been removed, or at least suspended. There was also reason to hope, especially during the 1990s, that Great Power interventionism would be reduced, and that principles of sovereignty and selfdetermination would be respected. Europe and Japan had gained much from the Cold War itself, as had China in its latter phase. The division of Europe, and of Germany, had been a tragedy, as had the imposition of dictatorial regimes in the East. But the international system had given Europe almost fifty years of peace, unknown there during the first part of the century. And protected by that peace, resilient societies had grown up that were able to handle post–Cold War transformations remarkably well, including the unsparing transition to capitalism in the East and the unification of Germany, the biggest single project of the post–Cold War era. Japan, shorn of the distinct international economic advantages that the Cold War era had bestowed upon it, entered a period of low growth. But it did so from a very high level of development, which in 1995 saw the country’s GDP per capita still stand at more than 30 percent above that of the United States. “If this is a recession,” commented an African friend of mine, living in Tokyo, “we want one, too!” China is often seen as one of the main beneficiaries of the Cold War. This is not entirely true, of course. The country saw imposed on it a European-style Marxist-Leninist dictatorship that was mostly out of tune with its needs. The result, during the Maoist era, were some of the most terrible crimes of the Cold War, in which millions died. But during the 1970s and 1980s, Deng Xiaoping’s China benefitted massively from its de facto alliance with the United States both in terms of security and development programs. The end of the Cold War came as a complete shock to the Chinese leaders, who suddenly realized that they—in part due to their own efforts combatting the Soviets—would be left to face the Americans in a unipolar world. From the Chinese perspective the wrong Superpower collapsed: they had believed that, at least long-term, the USSR was in ascendance, while the United States was declining. From the 1990s on, the Chinese Communist Party was terrified that US influence would subvert its rule at home and hem it in abroad, including among its Asian neighbors. In the multipolar world that is now establishing itself, it seems likely that the United States and China will be the strongest powers. Unless they stumble at home, and both may easily do so, their competition for influence in Asia will define the outlook for the world. But the US relationship with China, or with Russia for that matter, is unlikely to develop into any form of Cold War. Both have political systems very different from the United States (or from each other). But both China and Russia are well integrated into the capitalist world system, and many of their leaders’ interests are linked to further integration. Unlike the USSR, these people are not likely to seek isolation or global confrontation. They will attempt to nibble away at US interests and dominate within their regions. But neither are, by themselves, willing or capable to institute global ideological conflict or militarized alliance systems. Rivalries, most certainly, which may lead to conflicts or even localized wars, but not of the Cold War kind. Throughout the Cold War, it was the battleground regions that suffered most. Korea, Indochina, Afghanistan, much of Africa and Central America were left devastated. Some recovered, but for others devastation left cynicism in its wake. US Cold War clients may have been best at sheer plunder. Just dictators whose names start with the letter M—Mobutu (Congo), Marcos (Philippines), and Mubarak (Egypt)—among them amassed fortunes of an estimated $17 billion, according to recent estimates. But Soviet clients were not far behind. Angola, one of the countries most ravaged by the Cold War, could have been among the wealthiest parts of the world due to its mineral and energy resources. But today most of its population remain desperately poor. Meanwhile, the daughter of the president is reported to be the richest woman in Africa. Her net fortune is estimated at around $3 billion. The ease with which many former Marxists adapted themselves to a post–Cold War market system begs the question whether this had been an avoidable conflict in the first place. What is clear is that the outcome was not worth the sacrifice, not in Angola, but probably not in Vietnam, Nicaragua, or for that matter Russia either. “If I had to do it over again,” confessed Bulgaria’s long-time Communist boss Todor Zhivkov, “I would not even be a Communist, and if Lenin were alive today he would say the same thing.… I must now admit that we started from the wrong basis, from the wrong premise. The foundation of socialism was wrong. I believe that at its very conception the idea of socialism was stillborn.”3 Even among those who were on the winning side the costs and risks have sometimes seemed too high: in lives, in expenditure, and in the threat of nuclear war. But was it avoidable back in the 1940s, when the Cold War went from an ideological conflict to a permanent military confrontation? While post–World War II clashes and rivalries were certainly unavoidable—Stalin’s policies alone were enough to produce those—it is hard to argue that a global Cold War that was to last for almost fifty years and threaten the obliteration of the world could not in any form have been avoided. There were points along the way when leaders could have held back, especially on military rivalry and the arms race. But the ideological conflict that was at the bottom of the post–World War II tension made such sensible thinking very difficult to achieve. In that sense, it was its ideological origins that made the Cold War special and hyperdangerous. People of goodwill on both sides believed that they were representing an idea whose very existence was threatened. It led them to take otherwise avoidable risks with their own lives and the lives of others. Another big question is whether the Cold War actually was, as one key book title has it, “the division of the world.”4 Some argue that state leaders (and historians) were too blinded by the Cold War as an organizing principle for a period of history to see the diversity and hybridity that went on beside it. This book has argued that although the Cold War between capitalism and socialism influenced most things in the twentieth century, it did not decide everything. The two world wars, the Great Depression, decolonization, and the transfer of wealth and power from West to East may well have happened even without the Cold War (but obviously not in the form that they eventually got). Likewise, some polities refused to take part, at least fully. India, for instance, was in many ways established as an anti–Cold War state. Others had systems that allowed for significant levels of state control while remaining capitalist in essence, such as in Scandinavia. Capitalist Norway has more state ownership of companies than socialist China. And, percentage-wise, Sweden’s government spends two times more than China’s out of the country’s total GDP. And yet the Cold War did influence most things because of the centrality of its ideologies and the intensity of its adherents. A number of countries and movements went to war against US-led capitalism in the twentieth century. By 1945 they had been defeated, Germany and Japan first among them. Sitting in his bunker in Berlin in 1945, just before killing himself, even Hitler admitted that in the future “there will remain in the world only two Great Powers capable of confronting each other—the United States and Soviet Russia.”5 The reason why this was so clear to everyone was not just the strategic capabilities of the two states. It was also because each symbolized a distinct way of organizing society and the state. The United States was in 1945 and throughout the Cold War the more powerful of the two. But the USSR was on most counts a credible challenge right up to the end. The most important reason why the Cold War affected everyone in the world was the threat of nuclear destruction that it implied. In this sense, nobody was safe from the Cold War. The greatest victory of Gorbachev’s generation was that nuclear war was avoided. Historically, most Great Power rivalries end in a cataclysm. The Cold War did not (which is the reason why I can write about these events now from the relative safety of my Harvard study). Even so, there is no doubt that the nuclear arms race was profoundly dangerous. On a couple of occasions, we were much closer to nuclear devastation than anyone but a few people realized. Nuclear war could have broken out by accident, or as a result of intelligence failures. When awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, the organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War outlined the medical consequences: “A horror-stricken and dust-covered Earth, burned bodies of the dead and wounded, and people slowly dying of radiation disease.”6 Or, in pop culture, Depeche Mode sang about the two-minute warning before destruction and of the world afterward: “The dawning of another year… one in four still here.”7 Why were leaders willing to take such unconscionable risks with the fate of the earth? Why did so many people believe in ideologies which the same people at other times would have realized could not hold all the solutions they were looking for? The answer, I think, is that the Cold War world, like the world today, obviously had a lot of ills. As injustice and oppression became more visible in the twentieth century, people—and especially young people—felt the need to remedy these ills. Cold War ideologies offered immediate solutions to complex problems. For most, it was a bit like buying a car (which I happen to be doing at the moment). In my heart, I would like a bit of Volvo, and a bit of Ford, and a bit of Toyota. But I cannot have that, since manufacturers refuse to sell their new cars in parts. And, even if they did, I am not an expert mechanic. Though I trust (or at least hope) that the automakers’ mechanics are top-notch. The Cold War was a bit like that. Most people had to take what was available, even if it conflicted with specific needs or even with common sense. What did not change with the end of the Cold War were the conflicts between the haves and the have-nots in international affairs. Now in some parts of the world such conflicts are made more intense by the upsurge of religious and ethnic movements, which threaten to destroy whole communities. Unrestrained by Cold War universalisms, which at least pretended that all people could enter their promised paradise, these groups are palpably exclusionist or racist. Some, in the Middle East, Europe, south Asia, or in the United States, remind us a bit about what the world was like before the Cold War became an international system. Stakes are higher now, not least because of weapons of mass destruction. And solutions are even more difficult to find, though most realize that at some point negotiations and compromise will have to come into play. But compromise is hard, because supporters of these groups or states believe that great injustices have been done to them in the past, which somehow justify their present outrages. Before, during, and after the Cold War, everyone wants their place in the sun. A chance to be counted. Respect for what they consider as theirs, whether in religion, lifestyle, or territory. Often people, and especially young people, need to be part of something bigger than themselves or even their families, some immense idea to devote one’s life to. The Cold War shows what happens when such notions get perverted for the sake of power, influence, and control. But that does not mean that these very human urges are in themselves worthless. On the contrary, if the plan had been to heal the sick, abolish poverty, or give everyone a chance in life without threatening the world with nuclear annihilation, then we would probably have summed up much of the efforts that went into the Cold War as good. History is complex. We do not always know where ideas will lead us. Better, then, to consider carefully the risks we are willing to take to achieve good results, in order not to replicate the terrible toll that the twentieth century took in its search for perfection. (From Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017)