Document – Two Views of Why the Cold War Ended: Stephen Sestanovich, “Did the West Undo the East?” (1993), and Wade Huntley, “Who Won the Cold War?” (1993)

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WHO WON THE COLD WAR? The answer is not as obvious as public debate would make it seem. In fact, the question is better framed. Why did the cold war end?

Scholars have offered various explanations for both the genesis and the ending of the cold war, but the general public discussion has remained over-simplified, a dangerous situation if our policy makers are to avoid in the future some of the mistakes of the past. Scholars must press for a more sophisticated understanding of the costs of our foreign policy during the decades of the cold war. In doing so, it is useful to reflect briefly on why the cold war began.

The cold war emerged from the smoke and ashes of World War II. which left the United States and the Soviet Union as the two superpowers. Tensions between the two countries soon congealed, the Iron Curtain fell, and the parameters of the next era of world politics were established.

Three features distinguished the cold war from previous great-power structures.

First, the shift from a multipolar to a bipolar world centering on the United States and the U. S. S. R. altered the dynamics of great-power behavior by hardening alliances and intensifying rivalries. Second, the availability of nuclear weapons absorbed the attention of the superpowers; in retrospect, the prospect of global nuclear war induced great caution among the leaders of both countries, perhaps also preventing a large-scale conventional war between them. Finally, the United States and the U. S. S. R. were set apart not only by their competition for power, but also by an unprecedented degree of ideological division. The two states differed on the most basic aspirations of the human experience and the political principles necessary to pursue them. It is this feature of the cold war that is most crucial in understanding why and how it ended.

The importance of this ideological divergence was apparent to sensitive observers from the beginning. We need look no further than George F. Kennan. the Department of State official who in 1947 originated the idea of “containment” of the Soviet Union, the principle that became a touchstone of U. S. policy throughout the cold war. Mr. Kennan stressed the importance of Communist ideology in anticipating Soviet behavior: Because Soviet officials believed their social and political principles would triumph over the long term, the U.S.S.R. could afford to be patient. Thus. Mr. Kennan expected Soviet leaders, unlike Napoleon or Hitler, to be willing to yield in particular encounters, but to be less likely to be discouraged by such defeats. The contest would be decided not by a key victory at some juncture, but by endurance of will over time.

If the United States could muster such will and sustain it over the long run, ultimately it would prevail. The reason was not simply U. S. military superiority over the U. S. S. R., but differences in the organizing principles of the two societies—the very differences in ideology that formed the core of the cold-war rivalry. World War II was but a few years past, and already Mr. Kennan perceived the Soviet Union, unlike the United States, to be a nation at war with itself. Communist power and authority had been purchased only, as he wrote, “at a terrible cost in human life and human hopes and energies.” The Soviet people were “physically and spiritually tired,” at the limits of their endurance. Thus, he concluded, “Soviet power . . . bears within it the seeds of its own decay.”

It is well to remember Mr. Kennan’s foresight in considering current explanations for the demise of the Soviet Union. Many scholars and intellectuals seem to be taking the end of the cold war for granted, but what little scholarly attention has been paid to why it ended has not filtered into public forums. At least four possible explanations have been offered, only two of which have found their way into mainstream discourse in the United States.

Paul Anderson For The Chronicle

The first explanation is that the collapse of Soviet power is directly attributable to the confrontational policies pursued by the Reagan and Bush Administrations. In other words, the Republicans won the cold war. In this view, the massive increases in defense spending and uncompromising stances toward the “evil empire” inaugurated in the early 1980’s pressed the Soviet Union to the wall, beyond its material capacity to respond in kind.

The second popular explanation, mostly propounded by Democrats, is best termed the “me too” explanation. It holds that Presidents Reagan and Bush were not the first to confront the Soviets, and it trots out hard-line rhetoric and policies from the Truman to Kennedy to Carter Administrations. Adherents want to insure that history remembers that both parties’ leaders had fine moments of hardheaded intransigence.

Lost in this feeding frenzy of credit-taking have been two other possible explanations. The first is that the hard-line postures adopted by the United States throughout the cold war actually did more harm than good. This view, although normally associated in the popular media with out-of-touch liberals and pacifists, has received respectable scholarly attention. It holds that had it not been for wild-eyed anti-Communism on the American side, the Soviet Union might have collapsed under its own weight much sooner. The stridency and belligerence emanating from Washington over the last decades had little effect but to strengthen hard-line views in the Kremlin.

George Kennan himself endorsed this view in a New York Times opinion piece last year, saying the “greatest damage” was done not by the military policies themselves, but by the tone of those policies, which produced a “braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime.”

A final explanation concerning the end of the cold war is that the policies of the United States, in substance as well as tone, were not really important at all. This idea has rarely surfaced in public discussion, nor has it received much scholarly attention apart from Soviet specialists, who have long stressed the importance of domestic political considerations in determining Soviet behavior. The United States, although obsessed with its own domestic political processes, has paid remarkably little attention to similar factors in the Soviet Union. From this viewpoint, the only role that the United States played was indirect, in the alternative it presented to Communism by its mere existence. It was simply the success of American political institutions, rather than the policies promulgated through them, that set a standard that the Soviet Union could not match.

Let us push the ramifications of this final hypothesis a bit further. If Soviet-style Communism was consumed by the poverty of its own ideological principles, how must our own past policies be judged? Perhaps it was not only our belligerent rhetoric that was extraneous to the downfall of the U.S.S.R. It may also be that we needlessly spent billions of dollars on high-technology weapons systems and tragically sacrificed tens of thousands of American lives resisting Communism in faraway jungles. We set out to break the back of Soviet Communism, but simply broke our own bank instead.

The cost of the cold war to the United States was perhaps even more spiritual than economic. In 1947, Mr. Kennan singled out one standard above even military prowess or economic muscle that the cold war would test: “To avoid destruction, the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”

Now, with the cold war behind us, can it truly be said that we passed this test? The paranoid red-baiting of Joseph McCarthy, the cynicism of secret CIA-sponsored coups of elected regimes, the breached trust of Watergate, the duplicity of the Iran-Contra affair all add up to a weighty and depressing litany of failures. Recent revelations that secret Bush Administration policies, rooted in cold-war logic, contributed to the military buildup of Iraq simply add to this sorry score. Too often both our leaders and the public were willing to compromise American principles and ideals (not to mention laws) in the name of fighting Communism.

THE UNITED STATES has emerged from the cold war burdened by debt and poverty and carrying numerous scars from wounds to our cherished institutions—self-inflicted for the sake of superpower competition. In turning the nation into a hard-line cold-war combatant, we undermined our “best traditions.” Had U. S. leaders and citizens demonstrated greater faith in the strength of the nation’s founding principles, it might have emerged from the contest of the cold war sooner, leaner and meaner economically, brighter of spirit, with its democratic institutions and values far stronger.

Who, then, really won the cold war? Not the Republicans, nor the Democrats. Considering what might have been, the United States was the loser in the cold war, not the winner.

If this conclusion is valid, it suggests some crucial lessons for the future. The United States now shoulders a burden of world leadership perhaps unprecedented in its history. Realists are right in suggesting that, despite the most benign intentions, this new preeminence could generate more new enemies than friends. To minimize this likelihood, we must reinforce what has always been the most important American task: to hold out, chiefly by our own example, the beacon illuminating the path to freedom.

In the current time of transition, scholars have a special responsibility. Not only must we remain unstinting in our quest to understand our history, but we also must do more than we have to disseminate our knowledge and understanding to the rarefied chambers of Washington and to the public, as well. Scholars must discover, and everyone learn, the deeper lessons of the cold war—or we may lose the post–cold war as well.

Review

1. 1) According to Professor Huntley, what caused the Cold War? Why did the United States adopt the policy of containment?

2. 2) How and why did the Cold War end?

3. 3) What will be the long-term consequences of Cold War policies for the United States?