The Cold War

DANIEL SARGENT

The inhabitants of the Southern Hemisphere were the last to die, but their deaths were inevitable enough. After the radiation passed through the convergence zone where the winds of the hemispheres meet, it continued towards Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope.

This was how the Cold War ended - again and again and again. The above scenario is from On the Beach, a 1957 novel by Nevil Shute, but the variations were endless.¹ Nightmares of nuclear holocaust permeated the era of the Cold War. Thirty years after Shute's characters expired, Jim and Hilda Boggs, a fictional British couple, survived atomic war in the animated film “When the Wind Blows,” only to succumb to the nuclear winter that followed it. How plausible were such scenarios? None occurred, but the scientists who built the atomic bomb feared the prospect. As if to forewarn, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created a “Doomsday Clock” that estimated the probability of apocalypse; the closer to midnight the clock's hands moved, the greater its likelihood.^{[522] [523]} For much of the 1950s, it was two minutes to midnight; during the 1960s and 1970s, the risk of catastrophe waned, only to resurge in the early 1980s.

In reality, the finale was peaceful. When the Soviet Union abandoned Marxist-Leninism in the late 1980s, embracing political and economic reform, the Cold War ended in a fashion that few foresaw - with handshakes among leaders and the intercontinental delivery of economists, not a catastrophic exchange of missiles. This was an ideological victory, not a military triumph.

Insofar as endings shape meanings, historians should remember that the Cold War did not have to end as it did. Had the Cold War resulted in a fusillade of missiles, its historians might be inclined to emphasize its military aspects rather than the struggle of ideas - if any historians remained to write history, that is. Fortunately, the Cold War ended peacefully, leaving ample opportunity to debate its meanings.

What was the Cold War? Was it a geopolitical struggle between two military blocs? Or was it an ideological competition, a war of ideas more than arms? In fact, the Cold War entwined geopolitical and ideological aspects. An ideological disjuncture in the 1980s precipitated its conclusion, but it does not follow that ideas defined the Cold War from the outset. The Cold War's rationales varied, and a fluctuating combination of ideological and geopolitical elements made it a distinctive conflict.

Situating the Cold War in a world-historical context, meanwhile, opens questions of a different kind. Was the Cold War ever so encompassing as it appeared in the nightmares of atomic extinction such as Nevil Shute's? It may be tempting to conflate the Cold War with the international history of the post-World War II world, as textbooks often do.

Making the Cold War

“The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude.”^[526] So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville of the Americans and the Russians in 1835. Besides sociological generalization, Tocqueville offered a prediction. “Each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies ofhalf the globe.” Oft quoted, these words seemed prophetic in the era of the Cold War. Since its end, Tocqueville has looked less prescient, but he still offers clues as to the Cold War's nature. Conflict between America and Russia, he tells us, was ordained by allocations of power in the international system and by ideological differences for which culture, institutions, and history all accounted. A combination of ideology and geopolitics, in other words, made the Cold War.

Configurations of power and the rivalry of ideas may explain “why,” but are they insufficient to tell us “when” and “how”? Answering these questions require us to situate the Cold War's origins in the conjuncture that the twentieth-century's world wars and the Great Depression created. World War I exploded a system of economic globalization that took shape in the last decades of the nineteenth century. After the Great War, the European powers sought to reconstruct the old system, while the United States tried to reform it. In Russia, Vladimir Ilich Lenin seized control of the state and set out to make revolution from above, contending that political power would enable his Bolshevik Party to create the communist society that Karl Marx had foretold in social and economic conditions unfavorable to proletarian revolution.

The recasting of the pre-1914 international order did not endure long. The Great Depression shattered the international economy and sent some nations scurrying for alternatives. Italy, Japan, and Germany rejected liberal­ism and embraced the politics of nationalism and the economics of autarky. The British and the Americans abandoned the gold standard and retreated towards protectionism. The Soviet Union, having oscillated between engage­ment and autarky in the 1920s, opted for autarky in the first Five Year Plan (1928-32). German and Japanese geopolitical ambitions soon trans­formed the world crisis of the 1930s into World War II, a vast and violent cataclysm. Besides killing one-and-a-quarter percent of humanity, World War II left vacuums of authority at its end, as Japanese and German imperial projects crumbled. For Europe, the war marked a stunning reversal. The center of global power since the Industrial Revolution, Europe was at the war's end broken and bereft, its future uncertain.

Europe's catastrophe marked the passage from an era of great powers to the age of the superpowers. Coined in 1943-44, the term applied initially to the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union.^[527] Britain's claim was tenuous, which left two. It did not follow that the United States and the Soviet Union were equal. Vaster in territory, the Soviet Union lagged behind in economic might, technological prowess, and the atomic bomb, which the Americans tested in July 1945. The two had combined forces to defeat Germany in the Second World War, but their relations remained tense.

By 1945, Joseph Stalin had led the Soviet Union for two decades. The dominant figure in Soviet politics and foreign policy, Stalin viewed the capitalist world with a suspicion that Anglo-American intervention during the Russian Civil War (1917-22) had not allayed.

Of the war's victors, the United States was the most victorious. Having prevailed in Europe and the Pacific, only the United States among the world's great powers was in 1945 a global military power. Moreover, Washington monopolized the atomic bomb. Still, it was in the arena of economic power that US preeminence was clearest. At the war's end, the United States alone produced 60 percent of the industrialized world's economic output. President Harry Truman in August 1945 anointed the United States “the most powerful nation, perhaps, in all history.”^[529] Few could disagree, but what did the Americans seek to accomplish from the pedestal of preeminence? During the war, policy planners under President Franklin Roosevelt prepared blue­prints for the postwar world. These envisaged restoring, stabilizing, and reforming the international order that had imploded in the 1930s.^[530] The American design for the postwar future reflected the lessons of the recent past. Free trade would be restored, the 1930s having exhibited the links between economic protectionism and international conflict, but new institu­tions, above all the IMF, would stabilize the international economy. The United Nations, a reincarnation of the failed League of Nations, would superintend collective security, but the United States and the other great powers would take special responsibility for keeping the peace.

The definition of the Cold War's frontiers did not await the war's end. When they met Stalin at Yalta in February 1945, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill conceded a Soviet sphere of influence in postwar Eastern Europe. This was a cynical gambit, and Roosevelt never reconciled it to his lofty hopes for a liberal peace in which human rights and self­determination would prevail. Roosevelt died in April 1945, and his successor Harry Truman lacked his capacity for holding contradictory ideas in suspension.¹¹ A straightforward Missourian who failed as a haberdasher but succeeded in the US Senate, Truman hoped to sustain Soviet-American cooperation. Friction nonetheless intensified during 1945. Stalin's refusal to hold free elections in Poland, which his Red Army now occupied, outraged the United States. When the US Congress terminated wartime aid to the USSR in September 1945, Stalin sensed a hostile move. A decisive rupture came in December 1945, when the Soviet Union announced that it would not participate in the international economic institutions established during the war. The move confirmed that the Soviet Union would not participate in the liberal world order that the United States sought to build. Within months, leaders on both sides were speaking of schism. Stalin's “Election Speech” of February 1946 marked a return to the anti-capitalist dogma of the 1930s. The next month, Winston Churchill declared that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe. It more-or-less followed the line where Soviet armies, fighting from the east, and Anglo-American forces, coming from the west, had divided Europe, atop the ruins of Hitler's fleeting empire.

Still, division did not make inevitable the consolidation of the parts into hostile blocs. This was an incremental process, and it took the rest of the 1940s to complete. Unveiled in 1947, the Marshall Plan was the foundational act in the creation of “the West” as an alliance and a category in international politics. Providing some $13 billion in American assistance, Marshall Aid served both economic and strategic purposes. The infusion of dollars bridged Europe's transatlantic trade deficits and enabled the international economy to function.¹² The Marshall Plan also clarified Europe's division. Opposition to it discredited Western Europe's communist parties, and Stalin's refusal to permit the East European countries to accept Marshall Aid confirmed Europe's division. Thereafter, the rupture widened. Where the Red Army ruled, Moscow Sovietized the East, overthrowing Czechoslovakia's coalition government in February 1948, for example, and replacing it with a Stalinist regime. The United States also worked to shape political outcomes within European nations. The CIA channeled funds to Italy's anti-communist par­ties, which helped to ensure the defeat of the powerful Partito Communista Italiano in the elections of April 1948. The Cold War thus came to define the limits of political diversity in Europe. Communist parties predominated in

and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (Oxford University Press, 1972), an older but foundational treatment.

12 Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952 (Cambridge University Press, 1987). More skeptical on the economic benefits is Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-1951 (Berkeley, ca: University of California, 1984). the East, with Moscow's support. Christian Democrats and Social Democrats prevailed in the West, competing in elections but united in opposition to communism. (Left-wingers who had encountered communists were often the fiercest anti-communists of all, as the career of Britain's Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin suggests.) The blocs were not impermeable, and defections did occur. One came in 1948 when Josip Tito, Yugoslavia's charismatic commu­nist leader, split with Stalin and opened a dialogue with the West. For the most part, however, the Cold War's geometry remained stable.

The fulcrum of Europe's Cold War was Germany, now defeated and divided into occupation zones. From 1947, the United States and Great Britain moved to incorporate their occupation zones into the Western Alliance. Stalin retaliated in the spring of 1948 by shutting down access to West Berlin, a western enclave in the Soviet zone. The Berlin Crisis sharpened Europe's division, but it also revealed the reluctance of the super­powers to use military force. The United States did not attempt to break the blockade by force but instead airlifted supplies to West Berlin. The crisis nonetheless militarized the Cold War. Early in 1949, the Western powers created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a permanent military alli­ance. Later that year, the Federal Republic of Germany was born, its feet planted in the West. Its formal integration into NATO in 1955 prompted the creation of the Warsaw Pact, the East Bloc's military alliance, the same year. With this, Europe's division into armed and militarized Cold War blocs was completed.

Europe's division was mostly peaceful; East Asia's would not be. Here, the dynamics were different. Japan had ruled parts of East Asia for decades, and the collapse of its empire left complex struggles for power. In Southeast Asia, where Japanese imperialism had displaced European regimes, these involved not only nationalist claimants but also the Europeans - the French in Indochina and the Dutch in Indonesia both sought to reimpose colonial rule. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union wanted East Asia to become a Cold War battleground. Both were content to neutralize flash points, and the United States in 1946 granted the Philippines independence, which struck a salutary contrast to Europe's colonial nostalgia. Still, the superpowers found themselves drawn, almost inexorably, into East Asia. To a considerable extent, however, local leaders made their own Cold War, as the experiences of China and Korea will attest.

China in 1945 exhibited manifold divisions. World War II left China between those parts that Japan had conquered - Taiwan, Manchuria, and coastal China - and the vast interior, where the Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists or Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of Mao Zedong vied. These two parties fought a decade-long civil war from 1927, but they came together as the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) began. Their United Front endured only as long as their common foe. With Japan's defeat, the CCP and KMT turned upon each other. Mao was a communist, and Chiang was connected in the United States, but both superpowers tried to remain aloof.The Soviet Union maintained working relations with the KMT, and the United States, while aiding Chiang, did not intervene against the CCP. Chinese protagonists resolved China's Civil War largely on their own terms. Better organized than the KMT, Mao's forces pressed forward. In 1949, the CCP secured control of China's mainland, exiling the KMT to Taiwan. That October, Mao declared the People's Republic of China. A momentous shift, Mao's triumph led to a formal alliance with the Soviet Union in February 1950 that transformed the Cold War's geopolitics.

Besides consolidating a communist bloc, the Sino-Soviet alliance encour­aged Kim Il-Sung, a Korean communist, to reunify Korea by force. Neither superpower was much invested in Korea, where Japan had ruled for half a century, but they both promoted Korean clients during the years of joint occupation that followed Japan's defeat, the Soviets in the north and the Americans in the south. After securing grudging support from Stalin, Kim attacked in June 1950. The United States organized an international effort to assist South Korea. The ensuing war claimed about 2.5 million lives, most of them Korean. After several months of movement and a decisive Chinese intervention on the side of the North Koreans, the fighting settled into a stalemate. Korea's plight resembled Eurasia's division, with a great deal more blood shed. More than a microcosm, the Korean War transformed the Cold War. Korea galvanized the Sino-Soviet alliance, and it prompted Japan's rehabilitation and integration into the Western Alliance. Other American commitments were formalized, including a military guarantee to Taiwan, a pact with Australia and New Zealand (ANZUS), and the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO). The Korean War, which continued until 1953, confirmed the world's division and militarized the Cold War. Still, with the Soviet Union reluctant to intervene directly and Washington deciding not to use nuclear weapons - after debating the possibility - Korea also defined the Cold War's limits.

By the end of the Korean War, the Cold War had become something more than a conflict between the superpowers and their allies: it had become a framework for organizing international relations. Bipolarity became a source of stability, at least so far as the superpowers were concerned. It was on the Cold War's periphery, in places like Korea, that instability and violence prevailed. An international system that linked internal and external politics, the Cold War became, in effect, the settlement that ended World War II. As such, it might be compared to earlier postwar orders. It was not a settlement-like those of 1815 and (less successfully) 1919 - in which shared values bound participants together.^[533] American planners had attempted to build a postwar order based upon liberal commitments to economic integration and political self-determination, but what emerged instead was something quite different: a world order based upon an antagonistic equili­brium that evolved, unplanned and unintended, in the years after 1945. On this accidental equipoise, the peace of the world now depended.

Waging the Cold War

After Korea, the Soviet Union and the United States waged an arms race that made the prospect of superpower conflict steadily more atrocious. The destructiveness of nuclear weapons increased fast. It took the Soviet Union four years (and some espionage) to mimic the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. By the mid 1950s, both superpowers were testing thermonuclear bombs far more powerful than these. Engineers were soon setting thermo­nuclear warheads atop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Suchweap- ons could not be stopped; the only defense against them was the probability of retaliation. The logic of mutual deterrence did not emerge overnight, however. Nor was it so symmetrical as the word mutual implies. What emerged in the Cold War's first fifteen years was an asymmetric balance whereby more plentiful US nuclear (or “strategic”) weapons offset the Soviet Union's abundant conventional forces but in which Soviet technical accom­plishments spurred the development of US strategic weaponry. Nuclear weapons differentiated the superpowers from other powers, except for the few that tested nuclear weapons of their own: Britain in 1952, France in 1960, China in 1964, and India in 1974. So long as their arsenals far exceeded all others, nuclear weapons consecrated the special role of the superpowers in the Cold War international system.

Contrasted with earlier arms races, such as the Anglo-German naval race that prefigured the First World War, the Soviet-American estrangement was remarkable. It did not lead to war but may have facilitated war's avoidance. The nuclear stalemate engendered what historian John Gaddis famously called the Cold War's “long peace.”^{[534] [535]} But it did not make war impossible. The Korean War might have ended differently. Had General MacArthur continued his campaign into China, as he proposed to do, he would have invited all-out war, perhaps involving nuclear bombs. Perhaps the most dangerous crisis of all came in 1962, when the Soviet Union decided to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. Moscow's reasoning was logical enough; insofar as the United States outreached the USSR in strategic weaponry, locating medium-range missiles on Cuba closed the nuclear gap. Soviet leaders anticipated neither the strength of the American response nor the narrowness of their own options. After pondering escalatory alternatives, President John F. Kennedy opted for a compromise that drew down forces on both sides. Had he followed the advice of his more hawkish advisors, it is possible, even probable, that a nuclear exchange would have ensued. The brush with disaster was chastening. After Cuba, leaders on both sides sought stability as a shared imperative. The 1963 installation of a communications link between the Kremlin and the White House - the iconic “red telephone” that was, in fact, neither red nor a telephone - symbolized the new mood and prefigured future collaboration to control the arms race and stabilize the Cold War.

Retreating from the brink did not mean that the Cold War was passing. On the contrary, the terrible prospect of nuclear war brought other aspects of the superpower competition to the fore, including the ideological conflict between Soviet communism and American liberal capitalism and, increas­ingly, the struggle for the Third World.1⁵

The ideological struggle proceeded at multiple scales. At the international scale, the Cold War began with the Soviet Union's repudiation of the open, liberal world order that the United States aspired to build. Over time, the war of ideas came to focus not on the international system, which was divided, but on the futures of particular societies. This Cold War would be fought within nation-states as much as between them. What defined the contending camps? Whereas American-style liberalism prioritized free markets, private property, and representative democracy, Soviet-style communism favored economic planning, party dictatorship, and a long-term commitment to the pursuit of egalitarianism. To see the ideological struggle as a conflict between individualist and collectivist dogmas would be reductionist, but these were poles towards which the two systems gravitated. For all the differences, there were underlying similarities. Feuding children of the Enlightenment, liberalism and communism shared rationalist, secular, and materialist biases. Crucially, both camps believed history to be on their side. Heirs to Karl Marx's historical determinism, Soviet leaders presumed that history's objec­tive forces ran in their favor. Liberals lacked a historical schema so intricate as Marx's, but their historical determinism was no less powerful for it. The future, they too believed, was theirs. Ideology thus reinforced the stabilizing implications of nuclear weapons. Why risk the future in a reckless military gamble if long-term victory was assured?

Still, the Cold War's ideological aspect was not a constant; like the nuclear arms race, it developed over time, and its implications ranged from context to context. While liberalism lacked communism's canonical coherence, the United States worked to export its ideological synthesis earlier than did the Soviet Union. Vis-a-vis Europe and Japan, the Americans propounded a triangular compromise between liberalism, capitalism, and democracy that proposed to harness the efficiencies of free markets while assuring the stabilization of democracy and the protection of individual rights. Orchestrating growth was key to the project. Drawing on the lessons of their own history, American officials proposed to transcend distributive conflicts within societies through the achievement of material abundance. In Japan and Europe, these efforts met with considerable success; by the 1960s, these core allies had rebounded from defeat to prosperity and social stability.

Elsewhere, America's ideological Cold War proved more disruptive. It began early, when President Truman debuted his Point Four Program in 1949. Truman envisaged a “bold new” effort to share “the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress” with the “underdeveloped” peoples of the world. Assistance programs followed, including to India, Egypt, Southeast Asia, and, on a more limited scale, Latin America. Married to the insights of economists and sociologists who discerned generalizable lessons about the historical transitions from “tradition” to “modernity” from the West's experiences, these efforts came to constitute a distinctive agenda for “modernization.” Ensuring that developing countries became liberal, market- oriented societies - and did not follow the communist path - became a Cold War commitment. In practice, however, the United States ended up collabor­ating with a host of illiberal regimes in the developing world, and the pursuit of liberal modernization became entwined with ulterior commitments to the containment of communism.^[536]

The Soviet Union, for its part, was somewhat slower to propound its ideological system as a model for emulation. China was the principal focus of Moscow's development efforts during the 1950s, and Soviet expertise and resources flooded into the People's Republic during China's first Five Year Plan (1953-1958). But if Stalin had engaged the world cautiously, his death in 1953 brought to power, after an initial phase of collective leadership, a leader as brash as he had been cagy. Nikita Khrushchev espoused a true believer's faith in the Marxist-Leninist creed, according to which the Soviet Union was constructing a “socialist” social order that would soon give way, like a caterpillar's cocoon, to reveal the “communist” utopia that Marx had predicted, in which the state would wither away and human equality and material abundance would prevail. Khrushchev's ideological commitments made him a disruptive influence on the Cold War - a hardliner in some ways, a reformer in others. To his credit, Khrushchev dismantled aspects of the Stalinist system, denouncing in his “secret speech” of February 1956 Stalin's political crimes. Khrushchev nonetheless became an outspoken booster for Marxist-Leninism on the global stage, promising that the Soviet Union would “bury” the West. He did not mean by this to intimate war. The boast was that socialism would eclipse its adversary, by its egalitarianism and by its production of material abundance. To this end Khrushchev refocused the command economy on the production of consumer goods and food. One consequence of his reformism would be to open a schism with Mao, who had fashioned his own revolution on Stalin's. Still, Khrushchev found new allies elsewhere. He embraced Cuba's Fidel Castro, who seized power in a 1959 revolution and turned towards Moscow thereafter, becoming a stalwart of Third World revolution.

In 1959, Khrushchev also met US Vice President Richard Nixon in an impromptu debate in an American model kitchen at the Moscow World's Fair. Pointing and jabbing, they debated the merits of their respective social

systems, but they concurred that their competition should be peaceful. It was not, at least not in the developing world. Animated by a mixture of fear and opportunism, both superpowers intervened, by a variety of methods, and their interventions resembled each other. That is not to say that superpower interventions were symmetrical. The United States intervened faster and harder. In Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, it conspired with local reac­tionaries to orchestrate coups that overthrew democratic governments, replacing them with illiberal but pro-Western regimes. These set the pattern for future interventions, and the 1950s and 1960s marked the heyday of American interventionism. The Soviet peak came later. Still, the methods of American meddling varied from case to case. Guatemala and Iran were cynical moves, implemented by covert means. In South Vietnam, by con­trast, the United States worked to help Ngo Dinh Diem build a modern society that would stand firm against communism. It was Vietnam, none­theless, that became America's catastrophe. From the early 1960s, the United States took sides in a civil war that claimed sixty thousand American and up to one million Vietnamese lives.^{[537] [538]} The Vietnam War - the American War, as Vietnamese remember it - was the high-water mark of American Cold War interventionism. Thereafter, the United States retreated from direct action, relying on material aid and military assistance to anti-Communist proxies. Soviet leaders, by contrast, concluded that the developing world was going their way, and they escalated their involvement in it.1⁸

Besides intervening in the developing world, both superpowers acted coercively within their own blocs. Here the Soviet Union was the more forceful of the two. After Stalin's March 1953 death, the East Bloc erupted in anti-communist strikes and protests. In East Germany, Moscow responded by sending in the Red Army. Three years later, renewed unrest followed Khrushchev's repudiation of Stalin, especially in Poland and in Hungary where demonstrators massed. Imre Nagy, a reformer, came to power in Hungary in late October 1956 and tried at first to mediate between Moscow and the anti-communist revolution building on Hungarian streets. Unsuccessful, he sided with the masses and appealed for help to the United Nations. Unwilling to let Hungary defect from the East Bloc, Khrushchev sent in the Red Army. It crushed the revolution and arrested tens of thousands of Hungarians, including Nagy. By coincidence, the United States was at the same time flexing its own muscles against Great Britain, which colluded with France and Israel to invade Egypt in a bid to reverse Egypt's recent nationalization of the Suez Canal. When he learned that Anglo-French troops had landed on the canal's banks, President Eisenhower was furious. He worried that Britain's resort to naked colonial tactics would lose the Third World for the West. To force the British and the French to retreat, he ordered his Treasury Secretary to sell sterling bonds, applying financial pressure to coerce a British retreat. This was better than Khrushchev's methods, but it also betrayed inequalities of power. Still, America's predominant role owed not only to military and financial margins but also to cultural resources - from jazz to jeans - which made America's dynamic, sunbaked modernity a model to which Europeans - and others - from across the Cold War's frontiers aspired.

If the power of the superpowers defined the high Cold War that endured from the late 1940s to 1960s, the late 1960s and early 1970s were a turning point. Within the United States, Vietnam eroded the political consensus that had supported a Cold War foreign policy. With support for Cold War commitments waning, the question of how to sustain burdensome respon­sibilities preoccupied the Nixon Administration that took power in 1969. In Western Europe, the Vietnam War brought the legitimacy of American leadership into doubt. Here it was the student demonstrators who rallied in Paris, London, West Berlin, and elsewhere who asked the most forceful questions. Demonstrations also occurred in Eastern Europe, most notably in Czechoslovakia. Like the Hungarian events of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968 involved popular protests and an experiment in “reformed socialism,” which ended up threatening the unity of the East Bloc. Moscow again sent in the Red Army, but doing so again revealed the brittleness of Soviet power in Eastern Europe. Even more consequential was the deterioration in Sino- Soviet relations that culminated with a decisive split and the exchange of gunfire over the Ussuri River in March 1969. Historians debate whether ideological disagreements or geopolitical differences caused the Sino-Soviet split, but they agree that its consequences were momentous.^[539] With the communist world's fracturing and the slow emergence of a more cooperative Soviet-American relationship, focused upon the pursuit of nuclear arms control, the Cold War international order looked to be fragmenting.^[540]

Ending the Cold War

The Cold War did not end in the late 1960s; it endured for another two decades. It was nonetheless transformed in the 1970s in ways that altered its nature and prefigured its resolution. Cold War elites on both sides sought to stabilize the Cold War system while advancing their own national interests. Recognizing that the Vietnam War was a setback for the United States, some Soviet leaders pressed for advantage in the Third World. President Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger calculated, by contrast, that opening relations with China would shift the Cold War's balance of power towards the United States and permit Washington to dial back expensive military commitments, including to the defense of South Vietnam and other Third World allies. The triangulation of Cold War geopolitics, which hinged on Nixon's May 1972 visit to China, was a major achievement. It marked the beginning of China's defection from the East Bloc, and it prefigured China's reintegration to the US-led global economy in the 1980s.

By equipping Washington with a lever against the Soviet Union, the Sino- American opening facilitated direct negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. The ensuring dialogue, often characterized as a detente relationship, brought important benefits. Arms control negotiations pro­duced the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) in 1972. This agreement capped the size of both sides' nuclear arsenals, albeit at levels that did not reduce current arsenals. SALT nonetheless helped to control budgetary costs, a central goal for Washington. Leonid Brezhnev, who became the USSR's predominant leader after Khrushchev's 1964 ouster, sought for his part to establish through detente the USSR's status as a superpower coequal to the United States. This recognition the Basic Principles agreement of 1973 and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) of 1975 conferred. The 1973 agreement established a code of conduct for superpower relations; the 1975 conference formalized Europe's Cold War division and offered implicit Western recognition of the East Bloc's legitimacy. Between 1972 and 1975, then, a raft of negotiations and agreements stabilized the Cold War system even as the Sino-American rapprochement transformed its geopoli­tics. This stabilization was an impressive feat, all the more striking given how tenuous the authority of the superpowers had looked to be as the 1960s drew to a close.

Taking measure of detente's accomplishment, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1972 moved the hand on the Doomsday Clock back to twelve minutes before midnight. Superpower war appeared far less likely than it had in the 1950s, when the clock had been stuck at two minutes to midnight. This was detente's achievement, but there was an ironic aspect to it. Nixon and Brezhnev stabilized the Cold War, but they also reified it at a time when its insufficiency as a framework for comprehending complex international relations was becoming manifest. There was more to world politics than could be seen through bipolar lenses: youth was revolting against adult authority, economic globalization was stirring, and decolonization was reaching its historical climax.^[541] Superpower elites remained preoccupied with Cold War rivalries as a post-Cold War world was coming into being. What characteristics defined this new world? It was a postcolonial world, but it also revealed thickening interdependencies among nations, what might now taken for resurgent globalization. While the Cold War's superstructure remained stable, the substructure, as Marx might have put it, was changing. Economic, technological, social, and ideological developments were trans­forming international relations. These transformations, intersecting with detente's accomplishments, would define the terms on which the Cold War ended in the 1980s.

Still, the Cold War's demise was hard to foresee in the late 1970s. From this vantage, the Cold War looked to be spreading into new theaters, as if detente had achieved peace between the superpowers by transplanting Cold War tensions to the Third World. Africa became in the 1970s a theater of confrontation. When Portuguese rule in Angola ended in 1974, there began a struggle for succession in which the Soviet Union, the United States, and China took sides. The Horn of Africa became a zone of conflict when Somalia attacked Ethiopia in 1977, triggering an infusion of Soviet aid and a resurgence of Cold War thinking in Washington. In both cases, Cuba eclipsed the Soviet Union as a provider of fraternal aid, sending tens of thousands of troops to Angola and Ethiopia. Violence also rent Latin America, where the Cold War's ideological struggles unfolded not between nations so much as within and across them. Coups in Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973, Argentina in 1976 installed authoritarian regimes that collaborated, with Washington's support, to suppress not just the insurgent left but unarmed progressives too. In Nicaragua, by contrast, the tumbling of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 enabled the left-wing Sandinistas to seize control of the state. This prompted the right to embrace paramilitary violence. After Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, the United States provided significant (and under U.S. law illicit) aid to the anti-Sandinista Contras, which turned Central America into one of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the late Cold War. The specter of the Global Cold War, as historian Arne Westad calls this struggle for the Third World, prompted some in Washington to repudiate detente, calling instead for a return to the tough-minded anti-Soviet policies of the past.^[542]

While detente prevailed in the Cold War's core and conflict raged in the Third World, the idea of human rights emerged in the 1970s as a surprising - and surprisingly malleable - priority in the foreign policy of the United States and other Western powers. The origins of human rights were complex: a flourishing of NGOs brought attention to human rights abuses, and the Carter administration in the United States embraced human rights diplomacy issues in the aftermath of Vietnam. Human rights proponents assailed US foreign policy, arguing that the Soviet Union's violations of human rights made detente an amoral collaboration and rebuking alliances of convenience with oppressive anti-communist regimes in the Third World. Human rights had important consequences for the Cold War. Carter's insertion of human rights themes into Soviet-American diplomacy proved rancorous, but Western European diplomats succeeded in inserting human rights provisions into the treaty that concluded the CSCE negotiations, the so-called Helsinki Final Act of 1975. Doing so energized East European dissidents. Two years later, a group of Czechoslovakians that included the playwright Vaclav Havel constituted themselves as Charter 77. They demanded that the Communist Party honor the commitments to which it had acceded in the Final Act. Even more disruptive still was the Solidarity movement in Poland. A labor organization that drew succor from the international human rights movement and from the election in 1979 ofPope John Paul II, a Pole and an outspoken anti-communist, Solidarity's general strikes in 1980-1981 brought Poland to a standstill, prompting the regime to declare martial law. Unlike the coups d'etat that brought Communist parties to power throughout Eastern Europe, Solidarity's was a popular - if unsuccessful - revolution. Communist rule endured, but an opposi­tion was emerging, including in the Soviet Union itself.The immediate influ­ence of Soviet dissidents like Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was limited, but their invocation of human rights against the party-state in the 1970s prefigured the legitimacy crisis of the 1980s. For those who bothered to look, the disjuncture between the emancipatory boasts that communist rulers made and the tawdry, repressive realities they had created was becoming glaring.

Human rights were not all that the socialist system struggled to produce. The leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution had staked their legitimacy not only on the advancement of social equality but also upon their ability to transform the Soviet Union into a productive, industrious society. From the 1930s to the 1960s, they looked to be succeeding. The coercive mobilization of labor and capital produced impressive industrial growth. By the late 1960s, however, the Soviet growth model was flagging. So long as basic industries predomi­nated, the command economy proved adept at mobilizing growth. But as the opportunities for heavy industrial growth expired - as surplus labor disap­peared and as citizens demanded food and high-quality consumer goods, not pig iron and coal - the planned economy struggled. Lacking market incen­tives, the managers of state-owned enterprises had no reason to devise new product lines or make existing products more efficiently; they had planning targets to meet, not consumer demand. With private enterprise outlawed, the opportunities for entrepreneurship were minimal. What the Soviet Union did have were natural resources, and it mined these ruthlessly. During the 1970s, it benefited from rising commodity prices, especially for oil, which it exported to world markets. These earnings masked the system's underlying failures. The East European socialist economies were less for­tunate. Lacking oil wealth, they turned to debt to finance imports of con­sumer goods from the West. These imports helped to preserve political stability, but they came at the cost of structural deficits that left Eastern Europe's Communists in hock to the capitalists.^[543]

Still, the West itself was not exactly flourishing in the 1970s. Rather, it found itself confounded by recessions, unemployment, and price inflation. The oil crisis of 1973-1974 exacerbated these difficulties but did not cause them. Much like the East, the West was reaching the limits of energy­intensive industrial growth. High growth rates in the 1950s and 1960s had been sustained not by innovation but by the proliferation of existing industrial technologies, like the mass-production automobile plant. By the late 1960s, the opportunities for extensive growth (which comes from adding new factors of production to the economy, distinct from intensive growth, which comes from making existing factors more productive) were dwindling. Unemployment surged, especially in the recessions of the mid and late 1970s. Deindustrialization scarred the industrial heartland of the United States. Invigorated growth, it appeared, would have to come from innovation and new technologies. Here, however, the West fared better than the East.

While its roots ran deeper, it was in the 1970s that a postindustrial economy emerged. Entrepreneurs founded new corporations such as Apple (1977) and Microsoft (1975). This had consequences for the Cold War. The Soviet Union's command economy had competed credibly in the age of heavy industry, but it struggled to keep up with the postindustrial technol­ogies that Western firms were mastering. Besides propelling capitalism into a postindustrial age, 1970s-era developments brought important consequences for the world economy. The adaptation of new (and not so new) technologies from communication satellites to wide-body passenger jets reduced the costs of communications and travel. These developments facilitated the integra­tion of the world economy, pushing it forward into a new era of globaliza­tion. While Cold War divisions still endured, the capitalist world economy was transforming itself; a new system of economic globalization was emer­ging, and high-tech, consumer-oriented goods were circulating within it, pushing the West into a novel, postindustrial modernity.

The Cold War wore on, meanwhile, and even intensified in some places. The Middle East became a particular focus for American power, which owed to the West's dependence on the region's oil. Military alliances with Saudi Arabia and Iran aimed from the early 1970s to hold the Soviet Union at bay. This indirect strategy for regional security persevered until 1979, when Islamic fundamentalists overthrew Iran's pro-Western Shah. While radical

economy, see Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton University Press, 1997).

Islamism was a distinctive challenge, it was the prospect of Soviet encroach­ment into the Middle East that most troubled American leaders. The fear was exaggerated but not unfounded; the USSR had, after all, become involved in the Horn of Africa, from where oil freighters passing through the Gulf of Aden could be intercepted. Thus, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan at the end of 1979, American leaders inferred an offensive thrust towards the Middle East. To thwart it, President Carter in January 1980 declared the Carter Doctrine. It held that any assault by an external power on the Persian Gulf would be repelled by force. This doctrine prefigured America's subsequent entwinement in the Middle East, but it misread Soviet intentions in Afghanistan. The Soviet invasion served no coherent purpose; much like the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union was drawn into Afghan politics by a spiral of instability that it helped set in motion but could not control.

The year 1979 was a transformative year in the Cold War. ThatJanuary, the United States and the People's Republic of China normalized relations. Hereafter, China's reintegration to the liberal world economy accelerated; trade with the West expanded, and China's economy grew. While this reintegration built upon the opening that Mao and Nixon had forged in 1972, it was Deng Xiaoping who played the vital role. Where Mao had played a cautious, balancing game, Deng threw his lot in with the West, seeking a de facto alliance against the Soviet Union and a stage-managed economic opening that would generate trade, investment, and the transfer of technology - all on the Communist Party's terms. “To get rich,” Deng is said to have explained, “is glorious.” The Communist Party retained its monopoly on power, but market reforms and integration to the globalizing world-economy transformed China's Cold War, shifting the Middle Kingdom into the Cold War camp of the United States and leaving the Soviet Union isolated.

The Soviet-American Cold War, by contrast, intensified after the invasion of Afghanistan. Leaders on both sides were responsible for this. On the Soviet side, Leonid Brezhnev, his collaborators, and his immediate successors charted a conservative course. Creatures of the Cold War, they clung to its dogmas, clamped down upon their critics at home, and waged an unforgiving war in Afghanistan. Ronald Reagan, by contrast, was a different kind of Cold War president. He was among the most ideological leaders of the era; in the depth of his convictions, he resembled Khrushchev. For Reagan, it was not the USSR that was the enemy but communism itself. Here, Reagan took a hard line, supporting arms insurgents in Nicaragua and Afghanistan (he called them “freedom fighters”) and proclaiming the USSR an “evil empire.” Reagan also promised to build a defensive shield to protect the United States against Soviet missiles. This initiative, known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), threatened to destabilize the deterrence system that for decades made nuclear war improbable. Flaunting deterrence, Reagan rejected entrenched beliefs and frightened his critics. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at four - and then three - minutes to midnight. Western Europe saw massive anti-nuclear protests, inflected by anti-American sentiment.

Reagan in fact proved flexible as well as radical. Having defined commun­ism as the enemy, he was ready to deal with any Soviet leader who might be willing to rethink old ideological commitments. In the mid 1980s, such a leader emerged. The youngest member by far of the Soviet Politburo, Mikhail Gorbachev was convinced of the need for reform. A young man during Khrushchev's thaw, Gorbachev was convinced by the mid 1980s - as he whispered to his wife - that “we can't go on living like this.”^[544] After 1985, he moved to reintegrate the Soviet Union to the world economy and to build a more open relationship with the West. He was moved by developments elsewhere, especially the wave of democratization that from the mid 1970s felled authoritarian regimes from Portugal to the Philippines.^[545] Spain's post­Franco transition to democracy was especially influential.^[546] Committed to dismantling the machinery of repression at home, Gorbachev aimed to reengage with the world and to achieve reform at home. His achievements included the creation of an elected legislature and a Soviet presidency, to which he was himself elected in 1990. Abroad, Gorbachev worked with Reagan to end the Cold War. While the two leaders did not achieve all that they sought, they reached an agreement to abolish intermediate-range nuclear missiles in 1988. Economic reform proved harder to achieve. Unlike Deng, Gorbachev sought at first to improve the planning system through a program of “acceleration,” not to replace it with the market. By the time he accepted the need for more wholesale reform, the economic, social, and international orders that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had created would all be crumbling.

The implosion began in Eastern Europe, but the key act was Gorbachev's. In December 1988, he told the United Nations that the Soviet Union would not intervene in Eastern Europe to prop up Communist parties. The East Europeans, as Gorbachev's press secretary put it, were free to do it their way. It did not take long for the faςade of Communist Eastern Europe to fall. Before 1989 was out, Solidarity ruled in Poland after winning the free elec­tions, and the authors of Charter 77 were taking over the government of Czechoslovakia, with Vaclav Havel as president. That it all happened so peacefully, apart from the troubled case of Romania, owed to good fortune and an East-West engagement that traced back to the 1970s. Economic ties between the blocs disincentivized state violence; in East Germany, the Communist Party refrained from massacring demonstrators in part because its leaders knew how dependent on Western credit they had become. Instead, they stood aside when unarmed civilians broke through the Berlin Wall on the night of November ιι, 1989, and turned upon the thirty-year old barrier with shovels and sledgehammers. These events affirmed what Havel had called the “power of the powerless” against the power of the party-state.

With the collapse of the East Bloc, the Cold War ended. East Germany ceased to exist in 1990, absorbed into larger and more prosperous West Germany. Most stunning of all, the Soviet Union itself would not endure much longer. A failed coup against Gorbachev in the summer of 1991 led to the dissolution of the USSR at the year's end. In the last months of 1991, leaders of the national republics - from the Baltic Republics to Russia itself - opted to dissolve their federation and, with it, the Soviet Union itself. Having set in motion processes of state building intended to offset the power of the Communist Party, Gorbachev became a leader without a state. His attempt to reform the Soviet Union and to reincorporate it to a larger international order had led, with stunning rapidity, to the extinction of the Soviet project that he tried to salvage and redeem.

Conclusions

The Cold War, to return to its origins, began because Stalin would not participate in the open, liberal international order that the United States tried to build after World War II. It ended when Gorbachev attempted to integrate the USSR to the liberal world and, by doing so, brought down the Potemkin village of socialist modernity. The crude equipoise that existed through the intervening four decades ensured that the Soviet-American Cold War was mostly peaceful, at least in its core. There was no systemic war, although there were moments, as in 1962, when the superpowers danced upon the ledge of disaster. Instead, the Cold War's violence was borne by Africans, Latin Americans, Southeast Asians, and others - people who lived far from the initial geopolitical fault lines and who bore no responsibility for the world's division. Theirs was “the other Cold War,” as Heonik Kwon calls it, a conflict that emerged from the Soviet-American confrontation but remained distinct from it.^[547] Estimating the damage that this Cold War did remains a matter of conjecture. Whether the millions who died in Africa, Korea, and Vietnam, and the victims of torture chambers in Buenos Aires, Phnom Penh, and Tehran, should be counted among its victims is contestable. The Cold War made their catastrophes, but so did other struggles - postcolonial conflicts for power, efforts to make modern societies out of traditional cloth, and the eternal temptations of barbarism. Either way, one of the Cold War's ironies was this: while the struggle for control of Europe was never fought, the Third World still encountered the radioactive fallout.

The Cold War may have ended, but its effects endure, and for its historians it remains an ongoing struggle. Still a work-in-progress, Cold War historio­graphy has become a dynamic and innovative field, whose maturation the 2oιo publication of the three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War confirmed.^[548] For historians, the Cold War's end was a watershed. Before 1989-1991, historians fixated on the problem of origins and the ascription of blame. So-called “orthodox” historians blamed Soviet aggrandizement for the Cold War's advent; their “revisionist” critics indicted American economic ambitions.^[549] This debate subsided from the 1970s, and a “post-revisionist” synthesis emerged, locating the Cold War's origins in mutual misperceptions and in incompatible strategic and ideological expectations. The revisionist synthesis prefigured the field's post-1991 development. Since then, historians have turned themselves to a diverse array of themes, which the Cambridge volumes showcase. While hundreds of historiographical flowers have bloomed, the overriding historiographical development has been the Cold War's globalization. Looking far beyond the superpowers, historians now treat European countries as independent historical agents, probe the Cold War's diffusion into the Third World, and undertake sophisticated, multi-archival reconstructions of the East Bloc's internal politics. It has become difficult to construe the Cold War as residing exclusively - or even primarily - within the Soviet-American dyad of popular lore; instead historians now stress its global dimensions and its global consequences. At the same time, influential scholars still present the Soviet-American confrontation as the Cold War's central theme.^[550] Herein may reside the field's most pressing interpretative dilemmas: how global should the Cold War be?

Mulling the question, we might beware a distinction between the history of the Cold War and the history of the Cold War's era. The two are not synonymous. Whether the twentieth century's second half should be understood as an era of Cold War is a question that bears examination and brokers no clear answers. Expanding the Cold War's purview beyond the superpower dyad has enriched our understanding, especially of the global Cold War that became so violent in the Cold War's later decades. We might nonetheless be wary of conflating the history of the Cold War with the history of the postwar world. Conflation risks an analytical flattening that accepts cliches about the world holding its breath and ignores wide differences of experience between countries and regions where the Cold War rent massive damage - from Argentina to Cambodia to Zaire - and those where its effects were relatively muted - India, West Africa, and Scandinavia all come to mind. Then, of course, there are themes that exist apart from the Cold War but that intersected with it and about which it is difficult to say what the Cold War's real influence was. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one example. A second risk of conflation, beyond the flattening of historical experience, is that it may explode the Cold War into a meta-historical framework for postwar history, which precludes situating it within history, where it can be usefully related to other developments of its times. Processes extraneous to the Cold War - processes that antedated and outlived it - shaped the Cold War's course. Two obvious examples are decolonization and globalization. Yet these themes may be obscured if they are treated as subthemes of Cold War history.

None of this is to say that the Cold War was smoke and mirrors, more illusion than reality. It was a deathly serious confrontation that shaped the international relations of its times, so much so that the temptation of conflation of the Cold War with its era tempts and beckons. Instead, we would do well to recall Reinhold Niebuhr's call for historical perspective. “It is easy to forget that even the most powerful nation or alliance of nations,” Niebuhr wrote in 1952, “is merely one of many forces in the historical drama.” Warning against determinism of all kinds, Niebuhr cautioned against the arrogance and recklessness of inscribing in history a coherent will, purpose, or logic. Instead, he insisted, history must be viewed as a “conflict of many wills and purposes," “a bizarre pattern in which it is difficult to discern a clear meaning.”^[551] Decades after the Cold War's ending, it would be hard to find a better epitaph on the postwar era than this.

Further reading

Andrew, Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin. The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battlefor the Third World. New York: Basic Books, 2005.

Berend, T. Ivan. From the Soviet Bloc to the European Union: The Economic and Social Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe Since 1973. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Cooper, Richard. The Economics of Interdependence: Economic Policy in the Atlantic Community. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1968.

Costigliola, Frank. Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War. Princeton University Press, 2011.

Eichengreen, Barry. The European Economy Since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond. Princeton University Press, 2008.

Ekbladh, David. The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of An American World Order. Princeton University Press, 2010.

Feis, Herbert. From Trust to Terror: The Onset of the Cold War, 1945-1950. New York: W.W. Norton, 1970.

Fink, Carole. Cold War: An International History. Boulder, co: Westview Press, 2013. Gaddis, John L. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin, 2005.

The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War. Oxford University Press, 1987. The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947. Oxford University Press, 1972. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Gilman, Nils. Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

Hogan, Michael. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952. Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Ikenberry, G. John. Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order. Princeton University Press, 2011.

Koiko, Gabriel and Joyce KoIko. The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Kwon, Heonik. The Other Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Latham, Michael. Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation-Building” in the Kennedy Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernizatian, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy From the Cold War to the Present. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Latham, Robert. The Liberal Moment: Modernity, Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Leffler, Melvyn. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Palo Alto, ca: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Leffler, Melvyn and Odd Arne Westad, eds. The Cambridge History of the Cold War, 3 vols. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Luthi, Lorenz. The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton University Press, 2008.

Mastny, Vojtech. The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity. Oxford University Press, 1996.

Milward, Alan. The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-1951. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1984.

Philpott, Daniel. Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations. Princeton University Press, 2001.

Radchenko, Sergey. Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967. Palo Alto, ca: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Sargent, DanielJ. A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Seabury, Paul. The Rise and Decline of the Cold War. New York: Basic Books, 1967.

Suri, Jeremi. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: W.W. Norton, 1972.