The Long Twilight Struggle -- What A Cold War Realist Can Teach Us About Winning A "Long War."

[D. Spencer Hines]

The Long Twilight Struggle
What a Cold War realist can teach us about winning a "long war."

BY PATRICK J. GARRITY
Wednesday, September 6, 2006
The Wall Street Journal

In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, a Yale University student
asked one of her instructors, "Would it be OK now for us to be patriotic?"
The professor, John Lewis Gaddis, widely regarded as the dean of American
Cold War historians, replied: "Yes, I think it would."

Even allowing for the emotions of the moment, such a response from a
prestigious Ivy League academic might seem a bit surprising in these
politically correct times. Yale University was once home to Samuel Flagg
Bemis, the pre-eminent U.S. diplomatic historian before World War II. Bemis
is now widely ridiculed in the academy as "U.S. Flagg Bemis" for treating
America as something other than a rapacious, racist, retrograde regime.

Gaddis runs the same risk of professional ostracism. He told the story of
his student in a controversial 2004 book, "Surprise, Security, and the
American Experience," in which he concluded that the Bush administration's
policy of strategic pre-emption, whatever its merits in the particular
circumstances, did not depart radically from the American foreign policy
tradition. Gaddis's latest work, "The Cold War: A New History," intended for
popular audiences, offers a conclusion that is equally guaranteed to set his
colleagues' teeth on edge. "The world, I am quite sure, is a better place
for that conflict being fought in the way that it was and won by the side
that won it. . . . For all its dangers, atrocities, costs, distractions, and
moral compromises, the Cold War--like the American Civil War--was a
necessary contest that settled fundamental issues once and for all."

Bingo! -- DSH

Gaddis, to be sure, is no political conservative, much less a cheerleader
for the Bush administration. He gained his professional reputation as the
leading expositor of an interpretation of the Cold War known as
post-revisionism, which emerged during the 1970s and 1980s. The traditional
or orthodox school--always more of a popular or political viewpoint than an
academically respectable one--had held that the Cold War was the result of
unprovoked Soviet aggression, which left the Free World no choice but to
organize in defense of civilization. The contrary view, revisionism, emerged
during the Vietnam era as a variant of New Left history. The revisionists
placed the blame squarely on the United States, which pressed relentlessly
to take advantage of Soviet weakness after World War II in order to stave
off what was perceived as the imminent collapse of capitalism.

Gaddis offered a nuanced alternative to both orthodoxy and revisionism,
beginning with "The United States and the Origins of the Cold War,
1941-1947," published in 1972. He drew heavily, if not explicitly, on the
modern international relations theory of structural realism. From this
perspective, neither Washington nor Moscow was immediately responsible for
the emergence of a security competition in the aftermath of World War II.

The two new superpowers were driven naturally into opposition by the forces
of international politics. Both sought security and the prevention of a new
war, not ideological or economic dominance. Their views of security differed
greatly, however, based on their distinct geographical situations and
historical experiences, and as a result they found themselves caught up in a
classic "security dilemma." Steps that one side took to increase its
security, such as the formation of a defensive military alliance, were
interpreted by the other side as threatening. The second side responded with
its own defensively-intended measures, which in turn were interpreted as
threatening by the first side; and so on. The security dilemma was
intensified by the atomic bomb. Each side feared that the other would find a
way to use that revolutionary weapon to gain a decisive strategic advantage.

For Gaddis and the post-revisionists, the U.S.-Soviet competition was thus
an objective structural phenomenon of international politics. But security
competitions need not turn into war, cold or otherwise. Diplomatic
arrangements--such as sphere-of-influence agreements--could have moderated
if not resolved the underlying tensions created by the security dilemma.
What, then, accounted for the degeneration into a bitter, all-encompassing,
and apparently enduring Cold War?

According to post-revisionist analysis, both sides were to blame. Domestic
factors entered into the strategic equation and profoundly destabilized the
superpower relationship. On the Soviet side, the regime's fundamental
insecurity at home caused Moscow to project its fears outward and to adopt a
belligerent and aggressive posture. The West could offer nothing in the way
of concessions that would reassure Stalin. This was the great insight that
George F. Kennan, then an obscure American diplomat, set forth in his Long
Telegram from the Moscow embassy in February 1946 and later in the famous
1947 "X" article in Foreign Affairs magazine. The United States, according
to Gaddis and the post-revisionists, also faced domestic pressures that
warped its sense of security. Some of these were accidental. The death of
the worldly-wise Franklin Roosevelt brought into office an inexperienced
Harry Truman, who fell under the sway of FDR's harder-line advisers at a
critical juncture. Other domestic roots of American assertiveness towards
the Soviet Union were less benign. The Democratic Party, for electoral
reasons, was unwilling gracefully to accede to Soviet control of Poland.

Democrats also feared accusations of softness on Communism after revelations
of Soviet spying under Roosevelt. American foreign policy elites in both
parties consciously inflated the Soviet threat to frighten public opinion
into abandoning its traditional isolationism.

This post-revisionist approach suggested the importance of assigning the
relative blame for the breakdown in U.S.-Soviet relations. If one side was
principally responsible for turning a difficult security dilemma into an
intractable ideological struggle, that side presumably should have
taken--and might still take--the lead in moving the conflict onto a more
moderate path.

Gaddis's most influential treatment of the question of relative blame came
in "Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of National Security
Policy During the Cold War" (1982; revised and enlarged, 2005), which
immediately became the standard text on the subject. Gaddis followed
sympathetically Kennan's analysis of the situation as it emerged during the
critical years of the late 1940s and early 1950s. (The old diplomat and the
rising young professor became friends and Gaddis is now writing a biography
of Kennan.) Stalin had no grand strategy to dominate the world or Hitlerian
desire for military conquest; he pursued rather an opportunistic strategy of
filling power vacuums. The West was compelled to resist this Soviet campaign
of subversion and intimidation through a counter-strategy of political and
economic containment, which represented a sensible middle ground between an
aggressive strategy of rollback and a return to isolationism or appeasement.

Once the easy routes of expansion were closed to Moscow, Kennan concluded,
the indirect pressure of containment and the forces of history would
gradually transform the Soviet system.

Containment, according to Kennan and Gaddis, should have been limited
geographically as well as instrumentally. It went askew, Kennan argued, when
the United States grossly overreacted to a series of apparent strategic
setbacks in 1949, most notably Mao's victory in China and the unexpectedly
early detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb. Paul Nitze, Kennan's
successor in the State Department, was the villain of the piece. Nitze and
other hardliners seized the moment to advocate, in a famous internal
document (NSC 68), the pursuit of an aggressive political counteroffensive
supported by a massive American military buildup and the expansion of the
containment perimeter to encompass the entire globe. The United States, by
the post-revisionist line of analysis, became a victim of the classic
mistake of all empires, strategic overextension, caused by an inability to
distinguish vital from peripheral interests. Gaddis was hardly the first
scholar to see a decisive shift in containment taking place around the time
of the Korean War, but he offered the clearest account of what
post-revisionist scholarship generally delineated as the dark and
unnecessary transformation of American national security policy. If the
Soviet Union had been principally responsible for the origins of the Cold
War, the United States seemed to bear the onus for having radicalized,
militarized, and globalized the conflict.

Gaddis did not ride this hobby horse as hard as did some other Cold War
scholars. In "Strategies of Containment" he was interested primarily in
evaluating the internal consistency of the various Cold War strategies. He
discerned two basic strategic approaches: one sought to apply American
strengths to Soviet weaknesses (asymmetrical containment); the other sought
to match the Soviets across the board (symmetrical containment). Gaddis
acknowledged that both approaches had advantages and disadvantages, but he
tended to favor asymmetrical containment because it best matched
cost-effective means with achievable foreign policy ends. If that framework
of analysis led Gaddis to prefer Kennan over Nitze, it also produced more
surprising judgments, such as a clear sympathy for Eisenhower's strategy of
massive retaliation over Kennedy's flexible response approach.

The American foreign policy establishment, in the aftermath of the Vietnam
War, happily embraced Gaddis's structuralist explanation of the Cold War and
shared his taste for asymmetrical containment. Officials and think-tank
policy analysts were relieved to learn from academic authority that they
were not unconscious agents of American economic imperialism and that
containment, rightly understood, was a legitimate means to legitimate ends.

With appropriate adjustments in U.S. national security policy--more Kennan
and less Nitze--they presumed that the "competition" with Moscow could be
"managed" successfully. The national security community continued a process
that had begun in the 1960s, turning to international relations theorists,
social scientists, and economists for tools with which to alleviate the
security dilemma. Predictability, transparency, and stability became the
watchwords of the day. Viewed in this light the Cold War was not only
natural and enduring--it was, in a perverse way, desirable. It was a means
of keeping the United States engaged in the world and able to manage the
global balance of power without war. Gaddis himself contributed to this line
of argument with a 1987 book, "The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of
the Cold War," in which he predicted that historians of the next century
might well look back upon the Cold War as a time of general peace and
stability.

Of course, the bête noire of the Cold War school of competition management
and stability was Ronald Reagan. Reagan disdained détente, warned of evil
empires, spoke of transcending both Communism and nuclear deterrence; yet he
wanted to build more missiles on the ground and defenses in the sky. The
academic community, along with the majority of the foreign policy
establishment, was appalled. Reagan's strategy seemed a radicalized version
of Paul Nitze's NSC 68. Even Nitze, who served in the Reagan administration,
was clearly uncomfortable with the new American assertiveness. Gaddis,
surprisingly--though running as usual against the common wisdom--wrote
favorably of Reagan, who he thought was pursuing a promising combination of
symmetrical and asymmetrical strategies.

Then the Cold War came to a sudden and decisive end, flabbergasting
diplomatic historians and international relations theorists. Gaddis, taking
advantage of the wave of archival evidence flowing out of the former Eastern
bloc and being translated and summarized by other scholars, staked out a
landmark post-Cold War interpretation of the origins of the Cold War. In "We
Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History" (accent on "now," rather than
"know"), published in 1997, Gaddis put the blame for the worst of the Cold
War on Stalin. Although Stalin did not have a master plan for a global
Communist empire, he was a despicable tyrant who saw the world through the
ideological lenses of Marxism-Leninism. Stalin sought to dominate Europe as
thoroughly as Hitler had wanted to do. Stalin assumed initially that the
forces of history would bring this about naturally, as the capitalists fell
out among themselves. But when the capitalists actually united in
resistance, Stalin was perfectly capable of helping history along if the
opportunity presented itself, as when he gave Kim Il Sung a "green light"
for the invasion of South Korea. Stalin--and, to a lesser extent, his
successors--had a strong streak of revolutionary romanticism that might well
have led to strategic disaster had the United States not responded
appropriately. The United States, of course, often did not respond
appropriately or wisely, but this was the distinctly minor theme of Gaddis's
analysis.

"The Cold War: A New History" goes even further. Gaddis does not abandon his
structuralist argument or withdraw the conclusion that the United States
overreacted in 1949-1950. He also celebrates the fact that the Cold War did
not turn hot. But as he now sees it, the stable Long Peace--especially as
manifested in détente--actually proved to be unstable. The structural
determinants of international relations, it turns out, include not only the
pursuit of power and security but a sense of justice. National and popular
frustrations grew because unfair arrangements once deemed temporary (such as
a divided Europe) had become permanent. Public fear of nuclear war
challenged the elites' reliance on nuclear deterrence as a tool of Cold War
management. Those living in command economies resented the manifest failure
to improve living standards. There was a slow shift of influence from the
supposedly powerful to the seemingly powerless, through the nonaligned
movement, human rights organizations, and the like. The populations of
captive nations were unexpectedly emboldened by new international standards
for making moral judgments, such as the human rights provisions of the
Helsinki Accords (1975).

Sensing these deeper historical trends, a few great "actor-leaders" found
ways to dramatize them to make the point that the Cold War need not last
forever. For Gaddis the greatest actor-leader (literally) was Ronald Reagan.

"Reagan was as skillful a politician as the nation had seen for many years,
and one of its sharpest grand strategists ever," Gaddis writes. "His
strength lay in his ability to see beyond complexity to simplicity.

And what he saw was simply this: that because détente perpetuated -- and had
been meant to perpetuate -- the Cold War, only killing détente could end the
Cold War."

Others joined Reagan on stage, even though they were not all reading from
the same script--Pope John Paul II (himself an actor as a young man),
Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and Deng Xiaoping. Finally
there was poor Mikhail Gorbachev--completely at a loss to understand what
fundamental change truly meant for his Soviet Union but aware that things
could not go on as they were and, to his everlasting credit, willing to
eschew violence and accept the verdict of history. Reagan, through decidedly
un-Kennanesque means, had found a way to transform the Soviet regime.

According to Gaddis, not even these visionaries foresaw how soon and how
decisively the Cold War would end. The final impetus was provided by
ordinary people with simple priorities who saw, seized, and sometimes
stumbled into opportunities to seek freedom (the East Germans, for example,
who reached the West through Hungary when leaders there opened up the
border). In doing so they caused a collapse no one could stop. Leaders had
little choice but to follow, even if--like President George H.W. Bush, a
confirmed member of the Cold War country club--they did so with great
reluctance.

"The Cold War: a New History," following on "We Now Know," has been
generally well received by the American foreign policy establishment,
anxious to put itself on record as favoring the Right Side of History. But
Gaddis has scandalized much of the historical profession by migrating, as
they see it, from cutting-edge scholarship to iconoclasm to, of all things,
orthodoxy. Beyond that, he now stands accused, by critics of current
American foreign policy, of becoming a fellow traveler and tool of the
triumphalists, those who celebrate victory in the Cold War as the
vindication of American exceptionalism and of
peace-through-excessive-strength.

Hilarious! MORE FLAKEY INTELLECTUALS. -- DSH

Tony Judt sums up this case in the New York Review of Books (March 23,
2006): the untold story of the Cold War is not that of America's victory but
of the costs imposed on unwilling bystanders caught up in the superpowers'
struggle. America encouraged destructive civil and proxy wars such as
Vietnam and Afghanistan; supported friendly dictators and brutal regimes,
especially those in the Arab world; and brushed aside unfriendly democracies
or progressive regimes, such as Chile and Guatemala. Gaddis says little or
nothing of the tremendous collateral damage of the Cold War.

The Soviets, of course, were equal partners in these crimes but at least
they did not attempt to veil their brutality with hypocrisy.

According to this anti-triumphal view, American triumphalists are oblivious
to the deep-seated resentment and hostility to the United States that its
Cold War policies generated, especially when coupled with the
culture-destroying promotion of globalization. These worldwide grievances
have grown into outright hatred as the Bush Administration applies the
Reaganite/NSC 68 template to the so-called War on Terrorism, symbolized for
the world by the disastrous war in Iraq and the abuses of Abu Ghraib.

President George W. Bush acts in precisely the wrong way towards peoples
already weary of American hubris and power. Wisdom lies in shaking free of
the comfortable illusions, promoted by Gaddis and the neoconservatives, of a
triumphant and virtuous America marching to a universally welcome victory in
the war over terrorism, as it supposedly did over Communism.

"Surreyman", alias Horsellman Rarebit, and Gans are the Poster Boys for this
anserine Point of View. Horsellman Rarebit in Britain and Gans in the
United States. -- DSH

Those who don't object to American strength and even the occasional triumph
will also have some bones to pick with Gaddis.

In "The Cold War" (although less so in his scholarly writings) he makes the
process of waging the Cold War seem too easy, the outcome a bit too
predictable.

For those in the arena during the late 1970s, history seemed far from
turning decisively in our favor.

Bingo! Because of the disastrous results of the National Security Policies
of the Cut & Run From Vietnam Advocates and the abject Carter Incompetence
that followed. -- DSH

The West appeared in systematic decline if not on the verge of
failure--even if one took a relaxed view of the Soviet military buildup and
geopolitical gains during that decade. Capitalist economies stalled or
declined in the face of apparently permanent high inflation. Oil was
hideously expensive, in short and uncertain supply, without obvious
alternatives. A popular novel was built around the "Crash of 1979." Jimmy
Carter and the Club of Rome proclaimed eras of malaise and limited
resources.

Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II did not come on the scene with
unambiguous mandates to fix things. Reagan was elected overwhelmingly in the
electoral college, but he barely received a popular majority and was widely
denounced by the best and the brightest as a reactionary dunce. His
popularity plunged sharply in the midst of a brutal recession in 1982, which
threatened not only his reelection but his ability to sustain an assertive
foreign policy. Millions took to the streets in Europe to protest American
militarism and oppose the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces.

The NATO alliance nearly buckled under the pressure.

Sometimes, statesmen at the highest level must stand up to the apparently
inexorable currents of history rather than looking to ride them. These
statesmen accept the risk of failure, even as they strive to deserve
success. The successful end of the Cold War was actually a damned close-run
thing, subject to a variety of unpredictable factors.

Consider one of those historical counterfactuals of which Gaddis is so fond:
suppose Reagan and the Pope had not survived their assassination attempts?

Nor was a peaceful end of the Soviet empire foreordained by Soviet weakness.
Sophisticated American observers at the time understood that the Kremlin was
plagued by economic inefficiency, declining standards of living, ethnic
unrest, the demoralization of the nomenklatura, and the lack of political
legitimacy.

But there was certainly enough slack in the system to make one final push
against collapse if a vigorous, aggressive Soviet leader had emerged and
played cleverly upon the deep divisions in the West--or was prepared to turn
the Cold War hot. Conservatives feared that Gorbachev might be such a
genius. Reagan, to his credit, realized that Gorbachev was actually another
kind of genius, or fool.

Gaddis also reaches too easily the conclusion that the Cold War marked a
radical, permanent devaluation of military power as an active ingredient in
great power politics. He believes that nuclear weapons ended the era of
great power wars because leaders on both sides slowly (too slowly) came to
the realization that the Clausewitzian relationship between war and politics
was no longer rational when humanity itself would be destroyed by war. But
the Cold War was marked by an intense military-technical competition--a
qualitative arms race--that served as the functional equivalent of war,
especially when that competition meshed with hot wars fought by proxies or
by proxies against one of the superpowers.

Nuclear weapons, and the policies surrounding them, came to function as the
queens of the geopolitical chessboard. The U.S. military buildup of the late
1970s and early 1980s, when coupled with Reagan's Strategic Defense
Initiative (meant sincerely by him as a step towards nuclear abolition) and
with related efforts to subvert the Soviets' economy and political
legitimacy, was designed, after all, to force the Kremlin to choose between
retrenchment and collapse.

Reagan's strategy was risky because the Soviets had a third option. Although
an assertive U.S. strategy was necessary to compel a dramatic and favorable
shift in the strategic environment, this strategy accepted, and indeed
encouraged, a dramatic short-term increase in tension.

War was always a last-ditch option for the Kremlin -- one that a faction of
Soviet leaders actually advocated at the last moment to prevent the
re-unification of Germany.

It was not at all clear that public opinion in America or overseas
would support American assertiveness; nor was it clear how the peoples of
the Soviet bloc would weigh the prospects of liberation against those of a
devastating crackdown or superpower conflict fought on their soil. The
political stagecraft associated with the end of the Cold War, about which
Gaddis rightly makes much, had a heavy military dimension that manipulated
the fear of war even as it reassured public opinion and the allies. In the
future, military power, and great power war itself, may matter in equally
unexpected ways.

As the Cold War recedes into history, arguments about its causes and
consequences will certainly continue, just as they have over the American
Civil War. John Lewis Gaddis is a thoughtful, knowledgeable guide through
these arguments. He does precisely what a good scholar should do. He hews to
his own path. He offers broad yet serious interpretations that provoke as
well as instruct. He changes his mind or at least modifies his argument as
new evidence emerges. One may disagree with him, but only by clarifying
one's own thinking. And in our world, it is greatly to his credit that he
knows how a serious professor should answer a serious student's question.

Mr. Garrity is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. This article
first appeared in the Claremont Review of Books.