Beyond The Cold War

Marshall D. Shulman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032506852
• eBook ISBN: 9780429711770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

This book contributes to the public discussion of Soviet foreign policy issues by making available some of the information and insights which have resulted from the work of many scholars in this field. It explores how diverse trends in the evolution of the policy affected the nature of the Cold War.

1
Retrospect

IT HAS BECOME EVIDENT to most of us, I believe, that the language and ideas of the Cold War are no longer adequate as a guide to international politics today. For almost twenty years, the basic notions of the Cold War have dominated our thinking about world affairs, but these notions are in need of change. This is not because the conflict of purposes described by the Cold War no longer exists, but because this conflict is no longer the dominating fact of international politics and because the sources of this conflict have been changing. We are more than ready for some fresh conceptual approaches to deal with the complex currents which are now transforming the political world in unfamiliar ways.

On both sides of the Atlantic, there is a murmuring discontent with the prevailing philosophy of the Cold War, although no consensus has emerged as to what should take its place. This discontent is often part of the unarticulated background of policy differences within the Western alliance. Implicit in the discussion are varying assessments of the significance of recent dramatic changes in the Communist world, and some concern lest we cast away, out of weariness or a fascination for transient phenomena, what may still be valid and prudent in the prevailing Western outlook toward the Soviet Union.

In trying to decide to what extent our relations with the Soviet Union have changed, the first question we must deal with is: changed from what? We begin therefore with an effort to clarify our understanding of the past, with whatever detachment and insight the passage of two decades has placed at our command.

The matrix of the Cold War is to be found in the years 1945 to 1950. As we look back upon those years, briefly and quite schematically for our present purposes, they appear to us now as a spiral of interactions, tightening in a series of swift and convulsive stages.

The dominant impression one has, in thinking now about the early years of the Cold War, is how difficult it was, and still is, to separate what was real and what was distorted in the perception each side had of the intentions of the other. This is not to say that the conflict was a result of misunderstanding. The collision of incompatible interests was real, and extremely serious. But what powered the quick and violent intensification of the conflict into a clash of absolutes were the conditions within each country which affected its perception of the other. Each side, for quite different reasons, developed oversimplified and emotionally colored stereotypes of the other, which obscured the real nature of the conflict. The result appears to have been a cycle of reactions that took on a life of their own, disproportionate to and only partly related to the real conflict of interest involved.

To disentangle the objective realities of those years from the emotional exacerbating factors that prevailed is still a contentious task, but it is both an intellectual and a moral necessity, not for the purpose of assigning blame, but to clarify our understanding of the real nature of the conflict. To speak of "emotion recollected in tranquillity" in the language of the poet may evoke a wry smile, considering how relative is our present tranquillity, but perhaps we are far enough from the events of those days to speak of them with some detachment at least, and with some retrospective insight into the underlying causes.

The two developments that appear to have dominated the opening stage of the Cold War, in 1945 and 1946, were the Soviet effort to consolidate its position in Eastern Europe and the return of the Soviet leadership to those attitudes of suspicion and hostility toward the West which it had consistently and openly expressed before it entered into the wartime alliance against Nazi Germany. Neither development was sudden in its onset. The question of Poland had of course been an issue at every wartime conference of the allies. The suspicion and hostility had been manifested in some degree throughout the war, but with increasing openness after the German defeat at Stalingrad in the winter of 1943. By early 1946, Stalin had returned to the language of ideological warfare and was projecting a fifteen-year program of forced-draft concentration of resources upon heavy industry and scientific research, clearly reflecting an anticipation of possible war with his recent Western allies.

The American reaction to these developments, as it unfolded in 1946 and 1947, compounded apprehension with feelings of guilt, anxiety, anger, frustration, and surprise. The surprise arose because of the illusions about the nature of the Soviet system that had been harbored and cultivated in this country before the Nazi—Soviet pact, during the war and for a while afterward. Undoubtedly it was mainly a matter of innocence, but many American liberals, politicians, and conservative businessmen alike had compromised their perception of totalitarian reality in the Soviet system, believing that this was a necessary concomitant to wartime cooperation and to mutual trust and collaboration in the postwar period. As might have been expected, this indiscriminate enthusiasm, being shallowly rooted, gave way to equally indiscriminate hatred, burning with a sense of betrayal and self-anger. There was guilt also because of the fate of Poland and the other states of Eastern Europe, sealed not at Yalta, but in the course of the war. A climate of anxiety had its roots in many causes: the atomic bomb, with its moral ambiguities and its awesome prospects; the trauma of the Hiss case upon an entire generation, the Fuchs case, the Canadian espionage revelations, and in time the paralyzing and degrading McCarthy episode. Anger and frustration and violence were in part an emotional hangover from the war and the self-brutalization it entailed; in part also they accompanied the turning of the tide in American politics, the long-repressed conservative reaction to twenty years of New Deal and wartime centralization. The slogan of "anti-Communism" itself became the American ideology.

Perhaps it would be unreasonable to have expected an atmosphere of calm restraint in any case, but particularly so for the United States, whose major involvement in international politics had begun only after the First World War thirty years before, and whose people and institutions were unseasoned and sadly unprepared for the complexities and the burdens that were now their lot. The recent experience with Hitler Germany also was a complicating factor in several ways: there was a tendency to understand Soviet developments by analogy to German fascism, which was often misleading; and the record of liberal pacifism in its initial reactions to fascist aggression in the 'thirties had left residual confusions about the morality of force in international politics.

The effect of this emotional climate was to make clear perception and measured responses extremely difficult. In the face of this domestic turbulence, the record of governmental accomplishment seems the more remarkable. It would seem to be a fair judgment that the policy of containment, the Greek—Turkish Aid Program, the Marshall Plan, and the subsequent Berlin airlift and the organization of the Western alliance on the whole represented appropriate and reasonably successful reactions to the situation in Europe. In the space of two or three years, a revolution was accomplished in American foreign policy. A strong current toward withdrawal and demobilization was reversed; the United States was clearly committed to an international outlook and to the peacetime defense of Europe; an imaginative and unprecedentedly generous financial aid program amounting to almost thirty billion dollars was undertaken to restore European political and economic stability and to encourage the development of European integration. The containment policy, especially in the form in which it came to be popularly understood, lacking the qualifications and subtleties of its original statement, evoked bitter and contradictory domestic resistance. Some of this resistance reflected the persistence of isolationism. Many had not yet accepted the reality of the conflict with the Soviet Union, or were reacting to the extreme terms in which the case against Soviet aggressiveness was being described. You may recall that a leading political commentator assailed the containment policy as a "strategic monstrosity," partly on the grounds of unfeasibility and partly because the ideological component of Soviet policy was not yet widely understood or accepted.

The measures that were intended by the United States to stabilize and protect Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean area appear to have been construed in Moscow within the framework of its preconceptions of the inherent aggressiveness of what it defined and stereotyped as "capitalist imperialism." For if it was emotional turbulence that distorted American popular perceptions, it was largely the ideologically shaped preconceptions of the Soviet leadership toward the outside world that were responsible for the primitive and distorted simplicity with which it interpreted the actions of the United States. These interpretations were in turn responsible for a reciprocal hardening of Soviet policies. It is by no means evident that the Soviet Union had begun its process of consolidation in Eastern Europe with a clear design in mind for proceeding toward the creation of what came to be called "Peoples' Democracies." A large degree of improvisation seems to have been involved, which represented not so much the opening of a new revolutionary advance in an immediate sense, but the securing of what were regarded as the fruits of victory, and the bulwarking of its security. However, given the Soviet ideologically distorted interpretation of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan as American efforts to challenge the Soviet position in Eastern Europe and to establish an American hegemony in Western Europe, the Soviet conception of security could allow for no stopping place short of total domination over Eastern Europe.

These interactions were related, both as cause and as effect, to the apparent emergence of a faction in Soviet politics led by Andrei Zhdanov, a narrow and dogmatic leader who tightened ideological lines of control at home and pressed for militancy abroad. In the justification of his policies, Zhdanov seized on each measure in the Western response as confirmation that Western intentions were aggressive and war was imminent. It cannot be proved, but his leadership under Stalin seems to have been responsible for the establishment of the Cominform, the further tightening of Soviet control in Eastern Europe, the coup in Czechoslovakia, the incitement of the Communist parties of France and Italy to undertake violently militant actions against their governments. Even more importantly, it was he who presided over the opening of the struggle for the control of Germany, which was to become the most decisive territorial issue in the Cold War. With the blockade of Berlin and the airlift, cautiously opposing each other by measures short of war, the line that marked the westernmost advance of Soviet power into Central Europe was tested and held.

By the time of Zhdanov's death in late 1948, it had become apparent that Soviet misreading of events and miscalculations had resulted in a trend massively adverse to Soviet interests. Yugoslavia had been estranged, the Western zones of Germany were on the way toward unification, the militancy of French and Italian Communists had only served to contribute to the further cohesion and mobilization of the Western alliance. In the following years, the Soviet leadership sought to undo these consequences by intermittent gestures toward a reduction in the atmosphere of tension.

Once again, however, what now appears to have been a misreading of intentions on both sides was to carry tension to still higher levels. The Communist attack against South Korea, instead of being interpreted primarily in the local context of developments in Asia, came to be understood in the West, and I believe wrongly, as an indication of heightened Soviet militancy generally, which might also manifest itself by overt aggression in Europe and elsewhere. By the end of 1950, the Western mobilization was moving forward with a powerful momentum, driven by the conviction that the Soviet Union had both the capabilities and the intention of launching an attack on Western Europe as part of its program for military domination of the world. The United States reaction was colored and compounded, perhaps not wholly consciously, by two events which had immediately preceded the Korean War: the first Soviet nuclear explosion and the consummation of the Communist victory in China. These developments, plus the current preoccupation with espionage and the frustrations of fighting the first modern limited war, created a climate of legislative and public opinion of extraordinary intensity. In this climate, the United States administration found it possible to get legislative acceptance for higher levels of military appropriations which had originally been planned as a consequence of the Soviet nuclear explosion, but which had been shelved because of the costs involved.

In this climate, the administration also took the first steps toward the rearmament of West Germany. The effect was to complicate the internal political evolution of West Germany, to introduce serious political strains into the Western alliance, and to further freeze positions in Europe. Whatever possibilities may have existed for diplomatic adjustment of the German problem—and they may not have been substantial—were now further diminished. The effort to rearm the Federal Republic of Germany, thought necessary in the light of the imminent possibility of an overt military attack by the Soviet Union against Western Europe, in turn aroused a frenzied Soviet reaction, no doubt partly genuine and partly manipulative.

Of course it is difficult to say with certainty whether the prevailing Western picture of Soviet intentions was well founded or not. With the advantage of hindsight, however, and with no desire to impugn those who bore the responsibilities for our security, I believe that the impression of a planned Soviet military conquest of Western Europe was a misreading of Soviet intentions. There are many indications that Stalin fully appreciated the disastrous consequences of an overt move against Western Europe in the face of American strategic superiority. Moreover, although the Soviet Union made use of its considerable strength in France and Italy for political action against these governments, and for clandestine operations in the event of war, Stalin was not prepared to encourage the French and Italian Communist parties to seize power, although the militant wing of the French party had wished to do exactly that.

It should be added, however, that all we know about Soviet behavior in this period suggests that had there been no risk in further expansion, and no effective resistance, in all probability Soviet probing would have been far less conservative than it was. The organization of the Western defense and the American commitment to that defense were necessary to restore the confidence and political stability of Western Europe, and to ensure against any temptation of a militant Soviet leadership to consider that a military attack could be successful. What is at issue is a question of degree, of proportion, of emphasis. By overestimating the threat of Soviet military conquest, we were led to override political considerations in the face of what we believed to be the higher military priorities.

Another factor that made judgment difficult at that time was the deployment of the large Soviet land army to move quickly into Western Europe in the event of an American nuclear attack, "There is an element of tragic irony [I am quoting a few sentences from something I wrote several years ago] in the way in which Soviet superiority in armed forces and Western superiority in nuclear weapons, instead of creating a military equilibrium in this period, led to an interacting spiral of mutual anxiety and rearmament.... The irony is heightened by the fact that the means chosen by the Soviet to compensate for its sense of vulnerability stimulated Western military mobilization."

The spiral of armaments, while clearly not a cause of the Cold War, became, like the interaction of distorted perceptions, a complicating and intensifying factor. Each side felt a sense of vulnerability, which was heightened by the efforts of the other to overcome its corresponding feeling. Even before the war had ended, the Soviet leadership had begun to concentrate its resources on the earliest possible development of a modern military technology, to overcome the acute vulnerability it felt in the face of United States strategic air and nuclear power. Meanwhile, by the deployment of its land army, and by a foreign policy that used both tension and the easement of tension, the Soviet Union sought to deter the West from using, or gaining political advantage from, its nuclear strength before Soviet science could break the Western monopoly.

By the middle 'fifties, Stalin's successors harvested the fruits of his concentration of resources on the development of jet bombers, nuclear weapons, and missile delivery systems, and the strategic military relationship began to change its character. No longer was it a matter of Western nuclear preponderance versus Soviet preponderance in conventional land forces. The appearance of Soviet jet bombers was followed by intermediate range and then intercontinental range missiles; the Soviet atomic bomb by the Soviet hydrogen bomb. It was undoubtedly the expectation of the Soviet leadership that the acquisition of these weapons would produce what was optimistically called "a shift in the balance of power," which was expected to yield substantial political advantages. As the arsenals increased, however, the sense of vulnerability deepened because of the nature of the weapons themselves, which favor the offense over the defense, and also because of overestimations of what the other side was up to. The "bomber gap," the "missile gap," and the presumed "conventional gap" all reflected the prudent concern of men ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• 1 Retrospect
• 2 The Changing Terrain of International Politics
• 3 Transformations in the Soviet System
• 4 The Evolution of Soviet Foreign Policy and the Cold War
• 5 A Shift of Emphasis in Policy