The Cold War in Retrospect, Geoffrey Warner

Review article

The Cold War in retrospect

International Affairs 87:1 (2011) 173–184© 2011 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2011 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ox4 2dq, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

GEOFFREY WARNER

The Cambridge history of the Cold War. Edited by Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad. Volume I: Origins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. 643pp. Index. £100.00. isbn 978 0 52183 719 4.

Volume II: Crises and détente. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. 662pp. Index. £100.00. isbn 978 0 52183 720 0.

Volume III: Endings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. 694pp. Index. £100.00. isbn 978 0 52183 721 7.

‘The literature authored [on the Cold War]’, writes one of the contributors to the Cambridge history of the Cold War (CHCW), ‘fills many a bookcase and website, with no end in sight’ (vol. III, p. 422). Indeed, four other contributors, including both editors, have written their own histories of the conflict.1 One cannot help wondering to some extent, therefore, what is the precise purpose of this even by British standards extortionately priced, three-volume collection of essays on the same subject. The multi-authored Cambridge histories are, of course, widely regarded as standard reference works, but this one is in a league of its own. The most recent volume of the New Cambridge modern history, for example, which deals with a period of similar length and equal complexity (1898–1945 as opposed to 1945–91), managed to cover it in 845 pages with a mere 29 contributors instead of 75, and 25 chapters instead of 72.2

This is explained and justified by the editors in a preface which is printed in each of the three volumes. ‘The CHCW’, they write, ‘aims at being comprehen-sive, comparative, and pluralistic in its approach. The contributors have deliber-ately been drawn from various “schools” of thought and have been asked to put forward their own—often distinctive—lines of argument while indicating the 1 John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War (London: Allen Lane, 2005); Melvyn P. Leffler, For the soul of mankind: the

United States, the Soviet Union and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: a very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Odd Arne Westad, The global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

2 C. L. Mowat, ed., The shifting balance of world forces 1898–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). There are other important differences between the volumes under review and the New Cambridge modern history volume. The former have excellent bibliographies for each chapter, while the latter had none. Footnoting is different too. The Cold War volumes are liberally peppered with references, many of them to archival sources, whereas the New Cambridge modern history volume was sparsely footnoted, with no less than four chapters out of 25 having none at all and many more with only a few.

Geoffrey Warner

174International Affairs 87: 1, 2011Copyright © 2011 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2011 The Royal Institute of International Affairs.

existence of alternative interpretations and approaches’. As ‘a substantial work of reference’, they continue, ‘the CHCW provides detailed, synthetic accounts of key periods and major thematic topics, while striving for broad and original interpretations’. The whole enterprise, it is claimed, ‘constitute[s] a scholarly project written by academics for fellow academics as well as for policymakers, foreign affairs personnel, military officers, and analysts of international relations’, although ‘we also hope the CHCW will serve as an introduction and reference point for advanced undergraduate students and for an educated lay public in many countries’ (vol. I, p. xvi).

Apart from the occasional chapter, however, the bulk of the CHCW would, one suspects, be rather tough-going for most present-day undergraduates while the ‘educated lay public’ would have to be very well educated indeed. These volumes strike the present reviewer as much more akin to the proceedings of a huge scholarly conference in which academics discuss the current state of research in a particular area of study. Such conferences are necessary and often valuable, but they do not usually make for easy reading.

There is certainly a panoply of talent present in these pages, although roughly four out of five contributors are based in either the US or the UK.3 The editors explain this over-representation by suggesting that North America and Britain were ‘where Cold War studies first bloomed’ (vol. I, p. xvi), but while this may have been true, it no longer applies. There is a sprinkling of continental European contributors, together with a Russian and a Chinese scholar who are both based in their own countries to complement those of Russian and Chinese origin currently based in the United States and Britain. The biggest gap, however, is the absence of anyone from the Third World. It would have been both interesting and valuable to have had the perspective of someone from Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab world or the Indian subcontinent on the impact of the Cold War on their part of the world, but one would look in vain. These limitations cast some doubt on the editors’ claim that the CHCW is ‘comprehensive, comparative, and pluralistic in its approach’ as, perhaps, does the fact that only ten out of the 73 contributors are women.

The individual contributions follow two main patterns: the first deals with a particular country or region either over the entire period or for parts of it, while the second looks at general themes. The latter includes obvious choices, such as nuclear weapons and intelligence, but also ranges further afield. As the editors point out, in order to take the story ‘far beyond the narrow boundaries of diplomatic affairs we shall deal at considerable length with the social, intellectual and economic history of the twentieth century. We shall discuss demography and consumption, women and youth, science and technology, culture and race. The evolution of the Cold War cannot be comprehended without attention to such matters’ (vol. I, p. xv).

Some of this is a little presumptuous. I was only able, for example, to detect specific references to gender issues in three chapters: ‘Cold War mobilization

3 Well over half the contributors are based in American institutions, although not all are Americans.



and domestic politics: the United States’ (vol. I, pp. 435–7); ‘Counter-cultures: the rebellions against the Cold War order, 1965–1975’ (vol. II, pp. 460–61); and ‘Consumer capitalism and the end of the Cold War’ (vol. III, pp. 496–7, 499–500). Racial problems fare little better and are only salient in discussions of southern Africa and the United States. There are a couple of references to the racial element in the Sino-Soviet dispute (vol. I, p. 364; vol. II, pp. 371–2), but little or nothing about racial conflicts in the rest of Asia and Africa.

Even when topics ‘beyond the narrow boundaries of diplomatic affairs’ are discussed in more detail, they do not always yield much in the way of heightened understanding of the dynamics of the Cold War. Nicholas Cull’s chapter on ‘Reading, viewing, and tuning into the Cold War’ (vol. II, pp. 438–59) is, for example, a brilliant description of government propaganda and Cold War themes in popular culture in the United States, the Soviet Union and both Western and Eastern Europe (although not China), but it does not tell us very much about the impact of this output upon audiences except to say, apropos of Elton John’s perfor-mance of ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’ during the singer’s Russian tour of 1979, that ‘[a]s the Soviet economy stalled, the doors opened by [the] Helsinki [ agreement of 1975] revealed to the world the grim reality behind the official image of the worker’s paradise. The positive image which the Soviets had nurtured at such expense around the world withered away’ (vol. II, p. 456). Whatever the appeal of rock music, one would have thought that the transparently greater prosperity of the capitalist as opposed to the communist world would have had a much greater effect.

Similarly, Jeremi Suri, in what is undoubtedly an excellent analysis of ‘Counter-cultures: the rebellions against the Cold War order, 1965–1975’ (vol. II, chapter 22), argues that ‘[i]nternal dissent and disorder forced leaders to conceptualize their foreign-policy aims and capabilities’ (vol. II, p. 480), but comes nowhere near proving it. ‘Scholars of détente’, he concedes, ‘generally point to the importance of near nuclear parity and a general balance of power in bringing the United States and the Soviet Union to embrace more stable relations. They also point to the growing rift between Moscow and Beijing, and the opening this created for Washington to position itself between these two states’ (vol. II, p. 478). ‘They’, in this context, are surely right.

Other ‘thematic’ chapters are more satisfactory in that they make better links between their subject matter and the Cold War. In a typically provocative essay on ‘Science, technology and the Cold War’, for example, David Reynolds focuses on developments in transistors, satellites and computers and concludes, ‘The computer revolution … brought to crisis point the information deficit in Soviet society. Both superpowers controlled and directed information—social, scien-tific, and technological—during the Cold War, but the Soviet Union was much more regimented than the United States. In the short term, that kept it going, but eventually the “iron curtain” between its military system, on the one hand, and its civilian economy and society, on the other, was a significant factor in the Soviet collapse’ (vol. III, p. 399).

Geoffrey Warner


In her examination of ‘The Cold War and human rights’, Rosemary Foot’s main argument ‘is that Cold War rivalries contributed significantly to the exten-sive violation of the rights enunciated in the [United Nations] Universal Decla-ration of Human Rights (UDHR)’ (vol. III, p. 446). Communist violations of human rights are well known in the West—although the name of Pol Pot appears nowhere in the CHCW—but, as John Coatsworth points out in his chapter on ‘The Cold War in Central America, 1975–1991’, ‘Between 1960 … and the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and execu-tions of non-violent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites’ (vol. III, p. 221) and most of the perpetrators were supported or tolerated by the United States as opponents of ‘international communism’.

As mentioned above, other thematic chapters deal with more obvious questions, such as nuclear weapons, intelligence and economics. It is a pity that the three chapters on nuclear weapons (by David Holloway, vol. I, pp. 376–97; William Burr and David Rosenberg, vol. II, pp. 88–111; and Francis Gavin, vol. II, pp. 395–416) are not accompanied by at least one on the development of conventional weapons. It is clear, for example, that the Russians spent a lot of time and money on building up an ocean-going navy during the Cold War, but there is not much about it in the CHCW. Then there is the important question of the balance of ground forces in Europe. NATO forces, we were repeatedly told, were outnum-bered by those of the Warsaw Pact countries, particularly in terms of tanks. It would have been useful to have been told something about the development and effectiveness of each alliance’s armour. And surely there should be at least some reference to the AK-47, that relatively low-cost but highly effective example of an infantry soldier’s or guerrilla fighter’s armament whose fame earned it inclusion in the flag of Mozambique.

In his chapter on intelligence (vol. II, pp. 417–37) Christopher Andrew rightly stresses the importance of signals intelligence (SIGINT), imagery intelligence (IMINT) and scientific and technical intelligence. On the other hand he is somewhat neglectful of human intelligence (HUMINT), in which the Soviet Union and its allies seem to have enjoyed a relative advantage. There is, for example, no mention of the Cambridge Five, Markus Wolf or Aldrich Ames.4 On the subject of covert operations, Andrew rightly points out that too much attention has been paid to the activities of the CIA in the Third World as opposed to that of the KGB (vol. II, p. 425), but is he correct in his bald assertion that ‘there is no evidence that US covert action had a significant effect on the outcome [of the Italian elections of 1948]’ (vol. II, p. 423)?

The chapters on economics, by Charles Maier (vol. I, pp. 44–66); David Painter (vol. I, pp. 486–507), Richard Cooper (vol. II, pp. 44–64), Wilfried Loth (vol. II,

4 For examples of the kind of information supplied to their Soviet masters by the Cambridge Five, see Oleg Tsarev, ‘Intelligence and the Cold War: lessons and learning’, Part II, Harold Shukman (ed.), Agents for change: intelligence services in the 21st century (London: St Ermin’s Press, 2000), pp. 22–40. It included the Top Secret Chiefs of Staff memorandum on ‘Global Strategy’ of 1 May 1950, which was only declassified in 1991 and then with an excision. Stalin was sent his copy on 15 August 1950!



pp. 503–23), and Giovanni Arrighi (vol. III, pp. 23–44), are all useful, although Cooper, while conceding that ‘The real “battleground” of the Cold War after the early 1960s was [the] competition for influence in developing countries through trade, financial and technical aid, and military assistance in the form of equipment and training’ (vol. II, p. 64), actually says very little about it. Loth’s chapter has the advantage of a much longer perspective, in comparison not only with the other contributors on economic issues, but also most of the other authors as well, an issue to which I shall return.

There is something of a disagreement between Maier and Painter on the importance of oil and other raw materials. Maier writes: ‘Cold War rivalry … was not really rivalry over resources or raw materials despite many statements to the contrary. Each side was plentifully endowed with strategically impor-tant commodities, including oil. What the Soviets and their dependents could tap within their vast land mass, the Western allies effectively controlled in areas of former colonial dependency or longstanding special access’ (vol. I, pp. 54–5). Painter, on the other hand, states that ‘Control of strategic raw materials played a key role in the origins and outcome of World War II and continued to be a source of power and policy during the Cold War’ (vol. I, p. 494). I would be inclined to back Painter on the central issue. Despite what Maier says, the Soviet Union could not be assured of its oil supplies until the discovery of the huge Samotlor Field in western Siberia in 1965, while the dependence of the United States upon strategic raw materials from South Africa alone gave rise to considerable anxiety about that unstable part of the world.5

Turning from the thematic to the more strictly chronological chapters on countries and regions, no one will quarrel with the allocation of seven chapters each to the United States and the Soviet Union, four to China and/or the Sino-Soviet dispute and two to Japan. It is also possible to justify the allocation of only one chapter to the United Kingdom and France, although Anne Deighton should have been encouraged to extend her chapter on ‘Britain and the Cold War, 1945–1955’ (vol. I, pp. 112–32) so that it dealt with the whole period in the way that Frédéric Bozo’s on ‘France, “Gaullism” and the Cold War’ (vol. II, pp. 158–78) does. How can one explain, however, the absence of a separate chapter on the Indian subcontinent? Having already commented on the lack of a contributor from that region, I can only add that I find the virtual neglect of two nuclear powers, one a leader of the original non-aligned bloc, later a Soviet ally and more recently a burgeoning economic presence, and the other an important if often unreliable American ally, a facilitator of the Sino-American rapprochement and a key player in the growth of militant Islam, beyond comprehension.

A chapter-by-chapter review of the contributions on individual countries and regions would be both excessive and confusing, so I shall proceed by focusing on

5 See the table on p. 57 of Joanne Davies, Constructive engagement? Chester Crocker and American policy in South Africa, Namibia and Angola (Oxford: James Currey, 2007). Thus, the United States was 100 per cent dependent on the outside world for chromium, 48 per cent of which came from South Africa; and 84 per cent dependent for platinum, 67 per cent of which came from South Africa. The figures are from the US Department of Commerce and relate to 1985.

Geoffrey Warner


three major questions which occupy the attention of students of the Cold War: first, why did the Cold War start? Second, why did it last so long? And third, why did it end?

Not all contributions will be included in my answers to these questions and some will be mentioned more than once, but this should not be taken as a reflec-tion on the quality of those not discussed. All the contributors are specialists in their field and most have already made substantial contributions to the study of the subject. If the CHCW is unwieldy, the project itself is at fault, not those asked to participate in it.

Why did the Cold War start?

Given the title of his essay, ‘Ideology and the origins of the Cold War, 1917–1962’ (vol. I, pp. 20–43), it is hardly surprising that David Engerman stresses the impor-tance of two separate ideologies, both of which were universalist, among the causes of the conflict. So do John Gaddis in his ‘Grand strategies in the Cold War’ (vol. II, pp. 2–4), Robert Jervis, ‘Identity and the Cold War’ (vol. II, pp. 24–5) and Michael Latham, ‘The Cold War in the Third World, 1963–1975’ (vol. II, p. 259), although the terminology sometimes differs. While the influence of ideology was often underplayed, particularly by American scholars when writing about their own country, realpolitik was every bit as important, although there is little explicit examination of this in the CHCW.

In order to understand the role played by realpolitik in Cold War origins, one needs to go back much further chronologically than 1945 and while Engerman’s chapter does discuss Russo-American rivalry during the years 1917 to 1945, he does so—quite properly in view of his brief—in ideological terms. However, there was rivalry between the United States (and Britain) and Russia before the Russian revolution of 1917 and the installation of a communist regime.6 The latter merely exacerbated it. This conflict, however, was partially masked by the perceived threat from other powers: Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperial Japan. Together with France, these six countries were the principal state actors in the international system until the Second World War. That conflict resulted in the defeat and occupation of France, Germany, Italy and Japan, leaving only the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union as perceived victors. Even the United Kingdom’s status was uncertain. A senior Foreign Office official likened it on 1 October 1945 to that of ‘Lepidus in the triumvirate with Mark Antony and Augustus’.7

6 See, for example, Edward Zabriskie, American–Russian rivalry in the far east: a study in diplomacy and power politics 1895–1914 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1946); and David Gillard, The struggle for Asia 1828–1914: a study in British and Russian imperialism (London: Methuen, 1977).

7 Orme Sargent minute, 1 October 1945, cited in Terry H. Anderson, The United States, Great Britain and the origins of the Cold War, 1944–1947 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981), p. 84. The United Kingdom sought to solve this problem by becoming the equivalent to the head prefect in a British public school in which the head teacher was the United States. See my essay, ‘The British Labour government and the Atlantic alliance, 1949–1951’, in Olav Riste (ed.), Western security: the formative years: European and Atlantic defence 1947–1953 (Oslo: Universitetsvorlaget, 1985), pp. 247–65, especially p. 249.



This left the two ‘superpowers’, the United States and the Soviet Union. John Gaddis argues that ‘[n]o equally comprehensive strategy for confronting the Soviet Union emerged anywhere in the capitalist world before 1945’ (vol. II, p. 4), but that simply is not true. As Charles de Gaulle for one recognized as early as the summer of 1944, President Roosevelt was aiming at United States hegemony in the postwar world,8 something which was not likely to appeal to Joseph Stalin, whatever his political beliefs. Gaddis frequently cites Thucydides in his essay, but he omits what is perhaps the most pertinent passage, viz. ‘What made the [Peleponnesian] War inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta’.9 Whether one casts the United States in the role of Athens and the Soviet Union in that of Sparta, or vice versa, makes no differ-ence. There were only two admittedly unequal but nevertheless Great Powers remaining in the world in 1945. It was highly likely, if not inevitable, that they would clash.

Why did the Cold War last so long?

The simple answer to this question is that no one could clearly be said to have won or lost until 1989–90. The Soviet Union and the United States, together with their respective allies, were already jockeying for position before the end of the Second World War, which is another reason why the CHCW should have begun at least in 1941 if not earlier, but apart from a few references to this process,10 there is little discussion of this. The ‘jockeying’ continued for almost another 50 years and, for the most part, it was seen by both sides as a zero-sum game. Until one side or the other threw in their cards, therefore, the game would continue.

No sooner had the lines of conflict been drawn in Europe following the Marshall Plan, the establishment of the Cominform, the Berlin blockade and the formation of NATO, than the Cold War intensified in East Asia. As Niu Jun remarks in his chapter on ‘The birth of the People’s Republic of China [PRC] and the road to the Korean War’, the communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949 ‘overturned the existing postwar international order in East Asia, which was based on the Yalta agreement and the ensuing 1945 Sino-Soviet treaty’, which was signed by Chiang Kai-shek/Jiang Jieshi’s Chinese Nationalist government. ‘The new state of affairs was based on the new Sino-Soviet treaty signed in February 1950 [by Mao Zedong on behalf of the PRC]. Through its alliance with the USSR, the PRC now staked its initial position in the Cold War on standing alongside Moscow’s confrontation with the United States’ (vol. I, p. 236).

This pro-Soviet stance was brought into sharp focus during the Korean War (1950–53) when large-scale Chinese communist forces intervened to save the 8 The evidence for this may be found in my essay on ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt and the post-war world’ in David

Dutton (ed.), Statecraft and diplomacy in the twentieth century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), pp. 155–66.

9 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 49.10 See, for example, Ennio di Nolfo’s reference to the Soviet exclusion from any effective role in Italy by the

Americans and British in 1943 in his essay, ‘The Cold War and the transformation of the Mediterranean, 1960–75’ (vol. II, p. 238).

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communist North Korean regime from the consequences of defeat by United Nations forces led by the United States following the unsuccessful North Korean attempt to reunify the divided Korean peninsula by force. Although the Soviet Union was not primarily responsible for the war, as the United States and its allies believed at the time, Stalin did give his blessing to the North Korean attack; provided help in the form of planning, arms and equipment; and encouraged the Chinese to intervene when it looked as though North Korea might be overrun. As William Stueck points out in an excellent chapter on the war, ‘PRC success in fighting the United States to a stalemate in Korea greatly elevated China’s stature abroad. Less than a year after the armistice, China played a critical role in mediating the end of the first Indochina war and in 1955 it emerged as the star player at the Bandung Conference of African and Asian states’ (vol. I, p. 284). The Korean War also drew lines of blood between the PRC and the United States which were not crossed for almost 20 years and precipitated a huge rearmament programme on the part of the Americans and their allies.

It seemed briefly that the death of Stalin in March 1953 and the Korean armistice in July might lead to a rapprochement between the principal antagonists in the Cold War, but it did not materialize. In his chapter on ‘Soviet foreign policy, 1953–62’ (vol. I, pp. 312–33) Vojtech Mastny blames this largely on the Russians, castigating Foreign Minister Molotov for pursuing a ‘foreign policy … of Stalin’s without Stalin’ (vol. I, p. 315) and describing Stalin’s eventual successor, Nikita Khrush-chev, as both reckless—which Stalin was not—and ‘the last true believer in the ideals of Communism’ (vol. I, pp. 318, 333).

Not everyone will agree. Geoffrey Roberts, for example, in a recent working paper for the Cold War International History Project, has argued that Molotov was not as rigid as is often claimed,11 and while the recently elected President Eisenhower may have believed in and hoped for a relaxation of tension, some of his key advisers were less enthusiastic. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, for example, thought that conciliatory Soviet moves in both foreign and domestic policy introduced by the post-Stalin regime were the result of ‘outside pressure, and I don’t know anything better we can do than keep up these pressures right now’, while another influential presidential adviser, C. D. Jackson, dismissed them as ‘Soviet lures’, which ‘[d]ramatize Soviet power and confidence … [c]onfuse the free world as to Soviet intentions … [i]solate the United States from its allies … [and r]aise hopes and expectations for a relaxation of tensions, with resulting tendency to delay Western defense efforts’.12

In any event, the Cold War continued unabated for the next 20 years, involving serious crises in Indochina (1954), the Taiwan Straits (1955 and 1958), Berlin (1958–

11 Geoffrey Roberts, ‘A chance for peace? The Soviet campaign to end the Cold War, 1953–1955’, Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 57, December 2008. This can be downloaded from the CWIHP’s website at http://wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/WP57_Web.Final.pdf.

12 Emmett Hughes diary, 29 March 1953, Hughes MSS, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University, NJ; Jackson memos, 26 March, 15 April 1953, C. D. Jackson MSS, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KA. With regard to delaying ‘Western defense efforts’, it should be pointed out that a key US objective at the time was the passage of the treaty setting up the European Defence Community, which would enable the rearming of West Germany.



61), Cuba (1962) and the Middle East (1967 and 1973).13 Mastny regards the Berlin crisis as ‘even more dangerous than the later Cuban crisis’ because ‘[n]either side realized how close they came to a military conflict’ (vol. I, p. 333), but the CHCW gives Cuba pride of place by allocating an entire chapter to it by James Hershberg, ‘The Cuban missile crisis’ (vol. II, pp. 65–87), together with many references in other chapters as well.

There seems to be general agreement that ‘[t]he emergence of strategic parity at the close of the 1960s provided the context for superpower détente’ (Burr and Rosenberg, vol. II, p. 88), together with the Sino-American rapprochement which occurred as a result of the Sino-Soviet split. In his chapter on the latter, Sergey Radchenko writes that ‘the Sino-Soviet split transformed international politics. Fear of facing conflict on both the Western and Eastern fronts prompted Soviet leaders to choose the lesser of two evils, and by the end of the turn of the decade [the 1960s] the United States was seen as a more limited threat … Similar devel-opments occurred on the Chinese side. After the 1969 war scare, internal assess-ments in Beijing concluded that the USSR was China’s greatest external threat. Mao moved swiftly toward a rapprochement with Washington, seeking improved relations with the United States as a measure of security against perceived Soviet expansionism’ (vol. II, p. 369). By the same token it is clear that the United States wished to use China as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. (See Marc Trachten-berg, ‘The structure of Great Power politics, 1963–1975’, vol. II, p. 498.)

Detente enjoyed some success in the field of arms control, but there is also general agreement that it ‘began to unravel in the Third World’ (Svetlana Savran-skaya and William Taubman, ‘Soviet foreign policy, 1962–1975’, vol. II, p. 151). As Michael Latham points out in his chapter on ‘The Cold War in the Third World, 1963–1975’ (vol. II, pp. 258–80), ‘Where Nixon and Kissinger anticipated that détente would result in a Soviet acceptance of the status quo in the Third World, Brezhnev believed that the Soviet Union retained a free hand to challenge the United States; global engagement there’ (vol. II, pp. 276–7).

An interesting chapter in this context is that of Piero Gleijeses on ‘Cuba and the Cold War, 1959–1980’ (vol. II, pp. 327–48). Gleijeses makes much of the fact that the Castro regime in Cuba did not send large numbers of troops to Africa at the behest of the Soviet Union (vol. II, p. 340), but the fact remains that ‘it was enthu-siastically encouraged by Moscow’ and that the Soviet military arranged transport for the Cubans by sea and air and also supplied them with weapons.14 Gleijeses is on firmer ground when he points out, ‘If indeed the “rules” of détente were violated in Angola, the principal culprit was the United States, which had encour-aged South Africa to invade’ and in the Horn of Africa it was again the United

13 The so-called ‘second Indochina war’ which lasted from 1961 to 1975 is not included in this list because, despite the heavy involvement of the United States and the considerable support provided to the North Vietnamese by both the Soviet Union and the PRC, there does not appear to have been a risk of a full-scale superpower confrontation. The conflict is covered in the CHCW in a chapter by Fredrik Logevall, ‘The Indochina Wars and the Cold War, 1945–1975’ (vol. II, pp. 281–304).

14 Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The KGB and the world: the Mitrokhin archive II (London: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 95–6. See also Vladimir Shubin, The hot ‘Cold War’: the USSR in southern Africa (London: Pluto Press, 2008).

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States which encouraged Somalia to violate the Organization of African Unity’s principle of maintaining the colonial boundaries in its conflict with Ethiopia (vol. II, p. 346).

In her chapter on ‘The Cold War and Jimmy Carter’ (vol. III, pp. 66–88), Nancy Mitchell provides what is perhaps the best commentary on both superpowers’ intervention in sub-Saharan Africa. ‘[I]n “losing” Ethiopia’, she writes, ‘what did the United States forfeit? Washington had no significant strategic interests left in the land racked by Mengistu’s brutal revolution. And what did the Soviets gain? They lost access to Berbera [in Somalia] and failed to secure a comparable base in Ethiopia. Instead, they added millions of needy Ethiopians and an unstable regime to their roster of allies … Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, the chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces, delivered a succinct verdict on Soviet policy in the Horn. Ethiopia, he wrote, “was a serious mistake”’ (vol. III, p. 80).

It was not only Soviet activities in Africa which upset the Americans, of course, but their intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. Seen by the Americans as an offen-sive thrust towards the Persian Gulf and the West’s oil, it was in reality a defensive move.

The more or less simultaneous removal of the pro-American Shah of Iran and his replacement by the virulently anti-American ayatollahs did not help matters, although, as Nancy Mitchell states, ‘The Iranian revolution cracked one of the pillars of the Cold War—that it was a zero-sum game’ (vol. III, p. 83), by which she means that events in Iran did not enhance the interests of either side in the conflict. Amin Saikal’s chapter on ‘Islamism, the Iranian revolution, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan’ (vol. III, pp. 112–34) underlines the point.

Why did the Cold War end?

The collapse of detente and the revolution in Iran led to the defeat of Jimmy Carter by the right-wing Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, in the US presi-dential election of 1980. The ailing Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, died in 1980 to be succeeded, first by two fellow-members of the old guard, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, and then (in 1985) by a ‘new man’, Mikhail Gorbachev. In his chapter on ‘Soviet foreign policy from détente to Gorbachev, 1975–1985’ (vol. III, pp. 89–111), Vladislav Zubok argues that ‘It was Reagan’s luck that his presidency coincided with generational change in the Kremlin, that is, with the exit of the old guard and the rise of the Westernized ‘enlightened’ apparatchiks around Mikhail Gorbachev’ (vol. III, p. 111).

‘Luck’ in what sense? Beth Fischer, in her chapter ‘US foreign policy under Reagan and Bush’ (vol. III, pp. 267–88), suggests a number of answers by describing three schools of thought concerning Reagan’s contribution to the ending of the Cold War. The first is that ‘the Reagan administration was keenly aware of the fragile state of the USSR. Thus, it adopted a hard-line policy to push its enemy towards collapse’. The second is the reverse of the first, viz. that ‘the Reagan administration’s hard-line policies were an impediment to ending the



Cold War’, by making things difficult for reformers like Gorbachev. The third school of thought argues that ‘Gorbachev terminated the Cold War practically single-handedly’ (vol. III, pp. 267–8).

Fischer dismisses the first school of thought herself by showing that the Reagan administration only pursued an unambiguously hard line until 1983 and that Reagan began seeking some sort of rapprochement with the Soviet Union before Gorbachev came to power (vol. III, pp. 272–3). But in any case, any attempt to explain everything by the relationship between two personalities, however impor-tant, is flawed. An illuminating table on page 49 of Richard Cooper’s essay on ‘Economic aspects of the Cold War, 1962–1975’ shows just how weak the Soviet economy and those of its East European allies was in comparison with its western rivals during the last decade of the Cold War. Although the Soviet Union outpro-duced the United States in oil in the 1980s, it was unable to feed itself. Once the world’s largest exporter of grain, it was now the largest importer. Vladislav Zubok provides some figures: between 1976 and 1985 the Soviet Union earned $50 billion from exports of oil and natural gas, but spent $41 billion on grain imports alone (vol. III, p. 95).

Both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were also being affected by the prosperity of Western Europe and particularly the European Economic Commu-nity. As both Jussi Hanhimäki’s chapter, ‘Détente in Europe, 1962–1975’ (vol. II, pp. 198–218) and John Young’s ‘Western Europe and the end of the Cold War, 1979–1989’ (vol. III, pp. 289–310) clearly demonstrate, the Western European countries had their own concept of détente which did not always coincide with that of the United States. Not only were there significant trade and financial arrangements between Western Europe and the eastern bloc but, as Young puts it, ‘The significant point in a Cold War context was that Western Europeans not only pressed forward with creating a large, thriving economic unit that the Soviet bloc could not hope to emulate. They also developed a policy on social justice that gave fair treatment to individuals and social groups by guaranteeing basic rights such as those enshrined in the Social Charter’ (vol. III, p. 302). The Helsinki Agreement of 1975, to which the Soviet Union was a party, encouraged exchanges of view on such sensitive matters in a way which would have been impossible in the days of Stalin or even Khrushchev.

Partly as a result of this, the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe was also weakening. In 1968, when Czechoslovakia seemed on the verge of becoming a parliamentary democracy, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries had intervened militarily under the so-called ‘Brezhnev doctrine’, which permitted such inter-vention in order to preserve the integrity of the socialist bloc. But although the independent Solidarity movement in Poland had been repressed in 1981, this had been done internally as the Soviet Union had refused to intervene itself. According to Jacques Lévesque in his chapter on ‘The East European revolutions of 1989’ (vol. III, pp. 311–32), ‘Eastern Europe was already divided in two sub-blocs’ before Gorbachev came to power. ‘In Poland and Hungary, the regimes were prepared to accept the challenges of new economic transformations and experiments in

Geoffrey Warner


democratization’, although East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania refused to do so (vol. III, p. 315). In his first meeting with East European commu-nist leaders at his predecessor’s funeral in March 1985, Gorbachev apparently told them that the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’ no longer applied (Archie Brown, ‘The Gorbachev revolution and the end of the Cold War’, vol. III, p. 253), but it took four more years before the consequences manifested themselves.

According to Chen Jian, ‘China and the Cold War after Mao’ (vol. III, pp. 181–200), even developments in the PRC influenced the end of the Cold War. Mao Zedong died in 1976 and his eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, introduced major economic reforms in 1978. Deng’s ‘derevolutionizing process’, writes Chen Jian, ‘… buried the last hope of international Communism being an alternative to liberal capitalism as the mainstream towards modernity. Consequently, China played a crucial—indeed, at times even central—role in bringing the Cold War to its conclusion in the late 1980s and early 1990s’ (vol. III, p. 181). In terms of realpolitik too, although Gorbachev reached an agreement with the PRC over outstanding issues in 1986, Deng Xiaoping told President George H. W. Bush in November 1988 that the greatest threat to China still came from the Soviet Union and it was unlikely that Sino-Soviet relations would ever be as close as they were in the 1950s.15

Whatever the influence of these various factors, there is no doubt that the Soviet Union made the most concessions in ending the Cold War, the most notable one being the decision in 1990 not only to permit the reunification of Germany but to allow the reunified state to become a member of NATO. None of the essays in the CHCW explain this. It is true that the Soviet Union was weak, but it was no weaker under Gorbachev than under Stalin.16 Perhaps it was simply a question of national élan: the United States was more confident and the Soviet Union more weary. The latter was, after all, in the process of breaking up. Gorbachev’s role was important—more so than that of any American leader—but it is likely that, sooner or later, some other Russian leader would have reached the same conclu-sions as he did and brought the Cold War to an end.

How, then, should one sum up the CHCW? An inordinately expensive collec-tion of frequently overlapping and sometimes contradictory essays, but written by some of the best scholars in the field whose views are almost always worth reading and based upon a wealth of sources, both published and unpublished, which no individual could hope to master.

15 George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A world transformed (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1998), p. 96. 16 Soviet GDP was 35 per cent of the United States’ in 1950 and 36 per cent in 1990. In 1940 it had been 45 per

cent. See Angus Maddison, Monitoring the world economy 1820–1992 (Paris: OECD, 1995), pp. 183, 186–7. The calculations use 1990 US$.

Documents

The Cold War in Retrospect, Geoffrey Warner