Did Reagan win the Cold War?

Jan. 25, 2006 | Like the fashions of the late 1980s, the Cold War is a phenomenon both too recent to have retro appeal and too distant to strike anyone as relevant. We rarely talk about it or what it meant; it won't quite come into focus. When John Lewis Gaddis, a history professor and expert on the conflict, teaches Yale undergraduates about the Cold War, "hardly any of them remember any of the events I'm describing." His students, he reports, "have very little sense of how the Cold War started, what it was about or why it ended in the way that it did." A worldview and way of life that once seemed permanent have melted away.

But the Cold War is still with us. It shaped the world we live in and lies coiled at the roots of most of the international problems we face today. Bits and pieces of its legacy turn up regularly in the course of current political debates like the outmoded yet indestructible junk of a geopolitical yard sale. I recently overheard a scornful college student in a cafe explaining to a friend that the CIA used to supply arms to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1970s. And then there's the famous photograph, snapped in Baghdad in 1983, of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. All the flotsam and jetsam of the Cold War.

The only message some people get from these isolated factlets about yesterday's alliances with today's enemies is that political allegiances are highly subject to change. But to cynically conclude from this that all foreign policy is driven by amoral self-interest is to misread history -- always a bad idea. Americans once saw Osama and Saddam as bit players in a larger drama, and even when they knew they were consorting with bad guys (which was the case with Saddam; less so with bin Laden -- since the aid went through Pakistani intelligence), they believed this was necessary to defeat a greater evil. And that's exactly the kind of mistake that we're likely to repeat if we don't keep reminding ourselves of why we made it in the first place.

For those of us who remember some or all of the Cold War, it was surprisingly like hot wars in one way. Soldiers like to describe war as long periods of crushing boredom punctuated by interludes of total fear. In the Cold War, as Gaddis points out, the civilian populations of both superpowers, their allies, and eventually the rest of the human race learned to live under the continuous threat of utter destruction, but there were moments -- the Cuban missile crisis and some parts of Ronald Reagan's presidency -- when oblivion seemed particularly close at hand. For the average citizen, the fact that you knew that you didn't know what was really going on fueled the terror. The rest of the time, trying to follow the Byzantine diplomatic minuets of the SALT talks or recall who was who among the gray ranks of the aged, identical members of the Soviet leadership was likely to put you to sleep.

Gaddis' miraculously lucid and comprehensible book is, therefore, a boon even to those who lived through the events he describes. In recent years, the unsealing of records kept by both sides has added a lot to historians' understanding of the Cold War, and if this book offers nothing new, it presents what we have learned in a very readable form. That the whole saga looks very different from the outside is an understatement to say the least.

Gaddis begins his book with a description of the tubercular, dying George Orwell struggling to finish his dystopian masterpiece "1984" on a remote Scottish island in 1946. What a modern readership can't feel as immediately as Orwell's contemporaries did is the urgency of the novel's warnings about the threat of totalitarianism. Orwell's book became, writes Gaddis, "the single most compelling vision in the post-World War II era of what might follow it," and that vision of the future was, in Orwell's words, "a boot stamping down on a human face -- forever."

"It was as easy to believe, in 1945, that authoritarian communism was the wave of the future as that democratic capitalism was," Gaddis writes. The ideological assurance of the Soviets was still untarnished by history. Stalin was convinced that capitalist states could never cooperate for long and if he could manage to hold onto the advantages he acquired at the end of the war, he had only to bide his time until the West fell apart. John F. Kennedy after a 1961 summit in Vienna, confessed to being "intimidated" by the confidence Nikita Khrushchev had in the world's inevitable turn toward communism.

Meanwhile, the advent of fantastically powerful and devastating new weapons changed the face of war as human beings had known it for millennia. A whole series of grotesquely absurd principles came into play. Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) as a means of preventing the use of nuclear weapons lived up to its acronym -- only the likely eradication of civilization could save it.

Gaddis explains how some of these principles were formed when Eisenhower rejected the suggestions of his advisors that the U.S. formulate a plan for a war involving a "limited" use of nuclear weapons. If you've ever wondered why military service should be considered an asset in a president, here's an excellent example of how it helped. The former general knew better than his policy wonks "how easily the irrationalities of emotion, friction and fear can cause wars to escalate into meaningless violence" and preferred scaring statesmen out of even considering the possibility of a shooting war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Eisenhower "insisted on planning only for total war" as a way "to make sure that no war at all would take place." Thus he was, in Gaddis' estimation, "at once the most subtle and brutal strategist of the nuclear age."

Strategy, however, could easily run amok. When, in 1956, Britain, France and Israel seized the Suez Canal from Egypt, Khrushchev threatened them with "rocket weapons." They withdrew, but only in response to back-channel threats of economic sanctions from Eisenhower. Khrushchev, however, believed his saber-rattling had done the trick, and as a result, "this practice became a strategy ... From 1957 to 1961, Khrushchev openly, repeatedly and blood-curdlingly threatened the West" with nuclear weapons. It was a diplomatic technique that led the superpowers, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, to the brink of World War III.

The upside-down logic of the Cold War also meant that small, weak nations could "wag the dog" by playing the superpowers off against each other. Skilled players, like Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, perfected the subtle art of "nonalignment," tilting right or left as the advantage shifted. "There were limits," Gaddis writes, "to how much either Moscow or Washington could order smaller powers around, because they could always defect to the other side." And as a result, the U.S. found itself backing risible authoritarian regimes in Asia and Latin America simply because they were reliably anti-communist, while in Africa the Soviets allowed themselves to be suckered into supporting opportunistic local factions posing as leftist nationalist movements. Sometimes it behooved the leadership of small nations to seem a lot weaker -- and likelier to topple -- than they actually were.

Next page: On Gaddis' list of 1980s "visionaries": Margaret Thatcher, the pope and Ronald Reagan