Perpetuating the Cold War: Domestic Sources of International Patterns of Behavior
Author(s): James G. Richter
Source: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 107, No. 2 (Summer, 1992), pp. 271-301
Published by: The Academy of Political Science
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Perpetuating the Cold War:
Domestic Sources of International
Patterns of Behavior
JAMES G. RICHTER
The postwar international order has changed. As John Lewis
Gaddis has emphasized, this order provided a long and relatively stable peace
between the great powers.' But if the peace was long, one might also argue it was
unnecessarily confrontational and costly. Through most of the period, both the
United States and the Soviet governments regarded each other as essentially
aggressive entities that understood only the language of strength. As a result,
each power feared that any action - or failure to act - that allowed the other to
improve its position would be regarded as an expression of weakness and encourage
further aggression. This fear inclined both governments to view their
rivalry as a zero-sum game and to blur the distinction between vital and peripheral
interests. These images led both governments persistently to pursue policies that
were counterproductive to their domestic and international interests. The belief
that accommodation would encourage the other side to make greater demands
hampered negotiations. Both sides heavily burdened their national budgets with
defense spending, contributing to the current collapse of the Soviet economy
and to the United States's debilitating budget deficit. Finally, both governments
engaged in long, costly wars in areas of questionable strategic importance, severely
straining social tensions at home in the process.
I John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987).
JAMES G. RICHTER is assistant professor of political science at Bates College.
Political Science Quarterly Volume 107 Number 2 1992 271
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272 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
In this period of transition, it is important to understand how this selfdestructive
behavior started and why it lasted so long in order to avoid a repetition
of equally counterproductive behavior in the future. Structural theories only go
so far. They explain why in a bipolar system the two powers must concentrate
on each other in their competition for security and influence. But Kenneth Waltz,
in particular, argues that the increased certainty of a bipolar world and the wide
disparity in capabilities between the superpowers and the rest of the world lead
the two powers to manage their competition better.2 Thus, though he recognizes
that the two major powers may overreact in a global competition where "there
are no peripheries," he also suggests that their reliance on internal balancing
rather than alliance politics allows them to avoid foreign adventures more easily
than great powers in a multipolar world.3 In short, his analysis explains the
stability of the "long peace" rather than the virulence or persistence of the confrontational
aspects of the cold war.4
The superpowers' behavior is more puzzling when one considers the consequences
of the nuclear revolution. When each side has an invulnerable, nuclear
retaliatory capability, as Robert Jervis cogently argues, a state does not need
military superiority - or even equivalence - to defend its vital interests.5 Mutual
vulnerability should also induce greater restraint by highlighting the difference
between peripheral and vital interests, and increasing the risks incurred through
overreaction. Indeed, the condition of strategic interdependence contradicts the
very notion that one can impose a solution on a reluctant adversary, which is the
essence of the politics of strength implicit in an image of an aggressive enemy.
Psychological approaches to the study of international relations help fill in
some of the gaps left by structural explanations. The image of an aggressive
enemy who understands only strength, after all, has persisted since the time of
Pericles. The insecurity of an anarchic, self-help system inclines a rational actor
to prepare for the worst. This rational tendency is then reinforced by the inherent
egocentrism of human perception, which, as Jervis again argues, tends to make
leaders interpret their own actions as a response to objective conditions, and
another's actions, particularly when they conflict with their own interests, as the
expression of a hostile disposition.6
2 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1979),
chap. 8.
Ibid., 171-2.
Waltz does not contest these limits to structural explanations. He notes in reference to the
magnitude of the arms race: "That both continue to pile weapon upon unneeded weapon is a puzzle
whose solution can be found only within the United States and the Soviet Union"; see his "The Origins
of War in Neorealist Theory" in Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds., The Origin and
Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 51.
5See Robert Jervis, "Cooperation under the Security Dilemma," World Politics 30 (January 1978):
167-214. Also, see Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1984).
6 Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1976), 66-76, 343-355.
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR j 273
After World War II, the emergence of virulent enemy images was particularly
likely.7 Nuclear weapons had not yet supplanted industry and territory as the
most important strategic assets, and the power vacuum in the industrial center
of Europe excited fears on each side that the other would gain control of that
territory first. Moreover, the two powers' mutually antagonistic ideologies exacerbated
the tendency of each of them to ascribe the most hostile motives to the
actions of the other. Finally, leaders on both sides remembered the lessons of
Munich that concessions to inherently hostile countries - whether totalitarian or
imperialist -only embolden aggression.
Even so, psychological explanations cannot fully account for the virulence of
these images, their tenacity through the postwar period, or the persistence of the
behavior that accompanied them. One can find several occasions in which leaders
of the United States or the Soviet Union tried and failed to alter their governments'
respective cold war mythology: Georgii Malenkov in 1953-1954; Nikita Khrushchev
in 1959-1960 and in 1963-1964; John Kennedy in 1963; and arguably Dwight
Eisenhower in 1959-1960 and Jimmy Carter in 1977-1978. Even in 1963, when
leaders of both countries sought to overcome the prevailing public image of the
enemy simultaneously, the cold war myths prevailed. Only Mikhail Gorbachev
succeeded, but under special circumstances to be considered at the end of this
article.
These leaders' inability to change the course of their country's foreign policy
suggests that domestic politics contributed to the confrontational character of
the cold war. This should not be surprising. To the extent that international
pressures force states to undertake certain tasks for their security and well-being,
these states must define new institutional missions -and, if necessary, create
new institutions - to perform these tasks. They also must formulate legitimating
myths about their country's world role to justify these tasks and to mobilize and
extract the resources from within their territories necessary to accomplish them.8
Once established, these myths become embedded in countries' domestic politics
and are difficult to dislodge.9 Institutions defining their mission in terms of these
myths, for example, are sure to resist any attempt to change them. Meanwhile,
these myths are used not only by ruling bodies in the service of the state, but also
are coopted by persons, parties, or other political actors in order to mobilize
support for partisan interests. Leaders who seek to modify these prevailing imI
See Scott Parrish, "Soviet Reactions to the Security Dilemma: The Sources of Soviet SelfEncirclement,
1945-1950," (Unpublished manuscript, Columbia University, April 1990).
8 The domestic legitimating role of foreign policy myths and their impact on U.S. and Soviet
policies is discussed in B. Thomas Trout, "Rhetoric Revisited: Political Legitimation and the Cold
War," International Studies Quarterly 19 (September 1975). My analysis differs from this excellent
study in emphasizing the ability of competing interests to use this mythology to mobilize resources
for partisan purposes and thus sustain the mythology even when leaders desire to change it.
9 An excellent analysis of the institutional roots of foreign policy belief systems and their stability
can be found in Douglas Blum, "The Soviet Foreign Policy Belief System: Continuity and Change
in Ideology and Politics" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1990).
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274 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
ages, therefore, open themselves to political attack. In other words, once external
pressures prompt a government to adopt a particular course in foreign policy,
this course and its corresponding myths soon put down autonomous roots in the
domestic environment and may persist well after the international rationale for
such behavior has passed.
Because of these domestic roots, in fact, a country's prevailing myths about
its role in the international system are likely to change significantly only in times
of great instability or uncertainty. For example, international crises may make
it clear to a large section of the elite that continuing the existing foreign policy
would result in heavy and immediate costs, perhaps even threaten the survival of
the state, though even then domestic politics may prevent a change. Conversely,
domestic instability -often exacerbated by growing pressures from the international
environment - may allow political leaders to redefine a state's international
role in search of a new basis of legitimacy.
The foregoing analysis suggests that the domestic politics of the world's great
powers will play a significant role-if not decisive-in creating and sustaining
the pattern of behavior particular to a given international order. Rapid changes
in the international system may force states to reconsider their world roles, but
these states cannot completely discard or transform the myths and institutions
left over from their previous position; they must adapt or supplement them to
perform the tasks required by the new conditions. 0 How small states adapt their
systems to a changing international environment will have little impact on an
emerging international order. But as great powers define the conditions under
which other states must act, domestic constructs already existing in emergent
great powers may play a tremendous role in shaping new patterns of international
behavior.
Domestic politics of the great powers will also act as a brake on change once
the international system has stabilized. Leaders will hesitate before departing
from an established line in foreign policy because of the domestic political costs
they might incur. Furthermore, to the extent that rapid changes in the international
environment would force all great powers to alter their foreign policies
contemporaneously, domestic structures in each of these powers will reflect the
patterns of behavior emerging from this change. These structures could then
continue to reinforce each other and preserve these patterns even after further
changes in the international environment would allow a different, more profitable
type of interaction to emerge.
This article examines how domestic politics helps explain the emergence and
persistence of counterproductive behavior in the cold war. The first section describes
how existing domestic political conditions in both countries combined
10 An analogous point is made in Alexander L. George, "Domestic Constraints on Regime Change
in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Need for Policy Legitimacy" in Ole R. Holsti, Randolph M. Siverson,
and Alexander L. George, eds., Change in the International System (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1980), 233-62.
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR 1 275
with the unstable postwar international situation to produce the confrontational
character of the cold war. It then discusses how these images, once embedded in
the political systems of the two countries, persisted into the 1980s. I examine
three cases in which a leader of at least one of the two superpowers sought to
redefine the prevailing foreign policy myths of his country in order to lower the
danger of nuclear war, limit his country's commitments in the peripheries, and/
or reduce defense spending: the Stalin succession in the Soviet Union; the period
after the Cuban missile crisis until Khrushchev's ouster; and the period of detente
from 1972 to 1979. In each case, the confrontational behavior of one country,
often prompted by domestic considerations, reinforced the proponents of a similar
policy in the other, thereby undermining the attempt at accommodation.
This does not suggest that structural incentives for a more managed superpower
competition were not important nor that the domestic regimes in these countries
remained frozen in a cold war stance for the entire postwar period; clearly this
was not the case. Leaders of both countries did seek from time to time to overcome
the domestic barriers to a more cooperative foreign policy, and each success in
this direction reduced the barriers for subsequent leaders. The level of domestic
support for detente grew as the costs of the counterproductive cold war policies
became clearer. Still, until at least 1987 the burden of proof lay on those political
figures who challenged the prevailing image of the enemy rather than on those
who accepted it. To sustain a conciliatory policy for very long, therefore, a leader
needed to provide some evidence that the other side would reciprocate rather
than exploit such a policy, and this evidence would have to be convincing enough
to neutralize the arguments of those who played on established images to oppose
change.
The existence of similar constraints in both superpowers made it unlikely such
evidence would be available. Only very rarely were leaders of both countries
simultaneously willing to accept the domestic costs involved in altering their
countries' prevailing images; and even when they did, the persistent influence of
hardliners on each side provided ample evidence for their counterparts in the
other to cast doubt upon the intentions of the other and so undermine the rap-
prochement.
THE EMERGENCE OF COLD WAR IMAGES AFTER WORLD WAR II
The belief systems in both superpowers at the end of the war did not bode well
for postwar cooperation."' Both the Soviet Union and the United States relied
'" This article borrows heavily from the following accounts about the immediate postwar period:
on the American side, John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-
1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment:
A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1982); Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy: 1932-1945 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Deborah Larson, Origins of Containment: A Psychological
Explanation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Norman Graebner, ed., The National
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276 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
heavily on universalistic ideas to create a national identity and both justified their
foreign policies not only as a means to protect the national interest but also to
protect and even propagate the way of life (whether Soviet-style socialism or
liberal democracy) these ideas would prescribe. As a result, they perceived threats
to this way of life not only in the physical power of potentially hostile countries but
also in alternative belief systems claiming universal validity. During the interwar
period, for example, a strong isolationist strain existed in both countries that
regarded interaction with the outside world as potentially contaminating the
existing order at home.
This clash of legitimating myths did not make the virulent hostility of the cold
war inevitable, however. By 1945 the U.S.-Soviet collaboration in the anti-Hitler
coalition and the impact of the war on domestic institutions in both countries
provided each country an opportunity to overcome its isolationist, xenophobic
legacy. Franklin Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman as well as Josef Stalin sought
to establish some sort of modus vivendi between the two powers. Each of these
leaders, though, had to define and justify this foreign policy within the framework
of existing legitimating myths, which in the unstable international conditions of
the postwar era reinforced the elements of hostility and distrust contained in the
myths of the other, finally overwhelming the incentives to cooperate. By 1950
ferociously hostile images of each other prevailed in both countries and had
become embedded in their domestic institutions.
Of the two powers, the Soviet Union was the most constrained by the images
and institutions left over from the interwar period and the least flexible. In the
late 1920s, Stalin came to power in part by appealing to "red patriotism." He
coupled an image of the party at home as an "island of state power in a sea of
worker-peasant Russia" to a corresponding image of the Soviet international role
as a vulnerable island of socialism encircled by imperialist aggressors.'2 This
vision of the Soviet international role then helped justify the rapid industrialization
and the campaign of terror during the 1930s and informed the creation of
enormous bureaucracies to administer this revolution from above, including the
Security: Its Theory and Practice, 1945-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Jeffry A.
Frieden, Banking on the World: The Politics of International Finance (New York: Basil Blackwell,
1989); Ernest R. May, "The Cold War" in Joseph Nye, ed., The Making of America's Soviet Policy
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); George, "Domestic Constraints on Regime Change in
U.S. Foreign Policy"; Parrish, "Soviet Reactions to the Security Dilemma: The Sources of Soviet
Self-Encirclement, 1945-1950"; on the Soviet side, William 0. McCagg, Jr., Stalin Embattled (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1978); William Taubman, Stalin'sAmerica Policy: From Entente
to Cold War (New York: Norton, 1982); Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity: A Political History
of East Central Europe since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), Vojtech
Mastny, Russia'sRoad to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Werner Hahn,
Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946-1953 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1982).
12 Robert C. Tucker, Political Culture andLeadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev
(New York: Norton, 1987), 65-70.
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR | 277
party apparatus, the industrial ministries, the military, and the secret police. As
a result, these institutions relied on the vision of capitalist encirclement to ensure
their privileged position in society. Stalin, too, used the threat of impending
external danger to preserve his status as an indispensable protector of international
socialism.
But after the war, Stalin's actions suggested an attempt to reconcile two desirable
but potentially conflicting aims. He clearly wanted a security zone of friendly
countries in East Central Europe and, therefore, imposed regimes in these countries,
and especially Poland, dominated by communist parties. This conflicted,
however, with an interest to maintain the working relation with the West he
had attained in the anti-Hitler coalition, because the western countries were
demanding representative, freely-elected governments there.
This dilemma was exacerbated precisely because Stalin continued to rely on
the hostile image of imperialism to justify his own authority within the communist
movement. According to Milovan Djilas, for example, Stalin told his Yugoslav
comrades near the end of the war that "we shall recover in fifteen or twenty years,
and then we'll have another go at it."'3 Bolstered by such rhetoric, elements of
the communist movement outside Stalin's direct control often went further in
confronting the West than he desired. The Yugoslavs, in particular, pursued an
assertive anti-imperialist policy-such as supporting the communists in Greece
without Stalin's approval -that provided ample cause for East-West misunder-
standings.
A similar dilemma faced Stalin in domestic politics." During the war Stalin
had loosened the rigid ideological underpinnings of his rule in order to mobilize
the entire nation behind the war effort and had raised expectations that life
would be easier after it was over. Administering this effort had strengthened
a managerial tendency within the Soviet bureaucracy that aspired less to the
revolutionary mission of the 1930s than to the incremental improvement of the
domestic economy. The evidence suggests, however, that Stalin had every intention
of returning to the severe social discipline of the 1930s once the war was over.
To do so, therefore, he again pointed to impending danger from the international
environment. His speech of 9 February 1946 announcing the first postwar fiveyear
plan echoed his statement to Djilas that the Soviet Union must be prepared
to fight a war in fifteen years.
Despite Stalin's public rhetoric, however, his struggle to resolve the tensions
between his domestic and foreign policy goals left Soviet policies somewhat
flexible. For example, he constructed people's democracies in Eastern Europe,
which, while not fully representative, allowed noncommunist parties to participate
in the government in subsidiary ways. Meanwhile, a limited debate over both
domestic and foreign policy arose in the Soviet media between the managerial
3 Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 114-5.
14 This argument borrows in large part from arguments in McCagg, Stalin Embattled.
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278 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
tendency in the elite and those who favored a resurgence of revolutionary ideals.
In foreign policy, the former tendency was best represented in the writings of
Yevgenii S. Varga, who argued that the capitalist economies were sufficiently
healthy to endure for some time, implying the need for achieving some means of
coexistence between the two camps. 5
The debate ended, however, after U.S. efforts to contain the Soviet Union,
especially the Marshall Plan, raised fears in Moscow that the West hoped to
extend capitalism throughout East Central Europe and deprive the Soviet Union
of its security zone. To consolidate Soviet control before this could happen, Stalin
opted to crack the ideological whip. In the fall of 1947, Soviet Politburo member
Andrei Zhdanov made his famous two-camp speech calling for discipline among
the communist parties in the Cominform. Soon thereafter, the Soviets extinguished
any genuinely pluralist elements remaining in the people's democracies,
most dramatically in the 1948 coup in Czechoslovakia.
Stalin's decision to unleash the ideological hardliners had long-term consequences
in the Soviet Union. The prewar image of capitalist encirclement again
ascended to a status of unquestioned orthodoxy, while the arguments of a more
moderate tendency were forced underground. 16 As a result, when Stalin's death
allowed this moderate tendency to reemerge in the political debate, the ideological
assumptions underlying his foreign policy had been reaffirmed and adapted to
fit the new international conditions, which made them that much more difficult
to overcome.
In the United States, meanwhile, domestic politics placed far fewer constraints
on foreign policy after the war, as several different visions of the American
international role competed for influence. Although the war had severely weakened
the isolationist sentiment that had been so strong in the early interwar
period, an influential sector of Congress still remained that opposed active U.S.
leadership in world affairs, particularly the expenditures and the more intrusive
state that would be necessary to sustain such a role. Meanwhile, those who
favored an active foreign policy disagreed about what sort of action was needed:
some, like Averell Harriman and George Kennan in the Moscow embassy, had
become highly suspicious of Stalin and advocated taking a firm position against
Soviet activities; others, including influential segments in both the Republican
and Democratic parties, subscribed to the old Wilsonian vision of national selfdetermination,
world government, and the spread of democracy.
Roosevelt, too, desired an activist policy, but his strategy differed from those
found in the State Department and among the internationalists. He preferred an
arrangement somewhat analogous to the Concert of Europe that would acknowledge
spheres of influence in Europe while calling on the United States, Britain,
and the Soviet Union (and potentially China) to act as international guardians
15 Varga's argument is described in detail in Franklyn Griffiths, "Images, Politics and Learning
in Soviet Behavior Towards the United States" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1972).
16 Ibid.
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR 1 279
of peace. Toward the Soviet Union, he favored a policy that would assure the
Kremlin through limited accommodation that its security interests would be respected.
Because Roosevelt needed the internationalists' support to sustain any
activist foreign policy at all, however, he muted his recognition of spheres of
influence in his public statements in deference to the Wilsonian values of selfdetermination.
17
This presented Roosevelt with a dilemma of his own: he could not appease
domestic demands for self-determination while at the same time granting Stalin
a security zone in Eastern Europe. To reconcile this tension, he tried to convince
Stalin, with references to U.S. public opinion, to retain at least a pretense of
self-determination in Eastern Europe. This may have contributed to Stalin's
decision initially to create people's democracies in Eastern Europe rather than
rigid communist systems."8
By 1947, however, a confrontational image of the Soviet Union had gained
prominence among the U.S. foreign policy elite. In part, this reflected Truman's
inclination to accept Harriman's and Kennan's harsher views of the Soviet Union
far more than Roosevelt did. More importantly, though, Soviet actions during
the early postwar years, including the occupation of northern Iran, the pressure
on Turkey, and most importantly the continuing crackdown in Poland and Rumania,
tended to reinforce their arguments that the Soviet Union was not a
reliable negotiating partner. Stalin lended further credibility to this image when
he predicted in his speech of February 1946 that another war would break out
in fifteen years. While most of the U.S. foreign policy elite interpreted this
statement correctly as directed to domestic audiences, others regarded it as a
"declaration of World War III.'J 9
Still, if American tactics under Truman shifted from limited accommodation
to hard bargaining, the new president also preferred negotiating with the Soviets
to confronting them unconditionally.20 In fact, as Deborah Larson points out,
he might have continued exploring different tactics against the Soviets had not
the restabilization of Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan, and the entire internationalist
vision of a liberal economic order, required the mobilization of vast
domestic resources.21 To overcome potential resistance to such expenditures in
the fragmented American political process-particularly from the Republican
majority in Congress -Truman oversold the communist threat to the American
17 This interpretation of Roosevelt's policy strategy derives from Gaddis, Strategies of Containment;
George, "Domestic Constraints on Regime Change in U.S. Foreign Policy"; and especially
Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 482-484, 505-507, 524.
8 That Roosevelt referred to U.S. public opinion in order to gain from Stalin some pluralism in
Eastern Europe, see Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 505-507, 513-515,
524. We cannot know if these pleas were decisive in Stalin's decision to create the people's democracies,
but they likely played some role.
1' Larson, Origins of Containment, 252-5.
20 Ibid., 266.
21 Ibid., 302.
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280 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
way of life.22 The Truman doctrine, in fact, skillfully joined the internationalist
and unilateralist perspectives to gain bipartisan support for the containment
doctrine: he appealed to the internationalists' calls for American world leadership
in a new liberal economic order, while preserving for the unilateralists the isolationist
vision of an ideological threat from outside.23
Truman became hostage to his own rhetoric, however. In uniting the country
behind an activist foreign policy, he also provided a banner for any segment of
the elite to mobilize support in the domestic competition. This fact, combined
with changes in the international environment after the Marshall Plan, helped
entrench into American domestic politics the hostile image of the Soviet Union
and also the two persistent, counterproductive characteristics of U.S. foreign
policy in the cold war: overreaction to events in the periphery and overreliance
on the military.
First, the decision in 1949 not to give the Nationalist Chinese the massive
support they needed to prevent a defeat enabled the Republicans to accuse the
Democrats of losing China. As a result, few future U.S. leaders could look on
quietly while national liberation movements triumphed in the periphery without
severely damaging their political position.
Second, the doctrine of containment became increasingly militarized. In the
course of World War II, American public opinion had come to accept the need
for a powerful military "to safeguard postwar America and to maintain world
order."24 Still, the Truman administration relied heavily on political and economic
instruments of foreign policy until 1950, by which time the coup in Czechoslovakia
and the Berlin blockade in 1948, and the Soviet development of the
atomic bomb of 1949, not to mention the success of China's communist revolution,
had reinforced the view among members of the foreign policy bureaucracy
that only military power could guarantee Soviet restraint. This view was articulated
in the document, written by Paul Nitze and a group of officials in the State
and Defense Departments, known as NSC-68. It called for a massive increase in
U.S. defense capabilities and then became the basis of American national security
policy after the North Korean invasion of South Korea. It consolidated military
power as the chief instrument in American containment strategy.
To conclude, though the competition to control the unstable center of Europe
may have made tension between the United States and the Soviet Union inevitable
after World War II, the interacting influence of both countries' domestic politics
translated this tension into a cold war between two unconditionally hostile
powers. In each country, strong interests left over from the prewar period defined
22 For a discussion of how the fragmentation of authority in the United States often requires
overselling a threat to mobilize domestic support, see Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism:
Ideology, Policy and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York: Norton, 1969), 174-186.
23 Frieden, Banking on the World, 68.
24 From Richard D. Challener, "The National Security Policy from Truman to Eisenhower: Did
the 'Hidden-Hand' Leadership Make Any Difference?" in Graebner, ed., The National Security, 41.
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR | 281
and legitimated their countries' international and domestic policies through opposition
to the ideology of the other. Both leaders, therefore, had to appeal to this
mythology in order to reconcile their foreign policies -which sought to balance
competition with negotiation -with domestic needs and goals. As a result, they
emphasized the confrontational aspects of their policies. This created a spiral of
hostility as the actions of each country reinforced the image of an aggressive
enemy in the other and allowed elements in both countries to seize upon the
images of outside aggression to mobilize support for their own policies.
THE STALIN SUCCESSION
The first opportunity to ameliorate the cold war came after Stalin's death in
1953.25 The new Soviet leaders had to create a basis of legitimacy at home that
was less reliant on the dictator's personality and that in foreign policy enabled
them to alter the myths that accompanied his rule. Indeed, Stalin's foreign policy
had not left the Soviet Union in an enviable position: it faced the nuclear superiority
of a hostile power, the prospect of German rearmament in the European
Defense Community, and the potential escalation of the war in Korea. Furthermore,
the Soviets no doubt remembered Stalin's warning that "when I'm gone
the imperialistic powers will wring your necks like chickens."26
Under these circumstances, nearly everyone in the leadership agreed that
changes in both domestic and foreign policies were necessary to raise the status
of society, improve the population's living standard, and ease the international
threat. The new leaders disagreed, however, on what form these changes should
take, how much change was necessary, and how fast it should be implemented.
They had to make such decisions within a collective leadership that strived for
consensus and where no one could impose his will upon the others.
In the first year after Stalin's death, the most influential member of the Soviet
leadership, G. M. Malenkov, favored relatively rapid and far-reaching reforms.
A former proponent of the managerial tendency after World War II, on 8 August
1953, he introduced a domestic program that called for a shift in investment
toward consumer industry and a lessening role for the party bureaucracy.27 And
in fact, the Soviets announced a reduction in defense expenditures later that fall.
25 This account of the period between 1953-1955 relies highly on the American side on the following
works: Richard Immerman, ed., John FosterDulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Gaddis, Strategies of Containment; Graebner, The National
Security; Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower, volume 2: The President (New York: Simon and Shuster,
1984); Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (New York: Basic
Books, 1982). Most of the arguments on Soviet politics can be found in James Richter, "Action and
Reaction in Khrushchev's Foreign Policy: How Leadership Politics Affect Soviet Responses to the
International Environment," (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1989), chap. 2.
26 Nikita S, Khrushchev, Strobe Talbott, ed. and trans., Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1970), 392.
27 For Malenkov's domestic strategy, see George Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders:
Building Authority in Soviet Politics (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1982), 24-7, 40-1, 51.
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282 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
Malenkov coupled his domestic program with a foreign policy strategy that
mitigated the perception of an impending outside threat, basing this strategy on
the assumption that nuclear weapons made war unlikely. According to Malenkov,
nuclear weapons placed "a special responsibility" on both superpowers to seek
accommodation in the interest of international survival: "In our days, the government
of any country, if it is seriously concerned for the fate of its own people,
is obliged to take measures in order to effect in deeds the regulation of disputed
international questions."28
Furthermore, Malenkov argued that a conciliatory foreign policy, by depriving
the United States of the enemy image, would best cause the disintegration of
NATO: "The aggressive circles consider also that if the North Atlantic bloc is
racked with internal struggles and contradictions now, in conditions of a tense
international situation, with an alleviation of tensions things will lead to its
collapse."29
Malenkov's strategy encountered strong resistance in the leadership. In the
ruling Presidium, he could count only on the active support of M. G. Pervukhin,
M. Z. Saburov, and possibly A. I. Mikoyan. He faced the outspoken opposition
of N. S. Khrushchev, V. I. Molotov, N. A. Bulganin and L. M. Kaganovich. The
reasons for such resistance are not hard to find. Given the Soviet elite's prevailing
view about the West's insatiable hostility, Malenkov's willingness to deal with the
West to avoid nuclear war could be interpreted as an invitation to the imperialists
to use nuclear blackmail against the Soviet Union. As Bulganin argued: "we must
not . . . rely on the humanity of the imperialists."30
The division in the collective leadership manifested itself in a contradictory
and confused foreign policy, especially toward Germany.31 Though they shared
the goal of preventing the rearmament of West Germany, they disagreed on how
this could be done or what role East Germany should play in this solution. For
example, although Soviet policy after June 1953 had emphasized the construction
of socialism in the East German territory, Soviet declaratory policy and especially
Malenkov still recognized that the four allied powers, rather than the German
states themselves, held the chief responsibility for resolving this question.32 This
allows some speculation that Malenkov, at least, might have traded reunification
for the neutralization of Germany.
28 Pravda, 9 August 1953.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 11 March 1954. Khrushchev describes Malenkov at this time-in specific reference to the
advisability of a summit - as "unstable to the point of being dangerous because he was so susceptible
to the pressure and influence of others"; see Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 393.
"1 For discussions of Soviet foreign policy toward Germany during this period, see Ann L. Phillips,
Soviet Policy Toward East Germany Reconsidered: The Postwar Decade (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1986); Paul Raymond Willging, "Soviet Foreign Policy in the German Question, 1950-1955"
(Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1973). For a discussion on the related question of Austria, see
Audrey Kurth Cronin, Great Power Politics and the Struggle Over Austria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1988).
32 See Malenkov's speech in Pravda, 9 August 1953.
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR | 283
To overcome the opposition to his policy, however, Malenkov needed evidence
that Soviet accommodation would be reciprocated. At first, international events
seemed to provide such evidence. Despite his earlier, harsher views of the Soviet
Union, Winston Churchill now spoke out for a summit between East and West
and urged dialogue. Malenkov could also cite President Eisenhower's Chance for
Peace speech of April 1953 as an indication of realism in the United States.33
Finally, Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace speech before the UN in December 1953
seemed to concur with Malenkov's argument that even a few nuclear weapons on
each side changed the calculus of war.
Beginning in December, however, U.S. foreign policy began to confirm the
arguments of Malenkov's opponents. At the western summit in Bermuda in
December 1953, for example, the United States and the western allies made clear
that they could not be induced to sacrifice West Germany's inclusion in NATO
even for reunification, and they reaffirmed this stance at the Berlin Foreign
Ministers' Conference in February 1954. Meanwhile, the Eisenhower administration
began articulating how it intended to use U.S. nuclear superiority and particularly
its growing tactical nuclear arsenal in its military and political strategies.34
In the Atoms for Peace speech, Eisenhower's statement of concern about nuclear
war was accompanied by boasts that "the United States stockpile of atomic
weapons . . . increases daily" and that the weapons had gained a "virtually
conventional status within our armed services."35 More importantly, Secretary of
State John F. Dulles's New Look speech of January 1954 announced that the
United States would defend against communist aggression "with a great capacity
to retaliate instantly by means and places of our own choosing."36 Not surprisingly,
these expressions of foreign policy indicated to the Soviet leadership that
the United States, contrary to Malenkov's arguments, did intend to use nuclear
weapons to impose one-sided solutions to international questions.
While Eisenhower's policies might be regarded to some extent as a reasonable
response to Soviet conventional power in Central Europe, the administration's
public adherence to cold war myths rigidified U.S. policy and closed off opportunities
to explore alternative solutions. Dulles, for example, described Soviet-led
communism as a movement that "believes that it cannot survive except as it
succeeds in progressively destroying human freedom."37 Accordingly, he dismissed
the evidence of change after Stalin's death, warning that "Soviet Communists
have constantly taught and practiced the art of deception, of making conces-
33 Ibid.
34 On the developmnent of U.S. military doctrine at this time, see David Alan Rosenberg, "The
Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy" in Graebner, ed. The National Security,
144-46.
3S New York Times, 9 December 1953.
36 Cited in Ambrose, Eisenhower, 172.
37 Dulles speech at Geneva Conference in April 1954, cited in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment,
140.
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284 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
sions merely in order to lure others into a false sense of security."38 The fear of
deception could be detected in U.S. negotiating positions: in the words of one
historian, for example, Eisenhower's speech of April 1953, which Malenkov cited
for its reasonableness, "asked for . . . many obviously impossible concessions
from the Russians as 'proof of their good intentions."39
Recent research shows that the private communications of Eisenhower and
Dulles, while generally accepting the image of the Soviet Union as an aggressive
enemy that understood only strength, still betrayed a more sophisticated understanding
of the U.S.-Soviet competition than their public statements would
imply. In October 1953, for example, even Dulles mitigated his ideological stance
to say that negotiations "could not reduce tensions with the USSR if in each case
we expected to gain all the advantage and the Soviets none."40
This discrepancy suggests that domestic constraints contributed as much to the
administration's rigid positions as international pressure did. In particular, the
new administration had to sustain the support of such hardline anticommunists
and unilateralists of the Republican party as Robert Taft, William Knowland,
and Joseph McCarthy. This wing of the party influenced Eisenhower's choice of
Dulles as secretary of state and played a key role in drafting the 1952 party
platform, which lambasted the Democrats' "passive" containment strategy and
pledged to "roll back" Soviet influence.4' Eisenhower could not readily escape
from this rhetoric so early in the administration. Even Dulles felt constrained:
at the Bermuda Summit in December 1953 he cited domestic pressures when
he pleaded with the British to cooperate in his confrontational posture toward
China.42
The administration's defense policy, too, sought to reconcile international
pressures with domestic demands. On the one hand, Eisenhower and others in
the Republican party, particularly in the Taft wing, felt it imperative to reduce
federal spending. At the same time, the administration also faced pressure from
the military to increase defense spending and to use U.S. nuclear superiority even
more assertively for political advantage. The administration's harsh rhetorical
stance against the Soviets and its heavy reliance on nuclear deterrence, therefore,
sought to neutralize the pressures from the military while holding the line on
spending.
Whatever its sources, the rigid hostility of U.S. policy provided Malenkov with
little evidence that Washington would reciprocate his conciliatory strategy, while
38 Dulles remarks to Republican State Dinner, May 1953, cited in ibid., 141.
39 Ambrose, Eisenhower, 96.
40 For the discrepancy between the public and private views of these leaders, see especially John
Lewis Gaddis, "The Unexpected John Foster Dulles: Nuclear Weapons, Communism and the Russians"
in Immerman, John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, 47-77.
41 Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 128-9.
42 Ronald W. Preussen, "John Foster Dulles and the Predicaments of Power" in Immerman, John
Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, 29-30.
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR | 285
providing his opponents with ample evidence that it would exploit Soviet weakness
as far as possible. In response, the Soviet position hardened. At the Berlin
Foreign Ministers' Conference, for example, Molotov altered the Soviet position
toward a more confrontational posture, insisting that the German states themselves,
rather than the four powers, should decide questions on reunification.43
In this context, Malenkov's fateful statement that nuclear war would destroy
world civilization probably represented a final attempt to force a change in the
course of Soviet foreign policy.
Malenkov retracted his remarks one month later in April 1954, and he strongly
insinuated that he did so in response to domestic criticism: "the Soviet people,"
he said, "distinguish themselves by their sober approach to appraising the international
situation" and "warn against overestimating the significance of the
achieved easing of international tensions." He further admitted that the imperialists
"threaten the world with hydrogen bombs and openly proclaim the establishment
of a policy of strength and prolonged cold war, allowing them to resort to
methods of threats and intimidation." In such conditions, the USSR could not
afford to show weakness: "If the aggressive circles, putting their trust in atomic
weapons, decide on insanity and want to test Soviet . . . might-then one may
not doubt that the aggressor will be suppressed with the same weapons, and that
similar adventures inevitably lead to the disintegration of the capitalist social
system." Finally, Malenkov accompanied these arguments with a call for the
Soviet Union "tirelessly" to strengthen its defense capabilities.44
Though Malenkov remained in his position until February 1955, he never
articulated his strategy of mutual concessions again in public. Can one attribute
the failure of Malenkov's foreign policy to the actions of the United States? The
extreme nature of Malenkov's strategy-given the context of Soviet opinionsuggests
that he might have failed no matter what the United States had done.
Still, U.S. actions clearly weakened his position and accelerated his decline, if
only by providing his opponents a club with which to beat him. While Malenkov
cited Eisenhower's reasonableness, for example, Khrushchev emphasized the
darker presence of the U.S. administration:
[Soviet foreign policy initiatives] . . . evoke irritation and malicious attacks of certain
officials occupying quite responsible posts in the USA and other countries. I have in
mind, primarily, the U.S. Secretary of State Dulles.... It is known that insanity may
occur to a person in rage. But is it really fitting for a government official to proclaim
a government's foreign policy when he is drunk with rage and malice to other nations?45
4 Though the Berlin Conference represented a turning point in the leadership debate about the
creation of socialism in East Germany, in fact the issue about the status of Germany in Soviet foreign
policy still may not have been decided completely. The recently published memoirs of Khrushchev,
for example, note that Molotov opposed the inclusion of East Germany into the Warsaw Pact in
1955. See N. S. Khrushchev, Jerrold Schechter, ed. and trans., Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost
Tapes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).
" Pravda, 21 April 1954.
4 Ibid., 27 April 1954.
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286 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
More importantly, U.S. actions defined the boundaries of the Soviet foreign
policy debate for the rest of the succession. Judging by Malenkov's retraction,
the leadership clearly had decided to uphold the theses that the western powers
were inherently aggressive, that Soviet foreign policy remained primarily an ideological
struggle against imperialism, and that the ultimate and inevitable end to
this struggle would be the victory of socialism, even in case of nuclear war.
Anyone who argued differently became suspect for years to come. When Khrushchev
announced his policy of peaceful coexistence in 1956, for example, he affirmed
these tenets of the socialist image of the international environment even
as he accepted the need for international stability and negotiations.46
Khrushchev emphasized conciliation and peaceful coexistence in his policies
through the end of 1956, but an opportunity to rethink dramatically the cold war
myths created in the postwar period ended with Malenkov's speech of April 1954.
But how great an opportunity? After all, given the continuing asymmetry in the
two countries' conventional strategic military power and the remaining uncertainties
regarding the fate of Central Europe, one cannot wonder that the actions of
one state were regarded suspiciously by the other. The Soviet leadership still had
not decided what interests it had in Germany or what role the strategic imbalance
would play in a nuclear world, suggesting that some other outcome was possible.
In fact, examining external conditions alone does not account for Malenkov's
willingness to provide an alternative vision to the cold war, the defeat of this
vision, the rigidity of American foreign policy, or the discrepancy between the
public and private rhetoric of Dulles. To explain these aspects of the period,
one has to examine the domestic debates in each country, their context within
prevailing images in those countries, and how they interacted with each other. In
this case, Malenkov's reformist policy extended his position beyond the leadership
consensus and left him vulnerable to attack, while Dulles, keeping his public
rhetoric within the boundaries set by his own domestic base, provided the ammu-
nition.
AFTER THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
The resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis opened a promising opportunity to
overcome the spiral of "peace through strength" arguments.47 Both Khrushchev
46 See Richter, "Action and Reaction in Khrushchev's Foreign Policy," chap. 4.
47 This account relies heavily on Gaddis, Strategies of Containment; Arthur M. Schlesinger, A
Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, (New York: Fawcett Premier, 1971); Glenn T.
Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981);
Harold Karan Jacobsen and Eric Stein, Diplomats, Scientists and Politicians: The United States and
Nuclear Test Ban Negotiations. I also rely on Richter, "Action and Reaction in Khrushchev's Foreign
Policy"; Alexander Yanov, The Drama of the Soviet 1960's: A Lost Reform (Berkeley, CA: Institute
for International Studies, 1984); Christer Jonsson, Soviet Bargaining Behavior: The Nuclear Test
Ban Case (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Michel Tatu, Power in the Kremlin: From
Khrushchev to Kosygin (New York: Viking Press, 1967); Carl Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR | 287
and Kennedy, shocked by the nearness of catastrophe, sought to overcome the
psychological and domestic political impediments to a more stable relation between
the two superpowers. Both leaders were also concerned about the increasing
assertiveness of a militant China.48
Kennedy offered a new vision of U.S.-Soviet relations in his speech at the
American University in June 1963. In the nuclear age, he argued, peace must be
the "necessary rational end of rational men." The United States should pursue
this end even if the Soviets did not; the United States "must reexamine our
own attitude - as individuals and as a nation - for our attitude is as essential as
theirs."49 In short, Kennedy rejected the logic of peace through strength and
intimated support for a policy of accommodation.
Khrushchev also called on his country to pursue a more conciliatory policy in
order to avoid nuclear war. He told an audience of East Germans, for example,
that "Marxist-Leninists ... cannot think in terms of a communist civilization built
upon the ruins of the world's cultural centers, on ravaged Earth contaminated
by thermonuclear fallout."50 Later, he averred that realists in the West, too,
"understand that going to the thermonuclear button means suicide."'" Finally,
though he continued to argue that the ultimate guarantee to peace lay in Soviet
strength, he also emphasized that the Soviets had to make concessions in order
to gain western concessions: "in the interests of preserving the gains of socialism
we are ready to make and we do make reasonable political compromises."52
The two leaders pursued these strategies from very different domestic positions,
however. In the United States, the Cuban missile crisis had raised Kennedy's
prestige and made him less vulnerable to accusations that he was giving in to the
Russians.53 Khrushchev pursued his strategy from a far more precarious position.
He still had enough power to make his own decisions in foreign and domestic
policy, but his authority was on the wane.
Khrushchev's loss of authority stemmed in part from his attempts since 1958
to push through a military strategy of minimal deterrence and a reduction of
conventional forces.54 To implement this strategy at an acceptable political cost,
Leadership, 1957-1964 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966); William Zimmerman,
Soviet Perspectives on International Relations, 1956-1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1969); Franklyn Griffiths, "Images, Politics and Learning in Soviet Behavior Towards the
United States."
48 For the role China played in these leaders' considerations, see Gordon H. Chang, Friends and
Enemies: The United States, China and the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1990), 228-253.
49 New York Times, 11 June 1963.
50 Pravda, 17 January 1963.
51 Ibid., 12 June 1964.
52 Speech of 12 December 1962 in N. S. Khrushchev, Predotvratit' voinu, otstoiat mir [Preven
war, defend peace] (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1963), 400.
53 Seaborg, in fact, argues that Kennedy would not have been able to make the American Universi
Speech without this enhanced prestige; see his Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban, 212.
54 See Richter, "Action and Reaction in Khrushchev's Foreign Policy," chap. 5..
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288 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
Khrushchev initially tried to prove this strategy was consistent with prevailing
cold war myths by demonstrating through his threats against Berlin that a small
nuclear force could impel the aggressive enemy to recognize Soviet interests in
Eastern Europe. Except for glimmers of success in 1959, though, his tactics
merely confirmed the prevailing image of the Soviet Union in the United States,
damaged Eisenhower's attempts to restrain defense spending, and paved the way
for an even greater military build-up after Kennedy became president. In fact,
Khrushchev decided to place missiles in Cuba in part to redress the strategic
imbalance resulting from the Kennedy build-up.
The Cuban missile crisis ended Khrushchev's coercive campaign. Kennedy's
determination to risk war rather than accept the missiles in Cuba demonstrated
to the Soviet leader the danger and futility in seeking to coerce concessions
out of the West, while Kennedy's willingness to guarantee Cuba's security and
withdraw the missiles from Turkey indicated that the United States shared an
aversion to nuclear war. As a result, Khrushchev shifted to an accommodationist
strategy to induce the concessions he needed from Washington.
But Khrushchev's shift in policy met strong resistance among many in the
Soviet elite who felt the Caribbean crisis reaffirmed the image of a warmongering
West. Defense Minister R. Ya. Malinovskii, for example, clearly rejected Khrushchev's
arguments about the imperialists' attitudes toward nuclear war: "We have
no facts to indicate abandonment by U.S. imperialist circles of a policy of war."
Indeed, he averred that "preventive war against the Soviet Union all along has
been within the range of possibilities envisaged by the Pentagon."55 For those
sharing this view, the crisis undermined completely Khrushchev's claims that a
small number of missiles could deter a superior force and that conventional
weapons, in this case a surface navy, no longer had any political utility. The
lesson drawn by many Soviets, in fact, was that "the Soviet Union would never
again face a 4-to-I missile inferiority."56
Khrushchev's change in foreign policy also met resistance from ideological
guardians in the Soviet leadership. For example, M. A. Suslov, the most prominent
ideologist in the leadership, analyzed the crisis in a classic presentation of
the peace through strength argument. In his view, the imperialists had acted in
Cuba as they had in other adventures: "they backed down every time, breaking
their head on the solidarity and might of the socialist camp." Accordingly, he
called on "all peace-loving forces on Earth" to "preserve vigilance, strengthen
their solidarity, not weaken but strengthen the struggle against aggressive
forces."57
55 Pravda, 23 February 1963.
56 Soviet negotiator Vasily Kuznetsov said this to U.S. diplomat John McCloy soon after the crisis.
Cited in Benjamin Lambeth, "Contemporary Soviet Military Policy" in Roman Kolkowicz and Ellen
Propper Mickiewicz, eds., The Soviet Calculus of Nuclear War (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1986),
46.
57 Pravda, 7 November 1962.
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR 1 289
In this embattled position, Khrushchev quickly grasped at Kennedy's conciliatory
gestures as evidence that his accommodationist strategy would meet a favorable
response from the United States. Within days of Kennedy's speech at the
American University, for example, Khrushchev made a key concession by accepting
a limited rather than a comprehensive test ban. Later, just before the
Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) was signed, he told a delegation of American
agricultural experts that "we will now reduce expenditures on defense . . . and
direct this money into the production of chemical fertilizers."58 This prediction
was then realized in December 1963, when Khrushchev announced an unspecified
reduction in Soviet troop levels and a cut of 600 billion rubles in the official
defense budget.
But if the LTBT and other small treaties emerging from the detente of 1963
bolstered Khrushchev's ability to pursue a conciliatory policy, continued skepticism
within the leadership hampered his ability to do so consistently. U.S. foreign
policy, too, offered an uncertain mix of conciliatory gestures and the politics of
strength, partly because of continued domestic support for cold war myths but
also because of the inertia of decisions taken in 1961, when Kennedy promised
to replace Eisenhower's passive brand of containment with a more vigorous
assertion of American power. As a result, the detente of 1963 did not improve
relations as much as either leader desired, as illustrated in their failure to reach
a comprehensive test ban, which both of them wanted.
In November 1962, Khrushchev, returning to a position he held in 1961, announced
that he would accept three on-site inspections every year to verify a
comprehensive ban. Apparently Khrushchev based this proposal on a conversation
between Soviet scientist Yevgenii Fedorov and Special Assistant to the President
for Science and Technology Jerome Wiesner, in which Wiesner had told
Fedorov that such a gesture would open the way to resuming serious negotiations.
Though Wiesner reportedly added that Kennedy would counter this offer by
proposing eight to ten inspections, and perhaps bring it down to five or so during
the negotiations, Khrushchev's communication suggested that he believed the
United States would accept three inspections in a final agreement.59 Khrushchev
later told Norman Cousins that he had persuaded the Soviet Council of Ministers
to agree to this initial offer only with great difficulty. As a result, when the
president rejected this offer and proposed eight inspections instead, "once again
[an allusion to the U-2 incident?] I was made to look foolish." He then added:
"But I can tell you this: it won't happen again."'
In fact, Wiesner did try to get Kennedy to soften his stand, but the president
58 N. S. Khrushchev, Stroitel'stva kommunizma v SSSR i razvitie sel'skoyo khoziaistra [The Construction
of Communism in the USSR and the Development of Agriculturel, vol. 8 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat,
1964), 51; cited in Yanov, The Drama of the Soviet 1960's, 76.
59 See Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban, 180-181.
I Norman Cousins, "Notes on a 1963 Visit With Khrushchev," Saturday Review, 7 November
1964, 21.
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290 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
felt he could not get congressional support for fewer inspections unless he had
some guarantees about how these inspections would be conducted. Meanwhile,
opponents to a comprehensive test ban within the United States began to rally
their forces, including members of the military and scientific communities such
as Curtis LeMay and Edward Teller; influential Democratic members of Congress
such as Henry Jackson, Christopher Dodd, and Stuart Symington; and the Republican
Conference Committee on Nuclear Testing, led by treaty opponent
Representative Craig Hosmer. By May it had become clear that the comprehensive
test ban could not be ratified as it stood.6" Indeed, Kennedy had to make
important concessions to these interests even to ratify the less ambitious LTBT,
including a promise to accelerate underground tests.
In short, domestic constraints prevented the product of the negotiations from
meeting either leader's expectations. As a result, though the treaty clearly
strengthened Khrushchev's position, he still qualified his enthusiasm for the
LTBT with reservations that it did "not yet mean a cessation of the arms race or
by itself prevent the danger of war."62 Instead, he argued that the decline in
tensions brought about by this limited agreement would lead to more significant
cooperation in the future.
Khrushchev was to be disappointed. General opinion in the United States
attributed Kennedy's success in the Cuban missile crisis more to the firmness of
his resolve than to his willingness to deal with Moscow, with the result that the
crisis reinforced rather than challenged the myths about the politics of strength.63
Furthermore, Kennedy could or would not extend his more accommodative
stance with the Soviet Union to the German question, again partly for domestic
reasons. In the summer of 1963, for example, Khrushchev had proposed that a
nonaggression pact in Europe accompany the limited test ban, which if concluded
would greatly support his contention that realism had gained the upper hand in
the West. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy expressed serious interest
in this proposal, but did not want to pursue it until after the Test Ban Treaty
was concluded. As it happened, he dropped the proposal when he felt it would
complicate the struggle for ratification.64 As Schlesinger puts it:
For a moment the treaty seemed to be opening up a whole new range of possibilities.
This treaty was deeply disturbing to those accustomed to the familiar simplifications
of the cold war.... one felt an almost panicky desire in some parts of the government
to return to pre-test ban normal as soon as possible.65
Despite the change in Kennedy's rhetoric, the administration did not alter many
61 Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban, 227.
62 Pravda, 6 August 1963.
63 For evidence of this point, see James A. Nathan and James K. Oliver, United States Foreign
Policy and World Order, 3rd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), 280-286.
64 Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 835-838.
65 Ibid., 837.
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR 1 291
of the policies introduced in 1961. The United States continued to deploy strategic
missiles in 1963 in spite of its vast strategic superiority and in addition expanded
its military commitment to South Vietnam.
Conceivably, Kennedy might have tried to change these policies had he lived,
particularly in respect to Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson did not. Even if he shared
the doubts about prevailing American foreign policy beliefs that Kennedy seems
to have entertained - and there is little evidence to suggest that he did - his domestic
position after Kennedy's assassination would not have allowed him to
challenge them directly. Unlike Kennedy, he still had not demonstrated his firmness
in dealing with the Russians and with no mandate of his own would be
quite vulnerable to accusations that he departed from the perceived legacy of his
popular predecessor.
Furthermore, Johnson understood very well what would happen to his domestic
position if he did not prop up the anticommunist regime in Saigon:
I knew that if we let Communist aggression succeed in taking over South Vietnam
there would follow in this country an endless national debate-that would shatter my
presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy. I knew that Harry
Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day that the Communists
took over in China. I believe that the loss of China had played a large role in
the rise of Joe McCarthy. And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were
chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam.66
Thus, despite Khrushchev's success in easing tensions in 1963, U.S. actions
gave those who opposed his policy of accommodation plenty of evidence against
it. In June 1963, for example, Khrushchev complained that the U.S. military
build-up had reached "gigantic proportions unprecedented in history."67 Meanwhile,
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's and others' boasts about U.S.
military superiority enabled Malinovskii in February 1964 to claim a lack of
realism among U.S. ruling circles.66
The most controversial issue in the Soviet debate in 1964, however, concerned
aid to national liberation movements, especially in Vietnam. Since 1961, Khrushchev
argued that since local wars between the superpowers would necessarily
escalate, the Soviets did not need (and he implied that they did not dare) send
direct military aid to such movements: Soviet strategic capability would deter
imperialist intervention in these struggles and allow the local revolutionary forces
to win on their own. This view had always been hotly contested by the Chinese,
however, who accused Khrushchev of cowardice in the face of the nuclear threat;
but after the Cuban missile crisis one could find muted criticism of the policy in
the Soviet press as well.69 When the United States undermined Khrushchev's
66 Cited in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 242.
67 Pravda, 25 June 1963.
68 Ibid., 23 February 1964.
69 See Mark Katz, The Third World in Soviet Military Thought (London: Croon Helm, 1982), 19.
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292 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
arguments by beginning a secret campaign of harassment against North Vietnam
in February 1964, it could not but undermine Khrushchev's strategy even further.
By the summer of 1964, Khrushchev's decline in authority was evident in
his public rhetoric.70 His speeches usually included a long list of hotbeds of
international tension in the developing world, and in July he explicitly linked these
hotbeds to the need for more defense spending: "such is the realistic international
situation we must consider in deciding questions of economic and cultural development
and of the strengthening of the countries' defenses."71
But Khrushchev's rhetorical retreat did not mean he had given up the fight.
Quite the contrary, he prepared another diplomatic and political offensive against
the politics of strength that surpassed anything else in the history of the cold war:
he sent his son-in-law, Alexei I. Adzhubei, to Bonn to arrange a summit meeting
between Khrushchev and the West German leaders, which might have led to a
Soviet concession over Berlin;72 in August and September 1964, he reduced his
commitments to both North Vietnam and North Korea; and in October he seemed
to be preparing another assault on the defense budget. Unfortunately, the October
Plenum intervened and halted this initiative.
In all likelihood, Khrushchev's foreign policy did not play a decisive role in his
ouster. During the last four years, his attempts to improve the Soviet economy
had alienated virtually every major sector of the Soviet elite, especially the party
apparatus. Still, the failures of his foreign policy probably accelerated the decline
in his authority.73
How do we account for these failures? As in the period after Stalin's death,
a vast disparity in military power and continuing uncertainty about Germany's
fate suggest that international conditions played some role. By 1963, however,
most of these problems were eminently soluble. The military imbalance, as
Khrushchev appreciated, meant much less after the Soviets could deliver nuclear
warheads on U.S. soil reliably than it did in the early 1950s, when they could not.
Moreover, the Berlin wall helped stabilize Soviet control over East Germany;
by allowing its construction, the United States implicitly accepted that control.
Indeed, both leaders seemed to have recognized the new, stabler situation, but
both had to contend with domestic oppositions that limited their ability to make
any far-reaching concessions while pointing to the other's unwillingness to deal
as evidence of bad faith. In particular, the inertia of decisions Kennedy made in
1961, especially after the president was killed, called into question all of Khrushchev's
claims about western realism.
70 According to recent memoir accounts, the conspiracy to remove Khrushchev was already be
prepared at this time; see especially Sergei Khrushchev, William Taubman, ed. and trans., Khrushchev
on Khrushchev: An Inside Account of the Man and His Era (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990),
chap. 3.
" Pravda, 22 July 1964.
72 See Angela Stent, From Embargo to Ostpolitik: The Political Economy of West German-Soviet
Relations, 1955-1980 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 118-21.
73 See Yanov, The Drama of the Soviet 1960's, 103-105.
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR | 293
Indeed, the legacy of Kennedy's initial vigor affected Soviet policy even after
Khrushchev's ouster. The new Soviet leaders resumed the rhetoric of the politics
of strength soon after the October Plenum: they spoke favorably of detente but
also explicitly denounced a policy of appeasement, reaffirmed the commitment
to North Vietnam, and ended all discussion of unilateral cuts in Soviet defenses.
They disagreed, however, on the amount of resources to devote to defense, the
extent to which they should commit themselves to national liberation forces, and
the priority that should be given to stabilizing relations with the United States. The
Americanization of the Vietnam war, occurring only months after Khrushchev's
ouster, reinforced the forces behind L. I. Brezhnev that emphasized a commitment
to national liberation struggles and the development of a conventional
military capability that could project Soviet power to this purpose. The essential
framework of this coalition then persisted through the Brezhnev period.74
DEITENTE
By the early 1970s, the governments of both the United States and the Soviet
Union again developed a strong interest in a managed relation.75 The passage of
time since 1964 had removed many of the obstacles that hampered earlier efforts
to ease tensions: the status quo in Europe had been temporarily stabilized by the
Berlin wall, while the vast numbers of nuclear warheads on both sides precluded a
rapid change in the balance of power. Meanwhile, each side had its own particular
reasons for detente. Brezhnev sought improved relations with the United States
in order, first, to offset the continuing antagonism between the Soviet Union and
China and to prevent the formation of a hostile, U.S.-China alliance, and,
second, to import new technology from the West and so forestall the need to
reform the Soviet economic system. In the United States, the trauma of the
Vietnam war caused a large segment of the population to reject the cold war
mythology, severely weakening its ability to mobilize the necessary resources to
pursue a politics of strength.
74 This argument about the impact of the Vietnam war on Soviet policy is drawn from Richter,
"Action and Reaction in Khrushchev's Foreign Policy," chap. 7. Other scholarship noting the effect
of Vietnam on leadership politics includes Richard D. Anderson, "Competitive Politics and Soviet
Foreign Policy: Authority Building and Bargaining in the Brezhnev Politburo," (Ph.D. diss., University
of California, Berkeley, 1989).
75 This account draws heavily from Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, Raymond L. Garthoff,
Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations From Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC:
The Brookings Institution, 1985); Stanley Hoffmann, "Detente" in Nye, The Making of America's
Foreign Policy, 231-264; Strobe Talbott, Endgame: The Inside Story of SALTII (New York: Harper
and Row, 1979); Henry A. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982); Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977-1981 (New York:
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983); Harry Gelman, The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Detente
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Peter M. E. Volten, Brezhnev's Peace Program: A
Study of Soviet Domestic Political Process and Power (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1983); Breslauer,
Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders.
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294 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
These converging forces resulted in the most extended and successful period
of cooperation between the two superpowers during the cold war period. The
most virulently hostile images of each other became less evident in both governments'
rhetoric, and they codified their intentions to deal with each other on the
basis of equality and reciprocity in the Basic Principles Agreement in 1972. They
also made significant progress towards arms control in the ABM (Antiballistic
Missile) Treaty, SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) I and the unratified
SALT IL Finally, the Four Power Agreement on Berlin of t971 t and the Hetsinki
Pact in 1975 formally recognized the status quo in Europe.
Despite these achievements, the two governments - at least initially - challenged
neither the prevailing myths about the essential hostility of the other side
to its own interests nor the institutional arrangements supporting these myths.
In the Soviet Union, for example, the detente policy stretched the prevailing
myths but did not abandon them. Brezhnev did occasionally accept substantial
political costs to offer concessions necessary to make his Peace Program successful.76
However, he took care never to stray too far from the post-Khrushchev
foreign policy consensus or to disturb the essential elements of his own coalition.
Indeed, the collective leadership described detente not as a change in Soviet
postwar policy, but as a success of that policy: Soviet strength, especially the
emergence of strategic parity, had forced the United States to abandon its dreams
of imposing one-sided solutions to international disputes and to recognize the
continuing, inevitable changes in the correlation of forces. Accordingly, Soviet
foreign policy continued along the same course it had taken after Khrushchev's
ouster.77 Soviet defense expenditures increased steadily through 1977, and the
Soviets maintained an active commitment to clients in the Third World, as demonstrated
in the airlift of Cuban troops to defend leftist governments in Angola in
1975 and in Ethiopia in 1977, and of course in the invasion of Afghanistan in
1979.
In the United States, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger viewed detente less
as a success of U.S. postwar policy than as an attempt to salvage it from domestic
challenges. Recognizing that the Vietnam experience made it impossible for the
government to devote as many resources to the East-West competition as it had
before, these leaders sought to use the threat of a Sino-American alliance and
U.S. economic advantages to entangle the Soviet Union in "a network of relationships
with the West" that would increase the Soviet stake in the existing interna-
76 In the long term, the policy also helped erode the domestic foundations for Soviet cold war
myths by providing the proponents of more stable East-West relations with access into the policymaking
process. See Franklyn Griffiths, "The Source of American Conduct: Soviet Perspectives and
Their Policy Implications," International Security 9 (Fall 1985); and Allen Lynch, The Soviet Study
of International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
77 For Soviet perceptions of detente, see especially Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation, 36-52.
For its origins in the Brezhnev coalition of the 1960s, see Richter, "Action and Reaction in Khrushchev's
Foreign Policy"; Gelman, The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Detente.
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR | 295
tional system. The United States would then manipulate the levers provided by
this network to prevent Soviet expansionist behavior in the Third World.78
Thus, if Nixon and Kissinger changed the instrumentalities of containment,
they did not reject its assumptions. They both considered the Soviet Union-or
more precisely Russia-an expansionist, revolutionary power that understood
only countervailing power. They still blurred the distinction between peripheral
and vital interests: Kissinger lobbied hard for U.S. military aid to prevent the fall
of South Vietnam and Angola to Soviet-backed forces. Despite its advocacy of
strategic sufficiency over superiority, the Nixon administration escalated the
U.S.-Soviet arms race by deploying MIRV missiles that theoretically provided
greater advantages in a first strike than in a retaliatory strike.
That both leaders framed their policies within cold war assumptions may explain
in part why detente achieved more in the 1970s than in earlier periods.
Certainly it was a substantial reason for detente's failure. While the United States
expected the Soviet Union to curtail its activities in the periphery in order to
preserve superpower collaboration, the Soviet leadership felt detente opened the
way to a more active Soviet presence all over the world. When both sides began
to act according to these conceptions, conflict inevitably arose. But the key to
detente's failure lay less in misconceptions among the leaders, who tended to
defend their policies' accomplishments, than in the expectations their rhetoric
raised among domestic audiences. In each country, the other side's failure to live
up to these expectations provided the opponents of detente a basis for attack.
The domestic roots of detente's decline were especially evident in the United
States. The Nixon administration failed to create a public rationale for its attempts
to link further U.S.-Soviet cooperation to Soviet behavior in the Third
World, as these negotiations were carried out largely in secret. Instead, Nixon
and Kissinger oversold detente as an attempt to overcome the cold war on U.S.
terms.79 Not surprisingly, the policy dissatisfied both the cold warriors who opposed
cooperation in any form as well as the revisionist elements who objected
to the administration's continued support for interventions abroad and its neglect
of human rights violations. Soviet activity in support of Third World clients
exacerbated the situation, for it reinforced the hardline criticism that detente
encouraged the Soviets to more aggressive action, even as the administration's
attempts to respond to these actions with military aid further disenchanted the
revisionists with Kissinger's strategy. By 1976, detente had been so undermined
at home that President Gerald Ford, attacked both by the hardline wing of the
Republican Party and among the Democrats, avoided all references to detente
in his campaign.
78 See especially Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, chap. 9; Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation,
25-36.
79 For the pressure to oversell foreign policy in the United States, see Lowi, The End of Liberalism,
174-180.
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296 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
Jimmy Carter entered the presidency with a vision of U.S. foreign policy that
deemphasized and recast the cold war mythology without overtly challenging it.
He found support among those who became disillusioned with America's policy
after Vietnam and also among hardliners who disliked Kissinger's nonideological
approach to Soviet domestic politics. Carter's rhetoric portrayed the United
States less as a defender of the free world against an onslaught of Soviet expansionism
than as an advocate of peace and individual human rights. Thus, Carter
advocated arms control negotiations as a means to prevent nuclear war but did
not link it to Soviet actions in other spheres. Similarly, he felt that the Soviets
should pursue arms control on its own merits and not link it to his own vigorous
attacks on Soviet human rights violations. Most significantly, Carter argued that
cold war politics should not spill over into U.S. policy in the developing countries;
instead, the United States should concentrate on protecting human rights in all
countries regardless of a government's political orientation.
Carter's foreign policy failed for many reasons. First, the strategy was poorly
conceived. If Carter saw no linkage between pursuing arms control negotiations
and criticizing the Soviet observance of human rights, the Soviets certainly did.
Carter soon had to choose between arms control and a vigorous support of Soviet
dissidents, and his retreat from his human rights policy did him serious political
harm. Second, he did not execute the strategy well. For example, the administration's
initial arms control proposal jettisoned the Vladivostok framework for
SALT II, which Brezhnev had worked out with President Gerald Ford in 1974.
It was a comprehensive plan that boasted more ambitious arms reductions but
in fact asked the Soviets to reduce their heavy land-based missiles by half without
any corresponding reductions in existing U.S. forces. To make matters worse,
the administration announced this proposal publicly without first giving Moscow
a chance to study it carefully. Not surprisingly, the Kremlin interpreted the
proposal as a crass propaganda ploy and rejected it. As a result, SALT negotiations
were unnecessarily halted for six months. When Carter finally returned to
the Vladivostok framework, he again lost credibility at home for giving in to
Soviet demands.
More importantly, Carter's attempts to challenge the prevailing cold war mythology
aroused strong resistance at home, even within his original coalition. For
example, Carter's one-sided proposal of March 1977 aimed to ease the arms race
but to do so in a way that would also find the support of Senator Henry Jackson,
who as the Senate's foremost Democratic critic of Kissinger's detente strategy
represented part of the cold warrior leg of Carter's coalition as well as a potentially
decisive opponent to the ratification of any arms control treaty.80 When Carter
then returned to the Vladivostok framework, he prompted opposition not only
from such conservative opponents as the Committee on the Present Danger, but
80 Talbott, Endgame, chap. 3.
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR | 297
also from Jackson as well. Meanwhile, even Carter's selective defense of human
rights against rightwing dictatorships provoked opposition among hardliners,
who argued it betrayed U.S. allies and facilitated the victory of anti-U.S. revolu-
tionaries.
In these circumstances, the Soviet pursuit of its own conception of detente
weakened Carter's arguments further. When a new generation of accurate Soviet
MIRVs were deployed in the late 1970s, for example, American opponents of
arms control argued - incorrectly - that the Soviets might soon possess enough
warheads to destroy the U.S. land-based missiles in a first strike. Meanwhile,
Soviet activities in Ethiopia and Afghanistan raised questions about Carter's
claim that cold war politics should not intrude into U.S. policies in the Third
World.
One further episode might be cited to illustrate how partisan appeals to cold
war myths helped undermine detente. By mid-1979, domestic support for Carter's
foreign policy had dwindled, and the ratification of SALT II remained in doubt.
In the fall Senator Frank Church of Idaho suddenly drew attention to a Soviet
combat brigade in Cuba and declared its presence there unacceptable, even
though the brigade had been there since 1962 and did not violate the KhrushchevKennedy
understanding about Cuba. Church took this action at least partly to
stave off a challenge in the upcoming elections, in which the American Conservation
Action Coalition had targeted him for his dovish policies in the past. Still,
his maneuver and Carter's inept handling of the affair - first he joined Church
in calling the brigade's presence in Cuba unacceptable, then he accepted it strengthened
the opponents of SALT II. Even before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan,
detente had all but died in the United States.
In the Soviet Union, the effect of domestic politics on changes in Soviet foreign
policy is less evident. Brezhnev retained his dominant position in the Politburo
throughout the period, and the basic line of Soviet foreign policy remained
relatively stable as well. Still, there were occasions when Brezhnev did extend
himself beyond the leadership consensus in an effort to solidify detente, as well
as occasions when U.S. actions increased the political costs of this stance and
apparently caused a retrenchment in the Soviet position.
The Soviet response to the Jackson-Vanik amendment provides an example of
such an occasion. Brezhnev's intention to improve trade relations with the United
States aroused some controversy among leadership members, especially A. I.
Kosygin, who believed the Soviets should not delay reform and become dependent
on western technology. In 1972, Brezhnev seemed close to his goal when the
Nixon administration agreed, among other things, to grant Most-Favored Nation
(MFN) status to the Soviet Union. In 1974, Congress passed a law that required
the Soviet Union publicly and explicitly (rather than quietly as Kissinger had
done) to change Soviet immigration policy before such status could be granted.
This Jackson-Vanik Amendment represented to the Soviet Union not only an
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298 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
affront to its sovereignty but also an escalation of American demands over a
supposedly resolved issue.
Despite the Kremlin's distaste for the amendment, the Soviets -very likely on
Brezhnev's insistence-indicated privately they would accommodate congressional
demands so long as it could be done quietly. Moscow repudiated the trade
agreement only when Jackson responded much as the aggressive enemy image
would predict: he gloated publicly over the concession and began making more
demands. This put Brezhnev on the defensive. As Raymond Garthoff notes, N.V.
Podgorny's protest that "questions of sovereignty and of our internal affairs have
never been and will never be a matter for public bargaining" seemed to convey
an indirect criticism of Brezhnev's willingness to bargain on such matters just a
short time earlier.81
A second case in which U.S. policy undermined an extended position taken by
Brezhnev occurred after he declared, in a speech in Tula in January 1977, that
the Soviets would not seek strategic superiority. This speech - which did not
receive universal approbation in the Soviet elite, especially among the military most
likely represented an effort to signal to the incoming Carter administration
a continuing Soviet interest in detente and arms control.82 Not surprisingly, the
Soviet position hardened when Carter answered this speech with his attempt to
undo the advances made at Vladivostok and at the same time launched an attack
on Soviet human rights policy.83 And though no one has given convincing evidence
that these events affected Breshnev's authority in any serious way, they did
result in a cooling of U.S.-Soviet relations by the summer of 1977.
To conclude, the detente period provides the best example of how domestic
cold war myths constrained efforts to cooperate during the postwar era. The
difficult questions of the superpower competition -the division of Europe and
the strategic balance - had all been resolved, leaving only influence in the periphery
and an illusory fear of nuclear inferiority as arenas for competition. In
this case, however, the United States, rather than the Soviet Union, proved to
be the more flexible party when disillusion over Vietnam allowed it to redefine
the cold war mythology. Its failure to do so could be traced in part to Kissinger's
unwillingness and Carter's incompetence. More importantly, however, detente
failed because powerful domestic interests on each side used prevailing myths
about the unconditional hostility of the other to attack conciliatory policies as
encouragement of aggression. In each case the actions of the other side provided
evidence to support attacks.
81 See Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation, 466.
82 On Brezhnev's likely motives, see Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation, 585-6. On the reaction
in the Soviet Union, see Bruce Parrot, "Political Change and Civil-Military Relations" in Timothy
J. Colton and Thane Gustafson, eds., Soldiers and the Soviet State: Civil-Military Relations from
Brezhnev to Gorbachev (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 90.
83 Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation, 573.
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR | 299
CONCLUSION
In each of these cases, leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union who
sought to change the confrontational pattern of behavior associated with the cold
war had to overcome not simply the entrenched image of an aggressive enemy
existing in the other superpower, but also the roots of a similar cold war mythology
in their own domestic systems. Not surprisingly, leaders challenged this
mythology only after domestic or international upheavals shook the internal
bases of the cold war images enough to admit an alternative vision of the state's
international role in the policy debate. Even when this happened, the behavior
of the other power, similarly constrained by domestic forces, reinforced the
advocates of confrontation at home and the inertia of the cold war myths prevailed.
On the rare occasions when both leaders sought a more conciliatory policy
simultaneously, domestic constraints on both sides often made it impossible for
the leaders to reach common ground.
In the late 1980s the cycle of U.S.-Soviet aggression was broken. After 1987,
in particular, the Soviet regime articulated a New Thinking in foreign policy that
recognized the Soviet role in sustaining America's image of the enemy and sought
to erode this image by offering an escalating series of concessions. This process
was accelerated by the positive response of President Ronald Reagan, who was
less vulnerable than most to charges that he was appeasing the Russians. Under
Reagan the U.S. government did not offer any real concessions to Soviet bargaining
positions, but simply accepted Gorbachev's concessions. Furthermore,
the administration did not abandon the policy of negotiating from strength, but
rather acclaimed the Soviet new thinking as a confirmation of that policy. Only
during the summer of 1989 did the Bush administration announce that it would
meet Gorbachev halfway in order to support the process of perestroika.
How do we explain this change? On one level, the events provide convincing
evidence for the Graduated Reciprocation in Tension Reduction (GRIT) strategy
formulated by Charles Osgood and more recently championed by Deborah
Larson.84 This strategy emphasizes the stability of cognitive images in human
consciousness and argues that a succession of concessions are necessary to undermine
an image of an insatiably aggressive enemy. Yet one must remember precisely
what concessions were required before the United States abandoned its
policy of containment. In addition to meeting American demands on middle and
short-range missiles, the Soviets had agreed in principle to asymmetric cuts in
conventional forces in Europe and also accepted in large part the U.S. framework
for strategic cuts. More importantly, glasnost had opened the political debate in
unprecedented ways: a parliament had been chosen in semicontested elections
that rejected the candidates of the party apparatus in key Soviet cities, and Poland
84 See Deborah Welch Larson, "Crisis Prevention and the Austrian State Treaty," International
Organization 41 (Winter 1987): 27-60.
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300 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
and Hungary were both moving with Soviet blessing toward more pluralist re-
gimes.
In short, by the time the United States altered its policy, many of the fundamental
attributes of the Stalinist system had come under attack, and it seemed
likely that this process would continue. Clearly, no leader before Gorbachev had
been willing or in Khrushchev's case able to go this far. Gorbachev himself
succeeded as far as he did only because the decline of the Soviet economy, its
inability to meet the international demands for technological development, and
the domestic crisis of legitimacy in the Soviet Union had shifted the burden of
proof, once the old guard had departed from the scene, to leaders who favored the
status quo rather than those who advocated change.85 It is likely that Gorbachev
himself would not have taken the actions he did in 1989 had not events forced him.
This suggests that under most conditions the GRIT strategy, while undoubtedly
effective in eroding existing images in the other side, is impractical due to domestic
constraints.
Since only the domestic collapse of one of the superpowers enabled these
governments to overcome domestic mythologies and end their confrontational
behavior, perhaps domestic politics played an intermediate role -a brake, as it
were - between changes in the international structure and changes in international
patterns of behavior. Is this likely to hold true for all systems? This question must
be left for future research. One reason to think that the cold war might be different
from other eras is that in a bipolar world, where only two powers set the tone
of international politics, the domestic structures of these powers would have a
greater impact on the international system than if five or six powers competed
for influence. Stephen Krasner argues that even in the multipolar world of the
interwar period, the breakdown of the international trade system occurred in part
because domestic interests and institutions in the United States and Britain did
not adapt readily to changes in the international structure of trade after World
War 1.86
What does this analysis of the cold war portend for the emerging world order?
Because most of the likely great powers of the future, including the United States,
Germany, and Japan, have participated in the international regimes created
during the period of American hegemony in the capitalist world, powerful groups
and institutions embedded within these countries are firmly interested in continuing
this cooperation, though they may have difficulty in adjusting to the new
roles they will play in these regimes. The great question, however, lies on the
territory of the former Soviet Union. While the preceding analysis suggests that
the international community's influence in shaping domestic structures is limited
by preexisting constructs, the extent to which domestic structures have broken
85 For an analysis of the collapse of the old Soviet foreign policy ideology under Gorbachev, see
Blum, "The Soviet Foreign Policy Belief System."
86 Stephen Krasner, "State Power and the Structure of International Trade," World Po
(April 1976): 317-347.
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PERPETUATING THE COLD WAR | 301
down in this territory provides the West with great opportunities as well as risks.
The West should expand or develop existing regimes to include Russia and the
newly independent republics in order to embed in them institutions that would
increase the domestic costs their leaders would face in choosing a confrontational
foreign policy.
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