The Cold War

by Robert J. McMahon

  Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War

  The accession, in March 1985, of Mikhail S. Gorbachev to the position of general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party stands as the most critical turning point in the Cold War’s final phase—the one factor, above all others, that hastened the end of the Cold War and the radical transformation in Soviet–American relations that accompanied it. The dynamic, 54-year-old Gorbachev made virtually all of the major concessions that led to landmark arms reduction agreements in the late 1980s. Through a series of wholly unexpected, often unilateral, overtures and concessions, he succeeded in changing the entire tenor of the Soviet–American relationship, in the end depriving the United States of the enemy whose presumably expansionist designs it had been seeking to thwart for the past forty-five years. Absent this remarkable individual, the astonishing changes of the 1985–90 period become nearly inconceivable.

  Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, advanced dramatic new ideas about security, nuclear weapons, and the relationship of both to their highest priorities: domestic reform and the revitalization of socialism. Influenced by a changing intellectual milieu in the Soviet Union, shaped in part by Soviet scientists and foreign policy experts with broad exposure to the West and close contact with their Western counterparts, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze injected ‘new thinking’ into both the staid Kremlin leadership circle and the stalled Soviet–American dialogue. They had reached the conclusion that the arms race was self-defeating; it added nothing to the USSR’s real security while burdening an already strapped economy.

  True security, Gorbachev asserted, could only be provided ‘by political means’, not military means. Any ‘striving for military superiority’, he insisted, ‘means chasing one’s own tail’. Convinced that no rational person or state would use nuclear weapons, and that the Soviet Union possessed a sufficient nuclear arsenal for national self-protection, the new leaders thought the overarching goal of Soviet foreign policy should be to encourage a joint nuclear, and conventional, arms build-down with the United States. Doing so, they believed, would simultaneously foster a safer and more secure international environment and free up resources needed for long-overdue internal reforms of their deeply troubled economic system. Gorbachev’s domestic push for perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) was thus intimately linked from the first with his determination to halt the arms race with the United States and to bring an abrupt end to the relationship of poisonous hostility that had developed between the superpowers since the end of détente.

  Deep structural forces also compelled a new approach to the Cold War. Shortly after becoming Communist Party chief, Gorbachev learned that the USSR was devoting an unsustainable 30 per cent of its gross domestic product to military expenditures. Moscow’s ballooning international commitments in Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cuba, and the Horn of Africa left it severely overextended, exacerbating that core problem. Soviet growth rates, moreover, had declined appreciably by the 1970s and 1980s. The exponential rise in oil prices after 1973 partially masked the USSR’s economic difficulties, energy exports accounting for 80 per cent of the country’s hard currency. But slowing oil output by the mid-1980s and the plummeting price of oil—a drop of 69 per cent in 1986 alone—baldly exposed the systemic weakness of an economy so heavily dependent on fossil fuels. That economy’s failure to meet basic consumer needs stood as perhaps the most glaring shortcoming of the Soviet system. At the same time, the rise of human rights consciousness and activism, abetted by the Helsinki Accords, eroded the power and legitimacy of the Soviet state and those of its Eastern European satellites.

  In contrast, by the time of Gorbachev’s ascension the Western democratic capitalist states and Japan were experiencing a major economic resurgence from the setbacks and crises of the previous decade. Catalysed by technological innovation, computerization, trade integration, and globalization, capitalism proved far more resilient than its critics had thought possible. The gap between the economic performance of the West and that of the East was fast widening, as Gorbachev was keenly aware.

  The rapid-fire series of events that transpired between 1985 and 1990 stunned governmental decision-makers, foreign policy experts, and ordinary citizens alike across the world. Yet those epochal events, it is now evident, were preceded and conditioned by the new thinking about security, nuclear weapons, and domestic needs that animated all of Gorbachev’s dealings with the United States, Eastern Europe, and the world at large. Ronald Reagan, the most unequivocally anti-communist American leader of the entire Cold War era, suddenly found a Soviet leader saying yes to arms control faster than he could say no, moving to ‘deideologize’ Moscow’s foreign policy, offering unilateral concessions on conventional armed forces, and vowing to remove Soviet troops from Afghanistan. To his great credit, Reagan proved willing first to moderate, and then to abandon, deeply held personal convictions about the malignant nature of communism, thereby permitting a genuine rapprochement to occur.

  The two men met five separate times between 1985 and 1988, developing a stronger rapport with each summit. After a get-acquainted summit at Geneva in November 1985 that produced little of substance but markedly improved the atmospherics of the Soviet–American relationship, Gorbachev convinced Reagan to attend a hastily arranged meeting at Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986. There, the two leaders came remarkably close to a decision to eliminate all ballistic missiles. In the end, though, Reagan’s insistence on continuing with his SDI initiative led the Soviet leader to withdraw the breathtaking proposals he had placed on the table. Yet the setback at Reykjavik proved but temporary. Shortly thereafter, Gorbachev dropped his insistence that America’s abandonment of SDI must be a prerequisite for progress on all arms control matters, and moved to accept the ‘zero option’ first put forward by US negotiators back in 1981—and then largely as a propaganda ploy since it so plainly favoured the American side.

  Gorbachev’s concessions led to the conclusion of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed at the December 1987 Washington summit. Reagan, in his public remarks, jocularly repeated what he called an old Russian maxim: ‘doveryai no proveryai—trust, but verify’. The Soviet ruler offered a more soaring vision. ‘May December 8, 1987, become a date that will be inscribed in the history books,’ he declared, ‘a date that will mark the watershed separating the era of a mounting risk of nuclear war from the era of a demilitarization of human life.’ The INF Treaty, rapidly ratified by the US Senate, led to the destruction of 1,846 Soviet nuclear weapons and 846 US weapons within three years, with each side allowing close, and unprecedented, inspection of the other side’s nuclear sites. For the first time in the atomic era, an actual class of nuclear weapons was being not just limited but eliminated.

  Reagan’s trip to Moscow in the spring of 1988 testified even more powerfully to the ongoing transformation in Soviet–American relations—and the Cold War. The leaders of the two superpowers were now plainly treating each other more as friendly partners than as enemies. The American president, who described the two leaders as ‘old friends’, even disavowed his previous depiction of the Soviet state as an evil empire. When asked by a reporter if he still thought of the Soviet Union in such terms, Reagan replied: ‘No. I was talking about another time, another era.’ In his public comments before departing Moscow, the man who had issued some of the harshest denunciations of the Soviet state since the Cold War’s inception expressed ‘hope for a new era in human history, an era of peace between our nations and peoples’ (see Figure 11). Certainly the images of Reagan and Gorbachev amiably strolling arm in arm across Red Square and the American president speaking with his trademark avuncular charm to students at Moscow State University, in front of a huge bust of Lenin no less, spoke volumes about the remarkable metamorphosis that had taken place.

  11. Reagan and Gorbachev in Red Square during the Moscow summit, May 1988.

  In December 1988, Gorbachev made another visit to the United States to meet wit
h Reagan, one last time, while also conducting discussions with—and sizing up—president-elect George H. W. Bush. That trip coincided with a major speech the Soviet leader delivered at the United Nations, in which he revealed his intention to reduce unilaterally Soviet military forces by 500,000 troops. ‘Perhaps not since Woodrow Wilson presented his Fourteen Points in 1918 or since Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill promulgated the Atlantic Charter in 1941’, gushed the New York Times in a lead editorial, ‘has a world figure demonstrated the vision Mikhail Gorbachev displayed yesterday at the United Nations.’ Secretary of State Shultz remarked several years later that ‘if anybody declared the end of the Cold War, he did it in that speech.’

  Gorbachev’s proposal led to a significant reduction of the Soviet military presence in Eastern Europe. It also signalled, as did a series of his public and private statements, that the Kremlin leadership was discarding the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine—the notion that the Soviet Union would use force, if necessary, to maintain rigid control over each of its Warsaw Pact allies. With the loosening of the Soviet grip, Eastern European dissidents exulted, old-line communist apparatchiks quaked. What followed with remarkable speed were popular democratic revolutions that swept out of power every communist regime in Eastern Europe, beginning with Poland in mid-1989, where the once-banned Solidarity formed a new government, and ending with the violent denouement of the Nicolae Ceauşescu regime in Romania at year’s close. The event that most powerfully symbolized the crumbling of the old order was the opening of the Berlin Wall on 9 November. That infamous 28-mile-long concrete barrier had come to signify not just the division of Germany’s former capital, but the division of Europe as a whole (see Figure 12). As the wall disintegrated, so too did Europe’s East–West divide. ‘The total dismantling of socialism as a world phenomenon has been proceeding’, Gorbachev’s aide Anatoly Chernayev wrote in his diary. ‘And a common fellow from Stavropol set this process in motion.’ To the delight of the Bush administration, which wisely chose not to exult at the repudiation of Eastern Europe’s communist states, Gorbachev—that common fellow from Stavropol—simply let events run their course.

  12. The Berlin Wall comes down, November 1989.

  In many respects, the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the concomitant implosion not just of Eastern Europe’s communist governments but of the entire Warsaw Pact alliance system meant the end of the Cold War. The ideological contest was now over. Neither communism nor the Soviet state any longer posed a serious threat to the security of the United States or its allies. Many observers have, accordingly, cited 1989 as the Cold War’s terminal date. Yet, at that point, one crucial issue remained unresolved: the status of Germany. It was the very issue, moreover, whose importance and intractability first precipitated the Soviet–American breach in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

  Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s West German government began pressing for reunification once the wall came down, presenting the Kremlin with a daunting strategic dilemma. Gorbachev had calculated that Soviet security no longer demanded the preservation of compliant, satellite regimes in Eastern Europe. But Germany was different. A divided Germany had formed a core element of Soviet security policy ever since Stalin’s reign. ‘We had paid an enormous price for it,’ noted Shevardnadze, ‘and to write it off was inconceivable. The memory of the war was stronger than the new concepts about the limits of security.’ In the end, though, Gorbachev accepted by mid-1990 the inevitability of a reunified Germany. Unwilling to use force to thwart what seemed the near irresistible momentum towards unity, the Soviet leader took solace in Bush’s assurances that Germany would remain enmeshed in the Western security system. Gorbachev’s greatest fear was of an unharnessed, newly empowered Germany becoming a future menace to Russian security—the exact same fear, it bears emphasizing, that lay behind Stalin’s approach to the German problem during and right after the Second World War. The record of over four decades of German democracy, however, served to dilute those fears. Coupled with the American insistence that Germany would remain locked into, rather than independent from, NATO, that record of peace, stability, and democratic governance helped assuage Gorbachev’s anxieties.

  By the summer of 1990, the Soviets, Americans, British, French, and Germans agreed that the two Germanies would henceforth constitute a single, sovereign country that would remain anchored to the NATO alliance. With German power now fully co-opted in the Western coalition, one of the greatest Cold War worries of US officialdom—that of a unified, pro-Soviet Germany—disappeared. The succinct observation of Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s National Security Adviser, that ‘the Cold War ended when the Soviets accepted a united Germany in NATO’ thus seems essentially correct. The year 1990, rather than 1989, truly marked the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, the product of forces set in motion by Gorbachev’s reforms that he proved unable to control, stands as a critically important historical event in its own right, but an anti-climactic one insofar as the Cold War is concerned. By the time the Soviet Union disappeared, the Cold War itself was already history.

  Its sudden—and decidedly non-violent—ending stunned much of the world, defying the predictions and expectations of virtually all close observers of international affairs. ‘The “incredibly swift transition” of 1989–91,’ according to British scholar Adam Roberts, ‘was the most remarkable case of large-scale peaceful change in world history.’

  A short-lived honeymoon in Russian–American relations ensued throughout the 1990s and the early years of the new century only to give way to renewed suspicions and hostilities. Under Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, who attained power in December 1999 and has ruled the country with an increasingly autocratic hand ever since, Moscow has objected strenuously to the eastward expansion of NATO, Western efforts to woo former Soviet republics, and what it sees as the arrogant and condescending behaviour of the sole remaining superpower. Russia’s annexation of the Crimean region of Ukraine, in 2014, led to harsh Western sanctions. Partly in response, Putin directed covert cyber operations during the US presidential election of 2016, aimed at disrupting American democracy and boosting the prospects of his preferred candidate, eventual winner Donald J. Trump.

  Some pundits have proclaimed the onset of a new Cold War. Yet, despite some superficial similarities to the superpower conflict that followed the Second World War, the analogy falls short. The current Russian–American rivalry lacks the ideological dimension so central to the Cold War. Neither side any longer sees itself competing for the soul of mankind; neither views the contest as a Manichean struggle that envelops the entire globe and that leaves no room for neutrality among other nation-states. The power imbalance between the United States and Russia, moreover, is vastly greater now than during the Cold War years. Putin presides over an economy approximately the size of Italy’s, representing less than 10 per cent that of its old Cold War rival. With the rising power of China and signs of an increasingly multipolar world, Russian–American conflict may persist, but the unique historic epoch known as the Cold War will not recur.

  Further reading

  A number of books ably cover the entirety of the Cold War. Particularly recommended are Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (New York, 2017); John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York, 2005); Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, Mass., 2009); David S. Painter, The Cold War: An International History (London, 1999); S. J. Ball, The Cold War: An International History, 1947–1991 (London, 1998); Carole K. Fink, Cold War: An International History (2nd edn, New York, 2018); Richard J. Crockatt, The Fifty Years War: The United States and the Soviet Union in World Politics, 1941–1991 (London, 1995); Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–2000, 9th edn (New York, 2002); Ronald E. Powaski, The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917–1991 (New York, 1998); Geoffrey Roberts, The Soviet Union in World Politics: Coexistence, Revolution and C
old War, 1945–1991 (London, 1999); Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War (Baltimore, 1989); Warren I. Cohen, Challenges to American Primacy, 1945 to the Present (New York, 2013); and H. W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (New York, 1993).

  Important works that utilize new archival sources to reinterpret the first half of the Cold War include Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, Mass., 1996) and John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford, 1997). Useful collections are Odd Arne Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (London, 2000) and Richard H. Immerman and Petra Goedde (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford, 2013). An indispensable compilation of original essays by seventy-two experts covering nearly all aspects of the Cold War is Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, The Cambridge History of the Cold War (3 vols, Cambridge, 2010).

  Chapter 1: The Second World War and the destruction of the old order

  Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917–1953 (New York, 1994).

  Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 1, Origins (Cambridge, 2010).

  Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York, 1996).

  Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War To Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).

  Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War (New York, 1992).