My fundamental point is that our grand strategic task in the Cold War was not the military defeat of the Soviet Union but rather its economic defeat, letting that “base” victory destroy its ideological and political “superstructure”—a glorious process of disintegration triggered unintentionally by Gorbachev. That is the primary victory we claim in the Cold War, but it is also the most limited one. The far more complete victory, in terms of our grand strategy of first proving and then expanding our American System model on a global basis, came in opening up China and facilitating its co-optation to market economics. That victory completely overshadows the collapse of the Soviet bloc, which in many ways signaled the “end of history” only in Eurasia by finally discrediting the Left’s attempt at a catch-up economic development strategy based on class dictatorship. China’s embrace of markets was far more important because it validated early America’s neither-Right-nor-Left-but-rather-middle (as in middle-class) strategy of national economic development, which emphasizes a high degree of economic liberty conferred on individuals while allowing, in its extensive phase of growth, a healthy amount of state involvement in developing industry sectors and critical infrastructure plus an avowed policy of trade protectionism.
Does China follow our prescription as we might write it today? Certainly not. It currently follows the prescription we wrote for ourselves across the nineteenth century, with no apologies to anyone and a clear sense of chauvinism directed toward then dominant Great Britain. Are many of our criticisms of China’s economic path thus hypocritical? Yes, they are. Should we nonetheless press China on its lack of political liberty, much as Britain long shamed us on the question of slavery? You bet. But of course a certain patience is also called for, because there should be no desire on our part to reverse this greatest victory of the Cold War by insisting on premature political change that would destabilize China’s chaotically advancing market economy. Frankly, that’s the job of individual Chinese to pursue, with their capacity for pressuring the Chinese Communist Party on the pace of reform. I mean, that’s how it happened in America, right? Every political advance we made came when individuals, suitably empowered by economic advance (meaning they had money and a willingness to use it), simply grew fed up with the system as it was and demanded—en masse or per special interest—something better.
The key thing for us to remember in this historical jaunt is that by enabling China’s embrace of markets, we transformed our American System-cum-globalization model from a rather limited experiment (the West) to a truly global phenomenon. Adding China, all by itself, effectively tipped our model of globalization into majority status, meaning more than half the world was now involved, with China over time pulling India and Russia in similar directions by the combination of its example and sheer economic power. If we had “lost” China at the start of the Cold War, then it was now clearly won, along with serious momentum for a continuing grand strategy of projecting our states-uniting model of economic development upon the world.
By making this argument, I don’t seek to completely dismiss the importance of America’s superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union as the dominant dynamic of the Cold War period, but rather to put it in its proper place. Successfully containing the Soviet threat effectively closed the door on the twentieth century’s long spasm of system-level violence and great-power war. This is a huge accomplishment but essentially a backward-looking one. Co-opting China toward market economics opened the door on the twenty-first century and showed what the goal of our grand strategy must become: completing the construction of a globally integrated economy. Our American System model remains the same: Over time, economies integrate and states unite.
Of course, in retrospect all this seems easy. But the outcome of the Cold War seemed anything but inevitable at the time. If anything, the experience of the first half of the twentieth century seemed to confirm just the opposite: The West and the Soviet bloc were slated, as Stalin himself predicted, to fight another world war within a generation’s time. Nuclear weapons would shape that conflict, many thought, but certainly not obviate it. Thus, the journey of mutual discovery that America undertook with the Soviet Union on the question of nuclear weapons was necessary to concluding the Cold War as a transition phase for transforming the American-cum-Western experiment in economic integration into a truly global phenomenon. So long as the world remained trapped in the dynamic of superpower rivalry, too much of the planet would remain off-limits. The man who would change all that, Richard Nixon, thus becomes central to our story.
The actual journey was far shorter than most historians recognize—a mere two decades. Picking up the thread of the story with Eisenhower’s threatened use of nuclear weapons in 1953 to force an end to the Korean conflict, we can make two decade-long leaps to conclude the essential narrative.
The first leap takes us to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Like virtually all Soviet brinksmanship in the Cold War, the Cuban crisis had a distinct tie-in to events in Europe—specifically, West Germany/Berlin. Whenever the Soviets, who were beyond paranoid in fearing a resurgent German threat, felt even the slightest inkling of revived danger or Western intransigence on the subject, they usually acted out somewhere else. In this instance, as eminent Soviet foreign policy expert Adam Ulam argued, the Soviets were fishing for a trigger that might, in a quid pro quo fashion, force young President John F. Kennedy’s hand on a number of pressing international issues, including the ongoing but contentious negotiations for a German peace treaty that would settle the status of Berlin, where the Soviets had installed their infamous wall the previous year. This scary strategic standoff had two lasting effects: (1) the Soviets drove home to the American public the notion of rough parity, saying in effect, “We’re confident enough to try to park some missiles off your coast”; and (2) a somewhat shaken American national security establishment, in the personage of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, subsequently moved in the direction of elevating the embryonic concept of mutually assured destruction to the level of a permanent cornerstone of U.S. strategic nuclear planning, in effect saying, “We’ll aim for this minimum standard of security but logically no higher.”
This was a huge development for America and the world. By coming to the conclusion that nuclear weapons are good primarily for having and not using, we essentially codified Truman’s original instincts in the Korean War: All great-power war in the age of nuclear weapons is by definition limited war. While Truman had come to that conclusion in 1951, the U.S. national security establishment had not—witness Ike’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles’s toying with the notion of “massive retaliation” as an essential instrument in America’s brinksmanship toolkit in the mid-1950s. Because the Soviets appeared to be taking their usual route to brute, numerical superiority across the middle to late 1950s, when the United States first feared a “bomber gap” and then a “missile gap,” the decision to put our strategic faith in a secure second-strike capability was a bold move. What MAD basically said was this: “No matter how much you hit me in your first missile strike, I’ll have enough second-strike capability to lay your entire country to waste, thus our mutual destruction is assured as long as I maintain a sufficient counterstrike capability.” The subtext for the Soviets was “Your attempt to reach numerical superiority is useless. You may, for example, catch a lot of my ground-based missiles in their silos, but you can’t possibly intercept all my bombers or target my unlocatable submarines and stop them from striking back.”
Of course, it wasn’t enough for just the United States to understand and adhere to the notions of MAD; we also had to convince the Soviets of this same logic. This effort took years, finally culminating in the signing of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) treaty, as well as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, in May 1972 at the first of three historic summits between Richard Nixon and Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev. By agreeing for the first time ever to limit the nature of its ideological death match with capitalism, the international
Communist movement, as Ulam states, “was finished.” Yes, there would be future double crosses and spy scandals and proxy wars in the Third World, but none of these events changed the essential correlation of strategic forces—until Reagan threatened to do so with Star Wars in the early 1980s.
But by then, the essential die was cast for the Soviet experiment. Emboldened by détente and America’s apparent weakness (e.g., Watergate, Vietnam), the Soviets would make one, last-gasp attempt to spread their brand of Marxism-Leninism in the Third World. While that effort elicited frantic fears in Washington of an “arc of crisis” and a new Communist domino effect in Southwest Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, all that effort really brought Moscow were additional burdens of empire on top of what it already bore in Eastern Europe. Eventually, even the Soviet Politburo’s hardliners realized this danger, thanks in part to the Reagan Doctrine’s support of rebel movements targeting their client states (particularly the mujahideen in Afghanistan), and thus the Soviets began trimming back their imperial ambitions, triggering a long withdrawal from the world that extended across the entirety of the 1980s and ended only with the Soviet Union’s very dissolution in 1991.
There is much debate, naturally, as to the essential reasons why the Soviet bloc eventually disintegrated. My argument is a simple one: The Soviet Union was always going to fail eventually for economic reasons. The only question for grand strategy was, How could America get the Soviets to that point of realization in the safest and quickest fashion? Nixon and Kissinger safeguarded the process, and Reagan accelerated it.
Nixon entered the presidency with a set of unusual handicaps. First, he was effectively the first Republican president in thirty-six years, discounting the nonpartisan Eisenhower. Plus, he was the first president in more than a century to enter office with the opposition party controlling both houses of Congress. Worst, of course, was the strategic corner into which America had already painted itself on Vietnam across the previous two administrations. Read the White House memoirs of both Nixon and Kissinger and you’ll see the vast bulk of the pages consumed by Vietnam, arguably only the sixth most important foreign policy legacy of their combined efforts, trailing the settlement of postwar Europe, détente with the Soviets, the codification of MAD in treaties, the opening to China, and taking America off the gold standard. Those were all system-level changes, whereas Vietnam’s impact, as far as America was concerned, was largely internal, including the rapid rise and fall of the so-called imperial presidency.
Nixon was intent from the start on creating some strategic wiggle room, believing that America’s foreign policy had been, as he put it, “held hostage, first under Kennedy to the Cold War and then under Johnson to the Vietnam war.” Seeking out Kissinger’s service as national security adviser because of their similar takes on balance-of-power politics and their complete lack of interest in global economics, Nixon took an approach to the presidency that was the opposite of Truman’s, compromising on domestic policies while fighting damn near everybody on foreign policy. This was an inevitable tack, given Nixon’s ambition to reorder the structure of great-power relations while trying to end an unwinnable and overwhelmingly unpopular overseas war.
Like Nixon, Kissinger was wholly unsatisfied with the way U.S.- Soviet relations had been previously managed, comparing the relationship to “two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other whom he assumes to have perfect vision.” Not given, as he put it, to the “myth of inexorable Soviet advance carefully orchestrated by some superplanners,” Kissinger wanted to end the pendulum-swinging pattern of past diplomacy that saw America veering regularly from “sentimental conciliation” to “liturgical belligerence.” With Nixon, he would establish concreteness, restraint, and linkage as the principles for engagement. Linkage, in Nixon’s mind, was most important, “since U.S.-Soviet interests as the world’s two competing nuclear superpowers were so widespread and overlapping, it was unrealistic to separate or compartmentalize areas of concern.”
Seeking to free up American foreign policy would be a difficult trick. Nixon believed the first order of business was to tie off the loose ends of postwar Europe, because until the Soviets were made confident on the German question, getting their help on any other issue was highly unlikely. But as Kissinger points out, any move to engineer a more permanent settlement there raised magnificent fears among our European allies that some sort of “super Yalta” would be arranged by the superpowers alone. As initial overtures to the Soviets on a grand bargain showed them to be unrealistically demanding (they wanted a European settlement and dialogue, arms agreements, and an anti-Chinese alliance all on their terms before a summit was possible), Nixon decided to pursue the China option, a direction he’d been signaling going all the way back to a 1967 Foreign Affairs article tellingly titled “Asia After Viet Nam.” In the piece he stated that America “simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.” He put it more expansively in his 1969 inaugural address, where he stated that “we seek an open world—open to ideas, open to the exchange of goods and people—a world in which no people, great or small, will live in angry isolation.”
The Chinese leadership, and particularly Mao himself, picked up these cues and thus began a long diplomatic dance, largely through third parties, that finally resulted three years later in the Chinese offering to host Kissinger in Beijing for secret talks designed to craft a joint communiqué that would serve as diplomatic cornerstone for a first summit. Once Nixon publicly announced the trip and communiqué, it had the desired effect on the Soviets, who became, as Kissinger noted, “suddenly anxious to create the impression that more serious business could be accomplished in Moscow than in Peking.” As Brezhnev later quipped, Nixon went “to Peking for banquets but to Moscow to do business.” But the simple reality was that China and the United States actually had little business to do other than to end the diplomatic void that separated them.
China had no interest in helping America achieve anything in Vietnam except its rapid departure, and sought out U.S. recognition simply to escape the international isolation it had imposed on itself through the Cultural Revolution, an isolation that Mao now feared left China open to military invasion from the Soviet Union, with whom it had been openly feuding for years. If unfriendly countries surrounded China, Mao reasoned, it would be better to have a distant, powerful friend in the United States, or at least a nonenemy. China was playing its “American card” as much as Nixon and Kissinger were playing their “China card.” In seeing it as a straight-up trade that bought both sides some breathing space against a common enemy, Mao ended any White House hopes for a Chinese diplomatic rescue on Vietnam. Nonetheless, Nixon and Kissinger got more than enough, in the end, to justify their daring move, which was sure to anger a lot of conservatives back home. They had ended the bipolar order and, by doing so, had bought the Nixon administration a degree of flexibility that it immediately put to use vis-à-vis the Soviets.
Détente with the Soviets in Europe did much more than just settle the question of Germany and the nuclear arms race. Through the Helsinki Accords later crafted under Kissinger’s State Department in the Ford administration, détente reintroduced FDR’s Atlantic Charter concept of human rights as being applicable, in Elizabeth Borgwardt’s description, “within as well as across national borders.” As historian John Lewis Gaddis argues, the Helsinki Accords came back to haunt the Brezhnev regime in future years by making Soviet repression of political rights, both at home and in Eastern Europe, subject to the West’s diplomatic review, in effect providing dissidents throughout their system an external patron, an independent international body specifically empowered to investigate such matters with Moscow’s official sanction. It is impossible to describe the subsequent success of the political dissidence movement inside the Soviet bloc, and especially Eastern Europe, without reference to the “Helsinki m
ovement” and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the standing regional conference created by the accords.
Far more damaging for Moscow’s Communist leadership were the economic connections with the West triggered by détente. By opening itself up to trade, the USSR’s fake economy was ultimately undermined by the dollar’s infiltration: Its “hard,” or convertible, value in black markets revealed to all, but especially its own citizens, the illogic of the Kremlin’s central planning and pretend pricing. In short, Nixon and Kissinger revealed this “emperor had no clothes.” By introducing foreign goods with actual values attached and encouraging the Soviets to sell their energy resources on the international market, Western trade poisoned the entire Soviet production chain by suggesting that the vast bulk of its output arrived with little appreciable market value. As long as the Soviet economy remained virtually isolated from free markets, the illusion of productivity was maintained. But once it was connected to the real world, Soviet consumers began to opt out of the dysfunctional Soviet system in increasing numbers, instead availing themselves of desired goods via a black market whose pervasiveness was matched only by its sophistication. Moreover, by the time Mikhail Gorbachev and his fellow reformist technocrats started arriving on the scene in the early 1980s, the government had already become somewhat addicted to the hard-currency foreign revenues obtained through oil exports. After the United States negotiated with the Saudis to lower oil prices, the Soviet economy hit the wall, just as Reagan raised the specter of a costly arms race.
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