The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part I

A common and consequential misunderstanding is that the Soviet Union, by the mid-1980s, had no option but to end the Cold War. It’s asserted that the Soviet leadership accepted defeat because they could not keep up with the West either economically or militarily. President Ronald Reagan’s hard line is often credited with being the tipping point. Reagan’s anti-Soviet rhetoric was accompanied by greatly increased American military spending. In an American triumphalist view of the Cold War’s ending, special emphasis is placed on Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (an ambitious, long-term and vastly expensive programme to develop US anti-missile defence), announced in 1983.

The Soviet economy in many respects lagged behind that of advanced Western countries and it was also being outpaced in technological innovation and the speed of economic growth by countries of East Asia. However, its defence sector was the great exception to a more general economic sluggishness. Allocated vast resources, Soviet military industry employed many of the country’s best scientific and engineering brains. In the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union had a comparable nuclear arsenal to that of the United States, and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact had larger conventional forces than NATO. There was an approximate military parity between the Soviet Union and the USA from the early 1970s which still prevailed when Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1985. Earlier – from 1945 until the end of the 1960s – the US had military superiority over the Soviet Union. FULL THREAD

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The most consequential misunderstanding about the Cold War in contemporary public discourse arises from viewing it through an essentialist lens — the assumption that it was a contest between two fixed systems whose behaviour was predetermined by their inherent natures, shaped by history, culture, structure, and ideology. In this view, Russia today is the predictable continuation of these timeless instincts towards expansionism and autocracy.

Richard Pipes, the eminent Cold-War-era scholar of Russian history, best encapsulates this essentialist position: Russia, "for reasons rooted in either her social structure or her culture, or both, is committed to authoritarian government." His broader argument, developed over decades of Cold War, was that Russia’s cultural and political inheritance produced a nearly continuous legacy of autocracy and imperialism from 15^th-century Muscovy to the 20^th-century USSR to the 21^st-century Russia of Vladimir Putin.

The essentialist case has empirical logic, and an honest rebuttal cannot deny it. With the important exception of the Gorbachev era, Russia has pursued expansionism across five centuries. Its authoritarian governance and attempts to subordinate its neighbours have reinforced each other. Pipes is describing patterns that exist.  FULL THREAD

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Probably the most consequential misunderstanding about the Cold War is that nuclear deterrence—the US and European reliance on the threat of a devastating attack against the USSR with nuclear weapons—“worked” to maintain the peace and ultimately to end the Cold War. 

Why is it a misunderstanding? Most fundamentally because, as formerly secret archives from the East bloc have revealed, the USSR had no intention either to carry out a nuclear attack or launch an invasion of Europe with conventional armed forces. The Red Army demobilized substantially after World War II and relied on a defensive orientation in the event of an invasion from the West. Only in the 1960s, with the deployment of thousands of so-called tactical nuclear weapons by the United States in Europe, did the strategy switch to an offensive one, focusing on preemptive destruction of nuclear facilities on the territory of members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. That strategy, misunderstood by NATO and US officials, could have resulted in nuclear devastation of the European continent in the event that the US launched limited nuclear attacks for signaling purposes as NATO planned and strategists such as Thomas Schelling advocated during the Berlin Crisis in 1961. If the crisis had not been defused, and eventually the situation in Europe stabilized by the 1972 German State Treaty (“two states, one nation”) and the 1975 Helsinki Accords, failed nuclear deterrence could have produced nuclear war. FULL THREAD

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