Archie Brown, Julie Newton, Matthew Evangelista
The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part I
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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
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 15th-century Muscovy to the 20th-century USSR to the 21st-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
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
The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part I
Available here →October 13, 2026
20261013-weave-brown-newton-evangelista-part-one
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Archie Brown, Julie Newton, Matthew Evangelista
Archie Brown is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy, and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books include The Gorbachev Factor (1996), Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (2007), The Rise and Fall of Communism (2009), The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age (2014), and The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War (2020).
Julie Newton is the Principal Investigator of the University Consortium (UC), a ten-year interregional initiative based at St Antony’s and funded by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, New York. She is also a Research Fellow at the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre, St Antony's College, University of Oxford (where she received her DPhil), and a Visiting Professor of Russian foreign policy at Colorado College. She was previously an Associate Professor in the Politics and History Department at the American University of Paris for 15 years. Her research centres on Russia-West relations, Russian foreign policy, and the intellectual networks of Russian foreign policy elites. She has co-edited Institutions, Ideas, and Leadership in Russian Politics with Bill Thompson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and authored Russia, France, and the Idea of Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), along with numerous journal articles. Current and forthcoming work includes the chapter "Russia's Alternative Voices of the early 1990s: Missed Opportunities for a New Multilateral Security Order in Europe and Eurasia" in The Euro-Russian Entente: Brussels and Moscow between Convergence and Divergence (1985–1999), edited by Elena Dundovich and Simone Paoli (Routledge, 2026), and "The Kremlin and Foreign Policy Elites: 'De-Putinization' or Continued Cold War?" (with Robert English) in a special edition of Problems of Post-Communism, 2026.
Matthew Evangelista is President White Professor of History and Political Science Emeritus at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA. In Italy he has served on the graduate faculties of the Catholic University of Milan, the University of Roma Tre, and the University of Bologna. His books include Innovation and the Arms Race (1988); Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (1999); The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? (2002); Law, Ethics, and the War on Terror (2008); Gender, Nationalism, and War: Conflict on the Movie Screen (2011); Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945: Bombing among Friends (2023, available for free download here); and edited volumes on topics ranging from the laws of war to Italian politics. Many of his publications are available at https://matthewevangelista.com.
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The Soviet Union chose to end the Cold War from military parity, and nuclear deterrence never kept the peace.
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