CHAPTER FOUR
THE LONG WAR now continued because it had not truly been ended. In the closing months of World War II the Red Army advanced over 1,500 miles west from Stalingrad to Berlin and beyond. Agreements reached at the Yalta Conference provided that the states thus overrun by the Soviet Army would be permitted to organize themselves according to free elections. The Soviet Union, however, relying on local communist parties in these states, set about creating regimes that would be exclusively communist in character, and that did not depend on—indeed, would not permit—the legitimacy conferred by an open electoral process. This was most dramatically demonstrated in Poland where, in January of 1945, Stalin recognized the communist-dominated Lublin Committee as the rightful government of Poland and then promised at Yalta the following February to include representatives of the government-in-exile in London in the new Polish government. Stalin continued to work for a purely communist constitutional arrangement on the basis of which, rather than through parliamentary elections, the legitimacy of the state was to be assured.
At the time of the Potsdam Conference in August, the Allies made two decisions that, though not explicitly connected, interacted so as to ensure that the Long War would not be ended at this stage. First, detailed arrangements were made for the temporary occupation of Germany according to four zones of authority, corresponding to the four great powers of the United Nations alliance (the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and the USSR). Berlin lay deep within the eastern zone that was to be governed by the Soviet Union but the city itself was also divided into four zones, each allocated to one of the Allied powers. All parties agreed that a peace settlement would follow, uniting Germany as a whole; in the interim, Germany was to be treated as a single economic unit.
Second, the British, French, and American powers agreed to a substantial extension of Polish borders westward into what had been Germany, on condition that the Soviet Union renew its pledge to provide a role for noncommunist groups in the new interim Polish government, and to permit free elections, universal suffrage, and secret ballots for the selection of the permanent government. These elections were never held, and the noncommunist elements in Poland were liquidated. In February 1946, Stalin gave a widely publicized address saying that the Soviet Union had to remain prepared for war with the capitalist nations. The intentions behind this speech are still a matter of dispute, but its effect was to send shock waves through Washington. The next month, Churchill delivered his celebrated Fulton, Missouri, speech declaring that
Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern states of Europe, have been raised to preeminence and power far beyond their numbers, and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy… An attempt is being made by the Russians in Berlin to build up a quasi-Communist party in their zone of occupied Germany…1
By 1947, communist governments had indeed been set up, under strict control by the Soviet Union, in Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and in the Soviet zone in Germany, and where noncommunist parties had been included in the governing coalitions of these states, they were removed. The next year a murderous coup d'état brought communists to power in Czechoslovakia. In none of these states thereafter were parliamentary-style elections ever conducted. State terror, state-controlled media of expression, and single-party politics became the pattern for each of these states. In reaction the Western allies refused to proceed toward the unification of Germany and instead set up parliamentary constitutional institutions in the western zones of Germany, virtually creating a new German state.
This familiar chronology accounts for there being no peace treaty ending World War II among all the Allies: the Western states did not wish to ratify the subjugation and deformation of the states of Central and Eastern Europe; the Soviet Union was unwilling to risk independent states in the region, a real possibility any time free elections might have been held to constitute a government. Yet these two steps were linked: unless the USSR held free elections, the West would never recognize the governments that held power in these states. Therefore there was no formula for compromise on a unified German state. The Second World War had stopped with an invitation to contend further.
That a Cold War followed therefore poses two questions: Even if there was to be no peace, was there really war? In other words, how can war be cold? And if there was war, why was it cold, that is, why wasn't it fought across the plains of Europe with the million-man armies that had contested two prior episodes? In my opinion, decisions taken by the United States are responsible for both these outcomes, ensuring that the Long War would be continued and that it would be “cold.” First, on March 12, 1947, President Truman stated in a speech to Congress:
At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one… it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures… [W]e must assist free peoples to work out their own destiny in their own way.2
The immediately precipitating event for this statement was communist assistance to guerilla movements in Greece and Turkey and the continued Russian occupation of northern Iran. The immediate consequence of the Truman Doctrine, as it came shortly to be called, was a grant of about $400 million (or the equivalent of $2 billion in current dollars) to the governments of Greece and Turkey.
Three months later, in another act of resistance, the American secretary of state, George Marshall, announced a plan for European recovery. Altogether about $12.5 billion (or roughly $60 billion in current dollars) was sent on Western countries over the next three years.
Nor were the Russians deceived as to the import of these steps: it was war. At the refounding conference of the Comintern in September, Malenkov—who would later briefly succeed Stalin—replied:
The ruling clique of the American imperialists… has chosen the path of hatching new war plans against the Soviet Union and the new democracies… The clearest and most specific expression of the policy… is provided by the Truman-Marshall plans.3
In Chapter 5, I will venture some guesses as to why the United States decided to contest the issue of what system—parliamentary and capitalist or communist and socialist—would prevail in Europe. In Germany, the contest had begun as a domestic one; it couldn't be avoided in 1914 or in 1933. The same was true of other states—Russia, Spain, Italy—that were drawn into the Long War. But the United States was not threatened with a change in its own system, as were the states that chose to resist in the various campaigns of the Long War—France, Britain, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. For the moment, let us take as given that the United States did decide to resist, and that this converted the mere absence of peace into war.
The second issue is why this war remained “cold.” Like the decision to contest the unconsummated outcome of the Second World War, the decision to refrain from an armed conflict in Europe also required the commitment of two parties. On the American side, war meant (i) extending nuclear deterrence to Europe and Japan; (2) restoring conventional force levels in Western Europe to credible size so that this extension of nuclear deterrence could function; (3) refraining from initiating the use of force in Europe; and (4) accepting the challenge in “hot” campaigns outside Europe. If the war remained “cold,” the United States believed it stood a good chance to win it because the issues, moral and political and economic, that kept the Long War going were thought to favor the West. Because the Long War was essentially constitutional in nature, only a profound change in the Russian polity was certain to resolve it. The leadership of the United States believed such a change would ultimately come about (just as their adversaries not implausibly believed the reverse).
This attitude on the part of the Americans is clearly reflected in NSC 68, the strategic planning document that was drafted to govern U.S. policy from 1950 onward:
Resort to war is not only a last resort for a free society, but it is also an act which cannot definitively end the fundamental conflict in the realm of ideas… Military victory alone would only partially and perhaps only temporarily affect the fundamental conflict.4
In Germany and Japan total defeat had allowed such a remaking of the basis of constitutional norms. After the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons, however, that sort of victory was never an option because a total defeat requires a total war. The United States could not afford to risk such a conflict with a nuclear power capable of striking the U.S. homeland and destroying it. What was needed was a change of heart on the part of the persons enabling the Communist system to continue.
For the Soviet Union the commitment to contend with the West in the face of enormous hostile force (including nuclear weapons) meant: (1) developing a nuclear threat against the U.S. homeland; (2) maintaining force levels sufficient to prevent successful uprisings in the Eastern European client states and to deter any Western assistance to such uprisings; (3) refraining from any threat to the U.S. of sufficient imminence to overcome the American commitment to containment and risk the actual outbreak of hostilities in a central theatre; and (4) pressing the West wherever possible in Third World theatres.
The necessity of these particular elements of the Cold War strategies of the United States and the USSR may not be obvious, and so a little time can be spent on briefly explaining them. The important point, however, is that they can be seen to operate in each of the major crises of the Cold War, crises that took the place of battles in the various campaigns in this phase of the Long War.
To the extent that American and Soviet policy makers confronted a symmetrical set of problems in a bipolar world, their policies can be discussed in this paired, complementary way. First, with regard to the role of nuclear weapons: for the United States to maintain the conflict but avoid battle, it had to deploy a force sufficient to deter attacks by the Red Army and also sufficient to prevent the development of a West German nuclear force that would otherwise be inevitably raised to defend the Federal Republic of Germany from Soviet coercion. This deterrence was impossible to accomplish with U.S. ground forces alone, owing to the large numbers of troops required. The American public would not, in the decades-long struggle that evolved, have stationed such a vast armed force abroad. Only by developing and deploying nuclear weapons to defend American allies, rather than just the American homeland, could the United States field a force that would accomplish its strategic objectives. By the same token, the Soviet Union could not permit the United States to enjoy a continental sanctuary in case of a European conflict. Long-range nuclear weapons were the only way for the Soviet Union to take the threat of a hot war to the American continent and thus be assured of a cold war in Europe.
Second, with respect to force levels in Europe: once the U.S. homeland became vulnerable, the United States could not make its nuclear threat credible on behalf of Europe unless there were also ground forces under U.S. command in Europe that could both parry modest conventional threats (without forcing the United States to commit to a nuclear attack in political circumstances that would not justify such devastation) while at the same time serving as hostages whose destruction by a large-scale Soviet ground attack would immediately create the political will to ensure a nuclear American response.5 On the Soviet side, the USSR had to maintain forces large enough both to deter national uprisings—a mission that did not require vast manpower—and to check any temptation by the West to assist such uprisings—which might require large forces—and to exercise some coercive political influence over Western European states, espe-cially West Germany. To do less imposed enormous risks, because if the satellite states were to spin out of the Russian orbit, only a force of World War II proportions could bring them back in.
Third, with regard to the use of force: the United States had to find ways to refrain from actually resorting to fire in Europe, because its logistical position—six weeks across the Atlantic from delivering its full force—was so vulnerable and attenuated. The USSR also had to show restraint, because a change in U.S. policy to fight an active war in Europe would, whatever the ultimate outcome, threaten cataclysmic destruction for the Soviet state. As a result no two states were as careful to protect the existence of the other—despite their rhetoric—as were the United States and the Soviet Union once the Soviets acquired the ability to attack the U.S. homeland.
Fourth, with respect to the constraints placed on where the Long War was allowed to break into violence: the situation of both parties tended to confine conflict to areas outside Europe. So long as the United States was unwilling to use nuclear weapons beyond the well-defined limits of its vital interests, the USSR could maintain the conflict outside Europe and, it seemed for a while, even prevail in certain theatres. The United States, however, could neither acquiesce in nor escalate these conflicts: the former amounted to a loss in a campaign of the Long War, with incalculable effects on the cohesion and vitality of the Western alliance (which came to include Japan and other Asian states); the latter strategy would have cracked completely the domestic popular basis that, with some fissures, held together so remarkably for almost half a century, offering a rebuke to the Tocquevillian thesis that parliamentary republics cannot sustain a consistent foreign policy.
An awareness of these four, mutual parameters—the nuclear competition, the level of conventional forces in Europe, the avoidance of conflict on the Central Front, and the eagerness to engage in the Third World—will assist us in briefly reviewing the short history of the Cold War, this last of the campaigns of the Long War. But before recounting this nerve-wracking if ultimately triumphant history, one observation must be made about the Alliance and Soviet strategies described above. Neither of these strategies discloses a plan for terminating the conflict; neither shows how its side will actually win. (In the parlance of contemporary Washington, neither side had “an exit strategy.”) Each side seemed to hope that the other side would collapse of its own internal contradictions and to believe that, if only the conflict could be joined and endured, history would vindicate one but not the other. Astonishingly, this appears to be what actually happened (although it was hardly obvious at the time that this would be the case).
The first engagement of the campaign occurred, not surprisingly, in Germany. The Marshall Plan, which was begun as a program of reconstruction for Britain, France, and other Western European states, was soon extended to Germany. By 1948 German nationals had assumed economic responsibilities for the new “Federal Republic,” sustained by American support. In late June a new currency, the deutschemark (DM), was introduced to replace the inflation-ravaged reichsmark (RM). In retaliation the Russians introduced a new currency in their sector. The Western powers were unwilling to allow this currency, over whose monetary policy they had no control, to enter the West through Berlin and so they introduced the new DM into West Berlin. This assertion of constitutional sovereignty in the divided city provided the spark for the first crisis of the Cold War. The next day, the Russians cut off all access by road, rail, and canal between Berlin and the West. The blockade lasted for eleven months. British and U.S. aircraft made almost 200,000 flights to Berlin, carrying 1.5 million tons of food, coal, and other stores.6 In May 1949 Stalin lifted the blockade. Although American forces had been mobilized to fight their way into Berlin—and although the Russian forces could easily have interdicted the airlift—neither of these eventualities occurred. One might say that a “crisis” is the form of battle that is customary in a cold war, and that distinguishes it from a “hot” one. Engagements in a cold war therefore can include either conventional battles (like the Communist drive toward Seoul in 1950) or crises (like the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962).
The second engagement of this new phase of the Long War occurred in Asia, following a pattern that was to repeat itself in many different parts of the Third World. Beginning as a civil war, largely apart from the Long War, but fought, as in Europe, between parliamentary, fascist, and communist constitutional alternatives, the struggle for control of China entered its final phase with the withdrawal of the Japanese. Nationalist armies were given vast amounts of Western aid, but the corrupt and rigid system for which they fought proved unable to successfully deploy its superior forces. Promising land reform, an end to the dictatorships of regional warlords, and the extermination of a pervasive system of corruption, the Communists steadily gained support from China's people. In 1949—the same year as the Berlin airlift—Mao Zedong achieved complete control of China, and the American-supported forces of Chiang Kai-shek7 fled to the island of Taiwan, a former Chinese colony. Although the extent of Russian support for Mao has been exaggerated, this event was undoubtedly a terrible blow to the West. The United States did not wholly acquiesce in this development, however, and began to grope its way toward rules of engagement in Asia consistent with the parameters I have outlined above. Taken all in all, these rules have been a notable success—not as dramatic as in Europe—but probably as positive as could be reasonably expected.
Events in China structured everyone's expectations in the next campaign: Korea. The USSR had declared war on Japan only a few days before the Japanese surrender in 1945, but did not fail to send troops into the Korean peninsula as the war ended. The United Nations (the international organization, not the wartime alliance) assumed responsibility for the peninsula and designated the United States and the Soviet Union to administer the south and north of Korea respectively. South Korea was more populous than the North, and the United States hoped that having established a democratic constitution in the South, popular free elections to unite the country would bring parliamentary institutions to the whole peninsula. The Northern leader, Kim Il-sung, refused, however, to take up the 100 seats in the National Assembly allocated to the North. After months of discussions with the Russians, Kim returned to Moscow with a well-prepared plan for the invasion of the South. Stalin had doubts about such an invasion, according to Khrushchev, and feared the Americans might return to the peninsula in force. Mao's opinion was solicited, and it was he who, in the end, persuaded Stalin that the United States would not intervene.8
On June 25, 1950, the North Koreans launched a successful surprise attack on South Korea, capturing the Southern capital and trapping the South Korean forces within a narrow perimeter around a Southern port. In legal terms, this was an attack on the United Nations. The U.N. Security Council—with the Russian member absent in protest over the refusal to seat the Communist Chinese representative—voted to send assistance. After a dramatic landing in the rear of the North Korean forces, the American commander launched a counterinvasion of North Korea, driving north almost to the Chinese border. The Chinese then intervened in staggering numbers; urgent requests to Washington from the U.S. commander for nuclear weapons support were denied and the line of defense was not stabilized until the U.N. forces had been pushed back to a latitudinal parallel roughly marking the original division of the country. For two years there was a bloody stalemate, ending in an armed truce in 1953. This armistice was secured by the presence of U.S. forces and the extension of nuclear deterrence to the Korean peninsula. Perhaps as much as any other factor, this development led the Chinese to demand assistance from the Russians in producing nuclear weapons, a demand that the Soviet Union refused. This rebuff, disclosing as it did many other conflicts of interest between the two states, led to the break between the two great Communist powers and eventually to the triangulation of the Soviet/American/Chinese relationship. But before this could occur, the United States would be tested a third time in Asia.
Mao's assessment of U.S. fortitude had proved to be a fateful error. Had it not been for the Korean conflict with its massive Chinese commitment of forces, China would likely have successfully seized Taiwan,9 owing in part to the greater difficulty of delivering effective U.S. resistance to Taiwan than to Korea. Such a step would have had incalculable consequences, but fortunately this did not happen, though there continued throughout the 1950s to be threats to Taiwan from Beijing. No longer, however, could China count on Soviet support.
Stalin died in 1953, and the first of a series of meetings “at the summit,” in Churchill's phrase, took place in Geneva in 1955 among the parties to the Cold War. This led to the signing of the Austrian State Treaty, by which Four Power occupation forces were withdrawn and Austrian neutrality confirmed. Like the War of Spanish Succession, which it so much resembled, the Long War had its moments of successful diplomatic détente, and, also like the War of Spanish Succession, it was often driven by the local, national aspirations of populations in the occupied (or disputed) states. Khrushchev's secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, denouncing Stalin and Stalinism, was soon circulated and led to a surge of hope in the states of Central and Eastern Europe that a new order was possible. Riots broke out in Poznan in June that brought the return to power of the Polish leader Gomulka, previously imprisoned for ideological deviations from Stalinism. A greater threat to the Russian satellite system occurred in October when the Hungarian leader Imre Nagy took power. In November he announced that Hungary would end its alliance with the Soviet Union and pursue a neutralist foreign policy. Political prisoners were freed; there was talk of holding genuinely free elections under a multiparty arrangement. In strategic terms this was by far the most important development in Europe since the Berlin blockade. The Russians agreed to a tactical withdrawal but almost immediately returned to Budapest in force and crushed the Hungarians. Although Nagy was given asylum in the Yugoslav embassy during the conflict, he was eventually imprisoned and executed on June 16, 1958.10 Carefully adhering to the parameters that were emerging to govern the East-West conflict, the Americans expressed “profound distress” and claimed to be “inexpressibly shocked” by developments11 but did nothing.
These events not only were significant in themselves, as they crucially threatened the alliance system of the Warsaw Pact, but were important also for their relation to events in Germany. When an uprising ultimately broke out in East Berlin, it too was swiftly crushed with memorable brutality.
The successful prosecution of war depends, as Clausewitz wrote, upon the proper coordination of political leadership, armed forces, and the passions of the people. If the East German people, ignited by the same emotions that inspired the Poles and the Hungarians, had brought about a new leadership for the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—if they had chosen parliamentarianism for Germany—this would have forecast the end of the Long War. It was, after all, over Germany's fate with respect to the three alternative systems of twentieth-century government that the Long War began and continued to be fought. As it was, the USSR took special care to see this did not happen.
After the uprisings in Poland, Hungary, and East Berlin, the Soviet Union began to threaten to conclude a unilateral peace treaty with the GDR. From a legal point of view this would have forced the Western powers to negotiate with the East German state—which they did not recognize—for access to West Berlin. Such an assertion of constitutional sovereignty would have greatly inflamed the conflict: it would have amounted to an attempt to end the Long War through partition, much as the Thirty Years' War was ended. In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia had divided up the states and princes of Germany on religious lines; a Soviet peace treaty with the GDR would have done the same thing along ideological lines. This perspective helps explain why the West reacted with such horror to the prospect of a “peace treaty” and indeed provoked a panic among American leaders that is otherwise hard to understand today.12 Many assumed that recognition was tantamount to the seizure of West Berlin by the East Germans. At any rate, President Kennedy made it clear that he regarded this threat as the latest feint in the strategic competition between East and West* and promptly announced an increase in the strength of U.S. forces in the area by 217,000 men, roughly triple the previous number, bringing American troops to their highest levels in Germany in the post–World War II period.13
Ten days later, the Russians replied to Western diplomatic notes, observing that “[f]or many years the United States has been evading a peaceful settlement with Germany, putting it off to the indefinite future. The American Note shows that the U.S. Government prefers to continue adhering to this line.”14 Of course this was perfectly true. The United States had decided to resist the partition of Europe, to continue the Long War, and thus was unwilling to agree to a peace. On August 7, Khrushchev ridiculed the American position:
What provisions of the Soviet draft of a peace treaty with Germany could give the American President a pretext to contend that the Soviet Union “threatens” to violate peace? Could it be those which envisage the renunciation of nuclear weapons by Germany, the legalizing of the existing German frontiers, the granting of full sovereignty to both German states, and their admission to the United Nations? If anyone allowed himself to resort to threats it was the U.S. President.15
Many persons hearing these remarks must have asked themselves why the United States was overreacting; and unless the dimensions of the entire conflict are appreciated, the American position seems petulant, absurd. It was in fact, as the perspective of the Long War shows, nothing of the kind, but reflected instead an acute appreciation of the fundamentally constitutional issues at stake. Moreover, there was, lurking beneath the cloak of sovereignty that such a treaty would throw over the East German state, a vexing problem. To recognize the GDR would have been to permit them to control not only access to West Berlin, but access out of East Berlin, as any state is permitted to do with its own borders. At this time, about 300,000 East Germans were disappearing into West Berlin and thence to West Germany each year. Since 1949 three million persons had gone through Berlin to the West. This continued flow of young, talented, educated, and professional people was damaging in and of itself; it could at any time, however, erupt into a complete hemorrhage. The purpose of the Russian treaty was to stanch this flow, and thus to prevent a greater one. On the night of August 12 – 13, 1961, a concrete barrier up to six feet high and topped with barbed wire was erected in the Potsdamerplatz by communist “shock workers.” Similar barriers of greater height were raised at other points along the boundaries of the Eastern and Western sectors of the city. Building the “Berlin Wall” was a bold move by the Soviet Union and the wall's survival was, as Khrushchev later claimed, a “great victory.”16 This engagement, like the Viet Nam War, must be scored a communist success, even if, as in Viet Nam, the United States could not prudently have done more than it did. The West, though it brought up bulldozers backed by tanks and some infantry, never attempted to breach the wall and confined itself to complaints at the U.N.
Roughly one year later, American photo reconnaissance disclosed that the Russians were in the process of installing ballistic missiles in Cuba with an intermediate range (1, 000 – 1,400 miles). The Cuban Missile Crisis has been widely misdescribed as provoking the United States into a threat to launch nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union if Russian missiles were not removed from Cuba.17 Actually, the president's carefully worded ultimatum stated that if nuclear weapons were used against the United States from Cuba, the United States would retaliate against the USSR, a very different matter, and a position well within the parameters of the tacit U.S./Soviet rules of engagement.* This ultimatum was coupled with a blockade of the island and preparations for invasion. In that context, the statement was not an ultimatum so much as an invitation to deal, and this is exactly what happened. In exchange for the removal of the weapons, the United States pledged not to invade Cuba; and the United States undertook to remove intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) based in Turkey that were targeted against the Soviet Union. Like the Berlin Wall, this was a tactical success for the Russians—Khrushchev uses the same words in Russian to describe both events in his memoirs18—but was it not also, like the Berlin Crisis, a strategic calamity for the USSR?
It may be difficult to see such crises as taking the place of “battles” within the Long War. We are accustomed to thinking of battles fought with shock and fire and leaving behind casualties. But if we bear in mind the perspective of the Long War, however, which was punctuated by conventional battles as well as crises, we can see that its crises really had more in common with the battles of the eighteenth century than with the crises of the nineteenth. In the eighteenth century the extreme expense of highly professionalized armies made them far too precious to be risked in battle once technological innovations in warfare made actual fighting so lethal; advantages accruing to the defense imperiled any army that actually sought battle.19* Battles became actions of maneuver, culminating in the tactical withdrawal of one party once it was forced into an untenable position. Similarly, in the second half of the twentieth century, nuclear weapons—which, once mutual and secure against pre-emption, gave to the defense an asset of infinite value—made the hot battles of the First and Second World Wars too risky for the U.S. and the USSR. Crises served as battles of maneuver, with one side—as in Cuba—retreating when it became clear that, if things played out, that side would find itself in a losing position from which there was no escape.
Some historians believe that Kennedy, but for the constraints imposed by anti-communist domestic political pressures, was willing to go further to end the crisis by simply accepting Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Such a concession, coupled with the crisis/battles over the Berlin Wall and the Bay of Pigs, would have amounted to an American strategic defeat, in Long War terms. A remark allegedly made by Robert McNamara during the Crisis, that “a missile is a missile is a missile” (equating Soviet missiles in Cuba with American missiles in Turkey), is, obviously, dealing with the issue from a far different perspective than that presented here.20 Perhaps, from the view of systems analysis, IRBMs are more or less fungible, regardless of who possesses them, if they are placed to threaten similar or comparable targets. Should those missiles have been fired, one can imagine that Moscow would have been destroyed at about the same time as Washington. From the perspective of the Long War, however—where crises stand in place of battles to have accepted the Soviet adventure in Cuba would have been an American loss precisely because it would have amounted to an acceptance of a kind of “equivalence,” publicly conceding to the Soviet Union that it had every bit as much right to threaten the United States as the United States had to threaten it.
For the United States to achieve its strategic goals—for it to win the Long War—it had to contain communism within its Second World boundaries and thus prevent this movement from taking over fresh societies that would enrich its system with the accumulated human capital and other resources of the states it took over. If containment could be managed, then—so the Americans believed—the steady impoverishment of the socialist system would begin to tell. Like an engine requiring oxygen but producing carbon monoxide, the Soviet system would steadily grow more anaerobic until it collapsed. For the USSR to achieve its objectives—its leaders believed—it had only to maintain communism in a great power until the steadily declining business cycles and ever more severe economic depressions of the capitalist states provoked internal revolutions. Sergei Khrushchev recently quoted his father as saying—in classic nation-state terms—“between communism and capitalism, that system will win that presents the better life to the people.”21
The Soviet Union had world-dominating ambitions in a sense, but Russian strategic goals were not to be realized in conquests of the kind that brought them the satellite regimes of Eastern Europe. This distinction is underscored in a memorandum from Charles Bohlen* to Paul Nitze† in 1950:
It is open to question whether or not, as stated, the fundamental design of the Kremlin is the domination of the world. [Putting it this way] tends… to oversimplify the problem…. I think that the thought would be more accurate if it were to the effect that the fundamental design of those who control the USSR is (A) the maintenance of their regime in the Soviet Union and (B) its extension throughout the world to the degree that is possible without serious risk to the internal regime.22
This nicely captures the inner/outer nature of a constitutional conflict. Widespread extension of communism was unlikely so long as the United States continued its commitment to containment. In this light, the internal exile of millions of East Germans and the public humiliation of a Third World client though tactical successes were hardly strategic triumphs for the Soviet Union, the former because it tended to destabilize the Communist system in the Warsaw Pact states, the latter because it alienated revolutionary parties abroad. (And indeed the Cuban Missile Crisis—and the Sino-Soviet split—were two of the factors cited by the group that ousted Khrushchev in October 1964.) This difficulty for the Soviet Union should remind us that its interests were not entirely coextensive with those of the ideological adversary against which the West struggled. To defeat communism did indeed mean that the Soviet Union would have to be defeated, but it did not follow that every triumph for communism strengthened Russia. The success of a communist insurgency that took over an otherwise independent state might or might not be in the interests of the Soviet Union, much less Russia; the new regime might, as happened in Yugoslavia, turn against its Soviet sponsors, just as the Vietnamese communists quickly turned against China. In terms of the historic struggle between communism and parliamentarianism in the Long War, however, success for a communist takeover would amount to a defeat for the United States and her allies in any case because communism, and not merely any particular state, was the enemy. Some commentators of this period were fond of pointing out that communism was not a “monolith,” a fact they took to imply that the United States should not engage itself in struggles against communist movements not directly controlled by the Soviet Union. Viewed from Moscow, the increasing fragmentation of the world communist movement was indeed a source of alarm. But from a Long War perspective, this insight is, at best, beside the point.
In some ways, the U.S. role was easier than that of the Soviet Union, although it scarcely appeared so at the time. By the mid-sixties the United States had become deeply involved in Southeast Asia. To Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson the principle of containment required military assistance to the newly established Republic of South Viet Nam and, at least, a stalemate to the efforts of communist North Viet Nam to unify the country by force. By 1969 the United States had stationed 500,000 troops in the region, and by 1968 had defeated the communist insurgency in the South (although this fact was little credited by the public and the media at the time). But the American strategy of graduated response did not defeat the North Vietnamese, who were highly motivated, had secure bases in the region outside South Viet Nam, and were well supplied by other communist states. When it became apparent that American public opinion would not support the lengthy and costly commitment required to defeat North Viet Nam, President Johnson halted the bombing of the North and opened peace talks in Paris; not surprisingly the North Vietnamese stalled the negotiations in the hope of a further decline in U.S. popular support for the war and perhaps the election of an American president who would cut and run. In the ensuing five years, public opinion in the United States pressed ever more passionately for a disengagement. Eventually a ceasefire and peace treaty were negotiated that provided for an American withdrawal and a guarantee of nonaggression by the North Vietnamese. When the withdrawal was completed in 1973, however, the North immediately renewed its attack, correctly judging that the U.S. Congress would not permit the United States to re-introduce forces in the region in retaliation for the treaty breach. By 1975, the Congress, doubtless reflecting American public opinion, had even cut off military assistance to its ally in the South, and communist forces were able to overrun South Viet Nam as well as Cambodia and Laos.
It was a military defeat of historic consequence and continues to distort the American debate over war powers and foreign policy. But it was not, however, a decisive defeat for the American position in the Long War, of which the Vietnamese War was but a single, peninsular campaign. Indeed if we bear in mind the strategic objectives of the United States in the Long War, her ability to prevent a North Vietnamese victory for thirteen years, virtually without assistance from any major ally, in a remote theatre dominated by a civil war, was a remarkable achievement. American strategy revealed both the tactical weaknesses of containment—that it surrendered initiative to the adversary, allowed the enemy to choose the terrain and type of battle, committed the United States to marginal theatres of little intrinsic significance to American fortunes—as well as its strategic strengths, namely, that delay coupled with conflict on the periphery tended to play into the long-term interests of the West. During those thirteen years pro-Western governments consolidated their power in Indonesia,23 Malaysia, and Singapore while economic growth ignited in the region's key pro-Western states, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan. By 1975, the year of the worst U.S. military humiliation since 1943, the threats to all these states and territories, from within and from a hostile China, had far receded from their level in the late 1950s. In every one of these now prosperous and fast-growing states, the essential issues of the Long War had been decided in their domestic polity and had been resolved against communism (although the long-term fate of Taiwan may still be in jeopardy, depending on what path the mainland Chinese leadership chooses).
The Communist victory in Viet Nam did strengthen communist movements everywhere, as we know from the remarks of a wide variety of national liberation and communist state leaders. And the small “dominoes” of Laos and Cambodia did fall once the Americans withdrew. But the long struggle required to achieve that victory hardened the divisions between the Soviet Union (whose client was North Viet Nam) and China (which supported the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and invaded Viet Nam in February 1979). As in the Korean War, the imposition of civilian restraints on military operations in Viet Nam, though much criticized, succeeded in keeping Long War objectives in mind and in not permitting the goal of vic-tory in battle to obscure the pursuit of victory in war.
Between 1968 and 1980, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and deposed a communist regime in Prague; embarked on a breathtaking buildup of nuclear weapons; invaded Afghanistan, deposed and murdered its communist leader; attacked Chinese positions across the Ussuri River and maintained a force in readiness there of some fifty divisions; offered the United States a condominium in international affairs; and signed the Helsinki Accords, effectively ratifying the Soviet sphere of influence over Eastern Europe. Many persons saw this period as one of Soviet dynamism, and from a certain perspective, this was undoubtedly so. But viewed from the perspective of the Long War, it represented a collapsing position. Mao's designated successor, Lin Piao, of all people, read this well enough when he observed:
Since Brezhnev came to power, with its baton becoming less and less effective and its difficulties at home and abroad growing more and more serious, the Soviet revisionist clique has been practicing imperialism more frantically than ever. Internally it has intensified its suppression of the Soviet people. Externally it has stepped up its collusion with the U.S., intensified its control over and its exploitation of the various east European countries… and intensified its threat of aggression against China. Its dispatch of hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Czechoslovakia, and its armed provocations against China are two [such] performances.24
What the Chinese clearly saw, and what the West appeared to miss, was that Russians were anxious to rid themselves of socialist solidarity in favor of a world role within, and legitimated by, the great power system.25
When Gorbachev succeeded Brezhnev in 1985, after two brief intervening premierships, the Soviet Union found a leader with the energy and will to break openly with the Communist method of total state planning. Gorbachev's initial goal was the restructuring of the Soviet economy, a restructuring that he originally advertised as a reorganization of the government bureaucracy to make it more efficient and to bring about greater quality control without fundamentally altering the basis of the command economy. This restructuring he called “perestroika.” Gorbachev's campaign of reform ran into such opposition within the bureaucracy and the Party, however, that in 1986 he called for greater openness in debate in order to mobilize public pressure for reform. This policy he called “glasnost.” Within the Soviet Union a civil breakdown began to occur as credibility drained away from the Communist Party; the economy worsened, and food shortages began to appear as uncertainty enveloped the underground market. In a second attempt to harness popular opinion in order to bring about reform, Gorbachev called for greater democracy and pluralism. This, however, prompted the Baltic states to agitate for their independence. In Poland, a noncommunist government was formed in the summer of 1989 and, in October, the communist government of Hungary bowed to demonstrations and accepted a new constitution. In the interim, Hungary had permitted East Germans to use the Hungarian borders to escape to Western Europe. This refugee exodus led to massive antigovernment demonstrations within East Germany and, on November 9, 1989, crowds broke through the Berlin Wall. In October 1990 Germany was unified. By June 1990, democratic elections in Czechoslovakia had produced a noncommunist government, and a parliamentary constitution followed.26
The Long War was over. It officially ended in November 1990 when the thirty-four members of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE)—including the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—met in Paris and signed an agreement providing for parliamentary institutions in all the participating states. This was the Charter of Paris, which was the centerpiece of the more comprehensive Peace of Paris.
Formal peace was signed with the agreements at Paris in November 1990. Then a reunited Germany, a chastened Soviet Union, a reconciled Poland and Czechoslovakia, a benevolent Britain, France and United States, all behaved with a rational civility hardly seen in European relations. Unfortunately because of the collapse of the Soviet Union shortly thereafter and the confusion that followed it, the event passed almost unnoticed.27
On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union formally dissolved. Now all the great powers that had begun the turbulent search in 1914 for a legitimate and legitimating constitutional order to succeed the empires of the nineteenth century had reached consensus. Between 1914 and 1990, the population of the world tripled—but an estimated 187 million persons, about 10 percent of the population of 1900—were killed or fated to die by human agency.28
The end of the Long War is not the end of the need for history-making by the State if by that one means the achievement of a final state paradigm, nor the end of war. But it does represent, as Francis Fukuyama memorably showed, the final “perfecting”—in the legal sense—of the nation-state.29
It is possible to live within the culture of war for so long that the end of a particular war seems like the end of all violent political struggle, and the temporary quiet that follows seems to promise a perpetual, peaceful, and exhausted stasis. This feeling is all the more likely if it accompanies what appears to be a moral consensus. The Long War was in a deep sense a moral struggle. Each of the three contending state systems was the out-come of a particular nineteenth and twentieth century attitude about mankind, attitudes that I will roughly call the biological, the sociological, and the legal. The fascists believed in a sort of social Darwinism for states, by which the competition for survival among species was mirrored in the struggle among, and the domination of, genetically determined national groups among human beings. For all their differences about political action, on this fundamental social scientific point they were united. The communists took a sociological view of man, by which man could not only be wholly described according to his behavior in groups, but could be changed by manipulating the incentives of groups transcending states. Though they differed dramatically on many theoretical points, and endlessly debated whether socialism should be strengthened in a single state at the expense of world revolution, whether the Marx of the Grundrisse or the Marx of the later works was to be preferred, and so on—for the whole point was that the theoretical could guide the practical—they agreed on this assumption. The partisans of the liberal democracies also agreed on a basic element of the parliamentary attitude: that the impartial rule of law, and not simply the political power of the individual or group, should govern the outcome of state decisions. Each of these attitudes is not so much a reaction to the others, as it is to the nineteenth century self-consciousness that delegitimated the dynastic territorial states of the eighteenth century. Each tries to escape the problem of this loss of legitimacy by bringing an external, validating resource to bear. Each promises that it can best deploy the State to enhance the welfare of the nation. And to some degree, the residue of all these attitudes was present in every society—perhaps in every human heart—that contended in the Long War. What had ended was not just the Cold War, but a century of conflict over the basis of the State itself. And this accounts for the sense of bewilderment that followed. It wasn't like the usual end of an ordinary war but rather like the end of a way of living.
From a strategic point of view, the example of the West, and especially the United States, must rank among the most successful and skillful coor-dinations of force and statecraft for the achievement of political goals ever recorded. What Gordon Craig and Felix Gilbert said of the Truman administration and the strategic campaigns of the late forties can be said of the U.S. presidents generally with respect to the Cold War: 30
The effective mobilization of public support for its European commitments and the skillful use of economic resources to gain its objectives, and finally,… the imposition upon its military operations of limitations determined by political considerations—all in all [constitute] an exercise in strategy that would almost certainly have won Clausewitz' approbation.31
For roughly forty-five years, across nine administrations drawn from both political parties, the Americans were able to summon great resources and—unusually, it is said, for a democracy—great stamina and great restraint. What can be said of the United States–led Alliance during the Cold War can be said of the West generally with respect to the Long War.
When Clausewitz wrote his most famous and most widely misconstrued sentence, “War is the continuation of politics by other means,”32 he intended to remind his readers that the destruction and human sacrifice that attends war could only be justified to the extent that war was absolutely necessary to accomplish political goals. One might go further and say that it is a corollary to this truth that if the political question that impels states to war is not resolved in that war, then the peace that ensues may be only a pause. Each of the campaigns of which the Long War was composed had strategic consequences for the next, just as the First World War set the stage for the Second, and so on. Now the fundamental constitutional problem of the Long War has been answered. Government by consent, freely given and periodically capable of being withdrawn, is what legitimates the nation-state. Government under law—not government that is above the law—provides the means by which states are legitimated.* So the next question intrudes itself: what are the strategic consequences of the peace?
What will this new world look like, and how should a state make its way in it? Will such a world be so chaotic without the overarching framework of the Long War that we will look back on the era of the Cold War as a golden age? By means of what new framework ought we to understand events and, ultimately, decide when to use force? These are the questions taken up in Part III, and they are on the minds of thoughtful persons throughout the world. Sometimes it is said that such questions are more difficult now that the armed struggle among great powers is over. If the conventional approach is to assess the threat then because the threat has changed—indeed, to a very large extent vanished—it is said we shall be at a loss until a new threat appears.
But this observation, which might be rephrased as “If No Copernicus, Then No Newton” (if no problem, then no answer), doesn't go to the issue of deciding per se. It might explain and even justify decisions that seem ad hoc, or patternless, but it neither explains nor justifies the abrupt and repeated reversals of policy in the West since the end of the Long War. While such an explanation might excuse the cynical apathy that governs so many Western foreign ministries, it scarcely excuses the loss of life and loss of confidence in our institutions that has been the result. The flip-flopping of Western decisions regarding Russia or Yugoslavia or Iraq is characteristic not so much of mystery as of changing incentives.
Then, it is sometimes said, it is a matter of “leadership.” In its first term for example, the Clinton administration did not inspire critics by a slavish devotion to consistency in foreign policy. It is also said that the world is more complex now, that no single paradigm, such as that of containment that guided the West during the Long War and to which I have tried to draw attention, could possibly be useful today.
I am skeptical about these “explanations.” This is not the first time that an epochal war has ended, and certainly not the first time that profound constitutional questions have been decided by strategic developments, nor that constitutional innovations—like parliamentary democracy—have driven strategic change. In Part II, we will look at the strategic and constitutional consequences of earlier, state-shaping struggles. These make up a history, a way of understanding the development of the State, and of understanding the actual state we are currently in. Finally, in Part III, we examine the State we are becoming, the historic consequence of the Long War.
May 24, 1980
I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages,
carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters,
lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis,
dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles.
From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly
width. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.
Quit the country that bore and nursed me.
Those who forgot me would make a city.
I have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles,
worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter,
planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables,
guzzled everything save dry water.
I've admitted the sentries' third eye into my wet and foul
dreams. Munched the bread of exile; it's stale and warty.
Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl;
switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.
What should I say about my life? That it's long and abhors transparence.
Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit.
Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx,
only gratitude will be gushing from it.
—Joseph Brodsky, 1980
(translated by the author)