A Just Conflict, Ethically Pursued

Ernest W. Lefever is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and the author of America’s Imperial Burden (Westview Press, 1999) and The Irony of Virtue: Ethics and American Power (Westview Press, 1998).

In his first inaugural address on 4 March 1861, Abraham Lincoln spoke of “the mystic chords of memory” that bind a nation together and warned of those who would rend the precious fabric woven from the ideals, hardship and experience of a people. America, to be strong, healthy and free, must be rooted in a common historical memory embracing both heroic and catastrophic events. Our most tragic and redemptive event was the Civil War, about which there is still some division in the collective American psyche.

 

Another divisive event was America’s involvement in the Cold War. The great majority of Americans share a common understanding of this protracted conflict with the Soviet Union, though we are still divided over our involvement in the Vietnam War. Some revisionists at home and abroad blame America for precipitating the Cold War and hold it responsible for the Vietnam tragedy.

 

In my view, the revisionists have failed to make a compelling case. Their interpretation, often distorted by anger, ideology, or wishful thinking, enables them to distort or ignore clearly verifiable facts. Of course, I also have an ideology that influences my interpretation of the Cold War. I believe in freedom and democracy and am opposed to tyranny, especially of the predatory and messianic variety. I also assume that America, despite its many faults and missteps, is an example and a beacon of freedom and hope in a sinful world.

The Cold War Defined

The Cold War, a twentieth-century phenomenon, was a particular manifestation of the age-old conflict of power and purpose that has raged since the dawn of history. In a real sense, it was a cultural war between different concepts of how human beings should be governed, how communities can and should live and prosper. At the deepest level, the Cold War was a conflict between tyranny and freedom, between political domination by a self-anointed elite on the one hand, and government by, for, and of the people, on the other.

 

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lasted from approximately 1945 to 1990, cannot be understood without comparing it to the two brutal challenges to freedom and Western democracy that preceded it—the draconian territorial and ideological conquests by Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. In their fanatic determination to extend their power and dominion, these two evil empires imposed their tyranny on other nations by military force. At the same time, they killed millions of innocent civilians who got in their way.

 

Our antagonist in the Cold War must be seen in the same light as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The Soviet Union’s leaders, Lenin, Stalin and their successors, were similar in intent and consequences to Tojo and Hitler. There was, however, one significant difference. The Nazis and the Japanese imperialists never presented themselves as apostles of peace, democracy, freedom, or social justice. In sharp contrast, the masters in the Kremlin wrapped themselves in the garments of virtue, and in so doing recruited many Western intellectuals who had lost touch with traditional Western morality.

The Demonic in History

The German-born theologian Paul Tillich once defined the “demonic in history” as a brooding presence which at specific times and places is grotesquely manifest in evil geniuses such as Hitler or Stalin. Both of these men were messianic leaders driven by a grand vision and fired by an ideology that promised a new age. Both demanded absolute obedience. Like George Orwell’s Big Brother, both leaders aspired to be omnipotent, claimed to be omniscient, and attempted to be omnipresent. They emulated each other’s tactics and cynically used each other, notably in the Hitler–Stalin Pact. Each reached for utopia and gave us hell. Hitler and Stalin were also complex human beings, each with a moral sense, however twisted. Why they perpetrated such unspeakable crimes remains a baffling mystery.

 

At its zenith, the Soviet Union held sway over Eastern Europe, penetrated China and North Korea, threatened Western Europe, and schemed to bring the Third World to heel. For years the roads from Vladivostok and Shanghai, from Berlin and Budapest, all led to Moscow. Since its birth in 1917, the Soviet Union killed sixty-two million of its own people.

Communism as a Secular Faith

As early as 1948, I argued that the demonic strength of communism lay precisely in its cynical manipulation of Western concepts such as democracy and justice. Unlike Nazism, communism appealed to social and economic welfare. Like Nazism, it emphasised loyalty, commitment and discipline. Communism could best be understood as a dynamic secular faith competing fiercely with other faiths: it was an upside-down religion, an inverted Christianity.

 

The communist faith proclaimed the party as the agent of redemption and Stalin as its messiah. Louis XIV had declared “L’état, c’est moi” (I am the state), but Stalin declared, in effect, “I am God!” With his bemused eyes and enigmatic smile, Stalin looked down from his omnipresent portrait on a humanity he despised. The writings of Marx and Lenin were the sacred scriptures. The doctrine of dialectical materialism was authoritatively interpreted by the high priests in the Politburo. Heresy was punished speedily and without mercy—by exile, forced confessions, torture, or a shot in the back of the head in Moscow’s Lubianka Prison.

 

Communist dogma replaced the Kingdom of God with a future classless society where all humans would live as comrades and war would be no more. Its kingdom would be ushered in by messianic wars, culminating in a final struggle between communism and capitalism. In the meantime, the communist interim ethic justified any means deemed essential to the triumph of the classless society. In the 1950s, Soviet leaders variously portrayed the devil as Churchill, Truman, Tito, Chiang Kai-shek and Wall Street, but their ultimate Lucifer was God.

 

The Kremlin was a conspiracy masquerading as a government. I condemned the theoretical flaws of Marxism and the non-theoretical brutalities of the Soviet system. My views were buttressed by George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Stalin was indeed Big Brother and the Soviet propaganda apparatus the Ministry of Truth. In an era when ideology cluttered the literary landscape, Orwell’s rare clarity, humour and common sense were bracing. I particularly liked his Memory Hole, a device for controlling the future by manipulating the past. The Party consigned old orthodoxies to oblivion as it adopted more convenient ones, a temptation in any society (including ours) that confuses radical change with virtue.

 

This religious interpretation of the conflict was understood by writers of the “God that failed” tendency—former Western communists in the 1940s, such as Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, Louis Fischer and Richard Wright. These men helped do the intellectual spadework for communism’s ultimate collapse. Koestler exposed Stalin’s “treason trials” in Darkness at Noon (1941) and attacked those who equated America’s minor flaws with Moscow’s murderous deeds. Orwell, who managed to escape Stalin’s assassins during the Spanish Civil War, laid bare the evil of totalitarianism in his savagely satirical novels. His courage and clarity in an era when liberal illusions dominated the literary landscape were emancipating.

 

Yet Orwell didn’t foretell what would happen, but warned of what might happen if totalitarianism went unchallenged. Orwell knew that such regimes could not transform human nature and that their absolute goals were beyond reach. Neither Stalin nor Hitler could usher in his version of the millennium. Consequently, totalitarian states ultimately would fall under the weight of their internal contradictions or be crushed from without. But precisely when, no one could know.

 

Marxism was a heady mix of phoney science and messianic longing. With its arrogant certainty, its myths and rituals, this secular religion held enormous appeal for spiritually empty Western intellectuals. But it was doomed from the start by its hubris and its failure to comprehend man’s unquenchable thirst for freedom. The bitter fruit of godless totalitarianism in Russia was foreseen by Fyodor Dostoevsky and was later laid bare by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1962. Many Western intellectuals didn’t take Stalin’s pretensions and brutality seriously until his dark deeds were exposed by Solzhenitsyn, whom they considered, at least for a time, as one of their own.

Who Started the Cold War?

If one accepts this view of Soviet pretensions and behaviour, conflict with the West, and particularly with the United States, was inevitable. Historically, the first volley of the Cold War was fired at the Yalta conference in March 1945 when Stalin demanded that his Red Army occupy all of Eastern Europe. A tired and dying Franklin D. Roosevelt acquiesced. (Winston Churchill later said “we should have strangled the Bolshevik baby in its cradle”, without specifying when this auspicious moment might have been.)

 

The Cold War actually began when Stalin’s hubris was confronted by Harry Truman’s resolve—buttressed by determined US political, military and economic policies, including the Marshall Plan and the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), designed to contain further Soviet adventures. Truman’s courage won wide popular support in Europe and the United States. For almost fifty years, the American people backed these Cold War efforts to deter Soviet expansion without igniting a nuclear war.

The Nuclear Standoff

Given the bluntness of Stalin’s challenge at Yalta, his draconian policies in East Germany and his subsequent conquest of Eastern Europe, Truman and his successors had little choice but to respond by strengthening Western Europe economically and by establishing NATO as a defensive shield. And given Moscow’s acquisition of atomic weapons and the H-bomb, in both cases accelerated by Soviet espionage at Los Alamos, the United States was compelled to build a strong and reliable nuclear deterrent. The ensuing delicate balance of terror enabled us not only to deal with the Cuban missile crisis without firing a shot, but to avoid both nuclear and conventional war between the superpowers—the longest period of great power peace in the twentieth century.

 

During the long Cold War years, America made its share of mistakes, but these were errors of judgement, not of intent. We sought to ensure peace and encourage freedom. Our allies and virtually all other regimes around the world understood this and were convinced of our benign intentions. We, of course, made many mistakes and miscalculations, but we were not driven by dreams of conquest. We never sought hegemonic control over other states. In his new book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? (Simon and Schuster, 2001), Henry Kissinger correctly warns: “A deliberate quest for hegemony is the surest way to destroy the values that made the United States great.”

 

On the perplexing nuclear arms question, we should have spent less time and effort on multilateral arms control negotiations and more time on one-to-one talks with the Soviet Union. To be sure, it was virtually impossible to persuade Moscow to reveal the extent and character of its nuclear arsenal, much less its real intentions. In contrast, the whole world knew about our nuclear capabilities and our benign intentions.

 

After Moscow exploded its first H-bomb in 1953, Washington sought to maintain effective mutual deterrence at the lowest prudential level. But Moscow’s paranoia and its ironclad secrecy prevented us from knowing the numbers and disposition of Soviet nuclear forces. At the 1955 Geneva summit, President Eisenhower made his daring “open skies” proposal which, if implemented, would have given each side sufficient intelligence about the other’s arsenal to permit something approximating a minimum deterrent approach. Khrushchev promptly dismissed the idea, saying, “you want to look into our bedrooms.” Had he accepted, the superpowers might well have maintained the stability conferred by mutual deterrence at a much lower level of nuclear warheads and delivery systems, thus saving hundreds of billions of dollars on both sides. This lost opportunity must be laid at the door of the Kremlin.

A False Accusation

The revisionist charges that post-war America was or is now an imperialist power bent on aggression or hegemony ring hollow. Where is the evidence? During the Second World War, the United States expended an enormous amount of blood and treasure to liberate more than thirty nation-states in Europe and Asia from Nazi or Japanese conquest and tyranny. The beneficiaries of our military efforts also included our former adversaries, West Germany and Japan. In 1946, we granted full independence to the Philippines, our sole overseas possession. We later turned the Panama Canal over to the Panamanians.

 

True, we had toyed with imperial conquest during the Spanish–American War (1898). Since then, however, the United States has staunchly supported the right of national self-determination throughout the world and has provided economic and technical assistance to advance this end.

 

The charge of “cultural imperialism” is also without merit. While America has commended the blessings of democracy and helped countries to combat terrorist and other threats to their integrity, we have not imposed our political system or culture upon other peoples.

 

Foreign critics who accuse us of cultural imperialism are usually elitists from the upper reaches of the academy and the media. Most of them live in Western Europe, especially France. French premier Georges Clemenceau of First World War fame may have set the tone: “America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilisation.” And a cynical Sigmund Freud once called the United States “a giant mistake”.

 

Hard-core America-bashing reached its height during the Cold War. It still thrives among the dwindling band of Marxists and other ideologues who crave a single answer to the human condition and who seem to need a highly visible scapegoat that a “capitalist, materialistic and arrogant” America provides for them. When anything goes wrong in the Middle East or anywhere else abroad, we can be sure that someone will blame America. This deep-seated prejudice against America often betrays an unacknowledged envy of its singular achievements. Deep down, one suspects, what disturbs many Europeans the most is not McDonald’s or Microsoft or noisy Yankee tourists, but rather our relentless energy and the dynamism of our culture—in short, our remarkable success as a mature nation.

 

Not all Frenchmen are viscerally anti-American. In May 1962, André Malraux, the French minister of culture, underscored the significance of America’s example:

 

For culture, for an Atlantic civilisation, for freedom of mind, I offer a toast to the only nation that has waged war but not worshipped it, that has won the greatest power in the world but not sought it, that has wrought the greatest weapon of death but not wished to wield it; and may it inspire men with dreams worthy of its action.¹

 

Peter Aspden has commented that anti-Americanism in Europe “usually takes the form of a viciously sarcastic aside, premised on an apparent cultural superiority which is as tedious as it is tendentious”.² Such mean-spirited attacks, as opposed to legitimate criticism, make it more difficult for us to discharge our burdens abroad with modesty and grace.

 

Anti-Americans abroad have a symbiotic tie with their counterparts in the United States. Professor Paul Hollander notes that most domestic anti-Americans came of age in the countercultural 1960s, some forming an alliance with the old left. Virtually all have been or are anti-anticommunists. Gore Vidal may be our most cynical and irresponsible America-basher. In 1997 he asserted that our presidents “in the name of saving the world from Communism ... created a National Security State fortified by an ever growing arsenal of weapons and fears ... The winners were the arms merchants; the losers, the hoodwinked citizens of the United States”.³ There is no evidence that our heavy Cold War burdens have infringed our fundamental rights of free speech and association.

 

Vidal continues to spew his venom. On 18 May 1998, he told the National Press Club in Washington that Harry Truman, “who got everything wrong”, was responsible for Stalin’s brutality in Central Europe. Less flamboyant critics—such as Bella Abzug, Philip Agee, Richard Barnett, Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, Ronald Dellums, Louis Farrakhan and some liberation theologians—have probably sown more confusion about America’s alleged “imperialism” than Vidal, precisely because they were a bit more restrained and less highbrow.

 

Most anti-Americans assert that the United States not only exploits other peoples through transnational corporations, but attempts—and often succeeds—in imposing its tawdry materialistic culture on them. “We irritate the rest of the world with our incessant need to build McDonald’s and Disneylands,” said a letter in the New Yorker. In contrast, the Tokyo bureau chief of the New York Times said McDonald’s was not only welcome but that “the daily lives of most Japanese people have been shaped more by McDonald’s than the State Department”. A teasing comment!

 

The endless demand for things American by foreign consumers continues apace. Blue jeans, popular culture, computers and microchips do not have to fight their way into other societies. In the free market of goods and ideas, peoples abroad freely import the best and worst we have to offer. One might wish that our imitators abroad would have a greater hunger for our virtues—achievements in freedom, dignity and the rule of law—and less appetite for our vices—the destructive permissiveness celebrated in many Hollywood films and other conduits of popular culture.

 

In sum, charges that America oppresses, exploits or neglects Third World peoples have distorted the debate over our responsibility in the larger world. Though few in number, the blame-America-firsters have struck a responsive chord with some articulate and guilt-tinged members of Congress and the media who worry about the arrogance of US power. During the Bill Clinton years, they succeeded in cutting the defence budget and focusing undue attention on less-than-responsible Third World demands, thus diverting attention from positive forms of partnership.

The Vietnam Tragedy

During the Vietnam War, critics accused Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon of imperialist and racist motives. Like John Kennedy, his two successors sent US troops to South Vietnam to defend it against communist aggression from the North that was supported by the Soviet Union and China. Their approximate model was our defence of South Korea a decade earlier. All three presidents operated from the then widely accepted zero-sum assumption, namely, that any geographical gain by a communist power was a loss for the cause of freedom. But their noble intentions were subverted by realities, including the persistence of nationalism in Vietnam, the weakness of the Saigon regime and the failure of American politicians to provide adequate military support. An early bombing of supply lines deep in North Vietnam, for example, might have shortened the war and saved tens of thousands of lives on all sides.

 

For America, the Vietnam War ended when US troops pulled out of Saigon in April 1975, but our national memory of this traumatic war is still split over its larger meaning. The majority view holds that our cause was just, though it was “imperfectly pursued”, to quote Ronald Reagan. The other holds that our presidents had imperialist or racist motives. These two opposed interpretations continue to vie for the allegiance of the American psyche. Until the issue is resolved, we will suffer from a kind of historical schizophrenia. If the more positive and nuanced view prevails, America will be better prepared to accept its heavy burdens as leader of the free world. And we will better comprehend the tragic and ironic elements of wielding power. Perhaps Vietnam will help us understand our limits by dispelling what Denis Brogan once called “the illusion of American omnipotence”. And, I would add, the illusion of American innocence.

Reagan’s Victory

My interpretation of the Cold War and what brought it to an end was confirmed during my visit to Moscow in October 1991 to celebrate the demise of the Soviet Union. While there, I was invited by an American professor to lecture on religion and politics to forty graduate students at Moscow University. The eager Russians plied me with questions about Christianity, Lenin, Yeltsin and Reagan. For them, Reagan was a hero for daring to call the Soviet Union “an evil empire” in March 1983, and for demanding four years later in divided Berlin, “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

 

The students were not aware, however, that as early as 1975, six years before he became president, Reagan had said that “communism is a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature”. But they did know about his address to the British parliament in June 1982, when he said that the Soviet Union was in “a great revolutionary crisis ... where the demands of the economic order are colliding directly with those of the political order”. Some students saw Reagan as a prophet and his words as scripture.

 

The Russian students were fundamentally right. Without Reagan’s courageous words, Gorbachev’s liberalising moves would not have yielded the results they did, nor as quickly. As Clement Attlee said of Churchill in 1945, “Words at great moments of history are deeds.”

 

Reagan intuitively sensed the basic moral flaws and economic fragility of the Soviet system. His deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles in Germany to offset the Soviet SS 20s aimed at cities from Oslo to Istanbul led to the elimination of medium-range nuclear weapons on both sides. He also provided Stinger missiles to mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, enabling them to down Soviet helicopters, thus forcing Moscow to withdraw the Red Army from that country.

 

More quietly, Reagan’s National Security Council issued a series of top secret directives to pressure further the beleaguered Moscow regime. Accordingly, CIA director Bill Casey assisted Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland and undertook measures to destabilise the Soviet economy, which was about to get a boost from a 3,600-mile natural gas pipeline from Siberia to Western Europe. Since oil and gas revenues from Europe would earn billions for Moscow, Casey persuaded Saudi Arabia to lower oil prices in exchange for selling it American Awacs planes. This deal resulted in a Soviet loss of almost $20 billion a year.

 

Facing a catastrophic drop in oil revenue and responding to America’s Strategic Defence Initiative programme, Gorbachev realised that he could no longer compete economically. Concurrently, Reagan—with Margaret Thatcher’s encouragement—came to view Gorbachev as a different kind of Soviet leader, less ideological, more realistic. Reagan’s appraisal of Gorbachev briefly upset some of his more fastidious neo-conservative supporters, who insisted that the US president had “gone soft”.

 

With complex forces at work, we don’t know which straw broke the Kremlin’s back, but Reagan’s policies were crucial in shifting the “correlation of forces” in our favour. As Mrs Thatcher over-generously put it, “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.” But Thatcher deserves her share of credit for supporting Reagan’s efforts.

 

In my view, Reagan understood the Soviet Union and its vulnerabilities better than any previous president. He was also right on other foreign policy issues—from his defence build‑up to specific initiatives such as the liberation of Grenada and backing for the Contras in Moscow-supported Nicaragua. Reagan said what he wanted to do and then did what he said he would do, with a clear view of what the probable results would be. I’m convinced that history, that vague and sometimes harsh arbiter, will treat him with respect. He may eventually be judged to have had a greater impact on the twentieth century than any of its lionised tyrants—Lenin, Stalin, Hitler or Mao.

Nixon’s Record

Of our Cold War presidents, Truman and Reagan did more than any others to contain, confront and eventually defeat the Soviet Union. But the much maligned Richard Nixon also deserves credit for defying Soviet pretensions. His understanding of history matched Truman’s and he benefited from the wisdom of Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger and others. Kissinger, along with Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles, was among the wisest twentieth-century secretaries of state. When Nikita Khrushchev told Nixon in 1959 in Moscow that his children would live under communism, Nixon shot back, “Your grandchildren will live in freedom.” And so it was.

 

Long before Nixon became president, I had admired his firm stand against Soviet imperialism, if not his political style. As a young congressman, he played a key role in exposing Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, an act of courage for which the left never forgave him.

 

During the agonising Vietnam years, Nixon had the courage to bomb Hanoi’s forces in Cambodia in 1970, and two years later to strike military targets in Hanoi and Haiphong. Though I was uncertain about the consequences, I publicly endorsed both actions. The latter led to peace talks in Paris and the final withdrawal of American combat troops in 1973, but not to peace or freedom in South-East Asia. Nixon also initiated arms control negotiations with Moscow, again with mixed results. He opened the door to the People’s Republic of China, which helped shift the strategic balance in our favour, even as it placed Taiwan in a more precarious position.

 

After he left the White House, this shy, insecure, introspective and occasionally paranoid man wrote several solid works on world affairs that assured his place in the front ranks of American statesmen, the Watergate debacle notwithstanding.

 

After Nixon’s sudden death in April 1994, praise poured in from around the world. London’s Financial Times called him “the world’s most celebrated anti-communist”, with a “solid conservatism, untainted by racial or religious bigotry”. Only partly right: Nixon was not a consistent conservative. During his administration, the United States saw the largest peacetime expansion of government in its history, including the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, forced bussing, and job and educational quotas for designated ethnic minorities. Some pundits commented on the “two Nixons”, the conniving crook and the wise statesman. But how different was he from many other politicians? Certainly, there is no substitute for personal probity, but he suffered sorely for his sins and there is a place for pardon and redemption, to say nothing of healing, as President Gerald Ford recognised.

The Struggle Continues

The four-decade Cold War is over, but the endless lower case cold war among states and tribes goes on—the war between freedom and tyranny, the battle between truth and falsehood, and the war for men’s minds and souls. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” In this war of ideas and values, America has a responsibility commensurate with its capacity to influence external events. Our chief weapons are our example as a democratic people and a constructive use of our power and influence. I trust that we will fulfil our responsibilities with courage and humility.

Endnotes

1. New York Times, 16 May 1962.

 

2. Financial Times, 14 January 1996.

 

3. “The Last Empire”, Vanity Fair, November 1997, pp. 219 ff.