A Soviet Defeat, but Not an End of History

Robert H. Baker was director of the graduate programme in defence and security analysis at Lancaster University until 1996, when he left to establish the political consulting firm Hawthorne Associates. He is the author of Hollow Victory: The Cold War and Its Aftermath (I. B. Tauris, forthcoming).

Western triumphalism following the terminal convulsions of the Soviet system through the late 1980s was confined largely to the caperings and posturings of the political right, which had persuaded itself, easily enough given the poverty of its reasoning, that the renewed arms race of the second cold war begun by Ronald Reagan in his first presidential term had finally stretched the Soviet economy to the point of no return and made the Gorbachev capitulation inevitable. Beyond the immediately political, and in pursuit of the career enhancement offered by this historical opportunity, academic and strategic thinking attempted to draw the broader theoretical and ideological implications of this watershed together into a Weltanschauung for a post-ideological age. Earliest into the running was Francis Fukuyama with his proclamation that ideology was at an end as a political force of division among nations and therefore as an essential motor of history. Oblivious to the reality of ideological motivation in international politics, and apparently indifferent to the intellectual profundity of the Hegelian and Marxian patterns of ideological understanding within which the dialectic of the Cold War was understood (to say nothing of the continued existence and vigour of the People’s Republic of China), this new philosophical school announced the infinite temporal and spatial hegemony of liberal capitalism, with its unlimited capacity for wealth generation and human fulfilment.

More thoughtful reaction to the events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe anticipated the disruptive potential of the historical and social issues that had been stabilised by the Cold War permafrost in Europe and Asia, and pondered the international system’s capacity to manage them in the environment of such a violent historical transition. Historical hatreds and geographical grudges had lain, paradoxically, frozen but not cooled. Beyond the convulsions of the Second World lay the implications for the Third World and for the ability of the non-aligned states to steer any kind of independent course now that their room for manoeuvre was so drastically curtailed by the loss of the Soviet alternative—its cheap energy, its weapons and its non-market-regulated purchasing power.

Still others mused on the cost in lives, energy, money, human misery and environmental despoliation that ran like a bloody thread through the forty-five years from the Second World War. If the Manichaean global divide could be resolved by a simple policy overture from the Kremlin in 1985, why had earlier, more radical and eirenic overtures been dismissed out of hand? In 1954 and 1955 a pan-European, and therefore global, security offer was on the table but ignored. In 1983, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov offered an arms control and security package far more dramatic and concessionary than his successor Mikhail Gorbachev would table two years later. Gorbachev nearly lost his arm to the frenzied grabbing from Washington and London. Andropov received not even the courtesy of a reply. Moreover, could the enemy really have been so deadly and immutable when it could shed its ideological integuments overnight and convert from party apparatchik to such recognisable Western forms as capitalist entrepreneur, democratic president, pompous parliamentarian, or Mafia gangster?

As with victories in all wars, the immediate euphoria dominates the scene, and those who stand outside the celebrations and ask these kinds of questions are ignored or dismissed as carpers, fellow travellers, or simply naifs. But the questions do not go away, and as time passes the issues they address increasingly scar the picture of the future that Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, Kohl and their academic acolytes painted in that glorious dawn. Contusions notwithstanding, though, it remains a fact that the Soviet Union has been consigned to the “rubbish heap of history”, in Trotsky’s boomerang phrase, and that it indisputably lost the Cold War. By simple logic, then, the West won. In its victory the West proclaimed the world safe from a totalitarian and oppressive ideology and free to pursue a political and economic agenda rooted in the principles of liberal individualism. How might such a victory, dedicated to such universal values, be judged “hollow”?

The Role of Ideology

Before 1947 the American political elite harboured no serious ideological reservations about the United States’ ongoing co-operation and compatibility of interests with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was, after all, a long-time business partner of the Americans, overcoming the short-term hostilities of the post-revolutionary period to establish a prolific commercial intercourse that created many an American fortune, including that of Armand Hammer. During the 1930s, millions of dollars worth of American theoretical and embodied technology and industrial plant was sold as part of a massive programme of technical assistance to the Soviet Union, enabling Stalin’s industrialisation drive and the building of “Socialism in One Country”. By the early 1930s America was providing 40 per cent of technical support to the Soviet Union and, along with other Western powers, provided technology responsible for 90 per cent of Soviet economic development from 1930 to 1945. Without Stalin, the Depression in the United States and the West generally would have been worse.

De Tocqueville had seen the potential for global domination by the United States and Russia in the nineteenth century, with all its concomitant implications for imperial competition. What he did not foresee was that the earliest challenge to America’s imperial ambitions outside the Monroe area would come from a revivified Japan that had politically and militarily humiliated imperial Russia by the end of their war in 1905. It was from Japan, not Russia, that the challenge to American expansion into Manchuria came as the twentieth century ground from its first great war to its second in as many decades; Washington’s strategic interest was in the revitalisation of Russia as a check on Japan. For the new American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Soviet economic demand was to be welcomed for its role in his Keynesian programme to drag the United States out of recession and for its contribution to the strategic balance in the Far East.

Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for the Soviet Union as a global actor reached its apogee during the Second World War. The conflict gave the president the opportunity to play to his diplomatic skills and shape his vision of a post-war international order that would see global stability guaranteed by four “policemen”: the Soviet Union, the British Empire, China and, in hegemonic supervision, the United States. A significant element of Roosevelt’s wartime strategy was the emasculation of the British Empire, whose restrictive economic practices had, in the American view, done so much to intensify the global depression of the 1930s and accelerate the progress to war. Beyond that there was no reason to assume that the national interests of the major players could not be accommodated within a global system made stable by effective policing, regardless of national forms of socio-economic organisation or ideological systems of political control. The Moscow foreign ministers’ conference of 1943 established the principles of the organisation that would embody Roosevelt’s security vision, the United Nations.

The collapse of the collaborative arrangement between the Soviet Union and the United States came not from the messy conclusion of the war, but from the shrinking of the American political perspective from the self-interested, but nonetheless genuine, globalism of the Roosevelt administration to the America-first mentality of Truman and the business interests that made up his coterie of advisers. The Keynesian economic techniques essential to sustain a massively inflated US war economy after 1945 were politically unacceptable if unvarnished. With the United States entering into recession, with the Marshall Plan’s failure to stimulate economic growth in Europe, and with the labour problems resulting from moving millions of women out of the workforce back into the home to create jobs for returning GIs, a reprise of the economic stresses of the 1930s seemed imminent.

The answer to these difficulties came in the economic boom stimulated by the abandonment of the political conception of foreign policy towards the Soviet Union, advocated by George Kennan in his famous “Long Telegram” of 1946, in favour of the zero-sum, militarised global strategy advocated in the National Security Council document NSC-68 of 1950. This urged the identification of the Soviet Union and communism as global enemies to be confronted at all points. The costs of the military build-up and force maintenance such confrontation would require were justified in terms of the economic stimulus they would provide and the multiplier effect to be expected.¹ Truman’s reluctance to abandon his village-shop philosophy of economics precluded the adoption of NSC-68 until he was bounced into it by the political hysteria fabricated around the outbreak of the Korean civil war in June 1950.

From the Soviet perspective, the American shift towards confrontation had been strongly indicated by the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) and the West’s reneging on the wartime agreements on the treatment of Germany. Korea, the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany and the beginnings of US rearmament of the new German state locked Stalin’s mindset into a mirror image of the American one.

Ideology in any form other than an encapsulation of national interest had nothing to do with the confrontation. The crucial variables were American economic stability through government domestic spending and access to revived European markets. Once these had been achieved, the latter through Marshall aid, itself made effective only by the stabilising influence of NATO, normal US–Soviet relations might have been expected to be resumed. After all, a significant part of Roosevelt’s ambition had been realised. The United States, the British Empire and the Soviet Union were now the globe’s dominant powers. The United States was by far the wealthiest. It was unreachably powerful militarily and in a position to call the international tunes. The only shortfall from Roosevelt’s goal was China, where communists had come to power in 1949. Roosevelt himself would have seen that as a short-term setback—easily corrected in the medium term.

Permanent Mobilisation

By 1950 the hardening of the Cold War into two armed camps had led not only to the inversion of the Realpolitik premise that states have no permanent enemies or allies, simply permanent interests, but also to the effective freezing of traditional political processes of balance-of-power management. With the establishment of NATO and its Soviet counter-response, the Warsaw Pact, a historically unique situation had been constructed in which alliance systems remained in a state of permanent mobilisation, ready for instant military action against each other. The logic of this position ineluctably required, as in all cases of mobilisation, the primacy of the military–industrial endeavour in all national policy agendas. In virtually all the countries involved, this meant enormous economic strain at a time when post-war civilian reconstruction was the logical primary demand on resources. The exceptions to this rule were the United States, whose economy had been rescued from the Depression and promoted to global dominance by the war; and, ironically, the western part of Germany containing the bulk of the country’s natural resources and population, which was allowed to reinvent itself rapidly and relatively painlessly from fascist state to bastion of democracy (in which elevated condition it was also largely excused the payment of reparations for the holocaust it had inflicted on Eastern Europe). For the other NATO members, economic reconstruction was skewed by the demands of militarisation just as the painful and hungry transition from wartime to peacetime economies was beginning to bear fruit and living conditions were beginning to approximate to normality.

The state of permanent mobilisation guaranteed also the Stalinist subjection of Eastern Europe. Moscow had not initially intended to export the Soviet totalitarian model to the newly acquired buffer zone.² Quiescent communist parties in Warsaw, Prague and Budapest (or even communist retention of key government portfolios such as defence), coupled with a neutral Germany, would have met Soviet security requirements. Permanent mobilisation caused the abolition of different national forms of socialist development, the imposition of Kremlin replicas across the whole of the eastern zone and the continued stationing there of Soviet occupation forces.

A militarised and alliance-based foreign policy inevitably determined more and more of the institutional and individual interests of the subscribing nation states. The best-known encapsulation of this process is President Eisenhower’s epithet “military–industrial complex”. Although he would not have acknowledged it himself, Eisenhower had seen a particular example of the power of this complex in the failure of the East–West negotiations of 1954–5 to resolve the general question of European security.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, the new Soviet prime minister, Georgi Malenkov, struggling to establish himself domestically and develop a new economic direction with reduced emphasis on heavy and military-related industry, needed a less confrontational international environment in order to marginalise the arguments of the conservative domestic opposition that such a course would endanger Soviet security, surrounded as the USSR was by the hostile forces of capitalism. A series of dramatic overtures from the new Soviet government was laughed out of court by the United States,³ and Malenkov duly fell to his domestic opponents who immediately struck out down the arms race road.

Western failure to embrace this first détente overture is easily explained. The economic effects of the NSC-68 arms explosion were still benign for the United States. There was simply no need to revert to traditional patterns of foreign policy management. But this stance backfired with the initial Soviet successes in the arms and space-race fields, generating serious American fears and self-doubt by the end of Eisenhower’s second term. His successor, John F. Kennedy, adopting Eisenhower’s confrontational rhetoric and the economic management technique of boosting arms expenditure to avoid recession, found himself drawing the Cold War into his own hemisphere with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

It was at this juncture that the disadvantages of global confrontational military containment, as opposed to the political strong-point system advocated by Kennan, began to make themselves apparent. As long as the United States held all the cards and its economy benefited from defence spending, containment had real virtue. But as the Soviet system recovered from the war, developed a new ideological confidence under Nikita Khrushchev and began to exploit the political opportunities offered by Third World countries emerging from colonial tutelage, the picture changed. Defence economics also began to reveal its downside. Kennedy’s increased expenditure and tax cuts, along with President Johnson’s social spending, produced major inflation in the economy as a whole. The glimpse of the nuclear abyss offered by the Cuban crisis had already induced Kennedy to re-evaluate the virtues of confrontation. Johnson was led further into such reappraisal by the abattoir of Vietnam and the economic chaos that confronted the United States by 1967, causing him to undertake the earliest overtures of the policy of détente.

Johnson’s 1967 approaches to the Brezhnev and Kosygin government in Moscow produced the positive response that culminated in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the warming of relations through the détente process. Additionally, the Soviet Union was awarded most-favoured-nation trading status.⁴ The two sides had moved closer together through mutual economic interest. The Kosygin economic reforms of 1964 had failed to produce results by 1967, and the Soviet economy needed a technological kick-start which Moscow believed could come from the integration of Western technology into Soviet manufacturing processes. The United States needed alternative technology export markets as Europe increasingly began to meet its demands from its own resources, and as Japan began to intrude into the international market. In the dire conditions of the US economy as the sixties became the seventies, the Soviet Union and its allies were the obvious place to look for such markets. Between 1967 and 1975, technology transfer from the United States to the Soviet Union increased by 915 per cent. Transport equipment and machinery imports, which the Soviets believed were the key to their economic resurgence, increased from $457 million to $4,184 million.

The effect on the Soviet economy was nil, but along with the importation of grain to supplement the inefficient Soviet agricultural system and address a series of climatic disasters, the economic intercourse had importantly registered that a co-operative and mutually beneficial coexistence was entirely possible. Henry Kissinger, naturally, arrogated to his own diplomatic skills the new flexibility in American policy and the Kremlin’s accommodating response. Kissinger’s cavalier disregard of policy timelines notwithstanding, he did recognise the political absurdity of the bipolar relationship and sought to pursue US interests within a new, more flexible, framework.

But Kissinger’s and America’s flexibility was a symptom of a dramatic change in US fortunes, rather than a revision of political mindset. Hitherto, as the most powerful global actor, the United States had been able to conduct foreign policy from a position of strength. In the first half of the 1970s, America’s dominant position appeared to have collapsed. Nixon had engineered the end of the Bretton Woods Agreement, plunging the international financial system into disarray; the United States had gone down to its first defeat in a foreign war, and at the hands of a pygmy enemy; the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, racially despised in the United States, had drawn blood by declaring monthly 5 per cent cuts in oil production and a total embargo on oil sales to the United States and the Netherlands at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in 1973; and across the Third World, as the last remnants of European colonial rule were being removed, revolution and civil war were endemic. In these circumstances diplomacy rather than brute force became a requirement of foreign policy.

The End of the Conflict

As the 1970s drew to a close, the American right began what it would later claim to be the purposive endgame against the Soviet Union. Spuriously alleging that the Kremlin was “cheating” on détente, on the grounds of the Third World upheaval which the Soviet Union had neither stimulated nor could control, it promoted an agenda of renewed confrontation. This took institutional form in the Reagan presidency from 1980 and, as an element of his “voodoo economics”, in the reintroduction of the traditional Keynesian technique of stimulating demand through defence expenditure. Carter had begun the rearmament under pressure from the right, but Reagan took it through the roof, from $171.023 billion in his first fiscal year to $292.6 billion in 1985. This, it was claimed, would increase the strain on the Soviet economy to the point where it would simply implode.

In the event it did nothing of the kind. It is certainly true that the Soviet leadership suffered intense political and security anxiety over the unilateral abandonment of the co-operative relationship, and over what Andropov described as the American “war psychosis”. But here he had simply failed to recognise the centrality of defence spending to American economic management, and that once the political economy became rocky again, as it surely must given the crudity and inflationary character of the technique, so US attitudes would change. Thus it proved to be. Andropov’s dramatic peace proposals of 1983 were completely ignored by a Washington establishment on a spending and tax-cut high. Two years later a new Soviet leader, two years before he adopted the radical domestic policy initiatives of glasnost and perestroika, offered a far slenderer olive branch than Andropov’s. It was snatched with indecent haste by a Reagan administration whose disregard for the legalities of office and constitution had made it desperate for a foreign policy coup and a reduction in tension.

The policy of permanent mobilisation had, as we have seen, dramatic seesaw effects for the United States, skewing and aborting policies and expenditure, as well as providing a crude technique for short-term macro-economic reprieves. What it did not do was force the Soviet economy into meltdown. Given Soviet military doctrine, the relative efficiency of the defence industrial sector, and the immutable military algorithms of the offence/defence relationship, the enhanced American threat posed by the Reagan administration could have been withstood indefinitely. Even Reagan’s “Star Wars” programme was less troubling to the Soviets for any military threat it posed than for what it said about the administration’s war psychosis.

Spending through traditional means to offset Reagan’s “Strategic Defence Initiative” would be no problem for the Soviets and would not significantly divert resources from the rest of the economy. The problem for the economy was the economy, not defence expenditure. For decades, rates of growth had tailed off as the Soviet Union failed to make the transition from extensive to intensive growth. By the end of the 1970s growth was at a virtual standstill apart from the oil and vodka sectors. Factor productivity, the return on investment, had reached negativity. If the entire defence budget had been applied to the civilian sector it would have given a one-off increase of 3.6 per cent in GDP. If the entire Soviet armed forces had been demobilised and put to work in the civilian sector, the result would have been a mere 1.7 per cent boost to GDP, so spectacularly inefficient was that sector. For all the credit Reagan and Thatcher took for the collapse of Soviet power and the end of the Cold War, it was economic sclerosis that was the agent of history, in much the same way as it had threatened the US and British economies of 1939, before they were rescued by war.

But there was no deus ex machina for the Soviet Union. The end, when it came, was the result of Gorbachev’s misreading of recent Soviet history, and his belief that, as economic reform had invariably been frustrated by political conservatism, political radicalism was the key to unleashing Soviet potential. A more careful and imaginative reading of the Soviet past would have told him that the stagnation of the economy bore resemblances to the end stage of War Communism (1918–21) and that the appropriate response was the reintroduction of the main privatising principles of the New Economic Policy adopted by the tenth Party Congress in 1921. Such a programme would have liberated the massive latent demand in the economy, locked up in the artificially high rate of personal saving in the Soviet Union for want of a real consumer production sector. In the longer term it would have necessarily contributed to political liberalisation, as local and regional economic interests and needs fell outside the centralised planning purview. But such a process of controlled change was beyond Gorbachev’s vision. The immanent stresses of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe guaranteed systemic collapse, as the inebriation of occupying global centre stage led him to heights of political wantonness unseen in two generations.

Consequences

One of the early consequences of the Soviet collapse was the desperate struggle in the US security establishment to discover a new “threat”. This was difficult given that hitherto all major and minor potential threats had been pressed into service as allies in the struggle against communism, usually as “freedom fighters”. Candidates included the fundamentalist mujahideen in Afghanistan and the political drug barons of Latin and South America (“the swirling pot of drug-runners and crazies”, as one Pentagon representative carefully formulated it at the beginning of the 1990s). Samuel Huntington later made a risible attempt to create a global threat out of the most nationally fissiparous of ideologies, Islam.⁵ The redefinition of the People’s Republic of China from partner to adversary by the current Bush administration clearly reflects the need to maintain arms expenditure as an ongoing method of economic management. As US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan wrestles with interest rates, the “national missile defence” system, Star Wars reborn, is pressed into Keynesian service to supplement the tax-cutting party for the rich Bush has planned. These radical redefinitions have caused no evident embarrassment in US security circles.

One consequence that has not flowed from the end of the Cold War is the amelioration of living conditions for Third World populations, whose “hearts and minds” were the object of such expensive attention in the years up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Third World may be said to have expanded with the reduction of millions of former Soviet citizens to penury. A global future predicated upon the “self-evident” truths of the US Constitution built into the Atlantic Charter, and upon the struggle against godless communism, has resulted in three billion people living on $2 a day, the continuing decline of per capita income in eighty of the worst-country examples, and a dramatic reduction in life expectancy in thirty-three countries since the heady days of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Besides the failure of the New World Order to deliver the promises upon which the ideological struggle was predicated, there are notable examples of the Cold War driving political systems into a regression that was unthinkable as the dust settled in 1945. In Afghanistan, the secularising trend of the mid-1970s that might have taken the country forward has been displaced by a barbarian regime that has set back the cause of personal emancipation to the Dark Ages. In the name of anti-communism, the most active and violent elements of that “Islamic threat” the West is now called upon to mobilise against were generated and armed in Afghanistan. In Iran, US-backed suppression of liberal, middle-ground opposition movements as well as communist groups left only the ayatollahs to lead resistance to the shah.

Similarly, the ongoing Arab–Israeli conflict can be explained in terms of the licence issued to Tel Aviv by Washington in the late 1960s as regional stability and conflict resolution, to say nothing of legality, were discounted against the anti-communist struggle. In 1967 President Johnson, increasingly under strain from Vietnam, domestic civil unrest and the economics of the madhouse, authorised and provisioned the Israeli attack on Egypt that launched the Six-Day War. The Israeli argument for the provision of offensive weaponry was, of course, the advance of godless communism in the Middle East through the agency of Arab nationalism. Johnson’s paranoia was sufficiently advanced to blind him to Soviet policy in the region, which had consistently warned Arab nationalists to do nothing to affect Western oil interests. Johnson having given the green light for the Israeli attack, it fell to his successors to manage the aftermath. The “Rogers’ Plan” of 1969 provided a realistic basis for an enduring Middle East settlement, but fell foul of the bipolar character of international politics. Kissinger, with his instinctive construal of Realpolitik as amorality, briefed against the State Department plan, seeing any diminution of Israeli strength as limiting its role as America’s strategic outpost. The sidelining of Rogers and his plan guaranteed another three decades of conflict in which Israel, rather like the Afghan mujahideen, would grow beyond American control to become the rogue state of today.

Conclusion

The West’s victory in the Cold War is indeed a hollow one. The artificial crusade against the Soviet Union denied a system which had the potential for incremental progress the contact with other more progressive social forms that could have mitigated its worst features and helped develop its better ambitions. It forced Soviet and East European politics into a conservative mould that saw the persecution of moderate reformers as well as radicals and empowered the megalomania of Khrushchev and the scleroticism of Brezhnev and Chernenko. The Cold War brought death, destruction, and biological and environmental disruption on a scale many believed unrepeatable after the Second World War. And the heaviest price was levied on Third World countries for which the conflict, until it was over, appeared to have no relevance. The relevance is now, however, crystal clear to plantation labourers, to the sweatshop workforces of major Western corporations, and to governments whose education, health and infrastructure programmes are subject to corporate Western veto.

For professional historians, of course, the end of the Cold War brought both problems and opportunities. For some it meant a sad farewell to the lecture notes and mindsets that had carried them so comfortably through the years of repetitive and unimaginative debates that characterised the security intelligentsia. For others it offered the same golden opportunity that Kennan had so gloriously exploited in 1946 and 1947 with his ambitious leap into a policy vacuum at the heart of American government. But for Kennan’s successors there is no vacuum. Instead, there exists a rigid set of institutions and thought processes incapable of abandoning the zero-sum conception of international relations that has underpinned US policy for three generations.

In any case, there is nowhere to go with a post–Cold War end-of-ideology thesis that fails to recognise that the Soviet Union realised neither socialist nor communist principles in its attempted praxis. Given that, the defeat of the socio-economic system cannot be extrapolated to the clash of ideas. Already it is evident that the global application of neo-classical economics is provoking the resistance of the disempowered and dispossessed exactly as its national applications did in the nineteenth century. Globally dispersed, inchoate and powerless this resistance may be, but its mere existence confounds the post-ideological claim and reposits Marx’s dialectical choice, “socialism or barbarism?”

Endnotes

1. Extra growth of some 2 per cent per annum was anticipated.

2. Even so conservative a commentator as Zbigniew Brzezinski could not bring himself to claim unequivocally that the Soviet intention was to impose a uniform totalitarian system. See Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, rev. ed. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1961).

3. It was the recorded conviction of Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, that the permanent existence of a strong external threat was essential for the political and moral wellbeing of the United States.

4. The Senate later refused to ratify this arrangement, however, citing the spurious grounds of limited Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union.

5. See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).