The United States And The Ussr In A Changing World

Soviet And American Perspectives

Andrei Bochkarev, Don L Mansfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000306828
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

As the Cold War draws to a close, new issues inevitably have begun to surface in U.S.-Soviet relations. This reader brings together Soviet and U.S. perspectives on the broad range of challenges that both nations now face. Within the context of a "debate" format that presents parallel U.S. and Soviet views, these timely readings illustrate areas of cooperation and conflict and weigh policy similarities and differences. Topics covered include Soviet-U.S. relations after the Cold War, military and national security debates, and the changing international economic environment. The selections also consider the impact that the evolving Soviet-U.S. interaction is having on the "new" Europe and the developing world. The volume concludes by considering the direction the superpower relationship may take in the future. Students of Soviet and U.S. foreign policy will find this text invaluable in unraveling the complexities of U.S.-Soviet relations.

Part One
The Evolution of Soviet-American Relations in the Post-War Era

Section 1
The U.S.-Soviet Rivalry in Perspective

Who could mourn the passing of the Cold War? While the world was divided into two conflicting camps, there was the ever-present danger of nuclear war between the superpowers. Defense spending was at such high levels that the economies of both the Soviet Union and the U.S. were adversely effected. The conflict was on a global scale, with the "zero-sum game" approach to Soviet-American relations evident even in the Third World. The result was that both superpowers had the propensity to impose their conflict upon local conflict throughout the world. It was an ideological struggle that isolated the two nations from one another and produced xenophobia among their citizens. It was a hostile, risky, and wasteful period in the history of both nations. We welcome its demise and are already questioning the causes of such an odious relationship.

Despite this euphoria as the superpowers enter a new era of relations, political commentators and strategists have been quick to point out that the Cold War did have its positive features. In fact, some have gone so far as to suggest that the Cold War was actually a blessing, or at least a very useful thing. There is some logic to this view: During the Cold War there was a tested method of maintaining the semblance of world order by means of the bipolar rivalry, of dividing the world into two blocs headed by two military superpowers. It was a crude but effective device, which, John Gaddis argues, could be credited with maintaining the "long peace." These "benefits" of the Cold War are now being compared to the possible consequences of its demise—the disintegration of stable alliances, political fragmentation throughout the world, the instability associated with a multipolar international system, and nuclear proliferation.

In "Looking Back: The Long Peace," John Gaddis writes that it would be well for us to question why the great-power peace during the postwar era survived despite so much provocation. It is important for us to understand, in other words, why there has been no Third World War. Gaddis contends that the primary reason that war was avoided is that the bipolar structure of the world encouraged stability. So also did certain inherent characteristics of the bilateral Soviet-U.S. relationship. To a surprising degree the two countries were mutually independent. Despite the appearance of two opposing political systems, locked in a struggle to the death, the author points out that the domestic structures of the two states were not likely, in themselves, to produce war.

Nuclear deterrence was the most distinguishing characteristic of the military struggle and it provided a mechanism to control conflict escalation. It was one of the primary reasons that statesmen of the two superpowers were extremely cautious—particularly when compared to their predecessors—about risking war between the two countries. Somewhat paradoxically, he argues "that the development of nuclear weapons has had, on balance, a stabilizing effect on the postwar international system." Technology has also played a role in postwar stability, because the "reconnaissance revolution" reduced the likelihood of a surprise attack. Furthermore, despite the antagonistic rhetoric, the two powers have actually moderated their ideological objectives to the common goal of international stability. Finally, Gaddis argues that great power stability was possible because implicit "rules of the game" developed in the Soviet-U.S. relationship. For example, neither side directly challenged the other's sphere of influence.

His conclusion is that the Cold War, although perhaps not fully appreciated at the time, was a self-regulating system that accommodated a variety of shared superpower interests. As a result the postwar period is more aptly described as the "long peace" rather than a time of instability and warfare.

While Gaddis emphasizes the stability of superpower relations during the Cold War era, Lev L. Lyubimov, in his essay "The New Thinking and Soviet-American Relations," vividly recounts the intense rivalry between the two powers while the world was divided into antagonistic blocs. He also reminds us that the mutual stereotypes that colored the relationship were a barrier to any efforts to normalize Soviet-U.S. relations. Even though there was some movement away from confrontation toward "peaceful coexistence" in the early 1970s, detente was short lived. In the mid-1970s, Soviet-American relations deteriorated primarily because of a policy reversal by the Reagan administration and right-wing Republicans. He admits that General Secretary Brezhnev was partially responsible for the decline in detente, but the Soviets had little choice because the United States "was not contemplating relations based on equality...." The United States sought to restrict Soviet strategic arms, weaken the USSR's influence in the developing world, and "ideologically 'soften up' the countries of the socialist commonwealth." Lyubimov is not hesitant to assess blame in this so-called "Second Cold War": "the return to confrontation was carried out exclusively by the U.S., which bears political and historical responsibility for doing so."

It is the author's opinion that the Reagan administration also contributed to the economic stagnation experienced by the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. The "ruling circles" in the United States recognized the economic advantage they had over the Soviet Union and took steps to undermine the Soviet economy. This was accomplished primarily by reviving the arms race, but there were also efforts to restrain Soviet exports, prevent technology transfer to the USSR, and undermine any prospects for economic cooperation between the USSR and developed capitalist or developing countries. The U.S. also exacerbated regional conflicts to force the Soviets to shoulder additional expenditures. "The U.S. policy toward the USSR became an element of its policy of global revenge and a part of its efforts to restore its world standing."

But now Soviet-American relations are entering a new phase, and this is due to the foreign-policy component of perestroika. In the author's opinion, the new Soviet foreign policy has "forced the West to recognize that the initiative had shifted to Moscow," because the Soviets had denounced the "reactive" model of international behavior that characterized the Cold War period.

Now, as the superpowers enter into a new phase of their relationship, he sees some opportunities for cooperation but suggests that a great deal needs to be clarified. Therefore, a certain degree of caution is justified while the two countries work together to develop "stable models of interaction."

1
Looking Back: The Long Peace

John Lewis Gaddis

I should like to begin this essay with a fable.

Once upon a time, there was a great war that involved the slaughter of millions upon millions of people. When, after years of fighting, one side finally prevailed over the other and the war ended, everyone said that it must go down in history as the last great war ever fought. To that end, the victorious nations sent all of their wisest men to a great peace conference, where they were given the task of drawing up a settlement that would be so carefully designed, so unquestionably fair to all concerned, that it would eliminate war as a phenomenon of human existence. Unfortunately, that settlement lasted only 20 years.

There followed yet another great war involving the slaughter of millions upon millions of people. When, after years of fighting, one side finally prevailed over the other and the war ended, everyone said that it must go down in history as the last great war ever fought. To everyone's horror, though, the victors in that conflict immediately fell to quarreling among themselves, with the result that no peace conference ever took place. Within a few years, the major victors had come to regard each other, and not their former enemies, as the principal threat to their survival. Each sought to ensure that survival by developing weapons capable, at least in theory, of ending the survival of everyone on earth.

Paradoxically, that arrangement lasted twice as long as the first one, and as the fable ended, showed no sign of collapsing anytime soon. It is, of course, just a fable, and as a rule one ought not to take fables too seriously. There are times, though, when they can illuminate reality more sharply than conventional forms of explanation. This may be one of them.

For it is the case that the post-World War II system of international relations, which nobody designed or even thought could last very long—which was based not upon the dictates of morality and justice but rather upon an arbitrary division of the world into spheres of influence, and incorporated some of the most bitter antagonisms short of war in modern history—has now survived twice as long as the far more carefully designed World War I settlement. Indeed, it has approximately equaled in longevity the great nineteenth-century international systems of Metternich and Bismarck....

To be sure, the term "peace" is not the first that comes to mind when one recalls the history of the Cold War. The period, after all, has seen the greatest accumulation of armaments the world has ever known, a whole series of protracted and devastating limited wars, an abundance of revolutionary, ethnic, religious, and civil violence, as well as some of the most intractable ideological rivalries in human experience. Nor have those more ancient scourges—famine, disease, poverty, injustice—disappeared from the face of the Earth.

Is it not stretching things a bit, one might ask, to take the moral and spiritual desert in which the world's nations conduct their affairs and call it "peace"?

It is, of course, but that is just the point. Given all the conceivable reasons for having had a major war during the past four decades—reasons that in any other age would have provided ample justification for such a war—it seems worthy of comment that there has not in fact been one; that despite the unjust and wholly artificial character of the post-World War II settlement, it has now persisted for the better part of half a century. This may not be grounds for celebration, but it is at least grounds for investigation: for trying to comprehend how this great-power peace has managed to survive for so long in the face of so much provocation, and for thinking about what might be done to perpetuate that situation. After all, we could do worse.

Stability, Not Justice

Anyone attempting to understand why there has been no third world war confronts a problem not unlike that of Sherlock Holmes and the dog that did not bark in the night: How does one account for something that did not happen?

The question involves certain methodological difficulties, to be sure: It is always easier to account for what did happen than for what did not. But there is also a curious bias among students of international relations that reinforces this tendency: "For every thousand pages published on the causes of wars," Geoffrey Blainey has noted, "there is less than one page directly on the causes of peace." Even the discipline of "peace studies" has given more attention to what we must do to avoid the apocalypse than it has to the equally interesting question of why it has not happened so far.

One difficulty is that our actual experience is limited to the operations of a single system—the balance of power system—operating within either the "multipolar" configuration that characterized international politics until World War II, or the "bipolar" configuration that has characterized them since. Alternative systems remain abstract conceptualizations in the minds of theorists, and are of little use in advancing our knowledge of how wars in the real world do or do not occur. But in "systems theory," one can find a useful point of departure for thinking about the nature of international relations since 1945.

A valuable feature of systems theory is that it provides criteria for differentiating between stable and unstable political configurations: This can help to account for the fact that some international systems outlast others. It is characteristic of a stable system that it has the capacity for self-regulation: the ability to counteract stimuli that would otherwise threaten its survival, much as the automatic pilot on an airplane or the governor on a steam engine would do.

A system of self-regulating mechanisms is most likely to function when there exists some fundamental agreement among major states on the objectives they are seeking to uphold by participating in the system, when its structure reflects the way in which power is distributed among its members, and when agreed-upon procedures exist for resolving differences.

Does the post-World War II international system fit these criteria for "stability"?

Certainly its most basic characteristic—bipolarity—remains intact, in that the gap between the two greatest military powers and their nearest rivals is not substantially different from what it was four decades ago. At the same time, neither the Soviet Union nor the United States nor anyone else has been able wholly to dominate that system; the nations most active within it in 1945 are for the most part still active today. And of course the most convincing argument for stability is that, so far, World War III has not occurred.

We can all conceive of international systems that would combine stability with greater justice and less risk than the present one does, and we ought to continue to think about these things. But short of war, which no one wants, change in international relations tends to be gradual and evolutionary. It does not happen overnight. This means that alternative systems, if they ever develop, probably will not be total rejections of the existing system, but rather variations proceeding from it. All the more reason, then, to try to understand the system we have, to try to distinguish its stabilizing characteristics from its destabilizing ones, and to try to reinforce the former as a basis from which we might, in time and with luck, do better.

Bipolarity's Bounty

Any such investigation should begin by distinguishing the structure of the international system in question from the behavior of the nations that make it up. The reason for this is simple: Behavior alone will not ensure stability if the structural prerequisites for it are absent, but structure can, under certain circumstances, impose stability even when its behavioral prerequisites are unpromising. One need only compare the settlement of 1945 with its predecessor of 1919 to see the point.

If the intentions of statesmen alone had governed, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 would have ushered in an era of stability in world politics comparable to that brought about in Europe by the Congress of Vienna almost a century earlier. And, at least as far as self-determination was concerned, the Versailles settlement did come as close as any in modern history to incorporating the principles of justice.

Unfortunately, in so doing, it neglected the realities of power. It broke up the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, a move that accurately reflected the aspirations of the nationalities involved, but that failed to provide the successor states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Hungary with the military or economic means necessary to sustain their new-found sovereignty.

Even more shortsightedly, there was no effort to accommodate the interests of two nations whose populations and industrial strength were certain to guarantee them a major influence over postwar European developments—Germany and Soviet Russia. It should have been no surprise, therefore, that when the Versailles system finally broke down in 1939, it did so largely as the result of a deal cut at the expense of the East Europeans by these two countries whose power had been ignored, twenty years earlier, in the interests of justice.

Nobody, in contrast, would picture the post-World War II settlement as a triumph of justice. That settlement arbitrarily divided sovereign nations such as Germany, Austria, and Korea, not because anyone thought it was right to do so, but because neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could agree on whose occupation forces would withdraw first. It did nothing to prevent the incorporation of several of the countries whose independence the 1919 settlement had recognized—for example, Poland, whose independence Britain had gone to war in 1939 to protect—into a Soviet sphere of influence. It witnessed, in response to this, the creation of an American sphere in Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific.

What resulted was the first true polarization of power in modern history. The world had had limited experience with bipolar systems in ancient times, it is true: Certainly Thucydides's account of the rivalry between Athens and Sparta carries an eerie resonance for us today; and statesmen of the Cold War era could not forget what they had once learned, as schoolboys, of the antagonism between Rome and Carthage. But these had been regional conflicts: Not until 1945 could one plausibly speak of a world divided into two spheres of influence, or of the superpowers that controlled them.

Now, bipolarity may seem to many today—as it did four decades ago—an awkward and dangerous way to organize world politics. Simple geometric logic would suggest that a system resting upon three or more points of support would be more stable than one resting upon two. But politics is not geometry. The passage of time and the accumulation of experience have made clear certain structural elements of stability in the bipolar system of international relations that were not present in the multipolar systems that preceded it:

1. The bipolar system reflected the facts of where military power resided at the end of World War II—and where it still does today. In this sense, it differed from the settlement of 1919, which made so little effort to accommodate the interests of Germany and Soviet Russia.

It is true that in other categories of power—notably the economic one—states have since arisen that are capable of challenging or even surpassing the Soviet U...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Copyright Information
• Introduction
• PART ONE THE EVOLUTION OF SOVIET-AMERICAN RELATIONS IN THE POST-WAR ERA
• PART TWO SOVIET AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICIES AFTER THE COLD WAR
• PART THREE NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES
• PART FOUR THE ROLE OF THE UNITED NATIONS
• PART FIVE ECONOMIC RIVALRY AND COOPERATION
• PART SIX EUROPE AFTER THE COLD WAR
• PART SEVEN THIRD WORLD ISSUES
• PART EIGHT THE FUTURE OF SOVIET-AMERICAN RELATIONS
• About the Book and Editors
• Index