The Long Peace, by John Lewis Gaddis

...According to Gaddis, there are several factors, apart from the existence of nuclear weapons, that have served to moderate Soviet-American antagonisms...

...This framework it located in Leninist doctrine, which is less an ideology than an "operational code" for seizing and maintaining power...

...Unfortunately, the area that Professor Gaddis has made his specialty, Soviet-American relations, is one in which knowing what went on in the minds of Western policy-makers is insufficient...

...Pressure and strain would compel them to make more demands on the USSR which the latter would be unable to meet and the strain would consequently increase...

...That he is in fact quite unsympathetic, that he has paid "curiously little attention" to what he himself has written in a different context, is a mystery surely greater than the question of why Americans and Russians have so far failed to blow each other up...

...As Dulles put it to British Prime Minister Churchill and French Foreign Minister Bidault in December 1953: The best hope for intensifying the strain and difficulties between Communist China and Russia would be to keep the Chinese under maximum pressure rather than by relieving such pressure...

...Indeed, for Gaddis ideology is the great enemy of "stability": "Both the Soviet ideological aversion to capitalism and the American ideological aversion to totalitarianism could have produced policies—and indeed have produced policies in the past—aimed at the complete overthrow of their respective adversaries...

...With the outbreak of the Korean War, the Truman Administration's attempts to wean China away from Russia came to grief...

...Indeed, a good part of the fascination of Soviet-American relations derives from the interplay of two political cultures with radically different goals, outlooks, and methods...

...By contrast, Gaddis approaches diplomatic history almost as though it were a branch of intellectual history...

...The President rejected an alternative strategy of seeking to isolate China, on the grounds that such a policy would only reinforce that nation's dependence on the Soviet Union...

...But then Gaddis shifts his attention to Soviet matters, and suddenly the reader is left stranded in some murky tributary of the social sciences, where facile analogies replace insight, and the cliches of "game theory" and "systems analysis" substitute for thought...

...Even President Eisenhower's redoubtable Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, whose public pronouncements seemed to endorse the idea of "monolithic Communism," in reality believed that an alert and enlightened American diplomacy could pry the two Communist giants apart...

...Entitled, like the book itself, "The Long Peace," it seeks to explain why Russia and America, despite all their disagreements, have never gone to war...

...He cites newly released documents to buttress his contention that the Eisenhower Administration's support of Nationalist China during the Quemoy and Matsu crises of 1954-1955 and 1958 did not simply reflect the power of the "China Lobby," but was carefully designed to implement the "wedge through pressure" strategy by forcing the Chinese to turn to Russia for help...

...This was to be accomplished primarily by promoting carefully regulated trade between China and the West...

...Fortunately, Soviet-American relations today reflect "a new maturity . . . an increasing commitment on the part of both great nations involved to a 'game' played 'by the rules...

...The strengths and weaknesses of John Lewis Gaddis as a historian of postwar diplomacy are well reflected in his most recent collection of essays, The Long Peace...

...In fact, a decade ago they were accepted by much of the foreign policy establishment, and formed the intellectual rationale for the policy known as "detente...

...Professor Gaddis characterizes this approach as an attempt to split the Sino-Soviet alliance through fusion rather than fission...

...To begin with, since 1945 the United States and the Soviet Union have gradually evolved a series of "rules" to govern their rivalry...

...But "the preservation of stability" requires something more than the abandonment of ideological fervor...

...In one significant respect, however, the Eisenhower-Dulles "wedge strategy" differed from the Truman-Acheson approach: whereas the Truman Administration believed in encouraging China's defection from the Soviet bloc through economic inducements, the Eisenhower Administration believed that the best way of provoking a SinoSoviet split over the long-run was by increasing China's dependence on Moscow over the short-run...

...Admittedly, these rules are implicit rather than explicit, but thanks to the insights of modern game theory we are able to detect their presence...

...The United States therefore has a stake in preventing the Soviet Union's decline as a world power, and the Soviet Union has a similar stake in preventing America's decline...

...one has to know something about what the men in the Kremlin were up to, as well...

...Indeed, the conservative/neoconservative critique was strikingly similar to Gaddis's own criticism of his fellow historians, in that it too rejected excessive emphasis on the techniques of political science in favor of greater attentiveness to the intellectual framework underlying Soviet foreign policy...

...they leave the reader with the unmistakable sensation of sailing in first-class historical waters...

...On the contrary, even before the conquest of the Chinese mainland, they assumed that a Sino-Soviet rift was not only likely, but inevitable...

...His determination "to recapture what was in the minds of Western leaders" by patiently digging through the archives has made him one of the outstanding diplomatic historians of our day...

...One would recall that the views he espouses today were subjected to a devastating critique by conservative and neoconservative intellectuals during the 1970s—a critique that succeeded in depriving "detente" of much of its intellectual respectability...

...sensibly about the Soviet Union...

...History teaches us that when great nations decline, their behavior "can become erratic, even desperate, well before physical strength itself has dissipated...

...This was the course to be followed rather than to seek to divide the Chinese and the Soviets by a sort of competition with Russia as to who would treat China best...

...Whatever the nature of their ideological convictions, critics of "detente" argued, the members of the Soviet ruling class have been trained to think in Leninist terms, and to discuss Soviet foreign policy without reference to Leninism (as theorists of "detente" did in the 1970s, and as Gaddis does today) is as futile an exercise as, let us say, describing American postwar diplomacy without mentioning containment...

...N ow, in all fairness to Gaddis, one hastens to point out that he is not alone in holding these views...

...Despite what they said in public," he writes, "American policy-makers at no point during the postwar era actually believed in the existence of an international Communist monolith...

...Judging by his approach to American history, one would have expected Gaddis to be quite sympathetic to this line of argument...

...In reality, Gaddis argues, American diplomacy was far more sophisticated than is commonly recognized...

...a contempt for the brutal character of Stalinist diplomacy, which could be relied upon to alienate even the closest of Soviet sympathizers...

...Thus it happened that in 1949 President Truman authorized a policy of seeking "to exploit through political and economic means any rifts betweenthe Chinese Communists and the USSR and between the Stalinist and other elements in China both within and outside of the communist structure...

...and both have agreed not to undermine the other side's leadership...

...Gaddis goes on to point out that students of Chinese-Russian relations believe that Russia's reluctance to provide China with assistance during the two THE LONG PEACE: INQUIRIES INTO THE HISTORY OF THE COLD WAR John Lewis Gaddis/Oxford University Press/$24.95 Joseph Shattan THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 43 Quemoy-Matsu crises was crucial in precipitating the split between Moscow and Peking...

...For as Gaddis concludes, "International systems, like tangoes, require at least two reasonably active and healthy participants...

...In their fascination with regional, topical or bureaucratic approaches," he wrote, "they have paid curiously little attention" to the intellectual framework underlying American foreign policy...

...Here, Gaddis sets out to demolish the widely held view that American policy-makers in the postwar period, bemused by their belief in the "monolithic" nature of international Communism, failed to detect—let alone exploit—the emerging rift in Sino-Soviet relations...

...D ut if Gaddis's essay on American I) strategy toward the Communist world is an excellent example of how historical scholarship can renew our respect for Western statesmanship and enlarge our sense of diplomacy's possibilities, another essay in this collection can serve as a case study of virtually all of the myths and illusions that have prevented Americans from thinking...

...Those essays dealing solely with the evolution of American views and strategies are generally superb...

...But while Gaddis is a sensitive and imaginative student of American diplomatic history, his knowledge of Soviet affairs leaves much to be desired...

...Gaddis's conclusion is therefore as inescapable as it is surprising: Along with Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin, and Nikita Khrushchev, John Foster Dulles deserves to be recognized as one of the major architects of the Sino-Soviet dispute...

...Another "behavioral mechanism that has sustained the post-World War II international system" is the decline of ideology in both the Soviet Union and the United States...

...both "prefer predictable anomaly over unpredictable rationality" (whatever that means...

...But according to Gaddis, American policy-makers never abandoned the hope of exacerbating Sino-Soviet tensions...

...At the core of this critique was an emphasis on the singularity of the Soviet system, on the need to analyze it with much the same degree of care and sophistication that Gaddis brings to the study of American history...

...This conviction sprung from three sources: a healthy respect for the enduring reality of Chinese nationalism and xenophobia, which, it was felt, would make China's Communist leadership increasingly reluctant to subordinate its interests to Moscow's...

...Without such rules, Gaddis informs us, "the correlation one would normally expect between hostility and instability would have become more exact than it has in fact been since 1945...

...itcalls for "the realization that great nations have a stake, not just in the survival, but also the success and prosperity of their rivals...

...and the encouraging example of Tito's defiance of Stalin, which seemed to raise the prospect of "Chinese Titoism" emerging in the not too distant future...

...Thus, both the Soviet Union and the United States have implicitly agreed to respect each other's spheres of influence...

...A s an example of Gaddis at his best, consider his essay, "Dividing Adversaries: The United States and InJoseph Shattan, a frequent contributor, is a writer living in Washington, D.0 ternational Communism, 1945-1958...