The Waning of the Cold War

...We are often told that we live in a time of rapid social change and cautioned against taking for granted the permanence of anything...

...But it scarcely lacks for interpreters and celebrants among Western observers...

...I refer to the Third World: the economically undeveloped and politically unstable regions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America...

...The West could be regarded as having "won" the cold war in Europe by the early 1950s, at the very latest by 1961, when the East Germans built the Wall...

...The two events chiefly responsible for this perception of the world as a somewhat less dangerous place by the end of the 1970s were, it may be conjectured, improved relations with China and its post-Maoist reforms foreshadowing Gorbachev's reforms, on the one hand, and the falsification of the "domino theory" in Southeast Asia despite the American defeat in Vietnam, on the other...

...The Reagan administration revived the old cold war slogans of the 1940s and 1950s, brandishing them mostly with reference to the Third World rather than to Europe and the Far East...

...Gorbachev's reformism has created reasonable expectations of far-reaching changes beyond a renewed and more lasting détente, even if visions of total nuclear disarmament are unrealistic...

...The Soviet armies bogged down in Afghanistan and the United States aided the resistance from Pakistan, a policy also initiated by the Carter administration...

...it is also ceasing to haunt the underdeveloped nations...

...The massive Soviet arms buildup during the Brezhnev years helped strengthen such fears...

...When such "revolutionary situations" occur, the party as a combat group possesses real advantages in the struggle for power...

...Right-wing dictators, corrupt generals, and traditional ruling elites have, since the earliest years of the cold war, often proclaimed their determination to resist communism in order to win American support...

...The anticolonial movements in the last of the overseas empires, that of Portugal, were bound to triumph sooner or later, offering opportunities to self-declared Marxist-Leninist guerrilla leaders...

...The relation between the United States and the Soviet Union increasingly becomes comparable to that between Britain and Germany before 1914...

...Yet, at the end of the Second World War, it was identification with the dynamism of such a movement that made the Soviet Union, despite its material and military weaknesses, seem such a uniquely formidable adversary...

...The Sandinistas apparently SPRING • 1989 • 195 Cold War tried to follow the same route, but here the Soviet Union has been more wary in its commitments...

...Support for anticommunist guerrillas in communist Third World nations was labeled the "Reagan Doctrine" in imitation of the original Truman Doctrine...

...Nor is it likely to be revived, whatever the fate of Gorbachev's reforms...

...First and most obviously, it has long been recognized that it is easier for a right-wing, stridently anticommunist Republican administration to win domestic support for improvements in relations with communist powers...

...Events have rendered the whole argument obsolete today...

...Actually, the goal of overthrowing Marxist-Leninist regimes in the Third World echoes James Burnham's call in the early 1950s for "liberation" or "rollback" upheld at the time by the Republican right against the containment policy of the Democratic administration...

...When hard-liners invoke the Russian past to justify their rejection of détente, one is moved to wonder: "Whatever happened to communism...

...A prolongation of the Gorbachev era may witness an increase in the number of such unattached Leninist or Maoist revolutionary movements...

...Events elsewhere in the Third World looked even more ominous and intractable...

...A natural event, an earthquake, precipitated the mounting unpopularity of the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua...

...Critics complained that Reagan's "evil empire" remark was a throwback to the theologically tinged notion of "godless communism...

...Today, a wary interest on the part of both the Soviet Union and the United States in maintaining the existing balance of power is taking the place not only of fears of a suicidal nuclear war but of apprehensions that the other side will make political and economic gains to the point where it becomes the dominant world power...

...The 194 • DISSENT Cold War entire emphasis on the cold war as an ideological struggle implied such a view, as opposed to traditional balance-of-power strategic considerations...

...In the 1950s, even India and Japan were not considered immune to falling under communist control...

...However, it is significant that the prospect of a more promising détente appeared during the incumbency of the most rhetorically ferocious anticommunist administration since the start of the cold war...

...But there is little reason to think that their subsequent actions were orchestrated from Moscow, and it is arguable that there was a strong element of 196 • DISSENT Cold War coincidence when several of them came to power almost simultaneously on different continents...

...The ultra-egalitarian Maoist versions of communism that were popular in the 1960s, carried to horrific extremes in Cambodia, revealed a distaste for modernization itself as an essentially Western phenomenon—a distaste shared with antiWestern nativist movements of the quite distant past as well as with such present regimes as Khomeini's Shiite theocracy in Iran...

...There is a certain parallel between the Reagan administration's evocation of the crusading anticommunist spirit of the cold war at one remove from the original fronts in Europe and Asia and the attraction of New Left radicals to ideological Third Worldism— to "coveting thy neighbor's revolution," as a wit put it, because one cannot hope for a revolution of one's own in the stable industrialized democracies...

...We are less often warned of the opposite error: a present-mindedness that ignores recurrent patterns of events within the framework of quite durable conditions...

...Cuba is the most extreme case, but is somewhat exceptional in that ever since the missile crisis there has been a certain reciprocity with the Soviet Union in services exchanged...

...This tactic unavoidably led to a diversion of attention from the cold war with the Soviet Union and from communism as our major adversary...

...The Soviet Union evidently believed it could get away with invading Afghanistan to subdue an uprising against a shaky communist government, as it had in the past gotten away with suppressing revolts in Hungary and Czechoslovakia...

...The cold war began after the defeat of Germany brought Soviet armies into the center of Europe...

...Today, Sendero Luminoso in Peru is a Maoist party hostile both to the Soviet Union and to the present leadership of China...

...Of greatest importance has been the discovery after the final defeat of Maoism that China had made virtually no economic progress at all since the Revolution, failing even to eliminate disastrous famines, as the Maoists had often boasted...

...Knowledgeable anticommunists have, accordingly, always criticized those who have placed their main stress on the continuities between the foreign policies of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, insisting instead on the unprecedented worldwide potency of Marxist-Leninist ideology...

...It is certainly the most significant development in world politics in the last forty years...

...The Reagan administration itself tacitly acknowledged the reduced urgency of rivalry with the Soviet Union: at first by appearing to substitute "terrorism" for communism as the primary enemy abroad, later by proclaiming the neoWilsonian goal of promoting "democracy" throughout the Third World...

...Few of those arguing this view were in any sense supporters of the Soviet Union, but at least with regard to the Third World they did tend to endow communist totalitarianism with an aura of both desirability and historical inevitability...

...Gorbachev's reforming spirit certainly has its unprecedented aspects, but so did Khrushchev's more than thirty years ago...

...Forty years is a sufficiently long time and the world a sufficiently large and varied place for just about every possible hopeful or threatening event short of all-out war or total mutual disarmament to have occurred in the relations between the two superpowers...

...But the waning of belief in communism and the loosening of Soviet control have also been visible in Eastern Europe for some time...

...The most crude and even paranoid expression of this outlook was the claim that if the Sandinistas were not overthrown we would shortly have to confront "the Soviets" along the Rio Grande, a claim voiced not only by Oliver North but by Ronald Reagan...

...None of this means that there will be no new communist regimes in the Third World...

...Today Soviet military strength is greater than ever, but the universalist appeal of communism has almost totally dissipated...

...If Marxist-Leninist parties and regimes can use the potential support of the Soviet Union as a trump card in domestic and regional rivalries, this is no more than the mirror image of what has happened often enough on the other side...

...The economic failures of Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and, more recently, Nicaragua have also thrown into question the compatibility of Marxist-Leninist regimes and stable economic growth...

...Those parties are in no sense a danger today...

...The Italian Communist party appeared to be on the verge of winning the 1949 general election and still remains the largest Communist party in the noncommunist world...

...The communist victory in China in 1949 probably had the most devastating impact on American politics and national self-confidence during the entire cold war...

...The Russia of the Czars possessed a messianism of its own, envisaging Moscow as a third Rome destined to convert the world to a purer Christianity...

...it still wins a third of the votes, but it too has been declining in the face of competition from the smaller Socialist party...

...In the Far East the record was more mixed: the communist takeover of China, the military stalemate in Korea, the total U.S...

...Their ties and allegiance enable them to call on it for economic aid and military protection — often, especially in Latin America, from feared intervention by the United States—which their domestic rivals cannot match...

...The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the most important such event, suggesting that "Soviet expansionism" might once again be on the march...

...Over forty years have passed since the beginnings of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union in the wake of the Second World War...

...Then in a mere six years, between 1975 and 1980, all three Indochinese nations, Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia in Africa, South Yemen and Afghanistan in the Middle East, and Nicaragua in Central America acquired Marxist-Leninist regimes...

...The French communists now win just over ten percent of the vote...

...If successful containment of Soviet expansion is seen as the measure of victory, the Western powers achieved an unbroken series of triumphs in Europe—from the Marshall Plan, the Italian elections, and the Berlin blockade in the late 1940s to the installation of intermediate nuclear missiles in the early 1980s...

...SPRING • 1989 • 197...

...The specter of communism not only no longer haunts Europe...

...Even those who opposed it began to speak of a renewed cold war...

...Republican politicians and neoconservative intellectuals have repeatedly insisted that they are the true heirs of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy rather than more recent leaders of the Democratic party, lumping together such diverse figures as McGovern, Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis as "appeasers" and "isolationists" blind to the Soviet threat...

...But there has been another theater of the cold war, outside of Europe though partially overlapping the original areas of postwar confrontation in East Asia...

...In the twenty-six years between the Chinese Revolution and 1975, only one nation—Cuba in 1959—passed under communist rule...

...Yet despite its affection for Reagan and its preference for Republicans in the White House, the American public has not been much aroused by the crusade against communism in such obscure places as Angola and Nicaragua...

...No one who, as they say, is not getting any younger can possibly have witnessed the hoopla over last year's summit meeting without having felt that he or she had seen it all at least several times before...

...Nor should it be forgotten that there are Leninist parties in the Third World entirely independent of the Kremlin...

...The French Communist party participated in several postwar governments and in 1947 posed a threat to the Marshall Plan through strikes by trade unions under its control...

...At present, there are a number of small countries and a few larger ones with conditions favorable to Leninist parties...

...El Salvador, Haiti, Peru, the Philippines, and several African nations spring to mind...

...The Soviet Union may, in short, find itself burdened with unwelcome client states in the Third World...

...Yet preoccupation with hopeful possibilities within the Soviet Union should not distract attention from broader and less reversible changes in world politics that make a return to the cold war unlikely, even if Gorbachev were to be replaced by a stand-pat leader in the Brezhnev mold...

...A better example might be relations during the same period between the liberal states of Western Europe and the Russian autocracy, for despite deep mutual suspicions these powers were not engaged in a competitive arms race...

...Well into the 1970s it continued to win the votes of nearly a third of the French electorate...

...As early as the 1950s several farsighted observers—George Lichtheim for one—argued that the East-West opposition in Europe was essentially a sideshow to the larger, more consequential conflict over which system, totalitarian communism or liberal democracy, would achieve the modernization of the backward parts of the globe...

...I do not want to seem to have minimized the importance of the new direction in the Soviet Union promoted by Gorbachev...

...In the Middle East throughout the 1950s and 1960s fears were widely expressed that the entire region would soon fall under Soviet domination...

...In the Far East too, especially after the Communists had won the Chinese civil war, SPRING • 1989 • 193 Cold War two rival blocs confronted one another...

...The Spanish and Portuguese CPs have been reduced to minor fringe parties...

...The rhetoric of the Reagan administration was directed primarily against "the Soviets...

...In the 1960s many liberals and some socialists became persuaded that only revolutionary one-party regimes firmly committed to modernization could overcome the traditionalism and corruption that posed insuperable obstacles to successful modernization...

...Rather, anticommunist oratory seemed less likely to lead to the ultimate disaster of nuclear war than in the past...

...Recently Kennan declared in an interview: "In 1947, containment was devised against the political threat of international communism under Stalin's control, especially the Communist parties in France and Italy...

...but they failed to observe that at least it referred to a bounded state (which is indeed an empire) rather than to a decentered secular ideology incorporating many "modern" beliefs and assumptions...

...The ideology was seen as inspiring the Soviet leaders to fierce engagement in what Burnham called "the struggle for the world," providing a political weapon with which to win international popular support...

...The Reagan administration tried to claim credit for the sudden unexpected collapse of right-wing regimes in Argentina, Haiti, and the Philippines that, according to the Kirkpatrick doctrine, were presumptive allies of the United States...

...Nixon's 192 • DISSENT Cold War 1972 accord with China is the classic example...

...I remember appearing on a television panel in Canada to debate the Eisenhower administration's 1958 intervention in Lebanon with a National Review conservative— Willmoore Kendall, William Buckley's mentor at Yale—who insisted that "Arab nationalism" as represented by Nasser was just "a stalking horse for communism...

...Fullscale war broke out in Korea, one of several divided countries...

...The Middle East remains in turmoil, but no major country in the region is a plausible candidate for Sovietization on the East European model, nor can Islamic fundamentalism be considered any kind of "vanguard" for communism...

...This represents a marked change from the early cold war when the other side was often identified as "international communism," more extravagantly as "the international communist conspiracy," and most frequently as "communism...

...Yet it cannot simply tell Fidel Castro or Colonel Mengistu of Ethiopia or the Sandinistas to go away without impairing its prestige as a superpower...

...It is not that Reagan's geniality led him to be perceived as not really meaning it...

...The United States responded with increased military spending that began during the Carter administration...

...political and military defeat in Vietnam, the successful utilization by the United States of the split between the Soviet Union and China in order to establish friendly relations with China after nearly a quarter of a century of enmity...

...Old slogans of past rights and lefts can be sounded again at a comfortable distance from one's own society...

...George Kerman, author of the "containment" doctrine that became the basis of American foreign policy, and James Burnham, major creator of the rival doctrine urging the defeat of Soviet communism through the "liberation" of satellite nations, both regarded the fusion of military strength and ideological fervor as the essence of the Soviet threat...

...Such Republican cold warriors of over thirty years ago as John Foster Dulles (at least before the Hungarian revolt unmasked "rollback" as empty rhetoric) and Senators William Knowland, Styles Bridges, and Joseph McCarthy have since been cast into the memory hole by their GOP successors...

...Indeed, recognition of changes outside Soviet borders coinciding with economic decline within them has inspired Gorbachev to plot a new direction in foreign as well as domestic policy...

...Communism, in short, no longer rides the wave of what used to be called the "revolution of rising expectations...

...Their successes or failures cannot be equated with gains or losses by the superpowers...

...From Chiang Kai-Shek to General Noriega this has been a source of temptation to the United States, often followed by acute embarrassment...

...There are unmistakable continuities between that sense of mission and the postrevolutionary ideological thrust of Soviet communism...

...Undoubtedly, Marxist-Leninists throughout the Third World were emboldened by the American defeat in Vietnam...

...At the time of the Cultural Revolution in China, parties were formed all over the world that looked to Beijing rather than to Moscow...

...In 1975 Henry Kissinger regarded a communist regime in Portugal as inevitable after the overthrow of its right-wing dictatorship...

...More and more, "communism" has come primarily to connote the complex of practices and beliefs that account for American ideological disapproval of the Soviet Union: its rigid authoritarian government, its lack of religious and cultural freedom, its inefficient, overmilitarized economy, its cult of Lenin and the Revolution...

...My purpose here has been to point to some of these trends in order to suggest that, whatever the fate of Gorbachev's reforms, the cold war may now be passing into history...

...By the standards of modern history, that is a fairly long time...

...The Leninist revolutionary party is an authentic invention of the twentieth century, designed expressly to win state power under conditions of civil conflict and mass discontent...

...In addition to their ideological and organizational assets, Leninist parties lay claim to a "special relationship" with the Soviet Union...

...I am tempted to invoke the hackneyed phrase "this is no accident" in two quite different senses...

...And even the most monomaniacal cold war alarmists do not regard India and Japan as vulnerable to communist subversion...

...I have been confining my attention to areas where the cold war was considered most acute several decades ago...

...The media bath in which we are constantly immersed, however, often leads us to overlook slower, more dispersed trends that we may have come to take much for granted...

...The projection of Soviet power beyond its territorial borders manifested itself in the shape of powerful Communist parties in the West...

...In short, the notion of containment is today irrelevant...

...On the other hand, there have been some striking capitalist successes in the Third World that stand in marked contrast to the communist failures...

...Far more alarming, if less humbling, than the lost Vietnam War because of its ominous geopolitical implications, it was considerably responsible for the rise of McCarthyism and for the elevation of communism into a force perceived as more menacing than even the new superpower status attained by the Soviet Union...

...Marxist-Leninist movements, in this view are seen as created and directed by Moscow as steps toward world domination...

...The revival of the old anticommunist fervor, directed this time against Third World MarxistLeninist states, carries little risk and can be indulged in on the cheap...

...There was a general expectation that the Spanish CP would become the strongest party in Spain at the end of the Franco dictatorship...

...The contras were called "freedom fighters" after the Hungarian revolutionists of 1956...

...All this has utterly changed...

...Second, a candidate as addicted to bellicose anticommunist sloganeering as Reagan could probably not have been elected in the 1950s nor even the early 1960s: he would, like Goldwater, have frightened the voters too much...

...But the messianism of Holy Russia had an ingrown, archaic, preEnlightenment ring while the secular utopianism of communism was futuristic and material as well as spiritual in its appeal...

...It has lost much of its appeal to Third World elites as a mobilizing ideology mandating a forced-march industrialization...

...Marxist-Leninist movements, as I have stressed, possess real assets when civil strife and popular revolution are the order of the day, especially in backward countries...

...Nevertheless, there appeared to be a pattern, attributable to some combination of Soviet intervention, American passivity resulting from defeat in Vietnam, illusions bred by the Nixon-Kissinger détente, and increasing Third World instability...

...The Italian Communist party has for a long time been independent of Moscow, even supporting Italian membership in NATO...

...Ever since containment became the policy of the United States, George Kennan has insisted that he meant it primarily in political rather than military terms...

...These considerations contradict the habitual assumption of conservative and neoconservative anticommunists that Marxist-Leninist advances in the Third World represent unambiguous victories for the Soviet Union in a continuing cold war...

...With the exception of Indochina, where communism triumphed as a result of the lost Vietnam War, all of these were thinly populated, extremely poor, for the most part small, and strategically unimportant...

...Today, even the most ardent supporters of the continuation of the cold war are likely to define the enemy as "Soviet expansionism" rather than as "communism...

...The modernization achieved by South Korea and Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, under capitalist economies free from control by rickety authoritarian governments has repeated the earlier Japanese experience and falsified the widespread assumption that "state socialism" was the prerequisite for economic development in the Third World...

...Such apprehensions still shape the outlook of hard-line anticommunists in the Republican party...

...These are what "communism" now suggests rather than an ideological movement in tune with deep-seated world historical trends that also embodies utopian ideals...

...The latter emphasis amounted to an abandonment of Jeane Kirkpatrick's doctrine of favoring "authoritarian" over "totalitarian" —that is, MarxistLeninist— regimes that was so widely touted during Reagan's first term...

...The drastic decline in the fortunes of world communism as a political force is still insufficiently recognized by many moderate politicians and journalists, let alone by rightwing ideologues...

...Despite its religious overtones, the expansionism of Czarist Russia could hardly match the universalist appeal of communism...

...Let me, however, try to give the Reagan administration its due: Events in the late 1970s did lend some plausibility to the rooted ideological predispositions of right-wing cold war militants...

...Anyone with a memory does not need to be warned not to expect too much from these developments nor to be reminded that they fall short of ushering in universal peace...

...The long, drawn-out war in Vietnam can also be considered an aftermath of the earlier wartime destruction of established states, for it took place in a region that had been conquered by Japan and was later, like Korea and Germany, divided between communist and noncommunist regimes...