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End of the Cold War
By the early 1980s, the Soviet armed forces were the largest in the world
by many measures—in terms of the numbers and types of weapons they possessed,
in the number of troops in their ranks, and in the sheer size of their
military-industrial base. However, the quantitative advantages held by the
Soviet military often concealed areas where the Eastern bloc dramatically
lagged behind the West. This led many US observers to vastly overestimate
Soviet power.
By the late years of the Cold War, Moscow had built up a military that
consumed as much as twenty-five percent of the Soviet Union's gross national
product at the expense of consumer goods and investment in civilian sectors.
But the size of the Soviet armed forces was not necessarily the result of a
simple action-reaction arms race with the United States (Odom). Instead,
Soviet spending on the arms race and other Cold War commitments can be
understood as both a cause and effect of the deep-seated structural problems
in the Soviet system, which accumulated at least a decade of economic
stagnation during the Brezhnev years. Soviet investment in the
defense
sector was not necessarily driven by military necessity, but in large part by
the interests of massive party and state bureaucracies dependent on the sector
for their own power and privileges.
By the time Mikhail Gorbachev had ascended to power in 1985, the Soviets
suffered from an economic growth rate close to zero percent, combined with a
sharp fall in hard currency earnings as a result of the downward slide in
world oil prices in the 1980s. (Petroleum exports made up around 60 percent
of the Soviet Union's total export earnings.) To restructure the Soviet
economy before it collapsed, Gorbachev announced an agenda of rapid reform.
Reform required Gorbachev to redirect the country's resources from costly Cold
War military commitments to more profitable areas in the civilian sector. As a
result, Gorbachev offered major concessions to the United States on the levels
of conventional forces, nuclear weapons, and policy in Eastern Europe.
Many US Soviet experts and administration officials doubted that Gorbachev
was serious about winding down the arms race but the new Soviet leader
eventually proved more concerned about reversing the Soviet Union's
deteriorating economic condition than fighting the arms race with the West.
The Kremlin made major military and political concessions; in response Reagan
agreed to renew talks on economic issues and the scaling-back of the arms
race. The East-West tensions that had reached intense new heights earlier in
the decade rapidly subsided through the mid-to-late 1980s. In 1988, the
Soviets officially declared that they would no longer intervene in the affairs
of allied states in Eastern Europe - the so-called Sinatra Doctrine. In 1989,
Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan.
In December 1989, Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush declared the Cold War
officially over at a summit meeting in Malta. But by then, the Soviet
alliance system was on the brink of collapse, and the Communist leaders of the
Warsaw Pact states were losing power. In the USSR itself, Gorbachev tried to
reform the party to destroy resistance to his reforms, but, in doing so,
ultimately weakened the bonds that held the state and union together. By
February 1990, the Communist Party was forced to surrender its 73-year old
monopoly on state power. By December of the next year, the union-state also
dissolved, breaking the USSR up into fifteen separate independent states. (see
Dissolution of the USSR)
Legacy
Despite its rapid and relatively bloodless end, the Cold War was fought at
a tremendous cost globally over the course of more than four decades. It cost
the US up to $8 trillion in military expenditures, and the lives of nearly
100,000 Americans in Korea and Vietnam. It cost the Soviets an even higher
share of their gross national product. In Southeast Asia, local civil wars
were intensified by superpower rivalry, leaving millions dead.
The end of the Cold War gave Russia the chance to cut military spending
dramatically, but the adjustment was wrenching. The military-industrial sector
employed at least one of every five Soviet adults. Its dismantling left
millions throughout the former Soviet Union unemployed. Russian living
standards have worsened overall in the post-Cold War years, although the
economy has resumed growth in recent years. In the 1990s, Russia suffered an
economic downturn more severe than the US or Germany had undergone six decades
earlier in the Great Depression after it had embarked on capitalist economic
reforms.
The legacy of the Cold War continues to structure world affairs. The Cold
War institutionalized the role of the United States in the postwar global
economic and political system. By 1989, the US was responsible for military
alliances with 50 countries and 1.5 million US troops were posted in 117
countries. The Cold War also institutionalized the commitment to a huge,
permanent wartime military-industrial complex.
Some of the economic and social tensions that underpinned Cold War
competition in parts of the Third World remain acute. The breakdown of state
control in a number of areas formerly ruled by Communist governments has
produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former
Yugoslavia. In some countries, the breakdown of state control was
accompanied by state failure, such as in Afghanistan. But in other areas,
particularly much of Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War was accompanied
by a large growth in the number of liberal democracies. In areas where the two
superpowers had been waging proxy wars, and subsidizing local conflicts, many
conflicts ended with the Cold War; and the occurrence of interstate wars,
ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, or refugee and displaced persons crises
declined sharply.
Cold War Veterans
Veterans of the Cold War include those who have served both in actual
conflicts and on inactive confrontation lines since 1945. Thus Soviet
servicemen who served in Afghanistan and Korea, British servicemen from a
number of conflicts and in West Germany, Chinese personnel in Korea and
Vietnam, French personnel from Algeria, Vietnam, Lebanon and elsewhere, and
U.S. personnel in Vietnam, Korea, Germany and elsewhere, along with all the
other servicemen and women who served from many other countries in those
conflicts and along the confrontation lines in Germany and elsewhere can be
considered Cold War veterans.
Only recently has there been the glimmer of recognition for those who
served on active duty in the US military during the Cold War era (September
1945 to December 1991). Through the prompting of such individuals as Cold War
scholar Frank Tims, Ph.D., have some veterans organizations begun to
officially recognize Cold War veterans through official proclamations and
published articles such as the one published in VFW Magazine." Coincidently,
the editor of VFW Magazine is Richard Kolb ("Cobb"), author of Cold War
Clashes: Confronting Communism, 1945-1991.
For at least a decade, a U.S. effort has been underway to pass legislation
which would give official recognition to U.S. Cold War veterans beyond the
ambiguous Certificate which was previously offered. The Cold War Medal Act of
2007 passed in the House, but was stripped out of a larger bill in the Senate.
But, because the Cold War Victory Medal was passed by the House, it must be
considered in the Conference on the National Defense Authorization Act for
2008.
Historiography
As soon as the term "Cold War" was popularized to refer to postwar tensions
between the United States and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and
origins of the conflict has been a source of heated controversy among
historians, political scientists, and journalists. In particular, historians
have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of
Soviet-US relations after the Second World War; and whether the conflict
between the two superpowers was inevitable, or could have been avoided.
Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what the
sources of the conflict were, and how to disentangle patterns of action and
reaction between the two sides.
While the explanations of the origins of the conflict in academic
discussions are complex and diverse, several general schools of thought on the
subject can be identified. Historians commonly speak of three differing
approaches to the study of the Cold War: "orthodox" accounts, "revisionism,"
and "post-revisionism." Nevertheless, much of the historiography on the Cold
War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories.
Orthodox accounts
The first school of interpretation to emerge in the US was the "orthodox"
one. For more than a decade after the end of the Second World War, few US
historians challenged the official US interpretation of the beginnings of the
Cold War. This "orthodox" school places the responsibility for the Cold War on
the Soviet Union and its expansion into Eastern Europe. Thomas A. Bailey, for
example, argued in his 1950 America Faces Russia that the breakdown of
postwar peace was the result of Soviet expansionism in the immediate postwar
years. Bailey argued Stalin violated promises he had made at Yalta, imposed
Soviet-dominated regimes on unwilling Eastern European populations, and
conspired to spread communism throughout the world. From this view, US
officials were forced to respond to Soviet aggression with the Truman
Doctrine, plans to contain communist subversion around the world, and the
Marshall Plan.
This interpretation has been described as the "official" US version of Cold
War history. Although it lost its dominance as a mode of historical thought in
academic discussions in 1960s, it continues to be influential.
Revisionism
US involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s disillusioned many historians with
the premise of "containment", and thus with the assumptions of the "orthodox"
approach to understanding the Cold War. "Revisionist" accounts emerged in the
wake of the Vietnam War, in the context of a larger rethinking of the US role
in international affairs, which was seen more in terms of American empire or
hegemony.
The Wisconsin school of interpretation argues that the US and the USSR were
economic rivals, making them natural adversaries, irrespective of their
ideologies. Walter LaFeber, meanwhile, argues the US and Imperial Russia were
already rivals by 1900 over the development of Manchuria. Russia, unable to
compete industrially with the States, sought to close off parts of East Asia
to trade with other colonial powers. Meanwhile, the US demanded open
competition for markets.
While the new school of thought spanned many differences among individual
scholars, the works comprising it were generally responses in one way or
another to William Appleman Williams' landmark 1959 volume, The Tragedy of
American Diplomacy. Williams challenged the long-held assumptions of
"orthodox" accounts, arguing that Americans had always been an empire-building
people, even while American leaders denied it.
Following Williams, "revisionist" writers placed more responsibility for
the breakdown of postwar peace on the United States, citing a range of US
efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World
War II. According to Williams and later "revisionist" writers, US policymakers
shared an overarching concern with maintaining capitalism domestically. In
order to achieve that objective, they pursued an "open door" policy abroad,
aimed at increasing access to foreign markets for US business and
agriculture. From this perspective, a growing economy domestically went
hand-in-hand with the consolidation of US power internationally.
"Revisionist" scholars challenged the widely accepted notion that Soviet
leaders were committed to postwar "expansionism". They cited evidence that the
Soviet Union's occupation of Eastern Europe had a defensive rationale, and
that Soviet leaders saw themselves as attempting to avoid encirclement by the
United States and its allies. In this view, the Soviet Union was so weak and
devastated after the end of the Second World War as to be unable to pose any
serious threat to the United States; moreover, the US maintained a nuclear
monopoly until the USSR tested its first atomic bomb in August 1949.
Revisionist historians have also challenged the assumption that the origins
of the Cold War date no further back than the immediate postwar period.
Notably, Walter LaFeber, in his landmark study, America, Russia, and the
Cold War, first published in 1972, argued that the Cold War had its
origins in 19th century conflicts between Russia and America over the opening
of East Asia to US trade, markets, and influence. LaFeber argued that the US
commitment at the close of World War II to ensuring a world in which every
state was open to US influence and trade, underpinned many of the conflicts
that triggered the beginning of the Cold War.
Starting with Gar Alperovitz, in his influential Atomic Diplomacy:
Hiroshima and Potsdam (1965), "revisionist" scholars have focused on the
US decision to use atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the
last days of World War II. In their view, the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and
Hiroshima, in effect, started the Cold War. According to Alperovitz, the bombs
were not used on an already defeated Japan to win the war, but to intimidate
the Soviets, signaling that the US would use nuclear weapons to structure a
postwar world around US interests as US policymakers saw fit. According to
some revisionists, Japan had tried to surrender for several months, but the US
wanted to test nuclear weapons in war and, most importantly, show its power to
the Soviet Union.
Joyce and Gabriel Kolko's The Limits of Power: The World and US Foreign
Policy, 1945–1954 (1972) has also received considerable attention in the
historiography on the Cold War. The Kolkos argued US policy was both
reflexively anticommunist and counterrevolutionary. The US was not necessarily
fighting Soviet influence, but any form of challenge to the US economic and
political prerogatives through either covert or military means. In this
sense, the Cold War is less a story of rivalry between two blocs, and more a
story of the ways by which the dominant states within each bloc controlled and
disciplined their own populations and clients, and about who supported and
stood to benefit from increased arms production and political anxiety over a
perceived external enemy.
Post-revisionism
The "revisionist" interpretation produced a critical reaction of its own.
In a variety of ways, "post-revisionist" scholarship, before the fall of
Communism, challenged earlier works on the origins and course of the Cold War.
During the period, "post-revisionism" challenged the "revisionists" by
accepting some of their findings but rejecting most of their key claims.
Particularly, post-revisionist historians argued that revisionists put too
much emphasis on US economic considerations while ignoring domestic politics
and perceptions held at the time. Another current attempted to strike a
balance between the "orthodox" and "revisionist" camps, identifying areas of
responsibility for the origins of the conflict on both sides. Thomas G.
Paterson, in Soviet-American Confrontation (1973), for example, viewed
Soviet hostility and US efforts to dominate the postwar world as equally
responsible for the Cold War.
The seminal work of this approach was John Lewis Gaddis's The United
States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (1972). The account was
immediately hailed as the beginning of a new school of thought on the Cold War
claiming to synthesize a variety of interpretations. Gaddis then maintained
that "neither side can bear sole responsibility for the onset of the Cold
War." He did, however, emphasize the constraints imposed on US policymakers
due to the complications of domestic politics. Gaddis has, in addition,
criticized some "revisionist" scholars, particularly Williams, for failing to
understand the role of Soviet policy in the origins of the Cold War.
Out of the "post-revisionist" literature emerged a new area of inquiry that
was more sensitive to nuance and interested less in the question of who
started the conflict than in offering insight into US and Soviet actions and
perspectives. From this perspective, the Cold War was not so much the
responsibility of either side, but rather the result of predictable tensions
between two world powers that had been suspicious of one another for nearly a
century. For example, Ernest May wrote in a 1984 essay:
After the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union were
doomed to be antagonists.... There probably was never any real possibility
that the post-1945 relationship could be anything but hostility verging on
conflict... Traditions, belief systems, propinquity, and convenience ... all
combined to stimulate antagonism, and almost no factor operated in either
country to hold it back.
From this view of "post-revisionism" emerged a line of inquiry that
examines how Cold War actors perceived various events, and the degree of
misperception involved in the failure of the two sides to reach common
understandings of their wartime alliance and their disputes.
While Gaddis does not hold either side entirely responsible for the onset
of the conflict, he has now argued that the Soviets should be held clearly
more accountable for the ensuing problems. According to Gaddis, Stalin was in
a much better position to compromise than his Western counterparts, given his
much broader power within his own regime than Truman, who was often undermined
by vociferous political opposition at home. Asking if it were possible to
predict that the wartime alliance would fall apart within a matter of months,
leaving in its place nearly a half century of cold war, Gaddis wrote in a 1997
essay, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History:
Geography, demography, and tradition contributed to this outcome but did
not determine it. It took men, responding unpredictably to circumstances, to
forge the chain of causation; and it took [Stalin] in particular, responding
predictably to his own authoritarian, paranoid, and narcissistic
predisposition, to lock it into place.
For Stalin, Gaddis continues, "World politics was an extension of Soviet
politics, which was in turn an extension of Stalin's preferred personal
environment: a zero-sum game, in which achieving security for one meant
depriving everyone else of it."
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