In essence, the US offered the Europeans double containment – against the Soviets as well as against the Germans – while President Truman made it clear that part of the bargain was that the Europeans would put their economies together and coopt Germany into the club. This, one could say, was not only the origin of NATO but also, after the American-inspired OECD (Organisation for European Cooperation and Development), of the European Economic Community that was to become today’s European Union. Measured against the rise and fall of Soviet power in the second half of the twentieth century, US strategy was immensely successful in combining economic and military means, soft power and hard power, in order to contain and frustrate Soviet ambitions for world domination. In all of this, divided Germany, whether the Germans liked it or not, had a key role to play, both the catalyst of competition and its chief prize.
Containment, however, went through hard times. With Suez in 1956 London and Paris discovered that American nuclear guarantees did not cover post-imperial excursions beyond agreed NATO territory; it was only much later that the Americans recognized the vital strategic importance of the eastern Mediterranean, of the Suez Canal, of oil and nearby bases. Once Russian scientists, with the help of espionage and German experts, had tested nuclear weapons in 1949 and the hydrogen bomb in 1953 and sent intercontinental missiles into space, the correlation of forces changed in favour of the Soviets.
But how far? The answer to this question was to dominate much of the 1960s, starting with the Berlin crisis of 1958-61 and leaving behind uncertainty over whether the building of the infamous Berlin Wall was the end of the confrontation or just a pause in an unforgiving contest. Or was not the Cuban missile crisis just one year later an attempt to translate, once again, nuclear potential into geographic and political gain? Was Cuba an attempt to leverage the Soviet position in central Europe?
Soviet power goes global
Soviet outreach was long in coming. It did not start in Egypt and Syria, when Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s strong man, invited the Russians to build the Aswan Dam and allowed them to station troops in what had, for the best part of a century, been a British protectorate. Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique were turned into military colonies, mostly by proxies from Cuba. Afghanistan in 1979 was not only the last of those interventions which pretended to foster the cause of liberation, but it turned out to be the most disastrous one when casualties mounted and Russian mothers began to organize protests against the senseless sacrifice of their sons.
The Soviet Union had been extending throughout this period in a combination of ideological doctrine and military occupation. The Hungarian revolution of October 1956 demonstrated to the West the naked brutality of Soviet rule and sowed the seeds of doubt among communist sympathizers in the West. Inside the Soviet Union it provoked dissident movements among people who refused to believe any longer in the capacity of the Soviet system to adapt and to reform itself. Just over a decade later, the Prague Spring of 1968, once again crushed by Soviet tanks with a little fraternal help from the Warsaw Pact countries, was an open admission that Soviet power was about nothing but raw power. Even among some of the power elites throughout Eastern Europe doubts were growing.
Throughout the 1970s dissidents were persecuted, irrespective of the lofty aspirations signed by heads of government at Helsinki in 1975. But from then on, Helsinki Committees sprouted among the intelligentsia. In the Soviet Union samizdat and tamizdat made the rounds, shrouded in secrecy. Among all the satellite states only the leadership of the German Democratic Republic remained unquestioningly loyal to the cause. Faced with the freedom and prosperity of the western three quarters of Germany, and scrutinized by West German TV day and night, Ulbricht and Honecker had nowhere to go but to Moscow. When the winds of change began to be felt in the mid-1980s, they were left alone, no longer trusting their Soviet protectors, waiting for the end game: another Tiananmen Square in the summer of 1989, or the fall of the wall in November.
The long nuclear peace
All of this happened under the grim shadow of nuclear weapons, but these also imposed the sternest of discipline upon Soviet leaders. Moreover, they inspired a kind of Metternichian conservatism on all political leaders irrespective of which side they were on. They joined an informal and silent cartel of war avoidance. Raymond Aron, the French maître a penser, described the situation as ‘à guerre improbable; paix impossible’.
There was good reason to handle world affairs with care. Berlin and Cuba offered the two superpowers ample opportunity to imagine what nuclear war between them would mean: the end of the world. All of a sudden they found they had more in common than anticipated. As a consequence, they started formalizing their relationship through the so-called red telephone or hot line, linking centres in Moscow and Washington to avoid accidental war, and continuing with the Test Ban Treaty: no more nuclear tests in the Earth’s atmosphere. Moreover, they found that they had to avoid at almost any price another direct military confrontation.
The superpowers also learnt that nuclear weapons, whatever the generals told the politicians, were not for fighting wars, and once small powers got hold of them, were brutal equalizers among states. From this followed the two-tier system of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), limiting the number of nuclear ‘haves’ to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, who by the end of the 1960s were established nuclear powers anyway. More than one hundred nations signed up to a treaty that was clearly iniquitous – five ‘haves’ and the rest ‘have-nots’ – with Israel, Pakistan and India remaining outside. The strength of the treaty lay in its supervision by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Its obvious weakness was the absence of sanctions and corrective action should a signatory to the treaty one day decide to break out. South Africa, Brazil and Libya tried and gave up. North Korea is still in the bidding. In today’s world Iran seems to be the most conspicuous offender, supported half-heartedly by Russia, and opposed wholeheartedly by the US.
Philosophically, by the end of the 1960s both the superpowers had resigned themselves to the global status quo, the US not bent – except in rhetoric – on making the world safe for democracy and creating the ‘new world order’ promised on day one of the USA; the Soviets no longer engaged in a worldwide do-or-die campaign under the Leninist motif of ‘peace to the huts, war to the palaces’. Instead of policies short of war that had characterized East-West confrontation from the Korean War (1950-54) to Indochina, to Suez and to Berlin and Cuba, the nuclear world powers went through an agonizing learning process that resulted in a kind of long nuclear peace.