Other characteristics of the postwar era are worth noting. After 1945 the world witnessed the outbreak of two global wars that literally touched every country in the international system. The first was between white and non-white, European and non-European and the issue was liberation. The result was foreordained. Liberation prevailed. Colonialism ended.
The other global war was ideological. Indeed, the cold war was our first truly world war. In the first and second world wars, fighting did take place in several different regions. But there were major areas of the globe that remained relatively untouched, most of Africa, Latin America or South Asia for example. Because of the cold war’s ideological character, the struggle was everywhere. All regions were touched. Every single country or dependency became involved and the superpowers found reason to intervene virtually everywhere.
With the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, this global civil war is effectively over. The future of communism is in the hands of aging leaders in China, Cuba, North Korea and North Vietnam. Their days are numbered and so is the future of the movements they lead. This fact appears to many of us to alter radically the course of history, leading to the kind of turning point we faced in 1945. It certainly seems to be the case that the future of international relations will henceforth be different if only because the foreign policies of the Soviet Union and the United States are going to be so different. The primary organizing principle of postwar relations—the ideological struggle between the United States and the USSR—will no longer exist. That seems to be almost as significant a change as the arrival of American and Soviet troops in the heart of Europe.
No major new weapon has appeared on the international scene to rival the atomic bomb in its impact on international relations but other new features of the international system convince many that we are at a turning point: the rise of the trading state whose international power derives from its economic strength rather than its military might, the transformation of America from the globe’s leading creditor into its leading debtor, the evolution of Japan into the world’s most successful economy, the reunification of Germany, the globalization of world capital markets, and the rise of environmental dangers that affect the security of all countries regardless of political orientation. Yet of all the factors, the one that seems to have had the most immediate and profound effect is the end to the cold war.
But if this war has ended, why did it end? Who was responsible? Was it Mikhail Gorbachev, obviously a major figure in modern history? Was it Ronald Reagan with his defense buildup, the most massive peacetime arms effort in history? Or was something more profound at work that will help us to understand the world that is unfolding before us? The answer is not merely academic. If we attribute the end of the cold war to the actions of a few leaders whose appearance on the world stage can be seen as an accident, then we can fear that the arrival on the scene of a new leader might turn back the clock. Conversely, if more fundamental factors were involved, then we have less reason to fear the return of the cold war. A new leader would find it hard to reverse a process that is deeply entrenched internationally and had been set in motion not months before, but decades before.
In trying to assess the role of individuals as opposed to larger trends, we start out with a dilemma. Machiavelli once wrote that history’s record is written half by statesmen and half by fortune or fate. Statesmen, of course, claim all the credit for themselves while fortune by definition keeps her council. Hence the opportunity is created for self-serving memoirs by retired statesmen who claim all the credit for themselves or the opportunity is presented to analysts trying without full confidence or knowledge to see beneath the surface.
I am in the second category and my proposition is that the cold war, to remain cold, required a totalitarian enemy, one constitutionally incapable of evolving into a more normal international partner. By this definition, the cold war ceased with the historic address of Nikita Khrushchev before the 20th Party Congress, in which he unmasked Stalin before the elite of the Soviet Union. There was a reason that the Communist movement made strenuous efforts to keep this address secret. Knowledge of what Khrushchev said, we can now see, was explosive. As news spread of that speech, revolts broke out all over Eastern Europe. They were suppressed but thereafter the Communist world and especially the Soviet Union entered into an uneven process of becoming normal participants in the international system. And as the Soviet Union evolved so did the system that it led. The progress was fitful and the process is not yet complete, particularly in Asia, but the trend has been constant as we can see by looking at the postwar period in 10 year segments.
The high point of the cold war was 1945-55. Joseph Stalin, history’s most accomplished totalitarian, died only in 1953. While he lived, the Soviet Union was locked in fear as were those states that copied the Soviet system. Children denounced their parents, individuals were responsible for the imprisonment or death of their neighbors. The control of the state over the individual seemed almost total. But Stalin’s methods and the fear they engendered did not only affect the politics of the Communist world. It is no accident that during this decade the United States entered the self-destructive period of McCarthyism as working colleagues denounced one another and the civil liberties of all Americans were significantly curbed. The struggle between Communists and non- Communists in other countries was often conducted by war to the knife with hundreds of thousands of innocents harmed or even killed and whole communities destroyed as a result.
During this period the superpower relationship was largely marked by the signs of intense confrontation. In retrospect we can see that the two sides were involved in a struggle to establish the boundaries of the new postwar order. Major events were the Communist conquest of China, the Berlin Blockade, the Korean War, the creation of the two great alliance systems, the consolidation of Soviet power in Eastern Europe and the consolidation of American influence in Europe and off-shore Asia.
Efforts by each side to test the boundaries of the postwar division marked 1955-65. The Soviet Union encouraged militant Communist parties everywhere and the Communist movement made gains in such different areas as Latin America and Southeast Asia. Communists succeeded in gaining total control in Cuba and war broke out in South Vietnam. Meanwhile, the United States was engaged in similar efforts to test the postwar boundaries, primarily through the activities of the CIA. NSC directive 5412/1 of March 12, 1955, for example, authorized the CIA to enter into a covert war with communism. According to the directive, operations approved were to include “propaganda, political action, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition, escape and evasion and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states or groups including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrilla and refugee liberation groups.” The United States began to train armies for the day of liberation in Eastern Europe and China. Training camps were established on U.S. soil. On occasion Americans found out about this activity inadvertently. On December 7, 1961, a group of American civilians at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs, which serves both as a municipal airport and a U.S. Air Force base, found themselves ordered at gunpoint to lock themselves inside a hangar. When they looked through the window, they saw a group of oriental solders who turned out to be Tibetan guerrillas being trained in a remote part of Colorado. At government request the major papers in the United States suppressed any news of this sensational encounter.