Realism and Idealism - The cold war

It required no more than the postwar Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe,
in defiance of the Western principle of self-determination, to create
doubts regarding the Kremlin's ultimate intentions. As early as
1946, anti-Soviet officials and members of Congress predicted further
Soviet expansion into war torn Europe and elsewhere. Clark
Clifford's September 1946 report to President Truman, reflecting
the views of top U.S. officials, described a deeply threatened world. When
suspected Soviet ambitions, in early 1947, seemed to focus on Greece and
Turkey, the Truman administration framed the Truman Doctrine, with its
corresponding rhetorical predictions of falling dominoes across Europe,
Africa, or Asia, should Greece fall to the country's communist-led
guerrillas. Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan accepted the
administration's dire predictions uncritically.
"Greece," he wrote on 12 March, "must be helped or
Greece sinks permanently into the communist order. Turkey inevitably
follows. Then comes the chain reaction which might sweep from the
Dardanelles to the China Seas." Never before, critics noted, had
U.S. leaders described external dangers in such limitless, imprecise
terms. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, Soviet expert George Kennan,
and columnist Walter Lippmann objected to the language. Lippmann accused
the administration of launching a crusade, not defining a policy.

Even as the West triumphed in all of its anti-Soviet policies during the
next two years, including the creation of West Germany and the formation
of NATO, U.S. fears of the Soviet Union continued to mount. The National
Security Council's study NCS 7, dated 30 March 1948, defined the
Kremlin's challenge in global terms. "The ultimate objective
of Soviet-directed world communism," the document averred,
"is the domination of the world." NCS 68, of April 1950,
comprised the final and most elaborate attempt of the Truman Cold War
elite to arrive at a definition of the burgeoning Soviet threat. It
concluded that the Soviet Union, "unlike previous aspirants to
hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and
seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world."
What underwrote such fears was not the prospect of Soviet military
expansionism; Soviet armed forces were not prepared to march anywhere.
Rather, it was the fear that the Kremlin, with its alleged control of
international communism, could expand endlessly, without force, merely by
inciting communist revolutions. Actually, by mid-century, Europe was
stabilized with a vengeance. The United States and its allies would not
risk war to change the status quo on the European continent; the Soviets
had no power to do so. Europe was divided, but incredibly stable.

Events in East Asia, where the United States faced two unwanted,
powerfully led communist revolutions in China and Indochina, seemed to
confirm the fears of Soviet expansionism. The reason is clear. Washington
officials presumed, logically, that both revolutions were under Soviet
control. The State Department's China experts, in a memorandum of
October 1948, concluded that the Soviets had established control of China
as firmly "as in the satellite countries behind the Iron
Curtain." The Soviet Union, apparently, had taken over China
without one conquering or occupying soldier. Dean Acheson claimed no less.
"The communist leaders," he declared, "have foresworn
their Chinese heritage and have publicly announced their subservience to a
foreign power, Russia." Following the Chinese communist victory in
late 1949, NSC 48/1 declared: "The USSR is now an Asiatic power of
the first magnitude with expanding influence and interests extending
throughout continental Asia and into the Pacific."

By the 1960s, much of America's predominant realism had become
soft, emphasizing less the requirements of security and defense than the
need of accommodation with the realities of coexistence. Convinced that
previous administrations had exaggerated the Soviet threat, President
Jimmy Carter set out in 1977 to establish a more relaxed, flexible,
nonideological relationship with the Soviet Union and China. With the U.S.
failure in Vietnam, the country could no longer maintain the illusion of
global power. Carter recognized that reality by lessening the strategic
importance of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Nationalism, he believed,
limited Soviet as well as American influence in the Third World. In
dismissing the Cold War commitment to global containment, the Carter
administration accepted Soviet activity in the Afro-Asian world with
profound indifference. It expected the Soviets to respond by showing
strategic restraint in exploiting opportunities for adventurism created by
the new burst of revolutionary turmoil across the Third World. By the
mid-1970s, former Democratic liberals launched, as neoconservatives, an
anticommunist crusade to reassert America's role as defender of the
free world against the renewed Soviet danger. The neoconservatives found
themselves aligned with the traditional Right, characterized by Republican
columnists William Buckley, George Will, William Safire, and Patrick
Buchanan.

Already facing open challenges to its alleged loss of will, the Carter
administration reacted to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in late
December 1979, with bewilderment and rage. National security adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski warned the country that the Soviet Union now
threatened American interests from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Japan.
On 4 January, the president revealed his fears to the nation. "A
Soviet-occupied Afghanistan," he declared, "threatens both
Iran and Pakistan and is a stepping stone to possible control over much of
the world's oil supplies…. If the Soviets…maintain
their dominance over Afghanistan and then extend their control to adjacent
countries, the stable, strategic and peaceful balance of the entire world
will be changed."

The widespread assumptions that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan exposed
south and Southwest Asia to further Soviet encroachment pushed American
hawkishness to a new high. For many journalists and public officials, the
Soviet invasion sounded the inauguration of another cold war. Polls as
well as the reports of newspaper correspondents around the country
revealed the return of an assertive, Cold War mentality.

Ronald Reagan caught the country's post-Afghan alarms at full tide,
embellished them, and rode them to victory in the presidential campaign of
1980. He and the Republican Party pilloried the Carter administration for
leading the country into the posture of "weakness, inconsistency,
vacillation, and bluff" that enabled the Soviet Union to surpass
the United States in military power. Under Reagan, the Committee on the
Present Danger gained the influence that Carter had denied it; fifty-one
of its members secured positions in the Reagan administration. The Reagan
team determined to counter the global Soviet threat by aiding Nicaragua
and El Salvador, thereby preventing the rhetorical dominoes from falling
across both South America and North America.

Despite the new administration's tough rhetoric and massive
expansion of the military budget, it maintained the same defense posture
of previous administrations, much to the disgust of those who took the
Reagan rhetoric of rollback seriously. The Reagan administration made no
effort to recover the alleged losses of the Carter years in Africa and the
Middle East. It accepted the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, but held the
established containment lines. Indeed, what perpetuated the decades of
laudable superpower coexistence was the decision of successive
administrations to abjure the dictates of ideology and pursue the limited
goals of containment.

The process of Soviet disintegration culminated in the collapse of the
Soviet satellite empire in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the demise of the
Cold War during the following year. Reagan supporters attributed the
Soviet collapse to the rhetorical toughness and military buildup of the
Reagan years. For Soviet experts, the communist regime's crash
flowed naturally from its internal flaws, its political erosion, and its
ideological rejection.