Totalitarian Themes

Moreover, the powerful totalitarian scenario of the 1930s served retrospectively to sustain the position: totalitarian regimes, intrinsically bent on world conquest and impervious to change, made any attempt to negotiate with them useless, indeed counterproductive. Witness Munich in 1938. Totalitarian fascism had been crushed in war but totalitarian communism, headquartered in Moscow, not only remained intact but had been invigorated by that war.

Yet, paradoxically, the conflation of fascism and communism immediately invited sharp differentiation between them: the same but actually, it turns out, very different. Fascism (Hitler and Nazi Germany, chiefly) was impetuous, reckless, brashly and unthinkingly violent; communism, by contrast, was cautious, stealthy, sly, liable strategically to avoid open war in favor of operating in the shadows, subverting the social order of the Free, in short a lot more clever and a lot more dangerous.

The line of division in that regard was rigid and closed one way, and permeable the other: the Iron Curtain on the one hand (Winston Churchill’s line from Stettin to Trieste, soon, alas, to be revised when Tito went his own way), and containment on the other. One wonders about the strategic connotations of such a heavy metaphorical construction: defensively it may have made sense for Moscow, but what of moving the whole thing expansively west? Not an easy proposition, presumably.

Meanwhile, the line of containment in Europe between outside and inside was never a line proper because the parasitical (or cancerous) enemy was able to maintain a considerable presence in the form of domestic communist parties and other agents — and even without these forces there would be an urgent problem of keeping Western society prophylactically healthy, to foster vigor so as to prevent internal disorder.

The step from differentiation to the notion of hot (Hitler) and cold (Stalin) war is not great, though Walter Lippmann, who put the term “Cold War” into public circulation in the fall of 1947, actually placed a good deal of the blame for the war — which he thought of as frozen relations — on the lack of realistic US dealmaking.

Nevertheless, as Lippmann came to see, the policy worked well in anchoring at home the unprecedented engagements abroad in ostensible peacetime, engagements that included extensive alliances, albeit in his view not always in appropriate regions. Geopolitically, the result was indeed remarkably successful from an internationalist standpoint, above all that of the decisive Atlantic community. The posited threat from totalitarianism had silenced virtually all mainstream isolationists.

A bipartisan commitment to fighting the Cold War on a global scale emerged, political disagreement limited to the means and strategies of how to do it, formulaically expressed in containment versus rollback. The Faustian price here lay in the inevitable gap between the unlimited threat and the limited range of what one could actually do: every administration was open to criticism for not doing enough or doing the wrong things (witness John F. Kennedy’s famous missile gap).

Only after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the beginning of Sino-Soviet split, followed by the disastrous (in due course) intervention in Vietnam, did Cold War orthodoxy mutate into something else — détente, relaxation of tension, and above all, recognition of the Soviet regime as a legitimate Great Power and along with that the advent of sustained diplomacy.

Recognition of Rivalry

By no means was this peace and reconciliation. It was, however, recognition of rivalry and competition under managed forms of sorts — reversing in that sense the 1946–47 moment when there had been an odd case of anagnorisis, the recognition (discovery) that the Soviet Union was in fact world-conquering totalitarianism, in turn calling for a US posture of no recognition, as such a power could have no legitimate interests. After 1963, in short, the situation is qualitatively different.

This, then, is when I think the Cold War proper came to an end. Support for such a notion is scarce for obvious reasons: the Cold War makes sense as a sizeable chunk of world-historical time, postwar, a seemingly transparent period featuring the United States and the USSR as leading antagonists. And when the latter dissolves, so does the polarity and so does the war. This is the standard view from left to right, incidentally, traversing the political spectrum.

There is a spontaneous element of truth in it insofar as something truly world historical did actually happen in 1989–91 with the collapse (or more accurately destruction) of the Soviet Union. Why not call that moment, conveniently, the end of the Cold War? Significant obstacles, anomalies if you will, must however then be surmounted.

First and foremost there is the Sino-Soviet split. As noted but not often addressed specifically from the angle of the Cold War, the two giants of the communist world began the 1960s as allies of a kind but ended the decade as deadly enemies, Moscow denounced in Beijing as imperialist dogs or worse while outright armed clashes flared up in some border regions.

By the early 1970s, unthinkably by Cold War standards, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of China had better relations with the United States than with each other. If there was a Cold War at that point, it made more sense to apply it to the polarity between the USSR and the PRC.

The geopolitical terrain, in short, had changed profoundly. Any garden variety of realism (let alone Nixon and Kissinger’s) could readily account for this, a classical Cold War view not easily so. For in the axiom “totalitarianism > world conquest > cold war > saving grace of the indispensable Leader of the Free World and its defense,” there was little conceptual space for a fundamental split of international communism, the totalitarian antithesis of freedom. Tito in 1948 was one thing, an important but minor revision of the order of things; China an altogether different challenge.

In 1971, it should be remembered, Beijing was still a radical regime, though by then coming around to the view that the main contradiction in the world was with Moscow, accordingly also the main enemy. Thus the otherwise incomprehensible Chinese support for the Pinochets of that time as objectively on the right (that is, the Chinese) side of history, firmly against the New Tsars in Moscow and its local agents such as Allende. Thus, too, the Chinese agreement with US neoconservatives that détente was appeasement.

Out of Date

Beijing, at any rate, was now no longer a pariah but a regime deemed proper for a US alliance, however tacit. So the founding polarity of the Cold War seemed to have fallen by the wayside along with the policy, the grand policy. One might object that the frame did not require a single polarity, though it is hard then to see how the basic props of the US articulation could survive. One could maintain, with some difficulty, that cracks in the axiomatic monolith were natural and even products of successful US policy.

Nonetheless, in that case the setup had changed in its foundations. By any measure, totalitarian world conquest and the phantom of international communism had suffered a severe blow, surely, when Moscow had to keep a million men facing the PRC while Nixon, suitably feted, toured the two communist capitals. Ipso facto, deriving the Cold War directly from the systemic differences between capitalism and communism/socialism, or, alternatively, between freedom and totalitarianism, no longer made much sense.

Meanwhile, a certain mutuality was recognized. Accepting the existence of a Cold War always carried the implication, evil imputations notwithstanding, that both sides as indicated were in some way responsible for its conduct. Nuclear weapons provide the primary case in point. They signified the horrific effects if the Cold War should ever turn hot.

Doubtless, even before one could think of the balance of terror as parity (the United States far outweighed the USSR at least into the late 1960s), nuclear arsenals served as deterrence. In that sense they were fundamental in keeping the Cold War cold. However, only with considerable contortions could nuclear weapons ever be made to fit the original frame. The Eisenhower administration, for instance, tried to pass them off as ordinary munitions, just bigger bang for the buck.

It didn’t work. As everyone sensed, nothing by way of outstanding conflicts between Washington and Moscow could justify nuclear conflagration. In due course, too, the logic of these weapons and their use, a rarefied and phantasmagorical space, became rather similar for both sides. A certain mutual identity emerged, as manifested in the Test Ban (1963) and the Non-Proliferation (1968) Treaties. While the balance of terror is probably the iconographic essence of the Cold War, I actually think of nuclear weapons as ideology killers.

As a policy and a vision, then, the Cold War could never totally cover the facts. It was becoming more difficult for Washington to convincingly parade its clients and interventions as freedom incarnate. Once the binarism had gone — not only because of the Sino-Soviet conflict and decolonization/the Third World but also, in a minor key, de Gaulle’s European eccentricities — much of the energizing power of the grand policy faded.

Vietnam, begun as Cold War counterinsurgency, turned into an intensive hot war for, essentially, the sake of credibility. Nixon and Kissinger continued that ruthless policy, though their lasting interest was always de facto to reassert US power in the name of power. The Cold War was passé.

Competing Concepts

Competing concepts also appeared. Consider a very different setting and scenario: Cuba and the problem of anti-imperialism. Deeply disappointed over Khrushchev’s retreat in the Missile Crisis (the rest of us no doubt thankful and Fidel Castro himself eventually came round) and after failing to make a deal with the Kennedy administration, the Cuban regime came to support various struggles, insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, first rather unsuccessfully in Latin America in the 1960s, then to greater effect in Africa in the 1970s.

Was this sequence part of the Cold War, even its intensification? I think not. From the Cuban vantage point, the whole notion of a Cold War will have seemed secondary or even a category mistake. It certainly didn’t cover the Cuban facts. Closer to hand was the far more real matrix of imperialism/anti-imperialism, subject as the country was to massive sanctions and imposed isolation by successive administrations in Washington (the exceptions being Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama).

There was also the specifically Third Worldist aspect, the Cuban identification with national liberation struggles in the colonial and postcolonial world. Insurgency, the privileged form here, meant armed struggle, real war, partisan war for victory — not a Cold War. In the case of Cuba in Angola, it was a case of counterinsurgency, assisting the regime against rival forces backed from the outside as well as against South African incursions — again, armed force in no uncertain terms.

In the bilateral context of Washington’s continued exclusion of Cuba, one can perhaps speak of a Cold War of sorts: the United States could not invade (the price of the Missile Crisis deal in 1962, but any other skullduggery was permitted), while Cuba could obviously do nothing much to the United States except offer solidaric support elsewhere for the forces of anti-imperialism. That support was not, it should be underlined, any simple proxy effort for Moscow. Cuba often acted on its own initiative, and, given the facts of material dependence, often surprised the Soviets in the process.

Latin America, Cuba aside, nevertheless represents a problem here: What of the widespread advent of militarized, intensely repressive, and murderous regimes from the 1960s onward, forces acting officially with standard reference to internal subversion and the need in the name of anti-communism to destroy it? One might well argue that the process marks an exacerbation of the Cold War and certainly not the opposite.

The United States, after all, gave tacit and often material support to these violent regimes, and on occasion it also conducted outright intervention (the Dominican Republic, 1965). No president until Jimmy Carter — Nicaragua to his credit — could withstand accusations of permitting another Cuba in the region. Such scenarios, largely imagined but effective, served however to inscribe unequivocally Latin America as a dependably and properly American space.

More and better anti-communism per se did not amount to intensified Cold War. I rather doubt that Kissinger was at all interested in the domestic policies of the Allende regime. All things being equal, he would perhaps even have gone along; but things were not in fact equal, and the vicious Pinochet was an altogether better alternative.

Soviet Perspectives

The Soviet view, meanwhile, read the Cold War as a potential replay of the 1930s, the threat to be handled by the defensive strategy of anti-fascism: prevent fascism by mobilizing the widest possible coalition on the widest possible platform (for example, peace and national independence, policies aimed, in theory, at forces outside the reactionary circles within monopoly capital supposedly gearing up to destroy the Soviet Union).

Whatever its errors, this was a dialectical conception, an interactive binary, two sides locked in a contradictory unity that defined both. It was also a realist view. Social forces represent material interests and states act accordingly in interested ways. The Cold War was a name, an American name, signifying an offensive on all levels against the Soviet Union and the rising democratic camp.

Détente, any relaxation of tension, was predictably credited as a success for the Soviet peace policy — say, hearing Richard Nixon in the Kremlin announcing the end of the Cold War in 1972 with a very jolly Leonid Brezhnev. Continuity marked the Soviet frame because the logic allowed it. Bad moments such as the Cold War were the result of ascendant reaction and anti-Sovietism in the United States; good moments, dominant over time, the obvious effect of Moscow’s steady progression along the historical path to the splendid end.

After Stalin, however, Moscow had also begun to look beyond the boundaries of the immediate security zone and discover the virtues of anti-imperialism and even neutralism, forces not necessarily pro-Soviet but objectively belonging to the side of progress. This generated by the 1960s a great deal of competition in the Third World with the United States (and eventually with China).

From the Soviet standpoint, this was a realm beyond the emerging bilateral détente. Insisting that everything was in fact linked, Kissinger disagreed but, notably, not on any Cold War grounds. And if the Cold War entailed a freeze on diplomacy, Kissinger’s approach and practice may be described as its antithesis, hyperdiplomacy.

I emphasize a specific conjuncture in which the classical Cold War ceased to mean very much and indeed did not answer to existing realities — diverse, fluid and violent as they often were. It is to insist on the stricto sensu position that, seriously, the essence of the Cold War was an American affair that was over in 1963, resurrected briefly though it was in the early Reagan years.

A Losing Proposition

To restrict the term in such a specific manner is not to minimize the depth and extension of contradictions elsewhere and afterward. On the contrary, it is to open for inquiry beyond the founding polarity but with a clear view of what it is to invoke something called the Cold War. When I say “essence,” I’m not being literal. My periodization does not posit any real, ready-made object out there in history such as the Cold War, which we can find if we only work hard and widely enough.

Instead, the wager is that to proceed historically in explanatory pursuit of the object here is to provide an analytical account of its genesis as a project, its conditions of emergence. My periodization on that score, then, is far from standard. It is also a losing proposition. I have thus come to acquiesce, provisionally, to the everyday, sweeping view while, in the last instance, sticking historically to my original thesis.