Turning Points in Ending the Cold War by Kiron K. Skinner

Author:Kiron K. Skinner [Skinner, Kiron K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780817946333
Google: LcfyAAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18737358
Publisher: Hoover Press/Stanford Univ.
Published: 2007-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Commentary

Peter W. Rodman

Reversal of Fortune?

AMERICAN ANALYSTS of the cold war competition in the third world have the greatest respect for Georgi Mirski as one of those perceptive (and courageous) scholars in Moscow who led an agonizing reappraisal of Soviet third world policies in the 1980s. Dr. Mirski describes this reappraisal well in his essay, though he is too modest about his own role.

His essay reflects the same forthrightness and insight. Undoubtedly he is correct in saying that both sides sometimes treated the competition in the third world as more important than it really was; in retrospect, it was clearly never as central to the cold war rivalry as the division of Europe or the strategic nuclear balance. Nonetheless, I continue to find the contest in the third world the most interesting intellectually. From the days of Woodrow Wilson and Lenin, the anticolonial struggle in the developing world seemed to both sides a moral as well as a strategic opportunity. The United States and Soviet Russia both considered themselves free of the taint of European colonialism, and indeed natural champions of the anticolonial cause. Both sides, accordingly, invested much of their self-esteem and historical self-confidence in the question of how this contest would turn out—which side the new nations would “choose.” In the 1950s and 1960s, there were certainly many in America who imagined that the global balance of power would be decided there. Recall books and films of the 1950s such as The Ugly American that reflected Americans’ angst about whether they were sufficiently sensitive to the new nations’ needs.1 Recall the “long twilight struggle” to which President John F. Kennedy repeatedly summoned the American people in the early months of his term.2 Many of the bitterest domestic controversies over foreign policy during the cold war were over our engagement in third world conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Central America.

Dr. Mirski is also correct to point out two important historical moments when the third world contest did play a pivotal role in the East-West confrontation. He describes perceptively how Soviet overreaching in the third world doomed the détente efforts of the 1970s. And he is correct that in the 1980s the first practical evidence of the winding down of the cold war came in the negotiations that resolved a number of these conflicts (Afghanistan, Angola, and later Central America and Cambodia). The new inside information that Dr. Mirski presents about Soviet calculations (and miscalculations) makes this essay valuable.

An American observer is bound to offer some additional perspective, however. To Dr. Mirski, the prime mover in the endgame was Mikhail Gorbachev, who, he says, “initiated” and “first manifested” the policy of seeking an end to this dimension of competition. Both sides’ third world policies had failed, he says, and it was Mr. Gorbachev whose “new political thinking” broke the stalemate and led to the resolution of these conflicts. The American perspective is somewhat different. No one can doubt Mr. Gorbachev’s pivotal importance, but it is not chauvinistic of me to suggest that Dr.

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