The World the Cold War Made by James E. Cronin

Author:James E. Cronin [Cronin, James E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415908214
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1996-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

7 Communism’s Endings

In late spring 1976 George Bush, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, commissioned a review of the agency’s estimates of Soviet military strength by a group of outside experts who would come to be known as “Team B.” Chaired by the “Russophobe” Richard Pipes, Team B asserted that current CIA reports had been too optimistic about the Soviet Union, underestimating its capabilities and overlooking its aggressive intentions. The report’s conclusions were leaked in December 1976 in an obvious effort to push the incoming Carter administration away from détente and toward a confrontation with the Soviet Union.1 The manuever hardly seems to have been necessary, though it did contribute marginally to the growing pessimism about U.S.-Soviet relations. The interesting point about the exercise is therefore not its impact, nor its deeply flawed findings, nor what it says about Bush and the post-Watergate gloom of loyal Republicans but, rather, what it reveals about the assumptions surrounding the state of communism in the USSR and about the continued saliency of Cold War ideology.

By the early 1970s, Soviet leaders could boast confidently that the nation had achieved strategic parity with the United States, that its military and political strength had forced the West to recognize the legitimacy and permanence of its domination of Eastern Europe and to acquiesce to the “Brezhnev doctrine,” that its economic record had made these accomplishments possible, and that continued economic growth would sustain these positions of strength and allow further advances. It was indeed “this shift of the balance of forces in the world arena” that had made “peaceful co-existence and mutually advantageous cooperation” possible, according to Soviet spokesman Georgii Arbatov. Assumptions about the vitality and stability of the Soviet system were thus at the basis of Soviet foreign policy and of U.S. responses. Arbatov, again, made the connection explicit: “The possibility of successful talks with the U.S.A. and of positive changes in Soviet-American relations is ensured by the activity of our party, the Soviet state and the entire Soviet people in strengthening the homeland’s economic and defensive might, strengthening the ideological and political unity of our society and consolidating the Socialist Commonwealth.”2 Although U.S. experts debated whether this reality constituted the basis for peace and stability or the promise of confrontation, they agreed fundamentally on the underlying strength of the regime. Years later Pipes would insist that conservatives like him had perceived the mounting crisis of the Soviet system in the early 1980s, and that it was this perception that underpinned the foreign policy initiatives of the Reagan administration.3 But there is no evidence that they or anyone else detected the flaws in the Soviet economy or the fragility of its political system in the 1970s. On the contrary, the left, the right, and and the center shared a view that Soviet achievements were real, that they would persist, and that U.S. policy would have to take Soviet power into account as a structural feature of the system of international relations.

Where policymakers differed was over Soviet intentions.

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