CHAPTER III

——————

The Soviet-American
Cold War

IT WOULD be hard to deny that the most important single phenomenon in international politics since the Second World War has been the relationship, essentially an adversary one, between the United States and the Soviet Union, which is often known as the Cold War. Its ending has been hailed by American optimists and Soviet propagandists, but these reports of its death have always turned out to be greatly exaggerated. Every responsible leader on both sides has recognized the suicidal risks of a direct confrontation and has so far successfully avoided one, with a partial exception for the Cuban missile crisis. But if the Soviet-American crises that have occurred from time to time have never escalated to the level of war, neither have the periodic swings toward détente yet produced a condition of true harmony. In Trotsky’s famous phrase, the relationship has been one of neither war nor peace. An objective analysis must assign more than half, although not all, the responsibility for this unhappy situation to the Soviet Union.

Planning for the Postwar Period

During the last years of the Second World War, there were two main schools of thought among American leaders about the postwar period; both recognized the crucial importance of the Soviet Union’s wartime role and its postwar relations with the United States. The first school, led by President Roosevelt himself, was the idealistic or universalist school in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson. By prolonging the spirit of the wartime alliance somehow into the postwar period, and by bringing both the United States and the Soviet Union into the United Nations Organization as Wilson had tried unsuccessfully to bring the United States into the League of Nations, this school hoped to blur the edges of the Soviet Union’s Marxist-Leninist ideology and its tendency to regard the Western democracies as its adversaries. Regional spheres of influence for any major power were rejected in principle by this school as relics of the bad old power politics of an earlier era. The other school, which can be labeled the realistic, accepted the inevitability if not the desirability of power politics and spheres of influence and generally took a less optimistic view of the possibilities for postwar cooperation with the Soviet Union. The most articulate exponent of this view was George F. Kennan, a Foreign Service Officer stationed in Moscow at the end of the war, whose penetrating despatches did a great deal to awaken official Washington from its tendency toward euphoria about Soviet intentions and to a more accurate perception of the problem. As a result of interaction with the American realists, and still more with foreign realists such as Churchill and Stalin himself, the universalists modified their position reluctantly to the extent that they conceded to the Soviet Union, as the strongest power on the European continent, a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, which Soviet arms were in the process of liberating from the Germans. But Roosevelt naively insisted on seeking and accepting Stalin’s assurance that the countries in the Soviet sphere would be allowed to have democratic governments, for the first time in their history (except in the case of Czechoslovakia).

To Stalin, this would have meant no sphere of influence at all. Since about the time of the decisive victory of his armies over the Germans at Stalingrad early in 1943, he had been planning on the assumption, a virtual certainty, that the Soviet Union would not only defeat Germany but would be in a position to dominate a considerable area in Eurasia outside its current borders, especially in Eastern Europe. As he once indicated at a Kremlin banquet, he expected another war with Germany, and perhaps with other enemies as well, in fifteen or twenty years. Against that contingency he wanted a buffer zone wider and more securely defended than the mere eastern half of Eastern Europe, which he had acquired as his sphere through his famous pact of 1939 with Hitler, but which had been overrun two years later by the Germans on their way to attack the Soviet Union. To Stalin, a true buffer zone consisted of satellite states run by local Communist Parties controlled from Moscow. But he was prepared to move fairly cautiously toward this goal, for two main reasons. He did not want to disrupt the wartime alliance too soon or too violently, if only because one of his allies, the United States, had the atomic bomb (after 1945) whereas he did not (until 1949). Secondly, he did not want to endanger the promising political future of the vigorous French and Italian Communist Parties by embarrassing them in the eyes of their countrymen through obviously heavy-handed behavior in Eastern Europe or elsewhere.

By late 1943 Stalin felt confident enough of the basic strength of his position to begin negotiating face to face with Roosevelt and Churchill on wartime strategy and postwar arrangements and to promise something that he regarded as being in the Soviet interest and that the Americans also wanted for their own reasons, namely that he would enter the war against Japan shortly after the defeat of Germany. It was mainly at his conferences at Yalta (February 1945, with Roosevelt and Churchill) and Potsdam (July 1945, with Truman and Attlee) that the initial shape of the postwar arrangements was worked out, generally to the Soviet Union’s advantage.

It was agreed that the Soviet Union should annex some islands (mainly the Kuriles) from Japan, East Prussia from Germany, and the eastern part of Poland (so that the Soviet Union now bordered for the first time on Czechoslovakia and Hungary). Poland was to be compensated with German territory, an arrangement calculated to help insure Polish dependence on Soviet support in the face of probable German irredentism. Eastern Europe, apart from Greece, was to be in effect a Soviet sphere of influence; Stalin promised to allow free elections and democratic governments in these countries, but it was soon to become clear that there was no effective way to compel him to fulfill this commitment. Stalin also received Western recognition of the Mongolian People’s Republic (Outer Mongolia), which had been a Soviet satellite for twenty years, as his sphere of influence, and of his freedom to press Chiang Kaishek’s government for the right to use the main railways and ports of Manchuria. He was to be awarded reparations from the Axis powers, principally Germany and Japan. Germany, and possibly Japan, were to be divided into occupation zones, including one for the Soviet Union; the boundary of the Soviet zone in East Germany was drawn considerably to the west of the farthest point reached by the Soviet armies at the time of V-E Day, so that Berlin (which was divided into four occupation sectors) found itself well within the Soviet zone. Roosevelt conceded Stalin’s demand for a veto (for the other permanent members as well as the Soviet Union) in the United Nations Security Council and for three seats in the United Nations for the Soviet Union (one each for the Russian, Ukrainian, and White Russian Republics, all of which were completely controlled from Moscow). In exchange for all of this, as well as valuable wartime support and the possibility of postwar credits, Stalin conceded that Western Europe was outside his sphere and in effect could be an American sphere to the extent that the United States had the ability and desire to make it so, although he probably expected the United States to retreat into postwar isolationism after a time.

Breakdown of the Wartime Alliance

The uneasy wartime partnership between the Soviet Union and its Western allies began to collapse in favor of the Cold War as Soviet armies moved westward on non-Soviet territory, against crumbling German resistance, in 1944. Poland was the first country whose fate became a major issue between Stalin and his Western partners, both because its geography made it the first (apart from Romania) to be occupied by the Soviets and because of its political importance to the West: Britain had gone to war with Germany in 1939 on account of the German attack on Poland, and Roosevelt could hardly forget in an election year that the United States contained several million voters of Polish extraction. Ignoring these sensitivities, Stalin promptly showed his ruthless determination to crush all non-Communist leadership in Poland and bring it rapidly under the control of Soviet-dominated Polish Communists. A similar objective was implemented, with some variations, in the other Soviet-occupied countries as well: East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Yugoslavia and Albania escaped full-fledged Soviet military occupation but were taken over by their local Communist Parties after an anti-German guerrilla war; Czechoslovakia was occupied only briefly by Soviet forces but came under the control of its own Communist Party, the only strong one in prewar Eastern Europe, in 1948, without a civil war.

The Soviet victory brought difficulties to other countries as well. There was a flourishing Communist insurgency in Greece for a few years after 1944, although it was supported mainly from Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and Stalin regarded it as expendable, since he conceded that Greece was in the Western sphere. Soviet forces remained in occupation of northern Iran after the end of the war and tried to set up a local Communist regime but withdrew in the spring of 1946 under the pressure of an international crisis in which the United States supported the Iranian government. The Soviet Union tried unsuccessfully to pressure Turkey into ceding some territory.

It was reasonably clear that this behavior was part of an overall design whose main theme was hostility to the West, even though Stalin never gave any sign of an actual intention to invade Western Europe. He told his own people as early as February 1946 that they would have to continue sacrificing under stern discipline in view of the tense international situation. The Soviet Union’s armed forces were demobilized after the war only to a limited extent, whereas those of the United States were reduced drastically, so that there was no effective American military restraint on Soviet behavior apart from the atomic bomb. The latter, as well as the Soviet Union’s state of exhaustion after the defeat of Germany, was probably what prevented Stalin from behaving in an even more expansionist manner in the early postwar period than he did in fact.

It soon became obvious in Washington that more than nuclear deterrence was required to cope with the problem presented by Stalin and to alleviate the conditions around the Soviet periphery that seemingly tempted him to expand. The answer was the concept of containment, defined by its intellectual father George Kennan as “the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy.” The first official expression of this concept was the Truman Doctrine, announced in the spring of 1947, which promised economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey and to other countries that might be threatened by Soviet pressures in the future.

The Cold War passed from an undeclared to what amounted to a declared state over the central problem of Europe. Stalin not only refused an American invitation in 1947 to participate in the Marshall Plan for European economic recovery but vetoed the desire of the Polish and Czechoslovakian governments, Communist-dominated though they already largely were, to take part. He tried unsuccessfully to sabotage the operation of the Marshall Plan in Western Europe through a campaign of political violence on the part of the French and Italian Communist Parties, outraged by their expulsion from coalition governments in their respective countries in the spring of 1947. Stalin’s failure in Western Europe was symbolized by the defeat of the Italian Communists by the Christian Democrats in a hard-fought election in April 1948. Meanwhile, in the summer of 1947, he had established the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), an organization representing the Soviet and the major European Communist Parties including the French and Italian, as an aid to carrying on the political and propaganda aspects of the Cold War. The Cominform’s potential for international credibility and influence was badly shaken in the spring of 1948 by a crisis arising from Tito’s open and successful resistance to Stalin’s efforts to reduce Yugoslavia to the status of a satellite.

This great internal crisis was paralleled, in Stalin’s eyes, by an external one. By mid-1948 the American, British, and French governments, exasperated by the negative and obstructive character of Stalin’s German policy, were beginning to move toward the creation of a non-Communist German state through the merger of the three Western occupation zones. Stalin tried to stop this trend, which was highly objectionable to him, by blockading the land routes to West Berlin (i. e., the three sectors of Berlin occupied by the Western powers) in July 1948. But West Berlin managed to survive through the following winter on the strength of the toughness of its people and the famous American airlift, with which the Soviet Union chose not to interfere. Stalin quietly lifted the blockade in the spring of 1949. Later that year the Western occupation zones were formally merged in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), and the Soviet zone was proclaimed the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) while still under Moscow’s military occupation and political control.

The Berlin Blockade and the seemingly final breakdown of any hope for a common policy on Germany for the Soviet Union and the West produced an atmosphere of crisis in Western Europe, even though there was no evidence of an impending Soviet attack. In order to create instead an atmosphere of security and confidence that would promote West European economic recovery and political cooperation, the United States took the lead in forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in April 1949. It included all the West European countries except Spain, Switzerland, and West Germany (which was admitted in 1955), as well as the United States, Canada, Greece, and Turkey (the two latter countries joined in 1950). For some years at least, NATO’s existence did promote the goals for which it was established, even though there was probably no strictly military necessity for it in view of the possession by the United States of a nuclear deterrent.

Soviet-American Interaction in the Postwar Far East

The United States had two primary objectives in the Far East in 1945: to ensure that Japan would never again threaten the peace of the region, and to prevent a renewal of civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists in China. Stalin’s objectives were at the same time more flexible and more self-interested. George Kennan, the best authority on this subject then and now, described Stalin’s policy at the time as “a fluid resilient policy directed at the achievement of maximum power with minimum responsibility on portions of the Asiatic continent lying beyond the Soviet border.” This meant, in the Far East as in Europe, annexations and the creation of a buffer zone-cum-sphere of influence to the extent consistent with the overriding aim of avoiding a war with the United States. Stalin was considerably helped toward the fulfillment of his objectives by the eagerness of the United States that he should enter the war against Japan and save American lives by knocking out the supposedly powerful, but actually rather weak, Japanese forces in Manchuria. Stalin was determined to enter the war in any case and was delighted at the willingness of his naive American allies to reward him for what turned out to be a relatively easy military operation. He entered the war on August 8, 1945, so as to be sure that Japan would not collapse under the impact of American atomic bombs before he could stake a claim to be one of the victors.

Since Stalin had no presence in and little leverage on Japan, where he was refused an occupation zone by President Truman, there was no significant Soviet-American interaction over the major defeated Asian power. It was another story in Korea, which was within reach of the Soviet armies. Probably with the idea of giving Japan a buffer against the Soviet sphere of influence on the Northeast Asian continent, American planners and negotiators persuaded their Soviet counterparts, at and after the Potsdam Conference, to agree to American occupation of the peninsula south of the 38th parallel, for the purpose of disarming and evacuating Japanese military personnel, the remainder to be occupied by Soviet forces, supposedly for the same purpose. American military government authorities in the South wrestled after V-J Day, valiantly but rather clumsily, to operate an occupation regime and at the same time to foster a democratic Korean political system, something for which there was no basis whatever in Korean tradition. The result was the Republic of Korea (South Korea), which was inaugurated in 1948 under the nominal auspices of the United Nations, under the actual rule of the dictatorially inclined President Syngman Rhee, and with limited economic and military aid from the United States. In the North, the Soviet occupation forces set up a full-fledged satellite regime under the even more dictatorially inclined Korean Communist Kim II Song and then withdrew in 1948, at which time the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) was proclaimed. Soviet-American negotiations in 1946-47 aimed at unifying the country foundered on Soviet insistence that only Communist and pro-Communist Korean parties could even be consulted on the formation of a provisional democratic government for the entire country, a demand that was completely unacceptable to the United States.

Soviet and American interests in China were somewhat closer to being parallel. Neither wanted to be drawn into a war with the other over that vast and unmanageable country (or over anything else), and this meant that each was bound to try to restrain the known warlike impulses of its respective Chinese client, the Nationalists in the case of the United States and the Communists in the case of the Soviet Union.

Since Moscow had not played a very obvious role in China for nearly twenty years, and since the Communists were essentially operating a revolutionary movement rather than a government, the interaction between them was relatively inconspicuous. It is known, however, that Stalin privately advised the Chinese Communists to enter a genuine political and military coalition with the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership at least for the time being, a demand that the Communists rejected in essence while complying outwardly. There is reason to believe that Stalin wanted the Communists to confine their activities and influence to North China and Manchuria, where they were relatively strong but where he could also exert comparatively direct influence on them, and that the idea of their controlling the whole of China struck him as neither very probable nor very welcome. Soviet forces occupied Manchuria in August 1945, by agreement with the United States, and remained there for about six months. While in occupation they tilted the local power balance in favor of the Communists by admitting their troops, turning over captured Japanese weapons to them, and making entry difficult for Nationalist forces. The Soviet military authorities also removed about one billion dollars’ worth of Japanese industrial equipment, in order to ensure at the minimum that the region, regardless of who came to control it, could not again become a strategic base aimed at the Soviet Far East for a long time.

On the other side, the United States, which had played a very active diplomatic and military role in China since Pearl Harbor in support of the Nationalist government, undertook a difficult and in retrospect hopeless effort to mediate between the Nationalists and Communists and bring about a coalition government representing both of them as well as certain minor parties. This effort, which was conducted under the prestigious auspices of General George C. Marshall, was of course a failure. Each side was determined to crush the other and confident of its ultimate ability to do so. Each therefore put forward conditions it knew the other would not accept and waited only until the United States and the Soviet Union withdrew their military presences from China in the spring of 1946 to launch a full-scale civil war. For a variety of political and military reasons of which limitations on American aid and support were one, but not a decisive one, the Nationalists then acquired the dubious honor of being the first Asian client of the United States to fall victim to a Communist insurgency.

Dulles versus Khrushchev

An important change in the personalities and atmosphere associated with the Cold War occurred in early 1953. Stalin died and after more than a year of struggle among his heirs was succeeded by the more flexible and less bloody-minded Nikita S. Khrushchev. In the United States, there was a transition from the Truman to the Eisenhower administration, whose foreign policy was designed and executed to a considerable extent by the formidable John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State. Dulles was keenly aware of the trouble that his predecessor Dean Acheson had suffered from the conservative Republicans in Congress and was determined not to have the same problem. This consideration, even more than his own inclinations, imposed on him a rigid and indeed militant stance with respect to the Cold War, among other things. Where Acheson had preached and practiced containment, Dulles spoke—sometimes but not always as a bluff—of liberation (of Eastern Europe), brinkmanship (the art of getting the adversary to back down by going to the brink of war without actually going over), and Massive Retaliation. The latter concept, or slogan, was understandably misinterpreted by many people to indicate a willingness to launch a nuclear war in retaliation for virtually any military move by the Communist powers. What Dulles actually had in mind was a far more flexible strategy based on the fact that in 1954 both hydrogen bombs and tactical (battlefield) nuclear weapons entered the American military inventory alongside other types of nuclear and conventional weapons. The nervousness that Dulles’s threatening aura and brinkmanship inspired in his adversaries, as well as in nearly everyone else, helped considerably to extract relatively favorable settlements of the Korean (see Chapter IV) and Indochinese (see Chapter VII) conflicts.

Khrushchev emerged as the temporarily unchallenged head of the Soviet leadership in early 1955 after a series of successful power struggles against police chief Lavrenti Beria, who advocated concessions to the West on Germany and whose fall was precipitated by popular risings in East Germany on June 17, 1953; Premier Georgi Malenkov, who had advocated an only slightly less passive policy toward the West based on an acceptance of an inferior Soviet nuclear posture that would however, it was hoped, amount to a minimum deterrent; and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who advocated a cautious and “Stalinist” line in foreign policy without conciliation of the West. Khrushchev’s own policy, at least initially, was one of outward militancy toward the West short of serious provocation, combined with an active cultivation of major Third World neutrals designed to undermine Western influence in that region. In 1954-55, accordingly, he initiated major programs of military aid to Egypt and economic aid to India.

Khrushchev’s tough line on Europe contributed to the admission of West Germany to NATO, in the spring of 1955, something that was most unwelcome in Moscow since it seemed to increase the likelihood of American (and therefore Soviet) involvement in a military confrontation between East and West Germany if one should occur. The Soviet response was a round of conciliatory diplomacy: a new (but still essentially propagandistic) disarmament proposal; agreement on a state treaty (in effect, a peace treaty) for Austria; and a summit conference with his American, British, and French counterparts at Geneva. Khrushchev exploited the enhanced nervousness of his East European allies about West Germany, which has been one of the main sources of Soviet influence over them, by forming the Warsaw Pact (the Communist counterpart to NATO) in the spring of 1955.

At his party’s Twentieth Congress in February 1956, Khrushchev made clear his determination to avoid a thermonuclear war with the United States. To counter the impression of weakness that this line tended to convey in some quarters, especially Peking, he initiated a tactic of “rocket rattling” a few months later; in other words, he began to make carefully timed and essentially meaningless nuclear threats against various Western powers (not including the United States, until 1958). The classic example occurred at the time of the Suez crisis of November 1956, when Britain and France joined Israel in military operations against Egypt. Once he had seen the United States oppose the Anglo-French action in the United Nations, Khrushchev “rattled rockets” with a sense of impunity at Britain and France, which had already made it clear that they were terminating their military operations.

The Suez crisis also gave Khrushchev an opportunity to distract international attention to some extent from a major crisis in Eastern Europe growing out of his emotional (although secret) attack on Stalin at the Twentieth Congress. An upheaval in Poland in October was resolved by political means to Khrushchev’s satisfaction, but a similar affair in Hungary rapidly turned into an armed popular rising against pro-Soviet elements and gave rise to an independent Communist regime that promised to introduce a multiparty system into Hungary and to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. This situation, which was intolerable to Moscow if only because it might have encouraged similar trends in other countries, was resolved when Soviet troops drowned it in blood in early November. The Hungarian freedom fighters, as they are known to their sympathizers, had hoped for some sort of American military support even though the United States had not actually incited the rising, but there was none. “Liberation” was shown to be nothing but a slogan.

In 1957-58 Khrushchev came under powerful political pressure from the Chinese to take a tougher line toward the West, especially on the Taiwan issue. He made some gestures in this direction but was unwilling to go farther on Taiwan than verbal militancy, which he displayed when Peking whipped up a politico-military crisis in the Taiwan Strait in August-October 1958. Instead of pressing the United States in that direction, Khrushchev issued a seemingly stern demand in November 1958 for drastic changes in the status of West Berlin.

As this demand was still pending in the spring of 1959, Dulles died. No later American statesman has been willing to use threats as an instrument of diplomacy to the same extent or would have been credible if he had tried to do so. His passing marks a more important watershed in the history of the Cold War and in international politics than is generally realized.

Peaceful Competition and “Harebrained Scheming”

Instead of applying increased pressure on Eisenhower now that he had lost Dulles, Khrushchev launched into a phase of détente diplomacy stressing peaceful (largely economic) competition between the two systems. The high point of this phase, which began with a dropping of the demand regarding West Berlin, was Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in the summer of 1959, at the conclusion of which he hailed Eisenhower as a “man of peace.” But Khrushchev’s personal impulsiveness, as well as political pressures from some of his colleagues, rendered his détente diplomacy highly unstable. In May 1960 he canceled a scheduled summit conference at Paris, from which he expected little in any case and which was objectionable to the Chinese, when an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft crashed on Soviet territory and President Eisenhower assumed personal responsibility for such flights.

At first Khrushchev saw little reason either to like or to respect President Kennedy. He was enraged by American support for the disastrous effort by Cuban exiles to overthrow the pro-Soviet regime of Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs in the spring of 1961. During and after a conference with Kennedy at Vienna the following June, Khrushchev apparently formed the impression that Kennedy was very unsure of himself and would raise no serious objection if the East Germans were to put up a barrier to isolate East Berlin from West Berlin, into which refugees from East Germany were then streaming at an enormous rate. He was right; the raising of the Berlin Wall in August, in violation of the 1945 agreements, was not met with any effective counteraction from the Western side.

The granting of independence to the Congo by Belgium in 1960 was followed by a period of chaos during which Khrushchev tried in various ways to give support to left-wing elements. He failed and order began to be restored, largely because of effective action by the United Nations under the leadership of Secretary General Dag Hammarskjӧld. In a rage, Khrushchev demanded that the post of Secretary General be made into a troika (a three-horse Russian carriage), in other words a collectivity in which the top post should be held by a neutral (in the Cold War) and the two deputies be picked one each from the Communist and Western countries, each with a veto. The proposal, which if adopted would have seriously impaired the working of the United Nations, was blocked by Western opposition. On the other hand, the next Secretary General, the Burmese U Thant, took much greater care than his predecessor not to antagonize the Soviet Union.

By the summer of 1962, after several years of wrangling, the United States and the Soviet Union had come close to an agreement on banning nuclear testing. Moscow suddenly backed away, under Chinese pressure it was later learned.* Khrushchev, then in one of his erratic swings, was temporarily in a mood to conciliate Peking, and for this purpose he needed strategic leverage with which he might compel the United States to abandon its protection of Taiwan. He also wanted leverage with which to extract a settlement of Berlin and Germany more satisfactory than the essentially stopgap measure of the Wall. He was vastly inferior to the United States in intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) but had relatively large numbers of medium range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) and intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) as well as a potential forward launching platform in the shape of Cuba. It was mainly for these reasons that in September 1962 he began, secretly and in great haste in the hope of avoiding premature discovery, to install in Cuba what was apparently intended to be a total of 64 offensive missiles. He believed that once operational these missiles could be used to pressure Kennedy into making concessions along the lines already indicated. But to his enormous surprise and discomfiture, a combination of firm and judicious American counterpressures, which appeared to create some risk of general war, forced him to agree in late October to withdraw his missiles, which he did soon afterward.

Both sides were sufficiently nervous over their apparent trip to the brink over Cuba so that the latter was followed, as soon as Khrushchev had coped with some domestic opposition and strengthened his hand by taking the lead in a new round of polemics against the Chinese, by an important move toward détente. After suspending the jamming of the Voice of America, he reached at last an agreement on a nuclear test ban in late July. The difficult problem of verification through inspection, on which the Soviet leadership was very sensitive for security reasons, was bypassed by banning only tests in the atmosphere and under water, which could be verified without on-the-spot inspection.

Having contributed in this way to a considerable improvement of Soviet-American relations, Khrushchev was abruptly ousted from power in October 1964 by a coalition of his colleagues, who objected to what they called his “harebrained scheming” in domestic and foreign policy. Among the counts against him were undoubtedly his adventurism in sending missiles to Cuba, and probably also his heavy-handed policy toward the Chinese, to whom he may have been contemplating applying military pressure by the time of his fall.

After Khrushchev

Khrushchev’s successors, who were (and are) led by party First (now General) Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and by Premier Alexei Kosygin, were determined to avoid his swings between the extremes of demonstrative friendliness and dangerous provocation in dealing with the United States. Their attitude was to be hostile, but their behavior was not to be bellicose, at least for the time being.

The dramatic escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam in 1965 (see Chapter VII), although not entirely unexpected in Moscow, came as a considerable shock to the new Soviet leadership. North Vietnam, a Communist state and a member of the “socialist camp,” was being heavily bombed by the American “imperialists” and was therefore presumably entitled to expect effective Soviet support. If it were not forthcoming, the effects on Soviet influence not only in North Vietnam but elsewhere, notably Eastern Europe, might be very serious. Like Khrushchev, however, Brezhnev and Kosygin were unwilling to take any action that was perceived as creating a serious risk of war with the United States. Soviet policy toward the crisis in Vietnam had to be designed with this limiting factor in mind and accordingly consisted mainly of extensive military aid and advice for the North Vietnamese, but not direct involvement in the fighting to any significant extent.

The American action in Vietnam unwittingly reinforced a decision already taken in Moscow, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis and the resulting Soviet humiliation, to build up the Soviet Union’s strategic nuclear forces to a level of at least approximate parity with those of the United States, in order to avoid having to back down in any similar confrontations in the future. During the second half of the 1960s this was done with remarkable speed, although at the cost of serious strains on the Soviet economy, with transforming effects on Soviet-American relations and international politics in general.

These effects took time to make themselves felt, however. In the meantime, the Soviet leadership developed a highly uncomfortable feeling that the United States, emboldened by its own behavior in Vietnam, was inflicting a series of setbacks by proxy on the Communist cause in the Third World. In Africa, in particular, there was a series of military coups against leftist civilian leaderships in 1965-66; to Moscow the most traumatic of these was the one against President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, in whom the Soviets had invested a great deal of aid and political capital in the hope that his socialist regime could eventually be transformed into a Communist one without a civil war or an international crisis. The Brezhnev leadership evidently decided that it would be desirable, for psychological and political reasons, to inflict a compensating setback by proxy on the United States in the Third World.

The target chosen was an obvious one, Israel. The idea was to allege that Israel was about to attack Syria, to convince Nasser that this was the case, and then to manage the ensuing Israeli-Egyptian crisis so as to avoid an actual war, weaken the Israeli position, and enhance the reputation of Soviet statesmanship especially among the Arabs. The plan proceeded approximately on schedule until U Thant unexpectedly panicked and withdrew the United Nations Emergency Force from between the Israeli and Egyptian armies, whereupon what had been envisaged as a phoney crisis turned suddenly into a real war, even if a short one. It took Israel only six days to win the June War (1967). Instead of a success, Moscow had suffered another setback, this time self-inflicted.*

Still looking for a success, the Soviets selected the following year an area within their own sphere of influence, where the risks accordingly were more controllable. It was furthermore an area in which strong liberalizing tendencies were at work that seemed likely in Moscow, if unchecked, to have adverse effects on the Soviet leadership’s position and interests not only in Eastern Europe but in the Soviet Union itself. This was Czechoslovakia. Among the many aspects of the complex crisis that culminated in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 by forces of the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact states (East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria), the one most directly relevant to the Cold War was Soviet concern over the possible American reaction; if it had been perceived as sufficiently adverse, there would probably have been no invasion of Czechoslovakia. But it was an election year in the United States, and President Johnson was eager before leaving office to have a summit meeting with Kosygin and if possible reach an agreement on limiting strategic arms. Furthermore, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had a strong bias against the Czechs because they had been sending aid to North Vietnam. Accordingly, public statements by high American officials during this period made it clear that the United States still regarded Czechoslovakia as falling within the Soviet sphere of influence and indicated that it would take no strong action in the undesired and seemingly unlikely event that Czechoslovakia were invaded. When it was, Johnson felt compelled to cancel his meeting with Kosygin and thereby neatly got the worst of both worlds. He warned Moscow publicly against attacking Romania, which appeared to be another likely target, and this warning probably had something to do with the fact that Romania escaped the fate of Czechoslovakia.

By demonstrating its political resolution and military power, in short its machismo, through invading Czechoslovakia, Moscow had gone far toward restoring its self-confidence, reasserting its hegemony over Eastern Europe, increasing its influence on European affairs in general, and improving its position in the Cold War. To put it mildly, this was hardly good news for the United States. As for what the United States could and should have done, an eminent European remarked at the time that “You could at least have observed a decent silence.”

* Cf. Helmut Sonnenfeldt, “The Chinese Factor in Soviet Disarmament Policy,” The China Quarterly, no. 26 (April-June 1966), pp. 129-130.

* Cf. Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-1973, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1974), pp. 732-733.