No one today worries about a new global war, or a total triumph of dictators, or the prospect that civilization itself might end. That was not the case when the Cold War began. For all its dangers, atrocities, costs, distractions, and moral compromises, the Cold War—like the American Civil War—was a necessary contest that settled fundamental issues once and for all. We have no reason to miss it. But given the alternatives, we have little reason either to regret its having occurred. (Page 11)
Whatever the Grand Alliance’s triumphs in the spring of 1945, its success had always depended upon the pursuit of compatible objectives by incompatible systems. The tragedy was this: that victory would require the victors either to cease to be who they were, or to give up much of what they had hoped, by fighting the war, to attain. (Page 17)
But unlike the British, the Americans emerged from the war with their economy thriving: wartime spending had caused their gross domestic product almost to double in less than four years. If there could ever be such a thing as a “good” war, then this one, for the United States, came close. (Page 20)
The Soviet Union enjoyed no such advantages. It waged only one war, but it was arguably the most terrible one in all of history. With its cities, towns, and countryside ravaged, its industries ruined or hurriedly relocated beyond the Urals, the only option apart from surrender was desperate resistance, on terrain and in circumstances chosen by its enemy. Estimates of casualties, civilian and military, are notoriously inexact, but it is likely that some 27 million Soviet citizens died as a direct result of the war—roughly 90 times the number of Americans who died. (Page 20)
Disproportionate losses during the war may well have entitled the Soviet Union to disproportionate postwar gains, but they had also robbed that country of the power required to secure those benefits unilaterally. The U.S.S.R. needed peace, economic assistance, and the diplomatic acquiescence of its former allies. There was no choice for the moment, then, but to continue to seek the cooperation of the Americans and the British: just as they had depended on Stalin to defeat Hitler, so Stalin now depended on continued Anglo-American goodwill if he was to obtain his postwar objectives at a reasonable cost. (Page 23)
Stalin’s was, therefore, a grand vision: the peacefully accomplished but historically determined domination of Europe. (Page 26)
Despite an international ideology, therefore, American practices were isolationist: the nation had not yet concluded that its security required transplanting its principles. Its foreign and military policy was much less ambitious than one might have expected from a nation of such size and strength. Only with World War I did the United States break out of this pattern. (Page 28)
Finally, the settlement would have to be “sellable” to the American people: F.D.R. was not about to repeat Wilson’s mistake of taking the nation beyond where it was prepared to go. There would be no reversion to isolationism, then, after World War II. (Page 30)
Not until the June, 1944, landings in Normandy, however, did Anglo-American military operations begin to take significant pressure off the Red Army, which had long since turned the tide of battle on the eastern front and was now pushing the Germans out of the Soviet Union altogether. Stalin congratulated his allies on the success of D-Day, but suspicions remained that the delay had been deliberate, with a view to leaving the burden of fighting disproportionately to the U.S.S.R. (Page 32)
The first had to do with the brutality with which the Red Army occupied eastern Germany. Not only did Soviet troops expropriate property and extract reparations on an indiscriminate scale, but they also indulged in mass rape—some 2 million German women suffered this fate between 1945 and 1947.24 The effect was to alienate almost all Germans, and thus to set up an asymmetry that would persist throughout the Cold War: the regime Stalin installed in the east lacked the legitimacy its counterpart in the west would quickly gain. (Page 35)
The prevailing view in Washington and London had been that the Red Army’s assistance—especially an invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria—would be vital in hastening victory. But that was before the United States successfully tested its first atomic bomb in July, 1945. Once it became clear that the Americans possessed such a weapon, the need for Soviet military assistance vanished.25 With the precedents of Soviet unilateralism in Europe all too clearly in mind, there was no desire within the new Truman administration to see something similar repeated in Northeast Asia. (Page 37)
The American breakthrough was yet another challenge to his insistence that blood expended should equal influence gained: all at once, the United States had obtained a military capability that did not depend upon the deployment of armies on a battlefield. Brains—and the military technology they could produce—now counted for just as much. (Page 38)
Kennan’s “long telegram” became the basis for United States strategy toward the Soviet Union throughout the rest of the Cold War.34 Moscow’s intransigence, Kennan insisted, resulted from nothing the West had done: instead it reflected the internal necessities of the Stalinist regime, and nothing the West could do within the foreseeable future would alter that fact. (Page 42)
The European Recovery Program, which Marshall announced in June, 1947, committed the United States to nothing less than the reconstruction of Europe. The Marshall Plan, as it instantly came to be known, did not at that point distinguish between those parts of the continent that were under Soviet control and those that were not—but the thinking that lay behind it certainly did. Several premises shaped the Marshall Plan: that the gravest threat to western interests in Europe was not the prospect of Soviet military intervention, but rather the risk that hunger, poverty, and despair might cause Europeans to vote their own communists into office, who would then obediently serve Moscow’s wishes; that American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War. (Page 45)
Stalin fell into the trap the Marshall Plan laid for him, which was to get him to build the wall that would divide Europe. (Page 46)
Meanwhile, Stalin had undertaken an even less promising venture: a blockade of Berlin. His reasons, even now, are not clear. He may have hoped to force the Americans, British, and French out of their respective sectors of the divided city, taking advantage of their dependence on supply lines running through the Soviet occupation zone. Or he may have sought to slow their efforts to consolidate their own zones, which seemed likely to produce a powerful west German state within which Moscow would have no influence. Whatever its purposes, Stalin’s blockade backfired as badly (Page 47)
The Czech coup persuaded the Congress of the United States—which had not yet approved Truman’s program for European recovery—to do so quickly. The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe. By the time Stalin grudgingly lifted the Berlin blockade in May, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty had been signed in Washington (Page 48)
In the end, Truman approved all three alternatives. He quietly authorized an accelerated production of atomic bombs: at the time of the Soviet test, the United States had fewer than 200 in its arsenal, not enough, a Pentagon study had pointed out, to be sure of defeating the Soviet Union if a real war came.50 He then announced, on January 31, 1950, that the United States would go ahead with the “super-bomb” project. The option Truman resisted the longest was a buildup in American conventional forces, chiefly because of its cost. Producing more atomic bombs, even hydrogen bombs, would still be cheaper than what it would take to bring the army, navy, and air force back to anything approximating World War II levels. (Page 50)
There had been no clear confirmation of espionage, though, until the almost simultaneous announcements of the Hiss conviction and the Fuchs confession. It required no great leap to conclude—accurately enough, as it turned out—that the spies had made it possible for the Soviet Union to succeed so quickly in building its own atomic bomb. (Page 54)
The response, to be sure, almost failed: American and South Korean troops were forced to retreat to the southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula and might have had to evacuate it altogether had it not been for a brilliant military maneuver by the United Nations commander, General MacArthur, who surprised the North Koreans with a daring amphibious landing at Inchon, near Seoul, in mid-September. Soon he had trapped the North Korean army below the 38th parallel, and his forces were advancing almost unopposed into North Korea. (Page 58)
VICTORY IN World War II brought no sense of security, therefore, to the victors. Neither the United States, nor Great Britain, nor the Soviet Union at the end of 1950 could regard the lives and treasure they had expended in defeating Germany and Japan as having made them safer: the members of the Grand Alliance were now Cold War adversaries. (Page 62)
On December 2nd, acting under the authority Truman had delegated, MacArthur ordered the United States Air Force to drop five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Chinese columns advancing down the Korean peninsula. Although not as effective as they had been against Japanese cities at the end of World War II, the resulting blasts and firestorms did stop the offensive. Some 150,000 Chinese troops were killed in the attacks, along with an unknown number of American and South Korean prisoners-of-war. (Page 65)
When, on December 4th, that deadline passed, two Soviet bombers took off from Vladivostok, each equipped with a primitive but fully operational atomic bomb. Their targets were the South Korean cities of Pusan and Inchon, both of them critical ports supplying United Nations forces. Little was left after the bombs fell. (Page 66)
In the long run, these lapses proved less important than the precedent Truman set. For by denying the military control over atomic weapons, he reasserted civilian authority over how wars were to be fought. Without ever having read Clausewitz—at least as far as we know—the president revived that strategist’s great principle that war must be the instrument of politics, rather than the other way around. (Page 72)
Stalin’s role in all of this was ambiguous. He had, of course, started the Korean War by authorizing the North Korean invasion. He had been surprised by the decisiveness of the American response, and when it looked as though MacArthur’s forces were going to reach the Yalu, he had pushed hard for Chinese intervention—but he would have abandoned North Korea if that had not taken place.25 He accepted the likelihood of a military stalemate when he approved talks to end the war, but he also saw advantages in keeping the United States tied down militarily in East Asia: the negotiations, therefore, should proceed slowly. (Page 78)
The Soviet Union had tested its first air-dropped thermonuclear bomb in November, 1955, by which time it already had long-range bombers capable of reaching American targets. In August, 1957, it successfully launched the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, and on October 4th, it used another such missile to orbit Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite. It required no rocket scientist to predict the next step: placing nuclear warheads atop similar missiles, which could then reach any target within the United States in only half an hour. (Page 88)
Khrushchev threatened Britain and France with “rocket weapons” if they did not immediately withdraw their forces from the canal. They immediately did so, but not in response to Khrushchev’s warning. Eisenhower, furious at not having been consulted, had ordered them to evacuate Suez or face severe economic sanctions. Because Khrushchev’s threats were public and Eisenhower’s were not, however, the new Kremlin leader concluded that his own huffing and puffing had produced the withdrawal—and that this practice could become a strategy.42 From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly, repeatedly, and bloodcurdlingly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. (Page 89)
The U-2 photographs quickly confirmed the limited size and inferior capabilities of the Soviet long-range bomber force. Determining Soviet missile capabilities took longer, however, because the missiles themselves—in the quantities that Khrushchev had claimed—did not exist. By the end of 1959 his engineers had only six long-range missile launch sites operational. Because each missile took almost twenty hours to fuel, leaving them vulnerable to attack by American bombers, this meant that the total number Khrushchev could count on launching was precisely that: six. (Page 93)
John F. Kennedy took his time in taking advantage of this. He had made much, during the 1960 campaign, of the alleged “missile gap” that Eisenhower had allowed to develop. To acknowledge its absence too soon after taking office would be embarrassing. There followed, though, a string of setbacks that made Kennedy’s first months in the White House themselves an embarrassment: the failed Bay of Pigs landings against Fidel Castro’s Cuba in April, 1961; the Soviet Union’s success that same month in putting the first man into orbit around the earth; a badly handled summit conference at Vienna in June at which Khrushchev renewed his Berlin ultimatum; and in August East Germany’s unopposed construction of the Berlin Wall. (Page 94)
Khrushchev intended his missile deployment chiefly as an effort, improbable as this might seem, to spread revolution throughout Latin America. He and his advisers had been surprised, but then excited, and finally exhilarated when a Marxist-Leninist insurgency seized power in Cuba on its own, without all the pushing and prodding the Soviets had had to do to install communist regimes in Eastern Europe. (Page 96)
“The fate of Cuba and the maintenance of Soviet prestige in that part of the world preoccupied me,” Khrushchev recalled. “We had to think up some way of confronting America with more than words. We had to establish a tangible and effective deterrent to American interference in the Caribbean. But what exactly? The logical answer was missiles.” (Page 96)
The new strategy became known as “Mutual Assured Destruction”—its acronym, with wicked appropriateness, was MAD. The assumption behind it was that if no one could be sure of surviving a nuclear war, there would not be one. That, however, was simply a restatement of what Eisenhower had long since concluded: that the advent of thermonuclear weapons meant that war could no longer be an instrument of statecraft—rather, the survival of states required that there be no war at all. (Page 101)
Instead a series of Soviet-American agreements began to emerge, at first tacit, later explicit, acknowledging the danger nuclear weapons posed to the capitalist and communist worlds alike. These included an unwritten understanding that both sides would tolerate satellite reconnaissance, the vindication of another Eisenhower insight, which was that by learning to live with transparency—“open skies”—the United States and the Soviet Union could minimize the possibility of surprise attack. (Page 102)
What nuclear weapons did was to make states see—even in the absence of a common language, ideology, or set of interests—that they shared a stake in each other’s survival, given the tiger they themselves had created but now had to learn to live with. (Page 103)
Sybil was a warning: that a state whose economic progress depended on exploiting some of its citizens for the benefit of others was headed for trouble. Karl Marx, living in England at the time, witnessed and warned of the same phenomenon, but he did so by means of a theory, not a novel. Because capitalism distributes wealth unevenly, he claimed, it produces its own executioners. The social alienation generated by economic inequalities could only result in revolution: (Page 107)
Despite unprecedented economic development and the interdependence that had accompanied it, the great powers of Europe—some of them the most socially progressive governments anywhere—blundered into the worst war the world had ever seen. The vast quantities of weaponry their industries were producing made it possible to continue the fighting far longer than anyone had expected. (Page 108)
The United States and the other remaining democracies made no serious effort to prevent Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1931, or the Italian seizure of Ethiopia in 1935, or the rapid rearmament of what was now Nazi Germany—a process that by the end of the decade had made that country the dominant power on the European continent. And when, as a predictable result, World War II broke out, the Americans and the British found themselves depending on Stalin’s Soviet Union—which had itself collaborated with Hitler between 1939 and 1941—in order to win it. (Page 111)
the revival and eventual triumph of democratic capitalism was a surprising development that few people on either side of the ideological divide in 1945 would have foreseen. Circumstances during the first half of the 20th century had provided physical strength and political authority to dictatorships. Why should the second half have been different? The reasons had less to do with any fundamental shift in the means of production, as a Marxist historian might have argued, than with a striking shift in the attitude of the United States toward the international system. Despite having built the world’s most powerful and diversified economy, Americans had shown remarkably little interest, prior to 1941, in how the rest of the world was governed. (Page 114)
By the end of 1930, his agents had arrested or killed some 63,000 opponents of collectivization. By 1932, they had deported over 1.2 million “kulaks”—Stalin’s term for “wealthy” peasants—to remote regions within the U.S.S.R. By 1934 at least 5 million Ukrainians had starved to death from the resulting famine. Stalin then began purging government and party officials, producing the imprisonment of another 3.6 million people and the execution, in just 1937–38, of almost 700,000. (Page 121)
And when several recipients of Marshall Plan aid pointed out that self-confidence could hardly be attained without military protection, the Americans agreed to provide this too in the form of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the first peacetime military alliance the United States had entered into since the termination, in 1800, of the one with France that had secured American independence. The Soviet Union under Stalin, in striking contrast, suppressed spontaneity wherever it appeared, lest it challenge the basis for his rule. (Page 127)
Lavrentii Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief since 1938, was a member of the triumvirate which assumed power upon his death—the others were Molotov and Malenkov. A serial murderer and a sexual predator, Beria was also an impressive administrator who more than anyone else deserved credit for building the Soviet atomic bomb. (Page 128)
On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev shocked delegates to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party by candidly cataloging, and then denouncing, Stalin’s crimes. In doing so, he pulled down the façade—the product of both terror and denial—that had concealed the true nature of the Stalinist regime from the Soviet people and from practitioners of communism throughout the world. He did so with a view to preserving communism: reform could only take place by acknowledging error. (Page 131)
The Polish party leader, Boleslaw Bierut, had a heart attack when he read Khrushchev’s speech, and promptly died. The effect on other communists was almost as devastating, for the new Soviet leader seemed to be telling them that it was not enough now to assert, as a theoretical proposition, that they had history behind them. (Page 131)
Recalling Lenin’s New Economic Policy, Mao allowed a brief period of experimentation with market capitalism during the early 1950s, only to reverse that with a Five-Year Plan for crash industrialization and collectivized agriculture along Stalinist lines. After Stalin’s death— unimpressed with his successors in Moscow—Mao encouraged a “cult of personality” centered around himself, not just as the head of the Chinese Communist Party, but as the most experienced and respected leader, now, of the international communist movement. (Page 135)
He ordered farmers throughout China to abandon their crops, build furnaces in their backyards, throw in their own furniture as fuel, melt down their agricultural implements—and produce steel. The result of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” was the greatest single human calamity of the 20th century. Stalin’s campaign to collectivize agriculture had caused between 5 and 7 million people to starve to death during the early 1930s. Mao now sextupled that record, producing a famine that between 1958 and 1961 took the lives of over 30 million people, by far the worst on record anywhere ever. (Page 136)
Soviet-occupied East Berlin, however, had its own vulnerabilities, as the riots that broke out there in 1953 had made clear. The discontent had arisen, in large part, because Berliners were then allowed to travel freely between the eastern and western portions of the city. “[I]t was really a crazy system,” one East Berliner recalled. “All you had to do [was] board a subway or [a] surface train, … and you were in another world… . [Y ]ou could go from socialism … to capitalism in two minutes.” (Page 137)
This was a major crisis for communism itself, as Soviet Vice Premier Anastas Mikoyan warned the East Germans in July, 1961: “Our Marxist-Leninist theory must prove itself in the GDR. It must be demonstrated … that what the capitalists and the renegades say is wrong.” After all, “Marxism was born in Germany… . If socialism does not win in the GDR, if communism does not prove itself as superior and vital here, then we have not won. The issue is this fundamental to us.” (Page 138)
The wall was a “hateful thing,” Khrushchev admitted, but “[w]hat should I have done? More than 30,000 people, in fact the best and most qualified people from the GDR, left the country in July… . [T]he East German economy would have collapsed if we hadn’t done something soon against the mass flight… . So the Wall was the only remaining option.” (Page 139)
The ugly structure Khrushchev had erected was “the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see.” (Page 140)
It was left, years later, to one of the last great Marxist historians, Eric Hobsbawm, to give the early postwar era a name: he called it the “Golden Age.” What he meant by this was that “[a]ll the problems which had haunted capitalism … appeared to dissolve and disappear.” World manufacturing output quadrupled between the early 1950s and the early 1970s. Trade in manufactured products increased by a factor of ten. Food production rose faster than population growth. Consumer goods once considered luxuries—automobiles, refrigerators, telephones, radios, televisions, washing machines—became standard equipment. Unemployment, in Western Europe, almost disappeared. (Page 140)
Marxism and its successors, Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism, cannot be judged on their economic performance alone. The human costs were far more horrendous. These ideologies, when put into practice, may well have brought about the premature deaths, during the 20th century, of almost 100 million people. (Page 142)
Khrushchev was allowed a peaceful—if painfully obscure—retirement. Always the optimist, he came to see as his most significant accomplishment the fact that he had not been able to keep his job. During his years in power, constraints had developed on the wielding of power. It was no longer possible for a single leader to demand, and to expect to receive, unquestioning obedience. (Page 145)
It took World War II, however, to exhaust colonialism once and for all: the war set in motion processes that would, over the next two decades, end the age of European empires that had begun five centuries earlier. The collapse of colonialism coincided, therefore, with the onset of the Cold War (Page 147)
There were limits to how much either Moscow or Washington could order smaller powers around, because they could always defect to the other side, or at least threaten to do so. (Page 154)
Chiang insisted that the psychological effects of losing them would be so severe that his own regime on Taiwan might collapse. Eisenhower and Dulles responded as they had to Rhee: Chiang got a mutual defense treaty that bound the United States to the defense of Taiwan. But it left open the question of defending the offshore islands. (Page 157)
But it was not just the Americans who found this crisis alarming. Mao had neglected to consult the Russians, who were thoroughly rattled when he casually suggested to them that a war with the United States might not be such a bad thing: the Chinese could lure the Americans deep into their own territory, and then Moscow could hit them “with everything you’ve got.” The offshore islands, Mao later boasted, “are two batons that keep Eisenhower and Khrushchev dancing, scurrying this way and that. Don’t you see how wonderful they are?” (Page 158)
And so this early effort to relax Cold War tensions failed—despite the fact that Washington and Moscow wanted it to succeed—because the actions of smaller powers locked the superpowers into a confrontation from which they lacked the means, or the resolve, to escape. “The situation was absurd,” Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin later acknowledged: “[T]he behavior of our allies … systematically blocked any rational discussion of other problems that were really of key importance to both of us.” (Page 161)
Ulbricht was playing this card as early as 1956. Taking advantage of growing unrest in Poland and Hungary, he warned Khrushchev that insufficient economic assistance from the Soviet Union “would have very serious consequences for us,” and “would … facilitate the work of the enemy.” The raw materials and consumer goods Ulbricht requested, which the U.S.S.R. could ill afford to provide, were nonetheless forthcoming. (Page 163)
What allowed German weakness to become German strength was, of course, the preoccupation with credibility that dominated thinking in Washington and Moscow. Having installed their respective clients and then attached their own reputations to them, neither American nor Soviet leaders found it easy to disengage when those clients began pursuing their own priorities. (Page 165)
De Gaulle extended diplomatic recognition to Mao Zedong’s China in 1964, while vociferously criticizing American escalation in Vietnam. And in 1966, he withdrew France altogether from military cooperation with the NATO alliance, forcing the relocation of NATO headquarters from Paris to Brussels, as well as the withdrawal of American troops from the country they had helped liberate in World War II. (Page 167)
Defying the logic of balancing power within the international system, Mao sought a different kind of equilibrium: a world filled with danger, whether from the United States or the Soviet Union or both, could minimize the risk that rivals within China might challenge his rule. (Page 169)
It is unlikely that Mao had highly placed spies in Washington that summer, or that Nixon had them in Beijing: there was as yet little communication between them. What they did have, however, was a convergence of several interests. One, obviously, was concern about the Soviet Union, which appeared to both of them to be increasingly threatening. (Page 179)
He could exert “leverage”—always a good thing to have in international relations—by “tilting” as needed toward the Soviet Union or China, who were by then so hostile to one another that they competed for Washington’s favor. It was a performance worthy of Metternich, Castlereagh, and Bismarck, the great grand strategists that Kissinger, in his role as a historian, had written about, and had so admired. (Page 184)
Perhaps so, but what Watergate also revealed was that Americans placed the rule of law above the wielding of power, however praiseworthy the purposes for which power was being used. Ends did not always justify means. (Page 187)
The claim was not a new one. Every chief executive since Franklin D. Roosevelt had sanctioned acts of questionable legality in the interests of national security, and Abraham Lincoln had done so more flagrantly than any of them in order to preserve national unity. Nixon, however, made several mistakes that were distinctly his own. (Page 187)
In 1946, though, the Truman administration trusted the United Nations sufficiently that it proposed turning over its atomic weapons and the means of producing them—admittedly under conditions it would have specified—to the new international body. Four years later, the United States took the North Korean invasion of South Korea to the United Nations instantly, and for the next three years fought the war that followed under its flag. Truman’s own commitment to global governance was deep and emotional: throughout his adult life he carried in his wallet the passage from Alfred Tennyson’s poem Locksley Hall which looked forward to “the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.” (Page 189)
As NSC-68, a top-secret review of national security strategy, pointed out in 1950, “the Kremlin is able to select whatever means are expedient in seeking to carry out its fundamental design.” The principal author of that document was Paul Nitze, Kennan’s successor as director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. Confronted by such dangers, Nitze insisted, free societies would have to suspend their values if they were to defend themselves (Page 195)
In the Caribbean, the overthrow of Arbenz inadvertently encouraged communism: outraged by what had happened in Guatemala, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and their supporters resolved to liberate Cuba from Washington’s sphere of influence and turn it into a Marxist-Leninist state. When, after they seized power in 1959, the C.I.A. tried to overthrow them, it failed miserably. The unsuccessful Bay of Pigs landing in April, 1961, exposed the most ambitious covert operation the Agency had yet attempted, humiliated the newly installed Kennedy administration, strengthened relations between Moscow and Havana, and set in motion the series of events that would, within a year and a half, bring the world to the brink of nuclear war. (Page 198)
Not all C.I.A. operations ended this badly. In April, 1956, one of the most successful of them was, quite literally, exposed when the Russians invited reporters to tour a tunnel the Agency had constructed, extending from West Berlin a third of a mile into East Berlin, by which it had intercepted Soviet and East German cable and telephone communications for more than a year. (Page 198)
Shortly after taking office, President Kennedy had to admit that he too had lied when he denied, at a press conference just prior to the Bay of Pigs landing, that American forces would be used in any effort to overthrow Castro. To Kennedy’s astonishment, his approval rating in the polls went up: getting rid of a Marxist regime in the Caribbean was a popular cause, and the new president got credit for attempting it, even if he had failed. (Page 200)
Nixon’s staff quickly assembled an improbable gang of retired police detectives as well as former C.I.A. and F.B.I. agents—soon to be known, for their assignment to plug leaks, as the “Plumbers.” Over the next year they undertook a series of burglaries, surveillance operations, and wiretaps that had to be kept secret because, despite their White House authorization, they were illegal. (Page 207)
It would have been difficult, by any traditional moral principle, to justify the artificial division of entire countries like Germany, Korea, and Vietnam—and yet the United States and its allies had expended thousands of lives and billions of dollars to maintain those divisions. It strained democratic values to embrace right-wing dictatorships throughout much of the “third world” as a way of preventing the emergence of left-wing dictatorships, and yet every administration since Truman’s had done this. And surely Mutual Assured Destruction could only be defended if one considered hostage-taking on a massive scale—deliberately placing civilian populations at risk for nuclear annihilation—to be a humane act. (Page 213)
Begun by the Kremlin in an effort to legitimize Soviet control in that part of the world, the Helsinki process became instead the basis for legitimizing opposition to Soviet rule. (Page 225)
When John Paul II kissed the ground at the Warsaw airport on June 2, 1979, he began the process by which communism in Poland—and ultimately everywhere else in Europe—would come to an end. Hundreds of thousands of his countrymen cheered his entry into the city, shouting, “We want God, we want God!” A million greeted him the next day in Gniezno. (Page 228)
There was Deng Xiaoping, the diminutive, frequently purged, but relentlessly pragmatic successor to Mao Zedong, who brushed aside communism’s prohibitions on free enterprise while encouraging the Chinese people to “get rich.” There was Ronald Reagan, the first professional actor to become president of the United States, who used his theatrical skills to rebuild confidence at home, to spook senescent Kremlin leaders (Page 232)
THE CENTERPIECE of détente was the Soviet-American effort to limit the nuclear arms race. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which got under way late in 1969, had by 1972 produced a Soviet-American agreement capping the number of intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles each side could deploy, as well as a treaty banning anything other than symbolic defenses against such missiles. (Page 235)
In April, 1978, to the surprise of Moscow, a Marxist coup took place in Afghanistan, resulting in the overthrow of that country’s pro-American government. The temptation to exploit this opportunity was too great to resist, and soon the Soviet Union was sending aid to the new regime in Kabul, which undertook an ambitious program to support land reform, women’s rights, and secular education. (Page 244)
Politburo leaders—proceeding with minimal consultation as they had in authorizing the SS-20 deployment—ordered a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan. Military operations were to begin, with tactless timing, on Christmas Day. No one in the Soviet embassy in Washington was asked to predict the American reaction: whatever it might be, Foreign Minister Gromyko assured Dobrynin, it need not be taken into account. The whole thing would all be over, Brezhnev himself promised, “in three or four weeks.” (Page 248)
From this perspective, then, the Soviet Union’s support for Marxist revolutionaries in Africa, its SS-20 deployment, and its invasion of Afghanistan look less like a coordinated strategy to shift the global balance of power and more like the absence of any strategy at all. (Page 251)
Through this bottom-up approach, he showed that a communist party could significantly, even radically, improve the lives of the people it ruled—but only by embracing capitalism. Per capita income tripled in China between 1978 and 1994. Gross domestic product quadrupled. Exports expanded by a factor of ten. And by the time of Deng’s death in 1997, the Chinese economy had become one of the largest in the world. (Page 253)
Reagan had already made it clear what he thought of détente: “[I]sn’t that what a farmer has with his turkey—until thanksgiving day?” (Page 254)
But Reagan’s most significant deed came on March 23, 1983, when he surprised the Kremlin, most American arms control experts, and many of his own advisers by repudiating the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction. (Page 263)
United States was years, even decades, away from developing a missile defense capability, but Reagan’s speech persuaded the increasingly frightened Soviet leaders that this was about to happen. They were convinced, Dobrynin recalled, “that the great technological potential of the United States had scored again and treated Reagan’s statement as a real threat.” (Page 265)
The United States and its NATO allies had for years carried out fall military exercises, but the ones that took place in November—designated “Able Archer 83”—involved a higher level of leadership participation than was usual. The Soviet intelligence agencies kept a close watch on these maneuvers, and their reports caused Andropov and his top aides to conclude—briefly—that a nuclear attack was imminent. (Page 266)
Henceforth there would have to be glasnost’ (publicity) and perestroika (restructuring) within the Soviet Union itself. “Chernobyl,” Gorbachev acknowledged, “made me and my colleagues rethink a great many things.” (Page 270)
Secretary of State Shultz, a former economics professor at Stanford, took it upon himself to educate the new Soviet leader. Shultz began by lecturing Gorbachev, as early as 1985, on the impossibility of a closed society being a prosperous society: “People must be free to express themselves, move around, emigrate and travel if they want to… . Otherwise they can’t take advantage of the opportunities available. The Soviet economy will have to be radically changed to adapt to the new era.” (Page 272)
Over the next several years, he used his trips to that city to run tutorials for Gorbachev and his advisers, even bringing pie charts to the Kremlin to illustrate his argument that as long as it retained a command economy, the Soviet Union would fall further and further behind the rest of the developed world. Gorbachev was surprisingly receptive. He echoed some of Shultz’s thinking in his 1987 book, Perestroika: “How can the economy advance,” he asked, “if it creates preferential conditions for backward enterprises and penalizes the foremost ones?” When Reagan visited the Soviet Union in May, 1988, Gorbachev arranged for him to lecture at Moscow State University on the virtues of market capitalism. (Page 272)
Krenz, stuck in a Central Committee meeting, had no idea what was happening, and by the time he found out the crush of people was too large to control. At last the border guards at Bornholmer Strasse took it upon themselves to open the gates, and the ecstatic East Berliners flooded into West Berlin. Soon Germans from both sides were sitting, standing, and even dancing on top of the wall; many brought hammers and chisels to begin knocking it down. (Page 287)
With the wall breached, everything was possible. On November 10th, Todor Zhivkov, Bulgaria’s ruler since 1954, announced that he was stepping down; soon the Bulgarian Communist Party was negotiating with the opposition and promising free elections. On November 17th, demonstrations broke out in Prague and quickly spread throughout Czechoslovakia. (Page 287)
And on December 17th the Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceauşescu, desperate to preserve his own regime, ordered his army to follow the Chinese example and shoot down demonstrators in Timişoara. Ninety-seven were killed, but that only fueled the unrest, leading Ceauşescu to call a mass rally of what he thought would be loyal supporters in Bucharest on December 21st. They turned out not to be, began jeering him, and before it could be cut off the official television transmission caught his deer-in-the-headlights astonishment as he failed to calm the crowd. Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena, fled the city by helicopter but were quickly captured, put on trial, and executed by firing squad on Christmas Day. (Page 288)
The Americans, in the end, made only one concession to Gorbachev: they promised, in the words of Secretary of State James Baker, that “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction one inch to the east”—a commitment later repudiated by Bill Clinton’s administration, but only after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. (Page 293)
Another contrast, less evident at the time, would soon become clear: Yeltsin, unlike Gorbachev, had a grand strategic objective. It was to abolish the Communist Party, dismantle the Soviet Union, and make Russia an independent democratic capitalist state. (Page 297)
Yeltsin quickly abolished the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and confiscated all its property. He also disbanded the Congress of People’s Deputies, the legislative body Gorbachev had created, and installed in its place a council composed of representatives from the remaining republics of the U.S.S.R. It in turn recognized the independence of the Baltic States, which led the Ukraine, Armenia, and Kazakhstan to proclaim their own. (Page 299)
And so, in the end, he gave up an ideology, an empire, and his own country, in preference to using force. He chose love over fear, violating Machiavelli’s advice for princes and thereby ensuring that he ceased to be one. It made little sense in traditional geopolitical terms. But it did make him the most deserving recipient ever of the Nobel Peace Prize. (Page 300)
As Gorbachev had told Bush at Malta, it was “ordinary people” who made that happen: the Hungarians who declared their barbed wire obsolete and then flocked to a funeral for a man who had been dead thirty-one years; the Poles who surprised Solidarity by sweeping it into office; the East Germans who vacationed in Hungary, climbed embassy fences in Prague, humiliated Honecker at his own parade, persuaded the police not to fire in Leipzig, and ultimately opened a gate that took down a wall and reunited a country. (Page 302)
Columbus’s reputation, in turn, would hardly have been what it was had it not been for the decision of the Hongxi emperor, in 1424, to suspend China’s far more costly and ambitious program of maritime exploration, thus leaving the great discoveries to the Europeans. A strange decision, one might think, until one recalls the costly and ambitious American effort to outdo the Soviet Union by placing a man on the moon, completed triumphantly on July 20, 1969. (Page 303)
But then, after only five more moon landings over the next three and a half years, Nixon suspended the manned exploration of space altogether, leaving future discoveries to be postponed indefinitely. Which emperor’s behavior will seem stranger 500 years hence? It is difficult to say. (Page 303)
A third innovation followed: the globalization of democratization. By one count, the number of democracies quintupled during the last half of the 20th century, something that would not have been expected at the end of the first half. (Page 308)