Cold War, How it Came

¶ … Cold War, how it came to be, what the motives were for both superpowers, and how the actions of both the U.S.S.R. And the U.S. have impacted the world. No doubt all three authors, Jeremi Suri, John Lewis Gaddis, and Odd Arne Westad, have presented accurate and scholarly accounts. However the Gaddis text was published in 1982, and a great many events of international relevance - some of which resulted from the Cold War - have happened subsequent to the Gaddis book, making it somewhat less timely than Suri's effort (2003) and Westad's book (2007). And Westad's book seems more authoritative and builds the case that the Cold War was very much about superpowers interfering with the Third World. This paper will delve into the pertinent issues contained in the books - issues that affected the world then and still do - and make judgments through comparison of the three.

In Chapter 4, Westad, who attaches a generous share of blame on the U.S. throughout the book for laying the political / ideological groundwork for the Cold War, insists that it was the U.S. that "...had done much to create the Third World as an entity" (Westad, p. 157). He goes on to point out that the U.S. was never shy about intervening in other countries' affairs; Iran is mentioned, vis-a-vis the Eisenhower / Dulles / CIA coup that installed the Shah of Iran; and the U.S. covert military / political interference in the Congo and especially in Guatemala. In fact Westad argues that the U.S. - through its agenda of supporting laissez-faire economics - helped keep much of the Third World struggling, stuck in poverty. In many cases the U.S. did indeed oppose European colonialism (the French in Indo China, the Dutch in Indonesia and the French and British in the 1956 Suez Canal episode), Westad admits.

But he also takes the U.S. To task for helping to keep colonial empires intact, especially when regional leaders did not line up in lockstep with America's Cold War agenda; Nasser in Egypt is one example; Sukarno in Indonesia is another. When the U.S. ticked off countries such as Indonesia and Egypt, for example, those countries were not afraid to become friendly with the Soviet Union, which of course exacerbated the ill will between the U.S. And the U.S.S.R. - e.g., the Cold War players. He holds both the Soviets and the U.S. responsible, meanwhile, as the world's pivotal proponents of "modernity projects," and insists they were both "...driven to intervene in the Third World by the ideologies inherent in their politics" (Westad, p. 4). Indeed, he sets the table for his entire thesis: "Washington and Moscow needed to change the world in order to prove the universal applicability of their ideologies, and the elites of the newly independent states proved fertile ground for their competition" (Westad, p. 4).

Meanwhile Suri's spin on the Third World aspect of the Cold War appears to be softer than Westad's, which was put in a more in an historic context. Suri does not seem to take the U.S. - or the Soviet Union - to task as firmly as Westad, in terms of American and Soviet expansion of its interests into Third World countries. He explains that the intrusion into Southeast Asia and other Third World countries by China, the U.S.S.R. And the U.S. were simply those countries trying to show they had "the best ideas to fill in the open spaces" (Suri, p. 133). The U.S. called its imperialism in the Third World a matter of helping those nations with "self-determination." The Soviets called their commitment to Third World countries actions to promote "national liberation" from the "chains of international capitalism" (Suri, p. 133).

As for Vietnam, which the French vacated in 1954, none of the superpowers were particularly interested at first, Suri writes, but eventually the superpowers, in their attempts to "break out of a stalemated Cold War world," moved their "stalemate" to southeast Asia (Suri, p. 133). And so Suri implies that the U.S. didn't initially dive into Vietnam just to counter Soviet aggression (the Soviets supplied arms and money to North Vietnam), but rather to fill one of those Third World "spaces" he alluded to earlier. Surely the U.S. should have learned its lesson as to interfering with Ho Chi Minh, when Ho's communist forces soundly defeated the French military's best at Dien Bien Phu. What is not widely known by people who discuss the U.S. misadventure into Vietnam is that the Eisenhower Administration footed 80% of the costs of the French imperialism into Vietnam (Suri, p. 135). Clearly by putting money into a European country's colonialism in Vietnam was part of the U.S. Cold War strategy - and that it backfired should have been a lesson for the U.S. To stay out of that region, but the temptation was too great.

But (Suri, p. 136) the author notes that the U.S. wasn't the only outside interest pouring cash into Vietnam: the Soviets pumped about $100 million into North Vietnam in 1955, a year after Dien Bien Phu, and China gave around $200 million to Ho Chi Mien in food, technical aid and cash that same year.

Meanwhile, Gaddis writes with more interesting narrative and slams the Cold War strategies of the U.S. like a boxer slamming into a punching bag. While Suri writes that the U.S. went into Vietnam to fill "spaces" of Third World countries that needed saving, Gaddis asserts that the Lyndon Johnson approach was prove that he was better at the "flexible response" strategy than Eisenhower was (Gaddis, p. 238). The assumptions powering the flexible response approach all proved wrong; one, defending world order was not accomplished by the U.S. In Vietnam; two, force was not the answer in all cases against communist aggression; and three, the power, prestige and credibility of the U.S. were not enhanced but in fact degraded in Vietnam (Gaddis, p. 238).

The assumptions that led the U.S. into this Cold War bloodletting carnage in Vietnam reflected, in Gaddis' opinion (Gaddis, p. 238), "...a curiously myopic preoccupation with process - a disproportionate fascination with means at the expense of ends - with the result that a strategy designed to produce a precise correspondence between intentions and accomplishments in fact produced just the opposite" (Gaddis, p. 238). Aside from the Vietnam exercise in Cold War madness Gaddis continues his decisive explanation of the Cold War by pointing out on page 245 that while the Soviets, China and the U.S. were heavily involved in a Cold War standoff, they didn't always connect face-to-face, but rather "employed proxies" to avoid directly confronting one another.

Gaddis reports one key factor in the Cold War story that neither of the other two authors report, and that is "NSC-68," a sixty-six-page single-spaced document drawn up in 1950 that reflected "interests, threats, and feasible responses" that President Truman and his advisors felt needed to be explored (Gaddis, p. 90). The idea was Cold War "systematic containment" through the strategy of keeping "centers of industrial-military capability out of hostile hands" (Gaddis, p. 91). In hindsight that seems pretty naive although some of the tenets of NSC-68 were quasi-visionary. For example, Gaddis reports on page 94 that NSC-68 expressed the principle that "The resort to force...to the imposition of its will is...a difficult and dangerous act for a free society, which is warranted only in the face of even greater dangers" (Gaddis, pp. 94-95).

As to the perception that Truman's administration had with reference to the Soviet threat to democracy, NSC-68 put forth the view that "a negotiated settlement" could not be put in place "until the Soviet system itself had changed" (Gaddis, p. 104).

What stands out in a reader's mind in specifically delving into the conclusion of the Cold War is that Westad's book is the only one that mentions Mikhail Gorbachev. In fact it was Gorbachev, who engaged in realistic negotiations with Ronald Reagan that had the most to do with closing the door on the Soviet side of the Cold War. Of course Gaddis cannot be expected to mention the end of the Cold War or Gorbachev since the book was published years before Gorbachev came into power in what is now Russia.