Reagan and Gorbachev: Forty Years of Troubled Coexistence

Adam B. Ulam

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1985

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Summary:  What wise men had promised has not happened. What the damned fools predicted has actually come to pass,? exclaimed Lord Melbourne during one of the British politician?s fits of exasperation over the situation in Ireland. Well, viewing the post-World War II course of Soviet-American relations, one is tempted to echo the nineteenth-century statesman?s sentiments.

Adam B. Ulam is Gurney Professor of History and Political Science and the Director of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University. His most recent book is Dangerous Relations: The Soviet Union in World Politics, 1970-1982.

What wise men had promised has not happened. What the damned fools predicted has actually come to pass," exclaimed Lord Melbourne during one of the British politician?s fits of exasperation over the situation in Ireland. Well, viewing the post-World War II course of Soviet-American relations, one is tempted to echo the nineteenth-century statesman?s sentiments.

To be sure, during the last phases and immediately following the war, some very sensible and knowledgeable men entertained serious animadversions concerning the U.S.S.R. and its behavior on the international scene. But in public such pessimism was usually associated with the die-hard reactionaries, ex-communists with personal grievances about the state which represented the cult that had betrayed their hopes, and those incurably sentimental about lost causes, e.g., Poland. When the guns were finally silenced, the general mood in this country was still that expressed by Walter Lippmann one year before: "Not since the unity of the ancient world was disrupted has there been so good a prospect of a settled peace."

America?s leading publicist was not overlooking difficulties and question marks concerning the Soviets? behavior. The Polish issue could already be seen as a harbinger of potential trouble in East-West relations. Lippmann addressed this vexing problem with a mixture of realpolitik and hope; the United States, he wrote, "should recognize as valid and proper the strategic system of the Russian Orbit as including within it the states east of Germany and west of the Soviet Union." "Orbit" was of course a euphemism for "sphere of influence," a term grating to the Americans? democratic virtue. And the hope was that this sphere of influence would be of an old-fashioned nineteenth-century kind, the leading state in the area (one felt also inhibited from calling it the "imperial power")respecting its associates? internal autonomy. Thus the writer was impressed by the fact "that Marshal Stalin has now repeatedly affirmed the democratic principle in respect to his dealings with his neighbors within the Russian Orbit."

Problems concerning the Soviets? "orbit" and international behavior in general were also very much on the mind of a then relatively junior American diplomat stationed in Moscow, but his conclusions were quite different from those of Lippmann. George Kennan minuted in September 1944, "It would be useful to the Western world to realize that . . . the men in the Kremlin have never abandoned their faith in that program of territorial and political expansion . . . which underlay the German-Russian Non-aggression Pact of 1939." The young diplomat had little patience with those who put credence in the Soviets? profession of democratic virtue: "An exhausted and war torn Eastern Europe would provide a plastic and yielding mass from which the objectives of Russian statesmanship could easily be molded." And finally, this cri de coeur from Kennan about the possibility of the United States really getting a handle on the Soviet dilemma: "There will be much talk about the necessity for ?understanding Russia?; but there will be no place for the American ...

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