Ending the Cold War

Michael Mandelbaum

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1989

Article preview: first 500 of 8,165 words total.

Summary:  The West should not under-estimate the USSR's capacity to reform, and to accommodate the West on the issues of (1) regional claims on Eastern Europe; although the WP is unlikely to dissolve, there are good chances that the Soviets will permit political pluralism (2) reduced military deployments (3) human rights.

Michael Mandelbaum is Director of the Project on East-West Relations and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of The Fate of Nations: The Search for National Security in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries and the co-author, with Seweryn Bialer, of The Global Rivals. Copyright (c) 1989 by Michael Mandelbaum.

The cold war has dominated American foreign policy for four decades. For all of this time the American aim has been to encourage fundamental changes in the Soviet Union's relations with the rest of the world. For forty years the West has waited for signs of such changes. Now they have begun to appear. Mikhail Gorbachev has launched the most ambitious, sweeping and, from the West's point of view, promising program of reform in the history of the Soviet Union.

While the outcome of the process that he has set in motion is by no means certain, there can no longer be any doubt that something of extraordinary importance is taking place in the Soviet Union, with potentially profound consequences for American foreign policy. A marked improvement in Soviet-American relations has already occurred, and even more dramatic improvement is possible. It is now time to think seriously about what is required to end the cold war.

This is not, to be sure, the first time that a dramatic improvement in Soviet-American relations has seemed to be at hand. Indeed, declarations of a new day of harmony between East and West have been a recurrent theme of the postwar period. Hopes for a durable accommodation and expanded cooperation between the two great powers were highest at the time of the détente of the early 1970s, and its failure led to deep, bitter disappointment. The parallels between that period and the present one do not, at first glance, offer grounds for optimism.

Then, as now, a series of summit meetings between the leaders of the two countries took place. Then, as now, there was talk of expanded economic relations. Then, as now, many who wished to leave the Soviet Union were allowed to do so. Yet the détente of the 1970s did not bring a lasting improvement in relations between the two superpowers. Why should things turn out differently now? There are, in fact, two important differences between the two periods that make the present moment far more promising.

First, the international conditions are substantially different. In the early 1970s the Soviet Union was on the rise; it achieved nuclear parity with the United States and was able for the first time to project non-nuclear military force beyond Europe. Its Eastern European empire was tranquil: the liberal currents in Czechoslovakia had been snuffed out in 1968, and workers' demonstrations in Poland in 1970 and 1976 were effectively contained. The United States, on the other hand, was beleaguered-defeated in Vietnam, divided at home, with a politically crippled chief executive for a crucial part of the decade and a distaste for international entanglements for much of the rest of it.

Because they approached détente from differing circumstances, the two countries understood it in different and incompatible ways. For the Soviet leaders it represented the American acknowledgement that their country had become the international equal of the United States and was thus entitled to all the rights and privileges, as they saw it, that ...

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