The Cold War and its Aftermath

Zbigniew Brzezinski

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1992

Article preview: first 500 of 7,134 words total.

Summary:  Overview of the Cold War era, assessing its phases, US-Soviet strategies and tactics, and opportunities missed by both sides. The West faces the collapse not merely of Soviet power, but of "the great Russian empire, which laster for more than three hundred years". The West's objectives should now be to encourage the emergence of a "truly post-imperial Russia" and the "stable consolidation of the newly-independent non-Russian states".

Zbigniew Brzezinski was National Security Adviser to President Carter, 1977-81. He is now Counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a professor of American foreign policy at The Johns Hopkins University.

Karl von Clausewitz defined war as the continuation of policy by other means. By extension the Cold War can be defined as warfare by other (non-lethal) means. Nonetheless, warfare it was. And the stakes were monumental. Geopolitically the struggle, in the first instance, was for control over the Eurasian landmass and, eventually, even for global preponderance. Each side understood that either the successful ejection of the one from the western and eastern fringes of Eurasia or the effective containment of the other would ultimately determine the geostrategic outcome of the contest.

Also fueling the conflict were sharply conflicting, ideologically motivated conceptions of social organization and even of the human being itself. Not only geopolitics but philosophy?in the deepest sense of the self-definition of mankind?were very much at issue.

After some forty-five years of political combat, including some secondary military skirmishes, the Cold War did indeed come to a final end. And, given its designation as a form of war, it is appropriate to begin with an assessment deliberately expressed in terminology derived from the usual outcomes of wars, that is, in terms of victory and defeat, capitulation and postwar settlement. The Cold War did end in the victory of one side and in the defeat of the other. This reality cannot be denied, despite the understandable sensitivities that such a conclusion provokes among the tenderhearted in the West and some of the former leaders of the defeated side.

A simple test reinforces the above assertion. Suppose at some stage of the Cold War?say, ten years ago or even earlier?one were to have asked: What might be a reasonable but also substantive definition of a Western or American victory? Or, alternatively, what might a communist or Soviet victory look like? The answers are revealing, for they indicate that the final outcome was even more one-sided than most dared to expect.

Until 1956 some in the West might have defined victory as the liberation of central Europe from Soviet domination. Western passivity during the Hungarian uprising, however, indicated that the Western, and especially the American, commitment to a policy of liberation was largely rhetorical. Thereafter most serious Westerners probably would have defined victory as involving primarily a combination of the following arrangements: German reunification by mutual agreement, with at least the former East Germany neutralized and with many in the West (and especially in Germany itself) even willing to accept German neutrality in exchange for unity; a mutual NATO-Warsaw Pact treaty, providing for significant troop reductions on both sides but also for the retention of some political-military links between Moscow and the central European states; genuine liberalization of the Soviet-imposed regimes, but with many liberal Westerners quite happy to settle for Kadar-type versions; a comprehensive strategic and conventional arms reduction agreement; and the termination of ideological hostility.

In brief, victory would have been defined largely as an accommodation in some respects consistent with the Western understanding of the Yalta agreement: de facto acceptance of a somewhat benign Soviet sphere of influence ...

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