Cold War Endgame. Oral History, Analysis, Debates

353 Pages·2007·3.77 MB·English

by  Carol Foucault

Edited by William C. Wohlforth
C O L D WA R
E N D G A M E
O R A L H I S T O R Y A N A LY S I S D E B AT E S
• •
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COLD WAR ENDGAME
Wolhforth FrontMatter 12/26/02 11:32 PM Page ii
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COLD WAR
E N DG A M E
ORAL HISTORY ANALYSIS DEBATES
• •
Edited by William C. Wohlforth
THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
UNIVERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cold War endgame : oral history, analysis, debates /
edited by William C. Wohlforth.
p. cm.
Including index.
ISBN 0-271-02237-X (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-271-02238-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Cold War.
2. United States—Foreign relations—Soviet Union.
3. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—United States.
4. World politics—1945–1989.
I. Wohlforth, William Curti, 1959– .
D843 .C577312 2003
940.55'8—dc21 2002153327
Copyright © 2003The Pennsylvania State University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802-1003
The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally
chlorine-free (TCF). It meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI
Z39.48–1992.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction
William C. Wohlforth 1
PART I
Oral History: The Princeton Conference
1 Forging a New Relationship 15
2 The Unification of Germany 49
3 The Persian Gulf War 77
4 Countdown to the Collapse of the Soviet Union 115
PART II
Analysis
5 Once Burned, Twice Shy? The Pause of 1989
Derek H. Chollet and James M. Goldgeier 141
6 Trust Bursting Out All Over: The Soviet Side of German
Unification
Andrew O. Bennett 175
PART III
Debates
7 Gorbachev and the End of the Cold War:
Different Perspectives on the Historical Personality
Vladislav M. Zubok 207
8 The Road(s) Not Taken: Causality and Contingency in Analysis
of the Cold War’s End
Robert D. English 243
9 Economic Constraints and the End of the Cold War
Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth 273
Conclusion
10 Failure or Learning Opportunity? The End of the Cold War and
Its Implications for International Relations Theory
Joseph Lepgold 313
Participants and Contributors 337
Index 341
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Acknowledgments
this book is organized around the transcripts of the conference “Cold
War Endgame,” held at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School on
March 29–30, 1996. The conference was sponsored by the John Foster Dulles
Program for the Study of Leadership in International Affairs, Princeton
University, and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Rice
University. I am especially grateful to Fred I. Greenstein, director of the John
Foster Dulles Program, for organizing the conference and inviting me to
contribute to the project. The conference and this book would not have been
possible without the support of James Baker, the Baker Institute, and its
director Ambassador Edward P. Djerejian. The project also owes a debt of
gratitude to Don Oberdorfer, former chief diplomatic correspondent for the
Washington Post,for providing expert moderation during the conference and
crucial assistance in preparing for it.
The scholars who labored over many years to bring forth this book ded-
icate it to the memory of Joseph Lepgold, who died in December 2001as a
result of injuries sustained in a hotel fire in Paris. Without Joe’s encourage-
ment, his trademark enthusiasm, and his wise counsel, this project may never
have come to fruition. He enriched our work and our lives; we are better for
having known him and will suffer in his absence.
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Introduction
William C. Wohlforth
as the cold war recedes into memory it is all too easy to forget how
potentially apocalyptic it was. For forty-five years the two superpowers faced
each other across the globe, each dreading the consequences of ceding domi-
nance to the other. To forestall that outcome, each devoted colossal resources
to defense—5to 14percent of the economy for the Americans, 15to more than
25percent for the Soviets—and maintained a deterrence posture that eventu-
ally entailed the acquisition of massive nuclear arsenals jointly totaling over
50,000warheads.1Deterrence amidst such an intense rivalry put a premium on
the credibility of their commitments, and largely to defend their reputationfor
resolve U.S. and Soviet leaders periodically undertook policies that ran the risk
of escalating to global thermonuclear war, most notably over Cuba.
It staggers the imagination that a conflict which could have ended civi-
lized life on the planet rapidly drew to a close in the three years leading up to
the implosion of the Soviet Union in December 1991. How that transpired is
partly a result of large-scale tectonic changes in world politics, but it is also
very much a human story of leaders engaged in the responsible pursuit of
conflict resolution. How did top decision makers negotiate an end to the
Cold War? Why were they able to do it peacefully? What lessons does the
experience provide for dealing with other dangerous rivalries? This book is a
collaborative effort between scholars and policymakers to answer these ques-
tions. Its purpose is to illuminate our understanding of the ending of the
U.S.-Soviet rivalry, and also to contribute to the important dialogue between
scholarship and foreign policy practice.
Part I presents the record of a critical oral history conference featuring
two days of fascinating discussions by former Soviet and American officials of
how they managed the tumultuous diplomacy of 1989–91, including German
unification, the Persian Gulf War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Using the conference transcripts as well as the latest archival and memoir
1. U.S. estimates are reported in Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-
Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Soviet estimates are
reported in Noel E. Firth and James H. Noren, Soviet Defense Spending: A History of CIA Estimates, 1950–1990
(Houston: Texas A&M Press, 1998).
Wolhforth Introduction 12/26/02 11:35 PM Page 2
2 INTRODUCTION
evidence, each of the six scholarly chapters that follow tackles a different
aspect of the relation between theory, policy, and the Cold War’s end. Part II
considers a series of unresolved theoretical and empirical puzzles presented
by the events of 1989–91, and Part III presents a debate over the causes of
the end of the Cold War. In the concluding chapter, Joseph Lepgold offers a
framework for addressing these central questions. While his answers may not
persuade all readers, they provide a productive way to summarize and incor-
porate the new evidence and debates presented in this volume.
When Did the Cold War Begin to End?
There are as many answers to the question of when to date the Cold War’s
end as there are definitions of the Cold War itself. A fully satisfactory expla-
nation for the end of the Cold War would have to deal in depth with the years
leading up to the period this book calls the endgame. The decision to focus
on the years between 1988and 1992was partly pragmatic: an earlier confer-
ence and edited volume dealt with the Reagan-Gorbachev period, which in
crucial ways laid the groundwork for the ending of the Cold War.2But there
are sound historical reasons to study this specific three-year period. The pre-
ponderance of participants and scholars concur that the international epoch
they knew as the Cold War came to an unambiguous end sometime between
December 1988 and December 1991.3 In designating this period as the
endgame, the contributors to this volume do not mean to imply that the pre-
cise nature of the Cold War’s end was foreordained. The oral history and
analysis that follow amply demonstrate that decision makers did not know
how the Cold War would end, and in particular that it would end so swiftly
and peacefully. Nor was there agreement on who the victor would be—or
even whether there would be a clear victor.
By “endgame” we simply mean the period in which policymakers were
progressively becoming aware that the superpower rivalry and the bipolar
order they had known for a generation were coming to an end. Thus, the
analogy to chess is accurate in at least two senses. The endgame was a distinct
phase of the Cold War when the termination or fundamental alteration of
2. William Curti Wohlforth, ed., Witnesses to the End of the Cold War(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997).
3. For an excellent review of the scholarly literature and primary documents on the end of the Cold War,
see David S. Painter and Thomas S. Blanton, “The End of the Cold War,” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and
Roy Rosenzweig, eds., A Companion to Post-1945America (London: Basil Blackwell, 2002).
Wolhforth Introduction 12/26/02 11:35 PM Page 3
INTRODUCTION 3
the rivalry began to seem to many to be within grasp, although the precise
moment when it began was arguable at the time and is still so in retrospect.
And, though shorter than the opening and middle game of the Cold War, it
was just as important. For many participants in the conference and scholarly
contributors, the analogy works in a third sense as well; namely, that in the
endgame the normal way of assessing the value of pieces may be highly mis-
leading. A pawn may suddenly be more powerful than a rook. By the end of
1988 Mikhail Gorbachev and close advisers like Anatoly Chernyaev were
hoping to translate what by some traditional measures was beginning to look
like a weak position into a big win for the Soviet Union and, they would
stress, for the world as a whole.
To capture the moment when the action in this book begins, consider the
December 27–28, 1988, meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committeeof
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The first item on the agenda was a
discussion of Gorbachev’s historic December 7speech to the United Nations
General Assembly in which he stressed that universal human values took
precedence over the class struggle and affirmed the freedom of all countries
to choose their own destinies, thus implicitly revoking the “Brezhnev Doctrine”
that Moscow had a right to intervene to preserve allied regimes in Central
Europe. The speech followed a turnaround in U.S.-Soviet relations over the
preceding two years: negotiations were proceeding on arms control, regional
conflicts, and human rights. In December 1987, Gorbachev and U.S. presi-
dent Ronald Reagan had signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
(INF) treaty, the first Cold War arms agreement that actually reduced (albeit
by only four percent), rather than merely limited the growth of, the two sides’
arsenals. But the changes in superpower relations were still mainly intangible:
the intellectual ferment prompted by Gorbachev’s new political thinking on
the Soviet side, a marked softening of the Reagan administration’s anti-Soviet
rhetoric, and a burgeoning relationship of collegial trust between the highest-
level officials of the two governments.
The transcript of the Politburo’s session captures a crucial moment in
the Cold War’s ending when major change was clearly afoot but its precise
direction remained deeply uncertain. Gorbachev clearly wanted to go much
farther than the deep détente he and Reagan had attained. He stressed to his
Politburo comrades that the goal was to undermine the “foundation of the
‘Cold War,’” and to “build a new world.” To do that, it was necessary to “pull