Know Your Enemy

If there is one certainty about the origin of the Cold War it is that leaders on all sides were simply uncertain about the intentions of their enemies. We know even less about the Soviet thought processes; Russian records are still restricted, and the mysteries of Joseph Stalin’s mind remain the purview of psychologists and the ground of guesswork by historians. The calculations of the United States and Great Britain, however, are now amply available. Marc Selverstone painstakingly traces the evolution of a surprisingly overlooked but cardinal idea of the Cold War—the notion of a communist monolith—a concept addressed by foreign policy thinkers and leaders with considerable conviction during the budding superpower rivalry from 1945 to 1950. Fundamental questions arose: what objectives did the communists seek in the world arena and how would they attain them? Did they want a global revolution, security, independence, or some combination? Were they unified or divided? These questions continue to pique scholars; ambivalence among policy makers back then continues to occupy historians today.¹ Selverstone supplies some answers.

The book concentrates on images, perceptions, and ideologies rather than a litany of events. The latter appear as markers through which leaders pondered, formulated, and prescribed policies—as backdrops to an intellectual history of the monolith concept. The idea that international communism represented a unified conspiracy led by Moscow became a powerful image that shaped Western perceptions and simplified foreign policy, regardless of the various national brands of socialism and the Titoist rift within the communist bloc in 1948. Debate within policymaking circles in Britain and America revealed that monolithism came under constant questioning. But, it was a useful idea that solidified Western foreign policies and helped draw public and legislative attention to prosecuting the Cold War. A self-fulfilling circularity arose as a result of calculations based on appealing to voters and the press. Bureaucrats might have preferred more nuance on occasion, yet they, too, pursued hard-line, anticommunist ideologies by emphasizing the monolithic threat to Western values, practices, and power. Stalin made this all the easier. After the Soviet-inspired Turkish crisis of 1946, even a prudent realist like future Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who straddled the fence between confrontation and conciliation, “sensed a clear pattern of provocative behavior, one that met his lawyerly standards of evidence” on the part of Moscow, writes a recent biographer.² Regardless of ongoing, bifurcated historiographical debate that lays blame for the Cold War at the doorstep of American imperialism or alarmism or on Soviet paranoia or grasping, Moscow’s firm hand made it clear that the world was engaged in a zero-sum game.³ There could be no peace until the Soviet Union simply did not exist; “communism was the equivalent of war” (as was capitalism for Stalin), writes Anders Stephanson, and until it ended, world peace and Western security were impossibilities.⁴ The threat was clear, but was it also as extensive and pervasive as Anglo-American leaders believed?

Perhaps. This is not to say that Western leaders were not rational but that they sought to simplify the approach to communism into a neat formula of conspiracy in order to pursue their goal of weakening Moscow’s power. This would serve the ultimate purpose of mobilizing their publics while also driving a wedge between Stalin and his acolytes in Eastern Europe and Asia, and thereby breaking apart the monolith. They knew full well that several national brands of socialism existed (and that Moscow had encouraged its allies to travel different roads), but Anglo-American officials saw opportunities to capitalize on this diversity.

By considering international communism as both monolithic and non-monolithic, Anglo-America leaders revealed their doubts about the USSR. They were nuanced thinkers, which is ironic because the monolith concept endured in the public consciousness to create a meat-cleaver approach to foreign policy—a good versus evil mentality. Part of Selverstone’s interest in scrutinizing such deep and subtle...