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1. See Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization and the End of the Cold War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas,” International Security 25, no. 3 (2000/2001): 5–7. 2. For a discussion of the strawman bias, see Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, “From Old Thinking to New Thinking in Qualitative Research,” International Security 26, no. 4 (spring 2002). Economic Constraints and the End of the Cold War Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth debates about how the various causes of great events interact cannot be resolved conclusively, but neither can they be avoided. All arguments about the implications of the Cold War’s end for both policy and international relations theory hinge on rendering some judgment about how changing economic constraints affected this seminal event. Although scholars have spent a great deal of intellectual energy tracing the effects of ideas and leaders, comparatively few studies rigorously analyze how economic shifts independently influenced the final years of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry.1 The Endgame conference illustrates this problem. James Baker opened the conference with an analysis that highlighted Soviet economic decline and geopolitical exhaustion, yet the subsequent discussions focused on the interaction between leaders, changing ideas, and domestic politics. Participants, observers, and scholars are convinced that these factors all conspired to end the Cold War. But the analysis of how they interacted is hamstrung by imprecision. The standard approach is to show that because some cause did not wholly determine the outcome, some other cause “matters.” The problem is that no one actually claims that any single factor is both necessary and sufficient to explain the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, scholars routinely succumb to what we have elsewhere termed the “strawman bias”: they are led to misrepresent others’ work as deterministic in order to showcase the significance of their otherwise unremarkable finding that some cause mattered in explaining a complex outcome.2 The result is debate in which scholars regularly impute to others clearly untenable claims that some factor wholly determines an outcome, which they then debunk with evidence that another factor actually played a role. Against this confused backdrop, it is no wonder that scholars increasingly question whether qualitative research on important cases like the end of the Cold War can add to our general knowledge of international relations. 9 Wolhforth Chapter 9 12/27/02 12:38 AM Page 273 We seek to move beyond this standard practice by analyzing the role of economic constraints in a probabilistic manner. Our central finding is that the rapidly escalating economic costs of maintaining the Soviet Union’s international position made the Cold War’s end on American terms the most likely outcome. Elsewhere, we have demonstrated this finding by carefully sifting through general patterns of evidence concerning this case.3 Here, our main goal is to evaluate the most influential arguments against the explanatory power of economic constraints in this case. These objections are featured in the chapters by the other scholarly contributors to this volume, and they all entail careful consideration of counterfactual arguments. We find that these rebuttals do not undercut the major implication of the new evidence on economic constraints and superpower decision making. The problem is that these scholars’ counterfactual arguments also suffer from the strawman bias: in the end, they only succeed in showing that the actual outcome was not the only possible outcome.4 Such an argument works only against a deterministic claim concerning a specific event, which, again, no social scientist ever advances. Here, we seek to address these counterfactuals in a more realistic manner; that is, probabilistically. We proceed in three main sections. First, we briefly review the nature of the economic constraints facing the Soviet Union during the final phase of the Cold War. Second, we provide a concise portrayal of how our probabilistic conception of the causal effect of economic constraints actually works—that is, how economic incentives pushed events in certain overall directions without determining them. Third, and most important, we analyze the major objections to our analysis and the counterfactual arguments they imply. We conclude that on currently available evidence, economic constraints were more than necessary but less than sufficient to explain the end of the Cold War. Rather, they made Soviet retrenchment the most likely response. Soviet Decline, Globalization, and the Cold War Endgame Despite the ambiguity plaguing the literature on the end of the Cold War, there has been marked progress in scholars’ knowledge of economic...

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