In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

230 22 SHADOWING THE SOVIETS Looking backward, one Russian observer at a conference of former U.S.-Soviet decision makers in 1995, noted that this renewal of the Cold War might be understood via the Russian concept of shadowing. Players in the game of soccer may get so fixed on following in the footsteps of a particular player that they lose sight of the larger, overall strategic purposes involved in the game.1 The relevance of these observations to the two major powers’ territorial hopscotching around the world is quite clear: the Soviets became involved in Ethiopia, so the United States backed Somalia; the Soviets backed Vietnamese involvement in Cambodia, so the United States backed the Chinese-supported Pol Pot government as the representative of the Cambodian government in the United Nations; the Soviets intervened in Afghanistan, and the United States responded by arming a revolutionary group of warlords and peasant fighters, the mujahideen. Some of these forays may have reflected legitimate U.S. national interests, but others did not. Looking back at the border disputes over the Shaba Province in the Congo, several of the participants at the 1995 retrospective conference wondered about some of these interactions. How could the superpowers have become so concerned over an essentially meaningless set of border skirmishes in a part of central Africa that not one American or Russian in a thousand would have been able to find on a map?2 Aspects of this kind of interaction were also evident in the development of the nuclear policies of the two countries.The Soviets apparently believed in the possibility of prevailing in a nuclear war, so it was necessary that the United States adopt a similar policy. The first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty permitted the Soviets to maintain superiority in the numbers of launchers they could possess. Critics of the treaty argued that the United States should have numerical equality with its major adversary in launchers and every other category of weapons. The activities of the USSR contributed to this gloomy situation. The Soviet military buildup, the deployment of modern multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle–equipped (MIRVed) SS-20s, and the Backfire bomber in the European theater were three such examples. Both the State Department’s advisor on Soviet affairs Marshall Shulman and Soviet military leader Anatoly Gribkov concurred at the Fort Lauderdale Conference in 1995 that the Soviet deployment of the SS-20s in Europe was a fateful decision,leading to the U.S.deployment of the Pershing missile in Europe and a deterioration of U.S.-Soviet relations.3 Soviet involvements in the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan as well as the support of Cuban activities in the Third World raised additional concern about their ultimate objectives.4 Was the USSR simply aspiring to big power status so that it would SHADOWING THE SOVIETS 231 be taken into account on a variety of international issues as Brezhnev claimed? Or were its leaders motivated by a grand plan to dominate the world?5 There were many who thought the latter was the case. As the Committee on the Present Danger commented in its January 22, 1980, newsletter, In the years before 1939, people watched with disbelief as the world political system disintegrated toward anarchy, and anarchy led to war. During those years, the world order, partly restored at Versailles in 1919, fell apart under the hammer blows of Adolph Hitler. Today a similar process is taking place as the Soviet Union pursues a program of expansionism even more ambitious than that of Hitler, claiming the sanction of scientific Socialism for designs in the ancient model of conquest and predation.... As we Americans face the problems of foreign and defense policy, we should remind ourselves of that terrible experience. Even towering Western leaders like [Winston] Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt failed to prevent war. President Roosevelt, active as he later was in achieving Lend-Lease, the Destroyer-Bases Agreement, the convoys to Europe, and all the other important actions of the period after World War II had begun, did not join with Britain and France during the middle 1930s when the war might well have been prevented.6 The basis for these concerns, as journalist Bill Greider notes, was a “core anxiety,” based on a“perception of weakness.” But he saw this as a profound overreaction. The suggestion that the United States should “commit a fixed percentage of our growing national wealth to the military and argue later about how to spend it...

Share