Questioning Cold War Fundamentalism

In playwright Lillian Hellman’s 1976 memoir of the events surrounding her defiant 1952 testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities at the height of the McCarthy era, she suggested a poignant connection between what could be termed the closing of the American mind during the years immediately following World War II and the subsequent course of U.S. foreign policy. Writing of a familiar cohort of liberal journalists and commentators Hellman reckoned that of those many “thoughtful and distinguished” individuals none had even by the mid-1970s “yet found it a part of conscience to admit that their Cold War anti-Communism was perverted, possibly against their wishes, into the Vietnam War.” ¹ Hellman was touching on a larger Cold War truth. After the late 1940s there no longer remained any influential intellectual position in the United States from which to criticize the nation’s by-then established hard-line policy toward the Soviet Union. To do so was to risk being regarded a fool at best, or, more likely as time went on, a subversive and traitor. Individuals with critical inclinations buried them, perhaps even forgot them, and in the process contributed to the advent of what some have characterized as the “cold war consensus.” It is possible, however, that what existed was less a consensus, which implies a full and open discussion of alternatives, than a preclusion of such discussion. Debate over foreign policy in the United States was constrained within a very narrow conceptual rut that led to McCarthyism as well as to Korea and Vietnam. ²

During the 1960s American intellectuals, notable among them the historians of the “New Left,” began restoring a wider range to the historical discussion of U.S. international relations. Despite such efforts the discussion has remained constrained, particularly on strategic issues, and above all regarding that mantra of strategic national security, “deterrence” theory. Even among those thoughtful Americans who were influenced by New Left revisionism and ascribed to the United States at least some culpability for problems with the Soviet Union, there often remained the unspoken assumption that once the Cold War began and the hard line of deterrence was set in place it had to be adhered to at all costs. From such a perspective, critical as it might be of American policy historically, events since 1989 nevertheless suggest that the United States “won” the Cold War by sticking to its guns, as it were.

Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein’s book, We All Lost the Cold War, establishes a starting point within the realm of foreign relations history from which a full discussion of the Cold War can begin. Drawing on recently declassified documents and extensive interviews with American and Soviet policymakers, political scientists Lebow and Stein challenge common assumptions regarding the Cold War and its end. They do so by reexamining two of the most critical superpower confrontations of the era, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the crisis in the Middle East that developed out of the Egyptian-Israeli war of 1973. Their central argument is elemental: they reject as fundamentally mistaken the long and powerfully held belief that the “threat-based strategies” of “deterrence” and “compellence” prevented war and taught the Soviets that “aggression would not pay” (p. 4). They claim instead that while the Soviet Union clearly was a loser in the long struggle, it is in no way clear that the Soviets’ loss resulted from American strategies. More importantly, Lebow and Stein claim that America lost as well. Threatbased strategies, they argue, actually prolonged the Cold War as well as the existence of communism in Eastern Europe. The authors assert that the United States ultimately paid heavily for perpetuating the conflict: in damage to its economy, its international relations, and its moral stature at home and abroad.

Early in Lebow and Stein’s discussion of the missile crisis a central theme of their analysis becomes clear. Both American and Soviet...