Power, Ideas, and New Evidence on the Cold War's End: A Reply to Brooks and Wohlforth

The past decade has seen an outpouring of scholarship on the causes and consequences of the Cold War's end. Scholars of various theoretical perspectives—chiefly neorealist (materialist or power-based), neoliberal (institutionalist), and constructivist (ideas-based)—have digested an enormous body of evidence on the sudden dissolution of a superpower. Yet it appears that we are still far from agreement on one central issue: the sources of the Soviet Union's retreat from confrontation and embrace of a "new thinking" in foreign policy. And the reasons for this disagreement have much to do with the powerful, distorting influence of a second signal event: the Soviet Union's subsequent collapse.

This problem is seen in the materialist explanation for Moscow's "strategic retreat" of the late 1980s advanced by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth. ¹ Advancing one of the strongest such arguments to date, the authors cite new evidence on Soviet economic woes and their supposedly compelling effect on even hard-line opponents of foreign policy reform, toward a conclusion that ideas were mainly endogenous to structure and "largely a reflection of a changing material environment" (p.8). Yet Brooks and Wohlforth's case is weakened by an evident bias in their selection of sources—and, in turn, in those sources' recollections of the 1980s—that flows from hindsight of the Soviet Union's subsequent collapse and a consequently exaggerated sense of the inevitability of rapid retreat. Downplaying the hard-liners' opposition to reform, the authors also overlook evidence of the liberals' principled belief in new thinking with the result that the alternatives to strategic retreat disappear, the critical contributions of leadership and ideas fade, and economic decline alone renders fairly straightforward and all but inevitable a radical foreign policy turn that was in fact highly complex and contingent.

This bias of hindsight is compounded by assumptions Brooks and Wohlforth make about the "rationality" of pre-reform Soviet politics whereby the pervasive cynicism, careerism, and corruption of military-industrial officials is replaced by a kind of bureaucratically tempered realism. Had the Politburo of the mid-1980s been subject to anything like the pressures that would weigh on the leaders of a pluralistic state in similar economic straits, then correlation of those straits with subsequent policy change might constitute primary evidence of causation. But the Kremlin faced few such pressures, at least until the late 1980s, by which time Mikhail Gorbachev had already launched his boldest new-thinking initiatives. Until then, the Soviet system had been stable, the alternatives to strategic retreat had seemed viable (at least they had to a conservative leadership majority), and the most critical unexplored change had been the growth of ties between a reformist minority and a group of academics and policy analysts who had been advocating major "Westernizing" changes for more than a decade.

Below I examine some interpretive problems concerning evidence that Brooks and Wohlforth cite on the beliefs and actions of Soviet old thinkers. I then outline some important but overlooked sources on the origins and influence of the new thinking. Next I suggest an alternative to Brooks and Wohlforth's materialist explanation of Soviet behavior, seeking to give leadership and ideas their due alongside power. I conclude with some observations on the difficulty of assimilating new evidence on such a rare, complex event as the Cold War's end, including the need for balance, close attention to context, and the standards required for claims of correlation versus causation.

Economic Decline and Soviet Old Thinking

Brooks and Wohlforth begin with a synthesis of recent research on Soviet economic trends prior to Gorbachev's accession as general secretary in 1985, and follow them through the subsequent years of perestroika. They argue that Soviet relative decline came earlier and proceeded more rapidly than most analysts understood at the time. Further, this was a qualitative and not...