Was Gorbachev the main reason for ending the Cold War?

by peterealdoc2 (student)

The most turbulent period in diplomatic history, when the world edged on the brink of annihilation, the Cold War was an agglomeration of factors united together in a post-war power vacuum to emerge as one of the most potent conflicts in history. Combining economic rivalry and personality collision, arms and space races, ideological opposition and human discord, its nature is as multifarious as its origins. Yet although responsibility for the initial increase in Cold War tensions belongs to both Stalinist Russia and post-war America, accountability for its continuance and exacerbation rests fundamentally with the USA, who, by acting on ‘the grandiose idea that their identity depends on a special responsibility for world order’, according to Feinberg, intensified hostility between the two superpowers to create what Halliday refers to as a ‘New Cold War’. This second cold front was achieved thanks to Reagan’s belligerent new approach that largely prevented a resolution to the Cold War, and crucially a result of the strongest country in the world using its might to create an even greater enemy, whose strength Russia had not and could not ever hope to epitomise. This figment of the Great American Psyche was the driving force in Cold War tensions throughout the seventies and eighties and looked set to wreak its onslaught to all corners of the globe, until Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as a new kind of Soviet leader. Thanks to Gorbachev’s abilities to understand that the wishes of the Americans were far from dissimilar to his own, to employ not just his insight but his foresight to see a resolution to such a destructive conflict, he not only deserves the title ‘man of the twentieth century’, but also exemplifies the main reason that the Cold War started to come to its long-overdue end.

With this employment of insight and foresight, the role of Gorbachev in reducing Cold War tensions on both sides of the iron curtain cannot be underestimated. Despite his limited understanding of successful economic policy, in 1985 Russia’s new General Secretary signalled a dramatic new thinking in Soviet policy. With an estimated 130 million to feed and an agricultural industry so poor that spending two thirds of its GDP would have been necessary to import enough grain for its population, arms spending that absorbed more than 40% of national income was incompatible with national interest. These economic conditions were something caused solely by the economic stagnation of the preceding era of gerontocracy, and by 1985 the vegetative effects of this were outside the control of both Gorbachev’s efforts for improvement and Reagan’s attempts at exacerbation. Faced with these economic conditions, the choice between continuing towards mutually assured destruction with America and sustaining his own people was hardly a quandary for Gorbachev, as he envisioned an end to the Cold War.

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The pragmatic Soviet was indeed the ‘new kind of Soviet Leader’ Gaddis concedes, yet contrasting with the American historian’s judgement, it was not Reagan that realised this, but Margaret Thatcher, as Washington blindly refused to cooperate with anything Socialist for fear of contamination. This narrow-mindedness and mistaken assumption that Soviet Russia was expansionist was to completely misunderstand true Russian Communism; for Gorbachev was a true Communist determined to set Russia on its rightful, non-confrontational path, yet followed a line of leaders like Stalin and Brezhnev, whose oppressive dictatorships had come to represent the Socialist system in the eyes of America. For Russia’s Great Socialist Experiment and with it the brewing Cold War tensions should have died 1953 with Stalin, as in practice the West was opposed not to Communist ideology but Stalinist terror’s interpretation of it. Gorbachev did not fully understand economic theory, yet although he couldn’t save his political system, he did not cause its collapse; rather, Gorbachev attempted to revolutionise not just Russia but the world. Sewell asserts that Gorbachev’s domestic policies prevented him from making foreign policy progress, yet Glasnost and Perestroika in reality affected millions more people beyond those in Gorbachev’s own country. The collapse of the USSR cannot be blamed on its last General Secretary; it would have ceased to exist decades earlier had American imperialism not intervened. What Gorbachev did do, however, was salvage some semblance of world order before nuclear arsenals obliterated it completely.

Ronald Reagan, however, did not share the same foresight that characterised his Russian counterpart, and grossly misunderstood the nature of both the Cold War and the USSR, as his Reagan doctrine and relentless rhetoric, arms increases and Star Wars visions undid the majority of the progress nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction had made towards the end of the conflict. Reagan’s ‘military build up, with the intention of so straining an already inefficient USSR’, in the words of Gaddis, was an incredibly politically naive thing to do, that went against the grain of historical lessons learnt in the past. For to underestimate the power of nationalism, the force that had and could and would surmount in Russia when faced with criticism and attack, was to act as the west had done in 1917, and the Nazis at Stalingrad in 1940; both had failed in the face of a unified Russian defiance, where budgets had stretched to barricade national security. Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative was above all things a move towards active nuclear war, for far from bringing ‘the prospect of making nuclear weapons obsolete altogether’ in Gaddis’ opinion, the more likely prospect would have been an active conflict while the two superpowers were still on a level playing field, before SDI could be implemented. The 25% increase in USA arms spending coupled with this new tension brought on by the threat of SDI giving America a first strike option was reckless and ill-thought-through, as there was no guarantee such strategies would pay off, and rather than reducing Cold War tensions, brought them to their most dangerous point since the Cuban missile crisis. Furthermore, Reagan’s belief in SDI, that soon proved to be aeronautically impossible, prevented arms reduction progress from being made sooner, such as the potential agreement at Reykjavik. Gaddis is correct in his statement that ‘Reagan presided over the most solid programme in arms control’, yet incorrect in his assertion that this happened because of him, for in reality it occurred in spite of him and on Gorbachev’s initiative.

Nevertheless, Reagan personally does not shoulder the responsibility for failing to respond to Gorbachev’s new thinking, but the USA as a whole. In his article ‘Hanging Tough Paid Off’, Gaddis credits the ‘rebuilding of American self-confidence’ that came with Reagan’s inauguration as making ‘a big difference’. And this it did, yet not as the ‘conventional wisdom’ and ‘impressive results’ the American historian acknowledges it to be, but rather a destructive influence in Cold War tensions, and an inauspicious re-inflation of the Great American Psyche for which nothing was impossible. The fight against a monolithic Communism was the most potent conflict in world history because this made it so; America, ‘used to hearing that their identity depends on a special responsibility for world order’, according to Ravenal, used her might to create an even greater enemy, and provide it with its strength. With this, the more America involved herself, the greater precedent she gave to Nationalist leaders, gave these countries a ready enemy against which to unite. Given the state of the USSR economy throughout the Cold War, this common unity against an enemy was the only thing that kept the country together, and America succeeded only in propping up its perceived rival, keeping post-Stalinist Russia Communist. Revolutions in Eastern Europe happened because they were a natural progression, because socialist principles are not a permanent political system but something people reach out to in hardship; also crucial was the fact that the USA, following Gorbachev’s example, did not involve themselves in such events. This natural progression was prevented from unfolding earlier in Russia due to superpower squabbles and the aggression-retaliation dynamic that sprang between the USA and USSR, and it was not until Gorbachev pioneered a new era in transcontinental diplomacy that an end to the Cold War seemed in sight.

When the inbred American psyche of moral superiority and the ‘obligation of a great nation to defend liberty’ according to Hunt, brought the world of the brink, it took Gorbachev to bring it back again, to allow the USA to realise that their ‘evil empire’ tale was purely fictitious. It was Gorbachev too who broke the destructive spiral of retaliation between Russia and America, as both countries undoubtedly participated in their Cold War, and to Gorbachev that the world owes its gratitude for procuring a semblance of peace. Nevertheless, due to its complex origins and breadth of conflict across history, of all the many facets of Cold War, some still remain unresolved. Although the conflicts in arms and space came to an uneasy truce and the economic rivalry collapsed when the USSR did, the conflicts of power and mistrust still remain. As the Great American Psyche outlives both the perpetrators and conciliators of the Cold War, McCauley asserts that ‘Russia today is as fearful of America as ever’. The Cold War action as the world knows it is over thanks to Gorbachev, but the mutual suspicion and mistrust behind it remains. Sewell asserts that ‘with the red flag no longer flying high over the Kremlin, the Cold War ended’; yet the superpower rivalry was never about an ideological dichotomy, and extends far beyond the mere presence of a flag. Being a conflict so deeply ingrained into the minds and mentalities of its witnesses, the most menacing war to rear its head in history may take many more lifetimes to reach its long-overdue end.