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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 10/00
Leadership and the End of the Cold War: A Counterfactual Thought Experiment
George W. Breslauer and
Richard Ned Lebow
January 2000
Hinkley’s bullet still lodged in Reagan’s brain. Doctors foresee little chance of recovery. Vice President Bush assumes presidential authority.
— AP Bulletin, 21 March 1981
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has unanimously elected comrade Viktor Grishin as General Secretary.
— Pravda, 6 March 1985
If the news reports above had been real, there would have been no “Gorbachev phenomenon,” and glasnost’ and perestroika would not have become households words. Led by a cautious and conservative General Secretary Grishin the Soviet Union might have pursued a variant of Brezhnevism. The United States, led by an equally cautious and conservative President Bush, would not have sponsored dramatic initiatives to break through the stalemate in superpower relations. The Berlin Wall might still be in place and communist parties still in power in Moscow and Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Pact and NATO might be preparing to deploy a new generation of weapons because of the continuing deadlock in their arms control talks. The Cold War would be alive and well.
If this counterfactual — or some variant of it — seems plausible, it is because we recognize that leaders often make a difference, and sometimes make a huge difference. A Soviet Union without Gorbachev, and a Soviet-American relationship without the personal empathy and trust that developed between Reagan and Gorbachev, and between George Schultz and Eduard Shevardnadze, might not be identical to the world depicted above, but it almost certainly would have been very different from the world that actually took shape between 1985 and 1991. Nor is East-West relations an isolated case. The Soviet Union without Stalin, France without De Gaulle, the Middle East without Anwar el-Sadat or South Africa without De Klerk or Mandela would have adopted very different policies and likely have taken very different paths to the future.
The willingness of most political analysts and commentators to recognize the importance of leaders stands in sharp contrast to most theories of international relations. These theories rely on one or a few “structural” variables, and downplay the role of domestic politics, organizations, leaders and accidents. International relations theorists generally seek to understand the most critical driving forces behind events; they almost invariably do so after the fact, when the outcome is known. The process of backward reasoning tends to privilege theories that rely on a few key variables to account for the driving forces allegedly responsible for the outcomes in question. Since, for the sake of theoretical parsimony, the academic discipline generally favors independent variables that are “structural” in nature, the entire endeavor has a strong bias toward deterministic explanations, thus distorting our understanding of the causes of events or accounts that are products of complex, conjunctional causality. 1
In retrospect, almost any outcome can be squared with any theory unless the theory is rigorously specified. The latter requirement is rarely met in the field of international relations, and its deleterious effect is readily observed in the ongoing debate over the end of the Cold War. Various scholars, none of whose theories predicted a peaceful end to that conflict, now assert that this was a nearly inevitable corollary of their respective theories. 2 We observe a similar phenomenon in studies of the Middle East. Developments that seemed almost unthinkable before they happened—Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem, the Palestinian-Isreali moves toward peace—are subsequently described as having been overdetermined by structural causes, particularly shifts in the relative balance of power. 3
The disciplinary tendency to privilege structural explanations is reinforced by the well-documented human bias to exaggerate in restrospect the probability of an observed outcome. 4 By working back from the outcome, and from the known path to that outcome, we diminish our sensitivity to alternative paths and consequences.
In our opinion, both structure and agency are important. The challenge for analysts and theorists alike is not to choose between them but to develop a better understanding of their interaction. With this end in mind, we examine the role of leadership in ending the Cold War and do so through the use of counterfactual thought experiments that are based on a sober assessment of the strength of structural constraints. Thus, we do not claim that “anything was possible,” for counterfactual speculation must be disciplined by a realistic appreciation of the historical context that helped shape the observed outcome. We ask if different leaders in Washington and Moscow, operating under the same domestic and international constraints as Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush, would have adopted different foreign strategies and tactics? Would those choices have led to different patterns of interaction between the Soviet Union and the United States and between both of them and important third parties? Would this have made any difference for the trajectory of evolution of the superpower relationship?
We will argue that the end of the Cold War was highly contingent. Without Gorbachev and Reagan that conflict could have continued for some time, possibly in a more acute form. Readers who take for granted the decisive role of leaders in history may find such a conclusion unremarkable. Hence, we conduct a follow-up thought experiment that tests the limits of the power of leaders. We subtract Hinkley and other such initial contingencies from the equation, leaving Gorbachev, Reagan and, after 1988, George Bush in power. We then ask what might have happened to encourage one or more of these leaders to make different choices at critical turning points. This exercise forces us to focus on those aspects of structure and process that might have slowed, skewed, or scuttled the process of mutual conciliation that led to the end of the Cold War.
Our counterfactual thought experiments – with and without Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush — address only the short- to middle-term: the five years following the death of Konstantin Chernenko in March 1985. The longer-term prospects of a Soviet Union that avoided disintegration in 1990-91 are another matter. It is conceivable that the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and even the breakup of the Soviet Union would ultimately have occurred regardless of the strategies of the post-Brezhnev era leadership. But even structural determinists will concede that there was nothing inevitable about the way in which these developments occurred or about their timing. We believe that process and timing were critical for the peaceful transition that occurred and the nature of subsequent relations between Russia and the West. In the conclusion, we will offer some thoughts about path-dependent linkages between process and timing on the one hand and outcomes on the other.
Method
Counterfactual analysis introduces variation through thought experiments that add or subtract contextual or other factors and analyze how these changes might have influenced subsequent events. Thought experiments provide researchers with surrogates for the kinds of controls normally available only in the laboratory. They suffer from the obvious drawback that it is impossible to know with certainty the consequences of the variation introduced by the experimenter. 5 The uncertainty increases dramatically when one considers second and third level consequences of a counterfactual. This has led some historians to dismiss the exercise as little more than a “parlour game.” 6
The Epistemology of Counterfactual Reasoning
We disagree strongly with that judgment on epistemological grounds. Counterfactual analysis is not based on mere speculation; in fact, it may be as richly documented as so-called “normal” history. The controversy over France and Britain’s response to Hitler is a case in point. The failure of appeasement is undeniable, but the putative efficacy of deterrence as an alternative rests on the counterfactual that Hitler could have been restrained if France and Britain had demonstrated willingness to go to war in defense of the territorial status quo. German documents make this an eminently researchable question, and historians have used these documents to try to determine at what point Hitler could no longer be deterred. 7 Their findings have important implications for both the historical assessment of French and British policy and the broader claims made for the strategy of deterrence.
Even when such evidence is meager or absent, the difference between counterfactuals and normal history may still be marginal. Documents are rarely “smoking guns” that allow researchers to establish motives or causes beyond a reasonable doubt. Actors occasionally leave evidence about the motives behind their policy choices, and even then historians must decide how much of their testimony is credible. More often historians infer motives from what they know about actors’ personalities and goals, their past behavior and the constraints acting on them. When we move up the level of analysis from individual actors to small groups, elites, societies, and states to regional and international systems, the balance between evidence and inference shifts dramatically in the direction of inference. This is especially true of structural arguments that assume that behavior is a response to the constraints and opportunities generated by a set of domestic or international conditions.
For the most part then, arguments in history and social science are a chain of inference that use selected “principles” as anchor points. Documents or other empirical evidence, when available, may be used to try to establish links between these principles and behavior. But even in the best of cases these links are indirect and presumptive, and can be corroborated only obliquely and incompletely. Frequently, evidence is not available or not exploited. Readers evaluate these arguments on the seeming “reasonableness” of the inferences being made, the quality and relevance of the evidence offered in support, and the extent to which that evidence permits or constrains alternative interpretations. Receptivity to arguments is also significantly influenced by the appeal of the underlying political and behavioral “principles” in which the inferences are rooted. When these “principles” run counter to the reigning orthodoxy, the arguments may be dismissed out of hand regardless of the evidence.
Counterfactual thought experiments can be fundamentally similar to “factual” modes of historical reconstruction. In order to evaluate the importance of Mikhail Gorbachev for the ending of the Cold War by considering the likely consequences of Chernenko being succeeded by someone other than Gorbachev, we need to study the career and policy orientations of other likely candidates (Grishin, Romanov, Ligachev) and infer their likely policies on the basis of their past preferences and commitments, the political environment in 1985, and the general domestic and foreign situation of the Soviet Union. There is considerable documentary evidence about all three questions, evidence that sustains informed arguments about the kind of domestic and foreign policies these leaders might have pursued. Of course, unexpected events, like Matthias Rust’s Cessna flight to Red Square, which Gorbachev exploited to purge the military of many hardliners, can have a significant influence on policy, and stochastic events, by definition, are unpredictable.
In the final analysis, counterfactual arguments, like any other historical argument, are only as compelling as the logic and evidence mustered by the researcher to substantiate the links between hypothesized antecedents and expected consequences. Every good counterfactual thus rests on multiple “factuals,” just as every factual rests on counterfactual assumptions. The difference between good “factual” and “counterfactual” arguments is one of degree, not of kind. 8
Criteria for Plausible Counterfactual Rewrites
It has been suggested that counterfactual thought experiments must be based upon “minimal rewrites” of history. More specifically, to be treated as plausible, rather than fanciful, counterfactual rewrites must be disciplined by a realistic appreciation of the historical context that shaped the observed outcome. 9 Toward this end, we propose a three-fold test for the alternative policies we will consider: their intellectual availability, practicality, and political feasibility. Each of these categories has both an objective and a subjective dimension.
Intellectual availability : Policymakers depend on the state of social knowledge at the time to make sense of the world and the information they receive about it. Since the industrial revolution, governments might have been able to spend their way out of recessions and depressions through a program of public works, selective investment and tax cuts, but this strategy was not intellectually available until the twentieth century. Since the 1970s, many governments have been attempting to coordinate their policies to deal with looming threats to the global environment; the intellectual grounding for such efforts was not available in the 1950s. To be sure, such knowledge is rarely consensual, definitive, or universally accepted. Hence, the availability of a body of knowledge does not ensure its acceptability. But absent its availability, counterfactual thought experiments, to be plausible, cannot posit a rewrite of the historical context that stipulates the presence of social knowledge that does not yet exist.
Practicality : A strategy or policy might be intellectually available, but impractical in light of the resources available at the time. Those resources are technological, organizational, cultural, economic, and the like. Thus, to be plausible, counterfactual reconstructions must not be based on technological anachronism; for example, neither the Soviet Union nor the United States had the capability to deploy a space-based anti-missile system in the 1980s. Organizational, cultural, and financial constraints are nicely illustrated by Norman Naimark’s research on Soviet policy in eastern Germany after World War II. Stalin did not have the option of employing a strategy analogous to that which the West employed in western Germany: of winning the hearts and minds of the population through an expensive policy of economic assistance. Naimark contends that Stalin’s reliance on coercion and brutality to establish and maintain Soviet influence was not a choice but a necessity given the political-economic limitations of the Soviet system. 10
The observer can stipulate the limits of practicality only within general bounds. Some technological anachronisms are obvious; some economic limitations are also relatively “hard” constraints. But other technological and economic constraints may be less “hard,” while many organizational and cultural constraints can be “softer” and more ambiguous, subject to being changed or avoided by policies crafted for that purpose. Bold campaigns to overcome alleged constraints may marshal resources and attain ends previously thought impractical. Soviet campaigns under Stalin and Khrushchev occasionally did precisely this. And John Kennedy launched a campaign—ultimately successful—to land a US astronaut on the moon within the decade.
Such campaigns may also fail, and thereby demonstrate the intractability of the constraints in question. But it is important not to assume that policymakers will define what is practicable in the same way as will scientific observers. The “fact” that something is impractical does not mean that policymakers won’t try it. Khrushchev misjudged the ability of the Soviet Union to deploy missiles in Cuba without their being detected by the United States. American and Soviet leaders miscalculated the ability of their respective armed forces to prevail in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Similarly, the fact that something is practical and desirable does not mean that policymakers will necessarily recognize its practicality. For example, early in the Berlin crisis of 1948-1949, the White House and State Department thought there was no way an airlift to Berlin could deliver enough food, fuel, and medicine to support the City, and were therefore prepared to give in to Stalin’s demands. Only when the US Air Force demonstrated its airlift capability did minds change about the limits of the practical. 11
Thus, if our purpose is to explain how different policymakers might have behaved, or how the same policymakers might have behaved differently from the way they did, we have to consider both the limits of the “hard,” practical constraints within their environment and the factors that might induce them to test the limits of hard constraints, to stretch the limits of the softer constraints, or to miscalculate by overestimating or underestimating their practical capabilities.
Political feasibility : Many policies that are intellectually available and manifestly practical are impractical for political reasons. Most leaders will only sponsor major departures from established policies, or ways of conducting them, when they believe there is a real need to do so and think they have, or can muster, political support for these changes. The availability of political support may seem obvious to the outside observer in extreme circumstances: for example, it is likely that no American president could have sustained or built support for near-term conciliation of the USSR following the invasion of Afghanistan; similarly, it would have been extremely difficult for any Soviet leader to justify a strategy of conciliating the United States following the bombing of Hanoi and Americanization of the Vietnam War in 1965. But political feasibility is often a softer constraint than that, and can depend on the skills of the leader in building support for alternative policies. Moreover, a leader’s ability to wield these resources can be affected by fortuitous circumstances, whether stochastic events (e.g. the Chernobyl meltdown) or changes in other policy realms (e.g. good economic news). When we posit different leaders pursuing different policies, we must ask whether the leader would have had the skills to exploit beneficial circumstances. And we must recognize that political factors may push leaders to undertake initiatives they would have otherwise not chosen to pursue. Thus, just as the judgment of practicality combines elements of the objective and subjective, so judgments of political feasibility are indeterminate to some extent .
The concept of political feasibility also encompasses the beliefs and personalities of the leaders in question. A leader’s personal opposition to an initiative for which political support might have been (or been made) available will often doom such an initiative. For example, it is hard to imagine either Leonid Brezhnev or George Bush committing themselves to minimal deterrence and the radical reduction of nuclear weapons it would have involved, or to the strategy of “GRIT” 12 and the initial, unilateral concessions necessary to set it in play. Leaders will adopt policies because they are compatible with their goals, views of the world, and interests — or because they judge them tactically necessary to achieve more important goals like staying in power. They may or may not be able to create or sustain political support for their policies. Hence, that which is deemed politically feasible at a given point in time will depend on its acceptability to both the leaders in question and their actual or potential support bases.
Plausible Rewrites: Altering the Leadership Equation
To carry out our counterfactual experiment we need to substitute other leaders for Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. These leaders — George Bush or a Democratic President in the United States, and Viktor Grishin, Grigori Romanov or Yegor Ligachev in the Soviet Union — cannot arbitrarily be inserted into power by us. We must introduce plausible rewrites of history to arrange for their accession to power. In the case of George Bush, this is a relatively straight-forward matter. If Hinkley had been “lucky” or had better aim, Vice President Bush would have moved into the Oval Office in accord with the provisions of Twenty-Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. We would not have to introduce any changes in the domestic and foreign political context, although the domestic context would have evolved differently under a new, unelected President who assumed office almost at the outset of a new administration.
Substituting a Democrat for Reagan requires more serious political intervention. Walter Mondale, or some other prominent Democrat, would have to win the 1984 presidential election. Any number of developments could have led to this outcome, and the simplest scenario continues to rely on John Hinkley’s bullet. A few millimeters difference in its trajectory might have brought Bush to office in March 1981 and three years in which to alienate enough of the electorate for a Democratic opponent to unseat him. Reagan might have survived, but have been seriously impaired, and stepped down after one term, giving the voters a choice between a popular Democrat and a Republican who had spent four years in the relative obscurity of the vice-presidency. Alternatively, Reagan might have decided to run for a second turn, but have been rejected by voters in favor of a younger, more vigorous challenger.
How might we imagine a Soviet Union more or less the same but without Gorbachev at the helm? The easiest counterfactual to imagine is extend the life of Andropov or Chernenko another five or six years. But we can go beyond this pathway, and eliminate generational continuity from our counterfactual scenarios. Gorbachev could have been chosen General Secretary but assassinated shortly thereafter. This is not far-fetched; there were assassination attempts on several Soviet Party leaders, including Gorbachev, and any one of them might have succeeded.
The Politburo could also have chosen someone other than Gorbachev in March 1985. This is a bit more difficult to imagine in light of recent evidence. The Kremlinological literature of the late 1980s generally described the selection of Gorbachev as a close call, with Viktor Grishin and Grigori Romanov regarded as the main competitors. This judgment was based on the limited, indirect evidence available at the time, coupled with mistaken assumptions about voting norms and voting behavior within the Soviet leadership. 13 More recent literature, based on the extensive memoirs by Gorbachev's associates, tends toward the conclusion that Gorbachev won easily and quickly. 14 To change this outcome, we would probably have to change the participants in the process. Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, one of the most powerful members of the leadership in the early 1980s, died suddenly in December 1984. If we posit his survival and involvement in the decision-making processes of March 1985, we may plausibly change the equation sufficiently to produce another outcome. We can readily imagine a coalition of the aged Prime Minister, Nikolai Tikhonov, Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, and Defense Minister Ustinov teaming up to block Gorbachev and to support someone from the "younger" generation whom they perceived as less likely to oust them from their jobs. In this circumstance, it is at least plausible that the Politburo could have been induced to choose Grishin or Romanov as a “neo-Brezhnevite” successor. Alternatively, they could have dipped down into the ranks of recently promoted regional secretaries for a “neo-Andropovite” successor like Yegor Ligachev, who had a reputation for being incorruptible. Any of these alternative leaders could have served as General Secretary for at least five to ten years.
To run a controlled counterfactual experiment we need to hold domestic constraints and opportunities and the foreign environment constant and vary only the leaders in power. But any of the scenarios that would make a Democrat President in January 1985 or bring to office a different Russian General Secretary seven weeks later require changes, some of them significant, in the political context in the two countries. We need to acknowledge the nature of these changes, and take them into account as best we can as we conduct our thought experiments. What other changes might our changes have brought about – second-order counterfactuals — and how might they have altered the domestic and foreign policy environment or the consequences of any of the alternate strategies chosen by our substitute leaders?
Moreover, the end of the Cold War was the product of interaction among numerous actors, not just the United States and the Soviet Union. When contemplating alternative strategies and scenarios, we must inquire how our minimal rewrite of a portion of the history would have affected interactions with these third parties. Sensitivity to second-order counterfactuals, including the implications of different strategies for both alliances, will help us estimate whether the factors that propelled accommodation were so powerful that it would have come about regardless of the strategies pursued by either superpower. Or, could even minimal changes have led to very different outcomes? Naturally, we can only address these concerns in part in an article, and therefore will not delve deeply into the roles of random events and third parties. But we will be as explicit as possible about the most important second-order counterfactuals that might arise as a result of the historical changes we introduce.
The Nature of the US and Soviet Systems
To conduct our counterfactual thought experiment we need a theory or more formal understanding of the domestic and international structures within which the superpower interaction took place. This provides the context within which leadership processes take place. Our theory of the nature of the structural constraints will influence our conception both of their malleability and of the extent of leadership skill required to stretch them. 15 If we posit different leaders in power in Moscow and Washington, the question then becomes: would other leaders have been as capable of stretching those structural constraints and of bringing the Cold War to an end?
The Soviet Union and the United States stood at the center of militarized alliance systems that sought to deter and intimidate each other through the brandishing and bolstering of their nuclear capabilities, competed with each other for influence and allies throughout the world, yet regularly sought to reduce the level of tension in their relationship in order to avert nuclear war. Their relationship, then, was largely confrontational and competitive, but it contained as well an underlying collaborative dimension, once both political elites came to appreciate the dangers of an uncontrolled nuclear competition. The collaborative dimension periodically came to the fore in the form of summit meetings, arms control negotiations, and “détentes” (1955, 1959, 1963-64, 1971-1975) of varying scope and length. Until the late 1980s, collaboration always remained subordinate to competition. 16
The Cold War was neither static nor cyclical. Despite the repeated failure of efforts at comprehensive détentes, the conflict had changed significantly before Gorbachev came to power in 1985. Collective learning had taken place on both sides about the dangers of nuclear confrontation, the utility of arms control, the other side’s approach to competition and collaboration, and the internal constraints affecting their own and their adversary’s strategic and foreign policies. 17 Gorbachev’s dramatic initiatives thus built upon prior achievements — both the substantial accomplishments in arms control and crisis-management and the evolution of views on both sides about their rivalry and its possible consequences. It is difficult to imagine that Gorbachev or any other Soviet leader would or could have embraced such a far-reaching agenda in the 1950s or 1960s. Neither the intellectual nor the political conditions were as yet propitious. Nevertheless, Gorbachev’s efforts to conciliate the United States, end the Cold War, and transform the international system represented a quantum leap in accommodation. He sought to transcend manifold remaining constraints and to break out from almost fifty years of a competitive relationship. To make a difference, his initiatives had to be dramatic and far-reaching, for the international system remained polarized and fraught with distrust.
The Cold War international system reinforced or shaped the domestic politics in Moscow and Washington. The Soviet and American security establishments came to share some basic features, even though they differed sharply from each other in other ways. Common features included: (1) the nature of entrenched interests; (2) the structure of the dominant foreign policy ideology; and (3) the locus of policymaking authority. In both systems, the needs of the military and its associated industries usually received priority access to scarce resources. Although the American liberal and Soviet Leninist ideologies were diametrically opposed in content, they were, or became, strikingly parallel in form. They were progressive, optimistic, and missionary in seeking to influence others to reconstruct themselves in their image. In content, each ideology defined the other as its enemy; subsidiary, prescriptive ideologies of “anti-imperialism” and “anti-communism” justified struggle and competition and put the burden of proof on those who wanted to subordinate the competitive to the collaborative side of the relationship. 18 The locus of policymaking had always been highly centralized in the Soviet Union’s Politburo or Party leader. In the United States, the Cold War concentrated power over foreign and security policy in the executive branch and the office of the President.
To be sure, the differences between the systems were fundamental. The United States was an open society based on a commitment to individual freedoms, whereas the Soviet Union was a closed society that relied heavily on political repression. One political system dispersed political authority in the form of checks and balances among several branches of government, while the other concentrated authority in the highest levels of one institution (the CPSU). Other differences are less obvious, but important to an appreciation of constraints on change in the relationship. In the United States, presidents were elected to fixed, but short (four-year) terms; in the Soviet Union, General Secretaries were chosen by a cabal of high-level officials for open-ended periods of office. Barring impeachment, incapacitation, or death, a US president could govern in the certainty that he would remain in office until the end of his term, and might serve a second term if his electoral mandate was renewed. A Soviet party leader could hope for a very long period in power, but always had to worry about the possibility of being overthrown by an elite grouping. The difference in expected time-in-office, and in the nature and intensity of political insecurity, complicated efforts to coordinate superpower policies. Among other things, the authority-maintenance needs of the Soviet and American leaders were not always synchonized. For example, it was usually quite difficult for progress in US-Soviet collaboration to take place before or during a presidential election campaign. Similarly, it was especially difficult to reach accommodations with Soviet leaders during the first year or two of a political succession struggle, when political opportunism ran high and the winning candidate was attempting to consolidate his power by placating hardline constituencies. 19
Ending the Cold War required a fundamental restructuring of the international system, and this could only be accomplished by overcoming manifold institutional, procedural, and ideational constraints. In short, it required innovative, perhaps visionary, leadership . 20 Absent Gorbachev and Reagan, would such leadership would have available?
The Superpowers’ Policy Repertoires
To avoid embracing fanciful counterfactuals, we must explore the range of general options available to each superpower by the early 1980s. By that time, the Cold War had been raging for more than three decades. Many efforts at détente had been attempted and collapsed, though with legacies that left certain agreements and institutions in place. By 1980-81, the US had reverted to a posture of irreconcilable antagonism, while Soviet leaders, confused and concerned, were searching for a response. To understand what policies at the time were intellectually available, capable of being implemented, and politically feasible within each capital, we need to explore the general options or postures available at the time.
Realistic Soviet Options
When Ronald Reagan was elected President in November 1980, Mikhail Gorbachev was almost four-and-a-half years away from being chosen General Secretary. Indeed, Gorbachev would not become the Soviet leader until seven weeks into Reagan’s second term. President Reagan’s first term in office was marked instead by his having to deal with three aged and sickly Soviet leaders: Leonid Brezhnev (until November 1982); Yuri Andropov (until February 1984); and Konstantin Chernenko (until March 1985). During these years, Soviet leaders tried a series of approaches to parrying, countering, or defusing the threat from Reagan’s conventional, nuclear, and space-based military buildup, his active support for anti-communist insurgencies in the Third World, and his apocalyptic rhetoric. 21 At various times, and in varying combinations, they pursued five types of policies:
(1) confrontation: upping the ante by answering militancy with militancy and confronting the adversary with the potentially escalatory costs of intransigence. This may take the form of either threats or actions or both. The Soviets repeatedly threatened to match Reagan’s military buildup in kind or with offset measures. They boycotted arms control talks beginning in November 1983. In Spring 1984, they initiated a series of incidents with escalatory potential: maneuvers by the largest Soviet fleet ever seen assembled in the Norwegian Sea and North Athlantic; a buildup of missile-bearing submarines off the East coast of the United States; ramming of an American naval vessel on the high seas; mugging of an American consular official in Leningrad; interference with air traffic in the Berlin corridor; and others. 22
(2) competition: avoidance of confrontation, but support for initiatives likely to undermine the adversary’s positions, weaken and divide its coalitions, and undercut political support for its policies. During 1981-1983 , for example, the Soviets sought to mobilize and sustain peace movements in West Europe in their opposition to the deployment of Pershing-II and cruise missile deployments.
(3) temporization: watching-and-waiting while doing nothing likely to escalate or de-escalate the confrontation. This strategy assumes that with time the situation may clarify or even turn to one’s advantage. In the meantime, leaders do nothing that incurs great risks or costs. This was essentially the Brezhnev leadership’s response in 1981-1982 to the Reagan arms buildup.
(4) retrenchment: selectively cutting losses in realms that are not central to the conflict. Andropov’s behind-the-scenes review of Soviet policy in Afghanistan, and in the Third World more broadly, was intended as a prelude to retrenchment, although he did not live to implement the results of that review.
(5) conciliation: offering concessions to the adversary in the main realms of superpower relations in order to break the confrontational deadlock and foster cooperation. The Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko administrations all offered partial concessions in their terms for nuclear arms control agreements in hopes of inducing Western compromises. President Reagan still found their terms unacceptable.
Behind the scenes in Moscow during the early 1980s, all five options were being discussed and advocated by powerful political actors. These options were not mutually exclusive. One strategy could be pursued in one realm of foreign policy (e.g., retrenchment in the Third World) and another elsewhere (e.g. political competition in Europe and military confrontation in arms control). Strategies could also be sequenced within the same policy realm. A leader might consider following either retrenchment or confrontation with conciliation if the first strategy influenced the adversary to be more receptive to the proposed terms for cooperation.
By the time Chernenko lay dying in January-February 1985, none of these approaches had yielded fruit for Moscow. President Reagan had won reelection in a landslide; the deployment of new US missiles in Western Europe was proceeding apace, and the West European peace movement against deployment had failed; the more general Reagan military buildup had been financed and sustained by Congress, and the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) remained in place; the Soviet Union was more deeply mired in Afghanistan, with no victory in sight; and Soviet policy in the Third World was increasingly controversial within the policymaking elite. Even the conciliation strategy, limited by the Brezhnevite premise of “offensive detente,” 23 had found no taker in Reagan. It would be reasonable to suppose that the Soviet establishment would be collectively primed for, and consensually receptive to, some new thinking.
This was not the case. In February 1985, Gorbachev and Politburo-member Romanov engaged in polemics over what should come next in Soviet policy toward the United States. Gorbachev alluded to the necessity for and feasibility of cooperation; Romanov spoke of the irreconcilability of imperialism and the inevitability of confrontation. 24 Gorbachev’s perspectives were consistent with a strategy of conciliation intended to break the dangerous deadlock in superpower relations. Romanov’s perspectives implied some combinations of confrontation, competition, and retrenchment. Many others within the leadership were the fence-sitters, who shied away from either escalation or far-reaching conciliation, and who would likely have settled, at least in the near term, for a strategy of temporizing.
Realistically then, three, not five, general strategies for dealing with the US-Soviet deadlock were being advocated within the Soviet leadership in March 1985 when Gorbachev came to power. These were: (1) a hardline strategy of confrontation and competition, accompanied perhaps by selective cutting of losses (retrenchment) in some Third World hotspots; (2) an accommodative strategy that combined conciliation and retrenchment; and (3) a temporizing strategy of selectively cutting losses while avoiding any sharp turns toward either confrontation or conciliation in the principal theaters of confrontation: Europe and arms control. For ease of reference, we will refer to these three options as confrontation, conciliation, and temporization. These same general strategies were also being debated in Washington at the time. Our first counterfactual thought experiment therefore will examine alternative scenarios based on the choice of different strategies by one or both superpowers.
The three foreign policy strategies we described were not unrelated to different orientations toward key domestic issues. In the Soviet Union, the confrontational strategy tended to correlate with advocacy of hard-line policies on the domestic front: a continuing crackdown on political dissent, disciplinary-mobilizational policies toward labor, anti-corruption campaigns among officials, and budgetary aggrandizement of the military-industrial complex. The conciliatory strategy tended to correlate with selective liberalization of the polity and economy. The temporizing strategy was consistent with a wide range of domestic policies. It could have been accompanied by a hold-the-line strategy in defense of central planning and party control, including the kinds of tinkering with the economic system that Brezhnev engaged in, but without a radical swing to either the “left” or the “right.” Temporization could also have followed the “Chinese model,” which combined partial liberalization and opening of the economy with the maintenance of tight political controls. Within the Soviet political establishment in 1984-1985, advocates of all of these approaches could be found. 25
Realistic American Options
Ronald Reagan was elected president in November 1980 promising to rebuild US defense capability and to reassert the country’s standing as a global superpower. His perspective on international affairs was a reaction against the so-called post-Vietnam “syndrome” of the 1970s. Nor was this sentiment confined to the Republican Party. President Carter had already begun a defense buildup in 1980, embargoed grain sales to Moscow, and endorsed other confrontational and competitive initiatives in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. With the exception of his reversal of the grain embargo, President Reagan continued and intensified his predecessor’s policy of confrontation initially kept diplomatic contacts limited, used more offensive rhetoric, accelerated the arms buildup, and publicly considered disavowing previous arms control treaties and agreements. 26
If our thought experiment is based on the plausible counterfactual that Hinkley’s bullet ended Reagan’s life or incapacitated him just two months after he became president, 27 we have to ask whether George Bush’s policies of 1981-1985 would have been any different from the determinedly confrontational line followed by Ronald Reagan. We noted that Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko variously adopted five different policy postures in different policy realms at different times. It seems likely that George Bush, whose temperament, beliefs, self-confidence, and political authority within the Republican Party were quite different from Reagan’s, would have responded in a more differentiated way than did Reagan. Like his Soviet counterparts, Bush would have had five strategies to choose among at each point of decision: confrontation, competition, temporization, retrenchment, and conciliation. We view George Bush as more cautious and insecure, both personally and politically, than Ronald Reagan, more ambivalent as a personality, and a more complex, but less visionary, thinker than Reagan (on which, more below). 28 Hence, we deduce that he would have been inclined to respond to Soviet confrontation with confrontation, competition with competition, temporization with temporization, retrenchment with either competition or temporization and, depending on the situation, conciliation with either temporization or reciprocal, measured conciliation.
Each of these options was intellectually available and practicable: they were all part of the repertoire of postures the US had adopted in some policy realms at various stages of the Cold War. None of them exceeded US capabilities in 1981-1985. Their political availability, however, is less certain. Anti-Soviet sentiments surged among the US public and Congress following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and were further fanned by Carter’s reaction to the invasion and Reagan’s campaign rhetoric. Reagan came into office after a landslide victory, while promising to turn the tide in world affairs. All this, plus the sentiment generated by Reagan’s hypothetical death or incapacitation in March 1981, would have made it difficult, perhaps prohibitive, for his Republican successor to embrace a strategy of conciliation, even if he were so inclined.
But while the legacy probably ruled out, at least in the near term, most conciliatory US initiatives, it did not determine which of the four alternatives to conciliation would be embraced. Reagan’s personality, perspectives, and popularity inclined him toward extreme confrontation and competition; Bush’s ambivalences, moderate Republicanism, and lesser popularity might well have inclined him toward more muted expression of confrontation, less extreme rhetoric (“evil empire”) and policies (Star Wars), and even perhaps toward reciprocation of Soviet temporization. The latter choice might also have been made attractive by Brezhnev’s death in November 1982, and his successor’s initial softening of Soviet terms for an arms control agreement and signaling that a reconsideration of Soviet Third World policy was underway. The growing strength of peace movements in Western Europe and the related worries of key West European leaders would have added another point of pressure on hypothetical President Bush to avoid confrontation, to temporize on matters like Euromissiles, and perhaps cautiously to reciprocate Soviet conciliatory gestures. By contrast, President Reagan dug in his heels in the face of all these obstacles and held out for maximal Soviet concessions. He announced his Strategic Defense Initiative only four months after Andropov came to power and pushed forward vigorously with deployment of the Pershing-2 and a new generation of cruise missiles in Western Europe.
There was considerable diversity within the Republican Party and the Reagan administration by the time Gorbachev came to power in early 1985. Like the Gorbachev Politburo, officials within the Reagan administration — and leading Republicans more generally — advanced quite different policy agendas and not infrequently worked at cross-purposes with one another. 29 Gorbachev was perceived by some members of the Reagan administration as a skillful and dangerous master of public diplomacy whose goals were fundamentally similar to those of his predecessors. As “Gorbymania’ swept Europe and North America, those officials worried that the Atlantic Alliance would weaken and that public support would diminish for nuclear weapons, large military budgets, and the hardline policies they thought essential to constrain and weaken the Soviet Union. Confrontation was also advocated by a minority of officials who acknowledged Gorbachev’s interest in some kind of meaningful accommodation. Like Eisenhower and Dulles in 1953-54, 30 they read Soviet gestures as driven by weakness and considered it useful to hold out for more far-reaching Soviet concessions. Still another group of officials in the second Reagan administration, and much of the conservative media, doubted that Gorbachev’s initiatives were “for real”; at best, they were temporary measures dictated by political circumstances and intended to strengthen the Soviet Union and permit renewed confrontation. These officials recommended a “wait and see” attitude —a strategy of temporization. And it took Ronald Reagan himself several years before he concluded that Gorbachev’s foreign policy concessions and domestic liberalization had gone far enough to warrant treating them as significant changes.
The diversity of perspectives and personalities within the government would have provided a hypothetical President Bush with some wiggle room to pursue a less confrontational approach toward the Soviet Union in the years 1981-1984. The temper of American politics, as well as Bush’s personality, however, would have probably ruled out a substantially conciliatory US response to Soviet gestures. Given the history of the Cold War to that point, it is also unlikely that any reduction of tensions — or mutual forbearance – in the early 1980s would have broken down the Cold War system or significantly altered the interests and ideologies in both countries that sustained that conflict. The Soviets under Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko would not have abandoned “old thinking” or reduced the budget of the military-industrial complex. Nor would the US, given the temper of the times. However, a president inclined toward conciliation — whether a reelected George Bush or a newly-elected Walter Mondale—might increasingly have regained his freedom of action as a result of Gorbachev’s domestic and foreign initiatives and the overwhelmingly favorable reaction they elicited from the American electorate and European leaders.
Alternative Scenarios of Interaction
We now formalize and extend some of these scenarios by looking beyond the specific strategies available to each superpower to examine alternative scenarios of bilateral interaction among them. For the sake of convenience, and because several strategies could be pursued simultaneously in different realms of policy, we collapse the five strategies into three: confrontation (a combination of confrontation and competition), temporization (a combination of temporization and retrenchment), and conciliation. We play off each of the three Soviet strategies with their three American counterparts, for a total of nine possible combinations [see Table 1], and analyze the likely consequences of these different combinations for the course of East-West relations from 1985 to 1990. We also discuss how subtraction of Gorbachev or Reagan — or both — from the equation might have influenced the acceptability and political availability of each of the strategies. The stage is set by Reagan’s (or, hypothetically, George Bush’s) first term as president, and by the assumption that the American strategy during that term was, and would have been, largely confrontational. Our combinations therefore begin with Soviet policy following Chernenko’s death in March 1985.
TABLE 1
| STRATEGIES | SHORT-TERM OUTCOMES |
| Soviet confrontation vs. US Confrontation Soviet confrontation vs. US temporization Soviet temporization vs. US confrontation |
Possible intensification of the Cold War |
| Soviet temporization vs. US temporization | No change |
| Soviet temporization vs. US conciliation Soviet conciliation vs. US temporization Soviet conciliation vs. US conciliation |
Amelioration of relations |
| Soviet conciliation vs. US confrontation Soviet confrontation vs. US conciliation |
Unpredictable Fanciful Counterfactual |
Soviet confrontation and American confrontation: Another Soviet leader — Romanov, for example — might have responded to “evil empire” Reagan or “enough is enough” George Bush with a strategy of confrontation, based on a determination to confront the adversary, “tit-for-tat,” with the costs of its intransigence. 31 Politically, this strategy would have been most appealing to a general secretary who considered Cold War tensions a useful means of building political support at home, keeping dissidents in line and deflecting attention from the Soviet Union’s many structural problems. Soviet confrontation could have taken many forms: an extension of the war in Afghanistan that included attacks against guerrilla training bases in Pakistan, increased harassment of domestic opponents and American media and diplomatic representatives, the use of force against nationalist and anti-communist movements in Eastern Europe, acceleration of the arms race — all accompanied by a drum-beat of anti-American and “anti-imperialist” rhetoric.
Under this scenario, the Cold War almost certainly would have intensified, to the advantage of the military-defense establishments of both superpowers. There would have been few contacts between leaders of the superpowers &-; basically, the state of affairs during Reagan’s first term — and certainly no arms control negotiations, let alone agreements. Continued East-West confrontation, made more acute by mutual arms buildups, could have led to a crisis of the magnitude of Berlin in 1961 or Cuba in 1962. Suppose that Reagan had broken out of the ABM Treaty and that he or his successor had ignored stern warnings from Moscow and proceeded to deploy components of a space-based anti-missile system. Even Gorbachev, who was publicly committed to oppose any such deployment, worried that such a challenge could lead to a missile crisis in reverse. 32
A leader with the militarist perspectives of Romanov would have been likely to have brought out the hardline side of George Bush or Walter Mondale, making it politically almost impossible, and ideologically undesirable, for an American President to do anything but respond in kind, at least initially.
Soviet confrontation and American temporization: This is the flip side of Reagan’s first term, when the Soviets generally temporized in the face of an American political-military challenge. Temporization might have been judged an appropriate response by a President who believed that reciprocal confrontation would only make the Cold War worse, strengthen hard-line forces in Moscow, and risk drawing the superpowers into a war-threatening crisis. At best, it would have bought time and facilitated the return of a more moderate leader to the Kremlin. Given the nature of American politics, temporizing in the face of repeated Soviet provocations would have been extremely difficult to justify to the American people.
Soviet confrontation and American conciliation: Some conflict-management strategies like GRIT recommend cooperation as a possible response to defection. But it seems implausible that a president would have wanted to or could have pursued the strategy of conciliation in a sustained way. A Democratic president would have been accused of appeasement, and a Republican president would have confronted great opposition from within his own party and administration.
Soviet temporization and American confrontation: This was the reality of Reagan’s first term. Relations deteriorated between the superpowers and between the United States and its allies, particularly the Federal Republic of Germany. Soviet temporization was based on the premise that little could be accomplished with a hard-line, hostile president. It also reflected the stasis of Brezhnev’s last years and the fragile health of his successors. If Gorbachev, or some other successor to Chernenko, had continued to pursue a strategy of temporization, it seems unlikely that much, if any, progress would have been made in East-West relations. As part of a strategy of temporization, Soviet leaders likely would have sought to exploit politically growing disagreements within the Western alliance, and might have selectively cut Soviet losses in Third World hot spots. The net result might have been to raise the heat on an intransigent American president from critics within Congress and Western Europe, especially if the campaign were waged by a Soviet leader with the public relations savvy of a Gorbachev.
In this scenario, the Cold War would have remained very much alive, but its focus would have shifted to the political arena and could have put a hard-line American administration with a penchant for bellicose rhetoric very much on the defensive. Given the political weight of Cold War constituencies in the United States and Western Europe at the time, however, it is difficult to imagine an American president — be it Reagan, Bush, or Mondale — being forced into unwanted, significant concessions on arms control and other issues central to the relationship in the absence of concrete and far-reaching Soviet concessions in arms control negotiations.
Soviet temporization and American temporization: This combination could have developed out of the previous scenario. The political heat generated in Washington from a successful Soviet political campaign and selective retrenchment in theThird World might have encouraged an American president to back away from confrontation when he came to realize that it played into his opponent’s hand. Allied leaders, especially in Western Europe, would undoubtedly have pushed for such a change when they found themselves stretched between their commitment to NATO and a public increasingly disenchanted with the United States. An American policy of temporization might have been the fall-back position after an American policy of confrontation in the face of Soviet temporizing.
Alternatively, both superpowers could simultaneously have chosen to pursue wait-and-see strategies in early 1985, motivated by domestic or foreign calculations. Leaders might have preferred to direct their time and energy to pressing domestic concerns unrelated to Cold War issues, and therefore might have attempted to keep foreign policy issues off the agenda. Leaders might also have chosen to temporize if they believed that the other side was uninterested in accommodation, and that they could only lose politically at home by pursuing a strategy of conciliation. In this circumstance, arms competition and the struggle for influence would probably have continued in a muted way unless the independent action of third parties created some kind of undesired crisis. But such mutual temporization would likely have been temporary, as the growing costs of an arms race led to growing pressure on one or the other side to “do something” of either a confrontational or conciliatory nature to break the logjam.
Temporization could be the term to characterize much of Gorbachev’s policy toward the United States in 1985. The response of the Reagan administration was to continue the policies of the first term until Moscow became conciliatory. It is conceivable, however, that a President Bush or Mondale would have been more inclined to temporize instead. But, as we have suggested, that in itself would have been insufficient to transform the relationship.
Soviet temporization and American conciliation: Soviet temporizing could have prompted an American strategy of conciliation. If the political heat from within Western Europe threatened a crisis within the alliance, and that pressure was intensified by Soviet cutting of losses in the Third World, as well as the realization that the Soviets had not chosen to match the American military buildup of Reagan’s first term, an American president might have chosen to respond to Soviet temporizing with genuinely conciliatory measures. The result of this interaction might have been Soviet adoption of a conciliatory strategy and a “virtuous circle” of mutual accommodation.
But American efforts at conciliation could have elicited other responses depending on the underlying reasons for Soviet temporization. If caution had been motivated by doubts about the United States being a willing or reliable partner, presidential efforts at conciliation could have reassured a Soviet leader and helped him to build domestic support for reciprocal gestures. If temporization was primarily a response to domestic considerations, conciliatory policies could have created something of a dilemma for a relatively new general secretary in the process of consolidating his power, all the more so if he derived support from more conservative elements within the Communist Party. For a general secretary committed to shifting resources from national security to other sectors of the economy, however, American efforts at conciliation would have been helpful.
Moreover, it is unclear whether, in the mid-1980s, a US president would have been inclined to adopt a strategy of conciliation absent a Soviet conciliatory posture. On this score, we are challenged to demonstrate that a conciliatory counterfactual does not do violence to the history of the period. Perhaps it is plausible to contend that neither Bush nor Mondale would have had the self-confidence that Reagan had to stand fast until his maximal demands were met. Either of them might have responded to growing domestic and European demands for progress in US-Soviet relations with a policy of conciliation in response to the growing political costs to the US president of a successful Soviet strategy of temporization. Absent a rapid Soviet reciprocation of that conciliation, however, it is difficult to imagine this strategy being sustained.
The three remaining scenarios of interaction, all of which posit a Soviet strategy of conciliation, violate the premise with which we began this section: that, absent Gorbachev, Soviet policy would not have turned conciliatory to any great extent. Hence, we now make a partial transition toward our second thought experiment—alternative scenarios of interaction with Gorbachev and Reagan in power—though we will continue to interject observations drawn from the first such experiment, in which we had subtracted Gorbachev and Reagan from the equation.
Soviet Conciliation and American Confrontation: This was the state of US-Soviet relations in 1986-1987. Soviet conciliation amounted to movement toward acceptance of unequal terms in arms control treaties, liberalization of human rights policies and movement toward retrenchment or cutting of losses in the Third World, including Afghanistan. If President Reagan had responded to Soviet conciliation by continuing to raise the ante in negotiations, by refusing to strike deals that would abandon US military deployments, and by continuing to increase the military pressure on Soviet positions in the Third World — and some of his advisors urged him to do this — it seems unlikely that the Cold War would have moved rapidly toward resolution. Gorbachev would have found it difficult to maintain domestic support for a policy of unreciprocated conciliation. Hardliners would have found it easier to mobilize support against domestic changes that threatened to weaken the Soviet Union. In every way, Gorbachev would have been more constrained, and might have had to fall back on a foreign policy of temporization. Or, worse, he might have been replaced by a hardline leadership that promptly abandoned both domestic reform and foreign accommodation..
It also seems clear that political opposition to an American posture of confrontation would have risen greatly and rapidly. The Reagan administration would have found it increasingly costly politically to continue its all-round confrontation of the Soviet Union in the face of Gorbachev’s conciliatory behavior and clever public relations. “Gorbymania “ would have put considerable pressure on first Reagan and then Bush to adopt more conciliatory policies.
This scenario is counterfactual in the sense that it alters the actual American response to Soviet conciliation. Another counterfactual alters the actual leadership equation by subtracting both Gorbachev and Reagan. It is difficult to imagine a Romanov or any other Soviet old-guard leader embracing a strategy of conciliation in 1986-1987. It is easier — but still not easy — to imagine Bush or Mondale resisting the pressure to reciprocate Soviet conciliation, or at least to temporize in the face of it. If either man was insecure about his political authority and less than self-confident about his image within the United States, he might have been tempted to sustain a posture of American confrontation and deny the reality of Soviet conciliation. In that case, the explanation for Ronald Reagan’s refusal to go this route, and to test the sincerity of Soviet conciliatory policies, would be his greater political security and sense of identity combined with his visionary urge to go down in history as a great peacemaker.
Soviet Conciliation and American Temporization: Soviet conciliation might have encouraged an American president to back away from a policy of confrontation in the expectation that a softer line would facilitate further Soviet retreat. There is evidence that Gorbachev’s retrenchment and conciliation, coupled with his moves to liberalize the Soviet political system, had precisely this effect. Initially uncertain about Gorbachev’s broader goals, and disinclined for domestic and foreign reasons to take many risks, the Reagan administration chose to temporize. The president became more forthcoming when given the prospect of a favorable arms control treaty. If he had not done this, it might have been difficult for Gorbachev to continue his increasingly concessionary foreign policies. Gorbachev could have become more cautious about concessions in arms control, or simply drawn out the process of East-West accommodation for long enough that the German problem was still unresolved by the time his power waned.
Indeed, President Bush initially thought that Ronald Reagan had gone too far to accommodate Gorbachev; he accordingly temporized during 1989, his first year in office. Temporization is usually a short-term strategy, and Bush, like his predecessor, gradually moved toward conciliation. It is interesting to speculate about what would have happened had either president continued to temporize; it could have led to a very different end to the Cold War. It could have encouraged Gorbachev to try to cut a separate deal with Germany. Unification, even if it required a neutral Germany or special status for the East — as Gorbachev initially demanded — could have appealed to West German Prime Minister Helmut Kohl and his foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher.
Soviet Conciliation and American Conciliation: After the Geneva summit, Gorbachev’s policy toward the West became increasingly conciliatory on all fronts. As noted, both American presidents temporized and then adopted conciliatory policies. This was the path through which the Cold War came to an end, at the time it did, and on the terms it did.
Summing Up: Our analysis of the likely interactions among these several Soviet and American strategies suggests a wide range of possible outcomes, ranging from a rapid resolution of the Cold War to its intensification. In between lie a range of outcomes that represent continuation of the Cold War in one form or another [see Table 1]. Some of these combinations seem inherently unstable, given both the political pressures and the nuclear fears of the time. One or both sides would probably have switched to a less cooperative or less confrontational strategy. One combination—Soviet confrontation and American conciliation—seems fanciful, given the temper of American politics at the time.
It is entirely conceivable – perhaps, likely — that without Gorbachev and/or Reagan, the Cold War could have been alive and well for some time after 1989, the Berlin Wall still standing, the Soviet Union still in existence, and Eastern Europe still run by communist regimes. A Soviet leader other than Gorbachev might have been inclined to respond to Star Wars with counter-measures or implacable opposition to further arms control. A Soviet leader other than Gorbachev might not have launched glasnost’, perestroika, and democratization at home, thereby reducing the chance that anti-regime forces within Eastern Europe would eventually have gained the upper hand. Of course, such a leader might also have been quite willing to use force in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe to hold the Warsaw Pact together; he would also have been more willing to counter challenges to the regime in the USSR with the determined use of force. 33 A leader other than Reagan, facing a hardline Soviet leader, might have sought and found ways to decrease the level of tension in the relationship. But he would not likely have achieved an accommodation that went beyond the kind of détente temporarily achieved by Nixon and Brezhnev in the early 1970s.
Leader Indispensability? 34
The only peaceful route to resolution of the Cold War was through an iterative process of mutual conciliation. How essential were Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan to the adoption of sustained, mutually conciliatory postures? We should be careful here not to equate the strategy of mutual conciliation with the kind of fragile, competitive, mutually “offensive détente” reached by Nixon and Brezhnev. For the latter purpose, Gorbachev and Reagan were clearly dispensable. Earlier detentes did not break out of the Cold War pattern of combining selective collaboration with intense superpower competition; indeed, they may have unraveled for precisely that reason.
Gorbachev as Indispensable?
In the case of Gorbachev, we encounter a Soviet leader who made a conscious decision to reject the ideological assumptions that supported the “anti-imperialist” struggle, the Cold War international order, and the domestic Soviet institutions whose identities were defined by this approach to international politics. He came eventually to a conscious decision to transform Soviet domestic politics in a liberalizing, democratizing, and Westernizing direction. He articulated a vision of a transformed domestic and international order and managed to justify his conciliatory posture with reference to that new way of thinking. He was able to sell the approach to key audiences within the political establishment, in part for political-intellectual reasons. His doctrinal innovations were ingenious syntheses of old and new precepts, in ways that appeared to retain fidelity to the Marxist revolutionary tradition, while rejecting core features of the Leninist approach to international relations. In addition to these political-intellectual attributes, Gorbachev had the kind of self-confident and assertive personality that could dominate small-group decision-making processes. He also possessed the political skills to exploit opportunities created by stochastic events. He had an outstanding sense of timing, was highly articulate in small-group debate, and knew how to seize the initiative from prospective skeptics. He used the Chernobyl accident as a springboard to rein in the censorship authorities and exploited the landing on Red Square of Matthias Rust’s Cessna as a pretext to purge the military command.
To be sure, Gorbachev was not a magician; he was operating in a context that facilitated his efforts. A good deal of individual and collective learning had been taking place behind the scenes of Soviet politics during the twenty years before Gorbachev came to power. By the 1980s, party intellectuals and officials in growing numbers had sensed that something fundamental had to give — that the Soviet Union was approaching a cul de sac in both its domestic evolution and foreign relations. 35 Their foreboding was far from a majority position, but it did provide an opening for an entrepreneurial political leader ready to exploit new ideas and build a new political base. Then too, very large numbers of party officials who resisted this pessimistic conclusion had nonetheless lost confidence in their ability to justify their right to rule — to themselves and the populace at large — and worried about the sustainability of their domination under such conditions. Gorbachev was able to exploit these changes in both the intellectual and the psychological context, and to use his formidable political skills to maintain support — if only passive support in many instances — for the determined strategy of conciliation he had embraced.
There is no evidence to suggest that anyone else in the Soviet leadership possessed the flexible intellect, the personality, and the political skills that Gorbachev combined in his person. Men like Aleksandr Yakovlev and Eduard Shevardnadze matched him in intellect; but neither of them were in a position to be elected General Secretary in 1985, and neither had Gorbachev’s personality and political skills. Other supporters like Vadim Medvedev fell short on all three counts, and could not have been elected in any case. In short, any counterfactual that eliminates Gorbachev from the scene in March 1985 leads inexorably to the conclusion that he was indispensable for the redirection of Soviet foreign policy toward a sustained and sustainable posture of conciliation.
Gorbachev’s willingness simultaneously to transform Soviet domestic and foreign policy orientations and institutions lent much-needed credibility abroad to the rhetoric of “new thinking” in international relations. Foreign governments were understandably distrustful of changes in words alone; they wanted concrete evidence of changes in deeds. Changes in foreign policies that were not also accompanied by fundamental changes in domestic policies and institutions could be rationalized by foreign governments as mere efforts to gain a “breathing spell” abroad during a time of domestic weakness. This had been a time-honored Soviet strategy since the 1920s. Gorbachev’s concomitant transformations largely undercut the political and intellectual grounding of the “enemy image” of the USSR in Western governments.
Reagan as Indispensable?
Was Ronald Reagan equally necessary for the realization of a virtuous circle of mutual conciliation? Did his personality and perspectives uniquely facilitate East-West accommodation? Reagan had a deep abhorrence of nuclear weapons and, with it, a growing commitment to find a way out of the East-West impasse. There is some evidence that Reagan’s commitment intensified in early 1984 after his SIOP briefing [on the country’s strategic nuclear options] and as a result of the Soviet Union’s overreaction to the Abel Archer nuclear exercise. These events seem to have “primed” Reagan to initiate efforts to reestablish better communications with Moscow and, possibly, to respond more favorably to the overtures toward accommodation that Gorbachev would later make.
Ronald Reagan held strong views on many subjects and had little knowledge to back those views up. He repeatedly demonstrated his ignorance of the Soviet Union, in public and private. Reagan had a much less complex cognitive schema about the Soviet Union than did his advisors, or some other contenders for the presidency. Laboratory experiments offer robust support for the proposition that the less developed the schema the more receptive it is to change in response to discrepant information. People with more complex and developed schemas are more likely to find ways of interpreting discrepant information in a manner consistent with their schemas, or of making small, incremental changes in their schemas to accommodate this information. Thus, it is not surprising that Reagan, who entered office with the most fervently anti-Soviet views, retired as the biggest dove in his administration. Reagan’s advisors had far more elaborate schemas of the Soviet Union, and these schemas allowed them to explain away Gorbachev’s reforms and interest in arms control and accommodation. They remained doubting and dubious longer than most Americans. As we have noted, Vice President Bush claimed to be still unconvinced of Gorbachev’s sincerity when he assumed the presidency.
Reagan’s dramatic about-face may also have been facilitated by his propensity — noted by many of his confidants — to reduce issues to personalities. If he liked and trusted someone, he was more prone to give credence to the policies they espoused. Reagan’s closest advisors testify that his personal meetings with Gorbachev at Geneva in November 1985 and at Reykjavik in November 1986 made a big impact on him; he came away impressed by the general secretary and his seeming commitment to reduce the nuclear danger and tensions between the superpowers. 36 We can speculate that Reagan’s assessment of Gorbachev created considerable cognitive dissonance for him. If many of his advisors interpreted Gorbachev’s behavior in a manner consistent with their more complex schemas (i.e., that Gorbachev was clever, duplicitous and seeking to weaken the West by appealing to the anti-war sentiments of European and American public opinion), Reagan, with his less developed schema, changed his view of the Soviet Union. Once he accepted Gorbachev as sincere, he worked with him to bring about the accommodation both men desired. By the time of the 1988 Moscow summit, when a newsman reminded Reagan of his earlier depiction of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” the President chuckled and replied: “I was talking about another time, another era.” 37 It seems unlikely another president, and certainly not George Bush, would have undergone such a transition.
The Reagan-Gorbachev Relationship
Was there something about the personal rapport between these two leaders that encouraged conciliation and helped them to sustain the momentum of that process once it had begun? We think the answer is “yes.” Gorbachev shared Reagan’s horror of nuclear weapons. The fact that both men happened to share a vision of a world without nuclear weapons was salutary to the process of mutual conciliation. That they were in power at the same time was a remarkable and perhaps even necessary coincidence.? 38
The Cold War started as a struggle to fill a power vacuum in Central Europe, and superpower competition ultimately spread to much of the Third World. Gradually and grudgingly, both the superpowers came to accept the political and territorial status quo in Europe, and even gave it something of a formal status in the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The Cold War had driven Washington and Moscow to acquire thermonuclear weapons and the arsenals to deliver them against each other’s allies and homelands. By the early 1980’s, cause and effect had become reversed, and the principal cause of superpower conflict had become weapons deployments and the insecurities they generated in both capitals. To end the Cold War, it was necessary first and foremost to reduce these insecurities by reducing the weapons. Previous arms control agreements had done little to diminish nuclear arsenals; they were more a means of reducing uncertainty through regulated competition. Without Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s mutual commitment to deep cuts in strategic and theater-level forces, it is likely that whatever arms control agreements their countries reached would have been along more traditional lines. They would not have cut the Gordian knot of the Cold War.
Moreover, Reagan and Gorbachev had the right chemistry. Both men were self-confident idealists unprepared to bow to political expediency. They “immediately sensed this” about each other, former foreign minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh observed, and “this is why they made ‘good partners’.” Confronted with a different General Secretary, who had neither Gorbachev’s personality nor his commitment to reduce the nuclear threat, Reagan might well have remained a frustrated, anti-Soviet ideologue. Given his commitment to holding out for asymmetrical, indeed maximal, Soviet concessions in all realms, the Cold War might well have remained unresolved and a more complicated legacy for his successor. On the other hand, confronted with a different American President, Gorbachev might well have impressed and converted him with his willingness to make so many unilateral concessions. But the lesser resolve and greater political insecurity of a George Bush or Walter Mondale might have made it less attractive tactically and more difficult politically for Gorbachev to justify such far-reaching concessions. The perception that a Bush or Mondale would have settled for less could have led Gorbachev to demand a more balanced compromise. Had Gorbachev not transcended such a perspective, intellectually or politically, he might have participated in a more drawn-out process of negotiation that could have become the basis for mutual disillusionment — as it did in the 1970s — or, further down the line, a Cold War settlement different in scope and form. Paradoxically then, it is worth considering the proposition that it was Reagan’s maximalism and resolve, coupled with his willingness to strike deals and abandon hostile rhetoric when his maximalist demands were being met, and fueled by the personal rapport and vision he shared with Gorbachev, that ended the Cold War when and how it did.
Thus, when we examine the process in finer detail, we discover that the mutual conciliation that led to the end of the Cold War was more than a simple, iterative process of strategic interaction. The results could not have been predicted by knowing only the strategies and preferences of the actors. We find that, after the first iteration, the adoption of follow-on strategies can be influenced, perhaps decisively, by the personal chemistry and trust—or lack of it—that develops between leaders and between negotiators. That chemistry and trust can reshape preferences, commitments, and expectations of reciprocity. It can, in other words, make the difference between breakdown and further iterations of the game.
Mutual Conciliation: Variations on the Theme
One can imagine infinite counterfactuals about the possible sequence and consequences of US-Soviet interactions during the 1980s. Many of these counterfactuals are patently fanciful and do not warrant our attention. Which counterfactuals are plausible and worth addressing depends on both what we are attempting to explain and on our underlying theories about the nature and malleability of the international and domestic constraints faced by leaders. To this point, most of our counterfactual analysis has addressed the consequences of Gorbachev or Reagan, or both, not being in office in 1985-1989. We have asked if other leaders would have had the intellectual and political skills required to break out of the prevailing constraints and initiate and sustain an extended process of mutual conciliation. We have argued that Ronald Reagan was quite possibly, and Mikhail Gorbachev most certainly, essential for realizing this goal.
Let us now try to evaluate the sustainability of the process of mutual conciliation by invoking another set of counterfactuals that look at alternative outcomes with these two leaders in power . What would they not have done? What could they not have gotten away with doing? And how did these conditions evolve over time? How might the process of mutual conciliation have been slowed, skewed, or aborted? When did the process become irreversible? We began this exercise earlier in the article, when discussing the three scenarios of interaction that began with Soviet conciliation, since we could not imagine any other Soviet leader making the far-reaching concessions Gorbachev did in 1986-87. In this exercise as well, we must avoid the trap of retrospective determinism, this time regarding the process that unfolded during 1985-1990 after the re-inauguration of Reagan as president in January 1985 and the choice of Gorbachev as general secretary some seven weeks later, in March 1985. Of necessity, this thought experiment must probe the details of East-West interactions, the political processes within each superpower, the impact of stochastic events on the course of the relationship, and the roles played by third parties. By positing realistic changes in historical occurrences, and by exploring their possible repercussions for the superpower relationship, our thought experiment attempts to assess the ongoing, not the static, malleability of the domestic and international orders in question. By using two men with extraordinary political skills and a deep commitment to change, we are also testing the limits of leadership.
The authors of this article are participants in a multi-year project that is using interviews and archival research to explore these questions in depth. Hence, in the present article it is premature for us to provide a detailed analysis of the contingent process of mutual conciliation. However, we offer a discussion of some of the principal theoretical and methodological issues, along with telling empirical illustrations of key points.
Altering the Gorbachev-Reagan Interaction
When we think back on the process that ended the Cold War during Reagan’s second term and George Bush’s first term, a number of salient milestones come to mind: the Reykjavik summit of October 1986; the Euromissile Treaty of December 1987; the Soviet announcement in December 1988 of unilateral conventional forces reductions in Europe; the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in May 1989; the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe during the second half of 1989; the signing of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) in Paris in November 1990; the unification of Germany in 1990 on terms that allowed for the unified country’s inclusion in NATO; and the signing of the START I Treaty in July 1991. This is both a formidable array of breakthroughs — all of which predate the collapse of the USSR — and a rich field for examining contingencies.
The temptation is great to assume that some sort of “necessity” drove the process from beginning to end, and some international relations scholars of the “realist” persuasion have advanced this argument. But such assertions are acts of faith; they presume that which needs to be demonstrated: high confidence that the process would have unfolded the way it did in the absence of stochastic events, personal predispositions, and contingent constellations of political forces that shaped the choices made in Washington, Moscow and Eastern and Western Europe at each branch in the “decision tree.” The flip side of this counterfactual is, of course, explanatory causality: how much of an impact did those factors have on the choices that were made, politically “sold,” and sustained?
Ultimately we wish to make some informed judgments about the probability that any of these milestones might have been averted or aborted. For example, what would it have taken for Gorbachev to refuse, for personal or political reasons, to make the full array of concessions that Reagan was demanding as a precondition for finalizing the INF treaty? Or, on the American side, under what conditions might Reagan have upped the ante still further and rejected even these concessions as insufficient — perhaps because forces within his administration had come to view deployment of Euromissiles as an end in itself? To take a third example, under what personal and political conditions might Gorbachev have refused to allow the collapse of East European communist regimes or, having recognized that this political transformation was unavoidable, to have refused to agree to German unification on the terms offered?
Or returning to an earlier stage of the Gorbachev-Reagan relationship, it took one-to-two years before Gorbachev had consolidated his power and begun to introduce his more radical changes in domestic and foreign policy. Had Reagan treated these years as conclusive evidence that the new Soviet leader was just an old-style apparatchik — and some of Reagan’s advisors urged this interpretation on him — he might have been less receptive than he proved ultimately to be in the face of Gorbachev’s far-reaching concessions on Euromissiles. His demurrals might then have made it more difficult for Gorbachev to maintain his credibility within the Soviet political elite as the man uniquely capable of “delivering” Ronald Reagan — that is, of inducing Reagan to “do business” with Moscow and to agree to reciprocate Soviet concessions.
When we explore such counterfactuals, the plot thickens. Not only do we have to delve into the very specific details of particular moments in time, we have to consider the ways in which changes at one moment influence decisions further down the line. Had things gone differently at Reykjavik — for the better or the worse — what impact would this have had on the following year’s INF negotiations? If the INF treaty, for personal or political reasons, had not been consummated, how would that have affected the subsequent START I negotiations and Gorbachev’s willingness or ability to make unilateral concessions on conventional force reductions? Would a breakdown in these negotiations have discredited Gorbachev’s “new thinking” and diminished his political authority to the point that he might have lost the commanding political autonomy that allowed him to make large, unilateral concessions on CFE in December 1988 or to block consideration of sending Soviet tanks into Eastern Europe in 1989? Even if communism in Eastern Europe had been allowed to collapse, would a politically weakened Gorbachev have found it impossible to accept German unification within NATO? How would the increased strength and presumably confidence of militarist forces in Moscow have affected subsequent East-West relations?
In our collective research project we have attempted to determine the decisions and outcome in the process of accommodation that might be considered “close calls.” Close calls can take many forms. They can be decisions by ambivalent policymakers who, with only minor differences in the domestic or international situation, might have resolved their ambivalence in different directions. Close calls can be political, with the balance of support for initiatives having been marginal so that random events or third-party interventions might have changed the outcomes by changing the price or feasibility of support. Close calls can also be interpersonal: what if Reagan and Gorbachev had agreed at Reykjavik to announce their mutual commitment to complete abolition of nuclear weapons within 5-10 years? How might this have realigned political forces in Washington, Moscow and Europe, and what would have been the implications of this realignment for the political balance in other issue areas relevant to the end of the Cold War? What if Gorbachev or Reagan had listened to their advisors and not engaged in visionary discussions at Reykjavik, but instead had tabled the usual limited proposals for arms control and had reached some agreement on them? How would this have affected the constellation of political forces in both capitals in 1987 and the prospects of the INF Treaty? Looking further down the line, what if the proposal advanced by Henry Kissinger had been accepted by Reagan or Bush, and the US had acted to help guarantee the survival of the Warsaw Pact in return for freedom for these countries to choose their own forms of government? If Gorbachev and his American counterpart had negotiated such a deal in 1988-1989, would the Warsaw Pact still have collapsed?
Path Dependency?
A process of iterative mutual concessions that is set within a real-world political context creates psychological as well as political commitments that may constrain or redefine the field of options in later iterations. Counterfactual reconstructions of that process, which seek to determine how things might have evolved differently once it began, must take into account whatever deepening of commitment to given paths and goals the process has engendered. It must also consider other factors — such as a possible political backlash — that might push the relationship onto a different path, possibly away from conciliation. In some respects, then, the theories that we bring to bear on counterfactual reconstructions must concern the various ways in which cognitive, emotional, institutional, political, and international factors may reinforce the process of mutual conciliation, creating “lock-in” or other “path-dependent” effects. It is equally imperative to consider theories that would predict backlashes at any of these levels, aborting or altering the process of mutual conciliation.
For example, at what points did it become increasingly difficult for Gorbachev to abandon the conciliatory process? Levesque’s study of Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe demonstrates that, by 1988, Gorbachev had become locked into a way of thinking, and a set of international commitments, that made it prohibitively expensive for him — intellectually, emotionally, and politically — to use force in Eastern Europe. In like manner, Hough’s and Brown’s studies of Gorbachev show him to be an individual who, for various reasons, could not bring himself to use force during the later stages of his administration. 39 Similarly, a theory of Soviet politics based on an authority-building perspective 40 sensitizes the analyst to the stages of leaders’ administrations and how authority-maintenance dilemmas evolve over time. Having built their authority and consolidated their power on the basis of certain orientations and appeals, leaders may face a crisis of authority-maintenance when events discredit the predictions and promises inherent in their programs. John F. Kennedy’s response to the detection of Soviet missiles in Cuba is a classic example of this dynamic: “How could he do that to me!?” 41
On the basis of existing literature, it is our impression that Gorbachev’s freedom of action declined during 1988-1990, due to a convergence of three types of commitments—psychological, political, and international—that vastly increased the costs to him of retrogression. In the ongoing research project, we investigate the ways in which actions taken at one stage of the process of mutual conciliation created commitments that narrowed the range of options perceived to be desirable or feasible at subsequent stages.
Conclusions
We conducted two sets of counterfactual thought experiments to evaluate the importance of leaders for the end of the Cold War. In the principal experiment, we substituted other leaders for Gorbachev and Reagan to ask how Soviet-American relations might have evolved. To make our analysis as plausible as possible, we picked leaders (Grishin, Romanov, Ligachev, Bush, Mondale) who might have come to power in 1985, described scenarios by which this might have happened, and asked how the changed circumstances that would have brought these men into power would have affected the domestic and international constraints they faced. We identified five strategies toward superpower relations that other leaders might have pursued in different issue-areas, and at different points in time. In order manageably to explore the dynamics of interaction between superpower strategies, we collapsed the five into three—confrontation, temporization, and conciliation. We examined the nine possible interactions among these strategies, but treated them only as starting points, and assumed that some of them were inherently unstable (e.g., Soviet conciliation vs. US confrontation). We explored possible follow-on interactions and argued that many pathways led to three quasi-stable states for the near-term evolution of the Cold War: continuation, amelioration and intensification.
Our thought experiment led us to the conclusion that the end of the Cold War was highly contingent. Without Gorbachev and Reagan that conflict could have continued for some time, possibly in a more acute form. This is not only because of the strategies that Reagan and Gorbachev embraced. The end of the Cold War was more than an iterative process of strategic interaction. The personal interactions of the leaders, and of their most influential advisors, was also important for shaping their preferences, commitments and expectations of reciprocity. The personal “chemistry” between Reagan and Gorbachev was especially critical in this regard.
Leaders matter, but they are not all that matters. Intellectual, political, economic, and organizational constraints can severely limit the power of a leader to reorient foreign policy. To explore these limits in the case of the Cold War, we conducted a second, shorter, and still incomplete counterfactual thought experiment. Keeping Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush in power, we asked what might have happened to encourage one or more of them to make different choices at critical turning points in the process that led to the end of the Cold War. Here too, we emphasized the contingent nature of the outcome. Different actions or responses by important third parties, in either country or in Western or Eastern Europe, and a different set of random events might have prevented the accommodation that occurred. We also found that, during the course of the process of mutual conciliation, commitments of several kinds accumulated that raised the price of retrogression, such that, later in the process, reversals might have been more unlikely than earlier in the process. But even if mutual conciliation continued at the later stages, there was nothing inevitable about its taking the form that it did. We suggested, for example, that the German question might have been resolved on different terms.
By positing realistic changes in historical events, and by exploring their possible repercussions for the superpower relationship, our analysis attempts to assess the ongoing, not the static, malleability of the domestic and international orders in question. By using two men with extraordinary political skills and a deep commitment to change, it also provides an unusual opportunity to evaluate the power and limits of leadership. We believe that our provisional analysis proposes some tentative answers to important political questions and suggests a research program that could enrich our theoretical understanding of the relationship between agency and structure. However, our thought experiments beg the question of how events might have evolved in the longer term. One can acknowledge the contingent and diverse nature of short-term interactions and their outcomes, and still argue that in the course of time, by one means or another, the Cold War would have ended with a Soviet defeat, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and breakup of the Soviet Union.
We would not dismiss the utility of such speculation, but would emphasize that it is a very different kind of intellectual exercise. Counterfactual analysis is based on theories of politics that describe short-term interactions, whereas long-term prediction relies on broader, structural theories of evolution or interaction. Grandiose, long-term theories are typically imprecise because they are open-ended in the temporal aspects of their predictions. More importantly for our purposes, the farther into the future we try to extend a counterfactual rewrite, the larger the number of intermediate effects (“consequents”) we must control for in trying to fathom the long-term effects of an altered causal variable (“antecedent”). To take a concrete example, it is difficult enough to imagine what the Soviet Union would have looked like in 1939 if Nikolai Bukharin, not Joseph Stalin, had won the power struggle of the 1920s. Without a clear answer to this question we have no firm grounds to speculate on whether the Soviet Union would have won World War II—assuming there had been a World War II. And it is more difficult still to inquire as to whether there would have been a Cold War between the United States and the USSR if the allies had won the war with Bukharin at the helm in Moscow. Counterfactual analysis is best employed as a tool for the short-term reconstruction of history, and is best complemented by short-term theories of continuity and change. Hence, whether the Cold War would have ended “anyway” in the subsequent 10-20 years, or whether the Soviet Union would have eventually collapsed as well, are beyond the realm of our capacity to investigate using the analytic, theoretical, and methodological tools discussed in this article.
We do not challenge the importance of many of the underlying causes that scholars have identified as responsible for the end of the Cold War. But we have tried to demonstrate that underlying causes, no matter how numerous or deep-seated, do not make an event, or a sequence of events, inevitable. It is worth considering the somewhat counterintuitive proposition that there may be no relationship between the number and intensity of underlying causes and the probability of an outcome. One of us has made this case for World War I. This conflict, like the end of the Cold War, may have been both “overdetermined” and highly contingent. Social scientists err in thinking that major social and political developments are invariably specific instances of strong, or even weak, regularities in social behavior. These developments are sometimes the result of accidental conjunctions; they are events that might have had a low subjective probability. Conversely, events that seem highly likely may never happen. The concatenation of particular leaders with particular contexts, and of particular events with other events, is always a matter of chance, never of necessity.
Endnotes
Note 1: On conjunctional causality, see Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), pp. Back.
Note 2: William Wohlforth, “New Evidence on Moscow’s Cold War: Ambiguity in Search of Theory,” Diplomatic History , 21 (Spring 1997), pp. 229-242. Back.
Note 3: Steven Weber, “Prediction and the Middle East Peace Process,” Security Studies 6 (Summer 1997), p. 196. Back.
Note 4: Baruch Fischoff, “Hindsight is not Equal to Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment under Uncertainty,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, no.2 (1975), pp. 288-99; S. A. Hawkins and R. Hastie, “Hindsight: Biased Judgments of Past Events after the Outcomes are Known,” Psychological Bulletin 107, no. 3 (1990), pp. 311-27. The tendency was earlier referred to as “retrospective determinism” in comparative-historical studies by Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship (New York: Wiley, 1964). Back.
Note 5: On counterfactuals, and their applicability to history and international relations, see Max Weber, “Objective Possibility and Adequate Causation in Historical Explanation,” in Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, eds, Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1949), pp. 164-88; Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); John Elster, Logic and Society: Contradictions and Possible Worlds (New York: John Wiley, 1978); Robert Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964); G. Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); James D. Fearon, “Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science,” World Politics 43 (January 1991), pp. 169-95; Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, “Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives,” in Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Geissel des Jahrhunderts: Hitler and seine Hinterlassenschaft (Berlin: Siedler, 1989); Philip E. Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow and Geoffrey Parker, Unmaking the West: Counterfactual Thought Experiments in History (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). Back.
Note 6: See E.H. Carr, What is History? 2 nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. . According to A. J. P. Taylor, “a historian should never deal in speculation about what did not happen.” Struggle for the Mastery of Europe, 1848-1918 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954); see also E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), p. 300. M. M. Postan, writes: “The might-have beens of history are not a profitable subject of discussion,” quoted in J. D. Gould, “Hypothetical History, “ Economic History Review , 2nd ser. 22 (August 1969), pp. 195-207; See also David Hackett Fischer, Historian’s Fallacies (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1970), pp. 15-21; Peter McClelland, Casual Explanation and Model-Building in History, Economics, and the New Economic History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). Back.
Note 7: Yuen Foong Khong, “Confronting Hitler and Its Consequences,” in Tetlock and Belkin, Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics , pp. 95-118. Back.
Note 8: For a fuller elaboration of this argument, see Richard Ned Lebow, “What’s so Different about a Counterfactual?” in Tetlock, Lebow and Parker, Unmaking the West , forthcoming, ch. 2. Back.
Note 9: Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), ch. 1 and passim. Back.
Note 10: Norman N. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). Back.
Note 11: Lucius D. Clay, Decision in Germany (New York: Doubleday, 1950, pp. 365-366. Back.
Note 12: “Graduated Reciprocation in Tension-Reduction,” a concept and strategy first suggested in Charles E. Osgood, “Suggestions for Winning the Real War with Communism,” Journal of Conflict Resolution , no. 3 (1959), pp. 295-325. The strategy calls for making unilateral concessions and maintaining that posture, at least initially, even if the concessions are not reciprocated; in short, “don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” This was the approach that Gorbachev embraced, though without necessarily being aware of Osgood or GRIT per se . Back.
Note 13: For an early sorting of Western speculation on this matter, see George W. Breslauer, “From Brezhnev to Gorbachev: Ends and Means of Soviet Leadership Selection,” in Raymond Taras, ed., Leadership Change in Communist States (London, UK: Unwin Hyman 1989). Back.
Note 14: Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 82-88; Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985-1991 (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1997), ch. 3; Back.
Note 15: The notion of leadership as a process of “stretching constraints” is taken from Warren Ilchman and Norman Uphoff, The Political Economy of Change (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969). Back.
Note 16: On Khrushchev’s foreign relations, see James G. Richter, Khrushchev’s Double Bind (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); on Brezhnev’s foreign policies, see Richard D. Anderson, Public Politics in an Authoritarian Regime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Harry Gelman, The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Détente (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); on US-Soviet relations, see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (London: Oxford University Press, 1982); Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Brezhnev (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1985); Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); on the breakthrough in US-Soviet relations in the 1980s, see Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great Transition (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1997). Back.
Note 17: See George W. Breslauer and Philip Tetlock, eds., Learning in US and Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991), passim.; see also Richard Herrmann, “Conclusions: The End of the Cold War—What Have We Learned?” in Lebow and Risse-Kappen, International Relations Theory , pp. 259-284. Back.
Note 18: See Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955); Richard Herrmann, Perceptions and Behavior in Soviet Foreign Policy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). Back.
Note 19: On the impact of the electoral and succession cycles on US-Soviet relations, see I.M. Destler, Leslie H. Gelb, and Anthony Lake, Our Own Worst Enemy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984); Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); Gaddis, Strategies of Containment ; George W. Breslauer, “Do Soviet Leaders ‘Test’ New Presidents?” International Security 8 (Winter 1983-1984), pp. 83-101; Richter, Khrushchev’s Double Bind. Back.
Note 20: On the distinction between innovative and visionary leadership, see Howard Gardner, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 10-11. Back.
Note 21: For a detailed chronicle of Soviet policy in the early 1980s, see Garthoff, The Great Transition, , chs 1-4. Conceptualization and categorization of types of policies pursued, however, is our own. Back.
Note 22: See The New York Times [to be supplied] Back.
Note 23: Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 246-250. Back.
Note 24: Moskovskaya pravda, , February 22, 1985; Leningradskaya pravda , February 15, 1985. Back.
Note 25: See Hough, Revolution and Democratization , ch. ; Anders Aslund, Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform , 2 nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Back.
Note 26: On Reagan’s approach to the Soviet Union in his first term, see George P. Schultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), chs. 8, 12, 17-18, 25-26, and 30; Garthoff, The Great Transition , chs. 1-4; William C. Wohlforth, ed., Witnesses to the End of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1996). Back.
Note 27: We have decided not to pursue consideration of the counterfactual scenario that keeps a physically weakened Ronald Reagan in office and then has him win or lose the 1984 election, since we do not know how to estimate the likely behavior of a partially incapacitated Reagan. Back.
Note 28: Our image of George Bush is shaped by the following sources. George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998); James A. Baker III with Thomas M. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989-1992 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1995); Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels (London: Little, Brown, 1993); and Stanley A. Renshon, ed., The Political Psychology of the Gulf War: Leaders, Publics, and the Process of Conflict (Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993). Back.
Note 29: Schultz, Turmoil and Triumph , chs. 27, 29, 30, and 34; Garthoff, The Great Transition, chs. 5 and 6; Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), chs. 18, 19, and 21. Back.
Note 30: Matthew A. Evangelista, “Cooperation Theory and Disarmament Negotiations in the 1950s,” World Politics , 41 (July 1990), pp. 502-528. Back.
Note 31: Reference is to Bush’s comment about President Manuel Noriega of Panama just before deciding to invade that country to seize Noriega and bring him to the United States for trial. Back.
Note 32: Lebow Interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, Moscow, May 1989. Back.
Note 33: Those who, in retrospect, conclude that Eastern Europeans would have overthrown communism with or without a Gorbachev in power in Moscow forget that Gorbachev’s reforms, and his inhibitions about using force, combined to provide Eastern European societies with a model to emulate and a realistic hope that defiance would not be met with repression; Gorbachev’s model and policies also served to demoralize East European communist elites and to intimidate them in the face of societal defiance. Similarly, those who assume that the collapse of the Soviet Union would have followed on the heels of successful East European defiance vastly underestimate the intimidation level among Soviet citizens, and the collective action problems they faced, in the absence of Gorbachev’s determined efforts to neuter the regime’s capacity and will to use violence. Back.
Note 34: The concept, “leader dispensability,” was first suggested by Alexander George in [to be supplied]. The term “offensive détente” is Jack Snyder’s ( Myths of Empire ); an encyclopedic demonstration that the détente of the 1970s was based on the mutual pursuit of unilateral advantage can be found in Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation . Back.
See George W. Breslauer, “How Do You Sell a Concessionary Foreign Policy?” Post-Soviet Affairs, 10 (July-September 1994), pp. 277-290.
Note 35: See Brown, The Gorbachev Factor ; Hough, Revolution and Democratization ; Breslauer and Tetlock,, Learning in US and Soviet , chapters by F. Griffiths, R. Legvold, and G. Breslauer. Back.
See Garthoff, The Great Transition , chs. 5-10?
The strongest statements for the view that Ronald Reagan deserves credit as the initiator of the overtures of conciliation that led to the end of the Cold War are found in Beth A. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997); and Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1995).
Note 36: Nancy Reagan, My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan (New York: Dell, 1989), pp. 370-371; Wohlforth, Witnesses to the End of the Cold War , pp. 164-165, 170, 180 (comments by Aleksandr Bessmertnykh); Schultz, Turmoil and Triumph , pp. 996 and 1138; Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 504; Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, pp. 231-233. Back.
Note 37: Dan Oberdorfer, The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983-1990 (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), p. 299; see also Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels , p. 132. Back.
Note 38: The argument is also made by Fred I. Greenstein, “Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the End of the Cold War: What Difference Did They Make?” in Wohlforth, Witnesses to the End of the Cold War , p. 216. Back.
In Wohlforth, Ibid.,p. 107; See also the observation of Frank Carlucci, a cabinet member in the Reagan administration (in Ibid., pp. 102-103): “"And the amazing thing is that the alchemy between these two disparate personalities seemed to work, that it somehow came together. There is no question that Ronald Reagan was very taken by Gorbachev; that he understood that Ronald Reagan weas very taken by Gorbachev; that he understood this was a new figure in the Soviet Union; that this was a historical moment. And as our former Soviet friends have said, there's no question that Gorbachev recognized that this was a new, unique opportunity to establish a personal relationship and change the whole dynamic of the relationship."
Henry A. Kissinger, "A Memo to the Next President, " Newsweek, 19 September, 1988, pp. 34, 37; Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels , pp. 13-17; Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed p. 27; Jacques Levesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberalization of Eastern Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), p. 102.
Levesque, The Enigma of 1989.
Note 39: Hough, Revolution and Democratization ; Brown, The Gorbachev Factor . Back.
Note 40: George Breslauer, Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders: Building Authority in Soviet Politics (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1982); Anderson, Public Politics in an Authoritarian Regime ; Richter, Khrushchev’s Double Bind. Back.
Note 41: Richard Neustadt, “Afterword: 1964,” in Presidential Power (New York: Mentor, 1964), p. 187. Back.
See George W. Breslauer, “Counterfactual Reasoning in Western Studies of Soviet Politics and Foreign Relations,” in Tetlock and Belkin, Counterfactual Thought Experiments , pp. 69-94.
Richard Ned Lebow, “Franz Ferdinand Found Alive and Well: World War I Unnecessary,” to appear in Tetlock, Lebow, and Parker, Unmaking the West , forthcoming.
