Avoiding New Cold Wars

If it can teach us anything, it is as a cautionary tale of what not to do now. It is in no sense a model to be emulated.

Jordan Michael Smith reviews Hal Brands’ The Twilight Struggle:

Brands writes as if brutality at home and abroad was necessary to defeat the Soviet Union. But the U.S. could still have won the Cold War without treating the entire globe as a battleground. Melvyn Leffler, Fredrik Logevall, Odd Arne Westad, and other historians have made the case that the U.S. committed crimes that were both unwise and unnecessary. The U.S. always had more and wealthier allies than the Soviet Union did, a far stronger and more diverse economy, and a robust nuclear capability. “From the American point of view, containment had largely been achieved by 1949,” Logevall and his co-author, Campbell Craig, write in their 2009 book, America’s Cold War.

One of the recurring mistakes in U.S. policy during the Cold War was the exaggeration of the threat from communism, which in turn led to an overly militarized form of containment and a preoccupation with fighting battles in peripheral regions. Fantasies of falling dominoes became excuses for outrageous and indefensible policies that critics at the time recognized as having nothing to do with defending the United States or its allies. Right up until the end, hawkish anticommunists greatly overestimated the USSR’s strength, and virtually everyone in the West overestimated its longevity. The Cold War was a bloody, ugly period in our history and in the history of the world, and we should do everything we can to keep the world from falling back into another one. If it can teach us anything, it is as a cautionary tale of what not to do now. It is in no sense a model to be emulated.