We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History

National Review, Dec 31, 1997 by Peter W. Rodman

We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, by John Lewis Gaddis (Oxford, 425 pp., $30)

Mr. Rodman is director of national-security programs at the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom and a senior editor of NR.

THE struggle over history is not an exercise in pedantry. The Soviets understood this well, as they went about the Orwellian business of regularly rewriting the past: it was a way to try to shape the present and future. It is poetic justice, therefore, that the Soviet defeat in the Cold War is now being ratified by the historiographic confirmation -- from Communist archives -- of certain basic truths about how that great East - West contest began. For decades, the debate in the American academy over which side was responsible for the Cold War was, in itself, one of the most important collateral arenas of the struggle. For the so-called "revisionist" school, it was essential to show a high degree of American responsibility. The point was to discredit American postwar foreign policy, for the purpose of encouraging a more conciliatory posture toward the Soviet Union, and, in its more extreme versions, to cast the bully America as the main villain of world politics.

Thus the dual importance of John Lewis Gaddis's new book. Not only is there much to learn from it, it also represents the return of some sanity to the academy. Gaddis, the Robert Lovett Professor of History at Yale and probably the dean of American historians of the Cold War, has elsewhere written candidly, and with regret, about his youthful flirtation with revisionism. His new book -- with its categorical indictment of Josef Stalin as the cause of the Cold War -- is therefore a small milestone in recent American intellectual history.

Gaddis admits he has profited from others' research in the archival material liberated from Soviet, East German, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and even Chinese sources, as well as proliferating memoirs from the Communist side. His strength is as a synthesizer, analyst, and judge.

As the book starts out, the reader may be uneasy: Gaddis speaks of the United States and Soviet Union as both constructing "empires" out of the ruins of post-Hitler Europe. But instead of plunging into the swamp of moral equivalency, Gaddis takes the narrative swiftly in the opposite direction. What is striking about the American "empire," he shows, is its inadvertence, if not reluctance, and, more important, the degree to which it was formed at the insistence of its European clients, who eagerly sought American help and protection. The postwar institutions of Western cooperation --economic, political, and military -- were, in their details, as often as not the product of European initiatives. Gaddis uncovers a comment in 1948 by a State Department official who acknowledged that the new Europe which America was helping to build would grow, inevitably, into an independent center of power; what we expected to see was "not merely an extension of U.S. influence but a real European organization strong enough to say no both to the Soviet Union and to the United States, should our actions seem so to require." Some empire.

The contrast with Stalin's empire needs little elaboration, one might think, but it receives ample -- and illuminating --elaboration from Gaddis. He makes good use of the recent research of scholars, like R. C. Raack, who tell us of Stalin's consistent intentions in Germany and the rest of occupied Europe -- namely, to regain all that Hitler had promised him in the Molotov - Ribbentrop pact, to Sovietize eastern Germany as soon as possible, and to make a major push to subvert the western zones of Germany as well. Gaddis sees not the slightest chance that a different Western policy would have dissuaded Stalin from any of this. Stalin was a murderous brute and a paranoid, propelled by visions of tsarist expansion as well as raw revolutionary megalomania. Independent centers of power were anathema.

The brutality and paranoia of the dictator were so powerful that they led him into self-defeating policies -- such as a savagery toward occupied Germany that guaranteed permanent German hatred of the Soviet occupiers. Where the legacy of the American presence in Germany was the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift, the Soviet army left behind in eastern Germany, inter alia, the astonishing legacy of two million rapes in 1945 - 46 (yes, two million). This kind of behavior guaranteed in turn that the puppet regime in East Germany (like those in its fellow satellites) could never gain legitimacy and could therefore be propped up only by physical force. The result was "that an American sphere of influence would arise [in Europe] largely by consent, but that its Soviet counterpart could sustain itself only by coercion. The resulting asymmetry would account, more than anything else, for the origins, escalation, and ultimate outcome of the Cold War."

Readers of NATIONAL REVIEW need no instruction in the moral difference between Communism and freedom, but Gaddis's take on all this is not only illuminating but in places quite moving. America presided on its side of the line as one could expect of a democracy leading a voluntary alliance of democracies. The weight Gaddis gives to this moral and ideological dimension is a rebuke to "realist" scholars who neglected, indeed disparaged, that dimension.