A history of the Cold War? - column

National Review, April 16, 1990 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

A distinguished British historian, an old personal friend (we were roommates at school) suggested seriously that I undertake to write a history of the cold war. I told him my book-writing time was mortgaged through 1994; and one can reasonably expect a forest of Cold War R.I.P. books in the interval. But the proposition stayed with me and bore fruit, as follows:

1. Any book on the cold war should take seriously the thought of those who participated in it, and agonizingly predieted the defeat of the West. Most widely recognized among these was Whittaker Chambers. His lament, anthologizable in the literature of despair, was phrased in a personal letter to me written in 1954. He said: "The enemy he is ourselves. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth."

And there was Solzhenitsyn, who wrote in this journal and elsewhere that over a very few years he had witnessed the collapse of the will of the West. That for a period during the Fifties and Sixties, the uncoordinated resistance within the Soviet Union-a spiritual fraternity, really-had reason to think of the West as an immovable wall, against which the Soviet Union would not, could not prevail; but that after our retreat from Vietnam, and our insensitivity to so much that the Communists were engaged in, culminating with the declaration of martial law in Poland, there was little reason to hope that we would prevail.

The historian must examine the thought of such as Chambers and Solzhenitsyn without donning pathologists' robes. Their concern was deeply rooted in objective analysis-but objective analysis of Western weakness, not of Communist weakness. This is a point to stress.

2. Whereas we can proudly say that the Western will presented formidable obstacles to Soviet expansionism, we need to say this carefully. The Soviets' last successful diplomatic offensive brought them the INF treaty. We think little of it at this point because the prospect of a Soviet military drive across Eastern Europe has all but faded. But the offensive was dramatically and frighteningly successful. Any future general at a war exercise, studying the political culture of the late 1980s, would be justified in concluding that the disappearance from Europe of theater nuclear weapons of a range extensive enough to reach the Soviet Union left the potential enemy with a measure of security it had not dreamed of getting in early negotiations. The West was left with: strategic weapons, at closest range, from submarines in the Baltic Sea. But the firing of such weapons, aimed at slowing down or aborting a Soviet blitzkrieg, would have been seen by the Kremlin as the equivalent of the firing of weapons from Omaha. And our knowledge that such would be the Soviet reaction would have resulted in: preventing the submarines from firing. The Europe of 1989 might well have been converted, as little as one year later, into a neutralist Europe headed by an anti-nuclear political party in Germany, to be joined by an anti-nuclear political party in Great Britain. Meanwhile, the United States had acquiesced in what seems like a permanent satellite government in Afghanistan, had refused to take decisive action in Nicaragua, and then ...

3. And then, as some of us believers might put it, God cleared His throat. And lo, on March 11, 1990, the little state of Lithuania declared that it was independent of the Soviet Union. It is reasonably expected that Latvia and Estonia will follow, in the footsteps of Poland, and East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, and Rumania, and Bulgaria. A triumph of Western policy?

Only if one chooses to believe that the mere survival of the West was itself triumphant. It is forever to the credit of the West that it elected to remain a nuclear power, exercising the deterrent club, the shield which so many Westerners argued we should do without.

But it was the agony of life under Communism that dictated the outcome. The West might have reason to bask in its diplomatic prowess if it had taken less than 45 years to liberate the swollen kingdom of the slaves. They were liberated primarily by the shortage of bread in the motherland of the proletariat, rather than by the abundance of it in the West. No history of the cold war will successfully assert that the demise of the Soviet Empire was a triumph of Western diplomacy. What we did, essentially, was to stand still. And, in the case of some, to pray for divine intercession.