The End of the Cold War, Part I

Misperceptions of how the Cold War ended: 6wC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ViewAPI#v= onepage&q&f=false 6wC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ViewAPI#v= onepage&q&f=false

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The 3 main dimensions of the Cold War: Ideological  Crises of the world capitalist system, attempts to break out of it Geopolitical  The Soviet Union’s emergence after WWII as the strongest power in Eurasia Military  The arms race

What changed by the 1980s:

IDEOLOGY Capitalism boomed  The information revolution  Globalization  New dynamism of the market system Decline of the Global Left  Deepening crisis of state socialism: growing attractiveness of liberal ideas (markets and liberal democracy)  Western social democracy successful and stalled  The end of decolonization

The rise of the New Right: Thatcher and Reagan  Free markets as the universal solution  Militant anticommunism  Global counteroffensive against the Left The rise of ethnic and religious nationalism

GEOPOLITICS The Soviet Union’s global influence was declining China shifted to a semi-alliance with the US Western Europe was booming, confident, integrating In the Middle East, the US worked both sides of the Arab- Israeli conflict; the USSR was marginalized In the Third World, USSR was losing allies, becoming irrelevant Afghanistan became the turning point in Soviet fortunes in the Third World

THE ARMS RACE The economic burden: the Soviet economy increasingly unable to bear it Political futility of the arms race:  Do arms buy security?  Is major war thinkable? Nuclear weapons as a global threat The momentum of arms control: mutual vulnerability and mutual interest in survival The rise of new antimilitarism

By the mid-1980s, political conditions in the Soviet Union matured enough to produce a major shift in favour of comprehensive systemic reforms. GORBACHEV To enable the Soviet system to adapt to new world realities through political and economic reforms, the Soviet Union needed to get out of the Cold War “New Thinking” in foreign policy was closely integrated with the policies of “perestroika” (restructuring) of the entire Soviet system – a revolution from above

Late 1970s – early 1980s: Détente is scrapped, talk of Cold War 2 The US is desperate, gears for a counterattack

1979: the Iranian Revolution

US diplomats taken hostage in Tehran

1979: Soviet troops enter Afghanistan

1980: Solidarity movement in Poland challenges the Communist regime

1981: Martial law in Poland

January 1981: Ronald Reagan becomes US President

1982: Reagan addresses the British Parliament: predicts the fall of Marxism-Leninism

Cold War 2

Key hawks around Reagan

Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger

CIA Director William Casey

Prof. Richard Pipes, Reagan’s Adviser of Soviet Affairs

Soviet SS-20 missiles

US Pershing-2 missiles

Reagan’s Star Wars plan

Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov: hero of Sept. 26, 1983

The Sept.26 incident: Bruce Blair, former SAC officer, President of the World Security Institute in Washington, D.C., says the U.S.–Soviet relationship at that time "had deteriorated to the point where the Soviet Union as a system — not just the Kremlin, not just Andropov, not just the KGB — but as a system, was geared to expect an attack and to retaliate very quickly to it. It was on hair-trigger alert. It was very nervous and prone to mistakes and accidents... The false alarm that happened on Petrov’s watch could not have come at a more dangerous, intense phase in U.S.–Soviet relations.* In an interview televised nationally in the United States, Blair said, "The Russians saw a U.S. government preparing for a first strike, headed by a President capable of ordering a first strike." Regarding the incident involving Petrov, he said, "I think that this is the closest we've come to accidental nuclear war.“ ** *Ewa Pieta. "The Red Button & the Man Who Saved the World" (Flash). logtv.com. Red Button & the Man Who Saved the World **"War Games". Burrelle's Information Services (Dateline NBC), Nov. 12, 2000.

November 1983: NATO Able Archer exercise “Information about the peculiar and remarkably skewed frame of mind of the Soviet leaders during those times that has emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union makes me think there is a good chance—with all of the other events in 1983—that they really felt a NATO attack was at least possible and that they took a number of measures to enhance their military readiness short of mobilization. After going through the experience at the time, then through the postmortems, and now through the documents, I don't think the Soviets were crying wolf. They may not have believed a NATO attack was imminent in November 1983, but they did seem to believe that the situation was very dangerous. And US intelligence [SNIE and SNIE ] had failed to grasp the true extent of their anxiety.” – Robert Gates, From the Shadows, p. 273

Women of Greenham Common: activists against nuclear weapons

Peace demonstration in West Germany

West Germany, 1983

Gorbachev with Yuri Andropov