Notes on Chapter Five
Paul Bacon
SILS
IR201
Waltz and Nye’s method of analysis
• 3. International System
– Structure
– Process
• 2. State/society
• 1. Individual
• Proximate cause(s)
• Counterfactuals
Containment 1
• Important idea developed by George Kennan.
• The Soviet Union (Stalin) would be a cautious
opportunist wherever possible.
• Soviet communism was an expansionist ideology.
• Traditional Russian nationalism was not
expansionist.
• Therefore, the US had to be firm but not
aggressive with the Soviets.
• Match/passively resist Soviet attempts to expand.
Containment 2
• The US should contain, and wait for communism to collapse
from within.
• Kennan believed that this would happen in around 15 years
time.
• Kennan (and Nye) believed that the US was not firm
enough in the early stages of the Cold War, and later
became too aggressive.
• The US became too concerned with a global struggle
against the idea of communism.
• Instead, for Kennan, the US should have acted more like a
traditional, conservative Great Power, focusing on
capabilities and spheres of influence, rather than on
ideological potential.
3 Schools
• There are 3 main schools of thought on the
origins of the Cold War, according to Nye:
– Traditionalists (blame the Soviets)
• Second image explanation.
– Revisionists (blame the Americans)
• First and second image explanations.
– Post-revisionists (blame the structure of the
system)
• Third image explanation.
3 phases
• There are three phases to the early Cold War,
according to Nye.
• These were:
– 1945-1947, the prelude and slide into the Cold
War.
– 1947-1949, the onset of the Cold War.
– 1950-1963, the height of the Cold War.
Phase 1
• Six issues which arose in the first phase
contributed to the worsening of conflict between
the 2 emerging superpowers.
• These were:
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1. Soviet actions in Poland and Eastern Europe.
2. The May 1945 termination of lend-lease.
3. Disagreements over the future of Germany.
4. East Asia/Japan/Eastern Europe.
5. Possession/use of the atomic bomb.
6. Eastern Mediterranean – Turkey/Greece/Iran.
Phase 2
• Intensification of problems in Greece and
Turkey.
• Truman Doctrine.
• Truman’s exaggeration and escalation.
• Marshall Plan/Czechoslovakia.
• German currency reform.
• Berlin Blockade/Berlin airlift.
• Plans for NATO.
Phase 3
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The Soviet bomb.
Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War.
National Security Council Report 68.
Stalin’s permission for North Korean
aggression.
• Huge increase in the American defense budget.
• Korean Civil War.
Third image – structure
• Was the Cold War inevitable?
• Post-revisionists say yes – the bipolar structure made it likely that
the SU and the SU would be sucked into a power vacuum in Europe,
and find it difficult to withdraw.
• Alexis de Tocqueville, writing a century earlier, famously predicted
that the US and SU were bound to become continental giants and
rivals.
• So, third image or structural analysis can predict that some type of
conflict was highly probable.
• However, there were various different phases in the Cold War, and
neo-realist or structural explanations can not explain these different
phases or the varying depth of the hostility.
• This is why process (3rd image), domestic politics (2nd image) and
individuals (1st image) matter.
Third image - process
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Immoderate process.
Intense ideological hostility and competition.
Reduced communication.
Many opportunities for misunderstanding.
Mixed messages from US create Soviet uncertainty.
Containment and NSC-68 both imagine SU to be
potentially aggressive.
• Truman worried that the US will be isolationist again.
• Stalin paranoid about possibility of encirclement/attack.
• Exaggerated rhetoric of Truman and Stalin.
Second image – state/society
• Second level revisionists, such as the Kolkos, blame the US for the
onset of the Cold War.
• They argue that as the major capitalist power, the US is driven to
act aggressively.
• Nye does not support this economic determinism, but does agree
that we have to look at the second level more closely.
• Ideology and exaggeration were important in relation to domestic
politics.
• Truman believed that he needed to exaggerate the threat of the SU
in order to gain support for his policy of engagement, rather than
isolationism.
• Stalin needed to portray the US as the enemy in order to create
mistrust of foreigners and consolidate his domestic control within
the SU.
Second image – SU
• Soviet political culture:
– Influenced by Russian and communist ideas (which
was most important?)
– Emphasis on absolutism rather than democracy.
– Desire for strong leader.
– Fear of anarchy and dissent.
– Fear of invasion.
– Shame about backwardness.
– Culture of secrecy.
– Emphasis on class rather than the individual as the
basis for justice.
Second image – US
• American political culture:
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Debate about engagement or isolationism.
Emphasis on democracy rather than absolutism.
Belief in separation of powers.
Support for pluralism and dissent.
No real fear of invasion.
Pride in its technology and expanding economy.
Culture of open government.
Emphasis on individual rather than class as the basis
for justice.
First image – Roosevelt
• First image revisionists argue that individuals
mattered, and argued that Roosevelt’s death in
April 1945 was very important.
• They argue that US policy towards the SU became
harsher after Truman became President of the US.
• Roosevelt is criticized for:
– placing too much faith in the United Nations
– overestimating the possibility that the US would
become isolationist, and
– underestimating Stalin.
First image – Truman
• Truman had tried to intimidate Stalin by referring to the atomic bomb at
Potsdam in July 1945.
• Some historians argue that the main reason why Truman approved the use
of the atomic bomb was to intimidate the Soviet Union, rather than to end
the war with Japan with fewer US casualties.
• Truman also removed staff that supported better relations with the
Soviets, and replaced them with staff who were strong anti-communists.
• Nye argues that if the US had adopted different strategies, at different
times, then the Cold War might not have developed in such a hostile way.
• Arguably, the US was not tough enough under Roosevelt, and then too
tough under Truman. Instead, Nye argues that the US should have been
tougher in the early stages, as Kennan had suggested, and then been more
prepared to negotiate and communicate in the second phase.
First image – Stalin
• Stalin’s immediate postwar plans were to tighten domestic control.
• He preferred some co-operation, especially if it helped him to pursue
some domestic goals.
• Stalin believed (compare Kennan) that capitalism would have another
major crisis in around 15 years time. He wanted the SU to recover by then,
and to be in a position to be able to benefit.
• Stalin wanted to protect himself at home, and maintain his gains in
Eastern Europe.
• It was felt that Stalin would probe soft spots, and try to expand whenever
he had the opportunity.
• Nye refers to Stalin as tough, ruthless, and pragmatic. But also a cautious
opportunist rather than a reckless or inherently aggressive risk
taker/adventurer.
End of the Cold War
• Nye initially suggests three reasons for the
end of the Cold War:
– 1. Containment worked.
– 2. ‘Imperial overstretch’ – the Paul Kennedy thesis.
– 3. The US military build-up in the 1980s forced the
Soviets to surrender.
– Nye believes that each of these suggestions is
partly correct, but that none of them adequately
explain why the Cold War ended at this particular
time.
Precipitating cause
• Nye believes that the idea of proximate cause helps us to
understand the end of the Cold War.
• Precipitating cause: the most important precipitating cause of
the end of the Cold War was an individual, Mikhail Gorbachev.
• Gorbachev wanted reform not revolution, but lost control of
events.
• Gorbachev launched a number of initiatives in domestic and
foreign policy that quickened the end of the Cold War.
• Perestroika, glasnost, new thinking in foreign policy.
• Nuclear sufficiency/expansionism and empire too costly.
• Gorbachev was himself an ‘accident of history’.
Intermediate cause 1
• Intermediate causes:
– Kennan, the soft power of liberal ideas, as
constructivists would suggest.
– US hard power contained and deterred Soviet
expansionism.
– US soft power ate away at the belief in
communism in the Soviet Union.
– When the SU lost the Cold War, it didn’t lose a
single tank. The SU lost legitimacy (Fukuyama).
Intermediate cause 2
• The enormous Soviet defense budget spending began
to affect other parts of Soviet society.
• The US budget spend on defense was 6% compared to
25%+ for the SU.
• Health care declined and the mortality rate increased.
• The SU’s infrastructure began to crumble.
• Some people realized that the SU needed a better
civilian economic base, and access to Western trade
and technology.
• But in the early 1980s the older Soviet leadership was
not ready to accept this message.
Deep cause 1
• Deep causes: there were two deep causes of the end of the
Cold War.
• These were the decline of communist ideology (a
constructivist explanation), and the failure of the Soviet
economy (a realist explanation).
• Soviet communism had a great deal of soft power in 1945.
• However, this soft power was squandered through specific
acts of repression in Soviet satellites in 1956, 1968 and
1981.
• And at home, Soviet soft power was wasted as a result of
reform camps, gulags, censorship, informants, underground
protests, and dissent by human rights activists.
Deep cause 2
• The decline of the Soviet economy showed that centrally planned systems
could not respond adequately to change in the world economy.
• The Soviet system was very inflexible, and tended to stockpile labor rather
than transfer it efficiently.
• The most important issue was the role that information played in the third
industrial revolution.
• The secretive Soviet system was not good at handling information and
transmitting it quickly and effectively.
• It seems that centrally planned systems can be competitive in the first and
second industrial revolutions.
• However, they are unable to make the transition to, or compete against
information or knowledge-based economies.
• The SU fell behind in personal computer production, and only 8% of Soviet
industry was competitive at world standards by the late 1980s – not good
enough if you want to remain a military superpower.
Final deep cause – nuclear deterrence?
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Deterrence
Mutually Assured Destruction
Crisis stability (compare WWI)
First-strike survivability (how?)
Shared rationality
Deterrence prevents cold war from turning
hot?
• Question of proof