The D Word II: The Foundations of Fear During the Cold War
Before the Cold War and during the whole of it, leaders in the Soviet Union had found a profound threat in the capitalist countries of Western Europe and the United States. The cause of the threat was those countries’ “imperialism.”
The theories of Karl Marx that informed Soviet beliefs, which some saw as “scientific,” held that imperialism was inherent to capitalism. The benign word for imperialism could be said to be “growth.” The problem arises when it is growth through coercion.
The Soviets had some historical support for their concern. As of 1945, they had survived, barely, an invasion from their west by Nazi Germany that had killed some 20,000,000 of their people and destroyed maybe a fifth of their country. (We in the U.S. had lost some 400,000 people in World War II, few of them civilians, and almost no infrastructure in our country, if you don’t count the other kinds of infrastructure the money might have built. Schools and such.)
Before World War II, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russia had barely survived another invasion from their west, this one by French forces under Napoleon. In that war, as winter approached, the Russians had burned down their own capital, Moscow, to keep the city’s resources out of Napoleon’s hands. That’s how desperate things had gotten for them.
The Soviets also knew that since the 16th century, many Western European countries had been busily engaged worldwide in a kind of imperialism called “colonization.” The United States had started life as a British colony. Later the United States had itself done a bit of colonizing, in the Phillippines, for example.
These colonizing operations had continued into the 20th century.
For the citizens of Great Britain, the very large “Empire” they eventually acquired was clearly a point of pride. After World War II, however, it was pretty clear that the British Empire, among others, was coming undone. The colonized populations didn’t like the arrangement, in spite of the benefits the colonizers believed it conferred.
The “Empire” is often a point of pride for the British even today when it no longer exists except as a “commonwealth.” A “commonwealth” is a much more appealing proposition, wouldn’t you say?
The Americans and the West Europeans, on the other hand, saw in the Soviets a profound threat that flowed from the Soviets’ commitment to “world domination.” I am not aware of any official declaration of this goal by the Soviets. Western leaders might have found it implicit in Karl Marx’s argument that the collapse of capitalism was inevitable—a collapse that during the Great Depression of the 1930’s seemed not at all inconceivable—and communism would be what replaced it. This collapse would not have to be coerced, the theory said. It would happen naturally, though in some cases other communists might help it along.
After World War II, matters were very unsettled almost everywhere in the world and communist incursions began in a number of countries in Europe, in Korea, and in Southeast Asia. The Soviet Union was sometimes helping out. We sometimes helped out those we saw as anti-communists, early on in Italy and Greece, for example, and later in Korea and Vietnam.
In China, at the end of 1949, Chinese communist forces led by Mao Tse Tung defeated the Nationalist Chinese and took over that huge country. They hadn’t needed much help from the Soviets. The Nationalists retreated to an island called Formosa then, Taiwan now.
The West now had some historical justification for their belief that communism was a worldwide threat.
After World War II, the desire of the Soviets for “world domination” became an article of faith, unquestioned, among American leaders. Early in 1953, the first year of President Eisenhower’s administration, the Soviet desire for “world domination” was posited in just those words in National Security Council document 162/2, the document that established President Eisenhower’s policy for the use of our nuclear weapons against the Soviets. Against almost all communists, really. The Chinese were certainly included.
NSC 162/2 formulated what came to be called the New Look policy. The New Look policy said that any Soviet aggression, even with conventional weapons, against us or our allies would be met by us with massive “offensive retaliation” that would include a use of the nuclear weapons we were now rapidly accumulating.
The Soviets didn’t invade Western Europe, not while Eisenhower was president, nor at any time during or after the Cold War. Immediately after World War II, they had pretty much taken over some countries in Eastern Europe they had come through on their way to Berlin, like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria. We saw this as part of their project of world domination. They might have seen it as providing a buffer against another invasion from their west.
Communist China was on their eastern border, so no buffer needed there, maybe, for now.
Did the Soviets refrain from invading Western Europe because of New Look and our “nuclear deterrent”? Maybe. Maybe not. It’ can’t be proved either way. What doesn’t happen—the end of the world, let’s say—may not have happened for any number of reasons—maybe because of a dance that was performed, or a prayer.
Which doesn’t keep quite a few people from believing that it was our “nuclear deterrent” that kept them from invading Western Europe.
At the end of World War II, after we’d introduced the world to the atomic bomb by using it in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviets began a crash program to develop an atomic bomb for themselves. They got it done in four years, much less time than many of our leaders and industrialists had expected, or hoped, it would take.
Some of us might have seen their developing the atomic bomb as part of their plan for world domination. But maybe they did it to keep the “imperialists” from invading their country again.
Is their having an atomic bomb what deterred us from invading them during the Cold War? That’s not what we think. We think they had us read all wrong. We didn’t want to invade them, just to “contain” them. Which isn’t quite the same thing.
In any case, the fear is clear: throughout the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each feared the other as a mortal threat.
Were the Western Powers and the Soviets reasonable in fearing each other in the way they did during the Cold War?
Was neither one?
Some of us are not sure we know, even now.
That may be the best we can do. “The more certain our knowledge, the less we know,” wrote the psychiatrist, humanist, and philosopher Iain McGilchrist.1
He’s right, I think.
Next: The “D” Word: Fears without Foundation
Ian McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, 2 vols. London: Perspectiva Press, 2021.