The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War Review

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(More customer reviews)On the final page of this brief, but provocative, rumination about the United States' Cold War experience, author H.W. Brands, professor of history at Texas A & M University, presents this paradox: In 1945, nearly all Americans and probably a majority of interested foreigners had looked on the United States as a beacon shining the way to a better future for humanity, one in which ideals mattered more than tanks. During the next forty years,American leaders succeeded in convincing many Americans and all but a few foreigners that the United States could be counted on to act pretty much as great powers always have. To the extent that Brands is correct, the question, of course, is: Why? This is not merely an intellectual exercise. During the Cold War, Brands reminds us: "More than 100,000 Americans died fighting wars that had almost nothing to do with genuine American security." Practically all of them died in the barren hills of Korea and the steaming jungles of Vietnam. The question, again, is: Why?
Brands posits the "dual character of the Cold War - being both a geopolitical and an ideological contest" and explains: "The ideological gulf between the United States and the Soviet Union gave the geopolitical rivalry unprecedented urgency." In Brands's interpretation, the origins of the Cold War were partly the dynamics of conventional international relations: The United States and the Soviet Union emerged from the Second World War as the only world powers, so, practically by definition, they had to be rivals. But, as Brands, observes, geopolitical competition was intensified by extreme ideological differences. According to Brands: "By the middle 1950s, the American alliance system girdled the globe" and "[a]bout the only thing all the countries in the American system shared was an avowed opposition to communism." Sometimes this proved awkward. Brands reminds us that "Washington could be counted on to praise allies and clients for their opposition to godless communism, if not for their strict observance of the human rights and civil liberties of all their subjects." According to Brands, "by allying with repressive regimes, the American government undercut the popular moral base on which America's containment policy rested." The United States' alliances with unsavory right-wing dictators were prompted by the imperative for national survival. According to Brands, "[f]or the first time in American history, an enemy [possessed] the capacity to strike quickly and devastatingly at America's industrial resources and population." And Brands writes that after Sputnik's launch: "For the first time in their history, Americans found themselves facing the specter of national extinction." But "the anti-communist crusade...[also] served purposes that had little to do with its professed fear for American security." In 1963, for instance, during hearings on what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Sen. Strom Thurmond asserted that anti-segregation parades and demonstrations were "inspired by Communists" and were "part of the international conspiracy of communism." Richard Nixon's transformation from Cold War hardliner to foreign-policy realist is an intriguing case-study. Nixon was, of course, an original Cold Warrior ideologue. But the 1969 Nixon Doctrine, according to Brands, provided that the "United States...would no longer shoulder the burden of maintaining internal security for its friends, or of guaranteeing them against local or regional conflict." The Nixon Doctrine, Brands writes, represented "an intention to de-ideologize American foreign policy.... Geopolitics not ideology, henceforth would guide American policy." That was wishful thinking. In 1976, a group of hardliners whom Brands describes as "detente-distrusters" organized the Committee on the Present Danger which "dedicated itself to waking America to the dangers its members believed America faced from Soviet ambitions - in other words, to reviving the Cold War."
The reason, according to Brands, is that "Charles Krauthammer was probably right when he argued that nations need enemies." During the Cold War, Brands writes, "America had an enemy that could hardly have been improved upon. The Soviet Union was officially atheistic...dictatorial... socialistic... militarily powerful...ideologically universalist...obsessively secretive." This was the devil we knew. Brands makes this intriguing point: "[P]erhaps the most important reason for detente's demise was that Americans loved the Cold War too much to let it go." He suggests, therefore, that the Cold War was perpetuated long after there ceased to be a credible threat of a U.S.-U.S.S.R. military confrontation by the sectors of American society which benefitted from the Cold War: Defense contractors, fellow-traveling proponents of military Keynesianism, and right-wing ideologues. According to Brands: "Arguably, the most important effect of the Cold War on American life was the inspiration it provided for unprecedented spending on defense." For instance, Brands writes that "the Reagan [defense] buildup worked wonders for the American defense industry," as defense spending rose between Fiscal Year 1981 and 1985 from $171 billion to $229 billion. The administration's "anti-communism...fueled a new round of military Keynesianism." And Brands quotes New Right activist and fundraiser Richard Viguerie that this orgy of defense spending was necessitated by the false premise that "[c]learly, we have fallen from being the Number One military power in the world to the Number Two power, behind a country whose leaders are totally committed to defeating America and conquering the world."
Brands's final chapter is entitled in part: "Who Won the Cold War?" According to Brands, the United States enjoyed "a brilliant victory....At the end, the Soviet Union was utterly vanquished." He concludes that "the Cold War was no war at all, but simply the management of national interests in a world of competing interests." However, according to Brands, the American people " have an "incurable desire to make the world a better place." In Brands's view: "This save-the-world inclination was largely responsible for the fervor with which Americans waged the Cold War." Brands explains: "The staying power of the Cold War paradigm resulted in no small part from its capacity to combine the selfless with the self-interested." I would only substitute "confuse" for "combine." Others will dispute Brands's premises, as well as his conclusions. But I doubt that any thinking reader will fail to find this book stimulating.

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