At the turn of the century Paul Nitze remarked of the Cold War: "We did a goddamn good job." To this comment, Derek Leebaert responds, "Well, yes and no: yes if the overriding emphasis is that civilization survived more or less intact, that the Soviet Union collapsed peacefully, and that most of the world was liberalized along the way; no if we dwell on the indirection, inexcusable ignorance, political intrusions, personal opportunism, and crimes underlying this ultimate victory." Leebaert's lively and opinionated account of the last half-century bravely tries to assess the balance of costs and benefits.
The list of Cold War costs is daunting: nearly 100,000 American lives lost in combat, and millions of innocent lives lost in places such as Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Central America, Angola, Afghanistan, Congo and elsewhere. Vietnam alone cost $882 million in 1976 dollars, and the cost of real military purchases in the four decades after 1948 totaled around $10 trillion. Clean-up of Cold War-related nuclear sites will cost $350 billion and continue until 2045. One hundred and sixty million Americans received at least some fallout exposure between 1953 and 1968 - causing thousands of thyroid cancers, of which some 10 per cent may be fatal.
At home, the 1950s produced McCarthyism. In the 1970s, public confidence in our institutions declined after Vietnam and Watergate, recovered somewhat in the early Reagan years, but declined again after the Iran-contra scandal. Leebaert excoriates "unaccountable officials" and the "sprawling secrecy system" that made it "all too easy to deny, dis semble, or mislead as a matter of course." He reserves special condemnation for the CIA. "No other single government body has blundered so often in so many ways integral to its designated purpose," he writes. In propping up Third World dictators, undercutting elected officials in Iran, Guatemala, Congo and Chile, supporting "the bad against the worse" in Central America in the 1980s, we undercut our own values and tainted our claim to represent the "free world." And of course, the 25,000 non-Afghan Islamic warriors from 30 countries whom we helped train in the 1980s came back to haunt us after September 2001.
The price of victory also included promises unkept, time wasted, talent misdirected, secrecy imposed and confidence impaired. "Had Americans been able to invest their trillions of dollars elsewhere, not only would the country be richer, but its level of confidence, perhaps of generosity to the world's disadvantaged, would be much greater. Splendid cities of the mind and spirit have been lost - ones that might have towered in place of missile silos, command centers and barracks." According to Leebaert, "Throughout the Cold War enormous amounts of talent were used for fundamentally unproductive purposes."
Well, yes and no. Investing in security does not produce goods and services, but without security they cannot be produced. The Cold War involved many excesses, but how can we be sure what was necessary and what pure waste? Leebaert cites a Harvard Medical School dean who used to warn new students that half of what they were taught would eventually be proved wrong; he just didn't know which half. As Leebaert himself admits, the American people won the Cold War without allowing their society to be militarized. While we often violated our values of freedom and democracy because of what we thought was necessity, there would be less freedom and democracy in the world today had the other side won. Leebaert faces this puzzle several times without really resolving it. But watching him wrestle with it is a good read.
Leebaert's account is good at raising hard questions, but less successful as a history of the Cold War. Eisenhower and Reagan are his heroes, and he never misses a chance to criticize Henry Kissinger and George Kennan. Yet one can argue that Kennan's original doctrine of containment is what succeeded in the end. One of the interesting questions about the Cold War is why it did not become World War III, but Leebaert has little to say about this.
On the question of why it ended, his account places too much emphasis on personality. President Reagan deserves credit for pressing the Soviets and restoring American confidence, but the deeper cause was the failure of the planned economy and the closed society to cope with the information revolution after 1970. As for the influence of individuals, Gorbachev's well-intentioned but misguided reform efforts speeded up rather than slowed the process of decline. But read this book. Even when you fight it, you will encounter questions worth pondering as we enter another long struggle that mixes military and civilian measures.
· Copyright: The Washington Post
