International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War

International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War, by Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, editors

3. Explaining the End of the Cold War: Morphological and Behavioral Adaptations to the Nuclear Peace? _*

Kenneth A. Oye

To explain the transformation of the postwar order and the end of the Cold War, one must account for radical changes in both the behavior and the morphology of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The proximate sources of Soviet-American tension were alleviated by a series of increasingly dramatic Soviet foreign policy actions. Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, retreat from Africa, concessions on nuclear arms control, and, most centrally, relinquishment of control over Eastern Europe were reversals of traditional Soviet security policies. Then the underlying ideological conflict between the United States and Soviet Union was resolved by changes in the domestic structure of the Soviet Union, changes that followed from the displacement of Leninism by forms of political near-liberalism and by the partial displacement of centralized planning and state ownership by varieties of market capitalism. These changes in the structure of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc provided the clearest possible assurance that the transformation of Soviet foreign policy would endure. ₁

What theories of international relations provide insights into these developments ? Which bodies of theory stand up, in retrospect, as broadly consistent with these revolutionary changes in Soviet foreign policy behavior and domestic structure ? In the preceding essay, Richard Ned Lebow contends that traditional realism is broadly inconsistent with these developments. This essay joins several of the specific debates raised by Lebow without challenging his broad claim that the end of the Cold War proves realism wrong. Because realism is underidentified, it cannot be tested with reference to the end of the Cold War or any other sequence of events. Physicist Wolfgang Pauli might properly quip that, like bad science, realism and Marxism and liberalism are "not even wrong." However, specific theories commonly associated with realism may offer some insights into the end of the Cold War.

First, consider the relationship between the international environment and unit-level attributes. Kenneth Waltz argues that the international environment selects for some adaptations in structure and behavior and selects against others. ₂ By contrast, Lebow contends that the developments that led to the transformation of the international system were not adaptations to a changing international environment. In his view, learning rather than environmental selection accounts for changes in domestic structures and foreign policy behavior. I argue that international environmental characteristics--specifically the development of nuclear weapons and the subsequent long central systemic peace--were a significant permissive cause of political and economic liberalization within the Soviet Union and the weakness of institutions within the Eastern and Western blocs. These morphological changes in turn fostered the learning that Lebow quite correctly asserts is critical to accounting for change in Soviet foreign policy.

Second, consider the problem of explaining Soviet responses to hegemonic decline. Robert Gilpin argues that a state may seek to reverse its decline by shedding peripheral commitments and lightening burdens of leadership. ₃ By contrast, Lebow contends that the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe and the Third World and its reductions in military spending cannot be explained as mere retrenchment. Lebow argues that because these acts compromised traditionally defined vital security interests, they were at variance with realism. I hold that each of these changes in Soviet behavior was in accord with prudential realism, albeit a prudential realism redefined to address the problems of an economically declining power in a nuclearized international environment. In fact, as the Soviet new thinkers revolutionized Soviet security policy, their specific arguments on the desirability and feasibility of retrenchment are virtually indistinguishable from the specific arguments of Robert Gilpin on the economic burdens of hegemony and of Robert Jervis on the virtues of defensive security strategies in a nuclear world. ₄

The first section of this essay centers on morphology. It examines the transformation of domestic and bloc structures that might otherwise have precluded radical revision of Soviet foreign and domestic policy. I argue that a relatively peaceful nuclearized environment fostered liberalization and decentralization within the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc. The second section centers on behavior. It analyzes the changes in the content of Soviet policy that brought about an end to the Cold War. I argue that the lessons learned by the new thinkers and the policies that they proposed and that were adopted were framed in terms of theories associated with modern prudential realism.

Morphological Adaptations to the Nuclear Peace

As Otto Hintze observed, external insecurity breeds domestic illiberalism. A state's domestic organization is determined by what Hintze termed the necessities of defense and offense. ₅ A Prussia exposed on the plains of Mitteleuropa, an England sitting across the channel from the continent, and a United States insulated from conflict by the Atlantic Ocean dwelled in markedly different security environments. Given eighteenth- and nineteenth-century military technologies, geographical location had significant and direct implications for the levels of security in these nations. Hintze argued that relative insecurity fostered development of the Prussian barracks state, while relative security bred English and American liberalism. What effect did changing security environments have on the evolution of American and Soviet political and economic systems ? What effect did changing security environments have on the structure of the blocs that the United States and Soviet Union fashioned in the aftermath of the Second World War ?

National Political and Economic Structures

Does a benign international security environment select for liberal political and economic structures ? A relatively benign international security environment fostered the development of more liberal polities and economies by weakening domestic groups and bureaucracies that might otherwise have blocked movement toward liberalization. The characteristic Cold War activity of preparing for wars that did not come and the classical international activity of waging central systemic war have profoundly different effects on domestic political and economic structures. Consider the differing effects on domestic political and economic systems of preparing for war and of waging war.

The act of waging war has two opposed effects on the domestic characteristics of states. On the one hand, war can strengthen oppo nents and weaken proponents of political liberalism and economic decentralization. The economic centralization and political repression that I will argue reduced the economic efficiency of Eastern bloc nations in the 1970s and 1980s may be an asset in time of war. During the Second World War, the United States and Great Britain relied on systems of material balances and production quotas to mobilize and redirect resources to wage war. They turned to physical rationing to repress consumption. These liberal polities also curtailed freedom of movement and expression through preventive detention and censorship. During times of war, liberal capitalist democracies become more politically authoritarian and more economically centralized as the real or imagined necessities of war take precedence over individual freedoms. ₆ On the other hand, war can have liberalizing consequences. When locked in struggles for national survival, authoritarian governments with relatively narrow bases of domestic support may arm and / or enfranchise classes and groups that had been excluded from governing coalitions. In the aftermath of war, a return to the domestic political status quo ante bellum can prove difficult or impossible. Under these conditions, postwar liberalization can be an unintended consequence of wartime mobilization. But the liberalizing consequences of war are not always enduring. For example, during the 1930s, political illiberalism and economic centralization went hand in hand is Stalinist Russia. During the Second World War, some of the worst excesses of Stalinism were held in check as the Soviet leadership stepped away from domestic political measures that reduced rather than enhanced Soviet military capabilities. After the war, however, Stalinism reemerged quickly. In short, war simultaneously narrows the range of discourse while broadening bases of political support. As a consequence, effects of war on domestic liberalism are complex, with these two effects partially offsetting each other.

How does preparing for wars that do not come affect the characteristics of domestic polities and economies ? In a relatively peaceful world marked by perpetual preparation for war, rising security should be monotonically associated with increasing political and economic liberalism.

The 1940s and early 1950s saw the rise of a national security state within the United States and the reinforcement of the Stalinist Soviet system. ₇ The initial development of nuclear weapons and of long-range delivery systems engendered what could plausibly be described as an insecure environment for both the Soviet Union and the United States. Intercontinental bombers with nuclear payloads transformed military geography. Neither America's Atlantic moat nor Russia's Eastern European glacis appeared to afford adequate security in the early years of the nuclear era. Although robust second strike capabilities may well be profoundly stabilizing, the early postwar period was marked by insecure deterrents and rapidly changing capabilities. Preemption and fear of preemption are characteristic of this and other periods of rapid transition. External insecurity was an important, though certainly not an exclusive, cause of attacks on civil liberties within a McCarthyite United States and of the postwar purges of the Stalinist Soviet Union. America's sense of heightened insecurity contributed directly to the purges of State Department China hands and Alger Hiss, the witchhunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the McCarthy hearings. The Federal Bureau of Investigation moved back to a wartime footing while the Central Intelligence Agency adopted and expanded the missions of the wartime Office of Strategic Services. A large and centralized defense sector, dependent on Governmental Organization and subsidization of research and development and on guaranteed purchases of military products, developed within America's decentralized economy.

As for the Soviet Union, as argued above, the Second World War had had liberalizing effects on politics. However, during the postwar period, Stalin used external insecurity to legitimate a vicious round of purges that eradicated liberal and cosmopolitan tendencies tolerated during the war. During the immediate postwar period, the kgb and nkvd filled the gulags with real and imagined enemies. In the realm of economic affairs, Stalin relied on external insecurity to reinforce centralized planning and material balances. The Soviet economy continued to be organized to mobilize resources for the military sector.

As both the United States and the Soviet Union developed stable deterrents, years without central systemic war gradually assuaged early fears of attack. Soviet-American relations cycled between Cold War and détente. Both countries prepared for a war that did not come, and Soviet and American troops engaged in interventions on the periphery, but the existence of stable nuclear deterrents effectively guaranteed security while fears of possible uncontrollable escalation from conventional to nuclear war discouraged conventional challenges to traditionally defined vital interests. The central systemic peace engendered by these conditions contributed to the liberalization of American and Soviet polities and economies. First, the American and Soviet national security states softened. Immedi ate postwar movement toward the development of hardened national security states slowed and then reversed in the 1950s. Within the United States, the excesses of McCarthyism were followed by the domestic somnolence of the Eisenhower years. During the same period in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced Stalinism and engaged in moderate domestic political reforms. Although the hard structure of the Communist Party and restrictions on freedom of speech and expression remained in place until very recently, the Soviet political system gradually became more open. Although periods of moderate liberalization were followed by periods of repression, the Soviet system evolved toward liberalization.

The liberalization of the Soviet polity was a factor permitting the emergence of the new thinkers and the foreign policy they devised. Before treating the content of their analysis in the next section, a caveat is in order. International environmental factors do not provide anything approaching a complete explanation of the rise of glasnost and the survival of Soviet new thinkers. The absence of central systemic war was one, though hardly the only, factor permitting these changes. Fortunately, we can only speculate on how central systemic war might have precluded or deferred domestic changes that in turn fostered learning in Soviet foreign policy.

Of course, the significance of domestic liberalization extends well beyond the fostering of the new thinkers and their foreign policy. This détente differs from all others in one critical respect: ideological context. For forty years, students have been asked to comment on the relative significance of bipolarity, nuclear weapons, and ideology as explanations of the Cold War. For forty years, students argued that the Cold War was overdetermined, that the simultaneous emergence of bipolarity, nuclear weapons, and ideological cleavages in the immediate postwar period precluded evaluation of the significance of any one of these factors. Today, multipolarity, bipolarity, and nuclear weapons exist, albeit in lopsided form, but the ideological component has changed, albeit in response to a benign security environment defined by these factors. Previous efforts to limit East-West competition proved to be ephemeral because they could not address the ideological division between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Yalta agreement and the Helsinki agreement foundered over ideology. A politically liberal United States could not accept Soviet authoritarianism at home and Soviet violations of the principle of self-determination. These agreements over spheres of influence sought to reconcile the irreconcilable by accepting Soviet dominance over Eastern Europe while guaranteeing self-determination within Eastern Europe. By withdrawing from its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union eliminated this long-standing political impediment to enduring détente.

Bloc Structures

The political liberalization of the Soviet domestic system is one important permissive factor in the radical redefinition of Soviet foreign policy. A second is the absence of strong centralized institutions and loyalties within the Eastern bloc. The puzzle here is why the initial reorganization of international politics into bloc politics after the Second World War did not prove to be self-sustaining. Had the blocs developed into strongly institutionalized orders, then the radical restructuring of arrangements we have observed in the past two years would have encountered significantly greater resistance.

This section argues that the nuclear peace fostered looseness at the level of the blocs even as it promoted liberalization within the Soviet Union. For over four decades, the fundamental ordering principles of international politics and the basic elements of American grand strategy remained in stasis. Between 1945 and 1950, all advanced industrial societies were absorbed into one of two economically integrated military protectorates. The boundary between the Eastern and Western blocs came to define mutually exclusive zones of military protection, economic production, and relative political homogeneity. In subsequent years, this core system was projected onto the periphery as Soviet-American rivalry infused civil wars and regional conflicts throughout the Third World. Routinized geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union legitimated these postwar military, economic, and political arrangements. The grand strategies of the United States and the Soviet Union operated largely in defense of the postwar status quo. The line through Germany, the Eurasian industrial heartland, and the developing world appeared to be as fundamental to the organization of global political, military, and economic affairs as boundaries between nation states.

The transient arrangements of the immediate postwar period persisted for forty years and then collapsed abruptly in the first years of the nineties. To analyze the end of the postwar order and the restructuring of American foreign policy, I combine institutionalist and environmental perspectives. As Stephen Krasner has observed, institutions persist in the face of environmental change. As a consequence, political life is commonly marked not by gradual adaptation to shifting environmental incentives but by long periods of sta bility followed by brief episodes of discontinuous change. ₈ His general observation bears directly on the problems of explaining the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the postwar order.

In the weakly institutionalized postwar order, the domestic institutions and norms of bloc members, relics of the immediate postwar period, were a substantial source of inertia. Shifting international environmental incentives--specifically, continuing central systemic peace and widening disparities between economic and military strength--were a substantial force for the modification of the existing order. Although these factors impinged on the United States, their impact on the Soviet Union was acute. Tensions between the structures of the postwar order and shifting environmental incentives accumulated for forty years and then shattered the system in 1989.

Charles Tilly's analysis of the formation of the European state system bears on the problem of explaining the formation and collapse of the bloc system. He describes the transition from feudal to national order as a self-reinforcing macroinstitutional process. Nascent state builders protected or conquered feudal constituents and extracted resources to finance protection and conquest. ₉ As Tilly observes: "Power holders' pursuit of war involved them willy-nilly in the extraction of resources for warmaking from the populations over which they had control and in the promotion of capital accumulation by those who could help them borrow and buy. War making, extraction, and capital accumulation interacted to shape European state making." ₁₀ Preparation for war fostered development of national institutions and loyalties. Furthermore, war making and state making in one nation state reinforced war making and state making in its neighbors. In Tilly's pithy words, "If protection rackets represent organized crime at its smoothest, then war making and state making--quintessential protection rackets with the advantage of legitimacy--qualify as our largest examples of organized crime." ₁₁

Without implying that bloc making was a form of legalized extortion, I suggest that the process of bloc formation paralleled some aspects of state formation as described by Tilly. After the Second World War, rights to political and military protection and obligations to protect were defined at the level of the bloc. The Eastern and Western blocs were far more than mere alliances of convenience, and the boundary between East and West defined zones of political and military security as clearly as the national boundaries of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Furthermore, the resulting duopolistic system legitimated the leadership of the United States and the Soviet Union. This self-reinforcing dynamic accounted for the stability of the bloc system.

But the bloc system was not as durable as the state system that preceded it. The extractive mechanisms and loyalties so central to the formation and maintenance of the modern nation-state were not to be found within the blocs. Both the United States and the Soviet Union bore a disproportionate share of the economic burdens of military rivalry. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could shift economic burdens onto allies or clients. As a consequence, both countries weakened economically relative to the other industrialized nations and the industrializing Pacific rim. Bloc makers in contemporary international relations offered protection without extracting protection payments.

Under conditions of central systemic peace, economic benefits derived from military strength were minimal. The United States and the Soviet Union faced a slowly widening gap between the international distribution of military and economic strength. For the latter, the disjunction between military and economic strength reached critical proportions and could not be addressed without a radical reversal of its foreign policies and a fundamental alteration of the postwar order. Existing institutional arrangements strained and ultimately broke in 1989.

The postwar blocs remained more integrated than late feudal orders but less institutionalized than traditional nation-states. In the absence of war, pressures for the development of centralized bloc institutions and loyalties proved insufficient to sustain further consolidation of the blocs. As a consequence, with the partial exception of the European Community, boundaries between nations define the effective limits of institutional capacity. National governments define economic policies, collect revenues, raise armies, and administer systems of justice or injustice. To be sure, national decisions were conditioned by bloc-level politico-military and economic processes. Since the inception of the blocs until 1989, Eastern European leaders governed within limits defined and enforced by the Soviet Union, whereas the much greater autonomy of leaders of Western industrial democracies has been reinforced by principles of popular and international sovereignty. But the blocs did not develop centralized institutions that further impinged on the autonomy of the nations within them. The blocs were integrated economies without mechanisms for effective economic management. They were military protectorates without monopolies on organized violence or effective mechanisms for extracting resources to finance protection. As a consequence, both the Soviet Union and the United States found it difficult to sustain their economic positions within their blocs.

Behavioral Adaptations to the Nuclear Peace and Hegemonic Decline

Constancy of bloc structure contrasted with two quite substantial yet undramatic changes in context: the continuing central systemic peace and the emergence of looming disparities between military and economic strength. ₁₂ What John Gaddis calls "the long peace" and what John Mueller terms "history's greatest non-event" is the longest period without central systemic war since Roman times. ₁₃ This peace coincided with a second development. Historically, pronounced disparities between military and economic strength have been relatively rare and short-lived. Since 1948, however, differentials between military and economic strength slowly but steadily increased. Western and Eastern military capabilities were roughly equivalent, but the Eastern economies decelerated and then stalled relative to the West, while the Soviet Union declined precipitously in economic strength. The United States remained the preeminent Western military power, but the American economy grew more slowly than most Western Europe economies and grew far less rapidly than the economies of Japan and the East Asian newly industrializing countries (nics). ₁₄ This conjunction of prolonged central systemic peace and widening disjunctions between military and economic strength differentiated the postwar period from earlier eras in international affairs.

Disparities between economic and military strength grew larger rather than smaller as long as the blocs existed. It is by now common to assert that military strength can come at the expense of economic performance, citing as evidence the economic collapses of military powers over the last five hundred years. I move one step beyond this position and contend that the terms of the trade-off may have deteriorated over time. Widening disjunctions between military and economic strength followed from the conjunction of technological advance and prolonged but uncertain central systemic peace.

First, exogenous general technological advance and associated specialization reduced the proportion of spending that can serve both military and economic ends. Consumption, investment, and defense are exhaustive but not necessarily mutually exclusive categories. At low levels of technology, common implements may be equally effective as weapons or tools. If spears and knives are state- of-the-art instruments of war and the hunt, no clear trade-off between security and growth exists. At intermediate levels of technology, common production facilities can produce differentiated weapons and tools. If shipyards produce men-of-war and merchantmen, investments in shipyards can serve military and economic ends. At high levels of technology, common technologies may serve military and economic ends even if instruments and assembly facilities are highly differentiated. If microprocessor technology is embodied in advanced avionics suites and compact disc players, research on microprocessor technology can serve military and economic ends. At each of these technological levels, positive effects blur the trade-off between military spending and investment. However, as technological levels and associated degrees of specialization rise, the proportion of military spending that can contribute directly to economic growth declines. As a consequence, especially when exacerbated by secrecy and compartmentalization, which inhibit diffusion of technology to the civilian sector, the simple trade-off between military strength and economic performance is more acute in contemporary international relations than during earlier epochs. ₁₅

Second, the continuing peace neutralized two mechanisms that have traditionally closed gaps between military and economic strength. One time-honored gap-closing mechanism--looting and enslavement--has not operated since the Red Army carted off a substantial proportion of Eastern Europe's industrial base and labor immediately after World War II. The other mechanism is the traditional effect of war on the relative economic position of conquerors and conquered. Although conquest was not necessarily cost-effective in any absolute sense, the economic consequences of military victory were generally preferable to those of defeat. ₁₆ Less obviously, war traditionally spurred consolidation of the economically rich and the militarily strong by fostering the development of effective centralized institutions that tended to offset burdens within the larger polity. The centralized institutions and loyalties of the nation-state spread through military absorption and through emulation born of fear of conquest. As long as peace continued, further institutionalization and centralization of authority within the blocs was not feasible. Thus, since the immediate postwar period, contemporary gaps between military strength and economic performance have not been reduced through centralized and institutionalized redistribution of costs. ₁₇

Where do we stand today? The subtlety of American relative decline and access to external sources of financing have permitted the United States to continue with old policies. No crisis compelled a radical redefinition of existing policies. Relative decline was more acute in the Soviet Union than it was in the United States. Consider gross indicators of this economic performance in the 1970s and 1980s--the period leading up to the reforms. The Soviet Union's growth trajectory fell far below the mediocre performance of the United States. Furthermore, as figure 3.1 indicates, Soviet productivity grew at only half the abysmal American rate of increase in productivity. When compared with the growth paths and productivity paths of the United States, much less with those of Japan and Western Europe, Soviet economic performance can only be described as poor.

Figure 3.1: Manufacturing Cumulative Growth in Labor Productivityus1 overestimates American productivity growth. During the 1980s, the U.S. Commerce Department erred by attributing value added by offshore production of intermediate products to American plants, in effect, inflating the numerator of productivity calculations--value of goods produced--and then dividing it by the denominator of person hours of American manufacturing labor. us2 is based on a 1991 Commerce Department series that corrects for this error.

From International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook (Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, October 1990), p. 122. Soviet productivity calculated from cia, Handbook of Economic Statistics 1989 (Washington, D.C.: National Foreign Assessment Service, 1989), table 36, p. 60. us2 curve drawn from Department of Commerce productivity reestimates. Based on anonymous source, Council of Economic Advisors.

What factors account for this abysmal economic performance? Republican mythology holds that the Reagan administration defense buildup was indirectly responsible for Soviet retrenchment and democratization. In this view, Soviet efforts to match the U.S. military buildup overstrained the Soviet economy. By drawing resources from consumption and investment, the arms race with the United States served as the coup de gr�ce for an economically stagnant Soviet Union. This view is not sustained by the evidence. As figure 3.2 shows, the Soviet Union did not respond to the Reagan military buildup with a buildup of their own. In fact, Soviet military spending as a percentage of gnp was flat during most of the 1980s and then fell off moderately in 1988. Some portion of Soviet investment is hidden military spending; Soviet investment actually declined moderately during the Reagan years. In fact, the Soviet response to the Reagan military buildup was to spend a bit more on consumption. If Ronald Reagan did not engender reform by arms racing the Soviet Union into economic collapse, what factors do account for Soviet economic stagnation?

Figure 3.2: Soviet Military Spending and Investment as a Percentage of gnpFrom cia, Handbook of Economic Statistics 1984 (Washington, D.C.: National Foreign Assessment Service, 1984), 66, 68; and cia, Handbook of Economic Statistics (Washington, D.C.: National Foreign Assessment Service, 1990), 64�76.

In order of significance, the structure of the Soviet economy, the gross apportionment of resources within that economy, and external drains on Soviet resources account for flagging Soviet economic and productivity growth. The centralized command economy that had produced rapid increases in economic product and productivity during earlier phases of development were not well suited to modern conditions. Indeed, the slack and inefficiency engendered by the structure of the Soviet economy vitiated measures that might otherwise have enhanced economic performance.

Consider the Soviet Union's apportionment of resources to investment, defense, and consumption. As figure 3.2 indicates, Soviet investment levels ran at European and below Japanese levels during most of the 1960s, increased slowly through the middle 1970s, and then rose dramatically in the late 1970s. High and constant levels of military spending--roughly double American levels when expressed as a proportion of national product--tightened the trade-off between investment and consumption. This trade-off confronted Soviet planners as they sought to arrest flagging economic growth during the late 1970s. Asked to review figure 3.2, Vladimir Popov of the Academy of the National Economy noted that Soviet planners reacted in the simplest possible manner to flagging growth. As staunch advocates of material balances and centralized planning, they reasoned that raising levels of investment might overwhelm slack and inefficiency and restore Soviet growth to levels characteristic of the 1950s. In effect, they raised the investment quota. Investment levels rose dramatically in the late 1970s, ipso facto at the expense of consumption rather than military spending. The squeeze on Soviet consumption that followed from constant high levels of military spending and increasing levels on investment undercut incentives to work and did not attack the central problems of inefficient central planning. Popov further observes that increased investment probably reduced rather than raised rates of growth in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The Soviet Union's relationship to other Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (cmea) members increased, albeit marginally, these strains on the Soviet economy. Soviets extracted resources from Eastern European clients during the looting of the immediate postwar period, thereby accentuating unrest; then transferred substantial resources to clients to buy off discontent during the 1960s; and ultimately eliminated subsidies to clients to prop up the Soviet economy during the 1980s, again accentuating unrest. As the lowest line on figure 3.2 indicates, implicit trade subsidies from the Soviet Union to Eastern European members of cmea account for a small share of Soviet national product.

Figure 3.3: Soviet Subsidies and Economic Aid to Eastern European NationsInformation on implicit trade subsidies is from cia, Handbook of Economic Statistics 1990 (Washington, D.C.: National Foreign Assessment Service, 1990), table 9; information on net transfer of economic resources is from Michael Marrese, "cmea: Effective but Cumbersome Political Economy," International Organization 40 (spring 1986): 302, table 3.

Subsidies and economic aid to Cuba, Vietnam, Mongolia, North Korea, and other non-European clients roughly double the drain on Soviet resources. When viewed in absolute terms in figure 3.3, implicit trade subsidies to Eastern Europe amounted to roughly $15 billion at the 1980 peak. After 1980 Soviet net resource transfers to Eastern Europe fell dramatically, and by the end of the 1980s the Soviet Union was extracting approximately $1.5 billion in resources from Eastern Europe. The adjustments in levels of subsidies revealed in figure 3.3 resulted in large measure from the continuation of past policies rather than from radical rethinking of Soviet�Eastern European economic relations. Throughout most of this period, cmea trade was governed by a five-year moving average of world prices. During 1973�74 and 1978�79, oil prices within cmea lagged rising world prices and Soviet implicit subsidies increased. During the early 1980s, oil prices within cmea lagged behind falling world prices, and Soviet implicit subsidies fell. The levels of these estimates are somewhat suspect. Aleksei Kvasov, head of the economic department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, observes that Soviet exports of oil and raw materials to Eastern Europe are reasonably perfect substitutes for internationally traded raw materials while Soviet imports of manufactured goods from Eastern Europe were significantly inferior to manufactured products on world markets. As a consequence, valuation of products at world prices understates significantly the real level of Soviet subsidies.

The shifting pattern of real resource transfers had predictable effects on growth rates within Eastern Europe. Although these transfers were a small proportion of Soviet national product, they represented significant proportions of Eastern European national products. The levels of implicit price subsidies enjoyed by Eastern European nations amounted to as much as 5 percent of national product in 1980. The swing from effective subsidization in 1980 to the effective extraction of resources by 1987 squeezed Eastern European economies. The dramatic reductions in Eastern European rates of growth in the 1980s are in part a product of this swing. If the fragility of Western financial and monetary institutions imposes a constraint on the American ability to extract resources from Western allies, internal unrest imposed an even more significant constraint on the Soviet ability to extract resources from Eastern European clients.

National responses to prolonged peace and looming disparities between economic and military strength, most significantly the response of the Soviet Union, helped transform the bloc system that we took for granted. For forty years, strains between institutional sources of continuity and shifting environmental incentives accumulated. In 1989 the tension was relieved, and the Eastern bloc was transformed. The stability of the postwar order rested on policies that could not be sustained over the long term. Although enormous differences of both degree and kind existed between the Soviet and American systems, not least in terms of overall economic performance, adaptability, and viability, both superpowers found that all available options undercut the existing order.

The Soviet Union and the United States could simply have continued along the lines established during the first four decades of postwar history. But over the long term, differences in growth in eco nomic productivity threatened American and Soviet economic viability. Relative deterioration in American and Soviet economic bases were certain to undercut their dominance. The existing bloc system slowly but surely eroded Soviet and American economic performance and contributed to the gradual collapse of global bipolarity. Neither the Eastern nor the Western bloc could survive indefinitely if the material bases of hegemony continued to dissipate. The conservative response--a return to strategies of the past--posed a significant long-term threat to the continuity of the postwar system and to the security of the Soviet Union.

These circumstances created a growing propensity for change. The sudden, discontinuous rush of events was touched off by a series of deliberate policy choices in Moscow. During 1988 and 1989, Gorbachev let it be known that internal political and economic choices were a matter for the individual countries of Eastern Europe to decide for themselves. In short, he explicitly renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine. Moreover, at critical junctures he made it clear to each of the regimes not only that Moscow favored reform but also that Soviet troops stationed in Eastern Europe would not leave their barracks to support the leaders of Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia against the mounting demands of their own citizens. As the Soviet Union withdrew the political and military backing that had sustained the East European regimes, each of these regimes came crashing down. Ultimately, Soviet democratization and Eastern European devolution and revolution eroded the political boundary between East and West. Over the same period, reductions in military and economic aid and withdrawals of troops eroded the significance of the military boundary. The United States and Soviet Union chose to reduce interbloc military and political rivalry to decrease the quantity of resources allocated to defense. Both the American fiscal squeeze and the severe Soviet economic crisis imposed limits on military spending. In particular, Soviet economic reforms required the higher levels of consumption and stable (but redirected) levels of investment that can only come at the expense of military spending. Reductions in military spending by one power strengthened tendencies toward reductions in the other, less through formal international negotiation than by weakening coalitions favoring sustained defense spending within the rival state. Finally, the Soviet and Eastern European search for Western markets, credits, and technology eroded the economic boundary. Political democratization, military retrenchment, and economic liberalization within what used to be termed the Eastern bloc ended the postwar system.

Soviet New Thinking: The Logic of Retrenchment and Reform

If the existence of the Soviet new thinkers is due, in part, to the liberalizing effects of a benign security environment, the content of the new thinking is the recognition of that benign security environment and the derivation of implications for Soviet foreign policy. As Jeffrey Checkel has observed, the new thinking of Aleksandr Yakovlev and other key advisers to Gorbachev had far-reaching effects on the definition of Soviet interests and on Soviet behavior. ₁₈ In this section, I focus on the origins and content of a reasonably representative part of the wave of new thinking. Readers may wish to consult Checkel's fine study for a more extensive description and analysis of détente and the new thinking.

One of the seminal essays on the new thinking was written in late 1987 and published in Kommunist in January 1988. ₁₉ In "Security Challenges: Old and New," Vitaly Zhurkin, Sergei Karaganov, and Andrei Kortunov recognized explicitly that continuing military rivalry with the United States would result in further deterioration of the Soviet economic position. They argued explicitly that both external retrenchment and internal reform were necessary to reverse the gradual deterioration of the Soviet position. Their essay was what we would call a trial balloon. Because it appeared in Kommunist, members of the broader Soviet foreign policy community quite properly interpreted its publication as a clear signal that its radical arguments had been vetted by the highest levels of the party and the state. Yet because Zhurkin, Karaganov, and Kortunov were from the Academy of Sciences, the essay was unofficial and could be disavowed if necessary. To secure approval of the Foreign Ministry and of Gorbachev's inner circle, conventional paragraphs were inserted into the draft. As a consequence, the essay is an interesting combination of new thinking and ideological boilerplate. At a minimum, the arguments it contained were designated as within the legitimate realm of discourse. These arguments came to underpin the revolution in Soviet foreign policy of 1989.

The new thinkers stated explicitly that a combination of external retrenchment and internal reform served two purposes--the direct goal of restoring Soviet growth and the indirect goal of easing Western fears of the Soviet Union. Their arguments rested on assumptions about the Soviet economic predicament and the implications of a peaceful nuclearized international environment for Soviet foreign policy that cannot be readily distinguished from the assump tions of Western advocates of hegemonic retrenchment and defensive military strategies Gilpin and Jervis.

The new thinkers noted

a certain disparity between the tremendous foreign policy role and the relative economic and scientific and technical power of our country is lately becoming an increasing subject of concern, for it began to grow during the period of stagnation. The accumulation of negative trends in the economic development of the ussr in the 1970s and beginning of 1980s became more noticeable and has had a more dangerous impact on the dynamics of the correlation of forces between the two systems. The economic dimensions of the Soviet predicament were a consequence of . . . the economic exhaustion of socialism in the course of the arms race and, in particular, by imposing upon it unbearable military expenditures.

They argued that Soviet economic problems were so severe that nothing short of "the systematic implementation of the restructuring of the economic mechanism and social life and the acceleration of the socioeconomic development of socialism" offered much hope of renewal. ₂₀

The new thinkers' call for domestic restructuring is broadly consistent with a weaker strand in Soviet thinking in the early 1980s. Leslie Gelb reports on a 1983 conversation he had with Chief of the Soviet General Staff Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov. Ogarkov argued for an economic revolution within the Soviet Union and raised the question of whether the Soviets could have an economic revolution without a political revolution. Gelb notes that Marshal Ogarkov was purged less than a year later but that his logic was resurrected by Mikhail Gorbachev when he launched perestroika and glasnost several years later. ₂₁

If the new thinkers' statement of the need for internal restructuring echoed earlier themes, their arguments that "future security cannot be achieved by military means" were more radical. To lighten economic burdens and to enhance security, they argued, the Soviet Union should resist succumbing to American efforts "aimed at provoking the Soviet Union to develop its own sdi program and to engage in multibillion dollar expenditures to militarize outer space." They argued against heavy expenditures in conventional military capabilities that would only serve to reinforce "the myth of the Soviet military threat" without enhancing Soviet security. They argued against engagement in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, and Mozambique on the grounds that the old way "assigns to the ussr much greater political responsibility and economic and military burdens compared to those of the United States." ₂₂

Most centrally, the new thinkers argued that the existence of nuclear weapons had eliminated "the main traditional threat of an invasion from the West." This substantially weakened the main traditional justification for the retention of the Eastern European glacis. The old specter of Western encirclement had been solved "once and for all and irreversibly" by "the threat of annihilation in the flames of nuclear war." They observed that "strategic nuclear parity, understood in terms of depriving either side of the hope of mounting an attack with impunity, is a great factor of stability." The authors went on to discuss the threat to Soviet security posed by American development of Pershing II missiles and concluded that "from the viewpoint of present military-political realities, such a nuclear attack would also mean, in the final account, an inevitable catastrophe for the attacker as well." In short, they argued that the nuclear peace is the reason that "we can speak of a substantially increased freedom of maneuvering both in domestic and foreign policy." ₂₃

This remarkable essay continued with a careful discussion of the effects of increased freedom on American security policy. The following passage could have been drawn from Robert Jervis's writings on the security dilemma and on deterrence and the spiral model: "It is only openness that allows us efficiently to make the peoples of other countries aware of our political tasks, to convince them of the peaceful intentions and plans of the ussr and to isolate reactionary and militaristic groups. That is why steps aimed at broadening the openness of our foreign political and military activities are of tremendous importance in strengthening the security of the Soviet Union. They reduce rather than increase the threat." ₂₄ This parallels Jervis's argument that offensive strategies may have had the effect of reducing the security of adversaries and thereby eliciting offsetting responses that leave the aggressor less secure. Yet, as Jervis asserts, the problem of avoiding needless spirals of conflict is greatly complicated by inherent problems in signaling intent. The new thinkers' explanation of how openness might enhance Soviet security is by far the clearest quasi-official example of Jervis thought with which I am familiar.

The question of whether to label Gilpin, Jervis, and the new thinkers as realists is far less interesting than the emergence of virtually identical arguments on the advantages of retrenchment and defensive security polities in both declining hegemons at roughly the same time, a coincidence that appears to have contributed to the ending of the Cold War. ₂₅ Although Gilpin's analyses of hegemonic decline and retrenchment and Jervis's analyses of the security dilemma and the perils of needless spiraling did not find a receptive audience within the American foreign policy establishment of the 1980s, the writings of the new thinkers were a product of the Soviet foreign policy establishment. There was nothing inevitable about the acceptance of these arguments. Under different political conditions, international and domestic, the new thinkers and their ideas could well have been ignored or eradicated. But it is fair to say, at least in retrospect, that their arguments provided the intellectual underpinnings of the radically revised Soviet foreign policies that brought about an end to the Cold War.

When I was asked to respond to Ned Lebow's argument on realism and the end of the Cold War, I found myself somewhat uneasy with the assignment. There is merit in seeking to devise explanations for the end of the Cold War. But there is also a risk of undue scholasticism if the problem is framed in terms of defending or attacking academic theories rather than grappling directly with a phenomenon of truly historic significance.

First, traditional realism is not a theory of international politics that can be confirmed or rejected on the basis of the end of the Cold War or any other specific event or sequence of events. Realism is more properly viewed as a worldview rather than explanatory theory. As explanatory theory, it is grossly underidentified. The ambiguity and plasticity of realism permits its advocates and critics to argue indefinitely over the fit between realism and virtually any specific sequence of events. As a consequence, the task of confirming or denying realism by examining the end of the Cold War is hopeless. However, specific subspecies of theory that are commonly viewed as realist are defined with sufficient precision to permit at least some assessment of the events that led to the end of the Cold War. I accept the task of reexamining theories that may be associated broadly with realism while rejecting the notion that realism as a whole is a theory that can be tested. Although specific realists such as Waltz, Gilpin, and Jervis may take solace in the fit between their theories and the end of the Cold War, realism cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed by that event.

Second, although this essay emphasizes international factors that facilitated the end of the Cold War, it should not be interpreted as rejecting the significance of Mikhail Gorbachev, the new thinkers, and Soviet domestic political institutions and processes. To grapple effectively with the sources of the end of the Cold War, we should not consider international, domestic, or individual factors to the exclusion of the others. The only analysts who must choose to defend one and only one approach to international relations are unfortunate graduate students confronting poorly drafted general examination questions, many of whom may be forced to read this volume to prepare for their exams.

Gorbachev and the new thinkers could have chosen to pursue the old policies and to defend the old domestic political and economic structures. Because there was nothing inevitable about the changes in Soviet behavior or morphology, the end of the Cold War is a monument to these individuals. Because political and economic turbulence within the Commonwealth of Independent States may yet sweep aside the reforms and the reformers, we can only hope that the monument will continue to honor living individuals and reforms.

I acknowledge with gratitude the insights of Valerie Bunce, Michael Doyle, Kimberly Eliott, Andrei Kortunov, Stephen Krasner, Friedrich Kratochwil, Aleksei Kvasov, Richard Ned Lebow, Igor Malyshenko, Vladimir Popov, Judith Reppy, Lilia Shevtsova, and Jack Snyder; the research assistance and cite checking of Karen Alter and Byoung-Joo Kim; and the institutional support of the MacArthur Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts. None of these individuals or institutions bears responsibility for the content of this essay. Back.

Note 1: This paper focuses on the causes of the end of the Cold War and does not examine the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union or the evolution of the emerging interrepublican international subsystem on the territory of the former Soviet Union. The breakup of the Soviet Union into the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Baltic Republics, and the Republic of Georgia and the subsequent assertion of Russian authority over portions of the Caucasian region took place after the end of the Cold War. Back.

Note 2: Kenneth N. Waltz, "Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics," in Neorealism and Its Critics, ed. Robert O. Keohane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Back.

Note 3: Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Back.

Note 4: Robert Jervis, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma," World Politics 30 (January 1978): 186�214. Back.

Note 5: See Otto Hintze, "Military Organization and the Organization of the State" in The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). For more general arguments on the effects of international economic and security contexts on domestic structures, see Peter Gourevitch, "The Second Image Reversed: International Sources of Domestic Politics," International Organization 32 (autumn 1978): 881�911; and Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, "The International Sources of Soviet Change," International Security 16 (winter 1991 / 92): 74�118. Deudney and Ikenberry stress the pacific character of liberal capitalist democracies in their discussion of the effects of security environments on domestic Soviet liberalization. By contrast, my essay places greater emphasis on the consequences of the nuclear peace. Gourevitch, Deudney, and Ikenberry all provide clear derivations of the implications of the Gerschenkron early / late industrialization thesis for domestic structures. Back.

Note 6: Of course, not all repressive measures enhanced American military capabilities, the internment of Japanese-Americans being one obvious example. Back.

Note 7: A partial exception to the generalization about insecurity and war may be worth noting. The U.S. Army opposed the excesses of McCarthyism in part because of the debilitating effects of the witchhunt on the army's military efficiency. Back.

Note 8: See Stephen D. Krasner, "Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective," Comparative Political Studies 21 (April 1988): 66�94. Back.

Note 9: In feudal societies, semisovereign lords, barons, junkers, and daimyo governed economically and militarily self-sufficient territories. The principalities, duchies, and estates of feudal Europe and Japan were nearly autarchic. Local artisans and peasants produced weapons, capital goods, clothing and food; trade was limited to luxury goods, salt, and small quantities of metal. To secure their domains against rebellious peasants, marauding brigands, and ambitious neighbors, local nobles erected fortifications, maintained troops of loyal retainers, and warred or negotiated with each other. To extract resources from their domains, nobles appropriated the labor and product of peasants, collected rents from local monopolies, and imposed taxes and tolls on trickles of trade. Kings, emperors, and shoguns operated as mere franchisers of protection and extraction, exchanging titles to territory for promises of blood and treasure. Their claims to national authority rested ultimately on the personal loyalty and self-interest of potential domestic rivals. Feudal armies were transient agglomerations of local armies, with each noble mustering, arming, provisioning, paying, and commanding his own unit. Although royalty drew resources directly from royal lands, they could not extract men or material directly from the manors. The politico-military problem of bypassing a semisovereign armed nobility, the economic problem of taxing autarchic nonmarket entities, and the administrative problem of creating an alternative extractive and coercive apparatus were mutually reinforcing.

The great consolidations of European and Japanese feudal societies into nation-states were driven by the quest for internal and external security. As in feudal times, nominal national patrons and entrepreneurial clients co-opted, disarmed, or beheaded actual and potential rivals. Nascent state makers went on to establish protectorates over territories where they controlled organized violence. In feudal orders, access to peak military technology was restricted to members of oligarchies and denied to members of the masses. During the transition from feudal to national order, access to peak military technologies and the right to maintain armed forces were restricted to central authorities and denied to local oligarchs. Central authorities secured monopolies on organized violence gradually. For example, in Japan, local armies were thinned and remanded to central control, and firearms not secured in central armories were melted and converted into religious artifacts. Local lords retained small bands of swordsmen and archers. In France, small compagnies d'ordonnance with allegiance to Charles VII formed the core of what became a national army. In seventeenth-century Prussia and Switzerland, the constant formation and dissolution of central forces from foreign mercenaries gave way to small standing forces loyal to central authorities. In England, the New Model Army of 1645 became a centralized army. In each case, national forces were initially supported through solicitation of resources from local authorities. In each case, the creation of national armies permitted the gradual displacement of local authorities.

As nascent state makers replaced the local monopolies of lords with the national monopolies of kings, barriers to trade within national protectorates fell. Finally, as the size of protectorates increased, the centralized differentiated institutions of the state replaced administration through personalism and patronage. Each of these innovations increased the war-making capacity of nations. Domestic violence no longer dissipated blood and treasure, economic integration spurred growth, and the emergence of centralized differentiated institutions eased constraints on extracting economic resources and converting them into military strength. Because increased war-making potential in one nation jeopardized the security of other nations, these innovations diffused across international boundaries. Nation-states conquered and absorbed some neighbors, while fears of conquest legitimated state making in others. Once this self-reinforcing process began, it deepened until the last vestiges of feudalism were all but eradicated, and it spread to encompass virtually every nation in the world.

This discussion of an ideal typical feudalism does not take account of the many variations on these general themes. See Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Rushton Coulbourne, ed., Feudalism in History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956); John W. Hall and Jeffrey P. Mass, eds., Medieval Japan: Essays in Institutional History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Noel Perrin, Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543�1879 (Boston: Godine, 1979); and Peter Duus, Feudalism in Japan (New York: Knopf, 1976). Back.

Note 10: Charles Tilly, "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime," in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 172. For an earlier presentation of this logic of state making with application to state formation in the Third World, see Youssef Cohen, Brian Brown, and A. F. K. Organski, "The Paradoxical Nature of State Making: The Violent Creation of Order," American Political Science Review 75 (December 1981): 901�10. Tilly offers a convincing explanation of the durability of the state system once the process of war making and state making began but does not offer a similarly persuasive explanation of the timing of the transition from feudal to national order. Back.

Note 11: Tilly, "War Making and State Making," p. 168. Back.

Note 12: Portions of this section are drawn from Kenneth A. Oye, "Beyond Postwar Order and New World Order: American Foreign Policy in Transition," in Eagle in a New World: American Grand Strategy in the Post�Cold War Era, ed. Kenneth A. Oye, Robert Lieber, and Donald Rothchild (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). Back.

Note 13: See John Gaddis, "The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System," International Security 10 (spring 1986): 99�142; and John Mueller, Retreat From Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic, 1989). As these authors note, central systemic peace is not synonymous with global peace. Their observations do not extend to regional conflicts or to interventions within or outside spheres of influence. Back.

Note 14: For works on the causes and / or implications of asymmetries between military and economic strength, see Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics; Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic, 1986); and Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987). These views are attacked as "declinist" by Samuel Huntington in "The U.S.--Decline or Renewal ?" Foreign Affairs 67 (winter 1988 / 89): 76�96. Other works attacking the notion of American decline include Bruce Russett, "The Mysterious Case of Vanishing Hegemony; or, Is Mark Twain Really Dead ?" International Organization 39 (spring 1985): 207�231; Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic, 1991); and Henry Nau, The Myth of America's Decline: Leading the World Economy into the 1990s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Back.

Note 15: Unfortunately, I cannot test this conjecture on the effects of technological advance on the magnitude of spillover effects. Estimates of investment, growth, and military spending for tribes of hunters through early twentieth-century nation-states are unreliable even when they are available.

One can measure, albeit imperfectly, positive military spillover. Regressing economic growth against investment yields residual growth not explained by investment. Residual growth can then be regressed against military spending. I have tested for military spillover in eleven oecd Office for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in exactly this way. I could find no association between economic growth and military spending from 1951 to 1984 after controlling for investment. Back.

Note 16: On the relative efficiency of economic and military modes of extraction, see David A. Baldwin, Economic Statecraft (Princeton: Prince ton University Press, 1985) and Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State. Back.

Note 17: If state making was, in Charles Tilly's words, a protection racket in which state makers collected protection payments, bloc making was a protection racket in which extortionists failed to collect. Back.

Note 18: Jeffrey Taylor Checkel, Ideas and International Politics: Foreign Policy Change and the End of the Cold War (Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, 1994, unpublished manuscript). For an abridged version of his argument, see Jeffrey Checkel, "Ideas, Institutions and the Gorbachev Foreign Policy Revolution," World Politics 45 (January 1993): 271�300. Back.

Note 19: Translation in Joint Publications Research Service Report jprs-uko-88�006, Arlington, Va.: Foreign Broadcast Information Service, March 24, 1988, pp. 25�31. Back.

Note 20: jprs-uko-88�006, pp. 29�30. Back.

Note 21: Leslie Gelb, "Who Won the Cold War ?" New York Times, August 20, 1992, p. A27. Back.

Note 22: jprs-uko-88�006, p. 30. In August 1988 Alexei Izyumov and Andrei Kortunov elaborated on this position, arguing that "objective conditions of our development require that we should clearly define the spheres and priorities of our economic interests abroad and examine all pros and cons of any major international move. In other words, Soviet foreign policy must gradually introduce � cost-accounting and self-financing.' In particular, the gratuitous subsidizing of the economies of some of our allies should be replaced" ("The Soviet Union in the Changing World," International Affairs [ Moscow ] 8 [ August 1988 ]: 54). Back.

Note 23: jprs-uko-88�006, pp. 26�27. Back.

Note 24: jprs-uko-88�006, p. 27. The New Thinkers did not rely exclusively on the stabilizing properties of nuclear weapons to make their case for revolutionary change in Soviet foreign policy. They also noted that "the very nature of the industrial society operating there [ in Western Europe ] operates as a war-restraining factor" and that "bourgeois democracy provides a certain obstacle to the outbreak of war" (jprs-uko-88�006, pp. 27, 28). In effect, a modified version of Doyle thought coexists side by side with Jervis thought. In October 1991, Jack Snyder and I asked two of the new thinkers to explain why they believed that the West would not exploit Soviet retrenchment. Igor Malyshenko, then a personal aide to Gorbachev, and Andrei Kortunov, director of American foreign policy studies at the usa and Canada Institute (iskan) and coauthor of the 1987 Kommunist essay, began their discussion with what they termed the significance of nuclear weapons. Both argued that the existence of a stable nuclear deterrent effectively guaranteed the security of both the Soviet Union and the United States while fears of possible uncontrollable updraft from conventional to nuclear war discouraged conventional challenges to traditionally defined vital interests. Both observed that Soviet control of Eastern Europe, interventions in the periphery, and investment in war-fighting nuclear capabilities did not and could not enhance Soviet security. Igor Malyshenko, the son of a Soviet General, stressed the impossibility of maintaining a firebreak between conventional and nuclear holocaust as he made the case for why the West would not exploit retrenchment. Both also mentioned the relatively unaggressive character of liberal democracies as an important secondary factor in their analysis of contemporary security relations. Back.

Note 25: To be fair, the October 1991 conversation with Soviet new thinkers on the irrelevance of traditional territorial indices of security and of nuclear counterforce may reflect blowback from American proponents of these views such as Robert Jervis and Stephen Van Evera. Georgi Arbatov of iskan has spoken at mit of his first exposure to Scandinavian defensive security analysis, pointing explicitly to his contacts with the Palme Commission in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Back.

International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War