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International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War, by Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, editors
7. The Search for Accommodation: Gorbachev in Comparative Perspective
Richard Ned Lebow
The reorientation of Soviet foreign policy under Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the East-West reconciliation it brought about constitute a formidable challenge to theories of international relations. These theories did not recognize the possibility of such change and have been hard put in retrospect to find convincing explanations. 1 Our collective failure, while embarrassing, represents an opportunity. Theory progresses by acknowledging its failures and reformulating its assumptions. With this end in mind, I will offer a critical review of my theory of need-driven aggression and reformulate it on the basis of recent events.
The Theory
Between Peace and War, published in 1981, analyzed why states challenged critical adversarial commitments. 2 In contrast to theories of deterrence that identify opportunity as the catalyst for such challenges, my explanation was rooted in need. I hypothesized that leaders are most likely to resort to force or challenge important adversarial commitments when they confront serious foreign or domestic threats or, more often, a combination of the two. Case studies of acute international crises indicate that the most frequent objective of such behavior is to prevent or compensate for an adverse shift in the balance of power brought about by military deployments or changing international alignments. Examples include the 1905-6 Moroccan crisis, which was triggered by the Anglo-French entente and the fear of encirclement it aroused in Germany, and the Cuban missile deployment of 1962, which followed in part from Soviet concerns that the United States had achieved a first-strike capability. 3
Resorts to force and other foreign policy challenges can also be a response to internal threats to the state, its regime, or its leadership. Leaders are most likely to adopt aggressive foreign policies to cope with domestic problems when these pose immediate threats and are beyond the power of leaders to address directly but can be alleviated in part--or so leaders believe--by means of a forceful foreign policy. Such a calculus lay behind Austria's decision to wage war on Serbia in 1914 and the Argentine junta's decision in 1982 to invade the Islas Malvinas (Falkland Islands). 4
Domestic problems and foreign insecurities prompt aggressive foreign policies for a second, related reason: leaders of states who confront domestic or foreign threats worry that weakness--real or perceived--will encourage challenges by adversaries or defections by allies. Concern for their country's reputations prompts leaders to look for ways to demonstrate resolve and makes them loath to back down in international confrontations. Austria-Hungary and Russia behaved this way in the years before 1914. Their attempts to cope with mounting domestic challenges by expansionist foreign policies were a fundamental cause of the First World War. During the Cold War, the superpowers attempted to bolster their military capabilities and reputations for resolve, especially in the aftermath of foreign policy setbacks. 5 These superpower confrontations did not lead to war but provoked war-threatening crises and costly military interventions in the Third World.
The Prediction
In 1980 I speculated about the structural problems that would confront the superpowers in the course of the coming decade. Drawing on the propositions of Between Peace and War, I predicted how the superpowers would respond if these conditions were realized and suggested that both would suffer a series of foreign and domestic setbacks that would prompt more aggressive foreign policies. 6 The Soviet Union confronted two major adversaries: the United States and the People's Republic of China. I predicted that during the eighties both would grow relatively more powerful and more coordinated in their opposition to Moscow. Like German leaders in the early years of the century, Soviet leaders had a long-standing fear of encirclement. To the extent that they expected "opportunistic collusion" between China and the United States to develop into a full-blown anti-Soviet alliance, linked perhaps to Japan and nato, they might feel compelled to try to prevent this coalition from congealing. In 1905, 1909, and 1911 Germany brought Europe to the brink of war in three unsuccessful attempts to break out of its encirclement.
Moscow would also face a growing direct threat in Eastern Europe. The growing disparity between Eastern living standards and those of the West, a decline in upward mobility, discouraging prospects for economic growth, and the emergence of human rights groups in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany would subject pro-Soviet regimes to increasing pressure from dissident workers and intellectuals. By the end of the decade, I argued, Moscow would have to accept much greater diversity and autonomy among its Eastern European satellites or use force on a large scale to maintain its authority. 7
I thought that the most serious long-term threat to the Soviet Union would be internal. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, Soviet-sponsored economic and educational development had promoted the emergence of new classes of indigenous intelligentsia and workers who enjoyed a degree of prosperity. This elite had resisted Russification and showed increasing signs of resenting Russian domination. If the Soviet economy stagnated--as many economists predicted--and if military involvement in Afghanistan further alienated Soviet Muslims, demands for autonomy or independence might erupt in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Widespread alienation among young Russians, also a reaction to economic stagnation, corruption, and Afghanistan, could pose an even greater challenge to the survival of Soviet-style communism.
I did not expect the United States to experience threats of the same magnitude. The United States would confront more independent allies, especially in Europe, where opposition to the deployment of new nuclear delivery systems could become pronounced. In the Third World, terrorism and revolutions against American client regimes would continue to be a source of mounting frustration. The biggest threat to America's world position would be economic. The United States' economy would decline relative to Japan and Western Europe but not the Soviet Union. The threatened loss of industrial primacy would not immediately degrade the country's standard of living--it would be maintained through borrowing and a growing trade deficit--but would be a blow to national self-esteem and make Americans susceptible to appeals for a more assertive foreign policy.
Drawing on the propositions of Between Peace and War, I predicted that the relative decline of the superpowers would make them more insecure and intent on demonstrating resolve to adversaries and allies alike. Their rivalry, in the Third World and in space, would become sharper and could result in the kinds of acute crises that had characterized the tensest years of the Cold War. The most serious of these confrontations--Berlin 1948-49, 1959-62, and Cuba 1962--had been provoked by leaders who felt cornered. In their concern to prevent loss, the superpowers had been willing to accept the risks of confrontation, or, worse still, to delude themselves that the actions they considered essential to national security would not unduly provoke their adversary. 8
The Reality
My expectation of structural decline was accurate, although not derived from any theory. By March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, the Soviet Union had experienced major foreign and domestic setbacks. These included a costly and still unresolved war in Afghanistan, the failure to prevent nato's deployment of a new generation of highly accurate nuclear delivery systems in Europe, and a stagnating economy that ultimately threatened to make it impossible for the Soviet Union to play the role of a global power. By 1992 the combined effects of political liberalization and unexpectedly rapid economic decline had brought about the demise of the Soviet Union.
The decline of the United States was not nearly so severe. Tensions within nato mounted, American primacy in Latin America was challenged by the electoral and military success of left-wing movements, and the American economy suffered a series of shocks that threatened to make it the sick man of the First World. Public opinion polls revealed that Americans felt increasingly frustrated by their country's relative decline as a world power and uncertain about what could be done to regain economic and political primacy.
The American response was generally consonant with the expectations of my theory. Democrats and Republicans alike showed a heightened concern for the country's credibility and supported a more forceful foreign policy. Beginning in the mid-1970s influential members of the American national security establishment began to voice concern about their country's putative military decline and the consequent erosion of its credibility. They interpreted the Soviet Union's more active policy in Africa and its intervention in Afghan-istan as evidence of Moscow's belief that the correlation of forces had swung in its favor. 9 They advocated a major military buildup to restore the status quo. Begun in the last two years of the Carter administration and accelerated by Ronald Reagan, the buildup of American conventional and strategic forces was the largest carried out in peacetime.
The buildup was accompanied by a crescendo of anti-Soviet rhetoric and threatening weapons deployments. The Carter and Reagan administrations considered installation of Pershing IIs and cruise missiles in Europe essential to preserving nato's credibility in the face of the ongoing Soviet nuclear buildup there. Concern for its credibility also prompted the Reagan administration to dispatch marines to Lebanon, invade Grenada, threaten Nicaragua, and provide military aid to the contras in Nicaragua and the mujahideen in Afghanistan. During Reagan's first term, Soviet-American relations reached a level of tension not witnessed since the height of the Cold War. To many observers, Reagan's support of Star Wars and militant opposition to pro-Soviet governments in the Third World put the superpowers on a collision course.
My theory predicted that the relatively greater decline in Soviet power and the rising threats to its primacy in Eastern Europe would lead to an even more assertive foreign policy. This prediction was utterly confounded by the conciliatory policy of Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze. They withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan, agreed to theater arms control that was advantageous to the West, allowed anticommunist revolutions in Eastern Europe, and, to everyone's surprise, agreed to the unification of Germany within nato. By 1992 the Cold War was over, and the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.
The Reasons
The fundamental premise of need-driven theories of foreign policy is that serious domestic and foreign threats prompt proportionally dramatic responses. However, Soviet foreign policy between 1986 and 1992 represented a response to foreign and domestic threats that this theory does not envisage: accommodation with erstwhile adversaries. The Soviet experience is not unique. France's reconciliation with Britain in the years after Fashoda and Anwar el-Sadat's overtures to Israel after the 1973 Middle East War also were attempts by leaders to cope with domestic and foreign threats by extending the olive branch to their adversaries. Need-driven theories of foreign policy must be reformulated to take this response into account and to specify the conditions under which it is likely to occur. The French, Egyptian, and Soviet cases indicate three conditions associated with conciliatory responses: (1) commitments by leaders to domestic political and economic reforms; (2) the prior failure of confrontation; and (3) the expectation that conciliatory policies will be reciprocated.
The first of these conditions relates to the domestic agenda of leaders. I hypothesize that leaders are likely to pursue conciliatory foreign policies when they are committed to domestic programs that will directly benefit from accommodation with foreign adversaries. For Britain and France, the entente cordiale of 1904 paved the way for a lasting accommodation. Only five years before the agreement, the two rivals had been at the brink of war as a result of their dispute on the Upper Nile. In September 1898, as the Fashoda crisis neared its dénouement, the Dreyfus affair also entered its most acute phase following the revelation of the "faux Henri" on August 31. The humiliation of Fashoda and the exposure of the conspiracy against Captain Dreyfus facilitated a fundamental shift in French politics, pitting conservative, proclerical, anti-Dreyfusard colonialists against liberal, anticlerical, pro-Dreyfusard continentalists. At issue were competing visions of France; the one authoritarian, anti-British, and expansionist; the other republican, anti-German, and more conscious of the limits of French power.
In 1899 a government of republican solidarity came to power and then gave way in June 1902 to a government of the Dreyfusard left. Finding itself defending the Republic against a possible coup by authoritarian, nationalist, and anti-Semitic opponents, the Dreyfusard coalition--led by René Waldeck-Rousseau and his successor, Emile Combes--set out to weaken the church and the army, the principal institutional bases of the anti-Republican forces. Many clerical organizations were outlawed, the church's role in education was limited, the navy budget was sharply reduced, and national service in the army was reduced from three to two years. Broad measures were introduced to regulate working hours and conditions in order to maintain the support of the working class. When a military tribunal convicted Alfred Dreyfus a second time, the government had President Emile Loubet pardon him. 10
Beyond its instrumental interests in accommodation with Britain--prompted by France's diplomatic isolation and the growing power of Germany--the Dreyfusard left wanted to strengthen the hold of republicanism by aligning France with Europe's greatest liberal democracy. The coalition and its foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, had strong domestic incentives for seeking accommodations with both Italy and Britain. Improved relations with these countries would justify the coalition's assault on the military budget and shortening of the period of national service. An understanding with Britain could also facilitate French colonial goals; Delcassé offered to renounce all claims on Egypt in return for British support for France's effort to establish a protectorate over Morocco. French success in Morocco would co-opt the colonial agenda of the right and broaden support for the coalition. Lord Lansdowne and the British government were equally keen to encourage democratic forces in France and responded positively to this proposition. Negotiations began in the spring of 1903 and quickly led to the Anglo-French entente of 1904.
President Anwar el-Sadat was equally driven by domestic considerations to seek an accommodation with Israel. Egypt faced an acute economic crisis in the early 1970s. Socialism from above had failed, and Sadat, in a sharp break with the past, sought to liberalize the Egyptian economy and attract the foreign investment necessary to stimulate development. Sadat was convinced that foreign investors would not come to Egypt unless the Arab-Israel conflict was removed as a source of instability. After the war in 1973 had failed to end that conflict, Sadat pinned his hopes on a diplomatic solution, anticipating that a peace agreement with Israel brokered by the United States would create the conditions for the successful liberalization of the Egyptian economy. In a more secure and stable environment, foreign investment from the capitalist countries would flow into Egypt, accelerating economic growth. The United States, he hoped, would provide extensive economic aid and technical assistance to jump-start the Egyptian economy. Only if its economy grew could Egypt begin to address the fundamental infrastructural and social problems that it faced. Thus peace with Israel was important not primarily because of the direct benefits that it would bring--the return of the Sinai oil fields and an end to humiliation--but because of the opportunity it provided to open Egypt to the West and particularly to the United States. 11
Mikhail S. Gorbachev's attempt to transform East-West relations was motivated in large part by his commitment to domestic reform. Perestroika required accommodation with the West. This would permit the Soviet Union to shift scarce resources from the military to production and investment and to attract credits, investment, and technology from the West. According to Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, the chief objective of foreign policy was "to create the maximum favorable external conditions needed in order to conduct internal reform." 12
In the view of Perestroichiks, the conflict with the West had been kept alive and exploited by the Communist Party to justify its monopoly on power and suppression of dissent. 13 New thinking in foreign affairs was designed to break the hold of the party and the influence of the military-industrial complex allied to it. 14 It sought to replace the long-standing fixation on national security with the concept of "common, indivisible security, the same for all." Gorbachev proclaimed that the goal of the Soviet Union was to join a "common European house" that would foster security and prosperity through "a policy of cooperation based on mutual trust." 15
The promotion of change in Eastern Europe was another means of fostering and protecting change at home. Perestroika had provoked a conservative backlash among the party elites of the region, who attempted to forge an anti-Gorbachev coalition with their Soviet counterparts. "Here," Shevardnadze observed, "the socialist 'community' showed its true face, and we saw what it had always been: a fraternal alliance of Party-state elites." 16 Gorbachev expected socialist reformers to come to power in Eastern Europe and become his natural allies in the common struggle against the forces of reaction.
For committed democrats like Shevardnadze, perestroika and glasnost were more than mechanisms intended to reform and revitalize the Soviet economy. For the Soviet Union to join the Western family of nations, it had to become a democratic society with a demonstrable respect for the individual and collective rights of its citizens and allies. Granting independence to the countries of Eastern Europe was the international analog to emptying the gulags, ending censorship in the media, and choosing members of the Supreme Soviet through free elections. Perestroika, Shevardnadze explained, "was understood to be universally applicable and could not be guided by a double standard. If you start democratizing your own country, you no longer have the right to thwart that same process in other countries." 17
The second mediating condition of a conciliatory response concerns leaders' understandings of the consequences of confrontation. Leaders are more likely to pursue conciliatory foreign policies when they believe confrontation has failed. In all three cases discussed above, leaders recognized that confrontation had failed, had been extraordinarily costly, and was unlikely to succeed in the future.
Fin de sicle France had pursued the ambitions of a first-rank power although it no longer possessed the required capabilities. The gap between French ambitions and French power was most apparent in colonial policy and in the challenge to Britain's primacy in Egypt. France's ill-conceived attempt to establish a military presence on the Upper Nile provoked a British military expedition to the Sudan and an ultimatum to the small French force to withdraw. Outgunned on the Nile, at the mercy of the British fleet in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, and divided at home, France capitulated. 18
The humiliation of Fashoda did much to disabuse French leaders of their grandiose colonial illusions and encouraged serious rethinking of the premises that had guided French foreign policy during the previous decades. The view was increasingly expressed in the press and bureaux that opposition to Britain was pointless because it could not be effective. The crisis also dramatized the full extent of France's isolation. For months after France's capitulation in the Sudan, leaders on both sides of the channel continued to think that war could break out. Russia, France's only ally, was unprepared for war, and Muraviev, its foreign minister, urged caution on Paris. French leaders confronted a hostile Germany on their eastern border. Throughout the crisis, the kaiser tried to goad Britain into attacking by promising neutrality and military support if Russia intervened on the side of France. Fashoda encouraged thoughtful Frenchmen, alarmed by their isolation, to seek an accommodation with Britain, an objective made possible by a shift of power within France.
The Fashoda crisis had been an expression of the conflict between the Colonial Ministry and the Foreign Ministry. The Colonial Ministry regarded Britain as the major obstacle to the fulfillment of its colonial ambitions. The Foreign Ministry was primarily concerned with the military threat Germany posed to France and saw Britain as a natural ally. Fashoda discredited the Anglophobes within the Colonial Ministry and paved the way for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to seek rapprochement with Britain.
President Sadat's peace initiative took place in the aftermath of military failure, a costly war during which Egypt's battlefield goals were frustrated. Egyptian officials recognized that military conditions in 1973 had been optimal--Egyptian and Syrian armies armed with the latest weapons mounted a joint attack and achieved surprise--yet the war ended with Egyptian armies on the verge of a catastrophic military defeat. It was clear to Sadat and his generals that even under the best possible conditions, Egypt could not hope to defeat Israel. President Sadat accordingly began to search for a diplomatic solution that would return the Suez Canal to Egypt. To this end, he sought to involve the United States as mediator, broker, and guarantor of any peace settlement that ensued.
Mikhail Gorbachev's search for accommodation was also a reac tion to the failure and costs of confrontation. Under Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union had steadily built up its conventional and nuclear arsenals in a bid for military superiority. Brezhnev and many of his colleagues, as well as the Soviet military establishment, were convinced that a shift in the correlation of forces in favor of the socialist camp would compel the West to treat the Soviet Union as an equal superpower. Nixon and Kissinger's interest in détente, which came at a time when the Soviet Union was drawing abreast of the United States in strategic nuclear capability, confirmed the Soviets' view of the political value of military forces. 19
Reasoning that additional forces would further improve their position vis--vis the West, Soviet leaders continued their buildup into the 1980s. The policy had the opposite effect. Moscow's seeming pursuit of strategic superiority coupled with its more assertive policy in the Third World handed American militants a powerful weapon to use against détente. The Carter administration was forced to begin its own strategic buildup and then to withdraw the proposed salt ii treaty from the Senate. The apparent upsurge in Soviet aggressiveness and Carter's seeming inability to confront it contributed to Reagan's electoral landslide and support for his more extensive military buildup and anti-Soviet foreign policy.
Soviet foreign policy analysts in the institutes were sensitive to the ways in which Brezhnev's crude military and foreign policies had provoked a pernicious American reaction. Their critiques of Soviet policy circulated widely among the Soviet elite. These analyses were especially critical of the increasingly costly intervention in Afghan-istan. They also took Brezhnev and the military to task for their deployment of SS-20s in Eastern Europe and the western military districts of the Soviet Union. They maintained that nato's commitment to deploy Pershing IIs and the ground launched cruise missiles (glcms) that Moscow found so threatening was a predictable response to Moscow's provocative and unnecessary deployment of highly accurate short- and intermediate-range nuclear systems. 20 The overarching theme of these analyses was that the Brezhnev buildup had provoked the same kind of dangerous overreaction in the United States that the Kennedy-McNamara buildup of the 1960s had spurred in the Soviet Union. Soviet attempts to intimidate China with a massive buildup along its border were said to have had the same effect. A different and more cooperative approach to security was necessary.
Soviet failures in Afghanistan and in managing relations with the United States and Western Europe prompted a fundamental reassessment of foreign policy on the part of intellectuals and politicians not associated with the policies. Gorbachev and Shevardnadze maintain that their foreign policy views were formed in reaction to Brezhnev's failures and were significantly shaped by the analyses of Soviet critics in the Foreign Ministry and institutes. Both men had long conversations with analysts and Foreign Ministry critics of Brezhnev's policies before they decided to withdraw from Afghanistan. Such individuals were also instrumental in Gorbachev's and the Politburo's decision to accept on-site inspection, which helped break the logjam in arms control. 21
The Gorbachev revolution in foreign policy is reminiscent of the French experience in a second important way. The humiliation of Fashoda was the catalyst for a major shift of power within France that facilitated the emergence of a new foreign policy line. Soviet officials agree that economic stagnation and the running sore of Afghanistan paved the way to power for a reform-oriented leader. Once in the Kremlin, Gorbachev exploited Afghanistan and nato's deployment of Pershing IIs and glcms in Western Europe to discredit the militants and gain the political freedom to pursue a more conciliatory policy toward the West. 22
The third condition facilitating accommodation is the expectation of reciprocity. Leaders will be more likely to initiate conciliatory policies when they believe that their adversaries are more likely to reply in kind than to exploit their overtures for unilateral advantage. In many, if not most adversarial relationships, leaders fear that any interest they express in accommodation, or any concessions they make, will communicate weakness and so prompt more aggressive policies rather than concessions in kind. Given the serious foreign and domestic costs of failed attempts at accommodation, leaders are only likely to pursue conciliatory policies when they expect them to be reciprocated. In two of the three cases analyzed in this essay, leaders had clear indications beforehand that their adversaries were also interested in more accommodative relationships. During the Fashoda crisis, Lord Salisbury had expressed his country's willingness to consider French claims in Africa after France agreed to withdraw from the Sudan, and British leaders reaffirmed their interest after the crisis. Only after a series of private conversations about the possible form an agreement might take did the two countries enter into negotiations in 1903.
Anwar el-Sadat, too, had reason to suppose that Israel might respond positively to an offer of a peace treaty. He made extensive private inquiries about Prime Minister Menachem Begin. He asked Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, who had met Begin several times, whether the prime minister was sincere in his interest in peace and if he could fulfill any commitment that he made. Reassured by the Romanian leader, Sadat sent his deputy premier, Hassan Tuhami, to meet secretly in Morocco with Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan to explore the outlines of an agreement. Dayan assured Tuhami that Israel would consider returning the Sinai to Egypt in exchange for a full peace. In other words, President Sadat waited for his expectations of reciprocity to be confirmed before he undertook his public and dramatic visit to Jerusalem.
In the third case, the importance of the expectation of reciprocity is best illustrated by the different policies of Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev, the two Soviet leaders most interested in accommodation with the West. Gorbachev was able to pursue--and to persevere with--his search for accommodation because of the positive evolution of superpower relations since the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s. He had no explicit promise from the United States but had reason to hope that conciliatory actions might elicit a positive response. Khrushchev, on the other hand, was convinced that the United States and its allies would exploit any Soviet concession, and this intense mistrust severely constrained his search for accommodation. He was unprepared to gamble, as Gorbachev did, that conciliatory words and deeds would generate sufficient public pressure on Western governments to reciprocate. Khrushchev did make some unilateral concessions--he reduced the size of the armed forces and proclaimed a short-lived moratorium on nuclear testing--but when his actions were not reciprocated, he felt the need to demonstrate firmness to buttress his position at home and abroad. His inflammatory rhetoric then strengthened the position of militants in the West who all along had been opposed to accommodation with the Soviet Union. 23
Gorbachev succeeded in transforming East-West relations and ending the Cold War because the West became his willing partner. Unlike Khrushchev's quest for a German peace treaty, which frightened France and West Germany, Gorbachev's attempt to end the division of Europe met a receptive audience, especially in Germany and Western Europe. Disenchantment with the Cold War, opposition to the deployment of new weapons systems, and a widespread desire to end the division of Europe created a groundswell of support for exploring the possibilities of accommodation with the Soviet Union. Western public opinion, given voice by well-organized peace movements, was a critical factor in encouraging Gorbachev and his colleagues in their attempts at conciliation.
Gorbachev was intent on liberalizing the political process at home and improving relations with the West. Within a month of assuming office, he made his first unilateral concession--a temporary freeze on the deployment of Soviet intermediate-range missiles in Europe. This was followed by a unilateral moratorium on nuclear tests and acceptance of the Western "double zero" proposal for reducing intermediate-range nuclear forces (inf) in Europe. In subsequent speeches and proposals, he tried to demonstrate his support for sweeping arms control and a fundamental restructuring of superpower relations. President Reagan, however, continued to describe the Soviet Union as an evil empire and remained committed to his quest for a near-perfect ballistic missile defense.
To break this impasse, Gorbachev pursued a two-pronged strategy. In successive summits, he tried and finally convinced Reagan of his genuine interest in ending the arms race and restructuring East-West relations on a collaborative basis. When Reagan changed his opinion of Gorbachev, he also modified his view of the Soviet Union and quickly became the leading dove of his administration. Gorbachev worked hard to convince Western publics that his policies represented a radical departure from past Soviet policies. The withdrawal from Afghanistan, freeing of political prisoners, and liberalization of the political system eventually evoked widespread sympathy and support in the West and generated strong public pressures on nato governments to respond in kind to Gorbachev's initiatives.
Gorbachev's political persistence succeeded in breaching Reagan's wall of mistrust. At their Reykjavik summit in October 1986, the two leaders talked seriously about eliminating all their ballistic missiles within ten years and making deep cuts in their nuclear arsenals. No agreement was reached because Reagan was unwilling to accept any restraints on his Strategic Defense Initiative. Even so, the summit, as Gorbachev had hoped, began a process of mutual reciprocation, reassurance, and accommodation between the superpowers. That process continued after an initially hesitant George Bush became Gorbachev's full-fledged partner in eliminating the vestiges of forty years of Cold War.
In our analysis of need-driven aggression, Janice Stein and I argued that leaders who feel compelled to challenge adversaries to cope with serious foreign and domestic problems become motivated to believe that their challenges will succeed. We have documented how motivated bias of this kind encouraged unrealistic assessments of adversarial responses and was an important contributing cause of many acute crises and wars. 24 Leaders pressed to seek accommodation may be similarly biased in their assessment. Certainly, Gorbachev appears to have been unreasonably confident of his ability to end the Cold War and reform Soviet society. For him to have made unilateral or one-sided concessions in the face of Reagan's initial hostility was an extraordinary gamble. Neither Delcassé nor Sadat publicly offered concessions until after they were assured of reciprocation.
When accommodation is the goal, motivated bias can play a constructive role. Gorbachev's perseverance may have helped to make some of his foreign policy expectations self-fulfilling. Reagan was ultimately convinced of his sincerity and responded in a more positive way than any of his foreign policy advisers thought judicious. 25 Gorbachev and his advisers were equally insensitive to the dangers of success in encouraging reform in Eastern Europe and improved relations with the West. None of them foresaw that their policies would lead to the rapid demise of the Warsaw Pact and the reunification of Germany within nato or that the end of the Cold War would lead to the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The same air of unrealism characterized Gorbachev's domestic program. Gorbachev convinced himself that the Communist Party could be revitalized and transformed into an agent of progressive change and that freedom of expression and limited democracy could be introduced in the Soviet Union without undermining its Leninist political system. Interviews with Gorbachev advisers in the Kremlin in the spring of 1989 indicated that they also greatly exaggerated their ability to cope with national unrest. Vadim Zagladin insisted that the leaders of the Baltic states, and of their national movements,"were intelligent, cautious men who know just how far they could go without causing serious problems for themselves or their countries." 26
These miscalculations derived in part from political inexperience. Gorbachev and his advisers had little understanding of the nature of public institutions, the difficulty of reforming them and of overcoming vested interests. They also had at best a textbook understanding of democracy. Having grown up in an extraordinarily rigid and authoritarian political system, they overestimated the ability of leaders to control public opinion. They failed to realize that popular passions, once aroused, feed on themselves and that leaders who do not follow the crowd are likely to be shunted aside in favor of those who do. In domestic policy--and probably also in foreign policy--ignorance of public opinion and its potential power allowed motivated bias to flourish. Gorbachev knew how essential it was to revitalize the Soviet economy and convinced himself that he could bring about the foreign and domestic changes necessary to achieve this goal. A more insightful analysis of the likely consequences of liberalization at home and accommodation abroad might have made Gorbachev much more cautious in his foreign and domestic policies. Much the same could be said about Sadat, who had entirely unreasonable expectations about resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the beneficial consequences of foreign investment and aid for the Egyptian economy. The Soviet and Egyptian cases suggest the proposition that wishful thinking may play as powerful a role in bringing about accommodation as it does in confrontation.
The French, Egyptian, and Soviet cases indicate that my theory of foreign policy aggression was underspecified. Threats can prompt conciliatory as well as aggressive responses and do so under different conditions. I hypothesize that conciliatory responses are most likely when leaders (1) are committed to internal reforms that require or are expected to benefit from improved relations with an adversary; (2) recognize that confrontation has been counterproductive in the past; and (3) expect their adversaries to respond positively to conciliatory overtures.
The first two conditions were present in the three cases discussed above. Political logic suggests that they are essential. The commitment to domestic reform provides a much needed incentive to attempt the difficult and risky task of restructuring relations with an adversary. Equally important is the recognition that confrontation has failed in the past and is unlikely to succeed in the future. Without that awareness, leaders might be tempted to use threats or force to accomplish their foreign policy objectives, as Sadat did in 1973.
Condition three may be more important in influencing the scope and outcome of accommodation than in bringing it about. Not knowing if an adversary will respond positively to a conciliatory gesture, leaders are likely to proceed more cautiously so as to minimize the consequences of rejection. Yet dramatic gestures may be necessary or at least very helpful in overcoming adversarial distrust. Such initiatives carry great risks and are rarely undertaken. Leaders are more likely to take risks if they have reason to expect positive responses.
My propositions about accommodation need to be tested. One way to do this would be to search the same cases for other times when any of the three conditions was present. Evidence that other attempts at conciliation were made under similar conditions would strengthen my propositions' claim to validity. A finding that the three conditions were present on one or more occasions and no attempt at conciliation was made would indicate that they are insufficient, requiring a search for additional conditions and evidence that they were also present in the three attempts at conciliation investigated in this essay. The finding that additional attempts at conciliation were made under different conditions would point to the existence of different pathways to accommodation.
My propositions also need to be tested in other cases. To do this, I need to construct an appropriate data set. Ideally, it should include the universe of twentieth-century cases of attempted conciliation. This would allow the testing of propositions about the conditions under which conciliation is attempted and the conditions under which it succeeds. Once again, the next step would be to see if the conditions associated with conciliation were present on occasions when conciliation was not attempted.
This essay examined only one pathway to accommodation. In all three cases, leaders sought to resolve long-standing international conflicts because they regarded it as essential or extremely beneficial to the success of their domestic reforms. I fully expect that a search of other cases would reveal other incentives and pathways to accommodation. One alternative incentive is mutual fear of a third party, which played a role in Anglo-French relations in the years between 1905 and 1914 and was probably central to the Sino-American rapprochement of the 1970s. And economic incentives may have been critical in the partial accommodations between the two Germanies during the era of Ostpolitik and the two Chinas today.
A data set of the kind I have described could be used to make judgments about the relative frequency and importance of different pathways to accommodation and the conditions associated with them. It would also tell us if all roads lead to Rome or if some pathways are more successful than others in bringing about accommodation. Research into the causes of successful accommodation would have to specify its dependent variables as precisely as possible. It would need to distinguish between the limited accommodations of the kind sought by Soviet and American leaders in the early 1970s and the more far-reaching attempts described in this study. With respect to the latter, it must recognize the possibilities of fail ure, success, and partial success like the Egyptian-Israeli peace, which removed the threat of war between the two countries without leading to the closer political, economic, and social ties that one expects between friendly neighbors.
The research program I have outlined addresses only one-half of the accommodation problematique. For conciliatory overtures to lead to accommodation, they must be reciprocated. If they are spurned, they are unlikely to prompt further attempts at conciliation and may provoke more aggressive behavior on the part of the would-be conciliator. Soviet-American relations provide examples of both responses.
In 1953, following Stalin's death, the troika of Bulganin, Khrush-chev, and Malenkov came to power and signaled its interest in ending the Cold War. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, recognized the troika's intent but spurned most of their overtures. More, they interpreted the overtures as signs of weakness and decided to push harder in the hope of further weakening the Soviet Union and its hold over the countries of Eastern Europe. 27
In 1959-60 Khrushchev made another attempt at accommodation. Eisenhower was initially receptive and invited Khrushchev to visit the United States. Their summit raised the prospect of some kind of accord on Germany and led to the short-lived "Spirit of Camp David." Under pressure from Konrad Adenauer, however, Eisenhower became more recalcitrant. This about-face exposed Khrushchev to blistering criticism at home from powerful hardliners, leading him to protect himself by intensifying confrontation with the West. 28 A third unsuccessful attempt at conciliation was made by Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. Brezhnev and the Soviet leadership had already soured on détente, and from their perspective the Carter administration was sending mixed messages at best. Like Khrushchev before him, Carter suffered severe political embarrassment as a result of his adversary's failure to reciprocate. The Soviets' intervention by proxy in Africa and invasion of Afghanistan exposed Carter to further serious criticism, compelling him to pursue a harder line and begin a major military buildup. 29
Conciliation was not reciprocated until the secretary generalship of Mikhail Gorbachev and the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The reasons for these different responses are beyond the scope of this essay. But the importance of reciprocation is undeniable. In all three of the cases I have discussed here, other attempts at conciliation had not been reciprocated. In all three cases, reciprocation was necessary to transform initial attempts at conciliation into full-fledged processes of accommodation. It is just as important to discover why leaders reciprocate as it is to find out why they initiate conciliatory gestures.
Note 1: On realism's failure, see Richard Ned Lebow "The Long Peace, the End of the Cold War, and the Failure of Realism," the second essay in this book. Back.
Note 2: Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). Back.
Note 3: For an analysis of the origins of the Cuban missile crisis, see Lebow, Between Peace and War; and Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), chap. 2. Back.
Note 4: See Lebow, Between Peace and War, chap. 4; and Richard Ned Lebow, "Miscalculation in the South Atlantic: The Origins of the Falklands War," in Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 89-124. Back.
Note 5: Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, passim. Back.
Note 6: Richard Ned Lebow, "Clear and Future Danger: Managing Relations with the Soviet Union in the 1980s," in New Directions in Strategic Thinking, ed. Robert O'Neill and D. M. Horner (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), pp. 221-45; and Richard Ned Lebow, "The Deterrence Deadlock: Is There a Way Out ?" in Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 180-202, which offered a substantially revised and updated version of the argument. Back.
Note 7: Richard Ned Lebow, "Superpower Management of Security Alliances: The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact," in The Future of European Alliance Systems, ed. Arlene Idol Broadhurst (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1982), pp. 185-236. Back.
Note 8: For a bibliography and discussion of the Berlin crises of 1948-49 and 1959-62, see Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, "The Huth and Russett Data Collection Reevaluated," in Specifying and Testing Theories of Deterrence, ed. Kenneth A. Oye (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming). Back.
Note 9: For a critical review of this literature and the policy debates it spawned, see Richard Ned Lebow, "Western Images of Soviet Strategy," International Journal 44 (winter 1988 / 89): 1-40. Back.
Note 10: On French politics between 1899 and 1904 and on the negotiations leading to the entente, see Jacques Chastenet, La République triumphante, 1893-1906 (Paris: Hachette, 1955); Christopher Andrew, Théophile Delcassé and the Making of the Entente Cordiale (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 201-15; Jack D. Ellis, The French Socialists and the Problem of Peace, 1904-1914 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1967); Leslie Derfler, Alexandre Millerand: The Socialist Years (The Hague: Mouton, 1977); Keith Eubank, Paul Cambon: Master Diplomatist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960); Pierre Guillen, "Les accords coloniaux franco-anglais de 1904 et la naissance de l'entente cordiale," Revue d'histoire diplomatique 82 (October-December 1968): 315-57; George Monger, The End of Isolation: British Foreign Policy, 1900-1907 (London: Thomas Nelson, 1963); Pierre Renouvin, La politique extérieure de Th. Delcassé, 1898-1905 (Paris: Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Université de Paris, 1962); P. J. V. Rolo, Entente Cordiale: The Origins and Negotiation of the Anglo-French Agreements of 8 April 1904 (London: Macmillan, 1969). Back.
Note 11: See Janice Gross Stein, "The Political Economy of Security Agreements: The Linked Costs of Failure at Camp David," in Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics, ed. Peter Evans, Harold Jacobson, and Robert Putnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 77-103. Back.
Note 12: Eduard Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. xi. Back.
Note 13: Interviews with Fedor Burlatsky, Cambridge, Mass., October 12, 1987; Vadim Zagladin, Moscow, May 18, 1989; Oleg Grinevsky, Vienna and New York, October 11 and November 10, 1991; Georgi Arbatov, Ithaca, New York, November 15, 1991; and Anatoliy Dobrynin, Moscow, December 17, 1991. Back.
Note 14: For a good Western discussion of new thinking in foreign policy, see David Holloway, "Gorbachev's New Thinking," Foreign Affairs 68 (winter 1988 / 89): 66-81. Back.
Note 15: Mikhail S. Gorbachev, "Speech to the United Nations," December 9, 1988, Novosti, no. 97 (December 9, 1988): 13; Gorbachev, Perestroika, p. 187. See Holloway, "Gorbachev's New Thinking." Back.
Note 16: Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, pp. 115-16. Back.
Note 18: On Fashoda, see Roger Glenn Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered: The Impact of Domestic Politics on French Policy in Africa (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970); E. Malcolm Carrol, French Public Opinion and Foreign Affairs, 1870-1914 (New York: Century, 1931); William Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1890-1902 (New York: Knopf, 1960); J. A. S. Grenville, Lord Salisbury and Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); C. J. Lowe, The Reluctant Imperialists: British Foreign Policy, 1878-1902 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967); G. N. Sanderson, England, Europe, and the Upper Nile (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965); Philip Williams, "Crisis in France: A Political Institution," Cambridge Journal 35 (October 1963): 36-50; Christopher M. Andrew, "The French Colonialist Movement During the Third Republic: The Unofficial Mind of Imperialism," Transactions of the Royal Society, 5th series, 26 (1976): 143-66; Christopher M. Andrew, "Gabriel Hanotaux, the Colonial Party, and the Fashoda Strategy," in European Imperialism and the Partition of Africa, ed. E. F. Penrose (London: Cass, 1975), pp. 55-104; Lebow, Between Peace and War, chaps. 4 and 9; and Stephen R. Rock, Why Peace Breaks Out: Great Power Rapprochement in Historical Perspective (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 91-122. Back.
Note 19: Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, chap. 8. Back.
Note 20: Interviews with Oleg Grinevsky, Vienna, October 11, 1991, New York, November 10, 1991, and Stockholm, April 25, 1992; with Leonid Zamyatin, Moscow, December 16, 1991; and with Anatoliy Dobrynin, Moscow, December 17, 1991. See also Sarah E. Mendelson, "Explaining Change in Foreign Policy: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1993); and Robert Herman, "Ideas, Institutions and the Reconceptualization of Interests: The Political and Intellectual Origins of New Thinking in Soviet Foreign Policy" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1995). Back.
Note 21: Ibid. See also Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, passim. Back.
Note 22: Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, passim; and interviews with Oleg Grinevsky, Vadim Zagladin, Leonid Zamyatin, and Anatoliy Dobrynin. Back.
Note 23: For Khrushchev's strategy, see Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, chap. 3. Back.
Note 24: See Lebow, Between Peace and War, passim; Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); and Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, "Beyond Deterrence," Journal of Social Issues 43 (winter 1987): 5-72. Back.
Note 25: Don Oberdorfer, The Turn from the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983-1990 (New York: Poseidon, 1991), chaps. 5-7. Back.
Note 26: Interview with Vadim Zagladin, Moscow, May 18, 1989. Back.
Note 27: The best source on this is Matthew A. Evangelista, "Cooperation Theory and Disarmament Negotiations in the 1950s," World Politics 41 (July 1990): 502-28. Back.
Note 28: Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War, chap. 3. Back.
Note 29: Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1985), pp. 563-1009. Back.
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