Historians are providing a more accurate perspective on the Cold War, now that it's over.
Democratic governments in the West behaved "more realistically" than their communist rivals during the Cold War, declares John Lewis Gaddis, professor of history at Yale University. This is "contrary to what historians and theorists of international relations expected when the Cold War began," Gaddis concedes. In the aftermath of that conflict, however, "with the world more democratic than it has ever been," historians are now recognizing that communism generated "illusions" rather than "effective policy."
In an essay published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Gaddis notes that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin "believed to his dying day that the capitalist states would never join together to contain Soviet expansionism. Why?" he asks. "Because Lenin had taught that capitalists were too greedy ever to cooperate with one another: this idea left the Soviet leader ill-equipped to deal with such initiatives as the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the reintegration of Germany and Japan into an American-run system of alliances."
Gaddis argues that authoritarian leaders operated more from "a romantic rather than a realist view of the world." He emphasizes that "in an authoritarian system no one is in a position to tell the top leader that his conclusions make no sense. Democratic leaders were no wiser," Gaddis hastens to add. "But democratic systems did at least provide ways to challenge illusions at the top when they arose, and ultimately to remove leaders who persisted in holding onto them."
Gaddis reports that Cold War historians are now addressing "the role of ideas in shaping that conflict. We traditionally had viewed the Cold War as a clash of great powers," he observes. "We had calculated power in terms of material indices, giving the greatest emphasis to the military capabilities that existed on each side." Gaddis confesses that he and his colleagues "neglected the nonmilitary components of power." He recognizes in retrospect that the idea of Marxism-Leninism "determined how the Soviet Union and the other socialist states organized their power, their politics, their economics, and ultimately the appeals they made to their own people as well as to those beyond their borders. . . . In the end," says Gaddis, "what people thought counted for much more than what states could do."
We conservatives can be annoying sometimes, there's no denying that, but you really do have to forgive us for being just a little bit smug. Imagine the academic in his ivory tower poring over his research material for years on end, then suddenly leaping up and exclaiming, "Eureka! I've got it! The Cold War was . . . was . . . was a BATTLE OF IDEAS!" This is a revelation? Bravo, Professor Sappington, you've finally realized what the uneducated rabble knew all along. We even tried to tell you, but you wouldn't listen, because we lacked credentials. Ironic, isn't it, that a person whose life is supposedly devoted to the battle of ideas would not recognize the biggest one of the century?
