Brad, there is an important discussion here, but I shan't participate in it
if you can't keep it clean and depersonalized. I owe you an apology for not
doing likewise myself, and it is offered here. Now, let's get down to
business.
I should like to see evidence that the CIA, etc. expected tow in the Cold
War by fostering reform communism. I am surprised to see your assurance
about this, because I have not seen this idea in any of the research I have
encountered on the subject. Indeed, I don't think that in the 60s there was
thinking about "winning" the cold war in the dramatic sense that it was won
in the 1990s. "Containment" was more the idea. That is consistent with the
West trying to take advantage of divisions amongs its enemes, and vice
versa, when these were recognized.
I do not advocate EP Thompson's ideas about "exterminism" or that the Cold
WAr was a shadow play, a agreement between the bosses of each side to scare
its own population. I agree that it was a real conflict. I don't think it
was about rival visions of utopia. I think the West was far more ideological
than the East in fighting the Cold War. The ideological steam had been let
out of the USSR by the 1960s--certainly by the start of the Brezhnev era,
probably earlier. I think the USSR's fireign policy is best understood in
straight great power politics terms.
The US had a lot more ideological utopianism than the USSR did. I don't
think that is what drove the US, however, although it determined specific
actions at variuos times. I think the US was driven to "contain" communism
because it wished to reclaim as much of the world as possible for
marketization and foreign investrment. Given its support of savage
quasi-fascist dictatorships and its repeated overthrow of democratically
elected leftist governments, the utopia of democratica capitalism was
obviouslt a lot less important to it than were business interests.
--jks
>I can read: you apparently cannot remember what you wrote. Pathetic.
>
>It is not the case that LBJ saw "no advantage in letting reform
>communism develop." In fact, LBJ saw great advantage in letting
>reform communism develop. If you went to the CIA or the NEC in the
>1960s and asked people how they expected to win the Cold War, the
>answer would have been "reform communism."They expected the countries
>on the other side of the Iron Curtain to move over time toward more
>decentralized economies--imitation of the more successful Yugoslavian
>and Hungarian models. And over time they expected the countries on
>the other side of the Iron Curtain to move toward more democratic
>politics--at least within the party. So they expected Poland,
>Hungary, and Russia after a decade of reform communism to look a lot
>like Sweden: an economy with a large role for the market (albeit with
>strong "planning" elements), and politics that was effectively
>democratic (albeit probably with a very limited (though open)
>franchise). In that case, the Cold War would have been over: there
>would be no point in having a Cold War with a country that was close
>in politico-economic structure to Palme's Sweden or Brandt's West
>Germany.
>
>This is an important point in this context because of this view--I'm
>not certain whether it is a vulgarization of E.P. Thompson's view or
>whether E.P. Thompson was himself vulgar--that the Cold War was a
>shadow play: that both Russia and America were much less concerned
>with struggling against each other than with maintaining control over
>their respective empires.
>
>This view is false: both Russian and American leaders took their
>multi-level struggle with the other very seriously, seriously enough
>to disrupt and destroy attempts at detente. One of the most
>interesting things to come out of the Cold War International History
>Project is the negotiations over Angola in the mid-1970s. When
>Kissinger protests that the Soviet Union has no interests at stake in
>Angola, that it benefits a great deal from economic links with
>America, and that Soviet support of the MPLA in Angola will anger
>Congress enough to destroy detente, the Soviets reply: "Tough. The
>Cubans are our socialist brothers, and they wish to support our
>socialist brothers in the MPLA. We cannot sacrifice their interests
>for our own material advantage."
>
>To deny that the Cold War was overwhelmingly about
>*ideology*--different roads to utopia--is to commit an error of
>historical judgment as bad as denying that Naziism was overwhelmingly
>about the mass murder of the populations of Eastern Europe and their
>demographic replacement by Germans...
>
>
>Brad DeLong
>
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