> 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...
My grandfather Earl DeLong was one of Helms's spearcarriers in the
1950s. He says--and Helms says--that containment was the policy
because of a general belief that there would come a softening of rule
in the Soviet Union--a recognition of the benefits of economic
decentralization, less autocracy in politics, the restoration of
within-the-party democracy and so forth--and that with the softening
of rule in the Soviet Union there would be less reason to fear it and
less reason for it to fear us. Their view was that "rollback" was
likely to be a disaster: that it might well kill us all if it led to
the use of nuclear weapons on a large scale, and that it would
certainly retard any softening of forms of rule within the Soviet
Union...
>The US had a lot more ideological utopianism than the USSR did.
I see an equivalence here up until the 1980s. Khrushchev and his
people were absolutely certain that they were the wave of the future,
and the road to utopia. For the first half of the Brezhnev era I
think that the same was true, at least as far as Soviet foreign
policy was concerned. The Soviet Union may have become a status-quo
power as far as Europe was concerned, but its foreign ministry was
definitely interested in promoting world revolution throughout the
1970s. The Soviet Union went into Afghanistan, after all, for
relatively pure motives: to defend socialism against barbarism. (And
from today's perspective it is hard to argue that they were wrong.)
I don't know when the loss of faith in their system on the part of
the nomenklatura took place...
Brad DeLong
