No, The Cold War Isn't Really Over

By Charles Krauthammer

It seems that the cold war is over. Official word came not in the usual communique from the capitals but in a Doonesbury cartoon. A rethinking of the cold war is taking place at higher levels too. When a senior Democratic Senator noted in conversation that the cold war might indeed have ended, he was saying no more than Ronald Reagan said upon his return from the Moscow summit when he talked of the end of the postwar era. Since postwar has always meant cold war, the President was signaling the advent of some historic change.

Is the cold war really over? No doubt the withdrawal from Afghanistan marks a change. It signifies the demise of the Brezhnev Doctrine, first enunciated with the invasion of Czechoslovakia exactly 20 years ago. Brezhnev declared that socialism will suffer no losses: countries that come under Marxist- Leninism remain under Marxist-Leninism. Afghanistan is the first breach in that doctrine. (Grenada is too small to count.) Enthusiastic believers in the demise of the cold war also point to Gorbachev's words to show that the Soviet Union, apostle of revolution ("national liberation"), has become the defender of stability. A favorite quote: "We favor socialism, but we do not impose our convictions on anyone. Let everyone choose for himself."

This will come as news to Poles and Czechs and East Germans. But grant that outside Eastern Europe, in the Third World, the Soviets are indeed falling back. Why is that happening? Conventional wisdom has it that Gorbachev needs to rebuild his economy and restructure his society. He cannot do that while expending energy, treasure and occasional blood in foreign adventures. Internal retrenchment requires external calm. He needs a respite: a stable international arena and good relations with the U.S. Hence the cold war, like other old thinking, must go.

In this light, the Soviet pullback in the Third World is an autonomous Soviet decision, the first fruit of Gorbachev's "new thinking." The problem with this theory is that it overlooks one fact. In this sense it is very much like the common explanation of Gorbachev's acquiescence to American terms for the INF treaty. Did Gorbachev withdraw his SS-20s from Europe because of a change in ideology? Because he wanted to turn his attention to domestic tasks? In fact, he withdrew because he met resistance that he could not overcome. The U.S. responded to the SS-20s by deploying a powerful INF force of its own, despite the best Soviet efforts to stop it. As a result, the SS-20 adventure turned into a net loss for the Soviets (because the American missiles are more threatening: they can reach Soviet territory, whereas the SS-20s cannot reach American territory). Having met resistance and lost the game, Gorbachev wisely decided to cut his losses and withdraw.

Similarly, the Soviets are not withdrawing from Afghanistan because they have suddenly come to believe in "not imposing convictions on anyone" and "letting everyone choose for himself." Does anyone doubt that if the Afghan resistance had been overcome, Gorbachev would still be in Afghanistan, communizing? Gorbachev is withdrawing because he lost the war. Writes Afghan Expert Zalmay Khalilzad in the National Interest: "1986 was the turning point in the Afghan war." What happened? "The most crucial change in this period was the provision of U.S. Stinger ((antiaircraft)) missiles to the mujahedin." To put it bluntly, the Soviets are not leaving Afghanistan because they changed their minds. They are leaving because they lost their air cover. A change of minds followed.

Another recent elaboration in the press of the conventional wisdom puts it this way: "In the heyday of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union tried hard to promote Communism in the Third World . . . Now, under what might be called the Gorbachev Doctrine, the Kremlin has adopted a more cautious stance, backing away from confrontation." Why? Because "the Kremlin has been disappointed by the inability of Third World Marxists to impose stable Communist systems on underdeveloped societies."

But the chief cause of that instability in the 1980s is resistance. The Gorbachev Doctrine became necessary because the Brezhnev Doctrine failed. The Brezhnev Doctrine failed because it met armed resistance. And that resistance drew strength and sustenance from the U.S., more precisely from the Reagan Doctrine, the American policy of supporting anti-Communist guerrillas in the newest outposts of the Soviet empire: Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia and Nicaragua.

Throughout the 1980s, American critics have attacked the Reagan Doctrine as too grandiose and expensive an undertaking for the U.S. They saw it as a form of imperial overstretch, to use the now famous phrase of Professor Paul Kennedy. This critique is unintelligible. The effects of the Reagan Doctrine have been precisely the reverse. It turned out to be an extremely cost- effective form of Western resistance to the Soviet expansion of the '70s. It made the new Soviet outposts expensive liabilities. The Reagan Doctrine demonstrated -- to the Politburo, ultimately -- that it was the Soviet empire that had overreached.

When applied, the Reagan Doctrine worked. Which one factor best predicts the locus of a Soviet imperial withdrawal? The answer is not a colony's proximity to the Soviet Union, nor its ideological purity, nor the amount of Soviet investment. The single factor that best predicts a Soviet retreat is the strength and consistency of foreign support for the anti-Soviet resistance. American aid to the Afghan resistance has been massive, and the policy has ( enjoyed universal support at home. The Soviets are retreating. In Cambodia and Angola, American support for the guerrillas has been less intense but still generally bipartisan. Moreover, China and South Africa have provided steady support to the anti-Soviet forces. The Soviets are now exerting pressure on their clients to compromise. The one place where American support for the resistance vacillated and finally collapsed was Nicaragua. Not surprisingly, Nicaragua is also the one place where the Soviet client remains firmly entrenched and where Gorbachev shows no sign of bending.

Where Gorbachev has retreated, it is not because he has abandoned Soviet foreign policy objectives. It is because he was defeated. Where he has not been defeated, he has not retreated. Gorbachev has not given up the socialist mission. He is trying to save it from Brezhnev's excessive ambition.

What, then, is Gorbachev's imperial strategy? The same as his domestic strategy: not retreat but retrenchment. The tactics too are the same. Discard losing policies. Keep those that work. In foreign policy, the Gorbachev Doctrine is imperial triage. Discard the losers. Deal away the marginals. Keep the jewels.

Afghanistan is a loser, and the Soviets are leaving. Angola and Cambodia would be nice to have, but neither is a crossroads of the world, and the Soviet clients there are locked in bloody, draining stalemate. Moreover, Cambodia is a great irritant in relations with China, and Angola in relations with the U.S. The Soviets are dealing.

Gorbachev's eye is on the jewels, three great geopolitical prizes, for the achievement of which he has husbanded most of his foreign policy resources:

CENTRAL AMERICA. Soviet support for Nicaragua has not wavered, despite wishful reports to the contrary. The contras, having been disarmed by the U.S., are in the process of being defeated by the Sandinistas. El Salvador and Panama are becoming less stable. Even Honduras, the American linchpin in Central America, is stirring. Central America is a high priority for the Soviets. The Kissinger commission argued 4 1/2 years ago that Soviet penetration of Central America would be a great strategic asset for the Soviets. It would distract and divert U.S. attention to a region that had historically been secure. It is not that a Red Army is going to march from Managua to Harlingen, Texas, but that the vast military, political and strategic energy that Washington would have to redirect to this region would necessarily be drawn from elsewhere. This would result in a net weakening of the American position in the world.

CHINA. An even bigger prize. Gorbachev wants rapprochement with China but has been rebuffed until he clears away what the Chinese call the Three Obstacles: the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia and the Soviet-Chinese border dispute. Gorbachev is taking care of Afghanistan and the border dispute. And one reason he is putting pressure on the Vietnamese to solve the Cambodia problem is that the China card is worth more to him than Cambodia and Viet Nam combined. The next great shift in U.S.-Soviet relations may be Gorbachev doing a Nixon in China. It will not have been an accident.

EUROPE. The grand prize. Gorbachev's Westpolitik -- the INF treaty, his subtle wooing of the West Europeans with the notion of a "common European homeland," his gestures toward disarmament that have already propelled him in European public opinion polls higher than the President of the U.S. -- is calculated to advance the most important Soviet geopolitical objective of all, the detachment of Western Europe from America. The road to the breakup of the U.S.-European alliance is the denuclearization, leading to the neutralization, of Europe. This is a traditional Soviet objective. But ironically it may prove necessary for the success of perestroika. It may be, as the dissident writer Vladimir Bukovsky suggests, that the only way for the Soviets ultimately to salvage their bankrupt system is by neutralizing Europe and harnessing its energy, technology and vast wealth -- not by occupation but by the domination that would follow a detachment of Europe from the U.S.

The goal of Gorbachev's foreign policy is not to end the cold war and certainly not to lose it, but to continue the struggle with the subtlety and finesse that befits the modern man he is. He is cutting his losses not because he is a sudden convert to friendship and harmony and coexistence, not because he has lost the nationalist or ideological faith that underlies Soviet realpolitik, but because he knows that what the times demand is discrimination. And in an age of triage, that means concentrating on supreme geopolitical objectives and making sacrifices at the periphery.

Gorbachev's strategy should elicit neither shock nor dismay. He is simply pursuing his country's interests in the most economical manner possible. This is not cynicism. This is realism. No need for us to be scandalized. Just forewarned, and perhaps a bit envious. Would that our leaders had his foresight and command.