Statecraft. Margaret Thatcher
had none that were apparent to Soviet citizens. As the former dissident Vladimir Bukovsky once remarked – referring to the Russian proverb to the effect that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs – he had seen plenty of broken eggs, but never tasted any omelette.
A similar error – which I discuss in a later chapter – was made by those Sovietologists who tried to analyse and predict events in the Soviet Union in terms of doves and hawks, liberals and conservatives, left and right† (I am still perplexed as to why we should be expected to call hardline communists ‘conservative’ or anti-Semite fascists ‘right wing’ – except that it is a useful device of the liberal media to embarrass their opponents). For the advocates of ‘convergence’ and for certain advocates of détente it was assumed that a particular action by the United States would draw forth a parallel reaction from the Soviets.‡ Thus if we wanted peace we should not prepare for war, if we wanted security we should not threaten, and if we wanted cooperation we should compromise. This approach was entirely wrong – at least while the Soviet Union remained a superpower with an expansionist ideology, which it did until some time in the mid-to-late 1980s.
The proof of this is clear. While the United States was led by administrations (Nixon, Ford and Carter) which were intent on compromise with the Soviets, the Soviet Union expanded its military arsenals and intensified its military interventions around the world. But once there was an American President who openly proclaimed his aims of military superiority, systemic competition and the global roll-back of Soviet power, the Soviet Union cooperated, disarmed and finally collapsed. President Reagan’s former critics, in their desperation to find someone else to credit for an end to the Cold War, summoned up Mikhail Gorbachev as a kind of deus ex machina who transformed everything. And indeed Mr Gorbachev’s role was positive and important. But what President Reagan’s revisionist detractors fail to explain is (to use the words of Professor Richard Pipes) ‘why, after four years of Reagan’s relentlessly confrontational policies the Soviet Union did not respond in kind … by appointing a similarly hard-line, belligerent First Secretary, but settled on a man of compromise’.*
To be so wrong quite so often does not, it seems, in the post-Cold War world constitute any impediment to promotion. Far from it. Yesterday’s critics of the strategy which so triumphantly destroyed the Soviet Union were then trusted to manage relations with its successor. Mr Strobe Talbott, in his previous career as a journalist on Time, variously attacked the Reagan defence build-up, dismissed SDI, mocked the idea that external Western pressures could be effective, described the Cold War as a ‘grand obsession’ which diverted the world from other more important matters and described NATO’s continued existence as ‘at best a stop-gap’.† Mr Talbott went on to become President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State.
And, yes, all this does matter now. If so many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against during the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.
The Cold War has sometimes been portrayed as a struggle between two superpowers, the United States (and its allies) on the one hand, and the Soviet Union (and its puppets) on the other. The term ‘superpower’ was not one that I relished at the time, because it always seemed to suggest a moral equivalence between the two political poles. Of course, at one level this was, indeed, a competition for advantage between broadly equivalent powers. But the equivalence reflected might not right. Much more important, and significant for us today, the Cold War was a struggle between two sharply opposing systems, encapsulating two wholly contradictory philosophies, involving two totally different sets of objectives.
The Soviet communist system was, in a sense, simpler. Its central purpose was to achieve domination over the world in its entirety by an ideology, Marxism-Leninism, and by the Communist Party, which was that ideology’s supreme custodian and unique beneficiary. That purpose was, in the eyes of its proponents, subject to no moral constraints – the very notion of which appeared absurd. Communism recognised no limits except those posed by the power of its enemies. Within such a system individuals were only of value in so far as they served the role allotted them. Similarly, the expression of ideas, artistic endeavour, all kinds of ‘private’ activity, were judged and permitted according to whether they advanced ‘the Revolution’, which in practice increasingly meant the interests of the old men of the Kremlin. The pursuit of world revolution was at times largely suspended. At other times, notably in Soviet relations with China, disagreements broke out between the proponents of the great socialist ‘idea’ about its pace, conduct and immediate goals. But the objective of creating worldwide a fully socialist society, consisting of radically socialist citizens, remained.
Against this stood America and its allies. What we call in shorthand ‘the West’ was a reality as complex as ‘the East’ (in communist terms) was simple. First of all it consisted not of one power but of many. Within NATO, the institutional embodiment of Western defence resolve, individual states pursued constantly shifting policies, reflecting their own interests and the democratic decisions of their own peoples. America led; but America had to persuade its friends to follow. This reality reflected a fundamental philosophical difference. The very essence of Western culture – and the heart of both the strengths and weaknesses of Western policy during the Cold War years – was recognition of the unique value of the individual human being.
Put like this, it is easy to see why knowledge of the Cold War experience is important today. Still more important, though, is the fact that the struggle between two quite different approaches to the political, social and economic organisation of human beings has not ended and will never end.
Neither the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor victory in the Gulf War, nor the collapse of the Soviet Union, nor the establishment of free markets and a measure of democracy in South-East Asia – none of these has resolved the tension between liberty and socialism in all its numerous guises. Believers in the Western model of strictly limited government and maximum freedom for individuals within a just rule of law often say, and rightly, that ‘we know what works’. Indeed, we do. But equally there will always be political leaders and, increasingly, pressure groups who are bent on persuading people that they cannot really run their own lives and that the state must do it for them. And, sadly but inevitably, there will always be people who prefer idleness to effort, dependency to independence, and modest rewards just as long as nobody does better. There is always a danger that, as Friedrich Hayek put it in his Road to Serfdom, ‘the striving for security tends to become stronger than the love of freedom’.* It mustn’t.
Otherwise we will find ourselves in the circumstances of which that far-sighted French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, warned, when considering how democracies might incrementally lose their liberty:
Over [the citizens] stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, father like, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood … Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living? Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choices less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. Equality has prepared men for all this, predisposing them to endure it and often even regard it as beneficial …
I have always thought that this brand of orderly, gentle, peaceful slavery which I have just described could be combined, more easily than is generally supposed, with some of the external forms of freedom, and that there is a possibility of its getting itself established even under the shadow of the sovereignty of the people.*
Only if we remain convinced that freedom – the freedom for which we strove in those Cold