My conclusions from learning about the Cold War

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I’ve read a couple books on the Cold War recently to see what lessons we can learn from this time to apply to the politics of today (1).

Here are my tentative conclusions - if you disagree with these points or think I am missing something important please let me know!

We need to avoid “missionary zeal” in our beliefs about the best way to organize society. Conflict during the Cold War was largely enabled by ideology. Americans thinking that everyone in the world needed to live under American-style democracy with free market capitalism. Soviets thinking that it was their duty to help the rest of the world undergo communist revolution. And then the rise of revolutionary Islam - especially starting with the Iran revolution in 1975 - which aimed at freeing Muslims worldwide from capitalist and communist domination.

I do care about American values and think more countries should have freedom of the type we have in the US. But giving the US government the sacred mandate to spread freedom and the American way across the world - through violence and espionage - leads to more harm than good.

We should avoid zero-sum, us vs. them thinking.

  • “We can’t allow Vietnam to become communist because then the Soviets will be stronger” leads to hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Americans, Cambodians dead

  • “We have to retain nuclear superiority over the Soviets” leads to the institutionalized insanity of the nuclear arms race

  • “We can’t let Middle Eastern governments ally themselves with the other side” leads to Middle Eastern instability and terrorism that makes the world less safe for everyone

Sometimes American politicians are politically rewarded for taking advantage of and inflaming missionary zeal and zero-sum thinking…

  • The strong anti-Soviet stances of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan is part of what made all of them very popular presidents

  • In Kennedy’s campaign he continuously slammed Eisenhower for letting the USSR build more missiles than the US. This “missle gap” turned out to be untrue, but the narrative helped Kennedy’s campaign

  • The US under LBJ supported Indonesian dictator Suharto in purging millions of suspected communists. This resulted in Indonesia being an important US ally in Southeast Asia, and there was little to no resulting domestic backlash against LBJ

…but sometimes sometimes they are not

  • LBJ did not seek re-election largely due to the US’s failures in Vietnam

  • Aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion was disastrous for the Kennedy administration, both domestically and internationally

  • Reagan’s popularity took a huge dive after the Iran-Contra affair

  • Nixon’s decision to eschew 0-sum thinking and open US relations with communist China was received very well by the American public

So it’s up to us to punish our government officials when they make foreign policy based on missionary zeal and zero-sum thinking.

Sometimes intervening in other countries really does help your security. So it’s not realistic to say “the US should just leave all other countries alone.” But there are lots of different ways to influence the behavior of other countries, and the methods the US used during the Cold War were often both immoral and harmful to US security.

The US and China in 2023 are not in a “new cold war”

  • The US and Chinese economies are deeply intertwined in a way that the US and USSR’s were not

  • China is not engaged in a mission to manifest communism around the world in the same way the USSR was. And the US public has much less appetite for foreign interventions then they did during the Cold War

  • Thinking of the US and China as being engaged in a “New Cold War” tempts us towards the missionary zeal and zero sum thinking that we should be avoiding

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1. The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad, and The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace by Paul Thomas Chamberlain. I highly recommend both