The claim heard in campaign rhetoric that the United States under Republican Party leadership "won the Cold War" is intrinsically silly.
The suggestion that any administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish.No great country has that sort of influence on the internal developments of any other one.
As early as the late 1940s, some of us living in Russia saw that the regime was becoming dangerously remote from concerns and hopes of the Russian people.
These thoughts found a place in my so-called X article in Foreign Affairs in 1947, from which the policy of containment is widely seen to have originated.
There were some of us to whom it was clear, even at that early date, that the regime as we had known it would not last for all time.
By the time Stalin died, in 1953, even many Communist Party members had come to see his dictatorship as grotesque. Nikita Khrushchev took the leadership in the resulting liberalizing tendencies. He was in his crude way a firm communist, but he was not wholly unopen to reasonable argument. His personality offered the greatest hope for internal political liberalization and relaxation of international tensions.
The downing of the U-2 spy plane in 1960, more than anything else, put an end to this hope.
The episode humiliated Khrushchev and discredited his relatively moderate policies. It forced him to fall back, for the defense of his own political position, on a more strongly belligerent anti-American tone of public utterance.
The U-2 episode was the clearest example of that primacy of military over political policy that soon was to become an outstanding feature of U.S. Cold War policy.
The extreme militarization of American discussion and policy, as promoted by hard-line circles over the ensuing 25 years, consistently strengthened comparable hard-liners in the Soviet Union.
The more America's political leaders were seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate military rather than political resolution of Soviet-U.S. tensions, the greater was the tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the greater the braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime.
Thus the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s.
What did the greatest damage was not our military preparations themselves, some of which (not all) were prudent and justifiable. It was rather the unnecessarily belligerent and threatening tone in which many of them were publicly carried forward.
For this, both Democrats and Republicans have a share of the blame.
Nobody - no country, no party, no person - "won" the Cold War.
It was a long and costly political rivalry, fueled on both sides by unreal and exaggerated estimates of the intentions and strength of the other party.
It greatly overstrained the economic resources of both countries. All these developments should be seen as part of the price we are paying for the Cold War. As in most great international conflicts, it is a price to be paid by both sides.
It is not a fit occasion for pretending that the end of it was a great triumph for anyone, and particularly not one for which any American political party could properly claim principal credit.