CONTAINMENT: 40 Years Later : On Ending the Cold War

The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were the decisive initial moves in an effort to stem a postwar Soviet thrust for hegemony in western Eurasia that had been gathering momentum in the bleak winter and early spring of 1946-47. The historical circumstances pose two related questions: Why did the enterprise seem in Moscow a possible dream? Why did the U.S. reaction to the Soviet pursuit of its objective come late? The American delay imparted, as lagged responses and feedback generally do, a cyclical character to the U.S.-Soviet relationship which was to persist and yield three distinct cycles over the next four decades.

A full answer to the first question surely involves mixed impulses of fear and ambition deeply rooted in Russia’s history and collective memory, elements of ideological commitment and evangelism, and more mundane variables of geography, resources and technological capacity. But the cold war can be viewed more simply. It has arisen from the fourth major effort in the twentieth century by a latecomer on the world scene to enlarge its power at the expense of earlier front-runners already at or beyond the inherent limits of their international stature. Stripped of details, the past century has witnessed two attempts by Germany, one by Japan and, since 1945, one by the Soviet Union to achieve strategic hegemony in their respective regions, although Soviet ambitions in the cold war evidently came to reach much farther—as did Germany’s at the peak of its ambitions.

II

Think for a moment of how things stood in 1870 when Bismarck rounded out the German Empire with his three small wars. Britain accounted for 32 percent of the world’s industrial production; Germany, 13 percent; France, 10 percent; Russia, 4 percent; and across the Atlantic, the United States, 23 percent. The Japanese, only two years beyond the Meiji Restoration, were not in this company.