The Cold War: A New History
By John Lewis Gaddis
The Penguin Press
333 Pages. $27.95

In "The Cold War: A New History," John Lewis Gaddis, the author of a number of significant books on the Cold War, has distilled his learning into a highly readable, concise volume. He has read widely and made good use of materials translated from Russian as well as the rich American sources.

Nevertheless, the book is stronger in its analysis of the making of U.S. than of Soviet foreign policy and is much more persuasive in its account of the early and middle years of the Cold War than of its ending. It is a very America-centered view of how the standoff ended, although it fails to take on board some of the best American literature on the subject. Thus, for example, two books by Jack F. Matlock, Jr., the extremely capable U.S. ambassador to Moscow during the last years of the Cold War -- "Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union" and "Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended" -- do not appear in the bibliography.

The book ranges widely and Gaddis is always ready with an apt and illuminating quotation drawn from the memoir and biographical literature or from declassified government sources. His account of the Nixon presidency is masterly. Gaddis explicitly observes that his book "does not make any contribution whatever to international relations theory" on the grounds that this field "has troubles enough of its own without my adding to them." Thus, the book makes for easy -- and, for the most part, rewarding -- reading, and it has been nicely produced by its publisher.

In his interpretation of the last 20 years of the Cold War, Gaddis is very much in line with the conventional wisdom in Washington circles. Thus, he overstates the role of Pope John Paul II and of Poland in the process of bringing the Cold War to an end and gets the Gorbachev-Reagan relationship back-to-front, according primacy in making the decisive change to the U.S. president.

Let us take the case of Poland and the pope. Gaddis writes: "When John Paul II kissed the ground at the Warsaw airport on June 2, 1979, he began the process by which communism in Poland -- and ultimately everywhere else in Europe -- would come to an end." The author sees the domestic imposition of martial law in Poland by General Wojciech Jaruzelski in December 1981, rather than invasion from the East, as meaning the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine whereby the Soviet Union had accorded itself the right to intervene in any Warsaw Pact country to uphold a communist system. Gaddis believes that, from this point, the Soviet leadership was no longer willing "to use force to preserve its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe."

The election of a Polish pope and his first papal visit to his homeland were events of great significance for the Poles, and they were a stimulus to the rise of Solidarity. However, although Solidarity was welcomed in the West and surreptitiously admired in parts of Eastern Europe, its example was not followed anywhere.

After the imposition of martial law, the Vatican -- and, for that matter, the Pentagon -- could do nothing to restore political pluralism in Poland until policy had changed fundamentally in Moscow. The year in which reform of the system turned to transformative change in the Soviet Union was 1988, the same year that saw the reemergence of Solidarity from its shadowy existence in church halls. Gaddis' phrase "began the process" may or may not imply a causal relationship. The pope's visit to Poland did not cause the end of communism. What did bring about the end of communism throughout Eastern Europe was the dismantling of the pillars of a communist system in the Soviet Union itself, together with the transformation of the foreign policy of the region's hegemonic power.

Important arms-reduction agreements also played their part in bringing the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion, but the Cold War began with the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, and it ended when Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that there would be no more Soviet military interventions to sustain regimes rejected by their own people. It was in 1988 that Gorbachev made public this fundamental shift of policy -- in the summer of that year at the 19th Party Conference, and in December in his speech to the United Nations.

Rather than take Gaddis' view that the Brezhnev Doctrine ended in 1981, it is possible to see that the Soviet leadership had over several decades managed to retain their hegemony in Eastern Europe, even at times of trouble, by increasingly economic means. Very extensive bloodshed in Hungary in 1956, much less bloodshed in Czechoslovakia in 1968 despite the introduction of Soviet tanks, and a "virtual invasion" in Poland in 1981 when the Polish communist leadership was persuaded to crack down on the opposition for fear that if they did not, Soviet troops would do the job for them. Given the size of Poland, and the strength of Polish support in the United States, it was clearly preferable for the Brezhnev leadership to make the crackdown look like a domestic Polish affair. The idea, however, that any Soviet leader prior to Gorbachev was prepared to tolerate Warsaw Pact states becoming independent and non-communist is wholly fanciful.

Gaddis himself cites Lyndon Johnson's secretary of state, Dean Rusk, saying that what happened in Eastern Europe "had never been an issue of war and peace between us and the Soviet Union -- however ignoble this sounds." Indeed, even short of using force -- which would have been suicidal -- the Johnson administration reacted remarkably feebly to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. An invasion of a Central European country within "the Soviet bloc" in the early 1980s would doubtless have made the Cold War very much colder, but it would not have led to war between the superpowers, since that could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be in the interest of either of them.

I find Gaddis no more persuasive when he argues that if John Hinckley Jr.'s bullet had killed Ronald Reagan in 1981, the Cold War would not have ended because "there would probably not have been an American challenge to the Cold War status quo." It was Gorbachev who came to power determined to end the Cold War. Many aspects of Reagan's policies -- from the "evil empire" rhetoric to his fixation with the Strategic Defense Initiative -- made that task difficult for him. In the end, the fact that Reagan believed in the possibility of change in the Soviet Union, and had sufficiently strong anti-communist credentials to protect his rear in Washington, was an asset for the new Soviet leadership; the Gorbachev-Reagan partnership became a fruitful one.

But any U.S. president with an ounce of gumption should, with Gorbachev as a partner, have been able to preside over the end of the Cold War. Jimmy Carter can count himself unlucky that his presidency coincided with the last years of Soviet foreign policy run by Leonid Brezhnev, Andrei Gromyko and Dmitry Ustinov. Admittedly, a President Carter would have been given a far harder time in the United States if, like Reagan, he had come to Moscow in the summer of 1988 and declared that the Soviet Union was no longer an "evil empire" and that those words had applied to "another era."

George H.W. Bush might have been slower than Reagan to take advantage of the opportunity of a radical breakthrough in relations with the Soviet Union. His initial excessive caution upon succeeding Reagan suggests as much. Nevertheless, Bush in due course established relations of trust with Gorbachev. If, from the Oval Office, he had already experienced the frustration of trying to make headway with Brezhnev, Yury Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, he would probably have embraced Gorbachev all the earlier.

The greatest weakness of this otherwise worthwhile book is that its author has an inadequate understanding of the domestic context of Soviet foreign policy, of the role of Gorbachev, of the conceptual revolution in Russia in the second half of the 1980s and, thus, of the sources of fundamentally new Soviet behavior, which, taken together, were decisive in bringing about the end of the Cold War.

Archie Brown is emeritus professor of politics at Oxford University and a fellow of St. Antony's College.