Download The World the Superpowers Made

The World the Superpowers Made
Jeremi Suri, University of Wisconsin, Madison
The devastation of Europe and Asia in 1945 left two states with inordinate influence on the
future course of international affairs – the United States and the Soviet Union. These were the
only two countries to emerge from the Second World War stronger than before they entered it.
They had mobilized their vast resources for maximum effect: building more weapons and
placing more citizens under arms than ever before in either nation's history. They had also
expanded their territorial control and influence far beyond previous limits. When US President
Harry Truman and Soviet General Secretary Josef Stalin met in Potsdam, Germany in July 1945
most observers recognized that the decisions of these two men would determine the future course
of world history.
Truman and Stalin sought to avoid another war, but they also recognised one another as rivals for
domination over Europe and Asia. Both sides feared that the other would convert the resources
of the new areas under his control into war-fighting capabilities. Both sides feared a loss of
access to traditional markets. Most significant, both sides feared that the other would win the
'war of ideas', convincing the devastated populations of Europe and Asia that liberal capitalism
or communism was the only legitimate system of governance. What many Americans called
'psychological weaknesses' could leave societies susceptible to subversion from within by
propaganda. Ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, long predating 1945, made the nascent Cold War a contest between worldviews that extended beyond
weapons, territory and economics alone. Washington and Moscow could reach agreement on
various measures for geopolitical stability, but their ideological clash made a permanent
settlement almost inconceivable.
The development of thermonuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles in the 1950s added
another chilling dimension to the US-Soviet rivalry. The two states now had the capability to
annihilate one another, and most of the rest of the planet, in short order. Their leaders would
determine whether humankind survived or vanished in a radioactive firestorm. This was truly
'super' power. No country or community could escape an uncomfortable dependence on the
decisions of the two men in control of nuclear arsenals that continued to grow in their terrifying
lethality.
Dependence, however, ran two ways. Despite gross inequalities in power, small states –
particularly in the decolonizing 'third world' – gained leverage over superpower policy. Much of
the recent scholarship on the Cold War has focused on this issue. In south-east Asia, for
example, both the United States and the Soviet Union believed they needed to prove that their
respective systems of governance could set a bright course for newly independent nations. As a
consequence, Washington and Moscow poured massive amounts of aid into the region. In order
to export their ideas and institutions, the superpowers relied on local allies – often figures like
Ngo Dinh Diem and Ho Chi Minh in Indochina – who had personal connections to one of the
two superpowers.
These clients used their privileged positions to manipulate Washington and Moscow. Diem, Ho
and others were relatively weak international players, but they knew that the superpowers needed
them. They diverted foreign aid to unintended purposes, they built domestic regimes that
challenged superpower interests and they embarked on regional wars that embroiled Washington
and Moscow in conflicts they wished to avoid. In Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan and
many other areas, 'peripheral' actors drove superpower policies in self-defeating directions. In
this sense, the United States and the Soviet Union did not have full control over their own
expansive policies during the Cold War.
This observation about the complexity of power and policy is crucial, but it should not divert
attention from the dominant and driving influence of the superpowers between 1945 and 1991.
The United States and the Soviet Union were hegemons – states that structured the choices of all
actors in the international system. Although Diem and Ho could contradict immediate
superpower orders, they could not escape the constraints enforced by Washington and Moscow.
This explains, for example, why neutralism never succeeded as an alternative form of
international organization in the Cold War.
Even India, one of the leaders of the 'non-aligned movement', had to rely on American military
and food aid in the early 1960s, and Soviet military support in the 1970s. With superpower
assistance came, of course, superpower influence. One of the reasons India failed to wrest full
control of Kashmir from Pakistan is that both the United States and the Soviet Union restrained
New Delhi. Hindu nationalists recognized this fact, and they rode to power in India at the end of
the Cold War by exploiting popular frustration with external constraints. India, despite its proud
independence, did not make its own policy in Kashmir. It made policy in conjunction with
superpower pressures.
Discontent with superpower domination was not confined to Hindu nationalists. Throughout the
Cold War, citizens across the globe objected to the inequalities in international power and the
intrusion of Washington and Moscow's influences. Many of these same people also praised
superpower interventions when they served their interests. Nonetheless, Cold War discontents
reached a visible crescendo in the late 1960s as young people in nearly every society condemned
what they perceived as the moral injustices of the international system. American and Soviet
military attacks on North Vietnam and Czechoslovakia during this period symbolized the
apparent bankruptcy of the superpowers' respective claims to build a better world.
The Cold War did not, as many hoped, end after 1968. Through détente the superpowers
managed to repress their critics, create stability in the most dangerous areas of potential conflict,
and heighten their military and ideological competition in the 'third world'. Small states and
mobilised citizens could attract attention and create short-term crises, but they could not redesign
the structure of international power that grew out of the Second World War. The continuation of
the Cold War through the late 1980s, despite so much opposition, proves the extraordinary
resilience of superpower hegemony.
In many ways, the Cold War ended as it began. Two men, this time US President Ronald Reagan
and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, met in Moscow in 1988 to set the stage for a
new mode of relations between their societies. They did not have to do this. The domestic and
international pressures acting upon them were strong, but fundamentally these two men chose
out of personal conviction to leave the Cold War behind. Their decision to end the Cold War
rivalry, like Truman's and Stalin's choice to accept this rivalry, created an opening for
fundamental changes. The revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, the Tiananmen Square protests
in China the same year, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism
as a formidable international force all grew out of the superpower actions that ended the Cold
War. Reagan and Gorbachev neither anticipated nor desired most of these developments, but
they made them possible. Although the power of the superpowers had definite limits, they made
and un-made the Cold War world.