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Lessons of the Cold War
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10106 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
1,817 Words |
| Author
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Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr.
Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., is president of the Institute for
Foreign Policy Analysis and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of
International Security Studies at the Fletcher School of Law
and Diplomacy, Tufts University. |
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, lessons have been sought for the 1990s and beyond. However, lessons cannot automatically be applied without understanding how the present differs from the Cold War period.
It is widely recognized that, in place of the clearly defined threat environment of the past, we now confront a multiplicity of risks. The bipolar setting has been replaced by a complex, politically fragmenting security environment.
Many of the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s were held in check within the Soviet empire or, in the case of Yugoslavia, by Tito. If the problems of the post-Cold War era are, to a large extent, an outgrowth of the collapse of the Cold War system, how do we draw lessons, especially if the security setting of the years ahead remains unclear?
The Cold War era nevertheless offers many lessons that transcend the dramatic transformation of recent years. Whatever the changes, certain enduring interests and problems must be addressed, specifically, the relationship between the military and economic dimensions of security; the degree of emphasis on a balance of power as opposed to promoting human rights and democratization; and the relationship between foreign policy and domestic policy.
The most basic lesson to be drawn from the Cold War period is that the United States devised effective policies as part of a Cold War strategy. First and foremost, they provided a political-military framework within which economic recovery and growth could take place. Specifically, this meant the formation of the Atlantic alliance as the security umbrella under which the war-ravaged economies of Western Europe could be restored. NATO and the Marshall Plan formed two essentially linked components of strategy that, deprived of either its political-military of economic aspect, would have fallen far short of the requirements of the era.
Closely related were the integration of the defeated powers into the global economic system of the postwar era and their rebuilding as societies based on representative political institutions. That such a requirement existed as part of a power balance to help contain Soviet expansionism makes such policies no less impressive as acts of creative statecraft.
Even without a threat emanating from Moscow, a post World War II international order that did not include such a reborn
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