How Cold War Came to a Peaceful End
Twenty five years ago on Dec. 3, U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev issued statements at a joint press conference signaling the end of the Cold War. The two made the announcements at a summit in Malta, the same place Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in 1945 to discuss postwar Europe. Since Malta is located in the middle of the Mediterranean, it was historically a strategic location for military powers, and it sat symbolically halfway between “East and West.”
Although little substantive progress was made, Secretary Gorbachev told the press:
I assured the President of the United States that the Soviet Union would never start a hot war against the United States of America. And we would like our relations to develop in such a way that they would open greater possibilities for cooperation. … We stated, both of us, that the world leaves one epoch of cold war, and enters another epoch. This is just the beginning. We are just at the very beginning of our road, long road to a long-lasting, peaceful period.
President Bush, also sounding largely optimistic, added, "With reform underway in the Soviet Union, we stand at the threshold of a brand-new era of U.S.-Soviet relations. It is within our grasp to contribute each in our own way to overcoming the division of Europe and ending the military confrontation there."
How the USSR lost the Cold War is a question of intense debate among historians, but after the opening up of the Iron Curtain, it became clear that the Soviets’ centrally planned economy had been crumbling for decades.
The Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, had argued since the 1920s that socialism was infeasible because the knowledge needed to produce supplies to adequately fit people’s demands is disbursed across society. Since this requisite knowledge cannot be known by a central planner, only a market-based economy can prosper. After the fall of the Soviet Union and Red China’s turn toward market reforms, the formerly socialist (though still left-wing) economist Robert Heilbroner acknowledged, “It turns out, of course, that Mises was right.”
While economic theory can explain the Evil Empire’s long-term inability to keep up with the West and its eventual demise, there were shorter-term causes that hastened these events. A comprehensive explanation of such factors would take volumes of books, but here’s a short list of important highlights:
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
Although President Richard Nixon and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev established détente in 1972, this thaw ended when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to prop up a Soviet puppet state and became mired in a nine-year guerrilla war that became known as “the Soviet Union’s Vietnam” and the “Bear Trap.”
The war cost the USSR tens of thousands in casualties and worsened its image abroad. The guerrillas were funded by the western powers as well as the Chinese who had ended their alliance with the Soviets and opened up to the United States when Nixon visited Chairman Mao in 1972.
Nicknamed the “Graveyard of Empires,” Afghanistan proved a terrible strain on resources for the Soviet Union just as it had for Alexander the Great and the British Empire and has currently been a major strain for the United States.
Reagan and Thatcher
President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher bluntly denounced the Soviet Union. Reagan introduced a doctrine of providing support to anticommunist guerrillas and resistance movements across the world to “roll back” communism. While communism was rolled back, factions of our Mujahidin allies in Afghanistan metastasized into what would become the Taliban. Violent, inhumane right-wing factions also benefited from American aid. Furthermore, the legality of some of the actions taken during this time (notably, the Iran-Contra Affair) has been heatedly contested.
Reagan also launched the ambitious Strategic Defense Initiative, a space-based system that would destroy ballistic missiles. Despite being derided as a “Star Wars” that was incredibly unrealistic, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov feared the project.
