Diplomatic History

2018 Diplomatic History

doi: 10.1093/dh/dhy039

In the spring of 2017 many members of SHAFR participated in an exchange of emails and expressed frustration, indeed exasperation, over the prevailing state of affairs in the United States and elsewhere around the globe. Scholars voiced their dismay at the disregard for truth, facts, and objective analysis, as well as the scorn for expertise, among our leaders and in our public discourse. SHAFR members asked one another how they could make a difference. They wondered whether they could transcend the gulf that was dividing the American public. What could historians do to bridge the gap and assist policymakers? Several of us at the Miller Center at UVA read these exchanges and offered to convene a one-day conference that took place in June 2017. We discussed how we historians could bring our expertise to bear on questions of public policy. While there was a realistic sense of the formidable impediments to scholarly intervention in the public sphere, most of us shared the conviction that scholars studying the past had important things to say about the present. This conclusion comported with growing recognition among think tanks and public policy schools that historical understanding could sharpen analysis, mitigate false analogizing, encourage understanding, and improve decision-making. At UVA’s Miller Center that has been a core conviction for a long time. Thanks to the generosity of the William C. Battle family and the support of Bill Antholis, the director of the Miller Center, we convened a conference of leading scholars in November 2017 to see if we could apply this technique to an illumination of the current state of troubled Russian-American relations. It was a propitious time since we were about to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. We could not help but observe that for most of that century bilateral relations had been fraught with acrimony, disillusionment, and outright hostility. During the initial years of the Soviet regime, relations were poisoned by mutual ideological animus. After World War II, that ideological enmity became enmeshed in a worldwide geopolitical competition for influence, power, prestige, and economic gain. Yet even after the Cold War ended, hopes for improved ties were dashed, and “resets” failed to improve relations. Now, with the advent of President Donald Trump, we faced the unprecedented situation of an American president seeking to engage Russia’s leader personally, while distancing himself from the alliances, multilateral institutions, trade agreements, and geostrategic assumptions of his predecessors. President Trump sought this recalibration of relations even as Russia sought to revise the borders of Crimea and Ukraine, applied pressure on many small neighbors, projected power into the Middle East, and meddled in the electoral processes of most Western democracies, including the United States. Sharply breaking from seventy years of U.S. policy, Trump seemed eager to come to a personal understanding with a Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, who had openly pursued an authoritarian, nationalist form of governance as an alternative to what he deemed the paralysis, corruption, and ineptitude of Western democracies. We wanted to see if an examination of the past could shed light on the present and illuminate a constructive way forward. If we brought together many of the leading scholars and practitioners and if we systematically focused attention on past interactions between leaders of these two great nations, could we glean insights that might enhance understanding of our current condition? If we looked at the essential dynamics between Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin, Franklin Roosevelt and Josip Stalin, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Mikhail Gorbachev, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, and Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, might we learn something useful about the fraught state of current relations and might there be lessons for the future? In November 2017—on the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution—we gathered together at the Miller Center a group of eminent scholars and practitioners. For much of three days we examined the tortured history of Russian-American relations and discussed what it meant for the future. If there was one clear generalization that emerged it was that we should not expect the bilateral relationship to improve very much while Putin remains in power. But what was interesting about this generalization were the reasons for it. Most commentators, either explicitly or implicitly, blamed it on Putin’s behavior, his authoritarian tendencies and his narrow and self-interested geopolitical goals. Derek Chollet, a scholar and former assistant secretary of defense in the Barack Obama administration, asserted that the United States had underestimated Putin’s penchant for risk-taking and had not sufficiently appreciated the asymmetric threats emanating from Russian cyber-attacks and media meddling. Hal Brands, the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, echoed many of Chollet’s key points and emphasized the fundamental clash between America’s desire to nurture and spread the prevailing liberal and capitalist world order and Putin’s desire to challenge and constrict it. Brands emphasized the importance of building strength and containing Putin. Strobe Talbot, Bill Clinton’s former deputy secretary of state, agreed, as did Eric Edelman, the undersecretary of defense in the second administration of George W. Bush. But other conference participants disagreed. Allen Lynch, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, Eugene Rumer, a former national intelligence officer for Russian and Eurasian affairs on the National Intelligence Council, and Vlad Zubok, a professor at the London School of Economics, argued that the fault lay not simply with Putin’s actions and ambitions, but also with the assumptions and expectations of the United States. Briefly stated, they stressed the conflicting core goals, ideological values, historical memory, economic interests, and power asymmetries between the two countries. They asserted that U.S. officials, in effect, demanded that Putin accede to new power realities, accept the territorial status quo as it had evolved at the end of the Cold War, and acclimate Russia to the liberal, capitalist world order over which the United States presided. The United States, they said, had pushed NATO expansion and had failed to play a constructive role in generating enduring economic and political progress inside Russia in the 1990s. Whether Yeltsin and Putin were at fault or Clinton, Bush, and Obama, almost all participants agreed that, at best, we could anticipate nothing more than a transactional relationship over the coming years, and that, more likely, we might wind up in another cold war—building strength, containing Russian expansion, and championing alternative visions of international order and political economy. Although the future appeared bleak, much of the dialogue was illuminating because the examination of the past did provide insight into why the relationship was so troubled. The essays that follow are brief, pithy explorations of a particular pairing of U.S. and Soviet/Russian leaders. Readers will find in these essays the complex interplay of structure, ideology, interests, and human agency, and will also see evidence of the role that emotions and sensibilities—fear, pride, respect, empathy, and honor—played in U.S.-Russian relations from the 1917 Revolution to the present. Try as they might, however, readers will find no easy answers to the overriding questions: Should the United States double-down on its pursuit of a liberal international order? Should it demand compliance and pursue new forms of containment with increased vigor and additional economic resources and military assets? Or should officials in Washington recalibrate and modulate their demands recognizing the degree to which they have forced Russia to accept frontiers policymakers in Moscow deem illegitimate, a periphery they consider threatening, an international economic order they believe unfair, and a status they judge incommensurate with Russia’s inherent greatness? Our essays suggest that over the past century, “friendly” ties existed only when policymakers in both Washington and Moscow made it a priority: during World War II, during the Nixon-Brezhnev détente, and during the Cold War endgame. These times were brief and transitory because geopolitical developments, economic imperatives, and domestic political expedients quickly made officials in Washington and Moscow wary of the actions of the other. In this dynamic, we can see that core values and vital interests shape relationships, not vice versa, and this probably makes sense. We thought it would be interesting to ask a former academic and practitioner to reflect on these essays. Celeste Wallander, now the president and CEO of The U.S. Russia Foundation, taught at Harvard, Georgetown, and American universities and served as a senior director for Russia and Central Asia on President Obama’s national security staff. Readers will find her observations interesting and will want to draw their own conclusions as they study and ponder the short contributions to this symposium. We wish to thank the Miller Center again for catalyzing this dialogue. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

2018 Diplomatic History

doi: 10.1093/dh/dhy046

Lenin was a Marxist revolutionary who saw himself, and his organization, the Bolsheviks, as the vanguard of the global working class. His view of the world was based on what he saw as the unavoidable confrontation of opposing forces in world politics, socialism vs. capitalism. In his policies he was relentlessly internationalist, even though he was quite capable of temporary compromise on behalf of the Soviet state, which was based within the former Russian empire. His ideology was universalist, more so than even Marx himself: Lenin believed that the Russian revolution had set a pattern that all countries would have to follow, at least in broad outline, on their way to socialism. Lenin’s ultimate aim was a universal Soviet state, which would implement, first, socialism, and then Communism, on a global scale. Lenin’s policies towards the world from 1917 to 1924—the year he and Woodrow Wilson both died within a month of each other after long illnesses—were intended to overthrow the existing international order. He and his colleagues sought to foment revolution within states in the West ruled by the bourgeoisie and in the colonized worlds of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Lenin expected that capitalist wars and capitalist crises would do part of the job for the Bolsheviks abroad. But he also firmly believed that a Communist International of revolutionary parties, headquartered in Moscow, was a necessary step towards the socialist world-state that he envisioned. Only such a re-ordering, Lenin proclaimed, could do away with imperialism and war. Capitalism, which produced these ills, would gradually be replaced with socialism on a world scale, first in Europe, but then spreading all over the world. Vladimir Ilich Ulianov, who started using the pseudonym Lenin when he was in his late twenties, was born in 1870 in the provincial town of Simbirsk, six hundred miles southeast of Moscow. The critical moment in his early years was the 1903 congress of Russian Social Democrats in London, at which Lenin and his adherents broke with the mainstream socialist belief that socialism would replace capitalism through a gradual process of economic change. Instead, Lenin and his group, the Bolsheviks, claimed that a vanguard party was needed to overthrow bourgeois institutions and lead the working class to socialism through a revolutionary state. Lenin and the Bolsheviks would probably have remained a footnote in the history of socialism (not to mention world history) if it had not been for the economic dislocation and political disruption of World War I. From the summer of 1914 on, Lenin was convinced that the war would lead to revolution in Russia. His aim was to move quickly, through political insurrection, from a bourgeois revolution against the Tsar to a socialist revolution against the bourgeoisie. After the Tsar was forced to abdicate in 1917, Lenin returned from exile and proclaimed his “April Theses,” issued five days after Wilson’s war message to a joint session of Congress on April 2. Lenin’s theses laid out the Bolshevik worldview with the usual extreme and polemical clarity. His aim was to establish the “inseparable connection existing between capital and the imperialist war, and to prove that without overthrowing capital it is impossible to end the war by a truly democratic peace, a peace not imposed by violence.” “The masses,” Lenin continued, “must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government.”1 In other words: the bourgeoisie had produced war and only the Bolsheviks—not Social Democrats or Wilsonians—could remedy its ills. As Lenin constructed his revolutionary state in Russia, how alert was he and his followers to the growth of the United States as a world power? Lenin expected the global interests of the United States to expand and he was very aware of Wilson’s political appeal on a global scale. But his focus was on revolution in Europe, especially in Germany, and he saw Britain and France as his main imperialist opponents. Lenin was not surprised that the United States joined in the intervention against Bolshevik rule in Russia. Instead, he took pride in the fact that the main imperialist countries, with the United States as a hanger-on, deemed his revolution worth intervening against. The interventions helped secure the Bolsheviks’ self-image, while enabling the political master-stroke of presenting Marxist internationalists as defenders of Russia’s independence. For the nascent USSR, the United States provided opportunities through what Lenin saw as American double-standards in pursuing economic advantage under a cloak of democratic principles. In September 1920, at one of his lowest points in power after having been defeated by the Polish army, Lenin attempted to reinforce his idea of the world divided into two camps after World War I. “Only two forces exist in world politics,” he told the Bolsheviks, “one is the League of Nations, which produced the Versailles Treaty, and the other is the Soviet Republic, which undermined this Versailles Treaty.” “American politicians write extended notes accusing us of being poor democrats,” Lenin wrote. “A famous American billionaire comes to visit and says: ‘Let us shake hands…’.”2 Were there missed opportunities in U.S.-Soviet relations after World War I? Even if American businesses had engaged with the Soviets on a broad scale—something that both their government and their business sense dissuaded them from doing—it is unlikely that it would have made much of a difference. The Bolsheviks were fascinated with U.S. technology, production, and management methods, but only in order to learn enough to implement elements of them into their own concepts of a socialist planned economy. Otherwise the U.S. government, under Wilson and his Republican successors, was by its nature an enemy similar to the imperialist powers in Europe. The Bolshevik interest was in its overthrow, even though Lenin hoped that trade and business ventures to the Soviet advantage could be developed up to the point when that happened. Are there lessons from the era of Lenin and Wilson for U.S.-Russia relations today? The biggest ones may be in how the two countries view themselves and their global roles. Just like Wilson, Lenin was succeeded by leaders who believed in a more limited internationalist vision. But that retreat—if such it was—turned out to be temporary for both countries. In the latter half of the twentieth century both the United States and the Soviet Union returned to globalism, seeing themselves as centers of development models that would conquer the world. Just like Russian exceptionalism has roots deeper than Lenin, U.S. exceptionalism has roots deeper than Wilson, though each leader produced a vision with lasting significance for their century. One hundred years later, matters look very different both on the Russian and the U.S. side. The Communist experiment in Russia came crashing down in the 1980s, when it proved itself incapable of delivering a better quality of life for its citizens. It was replaced by forms of hyper-capitalism that both ordinary Russians and the post-Soviet Russian state were ill prepared for. Instead of opportunity and progress, the immediate post-Soviet era under Boris Yeltsin seemed to most Russians to deliver chaos and decay. Instead of being poor in a Soviet superpower, people were poorer in a state that seemed powerless at home and disrespected abroad. No wonder Russians embraced an authoritarian, nationalist policy when Vladimir Putin offered them one in the early 2000s. After all, it took much less post-Cold War pain for Americans to elect an authoritarian nationalist to the presidency in 2016. It remains to be seen how much Donald Trump will be able to change U.S. foreign policy during his tenure. What is clear is that since he came to power in 2000, Putin has changed Russia’s policies not only away from those of the Yeltsin interlude but also from the Soviet past. His main aim is to resurrect Russia as a global power. But he lacks the ideological or economic wherewithal to do so. Today’s Russia is not a Soviet Union, which presented a fundamental global challenge to the United States over how humanity should organize its affairs. Instead it is another capitalist country with an extraordinarily exploitative, inefficient, and corrupt state in charge of its affairs. Its per capita GDP is stuck somewhere between Turkey and Brazil, with the prospect of falling even further when the prices of oil and gas—on which the Russian economy entirely depends—continue their downward trend. Internationally, Putin’s anti-Western policies make his regime an irritant to the United States and Europe, but a danger only to neighbors who make a mess of their own affairs, such as Ukraine. Vladimir Putin is a Russian exceptionalist but on a regional rather than a global scale. He believes that Russia has a right to dominate its smaller and weaker neighbors, just like he sees the United States attempting to dominate both its neighborhood and areas further afield. What he completely lacks is Lenin’s internationalism: Putin is a Russian nationalist (even though he sometimes has trouble figuring out where his “Russia” begins and ends). He is very close to the kind of Russian whom the dying Lenin warned his comrades about: “the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is.” If such people come to power, Lenin prophesied, “there is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.”3 Lenin’s predictions may have been proven wrong in the main, but he is certainly right on this one. Footnotes 1 V. I. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution (The April Theses),” April 7, 1917, in vol. 24 of Collected Works (Moscow, 1964), 19–26, 21. 2 Lenin’s secret political report of the Central Committee RKP(b) to the 9th All-Russian Conference of the Communist Party, September 20, 1920, in V. I. Lenin, The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive, ed. Richard Pipes (New Haven, CT, 1999), 95–115, 102, 114. 3 V. I. Lenin, “The Question of Nationalities or Autonomisation,” notes dictated December 1922, in vol. 36 of Collected Works (Moscow, 1971), 607. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

2018 Diplomatic History

doi: 10.1093/dh/dhy051

The ideological clash between U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, which began when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in late 1917, was a defining moment in the international history of the twentieth century. Throughout his time in power, however, Wilson viewed the Bolshevik threat as merely one part of the global crisis of his era, a crisis that encompassed not only the ongoing world war but also a set of longer-term historical forces shaping developments both at home and abroad. So in order to understand Wilson’s response to Lenin and the lessons it has for our time, we must first consider the historical context of that relationship. Wilson viewed Lenin as dangerous in two ways. Most immediately, he saw him as a threat to the Allied war effort since the Bolsheviks, upon taking power, announced plans to take Russia out of the war. But second, and more importantly, Wilson saw Lenin and his revolution as a symptom of a broader malaise afflicting human affairs at that historical moment, a malaise that went beyond Russia or even Europe and penetrated deep into the body of United States itself. Indeed, Wilson’s perception of the threat Lenin posed, and of world affairs more broadly, grew out of his analysis of the challenges facing the United States domestically in his time. Wilson came of age politically in the Gilded Age, an era of profound historical transformation in American history. It was a time characterized by rapid globalization; large-scale immigration that brought with it new diversity and new tensions; technological and economic change coupled with recurring panics and social dislocation; and a steep rise in economic inequality, with its attendant strains on the social fabric. In short, it was a time not unlike our own. Surveying this landscape, Wilson worried about what he saw as the decline of democracy in the face of the growth of unaccountable power in the hands of the few; and he worried equally about what he saw as an inevitable reaction to this concentration of wealth and power—namely social unrest, instability, and indeed, revolution. As president, Wilson responded by pushing for a stronger role for government in the economy in order to promote economic stability, to advance protections for labor, and to break up the power of monopoly capital. In other words, Wilson sought a “third way” between plutocracy and anarchy—a path of reform that would check unaccountable power and, in doing so, stave off upheaval. Looking at the international arena during the Great War, Wilson spied a similar dialectic at work. On the world stage, the German kaiser (and the Russian tsar) represented unaccountable power—the sort that was liable to incite revolution. So when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in the face of an uprising in March 1917 and was replaced by a provisional government that seemed to fit in a reformist mold, Wilson was pleased. Washington recognized the Russian Provisional Government within a week, the first major nation to do so. The change also played a role in Wilson’s decision to take the United States into the war the following month since, with the tsar gone, the Allies were no longer tainted by the presence of Russian autocracy in their midst. The Bolshevik takeover of the revolution in November 1917 changed all that. Initially, Wilson only had the foggiest idea who Lenin was and what he was about. But whether he viewed him as an anarchist—commonly conflated with communists in the United States at the time—or as striving for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as Lenin himself proclaimed, Wilson could have little sympathy for his program. Wilson wanted change in order to preserve a liberal-capitalist order; Lenin wanted to tear it down. They shared the sense that world politics had to be transformed, but the transformation each wanted was utterly different. Wilson sought to chart a third way between reaction and revolution. For Lenin the choice was stark: either reaction, defined by capitalism and imperialism, or revolution. There was no third way. In Wilson’s very first recorded mention of Lenin, shortly after the Bolshevik takeover, the Russian appeared as a lightweight. But shortly thereafter Wilson came to see Lenin as a serious threat: a strategic threat in his intention to sue for a separate peace and an ideological threat in his appeal to war-weary publics with the advocacy of peace, self-determination, and the interests of the working classes. Wilson’s response to this double threat was encapsulated in his Fourteen Points address of January 1918. With it, he sought to try to keep the Bolsheviks in the war and, more importantly, to blunt their international appeal by co-opting some of their rhetoric. Most notably, Wilson soon adopted the principle of self-determination as his own, with widespread if not wholly intended consequences for the postwar order. Lenin, of course, still concluded a separate peace with Germany, and Wilson’s half-hearted support for the Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War failed to turn it around. In the course of 1919 Wilson’s health grew frailer as the Bolshevik position grew stronger and by the time Lenin firmly held the reins of power in Russia, Wilson was exiting the stage of history. He had failed to foresee the Bolshevik victory in his time; but then, so did many of the leading experts of the day, including the elder George Kennan. It was thus left to Wilson’s successors to deal more fully with the consequences of Lenin’s rise to power. So what lessons can we take from Wilson’s response to Lenin? The current circumstances, of course, are very different from those of a century ago. Unlike Lenin, Putin seems firmly entrenched in power in Russia. At the same time his ideology, centered on Russian nationalism, is about as far removed from Lenin’s communist internationalism as it could be. It is as particularistic as Lenin’s was universal, and it therefore seems far less likely to have appeal or serve as a model, as communism did, for political movements outside Russia and its immediate orbit. The main challenge that Putin presents, therefore, is geostrategic rather than ideological. Still, despite these divergent circumstances, Wilson’s history with Lenin offers important lessons for our present day. Just as Wilson understood Lenin and his revolution as part of a broader historical canvas that encompassed both the domestic and the international arenas, so too will we today benefit from thinking about Putin, and about Russia, within a global context, one that, most significantly, puts developments both at home and abroad within a single analytical frame. It’s only then that we can see Putin’s aggressive nationalism, to take one example, as part of a broader ascendance of reactionary nationalism in Europe and elsewhere in response to the challenges of globalization; a trend that includes the United States itself. If we look at the current presidents of Russia and the United States and see more similarities than we might care to admit, we ought to think of these similarities as both Wilson and Lenin, with their keen sense of history, no doubt would have. That is, as reflecting broader historical trends that, moreover, share important parallels with the world of Wilson and Lenin one hundred years ago. These include a recent history of accelerating globalization, large-scale immigration, economic and technological changes tied to crises and dislocations, and a steep rise in inequality that is challenging longstanding social contracts and political institutions in the United States and abroad. Contracts and institutions, in fact, whose roots, at least in the U.S. case, are firmly planted in Wilson’s own era. If the last few decades in American history have resembled the Gilded Age, then pressure for a political program intended to rein in the excesses of capitalism and globalization in order to save them cannot be too far off. One might even argue that such a program was underway under President Barack Obama, perhaps the most Wilsonian of our recent presidents. Obama, like Wilson, faced the challenges of escalating globalization and responded with efforts to chart a “third way” between plutocracy and upheaval. Like Wilson, too, his successes appear to have been substantial, but also woefully incomplete. Putin’s authoritarian nationalism may not have the universal ambitions of Lenin’s communist internationalism, and Lenin would have surely rejected Putin’s ideology as an abomination. Still, the two do share a disdain for democracies and a desire to exploit their weaknesses in order to destabilize and, perhaps, eventually destroy them. In his own time, Wilson understood that the United States could not effectively face challenges abroad, from Russia or elsewhere, without the sort of robust, resilient home front that could only be sustained through responsive, accountable politics. It is this insight that lay at the core of Wilson’s political worldview, however flawed his efforts to implement it. It remains a fundamental lesson today. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

2018 Diplomatic History

doi: 10.1093/dh/dhy050

“The combination of Russian revolutionary sweep [emphasis added] with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism,” declared Joseph Stalin in 1924, the year of Lenin’s death.1 Stalin’s fascination with American culture and business ethic was shared by many Bolsheviks of the 1920s. The last words read by Lenin’s wife to her dying husband came from a short novel by American author Jack London. While the United States was among the last countries to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, American companies were open for business with the Soviets earlier than their European competitors, supplying expertise and equipment for Soviet construction sites from Magnitogorsk in the Urals to the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station in Ukraine. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speedy recognition of Stalin’s government in Moscow soon after his inauguration, along with his New Deal policies, helped create in the Soviet media an image of the American president as the kind of capitalist with whom one could do business. With Stalin fearing encirclement by Germany and Japan and mistrusting Britain and France, the United States emerged in Soviet public discourse of the 1930s as the least hostile, if not the friendliest, capitalist country in the world. U.S. military intervention in the Far East during the Russian Civil War was largely forgotten, if not forgiven, by the Europe-obsessed Bolshevik leadership in the Kremlin. When Hitler turned against Stalin in 1941, the Soviet leader found it much easier in historical, political, and psychological terms to ally himself with Roosevelt than with Winston Churchill—in Bolshevik eyes, the embodiment of British imperialism since the 1917 Revolution. Until Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, he remained Stalin’s favorite capitalist leader. The United States was not only the country on which the Soviet Union most relied during the war with Germany but also the one with which it was most comfortable when it came to building the postwar future: unlike the British, the Americans were not going to stay in Europe. In the Far East they were willing to accommodate Soviet territorial claims, and in the newly created United Nations Organization they treated the Soviets as equals, extending to them the right of veto reserved for major powers. What went wrong in Soviet-American relations after 1945? This question, central to the debate on the causes of the Cold War, has been answered in various ways. Without dismissing the historical, cultural, and personal factors that led to the dramatic change in Soviet-American relations after World War II, I put the main emphasis on geopolitical factors. In the summary that follows I propose that it was Soviet expansion, or rather the return of Russia to Eastern and Central Europe, and direct American involvement in that part of the European subcontinent with the goal of protecting Western Europe and British positions in the region that spelled the end not only of the Grand Alliance but also of the relative friendliness of the interwar years, and eventually led to the Cold War. Interwar Eastern Europe was comprised of several young states that emerged on the ruins of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and (in part) Russian empires. The new states aspired to be national but grabbed more territory, settled by minorities, than they could assimilate to their titular nationalities. France and then Britain saw the region as a cordon sanitaire against the spread of communism. Stalin viewed it as a launch pad for capitalist attack not unlike that of 1920, when Polish and Ukrainian troops supported by the Entente captured Kyiv. When in 1939 the French and British refused to allow Stalin to enter Eastern Europe militarily to deal with the German threat, the Soviet leader did so anyway on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. At the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam meetings with his new Western allies, Stalin insisted on keeping his gains of 1939 and claimed an East European sphere of influence that went beyond the one arranged with Churchill in 1944. At the Yalta conference, Roosevelt refused to recognize Stalin’s claim to determine the political future of Eastern Europe, shifting the problem of spheres of influence to the arena of diplomatic negotiations, but at Potsdam Truman bowed to the seemingly inevitable Soviet control of the region. Stalin had no clear idea of what to do with his new sphere of influence—whether to Sovietize it completely or leave some elements of democracy and free enterprise in place. He insisted, however, that it had to be part of the Soviet “sphere of security,” as he called it in negotiations with Roosevelt and Churchill. He once went on record saying that the Russians knew how to fight but not how to negotiate. Stalin was determined to maintain Soviet political control over the territory taken by the Red Army during the war. He would compromise on Iran and Turkey, or even retreat from them, but dig in his heels on Eastern Europe. After Britain’s unexpected postwar implosion as a world superpower, American involvement in European affairs threatened Stalin’s position in Eastern Europe. The threat, however, came not from U.S. military power but from its economic potential, embodied in the Marshall Plan. Stalin could not compete economically. He responded militarily, as in the Berlin blockade, and politically, as in the communist coup in Czechoslovakia. One way or another, he sealed off Eastern Europe from the West to maintain his control over the region. The Cold War would eventually become global, but its beginnings and official end in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 attest to the paramount importance of that region in Soviet-American Cold War rivalry. Presuming that this reading of the fall of the Grand Alliance and the start of the Cold War correctly reflects Stalin’s attitudes toward Eastern Europe and American involvement there, what lessons, if any, can be drawn for the new round of Moscow-Washington rivalry, often called Cold War II? There are numerous parallels with the events of seventy years ago. Although the new rivalry seems to be global in scope, once again involving the Middle East, the eye of the new international relations hurricane is in the area known today as the “new Eastern Europe.” It covers some former Soviet republics and extends from the Baltics through Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova to the Trans-Caucasus. Like most of the states that emerged on the ruins of the old empires in 1918, most of the newly independent states of extended Eastern Europe are economically and militarily weak, have major problems with democracy, and include significant ethnic minorities. Like their interwar predecessors, they are viewed in Moscow as a launch pad for Western aggression but are perceived in the West as the antemurale where Russian expansion into Europe can and should be stopped. Putin’s Russia is staging a return to its “near abroad” in a way that parallels the “return” of Stalin’s Soviet Union to the lands that had been part of the Russian Empire or its sphere of interest. Some territories are being annexed outright, while others are being claimed as part of the Moscow-run economic and military union. As at the beginning of the Cold War, the main threat to Moscow’s ambitions in the region is American economic power and the appeal of its democratic institutions rather than its military might. And, as before, Moscow’s response to that economic and ideological challenge usually comes in military form. The Russians want a “new Yalta”—a division of Europe into spheres of influence. The Americans are resisting, as they did at Yalta. There are differences as well. The most obvious one is that with the exception of parts of Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, the rest of the new Eastern Europe is not occupied or controlled by Russian troops, as most of Eastern Europe was seventy years ago. The countries in question are basically free to make their own choices regarding their form of government and participation in economic and even military alliances. This “openness” of the region creates both opportunities and challenges for the development of U.S.-Russian relations, but challenges prevail as the dangers of open confrontation and proxy wars increase. Can the history of the early Cold War help us understand the present-day problems of Russo-American relations? Yes, it can. The American political establishment spent a good part of the Cold War trying to answer the question of whether President Roosevelt had sold out Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta. However one answered that not very productive question, there was general agreement that “losing” Eastern Europe was a bad idea, and that ceding it to the Soviet sphere of influence did not prevent the Cold War. Another lesson drawn from those events was that the great powers could not decide the fate of the East European nations without inviting them to the negotiating table. These valuable takeaways from the past can be very useful today as the United States and Russia face new tensions in the part of the world that sparked the Cold War seventy-five years ago. Footnotes 1 Joseph Stalin, “Foundations of Leninism,” in Works, idem, vol. 6 (Moscow, 1953), 196. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

2018 Diplomatic History

doi: 10.1093/dh/dhy049

It has been easy for Americans to grow angry, exasperated, or disgusted with the Russians, regardless of whether Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, or Putin was in charge. Think of all the appalling outrages, from the Katyn forest massacre and the mass rapes by Red Army soldiers during World War II, to the repression of Eastern Europe in the Cold War, to the more recent aggression against Georgia and Ukraine. Not to mention the Berlin and Cuban crises of a half-century ago and the egregious interference in the U.S. election last year. Even during the Grand Alliance, the Russians aggravated American sensibilities with their secretiveness and suspicion. It is therefore understandable—but also consequential—that strong emotions have conditioned how U.S. leaders and the public have conceptualized our ostensibly rational and objective national interests vis-à-vis Russia. Emotions are integral to all thinking, even thought that is supposedly rational. This does not mean that emotions determine policy, but rather that emotion-infused perspectives unavoidably influence our images, ideas, and beliefs. Manipulating emotions and impressions figured as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s strategy for managing Stalin and pursuing U.S. interests. Understanding that the Soviets intended to dominate Eastern Europe, Roosevelt offered Stalin a deal for the sake of postwar peace. He would accept de facto Soviet control if Stalin acceded to such Wilsonian public relations gestures as the Declaration on Liberated Europe agreed to at Yalta. As part of this political strategy, Roosevelt, who possessed a serene confidence in himself, acted on his belief that Stalin suffered an “inferiority complex.”1 In ways large and small, the squire of Hyde Park tried to play up to the pride, craving for respect, and fear of humiliation plaguing the scion of backwater Georgia. Observers at the wartime summits marveled at the extent to which the usually dour dictator responded to Roosevelt’s formula of personal empathy and political deal-making. The lesson here is that sharp differences and understandable anger with the Russians over their behavior in what they insist is their legitimate sphere of influence need not wreck the entire U.S.-Russian relationship. Personal respect can go a long way. Moreover, the Russians, regardless of regime, have craved bilateral dealings with the United States. Without too cynically over-playing their hand, U.S. leaders can turn that Russian desire to advantage. For reasons of personality and policy, Harry Truman reversed Roosevelt’s stance. Ambassador Averell Harriman rushed from Moscow to warn the new president that the Red Army’s rolling back of the Germans amounted to a “barbarian invasion of Europe.”2 That set off alarm bells for Truman, who had read about Genghis Khan and who already regarded the Russians as “semi-Asiatic.” When Harriman added, untruthfully, that Roosevelt’s policies of getting along with Stalin stemmed from “fear” of the Russians, Truman, who was anxious to show that he was man enough to be president, replied that he “was not afraid of the Russians” nor of anyone else.3 While such emotional reactions and associations alone did not impel Truman to abandon efforts to meet the Russians halfway, they apparently influenced his behavior. Truman viewed the Russians as inferior to Americans because racially they stemmed from a mix of Tartars, Mongols, and Slavs, while culturally the Russians came “from the wrong side of the tracks.”4 Such emotional judgments fed into a consequential strategic decision. A few weeks after the atomic bombing of Japan, Henry L. Stimson, the crusty, Republican secretary of war, acted on his fear that an atomic arms race would lead to a war ending human civilization. He urged Truman to reach out directly and bilaterally to the Russians with a proposal for step-by-step sharing of atomic information and a halt to atomic development. A majority of Truman’s Cabinet, including acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson, approved this forthright proposal. Some insiders commented that Roosevelt would have run with this potential game-changer. Truman, however, decided to reject Stimson’s plan. He explained that the Russians, because of their racial inferiority, lacked the technical ability ever to construct an atomic weapon. When the atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer asked the president when he thought the Russians would develop their own bomb, Truman answered, never. The lessons here are that the self-confidence or insecurity of presidents packs consequences. Moreover, perceived cultural and ethnic differences can sway Americans into underestimating the Russians’ ingenuity, achievements, and persistence. While the United States has repeatedly leaped ahead of the Russians in developing sophisticated weaponry, the Russians have doggedly followed. The sad result has been huge expenditures and endangered security. Like Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, the author of the containment doctrine, also tried to manipulate emotions. His manifestoes, especially his long telegram of February 1946 and Mr. “X” article of July 1947, crackled with emotion even as they claimed the authority of cool reason. While Kennan in later years would protest that his call for containment was misinterpreted by those pushing for a militarized response, the emotional force with which he depicted this dire threat in 1946–1947 made it seem prudent to build up the U.S. military. In terms of lessons, Kennan’s frustrations illustrate the peril of excessive emotionalism. Sparking fear can easily get out of control. Think here also of Truman’s following Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s advice in 1947 that he “scare [the] hell out of the American people” to win Congressional funding for aid to Greece and Turkey.5 That scaring ultimately led to the McCarthyite hysteria that hobbled Truman’s administration. Hyper-emotional responses can cloud our vision of national interests and make objectives seem more crucial than they really are. Emotional thinking can lead to underestimating the contingency and mutability of developments. Such thinking encourages hasty decisions. The Cuban Missile Crisis ended without a nuclear holocaust in large part because Kennedy was able to restrain the anger and fear within the ExComm and within himself. A powerful emotional response in foreign affairs is humiliation. A humiliated nation, whether it is France after 1871, Germany after 1919, or Russia by the late 1990s, becomes a force for destabilizing the status quo. In the aftermath of World War II, U.S. leaders understood the importance of giving West Germany a stake in the postwar system in terms of economic integration and then the NATO alliance. Important too were the exchange programs for cultural integration with the West and the emotional integration that began with the Berlin airlift. Much of Washington’s rigidity with regard to insisting that the Soviets rather than the East Germans regulate access to West Berlin stemmed from the imperative to keep the West Germans believing that America was indeed committed to reunification. Internal U.S. memos are filled with concern that the Bonn government not feel abandoned and humiliated by Germany’s division. One wonders whether internal Washington memos from the past twenty years would reveal a similar depth of concern about Moscow’s feeling abandoned and humiliated. A principal factor stimulating Russian feelings of humiliation and resentment has been efforts to thwart Moscow’s influence over the “near abroad.” Some historical perspective is in order. In August 1948, Kennan submitted a major policy memorandum regarding U.S. territorial objectives in the event of a military victory over the Soviet Union. While acknowledging the desire for independence in Ukraine and the push for such independence by the Ukrainian diaspora, he concluded that “there is no clear dividing line between Russia and the Ukraine… . [Setting up an independent Ukraine] would be as artificial and as destructive as an attempt to separate the American Corn Belt, including the Great Lakes industrial area, from the economy of the United States.” He warned: “We cannot be indifferent to the feelings of the Russians. Any long-term US policy must be based on their acceptance and cooperation. A solution which attempts to separate the Ukraine entirely from the rest of Russia is bound to incur their resentment and opposition, and can be maintained only by force.”6 He suggested instead a federation with considerable Ukrainian autonomy. When the issue of NATO expansion emerged in the 1990s, Kennan warned a friend in the Clinton administration that by extending NATO’s borders “smack up to those of Russia, we are making the greatest mistake of Western policy in the entire post-Cold-War era.” Kennan predicted the expansion would “inflame the existing nationalistic, anti-western, and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion, have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy, restore the atmosphere of the Cold War.”7 In response, the friend stressed the benefits for the former Soviet bloc nations in joining NATO and predicted that the Russians would soon accept the new reality. The lesson of the past two decades is that the Russians still resent and feel humiliated over the U.S. military presence close to their borders. These feelings feed Vladimir Putin’s popularity. Admitting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO would further inflame relations for a long time. Would such expansion really serve U.S. national interests? Moreover, the further NATO extends to the east, the more it undercuts the credibility of the collective security pledge at the heart of the alliance. The Cold War entailed considerable anguish over the difficulty of mounting a conventional defense along the German-German border and over whether America would really risk New York to avenge Hamburg. Leaving aside President Trump’s views on alliances, would America risk New York for Riga or Tallinn? Footnotes 1 Geoffrey C. Ward, ed., Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley (New York, 1995), 250. 2 Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances (Princeton, NJ, 2012), 323. 3 Ibid., 322. 4 John Morton Blum, The Price of Vision (Boston, MA, 1973), 451. 5 Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–2006 (New York, 2008), 61. 6 The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, vol. 2, ed. Anna Kasten Nelson (New York, 1983), 406–7. 7 George F. Kennan to Strobe Talbott, January 31, 1992, folder 4, box 47, George F. Kennan Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Library, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

2018 Diplomatic History

doi: 10.1093/dh/dhy045

What are the risks to global security when a disrupter rises to lead a nuclear-armed superpower? Imagine a leader who publicly vows “to smash [adversaries] in the teeth”; or who issues an off-hand nuclear threat to a foreign adversary while talking to a group of school teachers, saying “we have rockets which can land precisely at a preset target 13,000 kilometers away. This, if you want, is a warning ….”1 Two generations ago the world’s most volatile saber rattler was in the Kremlin. Nikita S. Khrushchev had threatened the use of nuclear weapons against France and the United Kingdom in the Suez Crisis of 1956; he demanded a re-drawing of the postwar settlement over Berlin in 1958; and he had loosely but energetically mentioned the possibility of protecting the Castro revolution with a nuclear attack from the USSR in 1960. John F. Kennedy came to office knowing Khrushchev had a record of nuclear bluster, but he was uncertain of what lay behind it all. How much of these statements were bluff, and how much a product of an aggressive, unyielding position? The conventional wisdom among most seasoned Kremlin watchers was that behind the scenes Khrushchev was actually a moderating force in Soviet foreign behavior. His fiery performances reflected not merely a personality quirk but an effort to appease a hardline faction in the Kremlin and the military. Building upon this analysis, President Kennedy believed that if Nikita Khrushchev received the respect and attention denied him by the hyper anti-Soviet Eisenhower administration, the Soviet leader would not only dial down the volume, but could beat back the hawks around him, permitting international relations to achieve some sort of calmer equipoise. But Kennedy misjudged Khrushchev, and Washington’s inability to understand the Soviet leader would lead to the eighteen most dangerous months to date in the nuclear era, when the superpowers almost dragged each other into wars over Laos, Berlin, and then most dramatically, Cuba. Although the Soviet Union is gone, the reasons for that misunderstanding hold valuable lessons in a world where authoritarians still control some closed societies armed with nuclear weapons. The misunderstanding of Kim Jung-il in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein before the Iraq War, and possibly Kim Jong-un today reflect an unwillingness to learn the lessons of dealing with the first nuclear bluffer. Nikita Khrushchev’s deep ideological commitment to the Soviet experiment did not blind him to the reality of Moscow’s comparative weakness in the superpower struggle. What proved so incomprehensible to Western minds, especially after intelligence on the Soviet war machine improved, was that Khrushchev did not respond to the facts of Soviet military inferiority with caution. In fact, it had the opposite effect on him. He saw the United States as an existential threat and took more risks. Khrushchev tirelessly supported Soviet allies, avidly recruited new ones, and pushed for changes in the dividing lines between the two Blocs with a confidence that belied any sense of insecurity. And to make these actions succeed, Khrushchev adopted what one might term a “puffer fish strategy,” rhetorically blowing up Soviet military power to scare away a much bigger fish, the United States. He routinely and shamelessly lied in public about the number of Soviet strategic missiles, their accuracy and their ability to hit the United States. He also made clear a willingness to use them. In May 1961 President Kennedy opted to reassure Khrushchev that the United States sought to coexist peacefully with the USSR. He deployed his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy as a backchannel to lay the ground for a productive superpower summit. It turns out, however, that backchannels and summits are not attractive to leaders who are on a mission to revise the bases of the international system, unless you are prepared to give in to their demands. Absent a complete U.S. capitulation over the presence of North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops in West Berlin, a demand Khrushchev associated with the continued existence of East Germany, the Soviet leader was spoiling for a crisis in 1961. In the last Presidium meeting (the term then used for the Politburo) before he set off for Vienna, Khrushchev unnerved his colleagues by explaining his plan to blockade West Berlin and even use force in a limited way if Kennedy did not give in to his central demand. “Our position is very strong, but we will have, of course, to really intimidate them now. For example, if there is any flying around, we will have to bring aircraft down … if we want it to be acknowledged, respected and feared, it is necessary to be firm.”2 Not surprisingly, the summit that followed in Vienna did not bring a meeting of the minds. Kennedy, who refused to budge on the status of West Berlin, was mystified that Khrushchev had come to intimidate him. “[I]t was a shock to him,” Robert Kennedy later recalled, “that somebody would be as harsh and … definite as this.”3 Instead of following up on the arms control and other proposals JFK had earlier sent through the fraternal backchannel, Khrushchev issued an ultimatum over Berlin and gave the United States six months to acquiesce. During the months of tension that followed, U.S. intelligence was unable to shed light on Khrushchev’s thinking. Thanks to a breakthrough in satellite technology, however, by September 1961 the CIA could assure Kennedy that the United States had much less to fear about the Soviet Union. Photographs of Soviet bases proved that the Soviets were way behind in the missile race. The new intelligence about Soviet weakness sparked a debate among Kennedy’s National Security staff over how to use this information to get Khrushchev to stop provoking crises over Berlin and elsewhere. Kennedy and his advisors convinced themselves that if Khrushchev were told that the United States knew the score and could not be threatened by fake news about Soviet strategic superiority, he would be more interested in relaxing tensions. Washington could not have been more wrong. In October 1961, the number two at the Pentagon, Roswell Gilpatric, gave a speech laying out the reality of the superpower relationship. And the effect was completely counterproductive. With the United States effectively saying that the “Emperor has No Clothes,” Khrushchev sensed his decade-long puffer fish strategy falling apart. Yet he did not back down. He became more aggressive. At a secret Kremlin meeting on January 8, 1962, Khrushchev unveiled the most dangerous policy ever adopted by the Soviet Union in the nuclear age. To deter a stronger, and more confident America, Khrushchev believed Moscow had no choice but to bring the major regions around the United States to the brink of war to distract Kennedy and the Pentagon. The disastrous decision to put missiles in Cuba, which Khrushchev would advocate only a few months later, grew out of this strategy of seeking ways to scare Kennedy and the American people. It would take the terrible events of the Cuban missile crisis for Khrushchev to see that his dangerous strategy of bluff had failed. It turned out that Khrushchev saw international relations not as a game of chicken, but poker. He bluffed, and when Kennedy called him, he folded. It is reasonable to speculate that as the missile crisis unfolded, and as Kennedy refused to give in, the looming prospect of mass casualties forced Khrushchev to understand that the risks associated with his strategy had become intolerable. We will never know for sure. What is clear is that the Cuban missile crisis doomed Khrushchev’s world strategy. He not only dropped the “puffer fish” approach, but a few months later agreed to a version of the test ban treaty that Kennedy had originally offered him before Vienna, without getting any change in the status of West Berlin. The lessons of the Khrushchev example of bluff cuts in different directions. Analysts should not be afraid to see weakness behind offensive rhetoric and deception. And however hard it may seem to some Americans, insecure foreign leaders often see us as an existential threat regardless of how inoffensive we think we might be. If the George W. Bush administration had concluded that Saddam Hussein had adopted a variation on Khrushchev’s puffer fish strategy to deter the United States, as well as Israeli and Iranian power, might it have restrained the dogs of war in 2003? Might analyses of Kim Jong-un change if he were considered simply another in a long line of North Korean dictators who sought to use our fears of nuclear attack to compensate for his strategic weakness? On the other hand, letting a weak authoritarian know you grasp his weakness may well lead to reinforcing a strategy of bluff, as Khrushchev did in the first half of 1962. What is the sweet spot? The good news is that if the bluffer is not suicidal, there is a point beyond which he will not go. But can one feel confident of this in advance? What made the Cuban missile crisis so dangerous was that Kennedy could not be sure that Khrushchev would remove the missiles to avoid war. In that instance, an approach that combined toughness and an escape route worked. But what if the leader is not a Khrushchev? The enduring challenge for policymakers who face puffer fish is figuring out the safest way to let the air out. Footnotes 1 William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York, 2003), 473; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble (New York, 1998), 52. 2 Ibid., 358. 3 Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman, eds., Robert Kennedy in His Own Words (New York, 1991), 29. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

2018 Diplomatic History

doi: 10.1093/dh/dhy044

Despite his Cold War rhetoric, John F. Kennedy wanted to improve U.S.-Soviet relations after he took office in January 1961. In his inaugural address, Kennedy suggested that they “begin anew the quest for peace.” After only a month, Kennedy invited Nikita S. Khrushchev to an informal summit meeting, believing that the Soviet leader would appreciate this gesture of respect. Kennedy allowed wishful thinking to color his preparation for the summit, which was scheduled for June 3–4, 1961, in Vienna. Khrushchev was determined to obtain some form of recognition of the East German government and an end to West Berlin’s status as a Western enclave inside East Germany. He had given President Dwight D. Eisenhower a six-month ultimatum in November 1958, which he had withdrawn based on the promise of East-West negotiations. Kennedy should have anticipated that Khrushchev would bring up the difficult Berlin issue. Instead, Kennedy focused on achieving a test ban treaty and neutralizing Laos. These were secondary issues for Khrushchev whereas the survival of East Germany, its legitimacy, and closing off the flow of refugees through West Berlin were vital Soviet interests. At Vienna, Kennedy wanted to negotiate a truce in the Cold War. Why could each side not accept the spheres of influence and the global distribution of power as then existed? Kennedy told Khrushchev that the ideological struggle should be conducted in a way “which would not involve the two countries directly and would not affect their national interest or prestige.”1 Kennedy exaggerated and characterized Sino-Soviet forces and the forces of the United States and Western Europe as being more or less “in balance,” thrilling Khrushchev, who would refer to this “admission” numerous times.2 Kennedy should not have given Khrushchev the false impression that he was prepared to treat the Soviet Union as an equal superpower. The U.S. president did not believe that strategic parity—should the Soviets achieve it—would mean Soviet political or diplomatic equality. Like other U.S. officials throughout the Cold War, Kennedy did not regard the Soviet Union as an equal partner because its communist political system was not legitimate, not freely elected, or responsive to the will of its citizens. In Kennedy’s view, the USSR was not a civilized state, not a member of the Western community, and not entitled to do what the United States was entitled to do. In response to Kennedy’s request that the Kremlin exercise restraint in intervening in Third World conflicts, Khrushchev retorted that the United States seemed to want the USSR “to sit like a schoolboy with its hands on the desk.”3 The Soviet Union could not accept being told, “don’t poke your nose” while the United States “spread its forces all over.”4 For Khrushchev, the United States practiced a double standard. Khrushchev viewed Kennedy’s suggestion that the status quo should be preserved as insulting and humiliating. Accepting the status quo in the Cold War would have required Khrushchev to give up his vision of communism as a dynamic system, attracting the support of peoples throughout the world, a view that he publicly espoused and privately believed. On the second day of the Vienna summit, Khrushchev informed Kennedy that resolution of the issues persisting since the end of World War II could no longer be delayed. If they failed to reach an agreement, Khrushchev threatened to sign a separate peace with East Germany in six months that would eliminate Western occupation rights for West Berlin. With the Berlin issue perceived as a vital interest for both sides, the summit broke up, to JFK’s great consternation and disappointment. Kennedy was more confident about his response after receiving new intelligence from satellite photographs showing that Khrushchev was bluffing in his boasts about Soviet ICBMs. The Soviets had no more than eight launching pads, and their current missile was unstable and liquid-fueled. In a July 25 speech, moreover, Kennedy announced that he wanted to increase the military budget by $3.25 billion, mostly for conventional forces. He also called up some reserves and tripled draft calls. But he refused to declare a state of national emergency, as some of his advisers wanted. He also offered to negotiate a settlement of Berlin and the German question. Given U.S. recognition of the imbalance of power, Khrushchev tried desperately to find a way to extricate himself from a crisis of his own making. In an October 1961 speech before the 22nd Communist Party Congress of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev retracted his six-month ultimatum on the grounds that the West was showing a “certain understanding” of the Berlin situation and was inclined to seek a solution—statements that cost him and the Soviet Union substantial prestige.5 Despite Khrushchev’s public retreat, Kennedy authorized Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric to deliver a speech in which he revealed that the so-called “missile gap” in the Soviets’ favor was a myth. He made it clear that the United States could absorb a surprise Soviet attack and retaliate with greater destructive force than the Soviets could deliver in a first strike. In another effort to humiliate and intimidate the Soviet adversary, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1962, emphasizing that the United States had “clear military superiority for major nuclear conflict.”6 Although Kennedy’s articulation of U.S. strength and his unflinching commitment to West Berlin were textbook applications of deterrence strategy, the public belittling of Soviet power and status was not wise. Khrushchev did not react as strategic theory would predict. Khrushchev was insecure and hypersensitive, both about his domestic political situation and the status of his country vis-à-vis the world’s recognized superpower. He adopted an aggrieved tone over Kennedy’s refusal to withdraw from West Berlin. Believing that the United States was acting arrogantly because of its nuclear superiority, in July 1962, Khrushchev complained to U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Llewellyn Thompson that American officials dwelled on issues, such as Berlin, as matters affecting American prestige, but “never seemed to take Soviet prestige into account.”7 Instead of being deterred, Khrushchev embarked on a daring gamble to rectify the strategic balance. He secretly placed medium-range missiles in Cuba. By threatening U.S. power on its own periphery, Khrushchev believed he could obtain leverage on West Berlin. After the Soviet Union’s clandestine installation was revealed by a U-2 surveillance flight, Kennedy enacted a blockade of Cuba and demanded the withdrawal of the Soviet medium range missiles from Cuba. While Kennedy was justified in his request for removing the missiles, which, if not removed, would make Cuba a Soviet military base in the Western hemisphere, Khrushchev regarded the demand as a challenge to Soviet power and prestige. In an October 27 letter to Kennedy at the height of the missile crisis, Khrushchev complained about Washington’s double standard: Did not the United States have military bases around the Soviet Union? “How then can recognition of our equal military capacities be reconciled with such unequal relations between our great states? This is irreconcilable.”8 After Kennedy succeeded in getting the Soviets to remove their missiles from Cuba by combining deployments of U.S. forces and manifestations of U.S. determination with artful diplomacy, secret concessions to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey, and sensitivity to Khrushchev’s political needs, Kennedy was determined to move forward to improve relations. He wanted to reach agreement with the Soviet Union on a test ban, even if it meant giving up U.S. demands for onsite inspections. Kennedy had learned the importance of giving due recognition to the Soviet Union. In his June 10, 1963, commencement address at American University, Kennedy outlined a strategy for peace. He said that the Cold War was not entirely the Soviets’ fault. This was the first time that a president had suggested that the United States was at least partially to blame for the Cold War. He pointed out that the United States and the Soviet Union had their differences, but they also had shared interests in avoiding a war and in halting the arms race. Kennedy recognized that it was important to Khrushchev that the United States accept the Soviet Union as an equal partner, not an outlaw or a pariah. The speech changed the atmosphere, and led to a détente and the Limited Test Ban. While Russia today no longer possesses the relative power it had in the Kennedy-Khrushchev era, the United States now needs Russian cooperation on many issues, such as North Korea, Iran, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Syria. Kennedy’s experience in negotiating with Khrushchev suggests the importance of avoiding embarrassing meetings as happened at the Vienna summit and at the initial meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Preliminary diplomacy and consultation among experts are necessary prerequisites for productive talks between the leaders of Russia and the United States. Moreover, American officials should refrain from reminding Russia of its economic weakness. While there is no need to give lip service to Russian equality or to a U.S.-Russian partnership, there is also no need to humiliate as when President Barack Obama said Russia was merely “a regional power.”9 Recognizing Russia’s sensitivities about its loss of superpower status, the United States should be cautious about even the appearance of interference in neighboring states such as Ukraine and Georgia that Russia has long viewed as part of its “sphere of privileged interests.”10 Even during the heyday of the Cold War, Democratic and Republican presidents alike—Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon—knew they should not challenge Soviet interests in Eastern Europe if they wanted to avoid war and establish trust that could lead to fruitful diplomacy. Footnotes 1 Memorandum of Conversation, June 3, 1961, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1961–1963, vol. 5, Soviet Union, ed. Charles S. Sampson and John Michael Joyce (Washington, DC, 1998), doc. 83, 176. 2 Memorandum of Conversation, June 3, 1961, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 5, doc. 85, 187; Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963 (New York, 1991), 202. 3 Memorandum of Conversation, June 3, 1961, FRUS, 1963–1963, vol. 5, doc. 83, 177. 4 Memorandum of Conversation, June 4, 1961, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 5, doc. 87, 208. 5 Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston, MA, 1965), 400. 6 Quoted in Beschloss, Crisis Years, 370. 7 Thompson to Department of State, July 26, 1962, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 15, Berlin Crisis, 1962–1963, ed. Charles S. Sampson (Washington, DC, 1994), doc. 88, 254. 8 Message from Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, October 27, 1962, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. 6, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges, ed. Charles S. Sampson (Washington, DC, 1996), doc. 66, 179. 9 Paul Richter, “Obama Puts Ukraine in Perspective,” Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2014. 10 President Dmitri Medvedev Interview Given to Television Channels Channel One, Rossia, NTV, August 31, 2008, accessed January 24, 2018, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/48301. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

2018 Diplomatic History

doi: 10.1093/dh/dhy040

Vladimir Putin’s announcement to run for another term makes him the most durable leader in Russia’s recent history. Some think of Putin as “the new Brezhnev,” who might die in office many years from now. But is it fair to compare Putin to Leonid Brezhnev? Can the Soviet past provide any lessons for Russia’s present and future? What should the United States expect of Putin? The comparison between Brezhnev and Putin reveals more differences than similarities. Brezhnev, who stayed in power for eighteen years, owed his whole political career to the ruling communist party. He had lived through the age of revolution and war, and perhaps for this reason yearned for stability, order and relaxation. His foreign policy was conservative. His personal insecurity and experience of the Second World War made Brezhnev feel that the Soviet Union, one of the two superpowers, was a major stakeholder in global stability, and should seek to prevent a major war. Brezhnev inherited the giant territorial empire and the bloc of allied socialist countries. He knew that the Soviet empire was vulnerable and feared a domino-effect. He said after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968: “If we had not disrupted the plans of counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia, NATO troops would soon end up immediately on our Western borders.”1 Brezhnev believed that the accumulation of military power was a precondition for the Soviets’ role and place in the world. At the same time, he realized that the Soviet Union could not win a race against the United States, and loathed