Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The End Of The Col

I am i am a research kkilo at the Hoover Institution and its my pleasure to introduce robert. Robert is going to tell us about his new book, the end of a cold war. His book will be published by publicaffairs in the u. S. And in great britain. Hes a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and americas professor at the College Oxford in england. He is the author of biographies in the russian revolution. He discovered america only in the year 2004. Ever since then hes been delving in the soviet state in communist and communist records held by the communist institution. It was the hoover archives so a few words about the time and place. Across the Portrait Party of courtyard behind your documentary records of communism and dictatorship in many countries. Every year scholars from around the world to take part in the annual per institution regimes directed by hoover fellow paul gregory. The scholars are all here today in the audience. This presentation is one of the keynote events of the program. Robert will now address us all with the end of the cold war. [applause] thank you very much for that generous introduction. What i want to talk about today is the subject of my new book which is about a war that never became a war. Although it was a cold war in the sense of the threat of military conflict throughout its existence it was the non war over the third world poor which could have obliterated human and animal life on the entire planet on around the earth. It really was a truly dangerous phenomenon of the cold war. There had been many in history. The british and french were in cold war or most of the centuries back to the norman conquest. They engaged in many with each other but the cold war that we know, that was the most dangerous war of all and god is never became a hot war. There were wars between the principal allies of the principal agents of the cold war, namely the soviet union and the United States of america. They were in africa between allies on one side and allies on the other side of america into the ussr never went to war with each other even though it came very close to that for times for example in 1962 and again in 1983. The account for the end of the cold war tended to be onesided and concentrate either predominantly on the american side with the soviet side and the reason i thought it was worth writing a new book about the end of the cold war was it seemed to me very few people have looked at the end of the cold war as a twosided process, as a bilateral process. And looked properly at the interaction between the two superpowers. Pay is extremely important because the cold war didnt end with a peace treaty in because there was no hot war. Because the state has a cold war if it was going to end as he called for it was always going to end with a fundamental process of interaction. And so i concentrated on looking at a number of materials and i did look at materials in moscow. We do have some very Good Administration materials in oxford. There were some marvelous materials in the sunny valley in the reagan president ial library that above all as was at once the material inside the institution over there in, the Hoover Institution archives to use that i use more than anything else and they are so rich in showing us a way to look at the end of the cold war, this very dangerous pinko in World History not just through memoirs but because as we know politicians write memoirs so as to look good for posterity and they are bound to be somewhat onesided. Interviews are very helpful. I had a disastrous interview in the 90s before i even thought of this book and he said what are you interested in and i said im writing a biography of lenin at the moment and he said its very interesting and then he cut the conversation short because for him to it remained in remains a sensitive topic. They didnt have the same sensitivity to mark the gorbachev did. Its possible to look at the binaries from the ministers of affairs. Quite extraordinary by a aids to the foreign minister but also the diaries of the deputy minister in the soviet administration and also the Party Defense official who kept maps and copies of discussions. If you add those materials to the american side we can have access to the papers of reagan and to some extent George Schultz, bill casey then we can get a way forward to understand how this terrible threat to the third world war would avoid that particular generation of leaders and i picked out for her leaders in the process of ending the cold war. On the american side, Ronald Reagan and George Schultz. On the soviet side, Mikael Gorbachev and his foreign minister. One of the questions one has to ask about the process and of ending the cold war is what was it that made the ussr jump . Why did they resist western pressure to the 50s, 60s and 70s and yet they started to make massive concussions in the second half of the 1980s. When i found is that contrary to what they kill gorbachev likes to suggest the change of attitude to the soviet internal crisis that did not occur only when he came to power in 1985. The material showed the Public Bureau repeatedly looked at the fundamental social, religious and imperial problems with relation to Eastern Europe. Problems that couldnt afford to solve in the old way because the soviet economy was going through it was draining away resources particularly after the invasion of afghanistan at the end of 1979 so that repeatedly in the first half of the 1980s they were looking at matters that it had inched away from an earlier decades but what but what they did is look at the symptoms and it didnt sink up to the realistic options of what the cures that have a crisis on its hands. He knew things were very, very bad about it turned its face away from options that might have led to a realistic internal viewer to those problems. If you look at the National Histories of their recent years, the french claim to have spotted orbit shop early. The british repeatedly make the same claim. The canadians have a very good case for being the first in two predictive gorbachev came to power he would be the one who would make a big transformation. Perhaps Margaret Thatcher had the most influence in recommending gorbachev to Ronald Reagan. But a number of countries knew that this was a man who was waiting in the wings and was an important man to friend and to enable. The crucial selector it was the bureau if south that on balance decided after half a decade of crisis in the early 1980s to make corporate child the general secretary and then the reforms began. And then the process of fundamental reform began under his generals if a ship which began in march of 1985. So, the second question to answer is why did he get away with it . My answer to this is partly that the problems had piled up so visibly that practically everyone in the bureau knew that something drastic has to be done. It wasnt just this magician in the kremlin. They have become demoralized. He got away with his program really in the Foreign Policy i think its fair to say that the documents suggest he got away with what he wanted to do in foreign and Security Policy until 1989. There was practically no dispute about the general orientation towards america. He wasnt dragging the bureau is by the head of hair. They went along with him and they went along with him because he constantly said he was a communist believer that he would consume the communist rule. So happened that he destroyed the ussr in the end but that wasnt how he presented himself or was thought of in the early years of his rule. The bureau recognized and this comes out to its minutes in the archives again and again and again not because they wanted quite the scale of internal reform that gorbachev eventually went for it because for various reasons the leaders of each of the big Public Institutions solve a need to have a breathing space in which to conduct an internal adjustment of the soviet Political Economic and social system so that for some of them it was a moral matter and from most of them it was a very practical pragmatic political and economic matter it something drastic needs to be done. So they went along with the Foreign Policy for those reasons and one of the cardinal features of the negotiations between the americans and the soviets was a Strategic Defense Initiative. We can now see if we look at the Party Defense Department Discussions a lot of officials thought it was a sham. A lot of american officials even in the Reagan Administration thought it would never work. They tended to endorse the Strategic Defense Initiative because it did seem to scare the soviets. And it did seem to be provoking fundamental attitudes towards international negotiations. The soviets, gorbachev among those people didnt believe the Strategic Defense Initiative would work. He thought he could wreck the soviet economy and he decided it would wreck the soviet economy had but they couldnt take the risk of acting on the basis that it was not going to work. There was always a possibility however outlandish that it would work and from that point of view the Reagan Administration did place an additional crucial pressure on the soviet union. Most of the big Public Institutions went along with the reconciliation with america for the reasons i just described. And this was really quite striking to me. That included the general staff. When there were problems with the arms negotiations, the general staff was often very abstract as to gorbachev. He handled them really brilliantly, he nursed them along. He made the chief of the general staff into his own military advisor. He did a lot of things to nursed them along that even the general staff recognized that if they were going to remain a world with three power, there have to be a has to be a change in the soviet economy that had to mean also the concessions had to be made from the old principle of what the general staff staff wants it has to once it has to get. So even the general staff was less obstructive to gorbachev then it might have been. He got into problems in Eastern Europe when they broke away in 1989 and 1990. It was then the elements in the bureau started to question whether it the reconciliation with america was worth continuing with. And one does have to say that the records show he retreated into a kind of government. He took decisions on german reunification in the summer of 1990 mainly on the basis of discussion with his own aides rather than ventilating in advance what he was going to agree with regarding german reunification and germanys future nato membership. So things went well for him because he had a good start. He was pushed well by the bureau and when he ran into difficulties, he was a far from weak ruler. He made lots of errors. His management of the economy was catastrophic. The nation of the economy was dramatic. I remember going to moscow in 1990 going into a gigantic dairy supermarket where nothing was sold but butter, milk, yogurt and associated products. There were about 20 dairy counter assistants in the supermarket and there was absolutely no milk, not a single bottle, can work of the milk in the whole supermarket. It was an absolutely catastrophic period of management of the economy. But on the side of International Relations, gorbachev got his way right towards the end of the soviet unions entire existence. I said i wanted to focus on interaction as much as possible. Where do the americans come into all of this . The Strategic Defense Initiative did make a difference. What also made a difference as the succession of american president s have maintained more or less in its entirety the technological transfer. This didnt have an Immediate Impact but they had an impact that the soviet union was cut off from cargill Technological Innovations that were then spreading through the western economies. More or less left the ussr gasping and the only way that the ussr could acquire this new technology was to steal it through industrial espionage so the ussr was left gasping he sells the ingrained that he wont sell them computers. He wont sell them at microsoft and the leadership recognizes that its been left and its been told by the secretary you are being left behind. You are a backward power now. He is correct with an initiation dont you realize that you are being left in the economic dust of history . America demands that tied not just for the need for disarmament but also the demand for disengagement from military intervention in africa, disengagement from the alliance with cuba and probably the most important demand for the internal reform of the ussr. The Reagan Administration was very firm about this that it had to have a reliable partner in these negotiations and a two to teller. Systems such as the one party one ideology state was. That wouldnt make for reliable negotiations. So time and again, the date was put on the hook for the big fish. If you want disarmament treaties your economic problems, youve got to do something about the internal political situation in the ussr, and theres got to be no concessions on the americans side so the americans were very crucial in moving this process forward. In another way they would limit their economic assistance. This didnt really come up too often in the negotiations when reagan was in power. It cropped up often under george bush, and bush and his secretary of state were frequently asked by the soviet side to bail out the soviet economy and they refused. Baker was very direct to the effect that until they reform their economy does have the money wasted which indeed i think personally it would have been wasted. Gorbachev really didnt know how to waste money. It was a great political figure in history. He reformed the ussr. He destroyed the ussr in the process of reforming it. As an economic manager he was quite appallingly inept. European leaders didnt always hope the process along as well as they might have done. Having welcomed the power to gorbachev decided to regard him as a dangerous enemy. It was only in the middle of 1987 that thatcher had any time for gorbachev at all so in the early period of the rapprochement between the ussr, the preeminent leadership was in washington. This was very striking to me when looking at the french records and the eight british records and to the extent that the germans played the cardinal rule, it was namely and we now can see because they were leaves them very closely with washington about practically all the steps that they took in 1989 and 1992 words the german reunification. So i think that they have tended to overplay the rule when they wrote memoirs opening their archives as the americans are over here. George bush closebrace george bush was very slow to realign. He engaged with a dumped a euphemism for the reinfection of the very frosty relations of washington and moscow in the first half of 1989. But once it became clear that gorbachev was willing to counter the independence of east european states, then george bush changed his stance and basically became a reaganite. And at the summit in december, 1989, he pushed the line that Ronald Reagan would have pushed if he had still been president. Now you have therefore the soviet leadership responding to pressure, responding to its own internal crisis, you have the americans piling on the pressure continued to pile on the pressure but making friendly enough gestures for the reconciliation to take place. The interaction, however, was very far from being a smooth process. Gorbachev had insisted in a way that he made announcements without prior consultation with Reagan Reagan and in the january january 1986 declaration on the Nuclear Disarmament, he promised Global Nuclear disarmament by total disarmament around the world by the year 2000 and the americans naturally said what does he really intend to do and they found that he had frontloaded the stages of disarmament in such a way as to only benefit only the ussr at the expense of the usa. This is a very hamfisted way of going on. Sometimes the american side over did it as overdid it as we can see from the soviet records in the conversations Ronald Reagan could make jokes on inappropriate occasions. He likes making irish jokes which he thought were not offensive but were extremely offensive. My father was irish. I like irish jokes about they were not funny to the foreign minister. They were not at all funny to him because he was a Georgia National and he didnt like the Little People of the world being mocked so he didnt look at these jokes with the same spectacles that westerners looked at and he actually said this to reagan i really wish you would stop these jokes come and George Shultz rebuked his own president about this wave going on. So he wasnt the perfect negotiator. You mustnt engage in this. I do think he was a brilliant negotiator. He was an old trade unionist and he really did know how to hang out for a deal. If he sometimes overdid it, weinberger and casey always overdid it can always save to reagan you shouldnt be dealing with these people. Lets just keep to the old way that we had in the early 1980s just piling on t