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History As It Happens
Owl of Minerva (Getting the Cold War Right)
01:15:09
For half a century, the Cold War defined global politics. Contested by two superpowers with opposing ideologies and interests, it touched nearly every part of the globe. It threatened nuclear war, and brought incalculable devastation to its...
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- [00:01]
Martin DeCaro
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- [00:28]
Vladislav Zubok
History as it happens July 29, 2025 Owl of Minerva if Greece should fall.
- [00:34]
Sergei Radchenko
Under the control of an armed minority, the effect upon its neighbor Turkey would be immediate and serious.
- [00:40]
John F. Kennedy
Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Moscow heads the communist world in mourning the passing of Joseph Stalin of a long twilight struggle year in and year.
- [00:58]
Ronald Reagan
The young people of Prague sitting down in the path of Soviet tanks.
- [01:02]
John F. Kennedy
Massive Soviet military forces have invaded the small, non aligned sovereign nation of Afghanistan.
- [01:09]
Ronald Reagan
They are the focus of evil in the modern world.
- [01:11]
Henry Kissinger
Thousands and thousands of West Germans come.
- [01:14]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
To make the point that the Wall.
- [01:16]
Henry Kissinger
Has suddenly become irrelevant.
- [01:20]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
After six and a half years in power, Mikhail Gorbachev confirmed his resignation on television. Tonight.
- [01:26]
Mikhail Gorbachev
I'd like to express on behalf of the my gratitude to Mikhail Gorbachev.
- [01:32]
John F. Kennedy
The tricolor banner of the Russian Republic now flies over the Kremlin.
- [01:36]
Vladislav Zubok
For half a century, the Cold War defined global politics contested by two superpowers with opposing ideologies and interests. It touched nearly every part of the world. It threatened nuclear war and brought incalculable devastation to its battlefields from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan. Could it have been avoided? Did the US Win? Or did the Soviet Union surrender? And where can we find Cold War continuities as the world unravels today? That's next, as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [02:06]
Henry Kissinger
The more you read books like this, the more owls you see all around you, because you start to understand history from different perspectives. And you understand too that it is very difficult to consistently argue one particular interpretation, because there are always others there who are also in command of historical documents, who have access to sources, who will tell a different story.
- [02:39]
Vladislav Zubok
What is fascinating about the Cold War is that it had origin points and end points, plural. There is no single date you can point to and say, there, that's when it started.
- [02:49]
Sergei Radchenko
It is necessary only to glance at a map to realize that the survival and integrity of the Greek nation are of grave importance in a much wider situation.
- [03:02]
Vladislav Zubok
And at the end, if you consider December 25, 1991, the end, Eastern Europe.
- [03:08]
Mikhail Gorbachev
Is free The Soviet Union itself is no more. This is a victory for democracy and freedom. It's a victory for the moral force of our values. Every American can take pride in this victory. From the millions of men and women who've served our country in uniform to millions of Americans who supported their country and a strong defense under nine presidents.
- [03:34]
Vladislav Zubok
Well before President Bush addressed the American people on that Christmas day, after Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down as President of the Soviet Union, well before that date, the Cold War had de escalated at many points along the timeline. For instance, when Gorbachev agreed not to block a UN Security Council resolution authorizing force against Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf, at least that's when James Baker said he believed the Cold War was over. Now some people today say the Cold War never ended because of Russian revanchism and the so called wars of Soviet succession or the rise of China. Well, it did end, but there are continuities and Russian forces are closing in.
- [04:15]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
On Kyiv with skirmishes dotting the outskirts.
- [04:18]
Vladislav Zubok
Of the Ukrainian capital.
- [04:19]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Ukraine has been victim of unprovoked aggression by Russian Federation.
- [04:23]
Ronald Reagan
Defending freedom will have cost.
- [04:26]
Vladislav Zubok
Vladimir Putin's full scale invasion of Ukraine might bring to mind the Soviets in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. Using massive violence to preserve a sphere of influence. Another important continuity comes to mind, one that transcends centuries of international relations. Misreading your opponent's motivations, aims, capabilities, all throughout the Cold War, Cold warriors got these wrong. But it would also be wrong to chalk up this globe defining conflict as just a big misunderstanding. In the conclusion of his terrific new book, the World of the Cold War, historian Vladislav Zubok writes the triumphalism of the liberal order and the mislearned or unlearned lessons from the past appear self evident 30 years after the end of the Cold War. At the same time, he writes, it would be another folly, perhaps the ultimate one, to assume that at any time in any country a new generation of political leaders can avoid the mistakes of the past purely by being excellent students of history. There is no perfect knowledge or universal theory about how and why things may go wrong in international relations. Zubak says new democratic elites, just like new autocratic rulers, are bound to walk into the same minefields in semi ignorance, driven by uncertainty, fear, arrogance, selfishness and myopic readings of the past. As one diplomatic veteran remarked, almost every government works day to day by the seat of its pants, responding with inadequate information to events beyond its control, driven by timetables set by others. So as I read this book I thought about current events. Does the US Today understand Putin any better than, say, Kennan understood Stalin or Kennedy, Khrushchev or Nixon, Brezhnev or Reagan? Gorbachev and vice versa.
- [06:17]
Ronald Reagan
Mr. Gorbachev, Mir Nanas Shmat. The world is watching, and we've got something to show them.
- [06:26]
Vladislav Zubok
If the Cold War could have been avoided, then maybe today's conflicts, too could have been avoided. But how? Think about that question as you listen to historian Vladislav Zubak of the London School of Economics and Political Science and author of the aforementioned the World of The Cold War 1945-1991, published this year by Penguin Random House and historian Sergei Radchenko of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of To Run the the Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power, published last year. The three of us discussed it on the podcast. Vladislav Zubak and Sergei Radchenko Our conversation.
- [07:06]
Martin DeCaro
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- [07:35]
Vladislav Zubok
Vote Vladislav Zubak, welcome back to the podcast.
- [07:41]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Thank you for inviting me, Martin.
- [07:42]
Vladislav Zubok
Sergei Radchenko, welcome back to the show.
- [07:45]
Henry Kissinger
Martin, great to be back to talk about Cold War. The Cold War again.
- [07:49]
Vladislav Zubok
Yes, I guess we haven't spoken about it enough in the past. Well, it's great that all three of us are back together here. But, you know, before we begin, Sergei, I have a very important question to ask you. While you read this book, was the owl of Minerva perched on your shoulder?
- [08:05]
Henry Kissinger
You know, the more you read books like this, the more owls you see all around you, because you start to understand history from different perspectives. And you understand, too, that it is very difficult to consistently argue one particular interpretation because there are always others there who are also in command of historical documents, who have access to sources who will tell a different story equally convincing or even more convincing. Therefore, the more you read these books, and that's what I appreciate about reading, even about a period that I know quite a lot about. I would say what I appreciate about reading it is it's sort of like, you know, Akira Kurosawa's movie Rashomon, where you have the death of a hero, and then it's being retold from different perspectives. And I kind of feel like that about Cold War books and their authors. They retell the Cold War from different angles, and each angle has something new to tell us.
- [09:05]
Vladislav Zubok
I will tell everybody why I'm bringing up the Owl of Minerva, but I don't want to do a long monologue right now. I'm going to dive into this. Vlad, why did you write this book?
- [09:15]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Well, the two reasons. One simple Penguin approached me and said, do you like to write something for non professionals, non historians, sort of like engineers about what the Cold War was about? That was ages ago. And they, of course said yes. And then they forgot about it. And I remembered about that in 2022 for. For the reasons we all understand, you know, the Ukrainian conflict started in earnest, and I decided, well, I have to understand, is it something different? And what was that past conflict about? And a longer reason was intellectual, I would say. It's sort of my debts to my predecessors. I enjoyed all previous great books about the Cold War. Sergey knows all these names, you know, Melvin Leffler, John Gaddis. But I remember also there was the only one book written by the Russians, the Soviets, in the 70s at the height of detente. Somebody asked during the Daytone, two Soviet historians, one of which was my supervisor at the Moscow State University, to write about the Cold War. And they wrote a book. It was awful. It was so Marxist, so turgid, so deterministic, so full of capitalism versus socialism jargon. It basically sank. And no one read it. There were a couple of reviews. Well, how interesting Soviet view and all that. And then it just sank without any trace. So I always remembered that. I said, you know, maybe. Maybe I should do better. Like to look at it from another angle, from another perspective as an ex Soviet who spent half of my life inside the Soviet Union.
- [10:56]
Vladislav Zubok
So, okay, you know, well, a Marxist tome was turgid. I can't believe it.
- [11:00]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Well, you know, it can be exciting. The manifesto was great, but, you know, short.
- [11:06]
Vladislav Zubok
You know, I felt like you. You had something you needed to get off your chest when you wrote this book. You were poking a lot of holes in your witty way in our favorite mythologies. And the reason why I brought up Owl of Minerva, which you taught me about, of course, in one of our earlier podcasts. You know, the Owl of Minerva only flies at night, meaning the wisdom comes too late for us to use it. Because it occurred to me again, Sergei brought up this point. You know, we have a lot of books a Lot of new books about the Cold War now, many different interpretations, but your book reinforced in my mind that we today got the Cold War wrong or its outcome wrong. You know, Western triumphalism and the end of history. I think we all know that that was way too optimistic. But also, as the conflict was carrying on from its origins all the way through the 50s, 60s and 70s, both sides got it wrong. They both misread each other time and again. So, Vlad and Sergey, I want you to comment on this as well, but I'll start with the author. Are you arguing that given the outcomes of the Second World War and the state the Soviet Union was in, plus Stalin's paranoia, the feelings of insecurity and uncertainty that you talk about in the book, that all of this influenced Stalin's decision making and that a new conflict with the former allies was inevitable?
- [12:26]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Well, the word inevitable is a very, very loaded word. And normally historians, including myself, we try to stay away from this heavy verdict. But in this case, I would say, yes, I would say it was determined over determined. There are plenty of reasons why Europe got to be divided. You know, just look at the situation. Look how the front lines moved in 1945, right? What happened to Germany, what happened to Central Europe? And then you kind of ask a question, okay, could have been a better world if both sides kind of quietly withdrew their forces back to the Soviets, back to their borders, and the Americans would have just left Europe to its own devices. Would it have been different? And then you ask a question, simply, was it ever possible? And then you look at the broader context of two world wars and a whole period that many people, not necessarily Marxists, call the period of imperialism. People like Eric Hobsbawm, the leftist British historian. And then you come to conclusion that the divided Europe was bound to stay. The stakes of divided Europe and divided Germany and who might, might control Germany in case of, let's say American withdrew, would be extremely difficult for them to come back. If the Russians or the Soviets withdrew, it was easier, much, much easier for them to return to Berlin at some point of their, of their decision. So you kind of play with these ideas and you decide, okay, it's almost deterministic, it's determined that the divided Europe was bound to stay until some kind of either compromise or some architecture, security architecture, would emerge. And it never did. They tried. They tried a couple of years to work on it, and the full Partheid Allied Council in Germany, and they signed treaties with smaller countries, but they never signed a peace treaty with Germany. It was the Reason for it? Well, that's simplistic. You know, not many, many people wrote about it, but you kind of rehash it, you come back to it, and you also ask a question, famous Tolstoyan question. Leo Tolstoy, at the end of War and Peace, raised it. Is it all about only Napoleon's? And we can say, is it all about Stalin's in this case, or their larger forces or, you know, something like that? And I think it's combinations. And I never quite understood what Tolstoy meant at the end of War and Peace, to tell you frankly. I thought it was Napoleon's decision to move troops into Russia in 1812 and so on and so forth. But yet when Tolstoy writes, the forces of Europe marched into Russia and that brought into place such gigantic historical forces, even Napoleon could not be in full control of those forces. Well, there's some power in these words. And we, we kind of, we historians look at 1945 and 49 with millions of people going back and forth, you know, leaving Auschwitz and going back to life, leaving other concentration camps, millions of DPs, millions of returning Germans and so on. We have something absolutely gigantic and absolutely massive that not only is about Stalin or Stalinism or capitalism or liberal.
- [15:47]
Vladislav Zubok
Yeah. Sergei, do you agree it was at least somewhat inevitable?
- [15:50]
Henry Kissinger
Well, I agree with Vlatt's comment that nothing is inevitable until it happens. I mean, that's how historians tend to view things, in terms of what could have been done to prevent the Cold War. We have different schools of thought. And when you read Vlad's book, you can see sort of where he comes out in this great debate. There's one school of thought that basically argues that you couldn't do anything because Stalin was determined to expand. There was an ideological clash between communism and capitalism. Stalin had to be stopped. If he wasn't stopped, then we would have Soviet domination of the world and so on and so forth. So Stalin is responsible effectively for the Cold War. You have another view which highlights that it was American assertiveness in, in Europe, including towards Eastern Europe, which motivated Stalin to take measures that he would not have otherwise taken. He was not determined to make the world red or even make necessarily Eastern Europe red. He was happy with some basic forms of control. But then when he saw that the Americans, instead of going back to their hemisphere to reign there unmolested, decided to stay in Europe, then he changed his approach and pushed back. And as a result, we had the Cold War. But that puts the responsibility more on the Western side. You have this debate, you've had it for decades. And you know what's interesting at this point, I'm coming to this fresh after, as you know, Martin, after my own book, where I investigated this question in depth and looked at all these documents and look at all the Stalin papers. And by the way, we have Stalin. They're online now. It's fantastic. Stalin papers have been scanned. You can actually read them. And they're tens of thousands of. I don't know how many of these papers there. You can just read them and they're really quite interesting. And the crazy archival historian in me always sort of feels encouraged. I'll just find that one piece of true evidence that will tell us all about what Stalin actually thought. But it turns out it's never like this. It's never like that. And no matter how much we look into this and how much all the historians have looked into this over the last, certainly since the Cold War records opened in the early 1990s. You know, Vlad has been doing this for decades. I've also done it for many, many years. We're still having the same debate, right? We cannot agree on who's responsible. But I'll say one thing.
- [18:23]
Vladislav Zubok
It was both responsibilities. Share. But that's obviously not easy. It's easy, so. But it gets more complicated. But go ahead.
- [18:30]
Henry Kissinger
Where I think it's complicated is we cannot imagine necessarily or we cannot prove that counterfactuals would have worked out in the kind of way that we would have wanted them to work out. I'll give you an example. Let's say we feel as historians that Stalin had limited ambitions after the Second World War. Why? Well, Vlad's book makes it very clear. The Soviet Union was destroyed. There was limited appetite, really, for having another war. In fact, Stalin did not want to have another war. That's very clear. For many years after the Second World War, he was very, very cautious under those circumstances. You might argue the policy of containment, that is pushing back on the Soviet Union, that it provoked the Cold War unnecessarily and that if we only just left Stalin to chew on bits and pieces of Eastern Europe, yes, this was. Would be very sad for people of Poland or Romania or Hungary, but, you know, we would have avoided the Cold War. You could make this argument. However, here's where it becomes complicated. Stalin's caution in the post war years, you might argue, was in itself a product or reaction to American policy of containment. If this factor was not there, if containment was not there, you might say Stalin could have just stayed in place or seeing that there's vacuum there, he could have tried something and then he could have positioned himself to make a push for something even greater. In other words, you know, with the French saying, appetite comes while eating. The problem, the fundamental problem, this is where historians simply were not able to answer these questions is at the time, if you put yourself in the shoes of American policymakers back in 1945, what are you supposed to. You don't know Stalin's intentions. You don't know whether he is limited in his ambitions or whether he wants to see the world turn red. You don't know. So the safest thing to do is to pursue the kind of policies, you might argue, that cannot ultimately call for a policy of containment. Because if you don't, then you risk effectively creating the kind of vacuum which then brings the Soviet Union. And at this point, what do you say? Oh, we thought that we could trust him, and look what happened. So you're forced as a responsible policymaker to pursue the safest policy, which has tragic results.
- [20:43]
Vladislav Zubok
Containment. The Truman Doctrine, 1947.
- [20:46]
Sergei Radchenko
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destiny in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid, which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes. The world is not static and the status quo is not sacred. But we cannot allow changes in the status quo in violation of the charter of the United nations by such methods as coercion or by subterfuges, such subterfuges as political infiltration.
- [21:38]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
We can go on about the origins of the Cold War forever. But a. I insist that we must bring the previous experience of all those policymakers because they lived through two world wars. They lived through the failure of appeasement. They base their decisions not just on rationality, although there was probably this. Scenarios were in play. They based their decisions, including the decision to contain the Soviet Union, on their experience, historical experience. Well, it's fascinating that between 1945 and, let's say, even 48, 49. Even 49. I would say. I would say before the Korean War, the world was in flux. And of course, Americans invented, coined the term the Cold War. But was it really the Cold War? The situation in Europe was much more fluid. Americans were demilitarizing repeatedly. Stalin had to demilitarize because he needed all the hands in the world to rebuild Soviet economy. Soviet army was Being diminished and built down and so on and so forth, all that created all kinds of opportunities and the peace treaties were reached and all kinds of cooperation continued in Germany. So you may say what would have happened if Americans were a little bit less belligerent in their rhetoric? And then comes the question of American domestic politics, in my view, and there's a lot of literature on this, but you have to bring it to this, because American domestic politics is a crucial moment when Americans had to do something new. And in this case was a gigantic choice to become a global power. To stay in Europe, to stay in Germany. That required a lot of domestic kind of massaging, and the public had to be scared. All kind of stuff had to be done. So if we bring domestic politics into the origins of the Cold War because much more clear that Americans could not be subtle, they had to choose a policy of bludgeoning those Soviets, the Russians, on its head because they needed appropriations. They needed appropriations to say in Europe. They needed the Marshall Plan above all to save Western Europe, to the chagrin of the Poles and the Czechs. But no matter. No matter what would have happened, it would have been to the chagrin of the Poles and the Czechs, because the Russians had no particular intention to withdraw, except in Czechoslovakia.
- [24:10]
John F. Kennedy
They did.
- [24:11]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
They withdrew their troops from Czechoslovak. But as long as Americans planned to save Europe, and they had millions of reasons to save their part of Europe that they still could control through the Marshall Plan, through NATO and so on, there was no way Stalin and the Red army would have withdrawn back to the Soviet borders. There was just no way. And again, why history? You go back to the 40s, 30s, and you begin to understand deterministic part of that history. Both sides had plenty of historical lessons not to budge.
- [24:48]
Vladislav Zubok
It's fascinating that we're still debating the starting points, plural, of the Cold War. You can say that the origins are in 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Hitler had. I'm sorry, Stalin had been fooled by Hitler, and he would never allow something like that to happen again. He needed his buffer zone. So I said inevitable in Germany. Yes. Whether the Cold War had to become a global conflict, I'm not sure that that was inevitable. But some conflict over Germany, where the armies met in 1945, did seem inevitable. This is a very long setup here. I'm going to stop talking in a second. I want to talk about some off ramps, though, because it does appear that the Cold War could have been avoided, even though I just said it was inevitable. Something can be inevitable and unnecessary at the same time. So page 70 of your book, Vlad.
- [25:35]
Henry Kissinger
I'm like in the class, you open your page 70 or 17, all of.
- [25:41]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Us open page 7, 7 0.
- [25:44]
Vladislav Zubok
This is really amazing. I had to read this paragraph several times to make sure I got it because I was like, wait, this seems pretty important. Stalin seemed ready to allow delegations from the so called People's Democracies, Eastern Europe to discuss possibly joining the Marshall Plan American assistance at a meeting in Paris in 1940. But at the very last moment, Stalin receives intelligence from his spies in London that as you say here, corroborated his worst suspicions that the Anglo Americans were plotting to create a European bloc against the Soviet Union. So that's it. Sorry, you can't join the Marshall Plan. The Eastern European countries were interested. Stalin forbid them.
- [26:27]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Whoa.
- [26:28]
Vladislav Zubok
Wow, that's big. Was this intelligence correct? Might have this been a way to avoid a cold war? Had Stalin's spies told him something different?
- [26:38]
Henry Kissinger
I slightly disagree here with Flydd and that will set up for a good discussion. Not with the narrative. The narrative in terms of what actually happened is we know that Stalin considered it, they went to Paris and then they pulled out. Because Stalin was worried about the penetration of the American dollar. If he was more foresighted, he should have accepted because this would have bankrupted the United States, so the argument goes, or would have made it much more difficult for the United States. But he was not the kind of person who would allow this sort of thing. He suspected that the Americans had evil designs and wanted to dominate Eastern Europe and potentially even the USSR itself. But here's where it becomes slightly complicated. So what I would like to mention is the period before Marshall's speech.
- [27:23]
John F. Kennedy
Thus a very serious situation is rapidly developing which bodes no good for the world. The modern system of the division of labor upon which the exchange of products is based is in danger of breaking down. The truth of the matter is that Europe's requirements for the next three or four years of farm food and other essential products, principally from America, are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or pay face economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character.
- [27:57]
Henry Kissinger
Before that you have a gradual change in the way that the Soviets approach their Eastern European satellites. And here's where the debate is. The debate is basically at which point does Stalin decide to Sovietize, brutally Sovietize, Eastern Europe? Norman Neimarch, for example, writes about this. It's a very interesting question because you might argue that from the start he did not have this intention. Yeah, he wanted some kind of democratic fronts where the communists would be part of a coalition. But he did not want to necessarily brutally communize everything and turn them into little Soviet unions. But in the spring of 1947 you already start perceiving change in Stalin's approach. One piece of evidence which I found very interesting has to do with Greece, because in Greece Stalin had agreed with Churchill that he would not support. Support the Greek communists or that he would basically leave Greece to, to Britain. And he actually carried out his promise. For a time he did not support the Greek communists. But then as we progress, we get into 1946, 47. By the spring of 1947, he is having secret meetings with Greek communists and he's supplying them with weapons, which is telling because that shows that this idea that he previously had of avoiding the Cold War, you know, great power, cooperation, et cetera, et cetera, that is not happening. So this actually was before the Marshall Plan. This was before the Marshall announcement, this was after Truman Doctrine announcement. In other words, a lot of these things do not really, chronologically do not really align. So I would say that Stalin already started to bring down the fist and started planning actually for what ultimately turned out to be the common form meeting where he, where his lieutenant Zhdanov announced the formation of two blocks before Marshall Plan. Before the Marshall Plan. Why? I can only offer a potential explanation and that is that Stalin realized that his various coalitions with communists and whatever could not actually hold power by democratic means. And he decided that in order to really hold power in Eastern Europe, you have to really crack down, you have to communise those societies, otherwise people will not choose communism voluntarily. And this was already becoming clear by early 1947.
- [30:16]
Vladislav Zubok
Well, Vlad, maybe there is a problem with my question. Assuming that had the Marshall Plan penetrated Eastern Europe, that Soviet domination might have been avoided and a Cold war might have been avoided. Why don't you pick it up from there?
- [30:29]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Soviet domination could not have been avoided. But the debate is also about what forms this domination could have taken. It could have been an open sphere of influence, more or less soft domination to the extent Stalin was capable of anything soft, which of course we should doubt. After the Marshall Plan and particularly later when NATO came into play, Stalin's domination became the domination of steel with, you know, very heavy fist fell on the countries of, of Eastern Europe. And the, the word acceleration comes to mind. You know, just throw out all the potential enemies. We are really talking about gradualism versus watershed moment. When we talked about 47 and reacted a little bit to what Sergey said, yeah, of course Stalin thought about this. So that he thought about possibility of Comintern. Stalin wouldn't have been Stalin if he hadn't thought all the time about worst case scenarios. But he at the same time reacted to realities being paranoid. He also reacted to realities and the reality was it's one thing to dominate in Eastern and Central Europe when you don't have Americans there. Let's say you have only the United Kingdom weakened by the war, you have accumulated and weakened France, you have divided and prostrate Germany, you know what else is there. But it's quite another thing when you keep getting intelligence from Washington, that Washington course keeps changing towards toughening the line. Yes, Stalin got intelligence about rule people out and hardliners in Washington, anti Soviet hardliners in. Then he read Cannon's long telegram. And then of course Kennan's article in 47 in Foreign affairs, which was translated into Russian. Even earlier, James Burns, Secretary of State gave a speech in Stuttgart appealing to Germans and telling them we staying, don't worry, we'll not let you down. In what sense? Vis a vis the Russians, obviously. So cropping up signals that both powers are testing each other. And there was a tite for tat game that inevitably was leading to narrowing of perspectives, to some kind of tunnel vision when all kinds of worst case fears began to turn up. Like you know, on this giant screen, alarms and all that, you know, you get to the Marshall Plan. But still what I think is remarkable, that even at that moment, because of economic and financial pressure, of post war misery and the difficulty of keeping Eastern Europe in Soviet sphere without giving them at least some money, at least some resources, Stalin was prepared still to consider American assistance unless this assistance would take the form of strings, attached blocks and all that. And Martin, you asked me about whether intelligence was correct. Yes, it was correct. There were conversations between the British and the Americans. But of course Stalin again interpreted it in the way Stalin interpreted every intelligence by just leapfrogging across several sort of phases and stages towards the finality of it. There was no discussion of military bloc at that time, no discussion. And Stalin already in his mind leapfrog to that stage. So he made NATO in a sense more inevitable by what he did after the Marshal pleasure.
- [33:59]
Vladislav Zubok
It's amazing considering how paranoid Stalin became. He trusted Hitler and he ignored the intelligence before Operation Barbarossa. We're not going to go back into World War II here. We're going to move along the chronology. Just seems to me again, this is my interpretation of your Book that as the Cold War endures and picks up steam and grows to other parts of the the world, each side continues to misread the other's intentions, aims, capabilities. So what explains these profound misreadings? Vlad, you go first, then Sergei can respond. For instance, U.S. policymakers believed. Not just policymakers, Americans of all stripes believed the Soviets were bent on world conquest. That was never the case. Was that an ideologically influenced misreading? That's Sergei's favorite topic, by the way, to discuss ideology versus realism. We got the Cold War wrong.
- [34:55]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Martin, I would kind of slightly disagree with you.
- [34:58]
Vladislav Zubok
That's fine.
- [34:59]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
People got the Cold War right and wrong. It's not like, you know, if we repeat that they got it wrong, we'll denigrate too much those great experts, you know, including Ken and Boland and Acheson and others on the American side, they were reading some stuff pretty well. The same can be said about Stalin. When I was young and naive, I, you know, I wrote my first article about Soviet intelligence. It was in the 90s, and I thought, oh, those Soviet intelligence reports was just a bunch of fiction, fake news. They all misread Western intentions and actions. And my colleagues, peer reviewers responded, no, you're wrong. It was absolutely right. They got it right. But, you know, of course, in terms of interpretation and exaggeration and ideological significance, spin on that intelligence. That's another matter. That's another matter. So when we get to the Soviet side, who was the decider? Stalin. Soviet people, little that they could do. Even Stalin's entourage, even Soviet intelligence, even NKVD secret police, they were not policymakers. They just basically were lackeys of Stalin who brought the stuff to him and waited for the boss to make a decision. And Stalin made some awful decisions, awful, misreading, but essentially he reacted to the fact that was a geopolitical sensation of the century, that Americans decided to save the world, that they replaced the British Empire, that they proclaimed American Century. Henry Lewis in 1941. And that was a geopolitical sensation. And, you know, that was an elephant in the room. And Stalin reacted absolutely correctly to that. From his viewpoint, what was he supposed to do? Yes, I agree with Sergei. He could have thrown a monkey wrench into the Marshall Plan, but just saying, okay, I'm participating as well and ruining it. I agree with that. That's fascinating. Counterfactual. Just the 5 cents on the American side. Back to my thesis about American politics. Why the Soviets were supposed to conquer the world, why Senator McCarthy emerged, why before Senator McCarthy, many Senators McCarra and others, mostly Republicans, played that card. Played the red herring card, as Truman called it. Right. Because they wanted to win elections in 46, they already won elections in Congress. So they used red herring card actively to such an extent that Truman had to engage in it and respond and so on and so forth. And this is how McCarthyism gained my fellow Americans.
- [37:37]
John F. Kennedy
There's nothing accidental about this picture. It is a pattern of deliberate communist infiltration. Impossible, you say? Yes.
- [37:49]
Henry Kissinger
Unbelievable.
- [37:50]
John F. Kennedy
Yes. But there you have. Is all a matter of cold record.
- [37:55]
Vladislav Zubok
Yeah. Domestic politics is so important when understanding foreign policy. But as the Cold War continues into the 50s and 60s and Stalin is long dead, even into the 70s, there's this idea, Sergei, on the US side to repose my question, that the Soviets were bent on world conquest. That was never the case.
- [38:14]
Henry Kissinger
Yeah. So, Martin, just to add, I think first of all, I completely agree with Vlad here on this question of domestic politics, especially in the United States. In fact, the more you read about the Cold War, the more you realize some of the key decisions were actually a function of American domestic politics more than anything else. I came to this conclusion while I was working on the detente era because you can, you know, that's in the 1970s. A lot has been written and where I know, I realize we're jumping forward quite a bit, but that's okay.
- [38:47]
Vladislav Zubok
We should. We should jump forward nevertheless.
- [38:49]
Henry Kissinger
Yeah, we should probably leave Stalin alone at this point. You know, looking at the 1970s, there are all these theories as to why detente fell apart. And you might say, well, this was because the Soviets were pursuing conflict expansionist policies in Africa or they were doing something in, I don't know, in the Middle east or in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. But then you realize still that fundamentally in the United States there was a view of the Soviet Union as an adversary. This view was widely shared by the elites, but also held by the public and those political actors who could would play that particular card in order to attain political power or to undermine their opponents. Think about the Cuban Missile Crisis just briefly. Vlad talks about it in the book. What was there about Kennedy's response, that Kennedy had to appear tough and et cetera. And of course, he pursued a very sensible policy and did not bring us into a nuclear war over this. But why did he have to respond in this kind of way and stand up to what was billed as Soviet encroachment into the American sphere of influence, effectively into American's own backyard? Because he had elections just around the corner. This was really, really important. We have to Understand this political element of the equation that is totally absent in the Soviet side. On the Soviet side, the Soviets were so much more flexible, skipping forward again to deton. We had the same problem. So during, you know, the early 1970s, and Vladigan talks about it in the book, we had genuine, I think, genuine interest in Washington to improve relations with the Soviet Union. You had the duo of Nixon and Kissinger who were working very hard on it, but their effort was constantly being undermined by the likes of Henry Scoop Jackson, who were basically saying, by the way, quite as Vladimir convincingly shows in the book, quite beside the point, were basically saying, no, no, we have to be tough on the Soviets because they have to allow Jewish immigration. This at the time were actually. The Soviets were actually allowing Jewish immigration. And after the Jackson Vanik amendment, they actually shut it off. They were so pissed off with what happened that they said, okay, we're just not happy about this American interference here. But you have basically the idea of deton that was worked down between leaders of the two countries, the two superpowers, which is basically being undermined internally in the United States because there's an alternative political force. We're saying, ah, you know, what are you saying? Detente. This basically means that you're selling out to the communist adversary. Therefore we have to push back against this. Therefore, in a democratic system, you have to, well, you have to respond to that and you have to take this into account. Situation that was just completely absent on the Soviet side. We can argue that on the Soviet side there was also complexity in terms of Brezhnev had to respond to, I don't know, the military chiefs or the military industrial complex or there was somebody on the politburo who may have privately disagreed with his decision making, but the pressures were so insignificant in comparison to what was happening in the United States. So to come back, Martin, to your question, why is it that the United States perceived, generally speaking, the Soviet was bent on world domination? Because this was the narrative. And anybody who spoke up against this narrative would have to face very significant pushback. And so if you're a politician, you couldn't really do that, could you? Because then you could not possibly come to power on an agenda that, oh, the Soviets are actually very peaceful. And, you know, if you said that, then somebody would point your attention to, you know, Angola or something, say, well, what about this? What about Angola?
- [42:41]
Vladislav Zubok
Look, they had their clients very early on.
- [42:44]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
That's classic kind of story of the Progressive Party by Henry Wallace. There's one attempt to challenge this that's right, Containment. And what happened to the Progressive Party, Right, they got smashed.
- [42:57]
Henry Kissinger
But here's the irony, and this is where, you know, this is where I disagree with myself because remember, Henry Wallace traveled to the USSR and he was totally duped. He went to a pioneer camp in Magadan or something like that.
- [43:09]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
And this was like, hey, the Magadan was not about the conquest of the world. It was horrible. The Gulag was horrible. Solzhenitsyn wrote about it. He was right. It was horrible story, but it was not about conquering the world. So Henry Wallace was wrong about the Gulag, but he may have been slightly right about toning down that anti Soviet rhetoric and kind of talking to Stalin, keeping the channels to Stalin. And of course, he got smashed for it. They were politically eliminated in a campaign in 1948.
- [43:41]
Vladislav Zubok
Well, you've both written about the following subject, and that is the Soviets still couldn't say no to their clients. Whether this was ideological affinity or just credibility. Those intangible ideas that, Sergei, you bring up in your book, legitimacy, recognition, credibility, prestige, whether it was those factors, a combination of ideology. As you both have argued, the Soviets couldn't say no to their clients. So people in the US could say, as you said, hey, look at Angola. But you know what's interesting? Khrushchev and Brezhnev seem to be looking for ways out of the Cold War. Khrushchev wanted to avoid an arms race. Now, the way he went about doing this wasn't very smart. He put missiles in Cuba thinking that the Americans would agree with his perspective on this. We're there to defend Cuba.
- [44:31]
John F. Kennedy
Unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.
- [44:41]
Vladislav Zubok
And you can understand why the United States went bonkers when they found the missiles and Brezhnev as well, right? He was looking for an accommodation, a partnership. Right? But it seems to me, Vlad, that the United States was never interested in ending the Cold War. They were interested in winning it.
- [44:58]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Yeah, great question, great question. I did think about it and we can discuss it at length. I think, because in American democracy there was a habit of fighting and winning. And geopolitically, Americans enjoyed free security for very long time and had giant, overwhelming preponderance of power over anyone who tried to pick fight and plenty of other things that we can describe as American exceptionalism, even American empire of liberty. It's liberty or death, right? In some slogans and some mascots and so on and so forth. So it's liberty or death. And that determined the self propelled power of the Cold War narrative, its containment to the end, as long as it takes, using more recent words, until communism gets defeated and freedom triumphs. On the Soviet side, you may find that even Stalin was not so absolutistic. You know, he could choose his fight, he could be less belligerent on other fronts. And you may say, oh, that's because he believed in the forces of history. He believed, Sergei, in Hegel and Marx, that socialism would prevail ultimately over capitalism. But then he died and Khrushchev openly began to speak about peaceful coexistence. And we should really give weight to this shift. Peaceful coexistence meant for plenty of Stalinists in the Soviet Union, for plenty of admirers of Stalin, including some Chinese we know, including Mao Zedong. Peaceful coexistence, it means demotivation and demobilization of masses and proletarians and people of the world to fight and win a historic battle against imperialism. And that's the road to ruin in the minds of many so called communist hardliners and all Maoists, by the way. So forward on to Leonid Brezhnev. And Sergey wonderfully wrote about Brezhnev as being obsessed more about peace and sort of his place in the world as a peacemaker.
- [47:16]
Henry Kissinger
Vlad, I stole this idea from you.
- [47:18]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Okay, we steal ideas from each other. That's wonderful, that's how it should be. But that sort of stepping, the next stepping stone and then you come to Gorbachev and you realize that Gorbachev didn't fall from Venus exactly. He grew up through all these stages and all those stages. First Khrushchev with his belligerence, but also peaceful coexistence and the lessons of the Cuban missile crisis. Then Brezhnev with his peace, peace, peace, constant program for peace and detente program. And they prepared Gorbachev, they made Gorbachev possible. So in the first several years of Gorbachev, until all began to fall down, including the Berlin Wall, everybody thought, oh, it just back to the early Brezhnev we have on the Soviet side. Amazing development, erosion of real communist faith in history and increasing pretension that somehow this kind of peaceful coexistence will give us more time to show that socialism can win by its own natural development. But of course, in the middle of that road, people began to see that capitalism was winning on its own and socialism was a giant fiasco economically and ideologically and all that. So that happened around 1968, by the way, in the early 70s, it continued. So that sort of inflection point is as hugely important as decolonization, as other developments. But that, in a sense means that capitalism is the main hero of the story. It should be brought in as a big hero of the story. From some point on, the Soviets themselves, Soviet Communists themselves, began to lose faith in their own doctrine and their own future. And capitalism, despite its own self, doubts its own crises all the way through the seventies began to prevail.
- [49:20]
Vladislav Zubok
Sergei, do you agree that the United States was never really interested in ending the Cold War? They wanted to win it. This helps explain the triumphalism that followed after 1991. We won, they lost because our form of government is superior.
- [49:36]
Mikhail Gorbachev
This is a victory for democracy and freedom. It's a victory for the moral force of our values.
- [49:43]
Henry Kissinger
There were moments during the Cold War where American leaders understood that you have to seek accommodation with this geopolitical rival. The most important moment, I think, for that is detente. But not the only moment in late 1950s also had that moment. But even as they considered the idea of having accommodation with this geopolitical rival, the underlying logic of geopolitical confrontation remained in place, which is why I think Deton proved so unstable. Fundamentally. This doesn't just apply to the United States. I think both sides were guilty of this. But at one level, you want to embrace your adversary and you want to say, yeah, you know what? Let's, you know, we understand that the world has all these nuclear weapons now and can be destroyed many times over. Isn't that unreasonable to have this confrontation? Why don't we just try to, to make peace? And at the same time, you try to score victories in various global Third World or global south theaters, whether it is in the Middle east, whether it's in Southeast Asia, whether it is in, let's say, in, in Latin America. You do that because that's the nature of the relationship, that's the nature of the geopolitical confrontation. And it's, it's tragic. And, you know, I think with this, with this commentary, I will have exposed my. Myself as a realist. This is what in, you know, IR theory would term as realism. In other words, there was something deeply unstable about any accommodation. There was something that just pushed both sides towards trying to undermine the other side. Yes, the Americans wanted to do it because they knew they could. The Soviets were fighting a losing battle for much of this time now. There were, of course, moments of enthusiasm, like, I don't know, October 4, 1957.
- [51:40]
John F. Kennedy
The epical scientific achievement by Soviet Russia in beating the United States of America in the race to launch the first man made moon has all humanity staring heavenward. For the miracle here simulated may have more profound implications than we mortals are ordinarily called on to grasp.
- [51:58]
Henry Kissinger
Sputny goes into the skies and everybody says, oh yeah, you know, in 20 years the Soviet Union will overtake and we will win at that time, I think on October 4, 1957, you could be in Nikita Khrushchev. You could say, you know, we will win the Cold War. He could say that if he didn't think that the Cold War was an American invention, but he could say that. But then as your economy starts to melt down, the Soviet economy in 1960, the Soviets were spending their gold to purchase what grain they had food rights in 1962 in Novocherkowsk. Some pretty bad indicators already in the early 1960s, you know that your promise to build communism in 20 years that was announced at the party congress is not going to be realized. And then you are effectively going to lose. Therefore, what do you do? You want to end the Cold War? Because by ending the Cold War you set yourself up very nicely as a status quo power and you just stab your partner in the back on suitable occasions, but not too much in order not to stir too much trouble. But generally speaking, you're a wonderful status quo power. That's where Brezhnev comes in. Because that I think what Brezhnev wanted to do. So fundamentally, did Brezhnev want to win the Cold War? No. He knew he couldn't do it. He could not do it. Did the Americans want to win the Cold War? Yes, they did, because they knew they could do it.
- [53:21]
Vladislav Zubok
Well, what's winning the Cold War mean anyway? Making the other side disappear, beating them in enough of these proxy wars it.
- [53:27]
Henry Kissinger
Does bin of history. Ronald Reagan identified this one pretty clearly, I think in one of his speeches.
- [53:32]
Ronald Reagan
The march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the son self expression of the people. And that's why we must continue our efforts to strengthen NATO even as we move forward with our zero option initiative in the negotiations on intermediate range forces and our proposal for a 1/3 reduction in strategic ballistic missile warheads. Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace. But let it be clear, we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used for the ultimate determinant in the struggle is not going that's now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets, but a Test of wills and ideas.
- [54:28]
Vladislav Zubok
Vlad. We perceive the Cold War as having monumental stakes. It was about really important things. The fate of Germany, that was important. It was about ideas. Liberal democratic capitalism, forget about Jim Crow, I guess, but liberal democracy versus Soviet communism. Yet on page 321 of your book we see how small and ridiculous the stakes could be. Where would the Soviets and Cubans go next? Wondered Ziggy Brzezinski, CIA officials and the US military in the late 1970s who were alarmed by Soviet military activism in Africa. The answer came soon. The Horn of Africa. In 1974 the ancient monarchy in Ethiopia was deposed. In autumn of 76amilitant pro Marxist regime was established, led by ambitious warlord Mengitsu Halle Mariam. Now, long story short, I'm not going to get into the entire history here. The bone of contention, as you put it, was Ogeden, a desert over which Ethiopia and Somalia were in conflict. Why the hell did anyone in Washington or Moscow care about Ogeden?
- [55:44]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Yeah, the beauty of the story is that on both sides there were, you know, sort of potential Soviet clients or real Soviet clients. And then Siad Barre began to shift to American side. Yeah. So kicked out the Soviets. Sergey wrote about it. I wrote about, tons of people wrote about that story. Getting back to the meaning, you mentioned Brzezinski. Brzezinski was a fascinating character on one level. He competed with great grand strategists of the previous generation such as Cannon. And he of course competed above all against Henry Kissinger. And you see his arc of instability and it's a pure abstraction really. There was intelligence in enough sources Americans had in the gru, in the kgb, I don't know, maybe in Politburo apparatus, I don't know about that. But for Brzezinski and anybody to realize the Soviets were incapable of planning that way, they were not about arcs of instability, axis of evil, all kinds of geometry of that sort of stuff. They improvised. If it's true, then you should welcome them getting into this morass, squandering their resources and you get to this. And Jerzinski got to this remarkably a little bit later in 1979 when he saw the Soviets sort of getting sucked into Afghanistan after so called democratic Saudi revolution of April 78. Afghanistan was a neutral country, both Americans and, and so it's tried to pull it to this side, but then ultimately gave up and said no, no, no, let's stay this pile of stones and mountains should stay neutral for, for the better of humanity. And then all of a sudden, you know, the Soviets were getting sucked into it for ideological, bureaucratic and other reasons. And the same guy, Brzezinski begins to think, hey, it might be a potential Vietnam for the Soviets. So where's real Brzezinski? Well, it's a question of all individuals. You know, they can have different schemes at different times and being opportunistic. But if we move again back to American domestic policy, Carter was getting badgered by the Republicans and Reagan was around and so called committee of present danger was around and Carter was perceived as increasingly weak in foreign policy. So it was another cycle of American domestic policy when detente was on its last, last legs. Anybody who was aspiring to become the next political leader bashed detente in any way possible and evil Soviet regime and all that. So in that situation, anybody would take it into account. So I guess it was the time when detente was careening down, it was impossible to save it, and people on the American side were jumping off that boat of detente and trying to find another course. And guess what? This course was the same old course. Waging and winning the Cold War because we have principles, we empire of liberty. We are for freedom and we'll win it because freedom always wins.
- [59:04]
Vladislav Zubok
Yeah. So who cares who controls Ogeden? Well, the way you put it, it matters for prestige, credibility, legitimacy. So, Sergei, you see what I'm getting at here. At times, the Cold War in retrospect, well, actually at the time could seem so ridiculous, Ogeden or Reagan in Grenada, as if this tiny, harmless island is going to be the sea of Soviet influence in the Caribbean.
- [59:29]
Ronald Reagan
Grenada, we were told, was a friendly island paradise for tourism. Well, it wasn't. It was a Soviet Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy. We got there just in time.
- [59:46]
Henry Kissinger
This issue of credibility that we just alluded to is enormously important. And it's important equally, by the way, for the Soviet Union. And that's something that Vlad also emphasizes in the book. You know, the psychological factors, this issues of, well, how will the others look at us? And what if we just show weakness, just small weakness here, or allow just a little concession, you know, some small concession here or there, will not domino start falling. And that logic affected decision making in both sides. And that is why we ended up in a situation like the Vietnam War, for example. And Vlad's book has an excellent account of the Vietnam War. When I was writing about the same thing, one thought kept coming, you know, just spinning in my head. What if, what if the Americans did not get bogged down in Vietnam. And, you know, the Vietnamese Communists triumphed in South Vietnam, but also they also planned to spread revolution into Thailand, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What would have happened? You know, the road's not taken. The things we can never know. They didn't come out this way because the Americans worried about their credibility. They didn't come out that way because the Soviets worried about their credibility. And they got stuck in these places. They got stuck and they fought out this costly, costly wars. Costly for them as superpowers, but even more costly for the poor populations of these poor countries that were subjected to these brutalities, whether it's Afghanistan or Vietnam. What if they didn't? And I don't know how to answer this because, you know, you could actually construct an argument which actually would give force to the domino theory and say, well, you know, the dominoes will continue falling, and then where do you stop? Et cetera. In other words, it's extremely difficult as a historian, it's just very difficult to answer those questions.
- [61:32]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
You know, you know, a great friend, Fred Lagerval, writes about Kennedy and the Vietnam War, wonderful books. And he argued quite a while ago that Johnson had no way of turning down that issue of South Vietnam because that would have damaged his credibility and by damaging his personal credibility, that would have jeopardized his Great Society, which ultimately failed.
- [61:56]
Henry Kissinger
We know exactly because of what happened.
- [61:58]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Soviet Communism failed, but the American Great Society also.
- [62:03]
Henry Kissinger
No, Vlad. Vlad. Here's where the difficulty is, and this is what I'm saying, what I'm trying to, I guess, salute to. I don't want to say that, you know, the domino threat theory was correct, because I simply don't know. I'm on a very agnostic position here. The problem is this. You look at the documents now from the other side and you see that actually there was, for example, in Hanoi, an intention to promote revolution in Southeast Asia. So the answer to this is, should it be so what? So what if they promoted it and they just got mired? And maybe we would have the kind of situation we got in 1979 with the sign of Vietnamese conflict. In other words, they all so much hate each other. America simply did not need to get involved in this morass. It just. Just needed to stay out and they would sort themselves out. That is part of the answer. But if you're a superpower and you're looking at the situation in the middle of the Cold War, you think, well, you know, the risks are too large for us. What happens if our clients and our Allies fall, then who knows what happens next? You know, then maybe, you know, Japan will fall or somebody else, and then, you know, we'll lose the Cold War, and that would not be so good.
- [63:01]
Vladislav Zubok
But the other side of that coin, the credibility coin, I think credibility was more important to Johnson in 65 than falling dominoes. Our allies start to question, not credibility. They question your sanity. You know, you're actually hurting your credibility by persisting along this route because the war was a mistake. We warned you it was going to be a mistake. You didn't need to do this to uphold American credibility. You're actually hurting American credibility because you cannot demonstrate that, you know, the difference between a. A core national interest and a peripheral one. Vietnam was a peripheral interest. And that's the moral of the story here. Ogaden.
- [63:37]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
It becomes almost the central story of our discussion. Ogaden. Was it all about Ogaden?
- [63:45]
Henry Kissinger
But, Martin, here's where it becomes interesting, because then you have to make those calls. What is peripheral and what is core? Korea, for example, was very much peripheral to American interests, you might argue, in 1950. And yet the Americans got involved there. And then as a result, we have, you know, very prosperous and nice South Korea. If the Americans did not get involved there, we would have Korea under a communist regime. And so that is where it's complicated, right? Because if you basically rule everything out and say everything is peripheral here, we're not going to get involved in Koreas and Vietnam and all those places, then where do you get involved? Maybe just only Germany. And by the way, we face the same problem today, right? Is Ukraine a peripheral issue for the United States? An argument can be made that it's peripheral, it's not core. Another argument can be made that actually it is very much core. And that's part of the debate that we have in the United States today.
- [64:37]
Vladislav Zubok
We look back on the past as discrete eras. There was a Cold War, and then there's something after that, and then something after that. I mean, if we're looking at Eastern Europe now, the continuities matter more Russian imperialism, notions of insecurity. But I guess really I wanted to wrap up on how the west has misread their victory in the Cold War. My verdict here, after reading yet another book, Vlad, your book, yet another book about the Cold War, is that, sure, the United States won, but it's because the Soviet Union surrendered. One of the most important decisions of the 20th century was made by Mikhail Gorbachev when he told the Eastern European satellites, you're on your own. But without that decision, the Cold War does not end the way it does. And without Eastern Europe, I mean, that's kind of the Soviet Union's raison d'. Etre. We talked about these peripheries, but Germany and Eastern Europe was always the most important. And Gorbachev, he surrendered, did not want to send in the tanks, was not going to be a repeat of Germany in the 50s, Hungary in 56, Czechoslovakia in 68, almost Poland in 1980, or whenever it was when they declared martial law.
- [65:46]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Absolutely. That's a generational kind of narrative for Gorbachev. Gorbachev was not exactly part of what I call, not me, but many people called enlightened uparatchiks, those people who were sincerely believing in socialism, but a different kind of socialism, idealized kind of socialism. Gorbachev was influenced by those ideas, both Eastern European and Soviet ideas of reform coming from that reform minded party intelligentsia, people who are both party members and considered themselves as members of the great phenomenon, Russian intelligentsia, you know, seeing themselves moral leaders of Russian nation. And even more so, Gorbachev kind of imbibed that, inherited that, tried to implement that and set in motion the falling domino. Really happened in 1989. And then he said, well, I don't want to stop it, because if I stop it, we're Back to square one. We'll be back to, you know, Brezhnev's 68, we're back. We're back to reaction. We're back to Khrushchev, we're back to the Cold War. So it's another example how long a narrative translated into generational experience at the key moment shapes the mind of one key decision maker on the Soviet side. Because when I say strongly believe with all the phenomenon of the crisis, economic, spiritual disillusionment and ideology and all, that the Soviet Union could have existed for a few decades more had one man, Gorbachev, not played the role of a philosopher, a Hegelian again, Hegelian owl, in a sense, sitting on his shoulder and telling him, you know, you need to move on. You need to introduce a new stage in history. But what is striking about this story and why I keep coming back to American domestic politics, when you talk to anyone in the United States, they're all convinced it was Reagan who came and told Mr. Chairman Gorbachev, tear down that wall. And that incantation kind of changed the course of history. Why is that? Why Americans are, are convinced so much that they are the only shaping force of global events and global developments. And that brings back American Factor in the Cold War in a big way. First, and I should say it, I disagree that Reagan had as much influence on the end of the Cold War as Gorbachev. Gorbachev had much more. He didn't know exactly how to exit the Cold War, but no one knew he wanted to avoid the nuclear war. That was one exit that he definitely didn't want to have. So he acted as a politician who knew what he didn't want to. American phenomenon, centrality of Americans brings to mind the uniqueness of the Cold War in many respects, because Americans played the role of the first fiddle. Sorry, Sergey, for stealing, you know, your. Your great image first fiddle. And let's imagine how the British Empire would have played in Auger then. British Empire had its own foolish moments in Africa. I know that, of course, the scramble for Africa and all that. But let's suppose the British had more propensity for divide and conquer, choosing kind of local guys, controlling each other and just coming as mediators and conquering all subcontinents. Like India, for instance. Right. Or fighting against slavery and as a result dominating the Atlantic. That's the British way. Americans are very different. And that color that shaped the Cold War to a great extent and it keeps shaping global developments today, including the conflict with China. This is something that cold or may be the gold mine for us, not of looking too much exclusively on the Russians, how they act. And I do believe, I do believe that Russians do act predictably in some way, although they kind of change their valency. They become, you know, instead of communists, they're now orthodox believers and conservatives, quite opposite. But they behave in the same way, in many ways. But Americans deserve more attention because as long as Americans remain the determining factor of global international history and politics, they would act in the way that they habitually acted during the Cold War and before the Cold War.
- [70:19]
Henry Kissinger
I can slightly disagree just for the sake of the argument. Broadly, I agree with Vlad. I think the agency here was on the Soviet side, but not entirely. And I think, Vlad, you've got this in your book there. Towards the end, you basically say you cannot convince the other side that this is not how it is. And indeed, because here's kind of the counter argument to what you said, it's an argument that reinforces it, but slightly from a different side. The Soviet system was not working. And as you say in the book, already by the late 60s, things were starting to fall apart. They knew that burden of Eastern Europe was unsustainable. Already by the events In Poland in 1980, 81, you have Andropov there talking. The quote of interventions has been exhausted. We cannot intervene anymore. By the grace of God or Marx or whoever. Yaruzelski imposed martial law. But what if he didn't? Then, you know, the Soviets would find themselves in a difficult situation. Would they still invade Poland in 1981 the way they invaded Czechoslovakia in 68? Or would they think, oh my God, you know, we just cannot afford it? No, we cannot afford it. So that's, that's a question. It's a counterfactual, just a question. But they were talking about this.
- [71:35]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
They knew the polls would fight back. So it would have been a giant war. It would have been a Ukrainian war before Ukrainian war.
- [71:41]
Henry Kissinger
Exactly, exactly. So in other words, there are all these factors that kind of starts. And you know, I'm, and you can say I'm slightly of a Marxist here by prioritizing the economic factors. I do think that economic factors really played a huge role in the run up to the, the end of the Cold War and with Gorbachev trying to reinvent the Soviet Union, etc. One of the reasons, one of the reasons he had to do it is because it just wasn't working. The system wasn't working, therefore you had to reinvent it because everybody knew that it wasn't working. And this is where Reagan comes in. And I'll put a little triumphalist pitch for Reagan, not a very big one, but just a small one. And that is, we know that Gorbachev was concerned that the Soviet Union was losing the arms race. I mean, he talked about a, of sort at the Politburo. His engagement in these issues with Reagan, whether it's Geneva or Reykjavik in 86, was underpinned by this understanding the Soviets simply could not sustain. Therefore, a particularly tough policy from Reagan, you might argue, contributed to that kind of disposition. That is, we need to negotiate peace because simply we cannot afford a continuation of the Cold War. But I understand that you still, you know, the motivation is still on the Soviet side. The Agency is still on the Soviet side. But the broader environment was also shaped by what was happening in the United States, by the Americans bouncing back from the defeat in Vietnam and from the economic crisis in the 1970s and bouncing back really, really well. And secondly by the Soviet economic problems which deepened and deepened and deepened in the 1970s and into the 1980s. Does that sound, I don't think that that's triumphalist. I'm just trying to give Reagan a little bit more ground here.
- [73:19]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Some critics of Reagan at the time could have Said Reagan was like a crowd that keeps crying to the sun rising. That's not why the sun was rising. The sun was rising for entirely different reasons.
- [73:31]
Vladislav Zubok
Well, no, I would say that Reagan, you can see.
- [73:33]
Henry Kissinger
No, you can see. This argument can be argued in slightly different way, which is why I like your comment in the book that people will never be.
- [73:41]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
That's my experience. Yeah, I'm sure it's your experience as well.
- [73:44]
Vladislav Zubok
I do think Reagan deserves credit for de escalating the Cold War. But as far as the collapse of communism and the unilateral decision to withdraw from Eastern Europe, I mean, this was Gorbachev, guys.
- [73:57]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
I still recommend to read my old book, Zhivago's Children. Russian Intelligentsia. I think it was all prepared in the minds of all those party minded intellectuals long before, before Gorbachev became the leader. Because reactions to Reagan were different and must have been different because Reagan as well as Thatcher were classic enemies. Classic enemies. And you know, the reaction to their rhetoric would have been, okay, guys, you know, we know we have trouble, but we'll fight back. We have a project, we'll defend this project. But the way Gorbachev reacted was entirely different. And that cannot be explained without the history of the Soviet 60s and the Prague Spring of 68 and a bunch of other things.
- [74:43]
Ronald Reagan
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate Mr. Gorbachev opens. Open this gate Mr. Gorbachev teared down this wall.
- [75:37]
Vladislav Zubok
On the next episode of history as it happens. Has there ever been such a thing as an anti war US President? Is it possible to be an anti war president? That's next with historian Stephen Wertheim as we report historical history as it happens, remember new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter comes out every Friday. You can sign up@historyasithappens.com or just go to Substack and search for History as it Happens.