True GRIT
Richard H. Immerman · Diplomatic History · 1999
Book reviewed in this article: Deborah Welch Larson, Anatomy of Mistrust: U.S.-Soviet Relations during the Cold War A disproportionate number of those of us who study the history of U.S. foreign relations have devoted virtually our entire scholarly careers to pouring through archives, primarily U.S. archives, in an effort to determine how and why the Cold War began, what policies and programs policymakers, primarily U.S. policymakers, pursued in waging it, and what consequences, intended or not, those policies and programs produced. The sudden, unexpectedly peaceful, and in a sense inconvenient end of the Cold War almost a decade ago, however, all but compelled us to address two additional and complementary questions: Why did the Cold War last as long as it did, and derivatively, could it not have ended earlier? After all, even those who attribute the collapse of the Soviet Union and “liberation” of its satellites to the arms buildup and initially uncompromising and bellicose policies of the Reagan administration cannot deny the salutary contribution of the Soviet leadership, especially Mikhail Gorbachev. It was Gorbachev who not only dramatically changed the tone of Soviet rhetoric but also gave substance to his expressions of “new thinking” by taking the initiative in proposing, and in some cases unilaterally executing, a series of radical measures to ease East-West hostility. At no time, nevertheless, did Gorbachev disavow, let alone denounce, his allegiance to Communist ideology. A plausible, indeed logical inference, therefore, is that Gorbachev's international attitude and behavior were either not driven mechanically by Communist ideology or sufficiently malleable to accommodate a nonconfrontational and strategically nonthreatening posture toward the non-Communist world. An equally plausible and logical inference is that Gorbachev was not unique, an inference made more credible by the support he received from the likes of Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexandr Bessmertnykh. These inferences lead inexorably to the question of whether there existed the potential years earlier for some similar set of developments or evolutionary processes that could have resulted in either ending the Cold War or radically altering its framework and conduct. UCLA political scientist Deborah Welch Larson's answer to this question is an unequivocal yes. In this context, the subtitle of her book is misleading. Larson has not written a study of U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War. Rather, her work is an episodic examination of missed opportunities, what she calls “branching points,” when Soviet-American relations “could have taken a different path” (p. 35). Her premise is that because “leaders on both sides had a strong interest in reducing Cold War tensions and in managing the arms race,” mutually satisfactory agreements could have been negotiated that would have avoided “needless sacrifice of lives and money” (pp. ix–x). Moreover, she challenges the view that irreconcilable antagonism toward the United States was integral to the Communist belief system by asserting that from the 1950s on a variety of “Soviet officials and academic writers manipulated Marxist-Leninist ideology to justify, cooperation with the United States and other capitalist states” (p. 16). Larson is already familiar to diplomatic historians as the author of The Origins of Containment.1 In Anatomy of Mistrust, she again applies cognitive social psychology, attribution theory in particular, in arguing that the primary reason that agreements between Washington and Moscow were not reached was that policymakers misperceived both the motives and the intentions of their adversaries. As the title suggests, she identifies the basis for their misperceptions as above all their profound mistrust of one another. This mistrust was largely a function of what social psychologists call the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) – the tendency of individuals to apply a double standard by assuming that others’ behavior is determined by predispositional (for example, ideological) influences, whereas any comparable behavior on their part had been forced upon them by external, situational pressures.2 Larson stresses that throughout the Cold War the Soviets offered many more concessions than did the United States, but her explanation is not that the Kremlin leadership was more trusting or less hostile. What accounts for the striking asymmetry in concessions is the difference in political systems. Larson maintains that domestic opposition to conciliatory initiatives constrained successive Soviet secretaries general much less than successive U.S. presidents. Larson uses five case studies, which she treats individually in 30–40 page chapters, to provide evidence to support her argument. Her choices are hardly surprising. The most predicable are the period between Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953 and the July 1955 Geneva summit; the final years of Dwight D. Eisenhower's second term, when the “Spirit of Camp David” appeared to portend the imminent signing of a comprehensive test ban treaty; and of course, the rise and fall of the Richard Nixon-Leonid Brezhnev era of détente. As one would expect, Larson also examines the opportunities missed by John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev during the truncated Kennedy presidency, although one might not expect her to concentrate on the interval prior, not subsequent, to the Cuban missile crisis. If any of her cases will raise eyebrows, it is her last. Larson classifies the ending of the Cold War during the later Ronald Reagan and early George Bush administrations as another missed opportunity because, regardless of the remarkable achievements in many areas, no accord was reached to reduce radically both sides’ strategic arsenals. In addition, the United States failed adequately to reciprocate Gorbachev's concessions, thereby humiliating the Soviet leader and contributing to the Russian people's present-day resentment. Larson's case studies are highly illuminating and cogently presented. In a very manageable form they contain much useful grist for all our lecture mills. Nevertheless, inherent shortcomings to her narrative, although they are to some extent unavoidable, will offend the sensibilities of many historians. As she did in her earlier work, Larson demonstrates that she is a political scientist who fully appreciates the value of primary research. She has supplemented her careful reading of collections of published documents such as the Foreign Relations series with rigorous use of archives, mostly the materials at the Eisenhower and Kennedy libraries. Although she is to be commended, the result is a dichotomy in her data base. The archives available for the Nixon years are severely limited (she uses none), and those for Reagan and Bush, virtually nonexistent. Larson explicitly acknowledges this distinction, but apparently does not consider it much of a problem. Historians undoubtedly will. Moreover, her premise regarding the shared interests of both the Soviets and the Americans requires that she credibly examine and evaluate the preferences and objectives of both sides. Needless to say, Soviet secrecy has long frustrated the most diligent scholar. The obstacles to the review and release of documents in the United States and elsewhere in the West remain unconscionable. Still, they pale in comparison to the Soviet – or Russian – declassification process, or lack thereof. The situation has improved, however, and her linguistic limitations aside, Larson could have taken more advantage of the benefits than she did. She has exploited an impressive array of recent scholarship and memoirs. But conspicuously absent from her citations (the brief bibliography lists only primary and unpublished sources) are such important works as Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, and Alexandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”.3 In addition, the haphazard references to documents published in the Cold War International History Project Bulletin and the project's valuable working papers do not make the reader confident that Larson consulted either systematically. In light of the ambiguity of the available Soviet evidence, it is difficult to avoid suspicion that Larson made selective use of it. What exacerbates the problem of Larson's evidence is her lack of nuance. Her case study of the period between Stalin's death and the Geneva Summit is perhaps the most revealing example because it has been the subject of so much recent scholarship. Larson leaves little room for any interpretation other than her own: The post-Stalin leadership was willing to allow for Germany's reunification in return for its neutralization, and it would have served both sides’ interests to pursue this goal. Hence, Eisenhower should have agreed to a summit in 1953. The Soviets were no less sincere in proposing sweeping disarmament in 1955, the year the summit was finally held, but instead of testing the Kremlin's intentions by bargaining in good faith, a mistakenly mistrustful Eisenhower countered with a disingenuous nonstarter – Open Skies. While Larson's argument certainly must not be dismissed, her analysis is too one-dimensional to be persuasive. A lot of evidence suggests that notwithstanding the fleeting musings of Lavrenti Beria and even Georgi Malenkov, Moscow was unprepared to use East Germany as a bargaining chip, let alone to write it off altogether. To the contrary, its reunification/neutralization schemes appear to have been tactical measures intended to enhance East German stability by mollifying popular discontent with the excesses of Walter Ulbricht's crash program to build socialism as much as to stymie West German remilitarization. Larson undermines her credibility by scarcely mentioning this possibility, and then undermines it further by devoting but one sentence to the 1953 East German uprising and one paragraph to the 1954 Berlin Conference. She also, in my opinion, gives insufficient weight to the influence of the Soviets’ response to the Chance for Peace speech. That response was less enthusiastic than Larson contends, and it reinforced Eisenhower's judgment that far-reaching disarmament proposals, such as that of the Soviets’ in 1955, were ineffective bases for negotiating constructively. Likewise, Eisenhower's perspective was also affected by what he considered the requisites of alliance management. Put simply, while vulnerable to criticism, Eisenhower's policies from 1953-1955 reflected more than irrational mistrust and the perfidious influence of John Foster Dulles, the image of whom Larson takes straight from the pages of Townsend Hoopes.4 Larson's other case studies suffer from similar sins of omission, which add up to a serious flaw in the book. That flaw is not one of interpretation; competition among interpretations is healthy. In this instance, however, Larson's conclusions demand categorical acceptance of her premise: that were it not for the profound mistrust produced by cognitive biases, “sensible [U.S. and Soviet] leaders would have adjusted their beliefs in response to unambiguous conciliatory moves from the other side” (p. 238). In other words, the only missing ingredient for ending the Cold War, or more specifically in her cases ending the arms race and reunifying Germany, was trust. Larson concedes that trust is an elusive commodity in adversarial relations, but maintains that throughout the period she examines a remedy was available. As early as the 1950s Charles Osgood postulated the strategy of GRIT (Gradual Reduction in Tension). By offering unilateral, irreversible, and at a minimum moderately costly concessions, a state can overcome the suspicions of its adversary and ultimately generate confidence that its intentions are peaceful. Larson avers that had Soviet and American leaders read Osgood and followed his GRIT strategy, countless lives and treasure would have been saved. Perhaps, but if the reader rejects or even retains reasonable doubts about Larson's premise, s/he cannot logically share her confidence in the efficacy of GRIT for resolving the core issues of the Cold War. Consequently, it is unfortunate for her purposes that Larson leaves herself open to the charge that she exaggerates the sincerity of the Kremlin's conciliatory motives in proferring proposals because she does not directly rebut evidence to the contrary. And she compounds the problem by sacrificing complexity to parsimony. To illustrate, Larson writes that his “efforts to persuade Eisenhower to agree to a summit meeting having been stymied by Dulles, Khrushchev created a crisis [over Berlin in 1958] to force the president to negotiate on the German question” (p. 87). She continues this line of argument when discussing the events of early 1962 in the next chapter: “His patience severely tried by JFK's reluctance to advance concrete negotiating proposals, Khrushchev initiated a new form of pressure on Berlin” (p. 141). These statements are not unjustified. The devil is in the details, however, and by leaving so many out Larson subverts her argument. Were Khrushchev's “moves” as unambiguously conciliatory as Larson insists they were, and if they were not, would it have been “sensible” for U.S. policymakers to perceive them as conciliatory? Larson's intent is to demonstrate how misguided and counterproductive the behavior of both sides was, but she can easily be misinterpreted as condemning the United States and exculpating the Soviets. Despite my criticisms, I recommend Anatomy of Mistrust. Larson asks important questions, and her provocative answers should challenge historians to address them. Moreover, I believe she could have mitigated many of the problems I identified by writing a sustained narrative instead of opting for case studies, and restricting her chronological parameters to the 1950s and 1960s. Her evidence would have been more consistently rich, she could have incorporated more of it, and her exposition would have been more textured and more sensitive to change over time. I also wish that instead of limiting her discussion of theory to the introduction and conclusion, she had integrated the theory with the history in order systematically to demonstrate instances of cognitive bias. In doing so, she might have placed more emphasis on the personal qualities that affect an individual leader's capability to overcome such bias.5 Larson, of course, decided how to conceptualize her book. Still, I lament that she is one of the few scholars with the necessary credentials to write one that I believe would have been more effective and provided further testimony of how much historians and political scientists can learn from each other.