The peaceful end of the Cold War Essay

International relations theory never had such a controversial and inconsistent issue like the end of the Cold War. The reorientation of Soviet foreign policy under Mikhail Gorbachev caused the East-West reconciliation, and attempts of the explanation of this fact led to the scholars challenge. Neither realists, liberals, institutionalists, nor peace researchers recognized beforehand the possibility such momentous change, and they have all been struggling to find explanations consistent with their theories. (Lebow 1994)
Most theorists and policy analysts assured that bipolarity, meaning Soviet-American rivalry, would be preserved for the foreseeable future. Any transformation of the system of one adversary was evaluated like unlikely, because of hegemon’s fear to take a disadvantage in a superpower war. Therefore everybody was surprised when the Soviet Union changed course in its foreign policy, retreated from Eastern Europe, and allowed constituent republics to secede – and did all this peacefully, without any aggression.

In his work, “The Long Peace, the End of the Cold War, and the Failure of Realism”, Richard Lebow gives a sharp criticism to a realist theory of the international relations. Author accuses his scholar opponents of ignoring careful conceptual and operational definitions of dependent and independent variables, which is essential for every testable theory.
The realist paradigm is based on the core assumption that anarchy is the defining characteristic of the international system. Anarchy compels states to make security their paramount concern and to seek to increase power as against other values. Power is defined as capability relative to other states. (Lebow 1994)
Lebow calls inaccurate and contradictory the disagreements of realists about “war-proneness and stability of multipolar versus bipolar international systems, the importance and consequences of nuclear weapons, and more fundamentally about the weight of power as an explanation of state behavior”(Lebow 1994). In his opinion, core assumption of anarchy has no theoretical content and cannot be used for a testable proposition. Other branches of realism, like power transition theories and neorealism, according to Lebow, “are neither logically consistent nor empirically persuasive” (Lebow 1994). Thereof the author suggests the need for alternative approaches to the study of international relations.
Richard Lebow ironically calls the realists’ explanations of Soviet foreign policy after 1985 the “unrealism”. On his point of view, Mikhail Gorbachev was not a moderate reformer with a goal to revitalize the economy of the Soviet Union and try to resume the role of superpower to it, lost in the end of Brezhnev’s rule. The last leader of the USSR was eager “to preserve archaic and dysfunctional domestic structures that stood in the way of the economic growth necessary to preserve the Soviet Union as a great power” (Lebow 1995). But without dismantling the command economy and encouraging the private capitalist ventures, in opinion of author, Soviet Union voluntarily ended the bipolarity, because of internal and external pressures.
It’s worth of saying that Lebow through out his work emphasizes that hegemony of the USSR was not so apparent as it seemed to be. For instance, he gives the readers statistics, according to which in 1947 its industrial base and output were roughly comparable to Britain’s — each produced 12 percent of the world’s steel in comparison with the United States’. (Lebow 1995)
Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. Defense Department studies showed that Japan, the United States, and Western Europe were steadily increasing their lead over the Soviet Union in the development and application of almost all the technologies critical to military power and performance. Post-Soviet Russia is in a demonstrably weaker position. (Lebow 1995)
Soviet technology remained backward, author claimed The Red Army was equipped with inferior weapons and its triumph over Germany, in Lebow’s opinion, was the result of sheer mass and the ability of an authoritarian regime to mobilize almost all available resources for its military effort. It’s known that the Soviet Union did not produce a jet engine until the late 1940s, and that was a copy of a Rolls Royce engine obtained after the war. It exploded an atomic device in 1949, but Britain also possessed the knowledge to produce nuclear weapons.
What distinguished the Soviet Union from Britain, Lebow highlights, was its population and size; but this, to his mind, had always been so and did not make the Soviet Union a superpower before World War. The Soviet Union did field a massive army, but it had proportionately larger forces than everyone else in 1939. The postwar Red Army was capable of little beyond its primary mission of occupation. Lebow publishes the facts that U.S. military estimates in the late 1940s depicted it as a poorly equipped, poorly trained, poorly led force without the logistical base to sustain a major offensive in Western Europe. Author emphasizes, that until at least the mid-1950s, if not later, there was little the Soviet Union could do to damage the United States, while throughout this period it was vulnerable to nuclear attack by long-range U.S. bombers. The Soviet Union remained a regional and local power until it developed a “blue water” navy and airborne “power projection” capabilities in the early 1970s. The year or the period, that the Soviet Union acquired superpower status is unimportant, claims Richard Lebow. According to his researches, the USSR was not a superpower in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The great power peace that survived the tensest and the most famous stage of the Cold War — the years of the Czech coup, the first Berlin crisis and blockade, and the Korean War — cannot be attributed to bipolarity, as author had proved before.
In another book, “The end of the Cold War”, by Margarita Petrova, criticism of realism paradigm continues. Like a previous author, Petrova holds the opinion that a bipolar system was dominated by the USA and the Soviet Union lacked the material wherewithal to go on, so its authorities had to just “sue for peace on the best possible terms” (Petrova 2003). But she doesn’t agree, that only material setting was determinate in “a new thinking” of Mikhail Gorbachev, but also points to the importance of an ideological factor. A Soviet leader was in a dire situation, realizing, that the decline of economy and international pressure had become inevitable for the retrenchment and weakening of the USSR impact in the Eastern Europe. Simply put, it was an “intellectual capitulation of the weaker to the stronger” (Petrova 2003). Thus, the peaceful change is explained by the position of USSR in the system — “a declining power calculating that it is in its own interest to withdraw the challenge without waging war” (Petrova 2003).
In opinions of most realists, Gorbachev had nothing but to follow a policy of accommodation and to comply with the U.S. terms, but Petrova highlights, that they outline two more possibilities — wage preventive war or do nothing. Author considers that the most significant factor of “committing voluntary suicide by making concessions to the West” is a “grip of the old communist ideology” (Petrova 2003). Moreover, in the end of 1980s the USA had succeeded in making alliances, especially it applies to overwhelming unification with Germany. This step was made due to liberal ideas of Gorbachev, who defended the principles of non-interference in the policy of the other independent states. Last Soviet leader tried to preserve superpower of a communist empire not only by military methods, but primarily by effective decisions in a foreign policy. Right for this purpose he had changed all his international apparatus with “new thinking” people.
But stasis, begun at his predecessors, enormous fraction of GDP on military costs and Marxist ideology crisis implacably resulted in the end of the Cold War.