Our Two Cold Wars Couldn’t Be More Different. Part One: The Russian Cold War Model

Victor Davis Hanson

How did the U.S. win the 45-year-old Cold War with the former Soviet Union? And what can we learn from that victory in our current growing Cold War with communist China?

1) While often clumsy and counterproductive, the U.S. was mostly able to portray the Soviets not as kind-hearted socialists, but cruel, murderous, and geriatric imperialists.

In other words, the U.S. emphasized how “socialist” Russia murdered its own dissidents, treated its clients abroad as slavish underlings, and destroyed what was left of the Russian standard of living after decades of failed Leninism and Stalinism.

Remember this Cold War reboot was not initially easy, given that Russia had been our ally in World War II. A host of Soviet sympathizers were deeply embedded in the U.S. government, the media, and popular culture, convinced, and determined to prove, that the wartime alliance would lead to a postwar new and permanent alliance, as we ourselves would supposedly drift to communism.

2) The U.S. socially, culturally, politically, and economically mostly shut off the Soviet Union. There were very few Russian students inside American universities where they could lap up superior U.S. science and engineering.

So, after the initial space race and weapons lag in America’s competitiveness, the U.S., especially after the Korean War, began unleashing its huge economy to fund scientific research and rebuild the military.

Soon Russia was usually 5-10 years behind American technology. Its few avenues of tapping into U.S. scientific breakthroughs that were found only through espionage, not via the yearly returns of hundreds of thousands of Russian students from inside American universities.

3) There was very little American investment in the former Soviet Union. The Lend-Lease model that, along with the British, had supplied 20-30 percent of the Soviet Union’s World War II military and economic needs ended shortly after World War II. There were few if any Marshall Plan funds extended to Soviet Russia. American investors in the USSR, like Armand Hammer of our capitalist classes, were seen as pariahs and, fairly or not, as possessing dual loyalties.

4) Russia was often caught clumsily and stealthily funding American communist groups. But otherwise, Moscow did not openly extend massive gifts to American foundations or universities to gain institutional influence inside the U.S. There was nothing like the so-called Chinese Confucius Institutes on American campuses.

5) The U.S. was merciless in hunting down Soviet spies. There were no nonchalant shrugs when a Russian operative was uncovered. There was nothing comparable to the Chinese biolabs operating quietly in small-town America and with apparent exemption. Had a Soviet spy balloon been lazily headed toward the continental U.S., the Curtis Lemays of that age would have obliterated it.

The result of these “iron curtain” safety margins was that the Soviet Union was always behind the U.S. in technological and engineering breakthroughs.

Since the days of their xeroxing of detained American B-29s to create a copy-cat version, the Tupolev Tu-4, Russia lacked the scientific infrastructure inside the Soviet Union and the ability to send its students abroad, and thus to return them fully trained in American scientific methods and technologies. And so, their research was often emulative and always a step behind.

By the 1980s it was clear that almost every American weapons system was superior to its Soviet counterpart—as often seen in the violent laboratory of American-Russian proxy wars in the Middle East, especially those between an American-supplied Israel and Israel’s many Soviet-supplied client Arab nation rivals.

What scared the Soviets about Reagan’s Star Wars was not necessarily that it would soon be unilaterally implemented, but that the U.S. had the potential to create such a system in the first place and the Soviets did not.