The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy

Abstract

How we periodize history matters, be it for teaching or in research. So where does one draw the line? The beginning or end of a major conflict is common, but wars rarely end with a clean finish, and the human consequences are felt for years and decades after the cessation of hostilities. For historians of the United States, the transition from one presidential administration to another offers a fairly clean break; it entails personnel changes at the top levels from the president and department secretaries on down. Furthermore, new administrations have a major stake in sharpening this delineation as much as possible: out with the old, in with the new.In reality, we know that the line is a great deal blurrier than partisan boosters and spin doctors would have us believe. Aaron Donaghy's The Second Cold War takes on what is commonly perceived as a particularly sharp break in U.S. presidential leadership, from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan. Both presidents, Donaghy argues, responded to domestic political pressures and changed course in their management of the Cold War. In Carter's case, this meant moving from a rejection of containment to an embrace of it and the militarization it required. For Reagan, this meant walking to the brink of superpower conflict and then, fearing electoral punishment, turning to negotiations. The key mechanism at play, according to Donaghy, was domestic. He examines how issues were framed for voters in public speeches and explains how policy was shaped for domestic consumption with an eye to reelection. He concludes that political interests at home were the decisive factor in making foreign policy. His narrative is engaging, fast-paced, and commendably digestible. Donaghy covers a great deal of ground in The Second Cold War, spanning two highly eventful presidential administrations and a period of the Cold War that is all too often misunderstood.Donaghy traces the evolution of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union (and U.S. Cold War strategy more generally) from late 1979 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to late 1985 with the summit meeting in Geneva between Reagan and the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. This six-year period gives the book its title, The Second Cold War. Over nine well-crafted chapters, Donaghy shows how domestic politics shaped the thinking of key officials in both U.S. administrations. He argues that the influence of domestic political concerns on U.S. leaders’ risk tolerance, desire for credibility, and sense of timing—at home and abroad—is what ultimately enabled Moscow and Washington to end the Cold War.At the core of Donaghy's work is a desire to reverse “the decline of political history as a field of study” (p. 5). He uses this theme to frame the book, addressing it at length in his introduction and returning to it in the epilogue. The accuracy of the claim that political history is (or was) in acute decline has been hotly—and not always helpfully—debated since Fredrik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood made the argument in an op-ed article in The New York Times in August 2016. (A panel discussion on the piece at the American Historical Association's 2017 annual meeting was marred by contentious debate, despite Logevall's and Osgood's commendable forbearance.) Donaghy does not engage the counterarguments to this claim that have emerged in the intervening half-decade, which is a missed opportunity to offer his own interpretation of an argument that has become something of a disciplinary Rorschach test. Nevertheless, his “intermestic” treatment of U.S. policy during the late Cold War is an illuminating study of how U.S. officials thought about domestic policy in the context of national security decision-making (p. 11). But at times he takes his argument too far. It is by no means clear, for example, that domestic political concerns were always the dispositive factor for Senator Henry Jackson in his hardline stance on the Soviet Union's refusal to allow Jews to emigrate. Donaghy insists that Jackson's “motives were as much political as ideological” and that his human rights campaigning was a ploy to win the Jewish vote in the Democratic primaries (p. 23). To be sure, it would be naïve—and downright ahistorical—to assume that politicians always acted without regard for the domestic political consequences of their actions abroad, but it is not clear that the opposite interpretation advanced by Donaghy is a more accurate extreme.A bigger methodological problem also arises here, which The Second Cold War does not decisively resolve. Donaghy is clear that he sees the United States as “the sole superpower” (which is highly debatable) and, accordingly, focuses his book on “the centrality of American power” (pp. 6, 293). He is undoubtedly right that something can be missed in international history's quest for breadth of national experiences, perhaps at the expense of depth in understanding the policymaking process in more and more countries.As authors, we always make difficult choices about what to include and what to omit. Donaghy has chosen to devote significant space to making the case for his U.S.- and domestic-centric approach in The Second Cold War. But a tradeoff is also present in such a tightly focused accounting of the mechanics of one country's policymaking process and its many inputs, which it would have been enriching for Donaghy to have addressed head-on. Such an approach cannot account for how the results of that thoroughly documented process are interpreted abroad, making it all too tempting to conflate correlation with causation.Seeing the United States as one of many actors in an international system—with the Soviet Union as the opposing superpower—and looking in depth at other actors beyond the superpowers are certainly worthwhile. On issues ranging from Soviet perceptions of bellicose U.S. political speeches crafted for domestic consumption (which Soviet officials openly recognized as a necessity in conversations with their U.S. counterparts, acknowledging that they were not above the practice either) to whether the world was nearly engulfed in nuclear war in late 1983 (it was not), we have much to learn from documents from the former Soviet bloc. With Donaghy himself casting Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, as “the principal human agent of change” in ending the Cold War, U.S. domestic politics alone clearly is not the entire story (p. 286).The solution is not one or the other approach to Cold War history. Deeply researched works focusing on one country, like The Second Cold War, have much to teach us. So, too, do those that embrace the international.