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In 1968–73, the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China played crucial military and political roles in the Vietnam War, particularly against the background of larger developments in world politics. The Sino-Soviet split, Sino-American rapprochement, and Soviet-American détente all influenced the North Vietnamese conduct of war. The split made coordination of socialist aid in the second half of the 1960s difficult, but also resulted in a Sino-Soviet competition of aid that enabled North Vietnam to launch the Tet Offensive in early 1968 in the first place. Rapprochement convinced the DRV to launch the Easter Offensive – a second Tet Offensive – in the spring of 1972. Détente eventually forced North Vietnam to rethink its strategy of trying to win a victory against the United States on the battlefield in Indochina and humiliate the superpower at the global level in the process. Despite Moscow and Beijing’s sustained loyalty throughout the conflict in the late 1960s and early 1970s, neither supported Hanoi’s overall strategy during the last years of the war. The Soviet Union preferred a negotiated solution to the conflict, while China jettisoned its world revolutionary positions in the 1970–72 period and instead counselled North Vietnam to settle for a negotiated agreement.
What was the Cold War that shook world politics for the second half of the twentieth century? Standard narratives focus on Soviet-American rivalry as if the superpowers were the exclusive driving forces of the international system. Lorenz M. Lüthi offers a radically different account, restoring agency to regional powers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe and revealing how regional and national developments shaped the course of the global Cold War. Despite their elevated position in 1945, the United States, Soviet Union and United Kingdom quickly realized that their political, economic, and military power had surprisingly tight limits given the challenges of decolonization, Asian-African internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab–Israeli antagonism, and European economic developments. A series of Cold Wars ebbed and flowed as the three world regions underwent structural changes that weakened or even severed their links to the global ideological clash, leaving the superpower Cold War as the only major conflict that remained by the 1980s.
The socialist economic system in Eastern Europe—the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance—was established in 1949. Most of the countries there did not join the CMEA because they genuinely believed in its purpose of rivaling the capitalist half of Europe. Stalin forced in order to protect Soviet influence there. Yet even he seemed not to be convinced about the viability of the CMEA. Several socialist states opted out of the idea of an integrated socialist economic system within two decades—Yugoslavia, China, Albania, and Romania. Because the USSR was the dominant member, it initiated several rounds of reforms from the mid 1950s to the 1970s to provide the CMEA with greater purpose and direction in the competition with the capitalist West. But the structural and ideological foundations, which Stalin had put in place before 1953, remained remarkably resistant to change. Thus, within two decades of the end of Worl War II, Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe turned from a source of reparations into an economic liability for the USSR. By the late 1970s, virtually all CMEA members understood that the organization had failed to deliver it had set out to do.
The previous fifteen chapters have explored the structural changes that Asia, the Middle East, and Europe had undergone during the decades leading up to the late 1970s. In Asia, reunified Vietnam replaced the rising China as a revolutionary power, while India transformed its internationalism into a national quest for great power status. In the Middle East, the Arab–Israeli conflict went through four major wars. Israel emerged as an unacknowledged regional power, Egypt ensnared the global Cold War in the region but realized the futility of allying closely with the Soviet Union, and the Palestinians managed to put their struggle for nationhood on the international agenda despite repeated military and political defeats. Asian–African Internationalism, Non-Alignment, and pan-Islamism all formulated alternatives to the Cold War bloc system.
As in Asia, decolonization in the Middle East intersected with the long-term effects of European imperialism and the influence of the global Cold War. Resembling Vietnam and India, many Arab states did not emerge from pre-colonial antecedents, but were mainly French and British creations (Chapter 2). Like China in Asia (Chapter 5), Egypt was the rare exception in the Middle East. Nation state formation in the region occurred relatively late as a result of previous European interventions. And similar to South Asia (Chapter 7), the Middle East experienced partition imposed from the outside.
The idea of the Free World emerged in World War II from the struggle of Western liberal democracies against their autocratic and totalitarian enemies. After the war, the Free World consisted of the United States, a group of Western European liberal democracies that re-emerged after liberation from Germany and sought American protection, and the reconstructed and mostly demilitarized war enemies Italy, (West) Germany, and Japan. The US-led anti-communist alliance building in the wake of the Korean War increasingly included Asian and the Middle Eastern countries in the defense of the Free World, although they often were authoritarian . The liberal-democratic nature of the Free World’s core in Europe allowed open political disagreements to emerge, mostly between Charles de Gaulle’s France and the Anglo-American powers but also within the societies of the Free World itself. These conflicts reached their combined peak in 1968 over the Vietnam War and widespread popular protests in several Western countries. The Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia and subsequent changes of government in the West, however, helped to recreate a semblance of unity within the Free World by the early 1970s.
Over several decades, three countries played major roles in Asia’s Cold War. China, Vietnam, and India all were dynamic agents in the shaping of their own fates, and definitely not just passive battlegrounds in the global competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Their decolonization occurred in parallel to that of the Middle Eastern countries (Chapter 2), but was intertwined with the Cold War in more profound ways. As early as 1927, China became a major regional theater of the ideological conflict that would be typical for the Cold War, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang (Nationalist Party) turned on the Soviet-sponsored Chinese Communist Party and started an intermittent civil war that lasted for over two decades.1 During a pause in this conflict in the period of 1937–45, China fortuitously got rid of formal colonial interference as Japanese occupation terminated the Western presence, and Washington’s defeat of Tokyo in 1945 ended Japanese imperialism. In early 1946, the civil war resumed in the form of a local Cold War, ending with Chinese communist victory three years later.
The Cold War did not cause the conflicts in the Middle East, particularly the one between Israel and the Arab states. The Zionist state building project rooted in the anti-Semitism of the emerging European nation states of the late 19th century, employed British imperialism as a vehicle, and derived its moral urgency from the Holocaust. But it triggered the Palestinian displacement. The United States and the Soviet Union both supported the UN partition proposal in 1947 and recognized Israel within a year. Still, they supported Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956. The United States was concerned about the possible growth of Soviet influence in the region, especially after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Its joint effort with the United Kingdom to build up an anti-Soviet alliance system divided the Arab world while it alienated both Israel and Egypt. In the end, the pre-emptive anti-Soviet alliance making helped destabilize the Middle East and allowed the USSR to enter the region. Although the Suez Crisis terminated British imperial influence, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were able to benefit from it by making significant inroads in the following decade.
The end of the Soviet-American competition not only seemed to occur unexpectedly but also destroyed near-unshakable assumptions about the long-lasting nature of the Cold War. Structural change in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe had put in place the conditions, under which the superpower conflict could actually have ended by in the first half of the 1980s. But why, then, did the superpower conflict still take so long to end? Both superpowers were Cold Warriors almost until the very end. American-centric interpretations of a US victory in the Cold War to the contrary, the USSR decided to end it. Although the last Soviet leader originally sought to reform and strengthen the Soviet Union, by 1988 he realized that this goal was unattainable.
Asia at the turn of the 1970s/1980s experienced a rapid realignment of forces. The Sino-Vietnamese split and Sino-American recognition signified the collapse of long-standing structures that had defined the Cold War in Asia. The roles of India and Non-Alignment in the period are more complex. In 1977-79, the first Indian government led by a party other than Congress tried to reverse the anti-Chinese and anti-American policies of its predecessor. The return of Congress leader Indira Gandhi to power in early 1980 led India to a temporary return to old positions, including the defense of the Soviet and Vietnamese interventions in Afghanistan and Cambodia, respectively. But by 1982, Gandhi tried to reorient India into a position of equidistance between the superpowers, just as India had gained control over the Non-Aligned Movement for the first time. The deep involvement of the USSR in the wars in Indochina, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, as well as its attempt to infiltrate the Non-Aligned Movement with the help of Cuba had damaged Soviet standing in all three areas. In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union was tied to losing Cold War causes in Indochina, South Asia, and the Middle East.
The Vatican was one of the seminal Cold Warriors, rejecting communism as early as the 1840s. It had hoped for the “containment” of Soviet-style expansionism into Europe during World War II, i.e. even before the United States adopted that term into its official Cold War vocabulary in 1946-47. However, the Vatican realized by the late 1950s that ideological rigidity damaged its own interest—ensuring the continued existence of functional churches behind the Iron Curtain. Mainly for this reason, it decided to engage with the communist world in the 1960s, although its policies were fraught with political danger and disappointments. Its major success in the European Cold War—the restoration of the Polish Church to independence—only occurred in the context of détente in German-German and European affairs in the early 1970s.
The Socialist Camp was a Soviet creation. In the wake of the Soviet military advance across the eastern half of Europe in World War II, Stalin’s USSR imposed communist regimes. As the Cold War heated up, the Soviet Union tightened controls in 1947-48, alienating Yugoslavia in process but also attracting the communist parties from China and Albania. The Socialist Camp appeared sturdy but was internally brittle. After Stalin’s death in 1953, his successors tried to regain legitimacy by reforming the USSR. De-Stalinization opened up rifts with China, Romania, and Albania, and created political crises in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. The rise of a conservative Soviet leadership in the mid 1960s did not smother conflict within the Socialist Camp but ultimately convinced the USSR to shore up a rump-camp through military means. The intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 ended the erosion of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe, but undermined the capacity of the Soviet system to reform itself. It further alienated other socialist states like China, Romania, and Yugoslavia while convincing Western European communist parties to reform themselves into democratic organizations.
European détente in the 1960s and 1970s comprised several parallel but related attempts to lessen the impact of the continent’s division. After two decades of hostility, West Germany tried to engage with East Germany in order to reduce the human toll of division and to entangle its communist sibling economically (Chapter 17). During the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the Soviet-led Socialist Camp hoped to get legal recognition for its contested post-World War II borders, while the Nine of the European Communities (EC) and Europe’s neutrals tried to improve the civil, political, and human rights situation in the communist half of the continent (Chapter 18). At the same time, the Vatican attempted to engage with the Socialist Camp in order to restore the pastoral life of the Catholic Church behind the Iron Curtain (Chapter 19).
The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe emerged at the confluence of two developments. Since the early 1950s, the USSR and Poland had demanded internationally sanctioned security arrangements against the rise of a rearmed West Germany by way of legal recognition of their contested post-World War II borders. In comparison, the European Communities wanted to overcome the legacy of the war through the guarantee of human rights throughout all of Europe. This conflict between the Communist focus on the supremacy of statehood and the Western emphasis on individual rights came to a denouement at the CSCE in 1972-75. The Socialist Camp did not receive a legal guarantee of its borders, while it had to concede on human rights. Yet the impact of human rights on the European Socialist Camp, which Western European governments had expected for the period afterwards, did not happen immediately. Poland would ultimately receive a guarantee for its post-war borders after the end of the Cold War in 1989/91. But the Final Act of the CSCE neither prevented the suppression of human rights in the Socialist Camp until the late 1980s nor saved the GDR from collapse and absorption into the FRG by 1990.