Chapter 1 of David S.

Yost, NATO’s Balancing Act

1. Introduction: NATO’s Post-Cold War Transformation

The British historian Martin Wight wrote that, “To understand the unstable and
intractable nature of international politics, you need only study the relations between
the motives and the consequences of a war, or between the purposes and history of an
alliance. The more general the scope of the alliance, the less does it work as either party
intended. New circumstances constantly arise which show each ally its obligations in
an unexpected light.”1

NATO’s scope has since September 2001 become far “more general” than its founders
could have envisaged during the Cold War, or even during the 1990s. The Allies have
made extensive adaptations in the Alliance’s purposes and operations in response to
“new circumstances” that have shown “each ally its obligations in an unexpected light.”

These adaptations have included measures to meet collective defense challenges that
could not have been imagined in 1949, when the Alliance was founded, plus ambitious
crisis management operations and the pursuit of a vision of cooperative security.

Any assessment of how well the Allies have done in meeting their declared goals in
recent years must begin by acknowledging the aspirational nature of NATO’s key
policy documents, such as its Strategic Concepts and summit declarations. Like the
mission statements of many organizations, these documents are often portraits of what
the Allies would like to achieve rather than descriptions of their actual
accomplishments.

When the visible realities fall short of the handsome portraits in the official policy
statements, it should be recalled that the idealized images have set standards that have
contributed to the better qualities of the admittedly uneven results. For NATO
aspiration has been the compass providing direction in the face of recurrent setbacks
and recalcitrant realities.2

1
Martin Wight, Power Politics, ed. by Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (London: Leicester
University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1978), p. 128.
2
It might be argued that NATO’s “cooperative security” vision derives from Kantian or
Wilsonian sources, in that it involves (at least in some policy statements) a vision of peaceful
cooperation among like-minded democratic states. The shortcomings in actual achievements
may remind one of the fact that even Kant expressed doubts at times about the feasibility of his
design for enduring peace and international order, notably in his famous statement that
“Nothing straight can be constructed from such warped wood as that which man is made of.”
Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” first published in
1784, in Kant, Political Writings, second edition, edited by Hans Reiss and translated by H.B.
Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 46.

1
Given the constraints, internal and external to the Alliance, it is remarkable how much
the Allies have accomplished and continue to achieve. The constraints internal to the
Alliance include structural dysfunctions, shortcomings in collective and national efforts,
and disagreements among the Allies about priorities among NATO’s three core tasks
and how to perform them. The external constraints are even more intractable, because
other countries and organizations have their own agendas and idiosyncrasies. These
agendas often clash with the Alliance’s concepts of pursuing a synergistic
“comprehensive approach” in crisis management and building harmonious
“cooperative security” structures in the Euro-Atlantic region and beyond.

Some observers argue, in the words of Ted Galen Carpenter, that “NATO has outlived
whatever usefulness it had. Superficially, it remains an impressive institution, but it has
become a hollow shell—far more a political honor society than a meaningful security
organization.”3 Similarly, Richard Rupp has described it as “an alliance in continuing
decline.”4 Nick Witney has written that “NATO is dying.”5 According to Andrew
Bacevich, “As a serious military enterprise, the alliance has all but ceased to exist. . . To
think of NATO as a great alliance makes about as much sense as thinking of Pittsburgh
as the Steel City or of Detroit as the car capital of the world. It's sheer nostalgia.”6

For critics, one of the proofs of the Alliance’s growing irrelevance resides in its
expanded set of tasks and the discord among the Allies about how to pursue them.
Since the end of the Cold War in 1989-1991, the NATO Allies have substantially
expanded the Alliance’s missions to include crisis management interventions and the
promotion of international security cooperation. Major developments have included
NATO’s interventions in the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s, NATO’s response to the
terrorist attacks against the United States in September 2001, NATO’s command of the
International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan since 2003, and NATO’s
intervention in the Libya conflict in 2011.

The Allies have defined their current tasks as collective defense, crisis management, and
cooperative security. This book analyzes tensions among these tasks and growing
problems of fragmentation and divergence in the Alliance. These problems were
evident, for example, in the Libya conflict, when several Allies chose not to participate

3 Ted Galen Carpenter, NATO at 60: A Hollow Alliance, Policy Analysis no. 635 (Washington,
D.C.: Cato Institute, March 30, 2009), p. 1.
4 Richard E. Rupp, NATO after 9/11: An Alliance in Continuing Decline (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2006).
5
Nick Witney, “The death of NATO,” Europe’s World, Autumn 2008, available at
http://www.europesworld.org/NewEnglish/Home_old/Article/tabid/191/ArticleType/artic
leview/ArticleID/21272/language/en-US/Default.aspx.
6
Andrew J. Bacevich, “NATO at twilight,” Los Angeles Times, 11 February 2008, available at
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/11/opinion/oe-bacevich11.

2
in strike operations or could not do so, owing to a lack of suitable capabilities. The
Allies are engaged in balancing multiple simultaneous missions in order to perform
their three core tasks.

The book also assesses internal and external constraints affecting the Alliance’s
performance and the prospects for surmounting these challenges.7 The Allies have had,
from their perspective, little choice but to take on a broadened set of complex tasks
owing to the demands of events. The additional tasks — and redefined tasks, as in
collective defense — have nonetheless involved challenges of great significance for their
national security and their ability to contribute to international peace and security.

This chapter reviews the Alliance’s origins and Cold War policies before turning to the
transformation process that began in the 1990s. This chapter also considers how the
heterogeneous NATO Allies manage to work together and accomplish their main tasks,
despite their differences and the inherent challenges of collective action. The
subsequent chapters examine the exertions associated with the Alliance’s three
principal contemporary tasks.8 The conclusion discusses constraints affecting the
Alliance’s efforts to perform these tasks and devise an appropriate balance among
them. Vision and political will are imperative for the Allies to succeed in their
balancing act.

NATO’s Origins and Cold War Policies

NATO’s origins reside in Soviet behavior during and immediately after World War II.
The Soviet Union’s leader, Joseph Stalin, made clear his intention to establish

7
This book is a sequel to NATO Transformed: The Alliance’s New Roles in International Security
(Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1998). In this chapter and elsewhere
the author has drawn at times from passages in the earlier book.
8
This book focuses on the Alliance’s external functions. Although NATO’s internal functions in
support of international security and the interests of the Allies may be categorized and defined
in various ways, at least nine have been identified: maintaining U.S. engagement in European
security, resolving intra–European security dilemmas, reassuring Germany’s neighbors and
allies, limiting the scope of nuclear proliferation in NATO Europe, promoting a certain
“denationalization” of defense planning, providing a forum for the coordination of Western
security policies, supplying economic benefits to all the Allies, encouraging and legitimizing
democratic forms of government, and (from the perspective of the non-American allies) serving
as a check on U.S. power. For background on the first eight of these internal functions, see
David S. Yost, NATO Transformed: The Alliance’s New Roles in International Security (Washington,
D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1998), pp. 50-72. With regard to the ninth, serving
as a check on U.S. power, see Sean M. Maloney, "Limiting American Nuclear Omnipotence in
NATO: The Canadian Method, 1951-68," in Gustav Schmidt, ed., A History of NATO:
The First Fifty Years, vol. 3 (Basingstoke, England, and New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 155-172;
and David S. Yost, “Dissuasion and Allies,” Strategic Insights, vol. 4 (February 2005), available at
http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2005/feb/yostfeb05.pdf.

3
communist regimes wherever the Soviet armed forces could reach. Stalin told a group
of Yugoslav Communists in April 1945, “This war is not as in the past; whoever
occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his
own system as far as his army can reach.”9 Stalin’s commitment to this principle meant
that he had no intention of honoring his commitment at the February 1945 Yalta
conference to hold free elections in countries liberated from Nazi rule. In July-August
1945, at the Potsdam conference, “Stalin made the Soviet position clear when he stated
that ‘any freely elected government would be anti-Soviet and that we cannot permit.’”10
In 1948 Stalin expressed regret that the Soviet military had not liberated France and
Italy and thereby assisted the French and Italian communist parties to take power.11

Soviet territorial acquisitions caught the attention of West European governments. The
USSR was the only great power that acquired territory in Europe in World War II. The
Soviet Union annexed three previously independent countries (Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania) and took territory from Czechoslovakia, Finland, Germany, Poland, and
Romania. Konrad Adenauer, the Chancellor of West Germany in 1949-1963, noted in
his memoirs that the territories annexed by the Soviet Union since 1939 added up to
492,600 km2 — over twice the area of West Germany.12

The brutal and dictatorial policies the USSR pursued in the countries it had liberated
from fascist rule gave governments in Western Europe and North America further
grounds for concern, as did several Soviet actions abroad. These included the
Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 and the Soviet blockade of
road and rail access to the British, French, and U.S. sectors of Berlin. It was during the
Berlin blockade, which lasted from June 1948 to May 1949, that twelve countries
completed the negotiation of the North Atlantic Treaty: Belgium, Canada, Denmark,
France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United
Kingdom and the United States.

9 Stalin quoted in Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, translated by Michael B. Petrovich
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), p. 114.
10 Stalin quoted in Philip E. Mosely, The Kremlin and World Politics: Studies in Soviet Policy and

Action (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), p. 214.

11 Letter from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the Central

Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, 4 May 1948, in The Soviet-Yugoslav Dispute:
Text of the Published Correspondence (London and New York: Oxford University Press for the
Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1948), p. 51. See also Gale Stokes, ed., From Stalinism to
Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe Since 1945 (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996), pp. 62-63.
12 Konrad Adenauer, Erinnerungen 1953-1955 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Bücherei, 1968), p. 19.

See also Hans-Peter Schwarz, “Adenauer’s Ostpolitik,” in Wolfram F. Hanrieder, ed., West
German Foreign Policy: 1949-1979 (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1980), p. 128.

4
It is worth recalling that at the beginning the main purpose of the North Atlantic Treaty,
signed in April 1949, was to communicate a deterrent message to the Soviet Union. In
the U.S. Senate hearings on the treaty in 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson was
asked, “[A]re we going to be expected to send substantial numbers of troops over there
as a more or less permanent contribution to these countries' capacity to resist?”
Acheson replied: “The answer to that question, Senator, is a clear and absolute ‘No.’”13

Some U.S. Senators believed that transmitting a message to Moscow via the North
Atlantic Treaty would be sufficient to deter aggression. Senator Arthur Vandenberg
said, “Senator, so far as I am concerned, I think a man can vote for this treaty and not
vote for a nickel to implement it, because so far as I am concerned, the opening sentence
of the treaty is a notification to Mr. Stalin which puts him in exactly the contrary
position to that which Mr. Hitler was in, because Mr. Hitler saw us with a Neutrality
Act. Mr. Stalin now sees us with a pact of cooperative action.”14

In order to send a deterrent message to the Kremlin, the Allies made a mutual defense
pledge in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or
North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently
they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the
right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the
Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking
forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it
deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the
security of the North Atlantic area.

Although the treaty provided for the establishment of the North Atlantic Council and a
defense committee, it was not until the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June
1950 that the Allies saw the need for a standing military command structure. In
December 1950, the Allies appointed Dwight D. Eisenhower the first Supreme Allied
Commander Europe (SACEUR), and he took command in April 1951. In March 1952
the Allies named Hastings Ismay, a British diplomat and former general, the first
Secretary General of the Alliance. NATO became a standing political-military
organization in peacetime without precedent.

13 Dean Acheson, testimony in U.S. Senate, North Atlantic Treaty, Hearings before the Committee
on Foreign Relations (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), p. 47.
14
Senator Arthur Vandenberg, Republican of Michigan, statement on March 8, 1949, in The
Vandenberg Resolution and the North Atlantic Treaty, Hearings held in Executive Session before
the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 80th Congress, 2nd session, in 1948
and 1949, and made public in 1973 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973),
p. 159.

5
After the admission of Greece and Turkey to the Alliance in 1952, followed by the
Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in 1955, there was no change in NATO
membership until 1982, when Spain joined as part of its post-Franco “return to Europe.”

In retrospect, the period from the mid-1950s to the breakdown of the Soviet empire in
1989–1991 appears to have been one of political and strategic stalemate. Europe,
Germany, and Berlin remained divided, and Communist rule in the Warsaw Pact
(founded in 1955) was sustained, for the most part, through Soviet military power and
internal security organs. Yugoslavia maintained a unique status throughout this
period. Ruled by a Communist party, yet not a member of the Warsaw Pact,
Yugoslavia enjoyed privileged relations with the West. Formal political-military
alignments changed little. Partly because of its geographic isolation, Albania succeeded
in leaving the Warsaw Pact in 1968. Romania, like Albania, declined to participate in
the Soviet-led suppression of democratic tendencies in Czechoslovakia by other
Warsaw Pact states in 1968. Romania was reluctant to participate in the Warsaw Pact’s
integrative schemes and managed to achieve an exceptional degree of foreign policy
autonomy, owing in part to its having persuaded Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to
withdraw Soviet forces from its territory in the late 1950s.15

Despite intermittent phases of détente, in which East-West tensions relaxed, the Soviet
Union was a remarkably reliable stimulus for political cohesion in NATO. Soviet
interventions — for instance, in East Germany in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, in
Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Afghanistan in 1979 — and Soviet-provoked crises (such
as the Berlin and Cuban episodes) tended to reinforce consensus in NATO on the
necessity for collective defensive precautions. Soviet triumphs in military technology
(the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missiles, for example) and periodic Soviet
declarations, reaffirming profound ideological hostility, bolstered Western resolve.16

From the outset, however, the Alliance defined its purposes as involving more than
simply collective defense against external aggression. The Allies repeatedly declared
their interest in pursuing positive political changes in Europe while avoiding war: “to
live in peace with all governments and all peoples” (1949), “to seek solutions by

15 For a useful analysis of national differences in foreign policy within the Warsaw Pact, see
Edwina Moreton, “Foreign Policy Goals,” in David Holloway and Jane M.O. Sharp, eds., The
Warsaw Pact: Alliance in Transition? (London: Macmillan, 1984), especially the discussion of
Romania on pp. 149-151.
16 For a discussion of Soviet ideology and propaganda about military-technical innovation

during the Cold War (at times the Soviets claimed credit for being the first to develop ICBMs
and certain other capabilities, and at other times portrayed the United States as the sole “engine
of the arms race,” with the USSR in a purely reactive mode), see David S. Yost, Soviet Ballistic
Missile Defense and the Western Alliance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp.
71-80.

6
peaceful means” (1953), and to promote “peaceful change” (1957).17 In the 1967 Harmel
Report, the two main purposes of the Atlantic Alliance were recalled in a classic
formulation. The first purpose was (and remains) to maintain sufficient military
strength to deter aggression and attempts at coercion, to defend the Allies in the event
of aggression, and “to assure the balance of forces, thereby creating a climate of
stability, security, and confidence.” Fulfillment of the first purpose would create a basis
for the second: “to pursue the search for progress towards a more stable relationship in
which the underlying political issues can be solved.”18

In practice during the Cold War the second function meant that the NATO Allies
pursued dialogue and arms control negotiations with adversaries to the East. The
Allies nonetheless articulated a longer term vision: “The ultimate political purpose of
the Alliance is to achieve a just and lasting peaceful order in Europe accompanied by
appropriate security guarantees.”19

The Allies professed these goals throughout the Cold War. However, during the late
1950s and early 1960s, their attitudes slowly changed with respect to two key issues:
the relative importance of pursuing arms control and changes in political order in
Europe, and the likely processes of change in the East. The Alliance initially held that a
settlement of the German question on Western terms (“reunification of Germany
through free elections,”20 according to a 1955 communiqué) would have to precede the
negotiation of arms limitations, and that the Soviets would in any case have to honor
their promises at the 1945 Yalta conference for free elections in Eastern Europe before a
fundamental improvement in East-West relations could take place. For several years
after Stalin’s death in 1953 (despite the brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising in
1956), there was a certain sensation of fluidity, in the West at least, regarding European
political order and hope that Western policies of “negotiating from strength” might
somehow bring about a palpable relaxation in Soviet control over Eastern Europe and
even German reunification.

Starting in the late 1950s and especially after the construction of Berlin Wall in 1961 and
the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, issues of political order in Europe began to be clearly

17 Phrases used in NATO communiqués of September 17, 1949; December 14-16, 1953; and
December 16-19, 1957, in Texts of Final Communiqués, 1949-1974 (Brussels: NATO Information
Service, 1975), pp. 39, 79, and 109.
18 The Harmel Report, named after Pierre Harmel, a Belgian Foreign Minister, is available under

its formal title, “The Future Tasks of the Alliance,” Report of the Council, Annex to the Final
Communiqué of the Ministerial Meeting, December 13-14, 1967, The passages cited are found in
par. 5. The document is available at
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_26700.htm.
19 Ibid., par. 9.
20 North Atlantic Council communiqué of December 15-16, 1955, in Texts of Final Communiqués,

1949-1974, p. 95.

7
subordinated to arms control and the pursuit of East-West détente. The Atlantic
Alliance devoted increasingly less attention to issues of political order and legitimacy in
the Eastern countries. While NATO communiqués in the 1950s referred to “the
totalitarian menace”21 and asserted that the peoples of Eastern Europe “have the right to
choose their own governments freely, unaffected by external pressure and the use or
threat of force,”22 by 1966 the Alliance was calling for “removing barriers to freer and
more friendly reciprocal exchanges between countries of different social and economic
systems.”23 In the 1950s, the division of Germany was regarded as a “continuing threat
to world peace.”24 During the 1960s, however, the goal of eventual German
reunification was gradually transformed into simply “an essential factor for a just and
lasting peaceful order in Europe,”25 and the Alliance in 1969 applauded West
Germany’s proposals for a “modus vivendi between the two parts of Germany.”26

These changes in priorities and assumptions were linked to the adoption of new views
about the likely processes of change in the East. The Alliance eventually adopted the
view that détente, which became shorthand for policies intended to reduce East-West
tensions, could only succeed in reassuring the Soviet leadership about the Alliance’s
peaceful intentions and bringing about a freer circulation of people and ideas (and
movement toward democratization in Eastern Europe) if many years were invested in
promoting greater East-West understanding. The sensation of the 1950s as to a certain
fluidity gave way to a conviction during the 1960s that change could be brought about
only on the basis of a stabilization and acceptance of the existing order, which might
then be transformed through a long-term process. Internal changes in the Soviet Union
and East European societies would, it was hoped, lead to a gradual East-West
rapprochement, thus eventually ending the military confrontation.27

21 North Atlantic Council declaration of December 16-19, 1957, in Texts of Final Communiqués,
1949-1974, p. 109.
22 North Atlantic Council declaration of December 11-14, 1956, in Texts of Final Communiqués,

1949-1974, p. 102.
23 North Atlantic Council communiqué of December 15-16, 1966, in Texts of Final Communiqués,

1949-1974, p. 178.
24 North Atlantic Council communiqué of May 2-3, 1957, in Texts of Final Communiqués, 1949-

1974, p. 106.
25 North Atlantic Council communiqué of June 13-14, 1967, in Texts of Final Communiqués, 1949-

1974, p. 189.
26 North Atlantic Council declaration of December 4-5, 1969, in Texts of Final Communiqués, 1949-

1974, p. 231.
27 This brief discussion omits national differences within the Alliance during the Cold War

regarding how to pursue peaceful changes in the European political order. Among other
sources, see Charles R. Planck, The Changing Status of German Reunification in Western Diplomacy,
1955-1966 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967); Bennett Kovrig, The Myth of Liberation:
East-Central Europe in U.S. Diplomacy and Politics Since 1941 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1973); Lincoln Gordon et al., Eroding Empire: Western Relations with Eastern
Europe (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987); and David S. Yost, Alternative Structures

8
It should, however, be noted that despite their declared interest in democratization in
the Warsaw Pact states and a process of reconciliation ending the East-West strategic
stalemate, many Westerners were reasonably satisfied with the European political order
during the Cold War. Some expressed concern that an inadvertent “de-stabilization” of
East European societies through political liberalization could result in war or, at the
least, setbacks for detente as a gradual and ultimately effective process. Some even
appeared willing to support repression for the sake of stability if it appeared that
liberalization trends might escape control.28 West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt
said in December 1981, with respect to the imposition of martial law in Poland, “[East
German leader] Honecker is as dismayed as I am, that this was necessary.”29 Some
West European officials even ventured to say that the Alliance’s declared political goal
of ultimate German reunification should be abandoned. In September 1984, Italian
foreign minister Giulio Andreotti provoked formal West German protests with the
following comments: “Everybody agrees that the two Germanys should have good
relations. It should be clear, however, that pan-Germanism is something that must be
overcome. There are two German states and two German states must remain.”30

Western governments also disagreed frequently during the Cold War about how to
relate the two alliance functions indicated in the Harmel Report. For example, when
would economic transactions (including technology transfers) promote favorable
political change in the Warsaw Pact, and when would they serve to strengthen Soviet
military power and make it harder and more costly for the West to maintain an
adequate military posture? Agreements on broad principles often broke down with
respect to specific cases. The U.S. approach often conflicted with the general West
European view (upheld by West Germany in particular) that economic sanctions could
not accomplish anything of value, and that East-West trade must be encouraged and
expanded because of its political significance. Such disagreements led to difficulties in
coordinating Alliance policies for change in the East.

In retrospect, it appears that the assumptions behind the Alliance’s policies for peaceful
change in the European political order were flawed. The vision of the gradual
liberalization and democratization of the East assumed that the Soviet Union would
moderate its control structure and that allied Communist regimes would accept
evolutionary movement toward civil rights, pluralism, and democracy when East-West

of European Security, Working Paper no. 81 (Washington,. D.C.: International Security Studies
Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution, 1987).
28 For a discussion of this attitude, see Ronald Steel, “The West Has Its Own Stake in the Eastern

Status Quo,” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1982, part IV, pp. 1, 3.
29 Helmut Schmidt cited in Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (New York:

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), p. 317.

30 Giulio Andreotti cited in James M. Markham, “For Both East and West Two Germanys is

Better,” New York Times, September 23, 1984, part IV, p. 5.

9
tensions had subsided and the Warsaw Pact nations had been reassured about the
peaceful and non-threatening intentions of the Atlantic Alliance. These assumptions
threatened the monopoly of power maintained by the Communist regimes, however.

The Soviet bloc’s Communist regimes were not established with the consent of the
governed as the principle of legitimacy, but on the basis of a party elite’s interpretation
of an ideology of historical determinism. Although some party members were
presumably faithful believers in Marxism-Leninism, the ideology was generally a tool
to justify rule by what Milovan Djilas called “the new class” and to conceal its
determination to hold power.31 In a pattern that prevailed over decades, whenever
popular pressures for change reached unacceptable thresholds and seemed likely to
endanger a Communist regime’s rule, repression to maintain power would follow. If
the regime was unable to handle the pressures, allied regimes in the Warsaw Pact
would offer fraternal assistance under Soviet leadership to maintain the gains of
“socialism.” Definite limits to Western-style liberalization appeared to apply to the
Soviet Union in particular, because of its power structure and the interrelationship
between its economic, military, and internal nationality problems.

The extent to which Western policies favoring gradual liberalization in the East
European countries contributed to the disintegration of the Soviet empire remains
unclear; and Allies differ in their general interpretations. As Peter Rudolf, a German
scholar with the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, has noted, “In the United States, the
end of the Cold War is widely perceived to be a success of containment and a hard line
approach. In the prevailing view in Germany, the end of the conflict was rather a result
of détente and Ostpolitik.”32

The Communist regimes in Eastern Europe were in fact not gradually liberalized as
much as they were overthrown by popular movements when it became evident that the
Soviet Union would no longer uphold them with force. Forcible Soviet interventions to
keep Communist parties in power might have been an infeasible proposition in the late
1980s, given that several of these regimes were disintegrating in close succession. Such
a non-violent end to the Soviet empire — and the East-West competition — was by no
means a foregone conclusion during the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact was formally
dissolved in July 1991, and the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991.33

31 Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Frederick A.
Praeger, 1957).
32 Peter Rudolf, “Managing Strategic Divergence: German-American Conflict over Policy

Towards Iran,” in Peter Rudolf and Geoffrey Kemp, The Iranian Dilemma: Challenges for German
and American Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: American Institute for Contemporary German
Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, 1997), p. 3.
33
Recent studies include Mary Elise Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), and Frédéric Bozo, Mitterrand, the End of the
Cold War, and German Unification (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 1989).

10