Annotations for Lbj: Cold War

It's our pleasure to have you. Fred is the author of 10 books. He's the author and editor of 10 books on American politics and foreign policy. Among my favorites and those which I know everyone has read, uh, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam, which really transformed our understanding of Lyndon Johnson's choices for war in 1964-1965. America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity, which Fred co-wrote with Campbell Craig, another historian, which looks at the influence of domestic politics on American Cold War foreign policy. Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire in the Making of America's Vietnam, which is really about early French and American activities in Vietnam before we would, we traditionally called the Vietnam War in the United States. Embers of War won the Pulitzer Prize as well as many other rewards and then his most recent book, which I hope all of our listeners will read and I know you'll be reading a lot about soon as well. And then his most recent book, which I hope all of our listeners will read and I know you'll be reading a lot about soon as well, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century.

There's a second issue that I'm only going to mention because I know we don't have time to go into it. I think we are still living in a time where the Cold War has cast its shadow over American history, which is why great, you know, civil rights activists like Paul Robeson [are] almost forgotten, which is why we don't talk about Hiroshima and we don't talk about Vietnam. But that's a question for a podcast in itself.

Well, in 1962, I think there were some valid concerns about the state of democracy and threats to democracy, having just gone through the McCarthy era and the undermining of civil liberties and attacks on civil liberties that became very serious in the 1950s. So many of those students grew up recognizing that threat.

Also concerns about ongoing war. The Cold War was becoming more tense between the Soviet Union and the US. And they talked about that in the document and identified that as a problem.

Nuclear warfare, the threat of nuclear warfare and annihilation in that way, hung over them. And I think you can see that fear on almost every page of the Port Huron statement. And just a concern that there was a lot of apathy about the way that the government was running things in the United States, about the United States' role in the world, and the lack of democracy extended to groups like African-Americans in the South.

But obviously there are different types. Democratic socialism is alive and well in most of the advanced countries and the United States, and that began in the early to mid-20th century. But socialism in the terms that SDS understood it, they did avoid the term, especially in the Port Huron statement, because it was such a weighted concept and that it had such negative connotations, particularly in the Cold War context when everyone was being accused of communism, if they stood up for anything that seemed radical.

And then the Cold War tensions heating up did rationalize the continuation of the military-industrial complex and that tight relationship between the government, big business for, you know, military industry and the military itself. And they saw this as, you know, perhaps a worst, a military state and a endless war type of society that they thought was a threat to democracy.

You know, another thing to be careful about, and Jeremi, I know I'm talking to the expert here, is, look, when we do reach back for that analogy of the Cold War, which both does not work at all and also works in some ways, is during the Cold War, we have to be careful about areas of competition that are unhelpful for the United States, chasing our tail into some areas, right? So yeah, you know, it is both a driver, it's one that will focus the mind, but it's also one that we are in and we have to be very careful about as well.

Charlie, you've put so many interesting issues on the table in a historical perspective, allowing us to see that the competition is real, but it's more complex than just saying we're competitors, and we're going to mobilize all the resources we have. It's a much more delicate game of balancing different interests and different communities abroad and at home. For our listeners who are concerned about this conflict, either leading us to chase our tail, as you put it, in places where we don't want to expend our resources, that's one of the lessons of the Cold War, that competing against a legitimate adversary can lead us to do things that we regret, in retrospect, and get into conflicts we regret. But also, what are the things we can do to avoid the conflict getting out of control? What are the positive steps that we can take and that our listeners can think about encouraging in their political leaders?

It makes a lot of sense. Zachary, as a young person who follows these issues pretty closely and is concerned, do you see a pathway forward that Charlie's outlined here with his insightful comments about how the United States can compete without recreating perhaps some of the excesses of the Cold War or without going too far in certain areas in dangerous ways?

I definitely think so. And I think the Cold War analogy works to some extent, but it also doesn't because China and the United States, our societies and our populace are in many ways very connected, not just through trade, but through immigration and travel and other forms of business. So I think that the connection between our societies, people in the United States interacting with Chinese immigrants and people in China interacting with Americans, I think that in many ways, I think, allows for a framework where we can think about competition and challenging Chinese aggression without going too far.

It's interesting, Charlie. Zachary brought up a point that reminds me of one of, I think, the great insights that our mutual advisor, John Lewis made years ago, that one of the striking things about the US-Soviet relationship was how distant these societies were, how little the United States needed the Soviet Union, in fact. And it's the opposite with China. And Zachary's commenting, I think, on how that could be a positive element. That could be something that prevents some of the, let's say, mistakes and excesses of the past. Sort of as a final thought, do you agree with that? Is proximity and closeness a strength here?

And Josh, on this point of the strategic purpose, which I think Jim is obviously correct about, was at the core of NATO, would you say, before we talk about the end of the Cold War, during the Cold War, did NATO succeed in containing Soviet aggression and did it succeed in, as you discussed before, bringing Germany into the Western alliance in a way that was comfortable and effective for the countries of Europe and for the United States and Canada?

The plan was for eventually Western Europe to stand on its own two legs against the Soviets and the Americans could move more offshore. Judged against that very high standard, NATO during the Cold War didn't quite meet its goal as Mark Trachtenberg has written quite elegantly on how this problem came about, how these tensions lingered. But in terms of making Germany acceptable to other countries and making France and Britain, Belgium, Holland, so on and so forth, comfortable with Germany, NATO managed to succeed in that mission. And American influence was critical to that project.

So I often hear NATO spoken of sort of as almost analogous to the Warsaw Pact, but obviously there was much more of a back and forth between the countries. How much did internal relations between NATO members shape NATO policy during the Cold War?

Right. And yet they managed to stay together. That's a that's a perfect segue to to to Josh and your work on NATO expansion. And of course, Jim's written about this as well. So we'll get both of you in on this. What happened at the end of the Cold War, if ostensibly the most obvious reason for NATO to exist was the Soviet threat when the Soviet Union no longer existed after December 25th, 1991. Why did NATO not only continue to exist, but actually expand into places like Poland and the Czech Republic, places that had been part of the Warsaw Pact that Jim just just discussed? Josh, give us give us your understanding of expansion.

Well, so first of all, we have to remember that at the end of the Cold War, there were any number of plans and a number of calls to wrap up both of the Cold War alliances. The Warsaw Pact obviously fell apart and there were calls in some quarters for NATO to close up shop and to be replaced with either a new European security organization to anchor European security on the European Union, then the European community, but slowly coming together. The Conference on Security Cooperation in Europe. So there were all these calls to abandon ship or change course.

But when the Cold War ended and the Cold War ended, above all, with Germany's unification with East Germany melding into West Germany, the Lord Ismay statement of keeping the Germans and the Soviets out, you know, the Soviets were gone, but keeping the Germans in check remained a real concern, number one. And German leader Helmut Kohl at the time was very much aware of European concerns with newfound German power. And so there was a lingering desire to keep the Americans engaged in Europe, keep NATO alive.

So, you know, but there we are. And I think that it's just, what's so fascinating, we started with the focal point of Europe and the Soviet Union, how NATO was formed, what the thinking was at the end of the Cold War. In that period, as Josh said, Europe and Russia were the focal point of US foreign policy. That's what we thought about the most. And that's no longer true.

Thanks for having me.

Well, I think the United States was in many places around the world in the 1960s, trying to demonstrate the applicability of its own economic and political and social systems as a way of waging the Cold War and sort of demonstrating to people all over the world that the United States had the answers when it came to human progress and development and effective governance.

This was a period of intense competition, as you well know, Jeremi, between the East and West for the loyalty and sympathy of societies all around the world. So it really mattered, I think, to Americans that they had the keys to unlocking development and democratization and progress in a broad way. Vietnam was just one of many places where Americans tried to achieve those objectives.

Well, I think that the American experience in Vietnam helped to tear down this set of ambitions that ran so high in the early 1960s. Americans in the late 1960s, perhaps in the early 1970s, by and large, believed that they had the ability because of their vast know-how, their technological capabilities, their resources. The world's most productive economy believed that they could bring real change to many countries around the world, and frankly, to their own society as well. I think there's a lot of continuity that has sometimes eluded historians between the domestic arena in which JFK and LBJ and other liberals were so determined to bring reform to all facets of American life, on the one hand, and the way that they approached the international scene as well, both in the international and domestic realms. Liberals believed that by marshaling the resources of the United States, the vast expertise that the United States had at its disposal, they could achieve great things.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that it's important to recognize that the American attitude toward the wider world in the early 1960s depended on a certain degree of confidence, right? That Americans could have their way in the wider world. It depended as well on the idea that the United States had the resources to pump into these areas to achieve the results that it wanted. And it relied as well, I think, on the idea that it was okay to take some risks, right? It might not ultimately pan out in every place, but it was worth the effort. And I think what you see across the 1960s, particularly as the Vietnam War heats up and really consumes debate in the United States, is that Americans question all of those ways of thinking that were easy to see at the beginning of the decade.

Yeah, I thought, Mark, your book did really a wonderful job of taking that story that some of us have focused on and really connecting it to the story of what was called the third world and how this impacted not simply detente policy, a search for stability between the US and the Soviet Union and a search for law and order at home. Lyndon Johnson's the first to really use that phrase, law and order. But as you show in this book, as I think no one has before, how this really comes to define, again, American policy in Brazil and Indonesia, which to me was, again, startling. I had seen hints of this, but my gosh, the depth of it, I think we have not appreciated until reading your book.

I think that the result of the trends that I write about in the book is that the United States by the early 1970s is drawn very strongly to the notion of stability in the third world. As I've said, most of that ambition that was so characteristic of the early 60s has disappeared. I think it really was Richard Nixon and someone you know, Jeremi, better than anyone, Henry Kissinger, who fully articulated the logic that had become clear to the Johnson administration as the 1960s passed.

What jumps out at me in connection with the history of the 1970s is how unstable some of those, many of those relationships that the United States had formed in the interest of assuring stability turned out to be. So the relationship with the Shah of Iran, very appealing, right? Under the chaotic circumstances of the 1960s gives way to massive instability in the 1970s. The quest for stability in Latin America gives rise to a new period of instability and chaos in some places, at least, as the 1970s advances. And on and on, we could go looking really around the world.

You are not kidding. I mean, the similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan, on the one hand, and Vietnam on the other, have been a subject of a vast amount of writing. I'm certainly persuaded that the similarities are eerie in many, many ways. And we could certainly spend some time, if you like, talking about some of the ways in which those wars were similar. The way I would tell the story of the way in which Americans have thought about and tried to draw lessons from the history of the Vietnam War would go something like this. In the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, Vietnam lost some of its power in American politics and society.

Sure. So, first of all, I just want to say I love listening to this podcast, mostly for Zachary's poems. And so he's given me a lot to think about there. And something he said in there made me think about this being the first "TikTok war" that we have going on today. So NATO, of course, was founded in 1949 with its 12 original members signing the Washington Treaty. And, of course, this is when much of Europe is in the ashes and just really beginning to recover from the devastation of World War II. And it's, you know, it's sort of the original charter of transatlanticism. You know, the United States and Canada from North America are two of the original members. And then 10 at the time, just Western European countries. And I think one way to think about why is NATO, you know, why are the particular 30 members today up from the original 12? Like, you know, why has this come to pass? I think to some degree, international relations theory shed some light on this. And I think NATO, when it was founded, really fell more into the realist kind of, you know, IR theory camp. And it was, you know, it was always for something, specifically the principles of democracy, individual liberty and rule of law. But it was really against something just as much, and it was against the Soviet Union and what it stood for.

And it was all about the collective defense of Western Europe at the time. And then, you know, in 1989 through 1991, when, you know, to the surprise of many, the Berlin Wall falls, the Warsaw Pact dissolves, the Soviet Union disintegrates. And NATO's really their reason for existing, i.e. the Soviet Union, you know, is no longer such a threat. And so, you know, the London summit in 1991 is really when NATO leaders ask one another, you know, what is our reason for existing now? And I think this is when we see a fundamental shift, really, from sort of the realist IR theory to really liberal internationalism. And more back to, as I mentioned at the beginning, in 1949, NATO was always for something, not just against the Soviet Union, right? And so really in 1991, this is when we start to see consideration of promotion of democracy, expanded cooperation and dialogue with former Warsaw Pact members and even former Soviet states in Central and Eastern Europe. And of course, over time, the two biggest tranches are in 1999 with Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary being offered admission. And then in 2004, when, you know, seven more allies are admitted in of particular note, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which are the three former Soviet states. And so I think there's this tension inside of NATO where it kind of goes back and forth between realism and liberal institutionalism or liberal internationalism, I should say. And I wonder now if we might be at another inflection point, you know, where collective defense of Europe, it's an original reason for existing there with NATO, I wonder if that again becomes the central task of the alliance.

Sure. So one of the great, one of my central critiques in my dissertation is that NATO historians, scholars, and I would just say everyday pundits treat NATO from, you know, with the state as the central unit of analysis. And NATO is often considered just an aggregation of X number of members' state preferences. The United States, of course, has always had the largest economy and the largest military inside of NATO. And therefore, you know, its preferences are seen as counting, you know, the most relative to other allies. And I think that that's, you know, a fundamentally insufficient means of understanding the alliance and how it works. The institution of NATO matters and the institution of NATO, specifically its political headquarters in Brussels, and then its military headquarters at SHAPE in Mons. And I think too often we overlook the key role that institutional leaders represented by the secretary general, you know, at the political headquarters in Brussels and then the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, particularly during the Cold War, but even still today, really play a central role in what policies or adaptations NATO makes. And so I think NATO is, you know, we have to account for the institution as well in any kind of outcomes and not just treat it as an aggregation of states.

Sure. So, you know, Vladimir Putin has famously said, the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century was the disintegration of the Soviet Union. And so, more recently, I think, as recently as last week, we've seen in his speeches, where he also talks even beyond the, you know, the 50 or so year history of the Soviet Union, he talks about the Russian Empire. And he sees Russia as a great power, and Russia has a, you know, a right to a sphere of influence. Because of, again, because of, you know, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, by and large, have demonstrated a desire to be part to be free to be part of the West. And those countries reside, you know, their land is where Putin understands the Russian sphere of influence to reside. And so there's inevitable conflict there.

That's absolutely right. A key point of the book is that double digit growth rates and a rapid rise is not the norm for any country and certainly not for China. In fact, most of Chinese history is very much the opposite. It's strife and poverty. I mean, really from the first Opium War in 1839 until the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, China's getting ripped apart by imperialist powers and internal conflicts that are among the worst civil wars in recorded history. Even after China unifies under communist rule in 1949, it almost immediately becomes the main enemy of the United States through the Korean War. And then when China's alliance with the Soviet Union falls apart in 1960, China is the main enemy of both Cold War superpowers. And so it's not until you get to the 1970s that China is not isolated, surrounded, and impoverished. And so in the book, we try to show that China's exceptional rise since the 1970s was the result of exceptional circumstances that we think are all starting to turn into liabilities that will drag China down.

But now all of those tailwinds that propelled China's rise are becoming headwinds. China's plowed through its resources. Half of its water and arable land, its oil are gone. It's the largest importer of food and energy. It's running out of people. That 10 to one ratio of workers to retirees is gonna collapse to two to one by the late 2030s. The government obviously is sliding back towards this sort of brutal dictatorship and a Maoist cult of personality that is gonna sacrifice future economic growth just to centralize power in Xi Jinping's hands. And then most importantly, the world is just starting to become belatedly a less welcoming environment. The United States used to engage China. Now I would argue it's essentially engaged in neo-containment of China. And many other major economies are following suit to varying degrees. China now faces thousands of new trade and investment barriers today that it didn't even as recently as 10 years ago. So from hyper-globalization to this sort of Cold War II scenario. These things are already dragging down China's growth and we think that they're actually gonna get worse in the years ahead.

Well, I think the basic problem with the responsible stakeholder thesis, which was first explicitly articulated by Bob Zoellick back in 2005, and in some ways provided the intellectual architecture for a lot of US policy toward China during the post-Cold War era. The challenge is that there's just less and less evidence to support it all the time. And so if the responsible stakeholder thesis bore out, we should expect to see a China that becomes more satisfied and more reconciled to the existing international system and all the things that go with it as it became richer, more powerful, more integrated into the system. Because the logic of the idea was that once China saw all of the things it could achieve simply by inserting itself economically into the existing order, it would lose any incentive to overturn or challenge that order.

And it's interesting to look back at the Cold War, because there are some parallels between the situation that the United States faces now and the situation that it faced during the early Cold War. I think most American officials during the early Cold War believed that the U.S. system would prove stronger than the Soviet system over time, but there were moments when the geopolitical balance appeared extremely precarious, either because Western Europe was in danger of outright economic collapse in 1947, 1948, in a way that might've opened the door to Soviet hegemony in Europe, or during the Korean War, when it appeared that the United States was facing a window of military vulnerability that it had to close very quickly. And so there are a handful of lessons that we take away from this, but I think one of the things that becomes really apparent from looking at the history of the early Cold War is not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. And so a lot of the legendary policies that the United States pursued during this period, the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, things of that nature, were not initiatives that were planned for months or years beforehand. They were things that were basically slapped together in moments of crisis, because the alternative to moving quickly and decisively looked far, far worse. George Kennan's policy planning staff came up with the outline of the Marshall Plan in about three weeks in May, 1947. NATO actually was a European initiative that the United States decided to sign onto. And the sense of the time was that the United States had to be willing to take risks. It had to be willing to work with new partners, including enemies that it had just defeated, like Japan and West Germany. And it had to be able to move quickly to close windows of vulnerability before they became too dangerous. And that's a similar lesson the United States needs to take away in thinking about the China challenge today.

And you give some very concrete suggestions in the book, which I encourage listeners to look at, and also you quote Dean Acheson quite often, and I think it's always, always beneficial to quote Dean Acheson, in particular on the importance of showing strength sometimes to prevent worse outcomes from from occurring. Mike, on this line of thinking, though, I wanted to ask you, how do we prevent ourselves from over committing in the other direction? One of the criticisms that Hal and myself and others and you have made about American Cold War policymaking is, although we did good work in many places and other places we sometimes overcommitted, went into wars we shouldn't have been in, and there were often domestic costs as well, and so you know the very period Hal is referring to in the late 40s is also the rise of McCarthyism in the United States, and I know, and I'm sure you and Hal know this better than I do, you know, for many Chinese Americans talk of more explicit American containment policy toward China raises worries about anti-Chinese sentiment within the United States, which we saw a lot of evidence of during the pandemic. How do we prevent ourselves from over committing in the other direction?

I think on the domestic factor, just making sure that you're separating the Chinese Communist Party from the Chinese people, and that our main problem is with some of the policies that the CCP is pursuing, not China necessarily as a nation. In terms of the, you know, we also try to derive lessons from history of what not to do, and you know, the United States imposed a massive oil embargo on Japan in 1941 and that pushed Tokyo to attack Pearl Harbor to try to survive, and today the United States could have a comprehensive tech embargo on China to try to trash its economy. It could enact across-the-board trade sanctions against it. It could even take some provocative pages from the Cold War playbook and start a huge covert action program to stir up Tibetan resistance, we hear resistance, foment internal violence, and sow chaos in Chinese society. And I think any of those measures would risk catalyzing the exact kind of conflict that we're trying to avoid.

I really appreciate it in the book how both of you talk about the importance of maintaining diplomatic connections, because I do think one of the lessons of the Cold War is that even in the worst moments of US-Soviet rivalry, talking was important. Diplomatic connections mattered, and the moments when we had least connection were often some of the most dangerous. And I think it's a point you emphasize, and I want to emphasize too, that as one is acting perhaps to strengthen Taiwan's defense, that doesn't mean you stop talking to the Chinese. In fact, it means you talk to the Chinese while you're doing that, and hope that you can make diplomatic progress at that moment. You both make the point in your book that if at some point the Chinese were willing to agree, as the United States did with Cuba, for example, in 1962 to a non-invasion pledge, that might be something the United States would want to talk about as a compromise agreement. I'm correct on this, right, that you, you both see diplomacy as a key part of the story, even as this relationship might become more militarized, yes?

Absolutely, and I think one of the lessons of the Cold War is that diplomacy isn't silly peacenik stuff, it's actually quite useful from a competitive perspective, as well. It's a way of keeping your allies on side. It's a way of convincing your own domestic public that you are actually trying to exhaust all avenues short of confrontation for getting what you want. It's a way of maintaining contact with the other side, so that you know when a breakthrough may be possible. And so, as Mike said, you've got to have your eyes wide open about it, and we shouldn't think that simply talking to the CCP is going to lead them to change how they think about their interests, but the strategic arguments for doing so, I think, are very compelling.

(Hal, your thoughts?) Yeah, well, the book I wrote before this was about lessons of the Cold War, and one of the most hopeful lessons of the Cold War is that geopolitical rivalry gives you an incentive to do things you ought to do anyway to improve your own society, and so the United States, for all of the nasty things it did to itself during the Cold War, also did some really constructive things, it invested massively in its own future by funding the world's best university education system, by developing big infrastructure projects like the interstate highway system, and through a variety of other means. The Cold War, in this case, and this is a contested argument, but one that I think it's true. Actually, helped the United States become a better version of itself, even though the progress was uneven. I hope very much that we will see the competition with China as an opportunity to do something similar today. I think there has been some initial progress in that direction with the passage of chips just recently, which Mike referred to, of course, there have also been some ugly aspects of the turn toward competition, including a surge in anti-Asian violence and a variety of other things, and so sort of the angels and demons always compete with each other, but we have been successful in the past of using competition as a way to strengthen ourselves internally, and that's the precedent we ought to try to emulate today.

Right? And our economies are certainly much more.. this is this is a point John Gaddis made a long time ago, that one of the unique features of the Cold War is that the United States and the Soviet Union actually had very few economic and trade interconnections, that's of course not the case for the US and China right now. I think your point, Zachary, is very well taken, and it echoes what both Mike and Hal said here on the podcast, and say in their wonderful book, which is that we study history, and their book is filled with useful historical analysis. We study history because it shows us that human beings have choices, they're difficult choices to make, and I think our discussion today is about the difficult choices the United States, as a democracy, has to make in order to avoid war, in order to avoid conflict, and hopefully build a more stable international system, where perhaps there's more space, as Mike just said, for a discussion about democracy, as well. I think this book and this discussion open up so many avenues, really, for thinking about current conditions in a useful way, in a way that's not simply about name calling and a kind of determinist assumption about war. And so I really, really appreciate the conversation. I highly recommend the book to all of our listeners. Again, it's called Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, written by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, filled with contemporary information, but of course, the part that's always most valuable: historical knowledge and research that's useful in understanding the present. Mike and Hal, thank you so much for joining us today.

He talked about the great chess match of leadership, and he knew he was outmatched by Khrushchev during those two vital days, and knows that Khrushchev leaves that summit emboldened, thinking that Kennedy was, in Khrushchev's words, too intelligent and too weak. By too intelligent, he means he's book smart, but he's not street smart. I can exploit this guy, Khrushchev thinks, coming out of this.

Kennedy knows this. He goes back to the American embassy in Vienna and talks off the record to Scotty Reston, and he admits to Reston that he has been savaged by Khrushchev. He realizes until Khrushchev doesn't respect him that there could be a crisis that emerges out of Khrushchev's deep confidence that he can outmaneuver Kennedy. That becomes this crucible in Kennedy's leadership. He knows he needs to show Khrushchev that he is a strong leader, or Khrushchev will move to exploit him.

But while he had the country rallied around him, he quickly stumbled with the Bay of Pigs and the failed incursion of Cuba as we tried to oust Fidel Castro from leadership. And yet, and this really says something, Jeremi, and yet in that desperate hour in his presidency, so soon into a very auspicious run in the White House, he sees his approval rating at 83%. This is after the Bay of Pigs.

But we also realize that it was so important to have a strong leader at a time when the Soviet Union was vying for hearts and minds across the world and trying to dominate much of the world landscape. That was the central crisis of the age. In that moment, Jeremi, and then at that desperate moment in his presidency, I think Kennedy shows to some degree his character. He's humble. He takes accountability. As he says in a press conference, success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. But at the end of the day, the buck stops with me, as Truman might have said. He took responsibility and vowed to the American people to do better. And he does.

Right, and you certainly show that very well, in a really well-described few chapters, I think, on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I want readers to read the book. I don't want us to share all that with them. I want them to buy the book to read that, because I think the Cuban Missile Crisis, as you say, is probably the most significant Cold War crisis.

Well, they do. Although, you know, it depends, I guess, on what one means by conservative, right? What is, and what does radical mean? You know, conservative, you know, at least in a kind of mid-20th century context for a lot of conservatives, did not necessarily mean conserving, did not mean conserving, let's say, the welfare state, or did not mean necessarily conserving, you know, U.S. foreign policy as it was defined in World War II or the early Cold War. It meant upending, right?

What did he mean by that? Well, he meant, I think, that the society enabled people to take action in their communities against the communist menace. So instead of just talking about communism, instead of just lamenting that, you know, communists and their allies had made inroads, the society allowed people to act. And in fact, Robert Welch and the Birch Society, the headquarters, one of the innovative things they did is to give people, give members, opportunities to go out in their community and take over a school board or a PTA or, you know, protest Earl Warren or put stickers up.

I think that maybe that's one aspect of the book and kind of some of the themes of the book. I mean, Hofstadter, obviously, I mean, Hofstadter has to inform whether one agrees or disagrees with him. He's really seminal and he informs anyone who's writing about the modern American right. I tend to shy away from the use of the word paranoid in the book because, well, it's clinical and also it's pejorative. And what I also resist is trying to define the Birchers primarily through conspiracy theories, because at the time they were known for the, well, Robert Welch's, the Founder's Theory, that Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy. And that's a fluoridation of the water supply was a communist plot.

I think that's exactly right, and the thing is, too, in mid-20th century America, even in the 1960s, you know, J. Edgar Hoover and others in law enforcement were more interested in trying to ferret out alleged communists in American society. They were less interested in going after, you know, far-right groups that may have promoted racism and anti-Semitism, and so it was even more important then for a group like the ADL to fill that gap, right, because it was a real void, and today, I think fortunately, at least under the Biden administration, for example, we have seen a Justice Department that has taken white supremacy and neo-Nazis and those threats seriously after January 6th, of course, and, you know, there are a lot of insurrectionists who are sitting in jail right now.

Oh, wow. Yeah, many reactions. First, on that last point about the Judeo-Christian tradition, it just reminds me of, I believe his name was Arthur Cohen. He was just a writer in the 1970s on religion in America. And he contested the idea that there was such a thing as the Judeo-Christian tradition because, for most of the last 2000 years, Christians have hated Jews. And that tradition was a construct of the, mostly the mid 20th century and Cold War politics and other things. So Zachary, I think your tension is not only felt by you, I guess, I'd say historically.

Yeah, and people like William Bell Reilly, who's a very famous fundamentalist minister in the Minneapolis city area was key to this. And one of the things that is a through line from the post Civil War period to the post World War II period is that Dispensationalist understood their highest calling to be missions, evangelization, converting people into Christians. And this took on a different implications for sort of national and international politics. By the end of World War ii, and the sort of dawn of the Cold War anti-communism becomes a key way that, or the threat of communism becomes a key way that Dispensationalist understand the world, and particularly as a threat to their highest calling, global missions. And so, in some ways, that is the answer to the question is that, Communism becomes such a threat to the mission's enterprise that many fundamentalists and dispensationalist who were sitting on the sidelines in earlier periods decided that this was such a existential threat that they needed to join the fray.

Yeah. One interesting fact about Graham is that he was the successor to William Bell Riley in the sense that when Riley died in 1948, he had handpicked Billy Graham, who at that time was a less well known revivalist who was traveling around the country to be his successor at his college in Minneapolis, Northwestern College. So Graham has a direct connection to Riley in that sense. But Graham became, yeah, the most influential evangelical, maybe most influential religious figure in the late second half of the 20th century, and Graham's relationship to Dispensationalism is that he grew up basically a dispensationalist and his early revivals taught. That there would be a rapture at any moment, and that that was one reason why listeners needed to convert was because you didn't wanna be left behind. And this gave an urgency to, not just individual conversion, but to the Cold War because communist societies wouldn't allow missionaries into them.

And so we needed to sort of support the downfall of communism in order to allow more missionaries to enter those countries. So that that was certainly part of his, earlier, his early career, we're talking about the 1940s, 1950s. Graham gradually moves away from that theology and he is a major figure. He's like a planet that everyone orbits in the evangelical world. And so for his entire career there were prominent people around him, and in other parts of the many organizations that he ran, that were dispensationalists and held to those views. But you definitely see a shift in the sixties and seventies and eighties where Graham is moving away from that sort of otherworldly theology, and getting much more invested in a, you could say, this worldly understanding of what the Christian's role is. And so by the, you know, by the 1980s, Graham is visiting the Soviet Union. He's visiting Jewish and Christian communities behind the Iron Curtain. He is a calling for a nuclear freeze. He is concerned about the environment and you just have a much different issue set for someone like Graham, as he develops into a major world leader.

Salim Yaqub is the author of three books that I highly recommend to all of our listeners. His first book, Containing Arab Nationalism, is really, I think, as close to the definitive work as is possible on the Eisenhower Doctrine in the Middle East, which was really the first American Cold War Doctrine for major influence, even perhaps for attempted dominance in the region.

But, in answer to your question Jeremy, the the seventies really are a very pivotal decade for a lot of reasons and in a lot of places, but certainly for the history of the Middle East and the history of U.S. involvement in that region. I mean, what you see in the 70s is the you know, sort of the last vestiges of European imperialism being removed with the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf region in the, in the first couple years of the decade. You know, the French had vacated North Africa in the previous decade and earlier than that. And so what you see then is a new, or maybe the continuation of a previous era in which the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union becoming more and more active in that region.

It's also, and also, you know, they're bringing the Cold War struggle, you know, to the region in a way that hadn't quite happened previously. Also, I mean, certainly the 1973 war is very key for all sorts of reasons that we'll probably get into. It's, you know, during and shortly after that war that the power of the oil producing Middle Eastern states, and in this case, particularly the Arab states, because they actually mount an embargo against the United States and some Western countries becomes, you know, unavoidable, you know, it becomes impossible to ignore.

And if, you know, if you want to count, consider the Middle East in its more, in a broader geographical frame, you could look at the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, also right around that time in December 1979 as ushering in a whole new set of issues that will define the last years of the Cold War and set the agenda for the way in which the Cold War ends.

And this is something many of us have chewed on for a long time, right? How to evaluate Kissinger's diplomatic shuttle diplomacy and his efforts to, as you say, take Egypt out of what had been a coalition of anti Israeli states. One other point I thought I'd add for you to comment on, and then I know Zachary has a question too, is part of what he's also doing is making the United States the most powerful external actor in the region. He's sidelining the Soviet Union, which had been an ally of Egypt, right? And that, of course, has implications for the United States in the region, taking us all the way up to the Iraq war, correct?

And that's a huge strategic blow to the Soviet Union. And again, that gets masked because the Soviet Union in some ways is more visibly active in the region in the years thereafter. I mean, it really, you know, it flexes its muscles. It, you know, has all kinds of agreements and makes various diplomatic gains on the Arabian peninsula with its relationship with South Yemen and, you know, further to the East, it's invading and occupying Afghanistan. It's cementing its strategic alliance with Syria. It's doing all these things that are on the surface fairly menacing, but that masks the underlying diplomatic reality, which is that the Soviet Union has basically been frozen out of Arab Israeli diplomacy and becoming increasingly irrelevant to it. And then, of course, it's not too much longer after that, that the Soviet Union itself ceases to exist.

In the United States, even though it had already been flexing its muscles pretty aggressively in the Middle East during the 1980s. And for that reason, I sometimes argue that, the cold war, the post cold war era began a decade earlier, a decade early in the Middle East. Nonetheless, by the time we get to the early nineties, it's unmistakable because the Soviet Union has ceased to exist. And the United States really is now the sole remaining superpower. And its ability to call the shots is made even more unmistakable by the victory in the first Gulf war of 1991.

And then, as I started researching the book more and more, I realized what a significant role the US military would play. When I started this book, I sort of understood that the military today plays a major role in humanitarian operations, but I assumed this was a later 20th century development, sort of a post-Vietnam, post-Cold War effort to reinvent the military, but in fact, as early as the early 20th century, you start to see the US Navy, especially, but also the Army Marines, depending on if they're on the scene, responding to a lot of catastrophes, the War and Navy Department committing rations, tents, their supplies to help disaster victims, so these three together, the military, the State Department, and their partners in the voluntary sector, are really responsible for cooperating to carry out disaster relief operations.

Yeah, and I would say that it is very much both at once. Again, you do have a lot of really well-meaning, you know, aid workers who are really concerned with the people they're assisting, who want to cooperate, collaborate, who want to kind of do things the right way, and to really improve people's lives, because they care about that as a value that they hold dear, but they're working with a lot of people whose primary goal is to defeat, you know, defeat global communism, to maintain US stability and power in the world, there's a lot of sort of private state department memos and correspondence, which are now fortunately declassified for us historians, where they really talk very explicitly about using aid to to counter communist propaganda or to really show the United States good side, the State Department takes a lot of notes on how much aid the Soviet Union is giving to other countries and makes sure that the United States is giving more in as many cases as possible. So, these political calculations are going on at the same time, and sometimes it leads to disagreements, there's fights, sometimes internal infighting between those people who really see aid as an international project and those who see it more as in line with national interests. So, I think that those kind of contests and competitions over the meaning and significance of aid are important to the story too.

But of course the Cold War decolonization, the growth of a right wing free trade tradition that we touched on at the very beginning of this discussion, all of these things are going to start muddying the waters, so to speak, and make the, what seemed like a new freer trade system, much less easy to maintain.

I think it does. I think it's also the last question in particular, last answer, was a really important reminder that oftentimes the questions that need to be asked or are not necessarily, like, ones of ideology, but of whose interests certain policies are serving. I think the sort of description of how the, at least the ages of free trade, was overtaken by neoliberalism in the 70s and 80s is a really important lesson about the importance of keeping in mind whose interests our policies serve, because, looking at it on paper, it can seem that the neoliberal policies are of the same tradition, but, in reality they were serving very different interests. And I think also this vision of left wing free trade is something that we should all take very seriously, especially at a moment when our, when the sort of liberal international institutions, which this movement created or the descendants of this movement created after World War II seem most threatened. And certainly when our, when the sort of free trade world order that developed after the end of the Cold War seems most threatened as well.

One of the reasons that Harry Truman, having won election as a civil rights candidate in 1948, wasn't able to convert that into legislation, some of the legislation he'd been proposing as far back as 1946, is that in the climate of the Cold War, when in the snap of the fingers, the idea that America's existential enemy is fascism and its remnant and fascism and its home front apologists, anyone who's listened to Rachel Maddow's podcast, Ultra, knows this very well. She's done excellent work on that.

All of a sudden, now the Soviet Union and global Marxist-Leninism is seen as the enemy. It's not that the Cold War competition with Stalinism wasn't real, but that it had an effect on domestic issues of shoving civil rights to the side, of shoving a lot of elements of liberalism to the side. That's part of the reason why it's not until 1963 and 64 that the process of legislating for civil rights that began in 48 can be picked up by Lyndon Johnson as president, by Dr. King in the mass movement, and by Hubert Humphrey then in the Senate.

Yes, thank you. I think that the creation of VOA was to really be the voice throughout the world of US society, of music, of culture, of politics and so forth. Radio Free Europe has a different sort of charge. It was really created with the start of the Cold War, interwoven with the Cold War as part of our effort to confront the Soviet Union, and it was addressed, and its origins really start, and it's very important to understand this, with the millions of people from Eastern, Central Europe, Soviet Union, who fled to the West during and after World War II. They were living in displaced persons camps throughout sort of the American sector in Germany. And George Kennan, who was really instrumental in creating both RFE and RL, and others as well, but he was more instrumental, and said, 'You know, these are people we could put to use. They are eager to do something.' They have a lot of connections. Some, in the case of Czechoslovakia and Poland, had been in the governments before, and in the Baltic states before World War II. And so RFE started first as a voice of Poland outside of Poland, so the idea being that you're in Munich, Germany, but you're creating a Polish broadcaster as if you were sitting in downtown Warsaw, and the same would be true for Czechoslovakia, for Hungary, for Bulgaria, for Romania. That was the beginning of Radio Free Europe. That same model was used three years later to create Radio Liberty for the Soviet Union, and very important to note, not just in Russian, but in the different (Mm-hmm) languages of the Soviet Union.

(And why are they in Prague?) They are in Prague... It's an interesting story to start with. In 1992, '93 with the Clinton administration coming into power, there was a lot of discussion of 'do we need the radios in general because the Cold War's ended, and life is wonderful, and who needs this very important tool of the Cold War?' And the Clinton administration was quite ready to zero them out, and it was Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa who really pleaded with Clinton that we need these radios for a while. (That's so interesting, that's so interesting.) And Havel said, 'Here is a gift to the American people, a building in downtown Prague to commemorate sort of your contribution to our freedom. We're giving it to the Americans for free.' That won the day. And by the way, I can say that the bipartisan support led by Senator Joseph Biden, (Hmm) by the way, Biden was critical in bringing together the Republicans and the Democrats to support the continuation of the radios, but with the proviso that as countries graduated to free media, those services would close. So the Polish service closed, the Czech service closed. In time, the Romanians, Estonians, Latvians, and it was... idea behind it was that through analyzing and understanding the evolution, that when those countries no longer needed an outside domestic voice, then of course that would be the end of it. (Right.) While they needed it, RFE/RL would continue to provide that. That was the understanding, and that's the way it has always been developed.

Yes. I mean, what always inspires me, I've spent time, as you know, Mark, originally in the archive when it was in Budapest before it was moved to the Hoover Institution. I've worked in it at Hoover, and I've listened to many of the broadcasts, especially from key moments in the Cold War. And it's inspiring, I think, to hear, particularly for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the various emigres covering news in their society, bringing a passion and a commitment to it, and innovating new ways to tell the stories of what's happening in their society. And I think for young journalists like Zachary and so many of our listeners, there's a lot we can learn from this, and there's a lot we can do, even within the constraints we face, to try to tell those stories and use the stories of the past to help inspire us to tell the stories today, we were talking about this earlier, Mark, you and I, before we came on, about what's really happening in Ukraine, for example.

Well, for one, you know, you look at the threat of national security and the Cold War coming from the Cold War. The threat of national security has been used by the executive to push the idea that only the president can protect the nation. There is some concern that a body like Congress that has endless debates and an endless number of ideas cannot come together quickly enough in order to protect the country in a proper way. A lot of people would say that too many voices are being heard and that you need a single person to make a decision. That said, in the 20th century, Congress has not necessarily used all of its powers to its best advantage. So I'd say one of the things that is not directly talked about in the Constitution, but is a constitutional power that Congress has that relates to war, is their investigatory powers and their powers of oversight.

Well, I'd say that the why is, you know, somewhat of a psychological factor of the threat of nuclear war that comes, you know, directly after the end with the Cold War, directly after World War Two. The country is afraid. People are afraid that of possible annihilation of possible World War III. There is a sense that there are, as I said before, too many voices in Congress that that you need one single strong person to push forward. You know, the president is tasked with defending the nation. And one thing that really comes clear in the atomic age is that the nation needs defending.

I think that's very well said. Certainly, I think we've been educated in the last 20-30 years on the importance of having debates over the use of war power. I think one of the points Clay made so well is that during the Cold War, there was a premium placed on acting fast and delegating authority because of the concerns that if we acted too slow, we would be the subject of a nuclear attack or some sort of communist expansion.