An ideologically-rooted conflict between the United States and its allies and the former Soviet Union and its allies fought through proxy wars during the period following World War II until the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 1990s.[1] It ought to be noted that there were two variants of cold war thinking in the West: the liberal and the conservative. [2] Hence, within the U.S. foreign-policy-making arena, the cold war would manifest itself in two forms: “regionalism” and “globalism.” Regionalism was a liberal variant of “globalism,” which had been the hallmark of post‑World War II U.S. foreign policy, and which saw the world from the perspective of the U.S./Soviet cold war rivalry, where conflagrations in the PQD nations, for example, were perceived to be exclusively the handiwork of the Soviet Union. In this simplistic conservative ideological world view even struggles such as the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa were seen as the work of the Soviet Union. No matter how bizarre this view may have been to rationally thinking people, it does have some logic to it given its roots in Euro-American racist stereotypes of PQD peoples as simple and unintelligent, and therefore easily gullible and manipulable by an external force. Regionalism, or liberal globalism, however, took a slightly more realistic view by suggesting that while U.S. foreign policy had to continue to be pursued ultimately in terms of the cold war, its objectives could be better realized by accepting that the sources of these conflagrations in the PQD were local or regional. Hence in this view the Soviet Union was still enemy number one, but it was no longer seen so much as the instigator, but rather as the exploiter of these conflagrations for purposes of its mission of world‑domination. The correct perspective should have been, of course, to view all major events in the PQD nations on their own merits, and not from a cold war perspective. However, that would have required a major transformation in the consciousness of the foreign policy establishment—an impossibility given the nature of the U.S. political and economic system. Needless to say, for the masses of the PQD countries, the cold war—especially in its globalist manifestation—would spell immense suffering, misery, and death for thousands upon thousands.[3]
For many in the PQD countries the cold war (to which their own fate had been tied willy-nilly by the protagonists) had been a perplexing phenomenon. To them not only did it appear to have been a dangerous quarrel among white people, given that they (the whites) possessed weapons of global destruction, over alternative ways of organizing society, but the context, terms and character of the quarrel seemed to lack logic too—at least on the surface. For example: instead of witnessing the growth of friendship and long‑term alliance between the war‑time allies, Western nations (led by the United States) and the Soviet Union, deep mistrust and animosity had developed between them. Yet, strangely, those nations that had once been archenemies of the Allies, the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan), were now their bosom friends. Moreover, to further emphasize the seeming contradictions of post‑World War II international relations, even those who would logically, it would appear, have been expected to remain enemies forever, the Jewish peoples and the Germans, had overcome most of their animosities and were now friends. At another level the perplexity became even deeper when such facts as these were taken into consideration:
The Soviet Union did not possess capitalist transnational corporations that could act as conduits for the domination of PQD economies, thereby siphoning off resources and profits to enable it to enjoy the same high standard of living that the West enjoyed (and continues to enjoy) through the activities of their transnationals. This circumstance therefore raised the serious question of which side in the cold war really had expansionist ambitions and which side had the most to gain from condemning and undermining wars of national liberation and freedom. After all, it is a historical fact that with the exception of that part of the world that is now known as Soviet Asia, it was the West and not the Soviet Union that had historically been in the forefront of colonizing the PQD nations for economic gains.
Western assertions that their opposition to the Soviet Union rested on grounds that the Soviet socio‑economic and political system (in common parlance known as “communism”) represented the ultimate in dictatorship and tyranny from which the rest of the world—especially the PQD countries—had to be protected by the West at all costs (“better dead than red”) was hypocritical. While all the time condemning the Soviet Union for human rights violations, the United States and its Western allies were busily engaged in setting and/or propping up right wing, pro‑capitalist, pro‑Western local tyrants of all shapes and sizes in the PQD countries—ranging from the blood‑soaked dictatorships in Asia and Latin America, through the racist European regime in South Africa, to the Pol Pots of Africa. These actions would, moreover, seriously raise the question of the validity of the oft‑proclaimed notion by the West that it was only within a capitalist economic system that freedom could flourish.
The interpretation by the West of any act on the part of a PQD country that led to the development of commercial and political relations with the Soviet Union as indicating that the country in question was now a satellite of the Soviet Union, and therefore had to be considered a worthy target of Western hostility, was infantile and imbecilic—especially considering that Western nations were falling over each other to develop commercial and economic relations with both the Soviet Union and China in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, the desire to sustain and expand these relations was so great that one of the first foreign policy acts of the Reagan Administration was to rescind the U.S. grain export embargo that the Carter Administration had imposed on the Soviet Union following that country’s ignominious invasion of Afghanistan.[4] Perhaps the assumption—in typically racist fashion—was that the PQD nations were incapable of protecting themselves from any Soviet designs on their sovereignty that might have ensued upon assumption of economic and political relations with it.
The reluctance and often outright refusal by Western nations to support wars of national liberation and freedom (in fact branding those waging these wars as “terrorists,” and leaving the freedom fighters no choice but to turn to the only country willing to give them assistance, the Soviet Union) would remain unexplained in the face of claims by them that they alone (and not the Soviet Union) stood for democracy and freedom. Yet, the Soviet Union, which ostensibly was supposed to champion tyranny and oppression, would be in the forefront of supporting liberation movements in their struggles for freedom almost all over the World—at enormous economic cost to itself given that, as noted earlier, it did not possess transnational capitalist firms that could bring back profits and resources.[5]
These contradictions and hypocritical behavior that so characterized the cold war, especially as it related to the PQD countries, raised the question of what the cold war was really about. Was it simply a war over “ideology” aimed at stemming the spread of totalitarianism—in the form of Soviet communism given that China was almost a Western ally in everything but name following President Richard Nixon’s visit to that country in 1972—in favor of the ideology of Western “democracy” because communism was supposedly antidemocratic, oppressive, and totalitarian in nature? Or was it in actuality more than a question of ideology? That is, was it a war over resources, profits, and potential markets? For there is no question that given that capitalism can only survive in an economic environment that permits unbridled accumulation of wealth via unrestricted flow of labor, raw materials, goods and profits (subject only to the law of supply and demand), any portion of the globe that functions under an alternative economic system represents a threat to the long‑term interests of capitalism everywhere (see below). In light of this point, and the contradictions mentioned above, the cold war was, in truth, not a war about “good” versus “evil,” or about freedom versus tyranny, or about totalitarianism versus democracy, but rather it was fundamentally a war over access to markets and resources, especially in the PQD countries, since the West had long exhausted its own raw materials, and since capitalism could not (and cannot) survive without the relentless quest for profits. Thus the cold war was, ultimately, about ensuring that the historically-determined imperialist economic advantages enjoyed by Western capitalist transnational firms were in no way compromised by governments trying to protect their own resources within their own national borders—which alternative economic systems, such as the socialist system, enjoined them to do. [6] Is it any wonder then that it was precisely in those parts of the world where tyranny and repression would reach unimaginable levels, but where the capitalist economist system would be fully entrenched, that the West would find its strongest allies and a source for much economic gain—often at the expense of the local populations, excluding the compradorial elites. (Compare today’s warm relations between the United States and most of the West with totalitarian “Communist” China—or even the Vladimir-Putin-led Russia for that matter as it regresses back to its old totalitarian ways under the guidance of a leadership comprising many former KGB men.) Nor is it surprising that the “freedom-loving” democratic West would have no difficulty whatsoever in not only turning a blind eye to mass human rights violations (that included torture and murder—supposedly the natural province of communists) that would endemically be perpetrated by governments against their own people in countries that the West considered as their allies but on the contrary provided them access to the economic and military means necessary to continue inflicting these horrors on their peoples. For, if freedom and democracy had truly been at the heart of U.S. foreign policy concerns then it would not have been consistently on the side of every brutal blood‑soaked tyrannical dictator that paid homage to the U.S. flag around the world throughout the postWorld War II era: from the regimes of Antonio Salazar and Marcelo Caetano in Portugal to those of the Euro-South African racists in Pretoria and the military thug in the then Zaire (Mobutu Sese Seko), and from the regimes of Agusto Pinochet in Chile and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua to the regimes of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and the Shah of Iran.[7] Many of these regimes far outdid some of the Communist regimes in the tyranny that they inflicted on their peoples; yet the United States supported them because their tyranny was in the service of capitalist interests: domestic and foreign, short‑term and long‑term and actual and potential.[8]
[1].This conflict could also be described as class-conflict on a global scale with the West (for our purposes including Japan) representing the capitalist class and the rest of the planet the working class.
[2]. The literature on the cold war is vast and would fill a small library, however much of it, from the perspective this work, is of little value and in fact often borders on nothing more than propaganda (where it is usually portrayed as a sort of a global chess game in which the United States won). For a credible entry point into the useful part of that literature these three sources should suffice: Borstelmann (2001), Westad (2005), and Statler and Johns (2006). Some may be surprised that there is no reference to the works of John Lewis Gaddis, considered the premier cold war historian by U.S. mainline historians—but that’s the rub: mainline.
[3]. For a critical analysis of the regionalist/globalist approaches to U.S. foreign-policy-making see Wolpe (1985).
[4]. Notice that this was an administration that prided itself in being staunchly anti‑communist, hurling such epithets at the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire” (fittingly derived from the Star Wars motion picture saga—given Reagan’s acting background—coupled with his fantasies of building Star Wars space weapons for use against the Soviet Union).
[5]. Now, cold war fanatics were quick to respond with the assertion that whatever help the Soviet Union had provided had been on an opportunistic basis, always with the aim of hurting Western interests. This may be so, but it is not fully convincing for two reasons: First, Soviet assistance to PQD nationalist forces had generally entailed economic sacrifice on the part of the Soviet Union in the vague hope of gaining some political influence in the future. Contrast this with the position of the Western nations whose defense of colonialism and imperialism had always had, at the bottom, direct material interests in the form of access to profits, cheap labor, and cheap raw materials. Therefore, it is doubtful that the Soviet Union’s support of PQD nationalist forces for so long, and on a fairly large-scale, involving considerable economic cost, had been motivated by only the need to achieve propaganda victories against the West. This is especially so when it is considered that political influence can very easily be lost with changes in the political climate within the “target” country—as the Soviet Union was to painfully discover from time to time (a case in point being Egypt following Muhammad Anwar El Sadat’s accession to power in 1970). Second, if opportunism was really the motivating factor, as the Cold war fanatics asserted, then one must pose this question: Would the Soviet Union have changed sides in South Africa, for example, if the West had changed sides? That is, if USGs, for instance, had decided to drop their support of SAAG and instead had begun to support the ANC in every way possible (in the same manner that they would support the “Contras” in Nicaragua and the “Mujahiddin” in Afghanistan), then would the Soviet Union have begun supporting SAAG? The answer obviously has to be a firm “nyet.” But what had motivated the Soviet Union to support the liberation forces among the PQD nations if not opportunism? The answer simply is that it was, in the main, ideology. Ideologically, the Soviet Union was predisposed toward supporting antiracist and anti-imperialist forces. In fact, its very constitution enjoined it to do so. Whether the cold war fanatics liked it or not, a very large dose of altruism (with some opportunism mixed-in of course) had been involved in Soviet foreign policy behavior—especially regarding the PQD countries. There is one qualification that must be entered here. To some degree, Soviet support of the nationalist forces in specific instances was also motivated by its rivalry with China (with whom it became embroiled in a “cold war” of sorts following the Sino-Soviet split around 1962 over strategic and ideological differences).
[6]. Of course, ideology (often couched in the simplistic terms of “democracy” versus “totalitarianism” against the backdrop of the nuclear arms race) had to and did play a part in the cold war. Otherwise, how would it have been possible for the West, especially the United States, to convince its citizenry to commit enormous resources to the war effort for almost half a century. However, to say that ideology was important in the cold war is not to suggest that it was the cause of that war. The cause lay elsewhere: in the confrontation between capitalism and socialism—as understood in its economic sense. (See, for example, Robin [2001] for an insightful study of one mechanism by which the cold war ideology was sustained in the United States: “rumor—an amalgam of opaque knowledge and cultural codes,” which “transformed a distant adversary into a clear and present danger.” In other words, “[t]he nation’s policy makers and military strategists stalked and feared an elusive predator based on suggestion and autosuggestion, the blurring of fact and fiction, and the projection of collective fears and desires” [p. 3].)
[7]. Compare the open use of torture by the United States itself today in its so-called “war on terror.”
[8]. Even today, the real concern that the United States and its allies have in the Middle East is not over the matter of freedom and democracy but to what extent can the interests of Western capital be secured in that region. The cozy relationship with the butchers of Beijing that the Bush Administration (Sr.) had maintained—continued by successive USGs to the present day—provides further testimony on this point. In the eyes of the Bush Administration (as with subsequent administrations) the Chinese dictators were acceptable because of their pro‑capitalist economic policies. And even during the height of the renewed cold war early in the administration of Ronald Reagan there was no lack of enthusiasm to sell U.S. grain to the Soviet Union, even though from a U.S. strategic point of view this did not make sense because grain sales to the Soviet Union meant that it (the Soviet Union) could neglect agriculture and continue to expend its scarce resources on the defense industry; such was the pressure on the administration from U.S. agricultural capitalist interests. Therefore, the cold war was not fought for the sake of a mythical “national interest” but the more narrow but real international capitalist interest where globalized U.S. capital always stood to lose from the appearance of socialist economic systems anywhere in the PQD ecumene because of the inherent capitalist need for a policy of “open door” to profits, resources, and markets. In other words, the forces that had driven Europeans to colonize the world during the era of merchant capitalism never really abated during the cold war era. What is more, today, in the current era of “globalization,” they have actually intensified.