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Even to ask whether the cold war is over is a bit like asking, "Is God dead?" Given the brutal nature of the Soviets' aggression and their willingness to impose totalitarian systems around the world, the question can seem blasphemous -- and worse, naive. The cold war, after all, describes not just the interaction between two powerful nations but a holy struggle between two starkly opposed value systems. The phrase, first used in a speech by Bernard Baruch in 1947, implies that the relationship is, in essence, a war -- not just a rivalry between great powers but a struggle that would eventually demand the triumph of one world view over the other.
But will the cold war remain, in that sense, a war? Will the struggle that has bifurcated the world for the past 40 years continue with the same crusading fervor for the next 40? Not necessarily. The cold war has never been a stable phenomenon. Its intensity has waxed and waned over the years. The very term, as traditionally defined, now seems dated. New political and economic forces have emerged; a different set of international challenges has arisen. The Marxist model has lost much of its allure around the globe.
George Kennan, the prescient diplomat who formulated the U.S. doctrine of containment shortly after the end of World War II, ruminated at a reunion of State Department planners about how these global changes have made the East- West ideological struggle less relevant to how the world is ordered. Says Kennan, who in recent years has adopted a more benign view of the Soviet Union: "The whole principle of containment as that term was conceived when it was used by me back in 1946 is almost entirely irrelevant to the problems we and the rest of the civilized world face today." Declares Ohio University Professor John Lewis Gaddis, a noted historian of the postwar era: "What was once an ideological struggle between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. has evolved into an old-fashioned great-power rivalry that is not much different from the rivalry between England and Russia in the 19th century."
That is debatable. But Foreign Affairs Editor William Hyland, a veteran Soviet watcher, agrees up to a point. The ideological component of the East- West struggle has receded, he writes in his new book Mortal Rivals, and that could fundamentally change the way the game is played. "Ideological conflicts brook no compromises," he explains, "but power and interests are negotiable commodities."
Former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was part of a 1980 international commission that endorsed mutual security as the guiding force in East-West relations. After visiting Moscow in February, he came away feeling that the Soviets had in fact adopted this approach. "The Soviets have made a major change in both rhetoric and doctrine under Gorbachev by adopting mutual security," he says. "It runs counter to Leninist doctrine, which was that one had to achieve superiority and threaten others in order to be safe."
Those who dismiss such changes in Soviet rhetoric, says James Schlesinger, the former Defense Secretary and CIA director, are being too reflexive. "These are the very people who argued that the Soviet Union is incapable of making even those changes that have already occurred. Now they're saying Gorbachev is no different from any other Soviet leader."