Thread by @DrRadchenko

I am sometimes asked what lessons the early Cold War holds for the present. Since I've written I big book on the Cold War that's about to hit the shelves, let me distill a few lessons with full awareness, of course, that history never repeats though often rhymes. amazon.co.uk/Run-World-Krem…

Lesson 1. The Cold War was not an unfortunate misunderstanding. Moscow had concrete plans for the postwar. To sum up their thinking, they planned to dominate continental Europe. The British would balance off-shore. The Americans would stay put in their hemisphere.

Norman Naimark (and others) rightly argued that Stalin did not have blueprints to make Europe "Communist." But he literally *had* blueprints to assure Soviet domination of Europe. The failure to attain these goals had everything to do with the US response to Soviet expansionism.

Lesson 2. Implicit understandings are overrated. Stalin did not abide by implicit understandings. Consider the Greek civil war. While it is well known that Stalin initially withheld direct support for the Greek Communists, by 1947 (before the Marshall Plan!) he came around, despite the percentages agreement etc.

Lesson 3. Signaling of resolve works. Stalin backed off from a whole range of misadventures, including in Iran/Turkey, Japan and, most prominently, Berlin, when he was faced with US resolve. By contrast, signals of irresolution or weakness, e.g. by the US in Korea in early 1950, led directly to Stalin blessing Kim Il Sung's invasion of the South.

Lesson 4. The Cold War was a global affair from the start. Facing constraints in Europe, Stalin turned to Asia, seeking to exploit Western weakness. What happened in Asia then had an impact on the Soviet thinking in Europe. Not just in the late 1940s but throughout the Cold War.

Lesson 5. There was no missed chance to end the Cold War in 1953, when Stalin died. The main reason was that the Soviet leaders had a certain perception of their global role, and expected the US to defer to this perception and recognize the Soviets for a peer competitor with certain "rights".

"Ending" the Cold War under these circumstances required more or less throwing in the towel and letting the Soviets impose their domination over Europe, just as Stalin expected in 1945. It didn't happen in 1945. It didn't happen in 1953.

Now, you might say: what about Germany. The German question is complicated, and it is true that the Soviets briefly considered German unification and neutrality as a possibility in 1953. But the idea was a non-starter as it would require Soviet retrenchment which was simply unnecessary in the nuclear age.

The Cold War did not end until there was change *inside* the USSR, and even then the Soviet exit from Eastern Europe was in part simply an admission of failure. We tried. It didn't work. Let's see if there is some other basis for projecting Moscow's global leadership.

Now, people might say: this just returns us to traditionalism in the Cold War historiography. And there is a lot to this. What's different now is that we have an enormous documentary basis on which to draw conclusions.

The main conclusion is that at no point during the Cold War did the Soviet leadership back away from their key goal of dividing and weakening the West. Dividing and weakening NATO. Dividing and weakening Europe.

Playing France against Germany. Playing Germany against France. Playing France and Germany against the United States, etc etc. Put yourself in their shoes: maybe you, too, would try the same.

-- "But if only we picked up the phone and called the Kremlin!"
-- Re-read from point 1.

Note: of course, communication matters. Another big lesson of the Cold War. Signal resolve. But maintain appropriate channels of communication. At all times. And plan for the long-term. It's the resilient who get the prize.

The Soviets were aggressive. But they weren't resilient. Or certainly not as resilient as they tried to look.