IB History reading - Cold War: Postwar International System

The Long Peace
Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System

by John Lewis Gaddis

Stability and the Future

History, as anyone who has spent any time at all studying it would surely know, has a habit of making bad prophets out of both those who make and those who chronicle it. It tends to take expectations and turn them upside down; it is not at all tolerant of those who would seek too self-confidently to anticipate its future course. One should be exceedingly wary, therefore, of predicting how long the current era of Soviet-American stability will last.

Certainly it is easy to conceive of things that might in one way or another undermine it: domestic developments in either country could affect foreign policy in unpredictable ways; the actions of third parties could embroil the superpowers in conflict with each other against their will; opportunities for miscalculation and accident are always present; incompetent leadership is always a risk. All that one can-or should-say is that the relationship has survived these kinds of disruptions in the past: if history made bad prophets out of the war-makers of 1914 and 1939-41, or the peacemakers of 1919, all of whom approached their tasks with a degree of optimism that seems to us foolish in retrospect, then so too has it made bad prophets out of the peace­makers of 1945, who had so little optimism about the future.

Whether the Soviet-American relationship could survive something more serious is another matter entirely. We know the answer when it comes to nuclear war; recent scientific findings have only confirmed visions of catas­trophe we have lived with for decades. But what about a substantial decline in the overall influence of either great power that did not immediately result in war? Here, it seems to me, is a more probable-if less often discussed­ danger. For if history demonstrates anything at all, it is that the condition of being a great power is a transitory one: sooner or later, the effects of ex­haustion, overextension, and lack of imagination take their toll among na­tions, just as surely as does old age itself among individuals. Nor is it often that history arranges for great powers to decline simultaneously and symmetrically. Past experience also suggests that the point at which a great power perceives its decline to be beginning is a perilous one: behavior can become erratic, even desperate, well before physical strength itself has dissipated.

The Soviet-American relationship has yet to face this test, although there is no reason to think it will escape it indefinitely. When that time comes, the preservation of stability may require something new in international rela­tions: the realization that great nations can have a stake, not just in the survival, but also the success and prosperity of their rivals. International systems, like tangos, require at least two reasonably active and healthy participants; it is always wise, before allowing the dance to end, to consider with what, or with whom, one will replace it.

The Cold War, with all of its rivalries, anxieties, and unquestionable dangers, has produced the longest period of stability in relations among the great powers that the world has known in this century; it now compares favorably as well with some of the longest periods of great power stability in all of modern history. We may argue among ourselves as to whether or not we can legitimately call this "peace": it is not, I daresay, what most of us have in mind when we use that term. But I am not at all certain that the contemporaries of Metternich or Bismarck would have regarded their eras as "peaceful" either, even though historians looking back on those eras today clearly do.

Who is to say, therefore, how the historians of the year 2086 -- if there are any left by then-will look back on us? Is it not at least plausible that they will see our era, not as "the Cold War" at all, but rather, like those ages of Metternich and Bismarck, as a rare and fondly remembered "Long Peace?" Wishful thinking? Speculation through a rose-tinted word processor? Per­haps. But would it not behoove us to give at least as much attention to the question of how this might happen-to the elements in the contemporary international system that might make it happen-as we do to the fear that it may not?