I was reading a contemporary account from the last years of the Nixon administration.
The author claimed that Kissinger was convinced that the USA would be displaced as the top superpower, by the USSR.
I have trouble believing this, because:
Kissinger was/is a very intelligent man
as SOS, Kissinger had access to the best CIA intelligence (on the state of the USSR)
Kissinger was very well acquainted with Western European leaders, who knew the (sorry) state of the USSR’s economy
So, was Kissinger really that misinformed/wrong?
It seems impossible, in the light of what we know today.
My parents took a trip to Russia in 1989, and were utterly amazed at how wrong their perception of the Soviet Union was. Their airplane was flown by a military pilot, because their air force pilots had to log practice hours wherever they could. Their “four-star hotel” maids borrowed my parents’ toothpaste and toothbrushes, because they couldn’t afford their own. Everywhere my parents visited showed an incredible lack of infrastructure support.
When they returned, they no longer believed Russia was a serious threat to America, like they had growing up.
Given that, I’ve alway wondered if the Russia bogeyman wasn’t a useful facade for our government to maintain. Yes, they had nukes, and yes, they had weapons, but our government had to know they weren’t the enormous threat that Americans had always feared.
Each side had aout 12,000 to 20,000 nukes. There was no effcetive way to stop all ballistic missles, no matter how many Star Wars programs you create. So they were a threat because they were a threat. An interesting book is “Russia House” by John le Carre; a Russian dissident smuggles papers to the west to indicate that the Russian missile system was not even close to as accurate as the west thought. Now what? Is it real? Is it true? Is it a plant to lull us into complacency, or genuine information? What do you do? In the end, nothing changes because you cannot rely on the information being true so you must assume the worst case.
Whether Kissinger really believed the USSR would dominate the world…? I’m sure he saw it as a possibility. Remember, if this was in the 1970’s when they were matching the west ship for ship, aircraft for aircraft, missile for missile… almost to the moon. It did not matter if they had some technical problems with consumer demand. They were taking over everywhere they landed - Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Congo and almost Chile; they were the friends of Syria and Egypt for the 1973 war. (A friend of mine recounts being evacuated from Israel when things got nasty, and watching the Russian fleet steam by Cyprus(?) single file headed for the Middle east.) Then they took over Afghanistan; they crushed revolts in Czechosolvakia and Poland. The cracks were not so obvious as in the mid to late 80’s. Should we be surprised if, from a geopolitical POV, they looked to be gaining ground?
Kissinger’s hero and idol was always the Austrian diplomat Metternich, who believed (Correctly) that the Habsburg Epire was ultimately doomed, but worked tirelessly to stave off its collapse for as long as possible (he msut have done something right, as the empire survived until World War 1).
I believe Kissinger was a pessimist who, like Metternich, believed his nation was doomed in the long run, and that communism was the wave of the future. Like Metternich, he hoped only to stave off collapse for as long as possible.
That’s one reason he and Ronald Reagan weren’t pals- Reagan wanted to WIN the Cold War, while Kissinger only wanted to postpone our defeat.
I was in US-ian grade school through the Reagan first term, The Day After, KAL007, “Evil Empire”, mysterious but short-lived Soviet leaders. Yeah, doomsday always seemed around the corner. (There was also some sort of non-Cold War planetary “Great Alignment” thing which spooked me too.)
I seem to remember a story that whipped through the chattering classes of my grade school sometime around 1983-1984, that the Soviets had revealed a whole bunch of new technology that was far beyond anything the US had. I even have in my head a picture of the headline on the front page of the local paper. Anybody know what I might be half remembering?
I don’t disagree with any of your individual points, md2000. Their industrial capability (not to mention thir nuclear arsenal) was definitely formidable.
I was referring to the specific time period I mentioned (1989), and suggested that by then, our government had to know they were struggling. Regardless of how dominant they appeared in the 1960s and 70s, there had to have been plenty of evidence by the late 80s that they were failing. This is a scant two years before the fall of the wall, and yet everyone I’ve talked to said their fall came as a (welcome!) surprise. I’m just speculating that for many in our government, that fall wasn’t nearly as surprising, as they’d have access to the best intelligence in the world, presumably.
Ultimately, at that point is it possible that we were maintaining the fiction that Russia would dominate the world to keep steady paychecks flowing into the defense industry?
Paranoia and job security are two motivators that were not mutually exclusive.
By the late 1980’s, after a massive failure in Afghanistan, after many other places were obviously not embracing the Sovit umbrella as had seemed in the 1970’s, after cruise missiles and Star Wars efforts were not matched by the Soviets, and crushing Solidarity failed miserably, it was obvious they were not on the rise.
But the OP refers to Kissinger and gives no dates. In the 1970’s the Soviet success may have seemed possible. Even in 1989, nobody in the intelligence community forsaw a major collapse just around the corner or the massive weakness of the Soviet economy.
(I recall a protest sign on the news in one eastern european country. It read
“Poland - 10 years
Czechoslovakia - 10 months
Hungary - 10 weeks
East Germany - 10 days”
Then, scrawled in handwriting across the bottom -
“Romania - 10 hours” )
Kissinger wasn’t writing in 1989, he was writing in the early 70’s. While Russia was poorer in absolute terms then the US, they had decent growth rates from WWII through to the end of the 70’s. Their economy didn’t really go into the crapper until oil prices dropped in the 80’s.
I think people in general have a tendency to backdate the condition of the USSR in the 80’s through to the entire history of the country. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense, if they were as consistantly broke as people imagine, there wouldn’t have been much of a Cold War. Dominating Eastern Europe, building nukes and hanging out in your Space Station costs money.
That’s an excellent point. Md2000 is doing a much better job of addressing the OP as stated. My anecdote is addressing a much different point in time.
I’d say that’s a fair criticism. It’s fair to say my story doesn’t really answer the OP’s question as much as I originally thought it did when I posted it!
Heinlein, wrting in the 1960’s IIRC, expressed doubts about Soviet capabilities after a visit he and his wife took there. One observation I noted was his doubt that Moscow was the 10-million inhabitant city that it was claimed to be; based on his “feel” of what a city that size should be like. So either Moscow was not as active as a first or third world city, or the Russians were lying even then (his conclusion) about the size.
The famous “kitchen debate” between Nixon and Kruschev - IIRC Kruschev challenged Nixon over the model kitchen in the exhibit. If featured the latest models of various appliances, and Nixon had to admit that these were showcase, not yet available to the general public; but I think Kruschev misunderstood how close to the showcase level a lot of American households were.
What did Kissinger write and where did he write it? I hadn’t heard anything to this effect, and don’t intend to believe it without a cite (even though, as other posters have observed, it would be a reasonable thing to believe in the 70s.)
I’ve never heard it either, and I read several books that chronicle the Nixon White House, and a couple of books specifically on Kissinger. I believe that you read it, Ralph, but I would like to know who wrote it and what source material they were using.
By 1986 it was common knowledge that the USSR was struggling economically and working towards reform. Perestroika and all that. How would that allow anybody to predict the fall?
China was in far worse shape in the 1960s and early 70s. North Korea has been in far worse shape for 50 years. Based on your logic both China and North Korea should have collapsed decades ago, Yet they continue to roll on.
I don’t think that you are appreciating the huge gulf between “not prospering” and “about to collapse”. The collapse of the USSR was a complete shock to everybody, mostly because it was completely unnecessary. The USSR could have struggled onwards for at least another 30 years. It would have become increasingly backwards compared to the western powers, but it would have been more than capable of securing its own borders and holding on to its member states.
The economy in the late 80s was clearly dysfunctional, but it wasn’t anywhere near collapse. It wasn’t as you put it, “failing”. In many ways it was more functional than it had been even 15 years earlier. The USSR was a net exporter of food, for example. It was still able to export military aid around the world. It was an economy that had reached its limits without a doubt. Further growth was impossible with the system that was in place, but even without reforms collapse wasn’t inevitable, and there were all sorts of reforms taking place to geared towards taking Russia down the road that China has since taken.
So yeah, the collapse of the union was complete shock. Up until the last minute there was no way of predicting that things would go as they did. There was a short-lived coup that ousted Gorbachev in favour of hardliners as late as 1990, and a conference that finally dissolved the union after that.
What surprised most pundits was not the economic or technological structure, that was widely known to anyone interested. What was surprising was the lack of commitment amongst the party membership. For years all Westerners had been raised with the idea that the upper levels of the party were all committed hard liners who would do anything for the cause of global socialism. We were told they would go down fighting and screaming, to the point of dying for the cause just as the senior Nazis had. It turned out that they weren’t. The younger generation like Gorbachev were just politicians and civil servants. They didn’t care about Communism in any sense, it was just the system they happened to have to work within. If they could advance their causes within a totalitarian Communist system they would do so, but if they could do so more effectively under any other system, they would do that.
That turned out to be the real surprise, and that is where the collapse came from. Once the last of the “Old Men” died, the new guard looked at the fucked up system they had, and decided to demolish it. Gorbachev’s idea was to reconstruct Russia much as China has done. Still totalitarian, but much more open and capitalist. But once the reforms started they couldn’t be stopped, and not enough people had enough commitment to the ideology to even try to stop them. Even the coup against Gorbachev was probably more about the Generals wanting to hold into power than any commitment to ideology.
I read Kissinger’s memoir White House Years, which came out in 1979, and his long letter of (unsolicited) advice to President-elect Reagan which appeared in (I think) Time magazine in late 1980. In neither did he indicate any belief that the Soviet Union would dominate the world at any time. He was a smart, aggressive Cold Warrior and thought that the U.S. should work with the Soviets when possible, but had to be strong enough to resist them if push came to shove. He was definitely more dovish than Reagan in the early Eighties, by all accounts, but I’ve never had the sense that he thought the Soviets would emerge from the Cold War triumphant, as long as we were at least halfway skilled in our statecraft.
I graduated high school at that time, and unless somebody was mistaking the starwars initative of the Reagan years as well as landwar2000 for soviet tech, the only thing the soviets had going for them, was a big cube at sharyshagan supposedly capable of firing a big laser.
Declan
By the end of the Cold War it was pretty clear that the USSR was never any real threat, but during the Cold War, the USSR consistently under-estimated us, while we consistently over-estimated them, leading both sides to end up thinking it was pretty close.
It was pretty common in the mid to late 1970s for people to think the USSR might end up winning. A lot of the serious predictions in “The Book of Predictions” predict Soviet dominance.
When it comes to predictions you have to remember two key things:
They’re almost always wrong. Predictions concerning any complex system are pure guesswork. The so called experts NEVER see it coming. Get 100 genuises into the room and ask them to tell you what will happen in the next ten years. Write it down. Look at it ten years from now and you’ll immediately see that a roomful of chimpanzees would have done just as well.
Henry Kissinger being a smart guy has nothing to do with it. Nobody is smart enough to predict the future with any sort of reliability.
People specifically will tend to err in their predictions by assuming that whatever the currend trend is is how things will continue. In the mid 1970s it was certainly reasonable to assess that the United States was not doing fantastically. As it happens that turned around, but nobody thinks of the current trend turning around, they just project forward how things have been recently.
I’ve read some of Kissinger’s books and I don’t remember an overall sense of pessimism from them about the U.S.
He seemed frustrated that the U.S. acted in ways contrary to its interests because it was ‘the right thing’. He was very much an old-time diplomat that believed countries had ‘interests’ and allies can change as interests change etc etc.
I did not get the feel that he thought the U.S. was doomed, however.
What I recall about his writings was the impression that it was completely devoid of any moral compass. And he seemed proud of this! Like BlinkingDuck said, he wanted to just ignore ‘doing the right thing’, and just do whatever you could to accomplish your goal.
I was reminded of some of the Nazi war criminals, and their characterization as “the banality of evil” – mostly not evil villains, just faceless bureaucratic functionaries following procedures.
My last impression was that Kissinger seemed to be an intelligent man, and worked really, really hard – I wondered why. Since he didn’t seem to have any ideals or overall goal that he was working toward.