The United States and the Soviet Union were not alone in seeking to shape Cold War strategy, however, and here, too, there were ancient echoes. One of the striking things about the Peloponnesian War is the extent to which smaller powers maneuvered the superpowers of their day. For in so delicately balanced a situation, small shifts in allegiance could make big differences. 6 The same was true in the Cold War.
Small powers had several sources of strength during that conflict. One came from the simultaneous dismantling - in some cases collapse - of the great European colonial empires in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. All at once dozens of new states were appearing that had not yet taken sides in the Soviet-American conflict. Few, if any, could expect by doing so to tilt the global balance in any measurable way. But fears in Washington and Moscow had gone beyond the measurable: the critical balance was now a psychological one in which appearances meant as much as hard facts. That empowered regimes that only recently had lacked power.
If there was a grand strategist of tilt it was Tito, whose defection from Moscow and subsequent success in winning American aid first demonstrated the possibility of playing off one superpower against the other. He, in turn, became close to Jawaharlal Nehru in India and Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, who also saw the leverage such a strategy could provide and encouraged other new states to embrace it. By 1955, the three of them had organized the "Non-Aligned" Movement: a Third World, as it came to be called, where power resided in the possibility that the countries that constituted it might cease to remain non-aligned.
The United States and - later - the Soviet Union tried persistently to shape such choices through diplomacy, economic and technological assistance, even covert and overt intervention. Their successes, however, were problematic because none of these measures could prevent future defections, whether as the result of revolutions, coups, dissatisfaction, neglect, or simply the other side’s offer of a higher price. The Third World, then, was both victim and manipulator of the "first" and "second.”
Alliances - formal and informal - provided another way to transform weaknesses into strengths. States generally join alliances because they lack power: they have either sought protection or been forced to accept it. But if the leading nation of an alliance has lost the ability to discriminate - if it has put its credibility on the line everywhere by declaring everything vital - then it has passed the initiative to its weaker partners, who can often use that advantage to get what they want.
Hence Ulbricht in East Germany undermined Khrushchev’s attempts to reform Marxism-Leninism by repeatedly warning that, if pressed too hard, his regime might collapse. Similarly, Syngman Rhee in South Korea and Chiang Kai-shek on the Nationalist-held island of Taiwan coerced a reluctant Eisenhower into giving them security guarantees, on the grounds that without these the North Koreans and the Chinese Communists would attack, with devastating results for American credibility. Rhee and Chiang were hardly democratic allies - they were not even predictable allies. But by flaunting their weakness they made themselves, like Ulbricht, necessary allies.
The risks of not defending allies became clear in 1963 when the administration of John F. Kennedy decided to abandon Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. It thereby left, for Lyndon B. Johnson, a leadership vacuum he was never able to fill. Fearing that the North Vietnamese, with the help of their Soviet and Chinese allies, would take over the country, Johnson embarked upon a full-scale military intervention that would cost the lives of 58,000 Americans, an unknown but far larger number of Vietnamese, and would bring the United States close to domestic paralysis.
It later became clear that neither the Soviet Union nor China had authorized Ho Chi Minh’s war against South Vietnam. In yet another demonstration of strength through weakness, he had acted on his own, confident that neither Moscow nor Beijing would disavow him. He was right: these large Marxist-Leninist states let a small one tell them what to do because they feared their own loss of ideological credibility if they failed to support it. Ho’s strategy produced impressive results. The long and costly war in Vietnam dissipated American resources and shook American resolve - even though, in retrospect, the global balance of power was never really at stake there to begin with.
One additional effect of the Vietnam War was to help mobilize a new generation of educated young people who were less prepared than their elders to accept the Cold War stalemate. Their energies manifested themselves, to be sure, in anti-war protests, but also in challenges to "establishments" everywhere: to governments, corporations, and universities throughout the United States and Western Europe, to Marxist-Leninist regimes that had suppressed dissent in Eastern Europe, even to the state and party bureaucracy in China, where Mao himself launched his destructive "Cultural Revolution" - a rare instance of an establishment igniting an insurrection against itself.
By the end of the 1960s, the grand strategic flexibility available to the Cold War great powers had narrowed significantly. Leaders in the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and even China found themselves frustrated in winning support for their ideologies, frightened by the prospect of nuclear
War, worried about the solidity of their alliances - and even about the cohesion of their own societies. The Cold War was now not only a stalemate: it seemed to be diminishing the influence of the states that supposedly dominated it.
World History
