What should be a source of disgust, and even outrage, is the very public discovery of what many of us believed all along - that the entire Cold War was bullshit from start to finish. Far too many human beings, whole countries in fact, were decimated by leaders who pledged adherence to a political ideology and practical policies they not only didn't believe in, but sought to undermine just as the goal of those policies was about to bear fruit.[italics added]
The beginnings of the Cold War were not, in fact, bs. While it may have taken a while for American policy-makers to realize the danger posed by the enraged Soviet Union, some of the leaders should have known that Stalin was hardly, as Truman called him during the Potsdam Conference, "Good Old Joe". At Potsdam, Stalin insisted on the execution of pretty much the entirety of the remaining German governmental and military upper echelons, the permanent dismemberment of Germany, with the resulting bits going (for the most part) to newly acquired territory to the east, although the industrial Ruhr Valley would be occupied by the victorious Allied powers sans France (Stalin never quite got over French surrender). They had to settle for the Nuremberg Show Trials, the destruction of the former kingdom of Prussia as a German province, and the multiple industrial spoils of war they carted back to replace their own decimated infrastructure.
Yet, Soviet adventurism did threaten France, Italy, and Austria (my uncle has still not forgiven Eisenhower for allowing the Red Army to take Vienna). By the time of the twin crises that led to the Berlin airlift and the Greek Civil War, it was clear the communist threat to southern and western Europe was far greater than had previously been understood (although the Greek communists were actually cut loose by Stalin, because he perceived that the western powers would fight for a democratic Greece). With the fall of Republican China to Mao's armies in 1948 and the North Korean invasion of the South in 1950, it was even more clear that at least some communists meant business.
Yet, by the time Kennedy took office, had a more deft hand been at the tiller, the US and the Soviet Union might just have managed some fake crises with a bit more finesse. While Kruschev made a show of walking out on Eisenhower because of the capture of a U2 pilot shot down over their territory, and the raising of the Berlin Wall were certainly fodder for American anti-communists to make much hay, cooler heads may have been able to move through the bluster and keep the lines open. The cowboy attitude on display during the Bay of Pigs fiasco - which resulted in the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later - was almost entirely the fault of the Kennedy Administration allowing their weakness to hang out for the Russians to see.
The renewal of the Cold War under Reagan, at least during his first term, was wholly avoidable, the product of rabid anti-communism run amok. It should be noted, though, that it really began toward the end of Carter's Presidency, with the overreaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Carter's willingness to go along with Defense Secretary Harold Brown's recommendations to deploy the MX Missile and build the B-1B bomber, both huge boondoggles.
With the publication of PM Thatcher's unguarded offer and blatant honesty to Gorbachev - that the anti-communism was pretty much for domestic consumption; the goal of stability of the post-war status quo being far more important than freedom for the captive peoples of Central Europe - we may at least be honest enough to admit that much of the fear and bluster, posturing and nonsense from 1981 until the collapse of the Iron Curtain was so much nonsense. Had Thatcher, Reagan, and Bush been as honest with their publics as they were with Gorbachev, history might be a bit different.
I'm still pissed, though, that it took 20 years for this to come to light.
