goldsnow,
Right: in the 1980s, I was a high school student and I remember how our local media kept on booing the so-called satanic empire, that is the Soviet Union.... However, as you might recall, there was a strong pacifist/green movement in Northern Europe --especially in Germany. Those were the days when people routinely demonstrated against NATO and its lethal arsenal of Pershing and Cruise nuclear missiles. They rallied around slogans like 'Yankees go home' and a NIMBY attitude toward nuclear missiles. I remember that every other week military pundits were speculating on the number of hours it would take for the Warsaw Pact armies to sweep through Western Europe --the USSR had allegedly a lead in conventional forces. This Cold War tension became particularly painful for West-Germans when they had to deploy tactical nuclear missiles whose range was limited to 500 km, meaning that their likely targets included East-German facilities (and cities).... So, I think the critical mismatch between Europeans and Americans on this Cold War issue is that (West) Europeans never really bought the Soviet bogeymanship in the same paranoid way the Americans did: while you, Yankees, were watching the sky every morning, anxiously looking for Soviet ballistic missiles to dive on your backyards, we, in Europe, were soothingly fiddling around.... As if we unconsciously expected the Soviet collapse.
The official, swanky story is giving all the credit to Ronald Reagan's adamant stand against communism but the real story includes Germany's behind-the-scenes diplomacy with the USSR. Helmut Kohl was likely instrumental in coaxing the Soviets into loosening their iron grip over Eastern Europe (the so-called OstPolitik).
Finally, I believe the first 'staunch proponent of Detente' was JFK: Prez Kennedy was premature in his desire to turn off the cold-war bluff with the USSR. In the 1960s, the US industrial fabric still relied too heavily on military expenditures --the so-called military-industrial complex-- and the US's main trading partners didn't offer a sufficient marketability to US mass-market outputs. In the 1960s, American households already enjoyed wholesale home ownership with double-garage, color TV, a cornucopia of domestic appliances, etc. while France had one telephone set per village (usually in the post office) and was barely getting out of the aftermath of WWII (ie foodstamps and the like).
My 2 cents,
Gus. |
