did the political willingness of non-Soviet Warsaw Pact members to partici-
pate. At this time, urgent arms control negotiations covering nuclear weapons
(Intermediate Nuclear Forcesand Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) and
Conventional Forces in Europe, were increasingly clearly in the economic
interests of all countries. However, there can be little doubt that it was
Gorbachev’s shifts in foreign policy, usually demonstrated by arms control
concessions, that spelled the long-term end of the cold war. What immediately
ended it, however, were the revolutions in Eastern Europe, so that the conflict
changed from one between two blocs to a conflict between NATO and the
Soviet Union alone. If a single piece of evidence is needed that the cold war
finally has ended (there had been failed promises of this every time the de ́tente
cycle ‘warmed’), it was the support which the Soviet government gave to the
UN-sponsored, but American-led, Gulf War against Iraq. Alternatively, the
Soviet Union having to accept that its troops should leave the eastern portion
of the now unified German state might be taken as the symbolic ending of the
purely military aspect of the cold war. The fact that the cold war ended
essentially by accident is fitting—it began that way. Since the 1970s historians
of the period have stressed the way in which mutual misunderstandings and
disappointments between the Soviet Union and the USA about what should
be done with post-war Europe grew into a structured opposition that neither
side had ever intended.
Like most such concepts, ‘cold war’ can only be valid if some ‘natural’
alternative exists; and it is arguably unclear that relations between the major
powers have been any worse during the supposed cold war period than has
usually been the case in many past periods following destructive wars. What
gave the cold war its impetus, and what had usually been missing in the past,
was the deeply felt ideological conflict between the East and West. It is because
of this that some commentators, almost entirely in the USA, want to see the
cold war as a real war which their ‘way of life’ won. In truth, serious analysts on
both sides of theiron curtainhad, for years, argued both that neither side had
any real intention of attacking the other, and also that neither side had the
capacity to do so. Nor is it the case that only the Soviet Union lost its
hegemonyover its junior alliance partners. The intensification of the cold
war in the early 1980s was met with very deep opposition among Western
European publics, and crucial dissension inside NATO’s own governing
councils over the perceived trend towards a return to isolationism in the
USA. There was pressure for Europe to be left to fend for itself, a denouncing
of European NATO members for failing to spend enough on defence (the
‘burden-sharing’ argument) to such an extent that NATO’s lack of ability to
fight a defensive war almost matched the Warsaw Pact’s inability and unwill-
ingness to fight an offensive one. The cold warisover, but this no more
guarantees peace in Europe than the cold war itself ever really threatened a hot
Cold War