To Dare Even More Boldly: The Promised Land Fallacy; Khrushchev and the Limits of Brinkmanship
It was not just von Tirpitz who has fallen into the trap of the promised land fallacy. More recently, the Soviet Union—under Nikita Khrushchev—became ensnared in precisely the same morass. As was true for Wilhelmine Germany structurally, the USSR under Khrushchev was seen as a rising power, struggling to be taken seriously as an equal by the dominant power of the day, in this case the United States.
Just as it was von Tirpitz’s dream to establish a world-class navy to cow the British, Khrushchev used Communist ideology to reach for the silver bullet to right the strategic equation, using aggressive brinkmanship to help the developing world wage wars of national liberation against the dominant West. As was the case with the kaiser, for Khrushchev catching up was vital, but brinkmanship was also intended to to keep his stronger American opponent off balance. This he certainly did, but as happened with Wilhelmine Germany, this led to predictably disastrous consequences. In Khrushchev’s case, brinkmanship directly caused his ouster in 1964.
Soviet support for ‘wars of national liberation’—bolstering rising global anti-colonial movements from Algeria to Cuba to Vietnam—had its roots in the far-off writings of Lenin, specifically his work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
As William Odom puts it, for the Soviets, nationalists in colonies ‘were objectively progressive’ political forces. Furthermore, because capitalism had become a world imperialist system, revolutions in the colonies might well break the ‘weakest link’ in imperialism’s chain of control, enabling a war in the colonies to bring down the whole imperialist structure. Strategically, Khrushchev dreamed of a world where a Communist East allied with the developing world would overturn the dominance of the West.
If Communist ideology as derived from Lenin’s anti-colonialist writings provided Khrushchev with the intellectual material for his silver bullet strategy, standard Soviet military doctrine provided the tactical form that such a strategy would take. Soviet ideas about war were based on, as Odom makes clear, ‘a belief in the primacy of the offensive form of warfare.’
So if the developing world amounted to the soft underbelly of capitalism and its chief champion, the United States, it had to be attacked aggressively through strategic, diplomatic, and, if necessary, military means. As was true for von Tirpitz and Kaiser Wilhelm, Khrushchev would play a dangerous, high-stakes game of brinkmanship with the world’s dominant power to secure the Soviet Union’s place in the sun.
But if the Khrushchev era was to be characterised by his blustering on the world stage—thereby fooling many Americans strategists into thinking they were outright losing the Cold War to an inevitably rising Soviet power—the reality of the situation was far different. The Soviet leader was attempting to make the USSR a viable global power, knowing that the country he had inherited from Joseph Stalin had been isolated, handicapped by a war machine it could ill afford.
As Alexander Fursenko and Timothy Naftali point out, when Khrushchev came to power, his ‘long experience as an agricultural and industrial manager made him more sensitive than Stalin or (Foreign Minister) Molotov to the cost of military confrontation with the West and its effects on the standard of living within the Soviet Union and its Communist allies. His few foreign travels, all of which had been to socialist countries—to East Germany, Poland, and China in 1954—had reinforced his belief that economics was the Achilles’ heel of the Soviet bloc.’
Khrushchev was acutely aware of the structural flaws marring Soviet power, even if his Western adversaries were not. He knew that enhancing Soviet economic growth was the absolute key to the country’s future geopolitical success, and that its oversized conventional military was a drag on its prospects. At the same time, Khrushchev was determined to pursue his aggressive ‘wars of national liberation’ foreign policy strategy. The key intellectual tension throughout the period of Khrushchev’s dominance was how to address the USSR’s acute economic needs while at the same time implementing its expansionist foreign policy designs.
Unlike the kaiser, who could simply have waited a few years until Germany’s growing economic dominance would have inevitably granted it a seat at the global top table with Britain, Khrushchev was working from a structural position of relative weakness compared with the US. The Soviet leader made this clear in a speech to his colleagues on January 8, 1962.
As Fursenko and Naftali note, ‘He adopted the metaphor of a wineglass that was filled to the brim, forming a meniscus, to describe a world where political tensions everywhere were brought to the edge of military confrontation…so long as the Soviet Union was the weaker superpower, it had to practice brinkmanship to keep its adversary off-balance.’ The unanswered metaphorical question in all this was, what was to be done if the meniscus was broken and the wineglass did overflow?
Khrushchev was certainly a true believer in the historically inevitable victory of communism on the world stage, and did all he could to enable the Soviet Union to overtake and supplant the United States over time as the world’s dominant power. But when push came to shove in the crises he so often caused, the Soviet leader shied away from war, having seen a great deal of it as a political commissar at the pivotal Battle of Stalingrad in World War II.
So at the exact same time Khrushchev embarked on his ambitious promised land strategy of using ‘wars of national liberation’ to best the US, he was simultaneously pushing for deep cuts in Soviet conventional forces across the board, while also disdaining a build-up of tactical nuclear weapons, for fear they would lower the atomic threshold and increase the chances of nuclear war.
Khrushchev was relying instead on strategic nuclear weapons, only to be used as an absolute last resort. So beneath all the bombast and his dangerous silver bullet strategy hinging on ‘wars of national liberation,’ in reality Khrushchev simultaneously pursued a very conservative and cautious nuclear policy. Unhappily for him, this nuance was lost on both his allies and his enemies.
Yet, as Taubman makes clear, on the other hand, ‘Khrushchev was convinced he could play on the nerves of his adversaries by threatening nuclear strikes he had no intention of undertaking. He tried out that tactic during the Suez Crisis, and was convinced that it worked; he used it again during the Berlin crisis and tried to repeat it in Cuba. But instead of cowing his adversaries, his bluster and bluff alarmed them and mobilised them to undertake resistance that forced him to back down.’
As had been true for the kaiser, Khrushchev’s menacing ‘wars of national liberation’ policy was the worst of all strategic worlds. It did just enough to alarm the United States to check Soviet advances without amounting to enough to overturn the established order.
Over the 11 years he was in charge of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev aggressively pursued the strategic offensive in the Cold War, through threats to use nuclear weapons, but primarily through the USSR’s sponsorship of what were deemed ‘progressive’ anti-colonial movements throughout the world. As Donaldson and Nogee state, Khrushchev viewed his ‘wars of national liberation’ strategy as ‘an arena in which the Soviets could compete with the West with a high likelihood of success, but with less risk than would result from a direct challenge.’
Khrushchev practised what he preached. In June 1955, during a state visit to India, a leading light of the anti-colonial world, he promised the Soviet Union would finance and construct the giant Bhilai steel mill, as a form of economic assistance for its developing world ally. This cemented a special relationship between Delhi and Moscow that lasted until well after the Cold War.
There is little doubt that Khrushchev’s foreign policy thrust the USSR into truly global involvement. Besides India, he forged ties with radical anti-colonial movements in the developing world, such as the Castro regime in Cuba and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. For these nationalist Communists, the Soviet Union represented a welcome alternative to the United States as a source of economic and military support. In the wake of Stalin’s narrow focus on Eastern Europe, Khrushchev expanded the parameters of Soviet foreign policy.
In pursuing the ‘wars of national liberation’ strategy, the USSR provided logistical, financial, and ideological support to Communist as well as anti-colonial groups. For example, in 1959, Khrushchev provided military assistance to Patrice Lumumba in Congo and supported his diplomatic initiatives at the United Nations. The Soviets also supported the Laotian Communists, but only within the parameters of the broader neutralist United Front, giving military aid to the allies of Souvanna Phouma.
The overall strategy called for picking away at imperialism in the developing world, as dismantling it over time would cause capitalism’s ultimate collapse. The USSR challenged the US in every single region of the globe. And that was precisely the problem with Khrushchev’s ‘wars of national liberation’ policy. The United States was challenged across the world, but the Soviet Union, as very much the junior superpower, was in no position to compete with America everywhere. As such, geopolitical realities doomed the policy to failure, eventually merely highlighting the very glaring Soviet weaknesses that Khrushchev’s operatic bluster had been designed to hide.