How America Won the Cold War

Net assessments identify an adversary’s vulnerabilities. Competitive strategies exploit them. Three questions guide this process: 

1. What game is the United States playing?

2. What game is our adversary playing?

3. What are their relative strengths and weaknesses?

During the latter half of the Cold War, this framework empowered policymakers to move past détente and actually compete with the Soviet Union by capitalizing on America’s unique advantages over the Soviets—namely, its free political system, market economy, and technological edge. In other words, the United States practiced strategy as a bottom-up exercise, not only as a top-down endeavor.

What did this look like practically? Three successful episodes are worthy of brief study and imitation: air defense, nuclear targeting, and defense spending.

In the late 1970s, Andy Marshall and the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment examined the various legs of America’s nuclear triad, which still to this day consists of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and heavy bombers. Whether from land, sea, or sky, Washington and Moscow had multiple ways to annihilate each other. Marshall noted Joseph Stalin’s strange obsession with heavy bombers, which stemmed from the USSR’s fear of America’s firebombing runs targeting Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II. This history, coupled with America’s regular reconnaissance overflights of Soviet territory, predisposed Moscow to invest heavily in air defense. The Pentagon tested this hypothesis with the B-1 bomber. It wasn’t even slated for production until 1982, but “the concept of a low-flying supersonic bomber played to Soviet fears,” explains London School of Economics visiting professor Gordon Barrass, “and the Soviet air defense forces leaped to the bait. The Soviets spent billions on developing the MiG-25, new surface-to-air missiles, and radar to counter this threat.” From Marshall’s perspective, every ruble spent on defense was one less ruble available for first-strike nuclear weapons.

Military technology is one thing; political decision-making is another. Even if we scrambled the Soviet’s investments, America still needed to address the amorphous issue of perception. In the final years of the Carter administration, the United States sent an unmistakable message to the Kremlin: we know where your secret bunkers are, and our missiles can reach each of them. Carter approved the deployment of two hundred MX missiles (each with multiple nuclear warheads) in secret bunkers throughout America and also signaled Washington’s intent to deploy Pershing II intermediate-range missiles in Europe in the coming years if Moscow didn’t agree to arms control measures. Especially clever were selective leaks from Presidential Directive 59 in July 1980, which outlined Carter’s decision to target Soviet command and control centers if the USSR attacked the United States first. Too many leaders in Washington today have forgotten the stabilizing effect of prudent brinkmanship. 

It wasn’t until the 1980s, however, that America gained an irreversible advantage over the Soviet Union. It wasn’t until the 1980s, however, that America gained an irreversible advantage over the Soviet Union. After his landslide victory and inauguration in 1981, Ronald Reagan indicated his belief that the time was ripe for delivering a death blow to the regime in Moscow:

I learned the Soviet economy was in even worse shape than I’d realized [during the 1980 presidential campaign]. I had always believed that, as an economic system, Communism was doomed…Now, the economic statistics and intelligence reports I was getting during my daily National Security Council briefings were revealing tangible evidence that Communism as we knew it was approaching the brink of collapse, not only in the Soviet Union but throughout the Eastern bloc…You had to wonder how long the Soviets could keep their empire intact. If they didn’t make some changes, it seemed clear to me that in time Communism would collapse on its own weight, and I wondered how we as a nation could use these cracks in the Soviet system to accelerate the process of collapse.

This excerpt from President Reagan’s autobiography is a prime example of a net assessment: identifying a weakness in your adversary ripe for exploitation. Washington had something Moscow lacked: a strong economy. Ronald Reagan leveraged that advantage with devastating effect. From fiscal year (FY) 1980 to FY 1985, America’s defense spending increased by nearly fifty percent. The Pentagon also outpaced the Soviets technologically, particularly with the development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), Reagan’s gambit for space-based missile defense. The program was young and had years of development to go, but the United States successfully duped Moscow into thinking otherwise. By 1986, the Soviet economy was sputtering, and Moscow couldn’t keep up with the competitive pace America set. 

To be sure, the United States still responded to Soviet movements and stratagems throughout the Cold War, just as the Soviets responded to American decisions. But the reaction was tied to a larger competitive rubric. Caught in an existential deathmatch with the Soviets, policymakers in Washington had no choice but to compete on dual planes that simultaneously defended their core interests while also understanding—and sabotaging—Moscow’s game. Instead of thrashing about, the United States acted deliberately, baiting the Kremlin into decisions that favored Washington’s strengths.

What Winning Looks Like

Net assessments and competitive strategies will be more difficult in this second Cold War than it was in the first, for America’s competition with the CCP is not only military in nature but also economic, political, and technological. Beijing’s foreign policy is multidimensional and, as such, is complicated to target. Even so, Washington has left multiple flanks untouched. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), for instance, is intrinsically connected to the systemic human rights abuses of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang because half of its land routes run through the territory and over the backs of oppressed minorities. Economically, the BRI relies on corruption—and, in large part, the U.S. dollar—to grease the skids of construction. Militarily, its global scope could quickly overextend the People’s Liberation Army.

Each of these openings stems from weaknesses that are particular to the PRC and its ruling Communist Party. China has adeptly exploited America’s strategic complacency, but its brittle political system, totalitarian ideology, and fear of its own people all serve to complicate the BRI. The entire plan has multiple weaknesses at key nodes that, if pushed, could jeopardize the entire project. By harnessing the tools of net assessment and competitive strategies, U.S. policymakers could initiate targeted campaigns to exploit these vulnerabilities, atrocities, and illicit activities and sabotage China’s “great game,” one step at a time.

What exactly, though, does winning look like? How will Washington strategists know if their net assessments are accurate and their competitive strategies are working? Economically, sanctions on corrupt, BRI-affiliated SOEs should weaken China’s commercial advantage abroad. Specifically, Washington should expect to see Beijing winning fewer contracts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Eurasian trade routes that run through Xinjiang would also collapse as countries withdraw from the project altogether and de-risk their supply chains. Over time, the United States should expect these competitive actions to materially impact China’s economy. Xi Jinping refuses to liberalize China’s market and continues to leverage SOEs for political control. A successful competitive strategy would further depress China’s economic growth forecast. America should not apologize for pursuing this outcome. International politics, to quote former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), is not a “polite tennis match.”

Informationally, successful policies would shift perceptions and media narratives within host countries and force the CCP to defend its record of exploitation. Over time, fewer heads of state from the Global South would make the pilgrimage to Beijing because doing so would imperil them politically at home. These optics would be embarrassing for Xi, but it would also suggest that the “Middle Kingdom” does not, in fact, rule over “all under heaven.” Losing the Mandate of Heaven in the eyes of the Chinese people is more than a public relations problem; it goes to the heart of the CCP’s legitimacy.

That external reality, combined with dedicated and persistent U.S. operations to weaken the CCP’s internal censorship apparatus, should yield higher spending on internal security. Counterintuitively, that resource allocation could be a positive sign for America, provided that increased attention at home distracts Xi and the Politburo Standing Committee from focusing on Taiwan. A more objective measure of success would be an uptick in political protests throughout China that question the party’s efficacy and legitimacy.

No doubt, some may balk at such brinksmanship as destabilizing and dangerous. Mindless hawkism, after all, is no less a betrayal of prudent statesmanship than pacifist appeasement. Even so, the Chinese Communist Party, not the United States of America, terrorizes its own people and exports its internal instability around the world. Healthy governments do not behave this way. It is not incumbent on representative democracies like the United States to make allowances for the CCP’s pathologies. Doing so would amount to strategic codependency. Nor is it America’s responsibility to change China politically; only the Chinese people can do that. What Washington can do, however, is distract Beijing from its dangerous agenda, lull it into stagnation, and, hopefully, head off the CCP’s rise.