The Vocabulary of Confrontation

By John Kohan

Four decades of ups and downs, seen through a special lexicon

It is an adversary relationship unique in history and, appropriately, an entire new vocabulary has been created to describe it. Some of the words are little more than political science jargon; many have become household terms. Together, they offer a surprisingly complete record of the ups and downs that have marked U.S.-Soviet relations in the 38 years since the two countries emerged as superpowers. The main entries in the U.S.-Soviet lexicon:

Cold War: neither war nor peace; a rivalry kept in check by fear of nuclear war.

Memories of the exuberant meeting of Soviet and U.S. soldiers at the Elbe River in April 1945 faded rapidly from American minds as the U.S.S.R. moved to consolidate its control over the countries of Eastern Europe that had been liberated by the Red Army. Coined in 1946 by Herbert Bayard Swope, a journalist and sometime speechwriter for Philanthropist Bernard Baruch, the term cold war became synonymous with the tensions of the post-World War II era. During a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., in 1946, Winston Churchill provided another image for the new age. "From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic," he said, "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."

The first major battle of the cold war was waged over an isolated Western outpost behind Churchill's curtain: Berlin. In June 1948, the Soviets blocked all water, road and rail links to the city in an effort to prevent the Allies from setting up a unified government in the Western-controlled zones of postwar Germany. For the next ten months, U.S. Air Force C-54 and C-47 cargo planes landed at West Berlin's Tempelhof Airport every three minutes, ferrying as much as 12,940 tons a day of food and fuel into the besieged city. The Soviets finally capitulated, but by the end of 1949 the West had new cause for worry: the Soviets had exploded an atomic bomb, ending the U.S. nuclear monopoly.

Containment: a policy aimed at checking the expansion of a hostile power or ideology by political, economic or military means.

The swift Western response to the Berlin blockade reflected postwar thinking about how to manage the Soviets. Writing in Foreign Affairs under the pen name "X" in 1947, George Kennan, then head of the State Department's policy planning staff, argued that the West should "contain" the U.S.S.R. by countering Soviet pressure at crisis spots around the globe. But Kennan later denied paternity of any "containment" strategy. It was President Harry Truman who made it the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. In requesting $400 million in military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey, which were threatened by Communist expansion in 1947, he boldly affirmed the Truman Doctrine: the U.S. was prepared "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." The Truman Administration also provided more than $13 billion in economic assistance to the nations of war-shattered Western Europe through the Marshall Plan and established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) one month before the Berlin blockade was lifted. Truman did not send Americans to China to prevent a Communist victory in 1949, but the following year he dispatched U.S. troops to block a Communist takeover of South Korea.

Brinkmanship: a strategy in which a nation displays its willingness to risk war if an adversary does not back down.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower took office in 1953 determined to be more aggressive in checking the spread of Communism. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles summed up this approach when he told LIFE magazine in 1956 that "if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost." Still Eisenhower and Dulles backed away when Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest later that year to crush the Hungarian uprising. Eisenhower contributed another idea when he invoked the domino theory in 1954 to justify U.S. economic aid to South Viet Nam. The notion that the fall of one nation to Communist control would send adjacent countries toppling like dominoes lined up in a row was used in the 1960s to explain U.S. military intervention in Viet Nam.

Peaceful Coexistence: the idea that countries with conflicting ideologies can live together without waging war.

Nikita Khrushchev and the collective leadership that emerged after Stalin's death in 1953 used the term peaceful coexistence to signal the Kremlin's interest in improving diplomatic contacts with the world. "Neither we nor the capitalist states want to make a trip to Mars, so we shall have to exist together on one planet," Khrushchev said during a visit to India in 1955. As he dismantled Stalin's apparatus of terror at home, the Soviets took their own word for the period from the title of a popular novel: The Thaw. The withdrawal of Soviet occupation forces (along with those of the Western allies) from Austria in 1955 seemed to belie the postwar axiom that Communists never give up any territory they hold. In an equally auspicious sign of improved East-West relations, Eisenhower traveled to a Geneva summit that year for the first face-to-face meeting between Soviet and American leaders since Truman had met Stalin at Potsdam in 1945.

Portly and unpredictable, Khrushchev left an indelible imprint on the American consciousness when he blustered his way across the U.S. in 1959, hobnobbing with New York multimillionaires, Hollywood stars and Iowa farmers. But in May 1960, before Eisenhower could return the visit, the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane flying about 65,000 ft. above their territory. Khrushchev demanded an apology from Eisenhower; a few months later, he showed his anger by pounding his shoe on his desk at the U.N. General Assembly.

Eyeball to Eyeball: a diplomatic crisis that threatens to escalate into war.

President John F. Kennedy had come to office criticizing Eisenhower's failure to check the advance of Communism in Cuba. But Kennedy's effort to roll back Soviet influence ended in disaster in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs. It was there that, 1,300 CIA-trained Cuban exiles failed to invade the island and spark a movement that would bring down Fidel Castro.

The West's commitment to Berlin was tested in August 1961, after the East Germans put up a wall to keep their people in. But the boldest Soviet bloc challenge came in the fall of 1962. Khrushchev gambled that he could shift the global balance of power by secretly building some 40 launch pads for medium-range missiles in Cuba. After U.S. surveillance planes spotted the new installations, Kennedy told the Soviets that a nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere would be considered "as an attack by the Soviet Union on the U.S." He ordered a naval quarantine of the island. After a tense 13-day confrontation, Khrushchev decided to withdraw the weapons. Said Secretary of State Dean Rusk: "Eyeball to eyeball, they bunked first."

Detente: the relaxation of tensions between nations.

The word was borrowed from the French, but the West Germans ushered in the new age in East-West relations with their own version, Ostpolitik (literally, Eastern policy). Its architect, Chancellor Willy Brandt, made a historic visit to Moscow in 1970 and signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. About this time, President Richard Nixon indicated to the Soviets that he would be willing to engage in negotiations aimed at limiting the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals. With the help of Henry Kissinger, Nixon also played his "China card" and traveled to Peking, putting Moscow on notice that the U.S. was prepared to deal with a country that shared a tense, 4,200-mile-long border with the Soviet Union.

During the Moscow summit in 1972, Nixon and Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT I pact and in a joint communique pledged to refrain from "efforts to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other, directly or indirectly." The high point of detente, in a literal sense, came in 1975, when Soviet and American spacemen linked up and shook hands 140 miles above the globe during a joint space mission. Meanwhile, troubles back on earth threatened to end the era of good feeling.

Linkage: a policy that ties progress on one front to developments in other areas.

In 1974 Congress attached the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the Trade Reform Act and said in effect that favorable trade concessions to the Soviet Union would be granted only if the Kremlin relaxed its restriction on Jewish emigration. Moscow balked. That year, President Gerald Ford flew to Vladivostok to pursue arms-limitations talks with Brezhnev. In 1975 the two leaders met again at the Helsinki summit of 35 nations to sign an agreement that recognized Europe's postwar boundaries and stressed the importance of increased human contacts between East and West. But the Soviets had stepped up their involvement in Angola and South Yemen, as they would later in Ethiopia, causing Americans to wonder if detente was a one-way street. As the 1976 election campaign began to heat up, Ford declared: "I don't use the word detente any more." Instead he advocated "peace through strength."

President Jimmy Carter came to office committed to advancing human rights and wrote a letter to Nobel Peace-prizewinning Physicist Andrei Sakharov, a leading Soviet dissident. The Kremlin responded in anger, and less than two months later the Soviets also rejected the Administration's new ideas on arms control. Carter and Brezhnev eventually met in Vienna to sign a SALT II pact in June 1979. But as Carter struggled to get congressional approval for the treaty, the Soviets marched into neighboring Afghanistan in December 1979. Said Carter: "My opinion of the Russians has changed more drastically in the last week than even the previous 2 1/2 years." After the invasion, Carter gave up attempts to ratify SALT II and called for an international boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The President also slapped restrictions on high-technology transfers to the Soviet Union; his embargo on grain sales was lifted by President Reagan in April 1981.

Deadlock: a stalemate characterized by a high level of frustration.

Coming to office on a conservative groundswell, President Ronald Reagan made no secret of his feelings about the Soviets. In a statement issued in September 1983, Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov railed against the "outrageous militarist psychosis" in the U.S. and accused the White House of resorting to "what almost amounts to obscenities alternating with hypocritical preaching about morals and humanism" in describing the Soviet Union. The Reagan Administration has spoken in terms that echo containment, brinkmanship, and eyeball to eyeball. Despite its abusive rhetoric, Moscow persists in claiming that it wants to uphold detente. The relationship may once again have changed, but the language of confrontation has not.

--By John Kohan