With some exceptions, such as Vietnam, the conservative Cold War impulse towards counter-Communist intervention was positive. It recognized that the Soviet Union’s power rested on turning democracies into resource centers and military outposts and free peoples into prisoners.
But on Friday, Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias responded to a tweet by conservative writer Mark Hemingway and suggested that conservatives were too keen to intervene against Soviet-supported communist movements. Yglesias believes we should have been more relaxed about communists taking power in marginally powerful states.
Conservatives spent (and I guess continue to spend) too much of the Cold War lacking confidence in their correct forecast that Communism was bad and would fail when implemented.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 15, 2019
Yglesias makes two major errors of analysis here. First, he assumes that what conservatives feared about a possible Central American communist takeover was an attack on the United States. But it wasn’t. What motivated conservative action to constrain the Sandinista-umbrella movements was the Cold War long game: the belief that if Soviet-aligned communism was not pressured at every margin of its relative power, it would seize nations and threaten the U.S.
This isn’t a theoretical concern. Consider a certain Caribbean island nation that once allowed Soviet nuclear weapons on its soil. Did Cuba pose a threat to Omaha in that moment?
While it’s unclear as to whether a Soviet-aligned Central America would have threatened the U.S. in the same way, its threat would have been real nonetheless. After all, that communist control would have threatened U.S. access to the Panama Canal and democratic values in the Western Hemisphere. Even if only at the margin, it would have strengthened the Soviet economy.
This danger deserved the U.S. constraint it received.
Yglesias’ second error is his assumption that the Cold War was won not by U.S. action but by the natural fallacy of communism itself. While it’s true that communism’s inherent failings tend to rot away a state’s power, U.S. pressure was also instrumental to the Soviet Union’s collapse. In the end, the U.S. defeat of Soviet communism was achieved by forcing that flawed economic system to use its limited resources to match U.S. global influence and military power. While that system would have remained flawed had the U.S. allowed the Soviet Union to continue seizing global power, as Yglesias apparently believes it should have, the Soviets would have mitigated their weaknesses far more effectively.
The Cold War power struggles over Egypt offer a great example of where the Soviets could have won major resources and influence had the U.S. not constrained them (incidentally, a similar reality exists with Russia and Egypt today). Soviet leaders would have used the resources of their dominion to strengthen their own hand against America. With time, they would have been able to isolate America and impose economic decline upon us. We would have lost the Cold War.
The simple point here is that the Soviet Union needed robust and relentless U.S. constraint. Trusting in its inevitable failure would have given Moscow the space and resources to delay that failure and dominate the globe.
