Waiting for Freedom: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Soviet Collapse, and THE FUTURE OF RUSSIA

If here today, Moynihan would probably see Russia’s invasion in the same way he viewed the Soviet Union’s behavior during the latter years of the Cold War: the actions of a weakened power, riven with internal problems, further undermining its own strategic position through hubris. And as during the final years of the Cold War, as long as the United States stands firm, freedom will prevail again.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan as ambassador, at the United Nations Security Council. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Long before the Soviet Union was consumed by the fiery flames of nationalism, spawning sporadic ethnic conflicts in its former borderlands and ultimately the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, one American statesman saw it all coming. In 1979, while many Western analysts continued to view Soviet power as something to be feared and combated, Daniel Patrick Moynihan boldly predicted that the USSR would be lucky to last another decade. Whereas some within the US foreign policy establishment believed the Soviet Union would continue to menace the world indefinitely, the long-serving senator from New York saw an empire laboring under the weight of its own contradictions and internal weaknesses, particularly the growing nationalism among its restive national minorities. This view remained marginal as the Cold War entered its fourth decade—indeed, it ran contrary to the views of the intelligence community and the White House—yet Moynihan firmly believed the USSR was facing internal dynamics that would soon bring it down. And as today’s US elites continue to speculate about the future of Russia and watch with horror as the ongoing conflict in Ukraine rumbles on, one wonders if Moynihan’s gaze would have penetrated deeper and more insightfully than current analysis.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was many things over the course of his long and distinguished career: accomplished academic, quintessential public intellectual, America’s ambassador to the UN, and senator for the state of New York from 1977 to 2001. He was sharply intelligent, always stylishly dressed, well-connected, and more than comfortable moving in the elite circles of Washington DC, despite his upbringing in the rough New York neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Although a loyal son of the Democratic party, serving in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s, he nevertheless also accepted positions under Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, eager to play a role in shaping government policy in areas he cared about. In some ways Moynihan was the paragon of twentieth-century American liberalism and a giant of the Democratic party, yet in many other ways the senator was unafraid to challenge accepted orthodoxy from his unique vantagepoint at the vital heart of the liberal center. Long an observer of domestic societal trends and an innovative policymaker, Moynihan also proved prescient in the realm of geopolitics, with the Cold War always offering a simmering backdrop to his views on international affairs.

As the 1970s drew to a close, the USA appeared to be stumbling from one foreign policy crisis to another. Jimmy Carter had swept into the White House in 1977 promising a fresh start, a reorientation of American statecraft away from détente and great power politics and towards a more humane foreign policy with human rights promotion at its core. Carter and his advisers were sincere in their desire to see the US leave the dark and destructive policies of the Vietnam and Nixon era behind, to once again become a beacon of hope in the world. Unfortunately for the president, who was an outsider in the world of Washington high politics, his time in office was dominated by the exact same foreign policy problem that had faced every US president since the end of World War II: superpower rivalry with the USSR. But just as Ronald Reagan ascended to the White House in 1980, having consigned Carter to one term in office partly by promising to take a much harder line toward the Soviets, there came a warning from one of Washington’s consummate insiders that time was actually on America’s side.

“In contrast to the USSR, Moynihan would probably be quite pessimistic about Russia’s potential for future reform, which means the United States must continue to contain the Russian threat wherever it emerges.”

Historians now look back on the early 1980s as a time of great peril, when the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union reached levels not seen since the days of Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. This period has become known as the “second Cold War” and was marked by a series of confrontations and pointed rhetoric on both sides, with the relative stability of the détente era long forgotten. The Reagan administration was laser focused on undermining the might of the Soviet empire, determined to take the fight to the Kremlin. The fear that the USSR had reached military parity with the United States pervaded Washington DC, with the intelligence community predicting a long struggle ahead. Senator Moynihan, however, was far more comfortable with the trajectory both superpowers were on. Having long been interested in matters of demography and social change, all he could see when he examined the USSR were growing nationalist grievances and a Russian population that was shrinking dramatically in comparison to the republics of the Soviet periphery. Far from a looming threat, Moynihan stood almost alone in seeing the Soviet Union as living on borrowed time.

These ideas were articulated in a Newsweek article in November 1979, entitled “Will Russia Blow Up?” in which Moynihan described the fragility of the Soviet experiment and even suggested it would collapse within the decade. While many hawkish commentators felt the US needed to prepare for a sustained period of intense confrontation with the Soviet menace, Moynihan controversially stated that the USSR “could blow up”within the next ten years, given the deep problems Moscow faced. Figures such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as Carter’s national security adviser, and Harvard professor Richard Pipes, who would go on to serve on the NSC in the Reagan administration, both identified ethnic grievance and nationalism within the Soviet empire as a looming crisis for the Kremlin. Both of these men were ardent anti-communists, as was Moynihan, but while they favored a more hawkish stance towards the USSR and crafted policies designed to ratchet up the internal pressure on Moscow, the senator noticeably tacked towards a more laidback position. If, as he believed, demography was destiny, then the US merely had to hold the line and wait for its superpower rival to unravel.

Moynihan’s adoption of a more dovish position with regard to US Soviet relations certainly raised eyebrows in Washington DC. Having long identified as a Cold-War liberal in the mold of Truman, Kennedy, and LBJ, and also having flirted with the growing neoconservative intellectual movement (although never fully embracing that label by any means), it was somewhat jarring to see Moynihan express reservations about the anti-Soviet hawkishness of the Reagan administration in the early 1980s. He actually became a fierce critic of Reagan’s policies in Central America and grew increasingly concerned about the direction American foreign policy was taking toward an enemy he believed would not last another decade due to its stagnating economy and demographic problems. Having studied the demographic changes within the USSR, the declining birth rates, and the growing calls for national self-determination in the republics of the Soviet periphery, Moynihan saw the ramping up of Cold-War tensions as a needless risk when the Soviet Union was clearly, to him, in terminal decline. This belief did nothing to dilute his view that America should stand for democratic ideals and freedom on the world stage, but it did inform the way he now viewed the Cold War, declaring in 1984, “our grand strategy should be to wait out the Soviet Union; its time is passing. Let us resolve to be here, our old selves, with an ever-surging font of ideas. When the time comes, it will be clear that in the end freedom did prevail.”

And of course, as the twentieth century drew to a close, freedom did prevail. Across Eastern Europe and within the Soviet Union itself, walls came down and communism’s red flag was lowered in Moscow. Not only were the Soviet satellite states of the Eastern Bloc released from the Kremlin’s iron grip, but the republics of the USSR itself also suddenly found themselves free to chart their own courses. The national independence movements within the Soviet empire asserted their right to self-determination, a principle long championed by the United States. Moscow’s control was revealed to be shallow, the Russian center listless in comparison to the energy of the periphery. An ongoing debate remains as to whether these dramatic events were the result of Reagan’s policies or merely the natural culmination of the USSR’s internal contradictions reaching their inevitable conclusion. Perhaps it was a little of both. Nevertheless, Moynihan could feel vindicated that events had played out exactly as he had predicted, with the nationalist movements in the Baltics, Ukraine, and the Caucuses spearheading the disintegration of the demographically doomed Soviet empire.

Looking back at this history and admiring Moynihan’s long-sightedness naturally raises questions about what the senator would make of contemporary events in Eastern Europe. In the last few years, tensions between the United States and Russia have risen to levels not seen since the height of the Cold War, with the eruption of the largest and most deadly ground war in Europe since the end of World War II. Russia’s brutal and ongoing assault on Ukraine—a conflict many decades in the making—has forced Western policymakers and elected officials to grapple with high-stakes questions of war and diplomacy. Unfortunately, too many of them have been found wanting. Counterfactuals are never going to be perfect, but the lack of vision and leadership currently on display in the Senate compels us to consider how Senator Moynihan might have responded to the challenges faced by the US in dealing with Vladimir Putin’s aggressive and revanchist Russia.

Interestingly, Moynihan would probably see a lot of similarities with the Russia he faced decades ago. As with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Russia today is a country beset by demographic challenges and poor life expectancy. Its armed forces increasingly rely on ethnic minorities recruited from its far-flung regions, just as the late Soviet Union relied on conscripts from its Muslim republics to fight its wars. Its economy, although proving more robust and resilient to Western sanctions than anticipated, faces many long-term structural problems that leave it unable to promote a society attuned to human flourishing. But there are also key differences such as the rise of China, which has now assumed the senior role in the Russian-Chinese relationship, that stand in stark contrast to when Moynihan served in office. Moynihan would also note that compared to the naïve and idealistic Mikhail Gorbachev, who kick-started a process he simply could not control, Vladimir Putin is a completely different animal. Putin will ruthlessly maintain power in the center, making it highly unlikely Russia will ever disintegrate the same way the USSR did, at least in the near term. There are no liberals waiting in the wings in Moscow, and there are no regions on the verge of breaking away. In contrast to the USSR, Moynihan would probably be quite pessimistic about Russia’s potential for future reform, which means the United States must continue to contain the Russian threat wherever it emerges.

Never afraid to take a contrarian position, Moynihan’s liberalism was flexible yet wary of radical change. He actually argued against NATO expansion into Central and Eastern Europe during the nineties, irking fellow Democrats such as President Bill Clinton and Senator Joe Biden in the process. Moynihan feared that expanding eastward would lead to an escalation in tensions with Russia, and as late as 1998 he declared, “We’re walking into ethnic historical enmities […] We have no idea what we’re getting into.” Nevertheless, as a champion of democracy and friend of freedom, there is no doubt he would be horrified by Russia’s actions in Ukraine and would be aghast at those who try to justify them as a legitimate response to NATO expansion. Moynihan would call on America to embrace its role as a defender of liberty, while also paying close attention to the internal weaknesses faced by Russia. Sadly, today’s Congress lacks statesmen and stateswomen with the foresight of Moynihan, those who can study trends and prescribe prudent policies based on realistic goals. If here today, he would probably see Russia’s invasion in the same way he viewed the Soviet Union’s behavior during the latter years of the Cold War: the actions of a weakened power, riven with internal problems, further undermining its own strategic position through hubris. And as during the final years of the Cold War, as long as the United States stands firm, freedom will prevail again.