Paul Nitze: "America's Cold Warrior"

James Graham Wilson’s biography is a thought-provoking exploration of the Cold War and one man's role in steering us through it.

Both as a defense intelligence officer and as a Foreign Service officer, I worked on programs involving preparations for nuclear war. Granted the vaunted “Q” (since purloined by the QAnon crowd) clearance, I had a ringside seat at the arena of oblivion, and, believe me, it’s not a pretty sight. One American more than any other conceptualized the strategic framework that helped Washington navigate the existential minefield of nuclear deterrence from Truman through Reagan. Until now, Paul Nitze’s story has been undertold. “No other American in the twentieth century contributed to high policy as much as he did for as long as he did in both Democratic and Republican administrations,” writes State Department historian James Graham Wilson in his book, America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan.

Paul Nitze has been called “last of the Wise Men” — the generation of men of privilege who shaped America’s emergence as a superpower as the Cold War followed immediately on the heels of World War II. They were not very ideological, were Democrats and Republicans, yet shared the same basic principles, including that America’s leadership role was “part of a moral destiny,” as Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas write in The Wise Men. Wilson writes that Nitze “helped create the architecture of the U.S. national security state and a system for training future professionals.” He came to encompass what Wilson describes as a new type: the “national security professional.” Generations of young average citizens (myself included) who studied international relations at a handful of universities which started such programs after the war aspired to join those ranks. We studied closely what Chip Bohlen, Averill Harriman, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Robert Lovett, John McCloy and Paul Nitze had to teach us on foreign policy-making in the nuclear age. What I particularly value in Nitze is that he viewed himself as a “man of action” who disdained scholarly theories, much favored by academics, that are disconnected from real world statecraft.

George Kennan and Paul Nitze were friends, yet differed considerably on how Washington should deal with Moscow. Nitze was the architect behind NSC-68, the 1950 presidential decision directive that constituted America’s geopolitical blueprint for waging the Cold War. While it included some of Kennan’s concepts of “containment,” it was much more robust in calling for U.S. policy to promote change in the Soviet system. “Preparedness lay at the heart of deterring Soviet aggression,” Wilson writes, and Nitze believed that peacetime deterrence meant “acquiring the means to prevail in wartime.” He felt that nuclear weapons must play a key role in shaping the geopolitics of the Cold War whereas Kennan placed more emphasis on diplomacy. It was this tension that we budding national security professionals wrestled with both in our academic debates and later as officers of government.

I spent the bulk of my government career on the front lines of the Cold War — in the field and in Washington — in Southeast Asia, Cuba, Afghanistan and Europe. We in the ranks alternated between favoring engaging with Moscow and its communist allies and confronting them — depending on the time and circumstances. It was as if Nitze, Kennan and the other Wise Men were whispering their often conflicting counsel in our collective ear. I perceived that senior policymakers felt the same way.

Nitze, like many others (I — guilty as charged), was slow to recognize the signs of the impending collapse of the Soviet Union. CIA analyses picked up on the USSR’s “internal contradictions” yet missed the impending collapse. But Nitze went further. He predicted that Gorbachev would intervene militarily in Eastern Europe to quash growing freedom movements to throw off Soviet domination. His skepticism of Gorbachev’s reforms and Soviet willingness to compromise contributed to his being sidelined during this time late in his career, Wilson points out. The author therefore is spot on in calling him “America’s cold warrior.”

The Wise Men may have long departed the scene, but their wisdom is as relevant today as we confront a surging China and reckless Russia. We are largely devoid of such sage bipartisan figures in our deeply polarized present. James Graham Wilson explains complex diplomatic negotiations, arms control treaties, and strategic doctrines in a clear and engaging manner. Paul Nitze’s long career has much to teach us still. I therefore highly commend to aspiring national security professionals and policy officials alike that they read and learn from this insightful book.

The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.