regarding the Gulf War, including both his own and Baker's talks in Moscow as well as their meetings with Soviet Foreign Minister (and later premier) Yevgeny Primakov and other Soviet officials as the crisis wore on and the war ensued. Ambassador Anatoly Adamishin (former Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister responsible for regional conflicts) in turn captured the change in thinking that was underway in Moscow with regard to regional conflicts in general and to the Gulf War in particular. In his view, the process of change had reasonably deep roots and involved as much a change in personnel, or at least in who was being listened to, as it involved a change in thinking of any particular person. Adamishin, and several other Russian participants, argued that Moscow's relationship with Iraq had been much more complex than often thought in the West and did not accept the characterization of Iraq as a Soviet ally in the traditional sense.

On the second day of the conference discussions returned to the issue of arms control and dealt with both the nuclear arms and conventional forces negotiations. Ambassador Richard Burt (head of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks - START) began by describing the evolution in American thinking about nuclear arms control that occurred between the middle Reagan years and the middle Bush years. Burt explained that nuclear arms control in the early period of the Bush administration was constrained by an ongoing policy review and important bureaucratic divisions. He explained how this was eventually overcome and progress made. Yuri Nazarkin (former Head of the Soviet delegation to START) recounted the Soviet side of the negotiation and emphasized the importance of his relationship with Burt and the determination of Shevardnadze to go forward. Nazarkin spend considerable time, as did Vitaly Kataev, described the political opposition within the Kremlin to the concessions Moscow was making. They also noted the importance of the shifting domestic balance in this regard and the significance of Shevardnadze's resignation.

Ambassador James Woolsey (former head of the U.S. delegation to Conventional Forces Europe (CFE) negotiations in Vienna and former Director of Central Intelligence) explained how he had entered the Conventional Force Talks negotiations with what he perceived to be a mandate from the president to make progress quickly if possible. Woolsey discussed how potential bureaucratic obstacles on the U.S. side were overcome, in part by his decision to include in the U.S. delegation key military representatives and in part by a set of personal contacts with the four key administration decision-makers on this issue. Oleg Grinevsky (head of the Soviet delegation to the CFE talks) explained why the Soviet military wanted to exclude certain forces by designating them as naval forces. Woolsey recounted his confrontation with Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov regarding this matter, and both Woolsey and Grinevsky explained how the agreement was eventually put back on track.

The final two sessions involved discussing possible

counterfactual pasts that could have occurred or almost occurred and what happened to prevent history from unfolding in that other direction. We spent considerable time using the posing of counterfactual questions to highlight underlying causal assumptions and to test through thought experiments the plausibility of the explanations we were accepting.

Following the Mershon Center conference, the fourth and final conference took place in the Bavarian Alps, at the former Wittelsbach spa in Wildbad Kreuth. Organized by the Geschwister-Scholl-Institut of the University of Munich in cooperation with the Mershon Center and the Watson Institute, this meeting examined the European role in ending the Cold War. It featured former German, French, British, and Soviet policy-makers along with the Mershon project scholars and experts affiliated with German universities. The discussion centered on the decisions within NATO leading up to German unification and the extent to which other outcomes were possible.

Perhaps the most striking finding of the Mershon and Munich conferences is in the realm of psychological dynamics, and the support the retrospective judgment of policy-makers provides for the "certainty of hindsight" bias. Baruch Fischoff has demonstrated that "outcome knowledge" affects our understanding of the past by making it difficult for us to recall that we were once unsure about what was going to happen. Events deemed improbable by experts (e.g., peace between Egypt and Israel, the end of the Cold War), are often considered "over-determined" and all but inevitable after they have occurred.2

Looking back on events, most of the policymakers, independently of their country or ideology, see the end of the Cold War, the unification of Germany, and the collapse of the Soviet Union as more or less inevitable. But almost all of them confessed that they were surprised by these events as they unfolded, even incredulous. The contradiction in their belief systems was also made apparent by almost every policymaker's insistence that the outcome of any decision or negotiation in which they personally participated was highly contingent. In the conference discussions and over drinks or coffee, they told amusing stories of how clever tactics, the nature of the personal relationship between them and their opposites, or just sheer coincidence, frequently played a decisive role in shaping the outcome of negotiations. Some policymakers including a few who characterized the end of the Cold War, the unification of Germany and the dissolution of the Soviet Union as inevitable-were nevertheless responsive to suggestions that components of the process might have been different. There was widespread agreement at the Wildbad Kreuth conference that there was nothing foreordained about the Two-plusFour format for negotiations over the future of Germany. When pushed, some of the Russian, American and German policymakers present at this conference agreed that a different format, say one that involved more European

countries as participants, might well have resulted in a different outcome given the widespread opposition to unification by Germany's neighbors. While there was general agreement that Gorbachev had little freedom to maneuver on the German question at the time of the Twoplus-Four talks, several Soviet officials suggested that he might have been able to negotiate a better deal if he broached the issue in 1987.

The experimental literature in psychology indicates that counterfactual scenarios can be used to increase receptivity to contingency. Counterfactuals can assist people in retrieving and making explicit their massive but largely latent uncertainty about historical junctures, that is to recognize that they once thought, perhaps correctly, that events could easily have taken a different turn. The proposed correctives hence uses one cognitive bias to reduce the effect of another. Ross, Lepper, Strack and Steinmetz exploited the tendency of people to inflate the perceived likelihood of vivid scenarios to make them more responsive to contingency. People they presented with scenarios describing possible life histories of post-therapy patients evaluated these possibilities as more likely than did members of the control group who were not given the scenarios. This effect persisted even when all the participants in the experiment were told that the post-therapy scenarios were entirely hypothetical.3 Philip E. Tetlock and one of the authors conducted a series of experiments to test the extent to which counterfactual “unpacking” leads foreign policy experts to upgrade the contingency of international crises. In the first experiment, one group of experts was asked to assess the inevitability of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A second group was asked the same questions, but given three junctures at which the course of the crisis might have taken a different turn. A third group was given the same three junctures, and three arguments for why each of them was plausible. Judgments of contingency varied in proportion to the degree of counterfactual unpacking. The discussions in Columbus and Bavaria provide anecdotal support for these findings, and suggest the value of conducting more focused, scientific experiments with policymakers as participants.

Are there any provisional conclusions we might draw about the certainty of hindsight bias and the Cold War? First, the discovery of the bias should come as no surprise. Policymakers and scholars routinely upgrade the probability of major events once they have occurred. World War I and the Middle East peace accord are cases in point. Second, we would expect policy-makers to stress the contingency of events in which they were personally involved. By showing how they made a difference, they buttress their self-esteem. Further research might make policy-makers face this contradiction between their micro and macro beliefs. Would they invoke complicated arguments to attempt to reconcile the contradiction? Or, would they alter one component of their belief system to bring it in line with the other? And if so, which belief will the change? Will there be systematic differences in how

policy-makers respond as a function of their personalities, political beliefs, nationalities or past and present positions? These are fascinating subjects for future research. In the interim, one thing is certain: we must be wary of accepting at face value the judgments and reconstructions policymakers offer of the past.

Richard K. Herrmann is associate director of the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University. Richard N. Lebow is the director of the Mershon Center.

1

Although the conference revolved around the oral history provided by the former policy-makers, each discussion was framed by a scholar engaged in doing research on the end of the Cold War. Policy-makers were not asked to give speeches; to the contrary, they were asked to react to opening questions and to engage in an open discussion with the scholars who had been doing archival and analytical research. The scholars participating in the discussion included: George Breslauer (University of California, Berkeley), Matthew Evangelista (Cornell University), Raymond Garthoff (The Brookings Institute), Richard Herrmann and Ned Lebow (Ohio State), Jacques Levesque (Université de Laval), Janice Stein (University of Toronto), and William Wohlforth (Georgetown University). William Burr (National Security Archive) and Christian Ostermann (Cold War International History Project) took part in the conference. The briefing book of documents is available through the NSA. The Russian and English language transcripts for both the Moscow and Columbus conferences are posted on the Mershon home page (http:// www.mershon.ohio-state.edu/) and are also available from the National Security Archive.

2 Baruch Fischoff, "Hindsight is not Equal to Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment under Uncertainty" Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 1:2 (1975), pp. 288-99; S. A. Hawkins and R. Hastie, "Hindsight: Biased Judgments of Past Events after the Outcomes are Known,” Psychological Bulletin 107:3 (1990), pp. 311-27. The tendency was earlier referred to as “retrospective determinism" in comparative-historical studies by Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship (New York: Wiley, 1964). See also Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, "Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives," in Tetlock and Belkin, Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics, pp. 15-16.

3 L. Ross, M. R. Lepper, F. Strack and J. Steinmetz, "Social Explanation and Social Expectation: Effects of Real and Hypothetical Explanations on Subjective Likelihood," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35 (1977), pp. 817-29.

wohlforw@gunet.georgetown.edu).]

By Fred I. Greenstein and William C. Wohlforth

O

n 29-30 March 1996, Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School hosted nine former top officials of the US and Soviet governments who played critical roles in the tumultuous diplomacy at the end of the Cold War. The conference on the "Cold War Endgame" followed an earlier Princeton conference on the period from 1983 to 1989 (the transcript of which was published in Witnesses to the End of the Cold War, ed. W. C. Wohlforth [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996]). Led by former US Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Soviet Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh, the conferees spent two days analyzing and "reliving" the major events affecting world politics from 1989 to 1992: the forging of a new political relationship between the incoming Bush administration and the Gorbachev team in the winter and spring of 1989; the collapse of Communism in Europe in the fall of that year; the new relationship that developed between Bush and Gorbachev at the shipboard summit in Malta in December; the genesis and management of the "two-plus-four" talks on Germany in early 1990; collaboration between the superpowers against Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, which was cemented by the two leaders at the Helsinki summit in September 1990; and the dramatic domestic developments in the Soviet Union that culminated in the August 1991 coup and the collapse of the Soviet state four months later. On the American side, Secretary Baker was accompanied by National Security Advisor Gen. Brent Scowcroft; Counselor of the State Department Robert Zoellick; Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack F. Matlock, Jr.; and National Security Council staffer Phillip Zelikow. Minister Bessmerntnykh was joined by Anatoly S. Chernyaev, personal advisor on foreign affairs to Gorbachev; Sergei Tarasenko, principal foreign policy assistant to Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze; and Pavel Palazchenko, special assistant and interpreter to Gorbachev. Journalist and author Don Oberdorfer who covered the events under consideration as chief diplomatic correspondent of the Washington Post and chronicled them in From the Cold War to a New Era1-moderated the discussion.

The National Security Archive's Vladislav Zubok prepared a briefing book for the conference that featured a

number of noteworthy documents, including Ambassador Matlock's "long telegrams" from Moscow in February 1989, declassified CIA intelligence assessments of Gorbachev's domestic situation and Soviet stability (September 1989) and the Soviet Union's prospects for survival in the face of the nationalist challenge (April 1991); and previously unpublished extracts from Anatoly Chernyaev's diary (courtesy of the Gorbachev Foundation) concerning the critical politburo discussion in January 1990 of the "4+2" formula on German unification. In addition, Chernyaev read extensive diary extracts that recorded Gorbachev's remarks on Saddam Hussein and the last minute negotiations to avert a US-led ground assault on Iraqi forces in Kuwait.

The discussions were extraordinarily frank. While many of these policy veterans have written memoirs, at the conference they were able to argue with each other, prod each other's memories, compare recollections, and debate policy options and possible "missed opportunities" as they relived the most important years of their careers. The conferees discussed both domestic politics and grand strategy; they debated underlying causes of events as well as the details of statecraft; they recalled specific meetings and decisions as well as the general perceptions that underlay decision-making on both sides. And the conference covered the critical years that bridged the end of the Cold War and the new post-Cold War epoch. The transcript of the conference-which will be published in a forthcoming book-thus provides important context for the memoirs that have already been published and for documents that have yet to be released.

James Baker and Anatoly Chernyaev opened the conference with brief presentations on the causes of the Cold War's end and the Soviet collapse. The opening remarks were followed by four roundtable discussions. The first session examined the recasting of the US-Soviet relationship following the Bush Administration's inauguration and Gorbachev's acceleration of reforms in Soviet domestic and foreign policy. It illustrated both the perceptual gap between the two sides that still existed in this period and the complex relationship between international interactions and domestic coalitions. The fundamental question was, why were the Americans so

much more uncertain of Soviet intentions than vice versa? Scowcroft "plead guilty" to having been the administration's chief skeptic while Chernyeav explained why the Gorbachev team maintained its "trust" in the Americans even as Washington stalled the relationship in early 1989 with a prolonged "strategic review."

The perceptual gap and the complex links between domestic and foreign policy were dramatically illustrated by the two sides' different reactions to Gorbachev's offer of a "third zero" on short-range nuclear forces, which he conveyed to Baker during the secretary of state's visit to Moscow in May 1989. The former Soviet officials insisted that this offer was not intended to sow discord in the NATO alliance, while the Americans assumed that is was precisely such a classic Cold War ploy. It temporarily set back Baker's efforts to reengage with Moscow and strengthened the administration's harder-line wing. The perception in Washington was that the administration's chief advocate of improved relations had gone to Moscow only to be duped by the wily Gorbachev. "I loved it!" Scowcroft admitted.

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the reunification of Germany were discussed in the second session. The participants debated the extent to which unification-in-NATO was a consequence of superior Western statecraft or the unintented outcome of a chaotic and uncontrolled process, with the former Soviet officials tending to argue in favor of the latter view. Chernyaev detailed the reasoning behind Gorbachev's acquiescence to American and German terms while Tarasenko explained Shervardnadze's resistance to the "2+4" formula. Palazchenko and Bessmertnykh described the assessments and expectations that lay behind Moscow's decision not to form a coalition with Paris and London to prevent or slow unification. The Soviet policy veterans also offered numerous glimpses into the details of the Soviet decision-making process in this period. They contended that Gorbachev and Shevardnadze played a complex strategic game designed to stave off the polarization of Soviet domestic politics-a game that required unorthodox decision-making procedures. According to Tarasenko, for example, a major problem confronting Shevardandze was the ingrained conservatism of the foreign ministry's German experts. As a result, bureaucratic strategems had to be employed to circumvent them and present them with faits accomplis. Such tactics help account for the erratic character of Soviet policy during this period.

The third session dealing with US-Soviet cooperation in countering Iraq's aggression against Kuwait and restarting the peace process in the Middle East generated the most new information. We learned how Shevardnadze against the views of most of his ministry and with only partial advance approval from Gorbachevagreed to a joint statement with Baker that condemned Iraq's occupation of Kuwait and endorsed an arms embargo; how Moscow came to support UN Security

Council resolutions on Iraq; how Iraq special envoy Yevgeny Primakov and Shevardnadze battled for Gorbachev's allegiance; and how Bessmertnykh single-handedly revised a Soviet plan presented to Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz by Gorbachev and Primakov that might have derailed US-Soviet cooperation. Chernyaev detailed Gorbachev's frenetic efforts to negotiate a diplomatic solution, quoting extensively from transcripts of Gorbachev's talks with Aziz. It is quite clear from the conference discussions that US-Soviet cooperation was fragile and contradictory. Gorbachev desperately wanted to avoid the bombardment of Iraq and the eventual ground assault on Iraqi-occupied Kuwait. Primakov continually kept alive in Gorbachev the hope that he could elicit concessions from Saddam Hussein. Had Primakov succeeded, the conference discussions leave little doubt that a major rift in US-Soviet relations would have followed. The final session directly addressed the crucial backdrop to all the preceding diplomacy of the Cold War's end: Soviet domestic politics and the mounting dual crises of the communist system and the Soviet empire. The conferees discussed efforts by Bush, Baker and Matlock to warn Gorbachev of an impending coup. Since many of the principals were present, the conference provided an opportunity to clarify the flow and eventual fate of information during this unusual episode. The discussants also explored the collapse of Gorbachev's support and the final crisis and dissolution of the Soviet Union. They discussed the extent to which the policies and actions of the United States and its allies played a part in these events. There was a sharp debate on the question of whether the Soviet Union could have been saved in some form, and whether US policy could have done more to support Soviet reforms. Baker made a strong case for the US policy of supporting Gorbachev to the end, but responding conservatively to the Soviet leader's pleas for financial support. By contrast, even Moscow's most ardent Westernizers were disappointed by the extent of the aid the United States and its allies were able or willing to extend. As Chernyaev noted, "my feeling is that eventually the Group of 7 did not come through and it did not help Gorbachev the way it could have helped Gorbachev at a crucial moment."

As the Cold War recedes into memory it is all to easy to forget how potentially apocalyptic it was. It staggers the imagination that a conflict that could have ended civilized life on the planet rapidly drew to a close in the second half of the 1980s and the two years leading up to the implosion of the Soviet Union in December 1991. How that transpired is very much a human story of leaders engaged in the responsible pursuit of conflict resolution. The testimony of the participants in the Princeton conference not only adds to the historical record, but also provides instructive insights into conflict resolution in general.