The Underside of Politics: Global Fictions in the Fog of the Cold War

The Underside of Politics

Global Fictions in the Fog of the Cold War

Sorin Radu Cucu

Fordham University Press

New York 2013

Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cucu, Sorin Radu.

The underside of politics : global fictions in the fog of the Cold War / Sorin Radu Cucu.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-5434-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Cold War in literature. 3. Political fiction—History and criticism. 4. National characteristics in literature. 5. Cold War—Social aspects—Europe. I. Title.

PN3448.P6C83 2013

809.3’935809045—dc23

2013006704

First edition

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

To my grandfather, Radu Necula

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prelude

Introduction. Writing the Cold War: Literature, Democracy and the Global Polis

1. Kafka and the Cold War: Fantasies of the Invisible Master

2. The Vicissitudes of Popular Sovereignty

3. National Security in the Age of the Global Picture

4. All Power to the Networks!

Concluding Remarks: Transnational American Studies in the Fog of the Cold War

Notes

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a series of fortunate intellectual encounters. My mentors at the Comparative Literature Department of the State University of New York at Buffalo, Joan Copjec, Rodolphe Gasché, Ernesto Laclau, and Henry Sussman, have inspired this project since its early stages. I thank them for their generosity and guidance. I have benefited from discussing contemporary literature and political theory with many close friends and collaborators. I am indebted to John Brenkman and Roland Végsö, who have given me many opportunities to defend, challenge, and rethink my arguments.

Special thanks are due to Helen Tartar for believing in this book and to Jeffrey Peck, Tom Hayes, and Phyllis van Slyck for believing in me. This would not have been possible without the support of my wife Erin and my family in Romania—Cipri, Sorica, and Ioan.

Sections of Chapters 1, 2, and 4 are significantly revised versions of previously published articles: The Fantasy of the Invisible Master (the ‘Unnamable’ in Kafka and Postmodern Literature), The Journal of the Kafka Society of America (June 2008): 53-64; "The Spirit of the Common Man: Populism and the Rhetoric of Betrayal in Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist," Philip Roth Studies 4, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 171–87; and Media on Target in the Global System: Military Strategy and Narrative Practice, Worldpicture 7 (Sept. 2012) n.p.

Prelude

The adventure of interpretation . . . implies a relation to power. To read a work . . . is to allow yourself to lose the bearings which assured you of your sovereign distance from the other, which assured you of the distinction between subject and object, active and passive, speaking and hearing (to interpret is to convert reading into writing), the difference between one time and another, between past and present (the latter can neither be suppressed nor ignored), lastly it is to lose your sense of division between the space of the work and the world on to which it opens.

—Claude Lefort

Writing, the test of the political (Écrire: à l’épreuve du politique)—this enigmatic phrase, coined in 1992 by the French political philosopher Claude Lefort, inspires, among possible intellectual reflections on its meaning, the main topic of this book: the shift of paradigms from political interpretations of literary texts to literary interpretations of the political.¹ This noun awkwardly and reluctantly translates into English the French term le politique (and the German das Politische), a word that carries in its philological biography meanings that convey the conflicted identity of modern political communities. These meanings take shape through writing and bear witness to how and why political thinkers have differentiated the political/polity from the commonly used term, politics.² Following Lefort, the historian Pierre Rosanvallon has offered a spirited argument on behalf of this conceptual difference:

In speaking of the political as noun, I thus mean as much a modality of existence of life in common as a form of collective action that is implicitly distinct from the functioning of politics. To refer to the political rather than to politics is to speak of power and law, state and nation, equality and justice, identity and difference, citizenship and civility—in sum, of everything that constitutes political life beyond the immediate field of partisan competition for political power, everyday governmental action, and the ordinary functions of institutions.³

At the same time, according to Rosanvallon, the return of the political should not be understood as an embrace of political philosophy under the guidance of Rawls and Habermas, but as the task to conceive of democracy as a question left unanswered, in the sense that no conclusive and perfectly adequate response can ever be provided to it.⁴ Rawlsian and Habermasian political liberalism is thus an attempt to dissipate the enigma of the modern political regime by an imposition of normativity.⁵ The critique of liberalism is a point of conjunction for theoretical narratives of the political. Against the universality of rational communication and the idealism of consensus, Chantal Mouffe, for instance, advocates an agonistic form of pluralism. In her view, democratic politics cannot do away with the dimension of antagonism—another way of delineating the political—that permeates social relations. Following this reasoning, Mouffe conceives of politics as an ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order and organize human coexistence in conditions that are always potentially conflictual because they are affected by ‘the political.⁶

Having briefly introduced possible reasons for talking about the political rather than politics does not eliminate the confusion created by the translation of the phrase à l’épreuve du politique into English.⁷ One possible translation-adaptation of this phrase calls for a literary and philosophical writing that is tested (or challenged) by the political:

Over the course of time, I have become better aware of the peculiar connection between literature and political philosophy, or the movement of thought and the movement of writing, when they are subjected to the test of the political. . . . To go straight to the things themselves, let us say that the novelist refuses to take the detour of argumentation, while the author of a political work rejects the detour of fiction. Nonetheless, it is a fact that the first can awaken our thought and the second can provoke in us a troubled feeling (my italics).⁸

According to Lefort, the art of writing is not simply the medium of an abstract philosophical exercise, but also the trace of a singular enigma that [their] present poses for writers and political philosophers. Thinking the political—writes Lefort—goes beyond the bounds of every doctrine and theory. Approaching the political via argumentation, or thinking it by means of literary fictions, is thus a dramatic event for the philosopher and the novelist alike: "Through writing, [the political] sustains the tension inhabiting it; it submits to the exigency that one take on the questions that are at the heart of every human establishment and the exigency to face up to what arises" (my italics).⁹ Following this imperative, we can explain the centrality of the political to Lefort’s work by taking into account not only his sophisticated readings of classic works by Machiavelli, Tocqueville, or Marx but also (more importantly) his analyses of the new society born in the Soviet democratic experiment. What lies behind Lefort’s intellectual commitment to the political is the rejection of totalitarianism in Western Leftist thought. He notes that this concept is political and the Left does not think in political terms,¹⁰ hence Lefort’s sustained polemic with thinkers unable to discern freedom in democracy . . . and servitude in totalitarianism.¹¹ This quote is from a paper originally delivered at the Center for the Research of the Political (organized in the late 1980s by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe), in which Lefort coins his signature statement: "Democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty. As a historical society, the democratic social form constantly revises itself; it thus inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge . . . at every level of social life."¹²

We can explicitly grasp the indeterminate character of this experience by thinking of the democratic-political in terms of its protean spatial, temporal, and discursive identities as it is addressed through philosophical and literary writing. The theoretical path that this present study takes begins not simply by recognizing the many forms or figures that can be named political—or, even better, the political as the fact of being-in-common that escapes figuration—but by emphasizing the two generative narratives of modern democracy: On the one hand, democracy was the attempt to organize the political space around the universality of the community, without hierarchies or distinctions. . . . On the other hand, democracy has also been conceived as the expansion of the logic of equality to increasingly wider spheres of social relations—social and economic equality, race equality, gender equality, etc.¹³ These reflections summarize a post-foundational direction or approach to writing political theory guided by the interrogation of metaphysical figures of foundation—such as totality, universality, essence, and ground.¹⁴ As the result of the disentanglement of the theologico-political matrix, the place of power becomes empty and no metaphysical foundation can guarantee a stable order and certainty to political communities. The autonomy of modernity’s political character is, however, only apparent. It cannot be derived, for instance, from the political structure of the state, located in the administrative body of the polis; at its heart thus lies a peculiar heteronomy, the grounding of the political in the failed unity of the social: A merit of Lefort’s political philosophy is to recognize that even with the disappearance of another place, modern societies continue to manifest an exteriority of society within itself.¹⁵

From this post-foundational perspective, democratic theory bears witness, however, to the event of totalitarianism. How can we be contemporary with Lefort’s interrogation of the political now that the historical and theoretical moment of totalitarianism seems to have passed?¹⁶ How are we to come to terms with his thought’s contemporariness now that the body of the Soviet regime (and its hold on Eastern Europe) has dissolved in the historic events of 1989–1991? If these are difficult questions, it is because of the inherent ambiguity characterizing the term contemporary—especially when it is used as qualifier for grand-narrative concepts like history, politics, art, literature, or culture, and especially when it partakes in the conflicts between interpretative paradigms that explore the political realm and, given its failed autonomy, its contamination by the spheres of war, economy, biology, or religion. Consider, for instance, how Roberto Esposito’s recent critique of totalitarianism frames the problem of contemporary history: Decisive events of contemporary history—the world wars, the emergence of technology, globalization, and terrorism are in themselves philosophical powers that struggle to control and dominate the world—or the predominant interpretation of the world and therefore of its ultimate meaning.¹⁷ Esposito’s argument follows from here: Free yourself from the philosophy of history and its inconsistent categories (such as totalitarianism) and you will be able to understand (since you are no longer blinded by theoretical or ideological narratives) history as philosophy. Where does, however, this peculiar philosophical power of events derive from, if it does not simply exist as a matter of some inner essence (which would imply a return to a metaphysics of history)? Events become philosophical by demanding to be interpreted—that is, by being open to interpretation. In other words, it is only possible to conceive of history as philosophy because history does not exist as such, but only as figure of history. We are reminded here of Eric Auerbach’s remarkable observation: History, with all its concrete force, remains forever a figure, cloaked and needful of interpretation.¹⁸ There is no reason to exclude totalitarianism from the list of contemporary historical events with a distinct philosophical power. If we take a closer look at Esposito’s argument—which only mentions Lefort briefly and focuses instead on Arendt’s genetic history of Nazism and Communism—we notice that he is, in fact, working with an abstract concept rather than the historical figure that mediates between the transformations of the political in the aftermath of the Russian revolution and its ideological foundations in Marxist thought. In order to identify the aporias of the entire totalitarian paradigm,¹⁹ Esposito proposes a theorization of the relation between democracy and totalitarian Communism that is misleading in that it assumes that their shared ideological resources (the emphasis on egalitarianism, for instance) forecloses the possibility of their opposition: How can totalitarianism, he asks, be defined in opposition to what it originates from? There is no aporia or contradiction here; the crucial difficulty we face in interpreting the historico-philosophical event of totalitarianism becomes obvious if we consider Esposito’s question as marking a terminus a quo—that is, a limit from which the potential closure of the political constituted a critical moment in the contemporary history of democracy. From a Lefortian perspective, this is, however, only the beginning of the interrogation, as we must continue to ask what democratic society means and by what route it opened the way for Communism. We must ask whether Communism, when it broke away from democracy, kept the latter’s imprint. In short, we should ask if the Bolshevik revolution was antidemocratic in its consequences and principles.²⁰

The Underside of Politics explores how the interpretation of the political, not only by philosophers but also by writers, is linked to the question of what it means to be contemporary. Writing at the challenge of the political (à l’épreuve du politique), constitutes for Lefort the task of asserting the legitimacy of a political concept (totalitarianism) rejected by the European Left. He is able to describe the peculiar logic of totalitarianism because he does not settle on simple solutions (such as the self-alienation of the working class), but takes intellectual and moral risks in order to comprehend the novelty of the domination under the Soviet regime. The investigation of the political, which Lefort begins as a philosopher and a militant Trotskyist in 1940s France, necessitates an expansion of the intellectual horizon of the interpretation: from the philosophy of history—based on the Marxist conception of the proletariat as agent of history—to history as philosophy. Developing a phenomenology of the political present, Lefort discovered the symbolic mutations of power that made possible the reconfiguration of democratic space into the monolithic body of the totalitarian regime; at the same time, adopting the psychoanalytical vocabulary of Freud and the Lacanian school, he was able to demonstrate how the fantasy of the People-as-One enabled and sustained the totalitarian perversion of democratic narratives: the universality of the community and the logic of equality. In order to become contemporary with the historical moment of Lefort’s work, we will examine the opposition between democracy and totalitarianism in the context of the global historical discourse that attempted to restrict the meaning of the political and dissolve its ambiguities by incorporating it into the geopolitical discourse of a new global order under the figural powers of the Cold War. Is, today, the democracy-totalitarianism paradigm the disavowed remainder of the global picture assembled in presumably strict Manichean terms at the end of World War II? Or is it simply the reminder that, what survived from the age of the Cold War is not only the embalmed corpse of totalitarianism, but also the trembling flesh of our democratic society, caught indefinitely between an apathetic present and a global future forever to come? By asking these questions, we make explicit our effort to be contemporary, to engage our age not only through the master-signifiers of the current moment—neoliberal globalization, war on terrorism, biopolitics—but also through the narrative of a past epoch that perhaps is still ending. In this regard, we take into consideration Giorgio Agamben’s definition:

Contemporariness is . . . a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism. Those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it: they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it.²¹

Given that the plurality of contemporary literary responses to the political present cannot be reduced to a unifying theme or genre, our task is to distinguish, in their poetic and fictional worlds, the interrogation of the movement of democracy in its most problematic dimensions.²² The investigation of the ways by which the literary encounters the political in the aftermath of World War II benefits from considering this hypothesis: Literary writing does not dispel the tension inhabiting the political but attests to it. As literature begins to address and sustain the impasses that have characterized the modern democratic experience,²³ as it begins to bear witness to the novelty of totalitarian domination, the contemporariness of literary writing makes up the fundamental blueprint of its being in the world. In order to substantiate this claim, this book does not attempt to construct what literary critics often call an interpretative model based on the work of Lefort (or of any other thinker of political difference and social ontology). In fact, we strongly believe that if we take seriously the formulation of the democratic experience presented here, the very idea of a political interpretation according to a doctrine or theory fails to account for the dialogue between the literary and the political. The key question, then, is whether specific literary forms, poetic styles, and thematic concepts provide an exemplary narrative that identifies the poetic, cultural, and historical coordinates involved in engaging the lack of fulfillment—the fractures, the tensions, the limits, and the oppositions—that have been emblematic of democracy.²⁴ Among literary responses to the political in the second half of the twentieth century, American and Eastern European novels that espouse interpretive historical narrative fictions constitute, in our view, one of the representative case studies. Reading this diverse corpus of texts, we notice how writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain face the challenge of the political in that different contemporary horizons shape their sense of the world and, therefore, the means through which their literary imagination confronts the underside of politics, the fictions of global order and emergency that emerged during the Cold War. How does political globalization challenge, in this historical context, the relations between individual subjects and the imagined community of a national people? What is the role of bureaucratic organizations and network structures (such as the Party, the state or the secret police) in determining the social configurations of global modernity? As literature takes these questions into account, it interprets the political by exploring the conflicting temporalities of historical experience in both democratic and totalitarian societies.

This argument can be clarified if we consider briefly contemporary (national and regional) literatures in the context of the global circulation and the international reception of literary works during the Cold War. The novels from Eastern Europe that we discuss in the following chapters had all been translated into English and published in the West before 1989; The Joke (Milan Kundera) underwent a long process of translation and adaptation, from a first English edition (1969) to the fifth edition, fully revised by the author and published by HarperCollins in 1992. Like other books by Kundera (Laughable Loves and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kiš had been published in the prestigious Penguin series, Writers from the Other Europe, edited by Philip Roth, while The Royal Hunt (D. R. Popescu) was published by Quartet Encounters, among books that featured prominent Eastern European texts by Eugène Ionescu, Ismaïl Kadare, Miroslav Krleza, and Osip Mandelstam. The novels that have crossed the Iron Curtain have a peculiar relation to the contemporary horizon of Cold War democracies since, in an attempt to translate the totalitarian experience of the Eastern Bloc into the language of Cold War ideology, readers in the West have often used these texts as the confirmation of their own views about totalitarian domination. The Cold War thus operated a discursive apparatus that appropriated the work of cultural translation and, therefore, framed the reception of Eastern European literature in simple political categories. In fact, as Czech writer Ivan Klima noted, the Empire where I lived . . . was much more complex from the inside than it looked from without. . . . Moreover, the Empire changed. . . . Time blunted the brutality of the revolutionary era: The rule of fanatics, ready to murder in the name of an idea, was followed by the rule of bureaucrats (though often police bureaucrats), who established some ground rules, which allowed people to adapt and carry on with their lives.²⁵

Communist regimes, having initially tried to annihilate the temporal plurality of democracy and—during the cycles of terror—having attempted to produce a type of homogeneous social time, were ultimately faced with the banal reality of their society’s finite historical existence. With or without Soviet intervention, totalitarian politics did not die with Stalin, yet moments of cultural liberalization have allowed Eastern European writers—such as Sławomir Mrożek, Ludvík Vaculík and György Konrád—the freedom to envision literary narratives in the absurdist and grotesque aesthetic tradition through which they could expose the masquerade of power in the Communist states: Whatever its harshness, the communist system was anything but an efficient and smoothly operating mechanism. It was monstrously corrupt, inefficient, bungling and wasteful.²⁶ At the same time, writers like Milan Kundera were also able to focus on the absurd Kafkaesque moments in ordinary people’s existence in nonallegorical terms and, by means of interpretive fictions, designed narrative compositions allowing us to examine the various temporalities that merge in the collective identity of the people, as a guarantee to the political community’s power to last over time.

Focusing on novels that use interpretive fictions to respond to the task of writing under the pressure of the political, we are able to describe a literary form that is ostensibly not a subcategory of historiographic metafiction. The construction of an interpretive narrative is made possible by juxtaposing two or several temporalities in the world of the novel and, often, by subverting—via metaphor and metalepsis—the clear border between the world of fiction projected by literature and the world of reality from which it has emerged. Interpretive narratives are thus not literary allegories about historiography (history as text) but fantasies, which inspire writers to design symbolic narrative structures that support their desire to be contemporary by allowing them to firmly hold their gaze on their time and to make sense of their time in spite of its obscurity.²⁷ In this current study, we explore three narrative forms that correspond to the interpretive fictional model outlined above:

a. Milan Kundera’s The Joke and Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist make sense of traumatic political experiences of the 1950s by integrating them in a dialectical narrative that recuperates this past decade from the perspective of a fictional present—the end of the 1960s in the former and the 1990s in the latter text.

b. In the case of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning and D. R. Popescu’s The Royal Hunt—the only two narratives that qualify as detective fictions—the interpretive function of the novels does not derive from the characters’ quest for meaning but from the texts’ relation to the context of their narrative discourse (récit). Written in the 1970s, the novels perform an indexical relation to current events, the Watergate scandal and the Neo-Stalinist socialist humanist turn in Ceauşescu’s Romania, which destabilizes the 1950s political allegories of the novels’ plots and allows for reflections on the political that involve questions about popular sovereignty in the age of global security.

c. A more difficult notion of political temporality emerges in Don DeLillo, Libra, and Danilo Kiš, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, two novels that organize their interpretive fictions in relation to an archive that both supports and constrains the novelists’ investigative fictional work into the world of political secrecy. In these novels, contemporariness inscribes itself in the present not so much by marking it archaic—as Agamben claimed—but archival.²⁸

What picture of the political Cold War emerges through these staged dialogues between interpretive fictions from the United States and Eastern Europe? For Klima, the bipolarity of a world divided between two superpowers constitutes the embodiment, in the Cold War figure, of an ideology based on age-old simplifications, which sees everything dualistically, as a clash between good and evil.²⁹ His account of the writers’ relation to this historical figuration of the opposition democracy-totalitarianism echoes the political attitude of American novels about the Cold War—I Married a Communist (Philip Roth), The Public Burning (Robert Coover) and Libra (Don DeLillo)—when he proposes an ethical-aesthetic imperative for contemporary literature: Writers . . . should reach under the surface of things, their picture of the world should embrace more than the vision of politics.³⁰ As these novels written on both sides of the Iron Curtain use their imaginative-interpretive power to go beyond the mere vision of politics, their narratives engage the trials of modern democracy and the dead end of totalitarianism by projecting fictional worlds in which the decades of the Cold War age emerge as temporal forms of the political.

Introduction. Writing the Cold War: Literature, Democracy and the Global Polis

Thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings.

—Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

The Fog of the Cold War

Can literature and art mediate our relation to the historical present? If we want to be contemporary, we cannot avoid this question. At the end of the twentieth century, we witnessed an epochal threshold: a picture of the world ended and a new one (the end of History) timidly emerged, only to be violently replaced by new representations of the global era, dominated by ever more expansive networks—military, technological, financial. At the same time, we discovered the return of the repressed: unruly politics without public discourse; deceptive myths of social and economic opportunity; religious fanaticism; and the near free fall of the open markets. Presented in these terms, our age looks at least gloomy and obscure! Yet this is why we must strive to be contemporary, in the sense given to this term by Giorgio Agamben: The contemporary is he who holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure. The contemporary is precisely the person who knows how to see this obscurity, who is able to write by dipping his pen in the obscurity of the present.¹

Let us consider, in view of our initial question, two statements made by Don DeLillo, the fiction writer who is most faithfully devoted to understanding the dilemma of his own present, in that the invisible force of large historical events has, under the guise of the Cold War, allured his imagination. In Mao II (1991), a novel about media culture, mass movements, and transnational terrorism, the protagonist is the solitary novelist Bill Gray. In his conversations with the shady George Haddad, the fictional novelist acknowledges that, after Beckett, the writer’s task is to compose the new tragic narrative of the world, to describe midair explosions and crumbled buildings.² However, through Bill Gray, DeLillo states his belief in the novel [as] a democratic shout³; in The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera suggests that a similar sharp contrast takes place between the totalitarian universe and the world of the novel.⁴ This judgment does not reflect, however, the idea that literary language can free all means of expression. It thus avoids Sartre’s critique of intransitive language, which he sees as an obstacle to creating a politically committed literature. At the same time, the novel is that literary space of exploration of the small and the large, the private and the public, the everyday and the historical, the local and the global. In another statement, DeLillo conveys a similar message as he describes the relation between the writer (who is powerless to influence history) and the public figure:

Fiction will always examine the small anonymous corners of human experience. But there is also the magnetic force of public events and the people behind them. There is something in the novel itself, its size and psychological reach, its openness to strong social themes that suggests a matching of odd-couple appetites—the solitary writer and the public figure at the teeming center of events. The writer wants to see inside the human works, down to dreams and routine rambling thoughts, in order to locate the neural strands that link him to men and women who shape history.⁵

This paragraph is taken from The Power of History, an essay-commentary on Underworld, DeLillo’s sprawling narrative of Cold War America. Understood in this specific context, the fictional examination of the small and large corners of collective human existence is not just a matter of seeing the contemporary age becoming past and entering History, but of working through the dilemmas of the present—this is also visible in the novel’s composition, with episodes moving in reverse from the 1990s to the 1950s. We know from Freud that working through is an arduous task⁶; reading the massive novels of Cold War America—from Underworld to Gravity’s Rainbow—we discover, however, that these Freudian terms operate beyond their psychoanalytic usage. In other words, writing through signifies an engagement with the evanescent spectacle of contemporary life that makes the novel so nervous.⁷ The novelist works to construct a fictional collective memory of the recent historical decades out of the cultural and political amnesia of the present. Who can hear today, not just the words of Churchill’s 1946 speech, Sinews of Peace, which we now can comfortably watch on YouTube, but also its ominous tone? This is the crucial passage: "A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organization intend in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies. . . . From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. The geopolitical reference points in Churchill’s speech achieve their meaning through the iron curtain, which designates the internal inconsistency of the global peace established by the end of World War II and signifies, in turn, the development of complex global military strategies, spurred not only by concrete ideological demands or by rational policy-making but also by the fog of the Cold War. In the words of Molotov, the situation is unclear. A great game is underway."⁸

I derive this term from Clausewitz, who alludes to the fog of war a few times in his writings, without using the phrase in this precise formula: War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser certainty.⁹ While some military historians consider this metaphor as superfluous, it reflects, in my view, the contingent nature of war intelligence—the formation of a corpus of knowledge about one’s enemy that is always insufficient, a foundation for military operations that could always crumble.¹⁰ That this metaphor is more important to the study of political and military Cold War than it is to classic theories of warfare, which remains too closely linked to nineteenth-century European