struggle, not its causes…[Reagan was convinced] that a more open Soviet Union with an informed and empowered
public would not threaten the United States or its neighbors.”
As this last quotation indicates, when leaders are dedicated to similar ideological beliefs, assessments of
intentions are very different than the worst-case assumptions made among ideological enemies. Ideological allies
tend to give one another the benefit of the doubt and interpret one another’s actions and statements in a mostly
favorable light. Clearly hostile actions can override this presumption of amity, but the evidence of aggressive intent
usually has to be clear and substantial before this point is reached.
Although cooperation among proponents of
some ideologies (e.g., monarchism and especially liberalism) tends to be more enduring than among members of
other ideological communities (e.g., communists), all major ideological groups among the great powers over the last
215 years demonstrated a clear tendency to trust one another and cooperate for substantial periods of time.
During the Concert of Europe, for example, British Tories looked at the exact same evidence concerning
the nature of Russian intentions as did Palmerston and fellow Whigs, but they reached the opposite conclusions.
Ideological similarities inclined Tories to view Russia as a satiated power. According to Foreign Secretary
Castlereagh (a Tory), Russia was likely not to adopt aggressive foreign policies because its most important
policymakers had a great interest in maintaining the institutional and thus ideological homogeneity that existed
throughout Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. Aggressive foreign policies, according to Castlereagh, “threatened…
the institutions which the Tsar [Alexander] wished to protect."
Given Russia’s ideological similarities with the
other powers, “the world,” as Castlereagh wrote in a private letter to his brother in November 1818, “has…more to
hope than to fear from Russia."
The result of these views were much higher levels of trust and cooperation
between Tories and Russian leaders than existed when Whigs governed Britain.
In the 1930s, British and French conservatives’ shared commitment to anti-communism with the Nazis
helped convince many members of the right that Hitler likely possessed only limited foreign policy aims that would
be consistent with the principle of national self-determination of peoples.
Hence the widespread belief among
25
Jack F. Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2004), 320.
26
For example, it took Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939 to convince most leading Western
conservatives that Hitler had hegemonic ambitions. See Mark L. Haas, "Ideology and Alliances: British and French
External Balancing Decisions in the 1930s," Security Studies 12, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 34-79.
27
Charles Webster, The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, 1815-1822: Britain and the European Alliance (London:
G. Bell and Sons, 1963), 361.
28
In Webster, Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, 593.
29
Haas, The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics, 94-96, 100-102.
30
Keith Middlemas, Diplomacy of Illusion: The British Government and Germany, 1937-1939 (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), 189, 191, 347, 375, 376; R. A. C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, British
Policy and the Coming of the Second World War (London: MacMillan Press, 1993), 29, 162; Charles Micaud, The
9
Convention