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Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History |
History and the End of the Cold War: A Whole New Ball Game? J. Garry Clifford As he inveighed against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, President Reagan often quoted Thomas Paine’s Common Sense with its vision of a United States great enough “to begin the world over again” (1). The dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and subsequent disintegration of the Soviet empire prompted Reagan’s successor to celebrate America’s triumph in the cold war by calling for “a new world order.” In the afterglow of victory in Operation Desert Storm in early 1991, President Bush spoke of America’s “defining hour,” while a columnist hailed the “unipolar moment” wherein the only remaining superpower should impose its millennial mission on the rest of the world (2). In the sports metaphor favored by the former Yale baseball captain in the White House, the United States had won the cold war contest against the Soviet Union by a lopsided score. International relations could now become a whole new ball game. Historians, however, hesitate to make such judgements. Exactly what the seismic events of 1989-91 portend for the United States and for the world is uncertain. “A series of geopolitical earthquakes has taken place,” John L. Gaddis writes, “but it is not yet clear how these upheavals have rearranged the landscape that lies before us” (3). Even though a state department official wrote an essay entitled “The End of History” (the end because the West had won the war against communism), historians have resisted such sweeping verdicts about the last half century (4). Given the failure of pundits, policy makers, and political scientists to predict when and how the Soviet-American confrontation would end, we should be careful. “All the statesmen, all the sages, all the savants, all the professors, all the prophets, all those bearded chaps on ‘Nightline’&emdash;all were caught unaware,” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has noted (5). It is not certain that the United States won the Cold War. To be sure, in the sense of an East-West struggle between two ways of life, as Harry S. Truman once put it, between totalitarian communism and democratic market capitalism, between an American empire by invitation and a Soviet empire by imposition, between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Washington did outlast Moscow. The leaders in the Kremlin quit first. Its work force demoralized by low wages, absenteeism, and a corrupt Communist party bureaucracy, the never robust Soviet economy (“Upper Volta with rockets,” according to one wag) became overburdened by the nuclear arms race and the ten-year war in Afghanistan (6). Mikhail S. Gorbachev instituted perestroika and glasnost. Hoping to slash military expenditures, which amounted to one-fourth of the state budget, Gorbachev also cut assistance to third world clients, reduced military forces in Europe, and pursued arms control agreements with the United States. Whether or not he expected Soviet satellites “to crumble like a dry saltine cracker in just a few months,” he encouraged reform in Eastern Europe and acquiesced in the revolutionary upheavals that followed (7). It was Gorbachev and the East Europeans themselves, not the Americans, who rolled back the iron curtain and ended the cold war. It is an exaggeration to claim that America’s military spending in the 1980s prompted the Soviet counter-measures and economic dislocations that forced the evil empire to surrender. Not only does such an argument downplay Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland and Vaclav Havel’s “velvet revolution” in Czechoslovakia, it ignores the degree to which the cold war had become institutionalized on both sides by the 1980s. If the early Soviet-American confrontations of the 1940s and 1950s resembled the behavior of a scorpion and tarantula in a bottle, each reacting to the menace of its opposite, four decades of hostile relations resulted in organizational programs and ideas that persisted almost without regard to actions by the presumed enemy. “The hardliners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another,” President Kennedy commented in 1963 (8). Worst-case analysis wherein generals and admirals overstated the strength of the adversary to justify larger weapons systems and budgets became standard operating procedure on both sides. If anything, the Reagan military build-up may have delayed an earlier Soviet move toward detente (9). The claim of victory in the cold war also overlooks the enormous costs incurred by the United States. When World War II ended, America’s economic power stood supreme; it accounted for nearly half the world’s total production. After waging cold war for nearly fifty years, after spending trillions on alliances, nuclear weapons, foreign aid, and military interventions, the American share of the world’s gross national product had shrunk to about one-fourth. The defense budget, which stood at $13.5 billion in 1949, expanded to $300 billion by 1988. The nation’s first trade deficit since the 1880s occurred in 1971, and increasing oil imports produced a stunning $148 billion deficit in 1985. During the Reagan build-up, the country went from being the world’s largest creditor to becoming its largest debtor. The current federal debt stands at more than $4 trillion with $300 billion in interest paid annually. Massive military spending eroded America’s infrastructure by drawing off capital from other categories essential to the national welfare&emdash;what economists call “opportunity costs” (10). The inadvertent spoils of cold war victory included urban decay, falling savings, sagging agriculture, declining manufacturing, higher high school dropout rates, drug abuse, environmental degradation, inadequate health care, and an economic underclass in which thirty-five million Americans live below the poverty level. In the words of Russia’s leading “Americanologist,” Georgi Arbatov, “both countries neglected their real problems, inside the country, and now have to pay for it. We have to pay more, you maybe less” (11). A historical best-seller in 1988, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, touched off a national debate about America’s apparent decline. Paul Kennedy put forth the controversial proposition that like such erstwhile great powers as Habsburg Spain and Victorian Britain, the United States was suffering from “imperial overstretch” (12). As with nations of the past, American power was unlikely to continue unless Washington revitalized its productive capacity and commercial competitiveness by balancing resources and commitments. When conservative critics charged Kennedy with defeatism and pointed out that the United States was still the number-one military and economic power, he retorted that throughout history the leaders of declining but still powerful nations had denied the severity of their problems. “Are we ready to follow that historical pattern,” he asked, “or do we want to learn from history?” (13). And what of the future? The invasion of Panama in 1989 and the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91 suggested that, at least in the short run, cold war-style activism will continue even in absence of a Soviet enemy. Part of the reason is inertia. Creating a cold war consensus, Chester Bowles once said, “is like carrying a double mattress up a narrow and winding stairway. It is a terrible job, and you exhaust yourself when you try it. But once you get the mattress up it is awfully hard for anyone else to get it down” (14). When governments do not know what to do, they do what they know. “Bureaucracies are meant to operate within a framework,” an American official explained in 1990. “In terms of European policy we have had that framework established for a very long time. There was NATO, the Warsaw Pact, the Wall, the spending levels. They were thought to be immutable. . . . Right. Now everything is back to square one. Nothing is immutable” (15). In this way, institutions with a vested interest in the cold war easily found arguments for clinging to the status quo. Potential hard-line successors to Gorbachev, nuclear proliferation, narco-terrorists, Islamic fanatics, even the need to maintain defense jobs in a declining economy&emdash;all have replaced the Red Menace as justifications for continuing Washington’s role of world policeman. In time it seems likely that transformations in the international system, in combination with neglected domestic priorities, may compel a fundamental reassessment of American foreign policy. As the world evolves from a tight bipolar system to a looser multipolar structure, officials should remember that most of these recent changes&emdash;national self-determination within the Soviet empire, economic reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan, decolonization of empires, world interdependence in trade, finance, and communications&emdash;have been long-term cold war objectives. Starting with the Marshall Plan and General Douglas MacArthur’s occupation policies, the subsequent rise of the European Economic Community and Japan as economic rivals was the deliberate result, in Geir Lundestad’s phrase, of America’s relative “decline by design” (16). There is further irony in that United States military interventions in Korea and Vietnam, fought ostensibly to prevent Asian dominoes from going communist, have made it possible for Japan to dominate those Asian rimlands as part of a new economic co-prosperity sphere. So deep are the historical roots that some features of the post-cold war world would hardly surprise President Franklin D. Roosevelt: revival of Germany and Japan as principal international actors, cooperation between Russia and the United States in settling regional conflicts from Namibia to Cambodia, Russo-Japanese disputes over the Kurile Islands and Sakhalin, ethnic fighting in regions previously dominated by empires, and calls for stronger peacekeeping machinery under the United Nations. A changing world will eventually require altered policies, many of which will have familiar historical antecedents. If regional blocs evolve from European integration, North American free trade negotiations, and Japanese dominance of the Pacific rim, some updated version of America’s traditional isolationism may become relevant. Instead of Pearl Harbor and the Berlin Blockade as automatic reference points, the next generation of foreign policy officials may remember the Iran-Contra fiasco and long gas lines. The 1992 electoral contest between President Bush, a World War II naval hero, and Governor Bill Clinton, a Vietnam War dissenter, may prove to have been a referendum on post-cold war foreign policy. As international economic issues converge with hard choices involved in reducing the federal deficit and reversing economic decline, Congress will have a stronger voice in determining the outcome than during the cold war heyday of the imperial presidency. The emphasis on disarmament and financial arrangements that characterized American contributions to world order during the 1920s may hold lessons for the post-cold war environment. Absence of a Soviet enemy will make it less likely that third world disputes will evoke ideological commitments; American backing for authoritarian allies like Shah Reza Pahlavi and Ferdinand Marcos will surely diminish. Washington’s deference to United Nations peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia and Somalia recalls John Quincy Adams’s admonition that America should not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy. . . . She well knows that by once enlisting under any other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication” (17). The United States, one must add, surely will not revert to the storm-cellar isolationism of 1930s if only because of the compelling importance of so-called planetary issues. Whether the threat is acid rain, deforestation, toxic wastes, global warming, ozone-layer depletion, or water pollution, the environment is endangered by impending disasters that do not respect national boundaries. “Until now,” Strobe Talbott notes, “the cold war provided an alibi” for ignoring such problems. “No longer” (18). The exponential growth in population, especially in the third world, means more consumption of resources, more pollution, more pandemic diseases like AIDs, more famines like those that ravaged sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s. Even though the Bush administration withdrew money in 1989 for the United Nations population fund because the agency supported birth control programs that included abortion, that same year it agreed with eighty-five other nations at Helsinki to phase out use of ozone-destroying chemicals by the year 2000. Washington has also begun to consider “debt-for-nature swaps” whereby third world countries pledge to protect the environment and receive debt reductions in return (19). As “green” parties dedicated to “global commons” issues gain prominence in Europe, the sense of urgency has quickened. “We do not have generations,” warns Lester Brown. “We only have years in which to turn things around” (20). Foreign policy in the post-cold war era will not be easy. It will be necessary for the United States to forget the exuberant proclamations of millenialism that accompanied the end of the cold war. Sober reflection on the travails of the Soviet-American contest should lower expectations about unilaterally shaping the future. As Michael H. Hunt has written, “We have known the bewilderment of the chess master who discovers that in fact no square is like another, that pawns often disturbingly assume a life of their own, and that few contests are neatly two-sided” (21). But no longer the he-gemonic pow-er of the 1950s and 1960s, the world’s only remaining military and economic superpower can still wield influence for good or ill in an international system it can no lon-ger control. The United States should certainly participate in writing the rules for a new world order in which the East-West contest is no longer a zero-sum game. And one must hope that the new game will be about world cooperation, not mastery, and that Washington will be on the winning team. Endnotes 2. Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs: America and the World 1990/91 70 (1991), 23-33. 3. John Lewis Gaddis, “The Cold War, the Long Peace, and the Future,” Diplomatic History 16 (Spring 1992): 235. 4. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18. 5. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Some Lessons from the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 16 (Winter 1992): 50. 6. Quoted in Foreign Policy Association, Great Decisions: 1990 (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1990), 5. 7. Robert G. Kaiser, “The End of the Soviet Empire,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, Jan. 1-7, 1990, 23. 8. Norman Cousins, The Improbable Triumvirate (New York, 1972), 114. 9. See Michael MacGwire, Perestroika and Soviet National Security (Washington, 1991), 381-93. 10. Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking of the Cold War (New York, 1992), ch. 9. 11. Mark Feeney, “An ‘Americanologist’ Looks Back at the Cold War,” Boston Globe, Sept. 20, 1992. 12. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1988), 515. 13. Paul Kennedy, “A Guide to Misinter-preters,” New York Times, Apr. 17, 1988. 14. Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (New York, 1967 ed.), 395. 15. Quoted in Bernard Gwertzman and Michael T. Kaufman, eds., The Collapse of Communism (New York, 1990), 289. 16. Geir Lundestad, “The End of the Cold War, the New Role for Europe, and the Decline of the United States,” Diplomatic History 16 (Spring 1992), 254. 17. “Address of July 4, 1821,” in Walter LaFeber, ed., John Quincy Adams and American Continental Empire (Chicago, 1965), 42-46. 18. Strobe Talbott in Time 135 (Jan. 1, 1990), 72. 19. James Baker, “Diplomacy for the Environment,” Feb. 26, 1990, Department of State Current Policy No. 1254. 20. Quoted in Time 133 (Jan. 2, 1989),30. 21. Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, 176. J. Garry Clifford is professor of political science at the University of Connecticut and author of several books and many articles on American foreign relations. He is coauthor of the popular American Foreign Policy: A History (3d ed). |