IN TOASTING THE BEGINNING of a new relationship between China and the United States in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing twenty years ago, I quoted from a poem in which Mao Zedong exhorted his followers to work for the victory of communism: “So many deeds cry out to be done always urgently. The world rolls on. Time passes. Seize the day. Seize the hour.” Today, as we celebrate the defeat of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the defeat of aggression in the Persian Gulf, many deeds remain to be done abroad and at home. We must seize the moment to win victory for peace and freedom in the world.
For the past half century, we have lived in a world dominated by the clash of two superpowers inspired by two conflicting ideologies. The East-West struggle was the defining characteristic of the era. The Soviet Union and the United States confronted each other across the front lines in Europe and Asia, backed rival clients in regional conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia, and sparred with each other in civil wars throughout the underdeveloped world. But today one ideology—communism—has been discredited beyond resurrection. And one superpower—the Soviet Union—has disintegrated, with the new noncommunist governments of its former republics so preoccupied with their massive problems at home that they can no longer play a major role abroad.
We now live in a world in which the United States is the only superpower. We must recast our foreign policy to cope with this radically new situation. For many on the American left and right, the knee-jerk response to the collapse of the Soviet Union as a credible superpower is to withdraw into a new isolationism. But in fact American world leadership will be indispensable in the coming decades.
During the last three years, the world took a roller-coaster ride from soaring hopes to shattered illusions to unbounded euphoria. In 1989, our expectations climbed as one great historic event was quickly overtaken by another. Communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed. The Berlin Wall fell. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev adopted significant political reforms. Superpower cooperation increased. Regional conflict in the underdeveloped world decreased. The conventional wisdom in the prestige media, in the universities, and in the think tanks was that we were witnessing the beginning of a new world order of peace and freedom.
In 1990, the changes of the previous year began to reverse themselves. The new democracies of Eastern Europe confronted the pains of reform. The Communist reactionaries in the Soviet Union caught their second wind. Gorbachev slammed the brakes on reform. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein invaded and pillaged Kuwait. America and its coalition partners were forced into a major ground war in the Persian Gulf. Regional conflicts in the underdeveloped world continued to defy easy resolution. The vision of a more peaceful world turned out to be a mirage. While the cold war had kept the peace between the two superpowers, its demise did not end the threat of hot war involving smaller powers.
In 1991, these developments were overtaken by two events. The decisive victory of the United States and its allies over Iraq and the expulsion of Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait in February restored America’s confidence in its role as a world leader. This was eclipsed by one of the watershed events of the twentieth century: on August 24, the forces of freedom in the Soviet Union won victory without war over the forces of communism. Just as the Russian Revolution of 1917 raised the curtain on this century’s totalitarian horrors, the new Soviet revolution dropped the closing curtain on the final act of a failed ideology and totally discredited system of government. While Gorbachev was still a Communist, the ministers in the new government were noncommunists.
These starkly contrasting events should remind us that the real world revolves not around wishful thinking about “peace breaking out all over” but around the enduring realities of geopolitics. While we should celebrate the current turn of events, we should not give in to euphoria. In a world of competing states, clashing interests and national conflicts are inevitable. The skillful use of American power represents the best hope for advancing freedom and preserving peace. Only if we learn the right lessons from the dramatic developments of the last three years will we succeed in securing our interests and promoting our values.
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For half a century, the principal cause of world conflict has been Communist aggression. The cold war started before World War II ended. Acting under cover of the infamous Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, Moscow annexed Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and large parts of prewar Poland and Romania. As the war ended, Stalin installed Communist puppet governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Romania. Soviet armies “liberated” Eastern Europe from Nazi Germany, but Communist liberation meant a new tyranny for these nations. To his subservient clients, Stalin exported the brutal tactics he had used in the Soviet Union before World War II—show trials, political purges, forced-labor camps, and mass terror. As the iron curtain descended, Eastern Europe was enveloped in totalitarian darkness.
Eastern Europe was only the first theater of the cold war. Over the ensuing years, the Soviet Union annexed four Japanese islands in 1945, attempted to dismember Iran in 1946, sponsored Communist guerrillas in Greece and Turkey in the late 1940s, helped to establish a Communist regime in North Korea in 1948, tried to subjugate Josip Tito’s independent Communist regime in Yugoslavia in 1948, blockaded West Berlin in 1948, helped Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution prevail in China in 1949, backed Communist North Korea’s attack against South Korea in 1950, suppressed a workers’ uprising in East Germany in 1953, supported Beijing in two crises with the U.S.-supported Republic of China in Taiwan over Quemoy and Matsu in 1955 and 1958, triggered the Middle East arms race with sales to Egypt in 1955, slaughtered hundreds of Hungarian freedom fighters in the streets of Budapest in 1956, backed Gamal Abdel Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal in 1956, helped to establish Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba in 1959, assisted Communist revolutionaries in the Congo in 1960, built the Berlin Wall in 1961, attempted to place offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962, supplied arms to India in wars against Pakistan in 1965 and 1971, supported Nasser’s adventurism throughout the Arab world in the late 1950s and 1960s, backed the Arab powers in their war against Israel in 1967, crushed the Czechoslovakian reform movement in the “Prague Spring” in 1968, supported Syria and radical Palestinians in their effort to topple the government of Jordan in 1970, provided indispensable assistance for North Vietnam in its war against South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s, supplied and supported Syria and Egypt’s war against Israel in 1973, backed a Communist coup in Ethiopia in 1974, installed Communist regimes in Angola and Mozambique in 1975, helped the Communist Sandinistas take power in Nicaragua in 1979, supplied Communist guerrillas in El Salvador with arms since the late 1970s, invaded Afghanistan in 1979, backed the Communist government’s repression of Solidarity and imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, trained and supported scores of international terrorist groups, engaged in state-sponsored terrorism through its clients in East Germany, Bulgaria, and Afghanistan, and conspired in dozens of other attempted coups and revolutions in every corner of the world.
While other sources of conflict existed during the cold war, none rivaled Moscow’s expansionism in scope and intensity. Without ever issuing a formal declaration of war, the Soviets engaged in an unprecedented campaign of direct and indirect aggression. Despite Moscow’s occasional calls for “peaceful coexistence” or “détente” in its diplomacy and propaganda, the leaders in the Kremlin continued to march to the ominous drumbeat of Communist expansion.
All this appeared to change in 1989. Everywhere we looked, dramatic events seemed to overturn settled realities. In the Soviet Union, Gorbachev initiated major reforms. He eased controls on the press and triggered a flood of criticism of the Soviet system. He permitted partially free elections that led to humiliating defeats for the Communist party. He opened up some limited opportunities for private economic activity that created hopes for a more prosperous future. He adopted changes in long-held foreign policy positions, accepting deep cuts in Moscow’s massive superiority in conventional arms in Europe and unprecedented on-site inspection provisions in the Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START) talks. More important, these changes soon acquired a momentum of their own as independent political movements demanded that Gorbachev press forward more aggressively with reforms.
In Eastern Europe, the upheaval was even more dramatic. In the 1980s, the tectonic plates of East European nationalism and Soviet-imposed communism had built up tremendous pressure, making a political earthquake inevitable. Once Gorbachev’s reforms at home had discredited communism abroad, the first fissures appeared in the Soviet bloc. Polish Communist leaders, trapped between foreign sanctions and domestic political gridlock, concluded that they had to legalize Solidarity, the anticommunist labor movement. After partially free elections produced a total defeat for the Communists, they ceded power reluctantly to democratic forces. In Hungary, after the party split between hardliners and moderates, even reformist Communists were swept from office through the ballot box. Hungary soon became a path to freedom for thousands of East Germans fleeing into West Germany. As the exodus bled the red Germany white, the Communist leadership accepted the necessity for democratic change, thereby signing its own death warrant. When Moscow failed to intervene to save the citadel of its imperial power—East Berlin—mass demonstrations swept the Kremlin’s clients from power in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Within one year, the East European political temblor left only Albania’s Communist regime intact, and the following year the aftershocks of this political earthquake hit Albania, toppling its hard-line Communist leaders from power.
In the underdeveloped world, the tide of Soviet expansionism in the 1970s receded in the 1980s. The ill-equipped, U.S. supported Afghan resistance fought the Red Army to a standstill, forcing Moscow to accept a humiliating withdrawal and shattering the myth of the irreversibility of communism. In Angola, after tens of thousands of Cuban troops and Soviet advisers failed to suppress the U.S.-supported UNIT A freedom fighters, Luanda grudgingly accepted an agreement demanding the withdrawal of foreign forces and free elections. In Southeast Asia, Vietnam withdrew its forces from Cambodia, as international mediation advanced toward a political settlement of its civil war. Under pressure from the U.S.-supported contras, the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua accepted a plan for free elections, which, to the shocked surprise of the Kremlin and most liberal observers in the United States, would propel noncommunists into power in early 1990. And the leader of the last Communist holdout in the Western hemisphere, Fidel Castro, was forced to impose wartime austerity measures in Cuba to stave off a total economic collapse.
Even in China—a country with few significant democratic traditions—a million demonstrators gathered in Tiananmen Square to demand political reform. Initially composed of only students and intellectuals, the crowds swelled dramatically when workers joined their ranks in calling for democratic change, and the protests quickly spread to over two hundred provincial cities. Mesmerizing Western television audiences, the tumultuous scenes outside the bastion of Chinese communism even eclipsed Gorbachev’s historic visit to China and the rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing. The ensuing violent crackdown by Chinese leaders in Tiananmen Square dashed democratic hopes and outraged the world. Yet considering the dramatic democratic triumphs of 1989, most observers viewed this brutal repression as a tragic but temporary aberration.
The changes of 1989 extended beyond the Communist world. After a decade of grueling trench warfare and 1.2 million casualties, the Iran-Iraq war came to an end. Namibia was granted independence and elected a new government. South Africa’s leaders accepted the need to create a nonracial society and moved decisively to relegate the policy of apartheid to the archives. U.S. intervention in Panama overthrew Manuel Noriega’s dictatorship and put the legitimately elected government into power. Elsewhere, new democratic governments in South Korea, the Philippines, and Latin America stabilized themselves and strengthened their long-term prospects for progress.
The balance sheet for 1989—nine democratic revolutions liberating 122 million people—created expectations that we were entering a new era of world history. These high hopes, though understandable, were unfounded. The world was moving into uncharted waters. Never before has there been a successful transformation of a Communist command economy to a free-market economy. All lasting change is incremental, based on unfolding traditions and developing institutions. Revolutionary upheavals may change how the world looks but seldom change the way the world works. Lasting historical change comes not through tidal waves but through the irresistible creeping tide.
The events of 1989 gave rise to three myths that dominated the debate about the future of U.S. foreign policy:
The myth of the end of history. Many argued that the defeat of communism, the triumph of liberal democracy, and the end of the cold war buried the idea of history as the armed rivalry of opposing ideologies. Market economics and representative government, they claimed, were now universally accepted as superior to central planning and dictatorship. The march of technology, not armies, and battles over markets, not ideas, would become the central dynamics of history. America, they concluded, should declare victory and come home.
This facile notion of an end of history is illusory. While communism has suffered several devastating defeats, Communist regimes continue to rule twelve countries with 1.3 billion people. Communism is a discredited ideology, but Communists are still effective in using force to gain and retain power. Moreover, the waning of the cold war does not mean an end to international conflict. Age-old struggles based on tribal, ethnic, national, or religious hatreds continue to fuel dozens of civil and regional wars. Nuclear powers have never fought each other, but the clash between Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India over the disputed Kashmir territory could erupt into the world’s first war between nuclear powers. As East-West tensions fade, the reins on potential regional aggressors—such as Saddam Hussein—will also loosen.
Since the end of World War II, 22 million people have lost their lives in “small wars”—8 million more than the number killed in World War I. Most of those killed in those wars would have perished had there been no superpower conflict. While it may not be dominated by ideological conflict, the “new era” in world history could become even more violent than its predecessor.
Those who proclaimed the end of history overstated the triumph of the ideas of liberal democracy and market economics. Never before has capitalism been so broadly accepted as the foundation of sustained growth and elections been so widely heralded as the basis for limited and accountable government. But rival ideas have not been driven from the field. Advocates of the cradle-to-grave welfare state and of “socialism with a human face” still carry clout at the elitist dinner parties in Washington and other Western capitals. Marxism is alive and well in many American universities, and radical ideologies such as Pan Arabism and Islamic fundamentalism have enormous appeal in the Middle East.
We should never underestimate the unpredictability of history. Previous proponents of “the end of history” have been proved wrong. Over two hundred years ago, Immanuel Kant foresaw an imminent “perpetual peace” as a result of the spread of democracy around the world. But Lenin’s communism, Mussolini’s fascism, and Hitler’s Nazism were only a few of the surprises that confounded his predictions. However illogical and inhumane these ideologies were, the leaders who espoused them did take power and proceeded ruthlessly to use that power to advance their twisted ideas. Rationality and politics have parted ways before. We cannot disregard the possibility that they might do so again. As Paul Johnson observed, “One of the lessons of history is that no civilization can be taken for granted. Its permanency can never be assured. There is always a dark age waiting for you around the corner, if you play your cards badly and you make sufficient mistakes.”
The myth of the irrelevance of military power. After the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan and the “velvet revolutions” in Eastern Europe, it became fashionable to argue that military power no longer serves as the key instrument of statecraft or represents the bedrock of foreign policy. Some say that interdependence among the great powers has rendered the use of force irrelevant. Others hold that the costs of waging war, in terms of both resources and world opinion, have become prohibitive. Still others contend that, as the cold war waned, the importance of economic power and “geo-economics” has surpassed military power and traditional geopolitics. America, they conclude, must beat its swords not into plowshares, but into microchips.
Though economic interdependence constricts every country’s freedom of action, it does not make military power irrelevant. While the end of the cold war has substantially reduced security concerns in Western Europe, our NATO allies know that a transatlantic security pact and a credible U.S. nuclear and conventional presence in Europe are essential to guarantee peace and security in a period of unprecedented instability in the former Soviet bloc.
If an issue affects vital national interests, a major power will throw even the strongest economic ties overboard in order to prevail. In both world wars, nations that traded with each other killed each other’s citizens by the millions. At the height of the cold war, many argued that trade with the Soviet Union would sate the Kremlin’s appetite for expansion. While trade can serve as an important added restraint on potential aggressors, it can never substitute for hard-headed deterrence based on military power. None of the West’s credits and investments in the 1970s dissuaded the Kremlin from ordering the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Those who propound the irrelevance of military power vastly overstate the influence of economic power. The world’s rising economic giants—Germany and Japan—have exploited their huge foreign exchange reserves and industrial competitiveness. They have gained control of foreign markets, dominated key bilateral trade relationships, and have set the pace for the economic integration of Europe and the Pacific rim. But on political and security issues, economic power does not amount to geopolitical leverage. The collapse of communism in East Germany, rather than Berlin’s economic payoffs to Moscow, led to the unification of Germany. Despite Germany’s and Japan’s critical need for Gulf oil for economic survival, both countries were impotent in the Gulf crisis, totally dependent on the United States and our allies in the Persian Gulf War to protect their interests. Saddam Hussein, after all, could not have been bribed to leave Kuwait.
This does not mean that economic power is irrelevant. As the cold war has waned, military security threats have diminished, thereby elevating the relative importance of economic issues. But matters of national security retain a higher priority in absolute terms. Economic power contributes only indirectly to a nation’s security by generating wealth to channel toward that end. While an essential prerequisite, economic power still represents only one of several necessary variables in the equation of national power.
The myth of the decline of America. The image of the United States as a declining great power remains dear to the hearts and minds of many academics. They argue that America, hamstrung by domestic budget and foreign trade deficits and obsessed with consumer consumption, stood on the sidelines during the great events of 1989. Their premise is that all great powers experience periods of expansion, stability, and decline. They have traced this pattern through the rise and fall of Spain, Austria-Hungary, France, and Great Britain and claim to have detected the telltale symptoms that the United States is on the same path of inevitable decline.
While drawing such comparisons may be an interesting exercise in intellectual gymnastics, it creates false parallels and reveals shallow reasoning. With the discrediting of Marxism, we should reject all other arguments based on economic determinism. Great powers have risen and fallen for reasons other than economic ones. International influence depends not only on economics, but also on such intangibles as leadership, political skill, ideological and cultural appeal, domestic unity and will, and even blind luck. History does not move according to a fixed trajectory, but rather ebbs and flows. Many great powers consigned to the ranks of declining powers have risen from their deathbeds.
Those who advance this myth ignore the fact that the United States retains a dominant position in the world economy. It still has the highest overall productivity, has the strongest scientific and technological base, and ranks near the top in per capita income. The often-cited decline in America’s share of the global economy—from 50 percent in 1950 to 25 percent in 1990—misreads reality. After World War II, Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan lay in ruins, while the United States continued on its wartime boom. U.S. dominance represented a temporary distortion of normal economic balances, certain to be corrected as the world recovered from the war. In fact, America’s current 25 percent share of world GNP—an impressive achievement by any measure—mirrors its proportion before World War II. U.S. GNP today is almost twice as great as Japan’s, three times as great as the former Soviet Union’s, and four times as great as Germany’s.
Many who discern a declining America are guilty of wishful thinking. They do not want to see the United States play a leadership role, promote its values and ideals, or serve as an example for others to follow. They should ask themselves this fundamental question: If the United States does not lead, who should? The only other nations with the potential resources to do so are Japan, China, Russia, and Germany. The United States not only has the resources to lead, but also has what all the others lack—the absence of any imperialistic aspirations or designs on other nations.
Today, as the only country that possesses global economic, military, and political power, the United States stands at the apex of its geopolitical power. If its status as the world’s only superpower erodes, that will result from choice, not necessity.
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The high expectations of a new era of peace and freedom in 1989 were crushed by the hard realities of 1990. The world saw its hopes for a more peaceful phase in world history dashed by a cascade of events from renewed repression in the Soviet Union to aggression in the Persian Gulf. Though developments around the world dealt severe blows to the dreams of 1989 in a new world order, these hopes were finally buried in the sands of Kuwait in 1990.
After playing off the reformers against the hard-liners and vice versa for five years, Gorbachev decisively rejected accelerated reform and allied himself with holdovers from the old regime in 1990, choosing reaction over reform. An improviser, not a strategist, he could not bring himself to bite the bullet on allowing private ownership of property and instead pursued the impossible objective of creating a halfway house between a market and planned economy. Having broken faith with the reformers, who then rallied to his rival, Russian federation president Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev aligned himself with the reactionaries, who backed him not because of political loyalty but because they needed a front man to conceal their control of the levers of power.
The renewed ascendancy of the hard-liners quickly checked progress toward a more cooperative U.S.-Soviet relationship. After signing the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, Moscow brazenly violated its provisions, claiming that several armored divisions were exempt from treaty restrictions because they had been resubordinated to the Soviet Navy and Strategic Rocket Forces security units. In the START talks, Kremlin negotiators backpedaled on a succession of key compromises and obstructed the completion of the treaty for more than a year. Meanwhile, the relentless Soviet strategic forces modernization program continued unabated. More ominous, top Soviet leaders resuscitated Stalin-era rhetoric, accusing the United States of seeking to subvert their country. Though Gorbachev had denounced the “era of stagnation” under Brezhnev, he launched his own “era of reversion.”
In Eastern Europe, euphoria gave way to a grim recognition of sobering realities. The odds against successful reform were stacked against the new democracies. A lack of domestic capital, willing foreign investors, modern technology, and well-trained managers was compounded by the loss of traditional markets and the danger of simultaneous hyperinflation and mass unemployment. To complicate matters further, all these problems had to be solved while politicians who had more experience in Communist prisons than democratic parliaments put into place entirely new political systems. While the anticommunist revolutions of 1989 represented a great step forward, they were only a first step on the long road to stable democratic government and market-based prosperity.
In third world regional conflicts, peace remained illusive. After the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan, resistance forces liberated 80 percent of their country but failed to topple the Communist government in Kabul. Hunkered behind its Soviet-built fortifications and bankrolled with its $3-billion annual aid allotment, Kabul opted for stalemate instead of a just political settlement. In Cambodia, negotiations between the warring parties bogged down as their Communist leaders insisted on achieving through the fine print of an agreement what they had failed to win on the battlefield: uncontested power. In El Salvador, peace talks stalemated as the guerrillas tested U.S. staying power and escalated attacks and civil strife.
Elsewhere, promising developments went sour and hopeless situations grew worse. In the Philippines, the Aquino government betrayed its commitments to adopt market reforms and end corruption. The transition from the Marcos to the Aquino regime seemed only to replace one hand in the till with another. In Sri Lanka, ethnic warfare between the Tamils and the Sinhalese grew ever more violent. In South Africa, President Frederik W. de Klerk pressed ahead with reform, but the death toll from black-on-black violence climbed to more than five thousand, over five times the number of blacks killed by the apartheid regime in the past ten years. In Liberia, savage revolutionaries overthrew a brutal dictatorship and then turned on each other. In the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, communal violence continued, as Israeli military police killed over eight hundred Arabs and Arabs killed sixty-five Israelis. In Lebanon, the tortured life of a once-prospering country no longer even made the headlines.
Saddam Hussein dealt the final blow to the high hopes of 1989 for a new world order with his invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. His aggression violated every tenet of the “new era” in world affairs: a barbaric dictator flouted international law and world opinion by conquering and annexing militarily a weak neighbor. It brought back memories of Hitler and Stalin picking off small European countries one by one.
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In 1991, we risked forgetting the hard lessons of 1990 amid the euphoria of the victory in the Persian Gulf and the defeat of communism in the Soviet Union.
President Bush masterfully orchestrated the world’s response to Saddam Hussein’s aggression. Sturdily supported by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, he recognized the grave threat to Western interests and promptly deployed the military force needed to deter further Iraqi aggression. He skillfully forged a global coalition and won U.N. Security Council approval for the use of force. He mobilized sufficient forces to achieve a rapid and decisive victory and repeatedly articulated the rationale for U.S. actions in terms of our strategic interests and moral values. He set forth a clear list of political demands and explored every diplomatic channel from the Soviet Union to the Arab League to try to achieve them without war. When he ordered our troops into battle, he resisted the temptation to micromanage the military effort. After he achieved his fundamental military objectives and even after he shielded the Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s wrath, he avoided the quagmire of playing kingmaker in Iraqi internal politics. Though some believe he stopped too soon, it was a textbook case of superb presidential crisis management and wartime leadership.
Had we not intervened, an international outlaw would today control more than 50 percent of the world’s oil. While the United States could survive if necessary without Persian Gulf oil, Western Europe and Japan could not. What happens to the economies of the other industrial democracies directly affects the health of our own economy. We therefore could not have afforded to allow Iraq to control access to Gulf oil and blackmail the world through its choke hold on our oil lifeline.
A far more momentous event than the Persian Gulf War followed five months later: Soviet communism committed suicide. Karl Marx once wrote that all great historical events happen twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. When the old Bolsheviks took power in the revolution of October 1917, they ushered in an era of unprecedented tragedy for the Russian and non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union. When neo-Bolsheviks tried to overthrow Gorbachev in a coup in August 1991, they finally fulfilled one of Marx’s prophecies: their putsch collapsed after a farcical three-day run on center stage.
The plotters were a Soviet version of the gang who could not shoot straight. When they decided to depose Gorbachev, they failed to understand how much his reforms had changed Soviet society. A freer press, laxer controls on social and political organizations, and free elections at the republic and local levels had toppled key pillars of the totalitarian order. Even the instruments of force—the army and the KGB—no longer responded to orders without questioning their legitimacy. The coup plotters were Stalinists who no longer commanded a Stalinist system.
They were not the only casualties of the revolution. Gorbachev as the central figure in Soviet politics and Moscow as the center of the Soviet empire also suffered devastating blows. The Soviet president, whose authority had eroded during six years of start-and-stop reform and economic deterioration, lost much of his remaining political standing by virtue of having appointed all the coup’s ringleaders to their high positions. In the aftermath of the coup, Yeltsin and the leaders of the other Soviet republics eclipsed Gorbachev as the authors of the Soviet future, and virtually all of the non-Russian nations took advantage of the paralysis at the center to assert their political independence. They forced the center to take a series of steps—such as cutting nuclear arms and curtailing aid to client regimes—that the precoup government had opposed. Though Gorbachev returned, it was a hollow and temporary victory.
After the tumultuous events of 1989, 1990, and 1991, the time has come for America to reset its geopolitical compass. We have a historic opportunity to change the world. While many of our traditional security concerns have faded with the end of the cold war, many new political and economic issues have assumed a new importance. Our top priority must be to redefine America’s global mission and reformulate its strategy.
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After the Communist victory in Vietnam in 1975, many believed the United States could achieve nothing of value in the world. After the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, many argued that we had nothing left to achieve. After the victory in the Persian Gulf in 1991, many concluded that we could achieve anything. After the new Soviet revolution in 1991, many asserted that America’s leadership was no longer needed. All these views miss the mark. Today, for the first time, the United States stands as the world’s only complete superpower. The key is how we choose to use this unprecedented power.
The Persian Gulf War highlighted America’s unique position. No other country could have mobilized the world to defeat Saddam Hussein. Western Europe, economically powerful but politically fragmented, acted individually, not collectively. Japan, an economic heavyweight but military lightweight, only barely met its financial pledges. Germany, limited by its constitution and preoccupied with the bills for reunification, remained peripheral. The Soviet Union, struggling with its internal crises, reluctantly followed America’s lead, but only diplomatically and not militarily. Only the United States, supported by Britain and France among the major powers, possessed the combination of economic, military, and political power needed to meet the challenge.
In the war’s aftermath, two rival American traditions—isolationism and internationalist idealism—clashed again. Isolationists argued that the United States should quit serving as the world’s 911 emergency number. Some of those on the isolationist left denounced aspirations to make America the world’s policeman and demanded that resources be kept at home to solve pressing problems such as the underclass, drug addiction, and AIDS. Others argued that because of our faults at home, we were not worthy to lead abroad. Those on the isolationist right insisted that the defeat of communism eliminated the rationale for a global U.S. presence, that foreign aid wasted money on ungrateful foreigners, and that “America should come not just first but first, second, and third.” In this unholy alliance, both counseled a retreat into comfortable isolationism.
The United States has too much at stake to heed that advice. Isolationists say, “Come home, America.” But the security of our home in this politically, economically, militarily, and ideologically interdependent world is affected by changes everywhere. Walking away from global challenges will carry a dangerous price. History may once again produce nations aspiring to regional or global dominance. Proliferation of nuclear and ballistic missile technologies renders the oceans obsolete as buffers against aggression. With imports and exports comprising over 20 percent of our economy, our prosperity depends on international stability. Most important, an America withdrawn into isolationism would not be true to itself. Our values, derived from our religious tradition, demand public as well as private virtue. This does not imply an unlimited commitment to right every wrong, but does involve a moral imperative to use our awesome capabilities as the world’s only superpower to promote freedom and justice in areas where our interests and our ideals coincide.
Idealistic internationalists argued that the United States enjoyed a unique opportunity to create a “new world order.” Some insisted that we should launch a crusade to advance the democratic revolution around the world and that imposing democracy on Iraq through military force would have represented a vital initial step. Universal democracy, they argued, would not only guarantee the respect of human rights but would also ensure peace because a democratic state has never started a war. Others viewed the role of the United Nations as the key to victory in the Gulf War and called for the United States to make collective security and international law the centerpieces of its foreign policy. Their goal was not just a better world, but a perfect world.
These noble aspirations are unrealistic. Those who call for a global democratic crusade ignore the limits of our power. Recognizing these limits does not mean that we should shrug off forces struggling to advance democracy or that we should give a green light to dictators poised to strike against fragile democratic regimes. But we do not have sufficient power to remake the world in our image. Even in the West, democratic government has existed for only two hundred years. Nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America cannot develop overnight the traditions, cultures, and institutions needed to make democracy work. What works for us may not work for others. In these regions, democratic government does not necessarily mean good government. It could lead to majority repression of minorities and to mob rule that would make authoritarian rule enviable by comparison.
The advocates of a greater role for the United Nations ignore the abysmal record of collective security. Woodrow Wilson envisioned the League of Nations as the body that would make World War I the “war to end all wars.” Yet within two decades the bloodiest war in history engulfed the world. In the more than one hundred wars since 1950, the U.N. adopted scores of resolutions condemning aggression, but took effective action in only two—the Korean War, when Moscow boycotted the Security Council debate and thus negated its veto power, and the Persian Gulf War, when all the major powers had a common interest in stopping Iraq. Because no great power will abdicate its right to defend its interests, the United Nations cannot operate successfully unless the major powers agree in advance. Though useful in slapping down minor aggressors, the U.N. will be paralyzed in any conflict that puts great powers on opposite sides.
Although President Bush has used the phrase “new world order,” he does not share this woolly-headed idealism. In the Persian Gulf conflict, he used the U.N. rather than being used by the U.N. Moreover, as he explicitly stated, failure by the U.N. to authorize “all necessary means” to liberate Kuwait would not have changed his course. Even without the U.N.’s blessings, the United States and its allies had the right to use force under the principle of a state’s inherent right of individual or collective self-defense. President Bush clearly aspires to enlarge the constructive role of the U.N. as part of a “new world order.” But he recognizes that no substitute exists for U.S. leadership and power. Where U.S. vital interests are threatened, the United States should act with the U.N. where possible but without it if necessary.
A new American mission in the world must be based not on the soft sand of unrealistic idealism but on the hard rock of enduring geopolitical realities. States have ideals and interests. To advance their interests, they acquire power, including military forces. In advancing interests, states often come into conflict. Without an umpire to settle disputes, such conflicts can—and almost certainly will—lead to war. These principles preceded the cold war and will survive the cold war. Unless the world transcends the current international system, we must accept them as immutable facts of life.
The sterile debate over whether we should have a policy of realism or one of idealism misses the mark. Idealism without realism is impotent. Realism without idealism is immoral. As Robert Kaufman has observed, “Realpolitik alone will not suffice to win the domestic support necessary to sustain an effective foreign policy. Americans must believe that U.S. foreign policy is right and legitimate as well as in our self-interest.”
In charting our course, practical idealism and enlightened realism should guide our policies. The world has not changed to the extent that we can ignore the realities of power politics. But it has changed enough so that we can devote more resources and attention to issues other than security in the narrowest sense. Today, there are vast opportunities to paint on a wider canvas. The world, though not a blank canvas, is an unfinished work. We should make our mark, adding bold strokes and bright colors, not timid touches and pale pastels. Our motif should be the concept of practical idealism.
The first task is to distinguish between vital interests, critical interests, and peripheral interests. No country has the resources to defend all these interests with its own military forces all the time. As Frederick the Great observed, he who tries to defend everywhere defends nothing. Making strategy means making choices, and making choices means enforcing a set of clear priorities.
—An interest is vital if its loss, in and of itself, directly endangers the security of the United States. The survival and independence of Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and the Persian Gulf states are vital to our own security. We also have a vital interest in preventing the acquisition of nuclear weapons by potential aggressors in the underdeveloped world. The United States has no choice but to respond with military force if necessary to turn back threats to these interests.
—A critical interest is one that, if lost, would create a direct threat to one of our vital interests. De Gaulle once observed that Central America is only an incident on the road to Mexico. Whittaker Chambers pointed out that the war in Korea was not just about Korea but also about Japan. Korea and Central America therefore are critical U.S. interests. We must recognize that the United States must sometimes treat critical interests as if they were vital as part of a prudent strategy of forward defense.
—A peripheral interest is one that, if taken by a hostile power, would only distantly threaten a vital or critical interest. While we would not want to see an aggressor seize a country such as Mali, we cannot conclude that such an event would endanger important American interests and require a military response.
Our overall security strategy must calibrate what we will do to protect an interest to its strategic importance. We should then match our capabilities—and the will to use them—to the threat we face. We should not send the Eighty-second Airborne Division to defend a peripheral interest in Mauritania, but we must not hesitate from doing so to defend a vital interest in the Persian Gulf.
Beyond its security concerns, the United States has a profound interest in the survival of democratic states, the expansion of economic prosperity through free trade and development, and the promotion of democratic forms of government. The level of commitment we make and the types of foreign policy instruments we use to pursue these values will vary widely. To secure our top priority among these values, the survival of threatened democratic states such as Israel or South Korea, we should be prepared to employ military force if necessary. But diplomacy, foreign aid, hardheaded negotiating, and sanctions will be the principal instruments to advance our lower-priority values. Our belief in these values is absolute, but our commitment to advance them in specific cases must be limited by our capabilities. The level of our response must be balanced against the costs, risks, and the possibility of success.
A policy of practical idealism may not be as emotionally satisfying as a clarion call “to bear any burden and fight any foe” to advance democracy or as a smug insistence on turning our backs to the complex problems of a troubled world. Americans usually respond to lifting rhetoric of idealistic crusaders, but just as often balk at staying the course when the crusade hits tough going. Practical idealism, with its limited objectives and measured commitments, offers a sustainable approach to global engagement. A world of opportunities exists today for major positive contributions by the United States. To take advantage of them, what is needed is not vast resources but creative ideas and sustained leadership.
—In the former Soviet Union—where the Communist revolution of 1917 has been succeeded by the revolution of freedom in 1991—the noncommunist governments of the republics are searching for a way to bring prosperity and progress to their long-suffering peoples. Our challenge is to help them find the way. We have a tremendous opportunity to shape the political system that will succeed the one built by Lenin and Stalin.
—In Europe—newly united after a half century of ideological division—we face the twin tasks of redefining NATO’s mission and ensuring the success of the fragile new democracies of Eastern Europe. The most successful regional alliance in history, NATO should become the focal point of cooperative foreign policy initiatives by the world’s industrial democracies. Helping Eastern Europe’s postcommunist recovery must be a top priority, not only for its own sake, but also because the fate of reform there will profoundly affect the prospects for reform in the Soviet Union.
—Along the Pacific rim—the world’s new economic locomotive—the lack of a comprehensive security framework keeps the region on edge. Moscow and Tokyo, estranged for more than fifty years, remain at loggerheads politically. Moscow and Beijing, after a wary rapprochement, remain divided by a long history of national and ideological rivalry. The region as a whole retains suspicions of Japan’s ultimate geopolitical aspirations, particularly as Tokyo takes its first tentative steps in almost half a century on the world stage. Our role as the key balancer can enhance stability and ensure continued regional prosperity.
—In the Muslim world—turbulent, unstable, but vitally important—the forces of modernism, radicalism, and fundamentalism have been struggling to win the hearts and minds of the peoples of thirty-seven nations with a combined population of over 850 million. Whether they choose to follow the path of pro-Western modernism of Turkey, secular radicalism of Iraq, or obscurantist fundamentalism of Iran, the evolution of the Muslim countries will have enormous consequences for the entire world. How America and the West deal with the Muslim world will contribute significantly to which choice these countries make.
—In the underdeveloped world—where 78 percent of the human race lives—many nations face not dilemmas of development but crises of regression, as incompetent political leaders and senseless economic policies squander the resources and energies of some of the world’s most capable people. We have the opportunity to take the lessons of the developing world’s success stories—South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong—and help apply them to other societies, thereby creating the hope that future generations will escape the misery of grinding poverty.
—In the United States—the richest and strongest nation in the world—we confront pervasive domestic problems of crime, drugs, poor education, inadequate health care, racial discrimination, and urban blight. When Moscow’s cold war expansionism threatened the survival of the West, foreign policy necessarily became our top priority. But today foreign and domestic problems should receive equal priority. Though they compete for our attention and resources, we need to engage ourselves on both fronts. Success abroad will bolster our confidence and unity at home, and success at home will enhance our prestige and leadership abroad. Above all, we must not allow our problems at home to blind us to the responsibilities and opportunities we have as the world’s only complete superpower to provide needed leadership abroad.
Our mission was not completed with the defeat of communism. We must now work to ensure the success of freedom. Winning a revolution is not easy, but governing after winning is far more difficult. This is the challenge facing the new democracies in Eastern Europe and the new non-communist governments in the former Soviet republics. We must do everything possible to help them measure up to it. We should bear in mind that many East Europeans chose freedom primarily because they hated communism, not because they loved capitalism. Democracy, free markets, and private enterprise are on trial. If they fail, these nations could suffer massive disillusionment and even experience counterrevolutions, restoring not communism but other authoritarian or statist systems. Like coups, not all revolutions succeed. No revolution is permanent if it fails to produce a better life.
Just as the free world turned to America for leadership to confront the post—World War II Soviet threat, the world as a whole will look to America for leadership to grapple with the post-cold-war problems. For most of the world’s people, the twentieth century has been a century of war, repression, and poverty. For the first time in history, there is a real chance to make the next century a century of peace, freedom, and progress. Today, only one nation can provide the leadership to achieve those goals. The United States is privileged to be that nation. Our moment of truth has arrived. We must seize the moment.