As the Cold War drew to a close, Washington worked its will abroad, no longer fearing a negative response from any foe. The new power of the United States resulted from the raw facts of military and economic might. At the same time, waves of peace and democracy were advancing in parts of the world that had known strife and oppression for many years. Few had foreseen either of these developments at the decade’s start, when Ronald Reagan had marshaled American forces for what turned out to be the closing episodes in the Cold War. Reagan had vowed his support for anticommunist “freedom fighters” around the world. The commentator Charles Krauthammer dubbed this a “Reagan Doctrine,” recalling older Republican cries for a “rollback” of Communist power.1 But Reagan supported freedom and democracy only against left-wing states; hence, these were halfway commitments at best. While rock-steady in his opposition to dictatorship in Eastern Europe, Reagan was only intermittently a friend to the cause of freedom elsewhere. When America arrived at the pinnacle of its power, during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, the United States responded with marked ambivalence to the ascendancy of freedom. Thus, it squandered the opportunity it enjoyed, with the demise of Soviet power, to consolidate its authority for a post–Cold War world. Power was one thing; authority was another.
The triumph of democracy abroad most widely heralded in the United States in the mid-1980s occurred in the Philippines. Ferdinand Marcos, long the violent and corrupt U.S. client ruler there, fled to sanctuary in Hawai’i in February 1986, in the face of massive protests that observers called “people power.” Marcos was displaced by Corazon Aquino, widow of Marcos’s rival Benigno Aquino, who had been assassinated in full view of television cameras in Manila in 1983. Stanley Karnow, a longtime Asia reporter with a gimlet eye, wrote, “Marcos was not overthrown . . . because Filipinos clamored for the return of democracy. He crumbled under the sheer weight of his venality, which bankrupted the country, alienating the Manila business community and the Catholic hierarchy, his most enthusiastic supporters at the beginning. They crystallized around Cory Aquino, who represented the old oligarchy that Marcos had dispossessed.”2 Marcos agreed to a presidential election in 1986, which he probably thought he could rig.
Powerful Americans were abandoning Marcos politically, but Reagan staunchly supported his friend. A brewing insurgency led by the Communist New People’s Army (NPA) alarmed U.S. leaders. To Reagan, this rising threat meant sticking with Marcos no matter what. The New York Times editor A. M. Rosenthal, visiting the White House, poisoned Reagan’s receptive mind against Aquino, calling her an “empty-headed housewife . . . a dazed, vacant woman.”3 Others in Reagan’s government saw in Aquino, educated in the United States and quite conservative, an upgrade from Marcos. These included Admiral William Crowe, head of the U.S. Pacific Command; Michael Armacost, first as U.S. ambassador in Manila and then as a key aide to Shultz in Washington; Paul Wolfowitz, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, glad of a chance to show that his professed commitment to spreading democracy was serious; and Richard Armitage, an undersecretary of defense with long experience in East Asia.4 They led a back-channel effort to foster rebellion against Marcos within the Filipino armed forces and business class.
Republican senator Richard Lugar of Indiana and Democratic congressman Jack Murtha traveled to Manila to observe the 1986 elections, and afterward briefed Reagan on Marcos’s brazen electoral fraud. Reagan disregarded Lugar and Murtha, stating that he saw “the possibility of fraud, although it could have been that all of that was occurring on both sides.” Stephen Bosworth, the desperate U.S. ambassador in Manila, counseled Aquino to ignore Reagan’s remarks. “That wasn’t the full U.S. position you heard,” he said.5 Events on the ground outstripped Reagan’s stubbornness. The Filipino army suffered large defections and huge crowds protected the rebels. Marcos’s troops declined to shoot to keep him in office. Reagan, unhappily, accepted Marcos’s departure. With the president sulking, Shultz invited Aquino to Washington, where she addressed Congress and received a rapturous welcome. A raucous democracy returned to the Philippines; but challenging the rotten social structure and culture of corruption that had festered under Marcos was not part of Aquino’s mission. In 1987, Aquino declared “total war” on the Communists; President Bush ordered U.S. forces to help put down a rightist coup attempt against her in 1989.6
The Filipino events were part of a contagion of protest for democracy in East Asia. In the Republic of Korea, home to a massive U.S. military presence, no network of powerful Americans urged rebellion. Here, there was no leftist insurgency; instead, university students and labor activists led a protest movement against a repressive regime that had reneged on promises of reform. The International Olympic Committee had awarded the 1988 Summer Games to Seoul, and democracy activists escalated their militancy, knowing the government would want to restore order before the world’s athletes, leaders, and tourists converged on their capital city. The U.S. State Department urged compromise, fearing chaos. After massive demonstrations in June 1987, the U.S.-backed president, Chun Doo Hwan, agreed to a December election to choose his successor. Unionization and strikes among industrial workers spread across the country as reform forces showed their political muscle. But the opposition was divided. Its two chief leaders, Kim Dae Jung, sometimes called “the Nelson Mandela of Asia,” and Kim Young Sam, both resolved to run against Roh Tae Woo, the regime’s candidate. The conservative Roh won with a plurality of 36.6 percent, as “the two Kims” split the reform vote. Thus, partial democratization did not threaten the U.S. military presence, and panic did not erupt in Washington.7
The reform tide reached the Communist Chinese state as well, and the United States responded timidly to a bloody PRC crackdown against protesters in 1989, reflecting the widening economic flows between the two nations—cheap Chinese goods to America and U.S. investment to China. When Reagan, long a stalwart supporter of Taiwan, had visited the PRC in 1984, he had been sufficiently impressed with the emergence of capitalism there that he had come home and spoken of “so-called Communist China.”8 His hostility to Beijing became a thing of the past. Bush had been the de facto U.S. ambassador in Beijing in the 1970s and served as Reagan’s emissary to the rulers there as early as the 1980 presidential campaign. In 1989, a visit from Gorbachev to Beijing helped spark an inchoate but unsettling uprising by students and workers against China’s elite. The protesters gained wide support from citizens angry at Communist Party insiders feathering their own nests. On April 15, students began gathering in the tens of thousands in Tiananmen Square, the enormous public space in the capital, overseen by a huge poster image of Mao Zedong’s face. As the weeks passed, workers and city residents joined the students, swelling the crowd to several hundred thousand, almost a city within a city. On the night of June 4, the People’s Liberation Army moved on the square and perpetrated a massacre, quite possibly killing thousands. Reacting to the violence, President Bush suspended arms sales to the PRC. But he sent Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser, on a secret mission to Beijing later that month, reassuring China’s leaders that their diplomatic ties with America remained intact at a time when the PRC was an object of global antipathy. News of Scowcroft’s visit, complete with a toast he made to his hosts, leaked out, and critics were unsparing. Bush, they said, coddled the “butchers of Beijing.”9
In Latin America, the democratic trend first took hold in South America, where the elimination of any possibility of socialism—of “another Cuba”—had been secured through years of rightist dictatorship. These sometimes vicious regimes had been firmly, sometimes warmly, supported by the U.S. government. But to many in Washington, a restoration of democracy now seemed safe far to the south, and in the mid-1980s, Reagan’s State Department began to balance its hemispheric stance by endorsing democratization in South America. First the Argentine junta, weakened by the Falklands debacle, fell in 1983, and an elected president took office. The United States was more closely tied to Augusto Pinochet’s Chilean dictatorship. Yet Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, said in 1985, “We support a transition to democracy” in Chile. The United States voted aye on five of nine UN resolutions criticizing Pinochet’s human rights record between 1986 and 1988.10 Unwisely, Pinochet agreed to hold a plebiscite in 1988 on the continuation of his rule. A vigorous, creative democracy coalition, with aid from the United States, channeled through the government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), pulled off an upset, dealing Pinochet a 55 percent negative vote.11 Patricio Aylwin, a Christian Democrat, was elected president one year later, although Pinochet and the military retained partial power and immunity from prosecution for their crimes.
The U.S. hand lay heavier on Central America, and there the Reagan administration, even as it preached democracy, tried in vain to stop an outbreak of peace. A critical event was the election of Oscar Arias as president of Costa Rica in 1986. Arias refused to allow the United States to continue using his country as a staging ground for the war against Nicaragua. Abrams, a hardliner on this matter, had crudely remarked to a colleague, “We’ll have to squeeze his balls.” Richard Secord, adding a racist touch, told Oliver North, “Boy needs to be straightened out by heavy weights.” After a browbeating from Abrams, Arias said defiantly, “Friendship should not mean being servile. A friend who does everything you want is not a friend, but a slave.”12 Arias, against U.S. wishes, helped bring the Sandinistas and Contra leaders together for negotiations, and engineered agreement among the leaders of five Central American nations on the terms of a peace deal. After Jim Wright became House Speaker, the Reagan administration, in an unusual diplomatic move, brought Wright into the talks, hoping to smooth the path for new Contra aid by coopting him. But when the Sandinistas, led by Daniel Ortega, signaled agreement to most demands made of them, Reagan tried to scotch the deal and turned on Wright, depicting the Speaker as a Communist dupe. “We started with the Wright-Reagan plan,” said the president. “Now we’ve got the Wright-Ortega plan.” Wright fought back, terming the attacks on him redbaiting. “I’m not afraid of the bastard,” he said, meaning President Reagan.13 Wright persisted in his diplomacy, dealing personally with both sides in the conflict, challenging the executive branch’s monopoly on foreign relations and infuriating Republicans.
With negotiations promising peace, Reagan was unable to keep the Contra war going. In 1988, Congress turned down Reagan’s last serious bid for Contra aid. The Sandinistas and the Contras signed a peace agreement the next year. Attention turned to the Nicaraguan elections, scheduled for 1990. The Sandinistas had made enemies domestically, on the basis of class and region, although they had mobilized wide support among the poor with education and healthcare initiatives. However, Washington was not content to let the internal dynamics of Nicaraguan politics decide the regime’s fate. What the United States had done for the opposition in Chile, it could do for the opposition in Nicaragua. The NED, the CIA, and the Republican Party spent lavishly to support Ortega’s challenger for the presidency, Violeta Chamorro, the editor of the main opposition newspaper in Managua, La Prensa, which long had received U.S. government largesse. Chamorro won by almost fourteen percentage points.14
Regarding El Salvador, Washington’s counterinsurgency fever did not break until Bush became president. In November 1989, amid a new rebel offensive, the Salvadoran army high command ordered the murder of a distinguished group of dissident Jesuit scholars in their homes on the campus of the Universidad Centroamericana in San Salvador. The new U.S. House Speaker, Thomas Foley, sensed the rising disgust in his caucus over the seemingly endless butchery committed by a government the United States was supposed to be reforming. Democrats’ fear of appearing soft on communism in Central America was dissipating as the Cold War wound down. They also seemed less afraid of Bush than they had been of Reagan. Representative Joseph Moakley, Democrat of Massachusetts, led a congressional investigation in El Salvador, and his damning report helped sway his colleagues to support halving aid to the regime. “Enough is enough,” he said.15 As in Nicaragua, political life in El Salvador would achieve a semblance of normalcy as the 1990s unfolded. The basic issues of social justice raised in the civil war went largely unaddressed, but the terror abated.
The emotional debates over U.S. interference in Central American affairs during the 1980s had wracked the political scene, poisoning U.S. civic life even as the peoples of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala experienced massive suffering and trauma. Inside the United States, unnamed parties perpetrated a wave of burglaries and assaults against those who protested Washington’s policy in Central America. The FBI targeted groups like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, compiling lists of activists, harassing them, and recruiting right-wing university students to spy on them.16 Many responded to these infringements on their liberty with bravado or insouciance, but this effort at political repression remains an ugly episode, and soon became an embarrassment to be forgotten. To the south, however, the era’s events were unforgettable. One Honduran businessman noted of his own country’s experience, “It is as though a hurricane passed through.”17
When Bush took the helm in 1989, the hurricane moved to Panama. In 1988, the Department of Justice had indicted Panama’s ruler, Manuel Noriega, on drug-trafficking charges. Noriega had made Panama a haven for drug merchants and money launderers. But he was also a highly paid U.S. informant.18 Now, the war on drugs in the United States created political pressure to make a show of high-profile law enforcement. The Senate voted, 83–10, to register outrage over rumors that the DOJ would quash the indictment in return for Noriega’s quiet exit from power. “You tell me how I and people like me can go to . . . children and their parents today and tell them to say ‘no’ to drugs when we’ve got an Administration in Washington that can’t say no to Noriega,” said Democratic presidential candidate Dukakis. Shultz, indeed, had dispatched an emissary, Michael Kozak, to negotiate a deal with Noriega. When Kozak returned to Washington for a key meeting, Shultz warned him, “You will be attacked by the vice president. . . . He will do everything he can to derail you.” Politically, Bush could not afford to do otherwise. Reagan, who liked the idea of a deal to avert a confrontation, encountered fierce arguments from Meese and others. “All the law enforcement people I know strongly oppose this,” Meese said. Reagan shot back, “You’ve just lowered my respect for people in the law enforcement field.”19 The issue went unresolved. After becoming president, Bush decided to make a new antidrug push, both domestically and internationally, and Noriega, now not merely a liability, became an opportunity for a display of steel.
Noriega stole a presidential election in 1989, keeping the real winner, Guillermo Endara, from taking office. Such things had happened many times in Latin America, with little reaction from the United States. One year earlier, the ruling party in Mexico had stolen the presidential election from a social-democratic challenger, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, claiming that the computers tallying the vote had failed and later announcing that the apparent margin of victory for Cárdenas had vanished mysteriously. Advisers to Cárdenas were murdered. The United States barely acknowledged these events.20 But now Bush, declaring himself democracy’s champion and pointing to incidents of violence and harassment against a handful of U.S. military personnel in Panama, determined to oust Noriega through a full-scale invasion. On December 20, Operation Just Cause commenced. (Some U.S. officers called it “Operation Just Because.”21) Pliant U.S. media outlets amplified U.S. Army claims that large piles of cocaine had been found in Noriega’s residence; they turned out to be tamales.22 The Organization of American States and the UN General Assembly damned the invasion as unlawful. Panamanian defense forces were easily overwhelmed. Noriega was brought to Miami for trial, and Endara took office. Little changed in Panama, but Bush was now a warrior president.
If the U.S. stance toward peace and democracy was a mixed one regarding Latin America in the late 1980s, it seemed almost schizoid in southern Africa. South Africa for years had pursued wars against leftist forces in neighboring Mozambique, Namibia, and Angola, with support from Washington. However, the U.S. State Department, under Shultz, yearned for a regional policy that was more strategically rational and internationally defensible. Mozambique became the chink in the armor of Reagan’s backing for Pretoria. Shultz brought the Mozambican president, Samora Machel, to the White House to meet Reagan in 1985, and the two leaders found they got on well. Washington, persuaded that Machel had kept the USSR at arm’s length, began to aid Mozambique, switching sides in the conflict there. Some American rightists provided private funds to the RENAMO rebels in Mozambique, and others, organized in a group called Free the Eagle, lobbied the White House to join them, calling this a vital Cold War battle. But the State Department released a damning report in 1988 on RENAMO.23 Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker called them “an African Khmer Rouge” and another official accused them of perpetrating “one of the most cruel holocausts . . . since World War II.”24 With this breach opened between America and South Africa, and with Gorbachev pressing Reagan to negotiate an end to superpower support for the region’s wars, late in 1988, the United States and the USSR agreed they would get out of Angola, as did the Cubans and South Africans. Reagan still sympathized with Pretoria, but now he confined himself to supporting conservative forces within South Africa regarding that country’s own internal dynamics. Bush, upon becoming president, seemed free of Reagan’s personal attachment to the old regime.
The South African regime—watching its pillar of outside support weakening, and besieged within its country’s borders by a courageous democracy movement, based primarily in trade unions and churches—began reconciling itself to the prospect of democracy and an end to apartheid. A new president, F. W. de Klerk, secretly negotiated with Nelson Mandela, still a prisoner, and then announced that Mandela and other rebel leaders would go free—an event that occurred in February 1990, to a global celebration. President Bush reached out to Mandela, who later noted that Bush “included me on his short list of world leaders whom he briefed on important issues.”25 The longtime conservative argument that only quiet, friendly counsels of moderation would bring positive change to South Africa stood discredited. Namibia gained its independence in 1990. However, peace did not come to Angola. As historian Odd Arne Westad notes, “The only outside power that reserved the right to continued intervention in the region was the United States, which doubled its aid to Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA . . . in 1990,” seemingly determined to show that it would still fund a war against Communists somewhere.26
In contrast to his treatment of apartheid South Africa, Reagan ruled out “constructive engagement” with Communist regimes—although he eventually engaged diplomatically with the Soviets. Bush, campaigning for the presidency in June 1988, came close to siding with those who feared Reagan had gone soft on the USSR. “The Cold War is not over,” said the vice president. Two days after Bush’s inauguration, Scowcroft agreed, “I think the Cold War is not over.”27 In the following years, Bush and his team skillfully made certain that Gorbachev’s defeat on key strategic issues would be complete and unmitigated. Bush managed to appear supportive of Gorbachev, while in substance giving him no quarter. In the end, Bush helped undermine Gorbachev’s political position in the Soviet Union itself, and the USSR started to come apart sooner than most Americans had expected.
Bush privately was warm toward Gorbachev. When the two men met alone briefly in December 1987 in Washington, Bush supposedly told Gorbachev that Reagan’s coterie was a bunch of “marginal intellectual thugs.”28 Bush recalled that, using a Chinese phrase, he told Gorbachev to disregard the “empty cannons of rhetoric” that would issue from the Republican camp during the 1988 election campaign.29 Bush did not wish to alienate Gorbachev; in fact, he appeared worried that the Soviet satellites were moving out of Moscow’s orbit too fast. The Polish ruler Wojciech Jaruzelski, who had outlawed Solidarity in 1981, was on the verge of losing power to the group he had banned. He had agreed to limited parliamentary elections, and in June 1989, Solidarity’s candidates won 260 of the 261 seats it was allowed to contest. Bush considered Jaruzelski a “real class act.” After meeting with Hungarian reformers in spring 1989, Bush remarked, “These really aren’t the right guys to be running this place. At least not yet.” Bush seemed willing to consider Henry Kissinger’s proposal that the United States refrain from interfering in Eastern Europe in exchange for a Soviet pledge not to use violent repression there. That idea appeared to die when James Baker, the new secretary of state, revealed it to public view. However, it got a new lease on life in December 1989, when Bush and Gorbachev met for their first formal summit, a shipboard affair on choppy seas near the island nation of Malta, and discussed such a tacit agreement.30 Appearances were deceiving. Despite Bush’s concern for stability, he gave Gorbachev no help with the key nations where crises brought down the Soviet empire.
Americans at large were most attuned, regarding Eastern Europe, to rapidly developing changes in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Kremlin and its enemies had always seen Poland as vitally important, the path of either communism’s westward spread or an eastward invasion of Russia. But by 1989, Gorbachev seemed glad to be rid of the Polish problem, having given up the age-old Russian fear of a land attack. His supporters in the CPSU had concluded, too, that “the roots of socialism have penetrated too deeply” for democratization to wipe out socialism in Eastern Europe.31 In August, he telephoned Jaruzelski and indicated no objection to the Polish ruler’s invitation to Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarity leader, to form a new government.32 Gorbachev optimistically (and wrongly) expected Poland to remain part of the Warsaw Pact. Indirect Soviet control of Poland ended without a pitched confrontation between dissenters and the state.
If the transition to postcommunism was peaceful in Poland, it was positively festive in Czechoslovakia. In late 1989, a group of free-spirited rebels, led by the playwright Václav Havel and others, simply took over in Prague when the Communist government resigned in the face of massive people power. The Czech events became known as the Velvet Revolution, denoting both the triumph of nonviolence and Havel’s affection for the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed’s New York rock-and-roll band—figurative bohemia intersecting with the real place.33 Havel was elected president and got a hero’s welcome when he traveled to Washington to address Congress in February 1990. Dispensing existentialist philosophy, Havel reflected that he had taken from life “one great certainty: Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim.” The line sparked enormous applause in the House chamber, indicating appreciation for Havel’s rebuke to Marxism, rather than wide appreciation among his audience for the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, which Havel paraphrased closely.34
Yet while American eyes were fixed in amazement on Warsaw and Prague, President Bush was concerned with events in Bonn and Berlin, the capitals, respectively, of West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG) and East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR). The fate of Germany, potentially the most powerful nation in Europe, had been the issue that, more than any other, had caused and shaped the Cold War in the 1940s; the resolution of Germany’s fate in the late 1980s would define the Cold War’s final disposition of power in Europe. With Gorbachev’s support in Moscow eroding, and his government’s finances collapsing, the Soviet leader had his hand out for German charity. Helmut Kohl was willing, up to a point, to give it, essentially purchasing Gorbachev’s acquiescence in the FRG’s absorption of the GDR. Bush, wanting what Kohl wanted—and seeing how much Kohl wanted it—let Kohl do the heavy lifting to achieve America’s strategic objective in the heart of Europe: a united Germany, inside NATO.35
Gorbachev’s position in the GDR was untenable. He did not have the funds to maintain the Soviet military presence there, and, without that presence, Gorbachev would lose his leverage over the GDR leadership. Kohl and Bush got progressively tougher with him. As Mary Elise Sarotte notes, “In the West, while Bonn and Washington publicly expressed sympathy for Gorbachev’s reformist goals in 1989–90, they privately sensed that they did not really need to accommodate him.”36 Gorbachev evidently had ruled out using force within Europe. His critics lamented that he “had no guts for blood.”37 He ordered Soviet troops stationed in the GDR to stay in their barracks if Erich Honecker, the East German ruler, attempted to repress popular unrest. In June 1989, Bush, traveling in Europe, spoke in Mainz, applauding the relaxation of border controls by Hungary and urging, “Let Berlin be next! Let Berlin be next!”38 In September, Hungary opened its borders, allowing vacationing East Germans to escape to Austria. Honecker’s own security chief, soon to depose him, refused to use violence against mass demonstrations in Leipzig. In October, Gorbachev, in Helsinki, reiterated his position that each country could choose its own political system. The USSR, he conceded, had “no . . . moral or political right” to intervene in Eastern Europe. His aide Gennadi Gerasimov remarked jovially to reporters that the Brezhnev Doctrine had been displaced by the “Frank Sinatra Doctrine,” referring to the Sinatra song “My Way.” “Hungary and Poland are doing it their way,” he said.39
Little remained to prevent the East German regime’s collapse. On November 9, panicky GDR authorities opened the gate in the Wall on Bornholmer Street, and almost seventy thousand people streamed out of East Berlin overnight. About three million East Germans exercised their new tourist opportunities in the Federal Republic over the following three days.40 The GDR authorities could not get the stopper back in the bottle. Ironically, dissidents who had suffered under the East German regime tried, in their way, as hard as anyone to preserve some version of socialism, seeking to stave off de facto annexation by the West. They were swept aside by an East German populace eager to share in the affluence of the FRG.
With Germany unified, the United States would achieve one of its two German goals. The other was to make a united Germany a NATO member. Years later, Gorbachev claimed that he had extracted a series of verbal promises from Germany and America to the effect that NATO’s borders would not move east. But he failed to get any written assurances, and Bush and Kohl soon felt comfortable rejecting his ideas.41 Bush remarked privately of Gorbachev’s demands, “To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.”42 In October 1990, the Federal Republic incorporated the Democratic Republic, and Germany was a NATO member. Bush, to secure victory, had only needed to remain impassive in the face of Gorbachev’s entreaties for a better deal. Bush had lamented aloud during the 1988 campaign that he was no “ice man,” but in conducting international relations his own sangfroid served him well. Still, he was doing the obvious. It is hard to imagine any U.S. president interfering in European political dynamics in order to produce a different outcome, when the future seemed to be falling into America’s lap.
A greater test came within the borders of the USSR, whose collapse Bush did not foresee. Here Bush simply stayed out of the way. The downfall of Communist power in Eastern Europe exerted a negative feedback effect on the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was losing support on both his left and right flanks. Liberals found him half-hearted; the pride of true-believer Communists and Russian nationalists was deeply wounded by the loss of the empire. Only in trying to hold the Union together would Gorbachev use violence to repress nationalist uprisings. In January 1990, Soviet troops killed at least 120 in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan and a major oil port. Bush expressed sympathy for Gorbachev, explaining to Newsweek magazine that this was “a situation where the Soviet Union is trying to put down ethnic conflict, internal conflict,” and that “a lot of pontificating from leaders in other countries” would do nothing to help matters.43 But the three Baltic nations, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, succeeded in opening a gap in the walls of the Soviet Union itself. In August 1989, marking the symbolically weighty fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet pact that had consigned their nations to Soviet annexation, two million Balts formed a human chain stretching from the Estonian capital of Tallinn, through Riga, to Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital and the leading source of Baltic resistance.44 In Vilnius, people power forced the government to agree to free parliamentary elections in March 1990, leading to a nationalist majority. The Lithuanians promptly declared the 1940 Soviet takeover of their country illegal—always the U.S. position—and then declared independence from Moscow. Latvia soon followed suit. There would be no confrontation between the people and the state, as the two were united in revolt against Soviet power. Bush cautioned his NSC that a public show of support for the Lithuanians would lead to another disaster like the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, an uprising the United States had encouraged.45 Kohl, eager to keep a pliant Gorbachev in power, called the Lithuanian prime minister and asked her to cease agitating for her country’s independence.46
Gorbachev’s strong disinclination to use violence inside Europe was fatal for the USSR. For, while Gorbachev might well lose Lithuania if he ordered violence, he clearly would lose it if he refrained from violence.47 In June 1990, Lithuania withdrew its declaration of independence, but this only bought Moscow some extra time. Bush watched and did nothing, despite harsh criticism within Congress. He reminded Gorbachev, “I have conducted myself in ways not to complicate your life. That’s why I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall.”48 But Gorbachev, to stave off utter defeat, needed more than good taste from his American counterpart, as Bush no doubt could see. Bush played his hand deftly during the final collapse of America’s Cold War enemy. He made a good show of commiseration with Gorbachev, thus leaving U.S. fingerprints invisible on the political and social wreckage that many Russians, despite their newfound freedoms, saw mounting all around them.
For most of the Cold War, the U.S. military had referred to the industrial heartland of its European NATO allies as the “Central Region,” the place where World War III was expected to break out. But in the 1980s, the United States dubbed the Persian Gulf the new central region. In 1983, President Reagan formed a new U.S. military command centered in the Gulf; it was called, revealingly, Central Command.49 Before this time, the U.S. military’s capacity to respond swiftly to events in the Middle East had been unimpressive, as the events in Lebanon in 1982 and 1983 showed. Lebanon, Israel, and Libya figured large in American news reports in the 1980s. But the deepest U.S. involvements in Western Asia during this era lay in the Gulf and in Afghanistan.
The leading advocates of support to the Afghan mujahideen, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, and William Casey, Reagan’s DCI, linked Afghanistan to the Gulf, asserting implausibly that the Soviets hoped to send their forces in Afghanistan slicing through hundreds of miles of Pakistani or Iranian territory to the Gulf’s mouth. The Red Army had its hands full propping up its unpopular client regime in Kabul. The main motive for U.S. aid to that regime’s domestic enemies, which Carter had initiated, was to pin the Red Army down and bleed its finances and morale.50 When Reagan became president, he and the Saudis quickly agreed that the two governments would fund the mujahideen equally, with the Saudi money channeled through Washington; in fiscal year 1985, this combined aid shot up to $500 billion, with the American half of that sum equaling all previous U.S. assistance.51 With few U.S. assets close to the action, the money was disbursed by the Pakistani government of dictator Zia ul-Haq, who had seized power in 1977. Islamabad was determined to push Soviet influence out of Afghanistan, and Washington would propitiate Zia. Shultz emphasized to Reagan in 1982, “We must remember that without Zia’s support, the Afghan resistance, key to making the Soviets pay a heavy price for their Afghan adventure, is effectively dead.”52 In March 1985, Reagan changed the U.S. aim, from “making the Soviets pay a heavy price” to the ouster of Soviet forces, and he signed off on a host of newly aggressive tactics, which included providing tactical intelligence and equipment to the rebels.53 Before 1986, the U.S. and Saudi money purchased arms on the world market. Starting then, the CIA directly supplied U.S. weapons to the rebels, including Stinger shoulder-launched missiles for use against Soviet helicopters.54
The Americans, eager to inflict a defeat on the Soviets, did not blanch at the strange bedfellows they took on in the mujahideen. The rebels were less Afghan nationalists than a mix of Pashtun tribalists and foreign volunteers, the two constituencies joined by a passionate, politically charged version of Islam. They were inspired with a lethal hatred for Communists and a vision of a puritan Sunni Islamic republic rising across the Khyber Pass. The mujahideen were violent and extreme enough that, for the purposes of U.S. policy, their sanguinary outlook was best left a bit cloudy to the eyes of the American public. But government insiders were aware of the tools they employed to torment the Soviets. One defense analyst later observed, “In Afghanistan, we made a deliberate choice. . . . what we [had] to do is to throw the worst crazies against them that we can find, and there was a lot of collateral damage. We knew exactly who these people were, and what their organizations were like. . . . Then, we allowed them to get rid of, just kill all the moderate leaders.”55 Osama bin Laden, a Saudi fundamentalist who made a name for himself by funneling money and volunteers from Arab countries to the mujahideen in the 1980s, opened a recruitment office with his confederates in Tucson, a city with a large Arab American population, in 1986.56
In Moscow, Gorbachev was anxious to leave Afghanistan, but also concerned to prevent a hostile government, which might spread Islamic revolution, from taking power on his country’s southern border. Gorbachev urged his Afghan puppet, Babrak Karmal—who only held power because Soviet forces had murdered his main rival—to pursue a moderate course domestically. “Forget about socialism, and share real power with . . . the warlords,” Gorbachev advised brusquely. “Restore the status of Islam.”57 In November 1986, having replaced Karmal with Muhammad Najibullah, a brutal but skilled subordinate, Gorbachev told the Politburo he planned to withdraw the Red Army within two years. “We have set a clear goal: Help speed up the process so we have a friendly neutral country, and get out of there.”58 In April 1988, the USSR, the United States, Afghanistan, and Pakistan signed a set of accords providing for the departure of foreign forces and noninterference in Afghan affairs. But Zia told Reagan he would continue aiding the mujahideen. “We’ll just lie about it. That’s what we’ve been doing for eight years.”59 Pakistani and U.S. aid continued on one side, Soviet aid on the other. Bush, after becoming president, “paid hardly any attention to Afghanistan,” according to journalist Steve Coll. “CIA officers who met the president reported that he seemed barely aware that the war there was continuing.”60
Bush was focused, instead, on the Persian Gulf. The Gulf’s egress through the Strait of Hormuz, which ran between Iran to the north and Oman to the south, became the scene of an undeclared, many-sided “tanker war” in the late 1980s. Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, subsequently backed by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, had become a horrible mire, with a half-million killed over eight years with no gain for either party.61 The United States sided with Iraq (while secretly selling weapons to Iran as well), providing Saddam Hussein with intelligence and materiel, despite his extensive use of chemical weapons. In 1987, Kuwait asked for protection against Iranian attacks on its oil tankers, and the Reagan administration resolved to “reflag” Kuwaiti tankers as American, protected by U.S. Navy ships. In May, an Iraqi jet hit the USS Stark with two missiles, killing thirty-seven sailors. Iraq pleaded human error. Washington, far from punishing Iraq, used the incident to turn up the heat on Iran, which it blamed for the whole situation. President Reagan insisted, “The villain in the piece is Iran.”62 In July, the U.S. House voted to disapprove the reflagging policy, and the Senate was stopped from doing the same only by a Republican filibuster. In April 1988, an Iranian mine damaged a U.S. ship. The U.S. Navy responded powerfully, destroying Iranian oil platforms and sea craft.63
Then, on July 3, 1988, in waterways crowded with the navies of over ten nations, the USS Vincennes shot down a low-flying Iran Air civilian jet, IR655, on its scheduled flight path in the daytime, apparently mistaking it for an Iranian fighter jet. The Vincennes was in Iran’s territorial waters, although the U.S. Navy claimed otherwise. All 290 passengers were killed. President Reagan, who had execrated the Soviet Union when its officers shot down KAL007 in 1983, expressed only perfunctory regret. The brother of the downed plane’s pilot wrote in anguish to the Vincennes’s captain that “the U.S. government . . . showed neither remorse nor compassion for the loss of innocent lives.” The sailors of the Vincennes received combat action ribbons when they returned home to a warm welcome.64
The Iran–Iraq War finally ended in 1988, leaving Iraq bitter. Saddam felt his country had shouldered the burden for the Kuwaitis and Saudis, and he accused Kuwait of behaving ungratefully. Iraq also long had coveted Kuwaiti oil fields, viewing the border between the two countries as a vestige of British imperialism. In July 1990, Saddam vented his frustration to the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie. Glaspie demanded of Saddam, “What are your intentions?” as she recounted to her superiors afterward. She got no clear reply. Nonetheless, Glaspie told Saddam, regarding “the border question,” that the United States “took no position on these Arab affairs.” She did not seem alarmed.65
On August 2, Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait, quickly advancing to the capital, Kuwait City. This move was a major disruption in a region designated strategically vital by the United States, potentially a threat to the certain flow of oil on favorable terms to the industrialized world. As Glaspie later explained, “I didn’t think—and nobody else did—that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.”66 President Bush called the invasion a threat to a lawful world, and began comparing Saddam to Adolf Hitler. “This will not stand. This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait,” he declared.67 Saddam’s criminal history suddenly became news, his “vast and cruel” police state now a fit subject for outrage.68 Bush succeeded in securing a UN Security Council resolution demanding Iraqi withdrawal. Iraq, a staunch defender of the Palestinian cause, tried to link diplomatic progress on the Israel–Palestine conflict to any negotiated withdrawal of its troops from Kuwait. The United States opposed such immediate linkage, demanding that Iraq simply vacate Kuwait. But, to Israel’s consternation, Bush and Baker promised Arab governments that an international conference on the Palestine question would follow a favorable resolution of the Kuwait problem. This assurance made it easier for Arab countries to join a mobilization aimed at forcing the Iraqis back across the Kuwaiti border, and many did so.
By October, Bush had dispatched two hundred thousand U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia, purportedly to deter an Iraqi advance into that country, before Congress had made itself heard. The next month, he doubled that number. The U.S. commander, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, rebuked reporters who questioned America’s motives. The Iraqi invasion was “an international rape of the first order,” he told them. “We all ‘tsk-tsk’ when some old lady is raped in New York and twenty-four people know about it and do nothing . . . it’s not just a question of oil. There’s not a single serviceman out there who thinks that—not any I’ve met.”69 Even if Schwarzkopf had not met such servicemen, they existed. One marine later recalled, “We joke[d] about having transferred from the Marine Corps to the Oil Corps.”70 Gorbachev, beset by troubles at home, supported Bush, telling Baker, “What’s really important is that we stick together.”71 The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, swatted away warnings of a morass, saying that when war came, it would be “over in a matter of hours. Do you know what happens to tanks in the desert? They are absolutely unprotected targets for the air force, in which we”—by which he meant the United States primarily—“have an overwhelming superiority.”72 As 1990 ended, the U.S. Senate prepared to debate whether to authorize war against Iraq, but many doubted a negative outcome would deter Bush.
At the end of the 1980s, America’s reach was global, and it had no rivals. The Reaganite goal in foreign affairs—to make the United States supremely powerful around the world—had been accomplished. Reagan’s military buildup had not created America’s preeminence—the fall of Soviet power did that—but the buildup put America in position to capitalize, at least militarily, on its now unchecked powers. Whether American power was matched by a global desire for U.S. leadership was a question seldom asked by Americans. The U.S. ascendancy coincided with dramatic breakthroughs toward peace and democracy all around the globe. But only in Eastern Europe was the march of freedom publicly and unambiguously urged forward by the United States, and only there were the two big shifts in power relations—between the United States and the rest of the world, and within nations in many regions—definitely linked.
Neoconservative thinkers who had lamented the decline of confrontation in U.S.–Soviet relations took heart from the prospect of a new assertion of U.S. primacy. One of them, Francis Fukuyama, argued that “history” had ended with the U.S. victory in the Cold War. In his view, the United States was the whole world’s future; no alternative social models would emerge.73 Krauthammer declared the world newly “unipolar,” dominated by a lone superpower.74 Anxieties over America’s decline, reflected in the success of Yale University historian Paul Kennedy’s 1987 work, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, which intimated U.S. power was in danger of collapsing through “imperial overstretch,” suddenly faded.75 The outstanding new reality in the world was Washington’s lack of military inhibition. Bush seemed eager to use his swollen powers. The dawning epoch of U.S. preeminence looked to be an age of steel and fire, not one of peace and idealism; an era of generals and diplomats, not one of people power. Some worried, despite assurances like those of Prince Bandar, about the military outcome of a looming war in the desert. But when war came, in early 1991, American power would sweep those concerns aside. The fighting would not last long. It would clip Saddam’s wings, ending his martial adventurism outside Iraq’s borders, while leaving him in power in his country. Bush’s vision for the Middle East would stand confirmed as one of stability, not transformation.
But, in late 1990, this outcome lay in the future. As senators debated in Washington, the brute facts of American strength seemed to carry an awesome momentum. The very presence of a huge U.S. force in Saudi Arabia became an argument for war. The soldiers could not wait in these conditions forever, it was said. One American serviceman described it: “After . . . six weeks of deployment, the desert is in us, one particle at a time. . . . Sand has invaded my body: ears and eyes and nose and mouth, ass crack and piss hole. The desert is everywhere.”76 The expedition was costly; the weather would turn, making action difficult. As the last month of the last year of the decade ran out, the world waited for the clash, and for the new order it might bring.