From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (149 page)

The Cold War ended in irony rather than celebration. United States officials watched the stunning events of summer 1991 with bewilderment and concern. Bush and his advisers feared that the fall of Gorbachev and the collapse of the USSR would set off rampant destabilization across the Soviet empire or lead to a restoration of the Communist old guard. Although Bush stopped well short of the massive infusion of economic assistance Gorbachev pleaded for, he tried other ways to help his friend. A START treaty was signed at the last summit in Moscow in early August, providing for sizeable reductions in the strategic arsenals of both countries. Proceeding to Kiev, the president warned restless Ukrainians of the
dangers of "suicidal nationalism based on ethnic hatred" and emphasized that "freedom is not the same as independence," a statement conservative columnist William Safire branded the "chicken Kiev speech" and one widely viewed as favoring the USSR over self-determination. Scowcroft watched the denouement "feeling numb, disbelieving," at the "sheer incomprehensibility that such an epochal event could actually be occurring." He and Bush congratulated themselves on setting the "right tone" of encouraging reform without provoking a reaction.
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R
ONALD
R
EAGAN AND
G
EORGE
B
USH PRESIDED
over one of the most remarkable periods of change in world history: the liberation of Eastern Europe; the end of the Cold War; and the collapse of the Soviet Union. These momentous events were not primarily a result of the massive Reagan defense buildup bankrupting the Soviet economy, as American "triumphalists" have argued. Soviet defense spending reflected more internal demands than U.S. policies; the Soviet economy collapsed primarily under its own weight, not external pressures.
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America's "soft power" in the form of such things as rock-and-roll music and the glitter of Western consumer goods may have had a greater subversive effect than its military power.
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The "historical wild card" in the great transformation, historian James Hershberg persuasively argues, was not Reagan but Mikhail Gorbachev, whose drastic reorientation of Soviet priorities set loose forces no one could control.
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Reagan did contribute to the changes, but not in the way that is usually argued. He helped to restore a sense of national well-being, a necessary precondition for accommodation with the Soviet Union. His seemingly naive commitment to a nuclear-free world and his unique relationship with Gorbachev dramatically eased Soviet-American tensions, making it simpler for Gorbachev to relinquish control over Eastern Europe. Reagan's solid anti-Communist credentials permitted him to do what few other American leaders could have—effect a rapprochement with the nation he himself had only recently called an "evil empire." Although his administration was caught off guard by the rapidity and magnitude of change in the
annus mirabilis
and seemed to favor order over freedom, Bush had the good sense to let events take their course without the unwelcome intrusion of braggadocio.

There was, of course, a darker side to the Reagan era. Flawed thinking, ideological zeal, and near scandalous mismanagement produced misguided and destructive policies. The president's absurd glorification of the Nicaraguan contras and obsession with a grossly exaggerated Soviet threat to Central America provoked debilitating political warfare at home and inflicted devastating destruction on that already benighted region. The muddled intrusions into the Middle East, also in response to an inflated Soviet threat, brought high costs and few gains. The two strands came together in the notorious Iran-Contra Affair that would be comical were it not so serious. Reagan and the zealots acting in his name displayed an open contempt for democracy, a disdain for Congress, and a blatant disregard for the law—in all, fourteen officials were charged with criminal offenses, including two national security advisers and the secretary of defense. They created what journalist Mark Danner has called an environment of "corrosive secrecy" to conceal what they were doing from the American people and Congress.
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To evade restrictions on executive power, they employed private subcontractors and other subterfuges. Policies flawed in conception were often implemented in a most amateurish manner.

The United States "won" the Cold War in the sense that the other side gave up the fight, but, as is usually the case in war, victory did not come without cost. Despite nearly a half century of bitter struggle, the two superpowers managed to avoid direct conflict in what has been called the long peace. In their relentless pursuit of their own interests, however, the two sides put millions of people at risk of nuclear annihilation in 1962 and possibly again in 1983. For much of the Cold War, the world lived nervously under the nuclear mushroom cloud. Proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and elsewhere produced a body count of millions.
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The United States experienced nothing to match the horrors of Stalin's gulags or Mao's Red Guards, but, especially during the McCarthy period, the Cold War produced rampant assaults on civil liberties. The Vietnam War, a direct by-product of the Cold War, divided Americans as nothing had since their civil war a century earlier, and the divisions persisted into the next century. The Cold War contributed to the so-called
imperial presidency that reached its apogee with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, producing in both cases abuses of power in the name of national security. The economic costs were especially high. The Reagan policies produced a short-lived boom but over the longer term had devastating effects on the U.S. economy. The massive defense budget was paid for by deficit spending and financed by foreign capital. The national debt soared to $2.7 trillion by 1989; 20 percent of it was held by foreign creditors. For the first time since World War I, the United States was a debtor nation. Focus on the Cold War deflected attention away from the infrastructure and such critical areas as education and social problems.
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For nearly fifty years, the Cold War was a major organizing principle of American life, providing for many a strange sense of certainty and reassurance. Its sudden and unexpected end left the nation unprepared for an uncertain era. "We were suddenly in a unique position," Scowcroft later recalled, "without experience, without precedent, and standing alone at the height of power."
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After the end of the Cold War, the United States enjoyed a degree of world hegemony beyond George Washington's most extravagant dreams. Despite gloomy talk of decline in the 1970s and 1980s, America in the last years of the twentieth century boasted a seemingly invincible high-tech military machine, a robust computer-driven economy, and an array of "soft power" that gave it nearly incalculable influence over the planet's affairs. Not since Rome, it was argued, had any nation enjoyed such preeminence. The French, so often critical of the United States, coined a new word—
hyperpower
—to describe America's unprecedented status.
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Yet the attainment of such power did not bring the freedom from fear that Washington had envisioned. During the first part of the post–Cold War era, an uncertain nation focused on problems at home and used its vast power only with great reluctance. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, made clear that even hyperpowers are vulnerable. And even after a smashingly successful 2003 military campaign against Iraq, the United States became bogged down in a confused and costly politico-military quagmire. Strategists pondered anew how the nation's vast power could best be used to protect its vital interests in a newly dangerous world.

For a fleeting moment in the early 1990s, peace and world order seemed within reach. The end of the Cold War and the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union removed the preceding half century's major causes of international tension and eased, if they did not eliminate altogether, the dread of a nuclear holocaust. The emergence of democracies and market economies in the former Soviet satellites, Latin America, and even South Africa offered the hope of a new age of global freedom and prosperity. The U.S.-led victory under the aegis of the United Nations in the Persian Gulf War seemed to hail the triumph of Woodrow Wilson's dream of collective security in which peace would be maintained and aggression repelled by international collaboration. President George H. W. Bush proclaimed a
new world order under U.S. leadership. State Department official Francis Fukuyama hailed the "end of history," the absolute triumph of capitalism and democracy over fascism and Communism, beyond which no great ideological conflicts could be imagined.
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It did not take long for such prophecies to be exposed as at best wishful thinking, at worst absolute folly. The Cold War had imposed a crude form of order on an inherently unstable world, and its end set loose powerful forces held in check for years. The two dominant trends of the post–Cold War world, integration and fragmentation, were each destabilizing; in a broader sense, they conflicted with each other.
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Almost without notice amidst the last climactic stages of the Cold War, the world changed radically in the 1980s, bringing people still closer together while setting off powerful new and often disruptive forces. A communications revolution—sometimes called the third industrial revolution—shattered old ways of thinking and doing things, challenging geopolitics itself. The development of computers and the Internet, cable television, satellite technology, and new high-speed jet aircraft created global networks that broke down old barriers and brought the world still closer together. These innovations made it impossible for governments to control information, as in the past, contributing to the collapse of the Soviet empire and in time the USSR itself. They empowered individuals and groups, enhancing the influence of non-state actors in international politics and economics. They permitted the globalization of trade in ways heretofore unimaginable, giving rise to new transnational corporations such as Nike that exploited cheap labor in developing countries to produce inexpensive, quality goods for an international market.
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Such was the impact of the communications revolution that Cable News Network (CNN) founder Ted Turner banned the use of the word
foreign
in his corporation's activities. By the mid-1990s, four of every five bottles of Coca-Cola were sold outside the United States, while high-quality European and Japanese goods flooded U.S. markets to satisfy the tastes of well-heeled and sophisticated consumers. Professional athletics became part of the process. National Basketball Association (NBA) games were telecast in 175 countries and broadcast in forty languages to six hundred million households. NBA mega-star Michael Jordan became the
"first great athlete of the wired world"; the paraphernalia of his Chicago Bulls—known in China as the "Oxen"—could be found even in Mongolia. A poll of Chinese high school students ranked Jordan with Zhou En-lai as the person they most admired.
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In sports as elsewhere, globalization worked both ways. Seven-foot four-inch Yao Ming of China became an NBA star. European players increasingly joined the rosters of NBA and National Hockey League teams. But the United States dominated the export of culture. "American popular culture is the closest approximation there is today to a global lingua franca," sociologist Todd Gitlin observed in 1992.
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The revolutionary changes wrought by "globalization"—defined as worldwide networks of interdependence—raised profound concerns across the world. In fact, American popular culture often coexisted as a second culture alongside long-established local versions. In many instances, it was modified for indigenous tastes before being exported. In other regions, however, especially in Europe, the process was often simplistically viewed as Americanization and provoked angry reactions. Certain as ever of their own cultural superiority and the banality of the U.S. variety, French spokespersons raged against the corruption and trivialization of traditional high culture. France's cultural minister denounced plans for a European Disney World outside Paris as a "cultural Chernobyl." In the Middle East, Islamic fundamentalists railed against the degradation wrought by Satanist American popular culture and plotted terrorist attacks, ironically using instruments of globalization such as jetliners, the Internet, and cellular telephones, on the symbols of U.S. global dominance.
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A process that seemed to favor the United States also provoked alarm at home. Americans responded angrily to French protests. "We offer them the dream of a lifetime and lots of jobs. They treat us like invaders," said a Euro Disney spokesperson.
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The growing "outsourcing" of jobs to cheaper labor markets made available to Americans less expensive consumer goods but also caused unemployment in U.S. manufacturing. An influx of Japanese capital in the early 1990s, including even the purchase of major communications networks, provoked nationalist fears of foreign
control of crucial media outlets. College students organized nationwide protests against the way in which giant corporations like Nike, owing allegiance to no nation-state and beyond the control of any government, exploited workers in sweatshops in developing countries to produce maximum goods at minimum cost. Critics complained that globalization was widening an already yawning worldwide gap between rich and poor.

Coexisting uncomfortably alongside these new forces of integration were older, equally potent, and potentially even more disruptive forces of fragmentation: nationalism, ethnic rivalries, and tribal hatreds, forces, historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote in 1991, that were "resurrecting old barriers between nations and peoples—and creating new ones—even as others are tumbling."
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The end of the Cold War took the lid off a pot that had been boiling for years. In Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, fragile national loyalties gave way to fierce ethnic and tribal conflicts, secessionist movements, and vicious "ethnic cleansing." Most prominent in the 1990s were the brutal wars between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, and conflicts between Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Kurds in the Middle East. The
New York Times
counted forty-eight such conflicts worldwide in 1993. New nations took shape almost as rapidly as during the heyday of decolonization. "Get ready for fifty new countries in the world in the next fifty years," a pessimistic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York admonished in that same year, most of them "born in bloodshed." Wilson's dream of self-determination threatened to divide the world with conflict rather than bring it together in peace and harmony.
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