THE END OF THE COLD War ...as the West saw it, the Soviet leadership was actively exploiting detente to build up its own military forces, seeking military parity with the United States and in general with all the opposing powers—a fact without historical precedent. The United States, paralyzed by the Viet- nam catastrophe, reacted sensitively to the expansion of Soviet influ- ence in Africa, the Near East and other regions. The operation of the “feedback” effect placed the Soviet Union in an extremely difficult position in the foreign policy and economic re- spects. It was opposed by the major world powers-—the United States, Britain, France, the FRG, Italy, Japan, Canada, and China. Opposition to their vastly superior potential was dangerously far beyond the USSR's abilities.” The same point was made by Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevard- nadze in a speech on July 25, 1988, to a meeting at the Soviet Foreign Ministry. He enumerated such Soviet mistakes as the Afghan debacle, the feud with China, the long-standing underestimation of the European Community, the costly arms race, the 1983-84 walkout from the Geneva. arms control talks, the Soviet decision to deploy the SS-20s in the first place, and the Soviet defense doctrine according to which the U.S.S.R. had to be as strong as any potential coalition of states against it. In other words, Shevardnadze challenged almost everything the Soviet Union had done for twenty-five years. It was an implicit recognition that Western policies had had a major impact on the Soviet Union, for had the democ- racies imposed no penalty for adventurism, Soviet policy could have been described as successful and not in need of reassessment. The ending of the Cold War, sought by American policy through eight administrations of both political parties, was much as George Kennan had foreseen in 1947. Regardless of how accommodating a policy the West might have conducted, the Soviet system had needed the specter of a permanent outside enemy to justify the suffering it was imposing on its people and to maintain the armed forces and security apparatus essential to its rule. When, under the pressure of the cumulative Western response that culminated in the Reagan years, the Twenty-seventh Party Congress changed the official doctrine from coexistence to interdependence, the moral basis for domestic repression disappeared. Then it became evident, as Kennan had predicted, that the Soviet Union, whose citizens had been reared on discipline and could not readily switch to compromise and accommodation, would turn overnight from one of the strongest to “one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.”*! As noted earlier, Kennan eventually came to believe that his contain- ment policy had been overmilitarized. A more accurate assessment would 801DipLomacy be that, as always, America had oscillated between overreliance on mili- tary strategy and emotional overdependence on the conversion of the adversary. I too had been critical of many of the individual policies which went under the name of containment. Yet the overall direction of Ameri- can policy was remarkably farsighted and remained remarkably consis- tent throughout changes in administration and an astonishingly varied array of personalities. Had America not organized resistance when a self-confident commu- nist empire was acting as if it represented the wave of the future and was causing the peoples and leaders of the world to believe that this might be so, the Communist Parties, which were then already the largest single parties in postwar Europe, might well have prevailed. The series of crises over Berlin could not have been sustained, and there would have been more of them. Exploiting America’s post-Vietnam trauma, the Kremlin sent proxy forces to Africa and its own troops into Afghanistan. It would have become far more assertive had America not protected the global balance of power and helped to rebuild democratic societies. That America did not perceive its role in terms of the balance of power com- pounded its pain and complicated the process, but it also served to bring about unprecedented dedication and creativity. Nor did it change the reality that it was America which had preserved the global equilibrium and therefore the peace of the world. Victory in the Cold War was not, of course, the achievement of any single administration. It came about as a result of the confluence of forty years of American bipartisan effort and seventy years of communist ossification. The phenomenon of Reagan sprang from a fortuitous conver- gence of personality and opportunity: a decade earlier, he would have seemed too militant; a decade later, too one-track. The combination of ideological militancy to rally the American public and diplomatic flexibil- ity, which conservatives would never have forgiven in another president, was exactly what was needed in the period of Soviet weakness and emerg- ing self-doubt. Yet the Reagan foreign policy was more in the nature of a brilliant sunset than of the dawn of a new era. The Cold War had been almost made to order to American preconceptions. There had been a dominant ideological challenge rendering universal maxims, however oversimpli- fied, applicable to most of the world’s problems. And there had been a clear and present military threat, and its source had been unambiguous. Even then, America’s travails—from Suez to Vietnam—resulted from its application of universal principles to specific cases which proved inhospi- table to them. 802THe END OF THE COLD War In the post-Cold War world, there is no overriding ideological chal- lenge or, at this writing, single geostrategic confrontation. Almost every situation is a special case. Exceptionalism inspired America’s foreign pol- icy and gave the United States the fortitude to prevail in the Cold War. But it will require far more subtle applications in the multipolar world of the twenty-first century, America will finally have to face the challenge it has been able to avoid through most of its history: whether its traditional perception of itself as either strictly beacon or crusader still defines its choices or limits them, whether, in short, it must at last develop some definition of its national interest. 803CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE The New World Order Reconsidered B, the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, Wilsonian- ism seemed triumphant. The communist ideological and the Soviet geo- political challenges had been overcome simultaneously, The objective of moral opposition to communism had merged with the geopolitical task of resisting Soviet expansionism. No wonder that President Bush pro- claimed his hope for a new world order in classically Wilsonian terms: We have a vision of a new partnership of nations that transcends the Cold War. A partnership based on consultation, cooperation, and collec- tive action, especially through international and regional organizations. A partnership united by principle and the rule of law and supported by 804THE New WorLD ORDER RECONSIDERED an equitable sharing of both cost and commitment. A partnership whose goals are to increase democracy, increase prosperity, increase the peace, and reduce arms. Bush’s Democratic successor, President Bill Clinton, expressed America’s goals in very similar terms, expounding on the theme of “enlarging de- mocracy”: In a new era of peril and opportunity, our overriding purpose must be to expand and strengthen the world’s community of market-based democracies. During the Cold War, we sought to contain a threat to survival of free institutions. Now we seek to enlarge the circle of nations that live under those free institutions, for our dream is of a day when the opinions and energies of every person in the world will be given full expression in a world of thriving democracies that cooperate with each other and live in peace. For the third time in this century, America thus proclaimed its intention to build a new world order by applying its domestic values to the world at large. And, for the third time, America seemed to tower over the international stage. In 1918, Wilson had overshadowed a Paris Peace Con- ference at which America’s allies were too dependent on it to insist on voicing their misgivings. Toward the end of the Second World War, Frank- lin Delano Roosevelt and Truman seemed to be in a position to recast the entire globe on the American model. The end of the Cold War produced an even greater temptation to recast the international environment in America’s image. Wilson had been constrained by isolationism at home, and Truman had come up against Stalinist expansionism. In the post-Cold War world, the United States is the only remaining superpower with the capacity to intervene in every part of the globe. Yet power has become more diffuse and the issues to which military force is relevant have diminished. Victory in the Cold War has propelled America into a world which bears many similarities to the European state system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to practices which American statesmen and thinkers have consistently questioned. The absence of both an overriding ideological or strategic threat frees nations to pursue foreign policies based increasingly on their immediate national interest. In an international system characterized by perhaps five or six major powers and a multiplicity of smaller states, order will have to emerge much as it did in past centuries from a reconcil- iation and balancing of competing national interests. 805Diplomacy Both Bush and Clinton spoke of the new world order as if it were just around the corner. In fact, it is still in a period of gestation, and its final form will not be visible until well into the next century. Part extension of the past, part unprecedented, the new world order, like those which it succeeds, will emerge as an answer to three questions: What are the basic units of the international order? What are their means of interacting? What are the goals on behalf of which they interact? International systems live precariously. Every “world order” expresses an aspiration to permanence; the very term has a ring of eternity about it Yet the elements which comprise it are in constant flux; indeed, with each century, the duration of international systems has been shrinking. The order that grew out of the Peace of Westphalia lasted 150 years; the international system created by the Congress of Vienna maintained itself for a hundred years; the international order characterized by the Cold War ended after forty years, (The Versailles settlement never operated as a system adhered to by the major powers, and amounted to little more than an armistice between two world wars.) Never before have the com- ponents of world order, their capacity to interact, and their goals all changed quite so rapidly, so deeply, or so globally. Whenever the entities constituting the international system change their character, a period of turmoil inevitably follows. The Thirty Years’ War was in large part about the transition from feudal societies based on tradition and claims of universality to the modern state system based on raison d'état. The wars of the French Revolution marked the transition to the nation-state defined by common language and culture. The wars of the twentieth century were caused by the disintegration of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, the challenge to the dominance of Europe, and the end of colonialism. In each transition, what had been taken for granted suddenly became anachronistic: multinational states in the nine- teenth century, colonialism in the twentieth. Since the Congress of Vienna, foreign policy has related nations to each other—hence the term “international relations.” In the nineteenth century, the appearance of even one new nation—such as the united Germany—produced decades of turmoil, Since the end of the Second World War, nearly a hundred new nations have come into being, many of them quite different from the historic European nation-state. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia have spawned another twenty nations, many of which have concentrated on re-enacting century-old bloodlusts. The nineteenth-century European nation was based on common lan- guage and culture, and, given the technology of the times, provided the 806THE New WortD ORDER RECONSIDERED, optimum framework for security, economic growth, and for influencing international events. In the post-Cold War world, the traditional Euro- pean nation-states—the countries which formed the Concert of Europe until the First World War—lack the resources for a global role. The success of their effort to consolidate themselves into the European Union will determine their future influence. United, Europe will continue as a Great Power; divided into national states, it will slide into secondary status. Part of the turmoil associated with the emergence of a new world order results from the fact that at least three types of states calling themselves “nations” are interacting while sharing few of the nation-states’ historic attributes. On the one side are the ethnic splinters from disintegrating empires, such as the successor states of Yugoslavia or of the Soviet Union. Obsessed by historic grievances and age-old quests for identity, they strive primarily to prevail in ancient ethnic rivalries. The goal of interna- tional order is beyond their fields of interest and frequently beyond their imaginations. Like the smaller states embroiled in the Thirty Years’ War, they seek to preserve their independence and to increase their power without regard for the more cosmopolitan considerations of an interna- tional political order. Some of the postcolonial nations represent yet another distinct phe- nomenon. For many of them, the current borders represent the adminis- trative convenience of the imperial powers. French Africa, possessing a large coastline, was segmented into seventeen administrative units, each of which has since become a state. Belgian Africa—then called the Congo, now Zaire—had only a very narrow outlet to the sea, and hence was governed as a single unit even though it constitutes an area as large as Western Europe. In such circumstances, the state too often came to mean the army, which was usually the only “national” institution. When that claim has collapsed, civil war has frequently been the consequence. If nineteenth-century standards of nationhood or Wilsonian principles of self-determination were applied to such nations, a radical and unpredict- able realignment of frontiers would be inevitable. For them, the alterna- tive to the territorial status quo lies in endless and brutal civil conflict. Finally, there are the continental-type states—which will probably rep- resent the basic units of the new world order. The Indian nation that emerged from British colonial rule unites a multiplicity of tongues, reli- gions, and nationalities. Since it is more susceptible to religious and ideological currents within neighboring states than the European nations of the nineteenth century, the dividing line between its foreign and do- mestic policies is both different and far more tenuous. Similarly, China is 807DipLomacy a conglomerate of different languages held together by common writing, common culture, and common history. It is what Europe might have become had it not been for the religious wars of the seventeenth century, and what it might yet turn out to be if the European Union fulfills the hopes of its supporters. Similarly, the two superpowers of the Cold War period have never been nation-states in the European sense. America had succeeded in forming a distinct culture from a polyglot national composition; the Soviet Union was an empire containing many nationali- ties. Its successor states—especially the Russian Federation—are, at this writing, torn between disintegration and reimperialization, much as were the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires of the nineteenth century. All this has radically changed the substance, the method, and, above all, the reach of international relations. Until the modern period, the various continents pursued their activities largely in isolation from each other. It would have been impossible to measure the power of, say, France against that of China because the two countries had no means of interacting. Once the reach of technology had broadened, the future of other conti- nents was determined by the “Concert” of European powers. No previous international order has contained major centers of power distributed around the entire globe. Nor had statesmen ever been obliged to conduct diplomacy in an environment where events can be experienced instanta- neously and simultaneously by leaders and their publics. As the number of states multiplies and their capacity to interact in- creases, on what principles can a new world order be organized? Given the complexity of the new international system, can Wilsonian concepts like “enlarging democracy” serve as the principal guides to American foreign policy and as replacement for the Cold War strategy of contain- ment? Clearly, these concepts have been neither an unqualified success nor an unqualified failure. Some of the finest acts of twentieth-century diplomacy had their roots in the idealism of Woodrow Wilson: the Mar- shall Plan, the brave commitment to containing communism, defense of the freedom of Western Europe, and even the ill-fated League of Nations and its later incarnation, the United Nations. At the same time, Wilsonian idealism has produced a plethora of prob- lems. As embodied in the Fourteen Points, the uncritical espousal of ethnic self-determination failed to take account of power relationships and the destabilizing effects of ethnic groups single-mindedly pursuing their accumulated rivalries and ancient hatreds. The failure to give the League of Nations a military enforcement mechanism underlined the problems inherent in Wilson’s notion of collective security. The ineffec- tual Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, by which nations renounced war as a 808