Seize the Moment (2 page)

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.”