The Nature of the Post-Cold War World (1993)

37 Pages·1993·0.08 MB·English

by  Strategic Studies Institute

THE NATURE OF THE POST-COLD WAR WORLD
THE WORLD IN THE YEAR 2000:
PROSPECTS FOR ORDER OR DISORDER
Charles William Maynes
REEXAMINING NATIONAL STRATEGY
William G. Hyland
March 1993
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The views expressed in this report are those of the authors
and do not reflect the official policy or position or the
Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S.
Government. This report is approved for public release;
distribution is unlimited.
*******
Comments pertaining to this report are invited and should be
forwarded to: Director, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army
War College, Carlisle, PA 17013-5050. Comments also may be
conveyed directly by calling the Conference Organizer, Dr. Gary
L. Guertner, commercial [phone] or DSN 242-3234.
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These papers were originally presented at the U.S. Army War
College Fourth Annual Strategy Conference held February 24-25,
1993, with the assistance of the Office of Net Assessment. The
Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to publish them as part of
its Conference Series.
FOREWORD
The editors of the nation's two leading journals on foreign
policy were asked to examine the nature of the post-cold war
world and America's transitional role. These essays represent the
views of Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy, and
William G. Hyland, former editor of Foreign Affairs.
Charles Maynes reviews the major transitions that marked 45
years of Soviet-American strategic confrontation. Predictably,
the U.S. global role and defense resources are declining as old
threats decrease and domestic problems move higher up on the
policy agenda. Less predictably, the relative defense spending of
small powers is likely to increase, adding to the potential for
regional instability. These trends and the proliferation of
weapons technology, including weapons of mass destruction, will
drive the major powers toward their third attempt in this century
to deal with global instability through collective security.
Power will become more evenly distributed as America's military
dominance recedes and others' economic power increases. Such
trends, Mr. Maynes believes, should not be disturbing so long as
prudent retrenchment does not become a foolish retreat from an
American global role.
William Hyland believes that no president since Calvin
Coolidge has inherited an easier foreign policy agenda.
Presidents from Truman through Bush did the cold war "heavy
lifting," and the Clinton transitional era should mark the
ascendancy of domestic over foreign policy issues.
Economic power is essential to America's future and the
country faces the difficult task of economic recovery while
avoiding the political expedience of protectionism or other forms
of belligerence toward our trading partners. This would
accelerate international fragmentation, undermining the political
trends toward a collective security regime that is vital to the
new world order and is the best alternative to the extremes of
U.S. isolationism or global policeman.
Mr. Hyland advises against grand strategic visions. Instead,
selectivity based on national interests should be a guiding
principle while we put our economic house in order.
The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to publish these
essays as a contribution to the debate on U.S. national security
strategy.
JOHN W. MOUNTCASTLE
Colonel, U.S. Army
Director, Strategic Studies Institute
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF THE AUTHORS
CHARLES WILLIAM MAYNES has served as Editor of Foreign Policy
magazine since April 1980. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard
University, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where he earned
First Class Honors in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. Over
the course of his career, Mr. Maynes has held significant
positions in the Department of State, U.S. Congress, and the
foundation world.
WILLIAM G. HYLAND was Editor of Foreign Affairs from 1984 until
1993. A graduate of Washington University, St. Louis, he also
earned an M.A. from the University of Missouri. Mr. Hyland served
on the National Security Council Staff and was Director of
Intelligence at the State Department. After government service he
joined the Georgetown Center for Strategic Studies and
subsequently became a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace.
THE WORLD IN THE YEAR 2000:
PROSPECTS FOR ORDER OR DISORDER
Charles William Maynes
Introduction.
Are we in a new era in world affairs? It has become
commonplace to assert this. But the best way to peer into the
future--perhaps the only way--is to examine the past and to look
for trends that appear to be shaping the present. If we
understand clearly the contours of the international system after
1945, it will probably be easier for us to determine the extent
to which we are now truly in a revolutionary era, one which will
give us, whether we wish it or not, a New World Order.
In 1945 all thoughtful observers realized that the world was
indeed at a turning point. Both domestically and internationally
strategists understood that the world could not return to the
policies of the interwar period.
The development of the atomic bomb guaranteed that. The
existence of a weapon qualitatively different from all that had
proceeded it convinced policymakers that the world was entering a
new age. Strategists began to assert that the very nature of war
had changed. Before the goal was to win wars. Now the goal was to
avert war.
Also convincing statesmen that a page had been turned was
the position of Europe after the war. In contrast to the First
World War, which despite its destruction still left Britain,
France and Germany as major international actors, the Second
World War brought Soviet and American troops to the heart of
Europe. The periphery of Europe, broadly considered, was now in
charge of the center. The world had not seen such a development
since 1815 when Russian troops marched in Paris and there was a
comparable sense that a new page in history was being turned.
In the domestic realm there was also a sense of dramatic
departure. Governments associated with the West announced their
determination to avoid the mistakes of the interwar period,
racked with social and class conflict. All parties agreed that
there had to be a new social contract, which we know as the
postwar welfare state. Even conservatives accepted that
government would have a new role to play in the economies of
their countries. All major parties recognized that society could
not permit the kind of domestic conflict that had spawned the
twin evils of fascism and communism. The major issue was not
whether to draw up a new social contract but what its provisions
should be and who should pay for the new state obligations.
Internationally the creation of the United Nations and the
development of the Marshall Plan reflected a feeling that a new
security and social contract were needed abroad as well as at
home. The consequences of unbridled nationalism were everywhere
to be seen. With the establishment of the United Nations and its
various affiliated organizations, the immediate postwar world saw
the second attempt in this century at collective security. The
international equivalent of the welfare state at home was
attempted in the creation of the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the World Bank as the notion emerged that economically
powerful states had an obligation to promote growth and welfare
not only in their own countries but throughout the globe.
Americans like to think that such attitudes reflect a
special vein of American generosity or altruism and that only
their country could have come up with the Marshall Plan. The new
course did represent an impressive policy departure, particularly
for the United States, but in retrospect it should be seen as
part of a more general international phenomenon. America stood
out, not because it was so much more generous than others in
terms of its national character, but because it was so much
richer than others in terms of its large treasury. Had other
victorious nations had the resources of America, it seems likely
that we would now be talking about the de Gaulle plan or the
Attlee plan or even the Chiang Kai-shek plan. For indeed, once
other nations recovered, they also began to display the same
pattern of generosity that many Americans like to believe is
restricted to themselves. Today other members of the OECD
contribute more to ODA than the United States by the standard
measure of per capita effort. Indeed, America is at the bottom of
the list of donors in per capita terms. If the American people
were inherently more generous than the people of other states,
such a transformation would never have taken place. It did take
place because of the general postwar tendency to believe that
governments had an obligation to promote an improvement in
economic and social conditions both at home and abroad that could
reduce the likelihood of civil strife and war.
Other characteristics of the postwar era are worth noting.
After 1945 the world witnessed the outbreak of two global wars
that literally touched every country in the international system.
The first was between white and non-white, European and
non-European and the issue was liberation. The result was
foreordained. Liberation prevailed. Colonialism ended.
The other global war was ideological. Indeed, the cold war
was our first truly world war. In the first and second world
wars, fighting did take place in several different regions. But
there were major areas of the globe that remained relatively
untouched, most of Africa, Latin America or South Asia for
example. Because of the cold war's ideological character, the
struggle was everywhere. All regions were touched. Every single
country or dependency became involved and the superpowers found
reason to intervene virtually everywhere.
With the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, this
global civil war is effectively over. The future of communism is
in the hands of aging leaders in China, Cuba, North Korea and
North Vietnam. Their days are numbered and so is the future of
the movements they lead. This fact appears to many of us to alter
radically the course of history, leading to the kind of turning
point we faced in 1945. It certainly seems to be the case that
the future of international relations will henceforth be
different if only because the foreign policies of the Soviet
Union and the United States are going to be so different. The
primary organizing principle of postwar relations--the
ideological struggle between the United States and the USSR--will
no longer exist. That seems to be almost as significant a change
as the arrival of American and Soviet troops in the heart of
Europe.
No major new weapon has appeared on the international scene
to rival the atomic bomb in its impact on international relations
but other new features of the international system convince many
that we are at a turning point: the rise of the trading state
whose international power derives from its economic strength
rather than its military might, the transformation of America
from the globe's leading creditor into its leading debtor, the
evolution of Japan into the world's most successful economy, the
reunification of Germany, the globalization of world capital
markets, and the rise of environmental dangers that affect the
security of all countries regardless of political orientation.
Yet of all the factors, the one that seems to have had the most
immediate and profound effect is the end to the cold war.
Whither the Cold War?
But if this war has ended, why did it end? Who was
responsible? Was it Mikhail Gorbachev, obviously a major figure
in modern history? Was it Ronald Reagan with his defense buildup,
the most massive peacetime arms effort in history? Or was
something more profound at work that will help us to understand
the world that is unfolding before us? The answer is not merely
academic. If we attribute the end of the cold war to the actions
of a few leaders whose appearance on the world stage can be seen
as an accident, then we can fear that the arrival on the scene of
a new leader might turn back the clock. Conversely, if more
fundamental factors were involved, then we have less reason to
fear the return of the cold war. A new leader would find it hard
to reverse a process that is deeply entrenched internationally
and had been set in motion not months before, but decades before.
In trying to assess the role of individuals as opposed to
larger trends, we start out with a dilemma. Machiavelli once
wrote that history's record is written half by statesmen and half
by fortune or fate. Statesmen, of course, claim all the credit
for themselves while fortune by definition keeps her council.
Hence the opportunity is created for self-serving memoirs by
retired statesmen who claim all the credit for themselves or the
opportunity is presented to analysts trying without full
confidence or knowledge to see beneath the surface.
I am in the second category and my proposition is that the
cold war, to remain cold, required a totalitarian enemy, one
constitutionally incapable of evolving into a more normal
international partner. By this definition, the cold war ceased
with the historic address of Nikita Khrushchev before the 20th
Party Congress, in which he unmasked Stalin before the elite of
the Soviet Union. There was a reason that the Communist movement
made strenuous efforts to keep this address secret. Knowledge of
what Khrushchev said, we can now see, was explosive. As news
spread of that speech, revolts broke out all over Eastern Europe.
They were suppressed but thereafter the Communist world and
especially the Soviet Union entered into an uneven process of
becoming normal participants in the international system. And as
the Soviet Union evolved so did the system that it led. The
progress was fitful and the process is not yet complete,
particularly in Asia, but the trend has been constant as we can
see by looking at the postwar period in 10 year segments.
The high point of the cold war was 1945-55. Joseph Stalin,
history's most accomplished totalitarian, died only in 1953.
While he lived, the Soviet Union was locked in fear as were those
states that copied the Soviet system. Children denounced their
parents, individuals were responsible for the imprisonment or
death of their neighbors. The control of the state over the
individual seemed almost total. But Stalin's methods and the fear
they engendered did not only affect the politics of the Communist
world. It is no accident that during this decade the United
States entered the self-destructive period of McCarthyism as
working colleagues denounced one another and the civil liberties
of all Americans were significantly curbed. The struggle between
Communists and non- Communists in other countries was often
conducted by war to the knife with hundreds of thousands of
innocents harmed or even killed and whole communities destroyed
as a result.
During this period the superpower relationship was largely
marked by the signs of intense confrontation. In retrospect we
can see that the two sides were involved in a struggle to
establish the boundaries of the new postwar order. Major events
were the Communist conquest of China, the Berlin Blockade, the
Korean War, the creation of the two great alliance systems, the
consolidation of Soviet power in Eastern Europe and the
consolidation of American influence in Europe and off-shore Asia.
Efforts by each side to test the boundaries of the postwar
division marked 1955-65. The Soviet Union encouraged militant
Communist parties everywhere and the Communist movement made
gains in such different areas as Latin America and Southeast
Asia. Communists succeeded in gaining total control in Cuba and
war broke out in South Vietnam. Meanwhile, the United States was
engaged in similar efforts to test the postwar boundaries,
primarily through the activities of the CIA. NSC directive 5412/1
of March 12, 1955, for example, authorized the CIA to enter into
a covert war with communism. According to the directive,
operations approved were to include "propaganda, political
action, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including
sabotage, antisabotage, demolition, escape and evasion and
evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states or groups
including assistance to underground resistance movements,
guerrilla and refugee liberation groups." The United States began
to train armies for the day of liberation in Eastern Europe and
China. Training camps were established on U.S. soil. On occasion
Americans found out about this activity inadvertently. On
December 7, 1961, a group of American civilians at Peterson Field
in Colorado Springs, which serves both as a municipal airport and
a U.S. Air Force base, found themselves ordered at gunpoint to
lock themselves inside a hangar. When they looked through the
window, they saw a group of oriental solders who turned out to be
Tibetan guerrillas being trained in a remote part of Colorado. At
government request the major papers in the United States
suppressed any news of this sensational encounter.
Most of these efforts collapsed with the Soviet invasion of
Hungary in 1956 to crush the Hungarian revolution. The man in
charge of the U.S. effort committed suicide a few years later.
The failure of the Communist side in the Korean War and of the
Western side during the Hungarian revolution made clear that the
boundary lines between East and West were being solidified. In
Europe the line between East and West soon became so clear that
no one could doubt where it was or dare to cross it. In Asia the
situation was a little less clear because of the continuing
struggle in Vietnam. But the United States interposed its fleet
in the Taiwan straits, signed a security pact with Japan and
stationed tens of thousands of troops semipermanently in Korea.
The end of the decade witnessed a devastating setback for the
Communist movement as a failed coup in Indonesia brought a savage
response. Perhaps 1/2 million people were slaughtered, and the
Communist party in the fifth most populous state in the world was
no more. The lines in Asia were also solidifying. Only the
continuing struggle in Vietnam blinded us to what was really
happening.
As the lines of division hardened and each side gained more
confidence that its core area of concern was not threatened, the
two superpowers cautiously began to explore, at first very
tentatively, the possibilities for a more normal relationship.
The Cuban Missile Crisis reminded them of the consequences of not
attempting to develop such a relationship. During this period the
two sides signed the Limited Test Ban treaty, they began to
expand trade and exchanges, and they started to institutionalize
arms control negotiations.
The years 1965-75 marked a period in which normalization was
pushed much harder. The two superpowers began to understand that
their special status depended on limiting the power of others as
well as preventing their own arms race from getting out of
control. The nonproliferation treaty was designed to accomplish
the former, and the ABM treaty and the SALT I treaties were
designed to accomplish the latter by putting a cap on the
superpower arms race. The two sides also began to cooperate when
they saw that wars at the periphery might disrupt their own
relationship at the center. So the United States and the Soviet
Union, after arming the parties to the conflict, worked together
to contain the spread of wars in the Middle East in 1967 and 1973
and in South Asia in 1967 and 1971. Although with less success,
the two sides even tried to cooperate to some extent to end the
war in Vietnam.
The rules of the game for superpower involvement in the
Third World were clarified from 1975 to 1985. A comparison of
Soviet behavior in Afghanistan with U.S. behavior in Korea and
Vietnam helps explain this point. The Soviet Union in Afghanistan
acted according to a certain code of conduct, brutal though it
was. Like the United States in Korea and Vietnam, the Soviet
Union used enormous power in Afghanistan but it stopped short of
using its full power. Like the United States in these two earlier
crises, the Soviet Union also did not allow its distress in
Afghanistan and its anger over the actions of its great rival in
feeding the rebellion to end its relationship with the United
States. Like the United States in Korea and Vietnam, the Soviet
Union drew back from decisive military action against neighboring
states supplying the force it was opposing in Afghanistan.
During this same period the United States made clear in
Central America that it was willing to use both legal and illegal
means to prevent a pro-Communist beachhead on the mainland in the
Western Hemisphere. So by the mid-1980s with the lines of
demarcation drawn in Europe and Asia, with attempts to cross
those lines largely defeated, and with the rules of the game
generally established in other parts of the world, the two powers
were in a position to treat one another like normal powers and to
make major gains.
Indeed the U.S. accommodation with China was an indication
that normal diplomacy was returning. The United States treated
China--despite its harsh Communist regime, which was, in fact,
much worse than that of Brezhnev's Soviet Union--no longer like
an ideological rival but as an important player on the diplomatic
chess board. Washington was beginning the process of moving
beyond cold war thinking. It was returning to an earlier or more
traditional geopolitical game. Facilitating this tendency of
ideological opponents treating one another as normal countries
rather than as unapproachable rivals was another important
development. By the early 1970s the Soviet Union had achieved
essential nuclear parity. Each side could destroy the other with
a second strike. It was becoming too dangerous to maintain the
cold war. The ground was prepared for a grand compromise, even a
grand bargain.
At this point someone may assert that the real reason the