Authors: Henry Kissinger
Reagan was convinced that Communist intransigence was based more on ignorance than on ill will, more on misunderstanding than on hostility. Unlike Nixon, who thought that a calculation of self-interest could bring about accommodation between the United States and the Soviet Union, Reagan believed the conflict was likely to end with the realization by the adversary of the superiority of American principles. In 1984, on the appointment of the Communist Party veteran Konstantin Chernenko as top Soviet leader, Reagan confided to his diary, “
I have a gut feeling I’d like to talk
to him about our problems man to man and see if I could convince him there would be a material benefit to the Soviets if they’d join the family of nations, etc.”
When Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Chernenko one year later, Reagan’s optimism mounted. He told associates of his dream to escort the new Soviet leader on a tour of a working-class American neighborhood. As a biographer recounted, Reagan envisioned that “
the helicopter would descend
, and Reagan would invite Gorbachev to knock on doors and ask the residents ‘what they think of our system.’ The workers would tell him how wonderful it was to live in America.” All this would persuade the Soviet Union to join the global move toward democracy, and this in turn would produce peace—because “
governments which rest upon the consent
of the governed do not wage war on their neighbors”—a core principle of Wilson’s view of international order.
Applying his vision to the control of nuclear weapons, Reagan, at the Reykjavík summit with Gorbachev in 1986, proposed to eliminate all nuclear delivery systems while retaining and building up antimissile systems. Such an outcome would achieve one of Reagan’s oft-proclaimed goals to eliminate the prospect of nuclear war by doing away with the offensive capability for it and containing violators of the agreement by missile defense systems. The idea went beyond the scope of Gorbachev’s imagination, which is why he bargained strenuously over a niggling reservation about confining missile defense system tests “to the laboratory.” (The proposal to eliminate nuclear delivery systems was in any event beyond practicality in that it would have been bitterly opposed by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterrand, who were convinced that Europe could not be defended without nuclear weapons and who treated their independent deterrents as an ultimate insurance policy.) Years later, I asked the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin why the Soviets had not offered a compromise on the testing issue. He replied, “Because it never occurred to us that Reagan would simply walk out.”
Gorbachev sought to counter Reagan’s vision with a concept of Soviet reform. But by the 1980s, the “balance of forces,” which Soviet leaders had never tired of invoking over the decades of their rule, had turned against them. Four decades of imperial expansion in all directions could not be sustained on the basis of an unworkable economic model. The United States, despite its divisions and vacillations, had preserved the essential elements of a situation of strength; over two generations it had built an informal anti-Soviet coalition of every other major industrial center and most of the developing world. Gorbachev realized that the Soviet Union could not sustain its prevailing course, but he underestimated the fragility of the Soviet system. His calls for reform—
glasnost
(publicity) and
perestroika
(restructuring)—unleashed forces too disorganized for genuine reform and too demoralized to continue totalitarian leadership, much as Kennan had predicted half a century earlier.
Reagan’s idealistic commitment to democracy alone could not have produced such an outcome; strong defense and economic policies, a shrewd analysis of Soviet weaknesses, and an unusually favorable alignment of external circumstances all played a role in the success of his policies. Yet without Reagan’s idealism—bordering sometimes on a repudiation of history—the end of the Soviet challenge could not have occurred amidst such a global affirmation of a democratic future.
Forty years earlier and for the decades since, it was thought that the principal obstacle to a peaceful world order was the Soviet Union. The corollary was that the collapse of Communism—imagined, if at all, in some distant future—would bring with it an era of stability and goodwill. It soon became apparent that history generally operates in longer cycles. Before a new international order could be constructed, it was necessary to deal with the debris of the Cold War.
T
HIS TASK FELL TO
G
EORGE
H. W. B
USH,
who managed America’s predominance with moderation and wisdom. Patrician in upbringing in Connecticut, yet choosing to make his fortune in Texas, the more elemental, entrepreneurial part of the United States, and with wide experience in all levels of government, Bush dealt with great skill with a stunning succession of crises testing both the application of America’s values and the reach of its vast power. Within months of his taking office, the Tiananmen upheaval in China challenged America’s basic values but also the importance for the global equilibrium of preserving the U.S.-China relationship. Having been head of the American liaison office in Beijing (before the establishment of formal relations), Bush navigated in a manner that maintained America’s principles
while retaining the prospect of ultimate cooperation. He managed the unification of Germany—heretofore considered a probable cause of war—by a skillful diplomacy facilitated by his decision not to exploit Soviet embarrassment at the collapse of its empire. In that spirit, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Bush rejected all proposals to fly to Berlin to celebrate this demonstration of the collapse of Soviet policy.
The adroit manner in which Bush brought the Cold War to a close obscured the domestic disputes through which the U.S. effort had been sustained and which would characterize the challenges of the next stage. As the Cold War receded, the American consensus held that the main work of conversion had been achieved. A peaceful world order would now unfold, so long as the democracies took care to assist in the final wave of democratic transformations in countries still under authoritarian rule. The ultimate Wilsonian vision would be fulfilled. Free political and economic institutions would spread and eventually submerge outdated antagonisms in a broader harmony.
In that spirit, Bush defeated Iraqi aggression in Kuwait during the first Gulf War by forging a coalition of the willing through the UN, the first joint action involving great powers since the Korean War; he stopped military operations when the limit that had been authorized by UN resolutions had been reached (perhaps, as former ambassador to the UN, he sought to apply the lesson of General MacArthur’s decision to cross the dividing line between the two Koreas after his victory at Inchon).
For a brief period, the global consensus behind the American-led defeat of Saddam Hussein’s military conquest of Kuwait in 1991 seemed to vindicate the perennial American hope for a rules-based international order. In Prague in November 1990, Bush invoked a “
commonwealth of freedom
,” which would be governed by the rule of law; it would be “a moral community united in its dedication to free ideals.” Membership in this commonwealth would be open to all; it might someday become universal. As such the “
great and growing strength
of the commonwealth of freedom” would “forge for all nations a new world order far more stable and secure than any we have known.” The United States and its allies would move “
beyond containment and to a policy
of active engagement.”
Bush’s term was cut short by electoral defeat in 1992, in some sense because he ran as a foreign policy president while his opponent, Bill Clinton, appealed to a war-weary public, promising to focus on America’s domestic agenda. Nonetheless, the newly elected President rapidly reasserted a foreign policy vocation comparable to that of Bush. Clinton expressed the confidence of the era when, in a 1993 address to the UN General Assembly, he described his foreign policy concept as not containment but “
enlargement
.” “Our overriding purpose,” he announced, “must be to expand and strengthen the world’s community of market-based democracies.” In this view, because the principles of political and economic liberty were universal “from Poland to Eritrea, from Guatemala to South Korea,” their spread would require no force. Describing an enterprise consisting of enabling an inevitable historical evolution, Clinton pledged that American policy would aspire to “
a world of thriving democracies
that cooperate with each other and live in peace.”
When Secretary of State Warren Christopher attempted to apply the enlargement theory to the People’s Republic of China by making economic ties conditional on modifications within the Chinese system, he encountered a sharp rebuff. The Chinese leaders insisted that relations with the United States could only be conducted on a geostrategic basis, not (as had been proposed) on the basis of China’s progress toward political liberalization. By the third year of his presidency, the Clinton approach to world order reverted to less insistent practice.
Meanwhile, the enlargement concept encountered a much more militant adversary. Jihadism sought to spread its message and assaulted Western values and institutions, particularly those of the United States, as the principal obstacle. A few months before Clinton’s General Assembly speech, an international group of extremists, including one
American citizen, bombed the World Trade Center in New York City. Their secondary target, had the first been thwarted, was the United Nations Secretariat building. The Westphalian concept of the state and international law, because it was based on rules not explicitly prescribed in the Quran, was an abomination to this movement. Similarly objectionable was democracy for its capacity to legislate separately from sharia law. America, in the view of the jihadist forces, was an oppressor of Muslims seeking to implement their own universal mission. The challenge broke into the open with the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. In the Middle East, at least, the end of the Cold War ushered in not a hoped-for time of democratic consensus but a new age of ideological and military confrontation.
After an anguishing discussion of the “lessons of Vietnam,” equally intense dilemmas recapitulated themselves three decades later with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both conflicts had their origins in a breakdown of international order. For America, both ended in withdrawal.
A
FGHANISTAN
Al-Qaeda, having issued a fatwa in 1998 calling for the indiscriminate killing of Americans and Jews everywhere, enjoyed a sanctuary in Afghanistan, whose governing authorities, the Taliban, refused to expel the group’s leadership and fighters. An American response to the attack on American territory was inevitable and widely so understood around the world.
A new challenge opened up almost immediately: how to establish international order when the principal adversaries are non-state organizations that defend no specific territory and reject established principles of legitimacy.
The Afghan war began on a note of national unanimity and international consensus. Prospects for a rules-based international order seemed vindicated when NATO, for the first time in its history, applied Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty—stipulating that “an armed attack against one or more [NATO ally] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” Nine days after the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush dispatched an ultimatum to the Taliban authorities of Afghanistan, then harboring al-Qaeda: “
Deliver to United States authorities
all the leaders of al Qaeda who hide in your land … Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps, so we can make sure they are no longer operating.” When the Taliban failed to comply, the United States and its allies launched a war whose aims Bush described, on October 7, in similarly limited terms: “
These carefully targeted actions
are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.”
Initial warnings about Afghanistan’s history as the “graveyard of empires” appeared unfounded. After a rapid effort led by American, British, and allied Afghan forces, the Taliban were deposed from power. In December 2001, an international conference in Bonn, Germany, proclaimed a provisional Afghan government with Hamid Karzai as its head and set up a process for convening a
loya jirga
(a traditional tribal council) to design and ratify postwar Afghan institutions. The allied war aims seemed achieved.
The participants in the Bonn negotiations optimistically asserted a vast vision: “
the establishment of a broad-based
, gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic and fully representative government.” In 2003, a UN Security Council resolution authorized the expansion of the NATO International Security Assistance Force
to support the Afghan Transitional Authority
and its successors in the maintenance of security in areas of Afghanistan
outside of Kabul and its environs, so that the Afghan Authorities as well as the personnel of the United Nations … can operate in a secure environment.
The central premise of the American and allied effort became “rebuilding Afghanistan” by means of a democratic, pluralistic, transparent Afghan government whose writ ran across the entire country and an Afghan national army capable of assuming responsibility for security on a national basis. With a striking idealism, these efforts were imagined to be comparable to the construction of democracy in Germany and Japan after World War II.
No institutions in the history
of Afghanistan or of any part of it provided a precedent for such a broad-based effort. Traditionally, Afghanistan has been less a state in the conventional sense than a geographic expression for an area never brought under the consistent administration of any single authority. For most of recorded history, Afghan tribes and sects have been at war with each other, briefly uniting to resist invasion or to launch marauding raids against their neighbors. Elites in Kabul might undertake periodic experiments with parliamentary institutions, but outside the capital an ancient tribal code of honor predominated. Unification of Afghanistan has been achieved by foreigners only unintentionally, when the tribes and sects coalesce in opposition to an invader.