The Year that Changed the World

by Michael Meyer

  Among the many problems with this worldview, none was more serious than the simple fact that it was a self-defeating fantasy. As we have seen, the myth that Americans spun around 1989—confront and they will fall—bore little resemblance to how the Cold War actually ended. The regimes of Eastern Europe were indeed rotten at the core. But the push to collapse came less from the outside than from within. Once the containing pressure of the Soviet system was lifted by Mikhail Gorbachev, they essentially imploded. This is not to diminish Ronald Reagan’s contribution to ending the Cold War. To the contrary, it is important to recognize how he did so: not by uncompromising Manichaean confrontation, as many in the Bush administration believed, but by engagement. He embraced Gorbachev as a reformer, a potential partner in peace, and that made all the difference.

  Mistaking cause and effect was the single most critical misreading of the lessons of 1989, and tragically costly. For it was a straight line from the fantasy of Cold War victory to the invasion of Iraq. Convinced that freedom could be won there as easily as it was in Eastern Europe, and that it need only confront the tyrant, the Bush administration scarcely bothered to plan for the aftermath of the war. There was no blueprint for building democracy. Little forethought was given to ruling the country during a transition to self-governance, nor to the hard work of creating institutions of civil society and the rule of law or even a functioning economy. The result was a loss of lives and fortune that will heavily weigh for decades to come.

  Worse, it blinded Americans to the realities of a dramatically changing world. In recent years, the United States behaved less as an unchallengeable superpower than some oddly enfeebled giant, besieged by enemies. It increased defense spending by a quarter of a trillion dollars since 2001—more than the combined military budgets of China, India, Britain, and Russia. It waged a global war on terror despite the lack of subsequent attacks in the United States, and despite clear evidence that well-coordinated international police action is more effective in combating terrorism than aircraft carriers or bunker-buster bombs. It confronted North Korea and Iran—the remaining members of the once-vaunted “Axis of Evil”—as though these geopolitical bit players were existential threats to the nation. It frittered away billions upon billions of dollars, largely without accounting or responsible management, as though military might somehow meant that money grew on trees and that, as vice president Cheney memorably put it, “deficits don’t matter.”

  Along the way, it all but missed the great transformation going on around it—one made possible by the end of the Cold War. In a recent book, The Post-American World, my Newsweek colleague Fareed Zakaria artfully dubbed this the “rise of the rest,” the story of how global economic growth has changed the world. Japan was the first non-Western nation to awaken, then China, India and the rest of Southeast Asia, not to mention the emerging economies of the Americas. Today these newcomers wield substantial power of their own, and their rise makes the world a very different place from what it was even half a decade ago, let alone in 1989. Since the turn of the millennium, the U.S. share of world GDP has declined from 36 percent to 28 percent; that of China, India, Russia and Brazil has more than doubled to 16 percent. Meanwhile, America’s low-cost industrial base and back-office services shifted to factories in Guangzhou and call centers in Hyderabad. China’s foreign exchange reserves rose from $200 billion in 2001 to $1.8 trillion in 2008; India’s have gone from $50 billion to $300 billion. Thanks to low savings at home, the U.S. government relies more and more on overseas borrowing to finance everything from Social Security and Medicaid to the ongoing war in Iraq. Europe has become a bigger market than the United States. The world’s biggest banks are increasingly Arab and Chinese. You have only to look for the world’s tallest buildings to appreciate, symbolically, how much has changed. Forget New York. Think Shanghai.

  The crash of 2008 will not change this fundamental dynamic. As the United States and Europe slide into recession, virtually all global economic growth will come from Asia, possibly for years to come. Though hurt by the crisis, the economic and financial power of China, India and other formerly “emerging” nations will grow relative to that of the United States. All this will accelerate the trend away from the America-centric world that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it will unfold in ways that are difficult to predict. Even amid the worst days of the Iraq war, when the world’s anger at U.S. foreign policy was at fever pitch, people everywhere retained their faith in one thing quintessentially American: its economy. Nothing could rival it as an engine for growth, prosperity and innovation. Its capital markets ruled the world; its entrepreneurial and technological prowess was unchallenged. For nations rich and poor, there was but one path for economic and social advancement. That was the American model.

  By early 2009, that model was widely seen as a sham. As the United States bailed out banks and automakers, the contagion of financial collapse threatened to spread around the world. Like Monarch butterflies fluttering north from Mexico, business and political leaders descended on the little village of Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum. Billed as a gathering of the Earth’s most powerful men and women, it has traditionally served as a celebration of the capitalist way, leavened with talk of corporate responsibility and the greater global good. This year, by contrast, the crisp alpine air was filled with angry shouts and murmurs about the perils of America’s “faith based” economic policies and its destructive “casino capitalism.” For so long, Americans lived under the almost religious illusion that markets were inherently self-correcting and self-regulating, that good governance was unnecessary if not an outright nuisance. Yet suddenly it all came crashing down. This, too, was a legacy of 1989. Self-proclaimed victory in the Cold War not only made the United States the sole superpower. It psychologically freed the country to do as it saw fit, in whatever realm it chose. Not only was America unbound from the rules of the old world; it was unbound from its own. It awoke, abruptly and unhappily, to a new world, unfamiliar but very much of its own making.

  Against this backdrop, America’s enduring obsession with military supremacy—the default position of Cold War confrontation, with its eternal quest for new adversaries—seems dangerously dated, if not wholly out of touch with the new reality. The rise of the rest has created new rivals but few enemies. Most would be better viewed as partners, for the challenges of this new world are primarily those of collaboration. How to revive the economy and keep the great global boom rolling into the coming decades? How to handle the politics of global prosperity? Growing populations and rising wealth place unprecedented stress on the earth’s resources. We see it in the volatile prices of oil, food and commodities. Malthus is back in vogue. Everything we have long taken for granted seems suddenly in short supply: energy, clean air and freshwater, all that nourishes us and supports our modern way of life. Climate change and environmental degradation threaten the very future of the planet. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, rightly calls this the defining issue of our age. Yes, Al Qaeda remains a challenge. But it is not remotely on the same scale as the threat of global warming or worldwide economic meltdown.

  This world, too, requires American leadership. Yet increasingly, the converse is also true: in a changed world, the United States can accomplish little without the partnership or cooperation of the rest. Americans sense this. Polls show that less than 40 percent believe the United Nations, for example, is a particularly effective organization. Nonetheless, a whopping 79 percent believe that U.S. foreign policy should be conducted in concert with it. This is not idealism. It is pragmatism: some problems are simply too big, too complicated, to be dealt with alone. Leslie Gelb summed it up in his recent book Power Rules: “The reality is this: succeed together or fail apart.”

  America remains the indispensable nation so long as it sees the world as it is and operates in the realm of reality, rather than self-delusion. One of the smartest commentators I know, the historian Tony Judt, not long ag
o wrote an essay entitled “What Have We Learned, If Anything?” In it, he warned of the dangers of “mismemory” or, worse, the deliberate rewriting of memory (not unlike the onetime overlords of the Soviet empire) to shape the future. “In the wake of 1989,” he said, “with boundless confidence and insufficient reflection, we put the twentieth century behind us and strode boldly into its successor swaddled in self-serving half-truths: the triumph of the West, the end of History, the unipolar American moment.” If there is a real enemy, he concluded, it is less the rogues’ gallery of Washington’s “bad guys” than America’s ignorance of itself and the past—a prescription, according to Judt, for self-defeat.

  America will sort out its troubles. The country does that well, better than most others. But it begins with stock-taking—going back to where things went wrong and facing problems squarely. Nations, like individuals, occasionally need a reality check. Mine grew partly from that encounter with a Russian soldier smoking a cigarette on a garbage heap in Berlin, spitting at the feet of my arrogance. For me, it was the beginning of understanding. As a nation, on the twentieth anniversary of the end of Cold War, Americans should look hard at 1989. It was, truly, the pivotal moment, the end of something momentous but also, and more important, a beginning—a year that changed the world, the United States included. It’s time to fully understand just how, and why, and move on.

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  I wrote this book to tell a story, largely unknown, and to do so simply and straightforwardly, in plain language for ordinary people. I would not presume to call it definitive history; this book might better be thought of merely as a firsthand account of the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  Unusually among foreign correspondents, I was on scene for most of the events described, with few exceptions. My beat for Newsweek ran from Germany through every country of the East. Most other news organizations, by contrast, divided assignments among a few (and in some cases many) correspondents.

  That is at once a strength and a weakness. If I can say with a certain authority how things happened on the ground, or at least how I saw them happen, I cannot claim the same about events elsewhere. I was not in Washington, reporting from inside the White House or the State Department. Nor do I have much sense, firsthand, of how Americans at home perceived them. I didn’t watch U.S. television. I read contemporary news accounts only when I could get them—not easy in an Eastern Europe cut off from the West, before the days of the Internet. I have since done considerable research to fill the gaps. But this book’s strength, in the end, derives from its eyewitness experience.

  Last, it goes without saying that the views expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of my employers, past, present or future.

  CHAPTER 1

  It is no revelation that George W. Bush modeled his presidency on Ronald Reagan’s. Lou Cannon and Carl M. Cannon make perhaps the best case in their biography, Reagan’s Disciple, 2008, in which they describe the Reagan legacy as the “gold standard” for Bush’s own. I also recommend Steven Hayward’s Lion at the Gate, 2005, as well as a New York Times Magazine article, “Reagan’s Son,” by Bill Keller, dated January 26, 2003, seven weeks before the invasion of Iraq—at which point, the Cannons argue, Bush broke with the Reagan model.

  Quotes attributed to the president are drawn from transcripts of his speeches and remarks. Among others: Remarks Announcing the End of Major Combat Operations in Iraq Aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, May 1, 2003; Remarks at the Twentieth Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, November 6, 2003; Eulogy at the National Funeral Service for Ronald Wilson Reagan at the National Cathedral in Washington, June 11, 2004; Speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, October 6, 2005; Commencement Address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, May 27, 2006; Remarks at the Dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial, June 12, 2007; Remarks to Conservative Union at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, February 8, 2008.

  I drew additional background from contemporary news accounts, including “Raze Berlin Wall, Reagan Urges Soviet” by Gerald M. Boyd, the New York Times, June 13, 1987, as well as retrospectives on the twentieth anniversary of the speech: Bild, “The Great Speech That Changed the World”; Associated Press, “Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Speech Turns 20”; Time, “20 Years After ‘Tear Down This Wall’ ”; American Conservative, review of Rise of the Vulcans, by Georgie Anne Geyer, June 7, 2004.

  For George H. W. Bush’s reaction to the fall of the Wall, see Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War, 1993. Peter Robinson’s fascinating book, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, 2003, was a key source for the background on Reagan’s immortal speech. Additional references: Hoover Digest, “Tearing Down That Wall,” by Peter M. Robinson, reprinted from the Weekly Standard, June 23, 1997. Also by Robinson, “Why Reagan Matters,” Speech to the Commonwealth Club, January 7, 2004. Ronald Reagan: Remarks at the Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin, June 12, 1987; Address to the Students of Moscow University, May 31, 1988.

  I cite James Mann’s masterly history of the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy and its ideological antecedents, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, 2004, further elaborated in “Tear Down That Myth,” a New York Times op-ed, June 10, 2007. An excellent analysis of Ronald Reagan’s transition from intransigent Cold War warrior to flexible partner in peace can be found in Bradley Lightbody’s The Cold War, 1999.

  For the ultimate indictment of communism, I refer to Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, Mikhail Gorbachev, 1987. “Chernobyl turned me into a different person,” Gorbachev writes in his book Manifesto for the Earth, 2006. The higher the future Soviet leader rose in the party hierarchy, the more clearly he saw the gravity of the social and economic crisis gripping the country: how heavy industry devoted mainly to military production was not only fueling an arms race and beggaring the civilian population but was, quite literally, poisoning the nation in its environmental effects. Chernobyl, as he saw it, was only the tip of the iceberg of a much deeper problem, propelling him to think differently about everything, from state policies on secrecy and information to Soviet foreign policy.

  As for the account of the evening of November 9, 1989, at Checkpoint Charlie, I was there, on the Eastern side, watching events unfold. For further details on Gunter Schabowski’s press conference, from 6:53 p.m. to 7:01 p.m., see the transcript filed as Document No. 8 at the Cold War History Project. The exchanges between Egon Krenz and Gunter Schabowski are based on interviews with both men, Krenz in 1990 and most particularly Schabowski in March 1999. The reporter who asked the fatal question was a friend, the British journalist and eminent literary critic Daniel Johnson. He, too, deserves a measure of credit for bringing down the Wall.

  CHAPTER 2

  My travels along the Wall and to East Berlin, at least as they relate to this chapter, took place in the fall of 1988 and early 1989 and culminated in a February cover story for Newsweek International. I spoke to diplomats, government officials on both sides of the Wall, analysts, polling experts, academics and many, many ordinary people from both East and West. To my shame, I began writing the article convinced that the Wall would come down within a year or two—and ended, persuaded by my largely West German sources, with an embrace of the conventional wisdom that it would be around for decades, if not forever.

  Basic facts about the Wall are drawn from many sources, among them: The Wall, Press and Information, Office of Land Berlin, 2000/2001; Bilanz der Todesopfer, Checkpoint Charlie Museum, 1999; Die Berliner Mauer, Fleming/Koch, 1999; Encyclopedia Britannica, Berlin Wall; a variety of Web sites pertaining to the Berlin Wall. Other useful references include Frederick Taylor’s fine history The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–1989, 2006; Peter Wyden’s tour de force Wall: The Inside Story of Divided Berlin, 1989, which amo
ng other things is the source of the Allensbach data on West German attitudes toward the Wall and reunification; William F. Buckley Jr., The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 2004. One of the best travelogues of this genre ever written is Anthony Bailey’s The Edge of the Forest, a reporter-at-large feature published in the June 27, 1983, New Yorker.

  For the “butcher’s bill” on the Cold War, great credit is owed to the Brookings Institution and its comprehensive Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940, 1998, compiled by Stephen I. Schwartz and his research team. See also “The Hidden Costs of Our Nuclear Arsenal,” Schwartz, June 30, 1998, Brookings Publications; “U.S. Military Spending in the Cold War Era,” Robert Higgs, Policy Analysis, November 30, 1988; We All Lost the Cold War, Richard Lebow and Janice Stein, Princeton University Press, 1994; “Four Trillion Dollars and Counting,” the Journal of Atomic Scientists, 1995; The Cold War, Martin Walker, 1993; The Black Book of Communism, 1997. Statistics on casualties in Cold War conflicts drawn from Warfare and Armed Conflict. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “The Chance for Peace,” a speech delivered to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953, should be required reading for contemporary policymakers.

  Anyone who traveled in the East bloc, and to East Berlin in particular, will be familiar with the phenomenon of “sticky” air and the gestalt of a communist police state. For those who are not, I recommend Anna Funder’s Stasiland, 2003. A series of popular movies, growing out of what the Germans today call Ostalgia, or nostalgia for the old East, capture something of its spirit, among them The Lives of Others. I am grateful to Wikipedia and its wonderful link to GDR jokes. The DDR Museum, on Karl-Liebknecht Strasse in Berlin, offers a vivid evocation of daily life in the former East Germany.