American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  Iran-Contra, as the Reagan administration operations became known after their revelation, accorded in methods and morality with the general character of American foreign policy during the Cold War. But Vietnam, Watergate, and the congressional effort during the 1970s to assert control over the intelligence community had at least temporarily delegitimized off-the-books, shadow-government operations. The Iran-Contra revelations led to a sharp drop in public support for the president. The failure of the covert program to achieve its goals—when it became public, the Sandinistas were still in power, the Contras had made little military progress, and more Americans were being held hostage in Lebanon than before the arms sales to Iran began—added to the widespread sense that something very wrong had been done.

  Yet the reaction to the Iran-Contra revelations in the end proved remarkably muted. Secord, North, and other key players in “Project Democracy” proved adept in defending themselves during televised congressional hearings, portraying themselves as patriots who had risked their careers in pursuit of worthy goals, bolstered by support from Republican members of Congress who began to realize that they could salvage some partisan advantage from the disaster. (Casey, the central figure in the affair along with Reagan, developed a brain tumor and died before being called to account for his actions.) For his part, Reagan proved almost pathetic as he repeatedly denied established facts, resisted taking responsibility, and finally confessed to investigators, after changing his story several times, that he could not remember what he did or did not approve.

  Few members of Congress displayed much interest in pursuing impeachment charges against the president, who had only a year left in office, even though arguably his knowing defiance of Congress and the law in the execution of foreign policy represented a more serious threat to constitutional government than Nixon’s illegal political skullduggery and inept cover-ups. Leaders of both parties had no stomach for another prolonged period of uncertainty and national humiliation like that which preceded Nixon’s resignation. The Democrats, having captured control of both houses of Congress in the 1986 election, already had the power to block whatever remained of the Reagan revolution. In 1987, the Senate rejected Reagan’s nomination of the extremely conservative Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, the first such turndown in seventeen years, and the next year the House again refused further aid to the Contras. Reagan never regained the huge public support he had before Iran-Contra, but he remained a popular president to the end, a measure of how little the citizenry seemed to care about strict adherence to the Constitution by its leaders or the use of irregular methods in the defense of empire.

  The Cold War Ends

  As Reagan stumbled through the last years of his presidency, he made significant advances in one immensely important area, the relationship of the United States with the Soviet Union. The dramatic improvement in Soviet-American relations occurred largely as a result of changes within the Soviet Union, particularly the coming to power of a new generation of communist officials, led by Mikhail Gorbachev. But Reagan’s openness to serious talks with Soviet leaders and his inclination for bold gestures, shared with Gorbachev, contributed to what turned out to be the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

  Gorbachev, who in March 1985 became the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party at the age of fifty-four, brought much more dynamic leadership and a different set of assumptions to the post than the aged leaders he succeeded. Gorbachev’s experience as a regional and then national leader convinced him that the Soviet Union had to undertake major reforms to stop its internal decay, propel its economy, and improve the daily lives of its citizens. That, in turn, he believed, required improving its international relations and checking the arms race, which absorbed enormous resources that otherwise could be devoted to the civilian economy. Gorbachev did not fear the United States, confident that the huge arsenal of atomic weapons and missiles that the Soviet Union had built up ensured that no nation would attack it. Over time he even moved away from the axiomatic Soviet belief that the security of the nation required a buffer of allied communist countries.

  Soon after taking office, Gorbachev announced a unilateral Soviet moratorium on testing nuclear weapons and sought out a summit with Reagan. At their first meeting, in November 1985 in Geneva, the two leaders failed to come up with an arms control pact but agreed to further summits. The April 1986 nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl made painfully obvious the weaknesses in Soviet technology and, along with a drop in world oil prices, led Gorbachev to more urgently seek reforms in domestic life and foreign relations. At a second summit, in Reykjavík, Iceland, in October 1986, Gorbachev and Reagan came very close to an agreement to cut their countries’ strategic nuclear arsenals in half and eliminate all intermediate-range missiles in Europe, only to see their effort break down over their disagreement about Reagan’s SDI plan.

  Gorbachev kept pushing to wind down the arms race, convincing the Warsaw Pact of Eastern European nations to declare that it would never start a war nor make first use of nuclear weapons and dropping his insistence that any agreement on intermediate-range missiles include restrictions on SDI research. The Reagan administration continued to maintain military and ideological pressure on the Soviet Union. It kept funding the mujahideen forces in Afghanistan, even after the Soviets privately indicated their intention to withdraw. And the president bluntly challenged Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. But Reagan remained eager to find a way to reduce the nuclear arms race and, increasingly, to improve relations with the Soviet Union more broadly. As a result, he found himself publicly attacked by veteran Republican foreign policy experts like Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, who had generally been considered more moderate and “realist” than Reagan but who opposed the elimination of nuclear weapons in Europe and remained skeptical that the Soviet Union was undergoing fundamental change.

  In December 1987, Gorbachev and Reagan signed a treaty calling for the elimination of all intermediate-range nuclear weapons. Though the countries remained armed to the gills with atomic bombs, for the first time they agreed to get rid of an entire class of weapons. Political conservatives initially tried to prevent ratification of the agreement but failed to gain much support in opposing the leader of their own movement. Ultimately the Senate ratified the pact with only five no votes.

  The next moves toward the ending of the Cold War almost all occurred at the Soviet initiative. In February 1988, Gorbachev publicly declared that the Soviet Union would be withdrawing from Afghanistan. The following fall, in a speech at the United Nations, he announced a large-scale reduction in the size of the Soviet armed forces and a major withdrawal of troops from Eastern Europe and repudiated the doctrine, put forth by Brezhnev, that the Soviet Union had the right to interfere in the affairs of other socialist countries. Reagan acknowledged the transformation taking place in the Soviet Union when, during a visit to Moscow, he said he no longer considered it an evil empire.

  During the last months of the Reagan presidency and the first months after George H. W. Bush took office, the United States essentially stood on the sidelines as the Soviet bloc underwent cataclysmic changes. Gorbachev’s economic reforms had failed to improve the lives of Soviet citizens, while his political reforms allowed his opponents to organize. His rejection of interference in the affairs of other countries opened the door for revolutionary change in Eastern Europe. In Poland, ongoing economic and political problems led the communist government to open talks with leaders of the opposition Solidarity movement. In May 1989, the government held partially free elections in which Solidarity defeated the Communist Party. Gorbachev supported the formation of a power-sharing government, a signal to oppositionalists in other Eastern European countries that it would be possible to peacefully overturn communist regimes. In Hungary, members of the Communist Party took the lead in transforming the government into a multiparty democracy. In East Germany, authorities did not use force, as they had in the past, to s
uppress mass demonstrations. Starting with protest marches in Leipzig in October 1989, in only a matter of weeks popular pressure led to the ouster of the longtime head of the Communist Party, Erich Honecker. Within hours of a decision by the new communist leadership to end travel restrictions, crowds began pouring through checkpoints into West Berlin. Not long afterward, the physical dismantling of the Wall began. In a period of just six months, all the communist regimes in Eastern Europe lost power, in every case except Romania without bloodshed.

  The Bush administration hoped for the integration of Eastern Europe into existing capitalist financial and political arrangements, but the lead came from West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who soon after the breach of the Berlin Wall laid out a plan for the reunification of Germany. Initially, Soviet and most European leaders opposed joining the two states, fearing the power and potential threat of a united Germany. But the Europeans ultimately dropped their objections (the French only after Germany agreed to adopt a common European currency). So did the Soviet Union, as Gorbachev came to see reunification as inevitable and faced increasing problems at home, with republics in his own country pressing for independence. Gorbachev even agreed to allow a reunified Germany to stay in NATO. On October 3, 1990, West Germany absorbed East Germany.

  The end of the Soviet Union itself came not all that long after. An August 1991 coup by communist leaders opposed to Gorbachev’s reforms fell apart after three days as a result of popular opposition, including large demonstrations led by Boris Yeltsin, who headed the Russian Federation. But Gorbachev never fully regained power, which quickly devolved to the individual Soviet republics. Accepting the new reality, on December 25, 1991, Gorbachev issued a decree dissolving the Soviet Union and resigned from office. In many of the former Soviet republics the communists quickly lost power or reorganized themselves under a new banner (and sometimes a new ideology as well). Over the dizzying period of two years, the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and communist hegemony in Eastern Europe all came to an end.

  The winding down of the Cold War facilitated the resolution of regional conflicts that had been proxy wars between the Soviet Union and the United States or at least had been shaped by the superpower rivalry. In Africa, the Soviet Union and Cuba pulled their advisers and troops out of Ethiopia, and the United States and the Soviet Union helped work out agreements under which foreign forces (by then largely from Cuba) withdrew from Angola. South Africa, at that point still white-led, accepted the independence of Namibia, an area it had long administered and effectively treated as its own. Profound change soon came to South Africa itself. With the Cold War over, South African defenders of apartheid and their allies in the United States no longer could justify their stance as an anticommunist necessity, easing the way for the victory of the decades-long struggle against the race-caste system and the adoption of genuine democracy. In Asia, the Soviet Union pressured Vietnam to pull its troops out of Cambodia, where they had overthrown the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, leading to the United Nations’ creation of a new government. In Central America, James Baker, Bush’s secretary of state, reversed course in Nicaragua, abandoning the Contras in return for a pledge from the Sandinista government to hold a free election. A coalition led by independent reformer Violeta Chamorro beat the Sandinistas, who peacefully ceded power (giving the lie to the intellectual justification for Reagan’s embrace of nondemocratic anticommunist forces in the third world). In El Salvador, Baker, with cooperation from the Soviet Union, pressured the right-wing government to end its war against the FMLN. Some regional disputes remained intractable, including the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the tensions between India and Pakistan, but with the world no longer organized around superpower rivalry, many difficult long-standing conflicts came to a rapid resolution.

  For four decades, the Cold War had structured economic, political, and military relationships around the world. For the United States, it had been the defining element in its foreign policy, the impetus for two major wars, and the occasion for an unprecedented level of peacetime military mobilization. The Cold War had shaped domestic life in myriad ways, narrowing the spectrum of political debate, justifying the expansion of the government, infusing the culture, and being used as an argument for particular policies in regard to race relations, sexuality, family life, and spending priorities. With the Cold War ending in an unexpected, rapid fashion, the United States faced an unusual moment of national redefinition, as one era of its history ended and another began.

  PART IV

  The New World Order (1990–2000)

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  “I’m Running Out of Demons”

  Americans felt a thrill watching television coverage of German crowds tearing down the Berlin Wall. Yet there was something anticlimactic about the end of the Cold War. The four-decades-long contest ended without a decisive battle or a dramatic final engagement. American troops entered no cities as conquerors and took part in no victory parades. Unlike after the Civil War or World War I, when the mass citizen armies raised for battle rapidly dispersed, the United States did not demilitarize after the Cold War. Many Americans felt that their country had won, but they did not have the feeling of triumph that came after the great military engagements of the past. The United States prevailed by staying in place as the Soviet Union transformed itself and then dissolved. The contradictions of the Soviet system, broad changes in the global economy and communications, and the rise of a new generation of communist leaders ended the Cold War, not something the United States did.

  Bereft of the satisfactions of martial victory, some Reagan supporters tried to make the case that the United States actively defeated the Soviet Union by forcing it into an arms race it could not afford and bleeding it in Afghanistan. Those drains of funds and lives did contribute to the exhaustion of the Soviet system but did not fundamentally cause the collapse of a regime that had been able to survive far, far worse in the past. In an era of media omnipresence, Americans saw with their own eyes the Berlin Wall come down and the Soviet Union dissolve without any U.S. involvement, making narratives of national triumph difficult to sustain.

  Without victory, at least in the usual form, the end of the Cold War left many Americans befuddled about what was to come next. Intellectuals, politicians, government officials, and financiers plunged into discussions about the meaning of the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and what post–Cold War policies the United States should pursue. But most ordinary people seemed to pay little attention, more concerned with their day-to-day lives and, starting in 1990, with the problems they confronted as the country slipped into a recession. While considerable debate took place over specific foreign policies, particularly the decision to go to war in the Persian Gulf, the United States adopted a post–Cold War military and diplomatic stance without thorough national deliberation, as elected and unelected leaders set the trajectory for a new phase of American empire.

  “The End of History?”

  While it proved hard to argue that the United States had defeated the Soviet Union rather than outlasted it, the claim that Western liberalism had proved itself the best system of social organization won greater traction. The extraordinary attention and praise for a 1989 article by Francis Fukuyama, an obscure State Department official, entitled “The End of History?” provided evidence of its appeal, not only in conservative circles (the article appeared in the conservative journal The National Interest), but also more broadly. Fukuyama contended, “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” With the defeat of fascism and communism as major world forces, Fukuyama argued, the combination of liberal democracy and mass consumerism that characterized the developed Western nations had become the only significant idea and ideal for the
organization of society. While other organizing principles continued to exist, like nationalism and religious fundamentalism, they lacked, in Fukuyama’s view, the potential for universal appeal. It would take time, he acknowledged, for actual social practices to catch up with ideology, and some strife might continue in the less developed world, but essentially the social evolution of the species had reached its culmination and endpoint with the intellectual triumph of liberal democracy.

  Fukuyama’s article, like Jeane Kirkpatrick’s claims about the relative likelihood of left-wing and right-wing autocracies evolving toward democracy, turned out to be wrong in its view of the future, but its bold assertion, confident air, and message of triumph made it one of the most influential essays of its time. The core idea that Fukuyama put forth already had been gaining ground in the policymaking circles of the major capitalist countries: that history had proved there was no viable alternative to the free market and parliamentary democracy for a successful society. Seizing the moment, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and U.S. government began promoting what came to be called the “Washington Consensus,” a version of Cold War triumphalism that argued not only for capitalism as the one best path for social development but for a specific brand of capitalism in which the state would play a minimal role in regulating the economy, distributing wealth, and controlling the flow of capital and goods across borders. “Consensus” backers argued that governments should reduce trade barriers, allow foreign investment and increased imports, privatize state enterprises, maintain fiscal discipline even if it meant imposing austerity measures, end subsidies for favored industries and in general deregulate, and provide strong legal protections for property rights. These policies, promoted as self-evident wisdom, won broad acceptance in the developing world in part because international lending agencies made their offers of loans and refinancing contingent on their adoption. (China and India, the most important rising powers, with the ability to finance their own growth, proved less willing to embrace the favored program of capitalist reform than less powerful nations.)