Worldmaking

by David Milne

  George Kennan was thrilled by Gorbachev’s ascension but fretted that the Reagan administration was incapable of grasping this opportunity, just as Eisenhower had failed to act decisively following Stalin’s death in 1953. In October 1986, Kennan recorded a diary entry that imagined him in conversation with this new leader: “You could give in to us on every point at issue in our negotiations; you would still encounter nothing but a stony hostility in official American circles; and your concessions would be exploited by the President as evidence that he had frightened you into compliance; and that the only language you understood was the language of force.”66

  Kennan was correct in one sense. Many conservatives did indeed attribute Gorbachev’s shift in direction to the pressure Reagan applied on Moscow through the radical hike in U.S. defense spending and the launch of the SDI. But he was wrong in another. Reagan’s actual response to Gorbachev’s ascension was far removed from the “stony hostility” that Kennan feared inevitable.67

  Over the course of a brief but historic encounter in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev established sufficient trust to propose the elimination of all nuclear weapons by the year 2000.68 The suggestion was quickly scuppered—to the relief of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and many within the administration—by Reagan’s refusal to shelve the SDI program, which Gorbachev fairly pointed out was not in the spirit of things. That such an idea was even seriously discussed was remarkable all the same, and it paved the way for nuclear arms negotiations of a more substantive nature than SALT I. The 1987 INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty was the first ever to deliver a real cut in the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals: Moscow dismantled 1,836 missiles and the United States 859. This caused a predictable outcry from conservatives, among them Richard Perle, William Buckley, and Jesse Helms. Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus derided Reagan as “a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.”69

  More to their liking was Reagan’s rousing demand in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in June 1987: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Both Secretary of State George Shultz and National Security Adviser Colin Powell had pleaded unsuccessfully with Reagan to delete these words, which they viewed as unnecessarily provocative in light of Gorbachev’s moderation.70 But “tear down this wall!” was an increasingly rare bit of cheer for the ideologues. Moscow and Washington cooperated in the UN Security Council on the issue of arranging a cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War, East-West cultural exchanges proliferated, and Moscow raised the cap on Jewish emigration quotas. Gorbachev drew huge crowds of admirers when he visited the United States in December 1987, creating a phenomenon soon tagged “Gorby fever.” In May 1988, Reagan visited Moscow, informing his hosts that his earlier characterization of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” no longer held true.71 Remarkable things stemmed from the warm personal relations that developed between the two men, described by Reagan as a “kind of chemistry.”72 Anatoly Dobrynin’s laudatory assessment captures a truth: “Ultimately, Reagan’s achievements in dealing with the Soviet Union could certainly compare favorably with, and perhaps even surpass, those of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.”73 Reagan launched his political career by attacking détente as defeatist; it closed with his surpassing Henry Kissinger’s most optimistic assessments of what dialogue with Moscow might achieve.

  The year 1988 ended in remarkable fashion. On December 7, Gorbachev delivered a speech at the United Nations that had seismic repercussions. He began by conceding that Moscow—and thus Marxism-Leninism—had no monopoly on wisdom and truth, which was akin to the pope suggesting the Bible was fiction. He followed this remarkable admission of ideological doubt by declaring that the Soviet Union would not deploy military force as a means to achieve its aims and observed that his goal was much more modest than that of his predecessors—to attain “reasonable sufficiency for defense,” which in practical terms meant demobilizing half a million troops from the Red Army. He ended by promising that Moscow would henceforth respect the right of all the constituent nations of the Warsaw Pact to self-determination: “the principle of freedom of choice is mandatory,” he declared.74 With remarkable grace and efficiency, Gorbachev had ended the Cold War—so far as he was concerned, at least.

  So what had happened? Who deserved the acclaim? In a 1993 essay for the National Review, Wolfowitz identified Reagan’s confrontational tactics as the catalyst for Gorbachev’s radical reforms and Moscow’s military retreat: “It is striking how many of Russia’s new democrats give Ronald Reagan much of the credit for the Soviet collapse.”75 George Kennan believed that such extrapolations, common among Reagan’s hawkish supporters, were illusory and indeed dangerous; the cause and effect, if any, was impossible to establish. As he observed to his friend the historian John Lukacs, “The suggestion that any American administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous political upheaval, in another great country on another side of the globe is intrinsically silly and childish.”76

  During a 1996 interview with John Lewis Gaddis—an admirer of Reagan’s foreign policies—Kennan slightly revised his opinion. When Gaddis asked Kennan who had ended the Cold War, he predictably named Gorbachev. “But then he added,” Gaddis recalled, “watching carefully to see whether his interviewer, who came close, would fall off his chair: ‘also Ronald Reagan, who in his own inimitable way, probably not even being quite aware of what he was really doing, did what few other people would have been able to do in breaking this log jam.’”77 Perhaps the truth was simply that Reagan’s instincts were good at identifying something substantively different in Gorbachev compared to his predecessors.78 The president sensed Soviet weakness during his first term and acted accordingly, and when he detected a meaningful change in direction in the second, he did the same. The fact that Reagan antagonized liberals and conservatives during his presidency certainly suggests the existence of a more flexible and pragmatic style than critics like Kennan, and indeed Kissinger, were capable of discerning. But Kennan’s fundamental point, that Mikhail Gorbachev was the principal actor in the Cold War’s final act—delivering the most important soliloquies—is a compelling one.

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  The election of 1988 pitted Reagan’s experienced, cautious, and uncharismatic vice president, George H. W. Bush, against Michael Dukakis, a similarly stilted communicator whom the Bush campaign damned as the stereotypical Massachusetts liberal: weak on crime and foreign policy, with an unsteady grasp of economics. The Dukakis campaign did their candidate no favors when they arranged for him to be photographed atop an M1 Abrams tank. The contrast between Dukakis’s strained gesture and the machine guns, the oversized helmet with MIKE DUKAKIS lettered on the front and the blue shirt–claret tie combo peeking through the khaki, created an iconic image of electoral desperation. The photo op failed to convince Americans that proximity to a tank made Dukakis a more plausible commander in chief—just as proximity to Henry Kissinger failed to do the same for Sarah Palin in 2008. Instead, Republicans used the Dukakis tank footage in devastating campaign advertisements, superimposing the words “America Can’t Afford That Risk” underneath his grinning visage. The election was a blowout: Bush won 53.4 percent of the popular vote to Dukakis’s 45.7 percent, which translated into a 426-to-111 victory in the electoral college. The fact that Bush won in Vermont, New Jersey, and Connecticut says it all.

  George Kennan was glad to see the back of a presidential administration whose cant he abhorred. He declared himself delighted to have “new and more intelligent people in and around the White House,” though he worried that the peaceable momentum with Gorbachev might be lost.79 For his part, Paul Wolfowitz lamented Reagan’s departure and was much more ambivalent about Bush than was Kennan. The new president nominated Dick Cheney, a colleague from the Ford administration, to serve as his secretary of defense. Cheney recalled Wolfowitz from Indonesia to serve as his undersecretary of defense for policy. In his memoir, In My Time, Cheney recalled, �
��Paul had the ability to offer new perspectives on old problems. He was also persistent. On more than one occasion, I sent him on his way after I had rejected a piece of advice or a policy suggestion, only to find him back in my office a half hour later continuing to press his point—and he was often right to do so.”80 They made a close and like-minded duo, but a clear ideological gap divided Cheney and Wolfowitz, the two most hawkish members of the Bush administration, from the rest of the national security team.

  President Bush appointed Brent Scowcroft, a former deputy to Henry Kissinger who shared much of his former boss’s worldview, to serve as his national security adviser. Bush nominated another realist-inclined figure, James A. Baker III, to serve as secretary of state. For these staffing reasons, Wolfowitz deliberated for a while before accepting Cheney’s job offer. The man who gave Wolfowitz his first job in Washington, Fred Iklé, observed that his friend “hesitated a long time. He couldn’t make up his mind. He talked about going back to academia.”81 Perhaps he remembered his marginality during the incommodious Nixon-Ford years and did not want to repeat the experience in his prime with another “moderate” Republican. Regardless, Wolfowitz’s friends and colleagues convinced him to accept the job; the administration needed more men of conviction to counter the renascence of Kissingerian realism. His new job asked Wolfowitz to turn away from the multicultural vibrancy of Indonesia and refocus his intellectual energies on the regions and issues that had consumed him during the 1970s: arms control, forward planning, the Persian Gulf, and the wider Middle East.

  On the first two of these issues, Cheney charged Wolfowitz with the task of reviewing defense policy in light of Gorbachev’s historic actions through 1988. The report that emerged counseled caution with a simple justification—it was too early to ascertain with certainty what was actually happening within the Soviet Union. On April 4, 1989, George Kennan repudiated this caution during testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In an effusive article for The Washington Post, titled “Kennan—A Prophet Honored,” Mary McGrory depicted a remarkable scene:

  Grandeur on Capitol Hill? Yes, it sometimes happens. George F. Kennan, the world’s greatest authority on the Soviet Union, appeared last week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and discoursed with such lucidity, learning and large-mindedness that the senators did not want to let him go. Kennan is 85 now. His back is as straight as a young man’s, his jaw as chiseled. Only the cloudy voice bespeaks age. What made his appearance more remarkable was that the speaker was as grateful as the audience.82

  Kennan’s gratitude likely stemmed from the fact that he had been provided a high-profile forum from which to criticize present policy. His opening statement announced unequivocally that the Soviet Union was no longer a threat to American interests:

  What we are witnessing today in Russia is the breakup of much, if not all, of the system of power by which that country has been held together and governed since 1917 … The arsenals of nuclear weapons now in the possession of the Soviet Union and the United States are plainly vastly redundant in relation to the purpose they are supposed to serve … In summary, it appears to me that whatever reasons may once have been for regarding the Soviet Union primarily as a possible, if not probable, military opponent, the time for that sort of thing has clearly passed.83

  So while some in the Bush administration had doubts about the sincerity and durability of Gorbachev’s actions, Kennan had none. The committee and the audience rose at the end of Kennan’s testimony to deliver a standing ovation. They liked his optimism and implicit message: the United States had won the Cold War because a weary Soviet Union had decided not to fight any longer. A month later the president declared his agreement. In a commencement address at Texas A&M University on May 13, Bush paid warm tribute to Kennan and the other architects of America’s containment policy. Concurring with the gist of Kennan’s testimony—rejecting the caution of Wolfowitz and others—Bush declared that it was time to move “beyond containment.” “We seek the integration of the Soviet Union into the community of nations,” he declared. “Ultimately, our objective is to welcome the Soviet Union back into the world order.”84 Outlining his general approach to foreign policy—and lack of interest in pursuing grandiose strategies—Bush had remarked in 1980, “I am a practical man. I like what’s real. I’m not much for the airy and abstract. I like what works. I am not a mystic, and I do not yearn to lead a crusade.”85 For the first time in a long time, Kennan and a president were largely in sync.

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  The foreign-policy crisis that defined Bush’s presidency for posterity was the Gulf War, which was either a model of diplomatic élan or a missed opportunity depending on one’s point of view.86 On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait to forcibly wrest back a territory—and the oil reserves and access to the sea it provided—that he viewed as historically Iraq’s. Saddam did not anticipate a strong American response, which perhaps was understandable. Eight days prior to the invasion, April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told him directly: “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait … I have direct instructions from President Bush to improve our relations with Iraq. We have considerable sympathy for your quest for higher oil prices, the immediate cause of your confrontation with Kuwait.”87

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, appeared to confirm Saddam’s confidence as well-founded the day after the invasion. He told General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, head of U.S. Central Command, “I think we’d go to war over Saudi Arabia, but I doubt we’d go to war over Kuwait.” Powell was wrong. When he counseled caution during the first National Security Council meeting called to discuss the crisis, Dick Cheney slapped him down: “Colin, you’re chairman of the Joint Chiefs. You’re not secretary of state. You’re not the national security adviser. And you’re not secretary of defense. So stick to military matters.”88 Twelve years later, Colin Powell was secretary of state. And his call for caution in Iraq was similarly ignored, trailing off into the vacuum of inconsequence that separates Foggy Bottom from the White House.

  Powell was out of step with idealists and realists on how to respond to Iraq’s aggression in the summer of 1990; his voice was a lonely one. Dick Cheney argued that Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait had transformed the nation into the major oil power in the Middle East—a transformation that intolerably threatened U.S economic interests and the regional stability that sustained them. Brent Scowcroft and James Baker focused on what the former described as “the ramifications of the aggression on the emerging post–Cold War world.”89 The Soviet Union was no longer a threat to the United States, but for Washington to ignore this crisis was unthinkable. Its credibility as a guarantor and peacemaker would be seriously harmed, and this might embolden other second-tier adversaries. This was certainly the view of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who famously urged President Bush “not to go wobbly” when America’s prestige was so clearly at stake.90 Paul Wolfowitz’s Carter-era prophecies, meanwhile, had apparently been vindicated in dramatic fashion. Saddam Hussein was fulfilling the early bellicose promise that Wolfowitz had been the first to identify. With Powell the sole dissenting voice within the administration, some form of military intervention was never really in doubt. “This will not stand,” President Bush declared, “this aggression against Kuwait.”91 Sensing the worst, as was his wont, George Kennan wrote on December 16, “Mr. Bush continues to entangle us all in a dreadful involvement in the Persian Gulf to which no favorable outcome is visible or even imaginable … At the moment, it is hard to see anything ahead but a military-political disaster.”92

  As it turned out, the president and his advisers managed the conflict more skillfully than Kennan could have imagined. The first thing Bush did in preparation for war was assemble a vast coalition to assist the United States in removing Iraq from Kuwait. Some partners, such as Japan and Germany, contributed treasure, not blood. Some, such as the Soviet Union, lent neither, b
ut crucially did not oppose military action against a traditional ally of Moscow—real evidence that Gorbachev was true to his peacemaking word. Across the Middle East, Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia all endorsed U.S. military action, while Israel, crucially, promised to hold fire in response to inevitable Iraqi missile attacks using outdated but dangerous Soviet-supplied Scuds. Convincing Israel of the need for patience, which Wolfowitz played a significant role in achieving through a series of trips to Tel Aviv, reduced the possibility of direct Israeli involvement, a wider war, and the destruction of the coalition. In total, President Bush assembled an alliance of nearly fifty nations to help wage and finance the war and secured a UN resolution authorizing the use of force. He also rejected Dick Cheney’s advice that congressional authorization was unnecessary, winning a majority of 250 to 183 in the House and 52 to 47 in the Senate. The preparatory diplomacy was exemplary. So what of the military campaign itself?

  Operation Desert Storm was launched on January 16, 1991, in dramatic style, with a devastating salvo of Tomahawk missiles and laser-guided bombs dropped by Stealth F-117 aircraft that targeted Iraq’s air bases and electrical and communications networks. This aerial bombardment lasted until February 24, when forces from the U.S.-led coalition entered Kuwait from Saudi Arabia and engaged Iraqi troop concentrations. The land invasion spanned only one hundred hours, the time it took for the demoralized Iraqi army to cut, run, and concede defeat in the face of overwhelming odds—Goliath won this particular matchup. American fatalities amounted to just over one hundred, Iraqi losses numbered between twenty thousand and thirty-five thousand. This one-sided war was similar in its decisiveness to America’s crushing defeat of Spain in 1898.