On December 7, 1988—Pearl Harbor Day on the calendar of American history—as President Reagan was preparing to turn the White House over to President-elect George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev strode forward to address a plenary session of the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York.
In an hour-long speech delivered with vehemence, and with his passion written clearly on his features, the Soviet leader presented the first full, clear formulation of Gorbachevism—of his “new thinking,” to use the concept of his book, Perestroika, which had been published internationally not long before. As his living words filled that forum of nations, there was no other leader in a position to challenge his formulation, and, judging from the reaction, no one wished to do so in any case.
Gorbachev set the stage for his program in what seemed the most classic Internationalist-Transnationalist terms. “The world economy,” he observed, “is becoming a single entity outside of which no state can develop.” For him, as for his contemporaries, this world was now built on a tripod system; and so: “It is virtually impossible for any society to be ‘closed.’” At the same time, however, “knots have appeared in our world’s main economic lines: North-South, East-West, South-South, East-East.” North-North, he might have added, and West-West. But he did not.
As a master geopolitician, Gorbachev called for a solution that lay in the formation of seminal geopolitical structures.
Our situation, he said, calls for “creating an altogether new mechanism for the furtherance of the world economy … a new structure of the international division of labor … a new type of industrial progress in accordance with the interests of all peoples and states…. Further progress is now possible only through a quest for universal consensus in the movement toward a new world order.” With such a bold geopolitical sweep as his basic platform, Gorbachev launched into the principles of the geopolitical world he sees as desirable.
Beginning with the bedrock Leninist idea, untroubling by now to many Western ears, of “humankind’s collective intellect and will,” the General Secretary proposed “the supremacy of the idea central to all mankind over the multitude of centrifugal trends” as we find them today between East, West, North and South. Only by letting “this central idea dominate will the society of nations develop into the ideal: a world community of states with political systems and foreign policies based on law.” Gorbachev left no doubt that he was talking about international laws binding all nations.
Of course, in order to let “this central idea dominate,” the nations must change their philosophical approach to the task of achieving world unity amid the diversity of nations. For in this way, they will also change their political relations. To accomplish this task, continued the passionate Gorbachev, the nations must rely on “objective world processes.”
One such process, he offered, would be reliance on the Helsinki agreement of 1975, so that Soviet territorial integrity would be accepted as final and definitive. Another “objective process,” said Gorbachev, would be reliance on the natural unity of the two Germanys, thus allowing West Germany to take up a more neutral position vis-à-vis the rest of Europe.
In a third example, Gorbachev addressed the twin realities of an interdependent world and the need for the integrity of world peace. Like it or not, he said, we are all now interdependent. None of us can have peace if the others have no peace. Peace has become indivisible. Therefore, exhorted Gorbachev, let us start a world political dialogue among all nations; for within that dialogue, the arduous negotiating process between East and West can go forward.
Moving onto the broadest geopolitical terrain, Gorbachev advanced the need for a central agenting authority to organize and galvanize all of these objective processes. And he declared that alone among all the world’s institutions, the United Nations itself is “an organization capable of accumulating humankind’s collective intellect and will.”
If the nations consent to cooperate in such a manner, then “cocreativity” or “codevelopment” would benefit all. If the nations consent, cooperation can include space exploration and environmental protection. It can lead to the conversion of arms production into a disarmament economy. It can wipe out the crippling debts of South nations. Through such cooperation, a homeland can be created for the Palestinians. Through such means, indeed, can all the pressing global problems that tear at our unity as a human community be addressed and solved at last.
Gorbachev was clearly not talking about internation politics; for that is no more than our present condition. He was talking about genuine geopolitics. And he had a warning: “Without the U.N., world politics is inconceivable.” Alone of all the institutions so far created, “the U.N. embodies, as it were, the interests of different states. It is the only organization that can channel their efforts—bilateral, regional and comprehensive—in one and the same direction.”
The geopolitician in Mikhail Gorbachev may be striking; but it never overwhelms his immediate political instinct. Did the General Secretary’s global program mean that capitalists must renounce their way of life, and Marxists renounce their Marxism? Not at all! None of us “need give up our convictions, philosophy and traditions, or shut ourselves away” from the new order.
Did the General Secretary claim, as his predecessors had all done, that the Soviets were the only ones who are right? Not at all! “We don’t aspire to be the bearer of ultimate truth.”
What, then, did the General Secretary propose happen between capitalist and Marxist? “Let us transform our rivalry,” he offered with a smile, “into sensible competition … an honest competition between ideologues! Otherwise, our rivalry will be suicidal.”
And finally, the ultimate appeal. Why did the General Secretary propose this panorama of “new thinking” for the nations? Because, he explained at length, “the world is at a turning point in its development…. A new world is emerging.” Today, “international relations must be humanized … the world must be made a safer place, more conducive to normal life.” International relations can be humanized only if “man, his concerns, rights and freedoms, are placed at the center of things…. The idea of democratizing the entire world has grown into a powerful surge and political force … and I have a feeling of responsibility to my own people and to the international community.”
When Gorbachev had said all he had come to say and had taken his chair, the delegates who had jammed into the tiers of seats in the U.N. chamber to hear him burst into loud and unaccustomed applause. This was not the ritual ovation due any head of state who takes it into his mind to address the United Nations. It was much more than that. It was a personal tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev. It was an enthusiastic acceptance of his words. It was an international endorsement of his person as the vehicle of their own fond and universally shared hopes.
In a single hour, Gorbachev had shriven himself and his Party-State of all the specters of Soviet leaders past—Stalin, Vyshinsky, Molotov, Gromyko, Brezhnev, Khrushchev—whose memories had for so long haunted the halls of the U.N. with the pall of distrust. In a single hour, he had dismissed all those baleful memories as so many outworn superstitions. In a single hour, he had become the embodiment of a hope and a warning—a hope that sorrow could at last be replaced with human joy; a warning that the only alternative to the hope he held out to them all was the merciless fratricide of Cain.
Finally, in a single hour at that podium, Gorbachev had shouldered aside all his peers in the nations and the power centers of the West, to claim the center spot of international attention and approbation. So prolonged was the tribute to himself, to his achievement and to his call to action, that Gorbachev stood up and took a bow!
If the troubles that already beset Gorbachev at home fostered worry—or, in some quarters, a momentary hope—that the Soviet leader might not be up to the role of the prime actor in international affairs, he himself seemed to have no such thoughts as he masterfully mounted pressure on the new American president, George Bush, to react to his proposals. By a combinati
on of carrot and stick treatment, and through a complicated series of carefully contrived international moves, Gorbachev raised the level of tension and expectations in the United States, Europe and Japan.
While behind-the-scenes plans were being discussed by West leaders in the early months of 1989, Gorbachev made advance announcements of his own plans to carry his campaign forward in visits to West Germany and France in June and July. The reactions in those two countries and elsewhere, riven as they were with expectation, heightened the pressure still further on President Bush. “We look like a bunch of bean counters,” said Wisconsin Representative Les Aspin, head of the House Armed Services Committee, “and Gorbachev looks like a guy who wants a different relationship in Europe.”
Before Bush had caught his breath as President, the Soviet General Secretary had created for him the classic put-up-or-shut-up situation, from which there was no escape. There was no question in anyone’s mind now who was the actor on the world stage, and who was the reactor. “What we have now,” said Gary Orren, professor of public policy at Harvard, “is not a perceived crisis, but a perceived opportunity without any apparent deadline. Instead of a bad guy, we have Gorbachev.”
Given that opportunity, so long hoped for, what did the Bush administration plan to do? What was the administration’s thinking? Had the new administration any answer? Any leadership to offer? One U.S. editorial specifically chided the President himself, whose “excuses for going ever so slowly are now likely to … sharpen the contrast between a dynamic, lively leadership and an American administration stalled in its own caution.” Within certain quarters of the Vatican, it was clear that the American administration was stalled less by its caution than by complicated discussions with allies, and by deep consultations within the sustaining traditions of the “Wise Men” of the West.
Then, in a series of four speeches—in Hamtramck, Michigan, on April 7; in College Station, Texas, on May 12; at Boston University, on May 21; and at New London, Connecticut, on May 26—President Bush carved out the clear position of the United States and the West. No doubt it was music to Gorbachev’s ears.
“It is time to move beyond containment,” declared the American president. And in that sentence, the Kennan policy—the basic doctrine that had guided the West nations’ reaction to the Soviet Union for sixty years, the fundamental policy Gorbachev needed to remove and replace for perestroika to work—was consigned to the inactive file.
There is now a “new policy,” Bush went on, “one that recognizes the full scope of the change taking place around the world and in the Soviet Union itself…. We seek the integration of the Soviet Union into the community of nations…. Ultimately, our objective is to welcome the Soviet Union back into the world order.” There was no mistaking the thinking of the Wise Men in such an objective. They had always envisaged a “new world order.”
The President did lay down conditions for welcoming the Soviet Union into that world order. It amounted to a line-item veto of certain Soviet actions. Soviet devilment in Cuba and Nicaragua had to stop. Soviet stealing of Western technology had to stop. Soviet use of the international drug trade to debilitate the populations of the West had to stop. Soviet restrictions on the free exchange of books and ideas, and on the movement of peoples, between East and West had to stop. Soviet suppression of human rights had to stop. Soviet maintenance of armed forces obviously poised for attack and not needed for defense had to end.
“A new breeze is blowing over the steppes and cities of the Soviet Union,” said Bush, reacting to the popular hope Gorbachev had raised by his very presence on the stage of titans.
“Why not, then, let this spirit of openness grow, let more barriers come down? … Perhaps the world order of the future will truly be a family of nations.”
The picture of that “family of nations” painted by President Bush, and the portrait he drew of the “new world order,” was the model of the Internationalist-Transnationalist vision of the future. We now see before us, the President declared, “a growing community of democracies anchoring international peace and stability and a dynamic free-market system generating prosperity and progress on a global scale.”
He then embraced the highest moral aim possible for human reason unaided by the grace of a transcendent God. The era of a new world order, he declared, has “an economic foundation: the proven success of the free market; and, nurturing that foundation, are the values rooted in freedom and democracy.”
The hallowed voice of John McCloy echoed in those words. And so did the voices of Elihu Root and Henry Stimson and the other giants who had so inspired him; the voices of all the Wise Men whose still-dominant aim was the landmark goal of a new world order regulated by economic progress beneath human skies. A new world order achieved without the intervention of a Heaven beyond the visible heavens. A new world order achieved within the lordship of man, and without the Lordship of the Son of Man. President Bush had gone as far as he could and still remain within the mental and moral guidelines of the Wise Men.
Once again—in Vatican analysis, at least—the only fundamental change had been in Gorbachev’s favor. The original processes of the West, based on the Kennan policy, had been designed as a reaction. Bush had announced to the world a change in direction, a change of gears for which the West was thankful. Still the West would meet and offset—but not liquidate—the fundamental aim of the Leninist process. Absent the central Kennan doctrine of containment, however, the questions in some minds were: What new centerpiece policy would replace it, and whose policy would it be?
And so the first and most difficult phase in Mikhail Gorbachev’s geopolitical plan had been accomplished. Containment was out as basic American and Western policy in his regard. And the way was open for a key element in the new geopolitical endgame to be put in place by the leader who had already secured the greatest advantage. The adversaries of the Leninist process had fallen into perfect position.
What better moment, then, for Gorbachev to follow up his now towering advantage? What better moment than this to begin the first clinical demonstrations of the “objective world processes” that had brought the nations to their feet in admiration at the United Nations? What better moment to do more than leap from one triumph to a greater one? What better moment to take a full and open run at a major geopolitical goal?
Summer was nigh. And if a “new breeze” was “blowing over the steppes and cities of the Soviet Union,” as Bush had said, so too were the winds of Gorbachevism blowing across the West.
West Germany’s reception of Gorbachev during his June visit, which he had announced with a politician’s timing after his U.N. speech, was dazzling. The crowds were dazzling. The brisk sales of Gorbachev coins and stamps were dazzling. The Red Star earrings and bright-red clothes the people wore in his honor were dazzling. Gorbachev’s obvious relish at plunging into the crowds to sign autographs, to shake hands, to be touched by well-wishers—all of it was dazzling. “He could be an American,” one student remarked, “or at least advised by Americans, the way he does public relations.”
Gorbachev needed no advice from the Americans, however. And he was after something far more than dazzle.
In his visits to Bonn, Stuttgart, Dortmund and other cities, it became clear that he was after a new union. And it wasn’t just talk. At the U.N., he had spoken of West Germany taking up a more neutral position vis-à-vis the rest of Europe. Now, on German soil, he put flesh on the bones of that proposal.
A new stage in Soviet-West German economic might, he suggested, bolstered by the Soviet Union’s vast resources, would create a colossus that, given time, could dominate Europe. In short, Gorbachev—never for a moment blind to history, and ever a geopolitician to the marrow of his bones—was after the Europe of Lenin’s dreams. Of course, he didn’t put that dream in Lenin’s terms. “Our common European home,” was how he put it. But in that appealing phrase, he was not talking about the Europe of the “Europeanizers” who aim at a new unity in 1992.
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bsp; Rather, he was holding out to the West Germans the possibility that they—now an economic giant, but still a political dwarf—could achieve a new status in partnership with his Soviet Union. “This calls for new political thinking,” Gorbachev sloganeered with the best of them, as he and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl signed a Joint Declaration and eleven other agreements. “Courted by both world powers,” responded the liberal newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in an editorial, “the political dwarf, West Germany, is waking up and growing into its normal size as the central power in Europe.”
Asked about the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev took even that emotionally loaded question farther than anyone had expected. At the U.N., he had spoken of a reliance on the natural unity of the Germanys. Now, on German soil, Gorbachev drew aside the barest corner of the curtain still shrouding the astounding “objective processes” he had in store for East and West alike. “Nothing is eternal …,” he said. “I don’t think the Berlin Wall is the sole barrier between East and West…. Conditions on the continent may someday make all border obstructions obsolete.” Nobody among his listeners, indeed no one in the West, could have dared to think at that moment: Within eighteen months, the Wall would be gone, and the two Germanys would be discussing unification.
Gorbachev had timed his July visit to France to precede by a matter of days the 1989 meeting, scheduled to take place in Paris that year, of the “Group of Seven” whose decisions and actions are fundamental to the federation of the European Community. During that visit, a few more details emerged about the General Secretary’s vision of the “common European home” he envisioned. It was not the vision of the Group of Seven.
That common home, said Gorbachev, extends from the Ural Mountains in Russia to the Atlantic. Still more striking was his addition to those contours: “The USSR and the United States constitute a natural part of the European international political structure. And their participation in its evolution is not only justified, but is also historically determined.” In fact, Gorbachev railed against those “who would like to place the USSR outside Europe.”
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