The World: A Brief Introduction

by Richard Haass

  MANAGING THE RIVALRY

  Why did the Cold War stay cold? There was, to begin with, a balance of military power. The United States anchored the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, which included much of Western Europe. The Soviet Union, for its part, established the Warsaw Pact, which included its satellite states in Eastern Europe. The two alliances made any war in Europe sure to be costly and uncertain in outcome, and therefore unlikely. This balance was based not just on military inventories but also on a willingness by the United States and other NATO members to act directly if they determined military action was called for. The basic bargain of membership in the NATO alliance, one enshrined in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, was that an attack on one constituted an attack on all.

  But such a willingness to act militarily was only one aspect of what sustained the Cold War order. What also kept the Cold War cold was the shared realization on the part of both the United States and the Soviet Union that any direct clash between them could escalate into a nuclear exchange in which the costs would dwarf any conceivable gains and in which there would be no victor in any meaningful sense of the word. Nuclear weapons thus buttressed the traditional, conventional balance of power. They dampened down competition because leaders understood that a nuclear war would be disproportionately costly regardless of the interests at stake and regardless of how it started. Behind that was the sinister genius of mutually assured destruction (popularly known as MAD) and what was known as second-strike capability, namely that a country would have the ability to absorb a nuclear strike by the other side and still be in a position to retaliate on a scale that would deter (assuming rationality was at work) the other side from acting in the first place. If nuclear weapons had never been developed, one could make a plausible case that the Cold War would not have stayed cold, that history might have evolved in very different ways because calculations would have been very different. Any number of confrontations might well have triggered either local military clashes or something much larger and more geographically diffuse. It is no exaggeration to say that absent nuclear weapons and the restraint they engendered, we might now be studying World War III rather than the Cold War.

  Arms control, in effect a specialized subset of diplomacy, also helped to keep the peace. The United States and the Soviet Union negotiated, signed, and entered into a number of agreements over the decades that bolstered deterrence and stability. The SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) and START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) agreements did their part by placing limits on the number and type of land-based missiles, bombers, and submarines carrying nuclear warheads each side could deploy. A 1987 treaty eliminated missiles that could carry nuclear warheads distances defined as intermediate (as opposed to either short or long range). Such agreements increased both transparency and predictability when it came to knowing what the other side did and would possess, thereby helping to avoid even more costly arms races and war through miscalculation.

  Deterrence was further reinforced by draconian limits set on defense. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was signed in 1972 and remained in force for the duration of the Cold War. Under the pact, the United States and the Soviet Union denied themselves the ability to deploy certain kinds of systems that could threaten the ability of the other side’s missiles to reach their targets. This left both countries vulnerable to attack, bolstering deterrence and decreasing the chance of nuclear war.

  Diplomacy was not limited to arms control. There was normal diplomatic interaction via embassies and consulates. The respective ambassadors had access to the most senior levels of each other’s government, as did visiting ministers. There was more than a little trade, cultural exchange, and tourism. And, most dramatically, there was regular summitry involving the leaders of the two countries. In short, the United States and the Soviet Union were great-power rivals, but their rivalry was bounded.

  Just as significant, the United States, while it spoke out in protest of how the Soviet Union treated its own citizens and those living in its external empire, was quite circumspect in what it actually chose to do to challenge Soviet control. This represented a triumph of realism over idealism, as the United States carried out a foreign policy that prioritized restraining Soviet behavior beyond its borders rather than trying to fundamentally alter what it did within them. To be sure, no U.S. administration ever formally accepted the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, named for the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, by which Moscow asserted the “right” to use military force to keep loyal Communist governments in power in its so-called political satellites residing in what was in effect a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. (A sphere of influence is an area beyond the borders of a country where it asserts special rights or considerations.) At the same time, when there were domestic political uprisings against Soviet-backed governments in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in 1970 and again in 1981, the United States did not intervene in any meaningful way on behalf of those peoples trying to liberate themselves. Nor did the United States block the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 that made it impossible for residents of Communist East Berlin to escape to democratic West Berlin. Again, this was a caution born out of concern that any such intervention could lead to a direct clash with the Soviet Union, which presumably would have used force to protect what it saw as interests vital to its empire and, as a result, to itself.

  This is not to say that either country ignored what was going on inside the other. The United States under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan (and Congress before that) condemned human rights abuses in the Soviet Union, pressing for, among other things, the freedom of high-profile political dissidents and for Soviet Jews to be able to emigrate if they wished to do so. And the Soviet Union would regularly point out shortcomings in American society. But these efforts were limited and did not assume a priority that threatened what was seen as a more basic stake in avoiding war at the nuclear level or in avoiding direct confrontation stemming from regional competition.

  For its part, the Soviet Union did what it could to promote anti-American, Communist regimes around the Western Hemisphere and succeeded in Cuba and Nicaragua. It had the advantage of aiding individuals and movements who were fighting against unpopular authoritarian governments that offered little to their people. But again the Soviet help was just that—help—usually in the form of intelligence, military assistance, and subsidies. Direct Soviet military intervention for the most part did not take place in Latin America, a part of the world where the United States had declared, through the Monroe Doctrine, that it was prepared to act to protect what it judged to be its vital interests in what was essentially viewed as an American sphere of influence.

  Stability during the four decades of the Cold War also benefited from the structural design of international relations at the time, namely, bipolarity. It is less difficult to manage a world with two principal centers of power than many. There are simply fewer independent actors and decision makers with real impact. This is not to say that Great Britain and France and others always did America’s bidding; they did not. And China’s resentment of and split from the Soviet Union in the late 1960s is a matter of record. Still, the world of the Cold War was to a significant degree a stable “duopoly” in which changes tended to take place within the structure of an international system dominated by two powers. Most countries chose or, as was often the case with the Soviet Union, were coerced into affiliating with one of the two great powers. Some, however, resisted and chose to be “nonaligned,” accepting assistance in one form or another from both superpowers without affiliating themselves. This bloc of developing countries (which on occasion proved quite adept at playing the two superpowers off each other) was also described as the third world, distinct from both a capitalist, U.S.-led first world and a Communist, Soviet-led second world.

  Stability was also girded by understandings about how geopolitical competition was to be waged.
Both Moscow and Washington came to appreciate that when it came to support for associates, there were limits on how much change would be tolerable for the other. The Soviets learned this lesson in Berlin when they blockaded the Western sectors and again in Cuba a decade and a half later. The United States, for its part, learned this lesson the hard way in Korea, when it was not content to restore the previous status quo and, after liberating South Korea, decided to press north to try to reunify the peninsula. This outcome was too much for both the Soviet Union and China, and the Chinese dispatched hundreds of thousands of “volunteers” to push back against the U.S.-led, UN-authorized force. The result was an additional twenty thousand American dead and a prolonged war that ended roughly along the original border. And during the October 1973 Middle East war fought by Israel against Syria and Egypt, when the Americans and the Soviets backed their respective allies, both superpowers also settled for an outcome that left Israel short of a complete victory and the encircled Egyptian army intact.

  The net result was that the Soviet Union and the United States, despite being in a cold war, evolved into a state of “peaceful coexistence.” Two very different political and economic systems with divergent worldviews and aims could nonetheless avoid outright conflict. Over time the two superpowers took steps to increase the odds their competition would remain peaceful. This became known as “détente,” from the French term referring to a relaxation of tension in a bow.

  THE COOLING OF THE COLD WAR

  There is no specific date when the Cold War ended (as there tends to be when “hot” wars end), but most historians place it in late 1989, when the wall separating East and West Berlin was taken down, or in 1991, when the Soviet Union along with its external empire in Eastern Europe unraveled. I was working at the White House at the time, and while I was not responsible for U.S.-Soviet relations, I distinctly remember events moving faster and further than I or anyone else predicted.

  Why did the Cold War end when and how it did? The Soviet economic system was deeply and structurally flawed and brittle. In 1987, the historian Paul Kennedy published an influential book on why major powers rise and fall throughout history, arguing that a principal reason was that the burdens of empire often undermine prosperity and as a result stability at home. The burden of its overseas role and activities surely contributed to the failure of the Soviet Union, which had to support a large military budget, a far-flung set of allies that often needed financial help, the cost of occupation in Eastern Europe, and the economic and human price of imperial adventures such as its ill-fated 1979 intervention in Afghanistan. These costs exacerbated a difficult, inefficient reality brought about by decades of an economy ruled much more by political forces than by market ones.

  Political decisions and diplomacy mattered too. The Soviet Union was isolated from the other major Communist power, China, as the two increasingly fell out over China’s resistance to being the junior partner in the relationship, differences over which Communist model other countries in the nonaligned third world should emulate, disagreements over the proper demarcation of their shared border, and much else. By the late 1960s, fighting had broken out between the two. Beginning in the early 1970s, the United States forged a relationship with China to further add to Soviet difficulties.

  Mikhail Gorbachev, who led the Soviet Union starting in 1985, played a pivotal role in the end of the Cold War. Gorbachev clearly concluded that the Soviet Union could survive and compete on the world stage only if it changed in fundamental ways at home. But his approach to change, in which political reform came before economic restructuring, mostly resulted in a loss of control over what was happening domestically and in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union was poorly positioned to resist the demands for greater independence from nationalities within its own borders and among its satellites in Eastern Europe. It could not prevail militarily and in the end could not compete economically or adapt politically.

  But some of the credit for how history unfolded surely goes to successive U.S. presidents beginning with Harry Truman and, more broadly, the sustained efforts of the United States and its allies over four decades in Europe and Asia. George H. W. Bush, the American president at the time the Berlin Wall was dismantled by German protesters in November 1989, deserves special praise for his handling of the Cold War’s final chapter. Bush has been criticized for not making more of these events, but he was careful not to humiliate Communist leaders and risk provoking a situation that could have pressured them to take dramatic action or brought to power those who wanted to do just that.

  That the Cold War ended peacefully and included the breakup of the Soviet Union, the unification of Germany, and its entrance into NATO is nothing short of remarkable. Much of history is often triggered by the friction caused by epochal events, and in this case such an outcome was avoided. It demonstrates the impact of individuals on history.

  The Post–Cold War Era (1989–Present)

  The last period of history to be covered here may appear to be somewhat odd to think of as history, because it includes where we are now and, for the time being, where we are heading. As is always the case, we are living in history. What makes it difficult to appreciate and understand is that we do not have the advantage of hindsight, the perspective that tends to come with the passage of time. People living in the Renaissance didn’t think of themselves as living in the Renaissance, or the late Middle Ages for that matter; they were just living their lives. Only afterward did these eras get defined and named.

  The current period is often called the post‒Cold War era, an age that extends from the Cold War’s end to and through the present and for an unknown time into the future. We know roughly but not precisely when this era began, because dating the end of the Cold War is necessarily subjective. Still, November 9, 1989, is as good a date as any to mark the end of the Cold War, for it was on that date that East German citizens successfully breached the wall that had divided East from West Berlin. The fact that citizens of East Germany could leave for West Germany and not be shot, as many individuals had been over the previous decades, revealed that the Communist regime in East Germany and its sponsor, the Soviet Union, had given up the fight.

  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, its external empire, comprising Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, became truly independent. What had been the Soviet Union for three-quarters of a century—its internal empire—dissolved into Russia and an additional fourteen countries, including Kazakhstan and the other four countries of Central Asia as well as Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and others. This took place peacefully, although subsequently Russia has used force against both Georgia and Ukraine and has signaled that it seeks considerable influence over the decisions of countries in its “near abroad.” It is worth noting that East Germany’s sense of national identity led it to join what had been West Germany in what became a unified Germany. Nationalism can bring people together as well as tear them apart.

  With the end of the Cold War, and the subsequent dissolution of both the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, NATO faced a conundrum. With its principal threat now gone, the alliance could have dissolved, but its members chose instead to maintain the alliance and expand it; membership went from sixteen countries in 1989 to twenty-nine over the ensuing three decades. The rationale was to preserve NATO as a hedge against future uncertainties, above all the emergence of a Russian threat, and to help new members democratize and professionalize their militaries. The downside of this adaptation is that it diluted NATO’s ability to act as a unified whole, contributed to the subsequent alienation of Russia, and created new obligations for all NATO members at a time when most members were anything but keen to meet existing commitments much less additional ones.

  POST–COLD WAR CRISES

  Some predicted or hoped the new era following the Cold War’s end would be calm and peaceful because we would no longer live with the acute risk of nuclear war or in a
world dominated by two rival superpowers. The hope was that a world dominated by the victorious and surviving superpower (the United States) would come to resemble it and be mostly democratic and peaceful. No one would have the ability—and few would have the desire—to challenge the primacy of the United States given its tradition, with some exceptions, of not seeking to impose its will on others. Others were more skeptical, fearful that a world without two rivals would lack structure and discipline and would as a result be more violent and disorderly even if the level of violence would not rise to the existential threats that were at the heart of the Cold War.

  Interestingly, the first full-blown international crisis of the new era proved both the pessimists and the optimists right. In August 1990, less than a year after the Berlin Wall was torn down, Iraq, then led by the ambitious authoritarian ruler Saddam Hussein, invaded and quickly conquered its smaller and weaker neighbor to the south, Kuwait, making it part of Iraq. It was the sort of naked aggression that Iraq, closely associated with and dependent in many ways on the Soviet Union, would not have been allowed by its former patron to undertake at the height of the Cold War because it could have given the United States the pretext for intervening militarily in the part of the world that hosted the lion’s share of global oil and gas reserves.

  It was not obvious at the time what the United States would choose to do. I was the young National Security Council staff member who met President George H. W. Bush on the South Lawn of the White House when he returned from Camp David on August 5, just after Iraq had devoured Kuwait. After I briefed him on the latest developments, he could not have been clearer in what he declared to an anxious world: “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.” Consistent with the president’s words, the United States intervened, first with diplomacy and economic sanctions, ultimately with military force. President Bush did not want Iraq to dominate the energy-rich Middle East; nor did he want the new era to start with the terrible precedent that force could be used to unilaterally change borders. The fact that the United States worked through the United Nations and put together an international coalition that ultimately defeated Iraq, forced it to leave Kuwait, and restored Kuwaiti independence turned what had been an enormous setback for world order into a victory and a demonstration of the value of multilateralism.