Abstract
For a brief period, from 1985 to 1991, the world was led by a visionary statesman. As the New York Times opined on May 21, 1989: “Imagine that an alien spaceship approached earth and sent the message: ‘Take me to your leader.’ Who would that be? Without doubt, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.”
In February 1986, during the Twenty-seventh Communist Party Congress, Gorbachev outlined the elements of his vision for domestic reform and improved international relations: common security, nuclear abolition, global interdependence, reasonable weapons sufficiency, and freedom of choice. Although some of these goals would remain unfulfilled, Gorbachev's attempt to see them through would ultimately transform Russia and bring an end to the Cold War.
Unfortunately, as Leon Sigal persuasively demonstrates in Hang Separately, no one in the Reagan or Bush administration was capable of grasping Gorbachev's revolutionary vision or willing to cooperate with him. The consequences of this shortsightedness, says the author, remain with us today.
In Sigal's analysis, a central culprit of U.S. political tunnel vision is the “realist” view of international relations held by many American policymakers and academics. Swayed by the theory of realism's core contention—that absent “a functioning system of international governance, states seek autonomy and control rather than interdependence and cooperation”—both the Reagan and Bush administrations believed Gorbachev's initiatives were either an attempt to seek advantage or a demonstration of weakness.
Sigal deflates “the prevailing view” that the Cold War ended “because containment brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union,” calling that conclusion “simple, satisfying and wrong.” Blinded by the militarization of American-Soviet relations and by their notions of totalitarianism, most U.S. analysts missed the gradual evolution of Soviet society and politics that occurred during the post-Stalin era. We now know that the infiltration and proliferation of “Western ideas in the Soviet Union helped to create a critical mass of intellectual and political support for fundamental reform. This cultural transformation enabled reformers to compete with Soviet hardliners and influenced the thinking of Gorbachev and his advisers.
Sigal is unsparing in his criticism of the Reagan administration's responses to Gorbachev, writing that they “did not believe in cooperating with the Soviet Union in arms control or anything else,” but he uncritically credits Reagan's determination to abolish nuclear weapons.
Reagan's nuclear radicalism and need to salvage his legacy after the Iran-contra scandal led to his signing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (inf) Treaty. Soon thereafter, Reagan's support for this and other cooperative security measures was heavily criticized by many of the conservatives and unilateralists who lionize him today. As George Will wrote in January 1989: “How wildly wrong he is about what is happening in Moscow. Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West— actual disarmament will follow—by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.”
“The important thing is that we got the grant.”
By the time George H.W. Bush was inaugurated, Gorbachev's common security initiatives had already laid the foundation for a peaceful conclusion to the Cold War. Gorbachev had renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine and the applicability of class struggle to international relations, reconfigured defense decision-making within the Soviet Union, and renounced both the offensive and counterforce nuclear doctrines. He had also offered numerous proposals for reducing nuclear weapons, purged the leadership of the Soviet military, and negotiated the INF Treaty. Further, in February 1988 Gorbachev announced the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, and in December 1988 he announced a unilateral reduction in Soviet military forces.
In response to these initiatives, says Sigal, the Bush administration demonstrated an “imprudent excess of caution.” Amazingly, after four years of Gorbachev's reforms, President Bush's top advisers—including Secretary of State James Baker, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney—still “had doubts about Gorbachev's commitment to transform the Soviet system and his likelihood of success.”
As a result, the Bush administration failed to engage Gorbachev in cooperative security measures at a time when cooperation and financial aid might have strengthened his position at home. It might also have enabled the completion of mutually beneficial arms control agreements before the Soviet Union collapsed.
When the Soviet Union did collapse, the Bush administration was confronted with a host of nuclear security dangers—many of which could have been avoided. Who controlled the “nuclear suitcase”? What would Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus do with the nuclear weapons in their possession? Where were the Soviet Union's 20,000 tactical nuclear weapons? Who was in control of the country's plutonium and highly enriched uranium? Who would assure that financially strapped nuclear experts would not sell their talents to “rogue” nations? What could be done about the Soviet Union's deteriorating nuclear deterrent, which remained on high levels of alert?
Most of these issues remain unresolved today. But, as Sigal notes, “the United States can do little on its own to reduce the new nuclear dangers.” Despite the fact that U.S. national security in the post-Cold War period demanded cooperative measures, the Bush administration did just about everything in its power to transform early post-Soviet Russian goodwill into suspicion and hostility.
The Clinton administration further antagonized Russia by expanding nato, bombing Yugoslavia, and acquiescing to right-wing pressure for national missile defense. As a consequence, Gorbachev's common security approach was supplanted by a reinvigorated Russian realism. Having misunderstood the reasons for the Cold War's demise, America's political elite proceeded to squander a potential revolution in international affairs.
More than 10 years after the end of the Cold War, the United States continues to engage the world like a bull in a china shop. President George W. Bush's promise to approach international relations with humility will accomplish little unless he is willing to cooperate and negotiate with world leaders. The early returns are not promising.