From Who Built America? text (2000?)

End of the Cold War

The Cold War cost more than $11 trillion. But the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites was not a result of such enormous military expenditures. No NATO tank fired a shot. No bomb fell on the Kremlin. Instead, a massive, home-grown insurgency, led by workers, dissident intellectuals, and advocates of national self-determination, cracked the Communist bloc regimes. The downfall began in 1980 when striking Polish workers organized Solidarity, an independent trade union of nearly 10 million members. Solidarity, which had strong support from the powerful Polish Catholic Church, demonstrated how a working-class movement could offer an entire nation moral and political leadership. The Polish military drove Solidarity underground late in 198 1, but when it reemerged later in the decade, Solidarity won a smashing electoral victory, which soon installed Lech Walesa, a shipyard unionist, as the first freely elected president of the Polish nation in more than sixty years.

Solidarity's example had an impact throughout eastern Europe. Under a relatively youthful party secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union in the late 1980s undertook a series of reforms: perestroika, designed to restructure the production system, and glasnost, meant to open the society to political and artistic debate. Gorbachev knew that in a world of increasing technical complexity and communications, Soviet- style authoritarianism had become economically dysfunctional. No regime could keep track of all the computers, copiers, and communication devices necessary to modern production in the information age. Gorbachev therefore wanted to liberalize Communist rule, but strikes and demonstrations soon erupted throughout the Soviet Union. Coal miners, railroad workers, Baltic nationalists, and urban intellectuals all formed independent organizations that called on Gorbachev to quicken the pace of political and economic reform. In Hungary and Poland, like-minded officials lifted most of the old restrictions on travel and emigration beyond the Iron Curtain.

Then came the revolution. Beginning in September 1989, a wave of huge--demonstrations shook Communist regimes across eastern Europe. A massive tide of East German emigrants surged through Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the West, undermining the authority of the Communist hard-liners who still clung to power in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Finally, on the night of November 9, 1989, ordinary Germans poured through the Berlin Wall. The GDR quickly disintegrated, and by the end of 1990, all of East Germany had been incorporated into the wealthy, powerful Federal Republic of Germany. The Communist government in Czechoslovakia also tumbled, and reformers strengthened their hand in Hungary and Bulgaria. In Romania, the Communist dictatorship fell only after a week of bloody street

battles between ordinary citizens and po- lice, who defended the old order to the bitter end.

Radical change finally reached the Soviet heartland in August 1991, when thousands of Russian citizens poured into the streets to defeat a reactionary coup d'e'tat. The Communist party quickly col- lapsed, and the Soviet Union began the painful and uncertain process of reorganizing itself as a loose confederation of independent republics. Boris Yeltsin, who headed the Russian Republic, replaced Gorbachev as president of a much- diminished state.

The Cold War was over, brought to a close not by the missiles and tanks of the principal protagonists, but by the collective courage and willpower of ordinary men and women. Most insurgents had sought civil rights and political democracy, not a capitalist revolution, but they got one nonetheless. New governments in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe began opening their economics to Japan and the west, selling off state-owned enterprises and even establishing stock

markets. In Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, and the Czech Republic, the process generated relatively successful economic systems oriented toward the West, but in Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Slovakia, and Bulgaria, the standard of living plunged amid political instability and plummeting production. Cuba, China, Vietnam, and North Korea remained authoritarian regimes, but almost all the Asian Communist countries abandoned state planning and encouraged capitalist trade and enterprise.

In the United States, partisans of Ronald Reagan claimed much of the credit for ending the Cold War, greeting the demise of European Communism in a triumphant mood. Reagan's forthright denunciation of the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire," along with his administration's military buildup, were said to have heartened eastern bloc dissidents at the same time the arms race exhausted the productive capacity of the Soviet Union and other inefficient Communist regimes.

But the Cold War doves had the stronger case. The West's militarized posture had long helped the Communists to rationalize their authoritarian rule. As the historian and diplomat George Kennan put it, the more U.S. policies had followed a hard line, 'the greater was the tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls . . . and the greater the braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime.' Indeed, U.S. policy makers encouraged such liberalization only with great caution. After the Chinese regime crushed a huge student demonstration in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989, President George Bush suspended sales of millitary equipment to China, but at the same time sent his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, to Beijing to secretly reassure the Communists that large-scale trade would continue. [RF note: see Scowcroft in arming Iraq internet files, has information on China] Moreover, conservatives in both the Reagan and Bush administrations mistrusted the initial Soviet reforms, claiming that Mikhail Gorbachev sought merely to strengthen the USSR's capacity to wage a new Cold War.

George Bush’s "New World Order"

George Herbert Walker Bush presided over the United States during this revolution in international statecraft. Although Bush had been Ronald Reagan's loyal vice president for eight years, he was hardly touched by New Right fervor…,,

President Bush felt sufficiently emboldened by the collapse of Communism to announce an American-dominated "new world order.' During his administration, several of the most troublesome proxy wars that had been energized by the larger East -West conflict rapidly wound down. The Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, after which the CIA stopped supplying the Afghan rebels with advanced weapons. The brutal war there, waged among rival religious factions, did not stop, but it no longer played a role in superpower politics. Likewise, in Central America, the Bush administration ended U.S. support for the antigovernment Contra forces in Nicaragua, in return for a pledge that the Soviets and Cubans would stop supplying arms and aid to the ruling Sandinista party. The deal paid off handsomely for Bush when free elections held in 1990 gave the presidency to a pro-U.S. candidate. And in neighboring El Salvador, a peace treaty signed in 1992 ended the civil war there, allowing left-wing rebels to participate in electoral politics.

Finally, the end of the Cold War created a far more advantageous atmosphere for the liberation of South Africa. There the apartheid regime headed by F. W de Klerk finally released from prison the African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, who had spent twenty-seven years in confinement. The ANC had long maintained an alliance with the Communists, and Mandela had publicly defended such anti-U. S. leaders as Cuba's Fidel Castro and Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi. U.S. governments had therefore kept the ANC atarm's length, especially during the Reagan presidency, when administration policy favored a "constructive engage- ment' with the white South African government. But as Mandela and the ANC swept to power in the early 1990s, even conservative U.S. diplomats applauded. The disintegration of South Africa's all-white regime quickly reduced the level of violence throughout southern Africa. Namibia, a vast South African protectorate on the Atlantic coast, achieved independence in 1990, after which the intensity of the civil war in nearby Angola diminished dramatically.

The end of the Cold War left the United States as the world's only superpower. Thus, even as international tensions declined, the United States had a relatively free hand to deploy its military might abroad, unhampered by a countervailing Soviet response. This new state of affairs

became clear in December 1989, when President Bush dispatched thou- sands of troops to Panama to oust a corrupt dictator, Manuel Noriega, in an overt display of U.S. military power that echoed early-twentieth-century interventions in Latin America. A short, bloody war ended with Noriega's capture and extradition to the United States, where he was convicted in a Miami courtroom of drug-related offenses. But little actually changed in Panama, which remained one of the major transshipment points for illegal drugs in the Western Hemisphere.

Little more than a year later, in an even more massive deployment of its military might, the United States confronted the troops of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whose invasion and annexation of the oil-rich emirate of Kuwait threatened to destabilize U.S. allies in the Persian

Gulf. The Bush administration assembled an international coalition, including the Soviets, Germany, Japan, and most Arab states, to endorse the dispatch of nearly 500,000 U.S. troops to the region by the end of 1990. Britain, France, and Saudi Arabia committed an additional

200.000 troops. Although many Americans, including most congressional Democrats, believed that economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations might force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, Bush administration officials argued that economic pressure alone would prove ineffective.

On January 15, 1991, U.S. forces launched a massive air assault against Iraq. The high-tech bombing campaign, which deployed a new generation of post-Vietnam 'smart" bombs, lasted over a month, killing and wounding tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens and soldiers and destroying much of Iraq's infrastructure and military hardware. A ground assault launched in February took but 100 hours to reclaim Kuwait and enter southern Iraq. Antiwar demonstrations briefly filled the streets of Washington and San Francisco, but light casualties and a swift victory soon generated a wave of patriotic fervor. As U.S. troops returned home to a series of huge victory parades down Broadway in New York City and Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D. C.--the first such parades since World War II -the president's approval ratings soared past 90 percent.

But the Gulf War left a mixed legacy. President Bush had hoped that the successful, massive use of military power against Iraq would shatter the nation's "Vietnam syndrome" by confirming a renewed U.S. willing-' ness to intervene abroad as the world's unchallenged superpower. But U.S. public opinion remained skittish when it came to the deployment of U.S. troops, especially when

diplomatic interventions or humanitarian missions turned violent, as they would in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia. In the Persian Gulf itself, Kuwait was once again an independent nation, but the Bush administration had chosen to end the war with Saddam Hussein still in power, largely because the United States saw his regime as a regional counterweight to Iran. However,

this meant that the Iraqi dicta- tor would retain the power to suppress domestic opposition and rebuild his military. The United Nations therefore continued an economically debilitating trade boycott,while the US maintained an active military presence in the region, periodically bombing Iraqi targets.