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End of the Cold War

Дата публикации: 20 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) ARMED FORCES →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1190295413


End of the Cold War

Is the Cold War over?

Viewpoint: Viewpoint: Yes. The Cold War is over because most communist states are defunct or struggling to survive in the international community.

Viewpoint: Viewpoint: No. Although the United States stands as the most powerful country in the world, many Cold War antagonisms continue to pose difficulties for American leadership.

_______________________

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 left many hotly debated questions about what the political shape of the world would be in the future. Some students of global affairs argued that the values of liberal democracy and capitalism had triumphed and that the emergence of shared political values, a global economy, and international organizations spelled the end of the competitive approach to international relations. Others contended that the hegemony enjoyed by the United States over much of the globe would come to an end and that a more traditional multipolar world governed by concepts of national interest would reassert itself. Critics of this view believed that the United States would retain its leading role in world affairs into the foreseeable future.
Whatever shape the world takes, serious questions were raised about whether the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) created chaos or harmony. The absence of the Soviet Union from the world stage and the relative weakness of the Russian Federation, its principal successor, altered the balance of power. While new centers seemed to be in the process of emerging, developing conflicts also had the potential to threaten international peace.
Many experts believe this situation resulted in a dangerous power vacuum that has been the agent of instability. Certainly, the world has had no shortage of wars and crises since 1991, problems that might not have emerged were there still a Soviet Union. Critics of this view argue that the collapse of the U.S.S.R. represented victory: a challenge to global security was defeated absolutely, whether by its own domestic problems, direct pressure from the rest of the world, or a combination of the two. While the post-Soviet world may have its problems, in this view the position of the United States in the world remains unchallenged, and structures of stability that developed in the postwar world continue to ensure global stability.



Viewpoint: Yes. The Cold War is over because most communist states are defunct or struggling to survive in the international community.

To define the end of the Cold War, one must first describe what it actually was. This endeavor is difficult, in some respects, because the Cold War was many things to many people. It was a struggle between the forces of communism in the East and capitalism in the West. Primarily, it was a political competition defined by military deadlock, with economic conflict thrown in to make it interesting. No one should ever question the fact that it was indeed a war--one unlike any ever seen, but a war nonetheless. The struggle grew out of the opposition of capitalists who financed the building of the United States and western Europe in the nineteenth century against communists whose adherents were primarily the people who actually performed the labor--who actually built the industrial might that exemplifies the West.

There has always been a struggle between the haves and have-nots, but this particular competition goes much deeper. Western democracy was founded on the individual right to succeed or fail based on little-to-no input or interference from government. This orientation led to what many saw as a heartless and cruel exploitation of the workers. It is interesting to note that some of those same laborers who rose to become the great "captains of industry" were decried by their former compatriots as the worst examples of the abusers. In fact, rarely have workers-turned-managers advocated unionism or better working conditions.

In the early twentieth century communism promised equality--political as well as economic--for all. This goal was something that the capitalists did not promise; they only said that one would have equal opportunity to achieve, not succeed, nor would one have equal say until one achieved power. Conversely, the communist ideal was appealing to those who were unable or unwilling to take the risks necessary to succeed on the capitalist playing field. The promise of equality also proved attractive to women who were not allowed to vote and had limited rights in commerce.

The advent of the Soviet Union in 1917 was heralded by communists around the world as a triumph--they believed that it was just a matter of time before this heaven-sent achievement spread all over the world. Abuses of the Soviet system, which were horrendous even then, were largely unknown to the outside world. In fact, the Soviet ideal was held up as a model by many in the United States, especially during the Great Depression. Information that leaked out of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) about the horrors of Soviet rule were believed to be propaganda created by capitalist opposition.

The extreme dislike of communism led business leaders early on to try and destroy it, especially as it appeared in the form of labor unions (although not all unions were communist, they shared many of the same ideas). This hostility continued into the political realm as well. Governments watched communists carefully, and after 1917 this scrutiny grew even more intense. Probably the greatest example of government fear of communism was in Germany during the early 1920s, when an Austrian-born sergeant (newly promoted) was sent to spy on the National Socialist Workers Party--the Nazis. The spy was one Adolf Hitler, who later came to power based partly on his hatred of the communists, who would also be among his first victims.

Western democracies remained vehemently anticommunist throughout the 1930s, condemning communism in all its forms and shunning the Soviet Union. While it is true that the Soviets joined the Allies during World War II, this alliance was done out of expediency rather than a lessening of the mutual animosity. The Cold War began shortly after the Japanese surrendered in 1945.

Relations between the victorious Allied powers grew strained after World War II. France, devastated physically, politically, and economically, set out to regain its former glory in the colonies. The British, breathing a sigh of relief, saw their empire disappear within fifteen years. The Soviets began to rebuild their country and establish a buffer zone to prevent being directly attacked ever again. This desire, as well as their ideological goals, drove the Soviets headlong into confrontation with the West.

While the Allies rapidly demobilized their military forces, the Soviets refused to do the same. Intent on protecting their borders, they established "independent" satellite states around them. From the Balkans to the Baltic, communism seemed to be winning the day. This movement was the "Iron Curtain" that Winston Churchill referred to in his 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri.

The Soviets soon confronted the West in Berlin, instituting a blockade in 1948 that was answered by an American airlift. Chinese communists defeated the nationalists in 1949. That same year the Soviets tested their first nuclear weapon. It seemed to the West that the communists, a singular, unified entity in their minds, were spreading worldwide like a cancer.

In response to this perceived threat, the West decided to protect itself by forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). An attack on any member nation was taken as an attack against all, to be answered by an appropriate response. The U.S.S.R. retaliated by establishing its own defensive organization, the Warsaw Pact, which hardly allayed Western fears--nor did the Korean War (1950-1953), introduction of a Soviet long-range bomber capable of delivering a nuclear device, the so-called space race, the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962), and development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

At the heart of all this competition was a fear of losing and being taken over by the other side. The Cold War was viewed as an "all or nothing," victory-or-death fight: a total war, but fought without the violent devastation of either side. Instead, the military aspect of the conflict typically was fought by proxy. Rarely, and secretly, did Western troops directly engage Eastern bloc forces. Most notably, this combat occurred with Soviet and American fighter pilots in the Korean conflict.

That is not to say that casualties did not occur. Many thousands of cold warriors died, especially reconnaissance and intelligence personnel, but the conflict was fought primarily through others. U.S. troops engaged the forces of communism in the uniforms of North Korea, Cuba, and North Vietnam. The Soviets fought capitalism in Africa and Afghanistan. The Cold War was fought on all continents and with most of the world taking part, with a few notable exceptions, such as India. From South Africa to Bolivia, Europe to Malaya, Vietnam to Angola, this conflict was fought by thousands.

In addition to military engagements, the Cold War was also an economic war. Western democratic capitalists lined up against Eastern totalitarian communists. The West tried to out-produce the East in weapons and matériel, as well as consumer goods. For their part, the East tried to keep up, but in the end could not. In the process the Soviet Union destroyed itself, while the West, and especially the United States, became stronger.

In many ways this war was also a cultural one, in which western European concepts of government, religion, justice, freedom, and culture ran headlong into that which developed in the East. This aspect of the conflict was not decided or resolved--who will win it is anyone's guess.

There can be no doubt that the West, headed by the United States, won the Cold War. The U.S.S.R. was defeated on every front, despite its tactical victories, most notably in intelligence and in Africa. President Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War by increasing the already high-level of military production, and in this case it was beneficial to the United States to prolong the conflict, as this was the greatest chance of success. For his part, Mikhail Gorbachev tried to stave off the collapse of the Soviet Union with glasnost and perestroika, but in the end the whole system crashed.

That the Cold War is over is readily apparent: virtually all of the communist states are gone, while those that remain are struggling to survive or change. Just because the world is now in a postwar era, however, does not mean the end of strife. In many ways the world is more dangerous than before. The Soviet Union, through its repression of ethnic, religious, and cultural differences, kept old hatreds and feuds from coming to the surface. This policy gave the veneer of calm and tranquility while these tensions were bubbling under the surface. One only has to look at the formerly communist region of the Balkans to understand just how dangerous this situation can be.

Perhaps the greatest failure of the United States at the end of the twentieth century was in not offering a new Marshall Plan to the defeated nations of the Cold War. While some were able to rebuild, most are unstable and in various stages of collapse. The Russians, who claimed that they always liked Americans, even during the Cold War, rapidly became angry at Western criticism of their methods of handling internal matters. They were left to fend for themselves, and the West criticized them anyway. Worse still, any offers of economic assistance came with the price tag of unwelcome, unrealistic, and unacceptable "advice" from the United States. This arrogance caused further alienation and the cooling of relations between the two countries.

The world was left with the United States as its sole superpower, or "hyperpower" as the French called it, at the end of the Cold War. How the United States will use this power and what influence it will have on the future remains to be seen. While there is an ongoing struggle, it is definitely not the Cold War. It is the international community trying to reestablish itself after the prolonged conflict stunted it. The Cold War ended when the communists were driven out of power in Moscow and the Supreme Soviet voted to disband the Soviet Union.

-- William H. Kautt, San Antonio, Texas


Viewpoint: No. Although the United States stands as the most powerful country in the world, many Cold War antagonisms continue to pose difficulties for American leadership.

In March 1998 the Cold War International History Project Bulletin published a piece by National Security Archive director Thomas Blanton that ruminates on the question of when the Cold War ended. Did it occur in 1988 when Mikhail Gorbachev renounced the Brezhnev doctrine or when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989? Was it during the Malta summit between Gorbachev and President George Bush in December 1989, or when the Soviet Union was formally dissolved in 1991? Blanton argues that the Cold War ended on Christmas Eve 1989, when the United States let it be known that it would not object to Soviet military intervention on behalf of antigovernment protestors in hardline communist Nicolae Ceauçescu's Romania. While the speculations of Blanton and his colleagues are interesting, they ignore a fundamental feature of modern international politics: for all practical purposes the Cold War never ended.

A crucial factor that those who reflect on the history of the Cold War, and the scholarly debate about its "end," must realize is that many predictions about the future structure of the world made after 1989 show little promise of coming true. Optimistic analysts, such as Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), argued that liberal capitalist democracy had triumphed in an intensely ideological structure and that this development represented the "end of history." Pessimists, such as Samuel P. Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), claimed that the world would not be dominated by one single ideology but would become divided along vaguely defined cultural fault lines that would replace Cold War bipolarity. Another school of thought posited that the authority of the nation state would decline in importance and be superseded by international organizations. Other observers contended that the collapse of the Soviet Union brought about a unipolar world in which no other nation posed a credible challenge to hegemonic U.S. leadership. Still others, such as former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, have argued from a realist perspective that the bipolar world will be replaced by a multipolar world in which emerging centers of power will become roughly equal players in a great power system dominated by interests.

Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, none of these analyses were even close to describing international politics at the turn of the century, or even the way they were likely to develop in the foreseeable future. A cursory look at the complexion of world governments shows a surprisingly wide variety, even if some states had made a transition from authoritarianism (communist or noncommunist) to democracy. Most of the world population, however, still lived in countries that were either fundamentally undemocratic or whose democratic credentials were far from ideal. Incidences of ethnic and religious persecution persisted, often developing in places where they had not been a notable factor in recent history. While cultural factors remained important in international affairs, it is difficult to argue that nations believed to belong to a tr ansnational cultural tradition would conduct themselves regularly and uniformly on that basis, to say nothing of the fact that diverse cultural traditions cannot be neatly delineated any more accurately now than when philosophers of the Romantic era tried to determine where "national character types" were located on the map.

Theorists who have suggested that international organizations were taking on greater importance cannot easily explain why the United Nations (UN) failed to stop literally dozens of conflicts since the end of World War II, many of which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and destruction without parallel. The argument is even less convincing when one considers how inefficiently other serious issues such as concerns about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, environmental problems, and human rights were addressed by international organizations. Even the European Union (EU), the institution that came closest to creating a supranational political structure at the regional level, had to contend in 2000 with serious political and economic challenges that engendered much skepticism and opposition.

In many other cases the jealous protection of national sovereignty, especially by larger and more-powerful countries with strong domestic opposition to notions of "world government," turned international forums into little more than debating societies to which certain members were embarrassed about paying their dues. Indeed, perhaps the most effective way to argue against the radical American militiamen who insisted that there was a vast international conspiracy to impose a "new world order" over the United States was to ask them how UN forces could be expected to pull it off when they could not manage to control small villages in Bosnia or Rwanda.

Assertions of sovereignty and independence also exposed the illusion that the United States enjoyed an historically unique role as world hegemon, or "the last remaining superpower." While the United States held an undeniably strong position, it was naive for strategic thinkers at the beginning of the 1990s to argue that Washington could effectively lead the world without opposition. In purely economic terms, the United States was challenged in fairly pronounced trade disputes with almost every other economic power. Even in the era when the Cold War was thought to be ending, America faced fresh challenges from several small countries, few of which were dealt with in an effective and lasting way. Solutions to broader international problems such as the Middle Eastern peace process, the spread of terrorism, and a plague of human rights violations, remained elusive under U.S. leadership, largely because Washington was neither powerful enough nor committed enough to bring them about.

Even the most pragmatic approach, the notion that the superpower struggle would fizzle and be replaced by global multipolarity, showed little sign of becoming reality. Many international-relations theorists, such as Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 (1987), predicted that U.S. preeminence was approaching an "imperial sunset" and that other rising powers, such as the EU, China, and Japan, would become serious and equal contenders in the world arena. Kissinger predicted in Diplomacy (1994) that the United States would become only one of several major powers that would cooperate and compete with each other in a way not all that different from the European great powers of the nineteenth century. For a variety of reasons, these models have not become reality, either.

Although European integration was further along, several major member-states experienced serious and long-term economic difficulties caused by the drain of their expensive welfare states and the constrictive economic policies demanded by the process of integration. Their situation was still less promising from a military-strategic perspective because, despite rhetorical attempts to recast its role, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was still far and away the sole guardian of European security, and, despite some talk of a purely European collective-security alliance and perhaps integrated European armed forces, American leadership showed no sign of weakening. Indeed, the two major "post-Cold War" crises in Europe, in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995) and Kosovo (1998-1999), were only effectively dealt with by unmistakably United States-led diplomatic and military action after years of waffling and indecision by both the European NATO members and the international community.

In Asia, neither China, Japan, nor India, three countries identified by Kissinger as "emerging centers of power" (albeit India was only a possible center in his analysis), escaped from the roles they played during the Cold War. Japan was still the only regional partner of the United States in promoting security of the western Pacific rim and, despite much worry in the late 1980s, its economy faced serious structural challenges that prevented its rise to independence as a great power. China was developing economically, it is true, but not showing much more geopolitical ambition than fussing over Taiwan, trying to build a blue-water navy, engaging in nuclear espionage, and moving closer to Russia. Domestically, Beijing had serious problems dealing with growing political, religious, and ethnic dissent, as well as the burden of sustaining what was still a predominantly agrarian population.While India tested nuclear weapons in the summer of 1998 and passed the billion mark in population in 2000, its strategic policy had more to do with the security of its own borders and its relations with Pakistan and China than with making a bid for global influence.

In a world neither unipolar, multipolar, nor supranational--and that showed no signs of becoming so in the foreseeable future--what else can be said but that it was bipolar? American leadership in certain (but by no means all) situations far from its shores was discussed, but where was the other pole in the contemporary world to be found?

It is important for the observer of international affairs to realize that the relationship between Washington and Moscow did not depart from its Cold War antagonism in any meaningful way. Although there was a flurry of diplomatic activity and much talk of good relations in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in many ways the events from 1989 to 1991 created a situation in which that relationship in some ways became dramatically worse. The mantra that "post-Cold War" foreign investment in the Russian Federation and other successor states of the Soviet Union, so widespread in the Western international-studies community in the early 1990s, would magically produce benevolent liberal democracy was proven wholly fallacious. Despite tens of billions of dollars in loans from the International Monetary Fund, direct foreign aid from Western countries, and private or semiprivate investment from Western businesses and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the institutions of civil society and the rule of law upon which democracy relies were tragically and embarrassingly weak or absent in Russia. The administration of foreign aid, in both the West and Moscow, was dogged by corruption and inefficiency, while the development of a free market was plagued by a variety of legal and ethical problems, including allegations that billions of dollars of foreign aid was stolen by Russian officials and laundered through Wall Street banks. In a society that was becoming increasingly disenchanted with democratic ideals, the popularity of the communist party and noncommunist "parties of order" far outpaced that of politicians and movements advocating further reform and democratization.

From a diplomatic perspective the failure to produce a government and society truly convinced of political democracy and capitalist economics has only enhanced the continuity of underlying tension in Russian international relations. Simply put, between 1989 and 1991 Russia lost almost everything it had gained territorially since the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725), together with a great deal of foreign influence. Consciousness of these developments has driven Russian foreign policy since 1991. Despite its acute domestic political and economic problems, Moscow failed to renounce its historic pretensions to world-power status. Moscow still tried to retain a predominating influence through its leadership of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and had no compunction about intervening militarily and economically in several of them. A movement to reintegrate former Soviet territory into the Russian Federation was afoot and met with some success with regard to Belarus. Moscow also consistently objected to NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, behaving as if Western guarantees of East European freedom and security, literally trod upon by Russian armies time and again since the First Partition of Poland (1772), were an explicit threat to Russia. Taken as a percentage of its annual budget, the Russian Federation, despite its obvious domestic economic troubles and serious questions about the effectiveness of its military, was proportionally the second largest defense spender after China, devoting 16.3 percent of its budget in 1998 to the military. Over the same period the United States spent 5.7 percent of its budget on defense.

In addition to its military prowess, Russia tried fairly consistently to develop or improve diplomatic relations with countries that had contentious relations with the United States. The most notable example was Moscow's support for Yugoslavia, first during the bloody wars in the former provinces of that country and then during the Kosovo Crisis. The choice to side unabashedly with a dictator associated with genocide, criticize the West and the United States for intervening against him, and insist on playing a role in the peace process to which it was patently not entitled illustrated that Russia was more concerned with its own status as a world power than with genuine cooperation with the international community.

Further afield, relations with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which fought a United States-led coalition in 1990-1991, were warmed by periodic Russian denunciations of the UN-sponsored economic embargo of Baghdad, even though this measure was taken to pressure Iraq into abandoning its genocidal attacks against its Kurdish minority and its attempts to develop weapons of mass destruction. This connection was enhanced by a reported $800,000 payment from Saddam to former Russian prime minister and popular political figure Yevgeny Primakov. There were further allegations that the Iraqi nuclear-weapons program may have been enhanced by Russian scientists and technology. Other "rogue states" at odds with the United States, such as Iran, Syria, Lybia, and North Korea, were courted by Moscow after the Gorbachev era, while "post-Cold War" governments or pseudo-governments that grew out of political movements not always in favor in Washington, such as the postapartheid government of South Africa and the autonomous authority of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), developed warm relations with Russia. The marked improvement in Sino-Soviet relations that followed Gorbachev's visit to Beijing shortly before the Tiananmen Square Massacre (3-4 June 1989) proceeded apace. Both countries signed a treaty normalizing their long and contentiously disputed frontier and were found on the same side of the Kosovo Crisis, especially after U.S. bombs fell on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

While Moscow successfully gained ground in the developing world and posed a credible strategic challenge to the United States, many of its Cold War antagonisms remained firmly in place. Although relations with Western Europe improved dramatically after 1989, with many bitter critics of the Soviet Union (such as British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and German chancellor Helmut Kohl) moving steadily toward cooperation, irresponsible Russian fiscal policies, leading up to the financial crisis of August 1998, endangered Western European investments while its stance over NATO intervention in Kosovo by and large alienated Western Europe diplomatically. The situation in the Far East was much worse, for Japan refused to accept Russian occupation of part of its northern territories and dramatically increased its attention to its mutual-defensive relationship with the United States.

With certain exceptions (notably Eastern Europe) the general geopolitical situation that existed throughout the Cold War endured. A distinctive bipolarity existed in that the United States and Russia were the only two poles that attracted other countries diplomatically, regardless of serious internal difficulties in Russia. The traditionally large and strong network of U.S. allies around the Sino-Russian periphery remained largely intact and expanded in the wake of the successful rolling back of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe. Superpower posturing in parts of the Third World where the influence of the other superpower was weak continued, and Beijing, despite its recent tilt toward Moscow, remained fickle in its orientation and continued to do whatever it perceived to be in its own strategic interest. The slow proliferation of nuclear weapons notwithstanding, nuclear deterrence and nuclear-arms control as strategic options remained the province of policy makers in Washington and Moscow alone.

Although the ideological component of the Cold War changed with the collapse of Soviet communism, the government of the Russian Federation was dominated by unrepentant former communists who had the largest parliamentary presence (for whatever that is worth in Russia) for most of the brief history of the federation. Like the Soviet Union, Russian pretensions to world power status and the actions that followed were of vastly more importance to the rest of the world than the political philosophy on which the power of the Russian state rested at home. Indeed, observers of the long-term foreign policy of great powers have argued convincingly that those goals (and the internal debates surrounding them) generally survive radical changes in regime. As Woodruff D. Smith thoughtfully posited in The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (1986) regarding imperialism in early-to mid-twentieth-century German history, they can even gain strength as new regimes come to power. Besides, if ideology alone defined the Cold War, why did no one seriously contend that it started with the inception of Bolshevik government in Russia in 1917? How, moreover, can one explain the downright cordial cooperation between the democratic West and the Soviet Union despite their obvious ideological differences during World War II if antagonism is a function of ideological conflict? If the Cold War was the expression of bipolar antagonism between Washington and Moscow--born of pretension to world leadership, kept cold by the specter of nuclear war, and fought through subtle diplomacy, small conventional conflicts on the geopolitical sidelines, as well as competition for influence in the developing world--one can only conclude that it continues on.

-- Paul Du Quenoy, Georgetown University

FURTHER READINGS


References


Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992);

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996);

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987);

Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994);

Henry R. Nau, The Myth of America's Decline: Leading the World Economy into the 1990s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);

Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Опубликовано на Порталусе 20 сентября 2007 года

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