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Events after the 1960s seemed to suggest that the world was entering an era both of complex interdependence among states and of disintegration of the normative values and institutions by which international behaviour had, to a reliable extent, been made predictable. Perhaps this was not an anomaly, for if modern weapons, communications satellites, and global finance and commerce really had created a "global village," in which the security and well-being of all peoples were interdependent, then by the same token the opportunities had never been greater for ethnic, religious, ideological, or economic differences to spark resentment and conflict among the villagers.
In a world so seemingly out of control, it was perhaps a wonder that politics were not even more violent and anarchic, for the liberal dreams of progress nurtured in the 19th century had surely proved false. The spread of modern technology and economic growth around the world had not necessarily increased the number of societies based on human rights and the rule of law, nor had multilateral institutions like the United Nations or financial and economic interdependence created a higher unity and common purpose among nations, except within the durable and democratic North Atlantic alliance.
Instead, the world after the 1960s saw a proliferation of violence at every level except war among developed nations, a world financial structure under tremendous strain, the worst economic downturn since the 1930s and reduced growth rates thereafter, recurrent fears of an energy crisis, the depletion of resources and concurrent global pollution, famine and genocidal dictators in parts of Africa and Asia, the rise of an aggressive religious fundamentalism in the Muslim world, and widespread political terrorism in the Middle East and Europe. The superpowers never ceased to compete in the realms of strategic weapons and influence in the Third World and thus failed to sustain their brief experiment with détente. As President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, concluded: "The factors that make for international instability are gaining the historical upper hand over the forces that work for more organized cooperation. The unavoidable conclusion of any detached analysis of global trends is that social turmoil, political unrest, economic crisis, and international friction are likely to become more widespread during the remainder of this century."
General Secretary Brezhnev and President Nixon were understandably optimistic in the wake of the endorsement by the 24th Party Congress of the Soviet peace program in 1971 and Nixon's landslide reelection in 1972. Both expected their new relationship to mature over the course of Nixon's second term. Détente, however, had fragile foundations in foreign as well as domestic policy. The Soviets viewed it as a form of mere peaceful coexistence in which revolutionary forces could be expected to take advantage of the new American restraint, while the U.S. administration implicitly sold détente as a means of restraining Communist activity around the world. American conservatives were bound to lose faith in détente with each new incident of Soviet assertiveness, while liberals remained hostile to Nixon himself, his realpolitik, and his predilection for the use of force. Between 1973 and 1976 Soviet advances in the Third World, the destruction of Nixon's presidency in the Watergate scandal, and congressional actions to limit the foreign policy prerogatives of the White House undermined the domestic foundations of détente. After 1977 the U.S.S.R. seemed to take advantage of the Carter administration's vacillations in Third World conflicts and in arms-control talks, until the Democrats themselves reluctantly announced the demise of détente following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Analysts with a sufficiently historical point of view tended to see in the Watergate affair and Nixon's 1974 resignation the culmination of a 30-year trend by which war and the Cold War had greatly expanded, and ultimately corrupted, executive power. Liberals who, in Eisenhower's time, had called for strong presidential leadership now bemoaned "the imperial presidency." With what were widely understood to be the lessons of Vietnam fresh in the nation's mind, and a majority in Congress and the press hostile to the sitting president, the moment arrived for a legislative counterattack on the executive. This interpretation is borne out by the subsequent congressional acts designed to limit executive freedom in foreign policy. The War Powers Act of 1973 restrained the president's ability to commit U.S. forces overseas. The Stevenson and Jackson–Vanik amendments imposed conditions (regarding Soviet policy on Jewish emigration) on administration plans to expand trade with the U.S.S.R. In 1974–75 Congress prevented the President from involving the United States in a crisis in Cyprus or aiding anti-Communist forces in Angola and passed the Arms Export Control Act, removing presidential discretion in supplying arms overseas. New financial controls limited the president's ability to conclude executive agreements with foreign powers, of which some 6,300 had been signed between 1946 and 1974 as compared with only 411 treaties requiring the Senate's advice and consent. Finally, revelations of past CIA covert operations, including schemes to assassinate Fidel Castro, inspired complicated congressional oversight procedures for U.S. intelligence agencies. These assaults on executive prerogative were meant to prevent future Vietnams, prevent unelected presidential aides from engaging in secret diplomacy, and restore to Congress an "appropriate" role in foreign policy. Critics of the limitations held that no great power could conduct a coherent or effective foreign policy under such a combination of openness and restrictions, especially in a world populated increasingly by totalitarian regimes, guerrilla movements, and terrorists.
The Nixon–Brezhnev summits of 1973–74 produced only minor follow-ons in the area of arms control—the uncontroversial Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War and an agreement to reduce the number of ABM sites from the two permitted in 1972 to one. Gerald Ford, president from August 1974, and Henry Kissinger, who remained as secretary of state, attempted to restore the momentum of détente through a new SALT agreement regulating the dangerous race in MIRVed missiles, which SALT I had not prevented. The United States proposed strict equality in nuclear delivery systems and total throw weight, which meant that the United States would be allowed to MIRV more of its missiles to offset the greater size of Soviet missiles. Since the United States had no plans for a unilateral buildup in any case, however, the Soviets had no incentive to make such a concession. Instead, Ford and Brezhnev signed an Interim Agreement at Vladivostok in November 1974 that limited each side to 2,400 delivery vehicles, of which 1,320 could be MIRVed. While the Soviets claimed that this was a concession, since they declined to count the 90 British and French missiles aimed at them, the Soviets' giant SS-18s, able to deliver up to 10 MIRVs, ensured the U.S.S.R. an advantage in ICBM warheads. The repeated failure to restrain the growth of Soviet offensive systems soon sparked fears that the United States might become vulnerable to preemptive attack.
Meanwhile, the mid-1970s brought to a logical conclusion the process of détente in Europe. Nixon and Kissinger, aware that the United States had seemed to ignore its European allies during the 10 years of Vietnam, declared 1973 "the year of Europe" and hoped to forestall NATO governments from bargaining with Moscow on their own. Watergate and the Arab–Israeli war of that year (the Yom Kippur War) turned this initiative into a public-relations failure, however. Instead, the United States was obliged to follow the European lead in the ongoing Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and negotiations toward a "mutual and balanced force reduction" treaty covering NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in central Europe. The climax of the security talks was the Helsinki summit of 35 nations in the summer of 1975 and an agglomeration of proposals divided into three "baskets." (A fourth basket dealt with the question of a follow-up conference.) In Basket I the signatories accepted the inviolability of Europe's existing borders and the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of other states—thereby recognizing formally the Soviet gains in World War II and the Soviet-bloc states. Basket II promoted exchanges in science, technology, and commerce, expanding Soviet access to Western technology and opening the Soviet market to western European industry. Basket III, the apparent Soviet concession, aimed at expanding cultural and humanitarian cooperation among all states on the basis of respect for human rights. Not surprisingly, Western opinion of the Helsinki Accords, and of détente in general, came to rest heavily on whether the U.S.S.R. would voluntarily comply with Basket III. American leaders of both parties considered Helsinki misguided and empty, especially after Moscow stepped up the persecution of dissidents and jailed those of their citizens engaged in a "Helsinki watch" on Soviet compliance. In sum, Helsinki (and U.S. demands on behalf of Soviet Jews) pointed up another contradiction in détente, this time between American insistence on Soviet liberalization and Soviet insistence on noninterference in the domestic politics of other states.
During final negotiations at Helsinki, events in Southeast Asia compounded the American sense of humiliation and growing discontent with détente. The North Vietnamese had never viewed the 1973 peace accords as anything other than an interlude permitting the final withdrawal of American forces. In the year following they built up their strength in South Vietnam to more than 150,000 regulars armed with Soviet tanks, artillery, and antiaircraft weapons. The ARVN was poorly trained, suffered from low morale after the Americans were gone, and faced an enemy able to attack at times and places of its own choosing. The American withdrawal also removed at a blow some 300,000 jobs from the local economy, and President Thieu made matters worse by trying to establish one-party bureaucratic rule without the charisma or prestige to sustain it. By October 1974 the Politburo in Hanoi concluded that the Saigon regime was ripe for collapse. Large-scale probes of ARVN defenses in January 1975 confirmed their optimism. By the end of the month 12 provinces and 8,000,000 people had fallen to the Communists. On April 10, unable to obtain congressional approval of $422,000,000 in further military aid, President Ford declared that the Vietnam War was over "as far as America is concerned." The final North Vietnamese offensive reached Saigon on April 30, 1975, as the last remaining Americans fled to helicopters atop the U.S. embassy. Hanoi triumphantly reunified Vietnam politically in July 1976 and confined thousands of South Vietnamese to "reeducation camps," while thousands of "boat people" risked death in the South China Sea to escape reprisals and Communism.
The end in Cambodia had already occurred. The Communist Khmer Rouge cut off the capital, Phnom Penh, in January 1975. When the U.S. Congress denied further aid to Cambodia, Lon Nol fled, and in mid-April the Khmer Rouge took control. Its leader, Pol Pot, was a French-educated disciple of Maoist "total revolution" to whom everything traditional was anathema. The Khmer Rouge reign of terror became one of the worst holocausts of the 20th century. All urban dwellers, including hospital patients, were forced into the countryside in order to build a new society of rural communes. Sexual intercourse was forbidden and the family abolished. More than 100,000 Cambodians, including all "bourgeois," or educated people, were killed outright, and 400,000 succumbed in the death marches; in all, 1,200,000 people (a fifth of the Cambodian nation) perished. The Khmer Rouge, however, were not allied with Hanoi, and in 1979 PAVN forces invaded Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge and install a puppet regime. This action completed the conquest of Indochina by North Vietnam, for Laos, too, became Communist after the fall of Saigon. Thus the domino theory was at last put to the test and to a large extent borne out.
Events in Africa as well seemed to bear out the Soviet expectation that "progressive forces" would gain ground rapidly during the new era of superpower parity. Angola and Mozambique, coastal states facing the oil-tanker routes around the Cape of Good Hope, were finally slated to achieve independence from Portugal following a leftist military coup in Lisbon in April 1974. Three indigenous groups, each linked to tribal factions, vied for predominance in Angola. The MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) of Agostinho Neto was Marxist and received aid from the U.S.S.R. and Cuba. The FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) in the north was backed by Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now Congo [Kinshasa]the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and initially by a token contribution from the CIA. In the south the UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) of Jonas Savimbi had ties to China but came to rely increasingly on white South Africa. In the Alvor agreement of January 1975 all three agreed to form a coalition, but civil war resumed in July. By the end of the year the MPLA had been reinforced by 10,000 Cuban soldiers airlifted to Luanda by the U.S.S.R. In the United States the imperative of "no more Vietnams" and congressional ire over CIA covert operations frustrated Ford's desire to help non-Communist Angolans. Neto accordingly proclaimed a People's Republic of Angola in November 1975 and signed a Treaty of Friendship with the U.S.S.R. the following October. The rebel factions, however, remained in control of much of the country, and Cuban troop levels eventually reached 19,000. A Marxist government also assumed power in Mozambique.
In winning the presidential election of 1976, Jimmy Carter capitalized on the American people's disgust with Vietnam and Watergate by promising little more than an open and honest administration. Though intelligent and earnest, he lacked the experience and acumen necessary to provide strong leadership in foreign policy. This deficiency was especially unfortunate since his major advisers had sharply divergent views on the proper American posture toward the Soviet Union.
Carter's inaugural address showed how much he diverged from the realpolitik of Nixon and Kissinger. Such a sentiment as "Because we are free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere" recalled Kennedy's 1961 call to arms. But Carter made clear that his emphasis on human rights applied at least as much to authoritarian governments friendly to the United States as to Communist states, and that such idealism was in fact, as he put it on another occasion, the most "practical and realistic approach" to foreign policy. He hoped to divert American energies away from preoccupation with relations with the U.S.S.R. toward global problems such as energy, population control, hunger, curbing of arms sales, and nuclear proliferation. Carter's first initiative in the perilous field of arms control was an embarrassing failure. Rejecting his own secretary of state's advice to take a gradual approach, he startled the Soviets with a deep-cut proposal for immediate elimination of as much as 25 percent of the U.S. and Soviet strategic missiles and a freeze on new long-range missile deployment. Brezhnev rejected it out of hand, and Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko called this attempt to scrap the Vladivostok formula a "cheap and shady maneuver."
Carter was to gain one stunning success during his term, a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel (see below also Palestinian terrorism and diplomacy), but he was unable to stem the growth of Soviet influence in Africa. Somalia, on the strategic Horn of Africa astride the Red Sea and Indian Ocean shipping lanes, had been friendly to Moscow since 1969. In September 1974 a pro-Marxist military junta overthrew the government of neighbouring Ethiopia, had Emperor Haile Selassie confined in his palace (where he was later suffocated in his bed), and invited Soviet and Cuban advisers into the country. The Somalis then took advantage of the turmoil—perversely, from Moscow's point of view—to reassert old claims to the Ogaden region of Ethiopia and to invade, while Eritrean rebels also took up arms against Addis Ababa. The Soviets and Cubans stepped up support for Ethiopia, while Castro vainly urged all parties to form a "Marxist federation." Carter at first cut off aid to Ethiopia on the ground of human-rights abuses and promised weapons for the Somalis. By August he realized that the arms would only be used in the Ogaden campaign and reversed himself, making the United States appear ignorant and indecisive. Somalia broke with the U.S.S.R. anyway, but 17,000 Cuban troops and $1,000,000,000 in Soviet aid allowed Ethiopia to clear the Ogaden of invaders and in 1978 to suppress the Eritrean revolt. Ethiopia signed its own treaty of friendship and cooperation with the U.S.S.R. in November. The failure of the Carter administration either to consult with the Soviets or to resist Soviet–Cuban military intervention set a bad precedent and weakened both détente and U.S. prestige in the Third World.
The events in the Horn of Africa, which Brzezinski interpreted as part of a Soviet strategy to outflank the oil-rich Persian Gulf so vital to Western economies, encouraged the United States to seek help in balancing Soviet power in the world. The obvious means of doing so was to complete the rapprochement with China begun under Nixon. Some advisers opposed "playing the China card" for fear that the Soviets would retaliate by calling off the continuing SALT negotiations, but Brzezinski persuaded the President that closer ties between the United States and China would oblige the U.S.S.R. to court the United States, as had occurred in 1972. Brzezinski went to Peking in May 1978 to initiate discussions leading toward full diplomatic recognition. His cause was aided by important changes in the Chinese leadership. Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong had died in 1976. Hua Guofeng won the initial power struggle and ordered the arrest and trial of the radical Gang of Four led by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing. Both superpowers hoped that the suppression of radicals in favour of pragmatists in the Chinese government might portend better relations with Peking. The rehabilitation of the formerly condemned "capitalist roader" Deng Xiaoping led to a resumption of Soviet–Chinese border clashes, however, and the clear shift of Vietnam into the Soviet camp strengthened Washington's hand in Peking. Hua and Carter announced in December 1978 that full diplomatic relations would be established on Jan. January 1, 1979. The United States downgraded its representation in Taiwan and renounced its 1954 mutual defense treaty with the Nationalist Chinese.
The spectre of a possible Sino-American alliance may have alarmed the Soviets (Brezhnev warned Carter not to sell arms to China) but was never a real possibility. The Chinese remained Communist and distrustful of the United States. They made clear that China was no card to be played at will by one or the other of the superpowers. Nor could China's underdeveloped economy sustain a large conventional war or the projection of force overseas (which the United States would not want in any case), while in nuclear systems China was as weak vis-à-vis the Soviet Union as the Soviet Union had been vis-à-vis the United States in the 1950s. Ties to the United States might provide China with high technology, but the United States was no more willing to place nuclear or missile systems in Chinese hands than Khrushchev had been. To be sure, the United States had an interest in preventing a Sino-Soviet rapprochement (an estimated 11 percent of the Soviet military effort was devoted to the Chinese front), but any pause given the U.S.S.R. by Sino-American cooperation was probably more useful to China than to the United States. Indeed, Peking was quite capable of playing its U.S. card to carry out adventures of its own.
After their 1975 victory the North Vietnamese showed a natural strategic preference for the distant U.S.S.R. and fell out with their historic enemy, neighbouring China. In quick succession Vietnam expelled Chinese merchants, opened Cam Ranh Bay to the Soviet navy, and signed a treaty of friendship with Moscow. Vietnamese troops had also invaded Cambodia to oust the pro-Peking Khmer Rouge. Soon after Deng Xiaoping's celebrated visit to the United States, Peking announced its intention to punish the Vietnamese, and, in February 1979, its forces invaded Vietnam in strength. The Carter administration felt obliged to favour China (especially given residual American hostility to North Vietnam) and supported Peking's offer to evacuate Vietnam only when Vietnam evacuated Cambodia. The Soviets reacted with threats against China, but Chinese forces performed abysmally even against Vietnam's frontier militia, and after three weeks of hard fighting, in which Vietnam claimed to have inflicted 45,000 casualties, the Chinese withdrew. The results for U.S. policy were all negative: Chinese military prestige was shattered, Cambodia remained in the Soviet-Vietnamese camp, and the tactic of playing the China card was rendered ridiculous.
To the chagrin of Peking, the Sino-Vietnamese War failed to forestall a planned U.S.–Soviet summit meeting and the signing of a second arms agreement, SALT II. After Carter's first deep-cut proposal, negotiations had resumed on the basis of the Vladivostok agreement and had finally produced a draft treaty. The summit was held in Vienna in June 1979, and Carter returned to seek congressional approval for SALT II as well as most-favoured-nation trade status for both the U.S.S.R. and China. The treaty inspired widespread suspicion in the U.S. Senate on its own merits. The modest limits on nuclear forces and allowances for upgrading existing missiles did not seem sufficient to prevent the Soviets' superior long-range missile forces from threatening the survival of U.S. land-based missiles. The American will to upgrade its own deterrent, meanwhile, seemed to be sapped by the SALT process itself. Confusion reigned over how the MX missile might be deployed so as to survive a Soviet first strike, and Carter cancelled programs to deploy the B-1 strategic bomber and an antitank neutron bomb designed for Europe. There also was widespread doubt over whether Soviet compliance with SALT II could be adequately monitored. The treaty foundered as well on growing American impatience with Communist expansion in the Third World.
Any chance of Senate ratification of SALT II disappeared on Dec. December 25, 1979, when the U.S.S.R. launched an invasion of Afghanistan to prop up a friendly regime. Even after a decade of détente the American public still thought viscerally in terms of containment, and this latest and most brazen Soviet advance pushed the President over the fence. "This action of the Soviets," said Carter, "has made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets' ultimate goals are than anything they've done." Calling the Afghan invasion "a clear threat to peace," Carter ordered an embargo on sales of grain and high-technology equipment to the U.S.S.R., canceled U.S. participation in the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, reinstated registration for the draft, withdrew the SALT II treaty from the Senate, and proclaimed the Carter Doctrine, pledging the United States to the defense of the Persian Gulf. It was clear to all that détente was dead.
Was détente a failure because the Soviets refused to play by the rules, because the United States was unwilling to accord the U.S.S.R. genuine equality, or because détente was never really tried at all? Or did the differing U.S. and Soviet conceptions of détente ensure that, sooner or later, American patience would wear thin? The last explanation is, in foreshortened perspective, at least, the most convincing. From the Soviet point of view the United States had been a hegemonic power from 1945 to 1972, secure in its nuclear dominance and free to undertake military and political intervention around the world. The correlation of forces had gradually shifted, however, to the point where the U.S.S.R. could rightly claim global equality and respect for "peaceful coexistence." Under détente, therefore, the United States was obliged to recognize Soviet interests in all regions of the world and to understand that the U.S.S.R. was now as free as the United States to defend those interests with diplomacy and arms. Those interests included, above all, fraternal aid for "progressive" movements in the Third World. Détente certainly could never mean the freezing of the status quo or the trends of history as understood in Marxist theory. Instead, in the Soviet view, the United States continued to resent Soviet equality in armaments, to shut the U.S.S.R. out of regional diplomacy (as in the Middle East), to interfere in Soviet domestic policy, to support counterrevolutionary movements, and, in violation of the spirit of détente, to attempt to organize the encirclement of the U.S.S.R. in league with NATO and China.
From the American perspective, Soviet policy from 1945 to 1972 was characterized by a Marxist-Leninist drive to export revolution and achieve world dominion by dividing and bullying the West and exploiting the struggles of Third World nations. At the same time the growing maturity of the U.S.S.R. itself, the split in world Communism, and the realization that the Western world was not about to collapse (from either "the contradictions of capitalism" or Soviet subversion) had made Cold War obsolete. Under détente, therefore, the U.S.S.R. was obliged to accept the responsibilities as well as the benefits of membership in the comity of civilized states, to reduce its exorbitant military spending and subversive activity, and to cease trying to turn the domestic problems of other countries to unilateral benefit. Instead, in the American view, the U.S.S.R. continued to exploit Western restraint, to build up its nuclear and conventional forces far beyond the needs of deterrence, and to exploit Communist proxy forces to take over developing nations.
Each view had a basis in reality, and, given the differing assumptions of the two governments, each was persuasive. The burden of compromise or dissolution of the relationship fell inevitably on the democratic, status quo power, however, and in time American opinion would cease to tolerate Soviet advances made under the guise of détente. The notion of détente was flawed from the start in two crucial points. First, with the exception of preventing nuclear war, the United States and the U.S.S.R. still shared no major interests in the world; and second, the specific agreements on respect for spheres of influence included Europe and isolated regions elsewhere but not the bulk of the Third World. Americans inevitably viewed any Soviet assertiveness in such undefined regions as evidence of the same old Soviet drive for world domination, while the Soviets inevitably viewed any American protestations as evidence of the same old American strategy of containment. Within a decade, the hopes raised by Nixon and Brezhnev stood exposed as illusory.
Among the manifestations of the diffusion of political power in the world after 1957 was the rise of regional powers and conflicts with only distant or secondary connections to the rivalries of the Cold War blocs, of multilateral political and economic pressure groups, and of revolutionary, terrorist, or religious movements operating across national boundaries ("nonstate actors"). The politics of the Middle East after 1972 comprised all three and so frustrated attempts by the industrial states to control events in the region that by 1978 Brzezinski was describing the old southern tier of states reaching beneath the U.S.S.R. from Egypt to Pakistan as the "arc of crisis."
The sweeping Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 had forced every Arab state to rethink its own foreign policy and the extent of its commitment to the cause of Arab unity. Egypt, having lost the Sinai, faced Israelis entrenched in the Bar-Lev line directly across the Suez Canal. Jordan, having lost the West Bank, faced Israeli troops directly across the Jordan River. Syria, having lost the Golan Heights, faced Israeli forces within easy striking distance of Damascus itself. The notion of united Arab armies sweeping the Jews into the sea had clearly proved to be romantic, while political unity among the Arabs suffered from the abiding division between nationalist and socialist states like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq and traditional Arab monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), organized in 1964 to represent some 2,000,000 refugees from the Palestine mandate who were scattered around the Arab world and from 1968 led by Yāsir ʿArafāt, was also divided between old families of notables, whose authority dated back to Ottoman times, and young middle-class or fedayeen factions anxious to exert pressure on Israel and the West through terrorism. The latter included the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), formed three months after the 1967 war. Over the next year the PFLP hijacked 14 foreign airliners, culminating in its spectacular destruction of four planes at once in Jordan. In 1970–71 the moderate King Hussein of Jordan lost patience with the autonomous PLO formations in his territory and expelled them, provoking a sharp military exchange with Syria. The PLO moved its central offices to Lebanon, whence terrorists could cross the frontier to commit atrocities against civilians inside Israel. The PFLP and other Palestinian groups also linked up with extreme leftist and rightist (because anti-Semitic) conspiracies in Italy, Austria, and Germany to form a terrorist network that left no European or Mediterranean state free from the fear of random violence. In September 1972 terrorists from an organization calling itself Black September took nine Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympic Games; all the hostages and five terrorists died in the ensuing gun battle with police.
The terrorist network benefited mightily from the financial support, training, or refuge provided by established pro-Soviet states like Cuba, East Germany, Bulgaria, Algeria, Syria, Yemen (Aden), and especially Libya. In 1969 the Libyan monarchy was overthrown in a military coup led by Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, a fanatical adherent of Nasser's pan-Arabism. Following Nasser's death in 1970 and the development of rich oil deposits in Libya, Qaddafi styled himself as the new leader and financier of the radical Arab cause. In imitation of Mao, he issued a little Green Book describing his "new gospelgospel…. . . . One of its words can destroy the world." The ideology was a mixture of Third World-ism, Socialism, and Muslim fundamentalism, and it called forth a "heroic politics." In the eyes of the West, the rhetoric masked a crazed cruelty, and even in Arab eyes it seemed at best antiquated in the wake of the 1967 war.
Another new feature of Middle Eastern politics was the assertiveness of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), composed of oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula as well as Libya, Nigeria, and Venezuela. The members of this producers' cartel accounted for a large percentage of the world's oil reserves and wielded tremendous potential power over the Europeans and Japanese, who relied on imports for more than 80 percent of their energy needs. In the past, oil prices had been kept artificially low by the Western oil companies through bilateral agreements with producer states. By 1970, however, most host governments had taken over ownership of the production facilities, and they saw in a drastic rise of oil prices a means of accumulating capital for development and purchases of arms, as well as a way to pressure the Western states into respecting their grievances against Israel.
The most populous frontline (i.e., bordering Israel) Arab state, but one without oil revenues, was Egypt. Since 1955 Egypt had undergone a demographic explosion. Population was growing at a rate of 1,000,000 per year, and 35,000,000 people were crowded into the Nile valley and delta. The numbers and youth of the Egyptians (over half were under 25 in 1980) and the country's economic weakness meant that frustrated and unemployed youth posed the constant threat of political instability. Certainly Egypt could no longer afford an endless crusade against Israel. These considerations dominated the thinking of Nasser's successor as president, Anwar el-Sādāt. He could not, however, abandon Nasser's legacy, especially with the Sinai under Israeli occupation, without losing his legitimacy at home. Accordingly, Sādāt laid a risky and courageous plan to extricate his country from its foreign and domestic stalemates. Husbanding the arms provided by the U.S.S.R. after 1967, he abruptly expelled 20,000 Soviet advisers in July 1972 and opened a secret channel to Washington, hinting that Egypt and the United States together could eliminate Soviet involvement in the Middle East. Only the Americans, he reasoned, might influence the Israelis to return the occupied regions. Then, on Oct. October 6, 1973, during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, he launched the fourth Arab–Israeli war.
The Egyptian army moved across the Suez Canal in force and engaged the Bar-Lev line. For the first time it made substantial progress and inflicted a level of casualties especially damaging for the outnumbered Israelis. Syrian forces also stormed the Golan Heights. The United States and the Soviet Union reacted with subtle attempts to fine-tune the outcome by alternately withholding or providing arms to the belligerents and by urging or discouraging a UN cease-fire. Nixon denied Israel an airlift of arms until October 13, preventing Israel from launching a prompt counterattack and thereby signaling Sādāt of American sympathy. Once assured of U.S. aid, however, the Israelis struck on both fronts, regained the Golan Heights, and crossed the Suez Canal. Kissinger, alarmed that the Israeli victory might be so complete as to hinder a lasting settlement, quickly agreed to call, with the Soviet Union, for a UN cease-fire. The cease-fire broke down at once, and Israeli forces encircled a 20,000-man Egyptian army corps. Brezhnev curtly warned Nixon of possible Soviet military intervention, which the United States moved to deter, perhaps recklessly, with a worldwide alert of its military forces. Finally, Kissinger threatened a cutoff of arms deliveries unless Israel halted its offensive, and peace was restored.
The 1973 war saved Egyptian honour and solidified Sādāt's prestige to the point where he could afford to be conciliatory. The United States emerged as the "honest broker" between Egypt and Israel. As Kissinger put it, "The Arabs can get guns from the Russians, but they can get their territory back only from us." Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy" between Tel Aviv and Cairo secured an Israeli withdrawal beyond the Suez in January 1974, the reopening of the canal, the insertion of a UN force between the antagonists, and, in September 1975, an Israeli retreat from the crucial Mitla and Gidi passes in the Sinai. The United States flooded both countries with economic and military aid, and Sādāt repudiated Nasser's Socialism in favour of policies stimulating domestic private enterprise.
The limited rapprochement that emerged from the 1973 war was purchased at great economic cost, for the Arab OPEC nations, led by Saudi Arabia, seized the opportunity to enact a five-month embargo of oil exports to all nations aiding Israel. More telling still was the price revolution that preceded and followed. OPEC had already engineered a doubling of the posted price of oil to $3.07 per barrel by the eve of the war. In January 1974 it nearly quadrupled the price again, to $11.56 per barrel. The importance of this sudden rise cannot be exaggerated. The resulting shortages and exorbitant costs accelerated the growing inflation in the Western world, exposed the energy-dependency of the industrial nations, created a vast balance-of-payments deficit in many industrial states, wiped out the hard-won economic progress of many developing nations, and placed massive sums of petrodollars in the hands of a few underpopulated Middle Eastern states. The political upshot was that the United States and Europe would have to pay close attention to the desires of those Arab states in foreign policy as long as OPEC unity survived.
In November 1977, Sādāt shocked the Arab world by announcing his willingness to go to Jerusalem personally to seek peace. When his talks with the new Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, broke down, President Carter invited them both to Camp David in September 1978. During 11 days of intensive discussion, Carter succeeded in bringing the rivals together. The Camp David Accords provided for complete Israeli evacuation of the Sinai, gradual progress toward self-rule for West Bank Palestinians over a five-year period, and a peace treaty signed by Begin and Sādāt at the White House in March 1979. This historic settlement dismayed other Arab states and split the PLO asunder, the so-called rejectionists refusing to recognize the settlement. Qaddafi purchased huge amounts of Soviet arms and expanded Libya's training and supply of terrorists. In December 1979, 300 Muslim fundamentalists seized the holiest of all Islāmic shrines in Mecca. Sādāt himself was assassinated by Arab extremists in 1981.
Carter's success in Middle Eastern diplomacy was likewise undercut by the collapse of the strongest and staunchest American ally in the Muslim world, the Shah of Iran. Since the monarchy had been restored by a CIA-aided coup in 1953, Reza Shah Pahlavi had used Iran's oil revenues to finance rapid modernization of his country and the purchase of American arms. Nixon had chosen Iran to be a U.S. surrogate in the vital Persian Gulf, and as late as 1977 Carter praised the Shah for making Iran "an island of stability." Clearly, American intelligence services failed to detect the widespread Iranian resentment of modernization (meaning, in this context, materialism, emancipation of women, and secularization), middle-class opposition to the autocracy, and the rising tide of Shīʾite fundamentalism that were undermining the Shah's legitimacy. Fundamentalist movements and conflicts between Sunnite and Shīʾite Muslims have arisen periodically in the course of Islāmic history, but the outbreaks of the late 20th century were especially notable in light of the Western assumption that less developed countries would naturally secularize their politics and culture as they modernized their society and economy. Instead, rapidly developing Iran succumbed to a religious revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. By November 1978 the beleaguered Shah saw his options reduced to democratization, military repression, or abdication. Despite the importance of Iran for U.S. interests, including the presence there of critical electronic listening posts used to monitor missile tests inside the U.S.S.R., Carter was unable to choose between personal loyalty toward an old ally and the moral argument on behalf of reform or abdication. In January 1979 the Shah left Iran; the next month, when he requested asylum in the United States, Carter refused lest he give offense to the new Iranian regime. The gesture did not help the United States, however. An interim government in Tehrān quickly gave way to a theocracy under Khomeini, who denounced the United States as a "great Satan" and approved the seizure in November 1979 of the American embassy in Tehrān and the holding of 52 hostages there. The hostage drama dragged on for nearly 15 months, and most Americans were infuriated by the unfathomable Khomeini and frustrated by Carter's apparent ineffectiveness.
Carter reacted to the crisis by adopting Brzezinski's formula that the Middle East and South Asia constituted an arc of crisis susceptible to Soviet adventurism. In his State of the Union address of January 1980 he enunciated the Carter Doctrine, declaring that any attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf would be viewed as an attack on the vital interests of the United States, and he pledged to form a Rapid Deployment Force to defend the region. Whether the U.S. military was truly capable of sustained combat in that remote region was doubtful. When diplomacy failed to free the hostages in Tehrān, Carter resorted in April 1980 to a military rescue mission, hoping to repeat the success of a brilliant Israeli commando raid that had freed 103 airline passengers at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, but the operation was a humiliating failure. Only in January 1981, after the overwhelming defeat of his reelection bid, did Carter achieve the release of the hostages.
Brzezinski's fears that the U.S.S.R. would take advantage of the arc of crisis seemed justified when the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in 1979. It is likely, however, that the Soviets were responding to a crisis of their own rather than trying to exploit another's. Remote and rugged Afghanistan had been an object of imperialist intrigue throughout the 19th and 20th centuries because of its vulnerable location between the Russian and British Indian empires. After 1955, with India and Pakistan independent, the Afghan government of Mohammad Daud Khan forged economic and military ties to the U.S.S.R. The monarchy was overthrown by Daud Khan in 1973 and was succeeded by a one-party state. The small Afghan Communist party, meanwhile, broke into factions, while a fundamentalist Muslim group began an armed insurrection in 1975. Daud Khan worked to lessen Afghanistan's dependence on Soviet and U.S. aid, and he reportedly had a heated disagreement with Brezhnev himself during a visit to Moscow in April 1977. Leftists in the Afghan officer corps, perhaps fearing a blow against themselves, murdered Daud Khan in April 1978 and pledged to pursue friendly relations with the U.S.S.R. Thus Afghanistan, under the rule of Nur Mohammad Taraki, was virtually in the Soviet camp. When Taraki objected to a purge of the Afghan Cabinet, however, the leader of a rival faction, Hafizullah Amin, had him arrested and killed. These intramural Communist quarrels both embarrassed the Soviets and threatened to destabilize the Afghan regime in the face of growing Muslim resistance. In the fall of 1979 the Soviets built up their military strength across the border and hinted to American diplomats that they might feel obliged to intervene. On Dec. December 25, 1979, the Soviet army began its occupation, and two days later a coup d'état led to the murder of Amin and the installation of Babrak Karmal, a creature of the KGB who had been brought into the country by Soviet paratroops.
The Soviets would probably have preferred to work through a pliant native regime rather than invade Afghanistan, but Amin's behaviour and Moscow's unwillingness to risk a domestic overthrow of a Communist regime forced their hand. The invasion, therefore, appeared to be an application of the Brezhnev Doctrine and was all the more pressing given that the Central Asian provinces of the Soviet Union were also vulnerable to the rise of Islāmic fundamentalism. The United States was tardy in responding to the 1978 coup despite Carter's concern over the arc of crisis and the murder of the U.S. ambassador in Kabul in February 1979. At the same time, the Soviet invasion aroused American suspicions of a grand strategy aimed at seizing a warm-water port on the Indian Ocean and the oil of the Persian Gulf. Over the course of the next decade, however, the puppet Afghan regime lost all authority with the people, Afghan soldiers defected in large numbers, and the Muslim and largely tribal resistance, armed with U.S. and Chinese weapons, held out in the mountains against more than 100,000 Soviet troops and terror bombing of their villages. More than 2,000,000 Afghans became refugees in Pakistan and Iran. Western observers soon began to speak of Afghanistan as the Soviets' Vietnam.
The Shīʿite revolution in Iran, meanwhile, provoked and tempted neighbouring Iraq into starting yet another war in the arc of crisis. The secular Iraqi regime was nervous about the impact Iranian events might have on its own large Shīʿite population. The Kurdish minority, which had resorted to terrorism in pursuit of its goal of a Kurdish state to be carved out of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, also presented an intractable problem. Finally, the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein hoped to use the opportunity of Iran's apparent near-anarchy to seize the long-disputed Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab waterway at the mouth of the Tigris-Euphrates river system. Bolstered by arms purchased with oil revenues, Hussein unilaterally abrogated a 1975 accord on the waterway and launched a full-scale invasion of Iran in September 1980. After initial victories the Iraqis were surprisingly thrown back and a war of attrition commenced. The Iraqis employed poison gas and were building a nuclear reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium until the Israeli air force destroyed the facility in a surprise raid in June 1981. The Iranians relied on human-wave assaults by revolutionary youths assured of a place in paradise for dying in battle.
Both sides employed imported planes and missiles to attack each other's oil facilities, tanker ships, and, occasionally, cities. Attacks then spread to neutral shipping as well, and oil production in the entire gulf region was placed in jeopardy. Neither superpower had direct interest in the war, except for a common opposition to any overthrow of the local balance of power, but the Soviets tended to benefit from a prolongation of the conflict. In 1987 the United States sharply increased its presence in the gulf by permitting Kuwaiti oil tankers to fly the U.S. flag and by deploying a naval task force to protect them in passage through the gulf. Compared to the situation of the 1950s, when John Foster Dulles' CENTO arrangement seemed to ensure a ring of stable, pro-Western governments in the South Asian region, that of the 1980s was almost totally unpredictable.
As the 1980s opened, few predicted that it would be a decade of unprecedented progress in superpower relations. All pretense of détente had disappeared in 1979, and the election of 1980 brought to the White House a conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan, who was more determined to compete vigorously with the U.S.S.R. than any president had been since the 1960s. He bemoaned an "arms control process" that, he said, always favoured the Soviets and sapped the will of the Western allies and a détente that duped gullible Americans into acquiescing in unilateral Soviet gains. Reagan sounded like Dulles when he denounced the Soviet Union as "an evil empire," and he echoed John F. Kennedy in calling for America to "stand tall" in the world again. Like Kennedy, he cut taxes in hopes of stimulating the stagnant U.S. economy, expanded the military budget (a process begun in Carter's last year), and stressed the development of sophisticated military technology beyond the means of the U.S.S.R. Reagan insisted that history was on the side of freedom, not Communism, and together with his close friend British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher he sought to dispel the "malaise" that had afflicted the United States during the late 1970s. To be sure, Reagan had to work within the constraints caused by growing federal deficits, Soviet parity in nuclear arms, and congressional limits on executive action. Hence his actual policies resembled more the cautious containment of the Eisenhower era than the aggressive interventionism of the Kennedy–Johnson years. The one novel means adopted by the administration for combatting Soviet power and influence was to extend aid to irregular forces engaged in resisting pro-Soviet governments in the Third World. Such "freedom fighters," as Reagan termed them, in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua seemed to offer hope that the United States could contain or even overthrow totalitarian regimes without getting itself involved in new Vietnams. This Reagan Doctrine was thus a natural corollary of the Nixon Doctrine.
As American diplomacy recovered its self-confidence and initiative, Soviet foreign policy drifted, if only because of the advanced age of Brezhnev and the frequent changes in leadership after his death in November 1982. Early in the decade a recurrence of serious unrest in eastern Europe, this time in Poland, also kept the attention of the Kremlin close to home. During the period of détente the Polish government had expanded an ambitious development plan financed largely by western European credits. Economic performance foundered, however, foreign debt mounted to $28,000,000,000, and the state imposed successive price hikes on staples. By 1979–80 a popular protest movement had grown up around the officially unsanctioned Solidarity trade union and its charismatic leader, Lech Wałęsa. The strong Roman Catholic roots of Polish popular nationalism were evident in the movement, especially in light of the accession in 1978 of Karol Cardinal Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in 456 years, who in 1981 survived an assassination plot probably hatched in Bulgaria, a Soviet satellite. As unrest mounted in Poland, NATO countries warned against a Soviet military intervention, holding in reserve the threat of declaring Warsaw in default on its debts. In December 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law, sparing Poland a Soviet invasion at the price of military rule and the suppression of Solidarity. The United States responded by suspending Poland's most-favoured-nation trade status and blocking further loans from the International Monetary Fund. Reagan held the Soviet Union responsible for martial law; his attempts to extend the sanctions to an embargo on high-technology exports to the U.S.S.R., however, angered western Europeans, who feared losing access to eastern European markets and who were in the process of completing a huge pipeline from Siberia that would make western Europe dependent on the U.S.S.R. for 25 percent of its natural gas. In both the debt and pipeline issues, it seemed that the web of interdependence woven during détente served to constrain Western countries more than it did the U.S.S.R.
Brezhnev's successor as general secretary of the Communist Party, the former KGB chief Yury Andropov, declared that there was no alternative to détente as the Soviets understood it. He denounced Reagan's "militaristic course" as a new bid for U.S. hegemony. It was Reagan's image of the U.S.S.R., however, that seemed confirmed when a Soviet jet fighter plane shot down a civilian South Korean airliner in Soviet air space in September 1983, killing 269 people. Some in the West supported the Soviet claim that the plane was on a spy mission, but they produced no persuasive evidence to that effect. Andropov's demise after a year and a half elevated Konstantin Chernenko, another member of the older generation of the Politburo who would himself survive only until March 1985. Given these frequent changes in leadership and the drain on Soviet resources caused by the ongoing war in Afghanistan, the Kremlin was even less able than the White House to mount new initiatives in foreign policy until late in the 1980s.
The most serious consequence of the collapse of détente and the failure of the SALT II Treaty (judged by Reagan as "seriously flawed") appeared to be an acceleration of the arms race between the superpowers. Liberal critics feared that Reagan would unleash a new arms race; his supporters asserted that the Soviets had never stopped racing even during the era of SALT. Reagan waffled on arms policy, however, because of stiff domestic and European opposition to the abandonment of arms control. Programs to upgrade the three elements of strategic deterrence were approved only after being cut back, yet they drew complaints from the Soviet Union that the highly accurate MX missile, the new Poseidon nuclear submarines, and air-launched cruise missiles for the B-52 force were first-strike weapons. A serious NATO worry stemmed from Soviet deployment of the new SS-20 theatre ballistic missile in Europe. In 1979 the Carter administration had acceded to the request by NATO governments that the United States introduce 572 Pershing II and cruise missiles into Europe to balance the 900 SS-20s. The European antinuclear movement, however, now officially patronized by the British Labour Party, the Greens in West Germany, and Dutch and Belgian social democrats, forced Reagan to link Pershing deployment with intermediate nuclear forces (INF) talks with the U.S.S.R. Reagan tried to seize the moral high ground with his "zero-option" proposal for complete elimination of all such missiles from Europe and a call for new Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) to negotiate real reductions in the superpower arsenals. The Soviets, however, refused to scrap any of their long-range missiles or to trade existing SS-20s for Pershings yet to be deployed.
In March 1983, Reagan announced a major new research program to develop antiballistic missile defenses based in outer space. This Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, dubbed "Star Wars" by opponents) was inspired by the emergence of new laser and particle-beam technology that seemed to have the potential to devise an accurate, instantaneous, and nonnuclear means of shooting down long-range missiles in their boost phase, before their multiple reentry vehicles had a chance to separate. The President thus challenged his country to exploit its technological edge to counter the threat of Soviet offensive missiles and perhaps liberate the world from fear of a nuclear holocaust. Scientific and political critics ridiculed SDI as naive (because it would not work or could be easily countered), expensive beyond reckoning, counterproductive (because it implied repudiation of the 1972 ABM Treaty), and dangerous (because the Soviets might stage a preemptive attack to prevent its deployment). The alarmed Soviets, however, weakened the case of American critics by launching their own propaganda campaign against SDI, implying that they took seriously its prospects for success. Evidence also mounted that the U.S.S.R. had been engaged in similar research since the mid-1970s. A $26,000,000,000, five-year American program was approved, although Congress limited future funding and arms-control advocates pressured the President to use SDI as a bargaining chip in the START talks. The Soviets broke off the INF and START talks at the end of 1983 but resumed talks two years later, apparently with hopes of stalling SDI research.
U.S.–Soviet competition in the Third World also continued through the 1980s as the Soviets sought to benefit from indigenous sources of unrest. The campaign of the Communist-led African National Congress (ANC) against apartheid in South Africa, for instance, might serve Soviet strategic aims, but the black rebellion against white rule was surely indigenous. White-supremacist governments in southern Africa might argue, correctly, that the standard of living and everyday security of blacks were better in their countries than in most black-ruled African states, but the fact remained that African blacks, like all human beings, preferred to be ruled by their own tyrant rather than one of some other nationality or race. What was more, the respect shown by African governments for international boundaries began to break down after 1970. Spain's departure from the Spanish (Western) Sahara was the signal for a guerrilla struggle among Moroccan and Mauritanian claimants and the Polisario movement backed by Algeria. The Somali invasion of the Ogaden, Libyan intrusions into Chad and The Sudan, and Uganda's 1978 invasion of Tanzania exemplified a new volatility. Uganda had fallen under a brutal regime headed by Idi Amin, whom most African leaders tolerated (even electing him president of the Organization of African Unity) until Julius Nyerere spoke out, following Uganda's invasion of his country, about the African tendency to reserve condemnation for white regimes only.
The black revolt against white rule in southern Africa was a timely consequence of the decolonization of Angola and Mozambique and of the Lancaster House accord under which white Southern Rhodesians accepted majority rule, resulting in 1980 in the full independence of Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, who in 1984 declared his intention to create a one-party Marxist state. South Africa tried to deflect global disgust with its apartheid system by setting up autonomous tribal "homelands" for blacks, but no other government recognized them. United States diplomacy sought quietly to promote a comprehensive settlement of South Africa's problems by pressuring Pretoria to release South West Africa (Namibia) and gradually dismantle apartheid in return for a Cuban evacuation of Angola and Mozambique. This policy of "constructive engagement," by which the U.S. State Department hoped to retain leverage over Pretoria, came under criticism every time a new black riot or act of white repression occurred. Critics demanded economic divestment from, and stringent sanctions against, South Africa, but supporters of the policy argued that sanctions would inflict disproportionate economic harm on South African blacks, drive the whites to desperation, and encourage violence that would strengthen the hand of Communist factions. Congressional pressure finally forced the administration to compromise on a package of sanctions in 1986, and U.S. firms began to pull out of South Africa.
The Middle East remained crisis-prone despite the Egyptian–Israeli peace. In 1978 an Arab summit in Baghdad pledged $400,000,000 to the PLO over the next 10 years. A comprehensive Middle East peace was stymied by the unwillingness of rejectionist Arab states to negotiate without the PLO and by the U.S.-Israeli refusal to negotiate with the PLO. In June 1982 the Begin government determined to put an end to terrorist raids by forcibly clearing out PLO strongholds inside Lebanon. In fact the Israeli army advanced all the way to Beirut in a bitter campaign that entrenched Syrian occupation of the strategic al-Biqāʿ valley and intensified what already amounted to a Lebanese civil war among Palestinians, Muslims of various sects and allegiances, and Christian militiamen. The United States sent Marines to Beirut to facilitate the evacuation of the PLO, while it tried without success to piece together a coalition Lebanese government and induce the Israelis and Syrians to withdraw. In October 1983 terrorists blew up the U.S. Marine barracks, killing more than 200 Americans. The Middle East peace process begun by Kissinger and continued by Carter seemed to have unraveled by the late 1980s. Western governments tried to coordinate policies on terrorism, including a firm refusal to bargain with kidnappers, but concern for the lives of hostages and fear of future retaliation insidiously weakened their resolve. In October 1985, however, the Israeli air force dispatched planes to bomb the PLO headquarters in Tunis. When Libyan-supported terrorists planted bombs in airports in Rome and Vienna in December 1985 and in a discotheque in Berlin in April 1986, Reagan ordered U.S. jets to attack terrorist training camps and air-defense sites in Libya. The raid was applauded by the American public, and terrorist incidents did seem to decline in number over the following year. Qaddafi suffered another reverse in the spring of 1987 when French-supported Chadian troops drove the Libyan invaders from their country.
In the Persian Gulf the Reagan administration held publicly aloof from the war between Iraq and Iran. Intelligence that Shīʿite terrorists were behind the kidnapping of Americans in Beirut, however, prompted the administration secretly to supply arms to Iran in return for help, never forthcoming, in securing the release of hostages. There was also a notion that such a deal might forge links to moderate Iranians in hopes of better relations in the event of the aged Khomeini's death. While the motives were humanitarian and strategic, this action directly contradicted the policy of shunning negotiations with terrorists that the United States had been urging on its allies. When the operation was exposed, the Reagan administration lost credibility with Congress and foreign governments alike.
After a tour of Latin America in 1950, the American diplomat George Kennan wrote a memo despairing that the region would ever achieve a modest degree of economic dynamism, social mobility, or liberal politics. The culture itself was, in his view, inhospitable to middle-class values. As late as 1945 almost all the Latin-American republics were governed by landowning oligarchies allied with the church and army, while illiterate, apolitical masses produced the mineral and agricultural goods to be exported in exchange for manufactures from Europe and North America. To Castro and other radical intellectuals, a stagnant Latin America without strong middle classes was precisely suited for a Marxist, not a democratic, revolution. Before 1958 the United States—the "colossus to the north"—had used its influence to quell revolutionary disturbances, whether out of fear of Communism, to preserve economic interests, or to shelter strategic assets such as the Panama Canal. After Castro's triumph of 1959, however, the United States undertook to improve its own image through the Alliance for Progress and to distance itself from especially obnoxious authoritarian regimes. Nonetheless, Latin-American development programs largely failed to keep pace with population growth and inflation, and frequently they were brought to naught by overly ambitious schemes or official corruption. By the 1980s the wealthiest and largest states like Brazil and Mexico faced a crushing burden of foreign debt. Neo-Marxist economists of the 1960s and '70s argued that even the more enlightened policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations kept Latin America in a condition of stifling dependence on American capital and markets and on world commodity prices. Some endorsed the demands of the Third World bloc in the UN for a "new world economic order," involving a massive shift of resources from the rich countries to the poor or the "empowerment" of the developing countries to control the terms of trade along the lines of OPEC. Others advocated social revolution to transform Latin states from within. At the same time the example of Cuba's slide into the status of a Communist satellite fully dependent on the U.S.S.R. revived the fear and suspicion with which Americans habitually regarded Third World revolutions.
Even after the Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 missile crisis, Cuba retained a certain autonomy in foreign policy, while the Soviets exhibited caution about employing their Cuban clients. Castro preferred to place himself among the ranks of Third World revolutionaries like Nasser, Nyerere, or Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah rather than follow slavishly the Moscow party line. He also elevated himself to leadership of the nonaligned nations. When relations between Havana and Moscow cooled temporarily in 1967–68, Brezhnev applied pressure, holding back on oil shipments and delaying a new trade agreement. Castro tried to resist the pressure by exhorting and mobilizing his countrymen to produce a record 10,000,000-ton sugar harvest in 1970. When the effort failed, Castro moved Cuba fully into the Soviet camp. The U.S.S.R. agreed to purchase 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 tons of sugar per year at four times the world price, provide cheap oil, and otherwise subsidize the island's economy at a rate of some $3,000,000,000 per year; thenceforward, 60 percent of Cuba's trade was with countries in the Soviet bloc. Brezhnev himself visited Cuba in 1974 and declared the country "a strong constituent part of the world system of Socialism." Castro, in turn, voiced the Soviet line on world issues, played host to Latin-American Communist party conventions, used the forum of the nonaligned nations movement to promote his distinctly aligned program, and made tens of thousands of Cuban troops available to support pro-Soviet regimes in Africa.
Soviet domination of Cuba, however, may have harmed their chances elsewhere in Latin America, since it alerted other leftists to the dangers of seeking Soviet support. Moreover, the Soviets simply could not afford such massive aid to other clients. This limitation appeared to be crucial even when Communists had a chance of prevailing in one of the largest, most developed South American states, Chile. The Communist party there was a charter member of the 1921 Comintern and had strong ties to the Chilean labour movement. The party was outlawed until 1956, whereupon it formed an electoral popular front with the Socialists, and it narrowly missed electing Socialist Salvador Allende Gossens to the presidency in 1964. The Christian Democratic opponent, Eduardo Frei Montalva, had warned that an Allende victory would make Chile "another Cuba." From 1964 to 1970, when Cuba was plying an autonomous course, the Chilean Castroites staged violent strikes, bombings, and bank robberies in defiance of the regular Communist party directed from Moscow. The latter's strategy was subtler. Hinting that it might support the Christian Democratic candidate rather than rival leftists, the Communist party provoked the extreme right to run its own candidate in protest, thus splitting the conservative vote. The Nixon administration tried clumsily to influence the nominating process or foment a military coup, but Allende won an electoral victory in 1970. Once in office, he seized U.S. property and forged close ties to Cuba at the very time Castro was being reined in by Brezhnev. The U.S.S.R., however, held back from extending large-scale aid, even after a fall in copper prices, radical union activity, and Allende's policies had plunged Chile into economic chaos. In September 1973, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte and the army overthrew Allende and established an authoritarian state. The Soviets and Allende sympathizers in North and South America depicted the denouement in Chile as the work of Fascists in league with U.S. imperialists.
The poor image of the United States in Latin America was of special concern to Jimmy Carter because of his dedication to the promotion of human rights. During his first year in office Carter sought to counter the traditional notion of "Yankee imperialism" by meeting the demands of the Panamanian leader, General Omar Torrijos Herrera, for a transfer of sovereignty over the Panama Canal. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty (which called for a staged transfer, to be completed in 1999) by a bare majority, but most Americans opposed transfer of the canal. Conservatives also held Carter's human rights concerns to be naive, because the linking of U.S. government loans, for instance, to a regime's performance on human rights damaged American relations with otherwise friendly states while exercising no influence on human rights practices in Communist states. Supporters of Carter retorted that the pattern of U.S. support for cruel oligarchies on the excuse of anti-Communism was what drove oppressed Latins toward Communism in the first place.
The first hemispheric explosion in the 1980s, however, occurred in the southern cone of South America when the Argentine military ruler, Lieutenant General Leopoldo Galtieri—apparently to distract attention from the abuses of his dictatorship and an ailing economy at home—broke off talks concerning sovereignty over the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) and invaded the remote archipelago in April 1982. The British government of Margaret Thatcher was taken by surprise but began at once to mobilize supplies, ships, and men to reconquer the islands some 8,000 miles from home. The United States was torn between loyalty to its NATO ally (and political friend of President Reagan) and the fear of antagonizing South Americans by siding with the "imperialists." When U.S. diplomacy failed to resolve the dispute, however, the United States supplied Britain with intelligence data from American reconnaissance satellites. The Royal Navy and ground forces began operations in May, and the last Argentine defenders surrendered on June 14. In the wake of the defeat, the military junta in Buenos Aires gave way to democratization.
Problems in Central America, however, commanded the attention of the United States throughout the 1980s. In Nicaragua the broadly based Sandinista revolutionary movement challenged the oppressive regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, whose family had ruled the country since the 1930s. In accordance with its human rights policies, the Carter administration cut off aid to Somoza, permitting the Sandinistas to take power in 1979. They appeared to Americans as democratic patriots and received large sums of U.S. aid. A radical faction soon took control of the revolution, however, and moderates either departed or were forced out of the government in Managua. The Sandinistas then socialized the economy, suppressed freedom of the press and religion, and established close ties to Cuba and other Soviet-bloc countries. By the time Reagan took office, neighbouring El Salvador had also succumbed to violence among leftist insurgents, authoritarian landowners supporting right-wing death squads, and a struggling reformist government. Reagan vigorously affirmed a last-minute decision by Carter to grant military aid to the Salvadoran government. Although Nicaragua and Cuba were identified as the sources of the insurgency, Americans became increasingly confused by evidence of atrocities on all sides and were again torn between their desire to promote human rights and their determination to halt the spread of Communism. Opponents of U.S. involvement warned of another Vietnam in Central America, while supporters warned of another Cuba.
Nicaragua, meanwhile, built up one of the largest armies in the world in proportion to population, expanded its port facilities, and received heavy shipments of arms from the U.S.S.R. The CIA used this military buildup to justify the secret mining of Nicaraguan harbours in February 1984, which was, when revealed, universally condemned. The CIA also secretly organized and supplied a force of up to 15,000 anti-Sandinista "freedom fighters," known as Contras, across the border in Honduras and Costa Rica, while U.S. armed forces conducted joint maneuvers with those states along the Nicaraguan border. The ostensible purpose of such exercises was to interdict the suspected flow of arms from Nicaragua to the Salvadoran rebels. In fact, American policy aimed at provoking a popular revolt in hopes of overthrowing the Sandinistas altogether.
Cuban and Soviet influence with leftist governments on the Caribbean islands of Jamaica, Trinidad, and Grenada also appeared to be on the increase, a trend that the Reagan administration tried to counter with its 1982 Caribbean Basin Initiative, an Alliance for Progress confined to the islands. Grenada, a tiny island that had won independence from Britain in 1974, initially came under the control of Sir Eric Gairy, whose policies and conduct verged on the bizarre. In March 1979, Gairy was overthrown by the leftist New Jewel Movement led by the charismatic Maurice Bishop. Over the next several years the Bishop regime socialized the country, signed mutual-assistance agreements with Soviet-bloc states, and hastened construction of a large airstrip that the United States feared would ultimately be used by Soviet aircraft. The evident incompetence of the New Jewel leadership, however, prompted a split in 1982 between Bishop's supporters and hard-line Leninists. In October 1983 the revolution came apart when Bishop was arrested and, when protest demonstrations broke out, shot. The Organization of East Caribbean States thereupon invited American intervention, and U.S. forces, together with small contingents from neighbouring islands, landed on Grenada to restore order and protect a group of American medical students. Free elections returned a moderate government to Grenada in 1984, but the self-destruction and overthrow of the New Jewel Movement, while a setback for Castroism in the region, also lent credence to Nicaragua's often and loudly voiced fear of an American invasion.
The U.S. public emphatically supported the Grenadan intervention but was split almost evenly on the question of support for the Nicaraguan Contras. While the Reagan Doctrine of supporting indigenous rebels, such as Savimbi's UNITA in Angola or the mujahideen in Afghanistan, appeared to be a low-risk means of countering Soviet influence, Americans remained nervous about the possibility of deeper U.S. involvement. Congress reflected this public ambivalence by first approving funds for the Contras, then restricting the ability of federal agencies to raise or spend funds for the Contras, then reversing itself again. In 1986 investigations of the secret U.S. arms sales to Iran revealed that National Security Council officials had kept supplies flowing to the Contras while the congressional restrictions were in effect by soliciting funds from private contributors and friendly Arab states and by diverting the profits from the Iranian arms sales.
In 1987 Congress launched lengthy investigations into the Iran-Contra Affair that virtually paralyzed U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and Central America for more than a year. Reagan himself denied any knowledge of the secret arms sales and diversions of funds, although he granted that "mistakes had been made." Evidence emerged that William Casey, the director of the CIA, had known of the plan, but he died in May 1987. National Security Adviser John Poindexter and his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, were eventually indicted for obstructing justice, although North's eloquent appeal to patriotism and anti-Communism in the televised hearings garnered much public support for the administration's ends, if not means.
In retrospect, the Iran-Contra Affair was another skirmish in the struggle between the executive and legislative branches over the conduct of foreign policy. Reagan and his advisers evidently believed, in light of the changed mood of the country after 1980 and his own electoral landslides, that they could revive the sort of vigorous intelligence and covert activities that the executive branch had engaged in before Vietnam and Watergate. The Democrats, who controlled both houses of Congress again after 1986, argued that covert operations subverted the separation of powers and the Constitution. The Iran-Contra Affair was especially obnoxious, in their view, because it contradicted the express policy not to deal with terrorists or governments that harboured them. The administration's defenders retorted that the United States would be impotent to combat terrorism and espionage without strong and secret counterintelligence capabilities and that, since the Congress had effectively hamstrung the CIA and too often leaked news of its activities, personnel of the National Security Council had taken matters into their own hands. The proper roles of the branches of the U.S. government in the formulation and execution of foreign policy thus remained a major source of bitterness and confusion after almost half a century of American leadership in global politics.
In 1980 the Soviet Union appeared to be stealing a march on a demoralized Western alliance through its arms buildup, occupation of Afghanistan, and influence with African and Central American revolutionaries, while the United States had been expelled from Iran and was suffering from inflation and recession at home. Eight years later the Reagan administration had rebuilt American defenses, presided over the longest peacetime economic expansion in 60 years, and regained the initiative in superpower relations. Because the "Reagan Revolution" in foreign and domestic policy was purchased through limits on new taxes even as military and domestic spending increased, the result was annual federal deficits measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars and financed only by the influx of foreign capital. Once the world's creditor, the United States became the world's biggest debtor. Moreover, American economic competitiveness declined to the point that U.S. trade deficits surpassed $100,000,000,000 per year, owing mostly to American imports of oil and of Japanese and German manufactured goods.
The sudden collapse of prices on the New York Stock Exchange in October 1987 compelled the White House and Congress alike to address the issue of American "decline." In 1988 Paul Kennedy, a Yale professor of British origin, published the best-seller The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. He developed the thesis that a great state tends to overextend itself in foreign and defense policy during its heyday and thereby acquires vital interests abroad that soon become a drain on its domestic economy. Over time, new economic competitors unburdened by imperial responsibilities rise to challenge and eventually replace the old hegemonic power. It certainly seemed that the United States was such a power in decline: Its share of gross world production had fallen from almost 50 percent in the late 1940s to less than 25 percent, while Japan and West Germany had completed their postwar economic miracles and were still growing at a faster rate than the United States, even during the Reagan prosperity. New light industries, such as microelectronics, and even old heavy industries like steel and automobiles had spread to countries with skilled but relatively low-paid labour, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Financial power had fled to new global banking centres in Europe and East Asia. In the 1960s, 9 of the 10 biggest banks in the world were American; by 1987 none were American, and most were Japanese. These trends were in part natural, as other industrial regions recovered from their devastation in World War II and new ones arose. Whether natural or not, however, they seemed to indicate that the United States could no longer afford to uphold either the liberal trade environment it had founded after World War II or the worldwide responsibilities that devolved upon the "leader of the free world."
European growth, led as always by the dynamic West German economy, also signalled a change in the global distribution of power. Yet, even as the European Community expanded in terms of both production and size (Greece became its 10th member in 1981), it failed to demonstrate unity and political leverage commensurate with its economic might. For years EC officials, the so-called Eurocrats, had quarreled with member governments and among themselves over whether and how Europe should seek deeper as well as broader integration. Finally, in 1985, Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission, steered through the European Parliament in Strasbourg the Single European Act, which set 1992 as the target date for a complete economic merger of the EC countries, for a single European currency, and for common EC foreign and domestic policies: in short, a United States of Europe.
The immediate result was a seemingly endless round of haggling among European cabinets about this or that point of the 1992 plan. Was the abolition of the venerable pound sterling, the French franc, and the deutsche mark in favour of the ecu (European currency unit) really necessary? Could all member states coordinate their labour and welfare policies, or be willing to countenance the free movement of peoples across national borders? Would national governments in fact prove willing to relinquish part of their sovereignty in matters of justice, defense, and foreign policy? The moderate governments of the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl in West Germany and Socialist President François Mitterrand in France, as well as those of Italy and the smaller countries, remained committed to "1992." Only Thatcher of the United Kingdom voiced doubts about merging Britain into a continental superstate. The alternative, however, would seem to leave Britain out in the cold, and so, despite Thatcher's opposition, plans for European unity went ahead. (In 1990, members of Thatcher's own party forced her resignation over the issue.)
Why did Europe resume the long-stalled drive for a more perfect union only in the mid-1980s? Some of the reasons are surely internal, having to do with the activities of the Eurocrats and the proclivities of the member governments. External factors also must have been important, including the debate over whether to base American missiles in Europe; the whole question of arms control, which affected Europe most directly but over which it had limited influence; widespread disaffection in Europe with Carter and (for different reasons) Reagan and hence a desire for a stronger European voice in world politics; and, last but not least, the Europeans' concern over the influx of Japanese manufactures. The world appeared by the late 1980s to be moving away from the ideals of national sovereignty and universal free trade and toward a contradictory reality in which international dependence increased at the same time that regional and increasingly competitive economic blocs coalesced.
To many analysts it seemed that the Cold War was simply becoming obsolete, that military power was giving way to economic power in world politics, and that the bipolar system was fast becoming a multipolar one including Japan, a united Europe, and China. Indeed, China, though starting from a low base, demonstrated the most rapid economic growth of all in the 1980s under the market-oriented reforms of the chairman Deng Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng. Paul Kennedy and many other analysts concluded that the United States could simply no longer afford the Cold War and would have to end it just to maintain itself against the commercial and technological competition of its own allies. For the U.S.S.R., the Cold War had to end if it was to maintain itself as a Great Power at all.
In retrospect, the course of the Cold War appears to have been cyclical, with both the United States and the U.S.S.R. alternating between periods of assertion and relaxation. In the first years after 1945 the United States hastily demobilized its wartime military forces while pursuing universal, liberal internationalist solutions to problems of security and recovery. Stalin, however, rejected American blueprints for peace, exploited the temporarily favourable correlation of forces to impose Communist regimes on east-central Europe, and maintained the military-industrial emphasis in Soviet central planning despite the ruination done his own country by the German invasion. Soviet policy prompted the first American outpouring of energy, between 1947 and 1953, when the strategy of containment and policies to implement it emerged: the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Korean War, and the buildup in conventional and nuclear arms. Then the Americans tired; Eisenhower accepted a stalemate in Korea, cut defense spending, and opened a dialogue with Moscow in hopes of putting a lid on the arms race. Khrushchev then launched a new Soviet offensive in 1957, hoping to transform Soviet triumphs in space and missile technology into gains in Berlin and the Third World. The United States again responded, from 1961 to 1968 under Kennedy and Johnson, with another energetic campaign that ranged from the Apollo Moon program and nuclear buildup to the Peace Corps and counterinsurgency operations culminating in the Vietnam War. The war bogged down, however, and brought on economic distress and social disorder at home. After 1969 Presidents Nixon and Ford scaled back American commitments, withdrew from Vietnam, pursued arms control treaties, and fostered détente with the U.S.S.R., while President Carter, in the wake of Watergate, went even further in renouncing Cold War attitudes and expenditures. It was thus that the correlation of forces again shifted in favour of the Soviet bloc, tempting Brezhnev in the 1970s to extend Soviet influence and power to its greatest extent and allowing the U.S.S.R. to equal or surpass the preoccupied United States in nuclear weapons. After 1980, under Reagan, the United States completed the cycle with a final, self-confident assertion of will—and this time, the Soviets appeared to break. In May 1981, at Notre Dame University, the recently inaugurated Reagan predicted that the years ahead would be great ones for the cause of freedom and that Communism was "a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written." At the time few took his words for more than a morale-boosting exhortation, but in fact the Soviet economy and polity were under terrific stress in the last Brezhnev years, though the Soviets did their best to hide the fact. They were running hidden budget deficits of 7 or 8 percent of GNP, suffering from extreme inflation that took the form (because of price controls) of chronic shortages of consumer goods, and falling farther behind the West in computers and other technologies vital to civilian and military performance. The Reagan administration recognized and sought to exploit this Soviet economic vulnerability. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and his aide Richard Perle tightened controls on the export of strategic technologies to the Soviet bloc. CIA Director William Casey persuaded Saudi Arabia to drive down the price of oil, thereby denying the U.S.S.R. billions of dollars it expected to glean from its own petroleum exports. The United States also pressured its European allies to cancel or delay the massive pipeline project for the importation of natural gas from Siberia, thereby denying the Soviets another large source of hard currency.
Such economic warfare, waged at a time when the Soviet budget was already strained by the Afghan war and a renewed strategic arms race, pushed the Soviet economy to the brink of collapse. Demoralization took the form of a growing black market, widespread alcoholism, the highest abortion rate in the world, and a declining life span. In an open society such symptoms might have provoked protests and reforms, leadership changes, possibly even revolution. The totalitarian state, however, thoroughly suppressed civil society, while even the Communist party, stifled by its jealous and fearful nomenklatura (official hierarchy), was incapable of adjusting. In sum, the Stalinist methods of terror, propaganda, and mass exploitation of labour and resources had served well enough to force an industrial revolution in Russia, but they were inadequate to the needs of the postindustrial world.
Young, educated, and urban members of the Communist elite came gradually to recognize the need for radical change if the Soviet Union was to survive, much less hold its own with the capitalist world. They waited in frustration as Brezhnev was followed by Andropov, then by Chernenko. The reformers finally rose to the pinnacle of party leadership, however, when Mikhail Gorbachev was named general secretary in 1985. A lawyer by training and a loyal Communist, Gorbachev did not begin his tenure by urging a relaxation of the Cold War. He stressed economics instead: a crackdown on vodka consumption, laziness, and "hooliganism" said to be responsible for "stagnation"; and, when that failed, a far-reaching perestroika, or restructuring, of the economy. It was in connection with this economic campaign that surprising developments in foreign policy began to occur. Not only were the costs of empire—the military, KGB and other security agencies, subsidies to foreign client states—out of all proportion to the Soviet GNP, but the U.S.S.R., no less than in earlier times, desperately needed Western technology and credits in order to make up for its own backwardness. Both to trim the costs of empire and to gain Western help, Gorbachev had to resolve outstanding disputes abroad and tolerate more human rights at home.
As early as 1985 the "new thinking" of the younger Communist apparatchiks began to surface. Gorbachev declared that no nation's security could be achieved at the expense of another's—an apparent repudiation of the goal of nuclear and conventional superiority for which the Soviets had worked for so long. Soviet historians began to criticize Brezhnev's policies toward Afghanistan, China, and the West and to blame him, rather than "capitalist imperialism," for the U.S.S.R.'s encirclement. In 1986 Gorbachev said that economic power had supplanted military power as the most important aspect of security in the present age—an amazing admission for a state whose superpower status rested exclusively on its military might. He called on the Soviets to settle for "reasonable sufficiency" in strategic arms and urged NATO to join him in deep cuts in nuclear and conventional weapons. He reiterated Khrushchev's remark that nuclear war could have no winners and de Gaulle's vision of a "common European house" from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains. Finally, Gorbachev hinted at a repudiation of the Brezhnev Doctrine—iDoctrine—i.e., the assertion of the Soviets' right to intervene to protect Socialist governments wherever they might be threatened.
Western observers were divided at first as to how to respond to this "new thinking." Some analysts considered Gorbachev a revolutionary and his advent a historic chance to end the Cold War. Others, including the Reagan administration, were more cautious. Soviet leaders had launched "peace offensives" many times before, always with the motive of seducing the West into opening up trade and technology. Gorbachev was a phenomenon, charming Western reporters, crowds, and leaders (Thatcher was especially impressed) with his breezy style, sophistication, and peace advocacy. He published two best-sellers in the West to enhance his reputation, which for a time caused Europeans to rate Reagan and the United States the greatest threats to peace in the world. What convinced most Western observers that genuine change had occurred, however, was not what Gorbachev said but what he allowed others to say under his policy of glasnost, or openness.
As Western experts had predicted, perestroika, an attempt to streamline a fatally flawed Communist system, was doomed to failure. What the Soviets needed, they said, was a profit motive, private property, hard currency, real prices, and access to world markets. But Gorbachev, still thinking in Communist categories, blamed bureaucratic resistance for the failure of his reforms and thus declared glasnost to encourage internal criticism. What he got was the birth of a genuine Soviet public opinion, a reemergence of autonomous organizations in society, and more than 300 independent journals (by the end of 1989) publicizing and denouncing Communist military and economic failures, murder and oppression, foreign policy "crimes" such as the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact and the invasion of Afghanistan, and even Communist rule itself.
By 1987 most Western observers still called for deeds to match the words pouring forth in the Soviet Union, but they were persuaded that an end to the Cold War was a real possibility. The Reagan administration made its first show of trust in Gorbachev by engaging in negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons from Europe. In 1987 Gorbachev surprised the United States by accepting the earlier American "zero-option" proposal for intermediate-range missiles. After careful negotiation a treaty was concluded in Geneva and signed at a Washington summit in December. This controversial Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons and allowed, for the first time, extensive on-site inspection inside the Soviet bloc. Critics still feared that stripping Europe of nuclear missiles might only enhance the value of the Soviets' conventional superiority and called for parallel agreements through the mutual and balanced force reduction talks on NATO and Warsaw Pact armies. In Moscow in mid-1988, Reagan and Gorbachev discussed an even bolder proposal: reduction of both strategic nuclear arsenals by 50 percent. A mellower Reagan, interpreting the Soviets' new flexibility as a vindication of his earlier tough stance and having thereupon repudiated his "evil empire" rhetoric, now seemed eager to bargain as much as possible with Gorbachev.
Finally, Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, reached out in all directions—China, Japan, India, Iran, even South Korea and Israel—in hopes of reducing military tensions, gaining access to trade and technology, or just creating new possibilities for Soviet statecraft. Gorbachev's most celebrated moment came in December 1988 at the United Nations, when he announced a unilateral reduction in Soviet army forces of half a million men and the withdrawal from eastern Europe of 10,000 tanks. Henceforth, he said, the U.S.S.R. would adopt a "defensive posture," and he invited the NATO countries to do the same.
Throughout his first four years in power Gorbachev inspired and presided over an extraordinary outpouring of new ideas and new options. Western skeptics wondered whether he meant to dismantle Communism and the Soviet empire and, if he did, whether he could possibly avoid being overthrown by party hard-liners, the KGB, or the army. He had maneuvered brilliantly in internal politics, always claiming the middle ground and positioning himself as the last best hope for peaceful reform. His prestige and popularity in the West were also assets of no small value. In June 1988 he persuaded the Communist party conference to restructure the entire Soviet government along the lines of a partially representative legislature with a powerful president—himself. Was the Gorbachev phenomenon merely an updated version of earlier, limited Russian and Soviet reforms designed to bolster the old order? Or would Gorbachev use his expanding power to liquidate the empire and Communism?
In truth, Gorbachev faced a severe dilemma born of three simultaneous crises: diplomatic encirclement abroad, economic and technological stagnation at home, and growing pressure for liberal reform in Poland and Hungary and for autonomy in the non-Russian republics of the U.S.S.R. Thoroughgoing détente, perhaps even an end to the Cold War, could solve the first crisis and go far toward ameliorating the second. His policy of glasnost, deemed vital to economic progress, had the fatal side effect, however, of encouraging repressed ethnic groups, at home and in eastern Europe, to organize and express their opposition to Russian or Communist rule. Of course, the Soviet government might simply crush the nationalities, as it had in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, but that in turn would undo the progress made in East–West relations and put Gorbachev back where he had started. If, on the other hand, the Soviet government relinquished its satellites abroad, how could it stop the process of liberation from spreading to the subject nationalities inside the U.S.S.R.? If it repudiated its Marxist-Leninist global mission in the name of economic reform, how could the regime legitimize itself at all, even in Russia?
George Bush was elected to succeed Ronald Reagan as president of the United States in November 1988. The new administration's foreign policy team, led by Secretary of State James Baker, was divided at first between the "squeezers," who saw no logic in attempts to bail out a troubled Soviet Union, and the "dealers," who wanted to make far-reaching agreements with Gorbachev before he was toppled from power. For five months Bush played his cards close to his vest, citing the need to await the results of a comprehensive study of Soviet–American relations.
Signs of unmistakable and irreversible liberalization in the Soviet bloc began to appear in the form of popular manifestations in eastern Europe, which the Kremlin seemed willing to tolerate and even, to some extent, encourage. Czechoslovaks demonstrated against their Communist regime on the anniversary of the 1968 Soviet invasion. In Poland, the Solidarity union demanded democratic reforms. The Sejm (parliament) legalized and vowed to return the property of the Roman Catholic church, and the government of General Jaruzelski approved partially free elections to be held on June 4, 1989, the first such in over 40 years. Solidarity initially won 160 of the 161 available seats and then took the remaining seat in a runoff election. On May 2, Hungary dismantled barriers on its border with Austria—the first real breach in the Iron Curtain.
Gorbachev was less tolerant of protests and separatist tendencies in the U.S.S.R. itself; for instance, he ordered soldiers to disperse 15,000 Georgians demanding independence. He moved ahead, however, with reforms that loosened the Communist party's grip on power in the Soviet Union, even as his own authority was increased through various laws granting him emergency powers. In March, protesters in Moscow supported the parliamentary candidacy of the dissident Communist Boris Yeltsin, who charged Gorbachev with not moving fast enough toward democracy and a market economy. On the 26th of that month, in the first relatively free elections ever held in the Soviet Union, for 1,500 of the 2,250 seats in the new Congress of People's Deputies, various non-Communists and ethnic representatives emerged triumphant over Communist party candidates. Three days later Gorbachev told the Hungarian premier that he opposed foreign intervention in the internal affairs of Warsaw Pact states—a loud hint that he did not intend to enforce the Brezhnev Doctrine.
In late spring Bush spoke out on his hopes for East–West relations in a series of speeches and quietly approved the subsidized sale of 1,500,000 tons of wheat to the Soviets. In a Moscow meeting with Secretary Baker, Gorbachev not only endorsed the resumption of START, with the goal of deep cuts in strategic arsenals, but also stated that he would unilaterally withdraw 500 warheads from eastern Europe and accept NATO's request for asymmetrical reductions in conventional armaments. In response, Bush announced that the time had come "to move beyond containment" and to "seek the integration of the Soviet Union into the community of nations." Western European leaders were even more eager: Chancellor Kohl and Gorbachev agreed in June to support self-determination and arms reductions and to build a "common European home."
For Gorbachev the policies of glasnost, free elections, and warm relations with Western leaders were a calculated risk born of the Soviet Union's severe economic crisis and need for Western help. For other Communist regimes, however, Moscow's "new thinking" was an unalloyed disaster. The governments of eastern Europe owed their existence to the myth of the "world proletarian revolution" and their survival to police-state controls backed by the threat of Soviet military power. Now, however, the Soviet leader himself had renounced the right of intervention, and he urged eastern European Communist parties to imitate perestroika and glasnost. Eastern European bosses like Erich Honecker of East Germany and Miloš Jakeš of Czechoslovakia quietly made common cause with hard-liners in Moscow.
Chinese leaders were in a different position. Ever since the late 1950s the Chinese Communist party had regularly and officially denounced the Soviets as revisionists—Marxist heretics—and Gorbachev's deeds and words only proved their rectitude. Even so, since the death of Mao Zedong the Chinese leadership had itself adopted limited reforms under the banner of the Four Modernizations and had permitted a modicum of highly successful free enterprise while retaining a monopoly of political power. When Hu Yaobang, a former leader, died on April 15, 1989, however, tens of thousands of students and other protesters began to gather in Chinese cities to demand democratic reforms. Within a week 100,000 people filled Tiananmen Square in Peking and refused to disperse despite strong warnings. The 70th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, the first student movement in modern Chinese history, propelled the protests, as did Gorbachev's own arrival for the first Sino-Soviet summit in 30 years. By May 20 the situation was completely out of control: more than 1,000,000 demonstrators occupied large sections of Peking, and on the 29th students erected a statue called the "Goddess of Democracy" in Tiananmen Square.
Behind the scenes a furious power struggle ensued between party chiefs advocating accommodation and those calling for the use of force; it remained uncertain whether the People's Liberation Army could be trusted to act against the demonstration. Finally, on June 3, military units from distant provinces were called in to move against the crowds; they did so efficiently, killing hundreds of protesters. Thousands more were arrested in the days that followed.
The suppression of the democratic movement in China conditioned the thinking of eastern European officials and protesters alike for months. Taking heart from Gorbachev's reformism, citizens hoped that the time had finally come when they might expand their narrow political options. They moved cautiously, however, not wholly trusting that the Soviet Union would stand aside and fearing that at any moment their local state security police would opt for a "Tiananmen solution." Nonetheless, in July, at the annual Warsaw Pact meeting, Gorbachev called on each member state to pursue "independent solutions [to] national problems" and said that there were "no universal models of Socialism." At the same time Bush toured Poland and Hungary, praising their steps toward democracy and offering aid, but saying and doing nothing that would embarrass the Soviets or take strategic advantage of their difficulties. So it was that for the first time both superpower leaders indicated with increasing clarity that they intended to stand aside and allow events in eastern Europe to take their course independent of Cold War considerations. Gorbachev had indeed repealed the Brezhnev Doctrine, and Bush had done nothing to impel him to reimpose it.
The results were almost immediate. In August a trickle, then a flood of would-be émigrés from East Germany tried the escape route open through Hungary to Austria and West Germany. In the same month the chairman of the Soviet Central Committee admitted the existence of the secret protocols in the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact under which Stalin had annexed Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. On the 50th anniversary of the pact, August 23, an estimated 1,000,000 Balts formed a human chain linking their capitals to denounce the annexation as illegal and to demand self-determination. In September the Hungarian government suspended its effort to stave off the flight of East Germans, and by the end of the month more than 30,000 had escaped to the West. Demonstrations for democracy began in East Germany itself in late September, spreading from Leipzig to Dresden and other cities. On October 6–7 Gorbachev, visiting in honour of the German Democratic Republic's 40th anniversary, urged East Germany to adopt Soviet-style reforms and said that its policy would be made in Berlin, not Moscow.
Against this background of massive and spreading popular defiance of Communist regimes, Western governments maintained a prudent silence about the internal affairs of Soviet-bloc states, while sending clear signals to Moscow of the potential benefits of continued liberalization. When Gorbachev's nemesis Yeltsin visited the United States in September, the administration kept a discreet distance. Later that month Shevardnadze held extensive and private talks with Baker; he dropped once and for all the Soviet demand that the American SDI program be included in the START negotiations. In the first week of October the European Community, West Germany, and then (at the insistence of Congress) the United States offered emergency aid totalling $2,000,000,000 to the democratizing Polish government. The chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board went to Moscow to advise the Soviets on how they, too, might make the transition to a market economy, and Secretary Baker proclaimed, "We want perestroika to succeed." A month later Gorbachev gave the first indication of the limits to reform, warning that Western efforts to "export capitalism" or "interfere with east European politics would be a great mistake." By that time, however, the collapse of Communism in the satellite states, at least, was irreversible.
Hungary became the second (after Poland) to seize its independence when the National Assembly, on October 18, amended its constitution to abolish the Socialist party's "leading role" in society, legalize non-Communist political parties, and change the name of the country from the "People's Republic" to simply the "Republic of Hungary." East Germany, one of the most repressive of all Soviet-bloc states, was next. By late October crowds numbering more than 300,000 rose up in Leipzig and Dresden to demand the ouster of the Communist regime. On November 1 the East German cabinet bowed before the unrelenting, nonviolent pressure of its people by reopening its border with Czechoslovakia. On November 3 the ministers in charge of security and the police resigned. The next day a reported 1,000,000 demonstrators jammed the streets of East Berlin to demand democracy, prompting the resignations of the rest of the cabinet.
After 50,000 more people had fled the country in the ensuing week, the East German government threw in the towel. On November 9 it announced that exit visas would be granted immediately to all citizens wishing to "visit the West" and that all border points were now open. At first, citizens did not dare believe—hundreds of East Germans had lost their lives trying to escape after the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961—but when some did, the news flowed like electricity that the Berlin Wall had fallen. A week later the dreaded Stasis, or state security police, were disbanded. By December 1 the East German Volkskammer (parliament) renounced the Communist Socialist Unity Party's "leading role" in society and began to expose the corruption and brutality that had characterized the Honecker regime. A new coalition government took control and planned free national elections for May 1990.
Czechoslovaks were the fourth people to carry out a nonviolent revolution, though at first frustrated by the hard-line regime's continued will to repress. A demonstration on November 17 in Wenceslas Square in Prague was broken up by force. The Czechoslovaks, emboldened by events in East Germany and the absence of a Soviet reaction, turned out in ever larger numbers, however, demanding free elections and then cheering the rehabilitated hero of the 1968 Prague Spring, Alexander Dubček. The entire cabinet resigned, and the Communist Central Committee promised a special congress to discuss the party's future. The dissident liberal playwright Václav Havel denounced the shake-up as a trick, crowds of 800,000 turned out to demand democratic elections, and Czechoslovak workers declared a two-hour general strike as proof of their solidarity. The government caved in, abandoning the Communist party's "leading role" on November 29, opening the border with Austria on the 30th, and announcing a new coalition cabinet on December 8. President Gustav Husák resigned on the 10th and free elections were scheduled for the 28th. By the end of the year Havel was president of Czechoslovakia and Dubček was parliamentary chairman.
The fifth and sixth satellite peoples to break out of the 45-year Communist lockstep were the Bulgarians and Romanians. The former had an easy time of it after the Communist party secretary and president, Todor Zhivkov, resigned on November 10. Within a month crowds in Sofia called for democratization, and the Central Committee leader voluntarily surrendered the party's "leading role." Romania, however, suffered a bloodbath. There the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu had built a ferocious personal tyranny defended by ubiquitous and brutal security forces. He intended to ride out the anti-Communist wave in eastern Europe and preserve his rule. Thus, when crowds of Romanian citizens demonstrated for democracy in imitation of events elsewhere, the government denounced them as "Fascist reactionaries" and ordered its security forces to shoot to kill. Courageous crowds continued to rally and regular army units joined the rebellion, and, when the Soviets indicated their opposition to Ceauşescu, civil war broke out. On December 22 popular forces captured Ceauşescu while he attempted to flee, tried him on several charges, including genocide, and executed him on the 25th. An interim National Salvation Front Council took over and announced elections for May 1990. By the end of the year the Czechoslovaks and Hungarians had already concluded agreements with Moscow providing for the rapid withdrawal of Soviet military forces from their countries.
In the span of just three months the unthinkable had happened: all of eastern Europe had broken free of Communist domination and won the right to resume the independent national existences that Nazi aggression had extinguished beginning in 1938. The force of popular revulsion against the Stalinist regimes imposed after World War II was the cause of the explosion, and advanced communications technology permitted the news to spread quickly, triggering revolts in one capital after another. What enabled the popular forces to express themselves, and succeed, however, was singular and simple: the abrogation of the Brezhnev Doctrine by Mikhail Gorbachev. Once it became known that the Red Army would not intervene to crush dissent, as it had in all previous crises, the whole Stalinist empire was revealed as a sham and flimsy structure. For decades, Western apologists for the Soviet bloc had argued that eastern European Socialism was somehow indigenous, even that the East Germans had developed a "separate nationality," and that the Soviets had a legitimate security interest in eastern Europe. Gorbachev himself proved them wrong when he let eastern Europe go free in 1989.
What were his motives for doing so? Certainly the Soviet army and the KGB must have watched in horror as their empire, purchased at terrific cost in World War II, simply disintegrated. Perhaps Gorbachev calculated, in line with the "new thinking," that the U.S.S.R. did not need eastern Europe to ensure its own security and that maintaining the empire was no longer worth the financial and political cost. At a time when the Soviet Union was in severe economic crisis and needed Western help more than ever, jettisoning eastern Europe would unburden his budget and do more than anything to attract Western goodwill. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that Gorbachev ever intended things to work out as they did. It is far more likely that he intended merely to throw his support to progressive Communists eager to implement perestroika in their own countries and thereby strengthen his own position vis-à-vis the hard-liners in the Soviet party. His ploy, however, had three attendant risks: first, that popular revolt might go so far as to dismantle Communism and the Warsaw Pact altogether; second, that the eastern European revolution might spread to nationalities within the U.S.S.R. itself; and third, that the NATO powers might try to exploit eastern European unrest to its own strategic advantage. The first fear quickly came true, and as 1989 came to an end, Gorbachev's foreign and domestic policies were increasingly directed toward forestalling the second and third dangers.
Concerning possible Western exploitation of the retreat of Communism, Shevardnadze expressed as early as October the Soviet Union's desire to pursue the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and NATO military alliances. (Of course, the Warsaw Pact was in the course of dissolving from within.) Then, in November, Gorbachev warned against Western attempts to export capitalism. Western European leaders were anxious to reassure him, as was President Bush at the December 2–3 Malta summit. Only a few days before, however, Chancellor Kohl had alerted the Soviets and the world that he intended to press forward at once on the most difficult problem of all arising from the liberation of eastern Europe: the reunification of Germany. That prospect, and the conditions under which it might occur, would dominate Great Power diplomacy in 1990.
Gorbachev had every reason to fear that his second nightmare would come true: the spillover of popular revolt into the Soviet Union itself. The first of the subject nationalities of the U.S.S.R. to demand self-determination were the Lithuanians, whose Communist Party Congress voted by a huge majority to declare its independence from the party's leadership in Moscow and to move toward an independent, democratic state. Gorbachev denounced the move at once and warned of bloodshed if the Lithuanians persisted. In January 1990 his personal visit to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, to calm the waters provoked a rally of 250,000 people demanding the abrogation of the Soviets' "illegal" 1940 annexation. When in that same month Soviet troops entered the Azerbaijan capital, Baku, and killed more than 50 Azerbaijani nationalists, fears arose that the Baltic states might suffer the same fate. Gorbachev let it be known that, the liberation of eastern Europe notwithstanding, he would not preside over the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.
Even before they had succeeded in chasing the Communists out of their government, East Germans had already begun to "unify" the country with their feet: 133,000 people picked up and moved westward in the month after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Such an influx of people placed tremendous strains on West Germany and all but forced Chancellor Kohl to begin immediate measures toward reunification in order to stem the tide. On Nov. November 28, 1989, he shocked the world with his announcement of a 10-point plan under which the East and West German governments would gradually expand their cooperation on specific issues until full economic, then political unity was achieved. He proposed no timetable and sought to appease the Soviets and western European powers alike by emphasizing that the process must occur within the contexts of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE; now the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe), the European Community, and East–West disarmament regimes.
The Kohl plan was more than an emergency response, however; it was also the culmination of a West German policy dating back to the founding of the two Germanies in 1949. Reunification was provided for in the West German Basic Law (constitution) and had remained the primary goal, no matter how distant, of its foreign policy. Even Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik in 1969 had differed only in regard to means, looking to increased contacts and aid to educate East Germans about the freedom and prosperity prevailing in the West, and so gradually and peacefully to undermine the legitimacy of the East German regime.
Almost no one was entirely comfortable with the prospect of a reunited Germany. West Germany alone had become the economic colossus of Europe; augmented by the East, it might come to dominate the European Community. Moreover, how was a united Germany to be prevented from aspiring to military power or hegemony in the power vacuum of eastern Europe? The Soviets seemed unlikely to countenance a united Germany fully allied with the United States and the EC, while a neutral Germany might become a loose cannon vacillating between Moscow and the West. So it was that on the day after the Malta summit, President Bush declared his support for a gradually reunited Germany to remain in NATO and the EC, within a "Europe whole and free." French President Mitterrand warned the Germans against pushing it too hard, while British Prime Minister Thatcher was openly skeptical. Gorbachev was expected to demand large concessions in return for his approval. Bush presumably had reassured him at Malta that events would not be allowed to get out of control. To underscore their intention to assert their rights in Germany dating back to the 1945 Potsdam conference, the Soviets requested a meeting of the old Allied Control Council in Berlin. To underscore their intention to respect Soviet feelings, the other World War II Allied powers (the United States, Great Britain, and France) agreed to meet on December 11.
The reunification of Germany, for so long thought impossible and, by many, perhaps most people in the U.S.S.R., France, Britain, and the United States, even undesirable, now suddenly appeared inevitable. Whatever their misgivings, the Allies could hardly deny Germany the right to the self-determination they claimed for themselves and all other peoples. When members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact convened at Ottawa, on Feb. February 11, 1990, Bush skillfully won universal agreement to a prudent format for talks on the unification of Germany. The French, British, and Soviets had considered involving the four powers from the start in group negotiations with the Germans, thereby calling into question German sovereignty. Bush's plan, however, would permit the German states themselves to work out their future and then submit their wishes to the four powers for final approval. These "two plus four" talks were expected to be a slow, deliberative process.
In fact, the overwhelming will of the German people and the press of events brought negotiations quickly to a head. First, the East German elections on March 18 revealed a strong majority in favour of immediate unification. Second, the East German economy underwent sudden collapse after the disappearance of Communist discipline and the flight of hundreds of thousands of people. Third, the East German infrastructure was now revealed as decrepit and backward, the environment grossly polluted, and the currency worthless. Talks began at once on an emergency unification of the two Germanies' economies, and in April, after much hand-wringing, Kohl and the Deutsche Bundesbank accepted a plan to replace the East German currency with deutsche marks on a one-to-one basis. The "two plus four" talks moved to the foreign ministerial level in May, and within two weeks East and West Germany published their terms for their imminent merger. Moreover, it would not be achieved by the laborious crafting of a new constitution but by the quicker provisions of Article 23 of the West German Basic Law, whereby new provinces could adhere to the existing constitution by a simple majority vote. The Bundestag approved these terms on June 21, and West and East Germany were unified economically on July 1.
Assurances were required to the effect that a united Germany, far from making NATO more threatening, would in fact be constrained by its membership in the U.S.-led alliance; that German military power would be limited by treaty and that Soviet troops might remain in East Germany for a time as a guarantee; that Soviet–German relations would improve after unification and yield vital economic assistance for the Soviet Union; and that the new Germany would recognize and respect existing international boundaries. Bush moved to satisfy the first and second of these desiderata at the NATO summit in July; its declaration defined NATO and the Warsaw Pact as no longer enemies, renounced NATO's long-standing policy on first use of nuclear weapons, agreed to limits (proposed by Shevardnadze) on the size of the German army, and invited the Warsaw Pact countries to establish "regular diplomatic liaison with NATO."
The third desideratum—improved Soviet–German relations—was, of course, up to Chancellor Kohl to satisfy. He offered to cut the German army to 370,000 men, renounce chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and aid in financing Soviet troops during an eventual withdrawal over a 3–4-year transition period. He also extended $5,000,000,000 in credits, with an expectation of more to follow. In return he secured Gorbachev's acceptance of a united, sovereign, democratic German state to remain a full member of the Western alliance and the EC. Kohl also took pains to reassure the French that the new united Germany would pose no threat. In the ongoing EC deliberations about the greater unification to take effect in 1992, Kohl sided constantly and strongly with the French position. He made it as clear as possible that the Germans were "good Europeans" and that their unity would occur harmlessly within the context of greater European and Atlantic communities.
Meanwhile, the bilateral talks between East and West Germans proceeded at an emergency pace. The two governments signed the terms for their political union on August 31. The four Allied powers then ratified them in their own Final Settlement with Respect to Germany. Those signatures, affixed in Moscow on September 12, formally brought World War II to an end. The next day Germany and the U.S.S.R. signed a treaty of 20 years' duration pledging to each other friendly relations and recognition of borders and renouncing the use of force. The four Allied powers renounced their rights in Germany on October 1, the final settlement took effect on Oct. October 3, 1990, and Germans tearfully celebrated their reunification.
One final issue remained—that of Germany's permanent boundaries. Western powers and especially the Polish government had pressured Kohl from the beginning to recognize for all time the inviolability of the Oder–Neisse border and thus the permanent loss to Germany of Silesia, eastern Pomerania, Danzig (Gdańsk), and East Prussia. At first Kohl hung back, earning for himself much abuse from Western statesmen and scaremongers. His tactic seems to have been to make a show of standing up for Germany's lost territories in the east in order to send a message to the Polish government about the need to respect the rights of ethnic Germans in Poland, as well as to minimize the appeal of the right-wing Republikaner party to the German electorate. As soon as German unity was assured, Kohl accepted Germany's boundaries as permanent, and he signed a treaty to that effect with Poland on November 14.
Five days later the second CSCE summit convened in Paris to proclaim the end of the Cold War. In the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, the NATO and Soviet sides each pledged to limit themselves to 20,000 battle tanks and 20,000 artillery tubes, 6,800 combat aircraft, 30,000 other armoured combat vehicles, and 2,000 attack helicopters. The CSCE member states signed the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, in which the Soviets, Americans, and Europeans both east and west announced to the world that Europe was henceforth united, that all blocs—military and economic—had ceased to exist, and that all member states stood for democracy, freedom, and human rights.
On Oct. October 15, 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev travelled to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace in honour of his having done much to bring the Cold War to a close. While few people in Europe and North America denied that Gorbachev's restraint in 1989 was largely responsible for the liberation of eastern Europe or criticized the directions of his reforms in the Soviet Union, the Nobel Prize seemed to imply standards of historical and moral judgment that struck many critics as, at best, strange. Was the Soviet president to be credited with the world's most prestigious prize for not sending in tank columns to crush innocent and unarmed people in foreign countries? What about the eastern European peoples themselves, who bravely seized their freedom in spite of the risks? Or the Western leaders whose denunciations of the Soviet empire encouraged the Polish Solidarity movement and other eastern European resisters?
Indeed, as soon as people in the West caught their breath after the cascade of events in 1989–90, they began to argue over why the Cold War had ended, why it ended when it did, and to whom the credit should go. Academic and liberal opinion favoured theories crediting Gorbachev and the generation of "new thinkers" in the Soviet Union for the transformations. Conservatives preferred to give the credit to the statesmen of containment who had stood up to Soviet pressure for 40 years. (When President Bush visited Poland upon the invitation of Lech Wałęsa in 1989, thousands of Poles lined the streets to cheer and wave banners reading "Thank you!")
Historians have argued over the end of the Cold War as intensely as they argued over its beginning, but some general observations can be made. First, the Cold War ended because the special sources of conflict and distrust between the Soviet Union and the West disappeared in 1989. That is not to say that geopolitical rivalry disappeared, or that conflicts of interest would not recur in many parts of the world. Great Power politics would go on. At the same time, the liberation of eastern Europe, unification of Germany, reduction of armaments, and suspension of Leninist ideological war against the outer world were symptomatic of the changed nature of superpower relations. Second, those relations changed their nature over the years 1985–90 because the Soviet leadership lost the ability or the will, or both, to prosecute the Cold War and seemingly came to realize that even the gains they had made in the Cold War were not in the best interests of the Soviet Union. Rather, the U.S.S.R. and its satellites and client states constituted a network of obligations that seriously strained the resources of the central economy and that had called into being a hostile alliance consisting of all the other major industrial powers of the world: the United States, Britain, France, West Germany, Japan, and China. What was more, the Communist (or Stalinist) command structure had proved woefully inadequate to the demands of a technological age. In sum, the Soviet Union had embarked under Stalin on a Sisyphean struggle against the entire outer world, only to discover over time that its huge conventional army was of doubtful utility, its nuclear arsenal unusable, its diplomatic attempts to divide the enemy alliance unsuccessful, its Third World clients expensive and of dubious value, and its pervasive apparatus for espionage, disinformation, terror, and demoralization of temporary effect only. Always the Western peoples recovered their will and dynamism; always the Soviet Union fell further behind, until finally, after 40 years, the empire fell, exhausted, to the ground.
That was when the younger generation came to the fore, promoting the "new thinking" that had sprung up from disgust with the rigid and brutal structures dating from Stalin and the rigid and counterproductive policies dating from Brezhnev. Perhaps Gorbachev himself remained a committed Marxist-Leninist—he said so at every opportunity—but the practical effect of his repudiation of old structures and policies was to dismantle much that had provoked the fear and hostility of the West in the first place. Nor would releasing eastern Europe suffice to reverse the inevitable decline of the Communist empire. The age of microelectronics, computers, space technology, and global communications was also an age in which human creativity, not brute labour, was the most valuable asset in a nation's economic and military strength. Far from unleashing creativity and spontaneous production, as Marxist theory predicted, Soviet Communism had stifled it—through terror, bureaucratization, the lack of a profit motive and market mechanism, and hierarchical, centralized decision making. Eventually, if the Soviet Union were to remain even a great power, much less a superpower, it would have to jettison not only its subject empire but also Communism itself.
George Kennan predicted in his famous "Long Telegram" of 1946 and "X" article of 1947 that the Soviets would ultimately fail to digest the empire they had swallowed and would have to disgorge it. In the meantime, the West had to contain Soviet influence, neither retreating into isolationism nor overreacting militarily, and above all remaining confident about its basic human values. He was right. The most fundamental, long-range reason for the end of the Cold War was that Communism was based on profound contradictions and a misreading of human nature. So long as other nations refused to surrender to their fear, the Soviet system could never prevail. Perhaps the exhortations and policies of Reagan and Thatcher did determine the timing of the Soviet collapse, but the collapse was bound to come sooner or later.
Students of Soviet history with a more sociological bent offered yet another explanation for the Gorbachev phenomenon, based on irrepressible trends within Soviet society itself. For whatever horrors he committed against his own people, Stalin had made the U.S.S.R. into a modern, industrial, and primarily urban country. Khrushchev introduced television and spaceflight, and Brezhnev, through détente, multiplied the foreign contacts and experience of Soviet citizens. By the late 1970s a great percentage of Soviet people had ceased to be illiterate peasants easily suppressed, propagandized, and drafted into massive military, agricultural, or construction projects. Instead, a second- or third-generation urban population had grown up that inevitably came to demand more access to the information, political influence, and material rewards available to people of their station in the West. Once glasnost gave them a voice, these new "middle classes" loudly expressed their dissatisfaction with a regime that had become not only inhumane but irrational, even on its own materialistic terms. According to this view, therefore, Sovietism was doomed even by its relative success: the more modern the U.S.S.R. became, the less legitimate its party dictatorship became in the eyes of its educated classes.
A final, long-range interpretation laid stress on the nationality crisis in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R. was the world's last great multinational empire. The Communist party maintained its tight control over the Balts, Ukrainians, Moldavians, Georgians, Uzbeks, Armenians, and a dozen other major peoples by a combination of economic controls, censorship and propaganda, police methods, suppression of national cultures and churches, Russification, dispersal of populations, and in the last resort, force—all justified by the myth that Marxism transcended "bourgeois" nationalism and ensured equality and prosperity to all. Glasnost, however, released the real and abiding national sentiments of all the peoples under the Soviet yoke, allowing them to organize and agitate, while the economic breakdown gave the lie to Soviet promises. Finally, the discrediting of Communism itself removed the last justification for the very existence of the empire. Gorbachev did not foresee how far his policy of limited free expression would get out of hand, and by the time he did it was too late. He then gave up trying to hold eastern Europe and concentrated instead on trying to hold the U.S.S.R. together. It remained to be seen whether he, or his successor, could achieve even that.
The three main arenas of Cold War competition had always been divided Europe, strategic nuclear arms competition, and regional conflicts in the Third World. By the end of 1990 the superpowers had seemingly pacified the first arena, made substantial progress in the second, and at least stated their intention of disengaging in the third. Ever since the 1950s, when the U.S.S.R. first bid for allies and client states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the superpowers had wrestled for influence through programs of military and economic assistance, propaganda, and proxy wars in which they backed opposing states or factions. When Gorbachev came to power, the Soviets still possessed patron–client relationships with North Korea, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Angola, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan and exercised considerable influence with Iraq, Syria, Yemen (Aden), and the frontline states confronting white-ruled South Africa. Moreover, the United States faced opposition to friendly regimes in the Philippines, El Salvador, and, of course, Israel. The Soviet Union's financial crisis increasingly limited its ability to underwrite client states, however, while its troubles in eastern Europe and at home afforded the United States the opportunity to resolve regional conflicts to its liking. Thus, events in disparate theatres of the world in the last half of the 1980s added up to a certain disengagement and reduction of Cold War-related tensions in the Third World.
In 1986 the corrupt autocrat of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, a long-standing ally of the United States, lost his grip on power. Crowds backed by leading elements in the Roman Catholic church, the press, labour unions, and a portion of the army rose up to demand his resignation. The Reagan administration, like previous U.S. administrations, had tolerated Marcos in light of his determined opposition to the Communist guerrilla movement in the Philippines and his support for two major U.S. military bases on the island of Luzon. It now had to decide, however, whether Marcos' continued rule might in fact strengthen the appeal of anti-American leftists. In hopes of avoiding "another Iran" (referring to President Carter's abandonment of the Shah, only to see him replaced by the Ayatollah), Reagan sent a personal envoy to Manila to engineer Marcos' departure in favour of free elections and the accession to power of Corazon Aquino, the widow of a popular opposition leader who had been murdered. The United States had evidently managed to remove an embarrassing dictator without doing serious harm to its strategic position in East Asia.
Closer to home, the United States continued to face not only the aggressively hostile Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and the leftist rebellion in El Salvador (backed, the White House said, by Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union) but also a growing rift with the Panamanian dictator General Manuel Noriega. For decades Noriega had collaborated with U.S. intelligence agencies, serving as an informant on events in Cuba and a supporter of the Contras in Central America. It came to light, however, that in addition to grabbing all power in Panama he had amassed a personal fortune by smuggling illegal drugs into the United States, and in 1988 a U.S. grand jury indicted Noriega on drug-trafficking charges. The Reagan administration offered to drop the charges if Noriega would agree to step down and leave Panama, but he refused.
In May 1989, Panama staged elections monitored by an international team that included former U.S. President Carter. Although the opposition civilian candidate, Guillermo Endara, appeared to win by a 3-to-1 margin, Noriega annulled the vote, declared his own puppet candidate the victor, and had Endara and other opponents beaten in the streets. President Bush dispatched 2,000 additional soldiers to U.S. bases in the Panama Canal Zone, and the Organization of American States (OAS) called for a "peaceful transfer of power" to an elected government in Panama. In December 1989, Noriega bade the Panamanian National Assembly to name him "maximum leader" and declare a virtual "state of war" with the United States. Within days a U.S. soldier was ambushed and killed in Panama, an incident followed by the shooting of a Panamanian soldier by U.S. military guards.
President Bush now considered that he had a pretext to act. A Panamanian judge taking refuge in the Canal Zone swore in Endara as president, and 24,000 U.S. troops (including 11,000 airlifted from the United States) seized control of Panama City. Noriega eluded the invaders for four days, then took refuge with the papal nuncio. On Jan. January 3, 1990, he surrendered himself to U.S. custody and was transported to Miami to stand trial. The OAS voted 20 to 1 to condemn what seemed to many Latin Americans an unwarranted "Yanqui" intervention.
The U.S. conflict with the Nicaraguan revolutionary regime of Daniel Ortega also reached a climax in 1989. On February 14 five Central American presidents, inspired by the earlier initiatives of the Costa Rican president and Nobel Peace laureate Oscar Óscar Arias Sánchez, agreed to plans for a cease-fire in the entire region, the closing of Contra bases in Honduras, and monitored elections in Nicaragua to be held no later than February 1990. In April Nicaragua's National Assembly approved the plan and passed laws relaxing the Sandinistas' prohibitions of free speech and opposition political parties. Because the Sandinistas' prospects for continued, large-scale aid from Cuba and the U.S.S.R. were slim in light of the Soviet "new thinking," Ortega concluded that he must, after all, risk the fully free elections he had avoided ever since his takeover 10 years before. The five Central American presidents announced in August their schedule for the demobilization of the Contras, and in October the U.S. Congress acceded to Bush's request for nonmilitary aid to the Nicaraguan opposition.
The elections were held on Feb. February 25, 1990, and, to the surprise of almost everyone on both sides of the struggle, the Nicaraguan people favoured National Opposition Union leader Violeta Barrios de Chamorro by 55 to 40 percent. Ortega acknowledged his defeat and pledged to "respect and obey the popular mandate." The United States immediately suspended the aid to the Contras, lifted the economic sanctions against Nicaragua, and proposed to advance economic assistance to the new regime.
The resolution of regional conflicts at the end of the 1980s extended to Asia as well. In Afghanistan the Soviet Union had committed some 115,000 troops in support of the KGB-installed regime of President Mohammad Najibullah but had failed to eliminate the resistance of the mujahideen. The war became a costly drain on the Soviet budget and a blow to Soviet military prestige. In the atmosphere of glasnost even an antiwar movement of sorts arose in the Soviet Union. A turning point came in mid-1986, when the United States began to supply the Afghan rebels with surface-to-air Stinger missiles, which forced Soviet aircraft and helicopters to suspend their low-level raids on rebel villages and strongholds. In January 1987 Najibullah announced a cease-fire, but the rebels refused his terms and the war continued.
In February 1988 Gorbachev conceded the need to extract Soviet forces from the stalemated conflict. In April, Afghan, Pakistani, and Soviet representatives in Geneva agreed to a disengagement plan based on Soviet withdrawal by February 1989 and noninvolvement in each other's internal affairs. The Soviets completed the evacuation on schedule but continued to supply the Kabul regime with large quantities of arms and supplies. The regime abandoned its strategy of seeking out the mujahideen and instead pulled back into strong defensive bastions in the fertile valleys, maintaining control of roads and cities. The rebels lacked the tanks and artillery to launch major offensive operations, and internal feuds among the rebel leaders also inhibited their operations. Thus, the predictions of Western journalists that Kabul would soon fall were proved wrong; the Soviets' client state in Afghanistan survived into the 1990s.
The war between Iraq and Iran, which began in 1980, also reached a conclusion. The war had been conducted with the utmost ferocity on both sides. The Iraqi leader, Hussein, employed every weapon in his arsenal, including Soviet Scud missiles and poison gas purchased from West Germany, and the Iranian regime of Ayatollah Khomeini ordered its Revolutionary Guards to make human-wave assaults against fortified Iraqi positions. Total casualties in the conflict numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The Soviets and Americans remained aloof from the conflict but tilted toward Iraq. The primary Western (and Japanese) interests were to preserve a balance of power in the Persian Gulf and to maintain the free flow of oil from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the emirates. In May 1987, after two Iraqi missiles struck a U.S. naval vessel in the gulf, the United States announced an agreement with Kuwait to reflag 11 Kuwaiti tankers and assign the U.S. Navy to escort them through the dangerous waters. Western European states and the U.S.S.R. deployed minesweepers.
The Iran–Iraq War entered its final phases in February 1988, when Hussein ordered the bombing of an oil refinery near Tehrān. The Iranians retaliated by launching missiles into Baghdad, and this "war of the cities" continued for months. In March, with the front stalemated along the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab waterway, dissident Kurdish populations in the north of Iraq took advantage of the war to agitate for autonomy. Hussein struck back at the Kurds in genocidal fashion, bombing their villages with chemical weapons and poison gas. In May 1988 Iraq launched a massive surprise attack that drove the Iranians out of the small wedge of Iraqi territory they had occupied 16 months earlier, and after eight years of warfare the two sides were back where they started. Although Khomeini called the decision "more deadly than taking poison," he instructed his government to accept UN Resolution 598 calling for an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal to prewar boundaries. Iraq refused, and Hussein ordered a final air and ground offensive with extensive use of poison gas. The Iraqis advanced 40 miles into Iran. UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar persevered in talks with the foreign ministers of the belligerents and announced finally that the two sides had agreed to a cease-fire beginning Aug. August 20, 1988.
To outsiders, Khomeini's militant Shīʿite regime in Tehrān appeared to be the most extreme, irrational, and dangerous government in the region. In fact, it was the secular revolutionary tyranny of Hussein that had begun the war and harboured the aggressive aims of seizing the mouth of the Tigris-Euphrates river system and establishing Iraq as the hegemonic power in the Persian Gulf. Iraq had assumed the strategic offensive, escalated the war, and initiated the use of weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction imported from Western and Soviet-bloc states alike.
In all these regions of the world long-standing conflicts either dissipated or lost their Cold War significance in the years 1986–90. One conflict, however, always remained volatile—and perhaps even more so for the retreat of the superpowers and their stabilizing influence: the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Throughout his years as U.S. secretary of state, George Schultz had tried to promote the peace process in the Middle East by brokering direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Such talks would require the PLO to renounce terrorism and recognize Israel's right to exist, but the PLO (which the Israeli ambassador Abba Eban said "never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity") refused to make the requisite concessions.
In December 1987, Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip killed an Arab youth engaged in a protest. Widespread unrest broke out in the Israeli-occupied territories, leading to 21 deaths in two weeks. This was the start of the intifada ("shaking"), a wave of Palestinian protests and Israeli reprisals that lent new urgency to Middle East diplomacy. Israeli military rule of the West Bank then hardened, and the Fatah faction of the PLO stepped up its terrorism from bases in Lebanon.
A first apparent breakthrough for U.S. policy occurred in November 1988, when the Palestine National Council, meeting in Algiers, voted overwhelmingly to accept UN Resolutions 242 and 338, calling for Israel to evacuate the occupied territories and for all countries in the region "to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries." Did this imply PLO recognition of Israel's right to exist? At first the PLO chairman, Yāsir ʿArafāt, refused to say, whereupon the United States denied him a visa to make a trip to the UN. He did in fact speak to a reconvened UN in Geneva but again failed to be explicit about PLO policy. The next day, in a news conference, ʿArafāt finally recognized Israel's right to exist, and he renounced terrorism as well. Schultz immediately announced that the United States would conduct "open dialogue" with the PLO. The Israelis, then in the midst of a cabinet crisis, were unable to respond decisively.
In March the new Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Arens, visited Washington, by which time the new Bush administration was also ready to make its first foray into the Arab–Israeli thicket with a plan for liberalized Israeli rule on the West Bank in return for PLO action to moderate the intifada and suspend raids on Israel from Lebanon. The Israelis had a plan of their own based on elections in the occupied territories, but without PLO participation or international observation. The Arab League endorsed the idea for a peace conference and held that Palestinian elections on the West Bank could occur only after an Israeli withdrawal. The Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, retorted that elections could occur only after the intifada had ended, insisted on continuing Israeli settlement on the West Bank, and denied the possibility of ever creating a Palestinian state. The deadlock in the Middle East was thus as intractable as ever.
In fact, the situation had hardened in the late 1980s for a variety of reasons. First, the Arabs themselves were seriously divided. Egypt, the most populous Arab state, had no desire to disturb its peace with Israel dating from the Camp David Accords. Saudi Arabia and the other wealthy oil states were preoccupied with the Persian Gulf crisis and nervous about the presence in their countries of thousands of Palestinian guest workers. Syria's president, Ḥafiz al-Assad, a bitter rival of Saddam Hussein, was busy absorbing a large chunk of Lebanon. King Hussein of Jordan was caught between Syria and Iraq, a prisoner of his large Palestinian refugee population, and yet in no condition to challenge Israel militarily. Meanwhile, the liberalization of emigration policy in the U.S.S.R. and the pervasive anti-Semitism there led to the influx of tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, whom the Israelis began to settle on the West Bank. Finally, the fading of the Cold War did little to enhance the ability of the superpowers to impose or broker a settlement in the region. Gorbachev hoped to improve relations with Israel while maintaining the Soviets' traditional ties to the radical Arab states and at the same time doing nothing to damage his détente with the United States. The Americans wanted to maintain their alliance with Israel but could not afford to alienate—or compromise—the moderate Arab governments so important to the stability of the oil-rich gulf.
For nearly two years after the UN-brokered cease-fire in the Persian Gulf, the governments of Iraq and Iran failed to initiate conversations toward a permanent peace treaty. Suddenly, in July 1990, the foreign ministers of the two states met in Geneva full of optimism about the prospects for peace. Why Saddam Hussein now seemed willing to liquidate his decade-long conflict with Iran and even give back the remaining land occupied at such cost by his armies began to become clear two weeks later, when he stunned the Arab world with a vitriolic speech in which he accused his small neighbour Kuwait of siphoning off crude oil from the Ar-Rumaylah oil fields straddling their border. He also accused the Persian Gulf states of conspiring to hold down oil prices, thereby damaging the interests of war-torn Iraq and catering to the wishes of the Western powers. The Iraqi foreign minister insisted that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the gulf emirates make partial compensation for these alleged "crimes" by cancelling $30,000,000,000 of Iraq's foreign debt; meanwhile, 100,000 of Iraq's best troops concentrated on the Kuwaiti border. In sum, a frustrated Hussein had turned his sights from giant Iran to the wealthy but vulnerable Arab kingdoms to the south.
Iraq's brash and provocative demands alarmed the Arab states. President Hosnī Mubārak of Egypt initiated negotiations between Iraq and Kuwait in Saudi Arabia, hoping to pacify the situation without the intervention of the United States and other outside powers. Hussein, too, expected no interference from outside the region, but he made only the poorest show of accepting mediation. He broke off negotiations after just two hours and the next day, August 2, ordered his army to occupy Kuwait.
Hussein had risen to the position of leader of the Baʾth socialist party and military dictator of Iraq in a postcolonial environment of intrigue, paranoia, and genuine political threats. Iraq, situated in the Fertile Crescent of the ancient Babylonian emperors, was a populous and wealthy country torn by ethnic and religious divisions. Iraq's boundaries, like those of all other states in the region, had been drawn up by British and French colonialists and either were arbitrary or conformed to their own interests rather than to the ethnic and economic needs of the region. In fact, the trackless deserts of the Middle East had never known stable national states, and Kuwait in particular struck Iraqis as an artificial state carved out of Iraq's "natural" coastline—perhaps for the very purpose of preventing the Persian Gulf's oil fields from falling under a single strong Arab state. In addition to coveting Kuwait's wealth, Hussein hated its monarchical regime even as he accepted its billions in aid to support his own military establishment and war with Iran. Hussein rationalized his hatred for the gulf monarchies, the Iranian Shīʾites, and the Israelis in Arab nationalist terms. A disciple of Egypt's Nasser, he saw himself as the revolutionary and military genius who would someday unify the Arabs and enable them to defy the West.
Hussein made the first in a series of fatal miscalculations, however, when he judged that his fellow Arabs would tolerate his seizure and despoliation of Kuwait rather than call upon outsiders for help. Instead, the government of Kuwait, now in exile, and the fearful King Fahd of Saudi Arabia looked at once to Washington and the United Nations for support. President Bush condemned Hussein's act, as did the British and Soviet governments, and the UN Security Council immediately demanded that Iraq withdraw. Bush echoed the Carter Doctrine by declaring that the integrity of Saudi Arabia, now exposed to Iraqi invasion, was a vital American interest, and two-thirds of the 21 member states of the Arab League likewise condemned Iraq's aggression. Within days the United States, the European Community, the Soviet Union, and Japan all imposed an embargo on Iraq, and the Security Council voted strict economic sanctions on Iraq (with Cuba and Yemen abstaining).
The same day King Fahd requested American military protection for his country. President Bush at once declared Operation Desert Shield and deployed the first of 200,000 American troops to the northern deserts of Saudi Arabia, augmented by British, French, and Saudi units and backed by naval and air forces. It was the largest American overseas operation since the Vietnam War, but its stated purpose was not to liberate Kuwait but to deter Iraq from attacking Saudi Arabia and seizing control of one-third of the world's oil reserves. In President Bush's words, the Allies had drawn a line in the sand.
Hussein was not impressed. On August 8 he formally annexed Kuwait, referring to it as Iraq's "19th province," an act the UN Security Council immediately condemned. Egypt offered to contribute troops to the Allied coalition, followed by 12 of the Arab League's member states. Hussein responded by condemning those states as traitorous and proclaiming a jihad, or holy war, against the coalition—despite the fact that he and his government had never upheld the Muslim cause in the past. He tried to break the Arab alliance with the Western powers by offering to evacuate Kuwait in return for Israeli withdrawal from its occupied territories—despite the fact that he had never upheld the Palestinian cause either. When his efforts failed to weaken the coalition's resolve, Hussein detained as hostages all foreigners caught in Kuwait and Iraq and moved to conclude permanent peace with Iran, thereby freeing his half-million-man army for battle.
Thus began the first post-Cold War world crisis. It can be described as such not only because it occurred after the collapse of the Iron Curtain in Europe and the dramatic moves toward East–West détente but also because of the characteristics of the crisis itself. The stakes in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait did not place Soviet and Western interests in direct conflict. Rather than falling into competition over how to handle the crisis, the United States and Soviet Union appeared in full agreement as the votes at the UN indicated. To be sure, a cutoff of oil exports from the Middle East would harm the Western states and perhaps even help the U.S.S.R. as the world's largest oil producer, but Gorbachev was counting on large-scale economic aid from the West. If he opposed President Bush's efforts to deal with the crisis, both the economic damage done to the West and the political hostility his opposition would arouse might end Gorbachev's hopes for economic assistance. Bush, in turn, openly described the Persian Gulf crisis as a test case for the "new world order" he hoped to inaugurate in the wake of the Cold War: a test of the United Nations as a genuine force for peace and justice, and thus of Soviet–Western cooperation.
Bush demonstrated extraordinary energy and deftness in building and maintaining the UN coalition against Iraq. His preferred medium of diplomacy was the telephone, and he kept in constant touch with the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and all other states represented either in the UN Security Council or in Operation Desert Shield. In some cases he doubtless had to make concessions on other diplomatic issues to win full support or, in the case of the Chinese, abstention, but he succeeded in presenting Hussein with a united front. Only the vulnerable neighbouring kingdom of Jordan, along with Algeria, The Sudan, Tunisia, Yemen, and the PLO, openly sided with Iraq. Finally, this was clearly a post-Cold War crisis inasmuch as a large portion of the American contingent in Saudi Arabia was transferred there from bases in Germany, a clear indication that the United States no longer considered the Red Army a clear and present danger in Europe.
As the crisis deepened, American observers applauded Bush for his skill in building the coalition, but critics also began to question his strategy. Would economic sanctions suffice to pry the Iraqis out of Kuwait? If so, would the coalition hold together long enough for that to occur, or would military threats be necessary to convince Hussein that he must retreat? Would Bush's insistence on working through the UN backfire? It seemed unlikely that all the world could be brought to endorse so bold and controversial an action. Not since the Korean War had the UN authorized offensive military action, and then only because the Soviets were boycotting the Security Council. However, by working gradually and calmly and in constant consultation with the Allies, Bush succeeded in convincing the Security Council to give him the authorizations he requested. On August 25 it voted to permit Allied ships in the Persian Gulf to use force to enforce the embargo against Iraq. On September 9, Bush and Gorbachev met in Helsinki and issued a joint declaration calling for Iraq to withdraw unconditionally from Kuwait.
Despite these demonstrations of unanimity, Hussein was not convinced that Bush could back up his promise that "the annexation of Kuwait will not stand." In early September he began releasing foreign nationals being detained in Kuwait, thereby eliminating the fears in many countries of a prolonged hostage crisis. Whatever his motive, this first act of leniency on Hussein's part raised hopes that a diplomatic solution might still be found. The months from October 1990 to January 1991, therefore, brought numerous and hectic efforts by the French and Soviet governments to initiate negotiations and to head off an outbreak of hostilities.
In October, after an emissary had flown to Baghdad to urge Hussein to withdraw, the Soviets announced that Iraq would be willing to negotiate if it could be assured that it could keep the Ar-Rumaylah oil fields and two strategic islands offshore. The United States, however, stood by the UN resolution calling for immediate and unconditional withdrawal lest Hussein seem to be rewarded in any way for his aggression. Instead, Bush succeeded in getting the Security Council to stiffen its requirements with a resolution holding Iraq liable for reparations for all damage caused in Kuwait by its invasion and occupation. Then, on November 8, Bush announced that he was doubling the size of the Desert Shield forces from 200,000 to more than 400,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, so that Allied forces would, if necessary, have "an adequate offensive military option." Hussein countered by reinforcing his own army of occupation to the level of 680,000 men.
What was U.S. policy at this time? Most observers believed that Bush would not or could not go to war on behalf of Kuwait and would sooner or later employ the multiple UN resolutions as bargaining chips—sacrificing some in return for an Iraqi withdrawal. Even the new military buildup did not imply an imminent war, since it could be justified by the argument that Hussein would not negotiate seriously unless faced with a threat of force. No sign of compromise emanated from the White House, however. Instead, Bush and his advisers repeated their insistence that Iraq comply with the UN resolutions unconditionally. Moreover, Middle East analysts and intelligence agencies began to question whether a mere Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait would suffice to pacify the region. After all, Hussein had proved twice that he considered aggressive war an acceptable tool of policy. He had built up a huge army and spent 10 years' worth of oil revenues on the most sophisticated weapons he could obtain, including chemical and biological agents and nuclear weapons facilities that were within a year or two of producing warheads. In other words, to oblige the Iraqis simply to withdraw from Kuwait would not prevent them from attacking there, or elsewhere, at some future time of their choosing. Genuine security in the gulf region would seem to require the destruction of the offensive capability of the Iraqi army and preferably the removal of Hussein himself. Such goals, however, could be achieved only through war, not by any sort of diplomatic compromise. On November 29, contrary to all expectations, Bush and the United States received authorization from the Security Council to use all means necessary in the gulf if Iraq failed to comply with all UN resolutions by Jan. January 15, 1991.
To bow to this ultimatum would be humiliating for Hussein, an admission of the bankruptcy of his policy and of his impotence to resist the coalition. To some observers it seemed that Bush was unwilling to leave Iraq the sort of opening that might avert a war. Bush argued that it was not his responsibility to provide Hussein with a way out and that he would not permit Hussein to appear, in the eyes of the Arab masses, as a hero who had stood up to the American imperialists. Saddam Hussein refused to respond constructively to French and Soviet overtures, remained defiant, and escalated his rhetoric. Meanwhile, his occupation force looted Kuwait city and dug an elaborate defensive line along the Kuwaiti–Saudi border.
President Bush's refusal to compromise seemed to contradict his stated readiness to talk. While he had shown great determination and skill in building the coalition, Bush had failed to communicate clearly the purpose of this vast military exercise. At one point, while the President was emphasizing that the conflict was about resisting aggression and defending the sovereign rights of nations and while protesters were chanting "no blood for oil," Secretary Baker said that the conflict was in fact about jobs. He meant that a cutoff in oil exports might so damage the world economy as to spark a great depression, but it came out sounding as if the administration did not know what it was proposing to fight for.
In the final months of 1990 a strange alliance sprang up in opposition to Bush's policy, consisting of liberals and peace activists on the one hand and neo-isolationist conservatives on the other. After a sober January debate, the Senate finally voted 52–47, and the House 250–183, to authorize the President to use force. Given this mood in the Congress, Iraq probably could have tied Bush's hands just by making a conciliatory gesture of some kind. Instead, Hussein played into Bush's hands.
Hussein had called what he thought was an American bluff by allowing the January 15 UN deadline to come and go. Instead, just a day later, Bush announced that Operation Desert Shield had become Operation Desert Storm and that the liberation of Kuwait had begun. He was not starting a war—the war, he reminded the world, had been started by Iraq the previous August—but he was launching the counterattack to drive back the aggressor. Hundreds of U.S. bombers, augmented by French, British, Saudi, and Kuwaiti planes and U.S. Navy cruise missiles, dropped precision-guided bombs on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. It was the start of the most intense campaign of strategic bombing in history, aimed in the first weeks at Iraqi command and control centres, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons plants, conventional weapons facilities, electrical utilities, bridges and dams, and all manner of military and government installations. From the first it was evident that Iraq was unable to mount meaningful resistance. Its radar and air defense network was destroyed, and most of its warplanes fled to airfields in neutral Iran to escape destruction.
Hussein's reaction to the outbreak of war was to strike back with words, threats, terror weapons, and ploys to break the unity and resolve of the UN coalition. He decreed a holy war against the United States, called on all Muslims to unite against the Satanic enemy, and warned that in this "mother of all battles" the Americans would drown in "pools of their own blood." He made good on his prewar pledge to attack neutral Israel, firing 39 Soviet-made Scud surface-to-surface missiles at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Most fell harmlessly, none contained the poison gas warheads Hussein had threatened to use, and after the first days many were destroyed in flight by American Patriot antimissile missiles. Furthermore, Hussein's purpose in launching the Scuds at neutral Israel was not achieved. He had hoped to provoke an Israeli counterstrike and thereby detach the Syrians and Egyptians from the enemy coalition. The Israelis were understandably furious at the unprovoked attacks against defenseless civilian targets but understood Bush's appeals to them not to respond. The Arab-Western coalition hung together.
Hussein tried every technique at his disposal to discredit the Allied operation. He opened Kuwaiti oil pipelines into the sea and created a huge oil slick in hopes of clogging Saudi freshwater plants and shocking American opinion with the extent of the environmental consequences of the war. He mistreated Allied airmen taken prisoner and televised trumped-up propaganda reports alleging that the Allies were purposely bombing civilian targets. All this only proved to Western populations, however, that he was indeed a madman, and it steeled their will to see him defeated. The only way left for Hussein to win the war was to entrap the Americans in a close-fought ground war and to inflict so many casualties that American public opinion would turn against the President.
While the world's attention remained tuned to the war in the Persian Gulf, important changes occurred in the U.S.S.R. Gorbachev faced increasing, and increasingly bold, internal opposition from all sides. His economic reforms had failed utterly, and the Soviet GNP continued to fall through the years 1989–90. Shortages grew worse, and even the old Soviet command structure broke down as the constituent republics, one by one, set up their own economic systems and voted to subordinate the laws of the Soviet Union to local laws. Boris Yeltsin, the Russian leader, resigned from the Communist party and became the acknowledged leader of democratic forces throughout the U.S.S.R. Separatism spread among the republics, with the Baltic states taking the lead in hopes of winning complete independence. At the same time, hard-liners in the KGB, the army, and the Communist party gradually regrouped after the buffetings of previous years and criticized Gorbachev for being too soft on dissent. The middle ground of moderate reformism was disappearing from beneath Gorbachev's feet. Late in 1990 he began to issue sterner warnings to Yeltsin to cease and desist, and he insisted that the Baltics and other republics submit to his newly drafted union treaty regulating the relationship between them and the Soviet central government. He also won still greater emergency powers for himself as president from the Congress of People's Deputies.
Westerners were awakened to the likelihood of a crackdown in the U.S.S.R. in December 1990, when Shevardnadze, Gorbachev's reformist friend and a main architect of détente with the West, suddenly resigned as foreign minister and warned of imminent dictatorship in the U.S.S.R. Indeed, no sooner had the Western powers opened the war against Iraq in January 1991 than Soviet security forces entered Vilnius and forcibly evicted Lithuanian patriots from public buildings, at the cost of several lives. Just as in Hungary in 1956, when the Western powers were distracted by the Suez crisis, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, when the United States was bogged down in Vietnam, the Kremlin took advantage of the Persian Gulf War to order a crackdown on challenges to its empire.
Gorbachev suddenly distanced himself from the UN coalition and began playing a separate game. He would extend his good offices, he said, to persuade Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait and thereby render a ground war unnecessary. His motives might have included any of a number of concerns: to end a war that had become a showcase for high-tech American weapons and thus was magnifying American prestige at the expense of the Soviets; to appease the U.S.S.R.'s own Muslim populations in Central Asia (though they were Turkic peoples and not necessarily in sympathy with Iraq); to reclaim the Soviets' traditional role as friend of the radical Arab states and advocate for the Palestinians; to save for the U.S.S.R. a seat at the peace conference even though it had contributed no forces and no money to the Allied effort.
Gorbachev's gambit began on February 15, when Iraq announced its "readiness to deal with" the demand that it evacuate Kuwait. Bush denounced the announcement as a cruel hoax inasmuch as Hussein had known for months the UN conditions and could at any time have chosen to observe them. Gorbachev hailed the announcement, however, and invited the Iraqi foreign minister to Moscow. The Soviet plan called for a withdrawal from Kuwait, in return for which the U.S.S.R. would see that Hussein was spared the terms of the other UN resolutions, including punishment for war crimes and reparations to Kuwait. Gorbachev also promised to work for a Middle East peace conference after the war, thereby linking the Kuwaiti situation to the Palestinian. The Soviets (and Iraqis) were betting that Western publics would lose their stomach for a possibly bloody ground war once Iraq had promised to fulfill their main goal—the liberation of Kuwait. If they won their bet, Hussein would not only survive in power, but his army would be largely intact and he could claim a victory of sorts for having advanced the "Arab cause." Bush consulted with the Allies and then set a final deadline for unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait.
The Soviets and Iraqis then produced yet another plan under which Iraq would withdraw. The linkage to the Palestinians was dropped this time, but a number of other conditions remained that flew in the face of Bush's demand for "unconditional withdrawal" from Kuwait. Bush's deliberate policy of channelling all decisions through the UN now paid off. The Soviets called an emergency session of the Security Council and presented their plan as the best chance for peace, but the member states refused to throw out their own resolutions. The alliance held, the Soviet gambit failed, and Gorbachev himself then backed off and expressed support for the UN effort.
When the final deadline was passed on February 23, the carefully planned UN ground offensive began at once. Saudi and Kuwaiti forces moved up the coast of the Persian Gulf toward Kuwait city, and U.S. Marines punched through the main Iraqi defenses on the southern Kuwaiti border, while more Marines on board ship feinted at making an amphibious landing to tie down Iraqi reserves. The main thrust came far inland on the desert flank, where American and Anglo-French armoured columns swept around the flank of the Iraqi army and turned eastward through southern Iraq on a line toward Basra. The Iraqi units in Kuwait were trapped in a pocket. The Republican Guards near the Iraqi–Kuwaiti border were engaged and destroyed by Allied tanks and aircraft. Within three days Hussein's massive army ceased to exist; 100,000 Iraqis had surrendered and tens of thousands more were trying to flee homeward. On February 27 the Allied forces had achieved all their major objectives, and Bush announced a cease-fire to take effect just 100 hours after the ground war had begun. Though Hussein still refused to make the personal confession of failure that Bush desired, the Iraqi government conceded defeat by announcing its willingness to abide by all 12 UN resolutions.
In retrospect, the war was a product of grave miscalculations on both sides. Throughout the 1980s U.S. policy had favoured Iraq in its war against Iran and permitted the continued export of strategic materials to Hussein despite repeated indications of his fanaticism and ambition. Hussein's errors were even more egregious and deadly. In light of the Vietnam War and the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979–80, he judged the United States to be unwilling and unable to take up a serious challenge in Asia, even one mounted by a Third World country. Having decided to invade, he threw away his advantage of surprise by stopping in Kuwait instead of sweeping down the gulf coast and conquering Saudi Arabia and the emirates as well. He then waited five months, affording the United States time to mobilize international support and send military forces halfway around the world. Finally, he failed to extend his heavily fortified defense lines westward along the Saudi–Iraqi border.
The war in the Persian Gulf thus proved to be an American and UN victory beyond the most sanguine hopes even of its military designers. The Iraqi military suffered more than 100,000 casualties at a cost to the Allies of some 340 killed; it was the most one-sided major engagement in the history of modern warfare. Kuwait was freed, albeit at the cost of terrible damage, since the Iraqis practiced a scorched-earth policy that included setting ablaze hundreds of oil wells. Above all, the UN had shown itself to be truly united and possessed of the will to back up its resolutions with force. What the Bush administration did not accomplish, however, was the overthrow of Hussein himself. On the advice of General Colin Powell, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Bush decided not to press on to Baghdad or to destroy all Iraq's Republican Guard units. Hussein proceeded to crush challenges to his authority from the Kurds in northern Iraq and Shīʿite dissidents in the south. In the first instance, Bush was restrained by the interests of Turkey, which also contained a large Kurdish minority. In the latter case, he was restrained by fear that Iran's Shīʿite regime might try to expand its own reach at Iraq's expense. U.S. forces did provide humanitarian relief to 1,000,000 Kurdish refugees and enforce no-fly zones to stop Iraqi attacks on civilians, but American policy clearly meant to uphold Iraqi unity so as to preserve the regional balance of power. Bush probably expected Hussein to be overthrown by the Iraqis themselves, but the dictator suppressed a military coup on July 2, 1992, and was still in power long after Bush himself was out of office.
Meanwhile, Gorbachev's efforts to crack down on dissident Soviet ethnic groups failed miserably. Within weeks of the January 1991 bloodshed in Lithuania, hundreds of thousands of Muscovites defied the ban on public demonstrations, six Soviet republics boycotted a referendum on Gorbachev's new union plan, and Ukrainian coal miners went on strike. When Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian republic with 60 percent of the vote on June 12, he clearly emerged as a more legitimate apostle of reform. Western governments observed these challenges to Soviet authority with a mixture of delight and dismay. American conservatives urged the White House to support the republics' struggle for freedom, but Bush insisted on caution. He had worked closely with Gorbachev to end the Cold War peaceably and feared that his fall from power would mean either the return of Communist hard-liners or the crack-up of the U.S.S.R. into quarreling regions. Moreover, given his lack of experience and reputation as a hard-drinking, impulsive populist, Yeltsin seemed suspect. In what proved to be a final bid to help Gorbachev, Bush flew to Moscow on July 29 to sign the START treaty for reduction of nuclear arsenals, then delivered a speech, later mocked as his "Chicken Kiev" speech, in which he warned the Ukrainian parliament against "suicidal nationalism."
Gorbachev's fate was sealed, however, on August 19 when a so-called Emergency Committee of Soviet hard-liners removed him from office while he was vacationing in the Crimea and imposed martial law. The task of resistance fell to Yeltsin, who branded the coup leaders as traitors, barricaded himself inside the Russian parliament surrounded by his supporters, and dared the military to attack their fellow citizens. After one brief clash, the soldiers indeed wavered and the coup collapsed within 48 hours. Gorbachev was returned to the office of Soviet president but never regained real power, which had clearly passed to the courageous Yeltsin. Moreover, the failed coup destroyed the last remnants of fear or loyalty that had held the Soviet empire together. Estonia and Latvia joined Lithuania by declaring independence, and this time the United States immediately extended recognition. On August 24 Ukraine declared independence, Belorussia (Belarus) the next day, and Moldavia (Moldova) on the 27th. The Russian parliament, in turn, granted Yeltsin sweeping emergency powers to liberalize the economy and suppress the Communist party. Even then Gorbachev tried to salvage some sort of economic and security union, but he gave up on December 1 when Ukrainian voters approved independence in a referendum. On the 8th Yeltsin and the newly elected presidents of Ukraine and Belarus declared that the U.S.S.R. had ceased to exist and replaced it with the loose Commonwealth of Independent States. The U.S. ambassador, Robert Strauss, finally acknowledged that Gorbachev was "in decline" and that henceforth Yeltsin's government "are the people with whom we'll deal." Gorbachev resigned on December 25, the hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered from the Kremlin, and in its place rose the white, blue, and red flag of Russia.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union completed the liquidation of the Cold War by extinguishing Leninism in its homeland. Happily, the chaos feared by the Bush administration did not erupt, but the emergence of 15 independent states from the wreckage posed a plethora of new problems. All the states were in economic distress as they began to make the transition from centrally planned to market economies. All contained significant national minorities; none had secure, legitimate boundaries; and Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan possessed sizable stocks of nuclear weapons. Thus, the world might be less scary in the short run, but it did not promise to be more stable.
In the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, Bush had summoned the United Nations to the task of building a new world order. He was seeking to place the resistance to Iraqi aggression on a high moral plane but was also responding to critics who accused him of lacking "vision." In fact, American opinion was sharply divided on how to take advantage of the sudden, surprising victory in the Cold War. Neo-isolationists urged the United States to pare back foreign commitments, neo-nationalists wanted the country to look more to its own interests abroad, liberals hoped for a "peace dividend" that could be applied to a domestic agenda ranging from education to health care and crime, and all hoped to address the yawning deficits in the U.S. budget and trade balance. Internationalists of both parties, however, insisted that Americans would miss a historic opportunity if they turned inward after the Cold War. Twice before in the 20th century the United States had led the world to victories over tyranny only to see its plans for a democratic world order frustrated. As the only nation with the unique combination of military, economic, and ideological strengths needed to lead, the United States now had a duty to "win the peace."
Was bold leadership in fact all that was needed to fashion a secure and free world order? Or must the post-Cold War international system, like all previous ones, evolve according to the play of power and interest among states? Would the end of the bipolar world eventuate in a unipolar one led by the UN? Or would it fragment into a multipolar system, with new sorts and sources of threats, such as ethnic and regional violence, terrorism, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to second-level states, some of them hostile to Western values?
At least two abiding conflicts did seem ripe for resolution in the wake of the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War. In the Middle East mutually reinforcing changes on the international, regional, and domestic fronts breathed new life into the peace process. First, the American commitment to gulf security raised U.S. prestige and influence throughout the entire region. Second, Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Arab governments cut financial support for the PLO. Third, the foremost "rejectionist" Arab states like Syria and Iraq were marginalized—the former because of the loss of its Soviet patron, the latter by military defeat. Fourth, weary Palestinians and Israelis began to look for an alternative to the ongoing strife of the intifada in the disputed territories. Sensing the opportunity born of these changes, Bush sent Secretary of State Baker to the Middle East twice in the spring of 1991 in order to revive the peace process, then joined Gorbachev on July 31 in calling for a Middle East peace conference. Other hopeful signs included Jordan's tentative moves away from Iraq and toward a more representative government at home and the renewal of diplomatic relations with Israel by the U.S.S.R., China, and India. In June 1992, the Labour Party, led by Yitzhak Rabin, defeated the Likud in elections, bringing to power a more flexible Israeli cabinet. Bush then extended $10,000,000,000 in American loan guarantees to Israel, and Jerusalem in turn announced a moratorium on new Jewish settlements on the West Bank.
Thanks to Bush's leadership, the conference that opened in Madrid on October 30, 1991, spawned three diplomatic tracks: Israeli–Palestinian discussions on an interim settlement; bilateral talks between Israel, on the one hand, and Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, on the other; and multilateral conferences designed to support the first two tracks. Syria's President Assad signalled a new flexibility when he first used the word "peace" in September 1992, and he later indicated that the total return of the Golan Heights was no longer a precondition for negotiations. A crucial breakthrough was made in May 1993 as Israel began secret negotiations with the PLO that bore fruit in August when—just as the delegates were gathering for the 11th multilateral round of talks—the Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, made the surprise announcement that an accord had been reached with the PLO. Secret talks held in Norway had resulted in a plan to establish Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and in Jericho. As part of the agreement ʿArafāt repudiated before the Israelis the long-standing Palestinian denunciation of Israel's "right to exist." The signing of a Declaration of Principles based on UN Resolutions 242 and 338, presided over by U.S. President William J. Clinton, followed on September 13. Speculation ensued as to whether ʿArafāt would survive to enforce the accord against the will of terrorist groups like Ḥamās. Despite continued violence, however, an implementation accord was reached on May 4, 1994, that in turn allowed the consummation of peace between Jordan and Israel on October 26. As the year ended, hopes were high that Syria would also agree to terms. Several sticky points remained between Jerusalem and Damascus, however, while the Israelis and Americans discussed whether or not U.S. peacekeeping forces should be deployed on the Golan Heights to monitor an agreement.
The end of the Cold War also promoted progress in the long-standing South African conflict. To be sure, Western and Soviet-bloc states had ritually condemned apartheid and imposed economic sanctions against the white government. So long as South Africa could point to the Communist backing received by the African National Congress (ANC) and neighbouring states like Angola and Mozambique, however, it had a certain leverage with which to resist black demands for majority rule. It was the disappearance of the Communist threat and the example of brave eastern Europeans throwing off their chains that finally allowed President F.W. de Klerk to persuade even the ardent Afrikaaners of his National Party to accept reform. So, too, did the ANC, which affirmed its readiness, in January 1990, to engage the South African government in peaceful negotiations. The following month de Klerk released the ANC leader Nelson Mandela from prison. Talks began on May 2, complicated by intramural violence among competing black factions, especially the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) of the Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. De Klerk pressed on, however, and in June 1991 Parliament repealed its requirement that citizens be categorized by race. The following month Bush, citing the progress made, lifted American sanctions against South Africa.
The final act began in December 1991 when de Klerk and Mandela sat down to design an interim constitutional arrangement for the transfer of power. Mandela insisted on "one man, one vote" at once, while whites, fearing retribution from an all-black government, insisted on a guaranteed voice in the new regime. The stalemate was broken in September at the expense of the IFP, which broke relations with Pretoria. De Klerk and Mandela proceeded bilaterally, and on February 12, 1993, they arrived at a formula for a transitional "government of national unity." They eventually fixed the date for the first all-South African free elections for April 1994. Ongoing factional violence in the black townships threatened to derail the plan, but in the final weeks the IFP agreed to permit its KwaZulu territory to participate. In the voting on April 26 Mandela won a landslide victory, and he was inaugurated as president on May 10. He called on all citizens "to heal the wounds of the past," respect "the fundamental rights of the individual," and construct "a new order based on justice for all." As the historic year closed, it appeared that inter- or intraracial bloodbaths and confiscations would not occur and that South Africa might truly be born anew.
George Bush's apparent triumphs in foreign policy failed to ensure his reelection in 1992, however. Instead, Americans turned their attention to domestic issues and seemed to hunger for change. Bush lost in a three-way race to William J. (Bill) Clinton, a self-styled "New Democrat" with little experience or interest in world affairs. His campaign staff's reminder to themselves—"It's the economy, stupid!"—epitomized their candidate's desire to take advantage of the U.S. public's discontent over economic issues. Like Woodrow Wilson, however, who had the same desire, Clinton was harassed by overseas crises from the start.
Clinton's foreign policy team, led by Secretary of State Warren Christopher and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, included veterans of the Carter administration, which had emphasized human rights. They, in turn, were influenced by academic theories holding that military power was now less important than economic power and that the end of the Cold War would finally permit the United Nations to provide a workable system of global collective security. Clinton symbolized this neo-Wilsonian bent when he elevated UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright to cabinet rank. She defined American policy as "assertive multilateralism" and supported Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's call for a more ambitious UN agenda.
The crises awaiting Clinton quickly revealed the pitfalls on the road to a new world order. The most abiding was the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but the most immediate impact came in Somalia. That East African state had suffered a total breakdown of civil authority, and hundreds of thousands of people were dying of famine as warlords fought for control. During his last days in office Bush had approved Operation Restore Hope for the dispatch to Somalia of some 28,000 American troops. He styled it a humanitarian exercise, and in December 1992 Marines landed safely in Mogadishu, with the aim of turning control of the operation over to the UN as soon as possible. The Clinton administration, however, supported a UN resolution of March 26, 1993, that expanded the mission to include "the rehabilitation of the political institutions and economy of Somalia." Albright lauded this effort at state-building as "an unprecedented enterprise aimed at nothing less than the restoration of an entire country."
Clinton officials articulated the principles of their new foreign policy in a series of speeches. Lake explained on September 21, 1993, that democracy and market economics were in the ascendentascendant, so that, just as the United States had previously laboured to contain communism, it should now work for "enlargement" of the community of free nations. Albright outlined the moral, financial, and political benefits of multilateral action in regional disputes, and Clinton defined his goal as nothing less than "to expand the reach of democracy and economic progress across the whole of Europe and to the far reaches of the world." Within three weeks of Lake's speech this bold agenda began to unravel. On October 3–4, more than 75 U.S. Army Rangers were wounded in an effort to capture the renegade Somali warlord General Maxamed Farax Caydiid (Muḥammad Farah Aydid), and two American corpses were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu before television cameras. American opinion immediately turned against the intervention, especially when it was revealed that the troops were fighting under UN commanders and had been denied heavy weapons by Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. Clinton was obliged to announce a deadline of March 31, 1994, for evacuation of the troops, which in turn meant abandoning the state-building mission.
Just a week later, the enlargement agenda received another public relations blow when a mob of armed Haitians at Port-au-Prince forced the withdrawal of American and Canadian troops sent to prepare the return of the ousted president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. That dispute dated from September 30, 1991, when a military coup led by Brigadier General Raoul Cédras had exiled Aristide and imposed martial law. The United States imposed economic sanctions but was preoccupied for the rest of Bush's term with the question of what to do with the thousands of Haitian boat people fleeing the country for American shores. Clinton embraced Aristide despite his communist sympathies and record of political violence and brokered the Governors Island accord of July 1993, in which Cédras agreed to reinstate Aristide in return for amnesty and the lifting of sanctions. Aristide refused to return, however, until the generals had left Haiti, while Cédras stepped up violence against Aristide's supporters. It was then that a U.S. ship attempted to intervene, only to be turned back at the dock.
The embarrassments in Somalia and Haiti and the indecision on Bosnia and Herzegovina, combined with military budget cuts exceeding those planned by Bush, provoked charges that the Clinton administration had no foreign policy at all, or an exceedingly ambitious one run from the UN and beyond the capabilities of the U.S. armed forces. To stem the criticism, Clinton issued a presidential directive that outlined precise rules for future deployments abroad. They included the stipulations that a given crisis be susceptible to a military solution with a clearly defined goal, that sufficient force be employed, that a clear end point be identifiable, and that U.S. forces go into combat only under U.S. command. Trimming their sails, Lake and Albright said that the administration would henceforth take multilateral or unilateral action on a case-by-case basis. Dubbed "deliberative multilateralism," it seemed another example of reactive ad hoc policy making.
A final crisis inherited by Clinton was sparked by the North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung's apparent intention to build nuclear bombs and the missiles needed to deliver them. One of the few remaining hard-line Communist regimes, North Korea had agreed to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985 as the price for receiving Soviet technical aid for its civilian nuclear program. When communism collapsed in Europe, the North Koreans also gave signs of wanting to shed their pariah status. In December 1991 they joined South Korea in a pledge to make the peninsula nuclear-free (thereby obliging the United States to withdraw its own nuclear warheads from the South). By the end of Bush's term, however, evidence had come to light that the North Koreans were cheating, first, by diverting enriched uranium to military research and, second, by inhibiting inspections. They threatened repeatedly to suspend adherence to the NPT.
Western experts pondered what Kim was up to. Did he mean to go nuclear, perhaps as a last-ditch demonstration to prevent the collapse of his regime? Did he intend to sell bombs and missiles abroad to boost his failing economy? Or did he intend to use his nuclear potential as a bargaining chip in exchange for foreign economic aid? The situation posed a terrible dilemma for the Clinton administration, which had made nonproliferation a top priority. Sooner or later the United States would have to threaten the use of force, either because Kim refused to allow inspections or because inspections revealed that North Korea was in fact building bombs. A threat of force, however, might provoke the mysterious regime in P'yŏngyang into unleashing nuclear or conventional attacks on its neighbours. South Korea and Japan urged caution, while China, North Korea's only possible ally in the dispute, refused to say whether or not it would support sanctions or help to resolve the dispute. The United States alternated between brandishing carrots and sticks, to which North Korea replied with a bewildering mix of signals that culminated in a June 1994 threat to unleash war against the South.
At the moment of greatest tension, when Clinton was engaging in a military buildup in East Asia and lobbying the UN for sanctions, he suddenly seemed to lose control of policy altogether. On June 15, former President Carter travelled to P'yŏngyang and engaged Kim in negotiations that resulted, four days later, in a tentative agreement. North Korea would gradually submit to international inspections in return for a basket of benefits. At times Clinton seemed unaware of Carter's activities and at one point even denied that the former president's words reflected American policy. Negotiations were then delayed by the death of Kim and the accession to power of his son Kim Chong Il. On August 13, however, a nuclear framework accord was signed under which North Korea would remain within the NPT and cease to operate the reactors from which it extracted weapons-grade plutonium. In exchange, the United States would provide North Korea with two light-water reactors, to be paid for by Japan and South Korea, and guarantee North Korea against nuclear attack. The United States would also supply oil to the North to compensate for the energy production lost during the transition and would work toward full diplomatic and economic relations. Because it appeared to reward nuclear blackmail and did not preclude possible future cheating, the pact was criticized in Congress. For the moment, however, Carter's intervention relieved the crisis.
Almost the same course of events followed in Haiti, only this time with Clinton's approval. Through September 1994 the Haitian military junta continued its harsh rule in defiance of sanctions and American threats. Clinton's credibility would suffer further if he failed to act, and he was also under pressure from the Congressional Black Caucus to help Haiti and was anxious to stem the flow of refugees. After receiving UN approval for an invasion, Clinton issued an ultimatum on September 15, advising General Cédras that "Your time is up. Leave now or we will force you from power." Republicans, however, warned of more bloodshed like that in Somalia if the United States sent in Marines, and so Clinton searched for a way to oust the junta without having Americans fight their way in. On the 17th, even as military units converged on Haiti, he sent Carter and a blue-ribbon delegation to Port-au-Prince. After 36 hours of intense discussions, Cédras agreed to leave the country and order his soldiers not to resist a U.S. occupation, in return for amnesty. The first contingents of Operation Uphold Democracy arrived on the 19th, and President Aristide returned home on October 15. U.S. forces remained until March 1995 and were then replaced by a UN force.
Throughout 1993 and 1994 Republicans accused Clinton of naïveté and vacillation. Opinion polls showed that the American people lacked confidence in U.S. foreign policy, while European and Asian leaders were dismayed by what they saw as weak leadership from Washington. On issues of international trade, however, Clinton scored major successes, albeit with Republican help. As befitted a president who wanted to focus on the economy, Clinton stood forth as the strongest proponent of free trade in decades. First, he completed negotiations begun under Bush for a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to forge a common market among Canada, Mexico, and the United States and won its passage in Congress in November 1993. Clinton then dispelled fears that NAFTA might divide the world into hostile commercial blocs when he won passage in December 1994 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), dedicated to reducing trade barriers worldwide and establishing the World Trade Organization (WTO).
The November 1994 elections transformed the environment of American foreign policy making by giving the Republican Party control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Indications were that the new Congress would insist on higher military budgets but be less willing to see armed forces deployed in regional crises. Beyond that all one could predict was that Clinton's foreign policy was likely to tilt more toward the "realistic" direction and less toward the "idealistic" one that had informed the sanguine rhetoric of assertive multilateralism.
For 45 years Europe had been divided by the Iron Curtain. Though tragic and often tense, the Cold War nonetheless imposed stability on Europe and allowed the western sector, at least, to prosper as never before. The end of Communism, therefore, posed several vexing questions. Would a united Germany dominate Europe economically and waver dangerously between East and West in foreign policy? Could the new democracies of east-central Europe achieve Western levels of prosperity and avoid the ethnic strife that had sparked two world wars? In the short run, the worst fears were not realized. Chancellor Kohl took every opportunity to reaffirm Germany's commitment to the idea of a united Europe, while the high cost of rehabilitating the former East Germany allayed fears of a German economic hegemony. Europe's long-term stability, however, depended on the continued vitality of institutions built up during the Cold War. Would the EC and the NATO alliance remain vigorous in the absence of a Soviet threat?
In the 1980s the dynamic Jacques Delors had revived the momentum of European integration by promoting the Single European Act, under which EC members were to establish full economic and monetary union, with substantial coordination of foreign and social policies, by 1992. Most of Delors's provisions were embodied in the Maastricht Treaty approved by the 12 EC member states (Spain and Portugal had been admitted in 1986) in December 1991. This unprecedented surrender of national sovereignty worried governments and voters, however. A national referendum in France barely approved the treaty, the Danes rejected it the first time around, and the government of John Major, Thatcher's successor as British prime minister, nearly fell from power before persuading Parliament to ratify Maastricht in July 1993. The treaty went into effect on November 1. In order to create "an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe," Maastricht replaced the old EC with a new European Union (EU), enhanced the powers of the European Parliament at Strasbourg, promised monetary union by 1999, promoted common policies on crime, immigration, social welfare, and the environment, and called for "joint action" in foreign and security policy. The EU promptly voted to "broaden" as well as "deepen" its membership by approving the applications on March 29 of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Austria (although Norwegian voters later rejected joining).
Even the prospect of a unified Europe could not ensure peace and prosperity unless two other issues were addressed: the future of NATO and the relationship among the EU, the United States, and the struggling democracies of eastern Europe, above all Russia. Western relations with the new Russia began auspiciously. In early 1992 Yeltsin toured western Europe and signed friendship treaties with Britain and France in exchange for aid and credits. On January 3, 1993, Bush and Yeltsin signed the START II pact, promising to slash their long-range nuclear arsenals by two-thirds within a decade. After a personal appeal from former President Richard Nixon, the Bush administration also approved an economic assistance package for Russia, and Congress voted funds to help Russia dismantle its nuclear weapons. On April 4, 1993, at a summit meeting with Yeltsin at Vancouver, Clinton pledged an additional $1,600,000,000 in aid. It remained unclear, however, how much the Western powers could influence Russia's future. Did outside assistance hasten Russia's progress toward capitalism, or just help it to subsidize old, inefficient industries? Should Western leaders urge "shock therapy" to propel Russia quickly into capitalist modes even at the risk of high unemployment, or should they advise Yeltsin to reform slowly? Should NATO stand firm against signs of Russian assertion in foreign policy, or might accommodationist policies boost Yeltsin's popularity at home?
Such questions became paramount after September 1993 when a coalition of Yeltsin's opponents in the Russian Congress of People's Deputies challenged his reforms and emergency powers and called for the President's ouster. On September 21 Yeltsin dissolved the parliament, and the latter promptly impeached him in favour of deposed Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoy. Violence soon erupted between security forces and mobs of Communist and nationalist sympathizers marching in support of the insurgent deputies. On October 4, Yeltsin ordered army units to attack the parliament with heavy weapons, resulting in an estimated 142 deaths. He clearly was acting in "undemocratic" fashion, but he did so to suppress opponents of democracy who had been elected under the Communist constitution. When fully free elections were held in December 1993, however, ex-Communists and extreme nationalists led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky won stunning victories. Clinton's expert on Russian affairs, Strobe Talbott, immediately called for "less shock, more therapy" in Russian economic policy, and Yelstin proceeded to dismiss his more liberal ministers. He also took a harder line in foreign policy in hopes of deflecting the criticism that he was too eager to please his Western benefactors. This ominous turn of events called into question the fundamental assumption of Russian partnership that underpinned Clinton's foreign policy.
Russian assertiveness complicated Clinton's efforts to recast NATO for the post-Cold War world. American neo-isolationists thought that the alliance had outlived its purpose, but moderates of both parties shuddered to think of a world without it and recalled that its function had been not only to "keep Russia out" but also to "keep the Americans in and the Germans down." Another slogan, "out of area or out of business," expressed the view that NATO should assume the task of defending Western interests outside Europe. Still others urged NATO to expand eastward and embrace the eager Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians. Yeltsin, after initially assenting to Polish and Czech membership, announced in September 1993 that Russia would oppose NATO expansion unless Russia were included. Defense Secretary Aspin floated Clinton's attempt at a solution on October 21, 1993, when he announced that NATO would offer less formal partnerships for peace to former Soviet-bloc states, including Russia. Clinton toured Europe in January 1994—after the Russian elections—to promote this so-called Partnership for Peace, but he was met with disappointment in Warsaw and Prague and continued intransigence from Moscow. In May 1994 the Russian defense minister, Peter Grachev, insisted that if NATO was bent on expansion it must subordinate itself to the CSCE, an unwieldy organization that included all the former Soviet republics. Then, on June 22, Russia insisted on a voice in the Partnership for Peace that reflected its "weight and responsibility as a major European, international, and nuclear power." Meanwhile, American critics pointed out that not to expand NATO implied recognition of a continued Russian sphere of influence over eastern Europe, while to expand NATO would require the West to guarantee boundaries beyond its capabilities. (The Kohl–Gorbachev accord on the reunification of Germany prohibited NATO deployments east of the old Iron Curtain.) Finally, to admit new nations would simply "draw a line" against Russia farther east. Clinton denied such an intent, but if he honoured Russia's wishes he would be permitting Russia to draw lines against NATO. U.S. Senator Richard Lugar accordingly dismissed the Partnership for Peace as "an artful dodge," while Yeltsin, in December 1994, warned of a "Cold Peace."
Russian assertiveness was more evident with regard to its "near abroad," the former republics of the Soviet Union. These states were indisputably within Russia's sphere of influence, and their economic, demographic, and security interests overlapped with Russia's. Moscow also claimed a right to intervene in its near abroad in order to keep the peace and defend Russian minorities and economic interests, a claim the United States had little choice but to tolerate because of its similar assertions regarding Panama and Haiti. By 1994 Belarus and several Central Asian republics were coordinating their financial, economic, and security policies with Moscow, and all the former Soviet states feared incurring Moscow's displeasure.
There was a growing disarray within NATO and the EU in the post-Cold War world, a fact evident in their ineffective and vacillating policies toward the former Yugoslavia. From its inception in 1918, Yugoslavia had been subject to strong centrifugal tendencies as its many constituent ethnic groups harboured ancient and current grievances against each other. World War II resistance leader Josip Broz Tito restored Yugoslav unity but only through the imposition of Communist ideology and complicated mechanisms for doling out benefits. This balance teetered after Tito's death in 1980, then collapsed after January 1990. By July, Slovenians voted for autonomy and the Serb minority in Croatia sought to unite with Serbia. In December Serbians elected a fiery nationalist and ex-Communist, Slobodan Miloševic, who exploited his waning power over Yugoslav institutions to seize national assets on behalf of the Serbs. Slovenia declared independence in December. As fighting erupted over disputed territories of mixed population, the presidents of the six republics—Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Montenegro—failed to revive a loose confederation. On June 25, 1991, Croatia declared independence, and the fighting spread.
During the Cold War the United States patronized Yugoslavia because of its independence from the Soviet bloc. The Bush administration, preoccupied elsewhere, regarded the Yugoslav breakup as a European problem. The EC, in turn, did not want to wade into a civil war and could not agree on a common posture until Germany abruptly recognized Slovenia and Croatia. In late 1991 and early 1992 Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence, the EC and the United States imposed sanctions on Yugoslavia, a UN delegation sought Serbian support for a cease-fire and peacekeeping forces, and the Security Council approved the dispatch of 14,400 UN peacekeepers (mostly British and French). A UN plan, which would have divided Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia into a crazy quilt of cantons based on local ethnic majorities, pleased no one, and fighting escalated throughout 1992 amid atrocities and evidence of "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs. UN sanctions, imposed in May, had little effect, and the UN peacekeeping forces had no peace to keep and no power to impose one.
During the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, Clinton criticized Bush for his ineffectual Balkans' policy. After Christopher toured European capitals in early 1993, however, it became clear that the NATO powers were unwilling to discipline the Serbs unless the United States contributed ground troops. The bombing of a crowded market in Sarajevo in February 1994 forced Clinton to threaten Serbia with air strikes. Russia then argued in support of Serbia and promoted its own plan for a partition of Bosnia. Clinton vetoed any plan that rewarded "Serbian aggression," yet he also refused to lift the arms embargo on the beleaguered Bosnian Muslims (BosniacsBosniaks).
By mid-1994 the confused battle lines had somewhat clarified themselves. Slovenia was independent and at peace. Macedonia was admitted to the UN under the curious name (in deference to Greek sensibilities) The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and a small international force, including Americans, protected it. Croatia controlled almost all its putative territory, including the Dalmatian coast. What remained of Yugoslavia included Serbia, Montenegro, and portions of Bosnia and Herzegovina inhabited or claimed by Bosnian Serbs, including a corridor stretching almost to the Adriatic Sea. The would-be state of Bosnia was strangled within this noose as the fighting among Serbs, Bosnian Serbs, BosniacsBosniaks, Muslim renegades, and Croats shifted from Sarajevo to Goražde to Bihać. To combat Serb aggression, the UN, NATO, and the United States debated whether to retaliate with air strikes. Each time a truce seemed near, fighting broke out anew. By the autumn of 1994 UN peacekeepers were literally being held hostage by the Serbs, and it was estimated that as many as 50,000 additional troops might be needed to extricate the UN force. Clinton pledged 25,000 American troops to such an effort, but everyone—not least the Serbs—hoped to avoid a deeper Western involvement.
There was little progress toward resolving the conflict between 1991 and December 1994. Carter then embarked on his third mission as a freelance mediator, and in the days before Christmas he shuttled between Bosnian Serbs and Bosniacs Bosniaks and fashioned an interim truce of at least four months' duration, which was reaffirmed in a UN-brokered accord on December 31. Although the truce gradually began to break down, by December 1995 a peace accord was drafted that created a loosely federalized Bosnia and Herzegovina divided roughly between the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (a decentralized federation of Croats and BosniacsBosniaks) and the Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb Republic).
The second half of the 1990s was marked by conflict between age-old enemies and efforts to bring peace to the world's trouble spots. The Middle East peace process suffered a series of delays and breakdowns. In November 1995 a Jewish extremist opposed to negotiations with the Palestinians assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. Although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu negotiated the Hebron agreement, which provided for the partial withdrawal of Israeli troops from that city, with ʿArafāt in January 1997, new Jewish settlements were constructed and each side accused the other of undermining the agreement.
With Oslo's deadline of May 4, 1999, looming for the resolution of all outstanding issues, fears arose that the Palestinians might independently declare statehood—a move that would escalate tensions with Israel. In 1998 at Wye Mills, Maryland, Netanyahu and ʿArafāt signed an accord in which the Palestinians agreed to amend the provision in their charter that called for the destruction of Israel and Israel agreed to grant the Palestinians an additional 14 percent of the West Bank. The agreement immediately began to unravel, however, and Netanyahu—citing continued Palestinian violence and making new demands—refused to proceed with the second phase of Israel's withdrawal.
Netanyahu's landslide defeat by Ehud Barak in the 1999 elections raised hope that a final agreement would be reached. Israel withdrew its forces from southern Lebanon in 2000, and later that year Clinton arranged a summit at Camp David between Barak and ʿArafāt. Despite far-reaching concessions by both sides, the summit failed. Meanwhile, a visit by Ariel Sharon, the new Likud party leader, to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to emphasize Israeli sovereignty over the city sparked Palestinian protests and the worst violence in the region in decades. As the fighting intensified, Barak came under increasing domestic pressure and called an early prime ministerial election. Sharon's landslide victory in February 2001 signaled a more cautious Israeli approach to the peace process.
In the former Yugoslavia, civil protest gave way to wide-scale fighting between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in February 1998, when Miloševic ordered troops into the province to regain territory controlled by the Kosovo Liberation Army. In October Miloševic agreed to a truce and the removal of Serbian troops from Kosovo, though the fighting continued, as did the slaughter of ethnic Albanians. To force Serbia's withdrawal, NATO launched air strikes against Serbia. The 78-day bombing campaign exacerbated atrocities in the short term, but by June it had forced Miloševic to accept a peace plan jointly sponsored by Russia, the EU, and the United States. In 2000 Miloševic was forced to resign following massive street demonstrations held to protest his fraudulent attempt to declare himself the winner (over Vojislav Koštunica) in the first round of the Yugoslavian presidential election. Miloševic was later arrested and extradited to the Netherlands to stand trial before the UN war crimes tribunal.
Negotiations in Northern Ireland produced the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement) in 1998. After voters in both Ireland and Northern Ireland ratified it, power was officially devolved on December 2, 1999, to an elected assembly headed by a Protestant first minister, David Trimble of the mainstream Ulster Unionist Party, and his Roman Catholic deputy, Seamus Mallon of the moderate Roman Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party. However, the issue of decommissioning (disarmament) of paramilitary groups continued to undermine the agreement into the 21st century. Less than three months after devolution, direct rule from London was restored, though the assembly was recalled again in May. The resignation of Trimble as first minister in 2001 over the IRA's continued resistance to decommissioning highlighted the tenuous nature of the peace process.
After 155 years of British rule, Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997 under the political formula of "one country, two systems," which preserved much of Hong Kong's economic autonomy. In the run-up to Taiwan's first direct presidential election in 1996, China held military exercises and fired missiles off Taiwan's coast to discourage moves toward independence. Relations between China and Taiwan further deteriorated in 1999 when Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui announced his opposition to the "one China" policy, a move that was interpreted as a declaration of independence. In March 2000 Ch'en Shui-bian, who had earlier supported Taiwan's independence, was elected president. Chen sought to placate China by foregoing independence as long as China did not threaten Taiwan. However, China spurned Chen's offer and demanded that he endorse their version of the "one China" policy.
In a 1998 attack allegedly organized by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi-born leader of an international terrorist network, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, killing nearly 300 people and injuring more than 5,000. The United States responded by bombing suspected terrorist-training bases in The Sudan and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan the Taliban (Persian: "Students"), an extremist Islamic group, consolidated its rule, though largely because of the regime's repressive methods—including public floggings and stoning to enforce rigid social restrictions and prohibitions on many activities by women (e.g., attending school, working, or appearing in public unaccompanied by a male relative)—it was not recognized by most countries. Reports estimated that more than one million people died as a result of the constant warring in Afghanistan and that there were more than three million refugees. Despite international protests, in 2001 the Taliban destroyed much of the country's pre-Islamic past, including two large Buddha statues (standing 175 feet [53 metres] and 125 feet [38 metres] high, respectively) that had been carved in the mountains at Bamiyan more than 1,500 years earlier.
In 1998 India and Pakistan conducted a series of nuclear tests despite the opposition of world leaders; Iraq ended its cooperation with UN arms inspectors; and, after widespread antigovernment protests and rioting, Indonesian President Suharto resigned under pressure after 32 years. In 1999, his successor, B.J. Habibie, ordered a referendum on independence in East Timor. After nearly 80 percent voted in favour of independence, paramilitaries—aided in some cases by Indonesian soldiers and police—burned and looted major towns and villages and forced tens of thousands of refugees to flee to Australia and neighbouring islands. After intense international pressure, Habibie allowed UN peacekeeping forces to secure the territory.
The new century brought hope to the Korean peninsula. In 2000 South Korean President Kim Dae Jung visited the North Korean leader, Kim Chong Il, thereby becoming the first South Korean leader to visit North Korea. A summit followed, and in August, 100 North Koreans traveled to Seoul for a reunion with family members, while 100 South Koreans arrived in Pyongyang. In September, 63 North Koreans held in South Korean prisons as spies and political prisoners—some for more than 40 years—were allowed to return to North Korea. North Korea also reestablished relations with Italy and Australia and opened a consulate in Hong Kong.
Economic globalization brought benefits and concerns in the late 1990s. An economic crisis in Asia threatened to undermine the region's governments and to destabilize the world economy. The WTO, which was established in 1995 to liberalize trade and enforce trade agreements, was targeted by anticapitalist groups, who viewed it as an undemocratic tool of wealthy countries that would undermine economic development and labour, health, and environmental standards. Protests at IMF, World Bank, and WTO meetings—including one in Seattle, Washington, in 1999, which involved approximately 50,000 people—became common and threatened to hamper the efforts of these international institutions.
The 1990s revealed how difficult it would be to design a global structure of peace that was based on institutions and values shared by all the leading powers and capable of imposition upon the lesser ones. After the collapse of communism, some analysts had talked buoyantly of the triumph of capitalism and human rights, of the "end of history," of a new world order. By the late 1990s, however, Russia was in such a dire condition—lawlessness and organized crime were rampant, in 1998 alone inflation was nearly 85 percent, Yeltsin fired two prime ministers, and the Duma launched impeachment proceedings against him—that analysts began to wonder if it would implode. The rosy scenarios gave way to suggestions that the world might soon be rent by a "clash of civilizations" pitting the democracies against militant Islam and an imperial China; by the spread of "chaos" as millions of refugees from the southern half of the world invaded the wealthy lands of the north; by ecological and demographic disasters touched off by the spread of industry and disease in the developing world; or by the spread of nuclear and missile technology into the hands of terrorists. These visions were perhaps overly pessimistic, but there were serious strains in the relationships of the great powers. Relations between the United States and Russia were often tense—especially because of Russia's opposition to NATO's use of force in the Balkans—and China's dealings with the United States were likewise strained over Taiwan and China's human-rights policies. The 1990s showed how vital it was for the world's predominant powers to act together and with other countries to prevent conflict and to meet the many challenges facing the globe. At the very least, the leaders of the 21st century might derive hope from the fact that humanity had survived the 20th century and acquire wisdom from its turbulent history.
The study of international relations has always been heavily influenced by normative considerations, such as the goal of reducing armed conflict and increasing international cooperation. At the beginning of the 21st century, research focused on issues such as terrorism, religious and ethnic conflict, the emergence of substate and nonstate entities, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and efforts to counter nuclear proliferation, and the development of international institutions.