Hal Brands
The post-Cold War era wasn’t supposed to end like this. The payoff from the free world’s victory in the superpower struggle was an imbalance of power more marked than anything since the Pax Romana. America’s goal, for the next quarter-century, was to make that moment last.
The end of the Cold War transformed the international landscape: subtracting one superpower from a two-superpower system left a single, hyper-dominant coalition. America and its treaty allies accounted for roughly 70 percent of global GDP and 75 percent of world military spending. Serious competitors were nowhere to be found. China was just rising to its feet, while post-Soviet Russia was flat on its back. When another would-be challenger, Saddam Hussein, sought to master the Middle East by invading Kuwait in 1990, the resulting “mother of all battles” turned into the mother of all beat-downs, which showed how outrageously superior America’s information-age military was. The ideological mismatch was also severe; democracy, having vanquished communism, enjoyed a dearth of rivals and a surfeit of prestige.
America’s first decision, in this environment, was not to throw it all away. Neo-isolationists argued that the end of the Cold War should mean the end of US globalism; America, wrote one erstwhile hawk, could become “a normal country in a normal time.” Yet most US officials in the 1990s and later understood that America’s postwar project hadn’t been solely about containing communism. It had also involved suppressing the strategic anarchy that had ravaged Eurasia twice before. That responsibility endured, even if the Soviet Union didn’t. “Either we take hold of history,” said James Baker, “or history will take hold of us.”
No comments:
Post a Comment