The end of the Cold War

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.

Gorbachev and the Soviet “new thinking”

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—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?

1989: annus mirabilis
Liberalization and struggle in Communist countries

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.

Aftermath of the breakup

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.

The reunification of Germany
From skepticism to reality

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 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 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 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.

Why the Soviet retreat?

On 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.

Disengagement in the Third World

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.

The Philippines and Central America

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 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 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 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 Middle East

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 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.

UN coalition and ultimatum

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, 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 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.

Soviet unrest at home and diplomacy abroad

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.

The ground war

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.

The collapse of the Soviet Union

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.