This was not how it was supposed to be at the end of “The American Century.”
With the world’s strongest economy and a dominant military that can flex its muscle almost everywhere, the United States won its place as the leading player on the global political stage.
But it is a difficult and confusing role.
Tuesday is the 10th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the most important symbolic event in a long string of events that began with simmering political dissent and the selection of a compelling pope from Poland and ended with Moscow’s economy in collapse and the ideological lights snapping off all over the old Soviet universe.
For the United States, though, winning the Cold War has amounted to capturing a golden cloud with a dark lining.
The era of simple consensus– the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were the enemy, and the United States and NATO the characters in the white hats–now seems ancient history, even though a Cold War mentality lingers in politics and diplomacy.
The reality that confronts American foreign policy is as old as the fevered hatreds of the Balkans and as fresh as the bloody conflict in East Timor.
A severely diminished, resentful and unpredictable Russia, longing for its glory days, is still a threatening part of the challenge. It has no ideology, an abysmal economy, a mercurial, fragile leader and a disintegrating social fabric, but it possesses lots of long-range missiles and nuclear warheads and commands attention, if not respect.
Winning the Cold War also affected the U.S. military, which is dramatically smaller than it was a decade ago but a lot busier putting out brush fires and serving peacekeeping roles around the world.
At the beginning of 1999, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright delivered her assessment of the nation’s place in the world.
The run-up to 1999 was not good, she said: Terrorists destroyed two U.S. Embassies in Africa; North Korea and Iran tested longer-range missiles; Pakistan and India seemed determined to match each other with nuclear weapons tests.
The coming year “promises little relief,” the secretary of state said. “As Shakespeare’s Brutus observed, `It is the bright day that brings forth the adder.’ As this century draws to a close, we face a serpent’s den of perils–some fueled by technology’s advance, some by regional rivalry, some by naked ambition and some by outright hate.”
Albright’s comments were prescient.
Within two months, the United States was playing the leading role in NATO’s air war over the Kosovo province of Yugoslavia, a mission that failed to accomplish its primary goal of stopping the ethnic purging of Albanians, even though it ultimately forced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw some 40,000 of his soldiers and police from the province.
Later, the U.S. would find itself with little influence in trying to deter violence in East Timor, where Indonesian troops brutally suppressed a growing independence movement.
Despite its strong rhetoric and diplomatic efforts, Washington also watched from a great distance as India and Pakistan, both armed with nuclear weapons, elevated their long-term animosity to border skirmishes and heavy artillery exchanges.
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As a backdrop to these events, U.S. bombers continued to make frequent attacks on targets in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein remained firmly in control after a sound defeat at the hands of U.S. forces during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
Despite the pounding, Hussein continues to ignore weapons inspections agreements that were part of the negotiated end of that war.
Russia moved with amazing speed from the death of communism to the birth of kleptocracy, seemingly embracing democratic ideals and capitalism early on but letting go of economic and political reforms as its fortunes waned, corruption flourished under President Boris Yeltsin and the nation’s domestic politics heated up.
As the century came to a close, the Russians were at war once again in the breakaway province of Chechnya, targeting civilians along with combatants. But American diplomats and President Clinton have had little influence on the Kremlin’s behavior.
China, an emerging economic power destined to play the central role in 21st Century Asia, continued its crackdown on religious and political dissenters, and huffed hot and cold on its relationship with the United States, depending on the circumstances.
Even when the U.S. won on the battlefield, the enemies were not clearly vanquished.
“The gulf war was the first major shooting war in which the United States was involved since Vietnam, and seen by some as maybe typical of what we are likely to experience in the post-Cold War era, but it was a war that wasn’t fought to completion,” because Hussein remains in firm control, said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a Brookings Institution guest scholar and, under President Richard Nixon, a member of the National Security Council.
“It has been haunting and irritating us ever since. It wasn’t the kind of war we fought where we finished off the bad guys,” Sonnenfeldt said. The same might be said, he agreed, of the U.S.-dominated NATO campaign against Yugoslavia.
Sonnenfeldt said it has been difficult to create an American foreign policy that is relevant over the middle or long term.
“It may not be possible for a while to have a sort of coherence and institutional arrangements that spring into action rather smoothly when something erupts. The crises we face all have different characteristics, and the interests of the U.S. and our allies are not as compatible as they were when there was this overarching danger from the Soviet Union,” Sonnenfeldt said.
The United States chalked up a victory in the Cold War, but it lost an enemy in Moscow that was so clearly defined by its behavior and so threatening that containing Soviet communism was at the heart of American foreign policy for decades.
“Here we are dominant in these two major areas, economically and militarily, and yet that leads to confusion more than to certainty about where we should go,” said James Goldgeier, a George Washington University scholar whose book “Not Whether But When” examines the U.S. decision to expand membership in NATO.
“It is not that you can’t affect things, it is that you don’t see why you should. Did we need to be in Kosovo because of America’s vital national interests? I wasn’t persuaded. I could see why you would want to be doing it. The humanitarian argument resonates,” Goldgeier said.
The United States is even running into trouble on the cultural and economic fronts. The U.S., Sonnenfeldt said, has a tendency to view its own economy as a model for the world.
But the world isn’t buying it.
“In Western Europe, there are important people who believe that what the Americans have achieved is great, but it’s not for them,” he said.
Many Europeans view American attitudes toward welfare and social spending as brutal. “They have problems with (American) mass culture and mass consumption, and they hate themselves for loving it so much,” Sonnenfeldt said.
The easiest change to measure in the wake of the collapse of communism has been the decline in military spending in the United States, which, around $270 billion a year, vastly outspends its potential challengers and most of its allies combined.
Active Army divisions have been cut to 10 from 18 in 1989; the Navy has dropped 4 aircraft carriers, leaving 12, and has cut the overall fleet to 314 ships from 546; Air Force tactical fighter wings have been cut to 12 from 24. In all, the defense budget is down by about $100 billion from 1980s levels once inflation is taken into account.
If American foreign policy finds itself searching for a role, the military has become the target of debates about its mission too.
“As we’ve seen in the last decade, the urge to take action in a crisis can be somewhat overpowering,” said Army Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We are, and always will be, a compassionate nation.”
But he added that it is getting more difficult to separate the “good guys” from the “bad guys,” which was rarely a problem during the Cold War. It’s easy to get involved in situations that have been simmering for centuries, and difficult to get out of them.
Pentagon planners have been talking for years about the need to change the role of the military as the power centers of the world have shifted, but to date, American military strategy remains much the same as it was during the Cold War.
The aim is still enough preparedness and readiness to fight two wars on separate fronts.
Some Pentagon planners are pushing for a much lighter, and much more easily deployed, U.S. military that is ready to meet the challenges of a new era.
“We are going into a world of chaos,” said Gen. Charles Krulak, former commandant of the Marine Corps, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. “Chaos will bring unbelievable requirements on this country to move and move rapidly to certain areas where we may just have a handful of American citizens. The idea that we are going to be able to pick and choose is not valid.”
Under President Clinton, human rights has been a dominant theme in foreign policy, to the point that protecting rights became Washington’s “moral obligation” in going to war over Kosovo.
But that impetus could disappear if the White House shifts into Republican hands, Goldgeier said.
“Listen, if (Republican presidential candidate) George W. Bush wins, we are going to be making those judgments on strategic calculations, not humanitarian ones,” he said.
The decline of communism has presented problems in domestic politics too.
“Historically, the hardest time for a president to get what he wants is when there is peace and when there is divided government,” the scholar said.
“I am not nostalgic for the Cold War,” Goldgeier said. “But it is much harder to get a bipartisan foreign policy because there is no clear struggle, no obvious enemy out there.”
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One clear lesson of the past decade, and a reality the U.S. foreign policy establishment must cope with in the future, is that being on the top of the heap doesn’t necessarily mean acting alone.
In the war with Hussein in 1991, then-President George Bush masterfully constructed a complicated European and Middle East coalition that backed the effort before the first laser-guided weapons were unleashed–but he had Saddam Hussein as a clear threat.
Former UN Ambassador and National Security Council member Jeane Kirkpatrick said the thought that the United States could isolate itself and act on its own in such a complicated world is a fantasy.
“It is not a choice between acting alone and acting in concert with others. We could not act alone. In trade, science, art, scholarship and politics, we are connected to the world. We couldn’t disengage from the world even if we tried,” Kirkpatrick told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in a speech last month.
Kirkpatrick represents a conservative side of foreign policy philosophy that pushes democracy and American ideals everywhere but calls for keeping up a high, protective, military wall that would guarantee the nation’s safety.
The Clinton administration and some Democrats, she said, have embraced a Wilsonian belief that warfare can be eliminated and security guaranteed through the drafting of carefully negotiated treaties.
“It is imprudent to rely on treaties for our fundamental security,” she said. “North Korea is a psychotic nation. Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, that is certainly true of them. We need to march always toward expansion of our ideals and be hard-headed realists when it comes to protecting our security.”