Winter Is Coming

THE LOST DECADE

Many today seem to have forgotten that the fall of the Iron Curtain, the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union were distinct events. Closely related events, of course, but by the time the USSR officially disappeared the Berlin Wall had been down for over two years. Anti-Communist revolutions and secessionist movements of various stripes spread across Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, beginning with the Solidarity movement in Poland in April. The wave swept through Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania.

In my recollection, the Soviet media covered these incredible events with the schizophrenia typical of the glasnost period. In theory, the press was free at this point, but television in particular was still under centralized Kremlin control. Programs that discussed the Baltic uprisings in an insufficiently critical way, for example, could suddenly disappear from the airwaves. It was also in response to these political shifts that a more aggressive form of propaganda began to appear on Soviet television instead of just bland news and light entertainment. The print media had come a long way since the party-line Pravda days before 1985 and periodicals were bold enough to accurately report the fall of one European Communist regime after another. The transformation was remarkably peaceful, with the notable exception of the execution of vile Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who had ordered his troops to fire on anti-government protestors and where an estimated eleven hundred people were killed during the violence.

China’s Tiananmen Square protests and massacre should also be mentioned in any discussion of “the Spirit of 1989,” especially since Gorbachev visited Beijing in May, right in the middle of the protests, three weeks before the tanks were sent in to crush the demonstrators. Dictators seem to learn from history much better than democrats, by the way. The Putins of this world view Gorbachev as having been too weak to hold the USSR together and take from Tiananmen the value of brutal force.

Far more blood would soon come from a sadly predictable quarter, Yugoslavia, which, while Communist, had remained officially nonaligned for decades. When dictator-for-life Josip Tito died in 1980, the tight lid he had clamped down on the many ethnic and territorial divisions in the patchwork Balkan nation began to rattle. Federal control was already very weak by the time the European anti-Communist movement arrived and led to the country’s first multiparty elections. But instead of settling things, the elections highlighted the irreconcilable differences among the country’s terribly intertwined republics and its ethnic and religious groups. The ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo was resentful of the Serbs while separatist parties in Slovenia and Croatia promised independence at the same time Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic worked to strengthen the federal system that he largely controlled. It was a recipe for disaster that would soon become the first test of the post-Cold War security system.

With enough problems already stemming from the 1989 revolutions, NATO and the Western powers were happy to ignore the initial phases of the Yugoslav wars as internal problems. Europe had to figure out how to deal with 130 million impoverished new friends and their fledgling democratic governments. The Bush administration was focused on the USSR and, from August 1990 to February 1991, with the first Gulf War and its aftermath. The US-led coalition to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait was notable for being the first time the two superpowers had been on the same side of a crisis since the end of World War II. The Soviet Union had been Saddam’s main supporter, so the joint US-USSR statement condemning his invasion was another signal that the Cold War was fading. (Although it later turned out that Gorbachev had hedged his bets and left Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze to push the statement through on his own.)

The moral clarity and stubbornness of Ronald Reagan had done its job in the end. In 1976, Reagan lost the Republican nomination to Gerald Ford, but succeeded in introducing the “morality in foreign policy” plank into the GOP platform. It is no exaggeration to say this modest achievement changed the world, as well as my own destiny. The Wall was torn down as Reagan had demanded and the evil empire fell. Lesser problems were left to lesser men.

While I am not an admirer of the first President Bush due to his extreme loyalty to Gorbachev, and I railed against his fecklessness at the time, his administration did a fair job of cleaning up the pieces in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution. He had a mature and competent foreign policy team whose lack of vision and courage before and during the USSR’s collapse wasn’t such a drawback when it came to managing the fallout. Bush, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Dick Cheney, and the rest grudgingly began to work with “loose cannon” Yeltsin on practical matters of nuclear security and economic reforms.

I would still take issue with how those economic reforms and aid packages were handled, although it was a hugely difficult task under any circumstances. The history of left-wing dictatorships transitioning to democracy with market economies is a short collection of horror stories. Communism is like an autoimmune disorder; it doesn’t do the killing itself, but it weakens the system so much that the victim is left helpless and unable to fight off anything else. It destroys the human spirit on an individual level, perverting the values of a successful free society.

It is no coincidence that right-wing autocracies have a much better track record of emerging from political repression and achieving democratic and economic success. Chile, Portugal, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan—their regimes were about power for the sake of power, without a deeper ideology. When their regimes fell, with elections in most cases, the roots, the human values of individual freedom, were still healthy enough to flourish. Communist ideology attacks both root and branch and poisons the soil. Many countries in Eastern Europe are still struggling, despite the stabilizing influence and massive financial support provided by the European Union for decades. For some nations it was psychologically easier to uproot Communism because it was seen as a by-product of the hated Soviet occupation and they were eager to throw it all out.

Of course this is hardly an endorsement of any type of dictatorship. I believe Churchill’s famous phrase: “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” But it partly explains why the former republics of the USSR have struggled so badly and why the regimes of Cuba and North Korea have proven so durable. It is the difference between people resenting that they are not free and people believing they do not deserve freedom.

The year 1992 saw the beginning of a modest debate over what the new world order should look like. It was no longer split between two rival superpowers. Was it a unipolar world where the United States, with most of Europe in tow, would set the agenda and enforce its will? Or was it a multipolar or nonpolar world, with no center of moral gravity? The US, with its massive military, enormous economy, and lack of any political opposition, was the de facto global hegemon, whether it wanted to embrace the role or not. The real question was how it would use this influence.

In 2015, after two exhausting and mismanaged wars, a humbling financial crisis, the rapid rise of China, and America’s apparent impotence in various global hotspots, it’s easy to forget just how dominant the United States was in the 1990s. In 1992, the US economy of $6.5 trillion was nearly double Japan’s, triple Germany’s, and thirteen times larger than China’s. Russia barely made it into the top twenty, where it would stay until the price of oil shot up enough to push it into the top ten. The balance in military spending and capability was even more tilted toward the US and NATO in the 1990s, as it was revealed that the fabled Soviet military machine was as antiquated and feeble as the rest of its economy. China’s relatively small military budget wouldn’t take off until the 2000s.

Even more importantly, victory in the Cold War provided the United States and the rest of the free world with ideological supremacy. Democracy and capitalism had triumphed, totalitarianism and socialism had lost. Again, this all seems obvious and inevitable today, but the ideology of Communism was a serious challenge for many decades in nearly every country in the world. With the collapse of the USSR, the argument was over. Even twenty-five years later, most outbreaks of socialist rhetoric are limited to populist would-be autocrats keen to redistribute wealth to their cronies and with stagnant economies dependent on natural resources.

The Bush team had already begun rhetorical disarmament from Reagan’s unapologetic American exceptionalism and moral leadership. America’s reach and power flashed briefly in the first Gulf War, although even there Bush went to great lengths to make stopping Saddam Hussein’s rampage sound like a pragmatic move by a broad coalition. Bush did speak boldly and eloquently on the importance of American leadership, however. He later wrote about the need for “a new domestic consensus for the American role in the world” to avoid isolationism and protectionism.

Bush continued:

Bravo! This passage approaches the urgency and clarity of Reagan, if not the charisma. Unfortunately, Bush said these inspiring and prescient words in his 1998 book with Scowcroft and not while he was in office. This concluding section of A World Transformed likely reveals Bush’s regrets about not pressing this role harder himself as president.

He had passed on the golden opportunity to remove Saddam from power and punish him for his attack on Kuwait. Along with condemning Iraqis to another decade of terror and oppression, it sent a message to other aspiring conquerors. In the summer of 1992, we heard Western politicians’ calls to bring the Yugoslavian dictator Slobodan Milosevic before an international court for his aggression in Croatia and Bosnia. How, when Saddam was still alive and in command?

Which brings us back to Yugoslavia. There, superficially, everything appeared to be clear. Direct American interests were not affected, so there was no reason to send troops. But Bush, whose blind support of the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia invigorated Belgrade’s confidence that it could risk military action, forgot that each innocent victim of the war weakened democracy and lent new power to waning totalitarianism. If, in an era of global military domination by a democratic superpower, we could passively witness the revival of Nazi practices-concentration camps and ethnic cleansing-it meant that Bush’s talk of a “new world order” was empty demagoguery aimed at a naive domestic audience.

Bush played on the fear of a prolonged Vietnam-style involvement in Yugoslavia, ignoring a fundamental change in the world scene. By that point there was no Soviet threat to back up Yugoslavia, so Bush could rapidly have affected events with much less force than would have been needed in the past. As was only demonstrated years later, after many tens of thousands had died, NATO air strikes were enough to undermine the determination of the “Greater Serbian” forces. The destruction by air of Serbian heavy equipment required Belgrade to face a war conducted on equal terms with Bosnia and Croatia. But Bush showed that rote support for “UN policy” meant more to him than saving tens of thousands of lives, and more than presenting a strong stance against aggression.

Yugoslavia also revealed the need for a new policy for the new post-Cold War era, and that the Bush administration had failed to imagine such a policy. When Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger visited his old friend Milosevic in Belgrade in February 1990, he was shocked to find there was no common ground to be found. There was so much good news coming from Europe at the time that the Balkan powder keg was pushed to the background even after Eagleburger returned from his trip warning that “it’s much worse than anybody thought and it’s going to be much bloodier than we thought.”

Bush quickly lost the chance to make amends in a second term thanks to an American electorate that turned its back on foreign policy in the blink of an eye. He lost to a man with no foreign policy experience, a man whose slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” efficiently discarded foreign policy and the Cold War from the campaign. (Third-party candidate Ross Perot syphoning his votes away didn’t help Bush either.) Bush was certainly no Winston Churchill, but the way he was turned out of office after the end of the Cold War echoes the way British voters quickly turned against Churchill after he led the nation to victory in World War II.

I was then, as I am now, an advocate for the use of every available tool to stop aggressors like Hussein and Milosevic, including military intervention. In this I have been consistently on the side of those who have suffered from violence and against those who spilled blood first, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. My sympathies were therefore clearly on the side of the beleaguered Bosnians and Croatians, despite Russia’s long-standing support for Serbian nationalism. From 1993 to 1995 I gave a series of charity events to draw attention to and to raise funds for Croatian and Bosnian refugees, including a simultaneous exhibition in the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo in July 1994.

Throughout 1992, Serbian paramilitary forces murdered civilians and terrorized Muslim populations. Bush insisted on working through the United Nations, with predictably absurd and tragic outcomes. For example, the arms embargo imposed on the region mostly prevented the Bosnians from defending themselves against the Serbs, who were well armed already.

On the day after the US presidential election, November 4, 1992, I wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal that was essentially an open letter to the US president, old or new. I wrote that I had no doubt that a serious warning from George Bush to Milosevic could have stopped the aggression and bloody ethnic war in Yugoslavia. The entire world had seen the pictures from Kuwait and Iraq showing the effects of the American military invasion, and they knew that the United States could accomplish great military feats if the will was there.

I also made a call for a return to strong moral leadership and ending the hypocrisy of putting stability ahead of democracy and freedom. “Coming global changes require a strong moral leadership, and only the U.S. is powerful and politically creditworthy enough to make the decisions and take the actions indispensable to a new world order…. Pure idealism, you say? Maybe, but I want to believe that yesterday America elected the leader of the world.”

Alas, as we know, America elected Bill Clinton. Clinton’s 1992 campaign had deftly exploited the ongoing recession and the end of the Cold War to paper over his lack of qualifications in the international arena. He made it clear he was of a new generation that wanted to break with the past and all of its heavy responsibilities around the world, and the American people seemed to agree. If any symbolism were required, Clinton’s campaign theme song’s lyrics included “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” and “Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.”

The horrors taking place in Yugoslavia were reaching the Western media by the time Clinton got into office. Photos of Bosnian Serb detention camps full of skeletal prisoners instantly reminded people of images from the liberation of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. Ethnic cleansing was once again taking place in the heart of Europe. Still plodding along with UN and European leaders, Clinton failed to convince France’s François Mitterrand and the UK’s John Major to lift the arms embargo. The new president declined to take unilateral military action without the permission of his NATO partners in Europe.

By the time NATO finally intervened militarily over two years later in the first combat action in its history, an estimated 140,000 people were dead and millions of people had been displaced. Genocide and coordinated rape campaigns were taking place while UN peacekeeping forces were on the ground. You may recall the artillery attacks of the marketplace in the historic center of Sarajevo in February 1994 and August 1995 that killed a total of over a hundred civilians with many more wounded. The images of the second savage attack finally galvanized NATO to launch the air strikes against Bosnian Serb forces. Along with the July offensive by combined Bosnian and Croatian forces that freed Knin and Bihac, the NATO strikes helped force Milosevic to accept the Dayton Accords and bring the war to an end.

Meanwhile, Russia supported its “Serbian brothers” and helped delay outside action, as it would do again in 1999 over NATO intervention against Serb forces attacking Kosovar Albanians. In the case of Kosovo, Clinton acted much more rapidly to intervene with force, even making a powerful televised speech to the American people on March 24, 1999, on why NATO was launching a bombing campaign against Milosevic’s Serbia. Reading it now, I’m struck by how much of Clinton’s address could, and should, apply to what is happening in Ukraine today.

It’s worth looking up and reading in full, but I will excerpt a few key lines:

Clinton went on to explain—he was always a great explainer—why Kosovo mattered, why this faraway place few Americans had heard of was vital to US interests, and why it was important to act quickly before things got worse. In Kosovo, as with Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, no NATO country was under attack. But, Clinton continued:

Again, bravo! Substitute “Ukraine” for “Kosovo” and “Putin” for “Milosevic” and President Obama could repeat it nearly word for word to my great satisfaction. And, again, this powerful statement on the importance of moral leadership and using American and NATO power to protect innocent lives came inexcusably late. The powerful closing paragraph of Bush 41’s book I quoted earlier about America shirking its responsibilities and retreating into indifference was surely a message to Clinton, who was in the middle of his second term at the time it was published. And Clinton, after vacillating over Bosnia and overlooking the 1994 Rwandan genocide of more than 800,000 people, was, in the penultimate year of his eight years in office, finally ready to use America’s unrivaled might to do the right thing without delay.

Seventy-nine days after the NATO air campaign began, Serb forces withdrew from Kosovo and nearly a million people were able to return to their homes. Remember Kosovo when you hear people say sending weapons to Ukraine would only “escalate the conflict” or “lead to World War III” in the popular straw man argument. Of course the scenarios and opponents are different—Russia is not Serbia and Putin is not Milosevic. But the lesson is that much good can come from the decisive application of power, both in the moment and with a deterrent effect, and that waffling has real consequences and fuels future aggression.

The seasonal cycles of history shape and are shaped by human policies and plans. The hard-hearted Cold War strategies of isolation and containment gave way to engagement and an overabundance of caution. Retrenchment allowed threats to grow unchecked and genocides to occur on multiple continents while the overwhelming might of the free world looked on. One of those unchecked threats fulfilled its destructive potential on 9/11, pushing the pendulum back toward intervention and, inevitably, overreaction. The two exhausting wars that resulted helped bring to power a US president with a mandate for, what else, retrenchment and engagement. Obama has fulfilled his mandate to the extreme, as nearly all of his predecessors did before him. Europe has been resting on its laurels for so long that it is struggling just to stand when faced with xenophobia and terror on the inside and an aggressive Russia on the outside. Once again the seasons are changing and new threats have been allowed to flourish and to escape their borders.