After The Cold War Is Won

Even in a campaign as issueless as this one, the vacuousness of what passes for foreign policy debate has been stunning. The reason, however, is simple. Not since World War II has the U.S. experienced such a serene international environment:

— The superpowers are in the midst of a second detente, more profound than the first because it is accompanied this time by a serious Soviet attempt at internal reform. Detente II has yielded an arms reduction agreement (the INF treaty) of marginal strategic importance but of such profound psychological impact that the peace movement, which only five years ago threatened to overthrow Western nuclear policy, has been eclipsed.

— The Western alliance is stronger than ever. Europe is embarked on full economic integration. NATO, whose imminent demise is annually declared by critics, has shown remarkable cohesiveness, withstanding with nary a blink the planned removal of an American air wing from Spain and its relocation to Italy.

— The Third World has been experiencing an unprecedented tide toward democracy. The Philippines, South Korea and much of Latin America have thrown off dictatorship. Even Chile may soon follow. Regional conflicts are being resolved at an extraordinary rate. The Soviets are leaving Afghanistan. They are putting pressure on Viet Nam to leave Kampuchea and on Cuba to leave Angola. Iran and Iraq are in a cease-fire. Even the endless Saharan war between Morocco and the Polisario guerrillas appears near settlement.

This is not to say that there are no real problems on the horizon. Two areas that remain hot and troubled for the U.S. are the Middle East and Central America. But even in the Middle East, Iran’s defeat and the subsequent isolation of Syria have checked at least temporarily the most radical and destabilizing players in that area. In Central America the Soviets have indeed established a strategic toehold, but this is unlikely to spell immediate danger for the region because of Nicaragua’s economic chaos and social unrest. In fact, for the first time in a generation, one can say that there is not a single international crisis facing the U.S. In such a becalmed environment, what can the two candidates debate?

In fact, the current outbreak of relative peace and the potential for a changed U.S.-Soviet relationship under Mikhail Gorbachev present an immense new foreign policy challenge that the candidates have yet to face: managing what may be the last stages of the cold war and inventing a new world role for the U.S. in an international system that may, in our lifetime, no longer be defined by the East-West struggle. Instead, the foreign policy debate in the campaign has focused mainly on two peripheral issues: drugs and trade.

America’s addiction to drugs is not a foreign policy issue at all, but the candidates have pressed it into service anyway. Dukakis has even declared drugs America’s No. 1 foreign policy problem. Such is the current drug hysteria that Bush has never even questioned the proposition.

As for trade, foreigners are being variously blamed for causing America’s trade deficit and for “buying up America.” There is, to be sure, a real trade issue: how to sustain the growing integration of the Western economies and prevent its arrest in midcourse with three mutually protectionist blocs — Europe, America and East Asia. This issue, however, awaits discussion in some future election.

So muted is the foreign policy debate that Dukakis now claims to be closer to Ronald Reagan’s view of the Soviets than is Bush. Dukakis has been careful to praise Reagan for his achievements in foreign policy and to promise to build on them. The only real argument with Bush is about how to achieve further improvements. Dukakis proposes to “challenge” the Soviets to let ^ their subject peoples go, reduce conventional arms, desist from taking over Central America, etc. Bush promises to follow the Reagan prescription of building up to build down, of establishing bargaining chips to force the Soviets into concessions.

During the primary season, Democrats tried to play on the relative “decline of the U.S.” theme espoused by Yale historian Paul Kennedy. In the jitteriness that followed Iran-contra and the 1987 stock market crash, that played fairly well. But no longer. The resiliency of the Western economies and the astonishing reverses of America’s adversaries have made the decline-of-the-U.S. theme not credible. The real story of this quarter- century, after all, is the decline of the Soviet bloc.

The success of the West is even more profound than that. One can say that 40 years after the end of World War II, the ideological war has been won. The triumph of democratic capitalism as a model for the world is nearly complete. From Hanoi to Tehran to Belgrade to Algiers, the three great countervailing models have been almost simultaneously defeated. Soviet-style Communism, Islamic fundamentalism and the kind of Third World socialist nationalism exemplified by Algeria were all at one time viewed as great leaps forward. They have each turned, like Mao’s, into a catastrophic leap backward. Communism, fundamentalism and Third World socialism have left their peoples, especially economically, decades behind where they would be without their glorious revolutions.

Moreover, the more expansive and self-confident of these creeds, Soviet Communism and Islamic fundamentalism, are in retreat. The Soviets ran into the latest chapter in the Western policy of containment, the Reagan Doctrine, which greatly increased for Moscow the costs of empire. Iran ran into an Iraqi army backed by most of the Arab world and the West.

Because the contraction of these anti-Western forces has been caused, at least in part, by external pressures, this is no time to let up on the strategy that has produced such salutary results — particularly the pressure exerted by the West on the Soviet Union. Dukakis is all too trusting that internal Soviet difficulties and paper international institutions like the Organization of American States will alone restrain the Soviets. He lacks Bush’s appreciation of the decisive role American power has played in the recent outbreak of Kremlin reasonableness.

With victory within sight, this is certainly no time to turn over the conduct of the final chapters of the cold war to those who were declaring it over 15 years ago, who never believed it was worth fighting in the first place, and in whose company “cold warrior” has long been a term of opprobrium. It is time to see the cold war through to the end. And a quiet end, on Western terms, is for the first time a serious possibility.

It may well occur in this generation. It could come about because Gorbachev fails and the Soviets slide back into stagnation, another decade or two of which may render them incapable of the kind of global all-front challenge to the West that they have managed to sustain for 40 years. Or if Gorbachev carries out the agenda that he and others are now enunciating, he may ultimately de-ideologize Soviet foreign policy. Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and chief ideologist Vadim Medvedev have begun saying that class conflict (a.k.a. anti-imperialism) should no longer be the guiding axiom of Soviet foreign policy. If the Soviets decide that they would do better accommodating themselves to the Western economic and state system, the next century holds out the promise that U.S.-Soviet relations could turn from ideological combat to mere great power rivalry.

The implications of such a transformation would be immense. For the first time since 1946, it is possible to imagine a transition from a bipolar to a truly multi-polar international system analogous to that of the 19th century and featuring five centers of power: Japan, China, Europe, the U.S. and what remains of the Soviet bloc.

In such a case, the U.S. would have to rethink radically its role in the world. The overriding question would be: With success having robbed the U.S. of its foreign policy raison d’etre of 40 years, what need is there for any foreign policy? And what kind of foreign policy?

It is not hard to see the outlines of the coming debate. Four historical models present themselves. The first great pull on the American soul will be to return to isolationism. Without a mortal enemy perpetually challenging U.S. interests, it would be very hard for a President to mobilize the country for foreign entanglements.

“Realists” will argue that now, as before, there is no safety in isolationism, only temporary respite. Safety in a world of dispersed and fluid alliances would require the U.S. to play 19th century Britain and be the balancer of power, aligning itself with the weaker parties in order to prevent any power or combination of powers from becoming dominant. But such an energetic, nimble and at times amoral Realpolitik would be hard to sell to the American people and even harder to sustain, as Henry Kissinger, premier American realist of this century, learned to his chagrin in the 1970s.

The pull to isolationism is likely to be challenged not by realism but by two other energetic foreign policy models, both more attuned to the moralism that characterizes America’s approach to the world. One is an internationalism of the kind envisioned briefly in the mid-1940s by the Western founders of the U.N. but made impossible by the cold war. In the absence of intractable ideological conflict between the U.S. and the Soviets, internationalism would no longer be a hopelessly utopian idea. (In fact, even during the cold war, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union found a temporary convergence of interests, they have been able jointly to control regional conflicts, such as Sinai, 1956, for example.) The Security Council could try to manage the world as a committee of the great powers. But any great power condominium needs unanimity to work. And that might still prove elusive in a post-cold war world of five contending powers, even if no two are permanently set against each other by ideology.

The other “moralistic” foreign policy alternative is to carry on as we are: aggressively and (if necessary) unilaterally supporting American interests and values around the world, arming a movement here, putting pressure on a dictatorship there, as J.F.K. put it, “to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Without an Evil Empire to contend with, the job becomes easier — there is less need to support dictators in the name of anti- Communism — but harder to justify. Why make the effort? Seventy years ago, Americans were not wildly enthusiastic about Woodrow Wilson’s crusade for democracy. Whether a post-Soviet America will want to embrace Wilsonian idealism any more than did a pre-Soviet America is an open question.

It is not the most immediate of questions facing the nation, but it may soon be among the most important. More pressing now is the question of how to get to that post-Soviet world, how best to encourage either the reform or the further decline of the Soviet Union. However, since Gorbachev is certainly right that the Soviet Union faces only one of these two alternatives, and since either alternative will radically alter the international environment, the U.S. had best start thinking what it proposes to do in a post-cold war world. The outlines of the coming debate are clear. Once the election is over, the debate might actually begin.