Jimmy Carter embraced a more belligerent attitude towards the Soviet Union, a policy continued by Reagan. Carter had no real foreign affairs expertise, but he was aided by two men who did, Cyrus Vance, his Secretary of State, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, his National Security advisor.  The problem was these two men gave the president almost completely contradictory advice.  Vance was a realist, encouraging cooperation with the Soviet Union through economic and cultural ties. He further believed that the United States should contain the Soviets only when our national security was threatened.  Brzezinski, on the other hand, was a hawk who believed that everything the Soviet Union did was a threat to the United States.  Vance believed that the emerging nationalist leaders worldwide could be used to American good, while Brzezinski argued that such ìnationalismî was merely a cover for Soviet activity.  As Carter listened first to one and then the other, American foreign policy veered wildly from one extreme to the other, confusing our opponents and allies alike.
     A born again Christian, Carter believed firmly in missionary diplomacy.  It was not sufficient that dictatorial, aggressor nations overseas not attack the United States and American interests overseas; they had to stop being either dictatorial or aggressive.  But the president ran straight into the reality of world politics.  Thus, he stressed human rights only in some cases, but not in others, making his moral outrage seem selective and self serving.  Carter benefited from the moral outrage than many Americans felt about the world they lived in, and their desire to return to their moral roots, as evidenced by the growth of fundamentalist Christianity.  But Carter had no real vision of what he wanted to do.  He tried to combine Kissingerís emphasis on arms control with Jacksonís emphasis on human rights, not seeing such moves were contradictory; the Soviet Union would not extend the trust necessary to have arms control if her very legitimacy was threatened.  To make matters worse, Carter also had a tendency to micromanage everything, meaning that decisions got made slowly or not at all.
     The Soviets believed that Carterís stress on human rights was a direct repudiation of détente.  Now equal to the United States in military strength, she refused to ìtake itî from us.  Soviet willingness to confront the United States masked a deep division internally, however, between the old guard like Breshnev, who were really geriatric, and reformers like Gorbachev, a division which was not fully appreciated in the United States at the time. Breshnev had wanted stability above everything else, but this meant he had to wait for someone to die to replace him with a more reform minded administrator; reformers thus languished in secondary or tertiary positions of authority, unable to bring their new ideas forward. To make matters worse,  the Soviets suffered a number of foreign policy setbacks such as being thrown out of Egypt, Somalia and the Sudan, just as Carter would be plagued with hostages in Iran and the intractable Sandinistas in Nicaragua. In the Soviet Union, as in the Untied States, a deep malaise emerged, as neither superpower seemed able to control events, but instead were always merely reacting to them.
     In the Soviet Union, the main reason for the malaise was her crumbling economy. The growth rate of the Soviet economy had been impressive until the 1960s, a stunning 5% per year. In fact, her GNP had increased faster than that of the United States. By the late seventies, however, the Soviet GNP began to decline, and later to simply plummet.  While the Soviet Union was outproducing the United States in some areas, like oil and cement, her profits were going exclusively to the military or down the drain in Cuba, thus bankrupting the country as Khrushchev had predicted.  These economic woes were magnified by a drop in the overall birth rate; though still high in some Muslim areas in the south, the number of births fell precipitously in Russia proper.  This was especially worrying because the Soviets had increased production not by actually becoming more productive but by adding more people to the workforce; a declining birth rate meant fewer people to add and production corresponding decreased.  Moreover, the more populous Muslim community refused to be transferred to Soviet industrial centers where their labor was needed, because they could find neither schools in their language nor Islamic religious institutions outside of their own areas; thus the Soviets were unable to use even the labor pool they had. Communism could imitate Western industrial models, but the system could not generate its own.  It was a society training engineers, not scientists.  Worse, the quick transmission of information so vital for the Third Industrial Revolution, the so-called Information Age, was stymied as the Soviet government still tried to restrict access to information to keep itself in power.  The Soviet Union had only 50 thousand personal computers while the United States had 30 million; only 23% of Soviet urban homes had telephones and only 7% in rural areas. All this distress led to higher infant mortality and higher death rates from bad medical care and alcoholism.
     Carter did score a number of successes, such as SALT II in 1979 which limited the number of warheads each side could have.  But almost immediately, the United States decided to go ahead with building the MX missile, so big it would not fit into the old Minutemen silos.  Carter considered building huge underground race tracks to house the new missiles, until the cost became prohibitive.  SALT II thus never ended the arms race, but merely shifted it to other weapon systems.  The president managed to give back the Panama Canal, improving relations with Latin America.   Carter reopened formal diplomatic relations with China in 1979, and gave the Chinese technology not available to the Soviet Union, technology that might be used for more sophisticated missile guidance systems.  This forced the Soviets to defend themselves against two powers, including one with whom she shared a long border.  American exports to China doubled in one year, but the Japanese felt betrayed because they had not been informed in advance of this trade deal.
     Carter took the troubles in the Middle East seriously, and in the Camp David accords of 1979, tried to provide a framework for peace in the area between Egypt and Israel.  While Egypt got the Sinai back, there was no mention of the Palestinian Arabs or the Gaza strip, and by accepting this agreement, Anwar Sadat, Egyptís president, became isolated from the rest of the Arab world which condemned the accords.  This isolation led eventually to his death at the hands of Muslim fundamentalists.
 But there were serious problems with Carterís policies that resulted in heating up the Cold War again and led eventually to his defeat in 1980.  He had no clear policy, and by shifting from one extreme to the other, he confused foreigners and Americans alike.  On the issue of human rights, for example, he made it an issue when the security of the United States was not as stake, as in Chile and Argentina, but he let it ride when our security was at stake, as in South Korea, China and the Philippines.  He criticized abuses in the Soviet Union, but the Soviets saw this as meddling in their internal politics. The Soviet hawks thus prevailed; instead of improving her human rights record, the Soviet Union actually cracked down on dissenters with even more fury, leaving dissenters worse off than before Carter had raised the issue.  The Soviets came to believe they were being held to impossibly high standards Carter would not impose on the rest of the world.
     The nadir came in November, 1979, when American diplomatic personnel were taken hostage in Iran.  Carter had accepted the shahís assurances that he was in complete control, and thus had made no attempt to reach out to other potential leaders in Iran.  When the shah was overthrown, Carter had no one else to turn to.  The Shah left in January, 1979 and Khomeni came to power in February, 1980.  Muslim militants came to power, and, when the United States took the shah into this country for medical treatment, 58 hostages were taken in the American embassy in Teheran.  After months of negotiations, Carter authorized a military rescue that failed miserably due to bad planning.  And when Carter solemnly announced he would not leave the White House until the hostages were freedóand then they remained in captivity for over a yearóhe was criticized as being duplicitous and insincere when he eventually had to leave the White House anyway.
     December, 1979 saw the Soviets invade Afghanistan.  With Western Europe and China hostile, the Soviets believed it was imperative for them to maintain control of their southern flank.  Afghanistan had long been in the Soviet orbit, and like many other countries, suffered from artificially created borders which yoked together many antagonistic tribes and ethnic groups who had only their religion, Islam, in common. The Soviet army saw the invasion as a way to get quicker promotions and thus did not seriously raise the issue that the Soviets might actually lose the war.  The first Soviet troops in were from the adjacent border areas and thus Muslim themselves; they refused to fight the Muslim Afghan rebels with vigor and had to be replaced by Slavs and Balts who bogged down in a guerilla revolt that dragged on for 10 years, a sort of Soviet Vietnam. Fifteen thousand Soviet soldiers died, many from diseases like hepatitis.  Soviet rule was anti-religious and anti-Muslim, resulting in the emergence of the Taliban, mostly ethnic Pashtuns who resented the domination of other Afghan ethnic groups. 
    The real problem in Afghanistan proved to be the CIA sharing information that led to the privatization of war and terrorism.  Sixteen thousand Arabs rebels were trained there.  Worse the CIA use drug money to finance the Afghan operations; Afghanistan thus became the world’s largest producer of opium and processed heroin.  Later, the Taliban would make inroads in the population by offering protections against these very drug warlords.   As in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and 1968, and Hungary in 1956, the Soviets were again disgraced in the worldís opinion as they heavy-handedly invaded their supposed allies.
     Carter reacted by embargoing all grain sales to the Soviets; such sales had been one of the lynch pins of détente.  Worse, the embargo actually hurt American farmers who had planted fence post to fence post in the expectation of selling all grain surplus to the Soviet Union for a handsome profit; when such sales were forbidden, the glut on the grain market plunged prices so low, farmers could not repay their loans.   Like most dollar diplomacy, Carterís embargo failed to work, or work quickly, and Carter was forced to search desperately for a new foreign polivy.
     Another setback for Carter was the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.  Originally, the Sandinistas wanted only non-aligned status, not membership in the communist camp, but even this show of independence angered Brzezinski, especially when the Sandinistas began aiding rebels in El Salvador.   The latter had been a showcase for Kennedyís and Johnsonís Alliance for Progress aimed at South America.  These two American administrations supplied more money to El Salvador than to any other country in Central America, but the wealth remained concentrated in a very few hands, distribution of aid was rife with corruption, and, in any case, a population explosion wiped out any real gains El Salvador might have made economically.  Even when the full extent of the failure of American aid to substantially improve El Salvador became apparent under Nixon and later Carter, the United States refused to admit that previous administrations had been wrong and that aid to Latin America was not resulting in the successes chalked up to the Marshall Plan in Europe.  When Nicaraguans began aiding El Salvadorian rebels, the corrupt regime in El Salvador found few supporters except in the United States; when Carter asked other Latin American nations to help overthrow or at least to punish Nicaragua in some way, the president was sternly rebuffed.  Moreover, the attack on the Sandinistas became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Because Nicaragua was treated like an enemy outcast, she began acting like one.  Nicaragua developed the largest army in Central America in part to defend herself against the oft-repeated threat of an American invasion to overthrow the regime.
     Carterís conflicted foreign policyówhich aimed for peace while stressing human rights abuses guaranteed to insult other nationsófailed.  When diplomacy fails, the only other option is military engagement.  Carter thus launched a massive military buildup.  This was the real beginning of the Ronald Reaganís military enlargement. It was Carter who first envisaged a Rapid Deployment Force, for example, designed to aid in Iran type rescues.  But given the years necessary to train and deploy such a force, Carter would not have time to benefit politically and instead the credit went to Reagan.  In July, 1980, Carter issued Presidential Directive 59 that put more emphasis on targeting Soviet nuclear forces than Soviet cities.   But this move was seen as threatening deterrence that had always targeted cities.  The Americans were distinguishing between ìvalueî targets and ìstrategicî ones: the first targets what the enemy values most, while the second aims to make military action more difficult.  The Soviets regarded the American shift to strategic targets as the first step in a plan to fight and win a nuclear first strike, and not surprisingly, negotiations between the two superpowers disappeared.

Reagan: Confrontation and Metamorphosis

    A true Cold Warrior, Reagan won the presidency in 1980 and his program was simple and direct—oppose the Soviet Union at all costs, everywhere.    Secretary of Defense Weinberger and National Security Advisor Perle saw in the deaths of Breshnev in November, 1982, his successor Andropov in 1984, and his successor Chernenko in 1985 an opportunity to exhaust the Soviet Union once and for all.  In fact, the Soviets regarded the Reagan administration as so threatening, the KGB was put on full alert from 1981-1983!  Realizing how bad off the Soviet economy was, Reagan and his advisors decided to bankrupt the “evil empire” by forcing her to compete when she could not really do so.  Unlike many post-World War II presidents, Reagan sincerely believed that the communist system could not work, and he was determined to push it into high gear until it broke.
    Reagan avoided negotiations with the Soviets by demanding what he knew they would never give, thus making the Soviets seem intransigent.  For example, the United States insisted the Soviets remove their SS-20 missiles, whether in Europe or Asia, back to the Soviet land mass; in return, we would agree not to deploy American made Pershing II and cruise missiles.  The Soviets would not agree to trade existing missiles for ones not yet there.  Another example: Reagan proposed elimination of all land based missiles that were larger and more accurate than those launched from submarines or bombers, but 7 out of 10 Soviet missiles were land based while only 2 out of 10 were for the United States.  In effect, Reagan had just demanded that the Soviets unilaterally disarm, and not surprisingly they refused.
    Since the Reagan administration’s papers remain classified, it is impossible at this time to know just how much Reagan controlled his own foreign policy and how much his advisors developed it for him.  What is clear is that the president concerned himself less about the details of policy than he did with its overall aims, which for him meant the destruction of the Soviet Union and her communism.
    Thus, the huge military buildup begun under Carter continued, partly to rebuild American pride damaged in Vietnam, partly to bring the Soviets to the bargaining table to end an arms race which was catastrophically expensive for them, and partly to reassure our European allies the United States was still a strong superpower.  After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the crushing of Solidarity, the Polish labor movement under Lech Walesa, Europeans felt more threatened than they had in decades, and thus were more willing to listen.
    The best example of pushing the Soviets to bankruptcy in an arms race they could not win was the SDI or Strategic Defense Initiative, otherwise known as Star Wars.  The idea was that the United States would invent and then deploy a series of platforms in space to shoot down Soviet missiles after they were launched, thus protecting this country from nuclear attack.  The problem was that it took four minutes to verify that a launch had actually taken place, but Russian missiles, like ours, MHRVed at six minutes.  This meant that instead of having a huge rocket to aim at, the platforms would have to shoot tiny warheads, many of which would be decoys.  If somehow we figured out how to shoot down everything in the mere two minutes we had, the Russians would simply fire up more decoys, to which we would have to respond with more platforms—in short an arms race would occur in space, rather than on earth.  Even the Reagan administration had to admit finally that SDI would—if we were lucky and the thing could be made to work—be used only to protect American missile bases (as opposed to American cities)to guarantee a retaliatory strike.  But the Soviets could not be sure that somehow we might pull it off; Gorbachev, who succeeded Chernenko in March, 1985, finally agreed to negotiate when he simply could no longer afford to compete in this vital weapons system.
    With his new and enlarged military, Reagan was willing to use military force as Carter had not been.  As he did so, major problems were revealed in deployment and imprecision of goals.  One example was the Marine deployment in Lebanon where the United States got sucked into someone else’s civil war and 239 unarmed Marines were blown up by a suicide truck bomber. In Grenada in 1983, it took 5000 Americans to rout fewer than 500 Cubans.  
    But the American armed forces were learning quickly from these troubles.  In 1984, Secretary of Defense Weinberger announced new conditions which had to be met before American military forces would be deployed overseas: first, there had to be assurance of long term public and congressional support; second, there had to be a wholehearted commitment and full intention of winning; and third and most important, there had to be a clear definition of objectives.  
    When troops were too expensive or unpopular, the Reagan administration was prepared to use the CIA as they did in Nicaragua.  Such a “low intensity conflict” allowed the president to wage war without formally declaring one.  When Congress passed the Boland amendment in 1984, capping funding for the Nicaraguan contras, Reagan turned to arms sales to Iran—listed by his own administration as a terrorist state—to provide funding.  The United States would sell arms to Iran directly or through Israel at inflated prices to get the money Reagan wanted to give the contras.  When word of this secret arrangement broke in November 1986, a scandal sometimes known as Irangate erupted.
    As the 1984 election neared, Reagan softened his emphasis on military conflict with the Soviet Union that had characterized his first four years in the White House, in part because he wanted to “secure his place in history,” and partly because his military buildup and refinements had clearly achieved superiority.  Now the president offered to negotiate with the Soviets on arms control.  Like Dulles before him, Reagan believed in negotiating from strength, but unlike most post-World War II presidents, when he finally had the strength, he was willing to negotiate. The Soviet Union was clearly a shell of her former self, not only economically, but militarily.  Her disastrous invasion of Afghanistan, where she was pinned down by a rag tag group of guerrilla fighters, as well as a never-ending war in Angola, had displayed Soviet weakness to the world.  Moreover, in a startling new concept, Reagan wanted not just to limit the number of nuclear weapons, as SALT I and II had done, but actually to reduce their number.  The stage was now set for major changes, made possible by changes in the Soviet Union.  The Soviets began to respond favorably to American ideas on arms control while choosing not to fight in Eastern Europe.
    No one knew better how bad off the Soviet Union really was than the leader who took control in March, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev.   Gorbachev was trying to restructure the Soviet economy so she could remain viable as a superpower, and to do so he would need to cut back massively on military spending, as Khrushchev had urged 30 years before.  Gorbachev thus met with Reagan in November, 1985 in Geneva and in October, 1986 in Reykjavik trying to hammer out an arms control agreement   Gorbachev agreed to withdraw from his Third World adventures; the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and abruptly stopped propping up the Cuban economy.   The Soviet leader finally did give up his SS-20 missiles, and in 1987, signed the INF treaty that eliminated medium range missiles from Europe.
    Gorbachev still had to deal with Soviet internal problems.  The leadership of the country was extremely aged, largely because they were those who had benefited from Stalin’s purges as very young men and had been in office ever since.  While Khrushchev had given the gift of life to office holders, ensuring they would not be put to death if they fell from power as had previously been the case under Stalin, Breshnev had given the gift of security in office: Soviet office holders died in office, rather than resigning or retiring.  Within one year, however, Gorbachev had turned over more of the top leadership of the Soviet Union than anyone ever had.  
    This was part of Gorbachev’s program of perestroika, or restructuring.   Importantly, however, perestroika was an elite movement, led by those at the top, unlike, say, the French Revolution where the restructuring was led by the dispossessed from below.  Some saw in Gorbachev the Fourth Russian Revolution: the first was Lenin’s, the second Stalin’s, the third Khrushchev’s and the fourth was Gorbachev’s.  Perestroika attempted to recapture the spirit of 1917, to take back the Russian revolution from the bumpkins who had stolen it.  Perestroika was also a tacit admission that the Soviet Union had become a more stratified society.  Better education and new skills had created different classes where the country had been relatively homogeneous thirty years before.  The “single society interest” as Stalin had it was simply no longer true; Russia was no longer an exclusively blue-collar nation.  But such an admission required a radical reassessment of Stalin and of communist theory, a reassessment that was politically impossible.  Too many people had benefited from Stalin’s purges and they were still in positions of power.  Moreover, political liberalization implied in perestroika would make taking hard economic choices more difficult; Gorbachev could either fix the economy or do liberalization, but not both at the same time without risk of destroying the very system he was trying to save.
    Part of Gorbachev’s willingness to compromise with the United States was based on his sincere desire to spread world peace, but a great deal of his motivation came from the disastrous Soviet economy which refused to respond to his initiatives. Gorbachev was a committed Marxist and thus certain areas of the Soviet economy remained off limits to peristroika, or the new thinking, the Soviet leader encouraged.  Agriculture, for example, would remain collectivized, no matter how inefficient it was. Fundamental reform in agriculture would deprive a large share of the party apparatus of its reason for existence and necessarily cause a major backlash.   Moreover, Gorbachev was a committed Marxist: he never intended to destroy communism, but merely to improve socialism.
    But Gorbachev’s interventions in the Soviet economy did not work.  His anti-alcoholic drive, designed to wean Russians from heavy reliance on booze, only wrecked one of the few profitable industries the country had and fostered the growth of the Russian mafia.   Ninety percent of the economy remained nationalized, there was no national market, no free peasant farmers, a ruble inconvertible into any currency at what the Soviets said it was worth, and no way to realistically judge prices.   Clearly communism, after seven decades, had still not demonstrated it could outperform capitalism.  
    By 1988, many of the minority republics were already acting independently of Moscow.  Without the use of force from the center, leaders in these minority republics had to represent their own people, rather than Moscow’s wishes.  As a result, only 40% of tax revenue required from the republics was actually reaching Moscow.  Minority Republics now had their own intelligentsia and saw no need to import one from Moscow.
    Thus in 1991, a new treaty was written that would create a loose confederation of republics to replace the centralized Soviet Union.  It was to be signed August, 1991, but a coup occurred that month while Gorbachev was away on vacation.  The plotters saw what Gorbachev did not, namely that the treaty as proposed would inevitably lead to the breakup of the Soviet Union and its fall from superpower status.  Boris Yeltsin lead a fierce resistance to the coup, climbing on top of a tank in defiance.  But the new democratic institutions of the Soviet Union, such as the new Parliament, remained passive—a serious warning that western democratic values were only quite shallow.  Yeltsin had an appeal that Gorbachev did not: Yeltsin had been legally elected as president of Russia in 1989, the first multi-party election since 1917, while Gorbachev had never been elected to anything.
     Clearly, the Soviet “appeal” was not idealistic, or materialistic, but instead was based on brute force.  When that force was withdrawn, because the Soviets could no longer afford to use it, the Soviet empire collapsed with six regimes in Eastern Europe overthrowing communism in seven months in 1989—and finally the greatest empire of them all, the Soviet Union herself, collapsed in 1991.

The  Cold War Evaporates

    Many times people have said that the Cold War was over, but in the 1990s that assertion appeared correct.  If the Cold war was defined as the diplomatic conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States after World War II, then the Cold War is over because there is no more Soviet Union.  Even if one uses the Cold Warrior definition of a conflict between democratic capitalism and communist totalitarianism, the Cold War must be considered over, for the Russians are no longer communist (their commitment to democracy remains debatable.)
    The breakup of the Cold War can be dated to 1989, when six communist regimes fell in seven months in Eastern Europe.  What Kennan had long ago predicted, that the Soviet system could not be made to work and that eventually the Soviets would have to pull back from foreign adventures to keep their creaky system afloat, came true here. Eastern Europe was a source of pride for the Soviets; communist regimes there reassured her she was safe from western invasion.  World War II, which had seen the Soviets liberate Eastern Europe, had been a great legitimizing factor for the Soviet Union, creating an authentic bond between her and all Slavic peoples who had suffered under Hitler’s racist theories.  But by the 1980s, a new theme began emerging in the Soviet press, namely, that the Soviets should stop spending money on these Eastern European ingrates and keep it for the real problems the mother country faced.  
    In Eastern Europe communism was imposed, unlike in the Soviet Union where Lenin stirred up the Communist Revolution in1917.  As a result, communism in Eastern Europe had always been unpopular, associated as it was with an occupying power.  Worse, the system imposed had for decades shown it could not work, either in Eastern Europe or in the Soviet Union.  The Soviets could simply not afford Eastern Europe any longer.  Soviet oil was exchanged for Eastern European manufactured goods, but the latter were of low quality because they were produced by disinterested workers using antiquated.  When the price of oil fell, the Soviets were able to buy even fewer of these inferior goods. And the cost of Soviet troops stationed there to keep these “allies” from rebelling drained Soviet resources and froze what could have been productive labor in mind-numbing occupation duty.
    To save money and reduce Eastern European resentment over their poor economic performance and Soviet imperialism, Gorbachev announced the Sinatra Doctrine. This Doctrine effectively repealed the Breshnev Doctrine which had given the Soviet Union the right to intervene to “save” any socialist state—when only the Soviets could decide if the socialism was correct or not.  Gorbachev now promised Eastern Europe could “do it their way,” borrowing a line from one of Frank Sinatra’s famous songs.  In short, Eastern Europe was free to experiment with change and the Soviets would not intervene with force as they had in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968.  
    Ironically, the problem was convincing Eastern Europe’s geriatric Communist leadership to adopt some version of Gorbachev’s reforms introduced in the Soviet Union.  Eastern Europe’s aged leaders realized instinctively what the Soviet leader did not see: any reform would mean their communist regimes—and themselves—would not survive. Remember that Gorbachev believed deeply in socialism.  He did not understand Eastern Europe’s hostility to the system or the Soviet Union, and the party hacks that staffed his intelligence services that should have given a more accurate reading of Eastern European intentions either shared Gorbachev’s belief in socialism or were unwilling to tell Gorbachev what he did not want to hear. Without Soviet troops to back them up, communist governments in Eastern Europe fell quickly, beginning in Poland.  In all cases except Rumania the process was peaceful.  
    But as the communist regimes fell, the ethnic rivalries that the Communist dictatorships had merely camouflaged reemerged.  A Magyar minority tried to secede from Rumania and join their confreres in Hungary.   Czechoslovakia split up into two republics, the Czech and Slovak, ending an artificial union that had long been fraught with tension since its creation after World War I.  Yugoslavia collapsed into several nation states that began warring with one another along religious and ethnic lines.  While the Eastern Europeans could make common cause against a single enemy like the Soviet Union, when she was gone, they fell to squabbling among themselves as they had done for centuries. Just as there had been no cookie cutter plan for Stalin absorbing Eastern Europe by force after World War II, there was no identical way communist regimes fell in 1989, nor a common set of reasons for why they did so.
    Let’s turn first to Poland as a test case.  After avoiding an invasion in 1956, Poland stopped collectivization of farms, but she became locked into small scale peasant farming instead.  These peasant farmers would produce more only if prices for farm goods were raised so they could make more money; until then, there was no need to invest in better farming technology (like tractors, combine/threshers, etc.) to produce more farm products. When the government tried to raise prices to accommodate the farmers and get more and better food into the country, strikes among industrial workers broke out because food prices were going up while their wages were not, and so the increases were withdrawn.  Polish farmers therefore did not increase production, even as the population soared due to a high birth rate.  Polish agriculture simply could not meet consumer demand, and of the $21 billion borrowed, $6 billion went to import food.  Forty percent of the Polish budget went for food subsidies.
    To cover up these difficulties, Gerek borrowed money from the West, hoping technology would somehow stimulate the Polish economy and produce goods the West would want to buy.  But the money went to salvage unsalvageable industries: the shipbuilding industry the former leader Golmulka had targeted for being phased out, was now given top priority under Gerek, even though the Baltic Sea was too shallow to build the kind of supertankers the world wanted and needed.  Thus, the Polish debt increased so much than in 1980 the government was obliged to raise prices.
    Lech Walesa formed the Polish labor union, Solidarity, to protest these price increases, and they were withdrawn.   Polish intellectuals would claim that Solidarity was a drive for “freedom,” but in fact it was from the beginning about making more money and living better.  However, such intellectuals spoke English and so shaped Americans’ image of the labor union to make it seem a cry for ending political repression. Significantly, Solidarity fought under the gold and white banner of the Vatican, where a Polish pope had been elected in 1978.  (The KGB insisted that election was a CIA plot!)  For over a year, the government tolerated Solidarity’s protests and even negotiated with the union, until a group of hot heads seized control away from Walesa in December, 1981.  By late 1981, many in Solidarity had become disillusioned with Walesa’s strong-arm tactics and dictatorial style.   In a series of demands now thrown at the government, the union demanded that Poland leave the Warsaw Pact, the eastern military alliance.  The next day, the Polish government invoked martial law and jailed most Solidarity leaders.
    In 1982, with Solidarity defanged, the Polish martial law government raised prices 76% in one year, resulting in a 25% drop in the standard of living.  Life became unbearable and Poles began agitating for change.   Once Gorbachev announced the Sinatra Doctrine, indicating he would not support the communist Polish government by force, the government capitulated and finally held elections in 1989.  Walesa won, but the turnout was not very large and there still appeared to be no broad-based desire for democracy.   Nonetheless, Walesa’s new non-communist government, in January, 1990, decontrolled almost all prices and made the Polish currency convertible into western currencies to expedite trade.  Poland planned a 500 day exit from communism, using a plan first developed by American economist Friedman to deal with Chile.  This “shock therapy” called for strict wage and monetary policy which even further reduced Polish living standards, but the Poles were willing to endure these hardships because they were finally in control of their own destiny. 1990 saw huge price increases, but they then stabilized as the exit went forward.  Unfortunately, Poland had long been tied into trade with the Soviet Union, so much so that she had become less and less able to compete even within the communist market..  When the Soviet market collapsed in 1990, Poland would experience a huge trade deficit when the Russians and other Eastern European countries abruptly stopped buying her inferior goods in favor of better western ones.
    East Germany is yet another test case of the fall of communism in Europe, but this country was already unique in its special relationship with the West.  East Germany had a large economy, the largest in Eastern Europe, but like many other countries it had invested in old technology.  In the summer of 1989. after Gorbachev announced the Sinatra doctrine, East Germans began leaking into Austria and the West German embassy in Prague.  As many as 4000 were crammed into the latter’s precincts.  The East German government tried to stop this “dash to the door” by not halting the taking down of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.  To its horror, however, the East German government discovered that the wholesale migration from East to West simply speeded up and many East German took advantage of what they feared was only a respite in the Cold War to vote with their feet and escape to Western Germany.
    With the division between East and West Germany now just an artificial one,, negotiations began for the unification of Germany.  For decades, most countries had piously spoken about unifying Germany, but when the opportunity presented itself in 1990, most were hesitant to carry through on their promises.  Would this new united Germany be in NATO or the Warsaw Pact, or neutral?   The Soviets had 370,000 soldiers stationed in East Germany.  What would happen to them?  There were no jobs for them to return to in the Soviet Union and the cost of repatriating them would be enormous.  Kohl’s West German government agreed to pay the Soviet Union $7.6 billion to get her troops out, basically a bribe.  Poland feared that Germany would not respect her borders, especially when Kohl refused to reassure her during a hard fought election campaign in West Germany in 1990. After all, 6 million Germans had been forcibly ejected from land now claimed by Poland after World War II and they wanted their land back. 
    Despite the world’s fears, Kohl just simply pushed ahead with the unification of Germany which was declared in September, 1990.  He exchanged the East German mark for western ones at par, despite the fact that the eastern mark was virtually worthless.  West German businessmen were horrified when they finally entered East Germany to discover how badly run and inefficient East German factories really were.  Westerners snapped up the potentially profitable ones, sticking the government with the losers that nonetheless employed so many thousands of people that they could not be shut down.  Whole areas of what had been East Germany were almost depopulated, with only the very old and unskilled left behind.  But for our purposes, Kohl’s determination to act alone, even in the teeth of world fears, encouraged him to do the same in Yugoslavia—with deadly results.
    Yugoslavia presents yet another test case for the end of the Cold War. Following Tito’s death in 1980, paralysis gripped the country both politically and economically.  Any attempt to fix the Yugoslav economy only brought to the fore the deep ethnic hatreds festering since World War II, when Croats had helped the German Nazis kills Serbs and Jews.  One and a half million people had died in this Yugoslav bloodbath, about 10% of the country’s population.  Now in the 1980s, the rich North, Croatia and Slovenia, increasingly resented having to pay for the economically backward South as well as the effective domination of the Serbs whom most Croats and Slovenes despised.  
    To make matters worse, the Serb government had long emphasized capital intensive investment in the backward South, rather than labor intensive development.  The result was that more and more Southerners were put out of work or could get only low-paying jobs in these new industries.  Serbs got the best jobs and settled in groups, creating pockets of Serbs who would need “rescuing” if the local population demanded more independence.  While the Serbs were the largest ethnic group in Yugoslavia, three million out of the 8.1 million lived outside of Serbia.
    In 1974, Tito had tried to decentralize the Yugoslav economy to give more autonomy to the restless northern provinces, but workers in the rest of the country simply voted themselves wage increases without increasing productivity. Poor economic performance of course only increased ethnic tensions.  Slovenia especially chaffed under the burden of generating 8% of the GNP but being forced to pay 25% of the total federal Yugoslav budget. (Slovenia found it convenient to ignore the fact that her success arose in large part from captive materials and markets in Yugoslavia as well as cheap labor provided by the rest of the county.)
    Bosnia only wanted more autonomy and was content to remain in the Yugoslav federation, but by 1989, both Slovenia and Croatia wanted independence from Belgrade.  The Serbs were prepared to let Slovenia go without a fight, since no Serbs lived in that province, but Croatia would be allowed to withdraw only if she left behind in Yugoslavia those areas of Croatia where Serbs lived.  Croatia refused these conditions.  Germany, Austria and Italy—as Serbia pointed out the former fascist powers of WWII—were sympathetic to Croatian and Slovenian demands, whereas Britain and France supported the federal republic of Yugoslavia.  Gorbachev also supported Yugoslav unity as did the United States.  These governments feared that breaking up Yugoslavia would result in ethnic civil war, since the various ethnic groups were so completely intermixed with one another that separating them into different countries would result in vicious warfare as one side or the other attempted to clear their area of other ethnic groups.  Since Europe was dominated by Germany, in Serbian eyes, and since Germany was supporting the Croats and Slovenes, the Europeans could not present themselves as neutral mediators, and were instead in league with Serbia’s mortal enemies.  European troops sent to preserve peace in the area were thus enemy agents and to be shot at and repulsed.  When Germany unilaterally recognized the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, against the wishes of her European allies, the United States and the Soviet Union were obliged to recognize as well.  The redrawing of the European map had begun—and so had the civil war.
    The crisis came in Bosnia.  That province had been about evenly divided in population between Serbs, Croats and Muslims, but the three groups were hopelessly intermingled with one another.  The Serbs decided to use military force to change the demography of Bosnia by forcing all Muslims and Croats out of areas where Serbs lived.  This process was called ethnic cleansing.  The viciousness of the process was deliberate, designed to instill such hatred and fear that it would be impossible for Serbs, Muslims and Croats to live together in peace again. United Nations troops sent to monitor the fighting were almost never allowed into an area until the cleansing had taken place.  This forced removal of people, though morally despicable, actually helped the peace process by creating ethnically pure areas which could be cobbled together to form more or less discreet countries.  Moreover, in the final peace plan brokered by the United States, 51% of Bosnia went to the Muslims, but 49% went to the Serbs, confirming them in their belief that ethnic cleansing might be condemned in the court of world opinion—but it got the job done.
    In Kosovo, Americans for the first time tried to win a war by air power alone, thus avoiding the risk to American combat personnel.  The Serbs eventually left Kosovo, but not because American bombing had actually destroyed Serb tanks or ruined their morale, as Americans claimed.  The Serbs used decoys and stayed under cover.  Without ground troops to root them out, the Serbs were able to withstand the aerial bombardment indefinitely.  What finally changed the picture was increased bombing of the Serbian electric grid, knocking out 60% of it.  Domestic pressure inside Serbia forced the regime to abandon Kosovo, although the United States allowed it to stand that air power alone could force change abroad.
    The Bosnian operation exposed deep divisions among the Western allies.  France believed, as did many other Europeans that the only way to achieve peace was through a negotiated settlement that would logically have to be concluded with the party then in power.  Demonizing the leader, as the United States was doing with Milosovic, was thus counterproductive.  While the negotiations went forward, the civilian population would be kept safe by nonconsensual means if necessary by creating safe areas where humanitarian aid could be dispensed.  This aid would be protected by armed convoys.  The French warned that if the intervening force, in this case the United Nations, was seen as helping only one side in the conflict, that force would be attacked.  That was in fact what happened, and the outgunned and understaffed United Nations forces became targets themselves.  American foreign policy by contrast was to a great degree driven by television images of people suffering, and so the American position was that negotiations could begin only after fighting had ceased in an area.  Fighting in fact ceased, however, only when the offending ethnic community had been “cleansed” by being wiped out or forced out.
    The violence of Yugoslavia and the economic collapse of Poland remind us that Eastern Europe generally was deeply in debt as the Cold War ended, a debt that they could not pay off.  Western firms were quick to snap up profitable Eastern European industries, leaving the governments there stuck with industries no one wanted to buy and which could not produce a profit.  The overwhelming percentage of western aid sent to Eastern Europe was in the form of credits given to the very western companies now gobbling up what viable industries the region possessed.   In order to soften the transition and save their people more misery, Eastern European governments decided to slow down the “shock therapy” that was to bring them out of communism.  But Western countries saw this slowing down as lingering socialism and refused to invest more until the governments showed a firm plan to give up their socialist past. With little or no Western investment, the economic straits of the East became even more dire and their commitment to pure Western capitalism even less sincere.
    The poverty in Eastern Europe allowed nationalism to flourish, as we saw in Yugoslavia.  The Magyars became almost obsessed with maintaining the purity of their Magyar culture in Hungary, and even Czechoslovakia broke up into the Czech and Slovak republics.  Anti-Semitism reared its ugly head as well.  And Eastern Europe was an environmental disaster. Czechoslovakia produces 18 tons of sulfur dioxide per square kilometer; Germany produces half that with four times the population.  Energy consumption in Czechoslovakia is 30-50% higher than in Western Europe.
    The diplomatic policy of the West was driven more by television than state interests.  The West was good at dealing with humanitarian relief, such as getting food into Sarajevo, but it seemed unable to deal with the problems which had produced the refugees in the first place.  And by focusing on the bombing of Sarajevo, for example, Serbs could get on with the ethnic cleansing in the countryside that was more important to them anyway.  Dramatic visual portrayal of conflict or human suffering was easier to convey to the American public than were abstractions like the importance of the Alliance with Japan or the potential collapse of the international system of trade and investment.
    Any solution to the Yugoslav problem, as well as the nationalism of other Eastern European countries involves an acceptance of the inviolability of borders coupled with a defense of the rights of minority peoples.   Without the first, wars of “liberation” will be a constant fixture of the area, as one ethnic group battled with another for control of a geographic region to make a country of their own, such as in Kosovo.  But without a firm commitment to protecting the rights of minority peoples, the incentive to set up independent countries remains great.  It is important to remember that the 1975 Helsinki accords accepted both premises, since even at that early date world leaders foresaw the potential for war in the former Soviet satellites.

The Middle East At the End of the Cold War

    The end of the Cold War did not bring peace to the Middle East either.  From World War I to the Gulf War, no one power dominated the Middle East in modern times.  Instead, countries in the region became skilled at playing one superpower off against another. For many in the Middle East, the Western concept of “human rights” as enshrined in the American Bill of Rights or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man simply is wrong.  They would argue that the duty of a government is merely to allow people to perform their duties to God under Islam.  Western criticism of human rights abuses, therefore, fall on deaf ears.  The separation of church and state which Europe and America hold dear really only occurred in the 18th century Enlightenment period.  Middle Easterners, especially the common folk, regard such a separation not only as unnecessary, but morally wrong, a blasphemy against the Almighty.  Such an attitude does not augur well for protecting the rights of minorities peoples, whether religious or ethnic.  There were, for example 71 recognized sects of Islam alone, let alone different faiths. European and American ideas of citizenship in a secular sate and “nationality” simply had not developed in the Middle East.
    It is important to remember that Europeans had imposed their culture elsewhere, such as North and South America, with some success, but it had taken centuries and in some countries the reshaping was hardly complete.  The Middle East was different; the people there had full access to Western technology, from cell phones to fighter jets, as native American populations did, and the population was at least equal to that of the West and growing at a faster rate, something again native American populations did not.  Moreover, the Middle East could point with pride to several major empires in the region, from the ancient Persian empire to the Islamic empire of the medieval period.  The Middle East also had a unifying religion, Islam, that they considered superior to Western religions.
    Middle Easterners had always resented the 1919 Treaty of Versailles which ended World War I and which arranged the map of the area much as it is today.  Called “the treason of Trianon,” the Versailles Treaty had taken no notice of the Kurdish desire for self-determination, nor the divisions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.  In an area where tribes were more important than states, and religious sectarianism even more important than tribes, rulers of the new Middle Eastern states were forced to rule over countries with arbitrary borders which were illogicial and unjust, much as occurred in Eastern Europe whose borders were also created at Versailles in 1919.  The rulers chosen to govern frequently lacked legitimacy, since they were handpicked by Western powers without consultation with the citizens, to a great degree because Western powers felt they could be more easily “controlled” than indigenous, popular leaders might be.  One by one, these “illegitimate” rulers were overthrown, to be replaced by military men, as occurred in Egypt with Nasser and Iraq with Saddam.
    Complicating matters further in the Middle East was Israel, which many Arab rulers saw as a bridgehead planted in their midst deliberately by the West to keep Arabs divided.  The Holocaust, they note, occurred in Europe, and salving the consciences of Western Europeans for this atrocity by taking land from Arabs who were not even involved in the warfare of World War II seemed unfair.  United States globalists had seen Israel as an asset, a bulwark against the Soviet Union in the Cold War and a bastion of regional order.  American realists, by contrast, saw Israel as a liability, leaving Arabs favorable to the Soviets and making it impossible for the United States to create a successful foreign policy with Arabs.  Kennedy had been more even-handed with Israelis and Arabs than had Truman, but Johnson moved to create a formal alliance with Israel.  After the Six Day War of 1967, American policy was dominated by the globalists who saw Israel standing for much of what the United Sates did, such as democracy and human rights.  The Soviets never questioned Israel’s right to exist and strictly rationed the supply of arms going into the area, so much so that a furious Sadat expelled Soviet military advisors.
    Under Nixon, Ford and Carter, the United States adopted the Two Pillar policy, relying on Iran and Saudi Arabia to keep the peace in the Middle East.  Since the Saudis had a smaller military, the armed might would come from Iran.  Nixon thus allowed the Shah to buy whatever he wanted short of nuclear weapons; eventually, Iran accounted for more than one half of all American arms sales abroad.  These weapons sales resulted in overspending and corruption, but perhaps more important, increased exposure to Western ideas disturbed Iranian and other fundamentalists who had a profoundly different view of the role of the state.  The Yom Kippur War of 1973-4 and the oil embargo saw a massive transfer of resources from the industrialized countries to the oil producing ones, leading Middle Eastern governments to squander the profits on building up their military.  The Nixon Doctrine by which the United States government would sell arms abroad to allow others to fight their own wars without American intervention resulted in a massive arms buildup in the region, leaving countries there to attempt to settle their disputes by war rather than negotiations.
    Hatred of Israel, denial of “human rights” as a necessary value, and the overriding importance of “fixing” the treason of Trianon were behind Saddam’s attack on Kuwait. Iraq was a hotbed of divisions, with 75% of Iraq tribal with no real tradition of obedience to any government.  Jews had long dominated the economic life of Baghdad: they were forced out by 1951 to be replaced by Shiites. Christian refugees from Armenia settled in large numbers around Mosul. Iraq had originally been three provinces in the old ottoman Empire, consisting of a Shiite South, Sunni middle and Kurdish north.  Saddam came to power in Iraq in 1969, openly declaring his intention to challenge the Versailles borders, a position which gained him immediate popularity at home and elsewhere in the Arab world. To get back land Iraqis considered theirs, Saddam attacked Iran in 1980 soon after the expulsion of the shah when the Iranian armed forces would not be able to put up a spirited defense.  This war dragged on for eight years, but it left Iraq shattered.  Iraqi GNP fell to one half that of 1979.  The Soviets condemned Iraq for starting the Iran war and suspended arms supplies, but the United States, furious over the taking of American prisoners in the embassy in Teheran, began shipping arms to Iraq.
    In August, 1990, Saddam attacked Kuwait, trying to undo the borders determined at Versailles.  Moreover, if Iraq and Kuwait were unified, together they would control 20% of Arab oil supplies.  And a quick victory in Kuwait would restore Saddam’s prestige damaged by his long, inconclusive war with Iran.  President Bush organized a coalition to stop him, not because he wanted to help the unloved Kuwaiti dynasty the Treaty of Versailles had put in power over the wishes of many in the area, but rather to protect the oil supply Kuwait sent to the West.  In no way did American policy seek to create a worldwide democratic revolution, for to do so would threaten stable autocracies in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia.  Bush was able to get an international coalition together because Saddam had committed an overt act of aggression by invading Kuwait; many small countries around the world empathized with Kuwait’s predicament.  To create the coalition, therefore, Bush was obliged to downplay the oil issue and stress instead the invasion of a small country as the putative reason for stopping Saddam. But by demonizing Saddam, Bush made it look as though the only acceptable conclusion was the dictator’s removal from office.  In fact, many in the non-Arab Third World saw the Gulf War as a crusade against the Arabs, especially after the United States was seen to have manipulated the United Nations into supporting Kuwait. Arabs worldwide accused the United States of a double standard, requiring a quick Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait but letting Israel stay for decades in territories she occupied.  To many in the Third Word, the New World Order announced by Bush was merely the Old World Order without the Soviet Union; American imperialism, now unchecked by Russian power, would dictate terms to the rest of the world under the thin veneer of defending “legitimate” borders the legitimacy of which the Arabs especially denied in the first place.
    In 1975, Saddam received a nuclear reactor from the French, the byproducts of which could be used to build what Saddam called “the Arab bomb.” Israeli security forces took out the innards of that reactor in Toulon before it could be shipped.  Following the Gulf War, the United Nations monitored diversion of nuclear material from peaceful activities, like electric generation, to weapons one, like enriching uranium.  Any nuclear power plant produces enriched uranium as a byproduct and so only careful monitoring of how much goes in and out could ensure that enriched uranium was not being squirreled away for weapons production.  UN monitors, however, could discover no such diversion in Iraq, for the Iraqis began using electromagnetic isotopes as the United States had done when it first began building atomic bombs 50 years before.  Such a process was described in scientific journals and was no secret.  Moreover, it used parts impossible to control because they were dual use, meaning they could be used for weapons production or simply engineering projects.  Thus, the UN monitors could find no evidence of diversion because there was none in the usual sense, although that did not necessarily mean Iraq was not engaged in producing the “Arab bomb.”
    The United States had long believed that religious Islam would be a bulwark against secular nationalism in the Middle East, the kind of nationalism that Communists usually dominated.  Thus, we subsidized madrasses, Muslim religious schools where fundamentalist Islam taught young boys how to fight communism—and godless Americanism, as it turned out.  The Iranian revolution that brought Khoumeni to power, however, caused Americans to rethink their position on religious Islam, since the Iranians proved that a revolution could be both Islamist and nationalist at the same time.  The convergence of these two strands occurred in Afghanistan as well.  
    When the Soviet invaded the country in 1979, rebels took up the cause of Pashtunism, or the domination of Afghanistan by those of Pashtun ethnicity.  Half of the Afghan population was Pashtun, but many Pashtuns lived on the other side of an artificially drawn border in Pakistan.  Almost always, the Taliban were ethnic Pashtuns, interested in religious fundamentalism, but also in the domination of Afghanistan by their particular ethnic group.  
    Since the CIA was looking for a way too bog down the Soviets as we had been bogged down in Vietnam, they looked for a Saudi prince to lead the crusade against the godless marxists, but the agency could not find one.  Thus it turned to Osama Bin Laden, the closest thing to a Saudi prince since he was part of the economic inner circle of Saudi Arabia.  The CIA began providing weapons and training to Bin Laden’s group among others, but the real problem was that the CIA began sharing information that would lead, as elsewhere in the world, to the privatization of war.  War-making from the Renaissance onwards had become the sole prerogative of nation states, but beginning in Afghanistan, war was privatized, allowing small groups to engage in low intensity conflicts that created terror at home and abroad..  Sixteen thousand Arabs trained in Afghanistan, becoming a killing machine that would inflict this privatized war on the rest of the world.  
    Worse to finance this training, the CIA encouraged the growth of heroin for sale on the world market.  By t1989 when the soviets finally exited the country, Afghanistan had become the world’s largest producer of opium and processed heroin.  Indeed, the Taliban grew in popularity when it offered protection from these newly powerful drug lords.

The End of the Cold War

    Is the Cold War really over then?  The answer depends on why it began and what it was about.  If the Cold War was ideological, as the Cold Warriors had always maintained, then as the Soviet Union abandoned totalitarian communism, the Cold War is over.   If it was a power struggle driven by geo-politial concerns the way the realists argued, then as the Soviet Union disappeared, the Cold War was over.  Most power rivalries end because of the rise of a third power dangerous to both.  Gorbachev called this the “Martian scenario,” meaning that even at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union would have worked together to defeat a common enemy.  There were plenty of such threats for the two superpowers to deal with: the rise of a reunited Germany caused alarm in Moscow after the Germans had invaded twice in this century; the growing economic strength of China and Japan threatened both American and Russian well-being; the proliferation off nuclear weapons in the hands of unstable states like Pakistan and India threatened world peace; and the rise of Arab fundamentalism directed against both superpowers threatened the secular states both Americans and Russians had developed.
    The Cold War could also end for, to a great degree, both the United States and the Soviet Union got much of what they wanted.  Russia had access to warm water ports in the east and west. Russian war ships even helped patrol the Persian Gulf during the Iraq war.  Western Europe did not appear to be belligerent, so keeping Eastern Europe as a buffer against invasion was no longer necessary.  Most important, Russia was treated as a world class power, if for no other reason than her nuclear weapons.  And these weapons gave her the ability to defend herself in a way she had never been able to before.  The United States succeeded in keeping the Soviet Union from expanding beyond her borders; the Russians did not control the Persian Gulf, Suez Canal or the Mediterranean. In fact, the Soviet Union herself broke up. Europe was peaceful and open to American goods, as was Russia.  Trade was free to pass on the high seas, and the vital cinch points were open or under American control.
       As the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union’s domestic economy collapsed.  She not only had no money for overseas adventures, she did not have enough to pay pensions and salaries.  Suffering from a 0% growth rate, the Soviet economy was producing shoes no one would wear, and steel nobody would use. Worse, the Chinese threat remained along a long, vulnerable border, and China had her own nuclear weapons she herself had invented, as Eastern Europe never had.  Soviet culture lacked intellectual challenge, producing a society of engineers rather than scientists.  Even well-educated people lacked the means to communicate quickly, especially by computers which were few and far between. The energy crisis of the 1970s, when the price of oil shot up following the Yom Kipper war, had temporarily masked some of the weaknesses of the Soviet economy, but the consumer driven economy of the 70s and 80s exposed the severe limitations of a command economy; central planners simply could not respond quickly enough to shifts in supply and demand when thousands of products were in play.  The Soviets faced the renewed nationalism of the Baltic states, Azerberjan, and Chechniya, just to mention a few of the flash points. The Russian and later Soviet empires had been held together by force, and when the force was removed, the empires collapsed. A collapsed economy and reduced expectations placed enormous strain on Soviet society which saw a rise in alcoholism which afflicted 35% of the working class, one-third of the Soviet Union living below the poverty line, increased infant mortality and skyrocketing juvenile delinquency.  Average life span actually decreased.
    The United States after the Cold War shared many of the Soviet Union’s woes.  The economy was crippled by a huge internal and foreign debt, one trillion dollars created under Reagan alone.  Our European partners were stronger together than the United States was alone, and in 1992 created a huge free trade zone in Europe from which we were excluded.  The Japanese, without American defense costs, were a potent trading rival, and the so-called Pacific rim “little tigers” like Singapore and Indonesia increasingly competed with American companies.  And American society too had huge strains like AIDS, skyrocketing medical costs, juvenile delinquency, and decaying inner cities.  The gap between the “haves” and have-nots” expanded to a worrisome degree.  The difference between the United States and the Soviet Union was first, a willingness to admit the problem, and second, a willingness to try solutions.
    Many opportunities presented themselves as the Cold War ground to a halt.  Reduction of arms should save some money, especially since even conventional forces, the most expensive form of defense, will be cut as well.  Whole weapons systems will be scrapped, and nuclear weapons will be used as originally intended, as defensive rather than first strike systems.  Perhaps more cooperation is possible on global problems like the environment and global warming.  A reduction in the conflict between the superpowers also reduces the threat of  unintentional war between them; no trip wires exist, like Berlin, where fully armed Russian and American soldiers stared across one thin wall.  Perhaps more money will be available for African and Latin American development as the Europeans provide for their own defense and American defense expenditures go down. The Middle East is no longer a place for superpower rivalries, making possible settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute.
    But while opportunities exist, so do risks.  Both the United States and the Soviet Union emphasized security over solvency, and now both are deeply in debt, reducing either’s ability or willingness to extend foreign aid.  The superpowers did keep the peace in Europe for 50 years, the longest uninterrupted peace in European history; when the exhausted superpowers could no longer control their allies, war broke out in Bosnia, a war the Europeans were unable to bring to an end themselves.  A reunited Germany could become a threat to European peace in the long run.  Germany has yet to solve the problems resulting from her absorption of the East, but once reconstituted, Germany presents the same challenge which caused World Wars I and II: a united country, sitting athwart the northern plain of Europe, with the ability to feed herself and a viable industrial revolution.  As superpower arsenals go down in response to their economic difficulties, the gap between them and other powers is not so large as to compel others to obey. Saddam’s army, for example, was almost the same size as the American one, and his was concentrated in one area while that of the United States spread out throughout the world; had it not been for Bush’s ability to create a coalition to fight the Guld War, taking advantage of many countries’ armed forces, the outcome of the first Gulf War might have been different.  Volatile areas of the world had hidden behind Cold War rhtoric, but once that rhetoric was removed, the deep-seated problems remained.  The Cold War had done little to address the Arab-Israeli dispute, nationalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, or pervasive anti-Semitism.  When the Soviet Union herself broke up in 1991, the question arose as to who would control the nuclear missiles in the former republics.  Would the Azerbajanis now have nuclear missiles to use against their traditional enemy, the Armenians?  
    Lord Palmerston declared “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies.  Our interests are eternal and those intereets it is our duty to follow.”  National interest does not shift from one crisis to another or from one administration to another. The United States is interested in international equilbrium, an equilibrium the Soviet Union threatened, because stability overseas means fewer wars into which the United States can be sucked.  The American concern for democratic governments is based on the belief that democratic regimes tend to have foreign policies less likely to upset the balance of power and draw the United States into war.  America’s desire to open trade worldwide and in essence step into British shoes after World War II to do so was not only about a search for markets and profits.  Americans also believed that capitalism produced wealth, which in turn prevented wars into which the United States might be sucked.  It is in the best interests of the United States to avoid war overseas and thus to prevent situations from occurring which threaten the outbreak of war.
    The Soviets in the Cold War period were prepared to create wars overseas, such as the invasions of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Afghanistan, and were certainly willing to create situations in which war threatened, like the Cuban Missile crisis.  But after 1990, the Soviet Union was in no position to create such wars, because she had so much to lose and was so internally weak.  The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 rendered her warmaking capability even more tenuous.
     The threat in the post-Cold War period comes not from the Soviet Union, but from others with less to lose like Iraq or those who might be economically stronger, like Germany and Japan.  The Soviet Union was at least a legitimate state uninterested in suicide.  The new enemies abroad are not legitimate states in any sense  and are willing to accept suicide.  Foreign and military policy designed to deal with traditional states are proving inadequae to deal with these new threats. The end of the Cold War, therefore, did not necessarily mean peace, and we may yet look back on the fifties and sixties as a halcyon period when at least there was only one enemy and we knew who it was.