Living without External Threat

As I recall, Dean Acheson called this early period after the war, and his involvement in that process, "present at the creation." Are our leaders today present at the creation of a new world order, do you think?

They may well be, but they have no idea of what they're creating at the moment. Mr. Acheson did have some idea of what he saw himself personally as creating, which may have been a slight exaggeration of his own individual role. There were several creators, but he clearly was one of them. There's a general sense out there now that, yes, we're coming to the end of the Cold War period, that there's something new out there that's developing, but I don't see anybody who has a comparably Kennanesque or Achesonian vision of what this is at the moment.

Part of our problem, in a way, is Gorbachev. If you look at his policies and this original formulation by Kennan that we just discussed, many of the things that were our hopes, our guiding lights, seem to be in the process of coming about.

It's as if Gorbachev has read Kennan -- and I'm sure he has.

The Russians themselves will joke with you these days that "we, under Gorbachev, are mounting the most significant challenge to the strategy of containment that has every been mounted. That is, we are out to deprive you of an enemy to be contained in the first place." If you do that, what's left of the strategy of containment, if there's nothing out there to be contained? It's as if the Soviet Union has simply decided to meet our checklist of things that would be necessary to end the Cold War, the things that we specified as necessary to make containment work. It's as if they've decided to meet those check lists. Where does that leave us? It's a good question.

You're saying that having a clearly focused adversary was important for contributing to a democracy's ability to have a clear-cut strategy.

Sure. One of the things Kennan always said about Stalin was that Stalin always required an outside enemy to provide a justification for his own rule, to provide coherence, legitimacy. But I would not limit it just to Stalin under the Soviet Union. It seems to me that you could make the same argument about the United States, and about the NATO alliance in particular. That, to the extent that there's been a sense of clear and present danger out there, the consensus domestically in favor of containment, and the consensus within the alliance in favor of containment, has tended to be greater. But as that sense of clear and present danger begins to erode, then arguments about priorities, objectives, policies begin to surface, as we see very clearly right now in the NATO alliance. So, to an extent, coherence in an alliance structure, and consensus in foreign policy, does depend on a sense of threat out there.

The threat was our top priority, our top concern, and following from that was this notion that we just talked about, of building up [or] restoring alternative centers of power. What that means today is that we have created, or helped create, the competition economically that we're now confronting within centers of power like Germany and Japan.

What this is to say is simply that we're won, we've got what we wanted, and now that we have it, we're not very comfortable with it. It's what you get into over a long period of time. These ideas were formulated over four decades ago. Four decades ago, if you could have told those who were "present at the creation" that the outcome was going to be a prosperous and self-confident Western Europe, a prosperous and self-confident Japan, and a Soviet Union that was economically on the skids, they would have been delighted. They would not have wanted an American empire that would have included Japan and Western Europe as subordinate members. They might well have welcomed the possibility that NATO, at some point, has served its purpose and no longer is needed. But with the four decades of Cold War, which after all encompasses the whole lifetime [of] a whole generation of leaders, the abnormalities of that situation became so normal that now to begin to depart from them, now to begin to go back to what was on our wish list in 1947, is making people intensely uncomfortable. There is a vested interest that had accumulated in the preservation of the status quo, even though that it was a status quo that, in the context of 1947, was highly abnormal.

Looking back at this historical record and our evolving strategies of containment, would you argue that we need a vision to confront these new problems? Or can you have a brokered way of dealing with a changing world?

It depends on what the problems are and how serious they are. It's very easy to say that we need a vision. But for what? You need to have something to look at if you're going to have a vision. You have to have a problem out there to deal with, and just the day-to-day average problems that one runs into in international relations are not sufficient to provide the occasion for that kind of vision. You require a crisis, like the one that we had in 1947, or like what we had in 1940 to '41, where the security of the country really is in danger, and people have to think and they have to think fast. Those are the situations where you normally get vision beginning to emerge. Where you're dealing with routine the expectation is pretty reasonable that what you're going to get are routine policies, and not visions.

That's the situation that we're in today. We're seeing the Soviet-American relationship evolve into a situation of normality, into a more routine relationship than what we have been used to in the past with the Soviet Union. I think that's all to the good, but one price of that is that we lack, to an extent, the capacity for vision. Now the problem is to try to get some sense of what the next great crisis is going to be out there on the horizon, and to try to think ahead and think about what our "vision," in quotes, ought to be.

My own sense is that the problems that are out there are only partially likely to be problems that relate to the Russians. They're likely to relate to declining economic competitiveness, to the rise of other actors in the world system, to the changing nature of power itself in the system. But defining just precisely what they are is difficult, and until that definition comes up a little more sharply, I don't expect to see a great overarching vision comparable to that of 1947.

One of the concerns of your present research is stability of the international system. How do we draw on this record of U.S. - Soviet relations to evolve a sense of what the requirements of stability are, and what America's role should be in achieving them?

The irony in all of this, of course, is that the international system that has existed as a product of the Cold War for the last four and a half decades has been the most stable and the most durable, at least at the level of the great powers, of any in modern history, exceeding even the classical period after the Napoleonic Wars. This is why I've come to calling it the "long peace," that we need to think of the Cold War as a long peace, because historically it has been that. book cover Its very ironic that this should emerge out of what appeared to be a highly dangerous confrontation, but the fact is, it has. And the fact is, it worked better than the system that was so carefully designed at the end of World War I and the Versailles Conference, which lasted only half as long.

So, I would argue that we've had stability, we've lucked into stability or we've backed into it, for whatever reason -- nuclear weapons, prudent leadership, good luck, however you want to explain it, all this time. What we have to try to be aware of is what the components of that stability are, to what extent the end of the Cold War might actually cause them to drop away, as in some cases it might. It would be ironic if ending the Cold War should result in an increase in international instability. But I don't think that's an implausible prospect at all.

Now would this task, and these concerns, necessitate a vision by the United States if it's going to play a leading role in that process?

The United States is going to play a leading role in the process whether it has a vision or not. We're big enough. You know, sometimes if you're big, you don't necessarily have to have a vision to play a role in the process. We're big enough. But whether we play a desirable role, whether we play a role that's consistent with our interests, whether we play a role that responds to the nature of the problem, that's where the "vision thing," as President Bush likes to call it, comes in. And that is what, I think, is not yet evident, partly because, as I say, we don't yet have a clear sense of what the dangers and what threats are going to be in this new period that we seem to be moving into.

In this record that we've been looking at and that you, as a historian, have been working quite a bit on, there is often a tendency to broker ongoing interests. How do you see this as a problem in dealing with this evolving world, the extent to which parts of our bureaucracy, for example, aren't willing to accept the possibility that the Cold War is over?

What tends to happen is that it leads to mediocrity. It's a strategy of splitting the difference. If you can believe the outside reports that we've had of the strategic review that George Bush is currently undertaking, the first response from the bureaucracy was status quo plus, which was a brokered, splitting-the-difference strategy, right down the middle, with no great departures from what had been the case in the past. What that leads to is incrementalism. That means no sharp breaks, that means that you'll make a series of small decisions that may have the effect of changing something big ten years down the pike, but it won't be because you intended to change it, it'll be as a more or less accidental result of a series of small decisions along the way.

The frustration that's beginning to develop now in Washington, and particularly with the journalistic community, but also with the Russians, is that there's an asymmetry involved. There is a fundamentally new ball game going on inside the Soviet Union. The change that has taken place inside the Soviet Union in the last four years is far greater, by light years, than the change that has taken place in the preceding four decades, or even the preceding seven decades, if you want to go back to the very founding of the Bolshevik state. The sense is that, in those circumstances, with those changes taking place, we need something more than creeping incrementalism on our side. We have great opportunities that could be taken advantage of if we could define our strategy a little more clearly. The problem is that we may not be able to define a clear strategy in the absence of a clear sense of danger. What's unusual about this situation is that there's great opportunity out there; there doesn't seem to be great danger out there. It's a good situation, not a bad situation. It is a favorable situation, not one that poses an imminent sense of threat. And there's a real question, intellectually, as to whether we're capable of having a vision to respond to something like that. I hope we can.

Do you think an immediate crisis would get our juices stirring, so to speak? An economic depression, an environmental catastrophe, is that what you have in mind? Or do you have in mind an ongoing, continuous threat?

If you can use 1941 or 1947 as analogies, it would have to be something a little more specific than just a Great Depression, it would have to be something like the fall of France in 1940, or something like the perceived crisis over Greece and Turkey in 1947. Something that, even though its influence may have been exaggerated, it has the effect of shaking people up within the bureaucracy in a major way. I don't see anything like that out there this time because, again, we're dealing with a very different kind of situation. We were dealing with enemies then, perceived enemies. If the Gorbachev strategy of depriving us of an enemy continues, then that element is not going to be present, and it may be more difficult to formulate something.

The most likely two places where we might see a crisis develop that might sharpen our sense of vision or force us to choose some priorities, are [these]: one would be disarray within the NATO alliance, and there's been a lot of that in recent weeks with the debate over the modernization of the short-range nuclear forces. And if there should be an absolute turn-down of the American position on this by NATO, and if we should see the NATO countries moving off on their own at this point, that could evoke a real sense of crisis in Washington, despite the fact that, historically, that's what we wanted them to do all along. People have forgotten that.

The other possibility, it seems to me, is Eastern Europe, which strikes me as the most dangerous situation in the world today, in the sense that, as perestroika proceeds, and as liberalization and the relaxation of controls advances in the Soviet Union, these submerged nationalist tensions that are still extraordinarily strong in Eastern Europe, and even within the Soviet Union itself, within the various nationality groups in the Soviet Union, can only come to the top and become more important. That presents, of course, a painful dilemma for the Russians, but it presents a painful dilemma for us, too, in terms of what we would do. Do we favor more democracy in Eastern Europe if that means a loss of Soviet control, which might then mean an undermining of Gorbachev and a reversal of perestroika? That's a very tough one. And we don't have any very clear answers to this.

Next page: Crafting a Better Future