Of course this is hardly an endorsement of any type of dictatorship. I believe Churchill’s famous phrase: “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” But it partly explains why the former republics of the USSR have struggled so badly and why the regimes of Cuba and North Korea have proven so durable. It is the difference between people resenting that they are not free and people believing they do not deserve freedom.
The year 1992 saw the beginning of a modest debate over what the new world order should look like. It was no longer split between two rival superpowers. Was it a unipolar world where the United States, with most of Europe in tow, would set the agenda and enforce its will? Or was it a multipolar or nonpolar world, with no center of moral gravity? The US, with its massive military, enormous economy, and lack of any political opposition, was the de facto global hegemon, whether it wanted to embrace the role or not. The real question was how it would use this influence.
In 2015, after two exhausting and mismanaged wars, a humbling financial crisis, the rapid rise of China, and America’s apparent impotence in various global hotspots, it’s easy to forget just how dominant the United States was in the 1990s. In 1992, the US economy of $6.5 trillion was nearly double Japan’s, triple Germany’s, and thirteen times larger than China’s. Russia barely made it into the top twenty, where it would stay until the price of oil shot up enough to push it into the top ten. The balance in military spending and capability was even more tilted toward the US and NATO in the 1990s, as it was revealed that the fabled Soviet military machine was as antiquated and feeble as the rest of its economy. China’s relatively small military budget wouldn’t take off until the 2000s.
Even more importantly, victory in the Cold War provided the United States and the rest of the free world with ideological supremacy. Democracy and capitalism had triumphed, totalitarianism and socialism had lost. Again, this all seems obvious and inevitable today, but the ideology of Communism was a serious challenge for many decades in nearly every country in the world. With the collapse of the USSR, the argument was over. Even twenty-five years later, most outbreaks of socialist rhetoric are limited to populist would-be autocrats keen to redistribute wealth to their cronies and with stagnant economies dependent on natural resources.
The Bush team had already begun rhetorical disarmament from Reagan’s unapologetic American exceptionalism and moral leadership. America’s reach and power flashed briefly in the first Gulf War, although even there Bush went to great lengths to make stopping Saddam Hussein’s rampage sound like a pragmatic move by a broad coalition. Bush did speak boldly and eloquently on the importance of American leadership, however. He later wrote about the need for “a new domestic consensus for the American role in the world” to avoid isolationism and protectionism.
Bush continued:
The present international scene, turbulent though it is, is about as much of a blank slate as history ever provides, and the importance of American engagement has never been higher. If the United States does not lead, there will be no leadership. It is our great challenge to learn from this bloodiest century in history. If we fail to live up to our responsibilities, if we shirk the role which only we can assume, if we retreat from our obligation to the world into indifference, we will, one day, pay the highest price once again for our neglect and shortsightedness.
Bravo! This passage approaches the urgency and clarity of Reagan, if not the charisma. Unfortunately, Bush said these inspiring and prescient words in his 1998 book with Scowcroft and not while he was in office. This concluding section of A World Transformed likely reveals Bush’s regrets about not pressing this role harder himself as president.
He had passed on the golden opportunity to remove Saddam from power and punish him for his attack on Kuwait. Along with condemning Iraqis to another decade of terror and oppression, it sent a message to other aspiring conquerors. In the summer of 1992, we heard Western politicians’ calls to bring the Yugoslavian dictator Slobodan Milosevic before an international court for his aggression in Croatia and Bosnia. How, when Saddam was still alive and in command?
Which brings us back to Yugoslavia. There, superficially, everything appeared to be clear. Direct American interests were not affected, so there was no reason to send troops. But Bush, whose blind support of the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia invigorated Belgrade’s confidence that it could risk military action, forgot that each innocent victim of the war weakened democracy and lent new power to waning totalitarianism. If, in an era of global military domination by a democratic superpower, we could passively witness the revival of Nazi practices-concentration camps and ethnic cleansing-it meant that Bush’s talk of a “new world order” was empty demagoguery aimed at a naive domestic audience.
Bush played on the fear of a prolonged Vietnam-style involvement in Yugoslavia, ignoring a fundamental change in the world scene. By that point there was no Soviet threat to back up Yugoslavia, so Bush could rapidly have affected events with much less force than would have been needed in the past. As was only demonstrated years later, after many tens of thousands had died, NATO air strikes were enough to undermine the determination of the “Greater Serbian” forces. The destruction by air of Serbian heavy equipment required Belgrade to face a war conducted on equal terms with Bosnia and Croatia. But Bush showed that rote support for “UN policy” meant more to him than saving tens of thousands of lives, and more than presenting a strong stance against aggression.
Yugoslavia also revealed the need for a new policy for the new post-Cold War era, and that the Bush administration had failed to imagine such a policy. When Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger visited his old friend Milosevic in Belgrade in February 1990, he was shocked to find there was no common ground to be found. There was so much good news coming from Europe at the time that the Balkan powder keg was pushed to the background even after Eagleburger returned from his trip warning that “it’s much worse than anybody thought and it’s going to be much bloodier than we thought.”
Bush quickly lost the chance to make amends in a second term thanks to an American electorate that turned its back on foreign policy in the blink of an eye. He lost to a man with no foreign policy experience, a man whose slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” efficiently discarded foreign policy and the Cold War from the campaign. (Third-party candidate Ross Perot syphoning his votes away didn’t help Bush either.) Bush was certainly no Winston Churchill, but the way he was turned out of office after the end of the Cold War echoes the way British voters quickly turned against Churchill after he led the nation to victory in World War II.
I was then, as I am now, an advocate for the use of every available tool to stop aggressors like Hussein and Milosevic, including military intervention. In this I have been consistently on the side of those who have suffered from violence and against those who spilled blood first, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. My sympathies were therefore clearly on the side of the beleaguered Bosnians and Croatians, despite Russia’s long-standing support for Serbian nationalism. From 1993 to 1995 I gave a series of charity events to draw attention to and to raise funds for Croatian and Bosnian refugees, including a simultaneous exhibition in the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo in July 1994.