Winning the War; Losing the Peace: When Victory is Tantamount to Defeat
by
James D. Hardy, Jr., PhD, Leonard Hochberg, PhD and Geoffrey Sloan, PhD
Introduction
The Twentieth Century War began on August 1, 1914 and ended on November 8, 1989.[1] The War began with Paris streets filled with people who watched with increasingly sober silence as drummers beat the rappel calling reservists to the colors and billstickers posted Mobilization Générale notices on walls and kiosks. The War began with the British Foreign Minister watching streetlamps come on in the dusk of August 3, 1914 and telling a colleague that the lamps were going out all over Europe. The War began with military pomp as the Kaiser told uhlans cantering down Unter de Linden that they would be home victorious before Christmas. The War began in foreboding and exultation.[2]
It ended the same way. It ended on television, with joyous Germans climbing on the Berlin Wall and chipping away pieces of it. It ended with police officials of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) burning files in an effort to conceal the monstrous cruelty and immorality of their regime. It ended with the slow disintegration of the Soviet Union, amidst hopes for a freer world, all symbolized by tearing down the statues of Lenin across eleven time zones. The War ended with the sense of a new world at dawn, just as it had begun with seeing an old world at dusk. It had been seventy-five years from foreboding tinged with desperate hope to fervent hope tinged with a dark sense that it all might yet fall apart.[3]
The world had fallen apart once, after all. What the Twentieth Century War meant was described by Winston Churchill in his speech at Westminster College in Fulton, MO on March 5, 1946.[4] Best known is his warning of the emergence of the Cold War, that “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”[5] But the main thrust of the speech was to warn America to remain armed and strong to deter evils of “War and Tyranny,” which come from the Soviet Union. Peace through strength, both moral and military, was Churchill’s basic theme. He stated that the “sinews of peace” were needed to deter Soviet fascism; he knew that the war was not over. He promised that victory would insure that “…the high-roads of the future will be clear, not only for us but for all, not only for our time, but for a century to come.”[6]
The speech, given near the mid-point of the seventy-five years of the Twentieth-Century War, touched upon all of the issues at stake in that War. Geopolitical relationships, economic growth or stagnation, human rights, intellectual and political freedom, these were all on the table in 1946, as they had been in World War II and before, and would be the theme of the Cold War already underway. “War and Tyranny” were the great evils Churchill discussed and these remained so until 1989. A single address had captured the Twentieth Century War as a conflict, basically, about the varieties of freedom.
And this time, unlike 1918 and 1945, freedom was actually victorious, and diminished shooting did not usher in a new form of continuing war. Victory was greeted not with exultation, except in Berlin, but with relief. At last, it was over. The West had hung in there and kept the faith, in spite of plenty of discouraging words.[7] Most of these words came from pundits and politicians of the left, who had spent the generations between Versailles and the fall of the Berlin Wall assuring everyone that free markets (which were socially immoral) and free speech (which merely allowed the politically incorrect to be heard) could never vanquish Marxist ideals.[8] But the free men and free markets did prevail and this added a bit of bewilderment and bemusement to the relief in victory. For the moment it was easy to forget that “Victory is a dangerous opportunity.”[9]
After Victory: The 90s
There was one thing all could accept on November 8, 1989. The West had won. George F. Kennan in his 1947 article in Foreign Affairs had been right.[10] The Soviet Union had imploded, beginning perhaps in the early 1980s and came completely apart in the years 1989-1991.[11] In stunning defiance of Marxist ideological hogwash, the Soviet Union dissolved into its national and tribal components, not into economic or industrial ones.
The Soviet system fell apart in other ways as well. Partly, it was intellectual. The defeat of Soviet-style fascism threw Marxist ideology into (temporary) disrepute, and (for a time) the bewildered left even thought that free-market, limited government democracy, although basically a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” might still have virtues. Partly, it was geopolitical. Sir Halford J. Mackinder[12] repeatedly warned that a recently unified Eurasian territorial-administrative “heartland” threatened the political and economic existence of maritime-commercial societies everywhere. Nicholas J. Spykman,[13] who responded to Mackinder’s warnings by claiming that the maritime-commercial “rimland” was inherently stronger than the heartland, was proved right after all.[14] Partly it was economic. The Soviet neomercantilist and collectivist command economy had proven, over a couple of generations, to be an utter failure. Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman had been right. Victory was also diplomatic, as the western alliances held amidst defeat in China, retreat in Vietnam[15] and stalemate in Europe, a cold version of the trenches in the Great War. Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and William Casey had been right to persevere in the hard times and apply pressure when possible.[16] If not quite a triumph of civilizations, victory in the Cold War was certainly a triumph of a (classical) liberal and civilized way of life over fascism.[17]
In the decade of the 1990s, there was a sustained effort to move beyond the celebration of victory and to define and organize the post-war world. President George H.W. Bush set the tone. He refused to gloat and set about organizing a system of alliances and collective security that he called a “New World Order.”[18] This did not quite catch the popular tone, though he was right in terms of the diplomatic reality. Robert Kaplan was slightly off key as well, though his article “The Coming Anarchy” in the 1994 Atlantic Monthly accurately described the chaos and carnage in a world of failed states.[19] Samuel P. Huntington was entirely correct about a long-standing and on-going “Clash of Civilizations?” in his 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, but the public was not enchanted. After seventy-five years of war people were not looking for another century of conflict, this time between Islam and Christianity.[20] Being right is not the same as hitting the right note.[21]
A public relations success was not impossible, and Thomas Friedman, in The Lexus and the Olive Tree,[22] succeeded. Friedman described the post-war world in terms of political economy, not geopolitics or cultural politics or political stability. His was a more optimistic view of things, and it suited a brief period of peace. Friedman understood as well as anybody that the world after 1989-91 differed from the bipolar Cold War. Like most, he thought of the new era of peace in macro-political terms, a peace among the Great Powers and a sharp decline in the threat of high intensity conflicts. Again, like most, Friedman did not overlook differing cultural values and attitudes (a lá Huntington), nor did he argue that the micro-politics of terrorism, guerilla war and ethnic strife in failed states (a lá Kaplan) had ended in 1989. Friedman did suggest that the dynamics of the new globalized economic world would overcome the centrifugal forces of regional cultural conservatism and local political collapse. Globalization, and its attendant political and economic “golden strait-jacket” would be too powerful and alluring to resist. There would be backlash, of course, but it would, over the long haul, fail.
He posited two attractive reasons why: first, the McDonald’s Theory of Peace. There had never (as of 1999) been a war between two countries that had McDonalds. McDonalds was attracted by political stability and increased political stability by building a market to supply the restaurant. Over the years, there would certainly be more globalized firms such as McDonalds, each with supply chains reaching into the countryside of previously isolated regions, thereby enhancing the wealth of those who were sufficiently entrepreneurial to reorganize production for a modern market.[23] Second, the five gas stations. The American model of the gas station, low prices and self-service, would ultimately prevail over the third world model of twenty-five related employees working in a gas station with no gas and where nothing worked, or the French model of high prices and no service, or the Russian model of low prices and no gas (all having been sold on a black market) or the Japanese model of high prices, lavish service and a long time spent filling up. Efficiency counts in a globalized world.
The basic conclusion that Friedman implicitly drew was that the globalized world would become more Americanized and that America, with its open and multi-ethnic society, was best suited for future success. This was most comforting. It helped immensely to sell the book – a best seller – and the idea of increasingly peaceful globalization. Geopolitical conflict would not vanish altogether, but would be less and less a threat to peace. Human rights and democracy would not prevail everywhere at once, but they would spread because of their obvious advantages in living, working and governing in a globalized world. Free markets would gradually replace the governmental “industrial policies,” a common theme of fascist regimes of all flavors – Marxist, Communist, Corporatist, etc.
Finally, Friedman seemed to be right. The West had won the seventy-five year war, and the spoils of victory should include a world based on western values of human rights, democracy, peace, private property and free markets. In the 1990s this appeared to be true. A globalized economy was developing rapidly. It was increasingly governed (though not in Africa, the Balkans, the Stans, and other unfortunate areas) by the rule of law. American-led globalization surmounted the Mexican fiscal crisis and the larger Asian fiscal crisis of 1998-2000. China, India, Brazil, and even the former countries of the Warsaw Pact were becoming more prosperous and freer than they had been in 1988. It was not that President Bush, Huntington or Kaplan were wrong; quite often, they were right, each and all. But they had described only a part of the post-war world, the part that remained relatively impervious to or isolated from economic globalization.[24] Friedman had described a westernizing post-war world in a coherent and comprehensive manner. In doing so, Thomas Friedman had described the nature, extent and prospects of victory, as well as why almost everyone in the West was cheered by that victory.
Twenty Years On
It is now 2010. The War has been over for two decades. And we can look back on the ideas and events of the post-war world and re-evaluate it. Did winning the war mean winning the post-war peace? If the geopolitical balances and relationships favored the victorious United States in 1990, do they still favor America today? And, have public expectations changed? Globalization and democracy for all beckoned in 1990 just as Churchill had predicted nearly a half-century before. In 2010, what does the future appear to hold?
We begin with geopolitics. The most significant development in the new millennium in that arena has been the formation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), founded in 2001, and tying China and Russia into an open-ended and evolving relationship. With the formation of the SCO, the Eurasian heartland first characterized by Sir Halford J. Mackinder and dominated by Russia or by Russia and Germany, is now on the verge of being reorganized by Russia and China. The SCO is sufficiently formalized in its structure to permit joint Sino-Russian military maneuvers, and sufficiently open to include associated members, observers, and sympathizers. These include some of the Central Asian “Stans,” notably Kazakhstan, with its energy resources, as well as Iran, also rich in hydrocarbons. Russia and China are the Big Two powers, with China – the rapidly growing power – the senior partner.
In geopolitical terms, the SCO seeks in effect to overturn Spykman’s prediction that the North Atlantic powers allied to the Eurasian rimland will emerge victorious over the heartland powers. The SCO stretches from the East China Sea to the Polish Border and from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean. It has established footholds in the Middle East (Iran) and the sub-continent (India), thereby potentially securing the long-desired victory in what amounts to a revived Great Game.[25] Perhaps Sir Halford Mackinder was right after all. Control of the Eurasian heartland may now at last mean control of global geopolitics.
With the notable exception of India, all states in the SCO sphere share two fundamental characteristics: they are fascist or authoritarian regimes, and they all dislike, to varying degrees, western policies on trade, finance, intellectual property, and human rights. Again, with the notable exception of India, they all, emphatically, wish to sever, if they can, the western conjunction between economic development and civil society with its rule of law. The SCO group wishes to be rich, but they do not want to be Western. They firmly reject Thomas Friedman’s implication in The Lexus and the Olive Tree that the imperatives of economic development include Westernization, meaning a free society and, in the case of the Islamic adherents, the emancipation of women.
It would be harsh to suggest, and we do not, that the SCO emerged primarily or even largely from American policy errors. The East, demographically, has always been larger than the West, and victory in the Cold War did nothing to change that. Western global dominance, from imperialism (from the 15th century on) to the World Trade Organization, had been based on technological, economic, and military superiority, and that would not last forever. That the geopolitical challenge from non-Western powers came after the end of the Cold War is hardly surprising. It is after all one of the main elements of Friedman’s thesis.
We suggest instead that the American policy response to the SCO has been pretty good, with the George W. Bush administration seeking openings to India, supplemented by increased diplomatic support for Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. The Obama administration has sustained these efforts, though on occasion it has been so preoccupied with domestic politics and by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that ties with India have been allowed to languish.[26] This neglect, should it continue, portends disaster. India is by far the most important initiative and moving to close the Indo-American suspicion from the Cold War may enable India to stand up to the periodic bullying in which China engages and may greatly strengthen America’s position in Asia.[27]
The area where American policy in Asia is a failure in 2010, and for several years previously, is with Iran.[28] The Iranian effort to obtain nuclear weapons, opposed by the West, has been unrelenting and is reportedly near success. Sanctions have been an empty threat, not deterring the drive toward nuclear weapons. Serious sanctions, on gasoline and financial services, will not alter nor delay Iran’s nuclear push, but they will force Iran to cooperate even more closely with China and Russia. There appears to be no effective policy toward Iran. The Islamic Republic is going nuclear; it is bitterly hostile to the West; it sponsors terrorism; and, with each threat of new sanctions, it is driven closer to the SCO; none of these things is desirable and there seems to be no way to prevent any of them. The search for the least worst solution, which is what foreign policy usually is, has yielded nothing with respect to Iran.[29] If US efforts to instigate ethno-cultural revolts in Iran ultimately succeed and Iran becomes a failed state, terrorists could get control over weapons of mass destruction and the long-distance delivery systems that are being developed. That cannot be a good thing.
America’s Spykman-inspired policy has enjoyed success for more than half a century, beginning with the E.U., Turkey and Israel in the West, through the hydrocarbon kingdoms of the Persian Gulf, now potentially through India to Malaysia, and the offshore islands in the East. But Iran remains a persistent problem and a wedge for the SCO to dominate the oil and gas of the Caspian basin, which the West needs. Moreover, a hostile Iran degrades western influence in the Eastern Mediterranean (via ties to Hezbollah and Hamas) and the Persian Gulf.[30] The Iranian hole in the Western-oriented Eurasian rimland is a big problem getting steadily bigger. Whatever America does or appears likely to do in Iran has failed, and this has created genuine foreboding in Israel and America.[31]
Nevertheless, even if the Iranian regime should disintegrate, and be replaced by a regime friendly to the west and western values, a virtually inconceivable outcome, Western problems in the Eurasian rimland would not disappear. Lurking behind the Iranian headlines is the problem of failed states. As Robert Kaplan has been proclaiming since his Atlantic Monthly article “The Coming Anarchy” in 1994, the primary source of international conflict, terrorism and instability lies in failed states. These include most of the sub-Saharan African regimes, much of Latin America – which is once again experimenting with various leftist gimmicks – and most of the Islamic world, including the nuclear state of Pakistan. Failed states appear on the world map, infest the United Nations, issue stamps, govern by violence and conspiracy, and are usually kleptocracies. These states are not a problem for the SCO, since neomercantilist economies and authoritarian governments are less interested in international stability than are the states of the West and the maritime-commercial rimland.[32] So the American government must cope (for the E.U. is morally too weak), and in the last decade America has been inept and awkward. True enough, Iraq is turning out much better than anyone had a right to expect, but it is still a borderline failed state. As for Afghanistan, it is a broken society in a failed state and the current administration’s half-hearted efforts will, in all likelihood, fail.[33] The only issue is how badly.
Still, even with the emergence of the SCO, and problems with Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other failed states, and the need to import energy, the American geopolitical position twenty years after victory retains substantial elements of strength. It doesn’t feel that way; and we do not often dwell on our strengths, but they exist. True, America is no longer the only Great Power, an inevitable development; yet American military capabilities continue to remain unmatched by any adversary or alliance of adversaries. Also true, looking around a world of failed and fractious states, the dismal swamp of worry is not unjustified. But, again and also true, given the fiascos in the greater Middle East, things could be much, much worse.
The deep sense of geopolitical failure has grown steadily gloomier since the mismanagement of the liberation/occupation of Iraq that had to be experienced to be believed.[34] It now seems incredible, and it should have seemed so then, that Muslim Iraqis would receive Christian conquerors as liberators. We were fortunate indeed that Iraqis turned primarily to inter-denominational butchery in preference to guerilla warfare against us. But the violence in Iraq was bad enough, and it was accompanied at home by the steady decline of support for the adventure in building “democracy” in the Islamic Middle East. And we are still there, seven years after the mission was accomplished.
Beyond Iraq lies the rest of South Asia, from the Persian Gulf to the Indus Valley, and we have a dispiriting lack of strategic aims in that entire area. Even success in those places seems, not unreasonably, like failure. But the sense of failure and pessimism is greater than it ought to be. In the first place, and this is policy in a minor key, if we cannot fix Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, no one can, and likely, after our expensive blunders, those who will come after us will do even worse.[35]
In a major key, involving Great Powers, where genuine concern is warranted, the SCO seems, in reality, a modest threat for the foreseeable future. Given the overwhelming military might of the United States as demonstrated in the Gulf Wars, the basic geopolitical deal, bringing the heartland together in a Mackinder alliance, seems a reasonable, if not inevitable, geopolitical response to that might. The basic SCO deal is clear. Russia supports China in the international arena, and Russia gets to keep Siberia,[36] at least most of it on a formal basis, even as Chinese migrants settle there. The hangers-on, such as the “Stans” and Iran, get some insulation from the pollution of Westernization, which many, perhaps most, Muslims see as damaging to Islam. The only cost is selling their natural resources to a resurgent China at below market value. But Russia is, and will remain as it was in Czarist times, a kleptocracy, using last year’s technology. China has environmental problems, including desertification and erosion resulting in dust storms that have begun to render Beijing unhealthy. India is a democracy and, like Brazil, is better off ultimately siding with the West than against it. As for Iran, already in a shambles socially and economically, the more it confronts the West, the closer it must move to the SCO; the closer to the SCO, the more concessions the Russians and the Chinese can extract because Iran has nowhere else to go. All of them, Russia, Iran, the “Stans,” and potential allies such as India and perhaps Indonesia clearly understand a bitter truth: if you live in East Asia, you can either work with America and the West, or learn to love the Chinese.[37]
But this is the good news, that is, news that sounds worse than it is. If the American geopolitical and geo-strategic position retains most of its post-war strength, the same cannot be said for America’s geo-economic position. Here, after Hiroshima, there had been nothing but success. Between 1944 and 1947, the world outside the Iron Curtain accepted the American world economic policies, formulated at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944 and Dumbarton Oaks in 1945 and institutionalized in the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the Marshall Plan. In 1945, the United States produced half the world’s economic product, an inherently unstable situation economically and politically. American policy was designed to assist by aid and trade the economic recovery of the rest of the world, minus the Soviet bloc which opted out of Western free markets and free trace policies in 1948. From that day to this American policy has worked extraordinarily well. America has grown economically, and the rest of the world has grown faster. Even the former Sino-Soviet bloc (minus Cuba and North Korea) has signed on. The success of American geo-economic policy reached to the Eurasian rimland and beyond – where overland transportation costs were low, tariffs reduced, private property introduced, and markets freed up after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Over the course of a few years, 3 billion (with a “b”) new producers and consumers came online. So, what was the problem? How could America’s geo-economic position fall apart?
The problem, from the American viewpoint, is that things have worked out too well. Recovery in Europe from the Marshall Plan (1947) to the Common Market (1957) was rapid and robust. The Korean War soon had the same effect on Japan, which became a forward economic base of production and transshipment for the war effort.[38] By the late 1950s, the United States was beginning to run a trade deficit, soon to become a current account deficit. In the post-Cold War period (after 1989) rapid and sustained growth continued and expanded its shift to the developing world, first to the small “Asian Tigers,” then the emerging Great Powers, China and India. Non-Western economic growth was nothing