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The Cold War saw a generation of Americans and Europeans came of age facing the very possibility that their world could quite literally be obliterated in a thermonuclear war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
By the late ‘80s, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had eased the danger by negotiating sharp reductions in their country’s massive nuclear arsenals, and the fall of the Berlin Wall put to rest the fear of being obliterated by the other’s missiles. But if the nuclear arms race had largely been a two-horse affair – with Washington and Moscow largely restricting the nuclear-armed club to a handful of countries, declared (Britain, France and China) and undeclared (Israel, South Africa, India and Pakistan).
But the post-Cold War has seen a proliferation of proliferation threats — the more alarmist (and, perhaps, less plausible) being the idea of non-state actors acquiring a nuclear device, but the more alarming in the long term being the possibility of new nation-states acquiring strategic nuclear capacity – and regional conflicts escalating to the point of nuclear exchange. Not to be outdone, though, both Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama have both ordered large upgrades of their nuclear fleets. South Africa remains the only country ever known to have dismantled and destroyed nuclear weapons.
The “military industrial complex” of which President Eisenhower had warned Americans of upon leaving office had grown mighty corpulent by the time the fall of the Wall ostensibly deprived America of the external military “threat” used to justify the colossal U.S. buildup. The U.S. spent around $400 billion on its military in 1989, a figure that dropped a little during the mid 1990s. In the decade that followed 9/11 it surged steadily upward, passing $800 billion in 2010 and for the next two years, before dropping to around $760 billion.
The 1991 Gulf War and assorted regional conflicts helped fill arms industry coffers, as did the case made by lobbyists for the multi-billion missile defense system. Even though the U.S. had no peer competitor in any arms race, Washington kept pouring tens of billions of dollars into ever more sophisticated combat systems. The expansion of NATO eastward into the former Soviet satellite states and the U.S.S.R. itself brought tens of billions more government-subsidized contracts to U.S. arms manufactures. Russia’s resurgence as a bare-knuckle geopolitical player looking to recover lost ground has created a new selling point for arms industry lobbyists. Even U.S. efforts to persuade partners to take a greater share of the combat load in campaigns like the one against ISIL in Syria and Iraq ultimately boosts America's arms industry — after all, many of those partner countries are also buying U.S. weapons.
Although non-violent revolution was hardly unprecedented before 1989, seizing state power from autocratic regimes had typically involved some degree of violence. But the events of 1989 produced one of history’s most successful periods of non-violent revolution. Many of the leaders of the civil disobedience movements that broke Moscow's hold on Eastern Europe recognized that violence was the terrain on which the state was strongest, and believed that the fall of the communist order did not require the violence that had first brought it to power in Russia in 1917. Lech Walesa in Poland and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia had successfully challenged Soviet rule by tapping into strategies previously utilized by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. which asserted that power of rulers ultimately rested upon the obedience of their subjects, particularly those in uniform – and that pressing the issue by breaking the law peacefully could more effectively overturn the status quo than utilizing revolutionary violence. The success of what Havel called the "Velvet Revolution" inspired similar movements across the world, and enabled Serbs to bring down Slobodan Milosevic and Tunisians to oust the Ben Ali regime. But setbacks in Egypt, Syria and Ukraine also demonstrated the limits of that approach, particularly against leaders willing to use overwhelming force or mobilize popular fears.
Many Washington hawks painted the fall of the Wall, and the Soviet Union itself, as a victory for President Ronald Reagan's hawkish military spending and willingness to confront Moscow through proxy warfare in Afghanistan and through rhetorical flourishes. Indeed, Reagan's June 1987 speech in Berlin, in which he intoned, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" is seen by some in almost mythical terms as a decisive moment in the history of the Cold War, that became a reality two years later.
Reality, of course, was far more complex: The Soviet Union's collapse had been decades in the making, with the KGB having deduced by 1982 that the country's command economy was an unsustainable model. The U.S.S.R. was slowly collapsing under the weight of its own economic paralysis, and it was this reality to which Mikhail Gorbachev directed himself after assuming the Communist Party leadership in 1985 through his programs of glasnost ("openess") and perestroika ("restructuring"). The fact that the Soviet empire, and then the U.S.S.R. itself were peacefully dismantled did owe much to Reagan — who established an unprecedented level of dialogue with the Soviet leadership, and who ordered vast cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal in conjunction with equivalent Soviet moves negotiated with Moscow in order to deescalate tensions. One reason for the peaceful outcome to the breach of the wall was that Reagan, and his successor, President George H.W. Bush, diminished the sense of an outside military threat to the U.S.S.R., which had enabled Gorbachev to restrain hawks on his own side.
Post-Soviet Russia was ruled, until 2000, by President Boris Yeltsin, a figure so pliant in the face of Western pressure and so dependent on the financial backing of a handful of oligarchs that he epitomized Moscow’s weakness amid the aftershocks of the Soviet collapse. Vladimir Putin set out to change that, taking power in 2000 with a nationalist agenda to recover ground lost to the West, consolidate authoritarian power and bring the oligarchs back under the thumb of the Kremlin.
The geopolitics of Putinism was most dramatically illustrated in the 2008 military operation that put paid to Georgia’s hopes of joining NATO, and in this year’s confrontation in Ukraine. Putin’s agenda – reflective of the consensus in Russia’s security establishment, and enabled by the recovery of the country’s economy has a result of surging oil prices that coincided with his tenure – involved reasserting Russian power in its neighborhood, and beyond. Seeing Western influence as its prime adversary, Putin’s Russia is promoting regional economic and strategic alliances to counter U.S. influence and challenge Washington, further away from Russia’s borders – by, for example, supporting President Bashar Al-Assad in Syria’s civil war.
Far from resurrecting communism, Putin, himself a former KGB officer has tried to build a Russia based on nationalist traditionalism and hostility to Western values. “Putin,” writes David Remnick, “has unleashed an ideology of ressentiment … chorused by those who, in 1991, despaired of the loss not of Communist ideology but of imperial greatness.”
For Putin, the dispute over Ukraine is at core an issue about a geopolitical tug of war that preserves Russian honor and interests, and reverses the defeats suffered in the Yeltsin years.
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