World Politics since 1989. Jonathan Holslag
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Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and a few havens of relative peace. It was a breath-taking joust between the United States and the Soviet Union, a clash of titans over geopolitical interests, with the Soviets seeking to expand their influence across Eurasia, and Washington seeking to stop it – a conflict over ideology, technological leadership, economic dominance, and military supremacy. It was a period of physical walls, barriers that halted both people and trade, and mental walls, separating ideas. The Cold War lasted over 40 years.
Rather suddenly, the skies cleared. In 1985, the Secretary General of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, and American President Ronald Reagan had made overtures and met for the first time in Geneva. That year also, Mikhail Gorbachev avowed that the rigid Soviet system needed openness and reform. Glasnost and perestroika became the keywords in Russian policy reform. In 1987, he allowed private ownership, followed by the relaxing of control over smaller Soviet republics in 1988, and first attempts toward democratization in 1989. That year, Soviet troops withdrew after a decade of deployment in Afghanistan. The dismantling of a bastion of authoritarianism had started.
Dictatorship was also defied in other parts of the world. In 1987, direct elections had peacefully ended a decade of military rule in South Korea. The same year, Taiwan, which already had moved toward economic openness, lifted martial law. In Singapore, strongman Lee Kuan Yew partially democratized the city state and prepared to step down. In 1989, tens of thousands of students assembled in Beijing to call for democracy. Despite brutal suppression, these Tiananmen protests made it appear that economic growth would make democratization irresistible. Also in 1989, elections ended military rule in Turkey. In Iran, Akbar Rafsanjani was elected president with an agenda of opening up, also toward the West.
Opportunity to lead
1989 and 1990 were years of excitement, of electricity in the living rooms of hundreds of millions of households when the images of the collapsing Soviet Empire reached them. The West entered a moment without peer rivals, a unipolar moment. With 6 percent of the world population, the countries around the Atlantic Basin controlled over 60 percent of the world’s economic production and trade. An average citizen here was twice as rich as a person in Russia, ten times richer than a Chinese, and 14 times wealthier than someone living in Africa or South Asia. Over 50 percent of manufacturing was located in the West. Western countries hosted all top universities and owned 60 percent of the world’s patents.3 Whether one lived in Boston, New York, London, Amsterdam, or Paris, one could see the emergence of a global elite that understood the same language, watched the same movies, and used the same brands. Its networking power, the capability of weaving large markets, was unequaled. It represented around 40 percent of the world’s shipping fleet, half of the largest multinationals, 70 percent of all large aircraft, and 90 percent of the internet traffic. At the center of this web of commerce and information sat the United States, the universal spider.
With the Soviets on the ropes, the United States was freed from its most important geopolitical concern: the menace of a Eurasian Leviathan. This geopolitical fixation had its roots far back in history, more precisely in the resistance to Great Britain as its imperial overlord. The American Declaration of Independence in 1776 was only the beginning of that struggle. In 1814, British troops burned the White House. It was this event, alongside a persistent European presence in the western hemisphere, that led to the Monroe Doctrine, prescribing the United States to keep rivals at a distance. Since then, Washington has kept a wary eye on the appearance of any Eurasian rival capable of projecting power into the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, and, hence, of menacing the American continent. This had been the case first with Great Britain in the nineteenth century, then with Germany and Japan in the early twentieth century, and subsequently with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Each time, these actors had first sprung up as Eurasian powers, forged onwards into the oceans, and extended their power to the shores of the American continent.
Hence, the United States pursued absolute security on the American continent, predominance in its flanking oceans, as well as the preservation of a first line of defense against Eurasian powers in Western Europe and East Asia (map 2.1). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this strategy was almost fulfilled. America’s neighborhood was secure. If in the north, Canada figured as a loyal seafood supplier, Mexico in the south could be considered its low-income seafood processor. Both countries had around 80 percent of their exports bound for the United States. The North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, signed in 1988, institutionalized these commercial relations. The United States preserved a mutual defense pact with most of the Latin American countries, the Rio Treaty, and had a controlling stake in the Inter-American Development Bank, the IDB. The adjoining two oceans were patrolled by the world’s largest navy and American companies controlled many of the undersea cables and satellites that provided connectivity with Europe and East Asia.
In Western Europe, American security interests were guarded by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The alliance was founded in 1949 to defend the liberal world, America’s European sphere of influence, against communism. “Determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law,” its preamble said.4 Article five provided for mutual assistance if one of the members ever came under attack. Washington traditionally provided most of the alliance’s budget. It delivered the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, or SACEUR, a four-star general for whom most European four-stars would jump up if he entered a meeting room. Some considered the SACEUR the American equivalent of the proconsuls dispatched by ancient Rome to its provinces. The United States maintained large numbers of troops in Europe and was indispensable for vital systems like satellite communication, missile defense, and transport aircraft.
Map 2.1 America’s world: Global leadership of the United States in the 1990s
There were certainly tensions between Washington and Western Europe. The United States believed that European countries did not spend enough on the alliance and came to see Europe as an economic competitor. The European Economic Community (EEC) steadily expanded. In 1987, the European Single Act gave more responsibilities to its common institutions and aimed to create an open internal market. Yet, the United States itself was a co-founder of the European project, considering it key to checking the Soviets after World War II.5 More recently, European enlargement proved useful to prevent weak countries, like Greece, from drifting toward Moscow, and to give others, like Turkey, the prospect of stronger ties with the West. If Washington lamented that Europe did not spend enough on the military alliance, Europe became important as the main external buyer of American government debt. There were rows between the two sides of the Atlantic, but these remained family rows.
The situation was similar in East Asia. Here, Washington’s first line of defense consisted of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Thailand. They curbed the Eurasian communist powers like a line of maritime strongholds. In 1989, these Asian partners represented three quarters of the region’s economic output. The United States had over 100,000 troops in the area. It possessed military facilities in South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines. From there, its warships and aircraft patrolled the area. Relations with these countries could be tense. Trade frictions with Japan were recurrent and the Japanese abhorred American military presence. Like with Europe, Washington found that Tokyo could do more to bolster the security partnership. Japan, too, compensated American security commitments by buying American government bonds. The Plaza Accord of 1985 stipulated that Japan would not let its currency depreciate in a way that hurt American exports. Japan was helpful in providing support to other American partners, like Pakistan, or countries that could otherwise drift into the orbit of Beijing and Moscow, like Cambodia and Vietnam. Japan and the United States were the main contributors to the Asian Development Bank (ADB). In 1989, the web of partnerships was strengthened by the establishment of APEC, the forum for Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation.
Beyond