It is worth remembering, to keep some perspective on our current historical moment, that those young people graduating from high school this year were born the year the Berlin Wall fell, democracy came like a thief in the night to Poland and Hungary, and China, poised on the brink of revolution, killed the only true heroes it has produced in what was then 41 years of communist rule, as tanks and troops rolled through Tiananmen Square. I remember quite vividly the events of early June; I shall never forget (possibly because they kept playing it over and over and over . . .) CNN's footage of a single man standing before a line of tanks, halting them in their path. I am quite sure than tank commander and driver had orders not to roll over him in broad daylight (killing people happens much more easily in confusion and darkness, after all), but it nonetheless provided a beautiful image for the power of a lone individual. He refused to budge, even moving back and forth when the tank tried to swerve around him.
The destruction of China's last best hope for true democracy came at a time when Poland was moving peacefully to multi-party democracy, Hungary had opened its borders to Austria, causing a flood of East German refugees to the west, and perestroika and glasnost, still disavowed by hard-line Cold Warriors, had opened a small window of light in to the workings of the Soviet Union.
In November, something wonderful happened. I shall never forget sitting and watching Tom Brokaw stand in front of images of East Germans dancing on the Berlin Wall, the guards who had orders to shoot them just a day or two before standing around with nothing at all to do. Within days, it seems, the sledge hammers came out, and cement and rock went flying as the first real cracks and holes appeared in a now-redundant wall. I think I cried a little, because too many had died because of this wall, and breaching it, in the end, was all too simple*.
Even as freedom marched down the rusted Iron Curtain (Bulgaria, reading the signs of the times, created a committee for constitutional reform and declared open elections for mid-year, 1990; after the Czech army killed protesters, a crowd gathered in St. Wenceslaus Square in Prague, and the regime fell like an over-ripe peach; the only violent revolution was in Romania, where Ceaucescu fought to the bitter end, his and his wife's bitter end at the receiving end of a firing squad caught for all the world to see on video tape), there were some who just didn't realize what was happening. Those "some" included the President of the United States and his national security/military team, who decided, for reasons I have yet to fathom (like the Iraq invasion Bush 41's son would later initiate, the reasons for this particular fiasco always seemed to change) invaded Panama. Even as democratic revolutions flared across the communist world, the United States engaged in 19th century gunboat diplomacy with a nation so small and powerless, it shares currency with the United States.
Within two years of what historian John Lukacs called the anna mirabilis, the Soviet Union ceased to exist after a failed coup attempt destroyed the last tatters of Soviet credibility. I won't soon forget those tense few days when the world poised on the brink, waiting to see if Pres. Gorbachev would survive, if Russian tanks in Red Square would mimic their Chinese cousins, the DC commercial classical station interrupting a string quartet to blast out the Beatles' "Back in the USSR" when the coup collapsed, and the terrified and exhausted faces of Gorbachev and his wife as they stepped off the airplane that brought them back to Moscow (they had been vacationing with their grandchildren at the time; one wonders at the stress upon them just on a personal level). The final nail in the coffin of the Cold War had been pounded down, and . . .
Nothing happened. Rather than change decades of public policy towards Cuba, South America, indeed most of the Third World, the United States engaged in one of the biggest orgies of triumphal nonsense one has ever seen. This was the time of The End of History; we were "the lone superpower"; communism was part of "the dustbin of history" (as neo-cons quoted their favorite Marxist, Leon Trotsky, in what must have been a bit of delicious irony); a "New World Order" was declared on the eve of the American-led multi-national military campaign to remove Iraq from Kuwait. While there was some initial discussion of a "peace dividend" - all that money that had gone to support a military establishment geared to a no-longer-existent threat moving to domestic spending, or perhaps tax cuts - it was soon clear that our bloated military-industrial complex was addicted to the idea that it was still necessary. The "lone superpower" rationale became the rationale for not just continuing to funnel money to the Pentagon, but to actually increase spending. The collapse of Cuba's main source of income increased rather than abated American retaliation for a former neo-colony's absurd decision to act as a sovereign state.
When Bill Clinton was elected President, his back-turning to the world was part and parcel of the general feeling in America that it was time to direct our energies towards domestic reform and restructuring. While the neo-cons and their think tanks continued to churn out all sorts of position papers and declarations, usually starting with phrases like, "It's still a dangerous world . . .", Pres. Clinton reflected the mood of a large portion of the United States when he quite consciously looked upon the rest of the world as potential trading partners and markets for American goods, rather than a Manichean world of good and evil, us and them. When an American cruiser turned back from the port in Port Au Prince, Haiti, the media and their neo-con allies screamed that America had been humiliated, thus necessitating the eventual landing of American troops in Haiti - again. Another interpretation of this event was that, perhaps, it was no longer necessary to engage in this kind of bully-boy tactics, and it might be better for an American ship to be taking care of piracy in the South China Sea, maybe. In other words, the neo-cons were still thinking of the US as "the lone superpower", while Clinton might well have been thinking in practical terms of what the US could actually do with its military, rather than just stand (or float) around and look tough.
In the years since - the best chronicle is the recently-deceased David Halberstam's War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals - the debate has gone back and forth over the role of the US in the world, but the range has been extraordinarily narrow. One thing that never gets questioned is the idea that the US is "the lone superpower". Yet, what has being the lone superpower brought the US? Indeed, is the US the world's lone superpower? Is the phrase even meaningful in a world that, perhaps, has outgrown the need for such an ungainly, undisciplined behemoth?
*In a documentary on the events leading up to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it was revealed that the East Germans desperately wanted to continue in power. It was only when Mikhail Gorbachev refused to take a call from the East German leader on the eve of the events in question that the order to shoot to kill was rescinded, at the last possible minute. With the Soviet Union no longer getting their collective backs, the East Germans knew that any attempt to use force would have ripped their country apart, and quite possibly have begun a new European war, with the Russians staying neutral. They opted for self-induced euthanasia over a period of about a year to a more brutal suicide.
Virtual Tin Cup
