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The Cold War Has Ended
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17234 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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2 / 1990 |
3,066 Words |
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Robert E. Hunter
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November 9, 1989, will surely be remembered as the day on which the European world turned upside down - and, by extension, global politics changed decisively. Late that afternoon, the East German regime opened its borders for travel by its citizens to West Germany and beyond. After 10,315 days, the Berlin Wall gave way to a flood of human aspiration and, with this act, the Cold War came to an end.
The finality of this statement is justified by what clearly happened on that fateful day: The Soviet Union of President Mikhail Gorbachev abdicated willingness to use military power to preserve the political primacy of the communist regime long believed to be most important to it. While East German party chief Egon Krenz was proclaiming his intention to hold free elections that would surely mean the end of a 44-year communist experiment, nearly 400,000 Soviet troops - the Group of Soviet Forces-Germany - remained in their barracks. And Soviet leaders declared themselves to be satisfied with what they saw happening.
History, of course, is rarely progressive, leading steadily if not gently onward to a predetermined goal, and there can still be numerous setbacks to the spread of freedom throughout the Soviets' East European empire. But the price of reversing what has already taken place - a price measured in bloodshed and the shattering of the Soviet leadership's ambitions for internal reform and international acceptance - would dwarf what happened last June in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
With this one key qualification, it is obvious that global politics will never be the same and that the postwar system of international security will be thoroughly overhauled during the next several years.
These changes begin in Europe. By the morrow of the vital decisions taken in East Germany, several conclusions about European security became readily apparent. With critical political changes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, the Warsaw Pact has ceased to be an effective structure for prosecuting aggression against the West. By the same token, it has also become impossible for the Western alliance to deploy any new nuclear weapons in West Germany - and perhaps even to retain those now deployed there: No actual or incipient democracy can be made the potential target of Western nuclear attack. Meanwhile, longstanding U.S. efforts to get its European allies to increase spending on defense are clearly dead, major efforts to modernize weapons in NATO will increasingly fall on deaf ears, and discussion of the relative sharing of defense burdens among the allies - a favorite concern of the U.S. Congress - will now shift to the management of reductions rather than increases.
Even in arms control, the earthquake in the Soviet East European empire is requiring critical reappraisal. In Vienna, 23 nations at the talks on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) have been bent on crafting a treaty that would (1) eliminate asymmetries that favor the Warsaw Pact in major categories of weaponry; (2) divide Europe into special zones for limiting force deployments; (3) place ceilings on forces that remain; and (4) provide for intrusive means of verifying any agreement. These remain valid objectives for the West - as set forth by Secretary of State James Baker, to use this opportunity to reduce the offensive potential of Soviet military power.
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