Admitting the Cold War Is Ended

The irony of George Bush’s first year in the White House is that a man supremely prepared for a traditional foreign-policy agenda will confront an entirely new one. Bush’s legacy to his country and party is likely to be determined by the way he handles three major issues--the transition from the Cold War, the challenge of geo-economics and the mounting international salience of environmental questions.

Although some--including Bush--deny it, the Cold War, at least as we have understood it, is over. For the Cold War assumed a struggle with an enemy portrayed as uniquely evil. As long as such dark visions prevailed, each side could persuade its population to subordinate social and economic goals to an overriding political objective--victory in this century’s supreme geopolitical struggle.

Now, in a spectacular fashion, Mikhail S. Gorbachev has accelerated trends that were gathering strength since the death of Josef Stalin in 1953. Over the years--albeit fitfully and with painful setbacks--more Soviets were permitted to learn, travel or emigrate; more Westerners to confer, trade and assist. The failures each superpower suffered in the Third World also encouraged each to reassess costs of across-the-board confrontation.

Yet though the Cold War’s foundations were shifting, the doctrine of total confrontation was unaltered--until Gorbachev. He has carried the process of change to a point where it is politically embarrassing to ignore too much longer the contrast between a rigid doctrine and a flexible world.

That contrast will have profound implications for Bush. His will be the first postwar Administration unable to use the Cold War as a glue to develop a foreign-policy consensus. His major challenge in this first year will be to articulate a post-Cold War vision of the U.S.-Soviet relationship that can carry credibility with the American people and the allies.

Bush’s second conceptional challenge lies in the field of economics. For most of the postwar period, U.S. policy-makers had the luxury of considering political and military issues “high politics” and economic issues “low politics.” Many postwar U.S. triumphs, such as the European recovery, were the result of America’s ability to sacrifice economic objectives for political or military goals.

That day has ended. The relative decline of the U.S. economy internationally has reached a point where U.S. Administrations must begin treating economic issues as “high politics.” The diplomatic skills of U.S. policy-makers will be tested as never before because America will no longer be in a position to purchase foreign policy triumphs through higher foreign aid levels or preferential trade arrangements. The danger is that without the United States able or willing to make major economic sacrifices to maintain the postwar system of international economic cooperation, it will break up into rival trading blocs with grave implications for global prosperity.

Finally, environmental questions will pose a critical challenge to the Bush Administration. There is an emerging consensus that the world faces a unique set of environmental problems, from global warming to acid rain. The threat is not only to prosperity but to survival.

The effort to respond to the environmental challenge could transform the U.S. foreign-policy community. For there has always been a struggle between what might be called today’s warriors and tomorrow’s worriers. The former stressed the immediate Cold War threat. The latter were concerned about the globe’s long-term future. As long as the Soviet threat seemed pressing, the former always won.

But tomorrow’s environmental worries seem to be becoming today’s immediate problems. If so, the balance of power within the foreign-policy community will shift. New policy trade-offs may have to be considered.

Ironically, Bush, elected as a tough nationalist and a reliable traditionalist, must now rise above nationalism and break with tradition. He will not be able to establish a new relationship with the Soviet Union unless he joins such fellow conservatives as Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and acknowledges that we are moving into a post-Cold War era. He will not be able to create a more stable international economic order unless he abandons a long-standing nationalist ambition to retain America’s postwar economic hegemony. He will never make progress on the environmental issues unless he recognizes that the free market sometimes leads consumers and countries into an economic and social cul-de-sac.

So there is a final irony: To succeed, Bush must challenge basic postwar assumptions critical to the GOP’s electoral success--belief in the demonic evil of Soviet power, insistance that America’s role as leader is more critical than its responsibility as partner and devotion to the magic of the marketplace.