Geopolitics, Like Nature, Abhors a Power Vacuum : Soviets: Before we celebrate the collapse of the empire, we should recall history and the mischief of pariah states.

The Ukrainian republic’s mid-July declaration of independence is but one of several recent events portending the eventual political and military dissolution of the Soviet Union. Some American conservatives do not conceal their glee over the prospect of the Soviet Union’s balkanization and abasement, which they regard as the logical and just culminating acts of America’s victory in the Cold War.

But this collapse is fraught with peril. Those who wish it betray an ignorance of what history can tell us about the potential consequences of such a collapse as well as a shortsighted appreciation of America’s long-term security interests in Europe.

Large, multinational empires held together by naked military force have rarely departed the world stage quietly. In almost all cases they have succumbed through violence--revolutionary, civil or foreign. We should remember that World War I originated in the death rattle of a decayed Austro-Hungarian Empire. In fact, as strongly suggested in recent events in Eastern Europe--the revival of irredentism in Yugoslavia, mounting Hungarian-Romanian antagonism and Moldavian longing to rejoin Romania, just to name a few--the issues that contributed to the Hapsburg Empire’s demise have still not been resolved to the lasting satisfaction of its successor states.

Moreover, any kind of civil war in the Soviet Union, to say nothing of one of the magnitude that ravaged the country from 1917 to 1922 (and claimed an estimated 20 million lives), would be the first such conflict to take place in a nuclear-armed state. This raises the prospect of unauthorized use of nuclear weapons by warring factors.

It is encouraging that Moscow has already taken care to evacuate nuclear weapons from regions that have been the scene of violent strife. But the specter of accidental or deliberate use of such weapons, and the possibility that their use could be misinterpreted as a foreign attack, could not be dismissed in the event of a full-scale civil war that divided the loyalties of the Soviet army.

Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the thoughtful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has properly raised this issue. “What would each side do,” he asked in a recent speech, “if there were an unexplained detonation at a site in the Soviet Union? Who would the Soviets suspect, and how would they react?”

But let us assume for the sake of argument that the Soviet Union disintegrates without a shot being fired by anyone. Would our long-term security interests be served by a vacuum of power, including military power, east of the Oder-Neisse?

For centuries, Russian and, later, Soviet military power, when not used to further Moscow’s own territorial ambitions in Europe, served as an indispensable counterweight to the hegemonic ambitions of other European states. Both Napoleon’s and Hitler’s attempts to conquer all of Europe met their ruination on the steppes of Russia. Indeed, absent Hitler’s strategically insane decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941, it is doubtful whether even the combined might of the United States and the British Empire could have succeeded in gaining a military foothold in Normandy, to say nothing of clearing German forces from the rest of Europe.

For most of this century, our enduring and overriding objective in Europe has been to prevent the Continent’s domination by a single power. It was to secure this interest that we declared war on Imperial Germany in 1917 and again on Nazi Germany in 1941. And it was to secure this interest against Europe’s threatened domination by the Soviet Union that we abandoned more than a century of isolationist foreign policy in the late 1940s and entered into an “entangling” military alliance with most of Europe’s non-communist states.

Today we face a challenge that has long bedeviled European emperors, kings, prime ministers and presidents: Now that yet another (albeit cold) war has been won, how is an enduring peace to be fashioned?

Historians have learned a few things from centuries of peacemaking in Europe. Because peace treaties must resolve--or try to resolve--the causes of war, settlements that protect the core security interests of the vanquished (as the 1815 Congress of Vienna did for France) have proven more stable over time than those seeking revenge (as did the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk against Russia, and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles against Germany).

Punitive treaties have, without exception, caused more problems than they solved. They create pariah states. And there is nothing more dangerous to international stability than a pariah state. Defeat, demoralization and, above all, humiliation breed resentment and revanchism.

The United States and its Western allies face a critical choice in the event of the Soviet Union’s disintegration. We can stand back, watch it happen and do nothing to cushion it, crowing all the while about the justness and completeness of our “victory.” In this case, however, we have to pray that a humiliated and outcast Soviet Union, or some lesser Russian entity, does not arise from its ashes (something that defeated pariahs, like post-Versailles Germany and post-Brest-Litovsk Russia, have demonstrated an annoying tendency to do); and that if it did, it would not seek (as did Nazi Germany) to “set things right.”

The other choice is for the West to refrain from victory celebrations and to encourage--via reassuring political and arms-control agreements and economic and technical assistance--the integration of the Soviet Union’s successor states into the community of responsible nations. This choice holds the most promise of what, after all, have been the declared “war” aims of the United States in conflicts hot and cold since President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill proclaimed the Atlantic Charter almost 50 years ago: “to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them” and to “encourage all other practicable measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.”

History has shown that, in victory, magnanimity makes for far more intelligent statecraft than lust for revenge.