Defining Moments

Abstract

DEFINING MOMENTS Simon Serfaty I? 1991, the Gulf War and evidence of civil strife in Yugoslavia and elsewhere brought to a quick end any hope that the demise of the Cold War would inaugurate a brave new world order. Although Iraq's aggression was defeated by an overwhelming display of U.S. military power, as well as by an unprecedented exercise in collective security, it served as a reminder that the future was likely to include many more new conflicts, always costly and often deadly. Nearly everywhere in the West, the mood has turned inward and become apprehensive. Such gloom in the West is not new, to be sure. Throughout the Cold War, predictions oflikely defeats and impending disasters were common, as political leaders gave up on the future too early and too readily. In the mid-1970s, for example, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's evocation of an "unhappy" world allegedly "going toward catastrophe" was largely shared during a decade that opened with reminders of pre-World War I crises— from Fashoda to Sarajevo—all designed to point to a drift toward superpower confrontation in either the Third World or in central Europe.1 But, however flawed these analogies were, they rested on much substantive 1. See, for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Peace and Power: Looking Toward the Seventies," Encounter (November 1968), and Miles Kahler, "Rumors of War: The 1914 Analogy," Foreign Affairs (Winter 1979-80), pp. 374-96. Simon Serfaty is Research Professor of U.S. Foreign Policy at SAIS. His most recent book is Taking Europe Seriously (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992). 51 52 SAISREVIEW ground: these were, after all, decades of war—in Korea and in Vietnam, colonial and imperial. These were also decades when there seemed to be no end to the emergence of new threats—always worse than had been envisioned, and usually in unexpected places. Today, however, as a century and a millenium come to an end, there should be more room for satisfaction. Whatever mistakes were made in the past, the most ambitious objectives ofthe West have been met in ways that most analysts had declared to be unthinkable: the Soviet threat is gone and the state that caused it has ceased to exist, the countries of central and eastern Europe are liberated from a foreign ideology that ruined them, Germany is unified in a European Community that is affluent and united, and everywhere in the Third World democratic values are spreading. Whether they live in previously totalitarian and authoritarian states or in well-entrenched democracies, most citizens should feel better off in 1992 than they did ten years ago. Instead, however, there are qualms and doubts. Nunc demum redit animus—now at last life returns to normal.2 But what life and what normalcy, how and for whom? In Europe no less than in the United States, the general public appears to sense what would have been lost generally had the Cold War not been won, but few seem to comprehend what was won specifically by not losing it. As old enemies become less threatening, the desirability of alliances that helped to contain them is also said to be fading. Would the pendulum ofthe Western world swing, once again, from the unity it achieved in wartime to the discord often shown in peacetime? Does the century threaten to end as it began, as if nothing has been learned from the waste of the Cold War and from the savagery of two World Wars? Over Here in America Throughout much ofthe world, America is viewed as the only remaining superpower. The global influence it exerts is unmatched in history. Defeated adversaries everywhere hope to be led to unprecedented political stability and economic affluence, as was done for Germany and Japan after World War II. Allies elsewhere hope that victory will not be followed by a premature U.S. withdrawal from the geopolitical entanglement that shaped the years of the Cold War. At home, however, the picture is different. Americans enjoy their influence in the world but they are 2. Ludwig Dehio, The Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the European Power Struggle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962). DEFINING MOMENTS 53 unsure...