The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

technological superiority. But our scientists tell me that if we want to destroy or neutralize the American SDI system, we only would have to spend 10 percent of what the Americans plan to spend.”³ Among Gorbachev’s scientific advisers, none was more important than Andrei Sakharov, who participated in the creation of the Soviet Union’s hydrogen bomb and later became a brave critic of his country’s human rights record and the winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize.

On December 23, 1986, Gorbachev ordered Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, released from internal exile in the city of Gorky, where they had been sent by the Politburo for criticizing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The freeing of Sakharov was one of Gorbachev’s earliest and most important acts of glasnost, or “openness,” which ultimately led to the unraveling of the Soviet system, but he also wanted Sakharov’s advice on SDI. Given in secret meetings in Moscow in February 1987, Sakharov’s analysis was unequivocal: “An SDI system would never be militarily effective against a well-armed opponent; rather, it would be a kind of ‘Maginot line in space’—expensive and vulnerable to counter-measures. It would not serve as a population defense, or as a shield behind which a first strike could be launched, because it could be easily defeated. Possibly SDI proponents in the United States were counting on an accelerated arms race to ruin the Soviet economy, but if so they were mistaken, for the development of counter-measures would not be expensive.”⁴

Rather than hiking investments in new weaponry, the Soviets actually were in the process of cutting back. In the mid-1980s, revised CIA estimates of Soviet spending on weapons procurement indicated that the actual rate of increase had been a measly 1.3 percent a year, not the 4 to 5 percent the CIA had previously reported to the president, and that Russian appropriations for offensive strategic weapons had actually declined by 40 percent. Such estimates were ideologically unacceptable to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who sent them back to the CIA. There Director Gates “ordered SOVA [the CIA’s Office of Soviet Analysis] to send Weinberger a memo focusing on Soviet economic strengths.”⁵

In fact, U.S. intelligence agencies did not see the crisis of the Soviet Union coming and never gave our political leaders an accurate assessment of the initiatives undertaken by Mikhail Gorbachev. On August 19, 1991, the USSR finally succumbed to a domestic coup d’etat thanks to an internal process of delegitimization that Gorbachev himself had initiated. The United States had little or nothing to do with it.

While Gorbachev was attempting internal perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost (the end of secrecy and the release of political prisoners), the defining event that made clear to the world how far the process of reform had gone occurred on the night of November 9, 1989. The Berlin Wall fell. Here again, the crucial acts were not American but West German. In his scholarly dissection (commissioned by the German Bundestag) of what he calls “one of the biggest paternity disputes ever,” Hans-Hermann Hertle explains: “Following a secret agreement with Bonn, they [the Hungarians] opened the border to Austria for GDR [German Democratic Republic, i.e., East German] citizens on 10 September [1989]. In return, the Federal Republic gave Hungary credit in the amount of DM 500 million and promised to make up losses that Hungary might suffer from retaliatory measures by the GDR. Tens of thousands of East Germans traveled to the Federal Republic via Austria in the days and weeks that followed. The GDR experienced its largest wave of departures since the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. This mass exodus demonstrated the weakness of the SED [Socialist Unity Party of Germany, i.e., the Communist Party] leadership on this issue and undermined the regime’s authority in an unprecedented manner.”⁶

It is a commonplace in the teaching of international relations that empires do not give up their dominions voluntarily. The USSR was a rare exception to this generalization. Inspired by Gorbachev’s idealism and a desire to become members of the “common European house” and to gain international recognition as a “normal” state, some reformers in the Soviet elite believed that rapprochement with Western European countries could help Russia resume its stalled process of modernization. As the Russian historian Vladislav Zubok has observed, “At certain points, ... Soviet political ties to France and West Germany became more important and perhaps warmer on a personal level than relations with some members of the Warsaw Pact.”⁷ Much like the Hungarian Communist Party chief Imre Nagy in the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising in Budapest and Czech Communist Party first secretary Alexander Dubcek in the 1968 Prague revolt, Gorbachev had turned against the imperial-revolutionary conception of the Soviet Union inherited from Stalin. He willingly gave up the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe as the price for reinvigorating the Soviet Union’s economic system.

The American leadership did not have either the information or the imagination to grasp what was happening. Totally mesmerized by academic “realist” thought, it missed one of the grandest developments of modern history and drew almost totally wrong conclusions from it. At one point after the Berlin Wall had come down, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union actually suggested that the Soviets might have to intervene militarily in Eastern Europe to preserve the region’s “stability.”⁸

After some hesitation the American government and military decided that, although the Cold War in Europe had indeed ended, they would not allow the equally virulent cold wars in East Asia and Latin America to come to an end.⁹ Instead of the Soviet Union, the “menace” of China, Fidel Castro, drug lords, “instability,” and more recently, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and the “axis of evil”—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—would have to do as new enemies. In the meantime, the United States did its best to shore up old Cold War structures and alliances, even without the Soviet threat, expanding the NATO alliance into Eastern Europe and using it to attack Serbia, a former Communist country. The Pentagon, in turn, demanded that military spending be maintained at essentially Cold War levels and sought a new, longer-term rationale for its global activities.

Slow as Washington was to catch on to what was happening in the Soviet Union—as late as March 1989 senior figures on the National Security Council were warning against “overestimating Soviet weakness” and the dangers of “Gorbymania”—the leadership moved with remarkable speed to ensure that the collapse would not affect the Pentagon’s budget or our “strategic position” on the globe we had garrisoned in the name of anti-Communism. Bare moments after the Berlin Wall went down and even as the Soviet Union was unraveling, Pentagon chief Dick Cheney urged increased military spending. Describing the new defense budget in January 1990, Michael R. Gordon, military correspondent of the New York Times, reported that “in Cheney’s view, which is shared by President [George H. W.] Bush, the United States will continue to need a large Navy [and interventionist forces generally] to deal with brushfire conflicts and threats to American interests in places like Latin America and Asia.” Two months later, when the White House unveiled a new National Security Strategy before Congress, it described the Third World as a likely focus of conflict: “In a new era, we foresee that our military power will remain an essential underpinning of the global balance, but less prominently and in different ways. We see that the more likely demands for the use of our military forces may not involve the Soviet Union and may be in the Third World, where new capabilities and approaches may be required.”¹⁰ It should be noted that the Pentagon and the White House presented these military plans well before Iraq’s incursion into Kuwait and the ensuing crisis that resulted in the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

The National Security Strategy of 1990 also foresaw the country’s needing “to reinforce our units forward deployed or to project power into areas where we have no permanent presence,” particularly in the Middle East, because of “the free world’s reliance on energy supplies from this pivotal region.” The United States would also need to be prepared for “low-intensity conflict” involving “lower-order threats like terrorism, subversion, insurgency, and drug trafficking [that] are menacing the United States, its citizenry, and its interests in new ways.... Low- intensity conflict involves the struggle of competing principles and ideologies below the level of conventional war.” Our military forces, it continued, “must be capable of dealing effectively with the full range of threats, including insurgency and terrorism.” Through such self-fulfilling prophecies, the military establishment sought to confront the end of the Cold War by embarking on a grandiose new project to police the world.

At the same time, American ideologists managed to convince the public that the demise of the Soviet Union was evidence of a great American victory. This triumphalism, in turn, generated a subtle shift in the stance the