and gut it out,” he told himself, “and hope you get something real when you come back.”
Later, after he was in Europe actually witnessing the landslide of transformations following the end of the Soviet Union, he began to have a very different take on his new job. “This place is changing,” he told himself then. “It’s getting exciting over here. We’re seeing something entirely significant taking place.”
Before going to EUCOM, Zinni attended the Capstone course for new one-stars at the National Defense University in Washington.
The collpse of the Soviet Empire came with a whimper. The bangs came later — almost always in unexpected places… as unexpected as the actual end of the empire. No one had predicted it. It happened so fast that even the most savvy foreign policy and intelligence professionals failed to get a handle on the specific events, much less to grasp their bigger picture implications. The disintegration started in ’89 when Gorbachev’s perestroika first let the demons out of the bottle. Later, Boris Yeltsin tried to pick up the pieces, but with limited success. What had once been the huge, proud, and powerful USSR had within a year fractured into separate republics, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, the Baltics, and the Stans.
The Soviet rapid free-fall collapse caused a series of quick reactions from the Western powers. Since the collapse was unforeseen, the reactions were unplanned — and inadequate. It was astonishing that the collapse came as such a surprise… or that none of the Western leaders had thought through what to do if containment actually worked and the Soviet Union imploded. “But here we were,” says Tony Zinni, “scrambling to stay ahead of remarkable events that surprised us virtually every day.”
This was not the hoped-for replacement of a worn-out and discredited communist structure with a new, better democratic and free-market one. The fall was far messier than that. True, the old structures had mostly vanished; but their replacements are even now nearly fifteen years later only still emerging. Nobody in or out of the former Soviet Union (FSU) had any idea about what had to be done next. So not very much was done.
When the Soviet Empire slouched off the world’s stage, there was a certain amount of euphoria (many wrongly imagined, for example, that its departure would remove the nuclear threat) and even more relief. “Thank God,” Americans sighed, “the Cold War is over. The Big World will take care of itself. We no longer need the vast, powerful military presence that kept the Evil Empire checked. Peace will bring incredible material dividends. Now we can go about our smaller, private business and get on with our personal lives. Everybody’s going to be secure… and happy.”
President Bush announced the emergence of a New World Order… without defining it.
It’s hard to find anybody then who realized that the fifty-year-old bipolar world structure — for all the risks and dangers it represented — had kept the lid on myriad and terrible demons… demons that made the ones Gorbachev had let loose almost seem harmless as spaniels.
Since conflict in the first and second world heartlands had been unacceptable, the superpower competition had mostly played out in the third world peripheries, where the norm among governing regimes was illegitimacy, instability, and corruption. No problem, these regimes could be propped up, bought off, or provided with military backing by one or the other superpower, in exchange for their support. Thus the world’s balance was maintained… though at the price of denying better lives to third world peoples. No matter. They didn’t have much to live for anyway.
But the long-suppressed demons of ethnic and national competitions and ancient seething hatreds and blood feuds remained alive. Once the lid was removed and the demons released, nobody was prepared to deal with them.
The Balkans exploded. The Horn of Africa. The Middle East. Iraq. West Africa. Rwanda. Zaire-Congo. Afghanistan. The Philippines. Colombia… And this is only a partial list.
The Capstone course is designed to give new brigadier generals and admirals[35] a heads-up on major strategic and national security policy. It lasts a relatively short six weeks. Part of the time is spent in study and seminars. Part of the time is spent with very senior leadership in Washington. And part of the time is spent in travel, talking with CINCs and other combatant commanders.
Zinni’s Capstone class trip, in March, took him and a handful of his Capstone colleagues to Europe — to Naples, where there’s a NATO and U.S. naval command; to Brussels and NATO headquarters in Belgium; to Germany and to EUCOM headquarters in Stuttgart; to Army headquarters in Heidelberg; to Air Force headquarters at Ramstein; and to Berlin. Their briefings at these commands all indicated that the impending collapse of the Soviet Union was about to unleash tremendous changes — changes that U.S. forces in Europe were having difficulty understanding or accepting. The rapidly unfolding events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were occurring so fast that U.S. and NATO leaders could neither grasp their implications nor make studied adjustments to them.
During their visit to Berlin, the Capstone team’s escort, a feisty second lieutenant from the U.S. Berlin Brigade, suggested an excursion through the recently abandoned Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. At that time, this was a bold idea. The famous security barrier that controlled access between East and West Berlin had ceased operation, there no longer being a reason for it. But its absence had left a rules vacuum. Nobody knew what regulations — if any — governed travel between the two parts of the no-longer-divided city. The new flag officers’ only guidance: They had to wear their uniforms.
“Is it okay to go across?” the Capstone team asked.
“I don’t know,” the lieutenant said, “but everything’s so confusing now that I doubt anyone will stop us. What’s to lose? Let’s give it a try.”
Though most of the new one-stars were a little concerned about getting stopped or even detained by East German or Russian guards — and about getting chewed out for putting themselves at risk without a good reason — they were unable to resist such a dare from a hard-charging young officer. So they piled into a van and headed for Checkpoint Charlie, where, to their astonishment, they found no guards. It was like the ghost of an old Cold War movie set.
On the other side, the main streets of East Berlin — Unter den Linden and Karl-Marx-Allee — offered a facade of modernity, an East German communist Potemkin village. But turning off the showplace avenues revealed the real differences between East and West — pockmarked walls still bearing bullet scars from the war — while more recent buildings were cheap and ugly Soviet-style cinder block and concrete, run-down and shabby. Instead of the new BMWs, Mercedes, and Audis of the West, they saw small cheap East German Traubis.
The most striking aspect of East Berlin was its quiet. Few people were about; there was no vibrant, urban bustle, as in West Berlin. In fact, there was little evidence of commerce… or activity of any kind.
East Berlin was a far cry from a great, modern world city like New York, London, or Paris… or its sister to the west. It was a poor, depressed, patched-together relic from the 1950s.
As they were taking all this in, the lieutenant came up with another bright idea. “Let’s go find a Russian military compound,” he said.
“Sure,” the one-stars agreed. “A terrific idea.” They were really game by then to push their luck. This was an opportunity they could have only dreamed about before this moment.
They drove around until they found a Russian military facility (they never figured out its function); drove inside; and out of the van stepped a group of American flag officers in uniform, who must have had the same impact on the stunned Russian military personnel and their dependents as squid-people out of a starship. The Americans wandered around the compound for most of the afternoon. During that time, no one spoke to them; there were no greetings, no questions, no challenges, no ideas about what to do with the American “invaders”—shoot them, kiss them, or say hello. There was no decision; nothing was done. The Russians and their families went about their business; the wives pushed their baby carriages or dealt with their children; in the commissary, people pushed their grocery carts and grabbed cans and boxes off the shelves; and without a “by-your-leave,” the American officers checked out everything that caught their interest. The only response they got from anybody was a shocked, deer- in-the-headlights look. When the Americans left the compound, the shocked looks followed them out the gate.
On the way back to Checkpoint Charlie, they stopped at a Soviet museum celebrating the fall of Berlin (the surrender had been signed in the building that housed it), and then at the Berlin Wall. “Do you want a piece?” the lieutenant asked, producing a small hammer. The others then chipped souvenir shards from the most powerful symbol of the Cold War.
Zinni had never before felt so close to living history. “It’s over,” he said to himself, truly realizing it for the first time. “There is no more Soviet Union. It’s gone. There is no more Soviet enemy.”
