character, a great leader, and always willing to accept new ideas and innovate.
We also became close friends.
I experienced many strange adventures with these two warriors over the next two years.
Big changes continued to pile up faster than anyone could handle them — German reunification, troop reductions, peace dividends, opportunities and problems rising from the opening to the east, a restructuring of NATO, a restructuring of Europe… and of course the New World Order (whatever that meant). It was all very heady.
So heady that very few noticed the fundamental conflict between what was called the “peace dividend” and the actual work it would take to reorder the world.
By late summer of 1990, what I was hearing from our leaders made it clear that the peace dividend was far more important to them than the reordering. They were looking at the fall of the Soviet Empire as though it was a winning lottery ticket that would let us cut defense spending, cut our troops and bring them home, close down overseas military bases, and use the money saved for all kinds of worthy projects (or tax cuts). The free world had triumphed, nobody ever again would suffer under the threat of communism, and all would be right with the world.
What I didn’t see was anybody trying to ensure that this new order would actually come into existence. Order doesn’t come out of chance. Somebody has to design it and make it happen.
Before the collapse of the USSR, the twentieth century had passed through two major democratic attempts to reorder the world — President Wilson’s after World War One and President Truman’s and George Marshall’s after World War Two. We were now embarked on the third. But now no one was trying to shape the new order. No one seemed to think we needed a vision. It would all work out on its own.
I could only wonder at that.
It seemed to me that our “victory” in the Cold War over the Soviet Union, or the Communist World, or whatever we might want to call it, had presented challenges similar to those we took on in Europe and Asia after World War Two. (The failure to address the challenges presented by World War One had led to the continuation of that war twenty years later.) Marshall and other visionaries had recognized the need to reshape the conditions that had given birth to the war, knowing that failure might make us again have to repeat it.
Now, as then, we were in a postwar situation. But here, the challenge wasn’t necessarily to reshape the conditions that had led to the war. The new threats were not going to emerge from out of the Soviet Union. Rather, the challenge was to reshape the world in the absence of the bipolar structure that had held all the other potential competing — or disruptive — forces in check. We had to replace the bipolar world order with a new structure that would create new balance, control, and justice. The alternative — the disorder — would unleash uncontrollable horrors… a chaos of failed states armed with WMD and exporting terror.
It was clear that the bipolar environment we had lived under for half a century had suppressed forces few politicians, statesmen, and foreign affairs analysts had paid much attention to. But now that the bipolar containment was off, the threats had broken loose.
During the Cold War, no one ever let a little remote country in the middle of nowhere go wobbly, because every little country was involved in the competition between the Soviets and the Free World. Each side invested whatever it took to keep the little countries in their camp. Though these investments went by names like “foreign aid” and “humanitarian assistance,” they were actually payoffs. These ended with the end of the bipolar world structure. There wasn’t a lot of support for humanitarian assistance and nation building once the Soviet Union had faded away.
The East-West competition had suppressed an underlying conflict (that emerged most visibly toward the latter part of the century): the North-South competition between the first world and the third world. This competition had never appeared serious because the East-West competition kept it suppressed. But when that was gone, it was immediately evident that the third world (South) had a serious quarrel with the first world (North).
Every world crisis we face today is a manifestation of that. Whether it’s the drugs and the political failures and instability in Latin America, the turmoil of extremism and violence as the Islamic world adapts to modernity, or the chronic health problems, deprivations, and violent anarchy in Africa… all of these were brewing as the last century neared its end. They were there; but kept down. They were secondary to the East-West struggle, which effectively suppressed the concerns of those who served the first world; namely, the third world. When the East-West struggle died, the third world came out fighting… but in unexpected ways.
It took us a while to see that we were in a conflict, and longer to begin to recognize its nature. The signs weren’t instantly obvious, we were feeling very good about ourselves after our great victory in the fifty- year war, and we were starting to enjoy the benefits of the emerging globalization. Globalized businesses, information technologies, borderless nations — all the webs that were increasingly linking everyone and everything in the first world did not inspire the same sense of hope and opportunity in the third world. They didn’t see the wonder. They saw inside the palace doors and knew they weren’t allowed in.
We took a stab at doing something about that. We began to invite them to our party… but without allowing them a place at the head table. (They saw this as patronizing and prejudiced.) We thought we were bringing in people who were seeking democracy, capitalism, freer trade, and a better life. We didn’t realize we were at the same time very subtly putting down a third world that already felt alienated, oppressed, and suppressed, and wanted to take on the first world.
The conflict that resulted is not primarily a fight between state and state — third world states versus first world states… Yes, we’ve seen state-against-state wars (such as those with Iraq); but that’s not where the serious action is. Again, we have to understand that this is a different kind of conflict. That is to say, it’s not a conflict born out of the ashes of some system that failed; namely, the former Soviet Union (as World War Two was born from the ashes of World War One). It’s a conflict with non-state entities.
By non-state entity, I’m not just referring to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and other violent adversaries but also to globalized corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have significant clout and power.
The global information revolution we’re now entering enhances the growing power and influence of non-state entities. So does the fading away of national boundaries (we’re becoming a borderless society) and the migration of vast numbers of third world people into first world nations (we’re becoming a transient society). Meanwhile, globalized extremist networks are doing everything in their power to bring down the structures that hold our societies together.
This whole new world was simmering underneath the Cold War. And we’ve had to meet this challenge unprepared. We should have gone full throttle into a visionary program like the Marshall Plan that would have injected energy, education, money — and hope — into the third world. Nothing like that happened.
The first changes to affect me as deputy J-3 involved the struggle over “peace dividend” troop reductions and the reshaping of NATO. These were soon followed by efforts to create new and productive relationships between NATO and the militaries of the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.
In the summer of 1990, when we had perhaps 300,000 troops in Europe, forces back in Washington were already saying, “It’s over. NATO’s an anachronism. It’s dead. Let’s close it down. We’ve got to bring back troops. We’ve got to close military bases. We’ve got to start getting rid of troops — taking them off the payroll.” Within weeks, these hazy words had gone from thought to action. No real thought had been given to consequences — what we were losing, what we actually needed militarily, what these troops were actually doing for us both inside and outside Europe. It was all a matter of numbers: So many bodies equal so many dollars. The more bodies we can axe, the more dollars we free up. All for the sake of a vague “dividend.”
Over the next weeks, I watched the disintegration of the Army in Europe. It really worried me. All of a sudden all kinds of career officers and NCOs were simply told to pack up and find other employment.
