American Foreign Policy
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The 50 years from 1941 to 1991 gave America the first real foreign policy it has ever had, the saving of the world from first fascism and then communism. The American idea was no longer just a distant example to other people; it was deployed on the world's front lines. Now that the double rescue is complete, America does not appear to have decided on what a permanent foreign policy should look like, especially after a bad case of anti-climax had set in. With the Cold War end, the Germans have achieved the chief thing they have wanted since 1945, the unification of their country. The French, on the contrary, have lost the chief thing they wanted since 1945, which was the ability to control Germany.The 20th century has lived through two great political distortions, fascism and communism. When the red flag came down over the Kremlin, in December 1991, the 20th century had beaten them both. The first effects are already visible: the collapse of Soviet power made it possible to construct the coalition that drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait; the discrediting of the communist example is tilting much of Africa towards multi-party politics and market economics; the fact that Central America guerillas no longer get backing from Moscow should help the building of democracy; and the spread of pluralism may encourage the advance of liberal ideas for the first time in nearly a century. The Cold War was won, former-President George Bush insists, because he and Ronald Reagan (the hawks)
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NATO. Within another year, he had jettisoned the Warsaw Pact and the socialist bloc, and agreed, in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, to verified deep cuts in strategic nuclear forces.
The group that may be in the best position to know what effect American policies really had on the Soviet Union's collapse were the policy makers who were in the Kremlin at the time of the Cold War ended. Two dozen former top Soviet officials offered their versions of how the Cold War ended, why the West prevailed and whether Bush or Reagan are the architects of victory or just its beneficiaries. Some of their accounts flatly contradict the historical record, as once-taciturn officials claim the superpower confrontation dragged on a decade longer than it need have because the Reagan-Bush hard line undercut a Soviet desire to mend fences. By 1980, the Russians say they knew the Soviet Union was in deep economic trouble, and they were seeking detente with the West.
Comparing the Russian views with the American ones underscores how little each side understood about the other and how poorly each calculated the effect its policies would have on its adversary. It also suggests that misunderstandings, miscues and missed opportunities probably did mor
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Approximate Word count = 2317
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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