[Prefatory Note; This post consists of my responses questions posed by Daniel Falcone, an independent journalist two days after Mikhail Gorbachev’s death.]
APPRAISING GORBACHEV
- Can you briefly comment on Gorbachev’s life? What do you suppose is his historical legacy, especially as it relates to the Cold War?
I think it is safe to say that Mikhail Gorbachev had the greatest historical impact of any public figure since the end of World War II. To be sure, it is a bitterly polarized legacy. One of unbounded admiration and historical achievement in the West and one of contempt and almost total disrepute in Russia, holding Gorbachev responsible for the breakup of the Soviet Union as a Great Power and its loss of political relevance beyond its territorial borders. It has taken Vladimir Putin, a political figure reviled in the West, to undue Russian irrelevance by launching an aggressive war against Ukraine, but whether the cost is worth it even for Russia, only time will tell.
As far as the Cold War is concerned, it was not Gorbachev’s original intention to bring it to an end, but rather to reform the Soviet internal political and economic system so that it would deliver a better life to ordinary people. There is little doubt that Gorbachev was affected by his travels as a young Communist functionary to Europe where he was deeply affected by the vastly higher living standards enjoyed by the peoples of these countries with comparably developed economies to that of the Soviet Union. I remember being told in Moscow by one of his close associates that Gorbachev’s aim in the first years after he assumed national leadership was to do for socialism in the Soviet Union what FDR had achieved for capitalism in the United States, nothing more nothing less. His public tactics were to encourage glasnost (freedom of expression) and perestroika (structural reform). I remember a Soviet security specialist in Moscow in the late 1980s telling me somewhat cynically that “we have lots of glasnost, but no perestroika.” It was a widespread critical sentiment expressive of the view of impatient Soviet reforms that Gorbachev was all talk and no action. As he proceeded with this domestic agenda, Gorbachev himself came to realize the depth of corruption and dysfunction throughout the Soviet bureaucracy, making the system almost non-reformable and on the verge of financial and political bankruptcy, and once challenged by a reformist leader, unravelling in an uncontrollable manner that rendered Gorbachev himself helpless to slow down the spiral ending in collapse.
Gorbachev was also affected by the cruelties of the Stalin period, being personally touched by the arrest and prison abuse of both of his grandfathers as political dissidents. In this sense, it seems he was attracted to the values and practices of liberal democracies as a model for a reformed Soviet Union. Undoubtedly. feeling blocked at home he sought to wind down the tensions with the West and the costs of the arms race in well-publicized 1986 meeting with Ronald Reagan, the so-called, ‘Reykjavik Summit,’ which led to significant progress in reducing the stockpiles of strategic nuclear weapons and gave public opinion the temporary illusion that nuclear disarmament might actually happen on his watch. These talks with Reagan in Iceland went so far in the direction of embracing disarmament that the American bipartisan nuclear establishment and compliant media showed its true colors, uniting to undermine Reagan’s diplomatic credibility when it came to global security, calling him ‘unprepared’ to conduct such delicate negotiations with a wily Soviet leader. This display of nuclearist bipartisanship with respect continues to haunt U.S. foreign policy more than 40 years later, persisting despite an atmosphere of extreme political divisiveness on all issues bearing on the daily lives of Americans.
It is also notable that Gorbachev remained a strong advocate of total nuclear disarmament after 1991 when he became a public intellectual active in Western civil society debates. His sophisticated approach to achieving a world without nuclear weapons was coupled with an insistence that in latter phases of nuclear disarmament it would be essential to also initiate a process of conventional disarmament with the goal being one of peace and security based on a demilitarized form of geopolitics. He correctly feared that getting rid of nuclear weapons without addressing the whole spectrum of weaponry would have the unintended effect of making the world ‘safe’ for major warfare, that is, ‘safe’ in this sense of removing apocalyptic fears but still enabling the repetition of ‘world wars’ of the sort that caused such devastation in the 20th Century, and were now enhanced by more powerful weaponry with greater precision and explosive potential, as well as various forms of cyber warfare.
As the Cold War was centered in Europe it was there that Gorbachev’s innovative approach to international relations most clearly manifested itself. Perhaps, challenged by Reagan’s famous taunt in Berlin, “Tear down that wall, Mr. Gorbachev!”
Gorbached proceeded to loosen Moscow’s grip on the Warsaw Pact’s bloc of East European counties, respecting their sovereign rights to claim political independence, and making clear that under his leadership there would be no Soviet interventions of the sort that occurred in East Europe dating back to Hungary in 1956 and forward to the Czech Republic in 1968. This process did indeed culminate with the dramatic breaching of the infamous Berlin Wall in 1989 followed by the unexpectedly rapid reunification of Germany, which epitomized the emerging realities of a post-Cold War Europe.
It was in Europe that Gorbachev advocated a hopeful end to the ordeal of a divided continent, proposing security for ‘our common European home.’ Had these ideas been acted upon by the West, it might have avoided the nightmarish aftermath of the Cold War now being experienced in Ukraine and threatened in relation to Taiwan, and early preceded by a predatory form of economic globalization that opened the floodgates to autocracy around the world. It may be that historians will someday come to acknowledge that if Gorbachev’s vision of future East-West engagement in Europe had prevailed rather than the neo-conservative thirst for American geopolitical expansionism, anchored in a revitalized NATO with a much more expansive and flexible mandate, recently highlighted by the inflammatory phrase ‘Global NATO.’ This may be the time to remember that NATO was brought into being in1949 as a strictly defensive alliance, supposedly the centerpiece of the containment policies so persuasively advocated at the time by George F. Kennan as a response to the threat of Soviet military expansionism in Europe. Given the failure to heed Gorbachev on Europe over the decades, despite ending the Cold War and the Soviet collapse, Gorbachev’s legacy is primarily being depicted as bringing the Cold War to an end in ways that allowed the West to pronounce itself ‘the winner,’ not so unlike the spoiled aftermath of World War II. It is obvious after the three big botched experiments in ‘peace diplomacy’ over the course of a little over 100 years that the liberal democracies of the capitalist West are better at waging war than making sustainable peace arrangements.
It should not be forgotten that unlike any leader of a Great Power in his time, Gorbachev made memorable speeches at the UN and elsewhere calling for a more robust internationalism and a geopolitical approach rooted in the values of the UN Charter. This advocacy of responsible internationalism and demilitarization endeared Gorbachev to peace activists the world over, but was dismissed as nothing more than diplomatic fluff by Beltway and Pentagon gurus who didn’t even take Gorbachev’s global and reform agendas seriously enough to bother refuting them. This life journey of Gorbachev carried him to the peak of power in the Kremlin, and then following his seven years as head of the Soviet state made him a world citizen in the best sense. His civilian life after the end of the Cold War was more in spirit and substance with progressive civil society tendencies than with the continuing necrophilia of the Great Powers.
2. Over the course of your research and activism, can you describe your experiences or interactions with him? How did his life impact your studies and craft?
I did have the opportunity on two occasions to interact personally with Gorbachev in a rather extended manner that included time for social engagement. I felt it a great honor to do so as he was already a brave and sympathetic historic personage of great distinction, and although misleadingly lauded in the West partly because he paved the way for unipolarity and triumphalism, and possibly even Putin and Putinism, outcomes that he was neither responsible for nor wished to have happen. In an important sense Gorbachev’s international legacy of humane global governance is already all but forgotten by the mainstream. The West admired most his decisive role in loosening the Soviet grip on East Europe and unwittingly accelerating the process by which the Soviet internal empire of ‘captive’ nations was permanently shattered.. My two encounters with Gorbachev were after he ceased to be a leader, and devoted himself to sharing idea and activities with likeminded individuals
My first encounter was a day-long meeting in 1993 or 1994 at a men’s club in New York City of a contemplated foundation that he was to be co-Chaiir with James Baker, George H.W. Bush’s influential Secretary of State to support work toward a peaceful world undertaken by politically independent persons of the once antagonistic so-called ‘superpowers.’ To my astonishment, which has not lessened over the years, I was invited to serve as a member of the initial Board of Directors along with several more mainstream individuals. For undisclosed reasons, Baker was unable to attend the meeting, but Gorbachev, by way of an interpreter participated throughout the long day, including at a small luncheon. The meeting was devoted to what the Foundation might most usefully do, how it would operate, including its plans to establish a funding base. Gorbachev mainly listened, asked useful questions, and projected a demeanor of being one among equals. As it happened, nothing further took place, and the whole undertaking was discreetly abandoned. Nevertheless, it did give me a glimpse of this great man adjusting to his new role and status. Looking back, it was a time when Gorbachev continued to identify with the transnational ruling elites of Western countries but showed an intellectual interest in working with more independent individuals in global civil society. Above all, it demonstrated to me that as a private citizen Gorbachev was committed to a peaceful and human sequel to the tensions and antagonisms of the Cold War decades.
The second encounter was a couple of years later in Italy at a meeting on the future of Euurope under the auspices of Gorbachev’s own foundation, bearing his name. The 25 or so invited participants were mainly European intellectuals and government officials. It went on for two days, revisiting Gorbachev’s ideas of a common European home and collective security structure. The debate was lively and stimulating although the pan-European consensus never got much further than the walls of the conference center. I had the feeling that Gorbachev now felt himself an independent voice of civil society, widely honored in the West yet ignored in his own country. He had returned to living in Moscow, and reported that Putin had respectfully received him and made him feel at ease about resuming Russian residence despite his continuing unpopularity in the country of his birth and later political prominence.
In my own work, I have been conscious of course of Gorbachev’s role as a transformative agent of change that made ‘the impossible’ happen in the Soviet context, although not altogether responsive to his agency, much that happened is best understood beneath the rubric of ‘unintended consequences.’. Given my interest in ‘the politics of impossibility’ I often mentioned Mandela in South Africa and Gorbachev in the Soviet Union as having validated this counter-intuitive belief that seems the most realistic hinge of hope given the present world situation, strange as that may sound..
It is always of great interest to meet with historic figures of global stature. In Gorbachev I found none of the moral radiance and existential charisma that I associated with my meeting with Nelson Mandela. Rather in Gorbachev I found a sense of purpose, of decency, of intelligence, and a seriousness about doing what he could to make his country, region, and world better than they were at present.
- How do you suppose Russia will use the public memory of Gorbachev and his commemoration to suit their own political purposes?
I would suppose that Putin does not regret the passing of the Communist Era, but will fault Gorbachev on nationalist, Czarist grounds as allowing the territorial extensions of the Soviet Union to shrink, leading to the temporary eclipse of Russian greatness. With minor variations the Russian media will follow this line, reporting on the demonization that Gorbachev deservedly experienced, especially in the decade after the Soviet collapse.
It may take several more political earthquakes for Russia and Russians to arrive at a balanced assessment of Gorbachev. But in fact, the West has not done much better, showering him with honors and awards, while keeping their near exclusive focus on his roles in ending the Cold War with the West and in taking on the Communist Party elite of bureaucrats (nomenklatura) that had presided since the early days of the Soviet Union following Lenin’s death. The fact that this precipitated the Soviet collapse was an outcome that almost no one in the West lamented.
Gorbachev memory will last, most celebrated outside of Russia, and subject to subtle reappraisals from within, in relation to Europe, and with regard to world peace. I would feel more comfortable contemplating the future of humanity if Gorbachev was running the global show than any other political leader currently walking about on planet Earth!
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
The Nuclear Challenge: 70 Years After Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Gorbachev’s Response (3)
21 AugNo public figure was more convincing and determined to pursue the ideal of a world without nuclear weaponry than Mikhail Gorbachev while he was the transformative General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between the years of 1985 and 1991. Of course, Gorbachev is appreciated in the West mainly as having presided over a political process that led to the nonviolent ending of the Cold War, the peaceful liberation of Eastern Europe, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet he was also perhaps the only head of an important sovereign state during the nuclear era whose commitment to nuclear disarmament and the conditions of a peaceful world reflected a deep realization that the existing world order was not sustainable and not serving the interests of the Russian people. His speeches at the United Nations and elsewhere exhibited ethical and political concerns that recognized that national interests could no longer be separated from the promotion of global and human interests.
Gorbachev believed then, and continues to believe, that nuclear war becomes more likely, a virtual certainty, with each passing year; as more governments continue to possess and others over time gain access to the weaponry the risk of nuclear war rises. Gorbachev believes that it is inevitable that the nuclear club will grow gradually larger, as it has, although more slowly than some had feared. He also believed, reflecting the Cold War context within which he governed, that the illusionary search for a winnable combination of weaponry and doctrine could produce an unwanted nuclear conflict between rival superpowers either by one side seeking a victory or by the other preempting an opponent it perceived as dangerous so as to lessen vulnerability and avoid defeat. In the mid 1980s the Soviet system was experiencing a complex and deep crisis of economic stagnation and bureaucratic rigidity, which meant that the nuclear arms race burdened an already acutely stressed Soviet reality.
In an August 16th interview with the German magazine, Spiegel, Gorbachev strongly reaffirms his anti-nuclear outlook, and recalls the successes and disappointments of his efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons. His skepticism about disarmament negotiations back in the 1980s is even disheartening today than when Gorbachev was in power. The approach then prevalent he regarded as a hypocritical blend of posturing and useless meetings, a pathetic wordplay in which “diplomats pored over mountains of paper, drank wine, and even harder stuff..and it was all for nothing.”
More helpful in Gorbachev’s view were unilateral steps taken in Moscow that acknowledged a growing danger of catastrophe that could only be removed by the “complete destruction of nuclear weapons and a permanent ban on them.” As significant as this serious affirmation of nuclear disarmament as a necessary and highly practical goal of state policy represented a shift in Soviet thinking and strategy that gave the highest priority to minimizing risks of war until a safer future could be brought into being by eliminating weaponry of mass destruction (including chemical weapons). This meant, in Gorbachev words, that instead of planning “for coming war” or seeking military advantages, the central policy effort was devoted to the prevention of “military confrontation with the West.” That is, war avoidance as an interim approach that depended on a Soviet foreign policy that consciously reduced international tensions rejected threat diplomacy and provocative policy moves.
Gorbachev surprisingly found that Ronald Reagan, his American right-wing counterpart, shared his nuclear anxieties, and was ready to be a partner in joint denuclearization efforts. Already in 1985 they jointly declared that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Gorbachev interprets this declaration as a commitment by the two governments not to seek a position of superiority based on developing new types of nuclear weapons (for instance, defensive shields that made an attack seem more plausible, and thus might tempt a potential target state to consider preemption), but claims that the United States never acted as if it understood this Reagan/Gorbachev declaration in this manner. Gorbachev does take appropriate note of Reagan’s deep attachment to SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) as limiting the progress that the two leaders could make in relation to denuclearization, and incompatible with his recognition of what a horror nuclear war would be.
In this regard, Gorbachev considers United States militarism then and now to constitute the “insurmountable obstacle to a nuclear-free world.” As this unfortunately seems to be a correct assessment, it entails a gridlocked nuclear future with no escape route. Gorbachev expresses his almost fatalistic view of human destiny if nuclear weaponry is retained: “The alternative is clear: Either we move toward a nuclear-free world or we have to accept that nuclear weapons will continue to spread step by step across the world.” In effect, the only effective long-term nonproliferation regime is dependent upon a parallel regime of complete nuclear disarmament, and without such a regime nuclear war will occur at some point due to the sheer multiplication of nuclear actors.
As others have noticed, the highpoint in Gorbachev era nuclear diplomacy occurred at the Reyjkavik summit in 1986 when Reagan and Gorbachev seemed to be on the historic verge of agreeing on the obligatory elimination of all nuclear strategic weaponry, only to have the potential breakthrough immediately undermined on the home front in the United States by the bipartisan realist guardians of the nuclear status quo. This very robust move in Iceland that briefly ‘threatened’ to achieve nuclear disarmament was unnerving for militarists in the West. Always skilled at summarizing the hawkish mood of governing elites, Margaret Thatcher sounded the collective alarm: “We won’t be able to handle a second Reyjkavik.” And indeed, her words were heeded at the pinnacles of government, and there has not been another Reyjkavik, or anything approaching a high profile inter-governmental occasion at which ideas about nuclear disarmament were being seriously discussed and contemplated by the governments of the respective leading nuclear weapons states.
What has received scant notice is the missed opportunity of the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 when the Cold War came to an end. It was then George H.W. Bush who was the American president, supposedly moderate, sensible, and knowledgeable about foreign affairs. And this is the depressing point. It was just his establishment realism that led Bush derisively to dismiss any ambition to take advantage of the new situation in the world to abandon the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and seize the opportunity to initiate a global nuclear disarmament process. Instead of exploring what could have been probably negotiated with Gorbachev, Bush notoriously rejected on principle fundamental reform as ‘the vision thing,’ which he happily admitted was not his cup of tea. And so this unprecedented moment of opportunity was tragically wasted, and instead the 1990s became a decade devoted to servicing neoliberal economic globalization being fashioned in a manner that produced a post-colonial predatory set of relations among the peoples of the world. This ‘new world order’ was driven by the logic of capital efficiency, which has led to steadily widening disparities between rich and poor within countries and regions and in their interplay as well as launched multiple threats to environmental sustainability.
In effect, after the Cold War even the fatuous nuclear disarmament diplomacy that Gorbachev decried disappeared, and a period of self-satisfied nuclear complacency ensued. Governments are more or less content with obscure ritual review conferences within the framework of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Regime. This failure of political imagination by Bush Sr. may be seen in retrospect as a most disastrous lapse in American global leadership, far worse than was the American refusal to join the League of Nations after World War I, and give that first experiment in war prevention on a global scale some slight chance of success. For these reasons I would not be astonished if a revisionist historian concludes that the Bush Sr. presidency was more harmful to the United States and the world than was the failed presidency of Bush Jr..
There is a final vital point that Gorbachev develops in response to skeptical questions from the Spiegel interviewer about the feasibility of nuclear disarmament. Gorbachev responds by posing a question of his own that is meant to answer itself by an implicit appeal to common sense: “And can we really imagine a world without nuclear weapons if a single country amasses so many conventional weapons that its military budget nearly tops that of all other countries combined?” He goes on to point out the obvious: “[t]his country would enjoy total military supremacy if nuclear weapons were abolished,” and by implication, other countries will never be so foolish as to submit their societies to such hegemonic arrangements. In effect, Gorbachev is imagining that nuclear weaponry should be linked, not as in most liberal speculation to an affirmation of the nonproliferation regime, but rather to undoing geopolitical militarism, which means that if the United States ever embraces nuclear disarmament as policy rather than sentiment, it will have to terminate its global domination project. Gorbachev delivers here a powerful and persuasive message: if the United States ever becomes truly serious about wanting to implement the visionary conceptions of nuclear disarmament that Obama affirmed in his Prague speech with lofty generalizations, then it must simultaneously embark on a program of unilateral demilitarization.
With this concluding bit of insight from Gorbachev, which I find compelling, we should also acknowledge that it has been an odd deficiency in strategic thought in the West that most forms of strong advocacy of nuclear disarmament have not been organically connected with an overall demand for American demilitarization. Unless nuclear disarmament is implemented in a policy context that includes the demilitarization of geopolitics, it would give the United States the kind of political environment in which its massive military machine would be far more usable, less inhibited, and in all probability more menacing to the rest of the world. From this perspective one wonders why the realist cadres at the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and the Beltway think tanks do not endorse nuclear disarmament as a prime strategic goal fully consistent with achieving the kind of global securitization administered from Washington that militarists have long favored as the keystone of American grand strategy since 1945.
Gorbachev doesn’t venture onto this speculative terrain. His current belief is that unless American demilitarization becomes part of the nuclear disarmament package “talks toward a nuclear-free world will be little more than empty words.” Although Obama is not mentioned, his Prague speech thus qualifies as ‘empty words,’ not only because of the absence of follow up, but more pointedly due to Obama’s silence about the relevance of diminishing America’s non-nuclear military capabilities as an essential aspect of making credible and beneficial the endorsement of a world without nuclear weapons.
It is also probably the case that when an American president possesses a determined commitment to a world without nuclear weapons he will make initiate a campaign to win over public opinion in Omaha, Denver, or Phoenix, and not Prague. What is said in the Czech Republic may play well in Oslo, but it is not going to shake the ideological and bureaucratic foundations of nuclearism in the United States.
In this short essay, it has been my principal intention to appreciate the humane wisdom of Mikhail Gorbachev, and to hope that even 70 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki an American leader will emerge in the dark of night to carry forward the struggle for a viable human future by championing nuclear disarmament to be accompanied by substantial American demilitarization. She will think and act against the grain of this delusional quest for absolute geopolitical control, and maybe rest long enough to thank
Gorbachev for showing the way, both as political leader and as engaged citizen, an exemplary instance of what I call ‘citizen pilgrim.’
Normal
0
false
false
false
EN-US
JA
X-NONE
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}
Tags: demilitarization, global securitization, grand strategy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nuclear disarmament, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, Ronald Reagan