Stephen F. Cohen, Nation - How did détente, despite three decades of repeated defeats and political defamation, remain a vital and ultimately triumphant (as it seemed at the time to most observers) American policy?
Above all, because Washington gradually acknowledged that Soviet Russia was a co-equal great power with comparable legitimate national interests in world affairs. This recognition was given a conceptual basis and a name: “parity.”
... It is true that powerful American political forces never accepted the principle and relentlessly assailed it. Even so, the principle existed—like sex in Victorian England, acknowledged only obliquely in public but amply practiced—as reflected in the commonplace expression “the two superpowers,” without the modifier “nuclear.”
Most important, every US president returned to it, from Eisenhower to Reagan. Thus, Jack Matlock Jr., a leading diplomatic participant in and historian of the Reagan-Gorbachev-Bush détente, tells us that for Reagan, “détente was based on several logical principles,” the first being “the countries would deal with each other as equals.”
Three elements of US-Soviet parity were especially important. First, both sides had recognized spheres of influence, “red lines” that should not be directly challenged. This understanding was occasionally tested, even violated, as in Cuba in 1962, but it prevailed. Second, neither side should interfere excessively, apart from the mutual propaganda war, in the other’s internal politics. This too was tested—particularly in regard to Soviet Jewish emigration and political dissidents—but generally negotiated and observed. And third, Washington and Moscow had a shared responsibility for peace and mutual security in Europe, even while competing economically and militarily in what was called the Third World. This assumption was also tested by serious crises, but they did not negate the underlying parity principle.
Those tenets of parity prevented a US-Soviet hot war during the long Cold War.
Above all, because Washington gradually acknowledged that Soviet Russia was a co-equal great power with comparable legitimate national interests in world affairs. This recognition was given a conceptual basis and a name: “parity.”
... It is true that powerful American political forces never accepted the principle and relentlessly assailed it. Even so, the principle existed—like sex in Victorian England, acknowledged only obliquely in public but amply practiced—as reflected in the commonplace expression “the two superpowers,” without the modifier “nuclear.”
Most important, every US president returned to it, from Eisenhower to Reagan. Thus, Jack Matlock Jr., a leading diplomatic participant in and historian of the Reagan-Gorbachev-Bush détente, tells us that for Reagan, “détente was based on several logical principles,” the first being “the countries would deal with each other as equals.”
Three elements of US-Soviet parity were especially important. First, both sides had recognized spheres of influence, “red lines” that should not be directly challenged. This understanding was occasionally tested, even violated, as in Cuba in 1962, but it prevailed. Second, neither side should interfere excessively, apart from the mutual propaganda war, in the other’s internal politics. This too was tested—particularly in regard to Soviet Jewish emigration and political dissidents—but generally negotiated and observed. And third, Washington and Moscow had a shared responsibility for peace and mutual security in Europe, even while competing economically and militarily in what was called the Third World. This assumption was also tested by serious crises, but they did not negate the underlying parity principle.
Those tenets of parity prevented a US-Soviet hot war during the long Cold War.
... We are in a new Cold War with Russia today, and specifically over the Ukrainian confrontation, largely because Washington nullified the parity principle. Indeed, we know when, why, and how this happened.
The three leaders who negotiated an end to the US-Soviet Cold War said repeatedly at the time, in 1988-90, that they did so “without any losers.” Both sides, they assured each other, were “winners.” But when the Soviet Union itself ended nearly two years later, in December 1991, Washington conflated the two historic events, leading the first President Bush to change his mind and declare, in his 1992 State of the Union address, “By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.” He added that there was now “one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America.” This dual rejection of parity and assertion of America’s preeminence in international relations became, and remains, a virtually sacred US policymaking axiom, one embodied in the formulation by President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, that “America is the world’s indispensable nation,” which was echoed in President Obama’s 2014 address to West Point cadets, in which he said, “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.”
This official American triumphalist narrative is what we have told ourselves and taught our children for nearly twenty-five years. Rarely is it challenged by leading American politicians or commentators. It is a bipartisan orthodoxy that has led to many US foreign policy disasters, not least in regard to Russia.
For more than two decades, Washington has perceived post-Soviet Russia as a defeated and thus lesser nation, presumably analogous to Germany and Japan after World War II, and therefore as a state without legitimate rights and interests comparable to America’s, either abroad or at home, even in its own region. Anti-parity thinking has shaped every major Washington policy toward Moscow, from the disastrous crusade to remake Russia in America’s image in the 1990s, ongoing expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, non-reciprocal negotiations known as “selective cooperation,” double-standard conduct abroad, and broken promises to persistent “democracy-promotion” intrusions into Russia’s domestic politics.
... Moscow has repeatedly protested this US sphere creep, loudly after it resulted in a previous proxy war in another former Soviet republic, Georgia, in 2008, but to deaf or defiant ears in Washington. Inexorably, it seems, Washington’s anti-parity principle led to today’s Ukrainian crisis, and Moscow reacted as it would have under any established national leader, and as any well-informed observer knew it would.
No comments:
Post a Comment