Years of Missed Opportunities

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the last pessimists had to admit that the world had changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Only in 1991 did President George H.W. Bush dare to speak of a new world order that offered chances for sustainable peace.

What did the European revolution bring, in the end? Except for freedom and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, too little. Sure, the expansion of NATO and the European Union was in line with Immanuel Kant’s thesis of democratic peace: democratic countries are stable and do not wage war against each other, so the Warsaw dictatorships needed to be anchored in the democratic camp as soon as possible. That worked, but this Kantian project had the wrong effect on the Russians. They saw the unification of Germany and the defection of former satellites to NATO as the ultimate humiliation, which has soured their relations with the West.

I have always had the feeling that the end of the Cold War took the leaders in the White House by surprise. Their distant predecessors, Wilson and Roosevelt, developed blueprints for a better world during the First and Second World Wars. They came up with ambitious plans like the League of Nations and the United Nations. Bush and Clinton came up with nothing. They were unable to utilize the historical years of absolute American power for a new world order on the basis of efficient international institutions and effective international law.

For a moment, hope glimmered when the first President Bush concluded in 1991 that the destruction of communism offered the opportunity for the Security Council to reach consensus more easily, to promote peace and safety in the world. The first test case was Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

It was indeed amazing how fast the Security Council gave America a mandate to relieve Kuwait. After that, it also proved to be easy to get approval to intervene in imploding Yugoslavia.

It went wrong when the West started to care less and less about the rest of the world and intervened without a UN mandate in Kosovo (1999) and subsequently in Iraq (2003). Instead of staking its money on effective “multilateralism,” the United States, supported by a couple of loyal allies, drifted into promoting their own interests. They wound up on a collision course with the rest of the world. China and Russia saw a new form of imperialism in this display of power, which increased their distrust of western intentions. Ultimately, this unilateral policy led to the weakening of the West itself, when it turned out that bringing and maintaining peace was easier said than done.

It turns out that the West could not simply remake the world. Meanwhile, “we” have been in the Balkans for over 15 years, the Kosovo intervention proved a Pyrrhic victory, Iraq ended badly for the Americans, and Afghanistan threatens to become a disaster.

I think that Bush and Clinton displayed an appalling lack of vision and that they failed to use the unbridled American power to create peace through international law, as Wilson and Roosevelt tried to do, through which safety and stability would have been guaranteed in the coming decades. Instead, the U.S. made unwise, unilateral and ineffective use of military power, often without the prescribed judicial legitimacy as per the norm. This behavior reached its nadir under George W. Bush.

The consequence is that this week, Obama had to openly admit in China that the world has changed yet again. How will future historians look upon those years of Western superiority right after the fall of the Wall? I think they’ll be seen as the years of missed opportunities.