United States Foreign Policy After the Soviet Collapse

UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY. AFTER THE SOVIET COLLAPSE Eugene V. Rostow T,he structure and dynamics of the state system that is taking shape in the aftermath of the Soviet revolution should be hospitable to the permanent goals of American foreign policy. That judgment is tenable, however, only if the United States and its allies take advantage of the opportunities and avoid the risks that are immanent in these turbulent flows ofchange. To succeed will require a foreign policy at least as active and probably no less expensive than the policy America and its allies have pursued since the Second World War. The pattern of that policy will surely be less rigid than that of the ice age of the Cold War. It will put a premium on flexibility, decisiveness, and above all on a shared understanding of the long-term security interests of the United States and the Western allies as a group, so that the resolution of particular foreign policy crises will further those interests—or at least not do injury to them. The military component ofthis policy may well be less central than it has been since 1950, when the Korean War began; in any event, it will almost Eugene V. Rostow is Distinguished Fellow ofthe United States Institute ofPeace. A Professor Emeritus and now a Senior Scholar of the Yale Law School, Professor Rostow has been Executive Assistant to Dean Acheson, who was then Assistant Secretary of State (1942^14); Dean of the Yale Law School (1955-65); Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs (1966-69); Director of the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1981-83), and Visiting Professor at Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Chicago and the National Defense University. The present article is adapted from the epilogue of his forthcoming book, Toward a Managed Peace: The National Security of the United States, 1759-. 2 SAISREVIEW certainly be different. But the overall costs can hardly be reduced by much. In short, there is no "peace dividend" in sight for a compelling reason: the Allies have not yet achieved a stable peace, and, indeed, show no clear signs of having a coherent strategy for doing so. But no lesser goal can satisfy the requirements of United States and Allied security. The closest analogy to the situation the United States and its allies confront after the collapse of the Soviet Union is the one they faced after the First World War, when, instead of working together, they fell apart. Defeated Russia was taken over by the Bolshevik coup d'état in 1917, while its hard-pressed Western allies did nothing serious to sustain the promising initiative for democracy and reform led in Russia by Prince Georgi E. Lvov and Alexander Kerensky. With the benefit of hindsight, there can be no doubt that the cause ofpeace and ofhumanity would have been far better served if the Western allies had been able to rescue the first Russian Republic from Lenin's putsch. The failure of the Allies to defend the Russian Republic then was surely one of the worst diplomatic blunders of the twentieth century—a period rich in such mistakes. One can sympathize with the Western statesmen of the day, who had to confront the imminence of the great German offensive of the spring of 1918, reinforced by one million hardened troops from the eastern front, and thousands of artillery pieces. Their armies and peoples were bone tired after three years of trench warfare. The United States had barely begun to face the realities of world politics, and its untested troops were just starting to disembark in France. There had been a French mutiny. And large segments of Western opinion were dazzled by the hope that Lenin's seizure of power might promise mankind a glowing future. Giving full weight to these difficulties, it is nonetheless obvious that the Allies should have followed Churchill's advice to put down the Bolshevik regime at once. They had every legal and moral right to help a friendly Allied government defeat an insurrection. If they had acted early, the task would not have required much force. Instead, the Allies dithered. The Bolsheviks consolidated their power after a long civil...