American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War: An Insider's Account of U.S. Policy in Europe, 1989-1992 (review)

The independence from Soviet domination of the East and Central European states in 1989 was a watershed event in international politics that marked the end of the Cold War. Robert L. Hutchings, who served as the director of European affairs at the National Security Council during the Bush administration, has made an important contribution to the history of the period by analyzing key turning points from 1989 to 1992 in Europe and the U.S. role in shaping them.

The study discusses the development of American strategy in 1989, the revolutions in Europe between 1989 and 1990, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. The war in the former Yugoslavia is touched upon at the end of the study. Hutchings pays particular attention to grand strategy. On this score, he judges that what “may have been the single most important contribution the United States made to the events of 1989” was that the United States “held its bilateral relationship with the Soviet Union, and East-West relations generally, hostage to the end of Soviet domination of the countries of Eastern Europe.”

The author’s analysis captures the importance of statesmanship in international politics. Indeed, the historic circumstances of the time period were especially conducive to the exercise of statecraft. As Hutchings explains, “Owing partly to the speed of events, it was a period in which pure diplomacy, unencumbered by the usual domestic political processes, played a central role more reminiscent of nineteenth—than twentieth—century international relations.”

The essence of statecraft is power and Hutchings relays a comment by one of the then Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel’s chief advisers which succinctly captures this lesson: “[w]hen Bush or Baker entered the room it was as if the entire history and power of the United States entered with him.” The author’s eyewitness accounts give the reader a feel for presidential power in action particularly during President Bush’s visit to Poland and Hungary on the eve of the collapse of communism. The visits, writes Hutchings, “had the effect of advancing the political agenda well beyond what had been contemplated in the earlier negotiations between the regimes and opposition forces.” President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker played pivotal roles in influencing Havel to view NATO—rather than a new pan-European security organization—as the centerpiece for European security.

Although Hutchings favorably reviews the performance of the Bush foreign policy team, he does make some measured criticisms. Hutchings asserts that the team’s cohesiveness was fostered by an efficiently-run NSC staff led by Brent Scowcroft and his deputy, Robert Gates. “Rivalry there was among agencies but there was almost none of the backbiting and turf warfare that had characterized other administrations.” However, the author concludes that “[t]he attributes that served U.S. policy so well in 1989 and 1990—the substance of policy as well as the collegial decision-making style—served us less well thereafter.” By 1991, Hutchings notes, “collegiality evolved into a closed and self-contained decision-making circle, increasingly impervious to new and unconventional ideas at the very time that unconventional thinking was most needed.”

The author’s criticism of the rigidity within the Administration reflects, in part, a strong dose of Wilsonian idealism in Hutchings’ overall realist framework. He has a firm appreciation of the necessity of power in all of its dimensions—political, psychological, economic, and military—in foreign policy. Nevertheless, Hutchings often appears optimistic and sympathetic in his discussions of Bush and the “New World Order,” the potential contribution of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the efficacy of multinational military intervention in Bosnia.

Hutchings’ study is an important addition to the literature at this critical juncture in the history of U.S. foreign policy...