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5. Once Burned, Twice Shy? The Pause of 1989
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1. Keynote address by Brent Scowcroft at a Brookings Institution National Issues Forum, “The End of the Cold War and What’s Happened in the Ten Years Since,” December 2, 1999, available at www.brook.edu (December 1999). See also George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 11–12. 2. Quoted in Don Oberdorfer, The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983–1990 (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), 299. 3. For overviews of the Reagan-Gorbachev era in U.S.-Soviet relations, see Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1994), 1–374; Oberdorfer, The Turn, 1–326; and Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 762–803. For an interesting argument that Reagan was more responsible for Gorbachev’s foreign policy reorientation than commonly understood, see Beth Fischer, “Toeing the Hardline? The Reagan Administration and Ending the Cold War,” Political Science Quarterly 112, no. 3 (fall 1997): 477–96. Once Burned, Twice Shy? The Pause of 1989 Derek H. Chollet and James M. Goldgeier “when the bush administration came into office,” recalls President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, “there was already a lot of talk that the Cold War was over. . . . But to me, you know, my life spent in the Cold War, the structures of the Cold War were still in place. The rhetoric was different, but almost nothing else was different. And having been in the Reagan and Ford administrations and through détente, I thought, you know, once burned, twice shy.” Worried that the Gorbachev agenda was simply designed to lull the West to sleep while the Soviet Union revived itself and created an even bigger threat to American national security, President Bush and his national security adviser were on heightened alert as they came into office in January 1989.1 Meanwhile, for many other observers, it was obvious at the end of 1988 that the world was on the brink of a great transformation. In less than three years, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had placed his country on a course few thought possible. The Soviet economy was sputtering, its society opening, and its military power, in Kennan’s terms, mellowing. In dismantling the world as we had known it, Gorbachev had found an unlikely partner in Ronald Reagan. To Reagan, the evil empire was of “another time, another era.”2 He and Gorbachev had done more to curtail superpower arsenals than ever before, or ever expected. As the Reagan-Gorbachev era came to a close, some were even claiming that the Cold War was already over. Although that point could be debated, what was certain was that U.S.-Soviet relations were better than ever before.3 5 Wolhforth Chapter 5 12/27/02 12:13 AM Page 141 Thus, the initially cautious approach of the Bush administration toward the Soviet Union during 1989 has been the target of considerable criticism from policymakers and academics alike. As the new administration came into office, many hoped that President Bush and his team would stay the course and vigorously support Gorbachev. Yet as Reagan’s secretary of state George Shultz left office in early 1989, he worried that his successors “did not understand or accept that the Cold War was over. . . . President Reagan and I were handing over real momentum. I hoped it would not be squandered.” In the view of many observers, this is precisely what happened—as one has quipped, the Bush administration “fumbled.”4 Critics thought that the new president seemed disoriented and wasted valuable time, not really engaging Gorbachev constructively until the autumn 1989, just when the revolution in Eastern Europe was under way. Therein lie two puzzles. Why, after all of the goodwill of the late Reagan years, did the Bush administration eye Gorbachev with concern and skepticism ? Why didn’t Scowcroft “get it” if Shultz already did? And why, after initial suspicion about Soviet motives, did the Bush administration’s support begin to develop, and as it turned out, at different times for different individuals? When scholars study “mistakes” in international relations, they often focus on the failure to identify threats, since the inability to balance rising powers adequately often has such harsh consequences. The buck-passing of the 1930s, for example, is widely disparaged for allowing Hitler to unleash a military force...