The coming crisis in international affairs

Book review of To Build A Better World: Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth

As secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice hung up in her office portraits of George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson, the predecessors who, more than anyone else, built the institutions that governed the international community after World War II. Rice and the president she served, George W. Bush, believed that with the invasion of Iraq, and the aggressive promotion of democracy across the Middle East, they could extend to the Arab world the liberal, democratic order that had sustained peace and prosperity in the West. They turned out to be dreadfully wrong, and neither the United States nor the Middle East has recovered from their reckless experiments.
 
Like Henry Kissinger, Rice is a scholar as well as a diplomat, and thus has additional means to influence the public and shape her own standing. A quarter of a century ago, she and Philip Zelikow, both of whom served as midlevel officials in President George H. W. Bush’s National Security Council, described the virtuoso statecraft that brought the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion in Germany Unified and Europe Transformed — a kind of bookend to the world-ordering labors of Marshall and Acheson. In To Build a Better World they return to the subject, but with a new sense of urgency, for, as they write, the world seems to be “drifting toward another great systemic crisis.” They would have us regard the end of the Cold War as a parable for our own beleaguered times.
Rice and Zelikow make a convincing case that the collapse of the Soviet Union constituted one of history’s rare “catalytic episodes,” when the existing order is convulsed by immense forces that statesmen can shape for good or ill. Had reckless leaders made self-aggrandising choices, the collapse of a great power could have led to chaos and war. This did not happen, in Rice and Zelikow’s telling, because the chief actors of the drama — the elder President Bush, the German chancellor Helmut Kohl and the Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev — were rational, worldly, pragmatic heads of state. They shared a vision of a common Europe, even if Gorbachev imagined a Communist Soviet Union flourishing alongside the capitalist West. They believed in, and used, the chief institutions of the postwar world, whether NATO or the United Nations. They understood the political limits under which each operated. When he met Gorbachev in late 1989, Bush said: “I have conducted myself in ways not to complicate your life. That’s why I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall.” Gorbachev, under great pressure from traditionalists to keep the Soviet sphere intact, responded that “he had noticed that and appreciated it.”
 
Rice and Zelikow told many of the same stories in their earlier book. But when you read them now, you feel an almost unbearable nostalgia for a time when leaders took risks in the name of a common interest and publics embraced the core values of liberal democracy. Where are the wise men of yesteryear? That, implicitly, is the question Rice and Zelikow pose. But perhaps that’s the wrong question.
 
In retrospect, the end of the Cold War gave birth to an extraordinary, and very brief, moment of consensus in which liberal values appeared to be universal and the institutions of the “liberal world order” seemed poised to operate as their founders had imagined. Peace and prosperity disposed citizens to defer to their leaders, who enjoyed the support needed to make tough decisions. That consensus is gone, along with the deference it fostered.
 
What happened? How did we lose faith in George H. W. Bush’s optimistic vision of American global engagement and sink into the toxic brew of bellicosity and isolationism that Donald Trump now promotes and exploits? Rice and Zelikow blame the economic crisis of 2008 and, incredibly, the preoccupation of the left with “the diversity narrative” rather than with poverty and inequality — blithely skipping over George W. Bush’s huge tax cuts for the rich. But that is hardly the chief omission. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 presented Bush and his national security team with their own “catalytic episode.” They could have closed ranks with allies and worked closely with the United Nations, as the elder Bush and his team had done. They chose a different path, one that ultimately damaged America’s standing in the world and soured the American public on engagement abroad.
 
At that critical juncture, our authors arguably did not practice what they now preach. Rice commissioned Zelikow to rewrite Bush’s 2002 national security report after the State Department produced a version that sounded to her too much like the elder Bush. The Rice/Zelikow version bristled with threats of military action — unilateral, if need be — in the name of principles that are “right and true for every person, in every society.” In the run-up to the war in Iraq, Rice ignored warnings from the same veterans of 1989 whom she praises so lavishly in To Build a Better World. And she and Zelikow refer only in passing to the Iraq war, observing with supreme understatement that the results “are still being debated today.” What, one is forced to ask, should be made of a work that is so scrupulous in historical analysis yet so impoverished in critical self-reflection?


To Build A Better World: Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth

Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice

Twelve

510 pages; $35

 
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