Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (124 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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All three terrible mistakes were underestimations of the United States, which grew steadily in strength and importance, other than during the early years of the Great Depression, throughout the twentieth century.
It was only 208 years since the British conceded three million Americans (including 500,000 slaves) their national independence—less than the time between George I and George V, or between the accessions of Louis XIV and Napoleon III. With most of an immense and stupefyingly rich continent open to it, armed with the English language, the Common Law, a democratic tradition, a revolutionary launch, Jefferson’s heroic mythos, and Madison and Hamilton’s Constitution, and brilliantly led when necessary, the United States had completed a rise without the slightest parallel or precedent in the history of the world.
It had operated since the World War I on a scale the world had never seen or imagined before, and its economic, military, and scientific might and political and popular cultural influence inundated the whole world, without any recourse to traditional conquest and imperial subjugation. And at the hour of its supreme victory, there was not a hint of triumphalism or condescension, officially or among the public, only relief that the Cold War was over and that the threat that had created such paroxysms just 40 years before had gone. Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and Russia generally, continued to be respected in the United States, and this mighty apotheosis, by a normally somewhat demonstrative, not to say boastful, people, was assimilated with gracious modesty, making it even more monumental because no monuments were erected to it, though they would have been justified. America was at the summit of the world, unchallenged in its mastery, in its time, and in all of preceding history.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
 
Waiting for the Future, 1992–2013
 
1. NEW RIVALRIES
 
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a sharply reduced need for strategic innovation or even vigilance in the U.S. government. Richard Nixon, when he startled the world with his overture to China in 1972, had told his principal European allies (Chapter 14) that there were five areas capable of influencing the world, militarily and economically—the United States, Western Europe, Russia, Japan, and China. He said that Western Europe and Japan were solid allies of the United States and that he wished to reinforce the detachment of China from Russia and then deal with Russia from strength. In 1992, Russia retained less than half of the population, though most of the physical expanse, of the former USSR, and all pretense at cooperation with the former Soviet republics quickly melted, except, to a degree, with Belarus and a couple of the Asian republics.
Russia itself was in a shell-shocked condition. Boris Yeltsin privatized almost everything, but on the basis of rank favoritism, and instantly created a notorious infestation of “oligarchs” who soon became familiar and generally rather coarse figures in the high-spending cities and resorts of the West. The transfer of nuclear weapons proceeded fairly well, and at least without disaster. Russia was reduced to renting its old Black Sea naval base of Sevastopol from Ukraine. The missile and air forces and the large navy that Khrushchev and Brezhnev had built after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 deteriorated and shrank, and the Russians no longer had the means or physical plant to conduct an arms race, in quantity or quality, with the United States. Yeltsin was a brave and sincere man but, like many of his countrymen, a chronic alcoholic. Yeltsin abruptly resigned in 1999 and was succeeded by Vladimir Putin, the premier, who had a KGB background, and has continued as the principal Russian political figure, either president or prime minister, since.
The much-feared famines and utter devastation of Russia did not occur in the early Yeltsin years, and Putin is generally conceded to have restored order, rebuilt income levels, largely completed the transition to a private enterprise economy, and produced high economic growth rates. He restored a nationalist foreign policy that has steered Russia to a nettlesome inconstancy, endlessly seeking more deference than it can now, on the basis of its geopolitical strength, legitimately claim. Russia again showed its imperishability and stoic genius of survival, a nation much punished in the severity of its climate and inborn grimness of its people (though not without bursts of exuberance). And it pays the price of having had, by Western standards, almost no experience of good government. Most its few successful rulers were barbarously harsh, particularly Peter the Great and Stalin, and as has been described, Stalin doomed Russia’s great charge to world power by opening an unwinnable contest with America. Like all of Europe but to a relative extreme, Russia has a declining birthrate. High oil and other commodity prices have helped, though at time of writing they seem unlikely to continue. But Russia still has no reliable political institutions, and Putin is a fairly shameless despot, though not heavy-handed by the standards of most of his predecessors. Russia is in its way immutable, and one of the world’s greatest cultures, but it does not now possess the stability, critical mass, or demographic trajectory to be believable as a coming source of great influence, or more than a self-important and rather abrasive regional power, albeit across most of the immense region of Eurasia.
To the extent that it was followed at all, the Russian threat to America’s primacy was succeeded by that of Japan, which, with apparently insuperable Oriental cunning, did a complete back-flip from the militarism and absolutism that led it to disaster at and after Pearl Harbor. It entrusted its entire defense to the United States, and built an industrial powerhouse based on quality of manufacturing, especially automobiles and other engineered products, and an ingrained, rigorously imposed national discipline. For a few years in the nineties, there was a good deal of talk of an irresistible triumph of Japanese industry and finance, a notion the Japanese collective leadership and opinion leaders helped to incite. When President Bush led the great alliance he and James Baker had constructed into the Gulf War in 1991, there was very audible speculation in prominent Japanese circles that if it were not successful, Japan would surpass the United States in economic might and international prestige, continuing, almost perversely, to leave the great burden of military defense almost entirely to the account of the Americans.
The nadir on the American side of this competition came on January 8, 1992, when President Bush vomited and fainted at a state dinner tendered to him by Japanese premier Kiichi Miyazawa. The premier had welcomed Bush to Japan in condescending words about the economic difficulties the United States was enduring, and the banquet incident, which followed an unsuccessful game of doubles tennis against the Japanese emperor and crown prince, were given considerable symbolic significance, for a time. Japan appeared set to become the manufacturing and even financial giant of the world, and redeployed its vast export revenues and the fruit of the high savings rate of the Japanese (about 25 percent, against almost none in the U.S. and between 5 and 10 percent in other advanced Western countries) in steadily more prominent foreign investments, such as Rockefeller Center in New York.
Japanese real estate values skyrocketed and Japanese banks and industrial groups (
zaibatsu
, vast conglomerates, four of which, working intimately with the government, controlled almost the entire private sector) were the largest in the world. But their financial reporting was inadequate, the state was too much implicated in the operation of the private sector, leadership in all sectors of Japanese life was too collegial to respond quickly to crises, and the country had bought into the notion of Japan as a superstate and didn’t recognize a mighty inflationary bubble. It all came down in shambles in the late nineties; the manufacturing exports continued, but real estate and other values crumbled and the Tokyo Stock Exchange evaporated by over 75 percent. Japan resumed its former status as an important country, but gradually indebted itself as its birthrate declined and it was unable to reignite an economic boom. (Rockefeller Center was repossessed by its former owners.) And Japan was steadily undercut by its fiercely competitive local rivals, especially South Korea and Taiwan, and in financial terms, Singapore and, while it remained outside China (until 1997), Hong Kong.
The next putative candidacy for rivalry to the U.S. for world leadership, though it was, in spirit, even less inherently hostile than that of Japan, was Western Europe’s. And like Japan’s, Western Europe’s defense had been largely in American hands throughout the Cold War. Although the implosion of the Soviet Union led to sharp American force reductions in Europe, it was also followed by a much greater withering of most of the defense capability of Western Europe, except for the modest number of submarine-launched nuclear missiles of the British and the French. Thus, opposite both the Japanese and the Europeans, American military primacy became even more pronounced in the 20 years after the Soviet breakup. Europe steadily integrated, through the handover of more powers to the European Commission in Brussels and to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
To the Eurocrats, as they were called, from the smaller countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands, it was the opportunity to rule a large jurisdiction. There was a brief, euphoric, pan-European sense of fraternity and the jubilant end to many centuries of horrifying internecine European strife. And to the Euro-integrationists in France and Great Britain, such as Edward Heath, British prime minister 1970-1974, and Jacques Delors, Mitterrand’s finance minister and head of the European Commission, though they and few others would publicly say so, it was the dream of the revival of a Eurocentric world. After the horrors of World War I, and the failure of the chief Western European powers to reach a durable accord at Munich, the one occasion where they met (Chapter 9), and the hideous reprise of World War II, Western Europe had had to endure the soft hegemony of America, its chief liberator from Hitler, to prevent the domination of Stalin and his successors, which would probably have been as harsh as Hitler’s, to judge from the unhappy fate of Eastern Europe. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was furtively reasoned, America could now be dismissed with thanks, and the Western Europeans could stand on each other’s shoulders and reestablish the Eurocentricity of the world after a painful lapse of a century.
Of course, it was utter nonsense; after a good deal of lively debate, Britain refused to chuck the political institutions it had developed and that had served it well for nearly a thousand years, for the earnest, untried
dirigisme
of Brussels and the talking shop of Strasbourg, with vague powers and 11 languages, before eight more languages came in with the addition of the former Soviet satellites and Baltic republics. And it didn’t want its often intimate and vital relationship with the United States, especially under Churchill and Roosevelt and Thatcher and Reagan, subsumed into the much less amicable relations of America with France and Germany.
The French were anti-integration under de Gaulle, who believed he could dominate Western Europe as long as Britain was excluded (he vetoed its entry in 1962), and Germany was divided and still self-conscious about the unspeakable atrocities of the Third Reich. Though he was doubtless sincere, as a World War I prisoner of war (taken when wounded and unconscious amid the slaughter of Verdun), de Gaulle flattered the Germans, and when he visited Germany spoke in heavily accented but comprehensible German (like Churchill’s French), which he had learned as a POW. Under Pompidou, the French were more expansive and admitted Britain to the Common Market, but were for autonomous member-states under subsequent presidents France was more driven by the pan-European bug but believed that it could be closer to Germany than were the British, and to the British than were the Germans, and somehow could manipulate the whole continent. (The French have rarely in their national history lacked an overconfident sense of their ability to prevail intellectually, as long as they weren’t too bedeviled by the Anglo-Saxons.)
In the same measure that the United States, unlike the British and the French and the Russians, did not fear a united Germany, Germany feared a Europe without the close alliance of the United States, the only power that was friendly, democratic, and so strong that it could discourage the rivalries within Europe. And the federal chancellor who accomplished German reunification, with indispensable help from George Bush and James Baker, had lost his father, uncle, and brother in France in the World Wars, and feared what a solitary Germany could do. Helmut Kohl restored the capital of Germany to Berlin, and was haunted by the close proximity to each other of the architectural remnants of successive failed regimes—Frederick the Great’s Brandenburg Gate, the Hohenzollerns’ Cathedral, Bismarck’s Reichstag, Hitler’s bunker, and Stalin’s immense embassy in East Berlin, all within a few hundred yards. He was sincere in calling for “a European Germany and not a German Europe.”

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