Week 12: Empire Renewed - and Attacked

I delayed posting about my last week of teaching on America and the World since 1898 at the University of Oslo because immediately after my last class I left for the UK, where I gave a couple of talks. But I wanted to make sure I got back and blogged my final class, which was a very good session with my very bright Oslovian students. We covered a lot of ground, racing from the Cold War's aftermath to the 9/11 attacks and the US responses, mainly the wars in Afghanistan (2001-) and Iraq (2003-11).

There were two major, earth-shaking events in the history of US relations with the world as a whole between 1990 and 2013. The first was the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The second was 9/11. What was the basic, bottom-line impact of these events on US relations with the world? That was our question for our last class meeting.

When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, this meant that not only was the Cold War unquestionably over, but it could not really resume, even with profound reversals of political trends in (the now sovereign) Republic of Russia. Yes, they still had plenty of nukes. But their economy was in the midst of collapse and barely-legalized looting by insider politicians and businessmen, and the Russians had lost a great deal of the landmass that had helped make them a superpower. Even in 2013, with some semblance of economic stability and political potency restored under Putin, Russia can counter certain diplomatic moves by the US, but no one thinks it can hope to become a rival to the US. American pundits starting in 1990 celebrated the new "unipolar world," one with only a single superpower (or hyperpower, as some said), the United States of America. This was a dramatically different state of affairs than the one Richard Nixon had said was emerging in the early 1970s. Back then, Nixon described a multipolar power structure in the world, one with five major players: the US, the USSR, the PRC, a partly unified Western Europe, and Japan. I suppose some would say that in terms of economic power he was right. But in terms of sheer force, the US stood alone as the 1990s began and it still does.

One thing this meant was that starting in the 1990s, the United States military filled the strategic vacuum that the Soviet collapse created, by stationing troops (on formal US bases or through other arrangements) in many countries that had emerged from the old Soviet Union, particularly in Central Asia. This meant, eventually, that a map of US bases in the Middle East and Central Asia looks like this:

of

This is from 2011 (the map appeared on Juan Cole's excellent website, Informed Comment). But many of these gains occurred in the '90s, as a glance at the maps in The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson reveals. The whole in the doughnut is Iran, of course. They're so aggressive!

Throughout the Cold War, both superpowers had always had to think about how the other might respond before using force internationally. Of course, this consideration often failed to inhibit superpower warfare, especially in proxy wars (you could list these almost endlessly). But there were some limits. Historians agree that US presidents, specifically Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, did place limits on their actions during the US-Vietnam War, mainly out of well-founded fears that the Chinese (not even worried so much about the Soviets on this score) would enter the war directly if the US crossed certain lines. (And no, this does not mean the US fought with one hand tied behind its back. Please. Think about whether, say, a US ground invasion of "North Vietnam" would have made US victory more likely. In this case the PRC saved the US from a worse disaster than the war already was.)

No more. Whatever exact increases in US power resulted from the Cold War's end - and it's an interesting exercise to try to think about precisely how you measure this, or other things like an increase in national security - America clearly was now less inhibited in the use of force.

As President George Bush the Elder quickly demonstrated.
 

That's Bush 41 in the front seat, with General H. Norman Schwarzkopf behind him. The new faces of American power. This is late 1990 in Saudi Arabia. They are inspecting the situation. Bush had ordered hundreds of thousands of American troops to mass here, a remarkable action in itself in light of historic Saudi reluctance to station foreign, specifically infidel troops in Islam's holiest land. But the idea, at least officially, was to protect Saudi territory from a further aggressive action by the Iraqi army of Saddam Hussein, which invaded and occupied the whole of Kuwait in August. This operation, called Desert Shield, led to Desert Storm, the official name for the US war against Iraq, fought strictly for the purpose of repulsing Iraq from Kuwait and restoring the status quo ante bellum. There was plenty of gnashing of teeth about this, in 1991 and later - Bush should have gone to Baghdad and "finished the job" - but this was clearly a war fought for Middle Eastern stability, and virtually everyone in Bush's government in 1991 agreed. Yes, this means Dick Cheney, Bush 41's secretary of defense.

(Actually Bush had already demonstrated what the US could do in 1989 with his invasion of Panama, a direct US invasion that, even in Central America, might have been unthinkable in light of the Cold War just a few years before then.)

Moving on to Huge Event #2.

I do remember where I was that morning. I was at home watching television. Which is a strange thing, since normally I do not have the TV on in the morning. Have no idea why I had it on then, but I did. When I turned it on, the first plane had already crashed into the first tower. A few minutes later I saw the second plane fly into the second tower. It took about five seconds and then I thought, "Oh." This isn't an accident. I am sure lots of people thought the same thing at about the same moment.

Below is a collage of photos of most of the people killed on 9/11.

It became a popular refrain after 9/11 that the United States, in the 1990s, had taken a "sabbatical" or "vacation" from "history." At least in certain circles. This idea had legs because many Americans, probably most Americans, had had no idea that there was deep concern within the US national-security leadership during President Bill Clinton's administration about al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. If you still doubt this, have a look at Against All Enemies by Richard Clarke. Quite absorbing. Actually, as I explained to my students, the United States first declared a "war on terror" in the 1980s, when Moammar Qaddafi was the Saddam Hussein (or the Osama bin Laden, take your pick) of the Reagan years. Reagan ordered major air strikes against Qaddafi in 1986, after an initial skirmish in 1981. Terrorism was a big, big deal back in the '80s. Remember Pan Am 103? I sure hope you do. That appears to have been Qaddafi's payback for 1986, which was supposed to be payback for the bombing of a disco in West Berlin. Starting to get the picture?

It wasn't Bill Clinton who first got tired of this sort of lethal back-and-forth, which seemed to have no real endgame. Reagan himself basically stopped talking about terrorism (especially after it was revealed he had secretly sold weapons to Iran, which he accused of sponsoring terrorism in the Middle East - oops!). Then Bush 41 shifted the focus to wars against states deemed bad and threatening actors. Behind the scenes, Clinton gradually got more and more worried about al-Qaeda with a series of increasingly spectacular attacks on US personnel. Then Bush 43 took over, and clearly he and his team were disdainful of the outgoing Clinton administration's focus on non-state terrorism. This was revealed fully in the investigations of the 9/11 Commission, which - it should be noted - Bush 43 really did not want. He truly resisted creating the commission, but eventually decided he had to give in an acceded to its establishment. Also he insisted that he would only give testimony himself in closed session (not surprising for any president) and with his vice president, Dick Cheney, sitting next to him (which was weird).

Among the things I learned from reading the 9/11 Commission Report:

The very afternoon of 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defense, wrote a note that read, in part:

"Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL . Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

S.H. is Saddam Hussein, UBL is Osama bin Laden.

It's not news that, even before 9/11, high Bush 43 officials were talking routinely about "what do to about Iraq." Iraq was a problem - wasn't it? Got to do something....

9/11 was immediately seen as an opportunity to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam. Afghanistan - which harbored bin Laden and had a close working relationship with al-Qaeda, even if the Taliban government had not actually known about the 9/11 attacks when bin Laden planned them - would have to come first. (And last, as it turns out.) This was unavoidable, it seemed. Not that there weren't arguments made against a conventional war aimed at ousting the Taliban from Kabul. There were, ranging from CIA arguments that special forces could do the job to arguments, mainly from Democrats, that a sharp focus on al-Qaeda was smarter than shifting the focus, once again, to state structures. But politically, the invasion of Afghanistan was the real "slam dunk" (apologies to George Tenet - or not). But after Afghanistan, Part Deux would be Iraq. This became clear pretty fast in Washington. The PR machine got cranked up in the later part of 2002 - the Mohamed Atta meeting with Iraqi officials in Prague, etc. All rather cynical, to be sure.

But none of this is to say, necessarily, that high Bush 43 officials never meant any of what they said about the links between 9/11 and Iraq. In a way, they were quite plain. Iraq had had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and suggestions that there were such links were, as I say, cynical efforts to mislead the public. But US officials from 2001 to 2003 also made a different argument. The neoconservative argument was that terrorism emanated from the Middle East in general and that the US had to "drain the swamp," initiating sweeping change in the region, to make it safe for America and the world. No longer could the US pursue its conservative, traditional policy of keeping authoritarian regimes in place. Bad things were festering inside those boxes, things that were escaping and doing damage to the outside world. By establishing a US protectorate in Iraq, a potentially wealthy and powerful country, a major country, in the heart of the Middle East and the Arab world, a democratic transformation (or at least a pro-American one, not necessarily the same thing) could begin in the region. This is what Rumsfeld meant by "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." He wasn't assuming Iraq had had anything to do with 9/11. Of course if it had, this would have been convenient. But he was linking Iraq and al-Qaeda even if such ties didn't exist (the "it" of "Sweep it all up").

A lot more dead in Bush's Iraq War than on 9/11. A lot more. Here are some of their faces in another collage.

So, what did the end of the Cold War and the results of 9/11 change? How much did the US relationship with the world change? Let's put the question different. Is the US a more powerful country today than it was in 1990? A less powerful country? About the same? In the first months of the Iraq War in 2003, we started to hear a lot about the American "empire," either as a reality or a desideratum. Funny. Time was you could start a pretty good argument by saying there was an American empire. Now it became a commonplace, the term often used approvingly. That fad kind of faded as the Iraq invasion turned sour. Under President Barack Obama, there has been some retraction from the boldest, biggest visions of US global hegemony. But certainly not as much of a turn toward US modesty as some of Obama's liberal supporters in 2008 hoped (for the record, I think Obama has largely conducted US foreign policy as he said he would back then).

My students achieved no consensus on this question of the current state of US power. Some were very impressed with US power today, others saw the limits of US power standing out more clearly. We have learned over and over again that preponderant military power does not equal an unlimited capacity to impose one's will on the world. Interestingly, among my students who still see the US as very, very powerful, some remained impressed the America's "soft power," i.e., its political, diplomatic, and cultural influence. Some Americans worried during the Bush 43 years that the US was throwing that all away. Maybe it was recoverable after all. It takes a lot to really destroy a computer's hard drive. And US power is, perhaps, something close to hard-wired in global structures by now. Lousy metaphor I guess, and maybe Norwegians are not representative. But global power arrangements don't change so quickly.

It's been a great semester teaching here. Even on a sabbatical! I am really thankful to all my students here in Oslo for sticking with me this semester. At least as long as Norway has stuck with America!

Week 11: Ending Detente, Reviving Detente - and Winning the Cold War

Here's the man who killed detente.

I showed this picture to my class this week, and offered symbolic bonus points (the only kind there are here in Norwegian universities) to anyone who could identify him. To my mild surprise, one student, a rather young woman, correctly identified him: Helmut Schmidt.

Q: How do you know who he is?
A: I'm German.

I like the two-finger thing. I'm guessing this is Schmidt being sworn in as chancellor of the old West Germany, i.e., the Federal Republic (FRG). Bear in mind Schmidt was a Social Democrat. In the US, that would be enough to make plenty of folks think he was a Communist.

Not quite.

So, why start with Schmidt? Well, we had a big task in class this week. We had to try to understand both the escalation of the Cold War starting about 1978 or 1979, the start of a nail-biting period that lasted about five years, and then the dramatic and incredibly fast wind-down of the whole 40-years' conflict, ending, basically, with the phased surrender of the Soviet Union. A new leader in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power in 1985 and proceeded to opt out of the arms race with the US and to withdraw Soviet forces from its Eastern European empire. And all this while, eventually, working with a US president, Ronald Reagan, who got elected in 1980 by pledging to build up the US military and be more aggressive with the Soviets than Jimmy Carter had been as president since 1977. Many Americans think Reagan ended the Cold War by getting tough with the Soviets; most people outside the US see Gorbachev as the leader in ending the conflict.

But that's getting ahead of the story.

In 1980, probably no one anywhere in the world expected the Cold War to end 10 years in the future. Most people saw the conflict between the superpowers getting a lot worse - escalating, not deescalating. And whose fault was this? Reagan's? Well, he didn't become president until 1981, so you can blame him for making tensions worse if you like, but not for starting what appeared a downward slide. He was completely against detente, but detente was already on its death-bed when he became president.

What about Jimmy Carter? A lot of people look to the second half of Carter's 4 years as president as the time when a rightward shift in the US international stance (and domestically, too, but that's another story) became clear. Particularly after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Carter launched a very aggressive response: reinstating universal male registration for a potential military draft (I recounted to my students my experience going to the post office to register when I turned 16, very soon after this change in the law), boycotting the 1980 Summer Olympics, set for Moscow, banning US grain sales to the USSR, and beginning covert aid to the Afghan insurgents (the mujahideen) fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Whew. Carter said he had had it with the Soviets.

But back up just one step more. The SALT II treaty, agreed to by Gerald Ford and Leonid Brezhnev, was already a dead letter in the US Senate by this time. So maybe Scoop Jackson killed detente. Boy, that guy really hated arms control. "The Senator from Boeing," they called him.

Well, what about Brezhnev himself? Doesn't he, and the whole Soviet leadership, deserve their share of the blame? Sure. Of course. But let's be honest: they weren't trying to restart the Cold War by invading Afghanistan. Not that they had any right to invade the country, murder its leader, and install their own guy in Kabul, which is what they did. But their purposes were pretty strictly regional - they were agitated over the prospect of (what we now would call) an Islamist state on their southern border, with the potential to export its politics to the populations inside the (largely Muslim) Soviet Socialist Republics of Central Asia. Carter's national security adviser, Zbig Brzezinski, insisted the Soviets wanted to use Afghanistan as a path toward the Persian Gulf, their eyes on oil. There was someone who said something wry once about the damage done by small maps. From Kabul to the sea is a hell of a long way, and a rough one.

But detente had its most fervent base of support in Europe - the same place the Cold War began, before it went global. In Robert McMahon's wonderful book, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (when has another book done so much so well, so concisely?), there is a key section that explains that the policy of detente had multiple sources in the 1960s and 1970s, and that one of these was an indigenous welling up of sentiment for peace and reconciliation within Europe, and especially within the FRG, led by the Social Democratic chancellor Willy Brandt.

Same party as Helmut Schmidt.

Detente was staggered by blows landed within Europe. Speed ahead a few years. In the early 1980s, there were huge protest demonstrations in Western Europe - Germany, Italy, Britain, elsewhere - against President Reagan's plans to install a new generation of nuclear warhead-tipped missiles (both Pershing II intermediate-range missiles and smaller cruise missiles) in several NATO countries, especially the FRG. Warmonger!

OK. Well, there was something in that. But hold on. Reagan can be blamed for a lot of things. But it wasn't his idea to install the "Euromissiles." Jimmy Carter had promised to do so, and Reagan was following through on that Carter promise.

And why had Carter promised to give new missiles to Western Europe? Why would he force these awful things on them?

He didn't. Helmut Schmidt demanded them. He practically browbeat Carter into promising these new missiles, supposedly to match a new generation of missiles the Soviets had installed in Eastern Europe. Carter, who did try to puzzle things out for himself in general, seems to have found this hard to understand. The old missiles did the trick (deterrence) pretty well. What difference would new missiles make? But Schmidt, who apparently really detested Carter, wanted them.

The Social Democrats, by the way, lost power in 1982. Then they decided they didn't like the Euromissiles so much.

Well, in 1983, in the missiles went - and out the Soviet delegation marched from the ongoing (if moribund) strategic arms control talks. It took a little while for things to get going again.

Reagan came into office insisting that Carter (and, by implication, Nixon and Ford) had let the Soviets become #1. America was #2. America was weaker militarily than the Soviet Union.

Does this seem comical now? Well, to plenty of Americans it didn't in 1980. The US defeat in Vietnam was not so long ago. More relevant, the Iran hostage crisis was still ongoing. This added powerfully to the sense among Americans than the US had become - in Nixon's undying phrase - a "pitiful, helpless giant." Smaller countries were picking on us! And we couldn't seem to do anything to stop them. That was definitely the feeling among many, many Americans in 1980. This had nothing to do with "throw weight" and other technical terms relating to weaponry. It was something visceral.

Reagan would make America #1 again. That was his promise on defense. Big, big military buildup. Which he delivered, the budget be damned. Reagan also distinguished his own brand of American patriotism from that of others (like, supposedly, Carter) in this way: Reagan would not tolerate any criticism of the United States. Period. Criticism of the US (worst of all if it came from Americans themselves) could only weaken the US image and US resolve to battle the Communists everywhere around the world.

Guy loved to salute. Had no official reason to, but did it all the time anyway. Any chance he got.

Once Reagan became president he basically ended diplomacy with the Soviets. Detente was a sucker's game, a "one-way street" - going the Soviets' way - that's what Reagan said at his first news conference as president in 1981. And diplomacy could only mean a continuation of detente. That's the way it looked to him. He liked to joke later on, after Yuri Andropov lasted 2 years as the Soviet leader and then Chernenko only 1 year, that he really wanted to make peace with the Soviets, but their leaders kept dying on him. That was bunk. Reagan had no interest in diplomacy with the Soviets in his first term as president. The Soviets kept saying they wanted to go back to detente, which was a dirty word to Reagan. Why shouldn't they have wanted to go back to detente? It was their policy. What I mean is, since they didn't have a democratic political system, the guys who'd negotiated the ABM Treaty, SALT I, and SALT II for the Soviets were still there. Same guys, basically.

In 1983 things got a bit hairy. Popular fears of a nuclear war between the superpowers were becoming severe. The high point, perhaps, was the airing of The Day After, a TV movie on ABC that depicted a thermonuclear war as it would look from Lawrence, Kansas. Not a great movie, but still an ugly picture.

This is a still shot from the movie. I remember finding it rather chilling to see the images of the missiles taking off. ABC was persuaded to have a roundtable discussion late at night, after their aired the film, where Reagan administration officials tried to allay public fears that the government actually contemplated fighting and winning a nuclear war. Truly a nutty idea, but one that various administration officials actually floated, for the record. I don't think the efforts to placate the public's fears worked so easily. What the public didn't even know, but what most historians seem to believe happened behind the scenes right around the same time, was a very serious "war scare," in which a NATO war-games exercise led the USSR's leaders to fear that NATO was really planning a nuclear first strike against them, using war games as a ruse. Oy.

Whether because of what was unknown to the public, or because Reagan was heading into a reelection year and his campaign saw fears of a nuclear war as perhaps his biggest political problem, Reagan changed his rhetoric starting in 1983, tentatively, then far more strongly in 1984 (election year). He started to say that a nuclear war could not be won and must not be fought. Imagine - this was a new departure for him. But gradually this worked to mollify public anxieties. I'm trying to make a long story short here. Reagan announced he was now ready to resume diplomacy with the Soviets. He may have believed that he now could do so safely because of his massive arms buildup. This is what we used to call "negotiating from a position of strength." But he certainly didn't persuade the Soviets to return to the bargaining table, because they were already pleading with him to go there.

Oh, and also: the Soviets shot down a plane, KAL007, killing 269 people. And 241 US Marines got blown up in Lebanon. Hell of a year, 1983. And Star Wars, too (the missile-defense fantasy, not the movie).

Of course, superpower relations weren't the only geopolitical game going on at the time. Reagan was determined not just to end detente when he became president. He also looked for places to roll back socialism (socialism, communism...whatever).

Like Afghanistan.

Those are mujahideen posing atop a downed Soviet helicopter. Reagan - with enthusiastic support from both Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress - dramatically increased levels of aid to the Afghan insurgents, and in 1985 switched from sending money to sending arms, notably Stinger antiaircraft missiles.

Reagan also resolved to wage indirect war in Central America. That long-feared event, a "second Cuba," finally had come to pass, it seemed, in Nicaragua, when the Sandinistas overthrew a really nasty US client regime in 1979 and took over. So Reagan started funding an insurgency, the Contras. (I'm a Contra, too, Reagan said. Contrarevolucionario, that is.) At the same time he started sending as much money and weaponry as he could find to the regime in El Salvador, so that the leftist insurgency there didn't create a third Cuba in the Caribbean Basin. Insurgency in Nicaragua, counterinsurgency in El Salvador.

Who are these guys? Bonus points here, too. Picture the guy in the back in a US Marine uniform, lots of medals on his chest. Yup, Ollie North of Iran-Contra infamy. Long story. Let me just say this is a classic picture, because it shows North as he usually dressed when he worked at the White House - in a business suit - and, of course, it shows him with Dutch (Reagan's nickname). The other guy, in the foreground with Reagan, is Adolfo Calero, one of the political front men for the Contras. Yes, Reagan knew who North was and had a pretty good idea of what he was doing, legally and illegal (illegally starting in late 1984 when the Congress banned funding for the Contras but North et al., on Reagan's orders and with Reagan's involvement in some details, did whatever they had to to keep the money and arms flowing to them, never mind what the law said).

Any of you 80s trivia nuts out there - again, who's this guy? Why, it's Eugene Hasenfus, of course, in October 1986. This is when the secret Contra supply operation got its cover blow. Hasenfus was the lone survivor of a supply plane the Nicaraguans shot down.

And what about the "Iran" in Iran-Contra? That was the politically dangerous part for Reagan. Selling US weapons to IRAN??!! Oops. Why?

Here's one big reason. William Buckley - not the National Review guy - the CIA's Beirut station chief, the most important of the several Americans taken hostage in Lebanon by militias in the early 1980s. Reagan really wanted to get these guys out. The idea that there was a "strategic opening" to Iranian "moderates" was always just so much smoke being blown. It was always about trading arms for hostages. And no, it didn't even work. About 2,000 antitank weapons delivered to Iran, 3 hostages freed - but at least 4 more taken. If you're inclined actually to keep score. And Buckley died in his captors' hands.

This was all blowing up (in a bad way, not a good way, like the kids say today) in October and November of 1986. By coincidence, in October Reagan met for the second time with Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader, in power for about 1.5 years at this point. They met, of all places, in Reykjavik. This is how they looked when they were done:

Which one looks angrier? Maybe Reagan. But they're both unhappy campers, no doubt about it. They seemed to have accomplished nothing in Iceland. We now know that their parleys ended acrimoniously, with each accusing the other of not really wanted to reach an arms-reduction agreement.

But we also know, and people learned very soon after the meetings ended, that Gorbachev and Reagan had at least talked about the idea of completely eliminating nuclear weapons.

!!??!!

Could this be possible? Conservatives in the US, the people who'd always hated detente, were beside themselves. Gorbachev, in fact, well before Reykjavik, had made public the outlines of a proposal to eliminate all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. And Reagan had started to embrace the same idea, at least as an ultimate goal, in 1983. (And no, in case you're wondering, Reagan had not been a secret nuclear "abolitionist" for years. This was a new idea for him.)

Reagan had gradually been persuaded to give up, rhetorically, the idea that the US had to achieve (or maintain) strategic superiority over the USSR. The two superpowers had achieved strategic parity by the late 1960s. Neither could really get an advantage over the other in a potential nuclear war. Reagan had always resisted the idea of parity, just hated it. Somebody had to be top dog, and he wanted it to be the US. But at their first meeting, in Geneva in 1985, Reagan and Gorbachev had agreed to a joint statement in which both countries renounced the quest for superiority. They didn't say "parity," but that was the implication.

And strategic parity was an essential concept of detente.

Here's the thing: Reagan was edging back toward detente, perhaps without understanding this is what he was doing. Once you give up the idea that the two countries are locked in a perpetual competition for supremacy, the door is suddenly open to negotiating a continuation of parity, simply at lower levels of armaments and danger. Lots of factors went into Reagan moving in this direction. The two leaders couldn't make their breakthrough in Reykjavik because Reagan was still clinging to the idea of missile defense - shoot 'em down in space, after they're launched - and Gorbachev couldn't sell disarmament to his own defense hawks without a US pledge to give up this idea, which was quite destabilizing, even if it was science fiction (long story).

Down the road, however, Gorbachev just gave up his objections to the missile defense fantasy. He agreed to take the nukes out of Europe - the Euromissiles gone from Western Europe and the Soviet missiles gone from Eastern Europe. This had been Reagan's proposition in 1981, when everyone saw it as something so unreasonable, from the Soviet view, that they would never agree to it, and it was probably a US effort to ditch arms-control talks by taking a position that was a total nonstarter. Well, now (in 1987) it was happening.

Concession after concession came from Gorbachev. He really, really wanted to get out of the arms race. He wanted to sink his resources into saving his domestic economy, which he ended up failing to do anyway.

There is, of course, a lot more to the story. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989 - and all the Warsaw Pact satellite regimes of the Soviet Union collapsed unbelievably fast, within months. In Prague, the Communists just handed the house keys over to Vaclav Havel and the dissidents. In Poland, the Communists invited Solidarity to form a government. There was violence in Romania - and, later, some in Lithuania, as the Baltic nations actually broke away from the USSR itself - but most of the Soviet empire's breakup was startlingly nonviolent as well as swift.

The US largely lost interest in Central America as the 1980s ended. The Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, often with the backing of the US Congress (and sometimes without it), fueled civil wars there in which US-backed governments killed 300,000 of their own people in the 1980s. It's a horrible record.

The Cold War had organized global politics, US foreign policy, and many elements of domestic US life for 40 years. It ended suddenly.  I'm not sure we've really adjusted. But I guess that's another story. This one was plenty dramatic enough for one week.