Читать книгу World Politics since 1989 - Jonathan Holslag - Страница 28

But what was the Cold War in the first place? In the early 1980s, a soldier in a bunker near Moscow was alerted to an incoming American missile. The alert came at a sensitive time. For months, the United States had been testing the resolve of the Soviet Union by deploying nuclear-capable bombers and submarines close to its borders. A Korean passenger plane, mistakenly identified as an American military aircraft, had just been shot down. Now, this soldier in his bunker saw an intercontinental ballistic missile heading toward his country. That was at least what satellites and computers made of it. The incoming missile was in reality nothing more than the sun reflected by clouds. Luckily, the duty officer also assumed it was a false alarm. This was the Cold War: the permanent threat of mass destruction by tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.

Close calls like this were common. They showed that if the war between the two superpowers ever became hot, the whole world would burn in a nuclear apocalypse. This threat hung over the world like a permanent storm cloud. In its shadow, the global order remained a patchwork of regional battlegrounds, like Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and a few havens of relative peace. It was a breath-taking joust between the United States and the Soviet Union, a clash of titans over geopolitical interests, with the Soviets seeking to expand their influence across Eurasia, and Washington seeking to stop it – a conflict over ideology, technological leadership, economic dominance, and military supremacy. It was a period of physical walls, barriers that halted both people and trade, and mental walls, separating ideas. The Cold War lasted over 40 years.

Rather suddenly, the skies cleared. In 1985, the Secretary General of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, and American President Ronald Reagan had made overtures and met for the first time in Geneva. That year also, Mikhail Gorbachev avowed that the rigid Soviet system needed openness and reform. Glasnost and perestroika became the keywords in Russian policy reform. In 1987, he allowed private ownership, followed by the relaxing of control over smaller Soviet republics in 1988, and first attempts toward democratization in 1989. That year, Soviet troops withdrew after a decade of deployment in Afghanistan. The dismantling of a bastion of authoritarianism had started.

Dictatorship was also defied in other parts of the world. In 1987, direct elections had peacefully ended a decade of military rule in South Korea. The same year, Taiwan, which already had moved toward economic openness, lifted martial law. In Singapore, strongman Lee Kuan Yew partially democratized the city state and prepared to step down. In 1989, tens of thousands of students assembled in Beijing to call for democracy. Despite brutal suppression, these Tiananmen protests made it appear that economic growth would make democratization irresistible. Also in 1989, elections ended military rule in Turkey. In Iran, Akbar Rafsanjani was elected president with an agenda of opening up, also toward the West.