Obama and Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War.

If President-elect Obama makes good on his campaign promise to withdraw troops from Iraq, it would be a serious mistake to ship them to Afghanistan. The situation there requires a more comprehensive approach that emphasizes politics and diplomacy. Mr. Obama could do worse than to draw some lessons from the Soviet effort to find a political solution in the late 1980s.

In its own entanglement, Moscow was supporting a quasi-communist government and fighting a counterinsurgency financed and supplied by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and a number of others, primarily through Pakistan. Soviet diplomats, military officers, and security officials worked tirelessly to find an international agreement as well as to win over mujahadeen leaders and convince them to join a coalition government.

The Soviets faced formidable challenges: the party they were supporting was internally divided, the opposition was well supplied for a variety of sources, and the U.S. drove a hard bargain by refusing to stop sending weapons until the Kabul government stepped down. While Moscow wanted to end the war that was a drain on resources, men, and morale, it had to so without leaving a vacuum or a hostile government on its southern border.

When the USSR invaded Afghanistan it did not expect to create a communist state there. Rather, the goal was to create a stable and friendly government in Kabul. The thousands of party advisors sent to assist in spreading government authority, however, often ignored local traditions; by 1986 Moscow realized they were doing more harm than good. Moscow ultimately concluded that even the generous amount of technical and political assistance it was providing would not end the civil war there if major opposition leaders could not be brought into the government.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan to strike at the heart of Al-Qaeda; once there, it engaged in a massive democratization program. The results of its efforts have been mixed, but it is clear that the country is becoming less stable, and the distinctly anti-democratic Taliban are gaining the upper hand. Given the circumstances, it is time to recognize that the U.S. should devote its energies primarily to creating a potentially undemocratic but nevertheless stable Afghanistan, something Mr. Obama is reportedly considering.

Even this more limited goal will prove difficult to achieve. However, the Soviet experience suggests the following steps will be necessary. First, finding a strong leader who can unite enough of Afghanistan’s various forces to keep the country from spinning out of control. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in part to remove the erratic and bloody-minded Hafizullah Amin, then spent six years trying to prop up the ineffectual Babrak Karmal before overseeing his replacement with Mohammed Najibullah. For all his faults (and he had many) the new leader proved strong enough to hold his own party together while using his clan links to open dialogue with some opposition leaders.

Second, it will mean taking an active role in bringing former enemies into the fold. Moscow got into this game a little too late, and its efforts were hampered by internal divisions about which mujahadeen leaders would be acceptable partners for the the Kabul government. In this sense the U.S. is somewhat better positioned – it already has similar experience in Iraq, where General David Petraeus was able to reach out to Sunni leaders in the Anbar province.

Third, it will mean forging a regional consensus on Afghanistan which includes Iran, Pakistan, Russia and the Central Asian States. In general the U.S. has been able to cooperate with each of these countries to a greater or lesser degree from the start of the NATO operation there in 2001. However, the Bush administration’s failure to constructively engage Iran and Russia, as well as its miscalculations in Pakistan, have created a murky picture in the region. (Needless to say, improving relations with Iran is doubly important if Obama is serious about withdrawing from Iraq.)

The Harvard realist Stephen Walt argues that going through with a planned expansion of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan may not be the best idea because of the relative costs involved. I would add that it is unlikely the U.S. or its NATO allies will commit the numbers necessary to pacify all the regions where the Taliban is active. If NATO were to take a more active role on the Pakistani side of the Pushtun tribal belt, which serves as a refuge for Taliban fighters, it would likely do more harm than good. It is useful to remember that Moscow also experimented with increasing troop numbers even as it was looking for a way out of the conflict in 1985, but ultimately Soviet leaders saw that the “surge” was only deepening their involvement, not leading to a resolution. It is safe to say that Afghanistan will only become stable once enough Taliban are co-opted to make a central government viable and the Afghan military (and tribal militias) are able to fight the remainder with U.S. supplies.

Soviet leaders were aiming for a similar scenario as they sought a way to withdraw their troops between 1986 and 1991. Almost all of the former participants (both people on the ground and at the center of decision-making in Moscow) I have spoken with believe they came close to succeeding. When the Geneva Accords were signed in April 1988, it was far from clear whether the Soviet backed government in Kabul would last more than a few months after the withdrawal. Yet after February 1989 the Afghan army, which rarely took a leading role in battles while Soviet troops were there, proved able to face down mujahadeen offensives on its own. Not only did the Kabul government hold most of the territory previously held primarily by Soviet forces, but the regime actually outlasted the USSR by four months!

Many Soviet officers realized early in the war that the task of creating a stable Afghanistan could never be fulfilled through military means. Eventually their superiors in Moscow came to believe the same thing and began pursuing both international diplomacy and internal reconciliation. When I spoke to Nikolai Kozyrev, the chief Soviet negotiator at the Geneva Accords and a specialist on the region, he highlighted this as the main lesson to draw from the Soviet experience. “Diplomacy allowed us to withdraw our troops,” he said, and pointed out that talks with the Taliban were absolutely necessary. In the end, the reconciliation would be up to by the Afghans themselves.

Further Reading:
For the current situation in Afghanistan and how it developed, I highly recommend the work of Dr. Antonio Giustozzi at the Crisis States Research Centre, including this paper. The veteran journalist Ahmed Rashid recently released a useful book on the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan, pessimistically entitled Descent into Chaos. A number of useful reports are available from the International Crisis Group. Finally, there was an interesting discussion on Iraq and Afghanistan this weekend in the New York Times.

US-Russian Relations: Some Historical Parallels

Much has been made of the recent Russian decision to place short-range iskander missiles in Kaliningrad. Artemy Kalinovsky rightly pointed out in his latest post that the western media has been implying that the Russians are somehow acting in an aggressive or militarist way. However, if the situation is turned on its head and one ponders what the US response would be if the Russians were to (and we need to suspend reality here for a moment for the sake of the argument) place a radar system in Canada; it becomes clear that the Russian response is not out of order. It should be expected.

Indeed, history has provided us with a parallel to the situation in the form of the Cuban Missile Crisis. While the US reasoning in the current situation makes it clear that the radar and interceptors are not meant for Russian missiles, the two events share striking similarities insofar as they threaten to upset the nuclear status quo. What Washington and the US media fails to acknowledge, and Moscow knows too well, is that the missile interceptors would be useful in stopping Russian launched missiles as well. This is not often heard in the media. Washington has made it clear that it is not their intended purpose, but it does not change the reality to the Russians.

The issue of US radar and missile interceptors based in Poland and the Czech Republic speaks to the broader issue of the failure of the Bush Administration to respect Russian regional security concerns. No doubt this has been influenced by the legacy of the Cold War. Key players in the Administration: Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle, were all advocates of hard-line approaches to US-Soviet relations under Nixon, Ford and Reagan. They seem to have failed to grasp that their policy of acting tough towards the Soviet Union was not key in hastening the end of the Cold War. They still feel that such an aggressive act is the correct path to increase US security and power. However, there are dozens of instances in the past 50 years that contradict such a sentiment. Every instance of belligerent behaviour towards the Russians has ended up with heightened tensions and a concurrent decrease in US security. According to the supporters of the Bush Administration, the installation of missiles is not aggressive. It is meant only to increase US security. Indeed, the Administration would contend that they have offered to share the radar with the Russians. Clearly someone needs to brief the Bush cabal on the concept of a ‘security dilemma.’ (Somewhat comically, one can only be reminded of Reagan’s assertion to Gorbachev that the US would share SDI technology, only to have an exasperated Gorbachev point out that the US would not even share milking machines.)

The recent Russian military resurgence is claimed to be a result of increased oil and gas revenues. But this is true only insofar as the Russians have someone to flex their rediscovered muscles towards and the US and West have provided that in the form of NATO expansion. If the expansion was intended to provoke a Russian response in order to justify the continued existence of NATO, then it has worked. However, past that, one has to wonder what the US hopes to get out of it. No less a Cold Warrior than George Kennan has stated that the eastward expansion of NATO is the biggest geo-strategic mistake since the end of the Cold War (he was speaking prior to 2003.)

Indeed, there are several parallels with prior pact expansions hurting US security. Eisenhower’s “Pactomania” ended up constraining more than it freed US resources or improved security. Both CENTO and SEATO are examples of this. In fact the pact expansion of the 1950’s and early 1960’s primarily increased the Soviet feeling of encirclement. It was such actions that in part motivated Khrushchev to expand the Cold War to the Third World. It must be asked, therefore, how the expansion of NATO to former Easter Bloc countries will increase US security? It is highly unlikely the world could expect a full military response to Russian aggression towards Romania or Bulgaria. NATO expansion has simply aggravated long standing Russian security concerns. It is not a complicated concept, which is what makes the US failure to pay heed to it all the more incredible.

This does not mean that the US should cosy up to the Russians or acquiesce to their demands. The US should most definitely protect what it sees as its interests on the Russian periphery. However, protection of interests and dialogue are not mutually exclusive. US-Russian relations through the Cold War have shown that the both sides have come out ahead when dialogue has been at its highest.

Perhaps what is most amazing is that the Bush Administration has still yet to learn the diplomatic lessons of the Cold War (this is all the more dumbfounding since all of the key policymakers were active participants.) President Medvedev’s recent speech was not nearly as hostile as it has been made to seem. Gregori Zhdanov spoke of the “outstretched hand under the clenched fist” regarding the creation of the Cominform. This same idea permeated relations between the two powers through the Cold War, and it remains today. President-Elect Obama has demonstrated that he understands subtleties better than Bush. Hopefully he will see what Bush failed to: the outstretched hand.

Obama and Medvedev - Improving US-Russian Relations

Moscow, Russia

After Dmitry Medvedev delivered his message to the Federation Council here last week, news outlets in the U.S. and Britain jumped on the Russian president’s seemingly hostile rhetoric regarding the planned missile defense system to be placed in Poland and the Czech Republic. Russia, Medvedev said, would respond by planting a system in Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea. The New York Times, which accompanied its coverage with a photo of troops on parade in Red Square, focused on his harsh words as well as the fact that that he did not congratulate Barack Obama on his election victory.

Yet these reports miss a number of essential points. Indeed, people I’ve spoken to here, some of them experienced watchers of Kremlin politics as well as US-Russian relations, thought the speech could prove to be an important marker in terms of a change in direction of domestic and foreign policy and the emergence of a distinct “Medvedev” policy that has not been evident since his inauguration in May.

Undeniably, the most notable elements of Medvedev’s speech had to do with domestic, not foreign, policy. He spoke about the importance of individual rights, battling with corruption, and economic freedom. His predecessors paid lip service to these principles, but what was striking was Medvedev’s tone and the fact that his words seemed to be directed at his own mentor and many of his supporters. (You can read the text for yourself here – try to ignore the slightly awkward translation).

What about Medvedev’s foreign policy?

Medvedev began the speech with a number of references to the summer’s events in Georgia and its two breakaway regions, Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia. He did not shy away from blaming Georgia for the conflict and insisting that NATO had overstepped its bounds. Most of the speech, however, avoided foreign policy. The message was “our priority is getting our own house in order.” And while critical of US policy in Georgia and on the missile-defense issue, it clearly left the door open for an improvement in relations: “I would stress that we have no issue with the American people, we do not have inherent anti-Americanism. And we hope that our partners, the new administration of the United States of America, will make a choice in favor of full-fledged relations with Russia.”

What would it take for the new administration to create a long standing, stable relationship with Russia?

First and foremost, it means being willing to accept limits. This includes limits on NATO expansion, and it may include abandoning the missile shield the Bush administration has worked to place in the Czech Republic and Poland. Why? Because Russia may come to terms with not being a global superpower, but it certainly will not abandon its status as a regional power. It demands respect and will lash out when its sphere of interest is violated. Contrary to the thinking of the outgoing administration and its intellectual supporters at AEI and the Project for a New American Century, not every region is equally important to the U.S. (Not surprisingly, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister called Obama's staff last Friday and said that Russia would not go ahead with the Kaliningrad deployment if the U.S. refrains from its plans in Poland. Apparently Mr. Obama has already signalled the door is open for discussion on this question, which I view as a positive development and John Bolton does not.)

Second, the Obama administration should do what both Clinton and George W. Bush failed to do – treat Russia as a partner not only in words but deeds. The word partner is now only seen between quotation marks in Russia, because it is associated with a campaign, almost two decades old, to weaken Russia at the expense of its formal rivals. Making someone accept a reality they are powerless to change, which was the case with expansion of NATO in the 1990s, is not the same as partnership. Similarly, it was disappointing that US officials did not even seriously consider the Russian counterproposal to the missile shield. The Obama administration needs to involve Moscow in a real dialog on all such security issues, and be willing to cede ground at least some of the time.

Third, the administration needs to have a frank conversation with its counterparts about what each others’ limits are. It may not like everything it hears, but Moscow is much more likely to cooperate on issues important to the US – including Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq, if it sees the US as willing to respect its influence in other areas, like Ukraine or Georgia. This may sound naïve, but it is these sort of conversations that have made cooperation between great powers (including the US and USSR) possible historically.

Finally, the new administration could take a number of steps to ease the mutual climate of suspicion, including permanently removing Russia from the Jackson-Vanik Ammendment and easing travel restrictions for Russians traveling to the US. Both the amendment, which links trade with Russia to freedom of emigration, and the costly and difficult visa process are seen as demeaning by many people here. Citizen’s from America’s other partners, like the EU states, don’t need a visa at all. Russia’s economic migrants are much more likely to head for Moscow or St. Petersburg rather than for the distant US; while a full visa-waiver program may be premature, the current regulations need to be relaxed. (US citizens who travel to Russia will also appreciate the reciprocal easing of the process that would follow on Moscow’s part.)

Would any or all of these measures create the kind of stable, peaceful relationship the US and Russia need? It is impossible to say for certain – Medvedev is still weaker internally than Putin, and the global economic crisis has left many things up in the air. Nevertheless, if Mr. Obama is serious about changing the way the US is seen in the world, Russia would be a perfect place to start.

The Obama Revolution: From Hustings to Reality

The Obama campaign turned American politics upside down. His approach to campaign financing revolutionised the rules of the game, and his use of the Internet and mobile web stirred unprecedented interest, brought people to the polls for the first time and produced a larger, more sceptical and informed electorate. Barack Obama portrayed himself as transcending politics, as a national reconciler, and as the harbinger of change in a disaffected country. No doubt President Obama has transformed American politics, but will he revolutionise American foreign policy as well?

Considering the nature of American politics, we may not be able to predict the tenets of President Obama’s foreign policy until after his official inauguration and after he has appointed the key decision-makers in his administration. What we do know is that campaign rhetoric rarely turns into presidential policy and that Obama’s policy will depend, of course, on how events unfold in the coming months.

Few President-elects have stirred so much emotion in America and risen to prominence with such high international approval ratings. Obama is a great symbol of change and progress in America, and his message is especially powerful considering the American and global public’s dissatisfaction with the George W. Bush administration. As such, President Obama is likely to respond to these expectations early in his presidency with a series of highly symbolic foreign policy decisions. He will shift the rhetoric away from Bush’s first term unilateralism and excessive reliance on military might. Obama’s first decisions will aim to repair America’s foreign relations and its reputation in the world. He will decide to close down Guantánamo Bay detention camp, end America’s policy of torture, reconsider extraordinary rendition and re-engage America as a leader in multilateral negotiations for a global climate regime.

Such decisions will be easy for Obama to promise and they will earn him much applause around the world. When the applause dies down however, challenges will abound. Closing Guantánamo will require him to jump through a complex set of legal and political hurdles, while concluding negotiations on climate change will require unprecedented co-operation between the big emitters as well as leadership and vision. Obama’s campaign provided few signposts for a new direction in foreign policy. Generally speaking, he will define the war on terror more narrowly and he will broaden the foreign policy agenda to include human security concerns, climate change, public health and organized crime. In a symbolic shift, the war on terror will no longer dictate the means and ends of American foreign policy. In a sense, his approach recalls the Clinton years – which focused on globalisation and humanitarian concerns – and the post-Vietnam era, when Republicans clung to Cold War thinking and Democrats acknowledged the Sino-Soviet split and the environmental agenda.

To read the rest of this piece, please visit the RUSI website here:

Lisa Aronsson is Head of the Transatlantic Programme at RUSI and a Fellow of the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Project

Well Done America: Now it’s Europe’s Turn to do its bit.

Barack Obama’s landslide election brings with it impossible expectations of, according to the front page of the Times, “The New World”. In his speech last night Obama promised a new dawn of American leadership based on the enduring power of American ideals. Yet one man’s beneficent leadership is another man’s ignoble imperialism, and talk of universal values and American leadership could well have come from the mouth of George W. Bush. If Obama is to realise the hopes contained within notions of American leadership and avoid the traps of leading without followers he will need to work with Europe, but Europe must also be prepared to fulfil its side of that particular bargain.

Nicholas Sarkozy has pledged that Europe “will find a new energy to work with America”. It needs to. Multilateralism is not just about shared decision making but about sharing the responsibilities entailed by those decisions. And good leadership is not just about bringing others along with you, it is about delegating roles and responsibilities. In the post-Cold War world to date Europe has not given the United States the opportunity to be a good leader because Europe has been a negligent multilateralist – demanding American activism but unwilling to back those demands with significant contributions of its own. The Clinton administration derived very little political capital at home from leading where Europe asked – in Bosnia and Kosovo – and an Obama administration would be wise to demand more from its European allies in return for activism.

So Europe must expand its capabilities, be prepared to contribute, and above all refrain from the kind of petty, electorally expedient ad hoc anti-Americanism that characterised much of the Bush era. In Robert Kagan’s phraseology, if Europe wants American foreign policy to be sprinkled with a touch of Paradise, then Europe will have to bring some Power to the table.

The opportunity is there. Obama won this election, not by moving his party to the centre-right, the modus operandi of Bill Clinton, the great triangulator, but by asking the American people to move themselves out of their political comfort zone. The American public feel that George Bush squandered the goodwill of the world that followed September 11th, and wants America’s prestige restored and its alliances rebuilt. Rebuilding the global financial system is the first major task, an area in which Europe is already possessed of both power and ideological authority.

But Europe should be warned: fail to fully engage, fail to back fine words with the means to help achieve them, and the United States will have little option to continue upon the unilateral pursuit of its interests rather than embrace a shared approach to our shared transatlantic goals. The Bush Doctrine was not so much of an aberration as many in Europe believe, and we would be wrong to assume that with Bush gone enlightened liberal multilateralism will simply fall into being. For that to happen Europe must be prepared to step up to the plate.

Nick Kitchen is a Fellow of the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Project

Lessons in Diplomacy à la Kissinger (1): Don’t be afraid to bend the truth….

US-Chilean relations during the Allende presidency

Memorandum of Conversation, Henry Kissinger, Chilean Foreign Minister, Cloromiro Almeyda, and the Chilean Ambassador in Washington, Orlando Letelier, c.7 October 1971, Fondo Orlando Letelier, National Archive, Santiago, Chile. 

"Mr Kissinger indicated that he agreed totally with [Chilean Foreign] Minister Almeyda that it was important to isolate the issue of copper and avoid this transcending into other areas of the two countries'  [US and Chile] relations. He said that, even if press speculation was impossible to control, the attitude of his government would be to make every effort to avoid any factor that could harm ties and calm dialogue between both countries. Referring to the Chilean revolutionary process, Kissinger indicated to Minister Almyeda that, as he had already had the opportunity to state to Ambassador Letelier, he profoundly admired the way in which President Allende was leading the Chilean political phenomenon. He signaled...his interest in Chile and in maintaining the most constructive relations possible with his government, which was reflected in the fact that Orlando Letelier was the Latin American Ambassador he had the most open relationship and most permanent contact with. He also indicated that if at any moment the Chilean government wanted to present his government with a proposal of a confidential character with respect to the relationship between both countries or pending problems, this could be managed through him at a presidential level with the safety that there existed an attitude of understanding and orientation towards facilitating constructive links between both countries [in the Nixon administration]. He also commented that as far as his country was concerned, Chile had a great importance within Latin America and he indicated that it would be very incongruent if, while the United States was able to seek a form of understanding with the PRC from which it had been separated for so many years, it could not find positive solutions to problems with Chile with which it had a long tradition of friendship. In this respect, he alluded to the tendency towards ideological pluralism in international relations."

The Expulsion of Washington's ambassador to Bolivia

Early this morning, my wife assured me that the Bolivian government was tossing out my ambassador, not me or any other Americans. I woke up to see the Minister of the Presidency, Juan Ramos Quintana, explaining tensely that the government has nothing against Americans in general, just US Ambassador Phillip Goldberg, who has spent the last few weeks meeting with leaders of separatist groups in Santa Cruz and Tarija, who are seeking the overthrow of the first Bolivian government headed by an indigenous president, Evo Morales Ayma. The expulsion of Goldberg, whose previous experience includes long stretches war-torn Yugoslavia and Kosovo, marks the culmination of his months-long battle with the Bolivian president, one based on a history of mistrust that is deeply reminiscent of the Cold War.

Last June, for example, a 20-year old Miami woman was arrested at La Paz's El Alto International Airport trying to enter the country with 500 rounds of .45 caliber ammunition while the wife of Washington's military attaché waited to greet her at the airport. The story barely made headlines in the US, mostly because Ambassador Goldberg resisted Morales’s demand for a full investigation, characterizing the event as an "innocent error.”

Then, three months ago, thousands of protesters descended upon the US embassy in La Paz, threatening to burn it to the ground. They were demanding that Washington accede to President Morales's extradition request for former President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada and former Defense Minister Carlos Sanchez Berzain. Both leaders are wanted in Bolivia on charges of genocide and human rights violations for their role in Black October, a series of protests in October 2003 in which dozens of indigenous Bolivians were gunned down by troops, allegedly upon government orders. Sanchez de Lozada currently resides in Chevy Chase, Maryland, while Sanchez Berzain works in Miami for a former US Ambassador to Bolivia, Manual Rochas, a firebrand who in 2002 warned that Washington would cut off aid if Bolivians elected Morales or his allies.

While these developments have served to strain the US-Bolivian relationship, it was Ambassador Goldberg's perceived role in stoking ethnic conflict, regional separatism, and violent insurgency that finally sparked last night's shock announcement. For the past several months, powerful interests, mainly in the country's east, have brought the country to the precipice of civil war. The capital of the insurgency is Santa Cruz, where political and economic power remains in the hands of a white and mestizo feudal elite, historically loyal to the United States and the anti-communist dictators that occupied the Palacio Quemado for much of the Cold War.

Over the past two weeks, violence against Indians, government buildings, and national gas installations has increased significantly, much of it led by the neo-fascist Unión Juvenil Cruceñista, the youth counterpart to the Pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee, a business-led activist group founded decades ago as an anti-communist counterweight to Bolivia’s 1950s revolutionary governments. In neighboring Tarija, the newly-formed Unión Juvenil Tarijenista is occupying the airport to prevent the government from flying in reinforcements. Meanwhile, another group of anti-government youths attacked a major gas pipeline, which is now costing La Paz an estimated $8 million a day in export revenues.

President Morales’s apparent hesitancy to meet the insurgency with serious force reflects two historic fears. First of all, his movement suffered greatly at the hands of the country’s military in the Gas War of 2003. Secondly, Morales’s supporters harbor a historic mistrust in their country’s military leaders, who in the early 1960s took power for themselves when they were called upon by the country’s revolutionary leaders to put down a rightwing rebellion from the east. Despite having vowed to remain loyal to the 1952 revolution, Bolivia’s generals reversed many of the redistributive policies set by the revolutionary regime and did not relinquish power until the 1980s. Since Morales and his supporters see themselves as the heirs to the revolution, they are reluctant to make the same mistake by turning its reins over to the country’s generals.

Not waiting for government action against the rioters, many of Morales's fervent indigenous supporters have vowed to march on Santa Cruz and Tarija, confronting the mostly mestizo youths. Meanwhile, indigenous campesinos have attacked opposition headquarters and the offices of UNITEL, the country's main television station which has fervently taken up the opposition's banner. Again, anti-US sentiment is stoked by Washington’s history of bankrolling opposition media outlets in Latin America, whether or not a US-UNITEL connection exists.

I was passing by UNITEL's offices last night when I found out that my ambassador had been expelled. Military police in riot gear were guarding the opposition television station, despite the fact that the government’s supporters had been behind the attempted arson. The taxi driver explained that a group of campesinos loyal to the government had just tried to burn down UNITEL, expressed lament that their attempt had failed, and proudly stated that his president had just declared the US ambassador to be persona non grata.

Obama Abroad and In the Minds of American Voters

The word is out: US presidential candidate Barack Obama scored a resounding victory with his recent eight-nation swing through the Middle East and Europe. With every stop, a remarkable media buzz and scores of well-timed, dignified images poured into the global political consciousness. It even seemed that for a short time, the world could regale in a US presidential campaign appearing to court a riveted (albeit non-voting) foreign public. In Afghanistan and the Middle East embattled leaders embraced Obama, understanding he may one day hold their respective fates in his hands. Obama struck the rights chords by promising more help in Afghanistan, more sovereignty to Iraq, and undiminished support for Israel. In Europe, Obamamania soared as he skipped across the continent, one day a public blitz in Berlin, another in Paris for a coup of statecraft, and concluding in London with grand day out.

For those who weren’t aboard “O-Force One” drenched in the festivities the commentaries remained notably sanguine, even by conservative estimates. The Christian Science Monitor conceded “there is little doubt that in taking the eight-nation tour, Obama has altered the calculus of the presidential race.” The Economist acknowledged Obama’s tour went off “better than he could have dared hope.” But with so many correspondents and news anchors on this junket, few were left behind to report on John McCain’s muted claims of media bias, or expand on the quite legitimate complaint that Obama's overseas adventures meant eschewing, for a time, his responsibilities to voters back home.

Undoubtedly, if Europeans could weigh in on this election the outcome would be long since decided by now. A recent YouGov/Daily Telegraph poll showed respondents in Britain, Italy, France, Germany and Russia preferring Obama by an average margin of nearly 5 to 1. Predictably, these figures carry no truck with Americans. In fact, under certain circumstances such an outpouring of affection from foreign constituencies (and Europeans in particular) only serve to raise suspicions that inevitably produce the opposite effect. During the 2004 US election, George W. Bush exploited the rumor that his opponent, John Kerry, was preferred by European leaders. He chided Kerry for indulging European opinions, in effect raising nagging questions about his opponent's allegiances, and summarily reaffirmed in many voters' minds the correctness of his administration's security policy.

As Obama savors his glorious receptions abroad, a lingering question returns: do Americans pay any mind to international views of their election? One piece of evidence at this time suggests they might be coming around: the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported in June that 56 per cent of Americans see its lowered respect from abroad as a major problem, up from 48 per cent in 2006. It has not gone unnoticed, either, that recent policy shifts opening the way to engagement with Iran and withdrawal from Iraq echo Obama's calls to reconcile with America's international partners. Bear in mind, of course, that it is foolhardy to believe Americans will openly seek suggestions from outsiders on how they should vote in November, especially as domestic issues command greater attention.

Still, one cannot help but wonder how this increased concern will play out in the coming election and beyond. As far as this question of whether Americans care is concerned, it is hard for them to discount the high confidence among foreign audiences in Obama to do the right thing in matters dealing with foreign affairs. How much does this confidence matter? If history provides any clues, some may exist in the correlation between a president's popularity at home as opposed to abroad. Although pollsters have only recently begun to chart foreign popularity of the US president, it is safe to say those who completed their terms in office with approval ratings over 60 per cent (Clinton, Reagan, Kennedy, and Eisenhower) enjoyed some measure of popularity abroad. It seems highly unlikely given the options that any president in the era of approval ratings could achieve overseas popularity while suffering from low approval ratings at home.

Americans justifiably question the foreign policy for the inexperienced first-term senator, but with his intentions for rapprochement with Europe made clear this past week excited Europeans are banking on hopes that Americans will see their fortunes as unified with those of the rest of the world, and realize that choosing the US president affects populations beyond its borders. Foreign enthusiasm over Obama is fueled by speculation that America may at last be tiring of the often contentious stewardship of George W. Bush and furthermore desire a more genial global leadership style to offset the more sobering aspects of its enormous power. It remains to be seen whether such enthusiasm and anticipation will be enough to tilt the balance in Obama's favor.

A Long Goodbye

What Gorbachev’s effort to get out of Afghanistan can tell us about how a President Obama might face the challenge of withdrawing from Iraq.

Barack Obama’s progressive supporters have been upset by his recent statements on Iraq. Yet his recent “move to the center” on the war should not be particularly surprising. After all, no matter how opposed he may have been to the war in 2003, in 2008 he would be taking over as commander in chief of the world’s most powerful nation and military with commitments all over the world. His advisors have pointed out, no doubt, that how he handles the situation will determine how he is seen by his detractors at home and how the US is seen abroad for years to come.

A useful historical parallel is the Soviet experience in trying to get out of Afghanistan. Mikhail Gorbachev, a reform minded leader who came to power in March 1985, faced a similar dilemma to the one Obama will face if elected. He was opposed to the war but was afraid of the consequences a withdrawal of Soviet troops might have on Moscow’s relationships with its numerous allies and clients. On the day he became General Secretary he jotted down a note saying that the Soviet Union needed to find a way out of Afghanistan, but do it in stages.

A US withdrawal from Iraq would most likely lead to an increase in violence, at least in the short term. It could mean increased influence for Iran. It could mean that US allies in the region and beyond, no matter their views on the war, begin to doubt Washington’s commitment and look elsewhere for support. All of the above could become ammunition for conservatives at home, much like the collapse of South Vietnam became a rallying point for conservatives in the late 1970s.

All of this could happen even if the US stays in Iraq for 10 years. The long term consequences for the US, as well as the region, might be more severe. But politics is a short term business. President Obama would have to think about the 2012 election, when the consequences of a withdrawal could be used against him.

That is why I was not surprised to hear that Obama was “modifying” his stance on troop withdrawal. After an uproar from his progressive supporters, he explained himself at a speech in Georgia on July 8: “We have to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in…You’ve got to be sure our troops are safe, you have to be sure the country doesn’t collapse.”

Gorbachev made similar statements on numerous occasions between 1985 and 1989, when the withdrawal, in closed, official meetings. Here he is at Politburo meeting in February 1987:

We could leave [Afghanistan] quickly…and blame everything on the previous leadership, which planned everything. But we can’t do that. They’re worried in India, they’re worried in Africa. They think that this will be a blow to the authority of the Soviet Union in the national-liberation movement. Imperialism, they say, if it wins in Afghanistan, will go on the offensive.

Indeed, Moscow’s numerous allies were worried about the implications of a withdrawal and the collapse of a fellow communist state and made their concerns known to Soviet officials. Gorbachev felt Moscow could not take these concerns lightly.

Gorbachev spent several years trying to find ways to make possible a Soviet withdrawal that did not bring about the collapse of the communist regime in Kabul and the attendant blow to Soviet prestige. This included economic aid as well as a policy of national reconciliation to bring opposition elements into the Kabul government. Most of these, however, resembled efforts undertaken between 1980 and 1985. Only when it had become clear that these efforts were failing that Moscow really started to move towards a withdrawal, which finally began in May 1988. In the meantime, the Soviet 40^th army continued to lose over 1000 dead per year and many more wounded.

Contrary to the expectations of US intelligence officials and many in Moscow, the Kabul regime survived without Soviet troops as long as Moscow kept sending economic aid and materiel. Soviet prestige did not collapse as a result of the withdrawal – on the contrary, it allowed Moscow to improve relations not only with the United States but also with China and some nations in the Middle East.

Which brings us back to Obama. A delay in the withdrawal may be justified, but only if he has a serious plan of what will happen during that period. His desire to talk to Iran is a good start- that country is a regional power and will no doubt carry weight in Iraq long after foreign troops are gone. Yet if he has a concrete plan to make sure the Iraqi army is more reliable than it is now or that the government is more stable he has not shown it.

My fear is that President Obama may, like Gorbachev, spend precious time reinventing the wheel or waiting for already failing programs to work. The delay may placate some of his conservative critics, but it will also be costly in terms of live lost and treasure spent. And it may erode his political capital as well, making his task of improving Washington’s relationship with the rest of the world much more difficult.

Of course, the United States is not the Soviet Union, Obama is not Gorbachev, Iraq is not Afghansitan. Yet the concerns that leaders of powerful empires face in trying to extricate their armies from such wars are similar. Obama’s supporters who would like to see him bring the troops home will most likely be disappointed, just as those who hoped Gorbachev would bring the troops home right after coming to power were to see the war drag on for almost four more years.

Call for Papers - GWU-LSE-UCSB Graduate Cold War Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS - 2009 International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War

Three partner institutions the Cold War Studies Centre at LSE IDEAS, the George Washington University Cold War Group (GWCW), the Center for Cold War Studies (CCWS) of the University of California Santa Barbara, are pleased to announce their 2009 International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War, to take place at the London School of Economics on April 24-26 2009.

The conference is an excellent opportunity for graduate students to present papers and receive critical feedback from peers and experts in the field. We encourage submissions by graduate students working on any aspect of the Cold War, broadly defined. Of particular interest are papers that make use of newly available primary sources. A two-page proposal and a brief academic C.V. (in Word or PDF format), should be submitted to IDEAS.cwc2009@lse.ac.uk by 25 January 2009 to be considered. Notification of acceptance will be made by February 24. Successful applicants will be expected to email their papers by March 24. Further questions may be directed to the conference coordinator, Artemy Kalinovsky, at the aforementioned e-mail address.

The conference sessions will be chaired by prominent faculty members from GW, UCSB, LSE and elsewhere. The accommodation cost of student participants will be covered by the organizers (from 24-26 April), but students will need to cover the costs of their travel to London.

In 2003, GW and UCSB first joined their separate spring conferences, and two years later, LSE became a co-sponsor. The three cold war centers now hold a jointly sponsored conference each year, alternating among the three campuses. For more information on our three programs, please visit the respective Web sites:

http://www.ieres.org for GWCW;
http://www.history.ucsb.edu/projects/ccwsfor CCWS; http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/IDEAS for IDEAS-CWSC.

The Power of Pictures

By now everyone has seen it, right? The Obamas in the Oval Office, Barack in a djellabah and turban and his wife Michelle as a gun-toting Black-Panther. An approving Osama Bin Laden looks down on the couple’s fist bump as an American flag burns in the fireplace. The New Yorker’s cartoon has provoked outrage on the left and the right, with both presidential candidates condemning the depiction.

Of course, it is just a cartoon. But there is an argument to say that the New Yorker, in opting for such an close-to-the-bone lampooning of the misgivings many Americans have about Barack Obama’s candidacy, has actually done him something of a favour.

Last week a Newsweek Poll revealed the following false beliefs Americans hold about Obama. Twelve percent of voters think he was sworn in as senator on the Qur'an. 26 percent believe the he was raised as a Muslim and 39 percent believe he attended an Islamic school as a child growing up in Indonesia. Prior to Newsweek’s poll, the Pew Center found at the end of June that 12% of voters believe Obama to be a Muslim.

The Republicans would have been expected to encourage these false beliefs, engendering mistrust of the opposition candidate. Yet the New Yorker’s cover renders such tactics far more difficult. By putting the issue of Obama’s religion into such contrast, and drawing condemnation from the McCain camp, it now becomes almost impossible for the Republicans to question Obama’s suitability for office on the basis of his religious outlook. The merest hint that Obama’s background renders him unsuitable for high office forces its advocate into a defense of that New Yorker cover, and in no way can that benefit McCain. Thus the effect of the extremity of the New Yorker’s take may be to render the entire issue of Obama’s religion off limits, even when the campaign – inevitably – descends into personal slurs and dirty tricks.

Professor Paul Kennedy - The Power Game

Paul Kennedy has spent the last academic year as LSE's Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs, based in LSE IDEAS. Here the author of 'The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers' summarises his lectures to IDEAS on American power, and you can hear the podcasts of the lectures using the link at the top of the page.


The Power Game

As I travelled to LSE early in February to deliver my lecture, it struck me that it was the 20th anniversary of my summons to Washington to debate what had become known as the ‘Kennedy thesis’ before the Senate foreign relations committee. It was not an experience that I would recommend.

The debate on American power, what it is and where it is going, was not new. The nature of American power had been much discussed following the Vietnam war and the setbacks of the Carter administration. Indeed, the idea that over time great powers rise and fall was hardly original. The Romans said it, the Arabs said it, George Bernard Shaw said it.

In my lecture I sought to understand how this debate had developed over the intervening 20 years, to consider how American power had been measured, end give some idea of the fractured world that has both challenged American power end buttressed it.

One of the key players in this ongoing debate is my great colleague at Harvard, Joseph Nye, professor of international relations. In a number of books in the 1990s Nye grappled with this issue and developed a definition of power that I have found useful ever since. Ha argued that one way of understanding power is to see it as the capacity to get others to do things that you would like them to do. In other words, the capacity to influence people.

Nye went onto argue that if you thought about power in more concrete ways, you could consider it as being played out on three separate chess boards: the chessboard of relative military strategic power; the chessboard of relative economic and productive power; and the chessboard which fascinated him most — that of influence In the realms of ideas and culture, or what he called soft power.


Military power

The first measure Nye pointed to was the obvious one: American military power. And if you want a symbol of this real, hard power you need look no further than a nuclear full-fleet carrier of the US navy. These are 20 storeys high, displace around 103-105,000 tonnes of water end are a mobile home to just under 6000 people. The cost of building these carriers comes to about $28 billion, which is slightly more than the entire defence budget of Italy.

In all, the US defence budget accounts for just over half of total defence expenditure in the world. This has never happened before in world history. The Roman Empire had a massive Persian empire to the east; Pax Britannica was chiefly a naval-based global reach system with a small army; none of the European powers in the 20th century got anywhere near this sort of share of total defence expenditure.

So can Americans sleep easy in their beds at night? Well, one of the interesting things that strategic writers talk about is asymmetrical warfare. If your enemies cannot match you head on, they go for weapons systems that are affordable, ones that are not going to challenge your assembled might so much as find weaknesses in the system.

Today, the People’s Republic of China is doing just that and is regarded as the number one threat to American supremacy by US military strategists. It lost its ranking after 9/11, but is now beck in pole position. The Chinese are buying weapons from the Russians, modifying them and improving them. Their diesel submarines can now sneak up on American aircraft carriers undetected.

And then there are the asymmetrical attacks by groups that are not pad of nation slates. It you really want to attack a superpower then you are not going to go for its aircraft, but for its civilians, its banking networks, students, cruise ships, electronic networks. You will use agents, sub-agents, small elements of discontented groups.

US policy makers are struggling with how to deal will, these groups— essentially the strategic military challenges which come to the international community from what are termed ‘failed states’. Most of these states — and the slaughter, mayhem, civil war and genocide that go with them — occur in troubled pads of Africa, in the Middle East and through into Central Asia, with some outliers.

The instinct of the American military is to walk away from this one. On the other hand, the instinct of quite a number of the liberal imperialists in Washington is to grapple with the problem. After all, these are the breeding grounds for Al Qaeda and terrorism.

This number of problems is manageable so long as Mr. Bush is willing to add $50 billion here end $75 billion there, so that each one be tackled. But these demands suggest to me that the responsibilities of being the number one global power tend to grow steadily end metamorphose.

So, although I have ended that particular chessboard analysis by suggesting that there are weaknesses in the giant, when we move to the second chessboard — that is to say the economic and productive measures of power— then something quite different is happening.


Economic and productive power

The second chessboard is much more multi-polar, with America’s share of GOP declining significantly since 1945. However, it is important to bear in mind that the immediate post-war period was rattler artificial – with much of Europe and Japan flattened, with two thirds of the world still tinder colonial domination, and the US economy benefitting from a massive kick-boost.

The recovery at Japan, the recovery of Europe led by Germany and the beginnings of shifts of production to East Asia started the erosion of this relative share — and I have to stress relative share. The total world GOP in 1945 was around $4 trillion; by the early 1990s it was about $45 to $50 trillion.

Today, the EU and US both have around a fifth at total GOP— and it has been that way for the last 20 years. This economic equality has all sorts of implications for the US, ones that the Americans of the 1950s, ‘60s or ‘70s just did not have to think about.

Take the three-way dance between Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. For a US senator from Silicon Valley the idea that the European Commission’s sub- body on competitiveness has a crucial say in any merger is ridiculous. But to Microsoft it is not— they have already paid enough fines to the Commission to last 15 years. And so the idea of getting others to do things they do not want to do, Nye’s idea of power and influence, is much curbed.

And then you see the significant increase. year by year, of the Chinese share of the GDP pie. I tend to regard the debate on the world’s rising
economies with a fair amount of suspicion, but it is worth looking at some much quoted research by the Goldman Sachs study team in October 2003 on the risk posed to established economies by Brazil, Russia, India and China (‘Dreaming with EPICS: the path to 2050’). According to Goldman Sachs projections, should the world have a relatively harmonious international trading system without major war or environmental catastrophe, China’s total GOP will be higher than that of the US by 2025.

We must be careful about these forecasts, but what we can say is that the power balances between nations in the last decade have been moving faster than at any other time since the 1890s — when the US economy overtook that of Victorian Britain and Germany.

So the second chessboard is a mixed story, with more signs of weakness emerging despite towering strength.


Soft power

And what of the third chessboard — the one Nye called soft power? If you look at his books of the early 1990s you will see that he put an awful lot of weight on cultural icons such as blue jeans, Hollywood movies, MTV and Marlborough man — all indicators of the popularity of American youth culture in particular. l am pretty sure that if he went back to revise those books now he would be less convinced. Indeed, I guess he would say that he got it wrong. He did not see how a few years of an imperial presidency and a lot of clumsy diplomacy would turn what where once seen as attractive elements of the number one country into unattractive ones.

So the debate on American power continues, and it is a complicated one. I want to conclude by asking a simple question. How long into the 21st century do you think that a country with less than 5 per cent of the world’s population and a fifth of the world’s product can carry more than half the world’s total defence expenditure? At some point there is going to be what economists like to term ‘convergence’ – and since it is unlikely that the US’s share of total world population and GDP will grow, there is a much bigger chance that its share of global defence spending will contract. Then we shall see how well, or poorly, Washington manages to balance its extensive overseas commitments with more constrained resources.

The global 1989?

As we approach the twentieth anniversary of ‘1989 and all that’, it might be worth ducking for cover. Lest we forget, the year ‘1989’ has become something of a cliché, caught in a sense of its own triumphalism, considered by all and sundry (or at least by most) to be the ur-contemporary demarcation point in world historical time, a normative, analytical and empirical referent point par excellence.

Of course, to some extent, this is a perfectly reasonable assumption – it would be pretty odd to claim that 1989 was insignificant, particularly for those living in the former Soviet sphere of influence. But looking back now, some two decades on, is it possible to generate a balance-sheet of 1989’s broader, global significance? In other words, can we assess the impact of ‘1989’ against longer-term historical trends, on key issues in international politics, and on places beyond its immediate zone of impact? And taken from this perspective, perhaps a more complex picture emerges than the conventional wisdom allows: a story of both continuity and rupture, varied across time and place, uneven in origin and outcome.

The ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘what’ of 1989
To that end, it is worth assessing the impact of 1989 in three domains: the ‘when’, the where’ and the ‘what’ i.e. in terms of its temporal, spatial and substantive impact. First, in terms of the ‘when’, 1989 should be understood as a conjunctural rather than as an epochal shift. In other words, 1989 did not mark the emergence and institutionalisation of a novel set of political, economic and social relations. Rather, it materialized out of collapse and implosion – the disappearance, virtually without a shot, of the Soviet Union and, with it, the final strand of the Cold War order, much of which had already melted away, whether by this we mean the ideological rather than the geopolitical dimensions of the Cold War, or the Keynesian post-war settlement institutionalised in the Bretton-Woods agreement. The key ideas and ordering mechanisms of the post-1989 period (marketisation, post-Fordism, neo-liberalism and privatisation) were both ascendant and had taken institutional form well before 1989, and the central legitimating ideas of the epoch (freedom, democracy, self-determination, sovereignty, justice, the market etc.), while powerful and important, were either time honoured or associated with notions of ‘return’, ‘normalcy’, ‘joining in’ and the like. In short, actors at the centre of 1989 sought not to remake international relations in their own image but to actively relinquish power, not least by signing away authority to international organisations ranging from the EU to the IMF.

As such, the shifts and reconfigurations of social, economic and political power associated with 1989, dramatic and extensive though these have been, remain locked primarily within existing relational configurations. To put this in old language, the organic tendencies of the old have reasserted themselves, in a new context, and on a vaster scale. 1989 may have sped up world historical time, but it marked neither its end, nor its beginning. Rather like the bionic man, the post-1989 era is quicker, stronger, faster – we have seen the acceleration of means of organising politics, economics and social life, but not their reformulation.

Second, can we map the ‘where’ of ‘1989’? Certainly there is much that we know: the emergence of US primacy, the break up of the Soviet Union, the hastening of EU enlargement, and a set of important regionally variegated experiences in Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and so on. And we have many ways to describe this world: as US imperium; as “one superpower, many great powers”; or as Richard Haass offers us, “nonpolar”. But as Saskia Sassen, Phil Cerny, Eric Swyngedouw and others argue, the spaces of 1989 are complex, fractured and, to a great extent, issue- and/or region-dependent. The global interlaces with the regional, the transnational, the international, the national and the local in complex spatial amalgams. It may be that at the heart of this picture lies a process of denationalisation: the withering away of the national frame as the primary site for the articulation of security, redistribution, status and identity claims. But even here there are countervailing trends: the renationalisation of security functions via anti-terrorist legislation, the Patriot Act or the CCTV-isation of everyday life; the emergence of sovereign wealth funds and other such etatist economic policies; or the continued hold of the national over cultural and social domains as witnessed by the fervency of debates on migration, multiculturalism, citizenship and the like.

In this sense, 1989 has bought us both closer and further apart: closer in terms of an intense acceleration of intersocietal integration, particularly in terms of economies, peoples and ideas; further apart in that this homogenisation has a doppelganger in the form of a return to the local, whether visited in claims of local autonomy, ethnic identity, or anti-immigration movements. Again, therefore, there is a fundamental contradiction in play: combined interactivity alongside uneven differentiation; universality and fragmentation; singularity and fracture.

This picture does not alter considerably when considering the ‘what’ of 1989: its substantive agenda: the globalisation of finance sits uneasily alongside the emergence of sovereign wealth funds; the re-emergence of nationalism next to heightened internationalism (whether in favour of intervention in Iraq or in protest against it); the rise in secularism is matched by increased religiosity. The key point here, on which George W. Bush has been unusually prescient, is that “we know that they’re out there, we just don’t know who they are”.

Blessings and curses
Given this picture of complexity and contradiction, it is unsurprising that our concepts and frames are struggling to keep up. And that is both the blessing and curse of 1989: it has allowed us to leave behind some of the more obscuring blinkers of the pre-1989 era, but it has not yet offered us much in their place. We are in an era where we know what we are post (modern, Westphalian, imperial and so on), but have little sense of where we are and what is to come. Whether we understand 1989 as bionic man, historical landmark, symbolic stamp or remain sceptical about its importance, one thing is clear: 2009 should be a year of careful reflection rather than hubristic triumph.

The Global 1989, edited by Chris Armbruster, Mick Cox and George Lawson will be published in 2009.

Zubok, Leffler...

Since fellow IDEAS blogger Nick Kitchen has started us off with a post on IR theory, I’m going to take the liberty of writing on of the first posts from the history side of our humble office on Aldwych.

The two most awaited items in Cold War history this past academic year were Melvin Leffler’s For the Soul of Mankind and Vlad Zubok’s A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev. Both books have received their share of attention, reviews, and each became the subject of an H-Diplo roundtable discussion. Both books are ambitious efforts to bring together existing cold war scholarship with the authors’ on research. Yet both authors clearly see themselves as doing the work of cultural interpreters. Zubok does this more directly by offering English language readers a view not only on the evolution of Soviet elites from the Stalin era to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also on their interaction with other cultural phases and phenomena – dissidents, bards, shestedisitanyki, nationalists, separatists and so on.
Both books also do a good job of illuminating some of the more complex statesmen of the Cold War era. Leffler, for example, gives a very helpful introduction to Reagan’s personality and the shaping of his political views, as well as on the in-fighting within his administration and how it affected US-Soviet relations in the 1980s. Zubok, who has already contributed to a better understanding of Stalin, Khruschev, and their contemporaries as well as Mikhail Gorbachev, brings out Leonid Brezhnev in a way that none have attempted.

Brezhnev’s name is normally associated with zastoy, the period of stability and stagnation in the Soviet Union. As for foreign policy, he is remembered for such costly adventures as the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979). His apparent ill health and mental decline in the late 1970s and until his death in office in 1982 make it tempting to dismiss him as a figure-head more interested in collecting cars and medals than in making policy. Without denying his failures as a leader, Zubok highlights Brezhnev’s singular contribution to détente, his obsession with preventing nuclear war and his genuine efforts to reach out to US leaders. Most importantly, he was willing to face down the opponents of détente and arms reduction within his own ruling elite.

That having been said, it was disappointing to see how little we learn about someone as important and enigmatic as Yuri Andropov. Although biographies of Brezhnev’s successor have proliferated in Russia, few are serious works. Even the best, by the former dissident Roy Medvedev, leaves much to be desired. More on that later…