Caution not always a boon to Bush
U.S. president George H.W. Bush was remembered Wednesday at a funeral in Washington, D.C. Since his death last weekend, he has also been praised in many op-eds, obituaries and podcast commentaries — the public and pundit view of his one-term presidency having improved a great deal with time. Bush deserves the plaudits; by all accounts, he was a classy and kind person, and he accomplished many foreign-policy successes while in office, including the liberation of Kuwait from Iraq. Certainly, Bush’s gracious personal style and presidential cautiousness and conscientiousness look especially good right now, while the United States is being run by President Donald Trump, a man who … well, isn’t exactly known for any of those particular virtues.
Bush was an honourable man and a fine president. Under his four-year watch, the United States won the Cold War.
But with all due respect to the late commander-in-chief, the credit he’s being given for this last significant world event is somewhat overblown and warrants a closer look back. As David E. Hoffman, author of the book The Dead Hand, writes, at the same time that then-president Ronald Reagan was strolling around the Kremlin with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in May of 1988, Bush was at home nursing doubts about “whether the changes taking place in Moscow were real.” While Reagan told reporters in Moscow that he no longer considered the Soviet Union an evil empire; a few weeks later, Bush asserted in a speech, “The Cold War is not over.”
As it turns out, it was. Or very close. But Bush didn’t see it. When he took office in 1989, he deliberately took what he termed “a strategic pause” from negotiating with Gorbachev and the Soviets. As Odd Arne Westad puts it in his book, The Cold War: A World History, Bush was fearful “that perestroika and glasnost might be too successful, so that the Western alliances lowered their guard too much.”
The important thing, of course, is that Bush eventually came around; it took over a year, but in May 1990, he finally had a summit with Gorbachev, where they signed the 1990 Chemical Weapons Accord. It is also worth noting that Bush’s skepticism wasn’t entirely misplaced: At the time of Bush’s first summit with Gorbachev, the Soviet Union was still lying about having destroyed all its biological weapons and production facilities. And we all know that the Cold War did end, thanks in large part to what Hoffman calls the “downhill arms race” that Bush initiated in 1991.
But it’s interesting to consider what might have been had the United States not, at Bush’s direction, taken a year off from working with Gorbachev and the Soviets. By the time Bush had rejoined the game, things were truly coming apart in the Soviet Union — the economy was a disaster — and Gorbachev had lost a great deal of his power. He weathered a frightening attempted coup in 1991, and emerged tired, weak, and dependent on Boris Yeltsin, who was seeking power for himself.
No wonder Gorbachev didn’t last long, resigning on Christmas Day of the same year with the Soviet Union dismembered and disunited.
The question is, with quicker U.S. co-operation when Bush came to power, might Gorbachev have retained the might to stay in power himself, at least for a little longer, perhaps reforming the U.S.S.R.’s totalitarian system and winding down the Soviet Union more gradually, without abruptly leaving 25,000 or so nuclear weapons scattered across its lands.
If Gorbachev had been able to hang on, and the Soviet Union had not descended into such chaos (perhaps with the help of U.S. financial aid, which Bush did not want to give), maybe Russia wouldn’t have quickly emerged from the dust of the U.S.S.R. as a country where a single person can maintain a tight monopoly on power, and the political system holds the president above society. Maybe Yeltsin wouldn’t have manipulated election results to stay in power in 1996 (so much for liberal democracy), and maybe then, he wouldn’t have been able to hand over his unearned power to Vladimir Putin.
The word I’ve seen used most frequently in association with George H.W. Bush is “cautious.” He was a president who took great care to avoid making mistakes.
For the majority of his presidency, Bush’s cautiousness was a welcome trait that kept the country safe. It might be said that the difference between Bush’s success in Iraq and his son’s failure in the same country is “caution” (or George W. Bush’s lack of it). But when it comes to the Cold War, it seems quite plausible that the war ended despite, not because of, Bush’s caution.
And that the results might have been better for the world without it in the end.
UNDER HIS FOUR-YEAR WATCH, THE UNITED STATES WON THE COLD WAR.