UC Berkeley - HIST 186 - 2012 Spring - Sargent - International and Global History Since 1945 - Lecture 23 - Fractures and Fissures - 00h 44m 15s

Lecture Overview: Geopolitics, International Relations, and Humanitarian Intervention in the 1990s

[00:00]

It's about 9:40 now so time to begin with the substance. Today we're going to be talking about the post-Cold War world. We're going to be talking about the world of the 1990s. But I'm going to be focusing today upon geopolitics, upon international relations, not upon the political economic themes that we dealt with last time we met when we talked about globalization in the 1990s.

[00:23]

Today we're focusing on international relations and in particular on the theme of humanitarian intervention, which emerged in the 1990s as one of the most sort of creative new developments in the international arena.

[00:36]

And humanitarian intervention -- I'm going to be talk much or about it -- but it's important to remember, even as we frame the topic, was very much an invention of the 1990s. At the beginning of the decade there was little talk about humanitarian intervention in international relations. There were not a whole lot of books being published dealing with the topic; there were not classes being taught in universities on humanitarian intervention.

[01:00]

By the end of the 1990s it would be a quite different picture. Humanitarian intervention was being widely discussed. So its emergence is a theme that we can situate in the immediate postwar decade. And that's something that you know I'd propose to try to do today.

The Post-Cold War International System

[01:17]

But we're going to start, because we're doing a history, at the beginning with the emergence of a post-Cold War international system. What did this international system look like? What would be its defining attributes? Who in particular would shape and dominate it?

[01:35]

It's difficult to talk about the post-Cold War international system without paying central reference to the role of the United States of America. The...international system of the Cold War had of course been a bipolar international system, an international system in which there were two competing superpowers. The rivalry between those two superpowers -- the Cold War -- as we usually describe it, of course defined the international relations of the postwar era.

[02:02]

But international relations did not stop with the Cold War's end. International history continued but the international system would be a system, at least for a time, defined by the preeminence, or primacy, of a single sole superpower -- the United States of America.

Paradigms of the Post-Cold War Era

[02:18]

And this is really important to think about. One way to situate ourselves in the immediate post-Cold War moment would be to ask what did observers of the international scene at the time have to say about the world that the Cold War left behind? If we're to sort of understand the immediate post-Cold War world then we could do much worse than to ask how historical personalities at the time understood the international situation in which they found themselves. How did they understand the world of 1990, 1991, 1992 and so on?

[02:54]

As an answer to that question I would like to you know sort of propose three rival paradigms, which, I will, you know sort of for the purposes of this lecture, link to three specific individual thinkers, of all whom were Americans. These three fit thinkers represent three quite different perspectives on the international relations of the post-Cold War era.

[03:16]

They have quite different ideas about the ways in which the world is developing. They offer quite different paradigms for thinking about and comprehending the international relations of the post-Cold War era.

Charles Krauthammer: A Unipolar World

[03:28]

Let's start with Charles Krauthammer↗, one of the three paradigmatic thinkers, who I would argue, helps us to sort of think about the contours of a post-Cold War world. For Krauthammer what exists now that the Cold War has been fought, lost and won is a unipolar world. The unipolar world is a world in which there a single superpower as opposed to the bipolar world of the Cold War.

[03:54]

Krauthammer argues that American ascendancy in the post-Cold War world is unrivaled. It no longer makes sense to think of the international system in terms of a competition among great powers Krauthammer argues. The United States is so dominant that there are no plausible rivals to the United States thus the international system is transformed in the image of a single sole superpower. It has become a unipolar world.

[04:20]

Yet Krauthammer does not see American power as oppressive or even hegemonic. He argues that American power is essentially benign. That the United States in this respect is quite unlike other superpowers, other hegemonic powers in world history.

[04:37]

And to make this case he looks at the reactions of foreign countries to the United States and Krauthammer argues that there is very little resistance on the part of foreign powers to American superpower. Foreign powers on the contrary are accepting of American hegemony -- even see the United States as a useful source of order in international relations.

[05:01]

Moreover Krauthammer emphasizes there are few sort of internal contradictions to the sole superpower role that the United States is playing. Krauthammer argues that the United States is devoting sort of relatively little expense to the sustenance of its kind of leading role in the international system.

[05:20]

The costs of American military primacy amount to no more than 4% of GDP per year, he argues, and thus are quite sustainable for the United States. So this is a world in which the United States is paramount and can afford to be paramount.

[05:37]

But Krauthammer argues that there are some sort of weaknesses to this hegemonic project that he sees the United States as living. And the clearest problem that he perceives is a lack of coherent vision. He doesn't see the United States as standing for much in particular in the post-Cold War world.

[05:57]

During the Cold War the United States defined its international purpose primarily in negative terms, right, in terms of anti-Soviet containment. After the Cold War what is the United States to stand for? Is it stand for pluralism and an international balance of power? As Henri Kissinger and Richard Nixon might have had it? Or is it to stand for the expansion of democracy and the promotion of human rights as Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan might have preferred?

[06:24]

It's not clear what exactly Americans want to accomplish with the remarkable margins of primacy which they enjoy after the Cold War. Nor is it clear that a forward international policy enjoys the support of a majority of US citizens. If you look at opinion polls in the early 1990s, Krauthammer argues, Americans are indifferent at best about the sort of leading international role that they now occupy de facto that the Soviet Union has disappeared.

[06:55]

But this is a unipolar moment, it's a moment for at least one analyst, in which the United States has a unique opportunity to reshape international relations in its own image. What matters for Krauthammer is power. The fact that the Soviet Union has lost it and that the United States now possesses it by historically unique margins.

Francis Fukuyama: A Convergent Liberal World Order

[07:17]

Other thinkers and theorists offer different kinds of perspective. And one of the most influential analyses of the patterns of post-Cold War international relations is offered by Francis Fukuyama↗, a political scientist.

[07:31]

Whereas Krauthammer emphasizes material power as the key to international relations Fukuyama puts much more emphasis on the role of ideas. He argues that the Cold War should be understood primarily as an ideological or ideational conflict, as a conflict between two competing paradigms of modernity, a liberal paradigm for which the United States stood and a socialist paradigm that the Soviet Union represented.

[08:00]

This conflict between liberal and socialist modernities, Fukuyama argues, was resolved in the 1980s with the Soviet Union's conversion to the liberal paradigm and the closure of the Soviet-American Cold War.

[08:14]

The long conflict that Karl Marx opened is in effect closed with the end of the Cold War. Thus the Cold War brings an end not only to a forty year geopolitic conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, but more profoundly to a hundred and fifty year old schism within the West -- a schism between socialism and liberalism.

[08:37]

That conflict for Fukuyama is resolved. It is now he argues liberalism's destiny to be the predominant form of social and political organization for the entire world. Liberalism, Fukuyama argues, represents the apogee of human social evolution. There is no higher form or system of government to be aspired to than liberalism. This he argues is it.

[09:04]

Liberalism is the best form of government that human society can produce and it has universal applicability. This is a challenging hypothesis and it's a hypothesis that we should continue to debate. But it's implications for foreign policy are not particularly clear or cogent. In fairness Fukuyama did not intend to be making foreign policy recommendations. He offered a sort of historical essay on liberalism.

[09:31]

There -- but there is some implications for American foreign policy in the Fukuyama hypothesis. That the -- now that the sort of world has reached what he calls the end of history, a moment in which liberalism has emerged unscathed from the Cold War, as the universal form of political organization to which all peoples should aspire -- the United States, Fukuyama implies, should simply be itself.

[09:59]

Liberalism has triumphed by virtue of its, sort of, inner strengths and characteristics. The United States, Fukuyama suggests, does not need to play a particularly proactive role in the world promoting liberalism. It's simply enough to, you know, sit aside and wait for non-liberal countries to themselves embrace liberalism. Emulating the historical example of the United States and the West.

[10:25]

So what Fukuyama implies, insofar as his end of history hypothesis has policy implications, is that the United States should be itself and await the inevitable conversion of illiberal countries to liberal truths.

Samuel Huntington: Clash of Civilizations

[10:39]

A very different kind of perspective on the post-Cold War world is offered by Sam Huntington↗ -- another political scientist and a political scientist who happens to have been Fukuyama's instructor at Harvard. So the two are linked but they have quite different perspectives on the international relations of the post-Cold War era.

[11:01]

Whereas Fukuyama sees liberalism as a universally applicable creed Huntington is much less confident that liberalism as you know it has emerged in the West is applicable to all peoples. Fukuyama -- Huntington is also not persuaded that the world is integrating towards a sort of convergent liberal version of modernity; rather, Huntington sees forces of fragmentation and disaggregation as remaining very powerful in the post-Cold War world.

[11:33]

For Huntington the key lines of fracture in post-Cold War international relations are to be civilizational and cultural -- not ideological. For Huntington the Cold War had of course been an ideological struggle. It was an ideological struggle in which ideology combined with geopolitics to create a major geopolitical schism.

[11:55]

The post-Cold War world is to be different. It's to be defined not by fractures of ideology, but by fractures of civilization and culture. And this is the key to Huntington's post-Cold War schema, which we might call a clash of civilization↗ schema for the essay that Huntington published in Foreign Affairs in the early 1990s.

[12:16]

It begins from the presumption that civilizations are different. That they have evolved in sort of isolation more or less and that separate trajectories of development have bequeathed quite different sort of ideological preferences and presumptions.

[12:35]

Liberalism Fukuyama argues is fundamentally a Western inheritance. It's a political framework that is most relevant to the countries of Western Europe and to the United States. Other countries Fukuyama argues, sorry, Huntington argues, will go their own way. They will develop and sustain systems of government better suited to their own civilizational needs.

[13:01]

Huntington does not expect the world in which civilizations clash to be conflictual. And this is a key point. He does not predict actual you know military conflict between civilizations. Rather he expects that civilizations will gradually drift apart. That they will become somewhat more introverted -- somewhat less interdependent than in the recent part -- past. Introversion not conflict is to be the sort of dynamic of intra-civilizational relations in the world that Huntington conjures.

[13:33]

What are the policy implications of this? Well, first off Huntington is wary of grand global schemes. Ideas for global governance, for reordering the international system, now that the Cold War has ended, meet with skepticism in Huntington's framework. Rather Huntington argues that the United States and its Western allies should pursue a more limited geopolitical agenda. They should work to bolster and consolidate intra-Western institutions and commitments.

[14:03]

Building the West; rather, than globalizing liberalism should for Sam Huntington be the purpose of American power in a post-Cold War world. To illustrate Huntington's civilizations concept it might be useful to sort of show you a colorized map of the world divided up into the civilizational units that Huntington construed.

[14:25]

The borders of these civilizational units are you know sort of contestable but you get the basic idea, right, from the map. That Huntington saw the world as being divided into civilizational units which he I think identified as sort of the Western Liberalism, you know, Latin American Liberalism, which is a sort of distinct variant thereof, the Islamic World, the Chinese World, the Slavic or, Orthodox World I think he calls it because he gives a fairly central role to religion in the definition of these civilizational units, and the And the Sub-Saharan African World.

[15:03]

I mean the borders of this civilizational concept can be contested and fine tuned but the basic idea is that the world ought to be divided along sort of world historical lines.

Paradigms of the Post-Cold War Era: Summary and Interpretation

[15:15]

So these are three quite different paradigms for thinking about the post-Cold War world. Krauthammer emphasizes the unique margins of military and political ascendancy that the United States now enjoys -- sees it as the responsibility of the United States perhaps to reorder post-Cold War international relations in its own image.

[15:37]

Francis Fukuyama sees the world as having arrived at a sort of convergent moment in its history, a moment when liberalism has triumphed as the sort of ideological system for organizing human affairs, regardless of particular sort of culture tradition or historical experience.

[15:56]

Huntington by contrast is much more deferential to culture than his student Fukuyama is. Huntington argues that sort of particularities of cultural experience will continue to shape the ways in which nation-states and indeed societies develop far into the future.

[16:14]

So these are three different perspectives. By juxtaposing them, particularly by juxtaposing Huntington and Fukuyama, we see a really interesting dialectical dynamic starting to emerge.

[16:28]

Fukuyama emphasizes the forces of integration. He sees nation-states as converging towards an increasingly singular destiny -- a liberal destiny. A destiny in which limited government, free trade, and political freedoms will apply to more and more people in the world.

Aggregation and Disaggregation

[16:48]

Huntington, by contrast, emphasizes fragmentation and particularism as the key dynamic of the post-Cold War world. He sees a world that is coming apart; rather, than coming together. And this idea which you get when you put the two together, that the world is caught between the forces of integration and disintegration, aggregation and disaggregation, will become sort of a really powerful theme in much serious writing on international relations in the 1990s.

[17:20]

Benjamin Barber↗ for example, political scientist, publishes in the mid-1990s, a book that's called Jihad vs. McWorld↗. And these two tropes, jihad and McWorld, are taken to represent the forces of integration and disintegration. McWorld of course stands for integration; jihad stands for disintegration.

[17:40]

Who else could we mention? Tom Friedman↗, who I mentioned in my last lecture, publishes a book in 1999 called The Lexus and the Olive Tree↗. Well, again the two tropes are doing the exactly the same work. The Lexus stands for the forces of integration, consumer goods, to which all peoples you know presumably aspire, whereas the olive tree stands for what is rooted and particular, what is unique to the experience and expectations and desires of particular cultural traditions.

[18:08]

But it's the dynamic, the dialectic, the tension between integration and disintegration, that is key. And that's something which you should think about when you think about the international relations of the post-Cold War world. Is the world really caught between these two forces? Integration and disintegration? Or not?

[18:27]

(student question)

[18:32]

I don't. You know that's -- that's a terrific question that the map prompts. Why when the rest of the world is shaded into neat colored zones are Turkey and Ethiopia colored gray rather than being you know shaded into a particular color?

[18:49]

It may well be that Huntington's essay "The Clash of Civilizations" fails to specify which cultural zone each of these countries ought to fall into. I mean they're both countries with very particular you know sort of historical experiences. Ethiopia being both a sub-Saharan African country and a country with a long history of adherence to Christian religion.

[19:13]

Turkey, of course is a country that in key respects, falls into sort of the larger Islamic world. That would I think be a case that would be much easier today now that Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan↗ has sort of redefined its relations with the Islamic world to make itself sort of more central to that region.

[19:34]

This map was produced in the 1990s. At a time when Turkey's political leaders still cleaved very tightly, much tighter than they do today, to the sort of secularism that is a legacy of Atatürk's↗ reforms in the early 20th century.

[19:48]

So -- these are ambiguous cases and I think that's why they're left shaded blank. Just for the record I didn't colorize this map myself. I took it from Wikipedia. So I don't want to be held responsible for you know any crude generalizations or you know stereotypes that it perpetuates. You know apologies for those, but it's not my work.

[20:09]

Okay, so this is how we might think about the post-Cold War world -- as being torn between the forces of liberal integration, globalization, if you will, and the forces of disintegration, and particularism on the other hand.

[20:23]

This is a fairly you know kind of general description of global political dynamics, but it's a sort of concept that is kind of useful to bear in mind as we think about this era in the world's international history.

Gorbachev, Bush and a New World Order

[20:37]

But what about leaders who ruled at the time? What about those who were responsible for the creation and maintenance of international order?

[20:46]

Charles Krauthammer after all, gives the United States central responsibility for the sustenance of post-Cold War international order. The United States, Krauthammer argues, is uniquely positioned to provide global public goods, to provide political stability, to keep markets open and so on and so forth.

[21:06]

And from a certain perspective Krauthammer is right. If we just look at the material distribution of power in the post-Cold War world it quickly becomes clear that the United States has much of it. So this begs the question: what do American leaders propose to do now that the Cold War has been won?

[21:24]

Leaders of the United States are obviously in a unique position globally to define and determine the future of a post-Cold War world. So what is that they propose to accomplish? What does the George H. W. Bush administration in particular want to do?

[21:40]

George H. W. Bush is elected in 1988. He's inaugurated in January 1999 by consequence his administration comes at a very key moment in the geopolitics of the late 20th century -- a moment when the demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe creates a sort of moment of malleable possibility for the recasting of international order.

[22:04]

So what kind of international order does George H. W. Bush want to recast? Let's start by listening to George H. W. Bush? What does he say?

[22:13]

The speech that I'm going to show you is a speech that is given to Congress in September 1991. The specific issue that is at hand is Iraq's invasion of its neighbor Kuwait. So there's a specific international crisis to which George H. W. Bush is responding.

[22:31]

But his words offer some powerful clues as to the shape of the international order that he wants to create now that the Soviet Union has in effect sort of been transformed into being a responsible member of the international community. So let's listen to George H. W. Bush and see what we can usefully infer.

[22:50]

[22:54]

Okay. Let's try turning up the volume.

[22:58]

George H. W. Bush: A new partnership of nations has begun. And we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf as gave as it is also offers a rare opportunity to move toward a historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times our fifth objective, a new world order can emerge, a new era -- freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice and more secure in the quest for peace.

[23:36]

George H. W. Bush: An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor.

[23:55]

George H. W. Bush: And today that new world is struggling to be born. A world quite different from the one we've known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice.

[24:14]

George H. W. Bush: A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak. This is the vision that I shared with President Gorbachev in Helsinki. He and other leaders from Europe, the Gulf, and around the world understand that how we manage this crisis today could shape the future for generations to come.

[24:37]

Of course the comparison between George H. W. Bush's management of the Persian Gulf crisis in 1991↗, and his son's management of the second Iraq War↗ in 2003, begs careful comparison and that's something that we should think about next week.

[24:58]

But one of the most striking aspects of this speech, it's a really important speech, a very good speech, is George H. W. Bush's use of the phrase "new world order↗". It's picked up upon by you know sort of conspiracy theorists on both of the right and the left (professor laughs) who allege that George H. W. Bush is the servant of the Trilateral Commission↗, you know, the Bilderberg Group↗, perhaps even the Bavarian Illuminati↗.

[25:24]

That he (laughter from the class)...seeks to create a you know new world order that will serve the interests of...you know conspiratorial elites in some grand, you know, sort of, organized syndicate led by you know Nelson Rockefeller↗ and Zbigniew Brzezinski↗.

[25:41]

You Google this -- "new world order" -- and so this is what shows up. It's actually a little scary. But that's really not what George H. W. Bush means. He's not talking about you know sort of turning over responsibility for the affairs of the world to the Trilateral Commission. He's talking about a different kind of relations between nations from those sort of torrid and conflictual international relationships which characterize the era of the Cold War.

[26:07]

He's talking about an era of international peace, and an era of international partnership that will be defined preeminently by the rule of international law. And this idea rule of law is really, really important.

[26:19]

Where does the phrase "new world order" come from? Where does it originate? Intriguely the phrase originates not initially with George H. W. Bush but with Mikhail Gorbachev. You will probably recall that in my lecture on the end of the Soviet Union I was fairly attentive to the speech that Gorbachev gives to the United Nations in December 1988.

[26:43]

This is the speech that prompts Gorbachev's press secretary to christen the Sinatra Doctrine↗. The East Europeans are free to go their way. Well, in this speech Gorbachev also talks at some length about the international relations of the entire world. This is quite a profound speech in terms of the exegesis that it offers of Gorbachev's philosophical concept of international relations.

[27:07]

And Gorbachev at this point introduces the phase "new world order" to connote a new kind of international relations -- an international relations that will be characterized by the presence, not the absence, of ideological conflict among nations.

[27:22]

Ideological conflict of the kind that defined the Cold War is, Gorbachev declares, over. The new world order will be a world order in which the United Nations are central to the affairs of the world. In which international governance through the intermediary of the UN will be definitive of global politics. The UN will sort of be a manager of international conflict, a source of stability, in a troubled world.

[27:50]

This will be, also be a world, in which the forces of globalization and interdependence render the fates of nations increasingly convergent. And this is really interesting. You know Gorbachev is after all leader of a country which has resided outside, for the most part, of liberal international trade relations for the best part of a century. But in 1988 Gorbachev goes to the United Nations and proclaims that globalization is a force for good, a force for stability, and a force for integration in the affairs of the world.

[28:21]

Trade, Gorbachev proclaims, can make the world sort of more integral, more stable, than it has been in the past. The new world order will also be an international order oriented towards the promotion of human rights and democracy within countries. So the phrase "new world order" for Gorbachev does not only have relevance to the affairs of nation-states but it also has relevance to what goes on within individual nation-states. For Gorbachev it will be associated with the spread of human rights and the promotion of democracy.

[28:54]

By comparison with this, which is a very sweeping definition of the new world order, the kind of definition that American liberals, or Democrats might have offered in the mid-1990s, George H. W. Bush is in fact fairly restrained. When George H. W. Bush talks about the new world order it's clear, at least to infer from the speech that we've listened to, that what he is primarily concerned with is the international relations of nation-states.

[29:20]

Bush doesn't say so much about human rights, and, you know, economic freedom within individual countries. He's really concerned with the relations of nations, and this is not altogether surprising. George H. W. Bush is a much older man than Gorbachev. He has direct personal experience of war. He served as a fighter pilot in the Second World War in the Pacific Theater and you know as such George H. W. Bush has a strong aversion to major war.

[29:51]

He's determined as President to do what he can to make the world more peaceful -- to institutionalize peace and collective security among nation-states. Ironically his international vision is in key respects reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt's.

[30:08]

Roosevelt in 1944, 1945, after all, proclaimed that the postwar world would be a world in which nation-states lived at peace, developed institutions for the promotion of collective security, and in which the great powers, meaning the Soviet Union and the United States, would have special responsibilities for the maintenance of international peace.

[30:30]

Roosevelt's vision of the postwar world was sort of torn between his commitment to the United Nations on the one hand and to the special roles that the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain would fulfill as global policemen on the other.

[30:44]

And what George H. W. Bush conjures in September 1991 is something similar -- a world of independent nation-states governed by the rule of law, subject to the writ of the United Nations, but also a world in which the great powers will have special responsibilities for maintaining international peace.

[31:04]

And George H. W. Bush at this moment sees the Soviet Union as a potential partner in the sustenance of the new world order. Mikhail Gorbachev is the only foreign leader to whom Bush makes specific reference in this very important speech, and that is consequential. The Soviet Union is to be a partner in the maintenance of international security.

[31:26]

And indeed when the Persian Gulf crisis unfolds the Bush administration consults very closely with the Soviet Union. And that's one of the key, you know sort of, dynamics of the crisis that we should think about as we turn to the crisis itself to ask what it might tell us about the new world order that Bush and the United States wanted to construct.

The Persian Gulf Crisis of 1990

[31:49]

Well, what happens in Iraq to provoke a major international crisis? A crisis that will in key respects be definitive of the new world order that Bush seeks to build?

[32:00]

Well, what happens is simple enough. Saddam Hussein↗, leader of Iraq, invades Kuwait in August 1990. He perpetrates an act of aggression against a neighbor for fairly self-interested reasons. Kuwait is rich in oil. It also has a wide outlet to the Persian Gulf; ownership of Kuwait's oil fields and ports would be a boon to Iraq.

[32:25]

So Saddam's motives are easy enough. This is a land grab and an oil grab. What to do about it?

[32:33]

How should the United States respond? Iraq is after all a long way away. Kuwait has been the victim of international aggression but Kuwait is not a particularly nice country. It's not as if somebody just invaded Switzerland.

[32:48]

Kuwait is a fairly authoritarian country, a country that does not you know really enshrine substantial human rights for its own people. So it's not a democracy. It's not a country that is committed to the ideals for which the United States stands in world affairs.

[33:06]

Nonetheless Bush argues that a vital principle is at stake, and this is the principle of international law. After all acts of aggression against any neighbor, whether they are democratic or not, are prohibited under the United Nations Charter↗ which specifically precludes sort of the use of force as an instrument of international statecraft.

[33:25]

That sacrosanct rule has been violated so Bush argues some response is in order. The United States moves immediately to orchestrate international sanctions again Iraq proposing to use a trade embargo to coerce Saddam to remove his forces from Kuwait.

[33:44]

As that, you know, it becomes clear is insufficient to force Saddam out of Kuwait, Bush tries to rally an international coalition to reverse Iraq's invasion through military means if necessary. Simultaneously he seeks Congressional authorization for the use of military force. Intriguely Congress is much less willing to grant authorization to use force in 1991 than it will be in 2003.

[34:15]

Prominent senators put up a real fight and argue that there are no national interests of the United States at stake -- that going to war in the Middle East is sort of antithetical to longstanding American traditions of restraint and that this is not something that the United States should do.

[34:32]

But Bush ultimately wins a majority vote in the Senate for the use of force arguing that it is not interests that are stake but rather principles -- specifically the principle of territorial sovereignty and the rule of international law.

[34:49]

With Congressional authorization Bush orchestrates a large sort of multilateral military operation. The Coalition that participates in Operation Desert Storm will be substantial. Some fifty, sixty, seventy nations, I forget to it write down the exact number but you can look it up, participate in the military operation.

[35:09]

Operation Desert Storm is a massive military success. US-led coalition forces, operating under the color of a United Nations Security Council Mandate -- this is important -- the UN Security Council specifically authorizes military action against Iraq, achieve an impressive victory over Iraqi forces.

[35:30]

The fighting showcases sort of a whole range of new military technologies including stealth avionics and laser-guided bombs. But what's important politically is the breadth of the international coalition that defends and even participates in the war effort.

[35:47]

Major Arab countries including Saudi Arabia also participate in the operation. So it enjoys a consensus of support both within the region and within the larger international community. And this is you know probably most, or best symbolized, by the fact that the Soviet Union and the United States cooperate in the UN Security Council to pass the resolution authorizing the use of force.

[36:11]

And this is really significant when you situate it in larger historical context, right. For most of the Cold War the United Nations had for the US and the USSR been a forum in which the superpowers bickered over competing national interests.

[36:24]

They -- the UN Security Council was more an arena of contest than a framework in which the superpowers could cooperate to maintain the peace of the world. Well, in 1991 things look really different. The Soviet Union and the United States are now aligned with each other cooperating to use the United Nations to defend and uphold the rule of international law.

[36:46]

This is more or less what Franklin Roosevelt had envisaged -- that the superpowers would cooperate via the UN to maintain the rule of international law.

[36:55]

Ultimately the operation is quite successful in the accomplishment of its immediate objectives. Saddam's invasion of Kuwait is reversed. Kuwait's sovereignty is restored. Democracy in Kuwait does not come to be. Kuwait is returned to the you know state in which it was before the war.

[37:16]

There's no regime change in Iraq. It was never George Bush's intention to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The UN Security Council did not authorize regime change in Iraq. The only purpose of the military operation was to reverse a specific act of Iraqi aggression against Kuwait. Once this had been accomplished the Bush administration stops the war.

[37:36]

General Colin Powell↗ whose the commander -- sorry -- I'm sorry, no, Norman Schwarzkopf↗ is the commander in the theater, Colin Powell is the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff↗, but they announce that the military hostilities have ceased. That the situation is stabilized and that US forces will be withdrawn from Iraq upon the conclusion of the ceasefire, and the restoration of full Kuwaiti sovereignty.

The Plight of the Kurds in Iraq

[37:55]

It's a limited war fought for limited objectives and it is quite successful in that. But there are loose ends. In northern Iraq for example the fate of the Kurds↗ is left uncertain at the war's end. During the course of the war the United Nations and the United States encouraged the Kurdish population of northern Iraq to rise up against Saddam Hussein.

[38:22]

The Kurds had long been the victims of oppression by the central government in Baghdad. Saddam Hussein was notoriously oppressive of the Kurds in the 1980s -- perpetrating acts of slaughter that amount by some definition to acts of genocide against the Kurds.

[38:40]

Well, in the context of the Persian Gulf War the West encouraged the Kurds to rise up. Doing so would serve the immediate war objectives for which the West was fighting. But once the war had been won little attention was paid to the plight of the Kurds. They were after all citizens of an Iraqi state. Once the immediate war objective, namely, Iraqi withdraw from Kuwait had been accomplished, then the United Nations and the United States had no more business in Iraq.

[39:08]

What happened to the Kurds was in a sense between Saddam and the Kurds themselves. So the West pulls out of Iraq following the completion of military hostilities and the Kurds are left to fend as they will with Saddam Hussein, and it's not a particularly appealing scenario.

[39:26]

The plight of the Kurds in the 1990s in Iraq will be a tragic one. So this is one sort of loose end which...anticipates some of the dilemmas of the 1990s. What is the responsibility of the international community to be when a nation-states oppresses its own people?

[39:43]

When Saddam Hussein uses military forces domestically, internally, to suppress Kurdish nationalism, when he perpetrates unlawful and wanton acts of violence against the Kurds what will the West do?

[40:01]

The lesson of 1991 is that the international community will do very little -- is that the circumstance of the Kurds are an internal Iraqi matter -- not a matter, unlike the invasion of Kuwait, for the international community.

[40:13]

(student question)

[40:19]

Yeah.

Iraqi Rationale for Invading Kuwait

[40:22]

That's a really good question. Why doesn't Saddam, why isn't Saddam more cautious? Why does he attack Kuwait?

[40:29]

I don't know that that's a question which we're not yet able to answer. I think that answering that question in a satisfactory way would require using Iraqi documents, including the documents that were seized after 2003, to get a better handle on Saddam's motives and decision making processes.

[40:46]

So I'm going to dodge the question, but I'll speculate nonetheless. I think that you know Saddam figures that this just is not on the radar screen of the West -- that Kuwait is a little out of the way principlality, that the United States is preoccupied with the reunification of Europe, with the reintegration of the sort of East to the West after the Cold War.

[41:09]

That this will not attract the kind of response that it does attract. It's also the case that the United States was a pretty strong supporter of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War↗ in the 1980s.

[41:22]

So there's a you know history of close association, well, close I think would be a overstate the case. There's a history of association between the United States and Saddam that may have made Saddam more confident than he should have been. But I think the best answer to your question is just that Saddam misjudges the probable responses of the Bush administration and the larger international community.

US Military Strength in the Post-Cold War Period

[41:43]

But what is you know unambiguously clear at the end of the Persian Gulf War, even as so much else remains opaque, is that the United States will be a sort of preeminent military force in the post-Cold War world.

[41:58]

This, the Persian Gulf War, makes very, very clear. And we can quantify this, and it might be useful to do so. Let's look at a map of the world in 1990 scaled for military spending. Well, it's not hard to see, you know, who has the biggest armies, the best military resources, the most advanced weapons and so on and so forth.

[42:18]

Military spending in the world of 1990 is dominated overwhelmingly by the United States and its allies in Western Europe. The United States plus Great Britain plus France amount for an overwhelming preponderance of global military expenditures.

[42:36]

And this -- this is really important. The US enjoys wide margins of ascendancy. If we, just assume, for the moment, that the United States gets much the same bang for the buck when it spends money on military forces, military spending in economic terms offers us a pretty good proxy for sort of military potential.

[42:57]

And here the United States prevails throughout the 1990s and into the first decade of the 21st century. US military spending, as a percentage of global military spending, hovers somewhere between, you know, 25% and 30% for most of this period.

[43:14]

If you look at military spending in real terms then you can see that the United States far outspends its closest rivals. US military spending in 1995 towers far above the military spending of the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China.

[43:31]

So the US is spending much, much more on military resources. However this is something that the United States is well able to afford to do. If we look at military spending not in absolute terms, which is what this chart shows you, but rather in relative terms as a percentage of the individual country's GDP, then we see a rather different picture.

[43:54]

And let's do that. Ignore the gray bar for the moment, and just concentrate on the colored bars. If you look at the colored bars, the green, yellow, red, purple and blue bars, you see that US military spending is actually fairly well in line with the military spending of other major powers.

(recording abruptly ends here)