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President Mikhail Gorbachev and waning of the first Cold War
In the late eighties at the height of his decisive interactions with the Ronald Reagan administration in the US on a range of Cold War issues, Gorbachev’s popularity in the West was such that the latter’s admiration for the Soviet leader came to be described as ‘Gorby Mania’ in media circles.
Unfortunately for Gorbachev, he inherited a run-down economy. The USSR’s Cold War defense spending coupled with its proxy wars in the global South in particular proved a huge drain on the Soviet Union’s purse. Prohibitive defense spending was its Fatal Cleopatra so to speak and it was seized by the US to cause the Soviet Union’s downfall. Essentially, the Reagan administration’s strategy in its Cold War confrontation with the USSR at the time was to tempt the latter into spending beyond its means on the defense front in particular.
Just a case in point was the US’ Strategic Defense Initiative or ‘Star Wars’ project. Basically, what was envisaged in this mega defense program was the installation of a missile defense system along the West’s Cold War borders with the Soviet Union and its ‘satellites’ in Europe. The aim was to repulse USSR-initiated ballistic strategic nuclear weapons strikes into the West.
Gorbachev was faced with the dilemma of either matching the US by initiating a similar defense program of his own or suffering substantial defeat in the USSR’s arms race with the West, since the former could ill afford defense expenditure of this magnitude and scale. It was at this juncture that the Soviet leader thought it best to enter into a stepped-up friction-free relationship with the West.
Rather than court further economic hardships the USSR apparently calculated that it would be advisable to put the détente process with the West into top gear and thereby save hard-to-come-by financial resources. Hard economic realities dictated the Soviets’ future policy towards the West.
It needs to be remembered that when Gorbachev came to power in 1988 the Soviet Union was in a military quagmire in Afghanistan. If the Soviets thought they could make a quick job of quashing the Mujahedin’s armed resistance in Afghanistan in the decade of the eighties, they were sadly mistaken. Soviet troops moved into Afghanistan in 1979 close on the heels of a coup that displaced a pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. A principal intention of the Soviets in their invasion was to prevent Afghanistan from falling to Islamic fundamentalists, a manifestation of whom was the Mujahedin.
It was the same year that the historic Islamic Revolution in Iran occurred. The Soviets were apparently apprehensive of the possibility of their Central Asian Republics coming under the sway of Islamic fundamentalists, with Afghanistan becoming a bridgehead of sorts of hardline Islamic influence in South-west Asia. It was to pre-empt these possibilities that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan but it turned out to be a long drawn out wasting war for the USSR.
Ten years into the war in Afghanistan in 1989, the Soviets could not see an end to it. Gorbachev thought it best to initiate a withdrawal and simultaneously opt for a relatively conflict-free relationship with the US. It is of importance that the Afghan Mujahedin was militarily armed by the US with Pakistan acting as a conduit for Western weapons.
The Afghan war was one among other major factors that contributed to the financial strains of the Soviets at the time. Gorbachev had no choice but to opt for a stepped-up normalization of ties with the West and thereby enable the USSR to forge ahead as a stable financial entity. It was against this backdrop that the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan occurred.
However, one of the cumulative results of the USSR’s policy of scaling down its defense expenditure and launching a re-think on its military commitments around the world was a gradual weakening of itself as a far-flung, strong federation. It could no longer contend with the West for global power and influence in conventional Cold War terms. Thus, the stage was set for the fading of the USSR as a super power.
It could be argued that Gorbachev contributed considerably to foster the ideals of social democracy in the USSR. His policies of Perestroika and Glasnost ushered in political and economic reforms that helped in the democratization of Russia and its ‘satellite’ states in Eastern Europe. Essentially, Perestroika denoted an easing of the clout political classes wielded over society in top-down fashion while Glasnost stood for greater transparency in the conduct of its affairs by the state.
These policy prescriptions were the polar opposites of what the communist system ossified into over the decades. Basically, the twin policies anticipated greater people’s participation in governance, which is an essential foundation of social democracy. However, Gorbachev could not be accused of having facilitated the break-up of the USSR in a major way or of having ‘presided over’ the collapse of communism. It was President Boris Yeltsin who followed Gorbachev who saw a formal end to the communist system in Russia and Eastern Europe. Besides, Yeltsin took Russia along a path of full- fledged capitalist development.
Accordingly, Gorbachev could be said to have brought the Soviet Union ‘out of the cold’, in the sense that he contributed towards weakening the ‘Iron Curtain’, which was seen as getting in the way of an East-West rapprochement. Thus, was brought to an end the first Cold War. However, the world is now confronted with a second Cold War, with President Vladimir Putin heading the Russian side and President Joe Biden of the US helming the West. The latter is no ideological conflict. On the contrary, military might and worldwide power and influence are proving divisive factors. It’s a separate chapter in international politics as it were.