Chapter 1: The Road to 9/11 (the decade 1990-2001)

 

Established in 1922, five years after the October Revolution, the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist on 26 December 1991. On the previous day, 25 December 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, declaring his office extinct. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was preceded by Gorbachev’s unsuccessful attempts to revive the Soviet economy, beginning in May 1985. His liberalization measures led to the emergence from 1986 onwards of nationalist movements and ethnic disputes within the diverse republics of the Soviet Union. On 7 December 1988 Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech to the United Nations in which he pledged to cut the Soviet forces in Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.

It is not publicly known when exactly the ruling circles of the United States and of the Western Alliance realized that the dissolution of the Soviet bloc was impending. From the time the Soviet Union withdrew its demoralized military forces from Afghanistan (1986), the telltale signs of a deep economic and structural crisis within the Soviet Union were, however, obvious. Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech to the United Nations in December 1988, cited above, left no doubt in Western minds that the Soviet Union was dying.

The impending demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact represented for the U.S. elite and to all those who based their global policies on the paradigm of the Cold War a massive challenge but opened at the same time exciting opportunities for the U.S. to assert its global hegemony.

(1) The loss of the Soviet Threat

 

John Lewis Gaddis, an American conservative historian, noted in 1991 what the loss of the Soviet threat meant for American global involvement:

 

For the first time in over half a century, no single great power, or coalition of powers, poses a “clear and present danger” to the national security of the United States… The passing of the Cold War world by no means implies an end to American involvement in whatever world is to follow; it only means that the nature and the extent of that involvement are not yet clear.19

 

Even before the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gregory F. Treverton, later Director at the RAND Center for Global Risk and Security and formerly vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, expressed his awareness that a new foreign policy paradigm was necessary: “America must now address the awkward question of how to organize its defense if deprived of the Soviet threat that has driven it for forty years.”20

Robert W. Tucker, pointed out in Foreign Affairs, flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), that to maintain the Western alliance, “a new adversary must be assumed.”21

Paul Wolfowitz, at the time Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, warned in 1991 that slashing military expenditures would require to send home people “who had planned to make a career in the military, [thereby throwing] away that strategic asset that’s represented by the quality of our officer corps and the quality of our enlisted people.”22

U.S. Representative Les Aspin elaborated as follows:

 

The way we design weapon systems are with the Soviet threat in mind, or use against the Soviet Union in mind. It drives everything. It drives not only the budgets, it drives the force structure, it drives the kinds of forces you have, it drives the kinds of equipment, it drives the whole business. Take away the Soviet threat and how do you design it? How do you decide what you need? How do you decide how to focus on that? [...] How do you build down the United States military and not destroy the industrial base at the heart of the United States’ military capability?23

 

Senator Sam Nunn was more explicit:

 

A study by the Defense Budget Project last August predicted the private sector defense industry employment would decline by over 800,000 jobs from 1990 to ’96 as a result of the defense spending reductions in the Budget Summit Agreement, which was entered into last year. The largest single year of decline, almost 300,000 jobs, will be eliminated in the fiscal year ’93, beginning October the 1st.24

 

None of these authors openly expressed the real reasons for the United States to maintain a powerful global military machinery. These reasons were spelled by others.

 

(2) Restating the rationale for U.S. global military supremacy

 

Political Columnist Charles Krauthammer explained in 1991 that “economic power is a necessary condition for a great power status. But it certainly is not sufficient, as has been made clear by the recent behavior of Germany and Japan, which have generally hidden under the table since the first shots rang out in Kuwait.” He then insisted that U.S. global military deployment

 

is in many ways an essential pillar of the American economy. The United States is, like Britain before it, a commercial, maritime, trading nation that needs an open, stable world environment in which to thrive. In a world of Saddams, if the United States were to shed its unique superpower role, its economy would be gravely wounded. Insecure sea lanes, impoverished trading partners, exorbitant oil prices, explosive regional instability are only the more obvious risks of an American abdication. Foreign entanglements are indeed a burden. But they are also a necessity.25

 

Krauthammer’s view was endorsed by Thomas Friedman, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and former advisor to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Friedman expressed his view in an unusually frank manner in the New York Times:

 

For globalism to work, America cannot be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is… The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist - McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonald-Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. 26

 

General Alfred M. Gray, who served as the 29th commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps between 1987 and 1991, offered further justifications for asserting U.S. global hegemony:

 

The Underdeveloped World’s growing dissatisfaction over the gap between rich and poor nations will create a fertile breeding ground for insurgencies. These insurgencies have the potential to jeopardize […] our access to vital economic and military resources. This situation will become more critical as our nation and allies, as well as potential adversaries, become more and more dependent on these strategic resources. If we are to have stability in these regions, maintain access to their resources, protect our citizens abroad, defend our vital installations and deter conflict, we must maintain within our active force structure a credible military power projection capability with flexibility to respond to conflicts across the spectrum of violence throughout the globe.27

 

Such views were crystallized in an official, but classified, document leaked to the New York Times, which published excerpts thereof in 1992.28 The document was drafted by Dick Cheney, then Defense Secretary, and Paul Wolfowitz, his Under Secretary for Policy. The policy statements in this document were developed “in conjunction with the National Security Council and in consultation with the President.” The document is known in Pentagon parlance as the “Defense Planning Guidance” and is also known as “The Wolfowitz Doctrine.”

America’s first objective in the post-cold-war era, as defined by the authors of this document, was “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.” They mentioned, however, three additional aspects to this objective: (1) Establishing and protecting a new international order; (2) Discouraging advanced industrial nations from challenging U.S. leadership; and (3) Maintaining mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from “even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”

Another objective mentioned in the...