Gorbachev's New World Order

Obermann, Magnus. “Gorbachev’s New World

Order.” The Webster Review of International

History 3, no. 1 (2023): 36-49.

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reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Gorbachev’s New World Order

How the Last Soviet President Sought to Make War in Europe Unimaginable – Thirty Years

Before Putin Renounced Gorbachev’s Doctrine and Launched War on Ukraine

Magnus Obermann

Department of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Email: [email protected].ac.uk

Abstract

This article reinterprets Mikhail Gorbachev’s momentous speech at the UN General

Assembly in 1988, arguing that he envisioned not just a but the new world order. In

contemporary historiography, the notion of the New World Order is usually ascribed

to President George Bush Sr., while Gorbachev’s UN speech is merely associated with

abandoning the Brezhnev Doctrine. But Gorbachev was promoting more than just a

vaguely defined reformation of the bipolar international system. This article argues

that the Russian original of Gorbachev’s speech may well be translated as a concrete,

not vague, plea for an international order built on superpower cooperation, arms

reduction, and the rule of law. In commemorating Gorbachev’s contribution to the

(relatively) peaceful end of the Cold War, this article also explores how the post-Cold

War era became America’s order, not Gorbachev’s. Bush’s “vision thing” was built

on less idealistic propositions than Gorbachev’s UN speech and ultimately replaced

the “Gorbachev doctrine” – a concept of international relations based on great power

cooperation, hopes for democratisation, and with the use of force as an exception

rather than the rule. However, Gorbachev’s ideals remained relevant principles of

peace and security throughout the post-Cold War era and may even inspire the new

order that will follow in its wake.

Keywords: Gorbachev, world order, Cold War, summit diplomacy, use of force

1. Introduction

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, who died on 30 August 2022, was undoubtedly one of the most

influential people of the late 20

century. But he is also a profoundly polarising and controversial figure.

For some, like the British magazine The Economist, Gorbachev was a “liberator of millions”,

whereas

The Economist, The Man Who Ended an Empire, 31 August 2022. For links to digital sources see bibliography.

Gorbachev’s New World Order

others, like the state-run Chinese outlet Global Times, criticise his “immature policy of cosying up with

the West” and portray the only-ever Soviet president as a naïve “traitor of his country.”

Russian

President Vladimir Putin could not find time to attend the funeral of his pre-predecessor in the Kremlin.

These obituaries for the last Soviet leader reflect a deep divide of opinions about his legacy. While

some will always praise “Gorbi’s” role in facilitating German reunification in 1990, others remember

him for his failed attempts at reforming the Soviet Union before its collapse in 1991, and yet others for

his contribution to ending the Cold War somewhere between these two events. What Gorbachev is

generally not remembered for is crafting the new world order that would emanate from the Cold War;

rather, credit is given to US President George H.W. Bush, who famously said of himself not to be a

great visionary. In hindsight, Bush’s laurels seemed justified by the fact that while the Soviet Union

collapsed, America experienced its “unipolar moment” and emerged as the world’s sole superpower.

However, the recent attacks on the US-led rules-based international order by powers claiming that

“America’s” post-Cold War international order was biased and unfair, warrants a reassessment of the

origins of this order. Gorbachev’s death in summer 2022 coincided with the final demise of the post-

Cold War era, which was dealt a mortal blow by one of Gorbachev’s successors in the Kremlin.

Vladimir Putin claimed that US and NATO dominance in Europe left him no choice but to wage war

on Ukraine. Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia could only negotiate with Ukraine in

the framework of a new world order. These and other claims that the “collective West” betrayed Russia

in the aftermath of the Cold War elevate the historical question of who the driving force behind the new

world order was to one of war and peace today. Most importantly, the Kremlin’s current interpretation

of this history is not only bellicose, but it also neglects Moscow’s agency in the world order matters of

the lates 1980s and early 1990s.

This article argues that before George H.W. Bush’s “vision thing” gained prominence, Gorbachev

formulated his own version of the new world order. It evaporated in thin air just as the dreams of many

in Eastern Europe materialized; nevertheless, key concepts of Gorbachev’s new world order resurfaced

in Bush’s version in subsequent years. To support the thesis, this article will discuss the drafting process

of the new order alongside Bush’s and Gorbachev’s superpower summits from 1988 to 1991, German

reunification, and the Persian Gulf Crisis of 1990–1991. The article suggests that despite increasing

domestic problems in the Soviet Union, the development of the “new world order” was subject to an

incremental bilateral process that took place throughout the “hinge years”

at the end of the Cold War.

By evolution and design, it was not America’s order alone.

2. Gorbachev’s doctrine - 1988

In December 1988, howling blizzards blew their way into the history books for the second coldest

December ever recorded in New York. Yet, judging by television coverage of Mikhail Gorbachev’s

arrival at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan, the sun was shining on 7 December. The storm

the Soviet leader unleashed with his address to the General Assembly, and the blow it meant to the

international order, was of a political nature. In his speech, the General Secretary of the Communist

Hu Xijin, Gorbachev won Western acclaim by betraying USSR, and Chen Qingqing, Chinese observers express mixed

feelings about Gorbachev, draw lessons from his immature policy of cozying up with West. Both published in Global Times

on 31 August 2022.

Kristina Spohr, Post Wall, post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989 (William Collins, 2019), 8.

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Party of the Soviet Union not only announced sweeping troop cuts in Eastern Europe and rang the death

knell for the Brezhnev Doctrine. He also laid out his aspirations of a “fundamentally new era” in

international relations, a new world in which great power rivalry should be superseded by “creative

cooperation” between the two superpowers.

Gorbachev planned the reformation, or perestroika, of the

bipolar international system. He gave his project a visionary name: the new world order.

“The idea of democratizing the entire world order has become a powerful socio-political force. […]

From this point, further world progress is only possible through the search for a consensus among all

humankind to move towards the new world order.”

The official English translation of Gorbachev’s address to the General Assembly does not mention his

proposal to “move towards the new world order.” Instead, the UN protocol only recorded a “move

forward to a new world order.”

In fact, the use of the indefinite article to translate Gorbachev’s words

—“движени[е] к новому мировому порядку”— seems a sensible choice to many Russian speakers,

albeit grammatically not peremptory. Yet for the sake of the argument, this article interprets

Gorbachev’s words as a concrete plea for the new world order he envisioned: an international

environment characterised by superpower cooperation in global and regional conflicts, promoting

technological and economic development to the benefit of all humankind, aiming at the reduction of

nuclear weapons, and driven by the rule of law.

Particularly in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the media as well as academics depicted the

new world order as America’s order.

On one hand, American leadership, in concert with a growing

cohort of NATO allies, seemed practically indispensable in a world that was experiencing a “unipolar

moment.”

On the other hand, the emphasis on the Americanness of the new global order paid tribute

to the idea that world orders are forged through the globalization of regional orders.

Once the Soviet

Union collapsed and President Bush proclaimed America’s victory in the Cold War, the wide-spread

post-Cold War teleological interpretation of history suggests, the (West) European and (North)

American liberal international order was expanded over the whole world. Put differently, the “inside

Western system” became the new “outside order.”

However, rise and decline of the liberal rules-based international order cannot be reduced to US

policymaking alone. Gorbachev’s address to the General Assembly in 1988 and Bush’s State of the

Union Address in 1991 were two similar, yet not identical, American and Soviet proposals for a new

world order. For Gorbachev, cooperation between the two superpowers was paramount; he renounced

the use of force as “Cold War method” and stressed that foreign policy should be “subordinate to law

Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (Transworld, 1996), 460.

Mikhail Gorbachev, Address at the 43rd UN General Assembly Session, author's own translation from the Russian original.

The French translation remains equally vague in stipulating an unspecific “voie d'un nouvel ordre mondial.” The Spanish

and Arabic translations use the indefinite article, too. The Chinese version does not specify if Gorbachev spoke about a or

the new world order, neither verbally nor by context.

For an exemplary media assessment see Doyle McManus, “Bush's Vision of a 'New World Order' still Unclear Policy,” Los

Angeles Times, 18 February 1991. For more recent monographs stressing a decisive role of US foreign policy in the post-

Cold War era see Timothy Lynch, In the Shadow of the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2020); Hal Brands, Making

the Unipolar Moment (Cornell University Press, 2016). For the alternate view see Michael Mandelbaum, Mission Failure

(Oxford University Press, 2016); Stephen Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2018).

Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” in Graham Allison and Gregory Treverton (eds.), Rethinking America's

Security: Beyond Cold War to New World Order (Norton, 1992).

Henry Kissinger, World Order (Penguin Press, 2014), 2-3 and 260.

John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton

University Press, 2011), 8.

Gorbachev’s New World Order

and nothing but law.”

Bush emphasised the importance of the rule of law, too, which for him was a

tool to safeguard three other “universal aspirations of mankind”: peace, security, and freedom.

For

Bush, the “universality” of these values had a clear American connotation. His speech was a reaction

to the Persian Gulf Crisis as well as the recent developments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union

itself. It gave rise to what is commonly dubbed the post-Cold War liberal international order, held

together by the promise of universality and sustained by the military and economic heft of America and

its allies. This “Liberal International Order 2.0” is falling apart since 2016, an observation for which

(amongst other factors) the foreign policies of “new ordering powers” like Russia and China are made

responsible.

The fragmentation of “America’s order” by the hands of a Russian leader therefore raises

new questions about the ownership of this order, its evolution and underlying forces.

In political science, the international order is a “dynamic social construct that is created through human

interaction, changes over time and is eventually transformed or dissolved.”

With his 1988 UN speech,

Gorbachev sought to demonstrate to the international community that the time was approaching for the

next transformation of international relations.

The non-application of force was a cornerstone of this

order. But how readily would Gorbachev’s counterpart, the incoming Bush administration, interact with

him to devise the social construct that Gorbachev called the new world order? Doubts were warranted.

Gorbachev’s new world order should have cemented the defusing of the Cold War that he and President

Reagan had worked towards through four superpower summits since 1985. Although the Cold War did

not end in December 1988, the USSR was no longer declared the “evil empire” since the summer

Moscow summit and conclusion of the INF Treaty in December 1987. For Gorbachev, ending the

ruinous arms race and creating a world free of nuclear weapons were means to an end: the ideological

success of perestroika and the economic revitalization of the Soviet Union. Not to lose pace and

initiative, Gorbachev urged President-elect Bush in his UN speech to continue the dialogue “without

long pauses or backtracking.” At the same time, it was clear that the Soviets would want their say in

formulating the “consensus” about the shape of the new world order. Gorbachev naturally expected this

responsibility as he perceived his empire as one of the two pillars of the coming era.

3. As Perestroika derails, the White House regains the initiative - 1989

A major obstacle in implementing Gorbachev’s new world order was the shift from the Reagan to the

Bush administration in the United States. After his address to the General Assembly, Gorbachev met

Reagan and Bush on Governor’s Island. He repeatedly tried to extract a promise from the President-

elect that the new foreign policy team would continue in the same vein, but Bush hesitated. He had no

intention to stall things, he told Gorbachev, but wanted to formulate prudent national security policies

before going forward.

Bush’s intuition told him that a continuation of the current course would benefit

Gorbachev more than the Americans. In fact, the CIA estimated that throughout 1989, Gorbachev would

Gorbachev, Memoirs, 461.

George Bush, State of the Union Address 1991.

Hanns Maull, The Rise and Decline of the post-Cold War International Order (Oxford University Press, 2018), 272. Also

cf. Roy Allison, “Russia and the post-2014 International Legal Order: Revisionism and Realpolitik,” International Affairs

93.3 (2017).

Maull, The Rise and Decline of the post-Cold War International Order, 5.

Gorbachev, Memoirs, 460.

Department of State, Allied Briefing on Reagan-Gorbachev Luncheon Meeting, 9 December 1988.

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gain even more momentum for his agenda.

The declared aim of Bush’s foreign policy was therefore

to “get ahead of Gorbachev.”

When the two leaders met again in December 1989, the world had

already started to re-order itself in Bush’s favour.

The spirits that Gorbachev had summoned, particularly his pledge to refrain from the use of force,

started to haunt his new world order throughout 1989. His promise to grant the people of Eastern Europe

the freedom to choose a (Socialist) government of their liking meant that the Red Army could not

intervene to keep the old Communist regimes in power. The Kremlin was convinced that a return to the

Brezhnev Doctrine would cost the new political thinking all the credibility it had gained in the West.

But while Gorbachev’s unilateral renunciation of force as means to restore order in the Soviet empire

had enabled regime changes in Poland and Hungary, there had been no concessions from the new

American government. Bush appeared so sceptic of Gorbachev’s intentions that former Secretary of

State George Shultz worried the “new team did not understand or accept that the cold war was over.”

If his new world order were to succeed, Gorbachev realised, he had to convince Bush that the age of

ideological confrontation between them had ended.

Gorbachev’s opportunity came at the next superpower summit in Malta in December 1989. That

summer, while Bush had visited Poland and Hungary, a triumphant Gorbachev had been welcomed in

Germany and France. His vision of the “common European home” was well received by the Council of

Europe in Strasbourg. Now, in Malta, Gorbachev wanted to “analyse history” and seal the end of the

Cold War.

Armed with his orange 2x3 inch notebook, he lectured the press that “many things that

were characteristic of the Cold War should be abandoned, also the stake on force, the arms race,

mistrust, psychological and ideological struggle, and all that.”

In his conversation with Bush,

Gorbachev expressed his concerns that the seeds of perestroika could only sprout if the Americans

accommodated his proposals for a new era in international relations, renounced Cold War thinking, and

allowed the new world order to flourish. The President responded that he had not “jumped up and down

on the Berlin Wall” because he was aware of Gorbachev’s domestic challenges.

To both men it was

clear, however, that the events of 1989 were reshuffling the cards in the world order poker.

The Kremlin’s diverted attention to economic remodelling, complicated by the collapse of Communism

in Eastern Europe, gave the White House the chance to “regain the initiative.”

As a February telegram

from the US embassy in Moscow read, the Americans had started 1989 “with a high degree of

confidence that the Soviet leadership’s preoccupation with internal reform will continue throughout the

first Bush administration.”

The geo-strategic outlook for US foreign policy at the end of the decade

was promising, too. In Asia, Deng Xiaoping’s violent crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests

had been a blow to his lao pengyou (“old friend”) Bush and all hopes that Deng’s economic reforms

Central Intelligence Agency, Intelligence Estimate: 'Moscow’s 1989 Agenda for U.S.–Soviet Relations', in Svetlana

Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton (eds.), The Last Superpower Summits: Reagan, Gorbachev and Bush. Conversations that

Ended the Cold War (Central European University Press, 2016), 495.

National Security Council, Memorandum from Scowcroft for the President: “Getting Ahead of Gorbachev", in

Savranskaya and Blanton, The Last Superpower Summits, 500.

Memorandum to Alexander Yakovlev from the Bogomolov Commission, “Changes in Eastern Europe and their Impact on

the USSR,” in Cold War International History Bulletin 12/13, 52-61.

George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (Scribner, 1993), 1139.

Department of State, Memorandums of Conversation, Bush and Gorbachev at Malta Summit, 2-3 December 1989.

New York Times, Transcript of the Bush-Gorbachev News Conference in Malta, 4 December 1989.

Department of State: Bush and Gorbachev at Malta Summit.

George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (Vintage Books, 1999), 44.

Department of State, 'The Soviet Union Over the Next Four Years', February 1989.

Gorbachev’s New World Order

would go hand in hand with political liberalisation. However, the CIA was convinced that Gorbachev’s

charm offensive in Beijing would not supersede the Chinese leadership’s priority for partnership with

the US.

In Europe, Bush had found a “good friend” and “partner in leadership” in the West-German

Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

As intermediary between Bush and Gorbachev, Kohl played a decisive role

to re-order Europe – and anchored US military presence in it beyond the Cold War.

The close political coordination between Bush and Kohl was mutually beneficial. Their frequent

telephone contacts helped the Chancellor in negotiating German reunification while Moscow’s consent

to the NATO membership of the unified country was a geostrategic gain for the President. After his

meeting with Gorbachev in Malta, Bush met Kohl ahead of the NATO summit in Laeken. The meeting

was a turning point for the Germans:

Bush fully supported Kohl’s “10 Points” for a German

confederation, so long as united Germany would remain a part of the Western security architecture. At

the next superpower summit in Washington, Bush and Gorbachev agreed that the Germans should

decide about their security alliance themselves. This signalled Gorbachev’s theoretical consent to

unified Germany’s membership in NATO, the jurisdiction of which would henceforth encompass the

former GDR and move approximately 160 miles to the East. In finalizing the deal with the Soviets after

fierce negotiations in the Caucasus, Kohl significantly contributed to the American guise of the post-

Cold War international order in Europe. It shortly proved its strategic importance.

4. Germany and the Gulf – 1990

If 1989 had been a “lost year” for Moscow, 1990 was “truly tragic.”

Illustrated by Gorbachev’s

consent to Germany’s NATO plans and the deep economic misery of his country, the Soviet Union for

the first time appeared as “supplicant rather than equal.”

Bush’s National Security Advisor, Brent

Scowcroft, realised that now the US could achieve a “fundamental shift in the strategic balance,

particularly in Europe.”

The American strategy changed from “getting ahead of Gorbachev” to

“engaging Gorbachev,” a further exemplification of the weakened role of the Soviet leader in world

order matters. Apparently, the Bush administration no longer considered Gorbachev and his plans that

could, potentially, shape the new international order, but just an important actor that should be engaged

not to interfere with the Americans’ plans. Simultaneously to Gorbachev’s decline, Bush increasingly

assumed the prerogative to interpret the global developments. In his State of the Union Address on 31

January 1990, he stepped out of the shadows of Gorbachev’s 1988 UN speech and announced a “new

era in the world’s affairs.”

Gorbachev sought to convince Bush that this new era should be based on “universal” values, rather than

“Western” ones. In a private audience with Pope John Paul II the day before the Malta summit,

Gorbachev and the Pontiff agreed that “changes in Europe and the world should not follow the Western

model.”

Talking to the US President, Gorbachev rejected the American motto that the division of

Europe should be overcome through “Western values” like personal liberties, pluralist democracy and

Department of State, Implications of a Sino-Soviet Summit, 23 December 1988.

White House, Memorandum of Telephone Conversation, Bush-Kohl, 16 May 1989.

Mary Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create post-Cold War Europe (Princeton University Press, 2009), 79.

Anatoly Chernyaev, Diary 1990, 78.

Savranskaya and Blanton, The Last Superpower Summits, 573.

Ibid., 587.

George Bush, State of the Union Address 1990.

Savranskaya and Blanton, The Last Superpower Summits, 529.

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human rights.

Instead, he argued, they should speak of “democratic, universal values.”

This was not

only a philosophically inclined Soviet intellectual struggling for words, but two world leaders

contending for legitimacy to reshape the international order. Although they finally agreed on the

compromised formula of “universal values,” Bush insisted that this was only a concession in words, not

substance. For him, the driving force for change in Eastern Europe, including Gorbachev’s own

glasnost, was essentially “Western”. Reinforced by the anti-Socialist mood on the streets in Eastern

Europe, the American president claimed more and more ownership of the new world order.

The Persian Gulf Crisis of 1990—1991 accelerated the US takeover of Gorbachev’s idea of a new era

in international relations. While Germany’s peaceful reunification—a project uniting popular East

German zeitgeist with American concepts for European security—made quick progress over the

summer of 1990, other world regions were re-ordered in more violent ways. Saddam Hussein’s invasion

of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 demonstrated that a core principle of Gorbachev’s new world order, the

reluctance to apply force in international relations, would be difficult to uphold without sacrificing

another goal, the rule of (international) law. Since a stronger Soviet Union would not have allowed its

client state, Iraq, to occupy another country, observers of the scene argued that Kuwait was a victim of

the new world order, rather than its cause.

Ultimately, the showdown in the Middle East had three far-

reaching consequences: it once more revealed the severity of the Soviet economic and political crisis,

within the superpower duo it continued to shift authority from Moscow to Washington, and it finally

prompted Bush to formulate his own version of the new world order.

From early on, Bush’s perception of the new world order was less idealistic than Gorbachev’s proposals.

Addressing a Joint Session of Congress on 11 September 1990, the President voiced his hopes that “a

new world order can emerge […]: stronger in the pursuit of justice and more secure in the quest for

peace.”

Yet the US also had national interests in Iraq and Kuwait. In the first few meetings of Bush’s

National Security Council, the pursuit of oil was stronger than the pursuit of justice, and the quest for

peace subordinate to the quest for the unhindered flow of global energy commodity trade.

It became

increasingly clear that the “historic period of [American-Soviet] cooperation” which Bush praised

before the Congress had less substance than some Senators and Representatives believed.

Although Bush and Gorbachev both tied the new world order to closer superpower cooperation, the

Persian Gulf Crisis also showed the limits of coordination between the Kremlin and the White House.

Just two days after the invasion, on 4 August, the National Security Council decided to send US troops

to Saudi-Arabia, not only to protect their ally in Riyadh but also to form the basis for an operation to

reinstate the emir of Kuwait.

After Saudi King Fahd approved the American plans, the State Secretary,

James Baker, asked whether they should involve the Soviets.

Scowcroft objected immediately because

“this would send a bad signal,” and White House Chief of Staff, John Sununu, agreed that briefing the

Soviets would only “slow things down.”

Therefore Baker had to deal with a grumpy Shevardnadze

Department of State, Bush and Gorbachev at Malta Summit.

Ibid.

Joseph Nye, “What New World Order?”, Foreign Affairs 71.2 (1992).

Ibid.

National Security Council, Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait, 2 August 1990.

National Security Council, Minutes of NSC Meeting on Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait, 4 August 1990.

National Security Council, Minutes of NSC Meeting on Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait, 5 August 1990.

Ibid.

Gorbachev’s New World Order

when the Soviet Foreign Minister learned that the US had sent troops to Saudi Arabia and started

operation “Desert Shield” without consulting Moscow in advance.

Gorbachev did not want to “enter the new world order to the thunder of cannon,”

since an American

military intervention against Iraq would undermine his principle not to use force. Encouraged by his

special envoy Primakov and downplaying the warnings of his foreign policy advisor Chernyaev,

Gorbachev believed that he could “convince” Saddam to retreat peacefully.

In various telephone

conferences with Turkish, Egyptian, Saudi, and Iraqi leaders from late August to early September,

Gorbachev tried to broker a diplomatic solution under involvement of a “regional Arab dimension.”

He scolded Iraq’s Foreign Minister Aziz that the invasion of Kuwait was “unacceptable to the world”;

nevertheless, he pointed out that a sustained US military presence in the Middle East would be equally

“unacceptable.”

An increasingly doubtful Shevardnadze communicated the Kremlin’s desire to

obviate any military solution to the State Department, and General Moiseyev, Chief of the Soviet

General Staff, conveyed the message to President Bush himself.

Yet the negotiations with the Arabs

fell short of Gorbachev’s expectations, so that by the start of the next superpower summit in Helsinki,

the Soviet strategy had shifted to “95% American and [only] 5% Arab.”

Bush and Gorbachev both viewed their meeting in Helsinki as a test for post-Cold War superpower

cooperation. Their negotiating positions, however, reflected the growing disbalance in this relationship.

Bush saw “a real possibility for a new world order”

if the international community enforced UN

Security Council Resolutions 660 and 661, which called for Saddam’s withdrawal from Kuwait and

sanctioned Iraq’s economy. Soviet cooperation was necessary to reach these aims, but beyond that the

US President sought to demonstrate decisive American leadership as a blueprint for the new era.

Gorbachev responded by pushing for closer coordination between Washington and Moscow, cautioning

Bush that “in the world that is coming together now, the United States will not be able to cope alone.”

Facing economic and political crisis at home, the Soviet leadership considered American recognition

of its global role as imperative to sustain its superpower status.

Rather than a manifestation of

cooperation among equals, the Helsinki summit thus foreshadowed Bush’s growing commitment to (re-

)order the Middle East while Gorbachev’s foreign policy aspirations were increasingly overshadowed

by domestic problems.

5. Gorbachev’s collapse and America’s order – 1991

Political and economic turmoil in the Soviet Union limited Gorbachev’s scope to solve the crisis in the

Persian Gulf. It seemed as if any success in the foreign policy arena was like “water on a duck’s back”

for his domestic audience.

After the failure of the Ryshkov-Plan, Gorbachev’s advisers Shatalin and

Yavlinksi set out for an ambitious 500-day economic reform programme: its aims were the introduction

Department of State, Telephone Conversation with Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, 7 August 1990.

Gorbachev, Memoirs, 564.

Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 330.

Gorbachev Foundation, From a Conversation with Abdel Meguid, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt, 27 August 1990.

Gorbachev Foundation, From a Conversation with Tariq Aziz, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Iraq, 5 September 1990.

White House, Meeting with General Mikhail Moiseyev of the USSR, 2 October 1990.

Chernyaev, Diary 1990, 13 September.

Savranskaya and Blanton, The Last Superpower Summits, 733.

Spohr, Post Wall, post Square, 321.

Ibid.

Savranskaya and Blanton, The Last Superpower Summits, 716.

Chernyaev, Diary 1990, 13 September.

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of a market system, large-scale privatisations, and the integration of the Soviet Union into the world

economy. Immediate progress failed to materialize, and Gorbachev came under mounting criticism

from his most prominent political rival in Russia, Boris Yeltsin, who demanded faster reform steps. In

addition, Gorbachev also faced threats from other parts of the Soviet Union. In March 1990, Lithuania

declared its independence, and the new Union Treaty drafted by Gorbachev was highly unpopular in

Ukraine, Russia, and the Baltic Republics. Forced to abandon his preference for peaceful solutions, the

President of the USSR threatened to use force against the rebels if they did not consent to his treaty.

Ultimately, these internal developments weakened Gorbachev’s position and tipped the scales in favour

of Bush’s version of the new world order.

The connection between Gorbachev’s reliance on force and his shrinking influence on the new world

order found its expression in Bush’s State of the Union Address on 29 January 1991. Nearly a month

before the ground operations of “Desert Storm” started, the President explained the purpose of

America’s first large-scale military deployment abroad since Vietnam to Congress. “What is at stake is

a big idea”, the President declared solemnly, and continued that he wanted to forge a new world order

“to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.”

Bush did not renounce the use of force as part of his new order, in contrast to Gorbachev’s speech 1988

at the UN. However, he expressed his “deep concern about the violence in the Baltics”, where on 13

January Red Army tanks had crashed anti-Soviet demonstrations. The death of singing protesters in

Vilnius and Riga almost coincided with the launch of the American military operation in Kuwait. The

sudden return of violence and force illustrated that Gorbachev had not only lost his initial vision of the

new world order, but also the control over his own country.

The swift victory of the US-led alliance over Iraq in February 1991 and the silent dissolution of the

Soviet Union in December nurtured the belief that “the Cold War did not end, it was won.”

While

Bush and the Americans “got all what we wanted,”

Gorbachev had been swept away by national

separatism and his “war” against Boris Yeltsin.

A stable domestic basis as foundation for world order

projects proved essential. Due to the internal weakness of the Soviet Union, the “consensus among all

humankind to move towards the new world order” of Gorbachev’s UN speech was never really found.

The search for such a consensus was probably exacerbated by Bush’s initial hesitation to respond to

Gorbachev’s proposal and his subsequent enthusiasm for his own new world order. Yet the inclusive

appeal of universality aside, the short life span of Gorbachev’s new political thinking might also be

explained with Bush’s claim that “universal” values such as self-determination, freedom of choice and

human rights, were in fact more endemic to the “Western” political system. The recent rhetorical

renaissance of “American” or “European” values seems to confirm the claim.

In conclusion, in 1988, long before Bush’s State of the Union Address of 1991, Gorbachev saw his

chance to forge this new world order. When Bush and Gorbachev met in December 1989, however, the

world had changed faster and more dramatically than Gorbachev could imagine. The “new world order”

was not mentioned even once at the Malta summit. Gorbachev’s new political thinking failed its “test”

Spohr, Post Wall, post Square, 408-409.

George Bush, State of the Union Address 1991.

George Bush, State of the Union Address 1992.

White House, Memorandum of Telephone Conversation, Bush-Kohl, 11 September 1990.

Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, 309.

Zhimin Chen (2016): “China, the European Union and the Fragile World Order,” Journal of Common Market Studies

54.4.

Gorbachev, Memoirs, 551.

Gorbachev’s New World Order

the Helsinki summit and the Persian Gulf Crisis showcased how “Americanised” the new world order

had become over the course of 1989–1991. Gorbachev’s problems in the Baltics as well as at home in

Russia made him appear increasingly unfit for the role of guardian of the new order. For some, he even

became its gravedigger. “The new world order was born in Washington on 11

September 1990 and

was shot dead in the streets of Vilnius on 13

January 1991”, as a New York Times editor wrote.

Within months, these developments culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the notion that

America had won the Cold War – with noticeable repercussions for (the) international order until today.

6. The legacy of Gorbachev’s doctrine

Thirty years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, there is a new debate whether Gorbachev’s

reforms may have caused,

not just accelerated, what Vladimir Putin infamously called “one of the

greatest geopolitical catastrophes of the 20

century.”

Whether one concurs with this assessment or

not, it is largely undisputed that the resurgence of Russian nationalism under Putin is a political

consequence of the “wild nineties” (дикие девяностые), a tumultuous decade for Russian domestic

politics that began under Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev cannot be fully exonerated from adding to this

controversy, as he supported Putin’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and its “reintegration” into

Russia in 2014. Shortly before his death, however, when the war in Ukraine had entered its sixth month,

91-year-old Gorbachev lamented that by commanding Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin

had “destroyed his life’s work, his entire legacy.”

Against this backdrop, the article has recapitulated the interplay of American and Soviet proposals for

the new world order that took shape against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War era, and outlined

how Gorbachev’s ideas lost their appeal and were incrementally incorporated in “America’s order”.

Analysing the workings of this order-shaping process teaches three important lessons for the present.

First, great voice in shaping global affairs demands a sound domestic basis. Gorbachev’s global role

started to decline as his support at home crumbled. Second, directing world order can only succeed as

an orchestrated effort between ordering powers and their allies. Neither Bush nor Gorbachev revised

the international order out of altruism. Gorbachev’s ulterior motive was the ideological and economic

revitalization of the USSR, while Bush at least partially pursued US interests by securing the free flow

of oil. Yet the American order was underpinned by multilateral structures like NATO and the G7, and

the Bush-Kohl tandem highlights the strategic confluence of US interests with those of key allies. In

contrast, the centralised Soviet system rested on a powerful Moscow, which could no longer assert its

leadership as Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, or the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact demonstrated. Third, the

fate of Gorbachev’s ideas for a new world order suggests that the world may not be ready to be ordered

solely through Gorbachevian persuasion, renunciation of force and the “constraint-free force of the

better argument.”

The Persian Gulf Crisis is a compelling example that international politics is not

only governed by values, but also by national interests and the political, economic, and legal means to

enforce them. George H.W. Bush mastered this task in a skilful diplomatic manner, which his son failed

Abraham Rosenthal, “The New World Order Dies,” New York Times, 15 January 1991.

Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale University Press, 2021).

Cf. Oliver Stone, The Putin Interviews (Skyhorse Publishing, 2017). Putin made similar remarks during his new year’s

speech in 2005.

Cf. Irina Kulinich, Стало известно, как Горбачев относится к войне РФ против Украины: журналист объяснил

его молчание, Obozrevatel on 29 July 2022. Author’s own translation from the Russian original.

Cf. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Beacon, 1984), 25.

The Webster Review of International History Vol. 3, No. 1

to accomplish, and Donald Trump did not even attempt. Just as the origins of the post-Cold War liberal

international order were only partly American, the new world disorder is partly American, too.

With his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin has renounced the “Gorbachev doctrine” and concluded

a chapter in international history that future historians could call the “hinge years”

at the end of the

post-Cold War era. Certainly, the use of force was never absent from international relations, as not only

the “war on terror” but also numerous other armed conflicts and internationalised civil wars across

Africa, the Middle East and Europe from the 1990s until this day demonstrate. Contrary to many

programmatic speeches, war did not “return” to international politics in spring 2022, not even in Europe,

because for some, it never seized to be an element of international relations. Wars may have been tamed

by international law and confined to Europe’s geographical margins, but it was an illusion to deny their

geo-strategic importance. Even the unprecedented Zeitenwende in European politics of 2022 had a

military prelude, in Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. However, Russia’s full-scale war on

Ukraine since 2022 stands out in terms of its importance for the international system.

If there was a lack of evidence that the post-Cold War era was declining between the election of Trump,

Brexit, the rise of China, the outbreak of Covid-19 and an ever-accelerating climate crisis, Russia’s

renewed invasion of Ukraine has filled it. From Ukraine to Armenia and Azerbaijan, to Kyrgyzstan and

Tajikistan, 2022 saw international armed conflicts flare up at the margins of the former Soviet Union,

challenging old concepts of order. Regardless of whose interests were allegedly neglected in the last

“new world order” after the Cold War, and who might make the next such claim, the value of rules-

based international relations is now more eminent than ever. Building on the superpower summits that

helped to create the post-Cold War order, the new “new world order” must extend beyond Russia and

ensure stronger ownership by China and other emerging great powers in the Global South. Time will

tell how this order will be created, or rather recreated – only through persuasion and peaceful means,

by brute force or a combination of economic and military pressure. While the stakes for international

security are as high as never since the end of the Cold War, the example of Bush and Gorbachev shows

that a combination of values and strength has so far fared best.

For the concept of “hinge years” at the end of the Cold War refer to Spohr, Post Wall, post Square, 8. Cf. Lord Bullock

and William Deakin, 'Part II Conclusion: The Hinge Years, 1929–1933’, in Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European

International History 1919-1933 (Oxford University Press, 2005) for an earlier notion of the concept.

Gorbachev’s New World Order

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