NATO – A Bridge Across Time - Newsdesk Media

President George H.W. Bush,
accompanied by National Security
Advisor Brent Scowcroft, right,
arrives back at the White House
August 19, 1991, having interrupted
his vacation following the overthrow
of Soviet President Gorbachev
Frederick Kempe interviews Brent Scowcroft,
National Security Advisor to Presidents Gerald Ford
and George H.W. Bush, and Chairman of the Atlantic
Council International Advisory Board
When the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago,
you were a central player as National
Security Advisor to President George
H.W. Bush. Looking back, who or what
would you say won the Cold War?
The Cold War ended when it did
principally because of the personality
of Mikhail Gorbachev. If, instead of
Gorbachev, the Politburo had chosen
another hardliner, the Cold War would
not have ended in 1989. The Soviet system
wasn’t working, but another figure like
[former Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev
would have kept it going for a while.
What was it about Gorbachev that
provided the key?
His personality. He saw the political and
economic liberalization that was going
on in Poland and Hungary as being run by
mini-Gorbachevs who were doing what
he was trying to accomplish in the Soviet
Union. So he supported, by-and-large, or
acquiesced in what was going on in Eastern
Europe – until the Wall came down, and
then he got scared.
What we were seeing was another of
the recurrent surges in Eastern Europe
that the Soviets had cracked down on
before, in Berlin 1953, Hungary 1956 and
Prague 1968. But, unlike previous leaders,
he saw the changes in Eastern Europe
as helping him in what he was trying to
achieve in the Soviet Union. Communist
Party officials were resisting his reforms,
so he threatened the party by saying, “I’m
going to have party elections if you guys
won’t shape up and do what I want. I’ll run
people against you in the party.”
But he was not a democrat, and he was
not trying to dismantle the Soviet Union.
He was trying to make it more efficient
because it was badly run down. What
he started was a program of reforms to
improve productivity by addressing issues
such as absenteeism, corruption and
alcoholism. He also cut back on brutality
and repression. But what he was doing –
and he did not realize it – was dismantling
the whole apparatus.
You say that Gorbachev didn’t
recognize what he was unleashing.
How about you? Did you have a sense
at the time that history was unfolding?
Yes, we did. When we came into office, a
lot of people were saying, “The Cold War
is over.” I and the President, however, felt
that it was not over because the heart of the
Cold War really was the division of Europe.
And Soviet troops were still everywhere in
Eastern Europe. The rhetoric had changed
dramatically. Gorbachev was saying
things we liked to hear, but nothing had
fundamentally changed. And so we decided
the key was really to get Russian troops out
of Eastern Europe.
How did you go about doing that?
We altered the strategy toward Eastern
Europe. We had focused previously on
arms control with the Soviets, but that
became less of a priority. We had also
favored the Soviet’s satellite states that
had made the most trouble for the Soviet
Union, but we shifted our emphasis to
promoting the countries that were leading
the liberalization measures.
That means we reversed our support for
Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania. He was a
dyed-in-the-wool communist, but he was
a pain in the neck for the Russians with his
independent foreign policy. So, Ceausescu
went to the bottom of our list and those
that got greater support were Poland and
Hungary. We wanted to encourage those
liberalization movements at a pace and
in a way that would not be so fast that the
Soviet Communist party leadership would
react, either to repress those countries
or overthrow Gorbachev because he was
losing control.
28 The Atlantic Council