Originally Posted: October 19, 2017
BY: Jeffrey A. Engel.
Jeffrey Engel is the founding director of SMU’s Center for Presidential History and the author of When the World Seemed New: George H.W. Bush and the End of the Cold War, published next month.
North Korea’s nuclear threat should have been solved 25 years ago. So President Trump proclaims. But the country remains problematic due not to American negligence, but because at a pivotal moment in history its own leaders misread history.
We should not repeat their mistake, forgetting the real meaning of the Cold War’s end for American policy: the value, and the virtue, of patience.
Trump begins his narrative of failure 25 years ago, and so should we. A new democratic age seemed at hand as the 1990s dawned, one Americans took largely as validation. “We know what works. Freedom works,” George H. W. Bush announced at his 1989 inauguration. The world need only follow the American model, in order to travel “through the door to freedom.” Peace and prosperity would come.
Those words appeared prescient three years later. “By the grace of God, America won the Cold War,” Bush declared by 1992.
Ronald Reagan’s acolytes gave their hero specific credit for the victory, citing his military build-up and moral certitude. Experts knew better. The real answer lay in Bush’s choice of words. America, collectively, had won.
Victory had required 40 years – time enough for democracy’s superiority to shine through. Moscow had turned away from Marx and toward McDonald’s. Crowds marched throughout Eastern Europe, chanting for the very freedoms American presidents had long proclaimed as their own. Communist regimes fell before them.
Crowds formed in China as well in 1989, but with a different result. The Chinese government fought back, transforming in the world’s consciousness the words “Tiananmen Square” from a place into an event.
It alone among the communist powers facing democratic uprisings survived.
The heady days of the early 1990s thus offered American policymakers a choice to do nothing, and no reason to do otherwise, when faced with recalcitrant regimes like North Korea. As they saw it, the stream of history flowed democracy’s way and would in time flow through even Pyongyang.
Crowds would eventually form in North Korea. They’d done so elsewhere. There was nothing to do but wait, especially given the proximity of South Korean civilians to northern cannons. READ MORE