Diplomacy at War’s End | American Diplomacy Est 1996

by Raymond F. Smith

The intense diplomatic activity that accompanies the end of a major international war has two broad objectives: first, for the winners, maximizing their gains and, for the losers, minimizing their losses; second, creating a new and more stable international system so that a renewal of the carnage the participants had just endured is less likely. The Thirty Years War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, World Wars I and II all either followed or produced a breakdown of the old system. These breakdowns were characterized by a significant change in the number of players in the system, a dramatic change in the relative power of one or more of the players, and/or a change in the ideological or normative basis of the old order. Only one almost entirely non-violent event in modern history has produced changes of that magnitude: the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Victor’s Choice: Stability or Aggrandizement

Our predecessors’ efforts to create a stable international system demonstrate that it is not an easy task. Part of the reason for this is that the diplomatic objectives of self-aggrandizement and system stability are not necessarily compatible. Broadly speaking, aggrandizement involves strengthening oneself and/or weakening one’s opponent. If all of the major powers have an important stake in the new system, ipso facto they also have a stake in maintaining its stability. If a major power sees itself as fundamentally disadvantaged by the new system, that power will not consider it legitimate and will seek to undermine it. Let’s take an admittedly brief look at how diplomacy shaped the international system after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, World Wars I and II, and the Cold War.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

Having just defeated France after about 20 years of almost continuous warfare that had spread from Spain’s Atlantic coast to Moscow, and from Egypt to the English Channel, the victorious powers gathered in Vienna in 1815 intending to prevent either ideology or national interest from leading again to such a catastrophe. Their initial inclination was to exclude disruptive and defeated France from the Congress of Vienna deliberations. French Foreign Minister Talleyrand sought to persuade Austrian Chancellor Metternich and British Foreign Secretary Castlereagh that without French participation the decisions taken at the Congress would lack legitimacy. For reasons that may have had as much to do with the interests of the victorious powers and Talleyrand’s diplomatic maneuvering as with his normative arguments, France was brought into the deliberations and supported their results. Those results treated the defeated French state relatively leniently, while ensuring its ideological compatibility with the victors by restoring its monarchy. Talleyrand was right. Only France, the losing power, could give the new system legitimacy. The European system that emerged tried to balance the interests of the five major powers—Britain, France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia, and Prussia—and put institutions into place intended to lessen the likelihood that conflicts would lead to war. It would be one hundred years before another multi-state war broke out in the heart of Europe. The Congress of Vienna decisions contributed to this long period of relative peace, no doubt aided by the European states’ focus on creating or expanding their colonial empires abroad.

World War I

An alternate approach, that of the French (with a substantial British assist) after World War I, attempts to combine self-aggrandizement with enhancing system stability by permanently destroying, weakening, or dismantling the losing state. Wilson’s initial efforts to construct a more magnanimous peace settlement failed abjectly, as did his subsequent effort to bring the United States into the League of Nations that he hoped would be instrumental in the future resolution of conflicts by means short of war. Historians generally agree that the harsh territorial, monetary, and military settlement the victors imposed on Germany contributed significantly to Hitler’s rise to power.

World War II

The surface impression that the victors handled the defeated states more deftly after World War II is somewhat misleading, particularly as concerns Germany. At the Potsdam conference in 1945, the leaders of the US, the Soviet Union, and Britain agreed on the terms that would be imposed on Germany. President Truman was able to limit German reparations, but the three leaders agreed that Germany would be disarmed and demilitarized, denazified, democratized, decentralized and deindustrialized. Four years later, NATO Secretary General Lord Ismay stated that the organization had been founded “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Largely because of the imperatives of growing conflict with the Soviet Union, the Western states abandoned most of this policy. Germany was, indeed, denazified and democratized, clearly positive steps, but it was also remilitarized, recentralized, and reindustrialized. The American Marshall Plan and the French Schuman Declaration of 1950 laid the groundwork for Western Europe’s economic recovery and West Germany’s integration into a set of economic institutions (eventually leading to the European Union) intended to tie the economies of the countries in the region so tightly together that further war between them would become unthinkable. Thus, despite the intentions of the wartime allied leaders, Germany (ultimately including East Germany) evolved into and has thus far remained a responsible defender of Western unity. The contrast with the aftermath of World War I could hardly be more striking.

What We Can Learn from this History: Ideology, Costs, Legitimacy

Any social scientist will tell you that an attempt to generalize from three instances of a phenomenon is going to be fraught with errors. On the other hand, these three wars constitute our entire history of continent- and world-wide wars, and it behooves us to try to learn what we can from them. The diplomacy that ended these wars revolved around three fundamental issues: ideology, costs, and legitimacy. The results were:

Ideology

The defeated power adopted the ideology of the victors, whether by choice or by imposition.
The Congress of Vienna restored the monarchy in France.
Impending defeat sparked revolution in Germany in late 1918, resulting in the creation of a democratic system.
The Potsdam agreements provided for rooting out nazism and imposing democracy.

Costs

In some cases, the victorious powers imposed terms intended to permanently cripple the defeated power; in other cases, their more lenient terms allowed or even helped the defeated power to rebuild.
The financial and geographic losses France suffered in the Vienna settlement terms were limited.
The victors at Versailles imposed geographic and financial penalties and military limitations intended to permanently cripple Germany’s economic, industrial, and military capabilities.
Conflict among the victors led them to abandon the terms agreed upon at Potsdam and instead support the regrowth of the areas of Germany they controlled.

Legitimacy

Defeated peer competitors admitted as full participants in post-war international structures supported them.
- - France accepted the decisions of the Congress of Vienna as legitimate and supported the state system it created.
  - West Germany supported and became a full participant in Western Europe’s economic and military structures.
Defeated peer competitors not admitted as full participants in post-war structures resisted them. Hitler exploited and enflamed resentment at the outcome of World War I to legitimize his rise to power and his subsequent crimes.
The stability of post-war international systems was enhanced when the defeated power accepted their legitimacy.

- - The Vienna Convention began the least violent century within Europe since the establishment of the modern European state system at the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648.
  - The Versailles Treaty ushered in an unstable 30-year interregnum between the two World Wars.
  - After World War II, Western Europe experienced decades of economic and institutional stability and growth, albeit within a larger global context of ideological competition and colonial collapse.

The End of the Cold War and the Collapse of the Soviet Empire

Can this history help illuminate the trajectory of the post-Cold War international system? Differences abound. The Cold War was a 40-year struggle for dominance between competing ideological, political, and economic systems. The two superpowers avoided the catastrophe of direct military confrontation, although their proxy wars cost lives in the millions. Since there was no war, there was no peace treaty. There are differing views on what, if any, specific event signified the end of the Cold War, but it was marked by three distinct, paradigmatic shifts: 1) the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact; 2) the repudiation of the Soviet communist party’s right to rule; 3) the break-up of the Soviet Union into fifteen independent states. The principal diplomatic negotiation concerned itself with Germany’s reunification and its military alignment, issues that juridically required the participation of the Soviet Union because of their World War II antecedents.

Was there even a defeated party? In some ways the answer seems self-evident. What else would you call it when your country breaks up into fifteen pieces, your economy is in free-fall, your belief system collapses, and your chief military alliance dissolves? On the other hand, the atmosphere that I witnessed as political counselor at the US embassy in Moscow from 1988-1991 was more of rebirth than defeat. Russia by 1991 was already reeling economically, but it had voluntarily divested itself of the burdens of empire and hopes were high for the solidification of democracy, the creation of a vibrant market economy, and the integration of the country into European economic and political institutions.

Ideology

The 1990s began in Russia with widespread enthusiasm for the expected benefits of democracy and a free market economy. The country experienced a decade of chaos, corruption, criminality, and, for many, economic desperation. By the end of the decade, this experience had reinforced fundamental anti-democratic elements of the Russian/Soviet political culture: authoritarianism, risk-avoidance, and control. * The then-new Russian president, Vladimir Putin, undertook to restore order, drive criminality back underground and, with the help of serendipitous economic forces, first pay wages in full and on time and then initiate an economic recovery. As his rule became more authoritarian, he sought to ground it in “traditional” Russian values: religious orthodoxy, family values, patriotism, suspicion of malign influences from abroad. The result today is a fundamental ideological disconnect between Russia and most of the rest of Europe, although, perversely, the current US administration finds much to like.

Costs

It is well known that Vladimir Putin considers the breakup of the Soviet Union one of the greatest geopolitical catastrophes of the 20^th century. The country experienced the collapse of its belief system, economic depression, and the loss of its empire. Svetlana Alexievich’s award-winning oral history Secondhand Time puts a human face to the variety of reactions former Soviet citizens had to these changes. Some experienced a profound sense of loss, often not so much in the geopolitical changes as in the sense that they had personally sacrificed much in the belief that they were helping to create what would become a better society. Many bemoaned the replacement of something noble in these sacrifices with a crass pursuit of economic gain. Others despised the entire corrupt, destructive, and incompetent Soviet political and economic edifice and rejoiced in its disappearance.

Overall, nostalgia for the Soviet era is real. The percentage of Russians regretting the disintegration of the Soviet Union fell to a post-Cold War low of 49% in 2012; it rose steadily to 65% in 2020. In the same year, 75% of Russians agreed at least somewhat that the Soviet epoch was the best in Russia’s history. The percentage of Russians describing their attitude toward the United States as good declined from the 70s during the 1990s to the 20s during Biden’s presidency (although it has climbed during Trump’s second term back into the 40s). There is fertile ground here for a narrative that blames the West for any problems Russia may face.

Legitimacy

The stated policy of the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, was to seek a “Europe whole and free.” The first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, and his initial foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, had similar aspirations. As the post-Cold War period proceeded, it became clear that Europe’s economic and military decision-making institutions—the European Union (EU) and NATO—would not admit Russia. Instead, the Western states, led by the US, used existing and newly-created institutions—the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Partnership for Peace (PfP)–to try to satisfy Russia’s desire for equal membership in the European community by giving it, in the parlance of the time, “a voice, but not a veto”. The distinction was not lost on Russia, particularly as one after another of its western neighbors were brought into full participation in the EU and NATO, and the military bases of what it considered a hostile alliance were extended to countries on its border.

At the same time, as the United States operated in the international arena, the temptations of unipolarity sometimes conflicted with the requirements of the rules-based international order that it espoused. A degree of triumphalism led to the assumption—sometimes acknowledged, sometimes implicit—that the virtues of the American political and economic systems were so self-evident that it had a right and a duty to propagate them in other countries, whether they were welcome or not. To Russia, and to other countries as well, this looked like a double standard. The United States would decide when and whether it was bound by the rules it espoused for others, and how those rules would be applied. In Europe, for example, this meant that Kosovo’s right to self-determination eclipsed Serbian sovereignty, but Georgian sovereignty eclipsed Ossetia’s right to self-determination.

The apparent stability of the early post-Cold War period turned out to be illusory. As Russia’s new president, Vladimir Putin, accrued authority and its economy recovered, the country’s policy shifted from reluctant acquiescence to overt rejection of the legitimacy of the US-led system. At the same time, China was demonstrating that authoritarian, state-run capitalism could offer economic growth prospects at least equal to those of the Western capitalist democracies, eroding the presumption that the superiority of liberal, free-market economies had been definitively demonstrated. In addition, the allegiances of Ukraine, Belarus, and Taiwan are both national interest and emotive flashpoints that, unresolved, pose ongoing challenges to system stability.

Is There an Alternative Post-Cold War Path?

Thirty-five years after the end of the Cold War we are living in an unstable international system marked by ideological incompatibilities, competing economic systems, and regional power struggles that could metastasize into something worse. It would be nice if we could point back to what went wrong, learn from it, and do better moving forward. Nice, but not easy. Russia’s history and political culture mean that it was always more likely to revert to authoritarianism than to seamlessly transition to democracy. In fact, the transition to democracy has rarely been seamless anywhere. Even at half the size of the Soviet Union, Russia remained too large for incorporation into the European Union or NATO, as they were and are presently constituted.

There were, however, some paths not taken, and some paths taken that might better not have been. Much more intellectual effort went into developing arguments for NATO expansion than into developing a more inclusive European security architecture. The United States developed a galloping case of hubris that led it into enormously costly foreign policy mistakes and damaged, perhaps irretrievably, its claim to speak on behalf of the principles it espouses.

The challenges we now face require a far more astute foreign policy. That should start with a better definition of our vital interests. We need a more stable international system; we need to avoid a nuclear war; and we need to avoid an alliance against us of the other nuclear superpower and the other economic superpower. As for the rest, not everything, everywhere need concern us. We can’t control everything and can’t afford to try. Not everything is a domino, and not every domino is aligned with others.

*See my Negotiating with the Soviets, Indiana University Press, 1989 for a detailed discussion of this.

Raymond Smith spent more than 30 years at the State Department, retiring from the Senior Foreign Service as a Minister Counselor and then serving as a senior advisor to the Department’s Nonproliferation and Disarmament Fund. He spent six years at the US embassy in Moscow, serving as political counselor from 1988-91, a period that included stints as acting deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires. He has a doctorate in international relations from Northwestern University and has authored two books, Negotiating with the Soviets and The Craft of Political Analysis for Diplomats, as well as numerous articles.

Raymond Smith

Raymond Smith spent more than 30 years at the State Department, retiring from the Senior Foreign Service as a minister counselor and then serving as a senior advisor to the Department’s Nonproliferation and Disarmament Fund. He spent six years at the US embassy in Moscow, serving as political counselor from 1988-91, a period that included stints as acting deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires. He has a doctorate in international relations from Northwestern University and has authored two books, Negotiating with the Soviets and The Craft of Political Analysis for Diplomats, as well as numerous articles.