The International Order Before and After World War II

>> Condoleezza Rice: Now, if I were giving this lecture, say, 14, 15 years ago, it would be a very different lecture. It would have the word hotspots in it, but it would not be joined with the idea of great power rivalry. And what do I mean by that? I mean that we have an international system that is fast making a transition from the verities of the international system that we knew after World War Two to a quite different, more chaotic, and indeed more dangerous set of circumstances that we face today.

Now, if you go back to the end of World War Two, the United States and its allies, after the defeat of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, put together a very structured international system. It had three important elements, and they were very clear about what those elements were to be.

The first and most important element was actually an international economy that was not going to be zero sum game. This was a very different concept, because if you looked at the period before World War Two, you saw that countries engaged in beggar thy neighbor trading policies. They engaged in currency manipulation.

They indeed engaged in violent conflict over resources, and as a result, they led to a depression and to a great war. And so, from the point of view of the people who were reconstructing the system after world War Two, it was very important to avoid that kind of international system.

And rather than have one in which everybody thought of the international economy as a fixed pie, that means if you grow, then I can't grow. They had the idea, really quite radical, that you would have an international economy that would be a positive sum game. That is, if everybody played their part, you could get prosperity for everyone, and cooperation would actually lead to better outcomes for everyone.

No more violent competition over resources, no more beggar thy neighbor trading policies, no more currency manipulation. And so they put together a set of institutions that were meant to help assure this, including the International Monetary Fund, which was dedicated to, initially, exchange rate stability. They would eventually have a World Bank, which helped not only the kind of successor to the European bank for Reconstruction and Development, which helped countries to recover from the war, but they would actually help countries coming out of colonialism to find their way into the international economy.

They believed in a free trading system. And so in many ways, the most important element was the GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which meant that you wouldn't have this beggar thy neighbor trading policy, everybody would trade in freedom. Now, it didn't work perfectly, but for the part of the world in which it was installed, the so called western world, which, of course, included Japan and later South Korea, it worked splendidly because these countries, the vanquished did rebuild.

As strong parts of this international economy, the victors didn't try to take advantage of others. In fact, the United States enjoyed well beyond 50% of the world's GDP but it didn't try just to protect that. It really participated in this international economy that was free trading. Okay, so an international economy that was positive sum game.

The second element was that they really did believe in something that political scientists can now actually demonstrate called the democratic peace. Now the democratic peace, the notion that democracies don't fight with one another. They took a really big bet in deciding that Germany and Japan would not be hostile, that they would not be a threat to the international order if they could be rebuilt as democracies.

The pre-war thinking would have been to make them as weak as possible. Think about, for instance, the Versailles treaty and the way that it treated Germany after World War One. But the Americans in particular had a very different idea, which is if you built these countries as democracies, they wouldn't threaten the international order.

It was most obvious, of course, in the case of Germany, where there were others, reportedly Churchill, for instance, who thought that Germany ought to be broken up. Churchill is famous for saying, I like Germany so much that I'd like as many of them as possible. In other words, break it up, make it weak.

And unless you think this was a kind of crazy idea, remember that Germany was only unified in 1871. So you could have had a bavarian state, you could have had a prussian state. But instead, the people, like Conrad Adenauer in Germany and the United States and others, rebuilt Germany as a democracy, encased it, by the way, in a European community, which would become the European Union.

And the bet was that France and Germany would never fight again. And, in fact, that bet turned out to be right. Similarly with Japan, Japan was rebuilt as a constitutional democracy, as a matter of fact, with the emperor, with ceremonial roles. But Japan also would become a stable democracy and not threaten the international order.

So a big bet on the democratic peace. And then finally, all of this was to be protected permanently by American military power, unlike the time after World War One, when the United States withdrew, leading its president at the time, Woodrow Wilson, to propose a league of nations which the United States itself would not join.

Instead of that return to isolation, the United States decided that it would make a very big pledge for the security of free markets and free peoples. This was most evident in the pledge taken in the Washington Treaty of 1949, the creation of NATO. An attack upon one is an attack upon all.

And when you think about how remarkable that is, think about the fact that it was just about the time that the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear weapon five years ahead of schedule. And yet the United States was willing to say, if necessary, we will sacrifice Washington, DC for London.

A quite remarkable pledge. And, of course, the United States took on the defense of Japan as well with a treaty that allowed Japan to only have self-defense forces so that it would never threaten the region again. Those guarantees would be eventually extended to South Korea, and ultimately, when Britain and France could no longer defend in the Mediterranean, the Middle east, the United States would take on the defense of the sea lanes worldwide.

So a very structured system, and it was structured in part of Europe and part of Asia, because, of course, the Soviet Union would create a kind of counter system in the occupied parts of Eastern Europe. But the remarkable thing is that the system which then stayed in place, doing what George Kennan said in his long telegram, denying the Soviet Union the easy path, so that would have to turn and deal with its own internal contradictions.

That is precisely what happened. And I was fortunate to be in 1989, the soviet specialist at the end of the Cold War, and frankly, didn't get much better than getting to be the soviet specialist at the end of the Cold War. Because I got to watch things and participate in things that I never thought possible.

In that period between 1989 and 1991, the fruition, the harvesting of this system that the United States and its allies had put in place really came into sharp relief as the Soviet Union was no longer able to defend its interest in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev, realizing this, essentially gave in, deciding that there would be no claims of class conflict any longer in Europe, that soviet forces would largely withdraw from Eastern Europe, and perhaps most stunningly, that Germany would be allowed to be unified fully and totally on western terms within NATO.

I remember very well going to visit Gorbachev's me, in other words, a man named Zaglatin, who was Gorbachev's advisor for American affairs. And he was very late that day. He came in after about an hour, and he said, I'm so sorry, but I come in every day to find out what disaster has befallen us now.

And I remember thinking to myself, okay, at least I'm on the right side of history. But in fact, as he said to me, you come, and you talk about the fact that this is not a strategic defeat, which was very much the way George HW Bush wanted to portray this.

Everybody won at the end of the Cold War. But he said, just think about this. There used to be two Germanies, one of was ours, the other was yours, now there will be one and it will be yours. It was a strategic defeat for the Soviet Union, and I'll return to that in a moment.

But for the time being, remember that 1989 to 1991 seemed to be the realization of everything that presidents who had sustained American power during the Cold War. Truman and Eisenhower and Kennedy and Reagan and Nixon, all of them, that it seemed to be the final coming together of that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the unification of Germany fully and completely on western terms.

Now, 1989 to 1991 didn't last very long, roughly ten years, when it really did appear that everything was going historically toward one pole, as some have called it, others have said, toward the Washington consensus. If you consider that the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, now Russia and Eastern Europe, would become a part of this international economy that was meant to be prosperous for everyone, that was one very important pillar.

But the other important pillar was at China, coming out of its isolation economically, and the policies of Deng Xiaoping, would join that same system. And so until 2001, it really appeared that this system had triumphed and triumphed in major way. It had triumphed too, because nobody thought about great power rivalry.

Russia was a part of the system, or at least trying to be a part of the system. China was a part of the system, if not politically, economically. And it appeared that we had put to rest great power rivalry, which had bedeviled the international system since the creation of the Westphalian state.

For almost 300 years, the international system had been bedeviled by great power rivalry, and now it was over. And then, of course, on September 11, we would have a break with that notion of the peace that we were all experiencing, the peace divotin that everybody experienced. When al-Qaeda attacked the United States on its territory, It did open a new chapter.

I can tell you I was national security advisor on that day, and I'll never forget when my young assistant came in and said, that plane hit at the World Trade Center. And I remember thinking that it was some kind of accident and calling President Bush. You'll remember he was in Florida for a children's event and telling him that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, we both thought it was an accident.

But a few minutes later we would be told that a second plane had hit the World Trade center, and now it was clear that it was a terrorist attack. When we learned that a plane had hit the Pentagon, as we realized that, we couldn't reach Secretary Rumsfeld, whose phone, they said, was just ringing and ringing and ringing, we knew that it was a major attack on the United States.

That, in some ways, changed everything for America's conception of what was really important in security, because for the first time since the War of 1812, there was actually an attack on American soil that killed civilians. Yes, there had been Pearl Harbor, but that was on a military base in Hawaii, which was not even a state at the time in the United States of America, but here, an actual attack on the territory of the United States.

And for the first time, a generation of American security specialists had to recognize that threats could come from within, that it wasn't just security was out there, and we were secure because of our oceans and our friendly neighbors. And so the United States restructured its security presence, its security forces, to be attendant to that threat.

And that meant that what took precedence was getting rid of terrorist strongholds like the Taliban in Afghanistan. We were working with countries around the world to try to keep terrorists from being able to burrow in. The United States went to lighter forces. Special forces became the most important part of the American military capability.

The marriage of military capability and intelligence became the way that we carried out our security forces. So that, for instance, fighting in the high mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan became one of America's most important goals, to try to clear that nest of terrorists that operated in those high mountains.

You weren't gonna do it with regular forces, you did it with special forces, with drones, you did it with intelligence. And so American security forces were suddenly or what seemed suddenly restructured into counterterrorism forces and later on, counterinsurgency forces, which would actually try to help rebuild weak states into functioning states.

Whether in Afghanistan or Iraq or, to a lesser extent, in places like Lebanon.