During the past several decades, the West put so much conceptual effort into containing communism and demolishing the Soviet system that little intellectual capital remained to figure out the kind of world order that should come next.
Nearly a year after the aborted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, which finally unraveled the Soviet empire, the tendency today is to fall back on old structures of thought - both about the global economic system and about the geopolitical balance of power.But this is woefully inadequate in addressing the new realities. We need to restructure our thinking about the world order. We need global perestroika, and we should begin by looking beyond the context of the Cold War in two areas:
First, Russia is now being chastised for slowing down its transition to the market in order to avoid complete social breakdown at home. The International Monetary Fund wants a balanced budget, rapid liberalization of energy and other prices, and a guarantee of social stability in order to continue the extension of vital credits.
Unlike President Boris Yeltsin (who acted on the very poor advice of such people as Harvard's Jeffrey Sachs), I would not have agreed to these conditions, with their high social price, especially since 95 percent of our economy still lingers under the monopoly control of the old system. In effect, the IMF has placed a noose around the neck of Russia's social revolution, threatening to strangle us if we don't strangle ourselves.
Such an arrangement is untenable. If we agree to balance our budget in an economic system that produced so little wealth for so many years, half of the people will starve. The United States, a prosperous consumer economy, can't balance its budget. How can we?
The IMF and World Bank, institutions that were created at the outset of the Cold War and that matured in that era, are approaching the post-Communist era in an entirely inappropriate state of mind. Their experience is based on economic stabilization in Latin America and Asia during the Cold War. It simply does not apply to our reality.
The Polish experience should show everyone what a failure the old approach is in the new context. So, in this area we need new global financial institutions appropriate to the unique historical circumstance of post-Communist societies.
Second, the system of geopolitical alliances and perception of threats must change. From a Russian standpoint, three new destabilizing threats appear on the horizon that will define the geopolitical landscape in the 21st century - Germany, the Islamic states formerly belonging to the Soviet Union that will unify with the Islamic world to their south, and China.
As economic growth in America and Japan slows to less than 3 percent for the foreseeable future, these three areas that bound Russia are likely to have an 8 percent to 10 percent growth rate.
If these dynamic regions surround the strategic vacuum of a weak, strife-torn Russia, the imbalance of power will be so gross as to cause destabilization and, no doubt one day, war. For this reason, Russia needs America's presence as a stabilizing external force.
In an ironic way, our long enmity has created a kind of shadow solidarity. For a future of peace, that emergent relationship should be formalized in security and economic alliances that recognize the new challenges to come.
1992 New Perspectives Quarterly
Distributed by L.A. Times Syndicate