The Great Transformation and the Failure of Illiberal Hegemony - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 159

The Cold War ended with the spectacular unraveling of communist rule in Eastern and
Central Europe in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. The Cold War
could have ended without the implosion of the Soviet Union. Indeed this is what its leader,
President Gorbachev, had hoped for. His aim was reconciliation between the United States
and Soviet Union that would keep communist rule in the Soviet Union and superpower re-
lations intact. But the end of the Cold War took the form of the collapse of bipolarity itself.
Soviet bloc countries elected new governments, Germany was united and remained inside of
NATO, and the Soviet Union itself disappeared. The old bipolar international order vanished
and a new distribution of power took shape.
The Cold War ended, as Robert Hutchings observes, “not with military victory, demobil-
ization, and celebration but with the unexpected capitulation of the other side without a shot
being fired.” 2 After past great wars, the old international order was destroyed and discred-
ited, opening the way for sweeping negotiations over the basic rules and principles of post-
war international order. But in this case, the American-led system of order not only survived
the end of the Cold War but was widely seen as responsible for Western triumph. Western
policy toward the Soviet Union was vindicated and the organization of relations among the
advanced industrial democracies remained stable and cooperative. In this sense, the end of
the Cold War was a conservative historical event. It entailed the peaceful capitulation of the
Soviet Union—reluctant to be sure and not on the terms that Gorbachev had hoped for. But
the collapse of the Soviet pole left in place the American pole, and the American-led rules,
institutions, and relationships that had been built during the Cold War became the new core
of post-Cold War world order.
The manner in which the Cold War ended says a great deal about the nature of the
American-led system that grew up during the decades of U.S.-Soviet struggle. The American
pole was extraordinarily capable of generating wealth and power that advantaged the West
in its competition with the Soviet Union. 3 Yet at the same time, this Western grouping of
democracies presented a sufficiently unthreatening face to the Soviet Union during its time
of troubles that its leaders were willing to move forward with domestic reform and a re-
orientation of their foreign policy. The West was both dynamic and, ultimately, defens-
ive. 4 Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders were convinced that the United States and Western
Europe would not exploit their weakness. The pluralistic and democratic character of the
countries that formed the Atlantic alliance, the multiple and conflicting positions toward the
Soviet Union that existed within and among these countries, and transnational and domestic
opposition movements toward hard-line policies all worked to soften the face that the Soviet
Union saw as it looked westward. The alliance itself, with its norms of unanimity, made
an aggressive policy by one country difficult to pursue. These aspects of Western order all
served to make Gorbachev's historic gamble less risky. 5