The Superpowers: Dance of the Dinosaurs
Article Summary and Author Biography
The dance symbolizes the over-militarization of the superpowers, leading to stagnation in the USSR and undermining the USA economically. Notes some political constraints (demonstrated by the dismissal of Yeltsin) on Gorbachev's domestic programme, as well as his conduct of foreign affairs. By 1987, Reagan faced 'new thinking' on the part of the USSR, a Democrat-controlled Senate and the Iran-Contra affair, as well as economic problems, a major cause of which has been military expenditures. These trends led to a cautious improvement in superpower relations in 1987.
Marshall D. Shulman is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, Columbia University.
Mikhail Gorbachev recently expressed to a group of American visitors his hope that the United States and the Soviet Union would not appear to future historians like "two dinosaurs circling each other in the sands of nuclear confrontation." This colorful image well describes recent relations between the two superpowers: even though they are not marked for early decline or extinction, the two nations have shown a manifest inability to conduct their relations with a rational regard for their survival as great powers. Both the Soviet Union and the United States have been so constrained by parochial domestic interests and weighed down by outworn ideologies that they have been unable to summon up a competent and enlightened management of their affairs reasonably proportionate to their respective and common problems.
Both superpowers are heavily overmilitarized. In each country this has created a community with a stake in perceiving the other superpower as a mortal threat. The differences between the two powers are real, as is their competition. But it is a question of proportion. Those who seek to justify disproportionate militarization with a Manichaean ideological orthodoxy, whether out of zealotry or for economic gain, have undermined their countries’ real security and capacity to adapt to the requirements of a rapidly changing world. In the case of the Soviet Union, overmilitarization has deepened the stagnation of an inept system. In the case of the United States, it has undermined the country’s economic competitiveness, its financial solvency and the well-being of its society. This is the dance of the dinosaurs.
True, 1987 ended on a cautiously hopeful note. The atmosphere at the December summit in Washington was positive, and a beginning was made in controlling a marginal aspect of the nuclear military competition. But between shadow and substance is a great gulf. Atmospherics are gossamer, a creation of the manipulative arts; the stubborn reality remains that the military competition continues to spiral upward toward more unstable and complex systems, constrained only minimally by budgetary and resource limitations.
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