Part IV. the great disruption

This series has so far demonstrated how in 1968, the US and the USSR faced tremendous disruptions that threatened to upend the Cold War order. The Tet Offensive and Prague Spring provoked similar terrors in Moscow and Washington, DC. Cold War leaders had lost their legitimacy. Domestic unrest triggered by failed foreign policies proved to the Cold War leaders that the political elite in the US and USSR could no longer “command domestic obedience without the use of force.”

After 1968, The US and the USSR would no longer allow their direct conflict to spill into the public eye. Instead, they opted for increased secrecy rather than transparency, for arms agreements that would settle their military spending and allow more lavish domestic investment, for the image that the men in Moscow and DC had everything under control.

Compare Khrushchev and Kennedy’s meeting in 1961 with Nixon and Brezhnev’s 1972 Moscow Summit. In Vienna, Khrushchev and Kennedy butted heads as mortal enemies in a global conflict. Yet, they achieved no compromise or agreement as neither man could put down the muscular rhetoric that their nation and ideology would emerge victorious from the inevitable mushroom clouds.

However, when Nixon met Brezhnev in Moscow in 1972, the leaders bonded over fears that their domestic authority was on the brink of collapse. The summit produced the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. Though the Treaty signaled the beginning of détente, it allowed each leader to rehabilitate his image to the public. These men colluded to regain the appearance that their leadership was vital to the protection of their nations. Détente meant protecting a “state-centered world and forestalled hopes for the creation of independent international authorities.” These powers recognized that their interdependence would protect their legitimacy and retreated to their agreed spheres of influence.

Tet provoked the already seething domestic unrest in the United States. Moreover, the horrors of the offensive narrated to the public by figures like Walter Cronkite exposed the failure of the frontier foreign policy that only seemed to achieve greater numbers of dead American troops.

Though LBJ did not recognize this failure, Nixon did. Nixon and his advisor Henry Kissinger determined that the US could no longer use American troops to fight imperial conflicts. Instead, the US opted for covert operations, increased public surveillance, and relied on its hegemonic power – sending economic aid and weapons to strongmen and insurgents who could do their dirty work for them. 

Brezhnev’s new doctrine successfully crushed the Prague Spring, but it ignited fierce anger in allied communist states. Days after the invasion, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai made a bold comparison, linking the Soviet intervention to Hitler in 1939 and the Americans in Vietnam. Faith in the Kremlin leadership had reached an all-time low. To ease the tension in Eastern Europe and reestablish his authority, Brezhnev began making more overt attempts at negotiation with the US to project stability.

The Brezhnev Doctrine would not be invoked again, not even as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 – a year when, more than ever, tanks would become the image of oppression in a different Communist country.

The mass demonstrations in Eastern Bloc countries in 1989 validated Brezhnev’s fear that the Dubcek reforms of the Prague Spring would trigger a collapse of Soviet authority. Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost and Perestroika, meant to bandage the fractured empire through policies of openness and economic change, sparked a chain reaction of democratic reforms across the Eastern Bloc. On November 17th, 1989, barely a week after the fall of the Berlin wall, students took to the streets of Prague as they had two decades before. Despite arrests and blackouts, the protesters were not met by Soviet Tanks but by the eventual resignation of the Communist leadership. Playwrite and dissident Vaclav Havel heard the announcement alongside Alexander Dubcek at a joint press conference for their newly formed opposition party, the Civic Forum. On December 29th, Havel was elected the final President of Czechoslovakia before the peaceful separation of the Czech and Slovak regions.

The decade of flower power and civil rights achieved some social reforms but ultimately froze the international order, seeing leaders shift their focus from an enemy abroad to an enemy at home. The Soviet Union paid the price for its abuses against its citizens in the dissolution of the Soviet empire. However, the United States adjusted its rhetoric for an era of diplomacy that persists today – one rooted in the disruptions of 1968.

Speaking to Congress in 1990, Vaclav Havel diagnosed the critical error of Nixon and Brezhnev. Their desire for self-preservation removed any moral responsibility to the public. Here are Havel’s words:

We still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science, and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions, if they are to be moral, is responsibility.

But who would argue that today’s leaders are morally responsible?

The Spirit of ’68 remains a dominant force within diplomats in boardrooms from Brussels to New York who are more alienated than ever from the people their placards suggest they represent. The fraternity of Presidents and Prime Ministers remain committed to the sole principle of stability. The most admirable and worthy civilian demonstrations suffer drawn-out deaths as they are no match for government forces. Government surveillance of mass populations has increased to a horrifying degree. Democratic leaders publicly condemn aggressive authoritarians, then blatantly treat them as friendly allies, willing to let them carry on behind closed doors.

That was my conclusion on February 23rd. The next day, Russia invaded Ukraine, provoking perhaps the greatest disruption to the international order since 1968. It’s challenging to place autocrats like Putin or Xi, or even a figure like Trump, into the legacy of ’68.

Instead, the questions will determine whether the 1968 framework persists multiple years from now. Will leaders remain united over the shared fear of domestic disruption? Will authoritarians move beyond their spheres of influence? The Russian invasion of Ukraine, or possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, may mark a new era of foreign policy. However, the unified denunciation of Putin by Western Leaders could be interpreted as a sign that the fraternity is more committed to preserving stability than ever. Maybe the shift has already occurred? Instead, the Russian invasion presents a reminder to keep perspective. In 1968, no street vendor in Prague or cameraman in Saigon knew the Cold War had changed. Likewise, we can make no such prediction in 2022. Recent events such as the pandemic, insurrection, and Ukraine-Russian Conflict made up three decades' worth of international crises in just two years. History feels to have sped up again. It is just too early to tell when it will slow down again.