TO BUILD A BETTER WORLD

Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth

By Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice

As secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice hung up in her office portraits of George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson, the predecessors who, more than anyone else, built the institutions that governed the international community after World War II. Rice and the president she served, George W. Bush, believed that with the invasion of Iraq, and the aggressive promotion of democracy across the Middle East, they could extend to the Arab world the liberal, democratic order that had sustained peace and prosperity in the West. They turned out to be dreadfully wrong, and neither the United States nor the Middle East has recovered from their reckless experiments.

Like Henry Kissinger, Rice is a scholar as well as a diplomat, and thus has additional means to influence the public and shape her own standing. A quarter of a century ago, she and Philip Zelikow, both of whom served as midlevel officials in President George H. W. Bush’s National Security Council, described the virtuoso statecraft that brought the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion in “Germany Unified and Europe Transformed” — a kind of bookend to the world-ordering labors of Marshall and Acheson. In “To Build a Better World” they return to the subject, but with a new sense of urgency, for, as they write, the world seems to be “drifting toward another great systemic crisis.” They would have us regard the end of the Cold War as a parable for our own beleaguered times.

Rice and Zelikow make a convincing case that the collapse of the Soviet Union constituted one of history’s rare “catalytic episodes,” when the existing order is convulsed by immense forces that statesmen can shape for good or ill. Had reckless leaders made self-aggrandizing choices, the collapse of a great power could have led to chaos and war. This did not happen, in Rice and Zelikow’s telling, because the chief actors of the drama — the elder President Bush, the German chancellor Helmut Kohl and the Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev — were rational, worldly, pragmatic heads of state. They shared a vision of a common Europe, even if Gorbachev imagined a Communist Soviet Union flourishing alongside the capitalist West. They believed in, and used, the chief institutions of the postwar world, whether NATO or the United Nations. They understood the political limits under which each operated. When he met Gorbachev in late 1989, Bush said: “I have conducted myself in ways not to complicate your life. That’s why I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall.” Gorbachev, under great pressure from traditionalists to keep the Soviet sphere intact, responded that “he had noticed that and appreciated it.”