When Mikhail Gorbachev talked to the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg this week to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, what he said evoked a strong sense of nostalgia for those hopeful days. But an unexpected sense, too, of a man caught in a time warp. As Soviet leader, Gorbachev had not quite acted on Ronald Reagan’s appeal to “Tear down that wall”, but he had let it happen. He had left the East German leaders to their destiny, telling Rosenberg: “We said we would not interfere”, without the slightest awareness, it appeared at the time, that the fate of East Germany and its leaders would be a precursor to that of the country he led, and his own.
Gorbachev is widely reviled in today’s Russia for, as many see it, destroying the Soviet Union and their country’s status as a great power. It may take another generation before Russians regard him, if they ever do, through a more charitable lens, as the heroic figure who facilitated the end of communism and accelerated the demise of the Soviet bloc in such a way that these momentous transformations took place largely without bloodshed.
So much for the nostalgia. What about the unexpected timewarp? The surprise was less at how Gorbachev has aged — it is 30 years, after all; the early death of his beloved Raisa (in 1999) hit him hard, he is diabetic, and he has had spells in hospital with heart problems. It was more that, when Gorbachev voiced his fears for today, his apprehensions seemed framed by quite a different world, the world of then rather than now. Asked about contemporary dangers to world peace, he replied: “As long as weapons of mass destruction exist, primarily nuclear weapons, it’s a colossal danger.” Repeating a theme from his earliest summits with Reagan, he declared: “All nuclear weapons should be destroyed, to save ourselves and the planet.”
His prism remains that of East-West relations, the bipolar world that ended with the Soviet collapse, and the premise of Mutual Assured Destruction that underlay the string of arms control treaties concluded by the United States and the Soviet Union. Then, these treaties were hailed as guarantees of security for both countries and the European states in between. Now, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), renounced by the United States in 2002, the Intermediate-range Nuclear forces Treaty (1987), which the US withdrew from after citing violations by Russia, and the latest Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (2010), which expires early in 2021, are passing successively into abeyance without being either renewed or replaced.
Is the world a more dangerous place because of that? Some would say it is, and blame Donald Trump for trifling with global security and abandoning the responsibilities of the United States as world policeman. Could it be, though, that the apparent lack of urgency to negotiate updated agreements is less a reflection of the US President’s brand of isolationism than evidence of how the world, and the perception of major threats, have changed since those years? Is codified arms control, including nuclear arms control, simply less significant than it was, at least in the bilateral form it then took?
The tentative answer to this has to be yes — and it is one reason why Gorbachev’s anniversary observations marking the fall of the Berlin Wall sound so dated. The concerns of today, which may themselves be hopelessly obsolete in far less than 30 years’ time, are very different from those that derived from the East-West divide then.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeI don’t see the “time-warp”. Surely nuclear weapons are today every bit as dangerous to the future of humanity as they have always been, no matter who controls them, and their complete removal is also every bit as relevant today as it has always been.