Constraining Unipolarity } 529
Soviet-aligned dictatorships, the very cause of the Cold War, was no more.
Europe was whole, united, and free—and remained allied with the United
States. The Atlantic alliance between the United States and Western Europe
did not split apart, as Beijing’s multipolarity prognostications had predicted.
Instead, the US-Europe link became stronger as the peoples of East Europe,
freed at last from fifty years of Nazi and communist dictatorship, began
moving toward entry into NATO and the European Union (formed by the
Maastricht Treaty of February 1992) as quickly as the West European states
would permit. The new East European members of NATO had a quite real-
istic appreciation of the security offered by European unity and the Atlantic
alliance.
The fact that the defeat of communism and the USSR and the liberation
of Eastern Europe had been achieved without war had a profound impact on
American psychology, making it more confident of its democratic creed and
more inclined to pass judgment on China’s internal governance shortcom-
ings. The monumental events of 1989–1991 were taken by a wide section of US
opinion as vindication of the liberal-democratic values and institutions for
which the Cold War—and for that matter, the earlier struggle against fascism,
too—had been waged. A strong sense of hubris developed. The belief spread
that communist rule in China too would soon disappear, or at least that the
abuses of that system should no longer be minimized by the US government.
Considerations of China’s human rights situation that had long been subor-
dinate in the American calculus to the awesome imperative of meeting the
Soviet challenge were now greatly elevated in the calculus of US and other
Western leaders. With the Soviet threat removed, Washington became much
more concerned with such issues as rights for Chinese dissidents, religious
groups, ethnic minorities, workers, and so on. The United States bestrode
the world in a position approximating world dominance to a degree perhaps
never before seen in history. Chinese analysts referred to this condition of un-
precedented unipolarity as an “extremely unbalanced international system.”
The great fear of China’s CCP rulers was that the PRC would become the
target of American power, that the United States would turn its awesome
power against the world’s last remaining communist party state, seeking to
topple that state or injure its interests in various ways—that communist-ruled
China would replace the USSR as the chief rival and opponent of US he-
gemony. This could destroy the favorable macro-climate for development
arduously created by Chinese diplomacy over the previous decade, possibly
aborting China’s development drive before it advanced very far. Even more,
US hostility might pose grave danger to regime survival.
Beijing’s position vis-à-vis the United States deteriorated further in
February 1991, when the United States decisively defeated Iraq in a 100-hour
ground war to restore Kuwait’s sovereignty. Shortly after that US victory, Li
Peng’s foreign policy advisor He Xin prepared a paper on the impact of that