Source: Foreign Policy
The Soviet Union saw itself as an ideological power. Moscow believed that communism offered, as the old communist slogan went, a “bright future for all humanity.” Leaders in Moscow were convinced that communism was the right recipe for any country, regardless of history, development, or culture — and 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet empire, that misplaced logic is still shaping events around the globe.
The Soviet Union’s first major success in communism promotion came in Mongolia, where Moscow prided itself in shifting the country from feudalism to socialism by the late 1930s. After World War II, in addition to Eastern Europe and East Asia, Soviet-sponsored regimes spread across the globe, from Latin America to East Africa, with nominal success.
But then came Afghanistan in 1979. Moscow went in first to ensure that leaders in Kabul remained loyal to the Soviet Union, but once it was in, the mission changed to helping the Afghans build a state and society based on the Soviet model, like it did in Mongolia. It was in Afghanistan that the Soviet Union discovered the power of militant Islam and eventually understood that it was so much easier to invade a deeply religious country than to reshape its society. By the time Moscow sent military forces into the country, the Soviet Union had revealed its cardinal weakness: imperial overreach. Moscow was already beginning to struggle to keep in line its allies in Eastern Europe — and to support dozens of client states across the globe.
Discontent at home was grossly enhanced by the war in Afghanistan, which was both costly and unnecessary. At the same time, the Soviet economy had run out of steam by the 1980s, with infrastructure crumbling and popular rancor growing. The cost of supporting a long list of satellites and surrogates was sapping the finances of the Soviet Union. Moscow, which had always been wary of borrowing abroad, began to take more and more loans. In the final years of the Soviet Union, its foreign policy was heavily influenced by the constant need to seek more funding from abroad: The pace of domestic liberalization was increased, steps toward the German reunification were taken, and Moscow did not intervene when Eastern Europe pursued its own political course in the 1980s.
The lessons from this historical episode apply first of all to the Russian Federation, the successor to the Soviet Union. It immediately rejected any state ideology, abandoning not only the global empire but also the lands traditionally seen as Russia’s historical heartland, such as Ukraine. Twenty-five years later, as it seeks to rebuild itself as a global great power, Russia is realizing that founding an empire under a different name is not in the cards. Having entered the war in Syria, Russia has also made it clear from the start that it will not send in its ground forces, lest Syria becomes another Afghanistan.
But the lessons shouldn’t be limited to the former Soviet space. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. U.S. interventions in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 developed into massive nation-building projects under the guise of democracy — at great human and financial cost. Any ideology, not just communist, is a poor guide for foreign policy. Foreign military misadventures result in disappointment at home and loss of prestige abroad. And a growing national debt is a ticking bomb that threatens the very stability of the state.
In the end, the Soviet Union paid the ultimate price for its imperial hubris.