The Real Death of the West | Prof. David Gibbs

## A deliberate post-Cold War trajectory: reclaiming history as choice The disorder and danger that define international politics today did not emerge out of sheer accident or an unknowable historical force; they were shaped by decisions and doctrines forged in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. Drawing on declassified documents and years of archival research, Prof. David Gibbs presents a strikingly intentional account: Western policymakers, especially in the United States, chose to preserve and even expand military dominance when the Soviet threat had vanished. That choice, he argues, set off a cascade of policies — military spending without serious restraints, doctrinal shifts toward permanent dominance, and interventions that doubled as public performances of power — which together helped produce the geopolitical turbulence we now live with. This article follows the key lines of that argument, situating them in the context of public opinion, elite networks, institutional incentives, and the politics of alliances. It also considers how European ambitions, corporate and military lobbies, and the intellectual ascendance of certain schools of thought combined to foreclose alternative, less militant paths like disarmament or a real peace dividend. ## The lost peace dividend and the politics of anxiety The 1990s represented a historical fork in the road. With the Soviet Union collapsing and the bipolar structure of the Cold War dissolving, policymakers briefly faced choices few great powers have: to scale back militaries, redirect resources to social or environmental needs, or to double down on military institutions. Gibbs underscores that options like nuclear disarmament — even proposals for sweeping bilateral reductions championed by Mikhail Gorbachev — were on the table but rejected. That rejection was not a neutral omission; it reflected a political calculus that prioritized continuity of power and institutional interests. Elite anxiety played a central role. When core constituencies — military leaders, defense contractors, think tanks, and academics tethered to security funding — perceived their “way of life” threatened by demobilization, they lobbied for a narrative of continuing danger. Public skepticism about foreign adventures existed as a constraint, but elites sought modes of managing that skepticism. The idea of a “peace dividend” was rhetorically attractive and economically plausible — resources could have been redeployed to infrastructure or climate action — yet such shifts threatened entrenched interests and the prestige and careers of officials and institutions built around military preparedness. Gibbs highlights the cultural and institutional dimensions of this anxiety: the sudden visibility of military hardware in previously quiet skies; jokes and cartoons about “selecting” a new enemy; and the candid admissions of senior officers who lamented the lack of demons to fight. Taken together, these factors created a political environment favorable to policies that would sustain military budgets and the global apparatus they supported. ## From Defense Planning Guidance to permanent dominance If the mood of anxiety set the stage, policy texts provided the script. Gibbs draws attention to the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance — a document closely associated with Paul Wolfowitz — as a watershed moment. Its blunt assertion that the United States enjoyed an unparalleled opportunity for “total global domination” and should act to preserve this advantage read like a roadmap for perpetuating hegemonic power. The language of the Guidance did more than forecast threats; it prescribed a posture of preventive and pre-emptive strength. This document functioned as the post-Cold War analogue of NSC-68, signaling a return to an alarmist and expansive posture even when traditional adversaries were diminished. It named potential future threats in Russia, China, and even Germany or Japan, thereby justifying the retention and redeployment of military assets. The Guidance also reflected and amplified the intellectual ascendancy of neoconservative currents that favored militarized solutions and skeptical views of diplomacy. Gibbs offers a genealogical reading: the text did not arise in a vacuum but drew on networks of thinkers, bureaucrats, and funders who shared a worldview in which American power should be assertive, untrammeled, and global. Far from a defensive reflex, the Guidance expressed a program — one that would shape force posture, alliances, and intervention choices across the decade. ## The “Israelization” of American strategy and the triumph of militarism A provocative strand of Gibbs’s interpretation concerns the ideological shape of late-20th-century U.S. foreign policy. Examining the private papers and networks of influential neoconservatives, he detects what he calls the “Israelization” of American strategy: the transposition of a thinking that privileges military assertiveness, skepticism of negotiations, and a readiness to use force as the primary instrument of policy. This is not a simple claim about lobbying or one interest group’s power. Rather, Gibbs perceives a deeper intellectual shift in which a particular model of national security — one that treats military solution as central and diplomacy as subsidiary — became normalized within policy circles. The political consequences were concrete. If military force is routinely seen as the most reliable way to produce outcomes, governments will look for occasions to use it; if military action is politically attractive because of its media-friendly demonstration effect, then interventions become instruments of domestic legitimation as much as instruments of foreign policy. That insight helps explain why the 1990s were not an era of restraint. Winning quick, decisive wars — or at least demonstrating the capacity to win them — became a way to socialize domestic publics into accepting continued high levels of defense spending and interventionist foreign policy. ## Wars, NATO, and the performance of hegemony Gibbs frames three early post-Cold War interventions — Panama, the Gulf War, and Somalia — as less about specific, narrowly defined national interests and more about a broader performance: showing that U.S. force still mattered and would be used. The Gulf War, in particular, had the professional advantage of being a conflict the United States could decisively win, thereby broadcasting competence and justifying the hardware and basing networks that had proliferated during the Cold War. The 1990s also exposed fissures in transatlantic relations. Europe briefly entertained a more autonomous foreign policy, with leaders and institutions imagining a stronger independent role for the European Union and the euro as a partial check against U.S. monetary and geopolitical dominance. That moment of potential European independence alarmed American policymakers who saw NATO as central to U.S. global leverage. The Yugoslav wars became the theater in which NATO’s post-Cold War relevance was asserted. Where NATO might have atrophied after the Soviet collapse, it was instead repurposed and reinvigorated through interventions that signaled transatlantic solidarity — but on terms compatible with American leadership. Gibbs’s narrative emphasizes that NATO’s continued centrality was not inevitable; it was actively defended and materially maintained by a variety of political and economic actors who benefited from its persistence. The breakup of Yugoslavia offered the practical and rhetorical moment to cement NATO’s new role as a guarantor and enforcer of a security order shaped by U.S. priorities. ## Interests, ideology, and the limits of humanitarian narratives The Q&A segment of Gibbs’s presentation pushes beyond elite strategy to interrogate the motives offered publicly for intervention. Humanitarian rhetoric and appeals to global norms did play a role in legitimizing action, but they often

The Real Death of the West | Prof. David Gibbs Historian David Gibbs argues that today’s international disorder grew from decisions made after the Cold War, when Western policymakers sought to preserve military dominance despite the disappearance of the Soviet threat. Kyoto University Symposium 2026: "Geopolitics in the Time of Monsters" Presentation 2: Prof. David Gibbs Drawing on declassified documents and Gibbs' research, he examines military spending, NATO, Yugoslavia and the politics of intervention. The audience discussion considers oil, capitalism, humanitarian arguments, China and public opposition to war. Recorded at the Kyoto Symposium 2026, this session includes the presentation and the full questions and answers. David’s Links: University profile: https://history.arizona.edu/person/david-gibbs Research and publications: https://dgibbs.arizona.edu/ Kyoto Symposium programme: https://neutralitystudies.com/events/kyoto-symposium-2026 Neutrality Studies Links: Neutrality Studies Substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Support Neutrality Studies: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Neutrality Studies shop: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop Time Stamps 00:00 Introduction: the search for new enemies 03:02 Military spending and the lost peace dividend 07:43 Support Neutrality Studies 08:39 The strategy of permanent dominance 14:44 Yugoslavia, NATO and European independence 24:46 Arms manufacturers, PNAC and NATO expansion 31:36 Q&A: oil, capitalism and intervention 46:17 Ideology, humanitarian claims and public resistance #David Gibbs Very good. Thank you for the introduction, Pascal. Thank you for inviting me. Well, I'm a historian, and I'm going to look at the issue of the world disorder we're facing today. I want to speak on the current state of historical world disorder from a historical perspective, based on declassified documents, which is my specialty, for a new book I'm writing right now. Well, we obviously have really the worst case of world disorder and danger certainly since the end of the Cold War. I would say it is as intense and dangerous as any part of the Cold War, including maybe even the Cuban Missile Crisis. And the question is, the key question is, how do we get there and why? And I'm going to argue it was not accidental, but to some extent intentional, in a certain sense of the term. It was an intended effect that we should be where we are today. And it was thought up, indeed, and advocated. And again, the key decade, as I would see it, was the 1990s. That was the decade right after the Cold War, when we, you know, the United States and Europe, had no enemies or no serious security threats at all. And I would see it—that was a decade of searching for enemies. I do want to emphasize very strongly that there really was not just a sense of no enemies, but a sense of anxiety and fear among people. -- 1 of 22 -- You might say the foreign policy establishment, the ruling class, whatever you want to call them, elites, that this was a real threat to their way of life. It's often said, why do countries go to war? They go to war because their way of life is threatened. And the way of life of foreign policy elites in the United States was permanent war or permanent preparation for war. And they were very loath to lose that state of affairs and were eager to recreate it. And it is remarkable the extent to which they said this, not only privately in documents. And again, I follow Evarist Bartolo in being a big fan of private communications, but also even public communications. And it really was remarkable that it was openly said that what we need is a new enemy. It was openly discussed. And I remember looking at—you know, there was, again, this was a source of anxiety. It was a source of humor as well. I remember this from memory. There was a magazine, a left-wing magazine, that had a cartoon that had the headline of the future. And the headline of the future was, "War to be declared tomorrow." And the sub-headline was, "Enemy to be selected soon." Right. All right. And that reflected an authentic attitude, a real attitude. Colin Powell, who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1990, in an interview, he said, "Think hard about it." "I'm running out of demons. I'm running out of villains," which is a way of saying he regrets running out of demons. He's a general, after all. What is a general going to do for a living if there are no demons or villains? There were powerful vested interests standing behind these things, most notably that cluster of interests referred to by Eisenhower as the military-industrial complex. But it was much broader than that. It included think tanks, journalists, academics. People forget this, but academics in America today, as then, were very closely interconnected, especially political science. My degree is in political science, actually, not history. Closely interconnected with the military, especially with the Central Intelligence Agency—intimate connections with the Central Intelligence Agency. And again, this was a source of great grants and conferences and fun places and so on for many academics. And it was openly discussed in 1990. There was an article in the Washington Post by a professor who studied Soviet intervention in the Third World, someone I knew, actually. It was entitled "Gorbachev Ruined My Career." That was the title. All right. Indeed. And it was a witty article, and it closed—I'm just going to paraphrase a bit. He said, basically, what we need in the Soviet Union is a hardline coup to bring the Cold War back, and my career would be on track and I'd get all these grants again. And he said, no, I know the objection. Some people would say, why should the Soviet people have to suffer just to advance my career? And my answer is simple. The Soviet people are used to suffering, which I, in contrast, am not. Anyway, and so it gives you some sense of the flavor, the atmosphere of the situation. I mean, one more, just a personal anecdote. I teach in Southern Arizona at the University of Arizona. In 1990, I arrived in Arizona. I had not come from the western part of the United States. It's very much intertwined with the U.S. Air Force. And for the first time in my life, I saw military aircraft all day flying in the sky. And I wondered, what are they going to do with all that equipment now that the Cold War is over? Now there are no more enemies. And I suppose my answer was, surely they'll find another enemy. -- 2 of 22 -- And that's exactly how it happened. That's exactly how it happened. All right. I do want to emphasize also, really, the extraordinary extent to which we lost an opportunity here. The period immediately after the Cold War and during the ending of the Cold War, there was openly the possibility of nuclear disarmament. This was explicitly proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev: bilateral nuclear disarmament, complete and total nuclear disarmament by the two principal nuclear powers. The U.S. rejected it. But it was on the table as a possibility. It could have been done. It was not that this was a choice. And again, you know, we were discussing before how there are choices made by leaders. Choices do matter. I agree with that. And a choice was made not to disarm, not to disarm. I should add, by the way, you know, the U.S. could have downsized its military to a pre-war, pre- World War II level. The United States could have become a normal country. There were no enemies, no justification for it. But there was a determination not to do that. We could have—the United States could have—I said, when I say "we," I'm an American citizen, so forgive the "we" here, the royal we, but it's a shorthand. But there was the possibility then of dealing with the issue of climate change, which was for the first time being recognized on a wide scale. There was a fascinating article in the New York Times that appeared, I believe, about two weeks after the end of the Berlin Wall, after the more or less official ending of the Cold War. And it was on—it was a front-page article. I remember it. I have it in front of me here. And it was on the issue of how much it would cost to address the issue of climate change. And it said the costs would be colossal, so colossal it would be equivalent to the entire U.S. military budget. They didn't even address the issue of maybe the money should, now that the Cold War is over and the enemies are gone, end the military budget and funnel it all into climate change, and even address the issue, underscoring how sacrosanct military spending really was and the basic attitude related to that. Okay. Now the problem, again, there was a call for a peace dividend. Again, a downsizing of weapons spending to pre-World War II levels many felt was necessary, made sense. The public, I should add, by the way, the American public has always been a constraint on U.S. foreign policy because there always has been some public reluctance to go along with foreign adventures. I think the public understands instinctively there is a trade-off between guns and butter. To the extent that you spend money on armaments, okay, you'll have less money to spend on social programs and living standards. By the way, military Keynesianism is often thought of as a generating force in economic growth. What's missed about that is it's a very inefficient one, because spending on military activities is a far less efficient way of creating jobs than government spending on civilian sectors like infrastructure. It's often left out. But in any case, the public, I think, has always been skeptical of these foreign adventures. #David Gibbs And during the Cold War, a prominent political scientist, Edward Tufte, commented that U.S. interventions at the time met—he was a public opinion specialist—with what he called uninformed -- 3 of 22 -- skepticism and informed hostility. My sense is that is generally how the public views foreign adventures. He was referring at the time to American intervention in Central America, but I think it applies much more broadly than that. And so the question was, how do you propitiate the public? And how do you bring the public on to the project of continued war? Well, in the first place, before I address that, let me note there was a determination not to have a generalized disarmament or anything close to it. And it was distilled in a number of documents, but the most important one is a document that I've been fascinated by, the Defense Planning Guidance document of 1992, which was either written by or written under the supervision of Paul Wolfowitz, a very prominent neoconservative, then Deputy Secretary of Defense. And basically it said the United States was faced with a circumstance no other great power in history has been faced with, which is total global domination, basically. And the U.S. should seize the moment and perpetuate this domination as far into the future as possible, and that should be the guiding force of American foreign policy after the Cold War. And it was a remarkable sense. There was a real sense of searching for enemies in this document. It talked about Russia and China. Russia, you know, the Soviet Union then, about to become the Russian Federation, was virtually on its knees economically. It was about to become a—it's not a vassal—something very close to a vassal of the United States. But nevertheless, it was looking forward to the possibility of Russia and China as enemy states in the future. And it even talked about, who knows, maybe we could go to war someday with Germany and Japan. It actually did say that, right? It talked about the European Union in hostile terms because this was a period when the European Union was considering an independent foreign policy, something I'll get to momentarily. And at the time, it was leaked to The New York Times, I think, and people were astonished by the aggressive, bellicose wording in the document. I think very much reflective of the neoc