Great powers don’t die in bed, the realist judgement goes. Empires fall amid flames and war.

Not so, answered Mikhail Gorbachev, proving his greatness by achieving the gentle end of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev’s achievement was to look beyond the glory and guns to pronounce the edifice hollowed and ailing. The USSR was as poor as it was powerful.

Gorbachev’s intellect and will meant he wasn’t seeking an end to Russia’s role as a great power. But having risen to the peak of the Soviet system, he acted on the truth he knew deeply: the system wasn’t working. He did what apparatchiks seldom dream of—he attacked the fundamentals of the machine that made him.

The changes Gorbachev set running went further and faster than he’d foreseen. His feat was to reach a place he never intended to go. He died as a man with little official honour in his own land. Yet Gorbachev’s role marks him as one of the great leaders of the 20th century. His was a triumph of humanity and intelligence.

Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Cold War.

Stating it simply merely underlines the magnitude of what this leader did.

A peaceful end was something that those of us who trekked through cold decades of nuclear peril hoped for but had a hard time imagining.

Gorbachev joined hands with US President Ronald Reagan in a leap of imagination. They changed course and changed history. The USSR’s role was the more important because its leader was prepared to surrender so much.

On the simple calculus of power, the US won and the Soviet Union died. But the end was peaceful.

Gorbachev’s choices and the surprises that followed could be seen as the end of history—a resolution of the great arguments about the nature of liberty and the best form of government. The last great war had wrapped the world in Cold War, fuelling proxy conflicts across the globe, dividing the international system along ideological lines. And then it ended.

The speed of it was extraordinary.

In 1985, Gorbachev became the last general secretary of the Soviet Union. By 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. In December 1991, amid chaos, Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union. His final letting go as president echoed how much else he had already let go.

For Gorbachev, the wild ride took only six years. A relative blip of time changed history. The great lesson is that in geopolitics, a mountain can turn into an avalanche.

Come down the time tunnel to see how some of that felt.

In the 1980s, I worked as a correspondent in Europe, so I was writing my way around the foothills of that slow-motion superpower struggle. The ideological competition framed by nukes had always been a fact of my life—a seemingly permanent reality.

See that nuclear knife-edge in the war that nearly engulfed Europe in 1983, when NATO conducted operation Able Archer simulating a nuclear attack. The Soviet politburo feared a genuine nuclear strike, as Reagan acted on his own bellicose rhetoric. Soviet nukes were readied and forces in East Germany and Poland went on alert.

A NATO exercise and fearful old men in the Kremlin took the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1983, yet none of us knew. When that horror story was declassified decades later, I reflected that I’d been living in London at the time with my wife and young family. We’d have been casualties of a catastrophic misunderstanding.

Gorbachev’s chance for power came as all those old men atop the Soviet Union tottered to their ends and died. One of the diplomatic motifs of the early 1980s was when Radio Moscow would scrap all programs and start playing hours of funereal music. The dirges set the scene for three leadership deaths: Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, Yuri Andropov in 1984 and Konstantin Chernenko in 1985.

The sclerotic Soviet system was symbolised by those old general secretaries. Then came a relatively young man who wanted to change the Soviet Union.

After her first meeting with the soon-to-be leader, in December 1984, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously pronounced: ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.’ And what a business it became.

As The Economist judged:

He did not mean the Soviet Union to die like that. The man who ended the cold war, who changed the course of 20th-century history, was neither a dissident nor a revolutionary. He intended to reform the Soviet Union, not destroy it. But his aversion to violence and his belief in the Enlightenment were enough to finish a system held together by repression and lies.

Nations seldom erect statues to leaders who peacefully dismantle empires and let go of lots of territory. That’s why it’s vital to see the achievement in what Gorbachev did.

He took the world a long way back from the nuclear edge and set many free. He gave Russia a chance to think differently about what it meant to be a great nation.

Gorbachev is proof that leaders always matter. Great leaders can do great things. Look at the leader Russia has today to see a nasty and dangerous version of what a leader can impose.

Vladimir Putin rejects all that Gorbachev did.

One man started a war. The other, much better man ended the Cold War that defined the second half of the 20th century.

This month marks 30 years since the USSR collapsed voluntarily. It’s rare in world history that such a militarily powerful empire disappears without going to war. The Soviet Union had 12,000 strategic nuclear warheads, 260 divisions with 50,000 tanks, 7,000 combat aircraft, 370 submarines (including 94 tactical nuclear attack submarines) and some 260 principal surface combatants. Western intelligence assessments until almost the very end continued to see it as a power with few real weaknesses. As late as 1986 the then deputy director of the CIA, Robert Gates, told me that the Soviet Union was poised to outstrip America in military power.

Why did US intelligence assessments fail to predict the end of the USSR, and does this have any relevance for today’s assessment of the threat from China?

First, it must be recognised that the Soviet Union was an incredibly difficult intelligence target. There were several reasons for this: the secrecy of the Soviet state and the unreliability of its statistics, the paucity of any publicly available military data that could be depended upon, and the lack of intelligence sources inside the Kremlin. There was an acute ideological suspicion of the USSR that made even modest attempts at a more balanced approach subject to ridicule and outright hostility, including in Australia. Even so, there was plenty of evidence for those of us who visited the USSR that something was acutely wrong with an economy that couldn’t supply even the most basic needs of food and housing for its population.

Second, there was real fear—especially in the 1970s—that Soviet economic growth rates were outstripping those in an America that was in the throes of stagflation and its defeat in Vietnam. Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was seen in some quarters—not least by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser—as the beginning of World War III and a real threat to the West’s crucial access to oil supplies from the Persian Gulf. On almost every front, the USSR seemed to be on a winning streak. So, there was deep concern throughout the Western alliance system that the USSR was creating a geopolitical situation in which ‘the correlation of world forces’ was moving decisively in Moscow’s favour.

Third, this sense of palpable fear that the Soviet Union was winning, and the West was losing, the arms race led to an acute sense of paranoia in US intelligence agencies. In the Western world’s most powerful intelligence establishment—the CIA—the head of Soviet counterespionage, James Jesus Angleton, believed that the agency was riddled with Soviet spies. Even in Canberra, the head of the Office of National Assessments considered that anybody who did not hold his views of the USSR was working for the other side.

This world of extreme fear meant that there was little recognition that Mikhail Gorbachev was attempting serious reforms of the Soviet political and economic system. Even now, there is no agreement about the fundamental reasons for the collapse of the USSR. Many Americans still believe that they outspent the Russians into oblivion in the arms race. Others think that it was the failed 10-year occupation of Afghanistan that was the trigger for the Soviet collapse. Still others—including me—focus on the prolonged stagnation of the Soviet Union’s economy and society.

The economic crisis played a central but often underestimated role in the last few years of Soviet history. In a new book, Collapse: the fall of the Soviet Union, historian Vladislav Zubok asserts that Gorbachev’s policy of openness and transparency greatly contributed to the rise of anti-communist and nationalist movements. Gorbachev’s decisions generated a voluntary and unprecedented devolution of power that eroded the ideological legitimacy of the Communist Party. Zubok concludes that Gorbachev’s leadership, character and beliefs constituted a major factor in the Soviet Union’s self-destruction. Under a different leader, there was no reason why the Soviet system could not have staggered on for several more decades—like North Korea, for example.

Turning now to the China threat assessment, I consider there is a grave danger that—yet again—the West is failing to see that country’s real weaknesses. And once more we are being asked to conform to the dominant view that China is all powerful, and that its economy and military are superior to those of America, or soon will be.

I detect the same inclination to accept self-serving claims that China’s military technologies are superior to those of the US. For instance, claims are made that the latest Chinese submarines are quieter than those of the US, even though America has been at submarine quieting for over 70 years and China is a Johnny-come-lately. It is also claimed that China’s DF-21D ballistic missile can destroy US aircraft carriers when we have no reliable data at all about the accuracy of China’s missile systems against a moving target.

We are supposed to be awed by the fact that China is now deploying multiple independently targetable nuclear warheads for its intercontinental ballistic missiles, which was a technology the Soviet Union developed in 1975 for its SS-18 ICBMs. And, contrary to the breathless claims that China’s recent testing of a fractional orbital bombardment system was unprecedented, the Soviet Union deployed 18 FOBS missiles more than 50 years ago (between 1971 and 1979) that could deliver their warheads into low-earth orbit and attack the US from its unprotected south.

China’s economic and military growth have been truly amazing over the past two decades, while America’s back has been turned in Afghanistan and the Middle East, but the fact is that China is not yet a military superpower like the former USSR.

We urgently need much more considered and cautious studies about the pros and cons of China’s emerging power. For this to be credible in terms of formulating the China threat assessment, we need to see deeply expert analysis about the strengths and weaknesses not only of China’s military power but also of its demographics, corruption and pollution challenges, as well as informative studies of domestic turmoil and the party’s reaction to Xi Jinping’s growing dictatorship.

And we need to remember that Beijing spends as much on internal security as on external defence, which should tell us a lot.

Most importantly, China has no experience whatsoever of fighting modern warfare. And when we proclaim that the Chinese leadership believes this or that, we need to acknowledge that, as with the former Soviet Union, we have no intelligence sources in Beijing’s Politburo.

In 1976, Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergei Georgyevich Gorshkov published his exposition of Soviet maritime strategy under the title The sea power of the state. It was translated by United States Naval Intelligence in 1977 and an English-language edition was published commercially by Pergamon and by the US Naval Institute Press in 1979.

The book is an argument for a rising great power to exploit the maritime domain in all its dimensions: military, political, economic and scientific. It is an argument derived from Marxist–Leninist foundations, made to the leadership of a continental state with a hitherto profoundly continental outlook, whose army saw the navy as a subordinate service used mainly for protection of its seaward flanks. It is an argument which seeks to gain not just priority in the allocation of defence funding, but national priority for an oceans policy in what was seen—at least until the 1980s—as an expanding and increasingly powerful industrial economy.

This work is more significant now than it has been at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, not because of what it still says about Russian maritime strategy, but for the insights it can provide on Chinese maritime strategy.

For The sea power of the state is more than simply navalist special pleading. Gorshkov wrote of the ‘world ocean’ and its resource potential and sought a whole-of-nation approach. At a time when the law of the sea was evolving rapidly and on the brink of the creation of a new regime with the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Gorshkov argued that the Soviet Union needed to be a leader in exploiting the ‘world ocean’, not only through direct efforts, such as fishing, trading and offshore mining, but also in scientific research. He was ahead of his time in certain respects, writing:

It is legitimate to consider the sea power of the state as a system characterised not only by the presence of links between its components (military, merchant, scientific research fleet, etc.) but also by the inseparable union with the environment—the ocean in the mutual relations in which the system expresses its wholeness.

The sea power of the state also made a compelling case of the ‘imperialist’ states’ successful use of the sea for both political and economic benefit. It argued that the Soviet Union needed to go onto the ‘world ocean’ to balance against and eventually defeat the ‘imperialists’. Gorshkov’s approach was finessed to manage the continentalist mindset of his political and military masters. In arguing for a stronger navy, Gorshkov was careful to acknowledge the fundamental importance of the defence of the motherland and the imperative for it to continue.

The sea power of the state made much of the increasing numbers of seaborne nuclear weapons and the threat that they posed. According to Gorshkov, this gave the navy an existential importance that it had never before possessed in Russian history. He repeatedly stressed the value of submarines, both as nuclear-missile carriers and as independent fighting units in the defence of the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, even as he acknowledged the primacy of the defence of the motherland and its centrality to naval force structure and doctrine, the admiral argued this was not sufficient to achieve the communist party’s long-term aims. Sea power offered the chance of both breaking free of the USSR’s geographic limitations and advancing the socialist cause—and that of the Soviet Union in particular—on a global scale. Gorshkov concluded, ‘The sea power of our country is directed at ensuring favourable conditions for building communism, the intensive expansion of the economic power of the country and the steady expansion of its defence capability.’

There is an obvious difference between the Soviet Union and communist China. Gorshkov’s project failed largely because it, along with other Soviet military ambitions, placed excessive demands on an already overstrained industrial base. China, on the other hand, may be returning to a command economy, with all the problems that might create, but has very much greater industrial capacity. As the second Chinese-built aircraft carrier nears completion and a multitude of other units come into commission, that capacity is being demonstrated in spectacular fashion.

China will always pursue its own approach to national strategy and Chinese maritime strategists will blaze their own trails. But, at a time when its leadership is pursuing regional dominance and global influence, while China re-emphasises its own Marxist–Leninist roots and looks to exploit its newfound economic strength, The sea power of the state provides a ready-made template for maritime expansion for a rising continental power new to the sea.

That the People’s Liberation Army Navy is on the one hand hedging against conflict with the United States with its anti-access strategy, and on the other seeking to emulate the American approach by making its presence felt further afield through the deployment of carrier battle groups and amphibious units, suggests that the template is being applied. Chinese fishing fleets roam the globe, China’s merchant marine is equally far ranging and its scientific research and survey units operate around the Indo-Pacific, not to mention in the Antarctic and Arctic.

China has gone to sea and The sea power of the state gives some clues about why.

I have worked for four US presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike, and perhaps the most important thing I have learned along the way is that little of what we call history is inevitable. What happens in this world is the result of what people choose to do and choose not to do when presented with challenges and opportunities.

George H.W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States, was presented with more than his share of challenges and opportunities, and the record is clear: he left the country and the world considerably better off than he found them.

I worked for and often with Bush for all four years of his presidency. I was the National Security Council member responsible for overseeing the development and execution of policy for the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. I was also brought into a good many other policy deliberations.

Bush was kind, decent, fair, open-minded, considerate, lacking in prejudice, modest, principled and loyal. He valued public service and saw himself as simply the latest in the long line of US presidents, another temporary occupant of the Oval Office and custodian of American democracy.

His foreign policy achievements were many and significant, starting with the ending of the Cold War. To be sure, that it ended when it did had a great deal to do with four decades of concerted Western effort in every region of the world, the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan, the deep-seated flaws within the Soviet system, and the words and deeds of Mikhail Gorbachev. But none of this meant that the Cold War was preordained to end quickly or peacefully.

It did, in part, because Bush was sensitive to Gorbachev’s and later Boris Yeltsin’s predicament and avoided making a difficult situation humiliating. He was careful not to gloat or to indulge in the rhetoric of triumphalism. He was widely criticised for this restraint, but he managed not to trigger just the sort of nationalist reaction that we are now seeing in Russia.

He also got what he wanted. No one should confuse Bush’s caution with timidity. He overcame the reluctance, and at times objections, of many of his European counterparts and fostered Germany’s unification—and brought it about within NATO. This was statecraft at its finest.

Bush’s other great foreign policy achievement was the Gulf War. He viewed Saddam Hussein’s invasion and conquest of Kuwait as a threat not just to the region’s critical oil supplies, but also to the emerging post–Cold War world. Bush feared that if this act of war went unanswered, it would encourage further mayhem.

Days into the crisis, Bush declared that Saddam’s aggression would not stand. He then marshalled an unprecedented international coalition that backed sanctions and the threat of force, sent half a million US troops halfway around the world to join hundreds of thousands from other countries, and, when diplomacy failed to bring about a complete and unconditional Iraqi withdrawal, liberated Kuwait in a matter of weeks with remarkably few US and coalition casualties. It was a textbook case of how multilateralism could work.

Two other points are worth noting here. First, Congress was reluctant to act on Saddam’s aggression. The vote in the Senate authorising military action nearly failed. Bush, however, was prepared to order what became Operation Desert Storm even without congressional approval, given that he already had international law and the United Nations Security Council on his side. He was that determined and that principled.

Second, Bush refused to allow himself to get caught up in events. The mission was to liberate Kuwait, not Iraq. Fully aware of what happened some four decades earlier when US and UN forces expanded their strategic objective in Korea and tried to unify the peninsula by force, Bush resisted pressures to expand the war’s aims. He worried about losing the trust of world leaders he had brought along and the loss of life that would likely result if the mission expanded. He also wanted to keep Arab governments on his side to improve prospects for the Middle East peace effort that was to begin in Madrid less than a year later. Again, he was strong enough to stand up to the mood of the moment.

None of this is to say that Bush always got it right. The end of the Gulf War was messy, as Saddam managed to hang onto power in Iraq with a brutal crackdown on Kurds in the north and Shia in the south. A year later, the Bush administration was slow to respond to violence in the Balkans. It might have done more to help Russia in its early post-Soviet days. Overall, however, the administration’s foreign policy record compares favourably with that of any other modern US president or, for that matter, any other contemporary world leader.

One last thing. Bush assembled what was arguably the best national security team the US has ever had. Brent Scowcroft was the gold standard in national security advisers. James Baker was arguably the most successful secretary of state since Henry Kissinger. And with them were Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Robert Gates, Larry Eagleburger, William Webster and others of standing and experience.

All of which brings us back to George H.W. Bush. He chose the people. He set the tone and the expectations. He listened. He insisted on a formal process. And he led.

If, as the saying goes, a fish rots from the head, it also flourishes because of the head. The US flourished as a result of the many contributions of its 41st president. Many people around the world benefited as well. We owe him our collective thanks. May his well-deserved rest be peaceful.

China last week celebrated the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Japan in what could only be described as an ostentatious display of military power and glory. Every aspect of the event was planned down to the most meticulous detail, including its historical and ideological significance. The re-writing of history goes on even though many of those who witnessed the events of 1945 remain; a continuous monologue that inflates the Communist forces’ contribution to victory against the Japanese, and minimises the more significant Nationalist involvement.

In China, the names of Mao Zedong and Peng Dehuai and their Communist forces will continue to be celebrated for their involvement in the end of the Japanese occupation of China, while the names of the more relevant Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists will always be marginalised, rarely spoken of, and never publically commemorated. In a process that has come to be known as damnatio memoriae (the condemnation of memory), Chiang Kai-shek has been erased from a significant part of Chinese history, at least in any capacity where he cannot be painted as the villain.

We’re all familiar with the process of erasing figures from history that has become famous from Soviet Russia. The poor grasp of subtlety (and even the basic principles of photo-editing) have left Stalinist attempts to manipulate photographs of those who had fallen from favour open to ridicule in the modern world. Encyclopaedias, books, images and official directives of all kinds removed traitors of the Party from public view, thus re-writing the narrative of history and discrediting their policies and actions as heretical.

In China, the narrative that continues to write Chiang out of the history of the Japanese defeat goes even further than leaving him out of commemorations. Recently, Chinese social media has struck back at China’s August First Film Studio’s The Cairo Declaration, which prominently features Mao (and even Stalin, another non-attendee) on all of its promotional material. Mao was in China at the time of the conference, while Chiang was actually in attendance.

People are less familiar with damnatio memoriae as practised in the ancient world, from the great civilisations of Egypt, Greece and Rome. In Republican Rome, damnationes were initially carried out within the family to hide disgraces from future generations. At the end of the Republican period and into Imperial Rome, sanctions became increasingly violent, often resulting in the mutilation and disgraceful burial of the deceased. Enter the names of Rome’s great tyrants: Caligula, Nero, Domitian and Commodus. As the Senate and people of Rome loathed them, murdering such figures wasn’t enough. Those emperors had their names erased from inscriptions, their monuments destroyed, their statues dashed to the ground and their names thoroughly vilified by the great historians of the Roman era. Once a person is vilified, it’s difficult to revive their memory, though Classical scholarship has made great strides over the recent decades to analyse Nero’s relationship with the plebs and revitalise his memory.

What’s clear about the process of damnatio memoriae is that it has explicit and tacit aims. On the surface, it appears that the punishment was used to attempt to erase someone from history, attacking the very notion of remembrance. We know from experience that this aim isn’t always successful, as we’re familiar with the names of Nero, Trotsky, and Chiang. But we’ll never know if anyone has ever been totally successful at eradicating someone else from history.

The tacit aim, which no one attempting to condemn another’s memory would ever admit to, is to make sure that the memory of the condemned is kept alive, but in a controlled manner that perpetuates their disgrace. Written and visual cues make it clear that something’s missing from the historical picture, a void left by those who’ve been disgraced. In Rome, this might’ve been an upright statue base without the portrait it once bore; Cicero tells us that this is much more disgraceful for the condemned than simply removing all trace of them.

In modern China, the void left by the Nationalist forces in the 70^th anniversary celebrations is even more obvious. They play no part in a celebration that they belong in the heart of. Damnatio memoriae is a fundamental mechanism of authoritarianism that has transcended the millennia.

The only thing about damnatio memoriae that has significantly changed between the ages is our capacity to fight back. Attempts to revitalise the memories of condemned are prominent in modern historiography—not only for Nero, but also for Chiang, as several recent biographies can attest to. Inside Soviet Russia, fear dictated that damnationes memoriae were effectively carried out, but outside the Soviet bloc, their poorly edited photographs have always been publically ridiculed. People in China and the West are united in their disdain for The Cairo Conference’s promotional material, seeing it for exactly what it is.