George H. W. Bush managed the end of the Cold War without a victory lap

No fist pump. No touchdown dance. Nobody on his staff allowed to gloat. A Republican wins the White House in 1988 as the heir to the man who stood in West Berlin and told the Soviets to tear down a wall, and within a year the wall is rubble and the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe is coming apart. The President, with the best seat in the house for the greatest geopolitical victory of the century, goes on television and does almost nothing. Three years later the voters throw him out. If you want to understand George H. W. Bush, start right there, with a man who won the big thing and lost the next election.

I want to be fair to him, and I want to be fair to the people in our own party who never fully forgave him. Both things can be true. He handled the end of the Cold War about as well as anyone could have handled it, and he broke the most famous promise of his campaign. Folks, a record that mixed is worth studying precisely because it does not fit on a bumper sticker.

The résumé behind the restraint

Bush came to the presidency with one of the longest résumés of any modern President. A Navy pilot in the Second World War, a congressman from Texas, ambassador to the United Nations, chief of the U.S. liaison office in Beijing, director of the CIA in 1976 and 1977, and then eight years as Ronald Reagan's Vice President. He had seen how foreign governments behave when they are scared, and he understood something that hotter voices in both parties did not: a wounded rival with thousands of nuclear weapons is more dangerous than a confident one.

That is the key to everything that follows. His instinct was that the way you win a long contest is to let the other fellow lose it in a way he can live with. Gloating would have humiliated the Soviet leadership and strengthened the hard-liners in Moscow who wanted the old system back. You can disagree with the instinct. But it was an instinct, and it was a coherent one, and it was built on the strength his predecessor had assembled. For the story of how the Reagan years set the table, see How Reagan built strength first and then sat down with Gorbachev and Did Reagan Really Win the Cold War or Did the Soviets Just Collapse.

November 1989: the wall opens and the President stays calm

On November 9, 1989, East Germany announced that its citizens could cross the border, and crowds poured through the Berlin Wall. Reporters wanted the President to say something soaring. Bush gave a restrained, almost flat response, and he took criticism for it from commentators who expected Reagan-style theater. His reason, as his advisers later explained it, was exactly the one above: do not give the Soviet military and the hard-liners a reason to crack down.

Think about what was at stake. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops were still stationed on East German soil. A single bad decision by a single nervous commander could have turned a joyful night into a bloodbath. The President's job that week was not to feel good. It was to make sure that nobody had a reason to shoot. By the standard of what actually happened, which was that the wall came down without a war, his quiet judgment looks sound.

The hard part: reunification inside NATO

The dramatic night was November 9. The hard part came in the eleven months after it. The question was not whether Germany would reunite, because East Germans had already voted with their feet. The question was on what terms. Would a united Germany be neutral? Would it leave the Atlantic alliance? Moscow wanted a neutral Germany. Several Western European leaders were privately nervous about a larger, stronger Germany at all.

Bush's answer was clear: a united Germany would be a full member of NATO. The negotiating vehicle was the so-called Two-Plus-Four talks, the two German states plus the four wartime powers, the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France. The treaty settling the matter was signed in Moscow on September 12, 1990, and formal German unification took place on October 3, 1990. A united Germany stayed in the alliance. Think about that for a moment. The very country that had started two world wars in the span of a generation joined the Western alliance peacefully, with Soviet agreement, and not a shot was fired.

To make that possible, Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, worked on a package of assurances for Moscow, including the idea that NATO would adapt its posture and that Soviet troops could leave on an agreed schedule. Historians still argue over exactly what was said to Soviet leaders about NATO's future size, and I am not going to pretend that dispute is settled. If you want to see how that argument connects to later events, read What America Promised Ukraine in 1994 and What It Did Not. The point for now is the outcome: Europe reunited without a war, and the Atlantic alliance came out of it stronger.

The Gulf War and the coalition

If the Berlin story shows Bush's restraint, the Gulf story shows his willingness to use force. On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait. Bush declared that the aggression would not stand and spent the next five months building a coalition rather than going it alone. He worked through the United Nations Security Council, which passed a series of resolutions culminating in Resolution 678, authorizing member states to use all necessary means if Iraq did not withdraw by January 15, 1991. He also asked Congress for its backing, and Congress voted to authorize force in January 1991. That detail matters to students of the war powers debate, and we cover it in How Republican presidents asked Congress for war powers from Formosa to Iraq.

Operation Desert Storm began with an air campaign on January 17, 1991. The ground offensive started on February 24 and ended in about one hundred hours, and the fighting stopped on February 28. Kuwait was liberated. The coalition included Arab states as well as European allies. And Bush made a decision that people still argue about: he did not send the army on to Baghdad. In a memoir he wrote with his National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, published in 1998, he explained that the mission was the liberation of Kuwait, that the United Nations mandate did not cover occupying Iraq, and that a march on Baghdad would have turned a limited war into an open-ended occupation. After the Iraq War that began in 2003, many conservatives came to read that judgment more kindly than they did at the time. Others still think he should have finished the job. That is a legitimate argument, and I will not pretend it is not.

START I and the rest of the arms agenda

On July 31, 1991, Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, START I, in Moscow. It was the first treaty to actually reduce the number of strategic nuclear weapons on each side, as opposed to merely capping their growth. The Senate ratified it with a wide margin of support, and conservatives who insisted on verification and tough inspection rules could take some pride in it, because the treaty carried real monitoring provisions.

A day later, on August 1, 1991, Bush spoke in Kyiv to the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian republic and warned against what he called suicidal nationalism. The columnist William Safire dubbed it the "Chicken Kiev" speech, and the label stuck. Critics said Bush was cautious about Ukrainian independence and tied too tightly to Gorbachev. Defenders say he was trying to avoid a violent breakup of a nuclear superpower. Within weeks an attempted hard-line coup in Moscow failed in August, and by December 1991 the Soviet Union dissolved. It ended not in a civil war, but in fifteen independent republics. Whatever you think of the speech, the thing Bush most feared did not happen. How Ukraine's independence plays into later American policy is the subject of the link above.

The promise that broke

Now to the other half of the ledger. At the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans, Bush told the country, "Read my lips: no new taxes." It was the line of his acceptance speech and perhaps the most famous sentence of the campaign.

Then reality arrived. The federal budget deficit was large, and Congress, controlled by Democrats in both chambers, demanded a deal. In the fall of 1990 Bush negotiated a budget agreement that combined spending restraint with higher taxes, including increases in certain excise taxes and a higher top income tax rate. The law, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, was signed on November 5, 1990. Here is the sharpest version of the case against him: he made a promise in plain English, the voters took it at face value, and he broke it within two years while the deal's promised spending restraint proved weaker than advertised. That cost him with the base, and Newt Gingrich, the House Republican whip, led a revolt against the package that foreshadowed the later fights between the leadership and the grassroots.

Here is the case for him: the deal was supposed to cut the deficit, and it came with spending caps and a pay-as-you-go system meant to force Congress to pay for new commitments. Reasonable conservatives, including some who disliked the tax increases, thought a divided government left him with a hard choice. Judge it yourself. But do not let anyone tell you the dispute was about nothing. It taught the party that a tax pledge is a contract with voters, and that is a lesson the movement has remembered ever since. Compare how later tax laws were sold in Republican tax cuts side by side, from Harding all the way to Trump.

The Americans with Disabilities Act and the compassionate side

Among conservatives, Bush's domestic record is often overlooked. On July 26, 1990, he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act on the South Lawn of the White House, a law that barred discrimination against people with disabilities in employment, public services and public accommodations. It passed with big bipartisan majorities and went on to shape the way every Main Street business thinks about doors, ramps and hiring. Conservatives continue to argue about the cost of compliance and about lawsuits aimed at small businesses, and those are fair complaints to bring to Congress. But the principle that a citizen should not be locked out of the workplace because of a disability is not a radical one, and a Republican President signed it. He also signed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which created a cap-and-trade system for the sulfur dioxide that caused acid rain, a market-based design that many conservatives of that era preferred to command-and-control rules.

1992: why a hero of the Cold War lost

By the fall of 1992 the Cold War was over, the Gulf War was behind us, and the economy had gone through a recession that left many families anxious. A national election turns on what feels most urgent at the kitchen table, and in 1992 the answer was jobs and wages, not missiles and summits. Bush also faced a challenge from inside his own party, as the commentator Pat Buchanan ran against him in the Republican primaries, hitting him from the right on taxes. In the general election, the independent candidate Ross Perot drew a huge number of votes. Bill Clinton won the presidency with less than a majority of the popular vote, and Bush went home a one-term President.

That is the sorry irony: the President who guided the world through the end of a forty-year confrontation was defeated by voters who thought he did not care about their paychecks. Whether that was fair is another matter. A recession, a broken promise, a third-party candidate and a sense that the campaign was not hungry enough all played a part. But do not miss the lesson. Foreign policy success buys you a little credit and no immunity.

What conservatives should take from it

Let me lay out the argument the way I see it.

1. Restraint is a form of strength. The President who refuses to gloat can sometimes win more than the one who does. Bush's calm kept Soviet hard-liners from having an excuse, and Germany ended up in NATO.
2. Coalitions multiply American power. The Gulf War was won fast, with allies sharing both the burden and the bill, and with clear limited aims.
3. Limited aims are a choice, and they come with a price. Stopping at Kuwait spared America an occupation and left Saddam in power. Both of those statements are true.
4. A promise is a promise. The 1990 budget deal may have been defensible policy, but it was a political disaster because it contradicted the plainest sentence he ever spoke to voters.
5. Party matters more than people think. The conservative base that Reagan built did not belong to Bush by inheritance. He had to keep earning it, and in 1992 a large part of it stayed home or went to Perot.

The strongest objection to my reading is that Bush's caution was a failure of nerve, that a bolder America could have pushed harder for the independence of the captive republics and for a more thorough housecleaning of the old Soviet structures. I take that seriously. But the alternative history that critics imagine is one in which things go better than they actually did, and the actual outcome, a peaceful end to the Soviet empire and a reunited Germany in the Western alliance, is hard to improve on.

The bottom line

• Bush's handling of 1989 to 1991 is a model for how a confident country behaves when its rival falls: be firm, keep the alliance together, and do not humiliate the loser.
• The "no new taxes" reversal is the cautionary tale. When you promise something to your voters, break it only if you are ready to explain it, and expect to pay.
• The Americans with Disabilities Act shows a Republican President acting on the principle that opportunity belongs to everyone, and you can support the principle while pushing Congress to cut the lawsuit abuse.
• If a candidate wants your vote because of a foreign-policy success, ask what they will do about your paycheck. In 1992 the voters asked, and they did not like the answer.
• Read the primary sources yourself: the text of START I, the Two-Plus-Four treaty, and the 1990 budget law are all public, and Congress.gov and the National Archives are good places to start.