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The Tsongas Committee - A Call
to Economic Arms « Chapter V Foreign Policy
1992 Democratic Presidential Primary
The Tsongas Committee
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| Chapter V |
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A CALL TO ECONOMIC ARMS
Forging A New American Mandate
PAUL E. TSONGAS
V. Foreign Policy - Time to Heal Thyself
Since the end of World War II the United States has held the Soviet Union at bay. The policy was called containment. It was a test of American resolve and determination that has extended for more than four decades.
Today we have witnessed the triumph of that policy. By containing communism, we allowed its inherent contradictions to eventually cause its downfall. Communism did not fall to invading armies or to an onslaught of nuclear warheads. Its demise was the result of two internal phenomena. First, the sense of injustice which fueled Marxist-Leninism soon gave way to police states wherever communism was dominant. Freedom was the first casualty of this "worker's paradise." Anyone crossing through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin could not avoid the heavy sense of oppression that characterized all of Eastern Europe. Second, the allure of communism as a cureall for the ills of capitalism came apart as more and more countries found that communism equalled petty corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency and economic stagnation. A system based on the theory of noble common interest faltered upon the reality that human beings need incentives that relate to themselves and their families. There must be a causal relationship between hard work and reward if there is to be hard work. Communism as an economic system destroyed that relationship. The result was thus inevitable. This inevitability, however, required time to manifest itself. It was containment that bought that time.
The price paid by America (and its allies to a much lesser extent) was enormous. Thousands of lives were given to protect freedom and trillions of dollars were expended as well. But the wisdom of Harry Truman has been borne out by history. Contain communism. Believe in the fundamental superiority of democracy and the free enterprise system. Hold fast and eventually people's yearning to be free and to provide their families with a decent standard of living will prevail. He was right. It took an awfully long time but it was accomplished without one nuclear warhead being fired in anger.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall brought the Cold War to an end. It will take a decade to mop up the remains but they will be mopped up. There will undoubtedly be setbacks as the Soviet Union suffers through the terrible throes of transition. Even if there were to be a new rightist regime in Moscow, it would be unlike the Soviet Union of the past forty-five years. The reason is quite simple. The Warsaw Pact is gone forever.
The fearsome armies of East Germany are now but memories as the Germanys have united in an emotional embrace that has turned the faces of the East Germans toward the West. Elsewhere throughout the Warsaw Pact, playwrights and union leaders have become heads of state and freedom is savored as only it can be tasted by the formerly enslaved.
Within the Soviet Union as well the question is not one of a possible Warsaw Pact army moving westward across Europe. The question is whether various republics will remain as part of the Soviet Union. And the answer is almost assuredly not. There will be new nations based on old identities. Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia are but the beginning of a long debate over what constitutes a viable national state that can endure.
And, finally, even within core Russia, the forces of freedom and self-expression have been loosened. Each day adds to the deeper rooting of expectations. The traditions of parliamentary debate, of open citizen criticism, of religious observance, of free market experimentation are all quite fragile. But they now exist in the minds of the Soviet people reinforced by images of the rampant freedom being experienced by their fellow citizens in Eastern Europe.
This is the joy of a great emancipation. But this is the honeymoon. More difficult days will follow as the harsh realities of transition set in. This is not a transition to be marked in months or years. It will take decades. And the long road will provide endless opportunities for demagogues to stake their claim to leadership. The sheer amount of dashed expectations will create mountains of bitterness and resentment as the coming economic dislocations set in.
Freedom is lovely. But chaos is frightening. And sooner or later here will be those who will take advantage of the deep instinctve fear of public disorder. One must understand that the alternative to Mikhail Gorbachev is not just Boris Yeltsin. It is the hardline military conservatives as well. The 1990's will see events in the Soviet Union (and Eastern Europe) which will not be pretty.
It is essential here to understand two fundamental points. First, a Soviet Union in transition will always pose a certain danger to us but that danger is not the risk of advancing Warsaw Pact armies preceding a care fully planned nuclear attack. It is the danger of an unstable leadership which happens to be well armed. It is the danger, not of miscalculation, but unbalanced desperation. As long as nuclear weapons exist in such vast numbers they cannot be allowed to drift from our consciousness.
Second, it is in everyone's interest to make the Soviet transition as smooth as possible. The less the economic chaos, the less will be the risk of political extremism. The Western nations must help demonstrate to the Soviet people that there is a light at the end of the democratic tunnel. Economic deprivation makes freedom less relevant to a people. We must ensure that economic hope is not extinguished within the minds of the Soviet citizenry.
This means a coalition of North American, EEC and Pacific Rim nations meeting at an economic summit with the Soviets (and the East Europeans) and hammering out Marshall Plan II. This will be a Marshall Plan not to contain communism but to keep it in its grave (the hard view) or to enable a long suffering people to enjoy the fruits of freedom at long last (the benign view). Instead of arraying our forces of war against the East, let us demonstrate the genius of democracy by unleashing the true generosity inherent in free nations. This generosity will involve the usual forms of assistance but it must include as well the transfer of knowledge. The task here is to bring into being the organizational infrastructure necessary for economic reforms to succeed. This is not just a matter of letters of credit or food aid. It is fundamentally a matter of providing skills and experience and management. These are human talents that can only be transferred by other human beings. It obviously involves the deployment of various Western corporate and academic entities. But it also means Western experts such as retired business executives and consultants on leave devoting themselves to the great task of the 1990's and beyond - the full integration of the former Warsaw Pact into the commonwealth of nations. Such an integration will also enable us to have a greater capability to influence the outcome of the independence movements in the republics.
Finally, a thought about how we have been affected by our relationship with this great Asian continental nation. Both the USSR and the United States spent the latter part of this century preparing for war against each other. This constant tension gave us our worst risk of loss of civil liberties (McCarthyism), our closest brush with annihilation (Cuban Missile Crisis) and our most bitter foreign involvement (Vietnam). All those are past. What is not is the economic price that both countries have paid. We are both like muscle bound weight lifters who now have little use for all the accumulated intercontinental muscle. The contest now is not weight lifting but long distance running. All around are the smaller, quicker nations who devoted themselves to business while we were both focused on confrontation. As one observer has noted "the Cold War is over and the Japanese won."
Both the United States and the Soviet Union need to ramp down their military machines to levels that provide true military security without rendering them economically impotent. There will be a lot of sorting out as we seek to find the appropriate level. I would opt to reduce our troop commitments overseas and retain the research and development capabilities. There is no military might in a nation impoverished by an inability to compete in the global marketplace. There is no sustainable milit:ruy might when the national economy is in decline. This must be the most significant underpinning of the New American Mandate. The Soviets face that reality now. But we face it also.
The New World Order
Harken a new chapter of world peace and harmony? Sadly not. But one must rejoice about the passing of the spectre of the superpowers having at each other in a fit of nuclear miscalculation. We have been delivered from the immediate threat of nuclear winter.
This deliverance, however, has given center stage to other destructive forces as we have now witnessed in the extreme. They are not the aftermath of the East-West confrontation. They are local; they are regional; they are linguistic; they are religious; they are ethnic; they are economic; they are tribal.
The world seems capable of offering up an endless array of bloody incidents on virtually every continent. The Persian Gulf has our attention but it is only the latest crisis. El Salvador, Ghana, Rumania, Argentina, South Africa, China, Panama, Liberia, Kuwait, India, East Timor, Haiti, Afghanistan, Phillipines, on and on. A year from now there will be others. The overlay of East versus West, of conflict based on capitalism versus Marxist-Leninism, is gone. That context hid other determining forces that are now free to roam at will across the landscape of the lesser developed world. Many of these countries are not rooted in centuries of jurisprudence and democratic institutions. For some of them, their history as a country is measured only in post World War II terms. Many of the boundaries of these countries were artificially determined by outsiders to accommodate foreign agendas. Often those boundaries cut across natural groupings or put historically rival groupings in the same nation.
Creating a nation requires a great deal more than geography. There must be a sense of people, a sense of common history. Many of today's nations lack these essential attributes. They are square pegs trying to fit into round holes carved by others. For some, the future cannot hold as tribal or ethnic or religious rivalries come roaring back from their bloody pasts. Added to this basic disequilibrium is the communications technology available worldwide which has raised expectations concerning freedom, standards of living, health care and the like. Many of these expectations will not be met.
Thus, we have a world where possible mass annihilation by nuclear warheads has given way to continuous individual and small group death by machetes, AK-47's and tanks.
What does the United States do in these situations?
The End of Pax Americana
It is clear that we cannot intercede in every case where clashes have broken out. Most of these conflicts are going to involve the loss of innocent life and the temptation is going to be to go in and somehow make things all right. That temptation is a snare and must be resisted. There is going to be a lot of sorting out in the years ahead as groups go against groups in countries where the institutional bonds are weaker than the bonds of ethnicity or religion. And often they are weaker than the acute remembrance of past injustices. Horrid affairs will take place and we must try to contribute to their prevention as much as possible. But no American blood should be casually spilled taking sides in the internal affairs of woeful nations. Our good offices, yes, but not our blood. The threshhold of American involvement must be raised to a level consistent with clear national interests that are embraced by the American people.
A clear example of this is Lebanon. In 1982 I stood on the balcony of the American ambassador's residence in East Beirut and watched Israeli planes bombing PLO positions in West Beirut. The night sky was illuminated with flares. Nearby Christian gun positions would occasionally fire in the direction of Moslem-held West Beirut. The scene below me was so different from anything I had ever seen before that it required an effort to believe that it was real and that people were dying in buildings I could barely discern. It was a scene out of Dante's inferno.
The natural instinct was to somehow intervene to end the bloodshed. But when I met with leaders from the various factions during my stay it was clear that ethnic and religious differences combined with past horrors were beyond any rational arbitration. There were forces at play that were primal and they would not be easily contained. Not by us, not by any western nation. Perhaps not even by any nation. Today, almost a decade later, there still is not peace.
A more difficult situation arises where borders are at stake. Herein there are other considerations that come into play - considerations that speak to the essential concepts of national sovereignty and non-aggression. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait is such an example. It had to be addressed.
In most instances the United States will not have great national interests at stake. In some cases, such as the Persian Gulf, the American dependence on imported oil raises the stakes considerably. _Our economic vital interests, caused by our almost twenty year failure to bring about energy self-sufficiency, will continue to make us vulnerable to whatever winds blow in that part of the world.
We cannot, however, allow ourselves to continually become the policeman of the world sending our youth to areas of great risk and pouring our national treasure into the fray. There must be a police force in future instances but we should only be part of the contingent. We must not be the whole contingent or even the majority of the contingent.
Efforts are going to have to be made to provide a United Nations Security Force with real teeth. This will not happen overnight and there are years of negotiations ahead to make it a reality. But one thing is for sure. America no longer can afford the role it has assumed since the end of World War II. Pax Americana must give way to Heal Thyself. This is not isolationism. It is participation in a new internationalism truly based on the principle of collective security. This principle has been articulated for decades but remains in the realm of rhetoric not reality. The United States must cause it to become the basis for a new Pax Mundi. True collective security means true collective burden sharing. The effort in the Persian Gulf is a step in that direction but the journey is by no means complete.
Other nations, especially those with great trade surpluses, have enjoyed a free ride as we willingly take up causes around the world. American blood is shed and we spend billions upon billions of dollars that should be spent at home to reinvigorate our economically depleted nation. We are seen as willing to fight battles for everyone else and rarely insistent that other nations truly participate up to their proportionate share. The attitude used to be that we would never really push other nations on these kind of issues so long as they were strong allies in confronting the Soviets. Those days are over.
There is a new world order, but we don't truly act that way. We need our resources at home. We have a Herculean task to steady our economic ship of state and to get out from under our crushing national debt. This is the first priority and all the other priorities come after it. Indeed, if we don't attend to our economic peril, we won't be in a position to be of help to anyone.
The time has come to confront our allies with tough choices. Either they have interests at stake here or they don't. If they do, then they must either participate fully or be prepared to see those interests adversely affected. This new order will come hard to countries who have prospered under our military umbrella and devoted their resources to build mighty economies. For them, the message must be that the party is over.
We have suffered our Vietnam. We have seen our Marines killed in Beirut. Our troops in Saudi Arabia are the majority force that contained the madness of Saddam Hussein, while not one Japanese or German life was at risk. Yet Japan is the most dependent upon Persian Gulf oil of all the industrialized nations in the world. They had enormous economic interests at stake. Yet the Japanese say that their constitution, unfortunately, prevents their involvement. The Germans sold all kinds of weaponry to Iraq including those necessary for chemical warfare. They even sold goods to Iraq after the embargo had been imposed. Rather than participate with other Europeans, however, the Bonn government chose to play the role of bystander. The Germans say that they want to devote their resources to reincorporating East Germany. We should say enough! They have vital interests here. They cannot be allowed to obviate their clear responsibilities by hesitantly providing contributory funds under duress. They are doing only what they have to in order to quell American public outrage.
There will not be a new world order until and unless other major countries are prepared to invest the blood of their sons and daughters and the wealth of their treasuries in the duties of the peacekeeper. Our actions must force this new world order. We must not delay it by pretending we have unlimited young soldiers and unlimited resources to spend all over the world.
There are three choices before us:
1. Allow military agression across borders to go unchecked.
2. Deploy American troops, alone if necessary, as each new world trouble spot erupts.
3. Put into place the new world order of multi-national peacekeeping where the United States is a major player but only in reasonable proportion to its allies.
Option #1 will lead to world chaos. There is no viable recourse for America that removes us from the responsibilities of a great global nation. Our military strength and our democratic values are world resources. The issue is not whether to be involved but how to be involved. To some Americans the temptation is to embrace a kind of latter day isolationism. But it will never be. We are the hub around which allied democratic nations revolve. That reality cannot be ignored. Iraq could not have been allowed to conquer Kuwait with impunity.
Option #2 will bankrupt America and cause undue personal grief to the families of our servicemen and women. This is the policy that our allies desperately wish us to continue. They must be made to understand that an economically crippled and divided America serves no one's interest over the long term. Japan and Germany are not safer with an America in economic receivership. It is truly galling that these nations have managed to secure the safety of their youth while their interests were defended by American men and women.
Option #3 must be the basis of our foreign policy. Only Pax Mundi can call upon American military resources in a manner consistent with our prevailing national needs. We are but five percent of the world's population. We are the greatest debtor nation the world has ever known. We suffered about 60% of the coalition casualties in the Persian Gulf. These are facts. Let's have a foreign policy that recognizes these facts and establishes the new world order in practice as well as in theory. We may be the most important policeman in the international police force and we can accept that. But we should never allow ourselves to become the latter day paid soldiers for nations who feel no moral obligation to sacrifice their own citizens.
The Third World
There is a pattern to our travails abroad. When it comes to dealing with a superpower we are reasonably comfortable that we know our enemy. The Russians have been more European than not in their 20th century history and mannerisms. We have a good sense of how they think and what motivates them.
The same is true with our NATO allies and the Warsaw Pact nations. East-West we know. All of our decision makers were groomed in the school of East-West relations. It is where we have the "touch" that allows policies to have some hope of success. By contrast virtually none of our leaders came of age in the North-South context. They then must rely on position papers prepared by others unaided by their own personal "feel" for such matters.
The Third World is very different. And we don't truly understand it. In Vietnam we imposed an East-West overlay on the Third World. It was assumed that ideological dynamics were the same everywhere. The domino theory drove our decisions there but Vietnam fell and the predicted onrush of Communist triumphs around the world never materialized. What happened? Who knows? No one ever felt it was important enough to hold Congressional hearings on the reason why the conceptual centerpiece of our rationale turned out to be in error. The war was over and no one had the stomach to try and figure out how the best and brightest could not understand what was happening inside the minds of friends and foe alike. An unhappy chapter. So much sacrifice. Let's put it behind us. It was just too painful.
We never tried to figure out what we didn't know.
Many hotspots of the future will be in the Third World. These potential conflicts will arise most probably over resource questions or attempts to "remedy" colonially-imposed, artificial borders. How can we deal with these as they come upon us? The resolution of these potential crises cannot be endless military engagement. There are just too many disputed borders, ethnic rivalries and unbalanced heads of state. These non-U.S.-Soviet confrontations must be the business of the world community but there is a limit to the capacity and willingness of countries to be militarily involved. These confrontations call for a new commitment to the rule of law in conflict mediation. Such mediation should be by entities that are perceived to be as third world in their composition as reasonably possible.
This means the strengthening of existing multilateral institutions. It means the creation of new mechanisms with sufficient muscle to enforce the principle of peaceful resolution of disputes. The old adage of speak softly and carry a big stick remains relevant today.
When territorial and/ or resource disputes do arise, such disputes should be forced into binding and timely international arbitration. The objective here is to create a moral and legal process that is created by the entire world community and not by the usual Western players alone. If the dispute is not resolved satisfactorily, the World Court should be given in reality what it has only been given in theory throughout the Cold War era, namely the power to adjudicate the remedy.
Should a potential aggressor refuse to seek a remedy through binding arbitration or the World Court, or ignore the ruling of such bodies, then economic sanctions as the primary enforcement tool should be implemented swiftly and completely. And they should be kept in place until shown to be inadequate. The world community has demonstrated that strict sanctions can be implemented effectively, witness the global response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Should sanctions fail the capability must exist to exercise the military option under United Nations auspices.
Herein it is essential that any future military actions clearly have the appearance and substance of United Nations supervision. This will require a great deal of rethinking because the current United Nations peacekeeping structure would not have been able to counter Saddam Hussein in time to prevent his possible invasion of Saudi Arabia, let alone evict him from Kuwait. The world's nations are going to have to sit down and decide how to give the United Nations effective military capability consistent with the concept of national sovereignty. It will require extensive negotiations obviously. But the world will be better served if the Saddam Hussein wannabes of the future have less room to miscalculate world reaction to unacceptable endeavors. And we in the West will be better served if such military responses are not perceived by third world peoples as Western actions against non-Westerners.
Finally, it's urgent that we spend the time necessary to understand how Third World nations think. They are not mini copies of Western nations. They are different peoples with different cultures - cultures no less worthy of our respect and understanding. They all need to be thought of as separate and sovereign. If we can do this we can avoid some of the quagmires that we have experienced in the past.
The nations of the Third World have a vastly different perspective than we do. Some are consumed with fears and resentments about the former colonial powers. Some have an inherent uneasiness with nations that are mostly white and Western. Many of them deal from feelings of insecurity and non-acceptance. They don't act as we in the West would expect because their cultures and histories and institutions are not the same as ours. Fundamentally, many of them do not believe that we respect them. And, sadly, they are often correct. We think that human history and the Judeo-Christian tradition are the same thing. Perhaps we can see how offensive that is to the billions of people who don't share that tradition. The Persian Gulf war has demonstrated this dilemma. Saddam Hussein was able to tap into reserves of sympathy in the Moslem world when the bombing of Iraq occurred. This despite the obvious lawlessness and brutality of his invasion of Kuwait. How could these people support such a dictator who had savagely killed other Arab people? The answer lies not in rationality but in the perception that this was Iraq versus the United States and a handful of Western allies. It is said that war is politics by other means. True. Future military actions must carefully calibrate the long term political implications of our strategic decision making.
It is in the self-interest of the United States to encourage our colleges and universities to focus more effort on the history and mores of non-Western cultures. We need to understand the thinking of Islam. We need to know the legacy of American involvement with regimes in Latin America. We need to be aware of the many cultures that determine the thinking of Asian and African nations just as thoroughly as they seek to understand the West.
We cannot presume that the rest of the world thinks that way we do. There are powerful factors at work that cause nations and peoples to have particular lenses through which they view events around them.
While this may sound self-evident I can attest to how easy it is not to see it.
I vividly recall how much my perspective changed during my two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia. I lived in a town/village called Wolisso and taught in the local school.
In the summer between school years I remained in Wolisso to work on a building project. For that period of time I was the only Peace Corps Volunteer there. I found myself beginning to think like an Ethiopian for the first time. I also found myself looking at non-Ethiopians through Ethiopian eyes.
Since Wolisso was on the road from the capital city of Addis Ababa to the provincial capital of Jimma there was occasional traffic through the town. Often they came at dangerously high speeds given the fact that the road was usually full of people, including children, and various kinds of livestock.
One day, while walking along the road towards the building site, I had to jump off of the side of the road as a car barrelled past. The driver of the large car was an Ethiopian. My reaction and that of the Ethiopians near me was clear irritation. Another arrogant upper-class Ethiopian. But it was soon dismissed as how things unfortunately were.
Just as we had returned to the road to continue on our way, another car came at us at a similarly irresponsible speed. Again, we all had to jump into the shallow gully at the side of the road.
As the car sped by with the horn blaring we all noticed that the driver was white - either an American or a European. My reaction was not merely irritation but anger. Real anger. I wanted to chase after the culprit and pummel him. The Ethiopians responded even more strongly. They began to shout to each other about the cursed "ferengi" (foreigner).
Both drivers had committed the same act. Both had jeopardized the same people. But there the sameness ended. History and perception and culture and nationalism came into play and caused the reaction of the Ethiopians to each miscreant to be radically different. Even I was rendering separate judgments. In the year that followed, I became acutely aware of this dichotomy and had no difficulty in seeing it in other circumstances.
It serves no purpose to argue that all of this is illogical. Logic and politics are not the same thing. And if we are going to be players in the non-Western world, we'd better understand the hearts and minds of its people.
But recourse to isolationism is not possible.
It is inevitable that we will be involved in other Third World crises after Kuwait. It is then imperative that such involvements only occur based on a true understanding of the political and cultural forces at play and not just an assessment of military capabilities.
The evolution to Pax Mundi is going to require a great deal more knowledge than we now have. We are always going to be a major player on the world scene, perhaps the dominant player. With American lives at risk, we have the moral duty to know what we are getting into.
Index
Forging A New American Mandate
PAUL E. TSONGAS
V. Foreign Policy - Time to Heal Thyself
Since the end of World War II the United States has held the Soviet Union at bay. The policy was called containment. It was a test of American resolve and determination that has extended for more than four decades.
Today we have witnessed the triumph of that policy. By containing communism, we allowed its inherent contradictions to eventually cause its downfall. Communism did not fall to invading armies or to an onslaught of nuclear warheads. Its demise was the result of two internal phenomena. First, the sense of injustice which fueled Marxist-Leninism soon gave way to police states wherever communism was dominant. Freedom was the first casualty of this "worker's paradise." Anyone crossing through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin could not avoid the heavy sense of oppression that characterized all of Eastern Europe. Second, the allure of communism as a cureall for the ills of capitalism came apart as more and more countries found that communism equalled petty corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency and economic stagnation. A system based on the theory of noble common interest faltered upon the reality that human beings need incentives that relate to themselves and their families. There must be a causal relationship between hard work and reward if there is to be hard work. Communism as an economic system destroyed that relationship. The result was thus inevitable. This inevitability, however, required time to manifest itself. It was containment that bought that time.
The price paid by America (and its allies to a much lesser extent) was enormous. Thousands of lives were given to protect freedom and trillions of dollars were expended as well. But the wisdom of Harry Truman has been borne out by history. Contain communism. Believe in the fundamental superiority of democracy and the free enterprise system. Hold fast and eventually people's yearning to be free and to provide their families with a decent standard of living will prevail. He was right. It took an awfully long time but it was accomplished without one nuclear warhead being fired in anger.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall brought the Cold War to an end. It will take a decade to mop up the remains but they will be mopped up. There will undoubtedly be setbacks as the Soviet Union suffers through the terrible throes of transition. Even if there were to be a new rightist regime in Moscow, it would be unlike the Soviet Union of the past forty-five years. The reason is quite simple. The Warsaw Pact is gone forever.
The fearsome armies of East Germany are now but memories as the Germanys have united in an emotional embrace that has turned the faces of the East Germans toward the West. Elsewhere throughout the Warsaw Pact, playwrights and union leaders have become heads of state and freedom is savored as only it can be tasted by the formerly enslaved.
Within the Soviet Union as well the question is not one of a possible Warsaw Pact army moving westward across Europe. The question is whether various republics will remain as part of the Soviet Union. And the answer is almost assuredly not. There will be new nations based on old identities. Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia are but the beginning of a long debate over what constitutes a viable national state that can endure.
And, finally, even within core Russia, the forces of freedom and self-expression have been loosened. Each day adds to the deeper rooting of expectations. The traditions of parliamentary debate, of open citizen criticism, of religious observance, of free market experimentation are all quite fragile. But they now exist in the minds of the Soviet people reinforced by images of the rampant freedom being experienced by their fellow citizens in Eastern Europe.
This is the joy of a great emancipation. But this is the honeymoon. More difficult days will follow as the harsh realities of transition set in. This is not a transition to be marked in months or years. It will take decades. And the long road will provide endless opportunities for demagogues to stake their claim to leadership. The sheer amount of dashed expectations will create mountains of bitterness and resentment as the coming economic dislocations set in.
Freedom is lovely. But chaos is frightening. And sooner or later here will be those who will take advantage of the deep instinctve fear of public disorder. One must understand that the alternative to Mikhail Gorbachev is not just Boris Yeltsin. It is the hardline military conservatives as well. The 1990's will see events in the Soviet Union (and Eastern Europe) which will not be pretty.
It is essential here to understand two fundamental points. First, a Soviet Union in transition will always pose a certain danger to us but that danger is not the risk of advancing Warsaw Pact armies preceding a care fully planned nuclear attack. It is the danger of an unstable leadership which happens to be well armed. It is the danger, not of miscalculation, but unbalanced desperation. As long as nuclear weapons exist in such vast numbers they cannot be allowed to drift from our consciousness.
Second, it is in everyone's interest to make the Soviet transition as smooth as possible. The less the economic chaos, the less will be the risk of political extremism. The Western nations must help demonstrate to the Soviet people that there is a light at the end of the democratic tunnel. Economic deprivation makes freedom less relevant to a people. We must ensure that economic hope is not extinguished within the minds of the Soviet citizenry.
This means a coalition of North American, EEC and Pacific Rim nations meeting at an economic summit with the Soviets (and the East Europeans) and hammering out Marshall Plan II. This will be a Marshall Plan not to contain communism but to keep it in its grave (the hard view) or to enable a long suffering people to enjoy the fruits of freedom at long last (the benign view). Instead of arraying our forces of war against the East, let us demonstrate the genius of democracy by unleashing the true generosity inherent in free nations. This generosity will involve the usual forms of assistance but it must include as well the transfer of knowledge. The task here is to bring into being the organizational infrastructure necessary for economic reforms to succeed. This is not just a matter of letters of credit or food aid. It is fundamentally a matter of providing skills and experience and management. These are human talents that can only be transferred by other human beings. It obviously involves the deployment of various Western corporate and academic entities. But it also means Western experts such as retired business executives and consultants on leave devoting themselves to the great task of the 1990's and beyond - the full integration of the former Warsaw Pact into the commonwealth of nations. Such an integration will also enable us to have a greater capability to influence the outcome of the independence movements in the republics.
Finally, a thought about how we have been affected by our relationship with this great Asian continental nation. Both the USSR and the United States spent the latter part of this century preparing for war against each other. This constant tension gave us our worst risk of loss of civil liberties (McCarthyism), our closest brush with annihilation (Cuban Missile Crisis) and our most bitter foreign involvement (Vietnam). All those are past. What is not is the economic price that both countries have paid. We are both like muscle bound weight lifters who now have little use for all the accumulated intercontinental muscle. The contest now is not weight lifting but long distance running. All around are the smaller, quicker nations who devoted themselves to business while we were both focused on confrontation. As one observer has noted "the Cold War is over and the Japanese won."
Both the United States and the Soviet Union need to ramp down their military machines to levels that provide true military security without rendering them economically impotent. There will be a lot of sorting out as we seek to find the appropriate level. I would opt to reduce our troop commitments overseas and retain the research and development capabilities. There is no military might in a nation impoverished by an inability to compete in the global marketplace. There is no sustainable milit:ruy might when the national economy is in decline. This must be the most significant underpinning of the New American Mandate. The Soviets face that reality now. But we face it also.
The New World Order
Harken a new chapter of world peace and harmony? Sadly not. But one must rejoice about the passing of the spectre of the superpowers having at each other in a fit of nuclear miscalculation. We have been delivered from the immediate threat of nuclear winter.
This deliverance, however, has given center stage to other destructive forces as we have now witnessed in the extreme. They are not the aftermath of the East-West confrontation. They are local; they are regional; they are linguistic; they are religious; they are ethnic; they are economic; they are tribal.
The world seems capable of offering up an endless array of bloody incidents on virtually every continent. The Persian Gulf has our attention but it is only the latest crisis. El Salvador, Ghana, Rumania, Argentina, South Africa, China, Panama, Liberia, Kuwait, India, East Timor, Haiti, Afghanistan, Phillipines, on and on. A year from now there will be others. The overlay of East versus West, of conflict based on capitalism versus Marxist-Leninism, is gone. That context hid other determining forces that are now free to roam at will across the landscape of the lesser developed world. Many of these countries are not rooted in centuries of jurisprudence and democratic institutions. For some of them, their history as a country is measured only in post World War II terms. Many of the boundaries of these countries were artificially determined by outsiders to accommodate foreign agendas. Often those boundaries cut across natural groupings or put historically rival groupings in the same nation.
Creating a nation requires a great deal more than geography. There must be a sense of people, a sense of common history. Many of today's nations lack these essential attributes. They are square pegs trying to fit into round holes carved by others. For some, the future cannot hold as tribal or ethnic or religious rivalries come roaring back from their bloody pasts. Added to this basic disequilibrium is the communications technology available worldwide which has raised expectations concerning freedom, standards of living, health care and the like. Many of these expectations will not be met.
Thus, we have a world where possible mass annihilation by nuclear warheads has given way to continuous individual and small group death by machetes, AK-47's and tanks.
What does the United States do in these situations?
The End of Pax Americana
It is clear that we cannot intercede in every case where clashes have broken out. Most of these conflicts are going to involve the loss of innocent life and the temptation is going to be to go in and somehow make things all right. That temptation is a snare and must be resisted. There is going to be a lot of sorting out in the years ahead as groups go against groups in countries where the institutional bonds are weaker than the bonds of ethnicity or religion. And often they are weaker than the acute remembrance of past injustices. Horrid affairs will take place and we must try to contribute to their prevention as much as possible. But no American blood should be casually spilled taking sides in the internal affairs of woeful nations. Our good offices, yes, but not our blood. The threshhold of American involvement must be raised to a level consistent with clear national interests that are embraced by the American people.
A clear example of this is Lebanon. In 1982 I stood on the balcony of the American ambassador's residence in East Beirut and watched Israeli planes bombing PLO positions in West Beirut. The night sky was illuminated with flares. Nearby Christian gun positions would occasionally fire in the direction of Moslem-held West Beirut. The scene below me was so different from anything I had ever seen before that it required an effort to believe that it was real and that people were dying in buildings I could barely discern. It was a scene out of Dante's inferno.
The natural instinct was to somehow intervene to end the bloodshed. But when I met with leaders from the various factions during my stay it was clear that ethnic and religious differences combined with past horrors were beyond any rational arbitration. There were forces at play that were primal and they would not be easily contained. Not by us, not by any western nation. Perhaps not even by any nation. Today, almost a decade later, there still is not peace.
A more difficult situation arises where borders are at stake. Herein there are other considerations that come into play - considerations that speak to the essential concepts of national sovereignty and non-aggression. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait is such an example. It had to be addressed.
In most instances the United States will not have great national interests at stake. In some cases, such as the Persian Gulf, the American dependence on imported oil raises the stakes considerably. _Our economic vital interests, caused by our almost twenty year failure to bring about energy self-sufficiency, will continue to make us vulnerable to whatever winds blow in that part of the world.
We cannot, however, allow ourselves to continually become the policeman of the world sending our youth to areas of great risk and pouring our national treasure into the fray. There must be a police force in future instances but we should only be part of the contingent. We must not be the whole contingent or even the majority of the contingent.
Efforts are going to have to be made to provide a United Nations Security Force with real teeth. This will not happen overnight and there are years of negotiations ahead to make it a reality. But one thing is for sure. America no longer can afford the role it has assumed since the end of World War II. Pax Americana must give way to Heal Thyself. This is not isolationism. It is participation in a new internationalism truly based on the principle of collective security. This principle has been articulated for decades but remains in the realm of rhetoric not reality. The United States must cause it to become the basis for a new Pax Mundi. True collective security means true collective burden sharing. The effort in the Persian Gulf is a step in that direction but the journey is by no means complete.
Other nations, especially those with great trade surpluses, have enjoyed a free ride as we willingly take up causes around the world. American blood is shed and we spend billions upon billions of dollars that should be spent at home to reinvigorate our economically depleted nation. We are seen as willing to fight battles for everyone else and rarely insistent that other nations truly participate up to their proportionate share. The attitude used to be that we would never really push other nations on these kind of issues so long as they were strong allies in confronting the Soviets. Those days are over.
There is a new world order, but we don't truly act that way. We need our resources at home. We have a Herculean task to steady our economic ship of state and to get out from under our crushing national debt. This is the first priority and all the other priorities come after it. Indeed, if we don't attend to our economic peril, we won't be in a position to be of help to anyone.
The time has come to confront our allies with tough choices. Either they have interests at stake here or they don't. If they do, then they must either participate fully or be prepared to see those interests adversely affected. This new order will come hard to countries who have prospered under our military umbrella and devoted their resources to build mighty economies. For them, the message must be that the party is over.
We have suffered our Vietnam. We have seen our Marines killed in Beirut. Our troops in Saudi Arabia are the majority force that contained the madness of Saddam Hussein, while not one Japanese or German life was at risk. Yet Japan is the most dependent upon Persian Gulf oil of all the industrialized nations in the world. They had enormous economic interests at stake. Yet the Japanese say that their constitution, unfortunately, prevents their involvement. The Germans sold all kinds of weaponry to Iraq including those necessary for chemical warfare. They even sold goods to Iraq after the embargo had been imposed. Rather than participate with other Europeans, however, the Bonn government chose to play the role of bystander. The Germans say that they want to devote their resources to reincorporating East Germany. We should say enough! They have vital interests here. They cannot be allowed to obviate their clear responsibilities by hesitantly providing contributory funds under duress. They are doing only what they have to in order to quell American public outrage.
There will not be a new world order until and unless other major countries are prepared to invest the blood of their sons and daughters and the wealth of their treasuries in the duties of the peacekeeper. Our actions must force this new world order. We must not delay it by pretending we have unlimited young soldiers and unlimited resources to spend all over the world.
There are three choices before us:
1. Allow military agression across borders to go unchecked.
2. Deploy American troops, alone if necessary, as each new world trouble spot erupts.
3. Put into place the new world order of multi-national peacekeeping where the United States is a major player but only in reasonable proportion to its allies.
Option #1 will lead to world chaos. There is no viable recourse for America that removes us from the responsibilities of a great global nation. Our military strength and our democratic values are world resources. The issue is not whether to be involved but how to be involved. To some Americans the temptation is to embrace a kind of latter day isolationism. But it will never be. We are the hub around which allied democratic nations revolve. That reality cannot be ignored. Iraq could not have been allowed to conquer Kuwait with impunity.
Option #2 will bankrupt America and cause undue personal grief to the families of our servicemen and women. This is the policy that our allies desperately wish us to continue. They must be made to understand that an economically crippled and divided America serves no one's interest over the long term. Japan and Germany are not safer with an America in economic receivership. It is truly galling that these nations have managed to secure the safety of their youth while their interests were defended by American men and women.
Option #3 must be the basis of our foreign policy. Only Pax Mundi can call upon American military resources in a manner consistent with our prevailing national needs. We are but five percent of the world's population. We are the greatest debtor nation the world has ever known. We suffered about 60% of the coalition casualties in the Persian Gulf. These are facts. Let's have a foreign policy that recognizes these facts and establishes the new world order in practice as well as in theory. We may be the most important policeman in the international police force and we can accept that. But we should never allow ourselves to become the latter day paid soldiers for nations who feel no moral obligation to sacrifice their own citizens.
The Third World
There is a pattern to our travails abroad. When it comes to dealing with a superpower we are reasonably comfortable that we know our enemy. The Russians have been more European than not in their 20th century history and mannerisms. We have a good sense of how they think and what motivates them.
The same is true with our NATO allies and the Warsaw Pact nations. East-West we know. All of our decision makers were groomed in the school of East-West relations. It is where we have the "touch" that allows policies to have some hope of success. By contrast virtually none of our leaders came of age in the North-South context. They then must rely on position papers prepared by others unaided by their own personal "feel" for such matters.
The Third World is very different. And we don't truly understand it. In Vietnam we imposed an East-West overlay on the Third World. It was assumed that ideological dynamics were the same everywhere. The domino theory drove our decisions there but Vietnam fell and the predicted onrush of Communist triumphs around the world never materialized. What happened? Who knows? No one ever felt it was important enough to hold Congressional hearings on the reason why the conceptual centerpiece of our rationale turned out to be in error. The war was over and no one had the stomach to try and figure out how the best and brightest could not understand what was happening inside the minds of friends and foe alike. An unhappy chapter. So much sacrifice. Let's put it behind us. It was just too painful.
We never tried to figure out what we didn't know.
Many hotspots of the future will be in the Third World. These potential conflicts will arise most probably over resource questions or attempts to "remedy" colonially-imposed, artificial borders. How can we deal with these as they come upon us? The resolution of these potential crises cannot be endless military engagement. There are just too many disputed borders, ethnic rivalries and unbalanced heads of state. These non-U.S.-Soviet confrontations must be the business of the world community but there is a limit to the capacity and willingness of countries to be militarily involved. These confrontations call for a new commitment to the rule of law in conflict mediation. Such mediation should be by entities that are perceived to be as third world in their composition as reasonably possible.
This means the strengthening of existing multilateral institutions. It means the creation of new mechanisms with sufficient muscle to enforce the principle of peaceful resolution of disputes. The old adage of speak softly and carry a big stick remains relevant today.
When territorial and/ or resource disputes do arise, such disputes should be forced into binding and timely international arbitration. The objective here is to create a moral and legal process that is created by the entire world community and not by the usual Western players alone. If the dispute is not resolved satisfactorily, the World Court should be given in reality what it has only been given in theory throughout the Cold War era, namely the power to adjudicate the remedy.
Should a potential aggressor refuse to seek a remedy through binding arbitration or the World Court, or ignore the ruling of such bodies, then economic sanctions as the primary enforcement tool should be implemented swiftly and completely. And they should be kept in place until shown to be inadequate. The world community has demonstrated that strict sanctions can be implemented effectively, witness the global response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Should sanctions fail the capability must exist to exercise the military option under United Nations auspices.
Herein it is essential that any future military actions clearly have the appearance and substance of United Nations supervision. This will require a great deal of rethinking because the current United Nations peacekeeping structure would not have been able to counter Saddam Hussein in time to prevent his possible invasion of Saudi Arabia, let alone evict him from Kuwait. The world's nations are going to have to sit down and decide how to give the United Nations effective military capability consistent with the concept of national sovereignty. It will require extensive negotiations obviously. But the world will be better served if the Saddam Hussein wannabes of the future have less room to miscalculate world reaction to unacceptable endeavors. And we in the West will be better served if such military responses are not perceived by third world peoples as Western actions against non-Westerners.
Finally, it's urgent that we spend the time necessary to understand how Third World nations think. They are not mini copies of Western nations. They are different peoples with different cultures - cultures no less worthy of our respect and understanding. They all need to be thought of as separate and sovereign. If we can do this we can avoid some of the quagmires that we have experienced in the past.
The nations of the Third World have a vastly different perspective than we do. Some are consumed with fears and resentments about the former colonial powers. Some have an inherent uneasiness with nations that are mostly white and Western. Many of them deal from feelings of insecurity and non-acceptance. They don't act as we in the West would expect because their cultures and histories and institutions are not the same as ours. Fundamentally, many of them do not believe that we respect them. And, sadly, they are often correct. We think that human history and the Judeo-Christian tradition are the same thing. Perhaps we can see how offensive that is to the billions of people who don't share that tradition. The Persian Gulf war has demonstrated this dilemma. Saddam Hussein was able to tap into reserves of sympathy in the Moslem world when the bombing of Iraq occurred. This despite the obvious lawlessness and brutality of his invasion of Kuwait. How could these people support such a dictator who had savagely killed other Arab people? The answer lies not in rationality but in the perception that this was Iraq versus the United States and a handful of Western allies. It is said that war is politics by other means. True. Future military actions must carefully calibrate the long term political implications of our strategic decision making.
It is in the self-interest of the United States to encourage our colleges and universities to focus more effort on the history and mores of non-Western cultures. We need to understand the thinking of Islam. We need to know the legacy of American involvement with regimes in Latin America. We need to be aware of the many cultures that determine the thinking of Asian and African nations just as thoroughly as they seek to understand the West.
We cannot presume that the rest of the world thinks that way we do. There are powerful factors at work that cause nations and peoples to have particular lenses through which they view events around them.
While this may sound self-evident I can attest to how easy it is not to see it.
I vividly recall how much my perspective changed during my two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia. I lived in a town/village called Wolisso and taught in the local school.
In the summer between school years I remained in Wolisso to work on a building project. For that period of time I was the only Peace Corps Volunteer there. I found myself beginning to think like an Ethiopian for the first time. I also found myself looking at non-Ethiopians through Ethiopian eyes.
Since Wolisso was on the road from the capital city of Addis Ababa to the provincial capital of Jimma there was occasional traffic through the town. Often they came at dangerously high speeds given the fact that the road was usually full of people, including children, and various kinds of livestock.
One day, while walking along the road towards the building site, I had to jump off of the side of the road as a car barrelled past. The driver of the large car was an Ethiopian. My reaction and that of the Ethiopians near me was clear irritation. Another arrogant upper-class Ethiopian. But it was soon dismissed as how things unfortunately were.
Just as we had returned to the road to continue on our way, another car came at us at a similarly irresponsible speed. Again, we all had to jump into the shallow gully at the side of the road.
As the car sped by with the horn blaring we all noticed that the driver was white - either an American or a European. My reaction was not merely irritation but anger. Real anger. I wanted to chase after the culprit and pummel him. The Ethiopians responded even more strongly. They began to shout to each other about the cursed "ferengi" (foreigner).
Both drivers had committed the same act. Both had jeopardized the same people. But there the sameness ended. History and perception and culture and nationalism came into play and caused the reaction of the Ethiopians to each miscreant to be radically different. Even I was rendering separate judgments. In the year that followed, I became acutely aware of this dichotomy and had no difficulty in seeing it in other circumstances.
It serves no purpose to argue that all of this is illogical. Logic and politics are not the same thing. And if we are going to be players in the non-Western world, we'd better understand the hearts and minds of its people.
But recourse to isolationism is not possible.
It is inevitable that we will be involved in other Third World crises after Kuwait. It is then imperative that such involvements only occur based on a true understanding of the political and cultural forces at play and not just an assessment of military capabilities.
The evolution to Pax Mundi is going to require a great deal more knowledge than we now have. We are always going to be a major player on the world scene, perhaps the dominant player. With American lives at risk, we have the moral duty to know what we are getting into.
Index
| Introduction |
1 |
||
| I. |
Economic Survival –
The Creation of National Wealth |
5 |
|
| II. |
Education –
The Meeting House of Our Society |
32 |
|
| III. |
The Environment —
Equilibrium With Earth |
38 |
|
| IV. |
Energy, Fossil
Fuels – Someday There Won't Be Any |
47 |
|
| V. |
Foreign Policy
– Time to Heal Thyself |
58 |
|
| VI. |
The
Culture of America – The Essential Need |
70 |
|
| VII. |
Return to Purpose |
85 |
|
| VIII. |
Biography |
86 |
Copyright © 2023 Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in
Action. 