Real Peace

by Richard Nixon

  But the worst mistake we could make in El Salvador or in any country under siege from Soviet-backed guerrillas would be to provide just enough military aid to keep them fighting, but not enough to win. If the Congress refuses to support President Reagan’s policy with the funds he feels are necessary to prevent a communist victory, he will have no choice but to get out and let the communists take over. This would be tragic for the people of El Salvador and for us, but it would be worse to half try and to fail. We cannot afford another Bay of Pigs, where we sent a brave but pathetically undersupported force to be cut to pieces on the beaches of Cuba. And we cannot afford another Vietnam, where Congress was unwilling to follow through with the commitment we had made in the 1973 Paris peace agreements to provide the same amount of support to South Vietnam that the Soviet Union was providing for North Vietnam.

  Such setbacks are bad enough for the people we let down. The legacy of our failure in Vietnam was over 100,000 boat people and three million Cambodians slaughtered by the communist Khmer Rouge government. But if it happens again the world may decide that failure is endemic to America, that our idealism and our good intentions, since they spell defeat for us and our friends time and time again, are burdens rather than blessings. Leaders everywhere will conclude, as did President Ayub Khan of Pakistan when he learned of U.S. complicity in the coup that led to the murder of President Diem of South Vietnam, “It is dangerous to be a friend of the United States; it pays to be neutral; and sometimes it helps to be an enemy.”

  The “how not to do it” pundits and congressional critics dominate the dialogue on Central America. What they fail to recognize is that while our current policy is not an ideal one, it is the least we can do under the circumstances. In the future, however, the United States should act before Soviet puppets such as the Sandinistas take power, before communist guerrillas can assail another freely-elected government such as El Salvador’s.

  To put it charitably, U.S. policy toward Latin America since World War II, while well-intentioned, has been inadequate, inept, and, worst of all, plagued by fitful starts and stops. Because of its proximity, Latin America should be our first foreign policy priority. But as I observed when I returned from Caracas in 1958, the only time Latin America receives frontpage attention in the U.S. media is when “there is a revolution or a riot at a soccer game.”

  For decades the U.S. has been smothering Latin America with slogans. Foreign aid programs such as the Alliance for Progress and Good Neighbors raised high hopes in Latin America, and when the hopes were unfulfilled they raised hackles. Despite our good intentions we have broken our promises to the Latin Americans over and over again. Most of the billions of dollars we have sent to their governments have been sucked up by corrupt officials or wasted on poorly conceived or poorly managed projects.

  Meanwhile we have left the impression that we become actively involved in Latin America only when our interests are threatened by communist aggression. We must now develop policies which also address their interests. Even if there were no communist threat millions of Latin Americans would justifiably demand reforms to lift the burdens of poverty, injustice, and corruption that have been their lot for generations. In addressing these concerns we will serve the interests of the people of Latin America and serve our own interests as well by depriving the communists of the issues they exploit to gain power and impose a new tyranny.

  A top Carter Administration official recently said that after the flurry of high-level concern in the U.S. government as Somoza was falling to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979, Latin America was once again put on the back burner—until the crisis in El Salvador erupted.

  It would be unfair to single out the Carter Administration for this tragic error. All postwar American Presidents, understandably busy with innumerable current crises far away, have not had the time or the inclination to focus on potential ones close to home. The tendency is understandable, but it must stop. We can no longer afford it. Since so many crises in Latin America and the other parts of the Third World are either instigated or encouraged by the Soviets, a modus operandi based solely on crisis management will give our adversary the advantage of always making the first move.

  To stop the Soviets from reaping further grim victories, we must scan the globe just as they do. When all is quiet in the Third World, all is not necessarily well. The potential for unrest in a country often smolders just below the surface. Up until now we have only moved in to put out the fires of revolution once they start. In the future we must learn to keep them from igniting at all.

  We need an early warning system for pinpointing these potential Third World hot spots. Once we identify them we must offer an active, workable alternative to communism.

  Our goal is not to prove to people that our system is better than communism. They know that. Communism is something a country is infected with, not something it chooses. We must help those countries whose immune systems are low, build up those countries the Soviets and their proxies are apt to find most susceptible to their tactics. The West must learn how to practice preventive political medicine. More economic aid now could reduce the possibility that we would be called on for more military aid later.

  The United States’ responsibility in this effort should be principally, but not exclusively, our own backyard: Latin America, both Central America and South America. Since every Latin American country is a potential target for the communists, every country should be a target for us.

  Our efforts, while directed primarily toward Latin America, should not be restricted to our hemisphere, and our allies’ efforts should not be restricted to theirs. The Soviets’ front lines in the fight for the Third World circle the globe. Their challenge is unified and centrally managed, and we will not meet it effectively if we simply divide the world into exclusive spheres of economic influence.

  Soldiers wearing the uniforms of many NATO nations serve on the front lines in West Germany because each member of the alliance recognizes that what happens there affects its interests. We must grapple in the same way with the Soviet threat in the Third World. In the effort to strengthen the economic base of the developing world each alliance nation should act in the areas with which it is most familiar—the Europeans in Africa, for instance, and the Japanese in Asia. But each Western nation must also recognize that its interests are directly affected by events on the other side of the world, such as those in Central America. Likewise, European and Japanese efforts in Africa and Asia should not preclude the U.S. from assisting in these regions.

  There is no reason why prosperity should necessarily exist north of the equator but not south of it. The West must find ways to teach what it knows. It will take an international effort involving both the public and private sectors; businessmen, government officials, educators, technical experts all must participate. If we are to protect what we have from our aggressive adversaries, we must share what we have with our less fortunate friends. Otherwise, it is through them that our adversaries may eventually get at us.

  We need dramatic new initiatives to break the vicious cycle through which underdeveloped nations with authoritarian governments and some hope for the future are transformed into underdeveloped nations with totalitarian governments and no hope for the future. The West has been on the defensive for 35 years on all fronts—in Western Europe, in Asia and Southeast Asia, throughout the Third World. We must now go onto the offensive—not just in Central America but worldwide. We and our allies must be as bold and as generous in helping poor Third World countries get started on the road to economic progress as the U.S. was in helping Europe and Japan recover after World War II.

  Obsessed with the idea that there is a limit to what we can do in the world, we have failed to press as hard as we could right up to that limit. In the Third World the Soviets exploit and extend human misery. It is our responsibility to confine and ease human misery. This is true of every nation of the Western alliance. The U.S. can show the way, however, by its actions in Latin America.r />
  The threat of communist aggression is far more immediate to the nations of Latin America than it is to us. These nations’ leaders are also far better acquainted with their peoples’ problems and needs than we are. We should encourage and welcome their guidance and initiatives. They, in turn, should encourage and welcome ours.

  Some Americans, believing we can duplicate our success in helping the nations of Western Europe rebuild after World War II, have called for a “Latin American Marshall Plan.” The goal is excellent, but in pursuing it we must bear in mind that the Marshall Plan was officially called the European Recovery Program. In Latin America and the rest of the Third World the issue is not recovering but getting started. The Europeans were experienced in running sophisticated industrial economies. Most developing nations are not. Any economic aid program for Latin America will cost far more and take much more time to achieve results than was the case with our aid to Europe and Japan after World War II.

  The debate over U.S. foreign aid is confined by two extremes. Some say we should cut government-to-government aid and increase private investment in Latin America. Others insist that more government-to-government aid rather than more private investment is the answer. In fact neither will work without the other.

  Government-to-government aid should be used as fertilizer, to prepare the ground for private investment and thus for economic growth. Such aid is only worth the investment if growing conditions are right. If the government is repressive, the aid won’t work. If the government is corrupt, the aid won’t work. If the government has policies that penalize private investment, the aid won’t work. If the government is so unstable that businessmen, workers, and consumers have no peace of mind, the aid won’t work. Most important, since aid will not work without trade, we must expand the array of trade preferences we offer to our Latin American neighbors.

  The Reagan Administration’s Caribbean Basin Initiative is an excellent step toward achieving these goals. It should be substantially increased and extended to other nations in South America.

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  A massive increase in both financial aid and human aid—in which Canada, Europe, and Japan carry their fair share and the great bulk of which will be provided through private investment rather than government grants—is the best investment the West could make for peace, progress, and stability in the Third World.

  While the Soviet promise is an empty one, we cannot beat it with nothing. We can beat it by recognizing and using the enormous economic advantage the West has over the Soviets. Our system works; theirs doesn’t. Marxist economic policies produce poverty rather than progress. The only economic success stories since World War II have been written in the free countries of Europe, North America, and non-communist Asia. The Soviets can only brandish their power. We can give the gift of progress by helping poor countries up the first, most difficult steps of the ladder of economic development.

  We can offer advice and even prescribe solutions to economic problems. But as far as political systems are concerned, we should be far more restrained and patient. While democracy works for the nations of the West, instant democracy is neither possible nor desirable for most of the Third World. We should hold fast to our ideals of human rights, but at the same time understand that a regime that provides some human rights is better than one that will provide none. The answer to those who contend that the U.S. loses in the court of world opinion because we support repressive anti-communist governments is that the most repressive governments in the world are communist ones.

  The West has a long tradition of democratic government that most of the rest of the world does not share. But even the U.S., as prone as we are to hurling moralistic lightning bolts at regimes that do not come up to snuff on human rights, gave the vote to women only 63 years ago and guaranteed civil rights to blacks only 20 years ago. We must learn to be less harsh judges.

  On the other hand, neither good moral sense nor good strategic sense compels us to subsidize an authoritarian regime’s practice of repression. By its very nature such a regime will inhibit rather than stimulate economic growth, and without growth and stability a nation remains vulnerable to violent revolution—and therefore Soviet meddling. Just as we can deter Soviet misbehavior by establishing economic ties the Russians would be loath to give up, we can influence friendly but authoritarian regimes if we quietly but unmistakably let them know that our friendship will be even more profitable to them once they adopt less repressive policies.

  If we give our friends nothing but public lectures on political morality, we create resentment and thus widen rather than narrow the gap between us. But if we give them economic support to help create stability and military support, in the form of aid and advice, against forces that threaten them with chaos, we will be sowing the seeds of democracy. Democracy is inevitably the first casualty of unrest and war. It is also an inevitable product of peace and prosperity.

  To build real peace in the Third World, we must be patient with those who do not yet come up to our standards of political behavior. We must be loyal to those nations that choose not to threaten us. And we must be generous in sharing what our prosperity has given us.

  In the countries where it has been established, Marxism has produced poverty, not progress; tyranny, not liberation; repression, not justice. Communism’s performance has belied its promise. In the 1950s and 1960s, many leaders of nations emerging from colonialism understandably mistook Soviet successes in forced industrialization as the wave of the future. But the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union and in the Third World has been exposed in ways all can see. Eighteen countries in the world have communist governments. None came to power in a free election. And there is no country in the communist world whose leaders will risk having a free, democratic election. Today Marxism-Leninism is only a recipe small groups of ruthless men use to gain power and stay in power.

  The Soviets have lost the ideological battle in the Third World. But this does not mean the West has won it. In the Third World, where change is inevitable, the West too often finds itself on the side of the status quo. If the choice is between the status quo and communism, the latter will prevail if only by virtue of the shrewd, cynical opportunism of the Soviet Union.

  To win the ideological battle, the West must be opportunistic, too. It must aggressively seek opportunities to channel the energy of inevitable change in the Third World toward peaceful revolution rather than violent revolution. Today, the only kind of revolution on the market is too often the kind that the Soviets and their surrogates sell. Tomorrow, we can put them out of business.

  PEACEFUL COMPETITION

  In World War I, the slaughter in the trenches prompted many to call the conflict “the war to end war.” Yet 20 years later world war again engulfed the globe, leaving unprecedented destruction in its wake and killing almost four times as many people. When World War II ended the nuclear age began, and the potential destruction of war increased exponentially. Today it is no longer an exaggeration to say that the next war would be “the war to end war” because it would also end civilization as we know it.

  We must not court confrontation or flirt with war, but neither should we let ourselves be seduced by the idea of peace at any price. Mao Zedong elliptically expressed concern about this danger in my last meeting with him in 1976. He asked me, “Is peace your only goal?” I replied that our goal was peace, but a peace that was more than the absence of war. I told him, “It must be a peace with justice.” If I had answered Mao’s question with a discourse that emphasized only the need for peace and friendship, he would have considered me to be not only wrong but also a fool. After all, if peace really is our only goal, we can have it any time we wish simply by surrendering. The peace we seek must be coupled with justice.

  To pursue peace with justice, the West must adapt its policies to the realities of the world today. Our policy must combine deterrence with detente. Detente without deterrence leads to appeasement, and deterrence without detente leads t
o unnecessary confrontation and saps the will of Western peoples to support the arms budgets deterrence requires. Together, they will lead to the containment of and peaceful competition with the Soviet Union.

  Hard-headed detente requires us to concert our actions on several fronts. We must erect a shield of military power that will deter Soviet aggression at all levels. We need to make progress on arms control agreements that will reduce the burden of defense, reestablish the balance of power, and increase strategic stability in crises. We have to provide the Soviets with an economic stake in peace as a further incentive to stop their aggression. We must create a process for settling those differences between the superpowers that can be resolved and for preventing our irreconcilable disagreements from leading to war.

  Peace and justice require nothing less of us. We do not oppose communism simply because our economic system is capitalist. We oppose its spread because of what it does to the people forced to live under its rule. Communism is an ideological bubonic plague. Wherever it has spread, it has made a nightmare out of the common man’s dreams of a better life for himself and his family. It has broken up millions of families and has turned millions of others into refugees. It has killed tens of millions of innocent people and has enslaved nations. The first requirement of justice is that we block the further expansion of communism.

  But containment is not enough. It would be wrong to hold a second Yalta conference, carving the world into spheres of domination and tacitly accepting the Brezhnev Doctrine that whatever is communist must remain so. It would be the height of injustice to purchase peace at the price of condemning forever to communism the millions behind the Iron Curtain. The Soviets will never accept the status quo in the West. We must never be satisfied with the status quo—East or West. We must never accept their rules for “peaceful” competition: that the Soviet bloc is a privileged sanctuary and that the West is their happy hunting ground.