Beyond Peace

by Richard Nixon

  We cannot lead solely by example or solely by power but must combine the best elements of both. Today we must find the moral equivalent of war to unify and inspire us. We do not seek a war at home or abroad, but we do need a mission that will evoke the same selfless response in individuals. When the people of the world look to us, they should see not just our money and our arsenal but also our vast capacity as a force for good.

  Peace demands more, not less, from a people. Peace lacks the clarity of purpose and the cadence of war. War is scripted; peace is improvisation. As writer Sophie Kerr observed, “If peace . . . only had the music and pageantry of war, there’d be no more wars.” Our conduct at home and abroad will determine how well we improvise beyond peace.

  When Mao asked me if peace was America’s only goal, he too had been searching for something beyond peace. His answers were the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, ruthless attempts to create political and social utopia in China that resulted in misery, devastation, and death for millions. Progress cannot be commanded; renewal cannot be dictated. The inspiration for a true leap forward for America must come from within—from within the people making up the nation, and from within the soul of the nation itself. In moving beyond peace, we must recognize that while human nature prevents us from ever attaining perfection, the infinite potential of human beings compels us to embark on a search for the best practicable good. We stand at a great watershed in history, looking back on a century of war and dictatorship and looking forward to a century we can make one of peace and freedom. The future beyond peace is in our hands.

  II

  A New World

  Beyond Peace

  America Must Lead

  Leaders of small countries at times have a clearer understanding of how the world works than do leaders of major countries, who are burdened with the day-to-day responsibilities of world leadership. During a conversation I had in 1967 with one such leader, Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew, he likened the world to a forest. “There are great trees, there are saplings, and there are creepers,” he said. “The great trees are Russia, China, Western Europe, the United States, and Japan. Of the other nations, some are saplings that have the potential of becoming great trees, but the great majority are creepers, which, because of lack of resources or lack of leadership, will never be great trees.”

  Since he made that statement twenty-seven years ago at the height of the Cold War, a political forest fire has swept over the world. Although Russia, China, Japan, Western Europe, and the United States are still the only giant trees in the forest, the fire has dramatically changed them and the world around them. Communism has collapsed in the Soviet Union. One hundred million people in Eastern Europe have been liberated from communist domination. China is no longer an enemy of the United States and is using capitalist tools to achieve communist goals. Japan has become an economic superpower. Western Europe, no longer united by the threat from the East, is searching for a new rationale for NATO, a new relationship with the newly liberated nations of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and a new momentum toward economic unity. After bearing the burden of free-world leadership for forty-eight years, the American people, as indicated by the 1992 presidential election, want to devote their attention and their resources to their problems at home rather than those abroad.

  Profound disagreement exists about the role the United States should play in the era beyond peace. A number of arguments against a continued American leadership role in the world have wide appeal:

  • Because of the downfall of the Soviet Union, there is no need for American global leadership.

  • Since the United States carried the major burden of the Cold War, other nations should lead now.

  • Even assuming that we are the only ones who can lead, we should give priority to our pressing domestic problems.

  • The United States, with huge budget deficits and trade imbalances, can no longer afford to lead.

  • Because of our massive problems at home, the United States is not worthy to lead.

  All of these statements are wrong.

  Only the United States has the combination of military, economic, and political power a nation must have to take the lead in defending and extending freedom and in deterring and resisting aggression. Germany and Japan may have the economic clout but they lack the military muscle. China and Russia have the potential military might, but they lack the economic power. None has sufficient standing with all the world’s great powers, none has the record of half a century of leadership. As the only great power without a history of imperialistic claims on neighboring countries, we also have something all these countries lack: the credibility to act as an honest broker.

  The popular idea that the United Nations can play a larger role in resolving international conflicts is illusory. During the last forty-eight years, the U.N. has debated, passed resolutions on, and contemplated intervention in scores of conflicts in every part of the world. But it has acted militarily on only two occasions: when the Soviet Union boycotted the Security Council vote during the Korean War, and when President Bush enlisted the U.N. to support our efforts to defeat Iraqi aggression during the Persian Gulf War. As former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkpatrick has observed, “Multilateral decision making is complicated and inconclusive. U.N. operations—in Bosnia or in Somalia or wherever—are characteristically ineffective.”

  Those who have led their peoples through the ultimate crisis of war understand better than anyone else that no leader can permit his country’s interests to be held hostage to the whims of an international body. Winston Churchill was one such leader. I vividly remember my last meeting with him in 1958. I had gone to London to represent the United States at the dedication of the chapel at St. Paul’s Cathedral honoring the American dead in World War II. I called on him at his home, where he was recovering from a stroke.

  As I saw him slouching down in a big chair before a wood-burning fireplace with a shawl over his legs, I thought how lethargic he seemed, compared with the extraordinary energy he radiated when I first met him in Washington just five years earlier, after he had returned to power.

  Marshall Tito and his wife had called on Churchill during the same period. She told me later that they too had noticed a striking change in him. He had been ordered to cut back on his smoking and drinking, and he looked on enviously as Tito smoked a huge Churchill cigar and drank Churchill’s scotch as well as his own. Speaking to no one in particular, Churchill had said, “How do you stay so young? I know. It’s power. Power keeps a man young.”

  I found that while Churchill had lost his power and some of his energy, he had lost none of his unique understanding of how the world worked. After a limp handshake, he ordered a glass of brandy. The effect when he drank it was like lighting a match to dry twigs. Our discussion ranged far and wide, from developments in the Soviet Union to a minidispute between Ghana and Guinea. When I asked him about the U.N., he said that he had supported it from the beginning and believed it had a significant role to play. But he added, “Under no circumstances can a major nation submit an issue affecting its vital interests to the U.N. or any other collective body for decision.”

  The concept of “assertive multilateralism” being advanced by some U.N. supporters can only be described as naïve diplomatic gobbledygook. A collective body cannot be effective unless it has leadership. As de Gaulle told André Malraux shortly before his death, “Parliaments can paralyze policy. They cannot initiate it.” Even a collective body as closely knit as NATO was not able to be “assertive” in Bosnia. Can anyone seriously suggest that a collective body such as the U.N., one third of whose members have populations smaller than that of the state of Arkansas and half of which are not stable democracies, could be “assertive”?

  This does not mean that the United Nations should be thrown on the scrap heap of history. It does mean that without leadership from the world’s strongest nation, the U.N. will not act. We should enlist U.N. support for our
policies but not put the U.N. in charge of them. The suggestion that the United States should put American troops under a U.N. command to give collective security a chance to work is completely unacceptable. To serve as President means accepting ultimate responsibility for the lives of troops put in harm’s way. It would be not only unwise but immoral for him to deliver the lives of American soldiers into the hands of an international bureaucrat selected by the United Nations. As Senator Bob Dole has pointed out, the Secretary General of the United Nations was not elected by the American people.

  The idea that the United States cannot afford to lead is fallacious. As Herb Stein has observed, “The United States is a very rich country. We cannot afford to do everything, but we can afford to do everything important.” The United States is the world’s top economic power, with the highest productivity per worker, the most advanced technological base, and one of the highest per capita GNPs in the world. It exports more goods, generates more scientific discoveries every year, and produces more Nobel Prize winners than any other country. Over $12.7 trillion in defense spending, $1.1 trillion in foreign aid, and more than one hundred thousand lives were the price the United States paid to ensure victory in the forty-five-year war against tyranny. We can well afford the infinitely smaller amount necessary to ensure that we do not lose the peace for which we sacrificed so much.

  In the 1992 presidential campaign, a sign in the Clinton campaign office read, “It’s the economy, stupid.” That was good politics but poor statesmanship. There is a world of difference between campaigning and governing. We cannot have a strong domestic policy unless we have a strong foreign policy. We cannot be at peace in a world at war, and we cannot have a healthy economy in a sick world economy.

  Since the end of World War II, the United States has been the world’s most powerful symbol of political and economic freedom. The Cold War was not merely a conflict between two opposing armies. It was a conflict over two opposing ideologies. We triumphed because we were rich economically and strong militarily, but we were rich and strong precisely because of our dedication to the ideas of freedom. The values of political and economic freedom that have guided our country since the days of the American Revolution are the moral imperatives that impel us to play a leading role in the world.

  Those who doubt our worthiness to lead should look at our record over the past forty-eight years. We have helped our enemies as well as our friends to recover from the devastation of World War II. We returned Okinawa to Japan and integrated both Japan and Germany into the community of Western nations. We have provided over $1 trillion in foreign aid to nations in the developing world. Since the end of the Cold War, we have returned Subic Naval Base to the Philippines; launched aid programs to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; continued to protect South Korea and Japan; freed Kuwait and protected Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states from Iraqi aggression; safeguarded Israel’s security; assisted anticommunist forces in Angola, Cambodia, and Afghanistan; supported peaceful democratic revolutions in the Philippines, in Latin America, and in South Korea; and been generous in our humanitarian aid to Somalia and other countries suffering man-made or natural disasters. Our record has not been perfect, but no other nation in history can match it. It is a record of benevolent leadership and of advancing not only our selfish interests but the values of political and economic freedom.

  As we enter the twenty-first century, we must adopt a clearheaded policy based on practical idealism and enlightened realism. For the first time in fifty years, we have the power to set a course for the next century so that all, not just some, nations can experience the victory of freedom over tyranny in the world.

  • • •

  Over the past few years, foreign policy observers have made the following points in articles and commentaries:

  • The democratic revolution in Russia and its political and free-market reforms are irreversible.

  • European political and economic integration will eliminate the need for a continued U.S. role in NATO.

  • The disappearance of the Soviet threat in the Far East means the end of geopolitical competition and conflict in East Asia.

  • The U.S.-led victory in the Persian Gulf War ensured the stability of the Middle East and Western access to Middle Eastern oil.

  All of these statements are false.

  When the reactionary left’s coup against Mikhail Gorbachev failed in August 1991, a half-century of superpower conflict ended. Yet Russia remains vulnerable to extreme nationalists and reactionaries intent on reversing free-market and democratic reforms. The European Community has stalled in its effort to achieve economic and political integration, and Europe is falling victim again to parochialism. Asia is threatened with conflict based on competing interests and traditional rivalries. The Persian Gulf remains a tinderbox that could catch fire at any moment.

  We have not achieved perfect peace, which philosophers have been writing about for centuries and which Immanuel Kant described as “perpetual peace.” This idea has always had enormous appeal. But it will never be achieved, except at diplomatic think tanks and in the grave. During my last meeting with Leonid Brezhnev in the Crimea in 1974, I jotted down this note on a pad of paper: “Peace is like a delicate plant. It has to be constantly tended and nurtured if it is to survive. If we neglect it, it will wither and die.”

  After the collapse of communism in the Cold War and the defeat of aggression in the Persian Gulf War, many observers concluded that we were witnessing the beginning of a new world order. They were wrong. The Cold War divided the world, but peace did not unite it. Instead of order, we find disorder in many areas of the world. The United States and the Soviet Union have kept the lid on potential small wars, but since World War II there have been one hundred and fifty of them. Eight million more people have been killed in those small wars than lost their lives in World War I. Most of those wars would have occurred had there been no superpower conflict. Since the end of the Cold War, the threat of small wars has substantially increased. Today, seventy-seven conflicts, based on tribal, national, ethnic, or religious hatreds, are being fought, and ruthless dictators such as Saddam Hussein, Kim Il Sung, and Muammar Qaddafi are poised to attack their neighbors.

  During the Cold War, the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union knew that they had the power to destroy each other and the rest of the world. This sharply reduced the possibility of global nuclear war. Pariah nations such as North Korea and Iraq, which are now trying to join the nuclear club, would not have these restraints. Consequently, the danger of a nuclear war is greater now than during the Cold War. Stopping nuclear proliferation therefore must be a top priority for all of the major nuclear powers—Russia, China, the United States, Great Britain, and France.

  All of these issues—the former Soviet Union, the future of Europe, the rivalry in East Asia, the stability of the Persian Gulf, and avoiding nuclear anarchy—represent strategic priorities for the United States. None of them can be resolved without a commitment of American world leadership. We cannot react to every emergency call like an international 911 operator. But we must respond to those that affect our vital interests in the world.

  The debacle in Somalia was a lesson in how not to conduct U.S. foreign policy. What began as a highly popular humanitarian relief program under President Bush became a highly controversial U.N. nation-building project under President Clinton. As the world’s richest nation, we should always be generous in providing humanitarian aid to other nations. But we should not commit U.S. military forces to U.N. nation-building projects unless our vital interests are involved, a test that neither Somalia nor Haiti satisfied. When we do intervene militarily to protect our vital interests, we should follow President Bush’s example in the Persian Gulf War, using the U.N., not being used by it.

  The fallout from America’s indecisive conduct in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia reaches far beyond those small nations. As Washington Post correspondent Stephen Rosenfeld has observed, “Would a country
that reversed course after suffering one day’s casualties in Mogadishu be likely to stand up to a nuclear-armed North Korea, Iraq, or Iran threatening their American-allied neighbors? Is it even faintly conceivable that the United States would extend and that Israel would accept an American nuclear guarantee as a substitute for Israel’s own bomb?”

  Above all, we should not allow our peripheral conflicts, such as those in Somalia and Haiti, to divert our attention from major conflicts where our interests are at stake.

  The new buzzword in the American diplomatic community is enlargement. After containing communism for forty-five years, we are told that our goal now should be to enlarge free-market democracy. This begs the question whether what works for us will work for others with different backgrounds, but even given that limitation, the concept is acceptable only if it is conditioned on American self-interest. This is not opportunism. Kim Holmes puts it well: “The U.S. does not violate its own ideals by pursuing its own interests. We should support democracy abroad when it is in our interests to do so, which fortunately is more often than not.”

  But defending our interests is not enough by itself to mobilize American support for American foreign policy initiatives. After our rather belligerent exchanges in Moscow in 1959, Khrushchev was trying to appear reasonable as we sat together at a lavish state dinner in the Kremlin. He pointed down the table to one of his vice premiers and said, “Comrade Koslov is a hopeless communist.” There is no question but that in foreign policy Americans are, at times, hopeless idealists, which is a source of great strength and a potential weakness.

  No one would question that our vital interests were involved in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. But American Presidents invariably clothed our interests in idealistic rhetoric. World War I was not simply a war to defend our interests against imperial Germany’s aggression. It was a “war to end war” and to make the world safe for democracy. World War II was not just a war to defend U.S. interests against Nazi and Japanese aggression. It was a war to extend four great freedoms to all people. The Cold War was not just a war to defend our interests against aggressive communism. It was a war to defend and extend freedom and democracy in the world. No war more seriously involved our vital interests than the Persian Gulf War. But even then, the practical objective of defending our access to oil resources was coupled with the idealistic goal of preserving the independence of Kuwait and advancing the cause of democracy.