Peace and freedom cannot survive in the world unless the United States plays a central international role. That is a simple fact, but a fact that makes many Americans profoundly uncomfortable. As André Malraux once told me, “The United States is the first nation in history to become a world power without trying to do so.” But if we fail to lead the free world, there will be no free world to lead.
Whether we like it or not, the task of leadership has devolved upon the United States. Ours is not a perfect country. Some claim that its imperfections mean it has no right to play a world role. But if the United States withdraws, the only superpower left on the field will be the one with far less benevolent intentions and far more dubious moral credentials.
The tragedy of Vietnam—not that we were there, but that we lost—has hurt America. The fact that the war was lost two years after our combat role ended did not lessen the pain. It hurt us in the eyes of our friends abroad, and it diminished us in the eyes of our adversaries. But it did the most damage at home. Our loss in Vietnam confused a nation that was not used to losing, that had always equated victory in battle with the triumph of what was right. It encouraged and strengthened the isolationist strain that has always been present in the American character. And it divided us against ourselves, and left some of us convinced, wrongly, that their government had been engaged in a shameful exercise rather than a noble one.
It is often said today that Americans’ pride in their nation has been restored. It would be more accurate to say that after several years of steady economic growth, and because most of the bad news from abroad—at least insofar as Americans are involved—has been of relatively isolated terrorist incidents or an occasional minor clash in the Persian Gulf, many Americans have the sense that things are better than they were eight years ago.
But national pride not tempered by adversity is sterile. National pride that lacks awareness of our international responsibilities is empty. National pride without the impulse to share that of which we are so proud is selfish. Too often what we have called a restoration of national pride has been no more than complacent, comfortable smugness. Real pride comes not from avoiding the fray but from being in the middle of it, fighting for our principles, our interests, and our friends.
It will take more than a few successful but relatively minor military missions like the invasion of Grenada and the raid on Libya to build lasting new confidence in the United States among Americans and our friends and allies abroad. Almost nowhere else on earth are people as secure and as prosperous as in the United States. Both our great power and our great blessings challenge us to adopt policies in both foreign and domestic affairs whose ultimate goal is to make the world safer and better. The stakes in this struggle for peace with freedom are far higher than they were in any of history’s struggles of arms. If the United States fails to step up to its global responsibilities, the West will lose, and the world will be infinitely more dangerous and cruel in the next century than it was in this century.
If we are to meet this challenge we must begin by shedding our illusions about how the world works.
Americans tend to believe that conflict is unnatural, that people from all nations are basically alike, that differences are products of misunderstanding, and that permanent and perfect peace is a reachable goal. History disproves each of those propositions. International conflict has been a constant through the centuries. Nations differ from one another in basic ways—political traditions, historical experience, motivating ideology—that often breed conflict. Clashing interests—the fact that we do understand one another—lead to disputes and ultimately to wars. Only when countries have accepted the existence of conflict and sought to manage it through a balance of power have enduring periods of general peace resulted.
Many of those who march through the streets hoisting placards calling for “peace” and “global disarmament” believe that the only solution to the danger of war is a world order preserved by an international organization. The twentieth century has demolished many myths but none more devastatingly than the wishful notion that world organizations could bring about perfect peace.
There have been two great experiments in world order in this century, the League of Nations and the United Nations. Both were tragic failures. In a speech urging U.S. membership in the League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson proclaimed, “It is a definite guarantee of peace. It is a definite guarantee by word against aggression.” Less than two decades after the League was established, the world plunged into the most destructive war in history.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was no less optimistic about the United Nations. He argued, “We must not this time lose the hope of establishing an international order which will be capable of maintaining peace and realizing through the years more perfect justice between nations.” One hundred twenty wars have been fought since the end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations. Eighteen million people have been killed in those wars—more than the total number killed in World War I.
Some of the world’s most able diplomats represent their countries in the UN. They could not have a more frustrating assignment. They can talk about everything and do something about nothing. They deserve our respect and our sympathy. But the United States cannot submit issues affecting its interests to a body so heavily prejudiced against us.
In the real world one tiny nation with six tanks, or six grubby terrorists with one tiny bomb, have more real power than the United Nations General Assembly gathered in all its magnificent splendor on the East River. What moves the world for good or ill is power, and no sovereign nation will give up any of its power to the UN or any other body—not now and not ever. This is an immutable aspect of national character. The sooner we face this fact—and the sooner the people of great nations, especially those in the West, stop feeling guilty about being powerful—the sooner a real international order, based on a stable balance of national power, will be achieved.
World peace is inseparable from national power. No foreign-policy goals, whether strategic, geopolitical, or related to human rights, can be achieved without the application of national power. If the American leadership class does not come to grips with that reality, the United States will lose its chance to act as a force for good in the world, for it will not be a force at all.
Of all the leaders I have met in traveling to ninety countries in the past forty years, none impressed me more than the Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew. His understanding of the great forces that move the world is encyclopedic and also profoundly perceptive. I vividly recall my first meeting with him twenty years ago. He paced back and forth in his modest office, punctuating his staccato statements with expressive gestures and colorful analogies. He likened the world to a great forest with giant trees, saplings, and creepers. He said the giant trees were Russia, China, Western Europe, the United States, and Japan. All the rest are saplings, some of which may grow into giants, and creepers, which because of shortages of people or resources cannot hope to become giants.
I am sure he would agree that two giants tower above the others: the United States and the Soviet Union. Our foreign-policy agenda in the remaining years of the twentieth century necessarily must focus on American–Soviet issues. But it cannot be limited to them. We must undertake new initiatives on four fronts:
• We must develop a new live-and-let-live relationship with the Soviet Union, one that recognizes that while the two countries have irreconcilable differences and will continue to compete with each other across the board, they also have a common interest in avoiding going to war over their differences.
• We and our allies must take on greater global responsibilities, with the West Europeans and the Japanese contributing a more equitable share of their resources to the defense of the overall interests of the West.
• We must continue to cultivate the relationship between the United States and China, focusing primarily on economic and political cooperation and following up with military and strategic cooperatio
n where possible.
• We must have a more creative policy for promoting peace, freedom, and prosperity in the Third World. Ironically, it is among the nations of the world with the least political and military power that the most dynamic and dramatic change will occur in generations to come.
The challenges we will face if we do not shirk the responsibilities of world leadership are breathtaking in scope and complexity. But the stakes could not be higher. In 1999, man’s capacity to destroy will be unlimited. But his capacity for progress will also be unlimited. One hundred years ago many thought we had reached the end as far as invention and progress were concerned. Now we know we are only at the beginning.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. The enormous scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century are only a prologue to what we can accomplish in the twenty-first century. We can lighten the burden of labor, find cures for dread diseases, and eliminate the pangs of hunger for all the world’s people. But we can do this only if we achieve our primary goal—to make the twenty-first century a century of peace.
I had my last private meeting with Leonid Brezhnev in the Crimea in 1974. While the interpreter was translating one of my remarks into Russian, I jotted down this note on a piece 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.” We failed to meet this challenge in this century. But we cannot afford to fail in the next.
In the twelve years until the end of the twentieth century we will shape the world of the twenty-first century. It is imperative that we seize this moment so that when we look back from the historical high ground in 1999 we will see that we have lost no opportunities to make the next century the best and not the bloodiest in the history of civilization.
General Douglas MacArthur received a standing ovation when he told a joint session of Congress thirty-six years ago, “There is no substitute for victory.” He was referring to victory in a conventional war. In a nuclear war there will be no victors, only losers. But there still can be no substitute for victory.
The Soviets seek victory without war. Our answer cannot simply be peace without victory. We too must seek victory without war. But we seek a different kind of victory. We seek not victory over any other nation or people but the victory of the idea of freedom over the idea of totalitarian dictatorship, which would deny freedom. We seek victory for the right of all people to be free from political repression. We seek victory over poverty and misery and disease wherever they exist in the world.
The Soviets are committed to the goal of a communist world. We are committed to the goal of a free world where all people have the right to choose who will govern them and how they should be governed. The Soviets believe that history is on their side. We must make sure that when the history of the next century is written, it will have been on our side.
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SUPERPOWERS
Nearly one hundred fifty years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed with incredible foresight that the future of the world was in the hands of two profoundly different nations: the United States and Russia. “The principal instrument of the former is freedom, of the latter servitude,” he wrote, adding that their size alone meant they were bound to play decisive roles. “Their starting point is different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”
Tocqueville could not have contemplated at that time the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century—the two world wars, the invention of the atomic bomb, or the Russian Revolution of 1917, in which an absolute monarchy was replaced by a far more repressive communist dictatorship. But what he predicted about the destinies of the United States and Russia in 1840 is true now and will continue to be true into the twenty-first century. The gulf between the United States and the dictatorship in the Soviet Union today is far greater than that between the United States and absolutist Russia in the nineteenth century.
The United States and the Soviet Union have never been enemies in war. We were allies in World War II. But as World War II drew to a close, Tocqueville’s prophecy became reality. Stalin set the Soviet Union on a collision course with the rest of the world. The Third World War began before the Second World War ended. While the United States demobilized its armies and the other major allies began to rebuild their countries, the Soviet Union embarked on a drive for brazen imperial conquest. In less than five years, Moscow annexed Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and parts of Finland and Japan, imposed communist puppet governments on the peoples of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and northern Korea, and made unsuccessful attempts to grab Greece, Turkey, and parts of Iran. Over the next thirty years, the Kremlin created satellite states in East Germany, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. Without ever issuing a formal declaration, the Kremlin has been at war against the free world for over forty years.
We are in a war called peace. It is a conflict that has not ended and that will probably continue for generations. The Soviets do not use armies or nuclear weapons to wage this war. Their principal weapons in the struggle with the West are propaganda, diplomacy, negotiations, foreign aid, political maneuver, subversion, covert actions, and proxy war. In this conflict, not only our own freedom but that of the rest of the world are at stake. Whether freedom survives depends on the actions of the United States.
Since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power three years ago as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, there have been no signs that the Soviet Union has altered its international goals. His personal style, so refreshingly different from that of his predecessors, has captured the imagination of many in the West. If we underestimate him by continuing to mistake style for substance, he may capture the rest of the West as well.
Under Gorbachev the Soviet Union’s foreign policy has been more skillful and subtle than ever before. But it has been more aggressive, not less. If his dramatic domestic reforms are as successful, in the twenty-first century we will confront a more prosperous, productive Soviet Union. It will then be a more formidable opponent, not less, than it is today.
That some observers believe the emergence of Gorbachev is a hopeful sign for the United States is an indication of how thoroughly they misunderstand the true nature of the U.S.–Soviet relationship. The beginning of the Gorbachev era does not represent the end of the U.S.–Soviet rivalry. Rather it represents the beginning of a dangerous, challenging new stage of the struggle between the superpowers. He has already earned our respect as the keenest, ablest adversary the United States has faced since World War II. Contrary to the wishful pronouncements of some political-science professors and editorial writers, Gorbachev does not seek peace in the way we do.
In the past forty years, I have had the opportunity to meet a number of great leaders—Churchill, de Gaulle, Adenauer, de Gasperi, Yoshida, Mao Tse-tung, and Chou En-lai. Gorbachev is in that league. Only a heavyweight should get into the ring with him. America is the only country capable of countering Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Whether peace and freedom are secure as we enter the twenty-first century will turn on whether we set the right strategy and adopt the right foreign and defense policies today.
Nuclear weapons have made war obsolete as a means of resolving conflicts between great powers. In the nuclear age, our goal must be peace. But perfect peace—a world without conflict—is an illusion. It has never existed and will never exist.
Real peace is not an end to conflict but a means to living with conflict. Once established, it requires constant attention to survive. Americans are idealists, and idealists long for a world without conflict, a world in which all differences between nations have been overcome, all ambitions forsworn, all aggressive or selfish impulses transformed into acts of individual and national beneficence. But conflict is intrinsic to mankind. History, ideas, and material aspirations have always divid
ed the peoples of the world, and these divisions have continually led to conflict and war. That will not change. We must accept the permanence of conflict and devise policies that take this immutable fact of international life into account.
We must not vainly search for perfect peace but turn our efforts to creating real peace. Perfect peace assumes the end of conflict. Real peace is a means of living with unending conflict. Real peace is a process—a continuing process for managing and containing conflict between competing nations, competing systems, and competing international ambitions. It is the only kind of peace that has ever existed and the only kind we can realistically hope to achieve.
Americans have often confused real peace and perfect peace. For most of its history, the United States was invulnerable to threats from external foes. Its great size and its location between two vast oceans allowed the United States to opt out of international affairs. For 150 years, it stood back in blissful isolation while the nations of Europe jousted in dozens of crises and wars. Americans felt so secure that in the early 1930s their army was the sixteenth largest in the world, ranking just below that of Romania.
America’s unique history taught Americans the wrong lessons. Many came to believe that the only obstacles to world peace were either selfish and cynical leaders who were unwilling to put aside parochial national interests in the interest of peace or the regrettable lack of international understanding among leaders and nations. For them, idealism and determined effort were all that was needed to produce peace.
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