1999

by Richard Nixon

  It is time for honest, open debate on the future of the peace process. All sides must cool their rhetoric. Those who deviate from the hard line of some of Israel’s more extreme supporters should not automatically be labeled anti-Israel. That happened to me and other friends of Israel when we supported the Reagan administration’s sale of AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia in 1981 and its plan to provide fighter aircraft to Jordan in 1986. Everyone must understand that being a friend of Israel’s neighbors does not make one an enemy of Israel. American and Israeli interests require that the United States have friendly relations with the moderate Arab states. Improving those relations will be impossible if America fails to use its leverage and influence to press forward with the peace process.

  Independence was always proclaimed as the first step toward healthier and more secure Third World societies. But the sad historical fact is that independence did not guarantee prosperity. Most of Latin America fell into an abyss following its independence more than 150 years ago. Most of Africa was dragged into a black hole of negative growth since its independence in the last two generations.

  The hearts of the West go out to Africa. So does its money. In 1985 and 1986 tens of thousands of generous Americans and Europeans reached into their pockets for famine relief for Ethiopia. They were pouring food into a political sinkhole, not into hungry mouths. Western governments have been doing the same for decades. Between 1965 and 1984 the United States and other industrial countries provided over $200 billion in aid and investment for Africa. But the people still starve, and Africa’s gross domestic product in 1983 was 4 percent lower than thirteen years before. The stark fact is that despite aid, despite all the kind thoughts and good intentions the world has to offer, the average African is poorer than he was in 1960.

  The reason is terrible governments. Most of them practice some form of socialism. Most are corrupt. Most are dictatorships. In communist Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Angola, human misery is caused by coldly calculated national policy. But except for countries such as Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia in North Africa and a few sub-Saharan nations such as Botswana, Senegal, Cameroon, Malawi, Mauritius, the Ivory Coast, and Kenya, Africa has abysmal leadership. Africa’s lesson for the twenty-first century is that all the foreign aid on earth will not improve the lives of the people of the Third World if it is spent by governments that have bad policies.

  The examples are discouraging and virtually endless.

  Ethiopia levies an import fee on famine aid which at its peak raised more money for its Soviet-backed Stalinist government than the export of its top commodity, coffee. While thousands of tons of food rotted on the docks and hundreds of thousands of people starved in the desert, Ethiopia spent $100 million on a lavish celebration of the tenth anniversary of its communist revolution. Of the one million killed by famine in 1984-85, three quarters died as a result of President Mengistu’s policy of forced farm collectivization.

  President Mobutu of Zaire is so rich that he could use his personal fortune of $5 billion to erase his country’s staggering national debt and still have $500 million to live on. Meanwhile real wages have fallen since 1960, and half of the children born in his country die before reaching age five. The Mobutu Suspension Bridge, the longest in Africa, opened in 1984 with one deck for cars and one for trains. There is no railroad anywhere nearby, and during its first six months of operation an average of fifty-three cars a day passed over.

  In the Sudan, a multimillion-dollar sugar plant was built on a swamp and sank, while a twenty-year-old milk-bottling plant has never been used to bottle milk because there was no means to refrigerate the milk and ship it to market.

  Because of price controls in Zambia farmers pay over a dollar for fertilizer for every dollar’s worth of food they grow, thus making it more profitable to grow no food.

  Between 1979, when it opened, and 1984 Togo’s $42 million steel mill operated at 22 percent efficiency in part because Togo did not have enough of the materials it needed to make steel.

  Liberia, which is a special responsibility of the United States, is an economic and political disaster area.

  I visited Ghana in 1957 and saw the British turn the colony over to its new American-educated President, Kwame Nkrumah. This was the first time I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Martin Luther King. We spent over an hour together talking about our hope that this first black colony to receive its independence would be an example for the rest of postcolonial Africa. We were both optimistic, because Ghana was one of the richest countries in the Third World, with twice the per-capita income of Korea. When it celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of its independence last year Ghana was an utter shambles, a bleak landscape of unfinished monuments to Nkrumah’s ego and factories that operate at a fifth of their capacity.

  Africa proves that a government does not have to be communist to enact economic policies that stymie foreign investment, penalize personal initiative and savings, and build bloated, parasitic economic-planning bureaucracies. Its governments are notoriously unstable. Between 1957, when Ghana became the first European colony to be granted independence, and 1985 Africa had seventy-two coups, thirteen assassinations of heads of state, and dozens of wars. Civil wars and genocide in Nigeria, Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda have killed over three million people.

  The picture is not unremittingly bleak. When President Felix Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast took power in the former French colony in 1960, he did not expel the Europeans as many other Africa leaders did. He permitted French investments and technicians to remain and allowed profits to flow back to France. Today there are 35,000 French nationals in his country, three times as many as before independence. This cuts against the grain of the policy adopted by black Africa as a whole, which considers European influences to be a barrier to progress and an affront to their national pride. Black Africa as a whole has a per-capita income of only $216; the Ivory Coast’s is $1,000.

  Four years ago Togo’s struggling steel plant was leased to an American entrepreneur. Before 1984 its 380 workers had never made more than 4,000 tons of steel in a year. Last year, 150 employees made 9,000 tons. Other governments are also making halting steps toward privatization, a small but encouraging sign that the rest of Africa is learning Houphouet-Boigny’s lesson: that a nation can have pride and progress at the same time.

  But a human being cannot have pride without some political freedom, and politically Africa is still in the Dark Ages. Forty out of forty-four sub-Saharan countries, containing 85 percent of the population of black Africa, have unelected governments not accountable to their people in any way: Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, the Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, the Ivory Coast, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, São Tomé and Principe, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zaire, and Zambia. In Zimbabwe the democracy established at the end of white-minority rule in 1979 is on the ropes. Prime Minister Robert Mugabe has called for a one-party state and is cracking down on the two main opposition parties.

  Another country with no democracy for its black citizens is South Africa. These oppressed blacks make up 5.5 percent of the population of Africa’s 412 million oppressed blacks, but they command the lion’s share of the attention of Western officials and journalists. South Africa’s blacks want political equality, and we want them to have it. But being for it is one thing, while doing something effective about it is another. Demagoguery does not produce democracy.

  Many Americans who are indifferent toward misery in the communist world and the rest of Africa become apoplectic over racial injustice in South Africa. One reason is that the cause of the dilemma is so easy to understand. As two Western analysts recently put it, “People in the West . . . have used South Africa as a ventilation valve for their own moral and political frustrations, finding in it a convenient surrogate or an
easy analogy for issues at home whose complexity has rendered them intractable.” Satisfying though their outrage may be to many Western leaders and intellectuals, it is no substitute for policy. Blood should not have to run in the streets of South Africa so that American college students and professors and newspaper editors can feel morally vindicated.

  Our policy should be to encourage vigorously a transition to power-sharing that does not disrupt the South African economy, which has enabled South African blacks to enjoy a much better life than African blacks in general. South Africa has the continent’s largest black middle class. It has more professional black women than the rest of the continent put together. More blacks own cars in South Africa than Russians own cars in the Soviet Union. If we encourage a violent solution in South Africa and the country descends into bloodshed and economic chaos and ruin, both blacks and whites will be the losers, and the Soviet Union will be the only winner.

  The Soviets have invested heavily in the African National Congress, and they have not done so because they are good democrats. Last year a young ANC member told a prominent U.S. television journalist that he had been taken to a training camp in the Soviet Union and taught techniques of guerrilla warfare, sabotage, disinformation, and terrorism, all to be used against South African whites. He was asked what he would owe the Soviets if he and his fellow revolutionaries ever came to power. “Gratitude,” he said with a smile. “Only gratitude.” But the Soviets are not in the market for gratitude. They are in the market for South Africa. The richest country on the continent in natural resources and economic development and the most important in strategic location, it is one of the most tantalizing prizes in the Third World. Moscow covets both the treasure trove of minerals, many of which the U.S. relies upon for its defense industry, and also the shipping routes around the Cape of Good Hope, through which 90 percent of Western Europe’s oil passes.

  If the ANC revolutionaries succeed, African blacks will simply trade their white African rulers for white Russians. If the United States can assist in the evolution of South Africa into a pluralistic, economically prosperous nation, it will serve as an inspiring role model for other struggling African nations. If the ANC and its Soviet sponsors succeed in South Africa, it will provide just another model for totalitarian dictators.

  A race war against South Africa is not the way to end racism in South Africa. It is the way to end the lives of millions of people, the prosperity of both blacks and whites, and also the country’s orientation toward the West. A race war is precisely what will happen if the West continues to assault the South African economy through counterproductive economic sanctions and the ANC continues to gain in its campaign for influence inside South Africa and legitimacy outside it.

  After a year and a half of U.S. trade sanctions and forced divestment by U.S. firms, their failure is glaringly apparent. As a result of these measures South African blacks have no more political freedom than they did before. All that has changed is that their economic position is weaker. Now that we have turned to punitive measures our diplomatic leverage over Pretoria is vastly diminished, and the government has cracked down hard on dissent. The eighty American corporations forced to pull out of South Africa can no longer enforce the fair-employment practices that had made life significantly better for blacks. Thousands of jobs are threatened, and some moderate black leaders, realizing that sanctions hurt black workers far more than Apartheid, are questioning the policy they once championed.

  The ANC encourages economic sanctions and other policies they hope will bring about mass unemployment among blacks and thus increase their “revolutionary consciousness.” So far, fortunately, the U.S. Congress’s sanctions have not had that effect. When Congress reviews these measures, it can decide either to toughen them—and thus make the ANC’s policy America’s policy—or abandon them and adopt a new strategy of prodding Pretoria down the road to reform through a combination of relentless diplomatic pressure and positive economic incentives. Since it will not provide instant democracy for blacks a gradual policy may not suit liberal American intellectuals, but it will serve the best interests of the people of South Africa, black as well as white.

  Those who contend that the reason for bad government in Africa is that most of its people are black miss the mark. Except for Ethiopia and Liberia none of the forty-two governments in black Africa was in existence thirty-one years ago. Fifteen of the twenty countries in Latin America had independence for over 120 years before they became democracies.

  In 1815, even as he was helping bring about this new era of Latin American independence, Simón Bolívar asked, “Is it conceivable that a people recently freed from its chains can ascend into the sphere of liberty without falling into the abyss?”

  If he were here today, he would be depressed as he read about the chaos in Haiti, the communist dictatorships in Cuba and Nicaragua, the authoritarian regimes in Chile and Paraguay, and the economic crisis in Mexico. But Bolívar, one of the Western Hemisphere’s most farsighted statesmen, would look beyond these immediate problems and point out that Latin America is still in a promising historical position. It has great problems, but unlike some other parts of the world Latin America has the human and natural resources to solve its problems and to move into an era of unprecedented progress with freedom in the twenty-first century.

  When I returned from my riot-marred trip to South America in 1958, I said that the only time that Latin America made the front pages in the United States was when there was a revolution or a riot at a soccer match. My comment was only partly facetious. We pay far more attention to what happens on the other side of the world than to our next-door neighbors in the Americas. Our attention now is justifiably focused on preventing the spread of communism in Central America, but we should also develop policies to encourage economic growth and political stability throughout all of Latin America before other countries become vulnerable to communist subversion. If the giant political forest of South America ever catches fire, any success we may have in extinguishing the brushfire in our Central American backyard will appear empty indeed.

  Latin America’s greatest promise, and one of its biggest problems, is its huge population. At the beginning of World War II it had 130 million people, about the same as the United States. Today, 300 million live in Latin America and 230 million in the United States. By the middle of the next century, Latin America will have three times as many people as North America. By 1999 the two most populous cities in the world will be Mexico City and São Paulo, Brazil. During this century it has been customary for people in Latin America to refer to the United States as the giant of the North. In the next century we will be referring to Latin America, and two great nations in particular, as the giants of the South.

  Brazil and Mexico illustrate the challenges facing Latin America and also its virtually unlimited potential.

  Brazil today has been compared to the United States at the end of the last century. It is a vast, largely unexplored land with a multiracial and -ethnic population of 135 million. It is the fifth-largest country in the world, with the sixth-largest population and the eighth-largest economy. Unfortunately, economic growth has far outpaced political and social development. Brazil has some of the Third World’s most magnificent cities surrounded by some of the most notorious slums; a friend once described Rio de Janeiro to me as a beautiful lady with dirty underclothes. Brazil also has the unenviable distinction as being the Third World’s largest debtor nation.

  If Brazil’s current economic crisis can be resolved, its democracy will be strengthened and a brilliant future will be assured. The solutions are free trade, more private enterprise, and a reasonable compromise on the debt issue.

  Brazil’s economic planners should open their markets and integrate their country further into a world economy where they already compete strongly. But we cannot expect them to do so if we maintain our restrictions on Brazilian imports. The giant of the North and this giant of the South, military allies in World War II, must n
ow become economic allies through reciprocal trade policies that will serve the interests of both countries.

  So that Brazil can compete more vigorously in the world economy, the government, which controls almost two thirds of the nation’s industry, should reduce its role in the domestic economy by embracing the privatization movement. Brazilians are born entrepreneurs. In 1986 a million people left salaried jobs to create over 200,000 new businesses. The government should leave economic growth to the people and concentrate instead on improving social conditions. Half of all Brazilians are under twenty years old, and half of these get no education. Millions still live in poverty.

  The Brazilian debt problem is as much political as economic. The government must not succumb to the populist urge to repudiate its debts or to increase anti–free-market policies. On the other hand, the lending governments and bankers must not dictate such unreasonable terms to Brazil and other debtors that their governments will feel impelled to consider repudiation. This tragic development would undermine stability in the lending nations and the Third World alike.

  Today Brazil is going through one of the greatest political and economic crises in recent history. There is a hard road ahead, but also great rewards. Its leaders and people are learning one of freedom’s harshest lessons: A system which places no artificial ceiling on success sometimes provides no floor for failure.

  I am confident that Brazil will overcome its difficulties, because I have great respect for the political skill of its leadership. Our ambassador to the United Nations, General Vernon A. Walters, probably knows Brazil better than any other American. I vividly remember his telling me thirty years ago, after a communist-led mob attacked our motorcade in Caracas, Venezuela, that the Brazilians’ Portuguese background gave them a different outlook from that of their neighbors, whose heritage is predominantly Spanish. “You see the difference when you go to a bullfight,” he said. “The Spanish kill the bull. The Portuguese only tease it.” With equally subtle, discerning leadership that avoids violence and guarantees security without destroying liberty, Brazil will inevitably be an economic superpower in the twenty-first century.