The advocates of a greater role for the United Nations ignore the abysmal record of collective security. Woodrow Wilson envisioned the League of Nations as the body that would make World War I the “war to end all wars.” Yet within two decades the bloodiest war in history engulfed the world. In the more than one hundred wars since 1950, the U.N. adopted scores of resolutions condemning aggression, but took effective action in only two—the Korean War, when Moscow boycotted the Security Council debate and thus negated its veto power, and the Persian Gulf War, when all the major powers had a common interest in stopping Iraq. Because no great power will abdicate its right to defend its interests, the United Nations cannot operate successfully unless the major powers agree in advance. Though useful in slapping down minor aggressors, the U.N. will be paralyzed in any conflict that puts great powers on opposite sides.
Although President Bush has used the phrase “new world order,” he does not share this woolly-headed idealism. In the Persian Gulf conflict, he used the U.N. rather than being used by the U.N. Moreover, as he explicitly stated, failure by the U.N. to authorize “all necessary means” to liberate Kuwait would not have changed his course. Even without the U.N.’s blessings, the United States and its allies had the right to use force under the principle of a state’s inherent right of individual or collective self-defense. President Bush clearly aspires to enlarge the constructive role of the U.N. as part of a “new world order.” But he recognizes that no substitute exists for U.S. leadership and power. Where U.S. vital interests are threatened, the United States should act with the U.N. where possible but without it if necessary.
A new American mission in the world must be based not on the soft sand of unrealistic idealism but on the hard rock of enduring geopolitical realities. States have ideals and interests. To advance their interests, they acquire power, including military forces. In advancing interests, states often come into conflict. Without an umpire to settle disputes, such conflicts can—and almost certainly will—lead to war. These principles preceded the cold war and will survive the cold war. Unless the world transcends the current international system, we must accept them as immutable facts of life.
The sterile debate over whether we should have a policy of realism or one of idealism misses the mark. Idealism without realism is impotent. Realism without idealism is immoral. As Robert Kaufman has observed, “Realpolitik alone will not suffice to win the domestic support necessary to sustain an effective foreign policy. Americans must believe that U.S. foreign policy is right and legitimate as well as in our self-interest.”
In charting our course, practical idealism and enlightened realism should guide our policies. The world has not changed to the extent that we can ignore the realities of power politics. But it has changed enough so that we can devote more resources and attention to issues other than security in the narrowest sense. Today, there are vast opportunities to paint on a wider canvas. The world, though not a blank canvas, is an unfinished work. We should make our mark, adding bold strokes and bright colors, not timid touches and pale pastels. Our motif should be the concept of practical idealism.
The first task is to distinguish between vital interests, critical interests, and peripheral interests. No country has the resources to defend all these interests with its own military forces all the time. As Frederick the Great observed, he who tries to defend everywhere defends nothing. Making strategy means making choices, and making choices means enforcing a set of clear priorities.
—An interest is vital if its loss, in and of itself, directly endangers the security of the United States. The survival and independence of Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and the Persian Gulf states are vital to our own security. We also have a vital interest in preventing the acquisition of nuclear weapons by potential aggressors in the underdeveloped world. The United States has no choice but to respond with military force if necessary to turn back threats to these interests.
—A critical interest is one that, if lost, would create a direct threat to one of our vital interests. De Gaulle once observed that Central America is only an incident on the road to Mexico. Whittaker Chambers pointed out that the war in Korea was not just about Korea but also about Japan. Korea and Central America therefore are critical U.S. interests. We must recognize that the United States must sometimes treat critical interests as if they were vital as part of a prudent strategy of forward defense.
—A peripheral interest is one that, if taken by a hostile power, would only distantly threaten a vital or critical interest. While we would not want to see an aggressor seize a country such as Mali, we cannot conclude that such an event would endanger important American interests and require a military response.
Our overall security strategy must calibrate what we will do to protect an interest to its strategic importance. We should then match our capabilities—and the will to use them—to the threat we face. We should not send the Eighty-second Airborne Division to defend a peripheral interest in Mauritania, but we must not hesitate from doing so to defend a vital interest in the Persian Gulf.
Beyond its security concerns, the United States has a profound interest in the survival of democratic states, the expansion of economic prosperity through free trade and development, and the promotion of democratic forms of government. The level of commitment we make and the types of foreign policy instruments we use to pursue these values will vary widely. To secure our top priority among these values, the survival of threatened democratic states such as Israel or South Korea, we should be prepared to employ military force if necessary. But diplomacy, foreign aid, hardheaded negotiating, and sanctions will be the principal instruments to advance our lower-priority values. Our belief in these values is absolute, but our commitment to advance them in specific cases must be limited by our capabilities. The level of our response must be balanced against the costs, risks, and the possibility of success.
A policy of practical idealism may not be as emotionally satisfying as a clarion call “to bear any burden and fight any foe” to advance democracy or as a smug insistence on turning our backs to the complex problems of a troubled world. Americans usually respond to lifting rhetoric of idealistic crusaders, but just as often balk at staying the course when the crusade hits tough going. Practical idealism, with its limited objectives and measured commitments, offers a sustainable approach to global engagement. A world of opportunities exists today for major positive contributions by the United States. To take advantage of them, what is needed is not vast resources but creative ideas and sustained leadership.
—In the former Soviet Union—where the Communist revolution of 1917 has been succeeded by the revolution of freedom in 1991—the noncommunist governments of the republics are searching for a way to bring prosperity and progress to their long-suffering peoples. Our challenge is to help them find the way. We have a tremendous opportunity to shape the political system that will succeed the one built by Lenin and Stalin.
—In Europe—newly united after a half century of ideological division—we face the twin tasks of redefining NATO’s mission and ensuring the success of the fragile new democracies of Eastern Europe. The most successful regional alliance in history, NATO should become the focal point of cooperative foreign policy initiatives by the world’s industrial democracies. Helping Eastern Europe’s postcommunist recovery must be a top priority, not only for its own sake, but also because the fate of reform there will profoundly affect the prospects for reform in the Soviet Union.
—Along the Pacific rim—the world’s new economic locomotive—the lack of a comprehensive security framework keeps the region on edge. Moscow and Tokyo, estranged for more than fifty years, remain at loggerheads politically. Moscow and Beijing, after a wary rapprochement, remain divided by a long history of national and ideological rivalry. The region as a whole retains suspicions of Japan’s ultimate geopolitical aspirations, particularly as Tokyo takes its first tentative steps in almost half a century on the world stage. Our role as the key balanc
er can enhance stability and ensure continued regional prosperity.
—In the Muslim world—turbulent, unstable, but vitally important—the forces of modernism, radicalism, and fundamentalism have been struggling to win the hearts and minds of the peoples of thirty-seven nations with a combined population of over 850 million. Whether they choose to follow the path of pro-Western modernism of Turkey, secular radicalism of Iraq, or obscurantist fundamentalism of Iran, the evolution of the Muslim countries will have enormous consequences for the entire world. How America and the West deal with the Muslim world will contribute significantly to which choice these countries make.
—In the underdeveloped world—where 78 percent of the human race lives—many nations face not dilemmas of development but crises of regression, as incompetent political leaders and senseless economic policies squander the resources and energies of some of the world’s most capable people. We have the opportunity to take the lessons of the developing world’s success stories—South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong—and help apply them to other societies, thereby creating the hope that future generations will escape the misery of grinding poverty.
—In the United States—the richest and strongest nation in the world—we confront pervasive domestic problems of crime, drugs, poor education, inadequate health care, racial discrimination, and urban blight. When Moscow’s cold war expansionism threatened the survival of the West, foreign policy necessarily became our top priority. But today foreign and domestic problems should receive equal priority. Though they compete for our attention and resources, we need to engage ourselves on both fronts. Success abroad will bolster our confidence and unity at home, and success at home will enhance our prestige and leadership abroad. Above all, we must not allow our problems at home to blind us to the responsibilities and opportunities we have as the world’s only complete superpower to provide needed leadership abroad.
Our mission was not completed with the defeat of communism. We must now work to ensure the success of freedom. Winning a revolution is not easy, but governing after winning is far more difficult. This is the challenge facing the new democracies in Eastern Europe and the new non-communist governments in the former Soviet republics. We must do everything possible to help them measure up to it. We should bear in mind that many East Europeans chose freedom primarily because they hated communism, not because they loved capitalism. Democracy, free markets, and private enterprise are on trial. If they fail, these nations could suffer massive disillusionment and even experience counterrevolutions, restoring not communism but other authoritarian or statist systems. Like coups, not all revolutions succeed. No revolution is permanent if it fails to produce a better life.
Just as the free world turned to America for leadership to confront the post—World War II Soviet threat, the world as a whole will look to America for leadership to grapple with the post-cold-war problems. For most of the world’s people, the twentieth century has been a century of war, repression, and poverty. For the first time in history, there is a real chance to make the next century a century of peace, freedom, and progress. Today, only one nation can provide the leadership to achieve those goals. The United States is privileged to be that nation. Our moment of truth has arrived. We must seize the moment.
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THE FORMER EVIL EMPIRE
A MULTINATIONAL EMPIRE, at its peak composed of more than a dozen nations, began to break apart. It was a relic of conquests accumulated over centuries, a mosaic of peoples with little in common except historical grievances against the imperial center and antagonisms toward each other. While Western capitals urged radical reform, a corrupt and dictatorial government—out of place in an increasingly democratic world—tried to pacify a sullen but increasingly assertive people. A rump parliament, partially elected but largely powerless, created more resentment than it defused. Doled out in half-measures, economic reform not only failed to cut the crushing fiscal burden of a huge standing army and parasitic bureaucracy but also increased prices for bread and other basic commodities while average wages dropped. Unable to collect taxes or enforce conscription, the center issued decree upon decree that vanished like water poured onto desert sands. As the center’s power waned, disorder broke out in the provinces, prompting deployment of regular and special troops to suppress nationalists. With the leaders of the military and security forces gaining a decisive voice over government policies, the regime’s base of support steadily narrowed. Within a few years, the empire collapsed as a result of a fatal crisis of legitimacy.
While this synopsis reads like recent news dispatches from the Soviet Union, it actually describes the demise of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As I visited the Soviet Union in March 1991, I sensed that I was witnessing the death throes of an old system and the birth pangs of a new one. When the coup by Communist hard-liners failed on August 23, 1991, the new “sick man of Europe” drew his last breath. The subsequent appointment of a noncommunist government and declarations of independence by a majority of the Soviet republics marked the passing of one of this century’s great false faiths and most fearsome totalitarian systems. In the wake of the old regime came not the rise of a renewed Soviet Union but the birth of new nations, though it remains unclear whether they will be stillborn or develop into full members of the family of nations.
Any revolution contains as much potential for evil as for good. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev once said that the triumph of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 represented a “new dawn for humanity.” In reality, it turned out to be the twilight before the fall of the totalitarian night. Just as the Chinese word for crisis is composed of the two characters for danger and opportunity, the situation we face combines both peril and promise. In toppling what President Ronald Reagan once called the “evil empire,” the nations of the former Soviet Union have an opportunity to build a new order that is neither evil nor an empire. At the same time, they confront three dangers that could make the victory of freedom short-lived.
—The Soviet bureaucracy—the “system” that has ruled the country for seventy-five years—remains in the hands of members of the former Communist party. The danger is that they will use their power not to restore the old Communist order but to sabotage the new democratic order. By frustrating reform, they hope to create economic chaos that will lead to calls for a new authoritarianism based on a desire not for communism but for order.
—The Russian imperial tradition, the fundamental but unspoken pillar of support for the previous Communist regime, has retreated but not disappeared. The danger exists that at some point a demagogue will revive Russian imperialism by depicting the defeat of the Communist center as a defeat for the Russian nation. In such hands, the Kremlin might then use the ethnic Russian minorities in the former Soviet republics to try to reestablish Russian domination.
—Communism has been totally discredited, but socialism appeals to a broad spectrum of Soviet society. As a true believer in communism, Gorbachev consistently resisted genuine free-market reforms on ideological grounds. As democratic politicians, reformers may succumb to the allure of democratic socialism and may balk at the needed wrenching economic changes out of fear of the voters, who expect the security of fixed prices and guaranteed jobs and housing and fear the uncertainty of the market.
A wide range of views exists on what tack the West should take in responding to the Soviet crisis. Some urge that we pour in massive economic assistance immediately to the new noncommunist governments to consolidate the victory of the reformers. Others contend that we must use aid to reverse the disintegration of the Soviet Union and prevent potential international “instability.” Others say that we need a step-by-step aid program that will reward each increment of economic reforms with Western assistance. Still others hold that we should set our policy on cruise control, waiting for events to sort themselves out before we accelerate or hit the brakes on Western help to Moscow.
All of these arguments address only par
t of the issue. The key strategic question is not what kind of help we should give but what kind of successor to the Soviet Union we wish to see emerge from the current crisis. In this respect, we should seek to advance one key principle: democratic self-determination. We must not use aid to prop up the center—whether ruled by Gorbachev or Yeltsin—at the expense of the republics. With the death of communism, a stable order can be built only by recognizing the legitimate rights of nations to determine their own political destinies through democratic means. If the new noncommunist leaders in Moscow try to cobble together a new centralized union or federation, it will be an unstable one. If they allow each former Soviet republic to determine its relationship with the center—including the option of outright independence—the result will be a sturdy new commonwealth based on the natural economic ties mandated by proximity, interdependence, and market forces.
The Soviet revolution has opened up new vistas for constructive relations with the West. In the past, our conflicting values led us to look for the few areas where common interests permitted limited cooperation. Today, our growing common values have created almost limitless possibilities for developing cooperative projects that serve our mutual interests. The first item on our new agenda must be to resolve old business, the outstanding issues of the cold war, such as arms control and Moscow’s aid to third world totalitarians. The second item must be to assist those former Soviet republics that take the needed and painful steps to transform their state-dominated economies into market-based ones. A policy of selective assistance that differentiates among republics on the basis of their commitment to economic and political reform will create powerful incentives for needed change.
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