Seize the Moment

by Richard Nixon

  • • •

  The demise of communism does not mean the end of poverty any more than it means the victory of freedom. During the cold war, we addressed only half the problem. Many of these nations suffered from the twin depredations of Communist insurgency and grim poverty. While the Communists talked about the people’s problems, we too often talked only about the Communists. That must now change.

  In most of the underdeveloped world, the road toward economic and political reform has been the road less traveled. While some countries have made valiant efforts to escape poverty, they face overwhelming obstacles to success. If these nations have the courage to implement market-oriented reform, we must support them every step of the way. We should not try to run their economic affairs from Washington. Each country in the southern hemisphere has its own distinct traditions. Each country must find its own path to development. Our task is not to point our finger at these countries’ failings. Instead, we should point out the lessons of the underdeveloped world’s success stories. We must help these struggling nations foster their creative energies so that they can unlock their own potential to achieve freedom and prosperity.

  To achieve these goals, we must have patience. Many developing countries see America through the eyes of the mass media and our pop culture. They think America is a problem-free society. The television programs we export—“Dallas,” “Knots Landing,” “Dynasty,” and others—paint an unrealistically glamorous picture of America. The people of the southern hemisphere need to understand that maintaining freedom and prosperity requires constant effort and that our country has deep problems that our prosperity has not solved.

  The southern hemisphere holds unlimited potential for success, but it also faces daunting odds. We are therefore presented with an immense challenge. If we turn our backs on the countries of the southern hemisphere, we will never narrow the widening gap between the developed and underdeveloped worlds. And if the future becomes a “tale of two worlds,” the foundation of future peace and stability will have been erected on soft ground.

  7

  THE RENEWAL OF AMERICA

  IN A DRAMATIC ADDRESS before a joint session of Congress forty-six years ago, President Truman asked for military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey to meet the Communist threat to those countries. Two freshman congressmen, John F. Kennedy and I, voted in favor of his proposal. It was a difficult vote for him because the liberal Democrats in his Massachusetts district opposed all military aid. It was a difficult vote for me because the conservative Republicans in my district opposed all foreign aid. We voted as we did because we were motivated by a great cause that transcended partisan politics: the defeat of communism. We thereby helped to launch the great bipartisan initiative that deterred Soviet aggression in Western Europe for over four decades.

  Today, we are witnessing one of the great watersheds in history. The cold war world order—based on two clashing ideologies, two opposing geopolitical blocs, and two competing superpowers—has been irrevocably shattered. We now have a cause even greater than the defeat of communism—the victory of freedom. If we meet the challenges of peace, our legacy will be not just that we saved the world from communism but that we helped make the world safe for freedom.

  Yet those who have hailed the beginning of a new order in which peace and freedom are secure speak prematurely. The peaceful revolution in Eastern Europe did not prevent the violent conquest of Kuwait by Iraq. Those who two years ago touted the conventional wisdom that economic power had replaced military power as the major instrument of foreign policy were exposed as false prophets when Japan and Germany proved impotent in responding to Saddam Hussein’s aggression. Despite the great victories for freedom in 1989 and 1991, both the Persian Gulf crisis in 1990 and the coup attempt by Soviet hard-liners in 1991 demonstrated that the world remains a dangerous and unpredictable place.

  America has an indispensable role to play in the world. No other nation can take our place. Some might eventually be able to replace us militarily. Others might be able to take our place economically. But only the United States has the military, economic, and political power to lead the way in defending and extending freedom and in deterring and resisting aggression. More important, our influence stems not only from our military and economic power but also from the enormous appeal of our ideals and our example. We are the only great power in history to have made its entrance onto the world stage not by the force of its arms but by the force of its ideas.

  As we chart our course, we must ask ourselves four fundamental questions. Do we have the will to lead? Do we have the means to lead? How should we lead? How can we renew America at home so that we can lead abroad not only through our actions but also through our example?

  • • •

  André Malraux once observed that the United States is the only nation in the world to have become a world power without intending or trying to do so. We have traditionally been reluctant to play a world role commensurate with our enormous potential power. But when events have compelled America to become involved, we have led with skill and will equal to those of any European great power.

  Idealism has been at once our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. American idealism—sometimes naive, sometimes misguided, sometimes overzealous—has always been at the center of our foreign policy. On the one hand, it has at times fostered a profound impulse toward isolationism. More comfortable with black-and-white moral choices than with the inevitable gray areas of world politics, we have often opted to withdraw into isolation in order to avoid tainting our idealism with the realities of power politics. On the other hand, this idealism has served as an indispensable foundation to sustain our commitment to the great moral causes of the twentieth century. It has enabled us to lead not on the basis of narrow and selfish interests but through the appeal of high ideals and common values.

  When untempered by realism, our idealism has caused our foreign policy to swing between ideological crusades and shortsighted isolationism. When combined with hardheaded realism, America’s idealism has left a record of world leadership that no nation, past or present, can match.

  After playing a major role in the Allied victory in World War I, we refused to join the League of Nations and slashed our defense budgets so drastically that when Hitler came to power in 1933, our army was the sixteenth largest in the world, smaller than even Romania’s. After World War II, we avoided that mistake, not by choice but by necessity. The British and the French were too weakened by war to play a leading role. The Germans and the Japanese were defeated enemies. The Soviet Union had become an adversary rather than an ally.

  Never has a world power been more generous and responsible in exerting global leadership than the United States after World War II. We built the great transatlantic and transpacific alliances that deterred Soviet aggression. We helped to rebuild the economies of both our allies and our former enemies. We gave independence to the Philippines in 1946 and returned Okinawa to Japan in 1971. While we benefited by preserving the free world and by participating in a great cause, we asked for none of the geopolitical tributes traditionally claimed by victorious powers.

  We parried dozens of Soviet political and military probes in every corner of the world. When Communist North Korea attacked South Korea in 1950, we provided 90 percent of the troops and suffered 95 percent of the fatalities in the U.N. expeditionary force that turned back the Communist aggression. When South Vietnam was attacked by Soviet- and Chinese-backed North Vietnam, we provided economic aid, training, and eventually armed forces to assist the South Vietnamese in their efforts to repel the aggressors.

  In 1972, we opened the door to a new relationship with China and initiated an era of negotiations with the Soviet Union. We not only advanced our short-term interests but also began a process of fostering long-term peaceful change in the Communist world. Contact with the West helped seeds of free thought sprout into political movements that would later blossom into peaceful change.

 
; But in the mid-1970s the United States began to lose its sense of purpose. One result was that after we withdrew our forces from Vietnam under the Paris Peace Agreements of 1973, the Congress irresponsibly slashed U.S. aid to South Vietnam by over 80 percent even as the Soviet Union and China were increasing their aid to Hanoi to record levels. Thus deprived of the military supplies needed to survive, South Vietnam fell to North Vietnam in 1975, two years after all American combat troops had returned home. While not a military defeat for the United States, it was a devastating defeat for the American spirit.

  In the late 1970s, a malaise enveloped the nation’s dominant elites. America’s confidence was broken. We lost our geopolitical bearings. Our idealism steered us toward isolationism. Instead of shaping history, the nation let itself be buffeted by events. Emboldened by our lack of will, the Soviet Union rapidly established beachheads in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. We comforted ourselves with the notion that our previous world role had been overzealous because of our “inordinate fear of communism.” By 1979, when the Red Army invaded Afghanistan, our reaction was primarily symbolic—refusing to participate in the Olympic games, curtailing grain sales to Moscow, and providing some antiquated arms to the Afghan resistance.

  While not recognized as such at the time, that Soviet invasion marked the low-water mark of U.S. world leadership. It was shortly afterward, in 1981, that we began down the long road back to playing our indispensable role as leader of the free world. President Reagan has been credited with restoring American economic and military strength. His greatest contribution, however, was to restore America’s spiritual strength. He renewed America’s faith in its ideals and recommitted America to a responsible world role.

  Ironically, the defeat of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the Soviet Union in 1991—the high-water mark for America’s ideals—renewed the debate over whether we should remain a major player. Our sense of idealism fueled the arguments of both the isolationists and the internationalists. Isolationists, on both the right and the left, demanded that the United States “bring the boys home” and concentrate its resources on solving our domestic problems. Those on the right contended that we had accomplished our mission and had no further reason to pursue a global role. Those on the left argued either that America was a declining power that no longer had the resources to play such a role or that because of its problems at home, America was not worthy to lead abroad. Internationalists appealed to our idealism in their advocacy of a continued world role. Some urged that we rely on the U.N. to resist aggression. Others called for America to take on global crusades at the expense of America itself.

  These views are narrowly myopic. We do not face a choice between dealing with domestic problems and playing an international role. Our challenge is to do both by setting realistic goals and by managing our limited resources. On both fronts—abroad and at home—America must be a dynamic innovator and leader. America cannot be at peace in a world of wars, and we cannot have a healthy American economy in a sick world economy. To lead abroad serves our interests at home, and to solve our problems at home enhances our leadership abroad. Americans will not support a strong foreign policy to deal with problems abroad unless we have an equally strong domestic policy to deal with our problems at home.

  We can readily summon the will and resources to make practical idealism the hallmark of our role in the world. We should not set out to try to remake the world in our image, but neither should we retreat from our global responsibilities. We should set goals within the limits of our resources while working to the limits of our power. We should remain dedicated to the ideals of freedom and justice that have served as the beacons of our foreign policy, but be realistic and practical about what it takes to move the world in their direction.

  • • •

  Does the United States have the means to play this role? The military forces, foreign aid programs, and other instruments needed to play a great-power role are expensive. But with a GNP over $5 trillion, we have the resources to meet the challenge. As Herbert Stein has written, “America is a very rich country. We are not rich enough to do everything, but we are rich enough to do everything important.”

  We can afford the military forces necessary to ensure our security and defend our interests. But we must radically alter our force structure. The potential challenges of the next two decades are vastly different from those we confronted in the past. During the cold war, military planners spoke of building forces capable of simultaneously fighting one and a half wars—a major war in Europe and a minor war in a secondary theater. With the Soviet Union’s disintegration as a world power, those days are gone. To prepare for the wars of the future, we must overhaul the military forces we used to deter those of the past.

  We must recognize that we live in a dangerous world where the former Soviet Union still has thousands of nuclear warheads targeted on the United States and where aggressive nations in the developing world will soon have nuclear programs and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Arms control has failed to neutralize either of these potential threats. Even if the START agreement and the additional Bush and Gorbachev weapons reductions are implemented, the former Soviet Union will have a more potent first-strike capability than it did when I signed the SALT I treaty in 1972. In addition, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty not only failed to restrain Iraq’s acquisition of nuclear technologies but the mandated inspections even helped provide cover for its covert nuclear program. The United States must commit itself to deploying by the end of the decade a limited space- and ground-based defense against ballistic missiles through the SDI. With nuclear weapons and their delivery systems proliferating, we cannot count on the chimera of arms control alone. We need defenses.

  On the conventional level, we should put a premium on the flexibility of our forces. When the clear and present danger was Moscow’s armies in Europe, we needed to build heavy forces dedicated solely to NATO’s defense. In today’s world, we need lighter forces and a smaller but more flexible force posture capable of responding to unforeseeable contingencies in other parts of the world. We must retain active forces adequate to respond to crises like the invasion of Kuwait and well-trained and-equipped reserves capable of reinforcing our allies in Europe and Japan in a major crisis. We must sharpen our technological edge. As the Gulf War demonstrated, this saves lives. But while we should vigorously research new technologies and develop new systems, we should not make the mistake we have too often made in the past of ordering huge numbers of new weapons that become obsolete before the final units roll off the assembly line.

  Economically, we should not panic but must not become complacent. Our industrial productivity and technological innovation still lead the world. Our GNP leads that of our nearest rival by a factor of two. Our economy attracts more foreign investment than any other major industrial power. Although our advantage is narrowing, our per capita productivity is still higher than that of Japan, our closest competitor. But to stay ahead we must move ahead. To ensure we have the economic means needed to lead the world politically, we must seize the moment to renew and extend our commitment to the values of competition, education, and investment.

  Instead of complaining about international competition, we should welcome it. Finland’s Paavo Nurmi, the champion Olympic long-distance runner in 1924, had no competition. He had to run with a watch strapped to his wrist so that he could see whether he was running in championship form. He never broke four minutes in the mile. Had Nurmi faced strong competition, he would probably have broken the four-minute barrier thirty years before Britain’s Roger Bannister did in 1954. Rather than hunkering down in the foxhole of protectionism or behind the wall of restrictive immigration, we should relish the opportunity to achieve excellence by competing with others. As St. Thomas Aquinas observed seven centuries ago, “If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.”

  America needs a National Economic Council with a status equal
to the National Security Council. In our embassies abroad and our bureaucracies at home, economic issues must receive the same priority attention as political and military issues. Today they seldom get it. In Japan, government is an ally—and some say even an instrument—of business. Too often in America, government is an opponent of business. This does not mean that we should adopt a national industrial policy under which unqualified bureaucrats would dictate business decisions. Nor does it mean we should subsidize American industry to even the score with Japan or other industrialized powers. But it does mean that we must take steps to ensure that we have a coherent strategy to prevail in the global economic competition and that U.S. multinational corporations are enabled to compete on a fair and equal basis with their foreign rivals.

  The United States will lose its economic and technological edge if we fail to do a better job of educating young Americans for the tasks they must perform as we move from an industrial to a high-tech economy. Over 25 percent of Americans do not graduate from high school, and many who do graduate lack the basic skills needed in a modern society. In the crucial disciplines of math and science, our teenagers trail those of virtually every other industrialized country. While some of our public schools perform well, many are less effective than schools in many countries of the underdeveloped world. Most school standards have become so lax that students no longer feel a need to work hard, with two-thirds of today’s high school seniors spending an hour or less on homework, reading ten or fewer pages of text, and watching over three hours of mind-numbing television each day.