Sunday, February 22, 2004
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OK this is a long piece but of worth composition. Enjoy:
Democratic Realism Print Mail
An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World
By Charles Krauthammer
Posted: Thursday, February 12, 2004
SPEECHES
2004 Irving Kristol Lecture
AEI Annual Dinner (Washington)
Publication Date: February 10, 2004
A Unipolar World
Americans have an healthy aversion to foreign policy. It stems from a sense of thrift: Who needs it? We’re protected by two great oceans, we have this continent practically to ourselves and we share it with just two neighbors, both friendly, one so friendly that its people seem intent upon moving in with us.
It took three giants of the twentieth century to drag us into its great battles: Wilson into World War I, Roosevelt into World War II, Truman into the Cold War. And then it ended with one of the great anti-climaxes in history. Without a shot fired, without a revolution, without so much as a press release, the Soviet Union simply gave up and disappeared.
It was the end of everything--the end of communism, of socialism, of the Cold War, of the European wars. But the end of everything was also a beginning. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union died and something new was born, something utterly new--a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe.
This is a staggering new development in history, not seen since the fall of Rome. It is so new, so strange, that we have no idea how to deal with it. Our first reaction--the 1990s--was utter confusion. The next reaction was awe. When Paul Kennedy, who had once popularized the idea of American decline, saw what America did in the Afghan war--a display of fully mobilized, furiously concentrated unipolar power at a distance of 8,000 miles--he not only recanted, he stood in wonder: “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power;” he wrote, “nothing. . . . No other nation comes close. . . . Charlemagne’s empire was merely western European in its reach. The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia, and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison.”
Even Rome is no model for what America is today. First, because we do not have the imperial culture of Rome. We are an Athenian republic, even more republican and infinitely more democratic than Athens. And this American Republic has acquired the largest seeming empire in the history of the world--acquired it in a fit of absent-mindedness greater even than Britain’s. And it was not just absent-mindedness; it was sheer inadvertence. We got here because of Europe’s suicide in the world wars of the twentieth century, and then the death of its Eurasian successor, Soviet Russia, for having adopted a political and economic system so inhuman that, like a genetically defective organism, it simply expired in its sleep. Leaving us with global dominion.
Second, we are unlike Rome, unlike Britain and France and Spain and the other classical empires of modern times, in that we do not hunger for territory. The use of the word “empire” in the American context is ridiculous. It is absurd to apply the word to a people whose first instinct upon arriving on anyone’s soil is to demand an exit strategy. I can assure you that when the Romans went into Gaul and the British into India, they were not looking for exit strategies. They were looking for entry strategies.
In David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, King Faisal says to Lawrence: “I think you are another of these desert-loving English. . . . The English have a great hunger for desolate places.” Indeed, for five centuries, the Europeans did hunger for deserts and jungles and oceans and new continents.
Americans do not. We like it here. We like our McDonalds. We like our football. We like our rock-and-roll. We’ve got the Grand Canyon and Graceland. We’ve got Silicon Valley and South Beach. We’ve got everything. And if that’s not enough, we’ve got Vegas--which is a facsimile of everything. What could we possibly need anywhere else? We don’t like exotic climates. We don’t like exotic languages--lots of declensions and moods. We don’t even know what a mood is. We like Iowa corn and New York hot dogs, and if we want Chinese or Indian or Italian, we go to the food court. We don’t send the Marines for takeout.
That’s because we are not an imperial power. We are a commercial republic. We don’t take food; we trade for it. Which makes us something unique in history, an anomaly, a hybrid: a commercial republic with overwhelming global power. A commercial republic that, by pure accident of history, has been designated custodian of the international system. The eyes of every supplicant from East Timor to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Liberia; Arab and Israeli, Irish and British, North and South Korean are upon us.
That is who we are. That is where we are.
Now the question is: What do we do? What is a unipolar power to do?
Isolationism
The oldest and most venerable answer is to hoard that power and retreat. This is known as isolationism. Of all the foreign policy schools in America, it has the oldest pedigree, not surprising in the only great power in history to be isolated by two vast oceans.
Isolationism originally sprang from a view of America as spiritually superior to the Old World. We were too good to be corrupted by its low intrigues, entangled by its cynical alliances.
Today, however, isolationism is an ideology of fear. Fear of trade. Fear of immigrants. Fear of the Other. Isolationists want to cut off trade and immigration, and withdraw from our military and strategic commitments around the world. Even isolationists, of course, did not oppose the war in Afghanistan, because it was so obviously an act of self-defense--only a fool or a knave or a Susan Sontag could oppose that. But anything beyond that, isolationists oppose. They are for a radical retrenchment of American power--for pulling up the drawbridge to Fortress America.
Isolationism is an important school of thought historically, but not today. Not just because of its brutal intellectual reductionism, but because it is so obviously inappropriate to the world of today--a world of export-driven economies, of massive population flows, and of 9/11, the definitive demonstration that the combination of modern technology and transnational primitivism has erased the barrier between “over there” and over here.
Classical isolationism is not just intellectually obsolete; it is politically bankrupt as well. Four years ago, its most public advocate, Pat Buchanan, ran for president of the United States, and carried Palm Beach. By accident.
Classic isolationism is moribund and marginalized. Who then rules America?
Liberal Internationalism
In the 1990s, it was liberal internationalism. Liberal internationalism is the foreign policy of the Democratic Party and the religion of the foreign policy elite. It has a peculiar history. It traces its pedigree to Woodrow Wilson’s utopianism, Harry Truman’s anticommunism, and John Kennedy’s militant universalism. But after the Vietnam War, it was transmuted into an ideology of passivity, acquiescence and almost reflexive anti-interventionism.
Liberals today proudly take credit for Truman’s and Kennedy’s roles in containing communism, but they prefer to forget that, for the last half of the Cold War, liberals used “cold warrior” as an epithet. In the early 1980s, they gave us the nuclear freeze movement, a form of unilateral disarmament in the face of Soviet nuclear advances. Today, John Kerry boasts of opposing, during the 1980s, what he calls Ronald Reagan’s “illegal war in Central America”--and oppose he did what was, in fact, an indigenous anticommunist rebellion that ultimately succeeded in bringing down Sandinista rule and ushering in democracy in all of Central America.
That boast reminds us how militant was liberal passivity in the last half of the Cold War. But that passivity outlived the Cold War. When Kuwait was invaded, the question was: Should the United States go to war to prevent the Persian Gulf from falling into hostile hands? The Democratic Party joined the Buchananite isolationists in saying No. The Democrats voted No overwhelmingly--two to one in the House, more than four to one in the Senate.
And yet, quite astonishingly, when liberal internationalism came to power just two years later in the form of the Clinton administration, it turned almost hyperinterventionist. It involved us four times in military action: deepening intervention in Somalia, invading Haiti, bombing Bosnia, and finally going to war over Kosovo.
How to explain the amazing transmutation of Cold War and Gulf War doves into Haiti and Balkan hawks? The crucial and obvious difference is this: Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were humanitarian ventures--fights for right and good, devoid of raw national interest. And only humanitarian interventionism--disinterested interventionism devoid of national interest--is morally pristine enough to justify the use of force. The history of the 1990s refutes the lazy notion that liberals have an aversion to the use of force. They do not. They have an aversion to using force for reasons of pure national interest.
And by national interest I do not mean simple self-defense. Everyone believes in self-defense, as in Afghanistan. I am talking about national interest as defined by a Great Power: shaping the international environment by projecting power abroad to secure economic, political, and strategic goods. Intervening militarily for that kind of national interest, liberal internationalism finds unholy and unsupportable. It sees that kind of national interest as merely self-interest writ large, in effect, a form of grand national selfishness. Hence Kuwait, no; Kosovo, yes.
The other defining feature of the Clinton foreign policy was multilateralism, which expressed itself in a mania for treaties. The Clinton administration negotiated a dizzying succession of parchment promises on bioweapons, chemical weapons, nuclear testing, carbon emissions, anti-ballistic missiles, etc.
Why? No sentient being could believe that, say, the chemical or biological weapons treaties were anything more than transparently useless. Senator Joseph Biden once defended the Chemical Weapons Convention, which even its proponents admitted was unenforceable, on the grounds that it would “provide us with a valuable tool”--the “moral suasion of the entire international community.”
Moral suasion? Was it moral suasion that made Qaddafi see the wisdom of giving up his weapons of mass destruction? Or Iran agree for the first time to spot nuclear inspections? It was the suasion of the bayonet. It was the ignominious fall of Saddam--and the desire of interested spectators not to be next on the list. The whole point of this treaty was to keep rogue states from developing chemical weapons. Rogue states are, by definition, impervious to moral suasion.
Moral suasion is a farce. Why then this obsession with conventions, protocols, legalisms? Their obvious net effect is to temper American power. Who, after all, was really going to be most constrained by these treaties? The ABM amendments were aimed squarely at American advances and strategic defenses, not at Russia, which lags hopelessly behind. The Kyoto Protocol exempted India and China. The nuclear test ban would have seriously degraded the American nuclear arsenal. And the landmine treaty (which the Clinton administration spent months negotiating but, in the end, met so much Pentagon resistance that even Clinton could not initial it) would have had a devastating impact on U.S. conventional forces, particularly at the DMZ in Korea.
But that, you see, is the whole point of the multilateral enterprise: To reduce American freedom of action by making it subservient to, dependent on, constricted by the will--and interests--of other nations. To tie down Gulliver with a thousand strings. To domesticate the most undomesticated, most outsized, national interest on the planet--ours.
Today, multilateralism remains the overriding theme of liberal internationalism. When in power in the 1990s, multilateralism expressed itself as a mania for treaties. When out of power in this decade, multilateralism manifests itself in the slavish pursuit of “international legitimacy”--and opposition to any American action undertaken without universal foreign blessing.
Which is why the Democratic critique of the war in Iraq is so peculiarly one of process and not of policy. The problem was that we did not have the permission of the UN; we did not have a large enough coalition; we did not have a second Security Council resolution. Kofi Annan was unhappy and the French were cross.
The Democratic presidential candidates all say that we should have internationalized the conflict, brought in the UN, enlisted the allies. Why? Two reasons: assistance and legitimacy. First, they say, we could have used these other countries to help us in the reconstruction.
This is rich. Everyone would like to have more help in reconstruction. It would be lovely to have the Germans and the French helping reconstruct Baghdad. But the question is moot, and the argument is cynical: France and Germany made absolutely clear that they would never support the overthrow of Saddam. So, accommodating them was not a way to get them into the reconstruction, it was a way to ensure that there would never be any reconstruction, because Saddam would still be in power.
Of course it would be nice if we had more allies rather than fewer. It would also be nice to be able to fly. But when some nations are not with you on your enterprise, including them in your coalition is not a way to broaden it; it’s a way to abolish it.
At which point, liberal internationalists switch gears and appeal to legitimacy--on the grounds that multilateral action has a higher moral standing. I have always found this line of argument incomprehensible. By what possible moral calculus does an American intervention to liberate 25 million people forfeit moral legitimacy because it lacks the blessing of the butchers of Tiananmen Square or the cynics of the Quai d’Orsay?
Which is why it is hard to take these arguments at face value. Look: We know why liberal internationalists demanded UN sanction for the war in Iraq. It was a way to stop the war. It was the Gulliver effect. Call a committee meeting of countries with hostile or contrary interests--i.e., the Security Council--and you have guaranteed yourself another twelve years of inaction.
Historically, multilateralism is a way for weak countries to multiply their power by attaching themselves to stronger ones. But multilateralism imposed on Great Powers, and particularly on a unipolar power, is intended to restrain that power. Which is precisely why France is an ardent multilateralist. But why should America be?
Why, in the end, does liberal internationalism want to tie down Gulliver, to blunt the pursuit of American national interests by making them subordinate to a myriad of other interests?
In the immediate post-Vietnam era, this aversion to national interest might have been attributed to self-doubt and self-loathing. I don’t know. What I do know is that today it is a mistake to see liberal foreign policy as deriving from anti-Americanism or lack of patriotism or a late efflorescence of 1960s radicalism.
On the contrary. The liberal aversion to national interest stems from an idealism, a larger vision of country, a vision of some ambition and nobility--the ideal of a true international community. And that is: To transform the international system from the Hobbesian universe into a Lockean universe. To turn the state of nature into a norm-driven community. To turn the law of the jungle into the rule of law--of treaties and contracts and UN resolutions. In short, to remake the international system in the image of domestic civil society.
They dream of a new world, a world described in 1943 by Cordell Hull, FDR’s secretary of state--a world in which “there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements by which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or promote their interests.”
And to create such a true international community, you have to temper, transcend, and, in the end, abolish the very idea of state power and national interest. Hence the antipathy to American hegemony and American power. If you are going to break the international arena to the mold of domestic society, you have to domesticate its single most powerful actor. You have to abolish American dominance, not only as an affront to fairness, but also as the greatest obstacle on the whole planet to a democratized international system where all live under self-governing international institutions and self-enforcing international norms.
Realism
This vision is all very nice. All very noble. And all very crazy. Which brings us to the third great foreign policy school: realism.
The realist looks at this great liberal project and sees a hopeless illusion. Because turning the Hobbesian world that has existed since long before the Peloponnesian Wars into a Lockean world, turning a jungle into a suburban subdivision, requires a revolution in human nature. Not just an erector set of new institutions, but a revolution in human nature. And realists do not believe in revolutions in human nature, much less stake their future, and the future of their nation, on them.
Realism recognizes the fundamental fallacy in the whole idea of the international system being modeled on domestic society.
First, what holds domestic society together is a supreme central authority wielding a monopoly of power and enforcing norms. In the international arena there is no such thing. Domestic society may look like a place of self-regulating norms, but if somebody breaks into your house, you call 911, and the police arrive with guns drawn. That’s not exactly self-enforcement. That’s law enforcement.
Second, domestic society rests on the shared goodwill, civility and common values of its individual members. What values are shared by, say, Britain, Cuba, Yemen and Zimbabwe--all nominal members of this fiction we call the “international community”?
Of course, you can have smaller communities of shared interests--NAFTA, ANZUS, or the European Union. But the European conceit that relations with all nations--regardless of ideology, regardless of culture, regardless even of open hostility--should be transacted on the EU model of suasion and norms and negotiations and solemn contractual agreements is an illusion. A fisheries treaty with Canada is something real. An Agreed Framework on plutonium processing with the likes of North Korea is not worth the paper it is written on.
The realist believes the definition of peace Ambrose Bierce offered in The Devil’s Dictionary: “Peace: noun, in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.”
Hence the Realist axiom: The “international community” is a fiction. It is not a community, it is a cacophony--of straining ambitions, disparate values and contending power.
What does hold the international system together? What keeps it from degenerating into total anarchy? Not the phony security of treaties, not the best of goodwill among the nicer nations. In the unipolar world we inhabit, what stability we do enjoy today is owed to the overwhelming power and deterrent threat of the United States.
If someone invades your house, you call the cops. Who do you call if someone invades your country? You dial Washington. In the unipolar world, the closest thing to a centralized authority, to an enforcer of norms, is America--American power. And ironically, American power is precisely what liberal internationalism wants to constrain and tie down and subsume in pursuit of some brave new Lockean world.
Realists do not live just in America. I found one in Finland. During the 1997 negotiations in Oslo over the land mine treaty, one of the rare holdouts, interestingly enough, was Finland. The Finnish prime minister stoutly opposed the land mine ban. And for that he was scolded by his Scandinavian neighbors. To which he responded tartly that this was a “very convenient” pose for the “other Nordic countries”--after all, Finland is their land mine.
Finland is the land mine between Russia and Scandinavia. America is the land mine between barbarism and civilization.
Where would South Korea be without America and its landmines along the DMZ? Where would Europe--with its cozy arrogant community--be without America having saved it from the Soviet colossus? Where would the Middle East be had American power not stopped Saddam in 1991?
The land mine that protects civilization from barbarism is not parchment but power, and in a unipolar world, American power--wielded, if necessary, unilaterally. If necessary, preemptively,
Now, those uneasy with American power have made these two means of wielding it--preemption and unilateralism--the focus of unrelenting criticism. The doctrine of preemption, in particular, has been widely attacked for violating international norms.
What international norm? The one under which Israel was universally condemned--even the Reagan Administration joined the condemnation at the Security Council--for preemptively destroying Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981? Does anyone today doubt that it was the right thing to do, both strategically and morally?
In a world of terrorists, terrorist states and weapons of mass destruction, the option of preemption is especially necessary. In the bipolar world of the Cold War, with a stable non-suicidal adversary, deterrence could work. Deterrence does not work against people who ache for heaven. It does not work against undeterrables. And it does not work against undetectables: nonsuicidal enemy regimes that might attack through clandestine means--a suitcase nuke or anonymously delivered anthrax. Against both undeterrables and undetectables, preemption is the only possible strategy.
Moreover, the doctrine of preemption against openly hostile states pursuing weapons of mass destruction is an improvement on classical deterrence. Traditionally, we deterred the use of WMDs by the threat of retaliation after we’d been attacked--and that’s too late; the point of preemption is to deter the very acquisition of WMDs in the first place.
Whether or not Iraq had large stockpiles of WMDs, the very fact that the United States overthrew a hostile regime that repeatedly refused to come clean on its weapons has had precisely this deterrent effect. We are safer today not just because Saddam is gone, but because Libya and any others contemplating trafficking with WMDs, have--for the first time--seen that it carries a cost, a very high cost.
Yes, of course, imperfect intelligence makes preemption problematic. But that is not an objection on principle, it is an objection in practice. Indeed, the objection concedes the principle. We need good intelligence. But we remain defenseless if we abjure the option of preemption.
The other great objection to the way American unipolar power has been wielded is its unilateralism. I would dispute how unilateralist we have in fact been. Constructing ad hoc “coalitions of the willing” hardly qualifies as unilateralism just because they do not have a secretariat in Brussels or on the East River.
Moreover, unilateralism is often the very road to multilateralism. As we learned from the Gulf War, it is the leadership of the United States--indeed, its willingness to act unilaterally if necessary--that galvanized the Gulf War coalition into existence. Without the president of the United States declaring “This will not stand” about the invasion of Kuwait--and making it clear that America would go it alone if it had to--there never would have been the great wall-to-wall coalition that is now so retroactively applauded and held up as a model of multilateralism.
Of course one acts in concert with others if possible. It is nice when others join us in the breach. No one seeks to be unilateral. Unilateralism simply means that one does not allow oneself to be held hostage to the will of others.
Of course you build coalitions when possible. In 2003, we garnered a coalition of the willing for Iraq that included substantial allies like Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy and much of Eastern Europe. France and Germany made clear from the beginning that they would never join in the overthrow of Saddam. Therefore the choice was not a wide coalition versus a narrow one, but a narrow coalition versus none. There were serious arguments against war in Iraq--but the fact France did not approve was not one of them.
Irving Kristol once explained that he preferred the Organization of American States to the United Nations because in the OAS we can be voted down in only three languages, thereby saving translators’ fees. Realists choose not to be Gulliver. In an international system with no sovereign, no police, no protection--where power is the ultimate arbiter and history has bequeathed us unprecedented power--we should be vigilant in preserving that power. And our freedom of action to use it.
But here we come up against the limits of realism: you cannot live by power alone. Realism is a valuable antidote to the woolly internationalism of the 1990s. But realism can only take you so far.
Its basic problem lies in its definition of national interest as classically offered by its great theorist, Hans Morgenthau: Interest defined as power. Morgenthau postulated that what drives nations, what motivates their foreign policy, is the will to power--to keep it and expand it.
For most Americans, will to power might be a correct description of the world--of what motivates other countries--but it cannot be a prescription for America. It cannot be our purpose. America cannot and will not live by realpolitik alone. Our foreign policy must be driven by something beyond power. Unless conservatives present ideals to challenge the liberal ideal of a domesticated international community, they will lose the debate.
Which is why among American conservatives, another, more idealistic, school has arisen that sees America’s national interest as an expression of values.
Democratic Globalism
It is this fourth school that has guided U.S. foreign policy in this decade. This conservative alternative to realism is often lazily and invidiously called neoconservatism, but that is a very odd name for a school whose major proponents in the world today are George W. Bush and Tony Blair--if they are neoconservatives, then Margaret Thatcher was a liberal. There’s nothing neo about Bush, and there’s nothing con about Blair.
Yet they are the principal proponents today of what might be called democratic globalism, a foreign policy that defines the national interest not as power but as values, and that identifies one supreme value, what John Kennedy called “the success of liberty.” As President Bush put it in his speech at Whitehall last November: “The United States and Great Britain share a mission in the world beyond the balance of power or the simple pursuit of interest. We seek the advance of freedom and the peace that freedom brings.”
Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That is the credo of democratic globalism. Which explains its political appeal: America is a nation uniquely built not on blood, race or consanguinity, but on a proposition--to which its sacred honor has been pledged for two centuries. This American exceptionalism explains why non-Americans find this foreign policy so difficult to credit; why Blair has had more difficulty garnering support for it in his country; and why Europe, in particular, finds this kind of value-driven foreign policy hopelessly and irritatingly moralistic.
Democratic globalism sees as the engine of history not the will to power but the will to freedom. And while it has been attacked as a dreamy, idealistic innovation, its inspiration comes from the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the Kennedy inaugural of 1961, and Reagan’s “evil empire” speech of 1983. They all sought to recast a struggle for power between two geopolitical titans into a struggle between freedom and unfreedom, and yes, good and evil.
Which is why the Truman Doctrine was heavily criticized by realists like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan--and Reagan was vilified by the entire foreign policy establishment: for the sin of ideologizing the Cold War by injecting a moral overlay.
That was then. Today, post-9/11, we find ourselves in a similar existential struggle but with a different enemy: not Soviet communism, but Arab-Islamic totalitarianism, both secular and religious. Bush and Blair are similarly attacked for naïvely and crudely casting this struggle as one of freedom versus unfreedom, good versus evil.
Now, given the way not just freedom but human decency were suppressed in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the two major battles of this new war, you would have to give Bush and Blair’s moral claims the decided advantage of being obviously true.
Nonetheless, something can be true and still be dangerous. Many people are deeply uneasy with the Bush-Blair doctrine--many conservatives in particular. When Blair declares in his address to Congress: “The spread of freedom is . . . our last line of defense and our first line of attack,” they see a dangerously expansive, aggressively utopian foreign policy. In short, they see Woodrow Wilson.
Now, to a conservative, Woodrow Wilson is fightin’ words. Yes, this vision is expansive and perhaps utopian. But it ain’t Wilsonian. Wilson envisioned the spread of democratic values through as-yet-to-be invented international institutions. He could be forgiven for that. In 1918, there was no way to know how utterly corrupt and useless those international institutions would turn out to be. Eight decades of bitter experience later--with Libya chairing the UN Commission on Human Rights--there is no way not to know.
Democratic globalism is not Wilsonian. Its attractiveness is precisely that it shares realism’s insights about the centrality of power. Its attractiveness is precisely that it has appropriate contempt for the fictional legalisms of liberal internationalism.
Moreover, democratic globalism is an improvement over realism. What it can teach realism is that the spread of democracy is not just an end but a means, an indispensable means for securing American interests. The reason is simple. Democracies are inherently more friendly to the United States, less belligerent to their neighbors, and generally more inclined to peace. Realists are right that to protect your interests you often have to go around the world bashing bad guys over the head. But that technique, no matter how satisfying, has its limits. At some point, you have to implant something, something organic and self-developing. And that something is democracy.
But where? The danger of democratic globalism is its universalism, its open-ended commitment to human freedom, its temptation to plant the flag of democracy everywhere. It must learn to say no. And indeed, it does say no. But when it says no to Liberia, or Congo, or Burma, or countenances alliances with authoritarian rulers in places like Pakistan or, for that matter, Russia, it stands accused of hypocrisy. Which is why we must articulate criteria for saying yes.
Where to intervene? Where to bring democracy? Where to nation-build? I propose a single criterion: Where it counts.
Call it democratic realism. And this is its axiom: We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity--meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.
Where does it count? Fifty years ago, Germany and Japan counted. Why? Because they were the seeds of the greatest global threat to freedom in midcentury--fascism--and then were turned, by nation building, into bulwarks against the next great threat to freedom, Soviet communism.
Where does it count today? Where the overthrow of radicalism and the beginnings of democracy can have a decisive effect in the war against the new global threat to freedom, the new existential enemy, the Arab-Islamic totalitarianism that has threatened us in both its secular and religious forms for the quarter-century since the Khomeini revolution of 1979.
Establishing civilized, decent, nonbelligerent, pro-Western polities in Afghanistan and Iraq and ultimately their key neighbors would, like the flipping of Germany and Japan in the 1940s, change the strategic balance in the fight against Arab-Islamic radicalism.
Yes, it may be a bridge too far. Realists have been warning against the hubris of thinking we can transform an alien culture because of some postulated natural and universal human will to freedom. And they may yet be right. But how do they know in advance? Half a century ago, we heard the same confident warnings about the imperviousness to democracy of Confucian culture. That proved stunningly wrong. Where is it written that Arabs are incapable of democracy?
Yes, as in Germany and Japan, the undertaking is enormous, ambitious and arrogant. It may yet fail. But we cannot afford not to try. There is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the monster behind 9/11. It’s not Osama bin Laden; it is the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world--oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism. It’s not one man; it is a condition. It will be nice to find that man and hang him, but that’s the cops-and-robbers law-enforcement model of fighting terrorism that we tried for twenty years and that gave us 9/11. This is war, and in war arresting murderers is nice. But you win by taking territory—and leaving something behind.
September 11
We are the unipolar power and what do we do?
In August 1900, David Hilbert gave a speech to the International Congress of Mathematicians naming twenty-three still-unsolved mathematical problems bequeathed by the nineteenth century to the twentieth. Had he presented the great unsolved geopolitical problems bequeathed to the twentieth century, one would have stood out above all--the rise of Germany and its accommodation within the European state system.
Similarly today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we can see clearly the two great geopolitical challenges on the horizon: the inexorable rise of China and the coming demographic collapse of Europe, both of which will irrevocably disequilibrate the international system.
But those problems come later. They are for midcentury. They are for the next generation. And that generation will not even get to these problems unless we first deal with our problem.
And our problem is 9/11 and the roots of Arab-Islamic nihilism. September 11 felt like a new problem, but for all its shock and surprise, it is an old problem with a new face. September 11 felt like the initiation of a new history, but it was a return to history, the twentieth century history of radical ideologies and existential enemies.
The anomaly is not the world of today. The anomaly was the 1990s, our holiday from history. It felt like peace, but it was an interval of dreaming between two periods of reality.
From which 9/11 awoke us. It startled us into thinking everything was new. It’s not. What is new is what happened not on 9/11 but ten years earlier on December 26, 1991: the emergence of the United States as the world’s unipolar power. What is unique is our advantage in this struggle, an advantage we did not have during the struggles of the twentieth century. The question for our time is how to press this advantage, how to exploit our unipolar power, how to deploy it to win the old/new war that exploded upon us on 9/11.
What is the unipolar power to do?
Four schools, four answers.
The isolationists want simply to ignore unipolarity, pull up the drawbridge, and defend Fortress America. Alas, the Fortress has no moat--not after the airplane, the submarine, the ballistic missile--and as for the drawbridge, it was blown up on 9/11.
Then there are the liberal internationalists. They like to dream, and to the extent they are aware of our unipolar power, they don’t like it. They see its use for anything other than humanitarianism or reflexive self-defense as an expression of national selfishness. And they don’t just want us to ignore our unique power, they want us to yield it piece by piece, by subsuming ourselves in a new global architecture in which America becomes not the arbiter of international events, but a good and tame international citizen.
Then there is realism, which has the clearest understanding of the new unipolarity and its uses--unilateral and preemptive if necessary. But in the end, it fails because it offers no vision. It is all means and no ends. It cannot adequately define our mission.
Hence, the fourth school: democratic globalism. It has, in this decade, rallied the American people to a struggle over values. It seeks to vindicate the American idea by making the spread of democracy, the success of liberty, the ends and means of American foreign policy.
I support that. I applaud that. But I believe it must be tempered in its universalistic aspirations and rhetoric from a democratic globalism to a democratic realism. It must be targeted, focused and limited. We are friends to all, but we come ashore only where it really counts. And where it counts today is that Islamic crescent stretching from North Africa to Afghanistan.
In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile crisis, we came to the edge of the abyss. Then, accompanied by our equally shaken adversary, we both deliberately drew back. On September 11, 2001, we saw the face of Armageddon again, but this time with an enemy that does not draw back. This time the enemy knows no reason.
Were that the only difference between now and then, our situation would be hopeless. But there is a second difference between now and then: the uniqueness of our power, unrivaled, not just today but ever. That evens the odds. The rationality of the enemy is something beyond our control. But the use of our power is within our control. And if that power is used wisely, constrained not by illusions and fictions but only by the limits of our mission--which is to bring a modicum of freedom as an antidote to nihilism--we can prevail.
Democratic Realism Print Mail
An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World
By Charles Krauthammer
Posted: Thursday, February 12, 2004
SPEECHES
2004 Irving Kristol Lecture
AEI Annual Dinner (Washington)
Publication Date: February 10, 2004
A Unipolar World
Americans have an healthy aversion to foreign policy. It stems from a sense of thrift: Who needs it? We’re protected by two great oceans, we have this continent practically to ourselves and we share it with just two neighbors, both friendly, one so friendly that its people seem intent upon moving in with us.
It took three giants of the twentieth century to drag us into its great battles: Wilson into World War I, Roosevelt into World War II, Truman into the Cold War. And then it ended with one of the great anti-climaxes in history. Without a shot fired, without a revolution, without so much as a press release, the Soviet Union simply gave up and disappeared.
It was the end of everything--the end of communism, of socialism, of the Cold War, of the European wars. But the end of everything was also a beginning. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union died and something new was born, something utterly new--a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe.
This is a staggering new development in history, not seen since the fall of Rome. It is so new, so strange, that we have no idea how to deal with it. Our first reaction--the 1990s--was utter confusion. The next reaction was awe. When Paul Kennedy, who had once popularized the idea of American decline, saw what America did in the Afghan war--a display of fully mobilized, furiously concentrated unipolar power at a distance of 8,000 miles--he not only recanted, he stood in wonder: “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power;” he wrote, “nothing. . . . No other nation comes close. . . . Charlemagne’s empire was merely western European in its reach. The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia, and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison.”
Even Rome is no model for what America is today. First, because we do not have the imperial culture of Rome. We are an Athenian republic, even more republican and infinitely more democratic than Athens. And this American Republic has acquired the largest seeming empire in the history of the world--acquired it in a fit of absent-mindedness greater even than Britain’s. And it was not just absent-mindedness; it was sheer inadvertence. We got here because of Europe’s suicide in the world wars of the twentieth century, and then the death of its Eurasian successor, Soviet Russia, for having adopted a political and economic system so inhuman that, like a genetically defective organism, it simply expired in its sleep. Leaving us with global dominion.
Second, we are unlike Rome, unlike Britain and France and Spain and the other classical empires of modern times, in that we do not hunger for territory. The use of the word “empire” in the American context is ridiculous. It is absurd to apply the word to a people whose first instinct upon arriving on anyone’s soil is to demand an exit strategy. I can assure you that when the Romans went into Gaul and the British into India, they were not looking for exit strategies. They were looking for entry strategies.
In David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, King Faisal says to Lawrence: “I think you are another of these desert-loving English. . . . The English have a great hunger for desolate places.” Indeed, for five centuries, the Europeans did hunger for deserts and jungles and oceans and new continents.
Americans do not. We like it here. We like our McDonalds. We like our football. We like our rock-and-roll. We’ve got the Grand Canyon and Graceland. We’ve got Silicon Valley and South Beach. We’ve got everything. And if that’s not enough, we’ve got Vegas--which is a facsimile of everything. What could we possibly need anywhere else? We don’t like exotic climates. We don’t like exotic languages--lots of declensions and moods. We don’t even know what a mood is. We like Iowa corn and New York hot dogs, and if we want Chinese or Indian or Italian, we go to the food court. We don’t send the Marines for takeout.
That’s because we are not an imperial power. We are a commercial republic. We don’t take food; we trade for it. Which makes us something unique in history, an anomaly, a hybrid: a commercial republic with overwhelming global power. A commercial republic that, by pure accident of history, has been designated custodian of the international system. The eyes of every supplicant from East Timor to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Liberia; Arab and Israeli, Irish and British, North and South Korean are upon us.
That is who we are. That is where we are.
Now the question is: What do we do? What is a unipolar power to do?
Isolationism
The oldest and most venerable answer is to hoard that power and retreat. This is known as isolationism. Of all the foreign policy schools in America, it has the oldest pedigree, not surprising in the only great power in history to be isolated by two vast oceans.
Isolationism originally sprang from a view of America as spiritually superior to the Old World. We were too good to be corrupted by its low intrigues, entangled by its cynical alliances.
Today, however, isolationism is an ideology of fear. Fear of trade. Fear of immigrants. Fear of the Other. Isolationists want to cut off trade and immigration, and withdraw from our military and strategic commitments around the world. Even isolationists, of course, did not oppose the war in Afghanistan, because it was so obviously an act of self-defense--only a fool or a knave or a Susan Sontag could oppose that. But anything beyond that, isolationists oppose. They are for a radical retrenchment of American power--for pulling up the drawbridge to Fortress America.
Isolationism is an important school of thought historically, but not today. Not just because of its brutal intellectual reductionism, but because it is so obviously inappropriate to the world of today--a world of export-driven economies, of massive population flows, and of 9/11, the definitive demonstration that the combination of modern technology and transnational primitivism has erased the barrier between “over there” and over here.
Classical isolationism is not just intellectually obsolete; it is politically bankrupt as well. Four years ago, its most public advocate, Pat Buchanan, ran for president of the United States, and carried Palm Beach. By accident.
Classic isolationism is moribund and marginalized. Who then rules America?
Liberal Internationalism
In the 1990s, it was liberal internationalism. Liberal internationalism is the foreign policy of the Democratic Party and the religion of the foreign policy elite. It has a peculiar history. It traces its pedigree to Woodrow Wilson’s utopianism, Harry Truman’s anticommunism, and John Kennedy’s militant universalism. But after the Vietnam War, it was transmuted into an ideology of passivity, acquiescence and almost reflexive anti-interventionism.
Liberals today proudly take credit for Truman’s and Kennedy’s roles in containing communism, but they prefer to forget that, for the last half of the Cold War, liberals used “cold warrior” as an epithet. In the early 1980s, they gave us the nuclear freeze movement, a form of unilateral disarmament in the face of Soviet nuclear advances. Today, John Kerry boasts of opposing, during the 1980s, what he calls Ronald Reagan’s “illegal war in Central America”--and oppose he did what was, in fact, an indigenous anticommunist rebellion that ultimately succeeded in bringing down Sandinista rule and ushering in democracy in all of Central America.
That boast reminds us how militant was liberal passivity in the last half of the Cold War. But that passivity outlived the Cold War. When Kuwait was invaded, the question was: Should the United States go to war to prevent the Persian Gulf from falling into hostile hands? The Democratic Party joined the Buchananite isolationists in saying No. The Democrats voted No overwhelmingly--two to one in the House, more than four to one in the Senate.
And yet, quite astonishingly, when liberal internationalism came to power just two years later in the form of the Clinton administration, it turned almost hyperinterventionist. It involved us four times in military action: deepening intervention in Somalia, invading Haiti, bombing Bosnia, and finally going to war over Kosovo.
How to explain the amazing transmutation of Cold War and Gulf War doves into Haiti and Balkan hawks? The crucial and obvious difference is this: Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were humanitarian ventures--fights for right and good, devoid of raw national interest. And only humanitarian interventionism--disinterested interventionism devoid of national interest--is morally pristine enough to justify the use of force. The history of the 1990s refutes the lazy notion that liberals have an aversion to the use of force. They do not. They have an aversion to using force for reasons of pure national interest.
And by national interest I do not mean simple self-defense. Everyone believes in self-defense, as in Afghanistan. I am talking about national interest as defined by a Great Power: shaping the international environment by projecting power abroad to secure economic, political, and strategic goods. Intervening militarily for that kind of national interest, liberal internationalism finds unholy and unsupportable. It sees that kind of national interest as merely self-interest writ large, in effect, a form of grand national selfishness. Hence Kuwait, no; Kosovo, yes.
The other defining feature of the Clinton foreign policy was multilateralism, which expressed itself in a mania for treaties. The Clinton administration negotiated a dizzying succession of parchment promises on bioweapons, chemical weapons, nuclear testing, carbon emissions, anti-ballistic missiles, etc.
Why? No sentient being could believe that, say, the chemical or biological weapons treaties were anything more than transparently useless. Senator Joseph Biden once defended the Chemical Weapons Convention, which even its proponents admitted was unenforceable, on the grounds that it would “provide us with a valuable tool”--the “moral suasion of the entire international community.”
Moral suasion? Was it moral suasion that made Qaddafi see the wisdom of giving up his weapons of mass destruction? Or Iran agree for the first time to spot nuclear inspections? It was the suasion of the bayonet. It was the ignominious fall of Saddam--and the desire of interested spectators not to be next on the list. The whole point of this treaty was to keep rogue states from developing chemical weapons. Rogue states are, by definition, impervious to moral suasion.
Moral suasion is a farce. Why then this obsession with conventions, protocols, legalisms? Their obvious net effect is to temper American power. Who, after all, was really going to be most constrained by these treaties? The ABM amendments were aimed squarely at American advances and strategic defenses, not at Russia, which lags hopelessly behind. The Kyoto Protocol exempted India and China. The nuclear test ban would have seriously degraded the American nuclear arsenal. And the landmine treaty (which the Clinton administration spent months negotiating but, in the end, met so much Pentagon resistance that even Clinton could not initial it) would have had a devastating impact on U.S. conventional forces, particularly at the DMZ in Korea.
But that, you see, is the whole point of the multilateral enterprise: To reduce American freedom of action by making it subservient to, dependent on, constricted by the will--and interests--of other nations. To tie down Gulliver with a thousand strings. To domesticate the most undomesticated, most outsized, national interest on the planet--ours.
Today, multilateralism remains the overriding theme of liberal internationalism. When in power in the 1990s, multilateralism expressed itself as a mania for treaties. When out of power in this decade, multilateralism manifests itself in the slavish pursuit of “international legitimacy”--and opposition to any American action undertaken without universal foreign blessing.
Which is why the Democratic critique of the war in Iraq is so peculiarly one of process and not of policy. The problem was that we did not have the permission of the UN; we did not have a large enough coalition; we did not have a second Security Council resolution. Kofi Annan was unhappy and the French were cross.
The Democratic presidential candidates all say that we should have internationalized the conflict, brought in the UN, enlisted the allies. Why? Two reasons: assistance and legitimacy. First, they say, we could have used these other countries to help us in the reconstruction.
This is rich. Everyone would like to have more help in reconstruction. It would be lovely to have the Germans and the French helping reconstruct Baghdad. But the question is moot, and the argument is cynical: France and Germany made absolutely clear that they would never support the overthrow of Saddam. So, accommodating them was not a way to get them into the reconstruction, it was a way to ensure that there would never be any reconstruction, because Saddam would still be in power.
Of course it would be nice if we had more allies rather than fewer. It would also be nice to be able to fly. But when some nations are not with you on your enterprise, including them in your coalition is not a way to broaden it; it’s a way to abolish it.
At which point, liberal internationalists switch gears and appeal to legitimacy--on the grounds that multilateral action has a higher moral standing. I have always found this line of argument incomprehensible. By what possible moral calculus does an American intervention to liberate 25 million people forfeit moral legitimacy because it lacks the blessing of the butchers of Tiananmen Square or the cynics of the Quai d’Orsay?
Which is why it is hard to take these arguments at face value. Look: We know why liberal internationalists demanded UN sanction for the war in Iraq. It was a way to stop the war. It was the Gulliver effect. Call a committee meeting of countries with hostile or contrary interests--i.e., the Security Council--and you have guaranteed yourself another twelve years of inaction.
Historically, multilateralism is a way for weak countries to multiply their power by attaching themselves to stronger ones. But multilateralism imposed on Great Powers, and particularly on a unipolar power, is intended to restrain that power. Which is precisely why France is an ardent multilateralist. But why should America be?
Why, in the end, does liberal internationalism want to tie down Gulliver, to blunt the pursuit of American national interests by making them subordinate to a myriad of other interests?
In the immediate post-Vietnam era, this aversion to national interest might have been attributed to self-doubt and self-loathing. I don’t know. What I do know is that today it is a mistake to see liberal foreign policy as deriving from anti-Americanism or lack of patriotism or a late efflorescence of 1960s radicalism.
On the contrary. The liberal aversion to national interest stems from an idealism, a larger vision of country, a vision of some ambition and nobility--the ideal of a true international community. And that is: To transform the international system from the Hobbesian universe into a Lockean universe. To turn the state of nature into a norm-driven community. To turn the law of the jungle into the rule of law--of treaties and contracts and UN resolutions. In short, to remake the international system in the image of domestic civil society.
They dream of a new world, a world described in 1943 by Cordell Hull, FDR’s secretary of state--a world in which “there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements by which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or promote their interests.”
And to create such a true international community, you have to temper, transcend, and, in the end, abolish the very idea of state power and national interest. Hence the antipathy to American hegemony and American power. If you are going to break the international arena to the mold of domestic society, you have to domesticate its single most powerful actor. You have to abolish American dominance, not only as an affront to fairness, but also as the greatest obstacle on the whole planet to a democratized international system where all live under self-governing international institutions and self-enforcing international norms.
Realism
This vision is all very nice. All very noble. And all very crazy. Which brings us to the third great foreign policy school: realism.
The realist looks at this great liberal project and sees a hopeless illusion. Because turning the Hobbesian world that has existed since long before the Peloponnesian Wars into a Lockean world, turning a jungle into a suburban subdivision, requires a revolution in human nature. Not just an erector set of new institutions, but a revolution in human nature. And realists do not believe in revolutions in human nature, much less stake their future, and the future of their nation, on them.
Realism recognizes the fundamental fallacy in the whole idea of the international system being modeled on domestic society.
First, what holds domestic society together is a supreme central authority wielding a monopoly of power and enforcing norms. In the international arena there is no such thing. Domestic society may look like a place of self-regulating norms, but if somebody breaks into your house, you call 911, and the police arrive with guns drawn. That’s not exactly self-enforcement. That’s law enforcement.
Second, domestic society rests on the shared goodwill, civility and common values of its individual members. What values are shared by, say, Britain, Cuba, Yemen and Zimbabwe--all nominal members of this fiction we call the “international community”?
Of course, you can have smaller communities of shared interests--NAFTA, ANZUS, or the European Union. But the European conceit that relations with all nations--regardless of ideology, regardless of culture, regardless even of open hostility--should be transacted on the EU model of suasion and norms and negotiations and solemn contractual agreements is an illusion. A fisheries treaty with Canada is something real. An Agreed Framework on plutonium processing with the likes of North Korea is not worth the paper it is written on.
The realist believes the definition of peace Ambrose Bierce offered in The Devil’s Dictionary: “Peace: noun, in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.”
Hence the Realist axiom: The “international community” is a fiction. It is not a community, it is a cacophony--of straining ambitions, disparate values and contending power.
What does hold the international system together? What keeps it from degenerating into total anarchy? Not the phony security of treaties, not the best of goodwill among the nicer nations. In the unipolar world we inhabit, what stability we do enjoy today is owed to the overwhelming power and deterrent threat of the United States.
If someone invades your house, you call the cops. Who do you call if someone invades your country? You dial Washington. In the unipolar world, the closest thing to a centralized authority, to an enforcer of norms, is America--American power. And ironically, American power is precisely what liberal internationalism wants to constrain and tie down and subsume in pursuit of some brave new Lockean world.
Realists do not live just in America. I found one in Finland. During the 1997 negotiations in Oslo over the land mine treaty, one of the rare holdouts, interestingly enough, was Finland. The Finnish prime minister stoutly opposed the land mine ban. And for that he was scolded by his Scandinavian neighbors. To which he responded tartly that this was a “very convenient” pose for the “other Nordic countries”--after all, Finland is their land mine.
Finland is the land mine between Russia and Scandinavia. America is the land mine between barbarism and civilization.
Where would South Korea be without America and its landmines along the DMZ? Where would Europe--with its cozy arrogant community--be without America having saved it from the Soviet colossus? Where would the Middle East be had American power not stopped Saddam in 1991?
The land mine that protects civilization from barbarism is not parchment but power, and in a unipolar world, American power--wielded, if necessary, unilaterally. If necessary, preemptively,
Now, those uneasy with American power have made these two means of wielding it--preemption and unilateralism--the focus of unrelenting criticism. The doctrine of preemption, in particular, has been widely attacked for violating international norms.
What international norm? The one under which Israel was universally condemned--even the Reagan Administration joined the condemnation at the Security Council--for preemptively destroying Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981? Does anyone today doubt that it was the right thing to do, both strategically and morally?
In a world of terrorists, terrorist states and weapons of mass destruction, the option of preemption is especially necessary. In the bipolar world of the Cold War, with a stable non-suicidal adversary, deterrence could work. Deterrence does not work against people who ache for heaven. It does not work against undeterrables. And it does not work against undetectables: nonsuicidal enemy regimes that might attack through clandestine means--a suitcase nuke or anonymously delivered anthrax. Against both undeterrables and undetectables, preemption is the only possible strategy.
Moreover, the doctrine of preemption against openly hostile states pursuing weapons of mass destruction is an improvement on classical deterrence. Traditionally, we deterred the use of WMDs by the threat of retaliation after we’d been attacked--and that’s too late; the point of preemption is to deter the very acquisition of WMDs in the first place.
Whether or not Iraq had large stockpiles of WMDs, the very fact that the United States overthrew a hostile regime that repeatedly refused to come clean on its weapons has had precisely this deterrent effect. We are safer today not just because Saddam is gone, but because Libya and any others contemplating trafficking with WMDs, have--for the first time--seen that it carries a cost, a very high cost.
Yes, of course, imperfect intelligence makes preemption problematic. But that is not an objection on principle, it is an objection in practice. Indeed, the objection concedes the principle. We need good intelligence. But we remain defenseless if we abjure the option of preemption.
The other great objection to the way American unipolar power has been wielded is its unilateralism. I would dispute how unilateralist we have in fact been. Constructing ad hoc “coalitions of the willing” hardly qualifies as unilateralism just because they do not have a secretariat in Brussels or on the East River.
Moreover, unilateralism is often the very road to multilateralism. As we learned from the Gulf War, it is the leadership of the United States--indeed, its willingness to act unilaterally if necessary--that galvanized the Gulf War coalition into existence. Without the president of the United States declaring “This will not stand” about the invasion of Kuwait--and making it clear that America would go it alone if it had to--there never would have been the great wall-to-wall coalition that is now so retroactively applauded and held up as a model of multilateralism.
Of course one acts in concert with others if possible. It is nice when others join us in the breach. No one seeks to be unilateral. Unilateralism simply means that one does not allow oneself to be held hostage to the will of others.
Of course you build coalitions when possible. In 2003, we garnered a coalition of the willing for Iraq that included substantial allies like Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy and much of Eastern Europe. France and Germany made clear from the beginning that they would never join in the overthrow of Saddam. Therefore the choice was not a wide coalition versus a narrow one, but a narrow coalition versus none. There were serious arguments against war in Iraq--but the fact France did not approve was not one of them.
Irving Kristol once explained that he preferred the Organization of American States to the United Nations because in the OAS we can be voted down in only three languages, thereby saving translators’ fees. Realists choose not to be Gulliver. In an international system with no sovereign, no police, no protection--where power is the ultimate arbiter and history has bequeathed us unprecedented power--we should be vigilant in preserving that power. And our freedom of action to use it.
But here we come up against the limits of realism: you cannot live by power alone. Realism is a valuable antidote to the woolly internationalism of the 1990s. But realism can only take you so far.
Its basic problem lies in its definition of national interest as classically offered by its great theorist, Hans Morgenthau: Interest defined as power. Morgenthau postulated that what drives nations, what motivates their foreign policy, is the will to power--to keep it and expand it.
For most Americans, will to power might be a correct description of the world--of what motivates other countries--but it cannot be a prescription for America. It cannot be our purpose. America cannot and will not live by realpolitik alone. Our foreign policy must be driven by something beyond power. Unless conservatives present ideals to challenge the liberal ideal of a domesticated international community, they will lose the debate.
Which is why among American conservatives, another, more idealistic, school has arisen that sees America’s national interest as an expression of values.
Democratic Globalism
It is this fourth school that has guided U.S. foreign policy in this decade. This conservative alternative to realism is often lazily and invidiously called neoconservatism, but that is a very odd name for a school whose major proponents in the world today are George W. Bush and Tony Blair--if they are neoconservatives, then Margaret Thatcher was a liberal. There’s nothing neo about Bush, and there’s nothing con about Blair.
Yet they are the principal proponents today of what might be called democratic globalism, a foreign policy that defines the national interest not as power but as values, and that identifies one supreme value, what John Kennedy called “the success of liberty.” As President Bush put it in his speech at Whitehall last November: “The United States and Great Britain share a mission in the world beyond the balance of power or the simple pursuit of interest. We seek the advance of freedom and the peace that freedom brings.”
Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That is the credo of democratic globalism. Which explains its political appeal: America is a nation uniquely built not on blood, race or consanguinity, but on a proposition--to which its sacred honor has been pledged for two centuries. This American exceptionalism explains why non-Americans find this foreign policy so difficult to credit; why Blair has had more difficulty garnering support for it in his country; and why Europe, in particular, finds this kind of value-driven foreign policy hopelessly and irritatingly moralistic.
Democratic globalism sees as the engine of history not the will to power but the will to freedom. And while it has been attacked as a dreamy, idealistic innovation, its inspiration comes from the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the Kennedy inaugural of 1961, and Reagan’s “evil empire” speech of 1983. They all sought to recast a struggle for power between two geopolitical titans into a struggle between freedom and unfreedom, and yes, good and evil.
Which is why the Truman Doctrine was heavily criticized by realists like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan--and Reagan was vilified by the entire foreign policy establishment: for the sin of ideologizing the Cold War by injecting a moral overlay.
That was then. Today, post-9/11, we find ourselves in a similar existential struggle but with a different enemy: not Soviet communism, but Arab-Islamic totalitarianism, both secular and religious. Bush and Blair are similarly attacked for naïvely and crudely casting this struggle as one of freedom versus unfreedom, good versus evil.
Now, given the way not just freedom but human decency were suppressed in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the two major battles of this new war, you would have to give Bush and Blair’s moral claims the decided advantage of being obviously true.
Nonetheless, something can be true and still be dangerous. Many people are deeply uneasy with the Bush-Blair doctrine--many conservatives in particular. When Blair declares in his address to Congress: “The spread of freedom is . . . our last line of defense and our first line of attack,” they see a dangerously expansive, aggressively utopian foreign policy. In short, they see Woodrow Wilson.
Now, to a conservative, Woodrow Wilson is fightin’ words. Yes, this vision is expansive and perhaps utopian. But it ain’t Wilsonian. Wilson envisioned the spread of democratic values through as-yet-to-be invented international institutions. He could be forgiven for that. In 1918, there was no way to know how utterly corrupt and useless those international institutions would turn out to be. Eight decades of bitter experience later--with Libya chairing the UN Commission on Human Rights--there is no way not to know.
Democratic globalism is not Wilsonian. Its attractiveness is precisely that it shares realism’s insights about the centrality of power. Its attractiveness is precisely that it has appropriate contempt for the fictional legalisms of liberal internationalism.
Moreover, democratic globalism is an improvement over realism. What it can teach realism is that the spread of democracy is not just an end but a means, an indispensable means for securing American interests. The reason is simple. Democracies are inherently more friendly to the United States, less belligerent to their neighbors, and generally more inclined to peace. Realists are right that to protect your interests you often have to go around the world bashing bad guys over the head. But that technique, no matter how satisfying, has its limits. At some point, you have to implant something, something organic and self-developing. And that something is democracy.
But where? The danger of democratic globalism is its universalism, its open-ended commitment to human freedom, its temptation to plant the flag of democracy everywhere. It must learn to say no. And indeed, it does say no. But when it says no to Liberia, or Congo, or Burma, or countenances alliances with authoritarian rulers in places like Pakistan or, for that matter, Russia, it stands accused of hypocrisy. Which is why we must articulate criteria for saying yes.
Where to intervene? Where to bring democracy? Where to nation-build? I propose a single criterion: Where it counts.
Call it democratic realism. And this is its axiom: We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity--meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.
Where does it count? Fifty years ago, Germany and Japan counted. Why? Because they were the seeds of the greatest global threat to freedom in midcentury--fascism--and then were turned, by nation building, into bulwarks against the next great threat to freedom, Soviet communism.
Where does it count today? Where the overthrow of radicalism and the beginnings of democracy can have a decisive effect in the war against the new global threat to freedom, the new existential enemy, the Arab-Islamic totalitarianism that has threatened us in both its secular and religious forms for the quarter-century since the Khomeini revolution of 1979.
Establishing civilized, decent, nonbelligerent, pro-Western polities in Afghanistan and Iraq and ultimately their key neighbors would, like the flipping of Germany and Japan in the 1940s, change the strategic balance in the fight against Arab-Islamic radicalism.
Yes, it may be a bridge too far. Realists have been warning against the hubris of thinking we can transform an alien culture because of some postulated natural and universal human will to freedom. And they may yet be right. But how do they know in advance? Half a century ago, we heard the same confident warnings about the imperviousness to democracy of Confucian culture. That proved stunningly wrong. Where is it written that Arabs are incapable of democracy?
Yes, as in Germany and Japan, the undertaking is enormous, ambitious and arrogant. It may yet fail. But we cannot afford not to try. There is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the monster behind 9/11. It’s not Osama bin Laden; it is the cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world--oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism. It’s not one man; it is a condition. It will be nice to find that man and hang him, but that’s the cops-and-robbers law-enforcement model of fighting terrorism that we tried for twenty years and that gave us 9/11. This is war, and in war arresting murderers is nice. But you win by taking territory—and leaving something behind.
September 11
We are the unipolar power and what do we do?
In August 1900, David Hilbert gave a speech to the International Congress of Mathematicians naming twenty-three still-unsolved mathematical problems bequeathed by the nineteenth century to the twentieth. Had he presented the great unsolved geopolitical problems bequeathed to the twentieth century, one would have stood out above all--the rise of Germany and its accommodation within the European state system.
Similarly today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we can see clearly the two great geopolitical challenges on the horizon: the inexorable rise of China and the coming demographic collapse of Europe, both of which will irrevocably disequilibrate the international system.
But those problems come later. They are for midcentury. They are for the next generation. And that generation will not even get to these problems unless we first deal with our problem.
And our problem is 9/11 and the roots of Arab-Islamic nihilism. September 11 felt like a new problem, but for all its shock and surprise, it is an old problem with a new face. September 11 felt like the initiation of a new history, but it was a return to history, the twentieth century history of radical ideologies and existential enemies.
The anomaly is not the world of today. The anomaly was the 1990s, our holiday from history. It felt like peace, but it was an interval of dreaming between two periods of reality.
From which 9/11 awoke us. It startled us into thinking everything was new. It’s not. What is new is what happened not on 9/11 but ten years earlier on December 26, 1991: the emergence of the United States as the world’s unipolar power. What is unique is our advantage in this struggle, an advantage we did not have during the struggles of the twentieth century. The question for our time is how to press this advantage, how to exploit our unipolar power, how to deploy it to win the old/new war that exploded upon us on 9/11.
What is the unipolar power to do?
Four schools, four answers.
The isolationists want simply to ignore unipolarity, pull up the drawbridge, and defend Fortress America. Alas, the Fortress has no moat--not after the airplane, the submarine, the ballistic missile--and as for the drawbridge, it was blown up on 9/11.
Then there are the liberal internationalists. They like to dream, and to the extent they are aware of our unipolar power, they don’t like it. They see its use for anything other than humanitarianism or reflexive self-defense as an expression of national selfishness. And they don’t just want us to ignore our unique power, they want us to yield it piece by piece, by subsuming ourselves in a new global architecture in which America becomes not the arbiter of international events, but a good and tame international citizen.
Then there is realism, which has the clearest understanding of the new unipolarity and its uses--unilateral and preemptive if necessary. But in the end, it fails because it offers no vision. It is all means and no ends. It cannot adequately define our mission.
Hence, the fourth school: democratic globalism. It has, in this decade, rallied the American people to a struggle over values. It seeks to vindicate the American idea by making the spread of democracy, the success of liberty, the ends and means of American foreign policy.
I support that. I applaud that. But I believe it must be tempered in its universalistic aspirations and rhetoric from a democratic globalism to a democratic realism. It must be targeted, focused and limited. We are friends to all, but we come ashore only where it really counts. And where it counts today is that Islamic crescent stretching from North Africa to Afghanistan.
In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile crisis, we came to the edge of the abyss. Then, accompanied by our equally shaken adversary, we both deliberately drew back. On September 11, 2001, we saw the face of Armageddon again, but this time with an enemy that does not draw back. This time the enemy knows no reason.
Were that the only difference between now and then, our situation would be hopeless. But there is a second difference between now and then: the uniqueness of our power, unrivaled, not just today but ever. That evens the odds. The rationality of the enemy is something beyond our control. But the use of our power is within our control. And if that power is used wisely, constrained not by illusions and fictions but only by the limits of our mission--which is to bring a modicum of freedom as an antidote to nihilism--we can prevail.
Monday, February 09, 2004
This is rather depressing if you are a eurofile, but enlighting to the real patriots:
Front Page
SPENGLER
Why Europe chooses extinction
By Spengler
Demographics is destiny. Never in recorded history have prosperous and peaceful nations chosen to disappear from the face of the earth. Yet that is what the Europeans have chosen to do. Back in 1348 Europe suffered the Black Death, a combination of bubonic plague and likely a form of mad cow disease, observes American Enterprise Institute scholar Ben Wattenberg. "The plague reduced the estimated European population by about a third. In the next 50 years, Europe's population will relive - in slow motion - that plague demography, losing about a fifth of its population by 2050 and more as the decades roll on."
In 200 years, French and German will be spoken exclusively in hell. What has brought about this collective suicide, which mocks all we thought we knew about the instinct for self-preservation? The chattering classes have nothing to say about the most unique and significant change in our times. Yet the great political and economic shifts of modern times are demographic in origin. Three examples suffice:
1) The great trans-Atlantic rift. Europeans are pacifists, not merely in the Persian Gulf, but on their own Balkans doorstep. If they cannot be bothered to reproduce, why should any European soldier sacrifice himself for future generations that never will be born?
2) The shift in global capital flows to the United States: old people lend money to young people. The aging populations of Europe and Japan lend money to younger people in the US.
3) The deflation danger. To illustrate, an economist of my acquaintance proposes a thought experiment. Suppose by a magic spell all the inhabitants of the United Kingdom instantaneously aged by 30 years. What would be the effect on the current account balance, the rate of interest, the price level and the exchange rate? (Answer at the end of this essay).
Little enough has been said about the "how" but almost nothing about the "why" of Europe's demographic suicide. Suicidal behavior is common among (for example) stone-age tribes who have encountered the modern world. One can extend this example to Tamil or Arab suicide bombers (SeeLive and Let Die, Asia Times Online, April 13, 2002). But the Europeans are the modern world. Have the Europeans taken to heart existentialism's complaint that man is alone in a chaotic universe in which life has no ultimate meeting, and that man responds to the anxiety about death by embracing death?
Detest as I might the whole existentialist tribe, there is a grain of truth here, and it bears on a parallel development, that is, the death of European Christianity. Fifty-three percent of Americans say that religion is very important in their lives, compared with 16 percent, 14 percent and 13 percent respectively of the British, French and Germans, according to a 1997 University of Michigan survey. Here I draw on the German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), an existentialist of sorts. Few Asians (including Jews) can make sense of Christianity's core doctrine, namely, original sin, handed down to all humans from Adam and Eve. Original sin motivates God's self-sacrifice on the cross to remove this stain from mankind; without it, Jesus was just an itinerant preacher with a knack for anecdotes.
All religion, Rosenzweig argued, responds to man's anxiety in the face of death (against which philosophy is like a child stuffing his fingers in his ears and shouting, "I can't hear you!"). The pagans of old faced death with the confidence that their race would continue. But tribes and nations anticipate their own extinction just as individuals anticipate their own death, he added: "The love of the nations for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death." Each nation, he wrote, knows that some day other peoples will occupy their lands, and their language and culture will be interred in dusty books.
The early Christian Church encountered a great extinction of peoples and their cultures through the rise and fall of the Alexandrine and Roman empires. Who now remembers the Lusitani, the Illyrians, the Sicani, the Quadians, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepidians, Herulians, Pannonians and a thousand other tribes of Roman times? As nations faced extinction, individuals within these nations came face to face with their own mortality. Christianity offered an answer: the Church called individuals out of the nations and offered them salvation in the form of a life beyond the grave. The Gentiles (as the Church called them) embraced original sin, which to them simply meant the sin of having been born Gentile, that is, to a culture doomed to extinction. (The Jews, who think of themselves as an eternal people, were having none of it).
In one respect, Christianity was an enormous success. Its original heartland in the Near East, Asia Minor and Greece fell to Islam, but even while Arabs rode victorious over St Paul's missionary trail, the Church converted the barbarians of Europe. Christianity made possible the assimilation of thousands of doomed tribes into what became European nations. Something similar is at work in Africa, the only place in the world where Christianity enjoys rapid growth. Yet Christianity's weakness, Rosenzweig added, lay in the devil's bargain it made with the old paganism. Christianity's salvation lay beyond the grave, in the wispy ether of heavenly reward. Humans require something to hang on to this side of the grave. By providing the pagans with a humanized God (and a humanized mother of God and a host of saints), Christianity allowed the pagans to continue to worship their own image. Germans worship a blond Jesus, Spaniards worship a dark-haired Jesus, Mexicans worship the dark Virgin of Guadalupe, and so forth. The result, wrote Rosenzweig, is that Christians "are forever torn between Jesus and [the medieval pagan hero] Siegfried".
At the political level, Christianity sought to suppress Siegfried in favor of Christ through the device of the universal empire, the suppression of nationality by the aristocracy and Church. The lid kept blowing off the pot. Just when the Habsburgs brought the universal empire to its peak of power in 1519 under Charles V, controlling Austria, Spain and the Netherlands, Germany revolted under the banner of Reformation. There followed a century and a half of religious wars, culminating in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) that wiped out more than half the population of Central Europe. France under Cardinal Richilieu (See The Sacred Heart of Darkness, Asia Times Online, February 11, 2003) gave a fatal twist to the Christian idea. Instead of universal empire, the French nation would be the standard-bearer for Christendom, such that French national interests stood in place of divine providence.
All Europe caught the French disease, substituting the warrior Siegfried for the crucified God. Christianity's inner pagan ran amok. A second Thirty Years War (1914-1944) gave unlimited vent to Europe's pagan impulses and drowned them in blood. The unfortunate Rosenzweig, who saw the faultlines in Christian civilization so clearly, died hoping that Europe still would embrace its Jewish population as a counterweight against its destructive pagan self. It never occurred to him that Europe would choose destruction and take its Jews with it. Siegfried triumphed over Christ during World War I. No shred of credibility was left in the Christian idea of souls called out of the nations for salvation beyond the grave. In 1914 Europe's soldiers still fought under the illusion of a God that favored their nation. Germany fought World War II under the banner of revived paganism.
For today's Europeans, there is no consolation, neither the old pagan continuity of national culture, nor the Christian continuity into the hereafter. The French know that Victor Hugo, Gauloise cigarettes, Chateau Lafitte and Impressionist painters one day will become a matter of antiquarian curiosity. The Germans know that no one but bored schoolboys will read Goethe two centuries hence, like Pindar. They have no ambition but to die quietly, no concerns except for those amusements which might reduce boredom and anxiety en route to the grave. They have no passions except hatred born of envy. They hate America, a new kind of universality that succeeded where the old Christian empire failed. They hate Israel, which makes the Jewish people appear all the more eternal in stark contrast to Europe's morbid temporality. They will pass out of history unmourned even by themselves.
[Solution to the thought-experiment above: if the entire population of the UK instantaneously ages 30 years, it will spend less and save more for retirement. That is, demand will shift from present goods to future goods, that is, securities. The price level of present goods falls. The price of future goods rises, that is, the compensation for waiting for the future declines, and the rate of interest falls. The suddenly-aged population trades surplus present goods for future goods, that is, exports goods and purchases securities with the proceeds, shifting the current account balance to surplus. The exchange rate will rise. In other words, we have Japan.]
Front Page
SPENGLER
Why Europe chooses extinction
By Spengler
Demographics is destiny. Never in recorded history have prosperous and peaceful nations chosen to disappear from the face of the earth. Yet that is what the Europeans have chosen to do. Back in 1348 Europe suffered the Black Death, a combination of bubonic plague and likely a form of mad cow disease, observes American Enterprise Institute scholar Ben Wattenberg. "The plague reduced the estimated European population by about a third. In the next 50 years, Europe's population will relive - in slow motion - that plague demography, losing about a fifth of its population by 2050 and more as the decades roll on."
In 200 years, French and German will be spoken exclusively in hell. What has brought about this collective suicide, which mocks all we thought we knew about the instinct for self-preservation? The chattering classes have nothing to say about the most unique and significant change in our times. Yet the great political and economic shifts of modern times are demographic in origin. Three examples suffice:
1) The great trans-Atlantic rift. Europeans are pacifists, not merely in the Persian Gulf, but on their own Balkans doorstep. If they cannot be bothered to reproduce, why should any European soldier sacrifice himself for future generations that never will be born?
2) The shift in global capital flows to the United States: old people lend money to young people. The aging populations of Europe and Japan lend money to younger people in the US.
3) The deflation danger. To illustrate, an economist of my acquaintance proposes a thought experiment. Suppose by a magic spell all the inhabitants of the United Kingdom instantaneously aged by 30 years. What would be the effect on the current account balance, the rate of interest, the price level and the exchange rate? (Answer at the end of this essay).
Little enough has been said about the "how" but almost nothing about the "why" of Europe's demographic suicide. Suicidal behavior is common among (for example) stone-age tribes who have encountered the modern world. One can extend this example to Tamil or Arab suicide bombers (SeeLive and Let Die, Asia Times Online, April 13, 2002). But the Europeans are the modern world. Have the Europeans taken to heart existentialism's complaint that man is alone in a chaotic universe in which life has no ultimate meeting, and that man responds to the anxiety about death by embracing death?
Detest as I might the whole existentialist tribe, there is a grain of truth here, and it bears on a parallel development, that is, the death of European Christianity. Fifty-three percent of Americans say that religion is very important in their lives, compared with 16 percent, 14 percent and 13 percent respectively of the British, French and Germans, according to a 1997 University of Michigan survey. Here I draw on the German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), an existentialist of sorts. Few Asians (including Jews) can make sense of Christianity's core doctrine, namely, original sin, handed down to all humans from Adam and Eve. Original sin motivates God's self-sacrifice on the cross to remove this stain from mankind; without it, Jesus was just an itinerant preacher with a knack for anecdotes.
All religion, Rosenzweig argued, responds to man's anxiety in the face of death (against which philosophy is like a child stuffing his fingers in his ears and shouting, "I can't hear you!"). The pagans of old faced death with the confidence that their race would continue. But tribes and nations anticipate their own extinction just as individuals anticipate their own death, he added: "The love of the nations for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death." Each nation, he wrote, knows that some day other peoples will occupy their lands, and their language and culture will be interred in dusty books.
The early Christian Church encountered a great extinction of peoples and their cultures through the rise and fall of the Alexandrine and Roman empires. Who now remembers the Lusitani, the Illyrians, the Sicani, the Quadians, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepidians, Herulians, Pannonians and a thousand other tribes of Roman times? As nations faced extinction, individuals within these nations came face to face with their own mortality. Christianity offered an answer: the Church called individuals out of the nations and offered them salvation in the form of a life beyond the grave. The Gentiles (as the Church called them) embraced original sin, which to them simply meant the sin of having been born Gentile, that is, to a culture doomed to extinction. (The Jews, who think of themselves as an eternal people, were having none of it).
In one respect, Christianity was an enormous success. Its original heartland in the Near East, Asia Minor and Greece fell to Islam, but even while Arabs rode victorious over St Paul's missionary trail, the Church converted the barbarians of Europe. Christianity made possible the assimilation of thousands of doomed tribes into what became European nations. Something similar is at work in Africa, the only place in the world where Christianity enjoys rapid growth. Yet Christianity's weakness, Rosenzweig added, lay in the devil's bargain it made with the old paganism. Christianity's salvation lay beyond the grave, in the wispy ether of heavenly reward. Humans require something to hang on to this side of the grave. By providing the pagans with a humanized God (and a humanized mother of God and a host of saints), Christianity allowed the pagans to continue to worship their own image. Germans worship a blond Jesus, Spaniards worship a dark-haired Jesus, Mexicans worship the dark Virgin of Guadalupe, and so forth. The result, wrote Rosenzweig, is that Christians "are forever torn between Jesus and [the medieval pagan hero] Siegfried".
At the political level, Christianity sought to suppress Siegfried in favor of Christ through the device of the universal empire, the suppression of nationality by the aristocracy and Church. The lid kept blowing off the pot. Just when the Habsburgs brought the universal empire to its peak of power in 1519 under Charles V, controlling Austria, Spain and the Netherlands, Germany revolted under the banner of Reformation. There followed a century and a half of religious wars, culminating in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) that wiped out more than half the population of Central Europe. France under Cardinal Richilieu (See The Sacred Heart of Darkness, Asia Times Online, February 11, 2003) gave a fatal twist to the Christian idea. Instead of universal empire, the French nation would be the standard-bearer for Christendom, such that French national interests stood in place of divine providence.
All Europe caught the French disease, substituting the warrior Siegfried for the crucified God. Christianity's inner pagan ran amok. A second Thirty Years War (1914-1944) gave unlimited vent to Europe's pagan impulses and drowned them in blood. The unfortunate Rosenzweig, who saw the faultlines in Christian civilization so clearly, died hoping that Europe still would embrace its Jewish population as a counterweight against its destructive pagan self. It never occurred to him that Europe would choose destruction and take its Jews with it. Siegfried triumphed over Christ during World War I. No shred of credibility was left in the Christian idea of souls called out of the nations for salvation beyond the grave. In 1914 Europe's soldiers still fought under the illusion of a God that favored their nation. Germany fought World War II under the banner of revived paganism.
For today's Europeans, there is no consolation, neither the old pagan continuity of national culture, nor the Christian continuity into the hereafter. The French know that Victor Hugo, Gauloise cigarettes, Chateau Lafitte and Impressionist painters one day will become a matter of antiquarian curiosity. The Germans know that no one but bored schoolboys will read Goethe two centuries hence, like Pindar. They have no ambition but to die quietly, no concerns except for those amusements which might reduce boredom and anxiety en route to the grave. They have no passions except hatred born of envy. They hate America, a new kind of universality that succeeded where the old Christian empire failed. They hate Israel, which makes the Jewish people appear all the more eternal in stark contrast to Europe's morbid temporality. They will pass out of history unmourned even by themselves.
[Solution to the thought-experiment above: if the entire population of the UK instantaneously ages 30 years, it will spend less and save more for retirement. That is, demand will shift from present goods to future goods, that is, securities. The price level of present goods falls. The price of future goods rises, that is, the compensation for waiting for the future declines, and the rate of interest falls. The suddenly-aged population trades surplus present goods for future goods, that is, exports goods and purchases securities with the proceeds, shifting the current account balance to surplus. The exchange rate will rise. In other words, we have Japan.]
Friday, February 06, 2004
Its been awhile but I found this :) enjoy:
Why the Left Fears Condoleezza Rice
Lowell Ponte
Thursday, Jan. 15, 2004
Condoleezza Rice is a "true illiterate," said a patronizing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
This Marxist thug added that he had asked his comrade Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to mail America’s National Security Advisor samples of Cuban books now being used to teach Venezuelan children literacy to “see if she learns to respect the dignity of the people and learns a bit about us."
Apparently President Chavez is both a racist and a puny macho sexist to make such stupid remarks. His stunted manhood is threatened by criticism from this powerful woman.
Condoleezza Rice, who recently called on Chavez to accept the democratic vote of Venezuelans in a legitimate election to recall him, is, as many have noted, "the most powerful woman in the world."
Dr. Rice understands collectivist terrorist murderers like Chavez better than do most Americans, and not only because she is a highly regarded expert on the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Most of us awakened to the threat of terrorism only on September 11, 2001. Rice as a 9-year-old African-American girl in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1963 felt the ground shake from a racist’s dynamite bomb going off in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church only blocks away from the church where her father, John, was pastor.
Among the four black girls murdered in that hate crime that shocked our nation’s conscience was Rice’s 11-year-old friend and schoolmate Denise McNair. She remembers their funeral and how small their coffins were.
“If you’ve been through homegrown terrorism,” said Dr. Rice, “you recognize there isn’t any cause that can be served by it. ... Because what it’s meant to do is end the conversation.”
Racism is a collectivist idea that denies human dignity by defining individuals as members of mythical collective racial groups. Socialism and Marxism are collectivist ideas that deny human dignity by judging individuals only as members of mythical class groups and by declaring all human beings to be slaves whose lives and labors belong to the collectivist state, as in Castro’s Cuba and increasingly in Chavez’s Venezuela. The indoctrination of this dehumanizing idea, as we shall see, is what Chavez means by Marxist education.
But first, let’s look more closely at the “illiterate” Dr. Condoleezza Rice. Leftists such as Hugo Chavez have tried to silence or discredit this “uppity” powerful black woman with insults. The Leftist media inside the U.S. have tried either to ignore her or to diminish her with the most vicious, loathsome and toxic kinds of racist satire, mockery, denigration, insults and ridicule.
Jamaican singer-limboist Harry Belafonte, an outspoken supporter of Fidel Castro and the Democratic Party, called Rice a “Jew” and a “slave who lived in the house” and “served the master.”
Leftists engage in such verbal terrorism against Bush administration National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell out of fear, wrote distinguished African-American journalist and liberal Clarence Page.
The Democratic Party depends on blacks for 18 percent of its votes. Its survival depends on keeping those voters as a solid, owned bloc of slaves, chained by dependency and fear, down on the plantation of the Democratic Party.
A powerful, successful Republican role model such as Condoleezza Rice could show young blacks an alternative to dependency on Democrats.
What if African-Americans notice that Democrats (the party of the slave owners, the Klan, Jim Crow and Bull Connor) talk about helping them but hold them down? And at the same time, the Republicans (party of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, who freed their ancestors from Democrat slave owners) have advanced blacks to the highest echelon of actual power in the Bush administration.
To prevent African-Americans from opening their hypnotized eyes to this self-evident truth and reconsidering why they vote for a party that chains and exploits them, Dr. Rice has been targeted for every kind of insult and attack possible. She must be politically assassinated.
This is why Leftists have been using character assassination against Dr. Rice to “end the conversation” about how little the Democratic Party has done for blacks ... and about how much the Republican Party is now doing.
(And the same Marxist tactics are being used against Latino Republican candidates, one of whom days ago was smeared by a desperate, racist Democratic National Committee official and Howard Dean operative as a “house Mexican for the Republicans.” This is yet more evidence of Dean’s implicit racism.)
So, who is Condoleezza Rice, this bright black woman whose mere presence strikes terror into the hearts of Leftists?
Condi, as friends call her, was born November 14, 1954, in what his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would call “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.” During the Civil Rights struggle it came also to be called “Bombingham,” with racist explosives killing not only Rice’s friend and three other girls but also shattering the home of black civil rights lawyer Arthur Shores and terrifying the African-American community.
“Rice’s father went to police headquarters to demand an investigation,” wrote Dale Russakoff in the Washington Post Magazine. “They didn’t investigate,” Condoleezza Rice has said. “They never investigated.”
The police commissioner in Birmingham who would not investigate was Bull Connor, a Democrat who perfectly embodies everything that political party has always stood for. When civil rights protesters arrived, Connor unleashed his dogs and fire hoses on them.
“John Rice,” writes Russakoff, “then did what black fathers all over Birmingham were doing – what Alma Powell remembers her own father doing then, when she happened to be home with her babies during her husband’s [Colin Powell’s] tour in Vietnam: They got out their shotguns and formed nightly patrols, guarding the streets themselves.”
One of the many dirty secrets of the Democratic Party is that its passion for gun control began, and continues to be, from a desire to disarm African-Americans and thereby make them powerless and dependent. Russian expert Michael McFaul, writes Russakoff, “remembers [Condoleezza] Rice telling him she opposed gun control and even gun registration because Bull Connor could have used it to disarm her father and others” in 1963.
Condi Rice remembers many lessons of how her mother and father stood up to segregationists, refusing again and again to accept the inferior place into which the white Democratic bosses of Birmingham tried to push blacks. She remembers learning from her grandfather that “You have control, you’re proud, you have integrity, nobody can take those things away from you.”
Her grandfather’s aunts were among the first nursing graduates of Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington. By hard work he would put his children through college, and they would marry into other African-American families with passionate faith in the power of education.
“My family is third-generation college-educated,” says Dr. Condoleezza Rice, winner of the NAACP Image Award. “I should’ve gotten to where I am.”
Both her father, the Rev. John W. Rice Jr., then pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church and dean of historically black Stillman College, and mother Angelena, a science and music teacher at a local black high school, were committed to providing the best education possible for their daughter. Her name, Condoleezza, comes from the Italian musical notation “con dulce” or “con dolcezza,” meaning to play “with sweetness.”
Condi began piano lessons at age 3 and by age 4 was accompanying the choir at her father’s church. She learned to read music before she, by age 5, could fluently read English. When the local superintendent of Negro schools decided that Condi was too young to attend first grade, Angelena took a year off from work to teach her daughter at home. Condi was soon mastering figure skating, French, ballet, Latin and a host of other advanced skills.
Playing Bach and Beethoven even before her feet could reach the piano’s pedals, Condoleezza pursued becoming a concert pianist. At age 13 her family moved to Colorado, where her father became a University of Denver assistant dean. She enrolled there at age 15, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, at age 19 when most other youngsters are just beginning college.
But by then she recognized that she lacked the skill to become one of a handful of pianists able to reach the top of that profession and would probably end up “teaching 13-year-olds to murder Beethoven for a living.”
One day she found herself in a classroom fascinated by Josef Korbel, former Marxist Czech diplomat, as he expounded on the Byzantine nature of Soviet politics and Stalin. “There was so much intrigue,” Rice says. “I decided I wanted to study the Soviet Union.”
“It was like falling in love,” she told Essence Magazine. “I just suddenly knew that’s what I wanted to do. ... Soviet politics, Soviet everything.”
Korbel, who became Rice’s mentor and career booster, is the father of Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Condoleezza went on to earn a master's degree in international relations at Notre Dame, then a Ph.D. at the University of Denver. The year she completed her doctorate, 1981, she was offered a teaching job at Stanford University. She is author or co-author of several scholarly books, including "Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army: 1948-1983," "The Gorbachev Era" and "Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft."
Her expertise on the Soviet Union soon earned Rice an advisory position with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1986 and, with the recommendation of Brent Scowcroft, a place on President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council in 1989.
She returned to Stanford in 1991, becoming provost of that great university in 1993, with oversight of its $1.5 billion budget. She has also served on the boards of Notre Dame University, the San Francisco Symphony, the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, San Francisco PBS affiliate KQED, and other institutions. She co-founded the Center for a New Generation to help educate gifted minority students, as she was and is.
When they first talked, she and George W. Bush, both big sports fans and devout Christians, hit it off immediately. “America will find that she is a wise person,” the president-elect said when announcing her as his pick to become National Security Advisor in December 2000. “I trust her judgment.”
Rice is part of a tiny Bush inner circle of brilliant advisers – including Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State George Schultz and Pentagon analyst Paul Wolfowitz – nicknamed for their superior intellects as “The Vulcans,” in the spirit of Mr. Spock and other Vulcans in “Star Trek.”
Now, at age 49, Condi Rice has already become what Business Week magazine called probably the most influential National Security Advisor since Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. When she, as one of two top foreign policy advisers to the president of the United States, criticizes or challenges Hugo Chavez, it is no wonder that this nasty little Marxist tyrant shakes with fear and rage.
Chavez knows perfectly well that Dr. Rice is not illiterate. In fact, she is an expert on Marxism, the Soviet Union and the kind of tactics Chavez and his ally Fidel Castro are now using to subvert Venezuela as well as several other Latin American nations. Her expertise is helping shape the hard line that President Bush has taken against Fidel Castro at this week’s summit of Western Hemispheric democracies in Monterrey, Mexico.
The difference between the Marxist indoctrination of Chavez and Castro and the kind of education that lifted Condoleezza Rice and her family is clear. An enlightenment Western education of the kind that informed America’s Founders is one that respects and empowers individuals.
One of the only three things Thomas Jefferson wanted inscribed on his tombstone and wished to be remembered for was the founding of the University of Virginia – and what it represented: universal education to empower every American with the basic tools of literacy.
Jefferson wanted all to be educated, not to teach conformity but so that every citizen could read the revolutionary pamphlets of future Tom Paines. Jefferson understood that revolution is a never-ending process, that each new generation must rise up and rein in the tendency of government to take more and more power from the people.
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization,” wrote Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be.”
Dr. Condoleezza Rice is a living symbol of the liberating power of education, determination and self-respect.
Hugo Chavez is also to some degree educated. He reportedly in 1975 earned master's degrees in military sciences and engineering from the Venezuelan Academy of Military Sciences. He also studied for a master's degree in political sciences at the Simon Bolivar University in Caracas but reportedly never graduated.
Like so many on the political Left, Chavez has the education of a technocrat and the soul of a machine. His is a mind without beauty, without love, without any depth of human compassion or comprehension, without respect for the unique talent of each individual. No wonder one wife divorced him and a second left. No wonder he has imported more than 10,000 Cuban operatives and tons of Cuban textbooks to indoctrinate the children of Venezuela with Marxist racist-like ideas of class hatred and class war.
To understand the Left, here and in Cuba, ponder the documentary “90 Miles” by Juan Carlos Zaldivar, aired on the PBS show “POV” on July 29, 2003.
“In 1980, I was a thirteen-year-old communist living in Cuba,” Zaldivar’s personal story begins. “The Revolution was the biggest thing in my life. Bigger than religion, or anything else.”
This documentary follows his reluctant move with his family to the United States via the Mariel boatlift and his comparison of Cuba and the U.S.
As you would expect from the Public Broadcasters of Socialism, this documentary is not entirely positive toward America. It shows Juan’s father “bitter,” disappointed with his inability to become rich in the U.S. and “defeated by the American dream for which he sacrificed everything in 1980.” It takes viewers back to Cuba and depicts people there as relatively happy.
And Zaldivar identifies himself as part of a politically correct minority, gays – while never mentioning Fidel Castro’s monstrous history of imprisoning, torturing and killing people simply because they are homosexuals.
But in this documentary we find that in Communist Cuba “instead of going to school, my class would join demonstrations that publicly humiliated the people who were deserting [leaving]. They were called ‘acts of hate.’ We’d build bond fires [sic]. ... And we’d make dummies out of uniforms that people left behind. We would stuff them with their pillows and then we would burn them. ... One afternoon, I saw a mob of my school friends chasing a student and her mother. The mother was caught sneaking her daughter out of school to take her out of the country.”
In addition to such lynch-mob “acts of hate,” Zaldivar says: In Cuba we had to wear uniforms to school. In Miami, we could wear whatever we wanted. I didn’t like that. It created this atmosphere that there was nobody to answer to. ...”
“I remembered how safe one feels in a crowd,” he says of the Orwellian groupthink in Cuba.
“During the first two years [in Miami], I was very outspoken,” says Zaldivar. “I was still spouting out communist slogans.”
His father explains to him how Fidel and the Marxists too control over who got what in Cuba. “You had to apply and they gave you a house,” the father says. “When they came to check me out, they saw pictures of saints on the walls. So they never gave me a house.”
His father had supported Castro’s revolution, and continued to be a block leader for it prior to deciding to leave for the United States. He was a man insufficiently loyal to either system, viewers are left to conclude, and fell between the two stools.
This columnist has also seen Castro’s educational system firsthand, albeit briefly. As a journalist in Cuba to do a piece for the Los Angeles Times, I visited a Potemkin Village school shown off to foreign visitors. Oddly, the pride of this school was its adjoining factory, into which young students were marched to work half of each day, burning their hands with acid as they manufactured batteries.
If such a thing happened in the U.S., it would be denounced as brutal exploitation of child labor. Visiting Leftists to Fidel’s factory-school, of course, make no such criticisms of Cuba whatsoever.
And, needless to say, we were not shown how those who fail to conform and succeed as Communists in Cuba’s schools are required to live out their short lives in the hot sun cutting sugarcane for 10 Cuban pesos a month – much the way slaves lived in Cuba centuries ago.
This school had a black principal – the only instance in Cuba where I saw a black person in a position of power. As Cuban-American author Humberto Fontova (whose current best-seller is "The Hellpig Hunt") explained to me, Leftist Hollywood movies about Cuba typically depict Castro’s revolutionaries overthrowing a blond, blue-eyed dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar. Batista, however, in real life was a dark-skinned mulatto of black ancestry from a poor farming family.
It is Castro who embodies the white Spaniard colonial ruling class and whose father was a crime boss in Cuba ... just as Fidel is a crime boss today. And under Batista, Cuba had the third-highest standard of living in the Western Hemisphere, while today this Marxist prison colony is near or at the bottom. This, notes Fontova, is typical of the lies America’s Leftist media use to brainwash Americans.
This is also typical of the lies in Cuban textbooks now being used by Hugo Chavez to enslave the children of Venezuela – and of the Left-slanted faculties that former Marxist intellectual David Horowitz has been fighting to diversify at the University of Denver and other institutions of higher learning.
Call it Red-ucation in the enslaving spirit of Karl Marx, not education in the empowering spirit of Thomas Jefferson and Condoleezza Rice.
Here’s one lesson to remember: A major 1986 textbook dealing with Marxist education lists 15 significant nations that were then Communist. Today, 18 years later, more than half of those nations are no longer Communist. Guess who is winning the global battle for hearts and minds.
A second lesson: As Condoleezza Rice so admirably teaches by example, we must never permit the collectivist thugs, here or abroad, to stifle or end the conversation.
Why the Left Fears Condoleezza Rice
Lowell Ponte
Thursday, Jan. 15, 2004
Condoleezza Rice is a "true illiterate," said a patronizing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
This Marxist thug added that he had asked his comrade Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to mail America’s National Security Advisor samples of Cuban books now being used to teach Venezuelan children literacy to “see if she learns to respect the dignity of the people and learns a bit about us."
Apparently President Chavez is both a racist and a puny macho sexist to make such stupid remarks. His stunted manhood is threatened by criticism from this powerful woman.
Condoleezza Rice, who recently called on Chavez to accept the democratic vote of Venezuelans in a legitimate election to recall him, is, as many have noted, "the most powerful woman in the world."
Dr. Rice understands collectivist terrorist murderers like Chavez better than do most Americans, and not only because she is a highly regarded expert on the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Most of us awakened to the threat of terrorism only on September 11, 2001. Rice as a 9-year-old African-American girl in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1963 felt the ground shake from a racist’s dynamite bomb going off in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church only blocks away from the church where her father, John, was pastor.
Among the four black girls murdered in that hate crime that shocked our nation’s conscience was Rice’s 11-year-old friend and schoolmate Denise McNair. She remembers their funeral and how small their coffins were.
“If you’ve been through homegrown terrorism,” said Dr. Rice, “you recognize there isn’t any cause that can be served by it. ... Because what it’s meant to do is end the conversation.”
Racism is a collectivist idea that denies human dignity by defining individuals as members of mythical collective racial groups. Socialism and Marxism are collectivist ideas that deny human dignity by judging individuals only as members of mythical class groups and by declaring all human beings to be slaves whose lives and labors belong to the collectivist state, as in Castro’s Cuba and increasingly in Chavez’s Venezuela. The indoctrination of this dehumanizing idea, as we shall see, is what Chavez means by Marxist education.
But first, let’s look more closely at the “illiterate” Dr. Condoleezza Rice. Leftists such as Hugo Chavez have tried to silence or discredit this “uppity” powerful black woman with insults. The Leftist media inside the U.S. have tried either to ignore her or to diminish her with the most vicious, loathsome and toxic kinds of racist satire, mockery, denigration, insults and ridicule.
Jamaican singer-limboist Harry Belafonte, an outspoken supporter of Fidel Castro and the Democratic Party, called Rice a “Jew” and a “slave who lived in the house” and “served the master.”
Leftists engage in such verbal terrorism against Bush administration National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell out of fear, wrote distinguished African-American journalist and liberal Clarence Page.
The Democratic Party depends on blacks for 18 percent of its votes. Its survival depends on keeping those voters as a solid, owned bloc of slaves, chained by dependency and fear, down on the plantation of the Democratic Party.
A powerful, successful Republican role model such as Condoleezza Rice could show young blacks an alternative to dependency on Democrats.
What if African-Americans notice that Democrats (the party of the slave owners, the Klan, Jim Crow and Bull Connor) talk about helping them but hold them down? And at the same time, the Republicans (party of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, who freed their ancestors from Democrat slave owners) have advanced blacks to the highest echelon of actual power in the Bush administration.
To prevent African-Americans from opening their hypnotized eyes to this self-evident truth and reconsidering why they vote for a party that chains and exploits them, Dr. Rice has been targeted for every kind of insult and attack possible. She must be politically assassinated.
This is why Leftists have been using character assassination against Dr. Rice to “end the conversation” about how little the Democratic Party has done for blacks ... and about how much the Republican Party is now doing.
(And the same Marxist tactics are being used against Latino Republican candidates, one of whom days ago was smeared by a desperate, racist Democratic National Committee official and Howard Dean operative as a “house Mexican for the Republicans.” This is yet more evidence of Dean’s implicit racism.)
So, who is Condoleezza Rice, this bright black woman whose mere presence strikes terror into the hearts of Leftists?
Condi, as friends call her, was born November 14, 1954, in what his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would call “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.” During the Civil Rights struggle it came also to be called “Bombingham,” with racist explosives killing not only Rice’s friend and three other girls but also shattering the home of black civil rights lawyer Arthur Shores and terrifying the African-American community.
“Rice’s father went to police headquarters to demand an investigation,” wrote Dale Russakoff in the Washington Post Magazine. “They didn’t investigate,” Condoleezza Rice has said. “They never investigated.”
The police commissioner in Birmingham who would not investigate was Bull Connor, a Democrat who perfectly embodies everything that political party has always stood for. When civil rights protesters arrived, Connor unleashed his dogs and fire hoses on them.
“John Rice,” writes Russakoff, “then did what black fathers all over Birmingham were doing – what Alma Powell remembers her own father doing then, when she happened to be home with her babies during her husband’s [Colin Powell’s] tour in Vietnam: They got out their shotguns and formed nightly patrols, guarding the streets themselves.”
One of the many dirty secrets of the Democratic Party is that its passion for gun control began, and continues to be, from a desire to disarm African-Americans and thereby make them powerless and dependent. Russian expert Michael McFaul, writes Russakoff, “remembers [Condoleezza] Rice telling him she opposed gun control and even gun registration because Bull Connor could have used it to disarm her father and others” in 1963.
Condi Rice remembers many lessons of how her mother and father stood up to segregationists, refusing again and again to accept the inferior place into which the white Democratic bosses of Birmingham tried to push blacks. She remembers learning from her grandfather that “You have control, you’re proud, you have integrity, nobody can take those things away from you.”
Her grandfather’s aunts were among the first nursing graduates of Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington. By hard work he would put his children through college, and they would marry into other African-American families with passionate faith in the power of education.
“My family is third-generation college-educated,” says Dr. Condoleezza Rice, winner of the NAACP Image Award. “I should’ve gotten to where I am.”
Both her father, the Rev. John W. Rice Jr., then pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church and dean of historically black Stillman College, and mother Angelena, a science and music teacher at a local black high school, were committed to providing the best education possible for their daughter. Her name, Condoleezza, comes from the Italian musical notation “con dulce” or “con dolcezza,” meaning to play “with sweetness.”
Condi began piano lessons at age 3 and by age 4 was accompanying the choir at her father’s church. She learned to read music before she, by age 5, could fluently read English. When the local superintendent of Negro schools decided that Condi was too young to attend first grade, Angelena took a year off from work to teach her daughter at home. Condi was soon mastering figure skating, French, ballet, Latin and a host of other advanced skills.
Playing Bach and Beethoven even before her feet could reach the piano’s pedals, Condoleezza pursued becoming a concert pianist. At age 13 her family moved to Colorado, where her father became a University of Denver assistant dean. She enrolled there at age 15, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, at age 19 when most other youngsters are just beginning college.
But by then she recognized that she lacked the skill to become one of a handful of pianists able to reach the top of that profession and would probably end up “teaching 13-year-olds to murder Beethoven for a living.”
One day she found herself in a classroom fascinated by Josef Korbel, former Marxist Czech diplomat, as he expounded on the Byzantine nature of Soviet politics and Stalin. “There was so much intrigue,” Rice says. “I decided I wanted to study the Soviet Union.”
“It was like falling in love,” she told Essence Magazine. “I just suddenly knew that’s what I wanted to do. ... Soviet politics, Soviet everything.”
Korbel, who became Rice’s mentor and career booster, is the father of Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Condoleezza went on to earn a master's degree in international relations at Notre Dame, then a Ph.D. at the University of Denver. The year she completed her doctorate, 1981, she was offered a teaching job at Stanford University. She is author or co-author of several scholarly books, including "Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army: 1948-1983," "The Gorbachev Era" and "Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft."
Her expertise on the Soviet Union soon earned Rice an advisory position with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1986 and, with the recommendation of Brent Scowcroft, a place on President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council in 1989.
She returned to Stanford in 1991, becoming provost of that great university in 1993, with oversight of its $1.5 billion budget. She has also served on the boards of Notre Dame University, the San Francisco Symphony, the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, San Francisco PBS affiliate KQED, and other institutions. She co-founded the Center for a New Generation to help educate gifted minority students, as she was and is.
When they first talked, she and George W. Bush, both big sports fans and devout Christians, hit it off immediately. “America will find that she is a wise person,” the president-elect said when announcing her as his pick to become National Security Advisor in December 2000. “I trust her judgment.”
Rice is part of a tiny Bush inner circle of brilliant advisers – including Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State George Schultz and Pentagon analyst Paul Wolfowitz – nicknamed for their superior intellects as “The Vulcans,” in the spirit of Mr. Spock and other Vulcans in “Star Trek.”
Now, at age 49, Condi Rice has already become what Business Week magazine called probably the most influential National Security Advisor since Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. When she, as one of two top foreign policy advisers to the president of the United States, criticizes or challenges Hugo Chavez, it is no wonder that this nasty little Marxist tyrant shakes with fear and rage.
Chavez knows perfectly well that Dr. Rice is not illiterate. In fact, she is an expert on Marxism, the Soviet Union and the kind of tactics Chavez and his ally Fidel Castro are now using to subvert Venezuela as well as several other Latin American nations. Her expertise is helping shape the hard line that President Bush has taken against Fidel Castro at this week’s summit of Western Hemispheric democracies in Monterrey, Mexico.
The difference between the Marxist indoctrination of Chavez and Castro and the kind of education that lifted Condoleezza Rice and her family is clear. An enlightenment Western education of the kind that informed America’s Founders is one that respects and empowers individuals.
One of the only three things Thomas Jefferson wanted inscribed on his tombstone and wished to be remembered for was the founding of the University of Virginia – and what it represented: universal education to empower every American with the basic tools of literacy.
Jefferson wanted all to be educated, not to teach conformity but so that every citizen could read the revolutionary pamphlets of future Tom Paines. Jefferson understood that revolution is a never-ending process, that each new generation must rise up and rein in the tendency of government to take more and more power from the people.
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization,” wrote Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be.”
Dr. Condoleezza Rice is a living symbol of the liberating power of education, determination and self-respect.
Hugo Chavez is also to some degree educated. He reportedly in 1975 earned master's degrees in military sciences and engineering from the Venezuelan Academy of Military Sciences. He also studied for a master's degree in political sciences at the Simon Bolivar University in Caracas but reportedly never graduated.
Like so many on the political Left, Chavez has the education of a technocrat and the soul of a machine. His is a mind without beauty, without love, without any depth of human compassion or comprehension, without respect for the unique talent of each individual. No wonder one wife divorced him and a second left. No wonder he has imported more than 10,000 Cuban operatives and tons of Cuban textbooks to indoctrinate the children of Venezuela with Marxist racist-like ideas of class hatred and class war.
To understand the Left, here and in Cuba, ponder the documentary “90 Miles” by Juan Carlos Zaldivar, aired on the PBS show “POV” on July 29, 2003.
“In 1980, I was a thirteen-year-old communist living in Cuba,” Zaldivar’s personal story begins. “The Revolution was the biggest thing in my life. Bigger than religion, or anything else.”
This documentary follows his reluctant move with his family to the United States via the Mariel boatlift and his comparison of Cuba and the U.S.
As you would expect from the Public Broadcasters of Socialism, this documentary is not entirely positive toward America. It shows Juan’s father “bitter,” disappointed with his inability to become rich in the U.S. and “defeated by the American dream for which he sacrificed everything in 1980.” It takes viewers back to Cuba and depicts people there as relatively happy.
And Zaldivar identifies himself as part of a politically correct minority, gays – while never mentioning Fidel Castro’s monstrous history of imprisoning, torturing and killing people simply because they are homosexuals.
But in this documentary we find that in Communist Cuba “instead of going to school, my class would join demonstrations that publicly humiliated the people who were deserting [leaving]. They were called ‘acts of hate.’ We’d build bond fires [sic]. ... And we’d make dummies out of uniforms that people left behind. We would stuff them with their pillows and then we would burn them. ... One afternoon, I saw a mob of my school friends chasing a student and her mother. The mother was caught sneaking her daughter out of school to take her out of the country.”
In addition to such lynch-mob “acts of hate,” Zaldivar says: In Cuba we had to wear uniforms to school. In Miami, we could wear whatever we wanted. I didn’t like that. It created this atmosphere that there was nobody to answer to. ...”
“I remembered how safe one feels in a crowd,” he says of the Orwellian groupthink in Cuba.
“During the first two years [in Miami], I was very outspoken,” says Zaldivar. “I was still spouting out communist slogans.”
His father explains to him how Fidel and the Marxists too control over who got what in Cuba. “You had to apply and they gave you a house,” the father says. “When they came to check me out, they saw pictures of saints on the walls. So they never gave me a house.”
His father had supported Castro’s revolution, and continued to be a block leader for it prior to deciding to leave for the United States. He was a man insufficiently loyal to either system, viewers are left to conclude, and fell between the two stools.
This columnist has also seen Castro’s educational system firsthand, albeit briefly. As a journalist in Cuba to do a piece for the Los Angeles Times, I visited a Potemkin Village school shown off to foreign visitors. Oddly, the pride of this school was its adjoining factory, into which young students were marched to work half of each day, burning their hands with acid as they manufactured batteries.
If such a thing happened in the U.S., it would be denounced as brutal exploitation of child labor. Visiting Leftists to Fidel’s factory-school, of course, make no such criticisms of Cuba whatsoever.
And, needless to say, we were not shown how those who fail to conform and succeed as Communists in Cuba’s schools are required to live out their short lives in the hot sun cutting sugarcane for 10 Cuban pesos a month – much the way slaves lived in Cuba centuries ago.
This school had a black principal – the only instance in Cuba where I saw a black person in a position of power. As Cuban-American author Humberto Fontova (whose current best-seller is "The Hellpig Hunt") explained to me, Leftist Hollywood movies about Cuba typically depict Castro’s revolutionaries overthrowing a blond, blue-eyed dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar. Batista, however, in real life was a dark-skinned mulatto of black ancestry from a poor farming family.
It is Castro who embodies the white Spaniard colonial ruling class and whose father was a crime boss in Cuba ... just as Fidel is a crime boss today. And under Batista, Cuba had the third-highest standard of living in the Western Hemisphere, while today this Marxist prison colony is near or at the bottom. This, notes Fontova, is typical of the lies America’s Leftist media use to brainwash Americans.
This is also typical of the lies in Cuban textbooks now being used by Hugo Chavez to enslave the children of Venezuela – and of the Left-slanted faculties that former Marxist intellectual David Horowitz has been fighting to diversify at the University of Denver and other institutions of higher learning.
Call it Red-ucation in the enslaving spirit of Karl Marx, not education in the empowering spirit of Thomas Jefferson and Condoleezza Rice.
Here’s one lesson to remember: A major 1986 textbook dealing with Marxist education lists 15 significant nations that were then Communist. Today, 18 years later, more than half of those nations are no longer Communist. Guess who is winning the global battle for hearts and minds.
A second lesson: As Condoleezza Rice so admirably teaches by example, we must never permit the collectivist thugs, here or abroad, to stifle or end the conversation.
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