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Toward a New Democratic World Order
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15856 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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1 / 1989 |
3,905 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
The new Bush administration, which takes over the helm of government in the United States this month, should place at the top of its foreign policy agenda programs designed to create a new and more democratic world order. The Bush administration should work to end the division of Europe, to fashion a global community of democratic nations with a court of human and political rights, and to create a system for the international management of national economic policies and resources.
If it is obvious that these programs cannot be implemented quickly--perhaps not even in the next eight years--then how can I justify the assertion that they must be placed at the top of the foreign policy agenda and that no foreign policy position should be taken until its impact on these long-term goals has been assessed?
Unless the United States begins to focus on these problems, it will fail to build those international institutions that are central to the creation of a world fit for free human beings. The scientific achievements that can permit this are just over the horizon. What it needs now is the political will and imagination to take those steps and to create those institutions that would permit us to anticipate these scientific developments. But to bring about these changes, it is necessary to reorient the way we think about the world.
Early in June, Michael Dukakis said NATO had lasted for 40 years and that it ought to be able to last for an additional 40 years. That statement pithily recapitulated what has been wrong with American statecraft for most of the post-World War II period.
The Truman triumph
The first Truman administration's national security policy was responsible for the only outstanding period in American statecraft since World War II. The Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the steps that led to the formation of NATO in 1949 were courageous, imaginative, and constructive. In their absence all of Europe might have fallen into the Soviet sphere of influence. And because of those measures, the United States has achieved a relatively stable postwar order within which American democracy has had room to work. And yet these important and required measures were taken within the framework of a myopic view of the world.
One episode sums up that myopia, and it involves America's greatest postwar secretary of state, Dean Acheson.
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