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Building the New World Order
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20273 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
3,308 Words |
| Author
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Robert D. Blackwill And Philip Zelikow
Robert D. Blackwill and Philip Zelikow are members of the
faculty of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of
Government. |
When Americans, in an election year, ask themselves whether they are better off today, one factor they consider is the place of their country in the world. Is America safer in 1992 than in 1988--or especially than it was in 1980, when Jimmy Carter was the Democratic president? Have our nation's ideals and interests faded or flourished since that painful time 12 years ago?
America's international position has not only improved in the last four years. It has been transformed. Since the United States accepted its global responsibilities in the Second World War, more than a half-century ago, our country has never enjoyed such security from foreign enemies. We defeated dictatorships in Germany and Japan in the 1940s but then faced another totalitarian empire, led brutally from Moscow. The Soviet Union massed vast armies in the heart of a Europe that it divided with barbed wire and concrete barriers. The Soviets perfected and deployed nuclear weapons to reach across the oceans and lay waste to America. For generations, we lived under the pervasive shadow of this nuclear nightmare.
That nightmare for the American people is over. In the last four years, with President Bush leading the free world, the Soviet empire and the USSR itself have collapsed, as Ronald Reagan predicted, into the dustbin of history. Communism has been completely discredited. The Soviet military threat to Western Europe has disappeared. Germany has been peacefully united. Eastern Europe has been liberated. Nuclear arsenals are being reduced as fast as technology will allow, with thousands of nuclear weapons leaving the two nations' inventories. American ideals of freedom and free enterprise are the dominant moral and intellectual forces on the globe. There is a word that precisely describes conditions such as these. That word is victory.
As with any geopolitical triumph, important tasks remain undone. The challenge of erecting and maintaining a structure of peace never ends. Yet from the perspective of history, there has never been another time when the United States has achieved so many of the enduring objectives of its foreign policy in such a short period.
Like Harry Truman before him, President Bush inherited favorable conditions for the exertion of American influence, including from his immediate predecessor. As in the 1940s, however, success required a vision for the new world to come, careful judgments on tactics and strategy, and a sure grasp of the U.S. diplomatic and security tools to be used in constructing a new world
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