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National Interests and American Purpose
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10508 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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1 / 1993 |
2,565 Words |
| Author
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George Weigel
George Weigel, a Roman Catholic theologian, is president of
the Washington-based James Madison Foundation and the editor
of American Purpose. His most recent book is Tranquillitas
Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American
Catholic Thought on War and Peace. |
Even by traditional American standards, the 1992 presidential campaign was singularly mute on issues of foreign policy. And yet President Clinton will face, over the next four years, a world that has been dramatically, dangerously, and, just perhaps, hopefully transformed in the 1980s. The Fifty-five Years' War against totalitarianism has been won (Chinese communist gerontocrats notwithstanding). Moreover, that victory was a decisive vindication of the West and its commitment to human freedom. No amount of spin doctoring by Mikhail Gorbachev or squadrons of American "Sovietologists" can change the basic facts of the matter: European communism did not just "wither away"; it was defeated, orally and politically, by the West in coalition with the brave of central and eastern Europe. That defeat nailed down the great lesson of the 1980s: If you want a just and prosperous society under the conditions of modernity, you choose democracy and the market.
Yet the very triumph of the forces of freedom has been the occasion for the revival of ancient animosities in the new democracies. Communism, in central and eastern Europe, was like a great frozen ocean; once the pack of ice began to break up, the human juices that had been locked beneath the surface during the Stalinist and Breznevite hegemony came to the surface--and at a time when formerly communist states are struggling to consolidate the transitions to free politics and the free economy. The torment of what used to be Yugoslavia is but the most extreme case of a situation in which the drive toward a secure democratic future has been for-stalled by the passions of a bitterly remembered past.
The new administration will be faced, throughout the world, but especially in central and Eastern Europe, with grave questions about the future of freedom. The Balkan upheaval could spill over into central Europe. Russia may go the way of Yugoslavia, creating the greatest flood of refugees since the Indo-Pakistani war of 1947. Or Russia may revert, for psychological safety's sake, into a radical nationalist shell. But any such withdrawal will not be without consequences for the rest of the region, and indeed, for the world. There are still tens of thousands of nuclear weapons in what used to be the Soviet Union. There are unresolved issues between Russia and Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, the new republics of central Asia, and China. What, if anything, can the United States and its allies do to prevent mass violence, as well as to secure a democratic and capitalist future, in the former USSR and its old sphere of influence? That question was largely avoided during the recent campaign. It will not be avoidable in the mid--1990s.
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