A Durable Peace (41 page)

In the face of Nazism, the democracies thus weakened themselves and strengthened their nemesis through a policy of appeasement
that gave Hitler one military and political victory after another: rearmament, the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia.
Not only did each triumph persuade Hitler even more firmly that the West would allow him the next victory, he gained immense
physical resources with which to build his war machine: ten million more German citizens, a dramatically improved strategic
position, vast new natural resources, and excellent industries, including weapons industries, all intact and ready to serve
the Reich.

But most important were the psychological resources that Hitler amassed: His string of bloodless victories over the most powerful
countries of the world allowed him to cast himself in the role of hero, as the champion and hope for the future of the oppressed
Germans (and of other peoples, such as the Arabs). It was this image of genius and invincibility that made opposition to Hitler
impossible, that robbed his opponents of their spirit to resist. At Nuremberg, German generals testified that in the early
years of Nazi rule they had planned to depose Hitler for fear that he would ruin the country—but that his unbroken string
of victories made it impossible to make this case to the German populace, and they were forced to leave him in power.
²

With the fall of Hitler’s Germany and the rise of Stalin’s Russia, the West vowed not to make the same mistake again. The
democracies promptly formed NATO, a powerful defensive alliance against the Communist menace, which had just conquered Eastern
Europe and taken over China. Ringing the Communist empire with a chain of defense organizations, the American policy of “containment”
was reviled as being warlike, intransigent, and an obstacle to peace through successive administrations from Truman to Johnson
to Reagan. But it was nothing of the kind. The unflinching American stand of the 1950s stopped the Communist juggernaut in
its tracks and reduced it to a seesaw battle of ultimately fruitless skirmishes for toeholds in the Third World. It was the
staunch American stand of the 1980s that ultimately convinced the Soviet leadership to give up all hope of a triumph over
the West and to forge peace with it instead. In dealing with tyrants, capitulating to their whims often accelerates the descent
into war. Standing firm in the face of dictatorial demands is not an obstacle to peace, only to aggression.

Of course, since the fall of the Communist system and the democratization of the European republics of the former Soviet bloc,
the peace of deterrence between the eastern and western parts of Europe is rapidly being replaced with the peace of democracies.
As soon as the Warsaw Pact was dismantled, NATO began to change its form accordingly. There is talk of orienting it toward
a more political and a less military role, and to the extent that it retains its military functions its members do not rule
out incorporating into it the countries of Eastern Europe, even the former Soviet Union itself. Furthermore, disarmament efforts,
which previously had advanced at a snail’s pace under the totalitarian Soviet regime, are now hurtling along with such speed
and scope that some arms experts even suggest slowing the pace a bit. For a democratizing
Russia need not be coerced into making such concessions; it
wants
to make them and readily volunteers to accelerate the process.

We can see the same principle at work in the former totalitarian regime of Germany, and in its relations with France, its
principal antagonist since the 1800s. In the period between 1906 and 1945, France and Germany fought four of the bloodiest
wars in history (the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II). Millions of French and Germans
died. The border between Germany and France was fortified, with standing armies facing each other. Yet today it is an open
border, shorn of any physical barrier. This development is often held as evidence that peace is possible between antagonists
of long standing. Indeed it is. But the question we must ask is,
when
did such a peace become possible? It was realized only after the last despotism in Germany, the Nazi regime, was destroyed
and replaced with a democratic government. Once this occurred, Germany and France reverted automatically to the first kind
of peace, the peace of democracies. All the fortifications, troops, and weapons disappeared from the Franco-German border,
and after half a century of solid German democratic institutions, they have not come back. I hazard to say that things will
stay that way as long as German democracy displays firmness and vitality, unlike the weak and vacillating experiment of the
Weimar Republic between the two world wars. But should there be a weakening of German democracy in the future and a concomitant
rise of antidemocratic forces in an increasingly powerful Germany, the peace of Europe and of the entire world will surely
be threatened. I do not use Germany as an exclusive example. The same can be said of Japan, of Korea, and of any other country
with a despotic past and a powerful economic, and hence political and military, future. Similarly, whether the newly liberated
peoples of the former Soviet Union will be able to avoid escalating their nationalist antipathies and territorial grievances
against one another into overt wars—as has happened in Yugoslavia—will depend in no small measure on their abilities
to genuinely democratize. If they produce authoritarian or dictatorial regimes instead, the chances of enduring armed conflict
among them will grow accordingly.

What we have learned in the twentieth century is that there are two radically different policies that will work to achieve
peace and sustain it, depending on which kind of peace is at stake. In a society of democracies, such as Kant envisioned,
it is possible to work to strengthen all states simultaneously, because the cooperation and goodwill of each state will in
the long run work to the benefit of all. This is the situation that pertains in North America and Western Europe and that
may now be spreading to parts of Eastern Europe as well. International relations in these areas consist almost entirely of
devising cooperative schemes by which the peoples of the respective states will benefit. In such a context, concessions and
appeasement toward friends are interpreted as signs of good faith, under the principle of “one good turn deserves another.”

But since the policy of concessions does exactly the opposite when dealing with dictatorships, encouraging dictators to demand
more, a different policy must be pursued toward such regimes. In these cases only the peace of deterrence is possible, and
the only means of achieving it is
to strengthen the democracies and weaken the dictatorships.

Here, in a nutshell, is the main problem of achieving peace in the Middle East: Except for Israel,
there are no democracies.
None of the Arab regimes is based on free elections, a free press, civil rights, and the rule of law. Further, they show
absolutely no sign of democratizing, thereby bucking the almost universal trend toward liberalization evident in Eastern Europe,
the former Soviet Union, Central and South America, Asia, and parts of Africa (which many predicted could never democratize).
In an era when even such hitherto cloistered despotisms as Mongolia and Albania are undergoing democratic revolutions, the
stubborn refusal of the Arab world even to contemplate genuine democratization, let
alone implement it, should send a warning signal to the champions of democracy in Western Europe and America that for now
this region is capable only of the peace of deterrence.

But alarmingly, no such signal is being received in the West. While the United States had a decisive role in pressuring the
dictatorships of Latin America to democratize, as well as some of the African governments such as the Mobutu regime in Zaire;
and while both America and Western Europe put enormous pressure (from trade sanctions to public protest) on the Soviet bloc
and South Africa to observe human rights and allow pluralism, no such pressure,
none whatsoever,
has been placed on the Arab world. It seems that the crusading zeal of the democracies stops at the Sahara’s sandy edge.

The first order of business for those in the West who are seeking a
Western-style peace
for the Middle East is to press the Arab regimes to move toward democracy. By this, I mean not only the tolerance of political
parties or even of majority rule but the introduction of such novel concepts as individual rights, constitutional constraints
on power, and freedom of the press. These run completely contrary to the bogus calls for “democratization” from the Islamic
fundamentalists, whose first act upon coming to power would be to crush such freedoms, as was done in Iran.

I, for one, summarily reject the view that Arabs are incapable of democracy. Israel’s Arab citizens (much like Arab-Americans
in the United States) have adopted the country’s democratic norms, practicing democratic politics in the town councils and
municipal and national elections with all the feistiness of Israeli politics and with none of the violence characteristic
in the Arab world. Yet similar norms cannot and will not develop in the Arab countries without intense and systematic encouragement
from the West.

But if the West is unprepared to agitate for democracy in the Arab world, it should at least bolster the deterrent capacity
of the Middle East’s democracies (there is only one) and work to weaken the power of the more radical tyrannies. This is in
line with the basic principle of building the peace of deterrence: firmness toward
tyrants, friendship toward democracy. Yet so often when it comes to this part of the world, the hard-learned distinction between
the two kinds of peace evaporates, and the West instead does precisely the opposite: pressuring Israel for concessions, and
feverishly appeasing the tyrants with every conceivable weapon and resource. The most obvious example is Saddam Hussein, to
whom the American government insisted on supplying loan guarantees a few
days
before his invasion of Kuwait.
³
In the subsequent war, the Americans had to fight weapons systems that had been supplied by firms from France, Italy, Britain,
Austria, and Greece and tried to bomb Saddam out of fortified bunkers that had been built by Belgians and to gird its troops
against poison gas supplied by German and Swiss companies.
⁴
Now the United States is trying to ferret out of Iraq the multiple hidden nuclear weapons projects that Saddam has built
and continues to build, using technologies sold to him by the West. His current ill repute, of course, seems to have induced
some of his Western suppliers to switch to selling their products to Syria, which was rewarded for its passive support of
the American war against Syria’s archenemy Saddam.

Not only does the West build up Arab dictators, it refuses to link granting them favors to any sort of democratic reforms
or to an end to human rights violations. When it
does
bother to think of criticizing oppression in the Middle East, the West focuses on Israel, the solitary democracy in the region,
whose record compares more than favorably with that of other democracies that have faced similar circumstances. Often enough,
Western officials will even stoop to asserting that because of its behavior, Israel cannot be considered a democracy. But
such condescension merely displays the speaker’s ignorance: of riot control in Los Angeles and Detroit, of antiterror tactics
in Northern Ireland, of the postwar Allied military administration in Germany and Japan. Israel is a democracy
at war,
and its behavior compares favorably with that of any democracy under such circumstances.

Even a cursory glance at events in the Middle East in recent
years reveals that the Arab governments obey the rules of the peace of deterrence to the letter. In 1975, when the Shah of
Iran was at the height of his power, Saddam Hussein signed a nonaggression pact with Iran
because
the Shah was so strong that there was nothing that Saddam could gain by aggression. But after the fall of the Shah and the
collapse of his once-formidable army, Saddam tore up the agreement and invaded Iran, starting the nine-year Iran-Iraq War.
It was only after the first years of fighting, when he realized that Iran would not be beaten, that Saddam sued for peace.
But at this point the Iranians under Khomeini—no democrats either—thought that
they
could win and refused to call off the war. It was only after Saddam had managed to beat back the Iranian counterattack for
several years that Iran too sued for an end to the fighting, and the peace of deterrence was restored along the original border.

Kuwait, too, lacked the capacity to defend itself against Iraq’s aggressive designs and perished until an American-led invasion
brought it back to life. Predatory Arab regimes are limited in their aggression either by deterrence (the two largest predators,
Iraq and Syria, have never actually warred with each other because of mutual fear) or, when deterrence fails, by someone with
superior force physically rolling back their conquests. This was the case with Libya’s invasion of Chad, which the French
intervened to repel in 1985, much as the British had helped Yemen repel the Egyptian invasion in the early 1960s.

In other words, peace in the Middle East means “peace through strength.” One way the West does acknowledge this fact is through
its massive arms sales to the nonradical Arab regimes. But this policy is chimerical, as all the weapons in the world cannot
transform flimsy Kuwait and Saudi Arabia into nations capable of fending off a military state like Iraq, which has an army
twenty times the size of theirs. They can be armed to the teeth, but they have no teeth—as the need for direct American protection
of these states in the Gulf War has proved.

What the arms-sales policy does do, on the other hand, is
build the arsenals for the future fanatics who may one day overthrow the existing rulers—as Qaddafi overthrew the pro-Western
King Idris of Libya, and as Khomeini deposed the Shah of Iran. Similarly, Arab tyrants may acquire weapons that their neighbors
gained, through pillage (as Saddam did in Kuwait) or through pressure of other sorts to put the weapons at their disposal.
In the Arab world, therefore, the destination of massive infusions of weapons today is not necessarily where they will end
up tomorrow; nor is their purpose today necessarily the purpose for which they will eventually be used.