Beyond Peace (4 page)

We and our allies can be proud of our role in the Cold War. But the defeat of communism was a double-edged sword. Surveying the carnage in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, where fifty thousand men fell in one day, Wellington said that there was “only one thing worse than winning a battle, and that was losing it.” Historically there is always a period of exhaustion after a military victory. Victory in the Cold War was not just military. It was a complex ideological, political, and economic triumph. Our exhaustion is therefore felt in all of these dimensions simultaneously.

Throughout the Cold War, we looked forward to a time when we might live in a peaceful world, with harmonious international relations, prosperous economies reaping the benefits of unlimited global trade, the expansion of freedom and human rights, and the opportunity to enjoy life. These promises of peace crystallized into an idealized vision of a post–Cold War future. The fact that it has not been realized has produced a pervasive, enervating sense of anticlimax. The reality of peace is that it is only the foundation upon which a more prosperous and just world can be built. This effort will require just as much determination, vision, and patience as the defeat of communism required.

Yet a potentially devastating fallout of our post–Cold War letdown is that the American people have grown tired of world
leadership. They were reluctant to have it thrust upon them in the first place. At a dinner I gave for him shortly before I went to China in 1972, André Malraux observed that the United States is the first nation in history to become a world power without trying to become one. We are essentially isolationist and become involved in foreign conflicts not simply when our interests are at stake but when we also believe we are engaged in a great idealistic cause.

Following World War II, the United States abandoned its traditional peacetime isolationism to wage the Cold War against communism around the world. We did so because we believed we were engaged in an ideological conflict with profound moral consequences. Many now believe that it is time for others to carry the burden of leadership abroad and that we should turn our attention and resources to our problems at home. This was candidate Clinton's major theme and the primary reason President Bush, a foreign policy expert, lost the election of 1992.

Most Americans thought that our victory in the Cold War, with its peace dividend, would help us solve our domestic problems. The opposite has occurred. The end of the Cold War has exacerbated our problems at home. Foreign challenges unite us. Domestic challenges divide us. What we must realize is that domestic and foreign policies are like Siamese twins—one cannot survive without the other. The American people will not support a strong foreign policy unless we have a strong economy at home. Conversely, a weak economy, as we learned in the thirties, almost inevitably leads to a weak foreign policy—with potentially devastating consequences. It is no accident that fascists rose to power in a Europe stricken by a depression aggravated by our shortsighted trade policies. Periods of prolonged peace are generally periods of stagnation. No one would say that war is good for a country, but it is undeniable that the United States has been at its best when confronted with aggression or some other significant international challenge (our space effort after the shock of Sputnik is a case in point). Most of our greatest
Presidents were war Presidents. Our greatest bursts of increased productivity and scientific advancement have occurred during war. To meet the challenges we face in the post–Cold War era, we must marshal the same resources of energy, optimism, and common purpose that thrive during war and put them to work at home and abroad during an era when our enemy will be neither communism nor Nazism but our own self-defeating pessimism.

Charles de Gaulle once said, “France was never her true self unless she was engaged in a great enterprise.” This is true of the United States as well. Great causes push us to heights, as a nation and as individuals, that would not otherwise be achieved. Without a great cause to galvanize America, the very unity of our nation will be at risk as we struggle to meet the challenges of the coming century.

If America is to remain a great nation, what we need today is a mission beyond peace.

•   •   •

In the first years of my Presidency, the Cold War was a dark backdrop to the rage of the Vietnam War. Conflict abroad and at home was the rule; concord was the exception. In the early pre-dawn hours of May 9, 1970, at the height of the massive demonstrations against our involvement in Vietnam, I went to the Lincoln Memorial and visited with a group of student protesters who had gathered there. Most of them were privileged young people who had not had to serve in Vietnam. They told me they thought the war was wrong. I stressed that tens of thousands of young men of their generation were fighting in Vietnam so that they and their children would never have to fight in a war again. In the shadow of a monument to a President who had fought the bloodiest war in American history for the abstract, almost spiritual concept of national union, I tried to lift their sights above their confusion and bitterness over a war they thought was wrong but that was being fought for the sake of safeguarding their country's security and most fundamental principles.

After returning to the White House I dictated my recollections of the conversation:

What are those elements of spirit that really matter? I knew that young people today were searching, as I was searching forty years ago, for an answer. I just wanted to be sure that all of them realized that ending the war, and cleaning up the streets and the air and the water, was not going to solve spiritual hunger—which all of us have and which, of course, has been the great mystery of life from the beginning of time.

The yearning for a better world felt by many of the more idealistic demonstrators found its most immediate expression in denunciations of the United States and its policies at home and abroad. They wanted equality, justice, and truth. Perhaps because they had not seen as much of the world as I had, they did not understand how scarce these qualities were in the rest of the world and how plentiful in their own country. All they knew was that they felt angry, hopeless, and spiritually empty. They believed that ending the war in Vietnam would end the pervasive climate of discord at home. When U.S. military involvement in Vietnam did end three years later, so did the demonstrations. But peace was not enough to fill the spiritual vacuum. Nor is peace enough at the end of the Cold War. Peace is a great goal, but it is not a panacea.

Neither is material wealth. Proponents of Marxism-Leninism believed that if the state provided all the necessities of life, people's greatest aspirations would be fulfilled—and yet communism produced the world's most drab, dispirited societies. The color of communism was not red but gray. Proponents of the Great Society programs of the 1960s thought the beneficent hand of government could salve the spirits of the poor by helping satisfy their material needs—and yet America's inner cities today are plagued with crime, drug addiction, and hopelessness. Those who are better off work their whole lives to assemble vast wealth, only to find that they are no happier, no more spiritually
enriched, than before. Surveys show that many prosperous, aging members of the baby-boom generation are driving their Volvos and BMWs back to church, searching for answers in the same doctrines they once ridiculed their parents for honoring. These examples and countless others show that individual fulfillment cannot be found in sheer materialism, whether communist, socialist, or capitalist. Just as nations need causes greater than themselves, so do individuals.

In his book
The Morality of Law,
Lon Fuller drew an eloquent distinction between the morality of duty and the morality of aspiration, a distinction that applies to nations as well as to individuals. In times of war a premium is placed on the morality of duty, the absolute necessity of doing what is required, of doing right in the limited sense of not doing what is wrong. The morality of duty, while indispensable, is not an adequate standard for a great people in the era beyond peace. The morality of aspiration calls for us to strive to accomplish not just the things we are required to do but all that we are capable of doing. It is this higher challenge we must embrace now that we have fulfilled our duty as a free people in helping to bring about the defeat of communism. Every individual, every community, every nation, must dedicate itself to the fullest realization of its potential. We must make peace more than simply the absence of war. We must make it the means to a greater end.

•   •   •

At the beginning of the Cold War, when real peace seemed more distant than ever, President Truman delivered before a joint session of Congress a powerful appeal for military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey to meet the communist threat to those countries. Two freshmen congressmen, John Kennedy and I, voted in favor of the aid. The vote was difficult politically for him because the liberal Democrats in his Massachusetts district opposed all military aid. It was difficult politically for me because the conservative Republicans in my California district opposed all foreign aid. We voted for it because we were motivated
by a great cause that transcended partisan politics: the defeat of communism. In voting as we did, we helped to launch the bipartisan effort that deterred Soviet aggression in Western Europe for four decades and united the nation in a great cause.

As a nation we responded magnificently to the threat of war then. Can we not now respond to the promise of peace? War brings out the best and the worst in men. Peace should bring out only the best.

Shortly after World War I, Winston Churchill eloquently described the same dilemma we seem to face today:

Why should war be the only purpose capable of uniting us in comradeship? Why should war be the only cause large enough to call forth really great and fine sacrifice? Look at the wonderful, superb things people will do to carry on a war and win a victory. Look at what they will give up. Look at what toil they achieve—what risks, what suffering, what marvelous ingenuity, what heroic and splendid qualities they display. All for war. Nothing is too good for war. Why cannot we have some of it for peace? Why is war to have all the splendors, all the nobleness, all the courage and loyalty? Why should peace have nothing but the squabbles and selfishness and the pettiness of daily life? All the arts and science that we use at war are standing by us now ready to help us in peace. Only one thing do we require—a common principle of action, a plain objective that everyone can understand and work for.

In the years since World War II, Americans rose successfully to the moral challenge laid down by Churchill. While the Cold War fueled an intense military competition and erupted into hot wars in Korea and Vietnam, as well as dozens of smaller engagements from the Bay of Pigs to Afghanistan, it never brought the superpowers into battle against one another. In at least two confrontations that might have led to global nuclear war—the Cuban missile crisis during the Kennedy administration and the Yom Kippur War during my administration—the
Soviets eventually blinked. For forty-five years, the West's toil, ingenuity, courage, and heroism were brought to bear, as Churchill would have had it, on keeping the peace rather than winning a war. Someday historians will look back on the defeat of communism in the Cold War and recognize it for what it was: one of the most magnificent achievements of free people in the history of civilization.

We no longer face the threat of aggression by a powerful foe. The fear of nuclear annihilation has been drastically reduced. No nation currently has the power to threaten us, our allies, or our friends without risking a devastating response by our forces. The way should be clear for the complete triumph of Western ideals of political and economic freedom. Yet all over the world, and especially in the post-Soviet states and the nations of Eastern Europe, these ideals are on trial. It is by no means certain that they will prevail. “One of the great lessons of history,” British historian Paul Johnson has written, “is that no civilization can be taken for granted. Its permanency can never be assured. There is always a dark age waiting for you around the corner if you play your cards badly and you make sufficient mistakes.” Whether the ideals of freedom survive and thrive in soil that has been laid waste by generations of misuse depends on how well the United States, the shining example of the power of peace and freedom, shows the way. How well we show the way, in turn, depends on how well we have learned four great lessons of the Cold War. These lessons require us to recognize the sheer power of our own example. They require that we act to renew the same qualities that made us strong. They require that we not turn away from the very principles that former communist nations now eagerly embrace as their own.

We will play our cards well if we remember these four principles:

• Only free markets can fully unleash the creative energies of people to drive the engine of progress.
The Cold War taught
us that communism does not work, socialism does not work, and state-dominated economies do not work. Communism failed its people both politically and economically, but it was its economic failure that ultimately destroyed it. People will put up with shortages of political freedom far longer than with shortages of food, shelter, and clothing.

When we met in 1959, Khrushchev predicted that my children would live under communism. I replied, “Mr. Khrushchev, your grandchildren will live in freedom.” At that time, I was sure he was wrong. I was not sure I was right. When I visited an open-air market that year in Moscow, the people were ebullient, upbeat, and optimistic about the future under Khrushchev's reforms. They were not free politically, but Khrushchev was at least better than Stalin, and most of them believed Khrushchev's assertion that they would overtake the United States economically.

In 1991, the last year of Gorbachev's Presidency, Soviet communism,
glasnost,
and
perestroika,
I visited a state-run store near the Kremlin. The people, as they waited in line for butter and a few pieces of gristly beef, told me that the economy had never been worse. For the first time in years, it was hard to get even basic foodstuffs such as bread and potatoes. Gorbachev had enacted significant political reforms, but the people were sullen and deeply pessimistic about the future. They were poor both in goods and in spirit. Just after dawn one morning, during a walk through Red Square, I came across a line in which thousands of people were waiting outside the GUM department store. They told me they had heard a rumor that food would go on sale later in the morning. As I looked into their angry, tired faces, I saw a rage at the prevailing system that had been absent in 1959, when Moscow was less free but more prosperous. I realized then that the people had lost faith in Gorbachev and that his attempts to reform communism were probably doomed. It was further proof that no politician, communist, noncommunist, or indifferent, can afford to forget that the greatest expectation
people have of their leaders is that they create the conditions for economic growth and prosperity.