Real Peace (12 page)

To stop the Soviets from reaping further grim victories, we must scan the globe just as they do. When all is quiet in the Third World, all is not necessarily well. The potential for unrest in a country often smolders just below the surface. Up until now we have only moved in to put out the fires of revolution once they start. In the future we must learn to keep them from igniting at all.

We need an early warning system for pinpointing these potential
Third World hot spots. Once we identify them we must offer an active, workable alternative to communism.

Our goal is not to prove to people that our system is better than communism. They know that. Communism is something a country is infected with, not something it chooses. We must help those countries whose immune systems are low, build up those countries the Soviets and their proxies are apt to find most susceptible to their tactics. The West must learn how to practice preventive political medicine. More economic aid now could reduce the possibility that we would be called on for more military aid later.

The United States' responsibility in this effort should be principally, but not exclusively, our own backyard: Latin America, both Central America and South America. Since every Latin American country is a potential target for the communists, every country should be a target for us.

Our efforts, while directed primarily toward Latin America, should not be restricted to our hemisphere, and our allies' efforts should not be restricted to theirs. The Soviets' front lines in the fight for the Third World circle the globe. Their challenge is unified and centrally managed, and we will not meet it effectively if we simply divide the world into exclusive spheres of economic influence.

Soldiers wearing the uniforms of many NATO nations serve on the front lines in West Germany because each member of the alliance recognizes that what happens there affects its interests. We must grapple in the same way with the Soviet threat in the Third World. In the effort to strengthen the economic base of the developing world each alliance nation should act in the areas with which it is most familiar—the Europeans in Africa, for instance, and the Japanese in Asia. But each Western nation must also recognize that its interests are directly affected by events on the other side of the world, such as those in Central America. Likewise, European and Japanese efforts in Africa and Asia should not preclude the U.S. from assisting in these regions.

There is no reason why prosperity should necessarily exist north of the equator but not south of it. The West must find ways to teach what it knows. It will take an international effort involving both the public and private sectors; businessmen, government officials, educators, technical experts all must participate. If we are to protect what we have from our aggressive adversaries, we must share what we have with our less fortunate friends. Otherwise, it is through them that our adversaries may eventually get at us.

We need dramatic new initiatives to break the vicious cycle through which underdeveloped nations with authoritarian governments and some hope for the future are transformed into underdeveloped nations with totalitarian governments and no hope for the future. The West has been on the defensive for 35 years on all fronts—in Western Europe, in Asia and Southeast Asia, throughout the Third World. We must now go onto the offensive—not just in Central America but worldwide. We and our allies must be as bold and as generous in helping poor Third World countries get started on the road to economic progress as the U.S. was in helping Europe and Japan recover after World War II.

Obsessed with the idea that there is a limit to what we can do in the world, we have failed to press as hard as we could right up to that limit. In the Third World the Soviets exploit and extend human misery. It is our responsibility to confine and ease human misery. This is true of every nation of the Western alliance. The U.S. can show the way, however, by its actions in Latin America.

The threat of communist aggression is far more immediate to the nations of Latin America than it is to us. These nations' leaders are also far better acquainted with their peoples' problems and needs than we are. We should encourage and welcome their guidance and initiatives. They, in turn, should encourage and welcome ours.

Some Americans, believing we can duplicate our success in helping the nations of Western Europe rebuild after World War II, have called for a “Latin American Marshall Plan.” The goal
is excellent, but in pursuing it we must bear in mind that the Marshall Plan was officially called the European Recovery Program. In Latin America and the rest of the Third World the issue is not
recovering
but
getting started
. The Europeans were experienced in running sophisticated industrial economies. Most developing nations are not. Any economic aid program for Latin America will cost far more and take much more time to achieve results than was the case with our aid to Europe and Japan after World War II.

The debate over U.S. foreign aid is confined by two extremes. Some say we should cut government-to-government aid and increase private investment in Latin America. Others insist that more government-to-government aid rather than more private investment is the answer. In fact neither will work without the other.

Government-to-government aid should be used as fertilizer, to prepare the ground for private investment and thus for economic growth. Such aid is only worth the investment if growing conditions are right. If the government is repressive, the aid won't work. If the government is corrupt, the aid won't work. If the government has policies that penalize private investment, the aid won't work. If the government is so unstable that businessmen, workers, and consumers have no peace of mind, the aid won't work. Most important, since aid will not work without trade, we must expand the array of trade preferences we offer to our Latin American neighbors.

The Reagan Administration's Caribbean Basin Initiative is an excellent step toward achieving these goals. It should be substantially increased and extended to other nations in South America.

• • •

A massive increase in both
financial
aid and
human
aid—in which Canada, Europe, and Japan carry their fair share and the great bulk of which will be provided through private investment rather than government grants—is the best investment the West could make for peace, progress, and stability in the Third World.

While the Soviet promise is an empty one, we cannot beat it with nothing. We can beat it by recognizing and using the enormous economic advantage the West has over the Soviets. Our system works; theirs doesn't. Marxist economic policies produce poverty rather than progress. The only economic success stories since World War II have been written in the free countries of Europe, North America, and non-communist Asia. The Soviets can only brandish their power. We can give the gift of progress by helping poor countries up the first, most difficult steps of the ladder of economic development.

We can offer advice and even prescribe solutions to economic problems. But as far as political systems are concerned, we should be far more restrained and patient. While democracy works for the nations of the West, instant democracy is neither possible nor desirable for most of the Third World. We should hold fast to our ideals of human rights, but at the same time understand that a regime that provides some human rights is better than one that will provide none. The answer to those who contend that the U.S. loses in the court of world opinion because we support repressive anti-communist governments is that the most repressive governments in the world are communist ones.

The West has a long tradition of democratic government that most of the rest of the world does not share. But even the U.S., as prone as we are to hurling moralistic lightning bolts at regimes that do not come up to snuff on human rights, gave the vote to women only 63 years ago and guaranteed civil rights to blacks only 20 years ago. We must learn to be less harsh judges.

On the other hand, neither good moral sense nor good strategic sense compels us to subsidize an authoritarian regime's practice of repression. By its very nature such a regime will inhibit rather than stimulate economic growth, and without growth and stability a nation remains vulnerable to violent revolution—and therefore Soviet meddling. Just as we can deter Soviet misbehavior by establishing economic ties the Russians would be loath to give up, we can influence friendly
but authoritarian regimes if we quietly but unmistakably let them know that our friendship will be even more profitable to them once they adopt less repressive policies.

If we give our friends nothing but public lectures on political morality, we create resentment and thus widen rather than narrow the gap between us. But if we give them economic support to help create stability and military support, in the form of aid and advice, against forces that threaten them with chaos, we will be sowing the seeds of democracy. Democracy is inevitably the first casualty of unrest and war. It is also an inevitable product of peace and prosperity.

To build real peace in the Third World, we must be patient with those who do not yet come up to our standards of political behavior. We must be loyal to those nations that choose not to threaten us. And we must be generous in sharing what our prosperity has given us.

In the countries where it has been established, Marxism has produced poverty, not progress; tyranny, not liberation; repression, not justice. Communism's performance has belied its promise. In the 1950s and 1960s, many leaders of nations emerging from colonialism understandably mistook Soviet successes in forced industrialization as the wave of the future. But the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union and in the Third World has been exposed in ways all can see. Eighteen countries in the world have communist governments. None came to power in a free election. And there is no country in the communist world whose leaders will risk having a free, democratic election. Today Marxism-Leninism is only a recipe small groups of ruthless men use to gain power and stay in power.

The Soviets have lost the ideological battle in the Third World. But this does not mean the West has won it. In the Third World, where change is inevitable, the West too often finds itself on the side of the status quo. If the choice is between the status quo and communism, the latter will prevail if only by virtue of the shrewd, cynical opportunism of the Soviet Union.

To win the ideological battle, the West must be opportunistic, too. It must aggressively seek opportunities to channel the energy of inevitable change in the Third World toward peaceful revolution rather than violent revolution. Today, the only kind of revolution on the market is too often the kind that the Soviets and their surrogates sell. Tomorrow, we can put them out of business.

In World War I, the slaughter in the trenches prompted many to call the conflict “the war to end war.” Yet 20 years later world war again engulfed the globe, leaving unprecedented destruction in its wake and killing almost four times as many people. When World War II ended the nuclear age began, and the potential destruction of war increased exponentially. Today it is no longer an exaggeration to say that the next war would be “the war to end war” because it would also end civilization as we know it.

We must not court confrontation or flirt with war, but neither should we let ourselves be seduced by the idea of peace at any price. Mao Zedong elliptically expressed concern about this danger in my last meeting with him in 1976. He asked me, “Is peace your only goal?” I replied that our goal was peace, but a peace that was more than the absence of war. I told him, “It must be a peace with justice.” If I had answered Mao's question with a discourse that emphasized only the need for peace and friendship, he would have considered me to be not only wrong but also a fool. After all, if peace really is our only goal, we can have it any time we wish simply by surrendering. The peace we seek must be coupled with justice.

To pursue peace with justice, the West must adapt its policies to the realities of the world today. Our policy must combine deterrence with detente. Detente without deterrence leads to appeasement, and deterrence without detente leads to unnecessary confrontation and saps the will of Western peoples to support the arms budgets deterrence requires. Together, they will lead to the containment of and peaceful competition with the Soviet Union.

Hard-headed detente requires us to concert our actions on several fronts. We must erect a shield of military power that will deter Soviet aggression at all levels. We need to make progress on arms control agreements that will reduce the burden of defense, reestablish the balance of power, and increase strategic stability in crises. We have to provide the Soviets with an economic stake in peace as a further incentive to stop their aggression. We must create a process for settling those differences between the superpowers that can be resolved and for preventing our irreconcilable disagreements from leading to war.

Peace and justice require nothing less of us. We do not oppose communism simply because our economic system is capitalist. We oppose its spread because of what it does to the people forced to live under its rule. Communism is an ideological bubonic plague. Wherever it has spread, it has made a nightmare out of the common man's dreams of a better life for himself and his family. It has broken up millions of families and has turned millions of others into refugees. It has killed tens of millions of innocent people and has enslaved nations. The first requirement of justice is that we block the further expansion of communism.

But containment is not enough. It would be wrong to hold a second Yalta conference, carving the world into spheres of domination and tacitly accepting the Brezhnev Doctrine that whatever is communist must remain so. It would be the height of injustice to purchase peace at the price of condemning forever to communism the millions behind the Iron Curtain. The Soviets will never accept the status quo in the West. We must
never be satisfied with the status quo—East or West. We must never accept their rules for “peaceful” competition: that the Soviet bloc is a privileged sanctuary and that the West is their happy hunting ground.