neoconservatism

Reckless War-Making; Review of Sergei N. Goncharov et al.'s Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford University Press, 1993); Kathryn Weathersby's "Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War: New Evidence from Russian Archives", Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 8 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, 1993); Herbert Goldhamer's The 1951 Korean Armistice Conference (RAND Corp., 1994); and William Stueck's The Korean War: An International History (Princeton University Press, 1995).

During June 1994, television newsreels showed former President Jimmy Carter preparing to enter North Korea on a nuclear peace mission. For a brief moment, as Mr. Carter stood talking to North Korean officials at Panmunjom, one could see between the two groups a concrete marker, cemented to the ground and perhaps one inch high, extending across the north-south roadway. This was, of course, the Korean Military Demarcation Line (MDL), established in July 1953, as it passes through the Joint Security Area near the 38th Parallel. In an unpredictable and changing world, which has seen the demise of the Soviet empire and much else besides, the MDL still rigidly divides the two Koreas and reminds the world that the Cold War is not over in Northeast Asia.

Best of Buddies; Review of Anatoly Dobrynin's In Confidence (Random House, 1995)

Washington has lived by leaks and rumors for a very long time, but until the collapse of communism there was one person in town with whom it was always safe to let your hair down. During his quarter-century tenure as Soviet ambassador, you could tell Anatoly Dobrynin whatever you wanted about your superiors, about American foreign policy, or about America itself, without fear that the Washington Post would get wind of your indiscretions. "One good thing I know about you", Richard Nixon told him, "there has not been a single leak."

Other Americans were equally confident that the Soviet system would keep their secrets. What else but such trust would have led Brent Scowcroft, as President Ford's National Security Adviser, to apologize to Dobrynin when his boss publicly endorsed the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate? Or Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to welcome an abusive letter from Leonid Brezhnev, in hopes that it might encourage Jimmy Carter to reconsider his approach in the strategic arms talks? Or Senator Ted Kennedy to complain to Dobrynin that Moscow's disgracefully mild handling of Ronald Reagan was weakening the anti-nuclear movement, and with it the Democratic party?

Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech, delivered in the gymnasium
of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, is one
of the two or three most significant speeches of the twentieth
century. It was made at a pregnant moment in history, as America's
wartime alliance with Soviet Russia was giving way to Cold War.
Churchill's carefully wrought words bespoke a half century of study
and observation of international politics, and an underlying
philosophy whose roots can be traced to major political thinkers of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The speech is remembered today as a seminal pronouncement on behalf
of the Atlantic solidarity and clearheaded realism that ultimately
carried the West to victory in the Cold War. What is less remembered
is that at the time the address brought down on Churchill a torrent
of controversy. Much of the criticism directed toward him had its
roots in philosophic assumptions at odds with Churchill's, ones that
took it as self-evident that a thorough-going transformation of the
state system was both possible and desirable. Churchill thought
otherwise.

Interest in this controversy from the chair of hindsight fifty years
later is not merely academic, for the main issues discussed by
Churchill--the role of the United Nations in what many hoped would be
a new world order, control of new weapons of mass destruction, the
efficacy of military power and alliances in ensuring peace--animate
debate in our post-Cold War world no less than they did at the dawn
of that age.

The "Iron Curtain" Speech

There has recently been sharp debate about that centerpiece of European Union (EU) planning, the European Monetary Union (EMU). In the run-up to the 1996 conference to review the EU's Maastricht Treaty--and leaving aside those who dislike the entire enterprise--three major schools of thought have emerged. One holds that not only a common market but even monetary union can be had without political unity. Monetary union, it is maintained, is a technical issue, designed to do away with exchange rate fluctuations, transaction costs for business, and other uncertainties. A new and independent European central bank could run such a regime, as independent central banks in Germany and the United States have done for decades, leaving political roles, including the management of national fiscal policies, unaffected.

Another view--strongly held, for instance, by Chancellor Kohl and in France--is that EMU is desirable for overriding political reasons, irrespective of formal political union. Once achieved, it will in any case promote further integration.

The third view--insisted on by the German Bundesbank--holds that if EMU is to succeed it must be accompanied by political union.

Two clusters of issues are involved here. One concerns the nature of the central bank and its independence, another the more technical issues of monetary management.

Many economists, business analysts and especially people in the communications industries are in a state of euphoria about globalization. While this is obviously a feature of the times, parts of the business press give the impression that a single world market is a foregone conclusion, indeed virtually exists already. Analysts are urging that competition for capital will steer governments to provide the conditions that international business wants, like some giant, spontaneous traffic-calming device. The certain near-term victory of this process is too readily assumed, reflecting the fact that economists and business commentators tend to fix their attention on the more mobile factors. Political commentators, on the other hand--particularly those of a "realist" disposition--are more likely to emphasize the less mobile ones. While both perceptions pick up aspects of reality, it is not hard to see that the two must be brought together, since the tensions between them are what cause conflict and, so to speak, sell newspapers.

There are three profound systemic movements now working at the global level. The common element among them is the rapid cheapening of information. This, though speeding economic, political, and social changes of disparate kinds in societies throughout the world, is paradoxically exacting a price in many unexpected ways.

The first process is a speeded-up circulation of factors of production. Great uncertainty is being created by competition to attract and retain industries, especially those using advanced technology.

Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (Free Press, 1995).

One of the standard put-downs of economists maintains that "about half of what economists say is right--the trouble is they don't know which half." In the same vein, Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson, with a mixture of derision and contrition, has observed that "economists have correctly predicted seven of the last four economic recessions." In Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, Francis Fukuyama is, ostensibly at least, more generous, conceding that neoclassical economics is "80 percent correct." The "missing 20 percent of human behavior" is the concern of his provocative, insightful, and deftly-written book.

The central thesis of Trust can be summarized in the following syllogism:

Premise I: High economic performance--i.e. the "creation of prosperity" (and sustaining it)--is substantially helped by large, private economic organizations.

Premise II: The establishment and progress of large economic organizations (e.g. corporate giants such as IMB, AT&T, Toyota, General Motors, Mitsubishi, Siemens, and Daimler-Benz) is substantially helped by what Fukuyama variously refers to as "social capital," "spontaneous sociability," and "trust."

Conclusion: Therefore, high economic performance is substantially advanced by the prevalence of social capital, trust, and cultural values that sustains these qualities.

There is increasing consideration of (and, in some quarters, consternation about) what might be dubbed "the new unilateralism," the practice of the United States going it alone in the world. It merits attention. The 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama was a unilateral exercise, as for all intents and purposes were the interventions in Grenada and Haiti (at least in its initial phase). Sanctions against Cuba have become a mostly unilateral endeavor, as have those against Iran. The United States broke rank over nato's enforcement of the Bosnian arms embargo, and Congress has tried to effect an unilateral abrogation of the embargo itself. Meanwhile, despite membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Clinton administration chose to confront Japan unilaterally, and again to threaten sanctions, over the marketing of automobiles and their parts.

The list could go on and no doubt will. Explaining why acting alone is as popular as it is in the United States is not all that hard, given the obvious advantages. It is much easier to act without having to gain the consent of others. No compromise is necessary and there is no one to slow you down. It is easier to keep secrets secret. And unilateralism has always been attractive to a people suspicious of the old world and wanting a free hand in dealing with matters closer to home.

Two features of the post-Cold War international environment-less automatic resistance from great power adversaries and less dependable assistance from erstwhile allies-also strengthen the temptation, and at times create the necessity, to act alone. The unilateralist impulse was strengthened further by both Somalia and Bosnia, two multilateral undertakings widely perceived as failures.

Michael Lind, The Next American Nation (New York: The Free Press, 1995).

"The CIA failed in its single, overriding defining mission, which was
to chart the course of Soviet affairs." --Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
Quoted by Bill Gertz, Washington Times, May 21, 1992.

"The CIA [has] come under legitimate attack from President Clinton
for failing to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union." --Morton
Kondracke, Washington Times, April 26, 1995.

"The CIA itself did not make much difference in the ultimate outcome
of the cold war. Its analysts misjudged almost every major
development in the post-World War II world, including the most
spectacular misjudgment of all--the flat-out failure to predict the
collapse of the Soviet Union." --David Wise, Nightmover: How Aldrich
Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million (1995).

"Has any government department goofed up more than the Central
Intelligence Agency?... Their most egregious and expensive blunder
about the Soviet economy we are still paying for." --Mary McGrory,
Washington Post, March 14, 1995.

"Never has so much money been allocated to study one country; never
have so many academic and government specialists scrutinized every
aspect of a country's life. . . . Yet when the end came, the experts
found themselves utterly unprepared." --Richard Pipes, Foreign
Affairs (January/ February 1995).

"The CIA failed to alert the President and Congress about the
inexorable Soviet collapse. The present DCI, in his starched white
outfit wishing it all away, is in a curious state of institutional
denial." --William Safire, New York Times, April 6, 1995.

François Duchêne, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994).

No one can seriously doubt the existence of a crisis in the affairs of the European Union. As the implications of the treaties on which it is based, including the Maastricht timetable for economic and monetary union, become ever more widely appreciated, and as the ordinary citizen in most member countries begins to participate in the debate over the future of the Union and its institutions (a debate hitherto largely confined to the United Kingdom), the glow of the European ideal begins to fade and the demand for precise definitions as to what it is all for becomes louder. We are all Euroskeptics now.

The only country seemingly unaware of this change in public attitudes is the United States of America. Washington continues to act on the assumption that a "United States of Europe" is the continent's inevitable destiny, and American ambassadors continue to proclaim in London, and no doubt elsewhere, that nothing must be allowed to frustrate this "manifest destiny," even at the expense of the solidarity of the English-speaking and Atlantic worlds.

Ever since I began studying this process nearly forty years ago, I have been puzzled by the uncritical acceptance in the United States of the view that only with common institutions exercising sovereign power could Europe flourish economically, and play a proper role in its own defense. For while it is understandable that the United States should welcome the apparent decision of the countries of Western and Southern Europe to end their age old strife--did not Americans twice have to intervene to redress the balance?--the assumption that, without the institutions of Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg, these countries would once again be preparing for armed conflict is on the face of it wholly implausible.