1999 (49 page)

No American administration since the end of World War II, including my own, has had an adequate Latin American policy. The next President must end this pattern of neglect. In doing so he should avoid continuing to smother Latin America with slogans. Our “Alliance for Progress” and “Good Neighbor Policy” brought little progress and left too much of the neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks. We can best aid Latin America by implementing and expanding to South America the Kissinger Commission's recommendations for economic aid to Central America. Our goal should be to encourage the development of free-market economies.

The United States must continue to demonstrate that we want democracy and economic prosperity for all of Latin America. If it can harness the energies of its peoples and resources, the region will unquestionably be a free world economic giant in the next century.

The only constant in the Third World is change. We do not have to accept Engels' philosophy to recognize the profound appeal of his words “It is necessary to change the world.” Change will and should come in the problem-plagued Third World. The only question is whether it will come by peaceful means or violence, whether it destroys or builds, whether it leaves dictatorship or freedom in its wake.

Two kinds of revolutionary change are threatening the Third World today. The first is communist revolution. Even though the twentieth century has left no doubt about the brutality and failure of communism, there are still those who carry on a romance with violent revolution. They encourage the destructive fires of communism by traveling to Nicaragua to pick coffee for the Sandinistas, supporting the terrorism of the communist-dominated African National Congress, and referring to the ruthless New People's Army of the Philippines as “Nice People Around.” From their comfortable distances they rarely get their own fingers burned, or
lose their homes, or see their families taken away in the middle of the night. Ignorant of history and self-deluding about current events, they are strangely silent when the charred remains of revolutions become apparent.

In the 1930s they were fans of Stalin, until he turned the Soviet Union into a slaughterhouse. In the 1950s and 1960s their hero was Mao, the “agrarian reformer” who unleashed an ideological firestorm in which tens of millions of Chinese perished. Before communism engulfed Indochina in 1975, they triumphantly celebrated the virtues of the Vietcong and the Khmer Rouge. When the new regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia laid waste to their people and countries, they were momentarily tongue-tied—until there were new communist revolutionaries to talk about in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Children should not play with fire, and these naive proponents of communist revolution are ideological children who are using the Third World as their playground.

The communist idea which had so much appeal in the Third World as little as fifteen years ago has been discredited by communism in action. It has failed to produce prosperity and peace in every Third World country where it is practiced. In Asia, the dead economies of the communist prison states stagnate next to the robust economies of the rimland states. In Latin America, where debt and growth are so completely intertwined, Cuba and Nicaragua have the highest per-capita debts and the lowest overall growth rates. In Africa, where plummeting living standards are the norm, the communist states of Mozambique and Ethiopia rank as the poorest and most destitute.

In the Moslem world from Morocco to Indonesia, Islamic fundamentalism has replaced communism as the principal instrument of violent change. As we discuss this recent phenomenon it is vitally important that we not allow the extremes of Moslem fundamentalism to blind us to the greatness of the Moslem heritage. The same religion that produced Qaddafi and Khomeini produced Avicenna and Averroës, two of the greatest philosophers in history. But the revolutionary vision offered by radicals on the fringes of the Moslem world is just as enticing as communism, and just as destructive. The communist revolution appeals to man's material needs. The Moslem revolution appeals to his spiritual needs. Communist
ideology promises rapid modernization. Islamic revolutionary ideology is a reaction against modernization. Communism promises to turn the clock of history forward. Moslem fundamentalism turns it back.

Islamic revolutionaries denounce the atheism of the communist East and the materialistic secularism of the capitalist West. The Iranian demonstrators who stampeded four hundred pilgrims to death in Mecca in August 1987 were chanting “Death to the Soviet Union” as well as “Death to America.” They threaten Western interests in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere and also the stability of the Soviet Union, whose population includes 55 million restive, spiritually oppressed Moslems.

Communist and Islamic revolutionaries are ideological enemies who share a common goal: the desire to attain power by whatever means necessary in order to establish dictatorial control based on their intolerant ideals. Neither revolution would bring a better life to people in the Third World. Instead they would make things worse. But one or the other will prevail unless the West develops a unified policy for addressing both the economic and the spiritual dimensions of the struggle now under way in the Third World.

The winds of change in the Third World are reaching tornado force. We cannot stop them, but we can help to change their direction. When people need and want change it is not enough to be against revolutionary change that would make things worse. The only answer to a bad idea is a better idea. Moslem fundamentalism is a faith. Communism is also a faith. As Whittaker Chambers observed in
Witness
thirty years ago, “The success of communism is never greater than the failure of all other faiths.”

In many parts of the Third World and particularly in the Moslem world, prosperity alone is not enough. Iran is an example. The myth of the Iranian Revolution is that it was caused by the Shah's corruption, police repression, and the poverty of the masses. This is simply wrong. During the Shah's reign Iran was better off than any other country in the region except Israel. Its people were by far the best educated. I recall the Shah telling me in 1979, when I saw him in Mexico shortly before he went to Egypt to die, that he had sent tens of thousands of students to colleges in the United
States only to have them return and join the revolution against him. He liberated the women; many joined the revolution that put them back into the
chador.

Khomeini's revolution was ostensibly against repression. It was actually against modern, Western values. As far as repression is concerned, he set the cause of women back a thousand years. He hated communism as much as he hated capitalism, seeing them as two sides of the same materialistic coin. Young people supported his revolution not because they wanted more freedom and better jobs, housing, and clothing, but because they wanted something to believe in more than materialism. Since the revolution the Iranian people have received exactly the treatment Khomeini promised. Whether it is exactly what they thought they would get is unknown, since the Ayatollah holds no free elections. But there is no denying that he offered a true revolution of ideas and that they embraced it with passion and conviction.

Western economic ideals produce growth and prosperity. Western political ideals produce liberty. The Third World yearns for both, but because the West has been better at sending money than at promoting its values the communists and now the Moslem fundamentalists rush to fill the void. In the years between now and 1999 the United States must lead the way in a campaign to seize the moral high ground from those who promise prosperity and fulfillment in the developing world and deliver poverty for the body and chains for the soul.

If the people of the Third World think we are interested only in winning the Cold War with the Soviet Union, we will lose the war for their hearts and minds. These people have tremendous problems. At least the communists talk about the problems. Too often we talk only about the communists.

We should launch a peaceful revolution for progress. To do so we need a coherent and consistent policy that addresses the security, economic, and political needs of the developing nations. We should understand that the Third World will not be a peaceful region of growth in the next century unless all three of these needs
are met. Security without growth is an empty promise, growth without security is an imperiled promise, and growth and security without political development are an unfullfilled promise.

Security aid.
While military aid to our friends and allies in the Third World is not the only answer to their problems, it is in some cases indispensable if they are to provide the security without which there can be no progress. Such aid should come with training assistance, not just in the use of these arms but in the proper conduct of the armed forces that receive them.

Economic aid.
In 1986 we spent under $13 billion on foreign aid, approximately two tenths of one percent of our GNP. Considering that we spent over 6 percent of our GNP on national defense, we spent over thirty times as much money preparing for a war that we probably will never fight than for a war—the peaceful revolution for prosperity in the Third World—that we risk losing. Congress is now cutting the administration's foreign-aid requests. This is tragically shortsighted. But we do need some major changes in our foreign-aid programs. Too much of our aid has been poorly distributed. Too much aid has fed Third World bureaucracies, maintained the status quo, fueled corruption, and supported repression. Too much aid was spent on north-to-south wealth distribution and too little on wealth creation.

We should distribute our aid according to three principles:

1. There should be no aid without strings. All aid should have clearly defined and measurable goals.

2. Wherever possible, aid should be bilateral, not multilateral. There is a powerful political reason for this. Congress will not approve aid unless it clearly serves our interests. The World Bank's willingness to make discounted loans to communist governments does not serve our interests. Current commitments to multilateral agencies should be reviewed and tested for cost effectiveness and whether they are consistent with American foreign-policy interests.

3. We should insist on monitoring the economic performance of all governments we help. We should make sure that they are moving toward more private enterprise and that they are attracting capital rather than scaring it off. Aid should be used as seed money to promote the right conditions for building growth-oriented free-market
economies. Aid should encourage success, not guarantee failure; it should promote progress and not the status quo.

Trade.
Even more than aid, the Third World needs trade. These nations stand a better chance of growing out of economic stagnation if we open our own markets to them. Instead, we are making a bad situation in the Third World far worse by continuing our self-serving agricultural subsidies.

A classic case is sugar. The U.S. government subsidizes our inefficient but politically powerful sugar growers by setting a price of twenty-two cents a pound. The world market price is ten cents less. Not only does this inflate the food bill of the average American family by $100 a year, but it has devastating effects on Third World sugar producers. Sugar production and refining have been many poor nations' key source of income and also frequently the first step in the evolution from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. Guatemala, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Thailand and the Philippines depend for a large portion of their incomes on sugar exports. In 1985 alone, the Caribbean Basin countries lost $250 million in revenues because of our sugar barrier.

As a world military power we cannot act like a provincial power in the international economy. This is not an argument for altruism. It is an argument for the wisdom of farsighted self-interest and the idea that long-term growth for all is better than short-term expediency for a very few.

The debt crisis.
The $850 billion in Third World debt is a hangover from the West's lending binge of the late 1970s. Like the Allied debt to the United States after World War I, it is a deadly drag on the world economy. Some say the debtors should not have borrowed the money. Others say the creditors should not have lent it. These arguments are no longer relevant. We are confronted with a condition, not a theory. There can be no substantial progress for the world economy unless debtor nations can attract investment and earn enough to afford to buy imports from the developed world. If the creditors insist on the austerity required to finance the debt in its entirety, responsible Third World leaders will be driven out of office and radical, irresponsible leaders pledged to repudiate the debt will take their places.