Beyond Peace (5 page)

In our “kitchen debate,” Khrushchev asserted that although the Soviet Union was trailing the United States in economic production at that time, it was beginning to overtake us, and in five years would be waving goodbye to us and urging us to catch up by emulating its system. During a famous United Nations session Khrushchev once shocked the world by rudely banging his shoe on his desk to protest the remarks of a speaker. Today, Khrushchev's famous shoe is on the other foot. Soviet communism is history. Even the remaining communist superpower, China, while still communist politically, is increasingly capitalist economically. A corollary to this development is that socialism is being rejected in the noncommunist world. The rejection of communism and socialism, however, does not mean the victory of capitalism.

Because of the inevitable pain of aborting a command economy and delivering a free-market economy, urgent voices are being raised in Moscow and elsewhere to slow the pace of reform. More startling, many Americans seem willing to promote and accept a larger role for government in American life, even as the dead hand of absolute government is being cast off in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. We have too much government today, and the government we have does not do its job well enough. It chokes initiative, depletes investment pools, and hobbles business—as it did under communism to a more extreme degree. It is not that capitalism is perfect. One of Winston Churchill's most quoted statements is that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” It is also true that free-market capitalism is the worst kind of economic policy, except for all the others. The most important lesson of the Cold War is that too much government is the enemy of progress and prosperity.

The very fact that an economy is free makes it unpredictable and potentially unstable. But it is worth the price. In the
long term, a free-market economy always outproduces a government-command economy. We must always remember that America is a great nation today not because of what government did for people but because of what people did for themselves and for one another. Government should reflect and draw upon their noblest aspirations, inspiring and sometimes goading them to the heights they are destined to achieve. Instead, since the 1960s government has become a one-trillion-dollar-a-year, grossly overweight, bullying nanny, punishing us when we say or think bad things and rewarding us with incentives and programs when we are good or are deemed especially worthy.

• The United States must play a leading role on the world stage.
On dozens of occasions during the Cold War, the United States proved that it was the only nation in the free world that would consistently extend its power far beyond its borders to blunt Soviet aggression. It provided the indispensable glue that held the European alliance together, and it took up similar challenges of leadership in Asia. Time and again it has acted in its own interests and those of the West in the Mideast and the Persian Gulf. Millions of young Americans have fought selflessly and courageously to defend foreign soil. Had we not been willing to invest billions of dollars in these engagements and risk the lives of our servicemen and -women, the Cold War might be over—but the Soviet Union might well have won. No nation or empire in history has defended its interests and its allies more dependably, and more responsibly. That mistakes and poor judgments were occasionally made serves only to spotlight the overall consistency and profound effectiveness of U.S. policy.

By being strong, resolute, benevolent, and creative for forty-five years, the United States wrote the book on how to be a superpower. It is typical, in view of our capacity for being almost relentlessly critical of ourselves, that some so-called experts now want to burn that book. Because they subscribe either to the old isolationism of the right or to the new isolationism of
the left, they say that the era of vigorous American internationalism is over and that it is time for us to concentrate on our domestic problems. They are correct in part. It is time to solve our domestic problems—but not just for our own sake. We must solve them so that the United States can address its international responsibilities from a more commanding base. As the richest and most powerful nation on earth, we must use our strength to consolidate and extend those principles and qualities that make us great wherever and whenever our interests permit us to do so. Only then can we be true to ourselves. Only then can we find strength in a renewed sense of purpose.

• The United States cannot be strong in the world unless it is strong at home.
I vividly remember Harry Truman's State of the Union address in 1949. Fresh from his dramatic upset victory over Tom Dewey, he strode cockily down the aisle of the House chamber, relishing his new reputation as the victorious underdog. I recall little about the content of the speech except the beginning. He said, “The State of the Union is good.” It brought down the house. Today, no President could honestly begin a State of the Union address in the same way.

Two hundred years ago the United States was militarily weak and economically poor, but to millions of people in other nations America was the hope of the world because of the timeless values we stood for. Today America must be a worthy example for others to follow, but our example is tarnished with every deepening domestic problem. Poor-quality secondary education, rampant crime and violence, growing racial divisions, pervasive poverty, the drug epidemic, the degenerative culture of moronic entertainment, a decline in the notions of civic duty and responsibility, and the spread of a spiritual emptiness have all disconnected and alienated Americans from their country, their religions, and one another.

Many Americans have come to assume they are entitled to lives of ease, even luxury, and that the defeat of the Soviet Union
means we will sit indefinitely at the pinnacle of the world. Those who were once called disciplined are now said to have closed minds. What was once called self-restrained is now called neurotic. What was once called modesty is now called prudishness. What was once called irresponsibility is now called “letting it all hang out.” What used to be called self-indulgence is now called self-fulfillment. Traditional restraints on individual behavior are being removed or eased; and yet it remains the predominant view that the problems of crime, drugs, and pervasive poverty are the fault of “society.” Rather than blaming ourselves, we blame society first. Unless we accomplish the renewal of America, the defeat of communism will be followed not by the victory of freedom but by a slow, steady decline into chaos in the world and an irrelevant role for our country.

America was created to protect the rights of the individual. Today, America accomplishes that mission, but we have forgotten that a well-ordered society also requires the individual to act in the interests of the whole, and that every right carries a corresponding responsibility. In a land of plenty, we have learned to take. To renew America in the era beyond peace, we must once again learn how to give. Above all we must prevent the debacle that the brilliant economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted sixty years ago in reflecting on the perils of prosperity. “Capitalism is being killed by its achievements,” he wrote. “Its very success undermines the social institutions which protect it.”

• America is great because it acknowledges a power greater than itself.
It must never be forgotten that the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe rejected communism not just because of its economic and political failures but because it tried to substitute materialism for enduring spiritual values. Communism preyed upon the bodies of its subjects through physical deprivations and attacked their souls as well. It could not produce materially, and it could not satisfy spiritually. Since the hammer and sickle over the Kremlin came down, the Russian
people have flooded into the marketplace and the voting booth, and also into the churches.

On my first trip abroad as Vice President in 1953, I was profoundly impressed by Rajagopalachari, a close friend of Gandhi's, who was then the Chief Minister of Madras. I can see him now sitting on a straw mat, wearing just a dhoti and sandals. While many leaders in newly independent nations in the developing world thought that because of its successes in the Soviet Union and China, communism might be the wave of the future, he strongly disagreed. “Communism will never succeed in the long run,” he said, “because it is based on a fundamental error. Self-interest is the motivating force for most human action. But by denying man the possibility of belief in God, the communists forfeit the possibility of any altruistic self-interest.” He proved to be right.

The Soviet Union began by banishing God. The United States began as a community of people who wanted to worship God as they chose. Many factors contributed to the outcome of the Cold War. One crucial but underrated factor was that a system that attempted to blunt, deny, and even punish the spiritual aspirations of its people could not survive because it was fundamentally at odds with human nature. Man does not live by bread alone. Those in the United States whose desire to create a strictly secular society is as strong as Lenin's was should study this Cold War lesson closely. Communism was defeated by an alliance spearheaded by “one nation under God.”

Poll after poll shows that most Americans believe in God and that church attendance is up. When Pope John Paul II visited the United States in 1993, hundreds of thousands of young American pilgrims journeyed to Denver to hear him. Many secularist intellectuals seem to find these developments unsettling, as though they proved that America is taking a step backward rather than forward. They are wrong. Our hunger for something to believe in is a profoundly positive development that members of the leadership class should celebrate, not fear.

It is important to observe the separation of church and state mandated by the Constitution. But in framing this provision, its authors could not have imagined a society in which religion did not play a dominant role. We should not use the requirement that religion be kept out of politics as an excuse to try to drive it out of our lives. With the end of the Cold War, we must ask ourselves what we stand for in addition to national strength and prosperity. Democracy and capitalism are just techniques unless they are employed by those who seek a higher purpose for themselves and their society. The communists denied there was a God, but they at least offered their people something to believe in—and for generations, millions did. We know that communism was a false faith, but the answer to a false faith is not no faith at all. We were against the false faith of communism during the Cold War. What faith shall we now champion in its place?

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For forty-five years our mission was to be the strongest and the best so that we could defeat an enemy without war. Today, our enemy is within us. A century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that the universal obsession with materialism, the lack of enduring social bonds, and the shallowness of religious and philosophical thought in America had given rise to a “new despotism”—of mediocrity, of selfishness, of directionlessness. Such a new despotism threatens America today unless it rediscovers a new sense of common purpose—a mission it cannot accomplish unless its leaders overcome their own bickering, fractionalism, and pandering. Its leadership crisis is by no means limited to the incumbent administration, nor to government in general. A wide variety of political, cultural, and religious leaders proffer remedies for our spiritual crisis and lack of direction that are even worse than the disease.

The religious right gained enormous media attention during the 1988 and 1992 presidential campaigns. Their vehement stand against abortion, their intolerance of any family arrangement they consider nontraditional, and their demands for religious
purity attracted fanatical support. While the religious right deserves credit for addressing the decline of values, too often their extreme tactics and exclusionary agenda put off those who might otherwise be open to their crusade for enhancing the spiritual life of our country. Meanwhile, as former Ambassador Henry Grunwald has observed, the religious left, as represented by many mainline churches, has increasingly turned away from saving souls to saving society. Those who join the religious right may be dispatched to lie down in the entrance of an abortion clinic, while those on the religious left can help you arrange a demonstration against U.S. policy in Latin America. Neither has much to offer the individual who is searching for answers to more fundamental, deeply spiritual questions.

The debate over economic policy is equally sterile. Those on the economic right argue that if free-market capitalism was allowed to function unimpeded by government, society's problems would evaporate, as gains from no-holds-barred free enterprise corrected them through sheer abundance. Such thinking ignores the human needs that only government can meet. People require protection in standards of health and safety, in the assurance of clean air and water, safe roads and skies. Capitalism without compassion is not enough. Rampant private enterprise, totally unrestrained by enlightened but limited government, would have a heart full of capital and an empty soul.

At the other extreme is the economic left, which believes, as did the architects of the Great Society, that government, rather than individuals acting through private business and other nongovernmental institutions, is the driving force for progress. They envision not just a government safety net for those truly in need but a suffocating security blanket that would create a psychology of dependency throughout society. Such a psychology is dangerously close to taking hold already, as young and old, rich and poor alike clamor for “entitlements.” Turning to new government programs to address our domestic problems, especially those that have been exacerbated by the failed programs of the
past, is like using gasoline to put out a fire. Government cannot create jobs for everyone, enforce equality, or legislate to remedy society's spiritual deficit. Many of those who ask more of government than history shows it can deliver are those who are most eager, even desperate, to create some new America to match their own dispositions and ideologies.