Seize the Moment (28 page)

Conduct talks only at the highest levels
. Success in mediation will come only as a result of the direct, active, and sustained personal engagement of the President. Although the secretary of state can serve as an effective surrogate, the President must clearly indicate that the U.S. position has his personal imprimatur. I took this approach during the negotiations that led to the Syrian-Israeli disengagement accords after the 1973 war. President Carter did so in negotiating the landmark Camp David Agreements in 1978. If the peace process is delegated to an assistant secretary of state or to another one of a long succession of personal envoys, no Middle East leader will take it seriously. History is strewn with failed missions of special presidential representatives who broke their picks on the hard rock of Arab-Israeli hostility. Only negotiations at the highest level have any chance of succeeding.

Prepare for the long haul
. The 1974 disengagement agreements took four months of virtually nonstop shuttle diplomacy by Henry Kissinger to achieve. Egypt, Israel, and the United States signed the Camp David accords only after
eleven months of often-contentious talks, including two summit-level meetings. Because of the geography of the Sinai, those agreements were relatively uncomplicated compared to what will be required for the remaining occupied territories. Any settlement will require not a quick sprint of negotiations but rather will come at the end of a diplomatic marathon. The optimal time to put negotiations on the front burner is during a nonelection year in the United States. In election years, political pressures will stymie any significant progress.

In coping with the Arab-Israeli conflict, we must recognize a key fact of international life: a treaty can change the behavior of states, but not the attitudes of people. Peace in the Middle East is not a matter of Arabs and Israelis learning to like each other. They have hated each other for centuries and will continue to do so. At most, it means learning to live peacefully with their differences. A lasting settlement requires that they be separated and kept apart by concrete security arrangements that, if violated, will cost the aggressor more than he could ever hope to gain.

•  •  •

As we develop our policies to engage the Muslim world, we must begin with respect and understanding for peoples who feel that they have been misunderstood, discriminated against, and exploited by Western powers. We should not try to impose our values on them. Though the Muslim world lags behind the West in political development—only two Muslim nations have democratic governments—our civilization is not inherently superior to theirs. The people of the Muslim world were more resilient against the appeal of communism than those of the West, and their widespread rejection of the materialism and moral permissiveness of Western culture redounds to their credit.

For five centuries—from 700 to 1200—the Muslim world led the Christian world in terms of geopolitical power, standard of living, religious toleration, sophistication of laws, and level of learning in philosophy, science, and culture. Decades of warfare turned the tables. As Durant wrote, “The West lost the Crusades, but won the war of creeds. Every Christian warrior was expelled from the Holy Land of Judaism and Christianity; but Islam, bled by its tardy victory, and ravaged by Mongols, fell in turn into a Dark Age of obscurantism and poverty; while the beaten West, matured by its effort and forgetting its defeat, learned avidly from its enemy, lifted cathedrals into the sky, wandered out on the high seas of reason, transformed its crude new languages into Dante, Chaucer, and Villon, and moved with high spirit into the Renaissance.”

Just as knowledge from the East helped trigger the Renaissance in the West, the time has come for the West to contribute to a renaissance of the Muslim world. If we engage the modernist states of the Muslim world as full and equal partners, and if we seek to resolve the difficult security issues plaguing the Middle East, we can lay the foundation for such a rebirth. If we work together and combine the best of our civilizations, the next period of our history will be one of constructive cooperation, not destructive conflict.

W
HEN
I
TRAVELED THROUGH
noncommunist Asia as vice president in 1953, I always made a point of not just meeting with leaders in their regal offices, but also making stops to examine conditions in the poorer neighborhoods. With the
grinding poverty I saw—children with distended stomachs, jobless men milling in coffee shops, and open sewers befouling the air—I could understand why these slums were a fertile breeding ground for communism. Many of the leaders whom I met at that time viewed communism as an attractive shortcut to economic prosperity. When I visited those same countries in 1985, no one entertained such illusions. With the collapse of the Soviet economy, the allure of socialist central planning had vanished. As a model for political and economic development, Soviet communism had been swept into the dustbin of history.

The defeat of communism in the underdeveloped world does not mean the victory of freedom. I visited more than a dozen nations and colonies on that 1953 trip, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Singapore, Burma, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Ceylon, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. Some, such as Vietnam and Afghanistan, took the fatal detour of communism. Others, such as India and Burma, turned down the dead end of socialism. Only a few, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, drove down the road to prosperity by adopting free-market economics.

Among the developing nations of Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and South Asia—regions that can figuratively be described as the southern hemisphere—the path to economic development remains strewn with obstacles. Corrupt government officials, mismanaged economic policies, and misguided development strategies hold back the potential of talented and hard-working peoples on every continent. These problems—most self-inflicted—have locked these countries into a vicious cycle of poverty from which they seem powerless to escape. Only if we work with them to overcome these obstacles can we ensure that the success of freedom in the
southern hemisphere follows the failure of communism around the world.

If we wash our hands of these concerns, the future will become a tale of two worlds—one rich and the other poor, one surging ahead with high technology and the other lagging behind with obsolete industrial plants and subsistence agriculture, one smug in its ease and comfort and the other increasingly resentful and hostile. The average annual per capita income of the more than 4 billion people of the underdeveloped world has stagnated at less than $800, compared with $21,000 in the United States. If we ignore those less fortunate than ourselves, we will not only disregard our moral responsibility, but also imperil our vital economic and strategic interests.

One quarter of the people in the underdeveloped world live below the threshold of poverty. Thirty thousand people die every day from dirty water and unsanitary conditions. Average life expectancy is twenty years shorter than in the United States. Because population growth is three times greater than in the West, the average per capita income will fall by the end of the century. We cannot stand back and watch from afar as the underdeveloped world sinks in an economic morass. We should not allow it, and the billions of people who live there will not tolerate it.

Contrary to the Marxist cant in many American universities, the West did not cause the poverty, famine, malnutrition, and disease that afflict poorer nations. The West, however, must not ignore their problems. As the world's only superpower, the United States has a particular responsibility to act. Until the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, the rationale for most of our aid to developing nations was to counter the threat of direct and indirect Soviet aggression. Now we must recognize that even in the absence of a Soviet
threat, it is imperative to continue to provide aid to the developing nations. Without our help, they cannot succeed. This does not mean that we should write a blank check to ineffective or corrupt governments. It does mean that we need a new aid program that will encourage developing nations to help themselves.

In addition to our moral obligation, we have major economic and strategic interests at stake. First, we will benefit if we can unlock the vast untapped economic potential of these countries. Seventy-five percent of the world's oil, as well as other critical raw materials, is in the underdeveloped world. By the year 2000, four out of five people will be living there. In 1900, the ten largest cities in the world were in Europe. By the end of the decade, eight out of ten will be in the southern hemisphere. If the per capita incomes of these countries were to rise to Western European standards over the next century, annual U.S. exports would increase by $3 trillion, infusing new vitality into our economy. Since every $1 billion in new exports produces 25,000 jobs, the United States could over the coming decades generate 75 million new jobs for future generations of Americans. Greater economic prosperity in the underdeveloped world means money in the pockets of American workers.

Second, if we ignore the southern hemisphere, we risk being dragged into potentially deadly regional conflicts. Poverty will no longer produce communism, but it can still produce brutal, radical regimes. Since the end of World War II, millions of people have died in over 120 wars in the underdeveloped world, forty of which are still being fought today. As the Persian Gulf War demonstrated, instability half a world away can have a profound effect here at home. Such conflicts could disrupt the flow of oil or other resources that are crucial to our national security. Our economic destiny
could be held hostage by capricious and hostile rulers such as Saddam Hussein. The danger to the United States has been heightened because many of these countries are acquiring the technologies to manufacture nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. While our allies in the underdeveloped world face the most immediate threat, we will not be immune from future threats.

Third, unless we foster economic opportunity in the underdeveloped world, our borders will be overwhelmed by a flood of economic refugees. The developing countries have a total population of over 4 billion people today and will have an estimated 7.2 billion in the year 2025. The ranks of unemployed and underemployed workers could swell from the hundreds of millions to the billions in the next century. The developed world cannot draw artificial lines in the sand to keep these people from fleeing their hopeless poverty. Even now, more than two thousand Mexican workers emigrate illegally to the United States every day. If we turn our back on their problems today, we will find them on our doorstep tomorrow.

Many on both the American right and left advocate a policy of disengagement from the underdeveloped world. Some argue that these countries are no-man's-lands of corruption—“kleptocracies” in which a few rulers rake in millions of dollars through theft while millions of workers eke out a few dollars through backbreaking labor. Others contend that we should focus our energies and resources on the poor and homeless in New York and Los Angeles rather than on those in Ouagadougou and Calcutta. But most responsible observers recognize our moral and strategic interests in assisting the people of the underdeveloped world. The question then becomes not
whether
we should help but
how
we can help most effectively.

More than other developed countries, the United States ought to know the paths to success. Only a hundred years ago—a passing moment in terms of human history—America was part of the underdeveloped world, with a per capita income of only $210. Also, the success of the four Asian tigers—Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore—should serve as a positive example that less developed countries can make the transition from poverty to prosperity. Many of our previous aid programs have amounted to nothing more than conscience money thrown at the problem of world poverty or spent to prevent Communist expansion. Today, we must reorient our approach to the southern hemisphere, applying the lessons of the successful development of East Asia's newly industrialized countries.