No More Vietnams (33 page)

Our goal should always be to use force as a last resort. But the capability and the will to use force as a first resort when our interests are threatened reduces the possibility of having to use force as a last resort, when the risk of casualties would be far greater. Vietnam highlighted the importance of blocking aggression early. Winston Churchill made the point that World War II was an unnecessary war because it could have been
prevented by timely action against Hitler when he launched his conquests of smaller countries. But at the time European leaders did not consider them vital to their interests.

Everyone agrees that we should never commit our forces to a losing cause. But win must be properly defined. We are a defensive power. We are not trying to conquer other countries. That is why we must have a policy in which we will fight limited wars if they are necessary to achieve limited goals. We
win
if we prevent the enemy from winning. The world has probably seen its last conventional war between major powers. In the end the world conflict will probably be decided by the outcome of unconventional, limited wars. A President must not be faced with the option of either waging total war or accepting total defeat.

In the wake of Vietnam, however, Congress has tried to force Presidents to make exactly that choice by passing measures that drastically curtail their ability to use limited and unconventional military power. The War Powers Act makes it impossible for a President to act swiftly and secretly in a crisis and permits Congress to pull our troops out simply by doing nothing—by failing to pass either a resolution for or against the President's action. The Foreign Assistance Act limits aid to governments that do not have squeaky-clean human rights records. Had it been in force during World War II, it would have prevented us from assisting our ally, the Soviet Union, against Hitler. The Clark Amendment of 1976, which forbade covert aid to the freedom fighters in Angola, gave Cuba and the Soviet Union the green light for their covert activities in Angola and around the world. The Boland Amendment of 1982 paved the way for the disastrous decision by Congress to cut off all covert aid to the contras fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

These measures require a President to wage war under Marquis of Queensbury rules in a world where good manners are potentially fatal hindrances. The Soviets observe no rules of engagement except for the one that says winning is everything. No one suggests that we should become like them in order to prevail. It was Nietzsche who wrote, “Who fights with crocodiles
becomes one.” But we must also remember that he who does not fight will be devoured by crocodiles.

There are no limits on the Soviets' power to invade, overthrow, and undermine any non-Communist government or to arm, strengthen, and encourage any aggressive Communist government. Hamstringing our power to respond in such instances invites further aggression. Futhermore, sometimes we must assist governments that are fighting Communist aggression even if their human rights records do not meet our standards. With our assistance and influence, their people will have a chance to have some human rights; under the Communists, they will have none. And we must face up to the reality that covert war is a fact of life in the Third World. If every shipment of arms to an anti-Communist government or group requires a full-blown congressional investigation, the arms will never leave the dock, and our friends will come up empty-handed. The Soviets and their surrogates, meanwhile, will fight harder and win faster in country after country, just as they did during the late 1970s.

The outstretched hand of diplomacy will have a very weak grip unless a President holds the scepter of credible military power in his other hand. The pace and the nature of events in the modern world make it more important than ever for a President to have the ability to make expeditious use of the full range of our military and intelligence forces when the situation calls for it. He cannot wait on the 535 members of Congress to make these quick, tough decisions for him. Events will not wait for us to respond. As Charles de Gaulle observed shortly before his death, members of parliaments can paralyze policy; they cannot initiate it. Congressional leadership means leadership by consensus, and consensus leadership is no leadership. By the time a consensus has formed, the time to act has passed. Congress is a deliberative body; its wheels grind slowly, often maddeningly so. A President, however, must look, think, and then act decisively.

The War Powers Act and the other measures that limit a
President's latitude are lingering symptoms of the Vietnam syndrome, manifestations of the fear of our own strength that swept America following our failure in Indochina. Those days are now past. If we are to hold our own in the crucial battles of the Third World war, the President and Congress should join together in an effort to remove these self-defeating restrictions from the lawbooks.

Avoiding another Vietnam and yet trying to help a non-Communist nation defeat a Communist insurgency—or to help anti-Communists where Communists have already won power—is very difficult. The surest way to prevent another Vietnam is to act before the fighting breaks out. When all is quiet in the Third World, it does not mean that all is well. We need an early warning system for finding potential Third World hot spots. Once we identify them, we must offer an active, workable alternative to the status quo at one extreme and to communism on the other. We need to practice preventive political medicine before the patient is infected with an incurable revolutionary virus.

This is a battle we can wage on our turf—where we are strongest and the Communists are weakest. Ironically, in the long run the Communists lose when they win in the Third World, because Soviet socialism does not work. The Communists have gained power in eighteen countries since the end of World War II. In not one did they gain a majority of the vote in a free, democratic election. In not one do they dare to have one. Immediately after World War II, the Communist idea had appeal in the Third World precisely because the people did not know what it would produce. Now they know. Communism no longer has appeal to the masses. It promises peace and produces war. It promises liberation and produces tyranny. It promises justice and produces gulags. It promises progress and produces poverty. But while communism no longer has appeal to the masses, it has a powerful appeal to leaders. It offers a means to gain power and to retain it. The Communists will continue to try to expand their empire, but
they can succeed only because of the power of their arms and not the power of their ideas.

The major geopolitical development since the end of World War II has been that the Communists have lost the ideological battle in the world. But the fact that they have lost this battle does not mean that the West has won it. The 3.5 billion people who live in the Third World have an average per capita income of $600, compared with $10,000 in the United States. Their societies are divided between the very rich and the very poor. The people of these countries want change. The only question is whether change will come by peaceful means or by violence, whether it destroys or builds, whether it leaves totalitarianism or freedom in its wake. For people who want change, it is no answer to offer the status quo. If there is no hope for peaceful change, violent change is inevitable.

There is too much of a tendency to look for scapegoats for the problems of Third World countries. Some blame their lot on the legacy of colonialism. Others contend that exploitation by the West's huge multinational corporations is responsible for the Third World's economic backwardness. Others charge that the West's niggardly aid policies and restrictive trade policies have caused Third World countries to lag behind in their development.

The real answer is that the economies of most Third World countries are sick, and they cannot recover without a proper diagnosis of the illness. Since the end of World War II, people in newly independent countries have suffered under incredibly bad governments—most of them corrupt, many of them repressive, very few of them democratic. Tinhorn dictators skimmed off billions of dollars in graft to feather their nests. Demagogues like Sukarno and Nkrumah built monuments to themselves rather than leaving a legacy of progress for their people. Socialist ideologues have imposed economic policies that discouraged private investment and, in the name of equality, have reduced millions of people to sharing poverty rather than participating in progress.

Their lot is not our fault, but it is our responsibility. The
people of these countries have terrible problems. The Communists at least talk about the problems. Too often we just talk about the Communists. This is not worthy of America. America is a great country. We became great not by just being against what was wrong but by being for what was right. We must make it clear to the people of the Third World that we would be concerned about their plight even if there were no Communist threat; that we are not for the status quo in which millions languish in poverty; that we are not just
against
the Communist way that would make things worse but
for
a better way in which others may share in our progress toward a more free, just, and prosperous society.

We have left the impression that we become actively involved in the Third World only when our interests are threatened by Communist aggression. We must now develop policies that address their interests. Even if there were no Communist threat, millions of people would justifiably demand reforms to lift the burdens of poverty, injustice, and corruption that have been their lot for generations. In addressing these concerns, we will serve the interests of the people of the developing world and serve our own interests as well by depriving the Communists of the issues they exploit to gain power and impose a new tyranny.

Until now, we have moved to put out fires of revolution after they start. We must learn to keep them from igniting in the first place. We have learned to project power around the world at a far greater level than any nation in history. We must learn to project progress just as dramatically. We must seize the opportunity to make a peaceful revolution in the Third World now or confront the necessity of dealing with violent ones later.

For forty years the Soviet Union has been on the offensive, promising struggling people the impossible: instant justice, instant prosperity, sudden destruction of oppressive old institutions and establishment of fairer new ones. In turn we have offered money and democracy. Unfortunately, democracy is more easily talked about than practiced, and money is more
easily stolen or wasted than it is used for the kind of fundamental economic development that Third World countries need. When it has come to inspiring people with a vision of the future that contrasts with the squalor of the present, the Communists have won hands down. Their vision is a mirage, but a mirage is better than nothing.

The answer to the false promise of the Communist revolution is to launch a peaceful revolution for progress in the Third World. We and our allies must be as bold and generous in helping Third World countries down the road to economic progress as the U.S. was in helping Europe and Japan recover after World War II.

This new initiative would not be a Third World Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan was officially called the European Recovery Program. What is needed in the Third World is not a recovery plan for nations with advanced economies but a start-up plan for nations with primitive economies. The aid must be structured in such a way that those who receive it will have a strong incentive to adopt political and economic policies that promote both progress and justice. The people of the Third World must be given something to fight for, not just against.

This is a competition in which we have an enormous advantage over the Soviet Union. Since the end of World War II, the United States has provided $160 billion in foreign aid to its former enemies, to its allies, and to Third World countries. In that same period, the Soviet Union has provided only $20 billion. Yet while Congress generally votes overwhelmingly for more defense spending, foreign aid has invariably been cut below the amounts requested by Presidents since the end of World War II. We spend 7 percent of our gross national product on defense and two-tenths of 1 percent on economic aid. This means that we are spending thirty-five times as much in preparing for a war that will probably never be fought as we are for programs that can help us win a war we are losing.

The time has come to reassess our priorities. I am not suggesting that we should support the well-intentioned but soft-headed
proposals for a massive transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor. This would only create a permanent underclass of pauper nations seeking handouts. We should share not our wealth but the means to achieve wealth. The Reagan administration's Caribbean initiative and the Kissinger Con-mission's recommendations for aid to Central America point to the direction we should take.

With the industrial nations only now beginning to recover from the recent worldwide recession, the last thing they are thinking about is more foreign aid. This is true despite the fact that in the last twenty years foreign aid has fallen substantially when measured as a percentage of gross national product. In 1960, seventeen of the largest non-Communist industrial nations gave one-half of 1 percent of their combined GNPs for foreign aid; by 1981, it had fallen to a third of 1 percent. Nations are fed up with seeing their money wasted on ill-conceived, poorly planned, and badly executed projects in the Third World. They are also discouraged by the lack of progress. For example, during the 1970s, personal income in black Africa, excluding oil-rich Nigeria, actually decreased despite billions of dollars in aid. The fact that Ethiopia's Marxist dictator Men-gistu Haile Mariam spent $110 million on an obscenely lavish anniversary celebration last year while millions of Ethiopians were starving to death has disillusioned even the staunchest supporters of foreign aid programs.

Many abroad and in the United States have understandably concluded that foreign aid is not worth the investment. As far as traditional government-to-government aid is concerned, they are right. Much of it is wasted, especially when it is handed over with no strings attached. Often officials in a developing country are too proud to take advice from foreigners about how to spend the money, while the bureaucrats in the donor countries are too poorly informed or too sensitive to Third World officials' tender egos to offer advice, lay down conditions, or follow up on a grant once it has been made. But just as a bank does no favor to a borrower by making him a bad loan, we do not help a Third World country when we
provide aid that subsidizes socialism, the status quo, corruption, or repression.