The Second Democratic Revolution

...Much of the revolution was well under way before the Soviet Empire was manifesting signs of collapse...

...Starting from scratch, as one often must in Africa, is in many ways easier than in the old Empire...

...If so, how many of them...

...Insofar as we had a grand strategy, it was based not on anti-Communism but on George Kennan's vision of the need to contain Soviet Russia until it mellowed or collapsed...

...The Poles have done the most so far, making their currency convertible, removing price controls on thousands of items, and preparing to lift wage controls...

...As good Communists they did not want to see heretical doctrines creep into the curriculum, and as good bureaucrats they resisted change...

...This pattern—a brief, moralistic spasm followed by an extended isolationism—became the model for this century, and after the Wilsonian spasm we remained in righteous solitude, unmoved even by the onslaught of Fascism, until the Japanese bombed us into the Second World War...

...We should listen to the rest of the world...

...We should emulate a particularly intelligent form of foreign aid now being given the East Europeans by the Common Market countries, which are paying the salaries of West Europeans now "on loan" to the ministries of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia...

...When Stalin attempted to expand his empire into Western Europe and the Persian Gulf, we managed a spasm between 1945 and 1948 (the 'Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan), and once again lapsed into isolationism, encouraging the Soviets and the Chinese to try once more—in Korea...

...Terrorism was put on the same moral plane as the struggle against tyranny ("One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter"), and the likes of Paul Kennedy even argued that, of the two "empires" extant in the modem world, ours was the more likely to fail, because we were guilty of "economic overreach...

...Then there are the massive problems of reconstruction: How to build democracy...

...Coups were called off in Bolivia, Peru, and Guatemala, and the Latino generals and colonels obeyed orders from their elected civilian leaders...

...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 words carried more credibility in certain Latin American circles than those of gringo diplomats...

...The Soviet Union still stands, or wobbles, under heavy challenge from the several republics that wish to break away from the collapsing Kremlin...

...Unless it is assumed that the Soviet marshals are living in dread of a NATO invasion, it must be concluded that someone in the Kremlin has an offensive plan for these weapons...

...The obligation to involve ourselves in building free societies does not end at the borders of the Soviet Empire, any more than the democratic revolution began or ended there...

...They can work in, or watch, our legislative and executive branches, intern at our newspapers, compare notes with our journalism professors, and study our national news broadcasts...

...Our failures derived in part from one of the paradoxes of American political culture: we desire the spread of democracy, but we are reluctant to meddle in the internal affairs of other countries...

...He was seen as a throwback to an earlier kind of American, a mix between a cowboy and a frontiersman, and these characteristics were transferred to the United States as a whole...

...If Africa and Latin America finally begin to develop, we shall have gained business partners as well as democratic friends...

...These are the questions they must learn to answer if their countries are going to make it...

...In Prague last July, I commented to a top journalist that I had spent time with one of the leading Czech defectors, General Sejna...

...After the First World War, we unleashed Woodrow Wilson on Europe, calling for the moralization of international affairs and supporting the spiteful Versailles Peace Treaty, then abruptly withdrew when the Senate decided not to participate in the League of Nations...

...Today the leaders of Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia are beginning to provide us with the details of these operations (and the news media shamelessly pretend to have known it all along), but future historians will marvel at American reluctance to believe the evidence...

...Like all good conservatives, such people are uncomfortable in the midst of revolutionary turmoil...

...The cause of human liberty is universal, and to compromise it in one place damages it everywhere...

...If our national leaders encourage American entrepreneurs to invest in the emerging democracies—offering tax credits and other incentives along the way—and provide some hands-on expertise to the new democracies, then we shall grow alongside them...

...making conflict more likely and, because we generally responded late, more violent...

...The concept has been copied by the East Germans, who in at least three cases have hired West Germans as mayors of their cities...

...Even when most of our attention in Latin America was directed at efforts by Cuba and Nicaragua to subvert Jose Napoleon Duarte's fragile democracy in El Salvador, American officials were informing our neighbors to the south that we were opposed to military dictatorships...

...By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious issue," he wrote, "by cowardice and submission, the sad choice of a variety of evils...

...Although the Warsaw Pact is dead and it is hard to imagine a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, the Soviet Union continues to produce weapons at very near its traditionally frightening rate...

...When a series of high-level Soviet-bloc defectors—from Czechoslovakia's General Jan Sejna to Romania's General Ion Mihai Pacepa—gave firsthand accounts of terrorist training camps run by Soviet military and intelligence officers, their testimony was rejected...

...it was a violent separation from the knowledge and the skills of the civilized world...

...The argument is half true: the Germans and Japanese should certainly be fully engaged (the Germans are, and the Japanese are doing more every year...

...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990...

...Others, like Richard Barnet and Theodore Von Laue, blamed us for the creation of something called "the national security state...

...We will discover that it is a reciprocal process, for they know the true story of the terror network, as well as the story of those of our own citizens who were used—consciously or otherwise—by the governments of the Soviet bloc...

...On the one hand, our behavior encouraged our enemies to believe that we would not respond to hostile actions, Michael Ledeen is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...From the late sixties on, a succession of administrations and most of the top journalists and producers fought valiantly against the very idea that the Soviet Union supported international terrorism, and until the late seventies we stopped developing new intercontinental ballistic missiles, permitting the Soviets to catch up...

...They had it backwards...

...I believe they are wrong, above all because this is our revolution...

...I t is hard for Americans to appreciate I how fundamentally Ronald Reagan transformed the international image of America...

...The Portuguese democrats were able to get active support (thankfully, because their defeat of the Communist forces was a very near thing), and considerable assistance from West European members of the Socialist and Christian Democratic Internationals...

...The rest can be attributed to the traditional American disdain for international affairs, entangling alliances, and the rest...

...These encouraging changes stem directly from the bankruptcy of the Kremlin, the collapse of the Soviet economy, and the consequent exodus of tens of thousands of Cuban mercenaries...

...There is a great debate in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia about whether vengeance is a wise policy at this juncture...

...Was there an economic crisisfrom South Korea to Brazil, and from Nairobi to Taipei...

...The purveyors of moral equivalence did their best to obscure the nature of the Cold War, and they are striving mightily today to distort the significance of the defeat of the Soviet Empire...

...And when Claire Sterling marshaled THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 19 the evidence in The Terror Network, she was accused of being a tool of William Casey and Alexander Haig, even though her book was written before Reagan was in office...

...It has been argued that, in a period of huge national deficits, the government cannot assume worldwide burdens or support a large foreign-aid program, and should encourage Germany and Japan to assume a considerable amount of that obligation...

...And there is hardly a businessman in all of Eastern and Central Europe who knows how to quantify his activities: What are his costs, his cash flow, his profit margin, his tax liabilities...

...Indeed, as many businessmen are discovering, it is very difficult to do business in Eastern Europe, because one must eliminate a great deal of rubbish and debris from the Communist era...

...We can bring such would-be entrepreneurs to the United States as interns, giving them hands-on experience in running similar enterprises (the National Forum Foundation in Washington is running a worthy pilot program...

...We can bring them to our business schools, or send American businessmen and professors to lecture to them over there (it is amazing how many American businessmen speak Hungarian, Czech, or Polish...

...The rough and tumble of mass movements, the chaos of disintegrating empires and falling tyrants, are unfamiliar and uncongenial...

...Embraced by the left and vigorously promulgated by Communist disinformation, this grotesque distortion suggested that there was no fundamental difference between the two superpowers...

...We planted the seeds two hundred years ago, and we must participate in the harvest...

...Walesa and Havel have come to America to proclaim their democratic faith and to thank us for having inspired them...

...Otherwise, the blow to the future of democracy—and therefore to our national security—will be monumental...

...Alas, a surprising number of voices—some of them highly distinguished—suggest that we should withdraw from the international arena...

...Some of this is the fault of the President, who apparently feels that passion is not appropriate for a government such as his...

...The message was often delivered by uniformed officers, whose The Cold War was about values, although many Americans stridently denied it and most of our national leaders remain embarrassed to proclaim it...

...Insofar as we can advance the democratic cause in Kenya or Zaire, Burma, or Panama, we should do so...

...Hardly...

...they wanted superiority...

...The obligation to involve ourselves in building free societies does not end at the borders of the Soviet Empire...

...Each new Soviet dictator was hailed as a closet liberal, beginning with Stalin himself and culminating in the phantasmagoricalportrayal of former KGB chief Yuri Andropov as a Scotch-drinking, jazz-loving aficionado of English-language pulp novels...

...The President's refusal to support the Lithuanians openly was profoundly discouraging to all the peoples and nations struggling for freedom, both within the old Empire and elsewhere, and reinforced the earlier appeasement of the massacre in Tiananmen Square...

...But if the Second Democratic Revolution owes much to the fall of the Soviet Empire, it is hardly the entire story...

...By the end of his first year, he had acquired almost mythic qualities...

...the agency's estimates of Soviet military spending—as we now know from the Russians themselves—were shockingly low...

...Years hence, we will see a generation of embittered democrats come to power convinced that the United States is not only an unreliable ally but a hypocritical one as well...

...The Cold War was about values, although many Americans stridently denied it and most of our national leaders remain embarrassed to proclaim it...

...Reagan unashamedly espoused the revolution's central themes...

...Yet, just as the triumphs of the first democratic revolution were fragile, so the wonderful democratic achievements of the recent past require active support if they are to endure...

...but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman...

...The East Europeans have already opposed some actions of the former secret services...

...We both had too many weapons, we both spied on each other and the rest of the world, we both had alcoholics and slums, and we both killed...

...As a lbrkish general once put it, "The trouble with having the United States for an ally is that you never know when the Americans are going to turn around and stab themselves in the back...

...We canmust—do our best to support thosefighting for our common ideals...

...And since we very rarely feel threatened, we are slow to engage, and overeager to return to "normalcy" as soon as the struggles seem to be over...

...Even the Marshall Plan was offered to the Soviet Union and its satellites...

...Just as the last quarter of the eighteenth century saw democracy sweep across Western Europe, laying waste to monarchies, duchies, and principalities, so today anti-democratic regimes are falling in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa...

...not until Communism had fallen in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia did the Italian Communist party undertake internal reform, and the Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians do not want Communism with a human or any other face...

...Pakistani president Ghulam Ishaq Khan used military backing in August to oust democratically elected Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her Pakistani People's party...

...When Chinese democrats demonstrated in Peking, they built a copy of the Statue of Liberty...

...El Salvador and Nicaragua are racked with internal conflict...

...But this does not exempt us from our duties...

...By the mid-1970s, most of the intellectual elite of the United States were prepared to believe that European Communists were not Communists at all, but liberal reformers...

...In Czechoslovakia, intelligence officers are on trial for continuing to tap phones and bug the homes and offices of dissident leaders, even after the "Velvet Revolution...

...We need to participate in the internal affairs of the new democracies, giving our expertise, investing our money, opening our doors to those who want to study our methods...

...The Spaniards, blessed with exceptional leadership from King Juan Carlos and President Adolfo Suarez, executed a smooth, peaceful transition to democracy, while in Portugal the democratic forces had to fight it out in the streets with the Communist forces of Alvaro Cunhal...

...We would do well to recall Thomas Paine's words: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country...

...But no sooner was the Axis defeated than we speedily brought the boys home...

...Gorbachev and his aides are today without vision, without solutions to their most elementary problems, and without the mass political base they would need to overhaul the Communist system, assuming they knew what to do...

...The same is true of the delightful electoral disgrace of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua...

...If De Klerk's efforts to liberalize South Africa fail, all of sub-Saharan Africa will suffer enormously...

...yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph...

...Both the American government and scores of American intellectuals went through amazing mental contortions to avoid admitting the truth about Soviet involvement in international terrorism...

...Patrick Buchanan thinks we have done enough for the Europeans and the Japanese, and wants the boys to come home and tend their own fires...

...We rail against the enemies of democracy, but ignore them unless we feel directly threatened...

...Nor is the struggle over in Central and Eastern Europe...

...As we do, we will find the Poles uniquely useful, for the Polish underground has spent much of the past decade assembling and publishing the true history of postwar Poland...

...These three body blows to Soviet international objectives, combined with the impact of radio, the surprisingly effective enforcement of high-technology controls, and Reagan's stubborn commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative, cracked the will of the Soviet leaders...

...African civil wars are winding down, and South African President De Klerk has begun dismantling apartheid...

...American credulity was heavily shaped by the myth of moral equivalence...

...On the other, it left our allies unsure that we would defend them...

...We were seen as having recovered the determination, entrepreneurship, and self-confidence that had saved the West in both World Wars and generated the wealth and know-how to rebuild both Europe and Japan...

...Czech émigrés in Canada, for example, raised money to teach democracy in Czech schools this past spring...

...Irving Kristol has confessed to being unable to generate interest in the struggles for democracy in faraway places like Burma, and he dismisses the Lithuanians' demands for independence with a sympathetic shrug...

...How to build a free-market economy...

...T hese activities sound so simple that one assumes they have already been done, but very little has happened, and those who have tried have been profoundly frustrated...

...Such examples show that the damage done by Communism was much more profound than is generally understood...

...The American government has pieces of the puzzle that we must share...

...Moreover, we need military power to defend the cause of freedom elsewhere...

...These things are best done by private organizations, but they are far more likely to succeed if our national leaders encourage and inspire them...

...we should be providing their citizens with as much information as we can reasonably declassify and publish...

...We have an enormous stake in seeing that the new democracies succeed...

...African leaders from Benin to the Congo to Cameroon are democratizing their policies, liberalizing their economies, and discarding the doctrines of Marxism-Leninism...

...Few generations have been privileged to live through a time of such excitement and promise, yet we are strangely subdued...

...Tiananmen Square was not a unique event in Asia, for protests and demonstrations in favor of fuller democracy involved Tibet, Taiwan, South Korea, and even Japan, as well as the defeat of Ferdinand Marcos...

...They berated Kissinger for refusing to encourage the participation of the "Eurocommunists" in the governments of Italy and Spain, many even proclaiming that the entry of the Italian Communist party into its national government would threaten the Kremlin by giving an ex-ample of "liberal Communism" to Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia...

...and disease and war menace much of Africa...

...Not least, our active participation in the Second Democratic Revolution will do wonders for our own people...

...The CIA seems invariably to have given the Kremlin the benefit of the doubt...

...While 1,3 the academic left would have us believe that the United States was driven by a near-pathological anti-Communism, we were typically quite slow to respond to the Communist threat, and showed little appetite for sponsoring the spread of democracy...

...they prefer orderly change and the rule of law and argue that what remains to be done is best done by the inhabitants of the newly freed foreign lands...

...This, then, is the moment we have been fighting for, with our major enemy in a state of confusion and despair, and our own revolutionary values achieving a degree of success never before seen, and only rarely imagined...

...We need to remain strong, at least until there has actually been a significant cut in arms or arms manufacture, or further disintegration of the Soviet Union itself...

...twice this century we have led a successful campaign against the enemies of democracy and bungled the peace...

...When Lithuanians were about to begin their desperate negotiations with the Russians, they dispatched their prime minister to Washington...

...The money was sent, the (Czech-speaking) instructors arrived, but the education bureaucrats blocked the initiative...

...When PLO spokesmen bragged about the money, weapons, and training they received from the Soviet Union, they were dismissed on the grounds that the PLO was not really a terrorist organization...

...In all Latin America, the only surviving anti-democratic regimes are in Suriname, Cuba, and Haiti...

...The Hungarians have done a bit, the Czechs next to nothing, but this is the least of it...

...W e have entered the Age of the Second Democratic Revolution...

...in Angola, that the Cuban mercenaries could not defeat American-supported UNITA fighters...

...Should former leaders be put on trial...

...The journalist reacted as if someone had set off a rocket under his seat, for he had believed the official version, that Sejna had died in the attempt more than twenty years ago...

...The front-line combatants in the Second Democratic Revolution take their inspiration from us, and now is the time for us to press our advantage to ensure that this victory will not be frittered away...

...ur moves in the 1980s were generally effective, and proved several basic points: in Grenada, that the advance of Communism could be reversed...

...Furthermore, the war is not over...

...It was not merely the day-to-day oppression and misery...

...Was it economic misery that inspired the electors of Corazon Aquino...

...It might have been hoped that we had learned our lesson, and would remain vigorously engaged in (at a minimum) Europe and Asia...

...Using economic factors to explain—and explain away—the revolt against Communism and tyranny is unconvincing...

...The recent adventures of Saddam Hussein should remove any lingering doubts about the advantages of raw power...

...The unstated premise of this fantasy was that the Soviet Union was somehow entitled to strategic parity, and it lasted until Jimmy Carter discovered that the Soviets were not satisfied with parity...

...The Second Democratic Revolution began with the fall of the Franco and Salazar dictatorships in Spain and Portugal in the mid-seventies...

...Our record is disappointing...

...Such questions are made more difficult by the fact that democrats in Central and Eastern Europe are often missing crucial elements in their own histories...

...When the East Germans and Hungarians rose against Soviet oppression, we made it clear that "containment" did not involve helping freedom fighters in the satellite countries...

...C o it was with the Cold War...

...And we were always eager to read signs of moderation in the tea leaves from the Kremlin...

...Meanwhile, it is surely no accident that many of the peoples of Africa are now demanding a voice in the affairs of their countries, to the peril of men like Kenya's Moi, Zambia's Kaunda, and Zaire's Mobutu...

...From the firing of the air-traffic controllers to the restrictions on the sale of high-tech products to the East, from the liberation of Grenada to the mid-air capture of the terrorists from the Achille Lauro and the bombing of Libya, Reagan showed that the United States was prepared to take action and—more important—win...

...We should not encourage the Soviets to believe in a foreign quick fix to their domestic ills...

...In like manner, we can bring politicians, journalists, and others to the United States for practical training in democracy...

...We must make it clear to Gorbachev that anything he does to stop this process will cost him future favors...

...Together, we might reliably reconstruct the Cold War years...

...Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered...

...There is no shortage of democracies under siege: narcoterrorism threatens several Latin American countries...

...American withdrawal was justified by the theory of "apes on a treadmill," which held that the nuclear arms race would continue as long as the United States held strategic superiority...

...In order to avoid a drastic inversion of the strategic balance, Carter's last budget began the surge in American defense spending that carried through Reagan's first term...

...Washington has become the holy city of democracy, and democratic pilgrims arrive from across the world to pay tribute...

...By contrast, the lack of American action in Spain was occasionally interpreted as indifference, and Suarez fumed at his inability to get either economic assistance or help in fighting Basque terrorism, but things were so well managed by the Spaniards that there seemed little need for American engagement...

...in Afghanistan, that the Red Army could be beaten...

...As Irwin Stelzer noted in Commentary earlier this year, the notion of a massive aid program for the new democracies makes very little sense, for only after the creation of free political and economic institutions can foreign aid and foreign investment be effectively absorbed...

...It is in our interest that the Soviet Union lose effective control over much of its present territory, and that independent, democratic governments be established in the maximum number of cases...

...He did not consider the Soviet Empire the only evil in the world (only the sole evil empire), and the fight to spread democracy was not limited to combatting Communism...

...The factories and businesses of these countries are overstaffed, underskilled, andatrociously maintained...

...Democracy proved contagious, until the governments of virtually the entire region had to submit to the popular verdict...

...From the very beginning, we were always looking for a convenient escape from the Cold War...