Freedom Betrayed
Ledeen, Michael A.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Freedom Betrayed" What Happened to the Great Democratic Revolution? He shrugged, and his deliberate snort, using both nostrils, meant, Of course. "Fascinating place." He shrugged again. This was a man who knew how...
...But he was no less effective in helping dismantle dictatorships by behind-the-scenes diplomacy throughout Central and South America...
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...They weren't the only ones...
...It may indeed have...
...He reminds us of the great courage of the Portuguese Socialists under Soares in 1975 in facing down a dangerous attempt at national take-over by a Stalinist-led Communist Party...
...The new democrats were certainly unprepared for the responsibilities of national government...
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...For Ledeen, it's simple: Neither policy-makers, nor elites, nor the American public as a whole, have grasped what the post–Cold War era is really all about...
...In 1989, there were only two that were not democratic...
...Further afield, Taiwan's Chiang Ching-kuo made a conscious decision not only to move away from long-standing martial law, but to ensure that constitutional provisions were in place for transition to full political democracy after he was dead...
...military, and even offering haven to the world's political refugees...
...interests that are paramount...
...The implication is that, for writer and reader alike, the pain and chaos of real life find order on the page...
...Ledeen shows how, at the very height of what ought to have been U.S...
...But, as Michael Ledeen points out, Western intellectual elites have had a marvelous track-record of getting it wrong, whether in Russia, Eastern Europe, or elsewhere...
...foreign policy in this "Age of the Second Democratic Revolution," including support of democrats wherever and whenever possible, revival of trade and aid "linkage," expansion of NATO, strengthening the U.S...
...Theroux is fiendishly smart, fond of the occasional whopper, and ambitious enough about his standing in Literature that he might easily have made My Other Life a very bad book—too clever by half, subsumed by the postmodernism and tone-deaf to human feeling...
...As literary tricks go it's a neat one: We read about Theroux's breakup as he reads about it himself...
...It's not exactly a flattering portrait of the Duke, but then Theroux is not especially sanguine about his fellow man...
...When the power went out in my building, I fumbled for my battery-powered laptop and switched it on to get light from the screen...
...global strategy was now to be, Warren Christopher said that "we neither had nor needed any such thing...
...Anlen Subscriber Service P.O...
...it is another thing to influence the events that flow, often unpredictably, from them...
...But the United States was at fault, too...
...Get it...
...Granted that Bush never quite comprehended the historic events surrounding his own presidency, but what could the U.S...
...But the disaster in the Balkans is plain for all to see...
...At Freedom Betrayed: How America Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away Michael A. Ledeen The AEI Press / 169 pages $24.95 REVIEWED BY David Aikman It was Karl Marx who inadvertently coined one of the most appropriate epithets for the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire: "History repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce...
...her loyalty grew out of a deep-seated commitment to freedom and democratic capitalism...
...So why, after events in Eastern Europe in 1989, did the democratic euphoria seem to peter out...
...Almost every episode in the book is preoccupied in one way or another with the nature of identity...
...Perhaps he meant weak jokes as well...
...de Klerk...
...Finally, there is the example of Ronald Reagan, who issued the final Cold Warchallenge to the Soviets through his arms build-up, the SDI initiative, and his doctrine of supporting local insurgency against Soviet imperialism...
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...self-assurance in surveying the collapse of Communism, President Bush, and his secretary of state James Baker, clung to a desire for "stability" not just within the foundering Soviet empire, but within collapsing Yugoslavia too...
...seriously have done to prevent the re-emergence of the nomenklatura elites in the shaky post–Warsaw Pact republics of Eastern Europe...
...Or, in his case, fellow Pauls: In one of the most moving sections of the book, the hero meets a German writer, Andreas Vorlaufer, of whom he has never before heard...
...44 1 82 December 1996 • The American Spectator...
...This is a compelling thesis...
...Saddam no doubt was terrified...
...Two years later, Spanish President Adolfo Suarez was faced with a similar challenge to newfound democratic legitimacy from Basque separatist terrorism...
...It is one thing to grasp a historical "knot," as Solzhenitsyn terms these tectonic global shifts...
...The Portuguese and Spanish examples of peaceful political evolution were studied by Poland's Solidarity intellectuals in 198o, and by the reformist South African leader F.W...
...Many Western reporters thought this confirmed what a charming chap was now running the Kremlin, and how we really ought to do everything to keep him in power...
...The old Communist nomenklatura clung tenaciously to power and privilege...
...The wondrous Margaret Thatcher not only proved a firm U.S...
...He's right...
...In its place would be "The Sinatra Doctrine...
...as the narrator says later, "life has no apparent plot, and so it seems messier than fiction...
...Bush and Baker should never have tried to prop up the disintegrating Soviet Union by clinging to Gorbachev and cajoling the Ukraine to stop flapping its nationalistic wings...
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...Their books have the same titles, their holidays are spent in the same places...
...Much older than Paul, Vorlaufer—his name means "forerunner"—appears already to have lived Theroux's life in duplicate...
...ultimately backed Soares, but not at first...
...After the Soviet Union collapsed, he says, we all thought that we would see democracy triumphant everywhere...
...I did not want to stop reading...
...Name: (Please Print) Address: City: State: Zip: Date of change: VCAFRMrejection of state power that actually began, not in Eastern Europe, but in the Western part of the continent...
...At that moment," Ledeen writes, "history pivoted on a Spanish hinge...
...political] parties to put together anything approximating a coherent post-Cold War foreign policy represents an extraordinary and unsatisfactory state of affairs...
...Ledeen also provides fresh insights into the vital role played by the three remarkable leaders of the 1980's...
...The U.S...
...In a used bookstore some months later, Paul discovers for the first time some ofVorlaufer's work, a short story that tells in aching detail of another formal and somewhat stiff dinner: that of the writer and his wife on the last night of their marriage...
...As Owen Harries recently put DAVID AIKMAN is a former Time foreign correspondent...
...How good is My Other Life...
...When asked in early 1993, at a closed-door meeting of State Department officers, what the U.S...
...In South Korea too, the model of authoritarianism quickly crumbled once it became clear that peaceful transition to political democracy was possible...
...But it may be over-simplified...
...Pope John Paul II not only helped dismantle Communism in his own country—demonstrating no illusions about the nature of Communist power, and a subtle understanding of how to use Polish nationalism against the Kremlin...
...Candidate Dole made the characteristically terse but common-sense point that "hopes and desires should not be confused with U.S...
...it in the New York Times Magazine, "The seven-year failure by both [U.S...
...Ledeen has articulated the very best of those "hopes and desires...
...Perhaps it is now time for someone to spell out, with equal lucidity, just what those American interests are...
...But it didn't happen, he insists, because "our leaders betrayed the Democratic revolution, abandoned our historic mission, and stood by as the forces of tyranny reestablished much of their evil sway...
...Rather, it was part of a global process of The American Spectator • December 199 6 81 MOVING...
...As for the Clinton administration, it didn't seem to want an actual foreign policy...
...Ledeen proffers a bracing ten-point list of suggestions for U.S...
...but the reader need pay no more attention to the postmodernist hall of mirrors than he need listen to the TV commentary to understand a tennis match...
...I think the Brezhnev doctrine is dead," he explained...
...The problem is, how to explain this failure...
...Such literary gaming is splashed like a background tint throughout My Other Life, yet Theroux is too fine a writer to bog his story down in self-conscious literariness...
...This was a man who knew how to express boredom...
...In 1981, there were only two fully democratic regimes in the whole region...
...I did it my way...
...When the tart-tongued Soviet foreign ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov was explaining to Western reporters in the fall of 1989 why Soviet tanks were not enforcing the survival of Communist gerontocrats of Eastern Europe, he coined a real doozy...
...What's missing from his analysis is an equally lucid understanding of America's own need for "linkage" between our ideals and interests...
...Ledeen calls it the "Age of the Second Democratic Revolution...
...Just as Suarez legalized the Spanish Communist Party, for example, so de Klerk freed Nelson Mandela from jail...
...Ledeen is at his most persuasive when arguing his larger thesis: that the collapse of Communism was not simply the consequence of Marxism-Leninism's inherent failure as a philosophical and economic system...
...Box 655, Mt...
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...Crises and other world challenges, he said, would be dealt with on a "case-by-case basis...
...ally at the most climactic period of the end of the Cold War...
...Nor is he optimistic about the future: "The enemies of democracy are becoming stronger in much of the former Soviet Empire, and in some cases the very same men and women who inflicted the Communist terror are now returning to power, wrapped in a newfound mantle of democratic respectability...
...The post-Soviet scenarios are still being played out...
...Instead he has crafted a remarkable carnival of a novel: polished, profound, profane, prophetic...
...That's all there is to it...
...He also firmly cracked down on dissident leftist theologians within his own church who were trying to legitimize grass-roots Catholic revolutionism in Latin America...
Vol. 29 • December 1996 • No. 12
