Responses
Denitch, Bogdan
This White House seems to have no foreign policy vision and no interest in developing one. This is a bad political mistake—even for an administration that would prefer to focus "like a laser...
...The great opening for democracy in South Africa will not survive if the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank attempt to impose austerity in the face of rising expectations for greater social justice and equality...
...We do not need to be that unimaginative...
...I assume no one proposes that there be no police force capable of overriding local sovereignty...
...This should obviously be a multinational effort mobilizing the European Community and Japan as well...
...But the greatest sin of this administration is its inability to grasp the historical opening that the end of the cold war has provided for democracy abroad...
...Should the United States act as a world policeman in those areas where the breakdown of government jeopardizes the lives of large numbers of people, or where major threats to regional or world peace arise...
...An analogous massive reflationary economic effort is needed on a world scale...
...Sustained long-range help must be provided for the economies and societies of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...
...This is also in the most direct self-interest of the United States and the world economy...
...The question is not the size of the budget, but rather what is sufficient for a reasonable security policy...
...This is a bad political mistake—even for an administration that would prefer to focus "like a laser beam" on domestic problems...
...The Marshall Plan helped rebuild Europe after the Second World War, but it was also very good for the United States...
...For starters, think of nuclear submarines, heavy battle tanks, Stealth bombers and fighters, and a good half of the aircraft carrier battle groups...
...It has permitted the North-South gap to keep widening remorselessly...
...Here a lack of courage and vision can have catastrophic consequences...
...Retired Admiral Gene LaRoque, Congressman Ron Dellums, and Gordon Adams, the former director of the Defense Budget Project, have systematically critiqued not merely military waste but the very assumptions that 504 • DISSENT underlie our military budgets...
...That all makes for a very much smaller budget than anything imagined by Clinton's speech writers...
...In all these cases, the legal government is either incapable of stopping the slaughter or is the active perpetrator...
...From that point of view, a whole range of enormously expensive weapons systems become clearly redundant...
...If it is our fate to be a mainstay of UN-sponsored police actions, which is not in itself a bad thing, then what we should end up keeping are the Marines, light infantry divisions, flexible air strength, and some naval transport and support units...
...President Clinton does not even propose that we provide a fraction of what we spent on defense for a chance at real security in the post–cold war world...
...If not (and I believe that the United States should act only within multilateral arrangements, which take time to negotiate and are therefore too slow for most emergencies) should we instead support the creation of a standing world police force under the United Nations...
...This is the only way to do something about the growing North-South gap, provide economic stimulus for the North and give the post-communist regimes a chance...
...The United States unflinchingly spends billions for the military and cries poor when it comes to large-scale economic aid for the post-communist countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...
...Think of the slaughter, rapine, and disorder in Rwanda, Southern Sudan, Kurdistan, Bosnia, Haiti, Myanmar, Armenia, and Georgia, and very likely soon Cambodia...
...It is the charisma established on international questions that gives the American presidency its imperial aura, which can sometimes be successfully parlayed in domestic politics...
...Otherwise we will be haunted by the ghosts of Weimar, to the peril of democracy, stability, and world peace...
...There must be a massive effort to raise the living standards of the South and to give South Africa a genuine chance...
...There is also the question of security...
...Economic misery will breed full-blooded populist ethnic nationalism and other authoritarian movements rather than democracy and pluralism...
...This is playing with fire...
...The bad polls on Clinton's foreign policy performance will greatly weaken his ability to mobilize support for his social programs...
Vol. 41 • September 1994 • No. 4
