TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/032690/0326640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6KB | 135 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 88

Don't Cash the Peace Dividend


By Charles Krauthammer


    The country, the Congress and the media are demanding a
peace dividend. Papa Bush sternly refuses to give it to them.
For that he is assailed as being out of sync, out of touch,
overprudent, weird even.

    Papa Bush is right.

    There is nothing wrong with a gradual reduction of American
forces in response to the Soviet eclipse. There may even be
some merit to skipping one generation of weapons and investing
instead in research and development of the next generation (as
suggested by former Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle).
Both of these approaches, however, rest on the premise that the
U.S. must maintain a large, technologically advanced, worldwide
military force. The logic of the peace dividend is the
opposite: now that the cold war is won, it is time to
demobilize.

    Postwar demobilization is a very American idea. We have a
penchant for demobilizing the day after the war is won. After
World War I, we rapidly demobilized and disengaged from Europe.
With no countervailing American force to contain the rise of
the monstrous totalitarianisms of the '30s, the way was cleared
for World War II.

    Which we also won. And after which we demobilized again: 9
million men in the first year after the Japanese surrender.
Stalin was slower to embrace the pleasures of civilian life.
He kept 3 million men under arms, the U.S. half that number.
Stalin kept a massive occupation force in Europe. The U.S.
decided this time that leaving Europe entirely would be a
mistake, so, having radically demobilized, we chose to stay on
the cheap -- with nuclear weapons, an expediency that kept the
world on the nuclear precipice for 40 years.

    We are now, once again but without realizing it, in an
immediate postwar period. The cold war was world war in every
respect but one. It was a great struggle between two massive
alliances conducted on every continent and at every level of
struggle -- economic, political and military -- save one: the
existence of nuclear weapons outlawed direct military
engagement between the great powers. Which is why the cold war
is not recognized for what it was -- World War III. And in 1989
it ended just like the first two: we won.

    Seeing the cold war as World War III is not just a metaphor.
It helps to explain the current rush to demobilize. We are
again in the grip of a postwar euphoria, and our instinct is
to do what we have always done: demobilize first, ask questions
later.

    It is in the American soul. Contrary to the fantasies of the
recent left about an imperial Amerika, it is hard to think of
a great power with less taste for empire than the United
States. Empire? The most universal response to the hegemony
that our Asian and European alliances brought us is the chorus
of Washington voices demanding allied "burden sharing." For
Americans, empire is a pain.

    Empire? Even when we do invade, whether it is Normandy or
Panama, the first question to arise is always, When do we get
out? Luigi Barzini once observed that for America
interventionism is often just an expression of "impatient
isolationism," wanting to get the job over with and back to,
"in the words of Theodore Roosevelt (who deplored it
vigorously), `the soft and easy enjoyment of material
comforts.'"

    Americans like to think -- they thought so in 1919, in 1945
and now again in 1990 -- that having conquered the great evil
of the day, they have conquered evil, that having defeated
today's mortal threat, they have banished threat.

    "Who's the enemy?" a reporter pointedly asked President Bush
at a recent press conference. The implication being, "If you
can't name the enemy, there is none. And if there is no enemy,
why $300 billion for defense?"

    It is true that no one can give a precise answer as to where
the next threat will come from. That does not mean -- as the
peace dividenders of today loudly pretend -- that there is
none.

    To assume that there is no threat is to assume, first, that
the Soviet threat is completely dead, that even a
disintegrating Soviet empire, home to 25,000 nuclear warheads,
will not disturb the peace. History does not support the
proposition that collapsing empires go quietly.

    It is to assume, second, that the Soviet threat cannot be
succeeded by a Russian threat. A Russia shorn of empire and
taken over by embittered nationalists could easily revert to
the kind of dangerous revanchism that seized other defeated
powers in this century, notably interwar Germany.

    It is to assume, finally, that threat, even if banished from
the East, will not come from elsewhere. We simply have no idea
where Germany, China, Japan are headed. We don't know how the
Balkans will evolve. We do know that with the Soviet decline
other forces will occupy the vacuum, among them long-dormant
nationalisms and newly awakened Islamic fundamentalism, neither
of which is necessarily friendly to American interests or
values. We also know that in a high-tech world, dozens of
regimes are acquiring weapons of mass destruction (nuclear,
chemical, biological) and the means to deliver them to almost
any place on earth.

    It is naive and highly dangerous, therefore, to pretend that
with the end of this latest war, war is abolished. Yet that is
what we want to believe. In 1943 Secretary of State Cordell
Hull returned from the Moscow Conference that set the
foundation for a United Nations and told a joint session of
Congress that as the provisions of the conference were carried
out, "there will no longer be need for spheres of influence,
for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the
special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the
nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their
interests."

    Sound familiar?