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The National Interest
Summer 1998—Number 52
Warren Zimmermann, the last U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, reviews the dangerous Balkan crisis. He insists that for both moral and geopolitical reasons it would be “unthinkable” for America to stand by while Milosevic applied a policy of ethnic cleansing to the Albanians of Kosovo. Only the United States has the credentials to mediate an agreement, and “a comprehensive settlement should be the objective.” Zimmermann evaluates the pros and cons of partition and of the granting of autonomous republic status to Kosovo as possible solutions. Criticizing “our misplaced gratitude” to Milosevic for his compromises at Dayton, Zimmermann concludes that it is essential to convey clearly to the Serbs that their president is an international pariah and that he can bring them nothing but disaster.
“Asia has been laid low before. It has, in its moments of crisis, been forced to open up to the West before.” Thus does Sebastian Mallaby, Washington bureau chief of The Economist, begin his assessment of the IMF’s response to the current Asian economic crisis. In the IMF’s actions, as earlier in the actions of Commodore Perry and Douglas MacArther, he sees—and approves of—a supreme confidence in American power and values. In contrast, he deplores what he identifies as the Western lack of self-confidence represented by recent Western conservative “revisionism.” He singles out a trio of distinguished doubters—Chalmers Johnson, Martin Feldstein, and Francis Fukuyama—for particular chastisement.
His article is immediately followed by spirited responses from those three. Johnson, for example, maintains that, “Like his magazine, Mallaby is an ideologist for the Western economic system.” In his own defense, Fukuyama warns against equating “the central Western idea, now victorious over much of the globe, with whatever set of policies the technocrats at the IMF and Treasury departments happen to subscribe to at the present moment.”
If your taste runs to high-level, sharp-elbowed polemics, not to be missed.
What Kishore Mahbubani, permanent secretary for policy of Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is really asking with his provocative question is whether Asian societies can order their affairs creatively and efficiently over the long term. He examines the historical, cultural, and economic cases for “Yes”, “No”, and “Maybe” answers. While forthright in emphasizing Asia’s shortcomings in comparison with the West’s civilizational achievements, he utterly rejects arguments that “draw a direct causal link between adherence to Asian values and financial disaster.” But Mahbubani warns Asians that they must reconcile history with modernity in a way that will best enable them to compete with the West—not only for their own sake but in order that they may properly shoulder their “share of the global burden in advancing human civilization.”
Congressional consideration of the Freedom from Religious Persecution bill introduced by Representative Frank Wolf and Senator Arlen Specter, as well as recent controversy concerning the treatment of Christians by the Chinese government, makes this comprehensive review of the historical interplay between religion and American foreign policy a timely one. Leo Ribuffo, professor of history at George Washington University, argues that the effect of American religious beliefs on American “exceptionalism”, the impact of religious interest groups on U.S. policies, and the influence of serious religious ideas on scholars and policymakers have been less important than commonly assumed. But the reverse impact—of America’s various foreign involvements on the domestic religious scene—has been greater than commonly assumed. As for Wolf-Specter, its passage “would complicate foreign—and perhaps domestic—policy in ways that no one has thought through.”
China scholar Ross Terrill reveals how the depiction of Mao has changed over recent decades, and with it judgment on his style of communist rule. Pointing to the increasingly pathological nature of Mao’s behavior over time—including his voracious appetite for obedient young women, strange personal habits (such as refusing to brush his teeth), merciless suspiciousness, and drug-induced, last-minute decision reversals—Terrill exposes the early scholars’ tendency to downplay the horrors (and Mao’s intention of them) of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in their eagerness to see Mao as a well-meaning agent of social progress. As for the future, Terrill predicts that when the communist epoch passes—as it soon will—“there will be an effort in China to distinguish Mao’s contributions from the whole box and dice of Marxism-Leninism. . . . Mao will be buried doctrinally while being saved as a patriot.”
The trial of Maurice Papon, argues Brussels-based author and analyst John Laughland, has been interpreted superficially in much of the world as a long overdue verdict on the complicity of Vichy France in crimes against humanity. It was nothing of the sort, he argues, but rather a politically motivated travesty of justice and a danger to historical truth. “The danger is obviously not that some hitherto unadmitted guilt will now be assumed”, says Laughland, noting that France’s coming to terms with Vichy has been ongoing since the early 1970s. It is “rather that the true guilt—Germany’s—will henceforth be conveniently dissipated into the anonymity of ‘Europe.’”
“Australia is the nearest Western country to that great bonfire of the vanities, the Asian crisis. The fear is that it may also be the most combustible.” One of Australia’s leading economists evaluates the impact of events on a country that until recently held itself aloof from Asia—and that then tried to “Asianize” itself overnight. While Australia is undoubtedly economically vulnerable, the crisis has served to emphasize the importance of some assets it possesses that much of Asia lacks: firm government, the freedom to oppose and criticize the government, a proper apparatus of contract law, and a free, if rather faddish, press.
Enoch Powell, the enigmatic and controversial British politician who died in February at the age of eighty-five, is sure to be, along with Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, one of the most remembered British politicians of the century. Made famous—and made a virtual political persona non grata—by his “rivers of blood” speech on immigration in April 1968, Powell was a more interesting and complicated man than his then-sudden international notoriety suggests. As Scott McConnell shows, his views on immigration, beyond the dictates of political correctness at the time, eventually became embedded in policy, as did his support for market-based economics. Not so, it seems, his views on Britain’s entry into Europe, which Powell opposed as essentially anti-democratic—at least not yet.
“How is it that the ‘indispensable nation’ had to rely twice in the space of four months on the likes of Yevgeny Primakov and Kofi Annan to save itself from serious embarrassment at the hands of the error-prone dictator of a middle-sized country? It took some doing”, says Adam Garfinkle, The National Interest’s executive editor. Accusing the Clinton administration of several forms of disconnected thinking in a performance fluctuating “between mediocre and abysmal”, he rejects the view that U.S. military threats forced Saddam Hussein to back down. On the contrary, it was the United States itself that did the backing down. If Iraq attains even a rudimentary strategic weapons capability, writes Garfinkle, “it may not be so clear even a year hence just who is deterring whom in the Gulf—with all that implies for the vitality of the present liberal international order.”
Book Reviews:
“While Russia relies more on nuclear weapons and on launching them on warning, its nuclear control regime is steadily deteriorating in physical, organizational, and human terms”, writes Bruce Blair of the Brookings Institute. Reviewing three books on the subject, he scores U.S. and Russian efforts to stop the leakage of dangerous materials as inadequate, thanks largely to a lack of leadership and consequent eruptions of debilitating bureaucratic turf wars. Despite some signal achievements, much more needs to be done to safeguard the detritus of Soviet strategic prowess.
Martin Kramer, head of the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, reviews not only Fouad Ajami’s new book, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, but Ajami himself as a medium of interpretation of the Arabs for Americans. Ajami writes of the world of Arab intellectuals, of how they have encouraged their countries into a cul-de-sac of failure and disappointment. Kramer agrees, praising Ajami’s “approachable prose” and his presentation of the Arabs as people who have made their own choices, however unfortunate many may have been. Ajami, says Kramer, “will give you some inkling as to why the Arabs, for all the talk of their undying commitment to unity and freedom, remain divided and oppressed, and fill your television screen with ‘presidential palaces’ and slit throats.”
Walter McDougall, a Pulitzer-prize winning professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, reviews both Patrick Buchanan’s new book, The Great Betrayal, and Buchanan himself as a political phenomenon. Buchanan “will not go away”, writes McDougall, and conservatives will ignore his new manifesto “at their peril.” McDougall presents a fair-minded summary of Buchanan’s anti-free trade, anti-globalization arguments, and serves up untainted Buchanan’s proposals for “enlightened nationalism.” The book is “powerful stuff” as a political tract, says McDougall, but its history is rather “too pat”, leading Buchanan to argue for misguided and impractical policy proposals.
Reviewing two books, Mark Falcoff of the American Enterprise Institute draws a fascinating portrait of the meteoric but ultimately short-circuited career of Sumner Welles, a key figure in FDR’s administration before and during the first half of World War II. Welles’ brilliance and his flaws come alive in Falcoff’s review, reflecting the volumes reviewed—one of which is the long-awaited account by Welles’ son Benjamin.
Charles R. Kesler, director of the Henry Salvatori Center at Claremont-McKenna College, reviews H.W. Brands’ new biography of Theodore Roosevelt, T.R.: The Last Romantic, in the context of the current “national greatness” debate. As Kesler sees it, the Republican Roosevelt is not the unalloyed model for energetic conservatives today that he is often made out to be. Drawing on Brands’ nearly 900 pages for evidence, Kesler points particularly to Roosevelt’s barely restrained Darwinianism, as well as his several anti-constitutional impulses in office, to make his case.