Statecraft

To be so wrong quite so often does not, it seems, in the post-Cold War world constitute any impediment to promotion. Far from it. Yesterday’s critics of the strategy which so triumphantly destroyed the Soviet Union were then trusted to manage relations with its successor. Mr Strobe Talbott, in his previous career as a journalist on Time, variously attacked the Reagan defence build-up, dismissed SDI, mocked the idea that external Western pressures could be effective, described the Cold War as a ‘grand obsession’ which diverted the world from other more important matters and described NATO’s continued existence as ‘at best a stop-gap’.† Mr Talbott went on to become President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State.

And, yes, all this does matter now. If so many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against during the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

The Cold War has sometimes been portrayed as a struggle between two superpowers, the United States (and its allies) on the one hand, and the Soviet Union (and its puppets) on the other. The term ‘superpower’ was not one that I relished at the time, because it always seemed to suggest a moral equivalence between the two political poles. Of course, at one level this was, indeed, a competition for advantage between broadly equivalent powers. But the equivalence reflected might not right. Much more important, and significant for us today, the Cold War was a struggle between two sharply opposing systems, encapsulating two wholly contradictory philosophies, involving two totally different sets of objectives.

The Soviet communist system was, in a sense, simpler. Its central purpose was to achieve domination over the world in its entirety by an ideology, Marxism-Leninism, and by the Communist Party, which was that ideology’s supreme custodian and unique beneficiary. That purpose was, in the eyes of its proponents, subject to no moral constraints – the very notion of which appeared absurd. Communism recognised no limits except those posed by the power of its enemies. Within such a system individuals were only of value in so far as they served the role allotted them. Similarly, the expression of ideas, artistic endeavour, all kinds of ‘private’ activity, were judged and permitted according to whether they advanced ‘the Revolution’, which in practice increasingly meant the interests of the old men of the Kremlin. The pursuit of world revolution was at times largely suspended. At other times, notably in Soviet relations with China, disagreements broke out between the proponents of the great socialist ‘idea’ about its pace, conduct and immediate goals. But the objective of creating worldwide a fully socialist society, consisting of radically socialist citizens, remained.

Against this stood America and its allies. What we call in shorthand ‘the West’ was a reality as complex as ‘the East’ (in communist terms) was simple. First of all it consisted not of one power but of many. Within NATO, the institutional embodiment of Western defence resolve, individual states pursued constantly shifting policies, reflecting their own interests and the democratic decisions of their own peoples. America led; but America had to persuade its friends to follow. This reality reflected a fundamental philosophical difference. The very essence of Western culture – and the heart of both the strengths and weaknesses of Western policy during the Cold War years – was recognition of the unique value of the individual human being.

Put like this, it is easy to see why knowledge of the Cold War experience is important today. Still more important, though, is the fact that the struggle between two quite different approaches to the political, social and economic organisation of human beings has not ended and will never end.

Neither the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor victory in the Gulf War, nor the collapse of the Soviet Union, nor the establishment of free markets and a measure of democracy in South-East Asia – none of these has resolved the tension between liberty and socialism in all its numerous guises. Believers in the Western model of strictly limited government and maximum freedom for individuals within a just rule of law often say, and rightly, that ‘we know what works’. Indeed, we do. But equally there will always be political leaders and, increasingly, pressure groups who are bent on persuading people that they cannot really run their own lives and that the state must do it for them. And, sadly but inevitably, there will always be people who prefer idleness to effort, dependency to independence, and modest rewards just as long as nobody does better. There is always a danger that, as Friedrich Hayek put it in his Road to Serfdom, ‘the striving for security tends to become stronger than the love of freedom’.* It mustn’t.

Otherwise we will find ourselves in the circumstances of which that far-sighted French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, warned, when considering how democracies might incrementally lose their liberty:

Over [the citizens] stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, father like, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood … Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living? Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choices less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. Equality has prepared men for all this, predisposing them to endure it and often even regard it as beneficial …

I have always thought that this brand of orderly, gentle, peaceful slavery which I have just described could be combined, more easily than is generally supposed, with some of the external forms of freedom, and that there is a possibility of its getting itself established even under the shadow of the sovereignty of the people.*

Only if we remain convinced that freedom – the freedom for which we strove in those Cold War years of struggle with socialism – is of abiding value in its own right will we avoid wandering down the inviting but dispiriting cul-de-sac which de Tocqueville describes.

That is why my old sparring partner, Mikhail Gorbachev, was wrong in what he said in Prague about the alternative to communism which the West offered in the past and which we still have to offer today. The politics and economics of liberty are not a kind of lucky dip from which one treat may be drawn out and enjoyed without tasting the others.

In truth, the Western model of freedom is something positive and universally applicable, though with variations reflecting cultural and other conditions. The theologian Michael Novak has christened that system ‘democratic capitalism’.* It is a good phrase, because it emphasises the link between political and economic liberty. And it is significant that it comes from someone whose profession is more associated with supernatural doctrines than political programmes. Later in this book I shall try to describe the Western model of liberty more fully.† But perhaps its most important defining feature is that it is based upon truth – about the nature of Man, about his aspirations, and about the world he can hope to create.

CHAPTER 2

The American Achievement

MY AMERICA

The America that I encountered on my first speaking tour after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington was more sombre, reserved and intense than the America I had known. Six weeks after the outrage, with the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban entering a new phase, there was only one issue on everyone’s minds, only one message it was imperative to convey:

In Britain we know how much we owe to America. We understand how close our countries are. America’s cause is, and always will be, our cause. The message I bring to you today is that Britain is united with America in the war against terrorism.*

I have now been paying regular visits to the United States for more than thirty years. But there is something more subtle and less explicable than mere experience that binds me to America. I have reflected upon what this ‘something’ is.

Charles de Gaulle famously remarked that he had ‘a certain idea of France’.† In fact, more accurately, he said that he had ‘created for himself’ that idea. To have an idea of a country is not necessarily to have a distorted view of it. It is, if the idea is a true one, to gain an insight into the mystery of a nation’s identity.

I too have a certain idea of America. Moreover, I would not feel entitled to say that of any other country, except my own. This is not just sentiment, though I always feel ten years younger – despite the jet-lag – when I set foot on American soil: there is something so positive, generous and open about the people – and everything actually works. I also feel, though, that I have in a sense a share in America. Just why is this?

There are two reasons. First, in an age of spun messages and fudged options I am increasingly conscious that Winston Churchill was right about this – as about other things – in his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri in 1946:

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

Consciousness of the underlying commonalities of that ‘English-speaking world’ and of its values has never been more needed.

But the second reason for my sense of belonging to America is that America is more than a nation or a state or a superpower; it is an idea – and one which has transformed and continues to transform us all. America is unique – in its power, its wealth, its outlook on the world. But its uniqueness has roots, and those roots are essentially English. Already at the time of their foundation, the settlements across the Atlantic were deeply affected by religious, moral and political beliefs.

This fact is unforgettably recalled by the words of John Winthrop delivered in 1630 upon the deck of the tiny Arbella off the coast of Massachusetts to his fellow pilgrims:

We must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities …

We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all the people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout all the world.

The pilgrims were in search of freedom to worship as they chose, but, as Winthrop’s words demonstrate, they were by no means relativists or liberals. They were imbued with a deep sense of individual and collective responsibility. They practised self-discipline and lived according to a dogged, undoubtedly severe spirit of community. The pilgrims were Calvinists, whereas my own upbringing was against the somewhat less forbidding background of Methodism. But in and around my old home town of Grantham there were preachers who spoke in the tones of Winthrop, and we all lived in a not dissimilar atmosphere. So I feel that I understand the pilgrims, who symbolise for me one aspect of the American character, one feature of the American dream.

But America was not just the new Jerusalem. It could not have been made by the saints alone, or if it had been it would not have prospered. As the years went by more and more people left their homes in the Old World to seek a life in the New for straightforward material reasons. And they are not to be despised for that. They wanted better prospects for themselves and their families and they were prepared to make enormous sacrifices to achieve them. These men were fearless, tough, dynamic. They too, whatever their origins, their destinations or their hopes, are a vital part of the American story. They represent the risk-taking, the enterprise and the courage which endured every danger, natural and man-made, to bring virgin forests and open prairies into productive use. Whether trappers, farmers, traders or (later) miners, these are the men whose spirit underlies American individualism in all its manifold forms today.

A sense of personal responsibility and of the quintessential value of the individual human being are the twin foundations of orderly freedom. In the years before the American Revolution the colonists, because of circumstances, developed such awareness to a high degree. But the political culture from which the American colonies sprang – that is English political culture – had always been imbued with it too.

One American scholar, Professor James Q. Wilson, has listed the following factors as important in shaping English (later British) freedom: physical isolation (which helped protect us from invasion); a deep-rooted and widespread commitment to private property; ethnic homogeneity (which helped create a common culture) and a tradition of respect for legality and the rights it guaranteed.* The Founding Fathers of the United States of America inherited all this. Their thinking about the rights of the subject and the purposes of a constitution were developments of what had occurred over more than five centuries in the country whose yoke they were determined to break.

I advanced this thesis in the course of a speech I delivered on my investiture as Chancellor of William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia in February 1994.†

The historical roots of our [Anglo–American] relationship are many. A shared language, a shared literature, a shared legal system, a shared religion, and a finely woven blanket of customs and traditions from the very beginning, that have set our two nations apart from others. Even when the founders of this great Republic came to believe that the course of human events had made it necessary for them to dissolve the political bands that connected them to Britain, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitled them, it was from our Locke and Sidney, our Harrington and Coke, that your Henry and your Jefferson, your Madison and Hamilton took their bearings.‡

These considerations are not just of academic importance. Their significance lies in the fact that they allow us to grasp an important truth about America – namely that it is the most reliable force for freedom in the world, because the entrenched values of freedom are what make sense of its whole existence.

That is why I felt equally entitled in another lecture on the same theme some two years later to make the following claim:

The modern world began in earnest on July 4th 1776. That was the moment when the rebellious colonists put pen to parchment and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour in defence of truths they held to be self-evident: ‘That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights … and that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ Henceforth patriotism would not simply be loyalty to the homeland, but a dedication to principles held to be both universal and permanent.*

Similar claims have, of course, been made for other revolutions. But they cannot ultimately be sustained. The French Revolution sacrificed Liberty to Equality – Fraternity never really mattered at all – and then Equality quickly gave way to centralised dictatorship. Today the only constructive results of that upheaval are to be found in the administrative reorganisations which succeeded it. The Bolshevik Revolution can be seen in retrospect to have been a reversion to the most odious kind of age-old tyranny, supplemented by the technological apparatus of totalitarianism. And it had no constructive results whatever.

The American Revolution, however, was not a revolution in either of these senses. It was successful through war, but its intentions were to secure peace and prosperity. It broke the political link with Britain, but it contained no programme of social or cultural transformation. Its novelty was at once more limited and more radical, for on the basis of English thinking about the rights of the subject, the rule of law and a limited government, it pronounced a doctrine that would be the basis of democracy.

On frequent occasions, especially when I have a speech to make in the United States, I take in my handbag a well-thumbed little yellow volume – a Bicentennial Keepsake Edition of the United States Constitution, given me by President George Bush Sr and signed by the members of the United States Supreme Court. In the introduction to it, the late Warren Burger, one of the great American judges and the nation’s longest-serving Chief Justice, notes: ‘The [US] Constitution represented not a grant of power from rulers to the people ruled – as with King John’s grant of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 – but a grant of power by the people to the government which they had created.’

And this really sums up what the American Revolution means to the world – and America to me.

These reflections lead me to certain conclusions about the conduct of international politics.

 America alone has the moral as well as the material capacity for world leadership

 America’s destiny is bound up with global expression of the values of freedom

 America’s closest allies, particularly her allies in the English-speaking world, must regard America’s mission as encompassing their own.

JUST ONE POLE

As I have argued in the previous chapter, however you look at it, it was the West which won the Cold War. But among the victors the United States emerged supreme. Because America is uniquely equipped to lead by its historic and philosophical identification with the cause of liberty, this is something I welcome. But many others neither welcome nor accept it.

As the jargon of the experts in geopolitics has it – and in such matters a certain amount of jargon must be permitted – we have moved with the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet Union from a ‘bipolar’ to a ‘unipolar’ world. Today America is the only superpower. No earlier superpower – not even the Roman, Habsburg or British Empires in their prime – had the resources, reach or superiority over its closest rival enjoyed by America today. Nor is this simply to be explained, negatively, by the outcome of the Cold War. It is also to be understood, positively, as the result of the dynamism inherent in the American system.

The Caesars, the Habsburgs and the British were in their day heartily disliked by those envious of their power: such is generally the fate of those who bestride the globe. America, by contrast, has until quite recently escaped such odium. This is because, at least outside its own hemisphere, it has refused the temptations of territorial expansion. Indeed, the potential of America has until the present day always exceeded its actual power.

The United States, as befits the world’s greatest democracy, is a reluctant warrior. In the two great wars of the twentieth century it was a late entrant. Even during the Cold War America was, it is sometimes overlooked, for much of the time far from aggressively anti-Soviet. The very doctrine of containment, which exercised greater influence than any other upon American foreign policy during those years, was at heart a defensive doctrine, aimed not at rolling back communism but rather at preventing its rolling remorselessly forward. For all these reasons, America has been a rather well-liked power.

But Americans have recently had to take more seriously the hostility which the United States faces from powerful forces outside its borders. The opponents of the American superpower do not, at present at least, have much in common except their shared hatreds. The more moderate or most discreet of them – in Continental Europe (especially France), Russia and China – express their opposition to America’s superpower status in terms of an alternative doctrine of ‘multi-polarity’. Thus President Jacques Chirac of France has evoked a new ‘collective sovereignty’ to check American power, and his Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, has complained that ‘the United States often behaves in a unilateral way and has difficulties in taking on the role to which it aspires, that of organiser of the international community’.* Beijing is particularly fond of such language. In April 1997 then-President Boris Yeltsin and President Jiang Zemin embraced a Sino–Russian ‘strategic partnership’ aimed at those who would ‘push the world toward a unipolar order’. The following month the ever-obliging French President agreed with his Chinese host that there was need of an international order with ‘power centres besides the United States’.† Most recently, the Swedish Prime Minister, host to the chaotic EU–US Summit at Gothenberg, extolled the EU as ‘one of the few institutions we can develop as a balance to US world domination’.‡

Very different in tone – and intent – from such grumblings from peevish statesmen have been the threats levelled against America and Americans from the proponents of Islamic revolution. Well before 11 September 2001 the Islamic terrorist supremo Osama bin Laden had left us in no doubt about his (and many others’) objectives:

We predict a black day for America and the end of the United States as the United States, and it will become separate states and will retreat from our land and collect the bodies of its sons back to America, God willing.§

Bin Laden and his associates were even then well advanced in their plans to fulfil those threats.

In the face of such hostility, any great power faces two temptations. The first, which has been much talked about, is isolationism. In fact, to judge from much of the rhetoric used about America one would easily think that the drawbridge had already risen. President Clinton, for example, described the Senate’s (entirely correct) decision in October 1999 to oppose the nuclear test ban treaty as ‘a new isolationism’. This was part of a broader campaign to portray the Republican Party as a whole as insufficiently committed to America’s world role. It is in this context worth recalling perhaps that the great majority of Democrats in Congress voted against the Gulf War of 1991. It is equally relevant that it was President Clinton’s own party in Congress which denied him fast-track negotiating authority on trade agreements. By contrast, President George W. Bush in his election campaign proposed an approach to American foreign and security policy which he termed ‘a distinctly American internationalism’ that involved ‘realism in the service of American ideals’. He affirmed that ‘America, by decision and destiny, promotes political freedom – and gains the most when democracy advances’. It was difficult to detect isolationism in any of that. Nor has there been any isolationism in the actions of the new administration, which has reaffirmed its commitment to the defence of Europe, proposed expansion of NATO to include the Baltic states, sought a new realistic relationship with Russia and advanced the idea of a vast free trade area covering North and South America. And in pursuit of the war against terrorism, President Bush has invested huge efforts and demonstrated great skill in assembling an international coalition to achieve America’s objectives.

What most of the conservative critics of America’s overseas engagements in the Clinton years were concerned about was the need to place national interest alongside, or ahead of, wider objectives. I disagreed with some of these critics on specific matters; but they were right to be concerned, and nine out of ten of them could not fairly be labelled ‘isolationist’.