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Jewish World Review Dec. 21, 2000 / 24 Kislev, 5761
Michael Ledeen
Clinton was bequeathed a world at peace, because Reagan and Bush
had effectively used the two main instruments of national security:
superior power and unbreakable will. As a result, the many foreign
leaders who hated us were terrified of our great military power, and
were convinced — by 12 years of proven resolve — that we were quite
prepared to use it.
That is the stuff peace is made of--real peace, not the illusions of peace
we have been fed for the past eight years.
Clinton and his feckless associates, from Warren Christopher to
Madeleine Albright, from Tony Lake to Sandy Berger, from Les Aspin
to Bill Perry, John Deutch and Bill Cohen, threw it all away. You want
strength of will? They gave us the occasional puny gesture, like lobbing a
handful of cruise missiles into Iraq from time to time, and then dismantling
the sanctions regime when no one was watching, or applying Band-Aids
to the open wounds in the Balkans when radical surgery was required,
or repeating the blunders of Vietnam in the jungles of Colombia. You
want military power? Forget it. They turned the armed forces into a vast
anthropological experiment that produced defections en masse, broken
morale, politically castrated commanders, and the world’s largest
daycare program.
But that is the least of it. In what future historians will undoubtedly regard
as the single stupidest policy ever adopted by a great power, we armed
the People’s Republic of China with our best military technology, despite
the Chinese proclamation that we are their major enemy, and their
announced intention to prepare to fight and win a war against us.
This folly alone could soon threaten our survival.
Our enemies know all this, and they are no longer afraid. The Chinese
are not the only ones preparing to do us in. Their North Korean allies —
Madeleine’s recent dancing partners in Pyongyang — have robbed us
blind, taking our money and our nuclear technology even as they build
missiles that can target our ships, our troops in the south, and even our
western shores. The Iraqis and the Iranians pursue their development
and production of weapons of mass destruction, and ever more accurate
missiles to deliver them against our allies and us.
The cauldrons of war are bubbling in all the major theaters of the globe:
Israel is at war even as Clinton babbles on about the peace process;
China is mobilizing men and materiel on its coast opposite Taiwan; India
and Pakistan are fighting a guerrilla war; terrorists arrogantly take
Western hostages in Europe and Saudi Arabia; Africa is a vast killing
field; Latin American ecoterrorism erodes the fragile legitimacy of
regional democracies brought into being during the Reagan years of
strength and resolve.
This is the Clinton legacy, and although it would have been appropriate
for some of these cauldrons to have boiled over during his presidency,
we should be pleased that these enormous challenges will be handled by
the Powells and the Rices and the Cheneys, serious grownups with a
realistic view of the world, the esteem of our friends and allies, and the
fear of our enemies. If we’re lucky, we’ll get enough time to get our
fighting forces back into acceptable condition in time for the first crisis.
The first sounds from the transition team are encouraging, especially the
resolve on missile defense, and the shot across the bow of the
Europeans — from my excellent colleague John Bolton, apparently
tagged for deputy secretary of state — warning about the grave
consequences of the planned European army, outside the NATO
structure. And we should take heart from Powell’s subtle shift in
language about Russia and China, no longer “partners,” but works in
progress, with as yet unknown outcomes.
It’s going to be tough, and it could be fatal. It’s a good thing that help is
on the way, but very few Americans have the slightest glimmering of the
gravity of our situation. As Tocqueville warned nearly 200 years ago,
democracies do badly at foreign policy. It will take great skill, courage,
and luck to survive Clinton’s
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