IN A DRAMATIC ADDRESS before a joint session of Congress forty-six years ago, President Truman asked for military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey to meet the Communist threat to those countries. Two freshman congressmen, John F. Kennedy and I, voted in favor of his proposal. It was a difficult vote for him because the liberal Democrats in his Massachusetts district opposed all military aid. It was a difficult vote for me because the conservative Republicans in my district opposed all foreign aid. We voted as we did because we were motivated by a great cause that transcended partisan politics: the defeat of communism. We thereby helped to launch the great bipartisan initiative that deterred Soviet aggression in Western Europe for over four decades.
Today, we are witnessing one of the great watersheds in history. The cold war world order—based on two clashing ideologies, two opposing geopolitical blocs, and two competing superpowers—has been irrevocably shattered. We now have a cause even greater than the defeat of communism—the victory of freedom. If we meet the challenges of peace, our legacy will be not just that we saved the world from communism but that we helped make the world safe for freedom.
Yet those who have hailed the beginning of a new order in which peace and freedom are secure speak prematurely. The peaceful revolution in Eastern Europe did not prevent the violent conquest of Kuwait by Iraq. Those who two years ago touted the conventional wisdom that economic power had replaced military power as the major instrument of foreign policy were exposed as false prophets when Japan and Germany proved impotent in responding to Saddam Hussein’s aggression. Despite the great victories for freedom in 1989 and 1991, both the Persian Gulf crisis in 1990 and the coup attempt by Soviet hard-liners in 1991 demonstrated that the world remains a dangerous and unpredictable place.
America has an indispensable role to play in the world. No other nation can take our place. Some might eventually be able to replace us militarily. Others might be able to take our place economically. But only the United States has the military, economic, and political power to lead the way in defending and extending freedom and in deterring and resisting aggression. More important, our influence stems not only from our military and economic power but also from the enormous appeal of our ideals and our example. We are the only great power in history to have made its entrance onto the world stage not by the force of its arms but by the force of its ideas.
As we chart our course, we must ask ourselves four fundamental questions. Do we have the will to lead? Do we have the means to lead? How should we lead? How can we renew America at home so that we can lead abroad not only through our actions but also through our example?
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André Malraux once observed that the United States is the only nation in the world to have become a world power without intending or trying to do so. We have traditionally been reluctant to play a world role commensurate with our enormous potential power. But when events have compelled America to become involved, we have led with skill and will equal to those of any European great power.
Idealism has been at once our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. American idealism—sometimes naive, sometimes misguided, sometimes overzealous—has always been at the center of our foreign policy. On the one hand, it has at times fostered a profound impulse toward isolationism. More comfortable with black-and-white moral choices than with the inevitable gray areas of world politics, we have often opted to withdraw into isolation in order to avoid tainting our idealism with the realities of power politics. On the other hand, this idealism has served as an indispensable foundation to sustain our commitment to the great moral causes of the twentieth century. It has enabled us to lead not on the basis of narrow and selfish interests but through the appeal of high ideals and common values.
When untempered by realism, our idealism has caused our foreign policy to swing between ideological crusades and shortsighted isolationism. When combined with hardheaded realism, America’s idealism has left a record of world leadership that no nation, past or present, can match.
After playing a major role in the Allied victory in World War I, we refused to join the League of Nations and slashed our defense budgets so drastically that when Hitler came to power in 1933, our army was the sixteenth largest in the world, smaller than even Romania’s. After World War II, we avoided that mistake, not by choice but by necessity. The British and the French were too weakened by war to play a leading role. The Germans and the Japanese were defeated enemies. The Soviet Union had become an adversary rather than an ally.
Never has a world power been more generous and responsible in exerting global leadership than the United States after World War II. We built the great transatlantic and transpacific alliances that deterred Soviet aggression. We helped to rebuild the economies of both our allies and our former enemies. We gave independence to the Philippines in 1946 and returned Okinawa to Japan in 1971. While we benefited by preserving the free world and by participating in a great cause, we asked for none of the geopolitical tributes traditionally claimed by victorious powers.
We parried dozens of Soviet political and military probes in every corner of the world. When Communist North Korea attacked South Korea in 1950, we provided 90 percent of the troops and suffered 95 percent of the fatalities in the U.N. expeditionary force that turned back the Communist aggression. When South Vietnam was attacked by Soviet- and Chinese-backed North Vietnam, we provided economic aid, training, and eventually armed forces to assist the South Vietnamese in their efforts to repel the aggressors.
In 1972, we opened the door to a new relationship with China and initiated an era of negotiations with the Soviet Union. We not only advanced our short-term interests but also began a process of fostering long-term peaceful change in the Communist world. Contact with the West helped seeds of free thought sprout into political movements that would later blossom into peaceful change.
But in the mid-1970s the United States began to lose its sense of purpose. One result was that after we withdrew our forces from Vietnam under the Paris Peace Agreements of 1973, the Congress irresponsibly slashed U.S. aid to South Vietnam by over 80 percent even as the Soviet Union and China were increasing their aid to Hanoi to record levels. Thus deprived of the military supplies needed to survive, South Vietnam fell to North Vietnam in 1975, two years after all American combat troops had returned home. While not a military defeat for the United States, it was a devastating defeat for the American spirit.
In the late 1970s, a malaise enveloped the nation’s dominant elites. America’s confidence was broken. We lost our geopolitical bearings. Our idealism steered us toward isolationism. Instead of shaping history, the nation let itself be buffeted by events. Emboldened by our lack of will, the Soviet Union rapidly established beachheads in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. We comforted ourselves with the notion that our previous world role had been overzealous because of our “inordinate fear of communism.” By 1979, when the Red Army invaded Afghanistan, our reaction was primarily symbolic—refusing to participate in the Olympic games, curtailing grain sales to Moscow, and providing some antiquated arms to the Afghan resistance.
While not recognized as such at the time, that Soviet invasion marked the low-water mark of U.S. world leadership. It was shortly afterward, in 1981, that we began down the long road back to playing our indispensable role as leader of the free world. President Reagan has been credited with restoring American economic and military strength. His greatest contribution, however, was to restore America’s spiritual strength. He renewed America’s faith in its ideals and recommitted America to a responsible world role.
Ironically, the defeat of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the Soviet Union in 1991—the high-water mark for America’s ideals—renewed the debate over whether we should remain a major player. Our sense of idealism fueled the arguments of both the isolationists and the internationalists. Isolationists, on both the right and the left, demanded that the United States “bring the boys home” and concentrate its resources on solving our domestic problems. Those on the right contended that we had accomplished our mission and had no further reason to pursue a global role. Those on the left argued either that America was a declining power that no longer had the resources to play such a role or that because of its problems at home, America was not worthy to lead abroad. Internationalists appealed to our idealism in their advocacy of a continued world role. Some urged that we rely on the U.N. to resist aggression. Others called for America to take on global crusades at the expense of America itself.
These views are narrowly myopic. We do not face a choice between dealing with domestic problems and playing an international role. Our challenge is to do both by setting realistic goals and by managing our limited resources. On both fronts—abroad and at home—America must be a dynamic innovator and leader. America cannot be at peace in a world of wars, and we cannot have a healthy American economy in a sick world economy. To lead abroad serves our interests at home, and to solve our problems at home enhances our leadership abroad. Americans will not support a strong foreign policy to deal with problems abroad unless we have an equally strong domestic policy to deal with our problems at home.
We can readily summon the will and resources to make practical idealism the hallmark of our role in the world. We should not set out to try to remake the world in our image, but neither should we retreat from our global responsibilities. We should set goals within the limits of our resources while working to the limits of our power. We should remain dedicated to the ideals of freedom and justice that have served as the beacons of our foreign policy, but be realistic and practical about what it takes to move the world in their direction.
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Does the United States have the means to play this role? The military forces, foreign aid programs, and other instruments needed to play a great-power role are expensive. But with a GNP over $5 trillion, we have the resources to meet the challenge. As Herbert Stein has written, “America is a very rich country. We are not rich enough to do everything, but we are rich enough to do everything important.”
We can afford the military forces necessary to ensure our security and defend our interests. But we must radically alter our force structure. The potential challenges of the next two decades are vastly different from those we confronted in the past. During the cold war, military planners spoke of building forces capable of simultaneously fighting one and a half wars—a major war in Europe and a minor war in a secondary theater. With the Soviet Union’s disintegration as a world power, those days are gone. To prepare for the wars of the future, we must overhaul the military forces we used to deter those of the past.
We must recognize that we live in a dangerous world where the former Soviet Union still has thousands of nuclear warheads targeted on the United States and where aggressive nations in the developing world will soon have nuclear programs and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Arms control has failed to neutralize either of these potential threats. Even if the START agreement and the additional Bush and Gorbachev weapons reductions are implemented, the former Soviet Union will have a more potent first-strike capability than it did when I signed the SALT I treaty in 1972. In addition, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty not only failed to restrain Iraq’s acquisition of nuclear technologies but the mandated inspections even helped provide cover for its covert nuclear program. The United States must commit itself to deploying by the end of the decade a limited space- and ground-based defense against ballistic missiles through the SDI. With nuclear weapons and their delivery systems proliferating, we cannot count on the chimera of arms control alone. We need defenses.
On the conventional level, we should put a premium on the flexibility of our forces. When the clear and present danger was Moscow’s armies in Europe, we needed to build heavy forces dedicated solely to NATO’s defense. In today’s world, we need lighter forces and a smaller but more flexible force posture capable of responding to unforeseeable contingencies in other parts of the world. We must retain active forces adequate to respond to crises like the invasion of Kuwait and well-trained and-equipped reserves capable of reinforcing our allies in Europe and Japan in a major crisis. We must sharpen our technological edge. As the Gulf War demonstrated, this saves lives. But while we should vigorously research new technologies and develop new systems, we should not make the mistake we have too often made in the past of ordering huge numbers of new weapons that become obsolete before the final units roll off the assembly line.
Economically, we should not panic but must not become complacent. Our industrial productivity and technological innovation still lead the world. Our GNP leads that of our nearest rival by a factor of two. Our economy attracts more foreign investment than any other major industrial power. Although our advantage is narrowing, our per capita productivity is still higher than that of Japan, our closest competitor. But to stay ahead we must move ahead. To ensure we have the economic means needed to lead the world politically, we must seize the moment to renew and extend our commitment to the values of competition, education, and investment.
Instead of complaining about international competition, we should welcome it. Finland’s Paavo Nurmi, the champion Olympic long-distance runner in 1924, had no competition. He had to run with a watch strapped to his wrist so that he could see whether he was running in championship form. He never broke four minutes in the mile. Had Nurmi faced strong competition, he would probably have broken the four-minute barrier thirty years before Britain’s Roger Bannister did in 1954. Rather than hunkering down in the foxhole of protectionism or behind the wall of restrictive immigration, we should relish the opportunity to achieve excellence by competing with others. As St. Thomas Aquinas observed seven centuries ago, “If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.”
America needs a National Economic Council with a status equal to the National Security Council. In our embassies abroad and our bureaucracies at home, economic issues must receive the same priority attention as political and military issues. Today they seldom get it. In Japan, government is an ally—and some say even an instrument—of business. Too often in America, government is an opponent of business. This does not mean that we should adopt a national industrial policy under which unqualified bureaucrats would dictate business decisions. Nor does it mean we should subsidize American industry to even the score with Japan or other industrialized powers. But it does mean that we must take steps to ensure that we have a coherent strategy to prevail in the global economic competition and that U.S. multinational corporations are enabled to compete on a fair and equal basis with their foreign rivals.
The United States will lose its economic and technological edge if we fail to do a better job of educating young Americans for the tasks they must perform as we move from an industrial to a high-tech economy. Over 25 percent of Americans do not graduate from high school, and many who do graduate lack the basic skills needed in a modern society. In the crucial disciplines of math and science, our teenagers trail those of virtually every other industrialized country. While some of our public schools perform well, many are less effective than schools in many countries of the underdeveloped world. Most school standards have become so lax that students no longer feel a need to work hard, with two-thirds of today’s high school seniors spending an hour or less on homework, reading ten or fewer pages of text, and watching over three hours of mind-numbing television each day.
America is on a downward spiral toward scientific and technological illiteracy not because Americans have lost their aptitude for science but because the kind of discipline it requires has gone out of style. We are raising a new generation, both in inner-city slums and in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, that might be characterized as the “MTV generation.” The appalling ignorance of so many members of this generation is due not to their being less intelligent but because their intelligence is not used. They inhabit a world of hard-rock rhythms pounded at earsplitting volume, MTV images that flash across the screen in barely the time it takes the eye to follow, and sensual stimuli that appear in rapid succession. There is no room for ideas beyond the most banal. There is even less room for the information on which any sensible ideas have to be based. The once-ubiquitous bumper-sticker slogan has given way to the T-shirt slogan, but the content level has not improved.
To arrest this decline, we must move in six areas. We must reform the profession of teaching. At Whittier College in the 1930s, my classmates who were going into teaching almost universally complained about the boring, useless courses in education theory they were required to take. Teachers today share that frustration. School systems should place less emphasis on education theory and more on a teacher’s knowledge of his substantive discipline. Teachers are taught how to teach but not enough about the subjects they are teaching—and a teacher who does not know his subject can neither teach it effectively nor convey enthusiasm for learning it.
We must raise the standards in schools. Students will deliver only as much as we demand of them. The erosion of standards—typified by policies of grade inflation and automatic advancement—has undermined the schools. Students will develop intellectual strength only by pedaling uphill. Unfortunately, in many school systems they can coast right through, with only students who seek admission into elite universities feeling any necessity to apply themselves fully.
We should focus more actively on motivation. Children are born with a vivid, innate curiosity—every child asks “Why?” until his parents’ ears grow numb—but along the way too many fail to connect that curiosity to the wonders of science, the challenges of math, the insights of history, or the rich rewards of language. Instead of being turned on by the process of learning, they are turned off by it. The only classroom learning they absorb is what they are force-fed, and the force-feeding only turns them off further. Both inside the classroom and outside it, we need to do far more to catch their imaginations and to lead them—especially in those early formative years when attitudes are being so crucially and often permanently shaped—to want to learn. This means exciting them not just about the process of learning but about what there is to learn. They have to be wakened to the inherent fascination of history, science, and the other disciplines. Once they want to learn, they will learn.
We must break the monopoly of the education establishment over public schools and introduce competitive market forces into the system to improve its performance. I support public schools. I attended them until I entered college, and Mrs. Nixon was a teacher in an excellent public high school. But today the difference between the performance of public and private schools in America is shocking. Public high school seniors who took the Scholastic Aptitude Test scored significantly lower than the private school seniors who did so. Many public schools are top-heavy, spending excessively on bloated administrative bureaucracies concerned more about maintaining their monopoly on public funds than about improving their performance. As The Economist reported, “New York’s public-sector schools employ ten times as many administrators per pupil as private schools do.” Private schools ultimately must satisfy their customers—parents and students—by providing effective educational services. In this competitive environment, they must continuously strive to upgrade their programs or risk going out of business.
To improve the public schools, we should subject them to the same competitive pressures that have made our private schools the envy of the world. The money each state spends on education should be pooled and then disbursed to parents of students in equal individual vouchers that can be spent at any school, public or private. This so-called “choice” program has already transformed some school systems. Since 1973, in New York City’s East Harlem district, it has boosted the graduation rate from under 50 percent to over 90 percent. When parents are given the power to choose, they become more involved in their schools and their children’s education. When students bear responsibility for their own future, they apply themselves more and develop greater self-discipline. Choice will create market pressures that will break the stranglehold of the education bureaucracy on the system and will force the public schools to reorganize and measure up to the competition of private schools. If we do not move decisively, the battle for education reform will be lost in the school boardroom before it ever gets to the classroom.
We must dispel the patronizing and destructive myth that all young people need to go to college and develop alternate career tracks based more on modern-day apprenticeship than on classroom learning. Today, too many students unsuited to college and uninterested in it waste four years that could have been better spent gaining practical workplace experience. To accommodate the aptitudes of the unsuited, many colleges have loosened their standards. This exacerbates “degree inflation,” which forces stronger students to spend more years “credentialing” themselves with graduate diplomas. Meanwhile, weaker students find that the first task an employer gives them is to enroll in a training program that will actually provide them with basic skills. Enabling all students to attend college might sound appealing in the abstract, especially to intellectuals, but for many young people hands-on training in workplace skills would be more appealing, more useful, and more appropriate. And we should recognize that a good carpenter is a lot more useful to society than a bad lawyer.
We must demand more of our universities. In recent decades, a silent conspiracy has developed between professors uninterested in teaching and students too lazy to study. Faculty, particularly at our best universities, often put first priority on their own research. Tenure and advancement are awarded on the basis of how many papers and books they publish rather than on what teachers do for their students. To reduce the burden of teaching, professors relax standards, often giving exams that demand little mastery of the material. Students, to a great extent, happily play along. The result is the paradox of declining competence of graduates amidst widespread grade inflation comparable to the currency inflation of Germany’s Weimar Republic.
Members of the educational establishment reflexively insist that whatever the problem, the answer is more money. But the United States already outspends all other major industrial democracies on education per student, even while their schools outperform ours. The answer is not more spending but better-targeted spending. Countless studies have linked student achievement not to higher budgets but to such essentials as student motivation, active family involvement, and well-organized and disciplined schools. America does not need to make a greater financial investment in its educational system but rather to demand a greater return on its current investment. The 180-day school year is a ridiculous carryover from the time when children were needed to harvest crops in the summer months. Germany has a 195-day school year. Japan has a 225-day school year. Lengthening the school year will give our students more opportunity to learn and make more efficient use of our school facilities.
The decline of our human capital is matched by a potential decline in our industrial capital. The debate over whether the federal deficit matters misses the point. A deficit level of over 5 percent of GNP will not bring the apocalypse. But it does represent an important economic choice. Because the deficit is financed through the pool of private savings and foreign investment, we are siphoning off funds into short-term consumption that could have gone toward long-term capital investment. While sustainable, the deficit acts like water eroding the foundation of a strong economy.
We should address the deficit through spending cuts, not tax increases. The deficit exists not because the American people are undertaxed but because the U.S. government overspends. In fiscal year 1988, the federal budget topped $1 trillion for the first time in history. By fiscal year 1992, it reached $1.45 trillion, increasing 45 percent while the economy barely grew 10 percent. Taxes now claim a larger proportion of the GNP than at any time since World War II. To rein in spending, we must disabuse ourselves of the myth that much of federal spending is “uncontrollable.” Apart from interest payments on the national debt, all spending derives from laws that Congress enacted and that Congress can change. To argue that we cannot tamper with the spending formulas for entitlement programs is to abandon any hope for bringing federal accounts into balance.
Savings and investment are central to our ability to finance industrial expansion and productivity growth. Capital gains taxes are taxes on savings. Payroll taxes are taxes on production. The sensible way to structure a tax system, if our goal is to increase prosperity for all, is to place the bulk of levies on consumption and to reduce the impediments to savings and production. This is essentially the way the value-added tax now used throughout much of the industrialized world operates. As we gear up to take on the global economic challenge, we should consider overhauling our tax system in this direction.
Now that socialism has so visibly failed abroad, we should not let the United States become the last surviving bastion of that discredited creed. In Eastern Europe, once-prosperous nations that were destroyed economically by their Communist captors are now struggling to make their way back to freedom and the prosperity that goes with it. We should help them, but we should also heed the lessons of their tragic experience. We must rededicate ourselves to the competitive, free-market values that have enabled us to become the world’s only superpower. If we do so, we can maintain that power and continue to play a major positive role in the world.
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Is the United States worthy to play a leadership role in the world? In a word, yes—and the world needs our example.
Western civilization is not just a condition but also a process. It is a process of striving toward the heights of freedom, creativity, and fulfillment. Through the centuries there has been one tragic setback after another on the way toward those heights. Some of the most highly developed nations have waged wars of conquest and committed some of the most grisly barbarities in the history of man. Those reversals provide dramatic proof that civilization itself is not a sufficient guarantor of freedom. We have to use the gifts that civilization offers and enforce the rules on which it rests.
One role of a great power is to enforce those rules on the world stage. Another is to set an example at home of what nations and people can achieve if they live by them. Unless the rules are enforced, the example will lose its luster and may itself become a casualty. And unless we set the example, we will throw away all that we have struggled to make possible for our own people and those of all nations. As Theodore Roosevelt observed fourteen years before he became President, “It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.”
America preeminently represents three values: freedom, opportunity, and respect for the individual human being. These values transcend borders. They rise from the human spirit, and they speak directly to that spirit. They are inextricably linked with the virtues of individual responsibility, competitiveness, self-reliance, and compassion grounded in an understanding of human nature. America’s dedication to these values and its practice of these virtues are what, through the years, has given such power and reach to the American idea. They are the source of our strength and cohesion at home. They also give powerful moral sanction to our voice in the councils of nations abroad.
American progress, based on these values, has been spectacular. We are the richest nation in the world. The very poor in the United States would be rich in three-quarters of the world today. We are the strongest military power in the world. We have the world’s best universities. Americans have won more Nobel Prizes in the sciences than any other people have. We have the best medical care in the world, with those abroad who can afford it coming here for treatment rather than using their own countries’ nationalized health care programs. We have the most advanced programs for protecting the environment. We have less racial prejudice and more opportunity for all in our society than virtually any other multiethnic nation. That is why the traffic is all one way. Those who want to leave America and live in another country number in the hundreds. Those who want to leave their home countries and live in America number in the millions.
It is vital to the democratic future of the world that the one nation preeminently associated in the minds of others with the democratic ideal should, in the course of this next generation, be an example visibly worth emulating. We have to show democracy not only working, but working well—not just to persuade others that the democratic way is the way to go, but also to demonstrate how a democracy can be made to work effectively. Even those who most hunger for democracy are still trying to figure out how best to achieve it. Ours must be an open laboratory that shows how the experiments can work.
In Democracy in America, Tocqueville stated that the principles on which the U.S. Constitution rests—“those principles of order, of the balance of powers, of true liberty, of deep and sincere respect for right”—were indispensable. As Europe moved into the democratic age, he urged, “Let us look to America.” At the same time, however, he foresaw dangers inherent in democratic society. The universal obsession with materialism, the ruthless economic competition, the lack of enduring social bonds, and the shallowness of religious and philosophical thought, in his analysis, gave rise to the danger of a “new despotism.” He feared that because of the lack of economic security in democratic society, individuals would eventually seek that security from the state—which, in turn, would render society dependent on a paternalistic government.
Today, we are witnessing the rise of that new despotism under the cover of “entitlements.” We hear claims that by virtue of living in the United States, a person is “entitled” not only to subsistence amounts of food, clothing, and health care, but to more and more of the amenities of life as well. It is not just the poor who seek these entitlements. Farmers who demand a guaranteed price for their crops, steelmakers who demand tariffs to protect their market share, retirees who demand Social Security payments far exceeding their contributions into the system, students who claim a right to subsidized loans, and dozens of other special interests all seek a guaranteed place at the federal trough. Today, if entitlements continue to proliferate, we risk the demise of the virtues of self-reliance and individual responsibility and the triumph of the new despotism about which Tocqueville warned.
It is healthy for all Americans to strive for the amenities of life, but dangerously destructive to foster the notion that they are entitled to them. People are entitled to an opportunity to earn the good things in life. They are not entitled to receive them from the earnings of others. It is up to them to ensure that what they bring to the market equals in value what they want to get out of it. Entitlement is one of the most ruinous concepts in the philosophical lexicon of the modern American liberal. It saps incentive, builds resentment, and leads eventually to a corrosive sense of alienation and failure among those who are lured by its siren song into thinking that the nation owes them the good life without effort on their part.
There is an enormous difference between a right and an entitlement. We have largely lost sight of that difference in the rush toward a “risk-free” economy in which the government insures us against failure and an egalitarian society in which each is rewarded regardless of his contribution. A right permits us to work our way up, while an entitlement is something society owes us whether we earn it or not. Rights help a society and an economy grow, while entitlements slow its growth and erode its character.
The old hereditary nobilities were, in essence, built on the principle of entitlement. A person was born to privilege, and by virtue of birth alone was entitled to keep those privileges. It is essentially this concept of birthright entitlements that is corroding American society. Liberal egalitarians are trying to impose it on the United States, except they have applied it from the bottom up rather than from the top down. To the extent that they succeed, they reinforce society’s other special pleaders in their quest for equality not of opportunity but of results.
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America has other daunting problems at home, and because of them we are far less than we could be and should be. We must seize the moment of freedom’s triumph abroad to make America not just a rich society but a good society.
—The richest country in the world cannot tolerate the fact that we have the highest per capita health care costs in the world and yet 38 million of our people are unable to get adequate medical care because they cannot afford it.
—The richest country in the world cannot tolerate the fact that America—with one-twentieth of the world’s people—spends almost as much on illegal drugs as the rest of the world combined.
—The richest country in the world cannot tolerate the fact that we have the highest crime rate in the world and that during the Persian Gulf War almost twenty times as many Americans were murdered in the United States as were killed on the battlefield.
—The richest country in the world cannot tolerate the fact that a permanent underclass has developed that is rapidly making our great cities unsafe and unlivable.
To address these problems, we need not new ideas but a renewal of faith in those that brought us to where we are. From the beginning, this has been a country in which people from every corner of the earth could reach their full potential because it was built on the rock of individual liberty, equality before the law, and opportunity for all.
It has become fashionable, especially in the news media, to measure every effort to deal with America’s domestic needs in purely quantitative terms—and specifically to measure it solely by the number of additional federal dollars committed to federal programs that are labeled, however falsely, as cures. This is nonsense. It represents the sort of one-dimensional thinking that gave us the great failure called the Great Society. The Great Society was given a blank check. It bounced. While some of the poor advanced over the last twenty-five years, most who did so succeeded the old-fashioned way—by their own efforts. Most inner-city poor are worse off today than they were before President Johnson launched the Great Society.
If we are both serious and realistic about addressing the nation’s key domestic needs, we must make two clear distinctions.
First, the most critical of our social problems—crime, drugs, dependency, education—center on values, attitudes, and behavior. These are not dependent on dollars, and programs to deal with them that are measured in dollars are often counterproductive. More than dollars we need direction—a clear, forceful set of values and norms that the community accepts and imposes.
Second, a vital distinction exists between a national response and a federal response. From the beginning, the secret of America’s success has been that it has not depended on government, but rather has been achieved by private institutions and all the many centers of activity that make up our free society. In most matters that directly touch people, those organizations operate more effectively than the federal government would. And they have the energy, the resources, and the skill to get things done. If we depend on government, we force all concerned to follow the government’s rigid prescriptions, on the government’s timetable, and through the often impenetrable labyrinths of the government’s bureaucracy.
This is not the way a free society is meant to work. And it is not the way a successful society does work. As Goethe observed two hundred years ago, “What is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.”
One of the key roles of national leadership is to focus people’s attention on what needs to be done and inspire them to do it. The more the federal government steps in and does things for people—whether for individuals, state and local governments, school boards, or communities—the less they are going to do for themselves and for one another. The best spur to initiative by the private sector is to let people know that if they want something done, they had better roll up their sleeves and do it. The best role for the federal government is to create conditions conducive to doing it.
Most of our current ills are the direct result of going down the wrong path—of flirting too much with the dreams and doctrines represented by statist, socialist ideals, and in the process eroding the unique and special values that have made America a great nation. At a time when those who have tried socialism are turning our way, we should not turn their way.
To take one glaring example, we have made a mistake in addressing issues such as the exploding costs of health care in ways that removed market forces from the equation. We have erred by separating health care consumers from any concern about the costs of the care being provided. We need to work out a system that includes a greater emphasis on preventive care, sufficient public funding for health insurance for those who cannot afford it in the private sector, competition among both health care providers and health insurance providers to keep down the costs of both, and decoupling the cost of health care from the cost of adding workers to the payroll.
On another front, we will not gain the upper hand in the war against drugs until we shift the focus of our efforts from a supply-side battle in distant corners of the world to a demand-side battle at home. There is no way that the United States can seal its borders tight enough to stop drug trafficking. While budgets for drug interdiction have risen, the street price of drugs has dropped as traffickers devised ever-more-artful means to penetrate our defenses. Victory will only come if we reduce the demand for drugs through stronger legal sanctions, education, treatment, and most important, a radical change in community values. The current drug culture has its roots in the permissive attitudes of the 1960s, which glorified the use of both marijuana and hard drugs, and in the condoning of the “casual” use of drugs today. Unless we reach children early with knowledge of the consequences of drug use, and unless we reverse the tolerance and even glamorizing of drug use in the popular culture of Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry, we will stand no chance of winning the war on drugs. And unless we adopt and enforce strict gun-control laws—ones much tougher than the Brady bill—we will never succeed in stemming the violence spawned by the drug trade.
For years, it has been popular in many quarters to say that the answer to poverty in America is to give the poor money. This approach is tragically misguided. We should heed the old proverb, “Give a man a fish, and he has food for a day; teach him to fish, and he has food for a lifetime.” There is a place for welfare payments and other purely financial aid, but only as a means of meeting temporary needs and only in conjunction with a structure of incentives—both positive and negative—designed to make the dependent independent. Dependency weakens the nation and destroys the individual, yet too much of our welfare system today merely institutionalizes dependency and perpetuates it from one generation to the next.
Attacking the pathology of the urban underclass is central to success in meeting the whole range of our domestic social needs. This underclass is primarily responsible for the plague of violent crime. It drains the resources of our state and local governments and of our social service institutions. It cripples much of our school system. It represents an enormous human waste: millions of people wasting away in slums could be productive members of the larger society, strengthening the nation in the global economic competition and adding to its reputation as a place of opportunity.
The underclass will be rescued only to the extent that its members can be induced to change their patterns of behavior. They suffer not so much from material poverty as from behavioral poverty—a vicious cycle of illegitimacy, broken families, lax work ethics, and welfare dependency. We have developed this vast and often predatory underclass precisely because we adopted policies that denied the individual’s responsibility for his own condition and for the consequences of his own behavior. Too often, the most effective sanctions in the inner cities today are not against destructive behavior but against constructive behavior, as in the case of those students who try to study and, because of this, are shunned or even persecuted by their classmates for “acting white.”
The worst thing that we could do would be simply to increase the present programs of welfare maintenance, which make no demands on the recipient and pay no dividends to society. Unless a program motivates the recipients to change their behavior, it cannot be considered a success. By those standards, 90 percent of the current welfare system is an abject failure. It not only perpetuates the behavioral pathologies, but also actively encourages them by making the decision to work or go on welfare purely a pragmatic one of which pays better, with welfare often the winner.
Liberalism holds as its central article of faith that society—“the system”—and not the individual is responsible for antisocial behavior. This approach has produced disaster in coping with the problems of the inner city.
The only way to lift people out of the underclass is to change their behavior. This requires national leadership. But above all, it depends on local and community leadership. It requires a wrenching, radical change in the systems of values that govern in the inner city. We must accept the fact that when people are poor because they choose not to make the effort or to accept the discipline needed to earn a living, it is not only appropriate but necessary that they suffer the consequences of that choice.
The threat of having to do without is central to a productive economy. Some people work because they want to, but most people work because they have to. If you eliminate the necessity, you remove the motivation. Even worse, you introduce a spiritual rot that eats at the foundation of society itself. Those who do work resent those who do not, and they also resent the system that rewards the lazy with leisure. Seeing the lazy rip off the system and get away with it, they are tempted to rip it off in their own ways. Society as a whole goes on a downward spiral of alienation and irresponsibility, which in turn fosters hostility, resentment, and even revenge.
An approach based on enforcing society’s values will be fiercely rejected by most of the noisiest self-proclaimed tribunes of the poor, who have created a thriving poverty industry of their own. A lot of that poverty industry is built on the hustle. It is about getting and taking in the name of the poor but not for the benefit of the poor. It is about preserving the jobs and status of the welfare bureaucracies that ostensibly serve the poor but primarily serve themselves. It is the old, familiar shell game played out on a grand national stage.
The exploiting class in the black community today is every bit as despicable as those who lived on the slave trade. Their cynical manipulation of the fears, anxieties, and vulnerabilities of their black constituents is itself a form of psychological slavery. America’s blacks will not be fully free until they free themselves from that exploiting class—until they learn that each of them can make it on his or her own and until they set out to do what it takes to make it on their own. As long as they give their allegiance to the loud wheedlers for alms, they will not have their independence. And without their independence, they will not truly have their freedom.
Almost anyone can lead a productive life. The basic distinction we must draw is between those who choose to do so and those who choose not to do so. Those who choose to do so but need help in getting started deserve that help. Those who through misfortune falter along the way and need a hand back up deserve it. But those who willfully fail to prepare themselves for a job or self-indulgently sink themselves into drugs have no claim on the community conscience.
Once we make this crystal clear, the numbers choosing life outside the productive economy will drop drastically. Crime rates will fall. Despair will diminish. Productivity and incomes will rise. Alienation will give way to pride and a sense of community. All of this requires one basic step: a radical change in attitude among those who live on the fringes of civilized society. Like behavior, attitudes are learned. Changing attitudes requires altering our social system of reward and punishment. It requires reinstilling that basic sense of personal responsibility that has been one of the prime casualties of the liberal era.
Racism will not be conquered with more welfare. It will be overcome when people no longer draw invidious distinctions among one another on the basis of skin color. The best way to speed that day is to get more blacks and other minorities climbing the ladder of opportunity. This requires ensuring that any remaining obstacles are removed. And it requires those at the bottom of the ladder to take the first step and then to make the climb.
What a person makes of that opportunity is, and should be, up to the person himself. The flip side of individual freedom is individual opportunity. In maximizing opportunity government has a key role in ensuring that individuals are able to take advantage of it. This means promoting educational achievement. It means motivating people to use the advantages available to them. It means knocking down barriers of discrimination that have historically held so many back. It means, in many cases, extending a helping hand to those who have the will to make the climb but have not found the way. This is more than a moral obligation. It represents an indispensable investment in the nation’s future.
To be both strong and rich is not enough. We must also be an example for others to follow. After Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, William Pitt was toasted as the savior of Europe. He responded, “Europe will not be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions and will, I trust, save Europe by her example.” To paraphrase, the victory of freedom will not be won by America alone. We can make freedom work by our exertions at home and enable freedom to win abroad by our example.
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How should the United States exercise its leadership in today’s world? The world needs U.S. leadership militarily, politically, and economically. Most of all, it needs our leadership in the critical arena of ideas.
Even within and among the countries of Western Europe, bitter conflicts have arisen over the extent to which markets should be controlled by the state and over the degree to which democratic choices of individual nations should be turned over to a new supranational bureaucracy. The danger that the united Europe after 1992 will become protectionist and socialist is real. This is one reason why a continued active American presence is essential to Europe, the United States, and the world. Our commitment to democracy and free markets could prove to be a vital counterweight to the forces trying to turn Europe inward and backward.
As the world’s only complete superpower, the United States must exercise leadership without imposing its political and cultural values on others. This is a fine line to walk. But we can advance our values and ideals with restraint dictated by realism. We should cultivate the growth of democratic principles where a reasonable prospect exists for their success and where they would be supported by national traditions, customs, and institutions. We should not, however, engage in an indiscriminate global ideological crusade.
Traditionally, nations have chosen to wage war according to the logic of their interests. America is no exception, even though leaders such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt skillfully couched their appeals to war in terms of the natural idealism of the American people. To a substantial extent, President Bush also followed this tradition in the Persian Gulf War. This approach should not be dismissed as cynicism. Our basic idealism is not only a defining characteristic and animating force of the United States but also a key facet of our own national interests.
America’s concern for the Kurds, like its earlier concern for the victims of the Holocaust in World War II, was genuinely based on compassion rather than on a geopolitical calculus. But the plight of the Kurds, like that of the Jews in Europe under Hitler’s rule, cannot be divorced from that equation. The hardheaded calculations of power politics do not exist in a vacuum. They must serve not just our security interests, but our wider values as well.
America’s central national interest in the world today can be defined in terms of structure and process. In my administration, I spoke often of building a “structure of peace.” By that, I meant a set of interlocking relationships, together with accepted processes for resolving differences and effective deterrents to aggression that would allow even antagonists to live together in a reasonable expectation that peace was secure enough to be maintained among them.
This kind of structure requires a decent respect for the norms of civilized behavior both among and within nations. Promoting—and, when necessary and possible, enforcing—such norms may seem idealistic. But it reflects a hardheaded assessment that practical idealism represents an indispensable component of realism in the modern world. While our short-term goals must be governed by the limits of our resources and our ability to shape a frustrating and intractable world, such constraints should not limit our long-term aspirations. Just as no man is an island, no nation lives in isolation. When freedom is denied in one country, it is diminished in all.
This does not mean that we should insist that other nations copy our particular form of government. Many countries are not ready for it. Each nation must develop its own institutions and advance at its own pace. Democracy literally means government by the people. It must come from the people. In contrast to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the peaceful revolution in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the Soviet Union in 1991 were peoples’ revolutions. They were not imposed from above by an elite few—a “vanguard.” They welled up from below—from the people themselves. Democracy has to grow roots and branches in a society before it blossoms. We can and should work to speed this growth, but the process is vital to realizing the promise.
In the former Soviet Union, after centuries of autocratic rule, the people have only recently had a chance to begin experimenting with the institutions of self-government. They face enormous challenges, but have shown themselves eager to learn and alert to the lessons of other countries. If they continue to go down this path, they will astonish the world with their achievements.
To say that we should be realistic does not mean that we should abandon our idealism. Practical idealism differs fundamentally from mere expediency. We should be circumspect about prescribing the political means chosen by others, but we should insist that those political means serve moral political ends. We seek to advance the cause of freedom, but we must recognize that in different cultures it will take different forms and advance in different ways.
The great danger in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is that the current high expectations, when not fully met, could themselves lead to impatience and disillusionment and ultimately a return to coercion and control. It is precisely when a faith appears to have been betrayed that a people are most susceptible to the lures of the demagogue. These coming years are critical to the future of Europe and the world. It is vital that the experiments in freedom now being tried should succeed, that those countries enslaved for so long should not stumble back into socialism or some other form of statist domination.
This means help. It means example. The revolution for freedom currently sweeping the world began with a spark of hope—what Dostoyevsky called “the fire in the minds of men.” It is a testament to the human spirit that this fire continues to burn so brightly in so many places among so many people. As Americans, we carry part of the original flame. We must make sure it is never extinguished.
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As I have traveled around the world during the past forty-five years, I have found that some hate us, some envy us, and some like us. But I have found that almost all respect us. All know that without the United States peace and freedom would not have survived in the world in the past and will not survive in the future. But the question that has arisen again and again has been whether the United States had the will to play a world role over the long haul.
We have demonstrated that will during the decades of the cold war, and we must sustain that will in the decades to come. We should commit ourselves to a world role not just to keep the world from becoming worse but to make it better. We need to restore our faith in our ideas, in our destiny, and in ourselves. We exist for more than hedonistic self-satisfaction. We are here to make history, neither to ignore the past nor to turn back to the past, but to move forward in a way that opens up new vistas for the future.
In his writings, legal philosopher Lon Fuller contrasted what he called a morality of duty and a morality of aspiration. A morality of duty requires only doing what is right in the sense of avoiding what is wrong. A morality of aspiration requires the full realization of our potential in a manner worthy of a people at their best. It is not enough to be remembered just as a good people who took care of ourselves without doing harm to others. We want to be remembered as a great people whose conduct went beyond the call of duty as we seized the moment to meet the supreme challenge of this century: winning victory for freedom without war.
There has never been a more exciting time to be alive and a better place to live than America in 1992. For centuries, people have dreamed of enjoying peace, freedom, and progress around the world. Never in history have we been closer to making those dreams come true.
The twenty-first century can be a century of peace. Because of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, there will not be another world war. Those who have nuclear weapons know that in a nuclear war there will be no winners, only losers. Although the twentieth century has been the bloodiest in history, the world’s aggressors have suffered devastating defeats. Hitler’s fascism was defeated in World War II. Soviet communism was defeated without war in 1989 and 1991. Saddam Hussein’s brazen aggression was defeated in 1991. Because the world united to liberate Kuwait, international outlaws—large or small—will be less likely to launch aggressive wars against their neighbors.
The twenty-first century can be the first in history in which a majority of the world’s people live in political freedom. Not only in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union but also across Latin America, Asia, and even Africa, freedom has become the wave of the future. A revolution of free ideas and free elections is sweeping the world. This freedom comes not from abroad or from above but from within the people themselves. Woodrow Wilson sought to make the world safe for democracy. Today, many urge in his name that we export our particular form of democracy to other nations. This is not necessary. Dictatorship of the left and of the right has been discredited. The people have spoken: they want freedom. America’s challenge is not to export democracy but to provide an example of how freedom can be secured through democracy.
The twenty-first century can be the first in which the majority of the world’s people enjoy economic freedom. The twentieth century has taught us four great economic lessons: communism does not work. Socialism does not work. State-dominated economies do not work. Only free markets can fully unleash the creative abilities of individuals and serve as the engine of progress.
The twenty-first century can be a century of unprecedented progress. The technological revolution can provide the means to win the war against poverty, misery, and disease all over the world. Twenty years ago, futurist Herman Kahn predicted that the annual per capita income of the world’s 5 billion people—now less than $4,000—would rise to $20,000 in the next century. His predictions, which seemed so unrealistic at the time, will almost certainly come true in a century of peace.
Only 5 percent of the world’s people live in the United States. But what we do can make the entire world a better place. We are not mere passengers on the voyage of history. We are its navigators. We have the opportunity to forge a second American century.
In his Iron Curtain speech in 1947, Winston Churchill said, “The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American democracy. For with primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability for the future.” Those words are as true today as when he spoke them forty-five years ago. We hold the future in our hands.
This is not a burden to be grimly borne. It is a high enterprise worthy of a great people. We are privileged to live at a moment of history like none most people have ever experienced or will ever experience again. We must seize the moment not just for ourselves but for others. Only if this becomes a better world for others will it be a better world for us, and only when we participate in a cause greater than ourselves can we be fully true to ourselves.