Perils of success - anti-communist movement - editorial

National Review, May 28, 1990 by John O'Sullivan

"Nothing fails like success," said G.K. Chesterton, and unlike Wilde's inverted cliches ("her hair has turned quite gold with grief'), this epigram contains a good deal of truth. Success can fail in a number of ways. It can unite a coalition of the envious against itself. It can be the climax of some great enterprise which then starts to decline-for instance, Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, from which the British Empire never recovered. Or by wholly securing its objective, it can put itself out of a job. This last is widely thought to be the fate of antiCommunism, allegedly suffering from the mortal blow of its great opponent's suicide (during a lucid interval).

Were that so, it should have been evident at the Washington conference of the Committee for the Free World. The Committee was founded in 1981 to rouse the slumbering West against a Soviet imperialism then advancing in regions as far distant as Afghanistan, southern Africa, and Central America. Times have changed. Mrs. Chamorro was sworn in as President of Nicaragua two days before the conference, and the May Day march in Moscow jeered the Politburo two days after it. How could the Committee respond to the threat posed by such a victory?

It might, first, have announced that its purpose had been served and dissolve itself. Irving Kristol came close to suggesting that when he argued that with Communism gone, U.S. foreign policy should be the pursuit of the national interest shorn of wider moral preoccupations. Presumably the Committee, which addresses foreign policy in avowedly principled terms, would then be irrelevant. Second, it might have maintained that little has really changed. Thus, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy argued that the Soviet Union is still a superpower, still armed to the teeth, still subsidizing antiWestern dictatorships, and so still a major threat. As an argument for caution, this passes muster. But does it not gloss over such factors as the economic collapse of the Soviet Union and its loss of Central Europe?

Both these views were, it seemed to me, minority opinions. It was the third option toward which most participants groped: namely, exploring the positive aspects of their anti-Communism. Anti-Communism, after all, is merely the negative aspect of such positive beliefs as individual liberty, democratic government, the market economy, and free trade. Most there agreed on these fundamentals, but differed on how they could be advanced in the coming post-Communist world.

Disagreements led to debates of great vigor on the future shape of Europe, how to deal with the multiple crises of the Soviet Union, the threats to Western culture, and the role of the United States. If I was present at the death of anti-Communism, the wake was a lively one and the corpse joined fully in the singing.

* The standard criticism of Irving Kristol's Realpolitik above is that the American people lack the stomach for an interventionist foreign policy without moral justification. What is worse, however, so do American politicians.

Realpolitik thus becomes a cloak for policies conducted on other grounds. We give reasons of hard-headed national interest both for supporting popular rebellions against pro-American rulers, as in the Philippines (and Nicaragua in 1979), and for refusing to support popular rebellions against Communist rulers, as in Lithuania (and Nicaragua in 1989).

The real reasons? Some, like "supporting Mr. Gorbachev," are of strictly temporary application. But I can detect three underlying rules of State Department Realpolitik:

1. We cannot pursue our interests if they conflict with our principles.

2. We can pursue our principles only when they conflict with our interests.

3. Our principles and our interests never coincide.

* Rumblings on the Right: On the Hill, conservatives are up in arms over certain Bush policies, among them, says Rep. Vin Weber (R., Minn.), "the level of response to Lithuania, the National Endowment for the Arts funding, the very overt invitation of gay activists to the White House [for signing of Hate Crimes bill]." . . . Howard Phillips, of Conservative Caucus, says: "More and more conservatives are talking about it [the Bush White Housel as the Nelson Rockefeller Administration that never was." . . . Newt Gingrich believes White House is missing the boat on growing American criticism of permissiveness in many areas: abortion, drugs, pornography, cultural issues.... Evans & Novak see major moves by pollster Robert Teeter and 1988 GOP convention manager Fred Malek to nudge the President left on abortion issue. . . . Move by Ann and Roger Stone to set up a Republicans for Choice organization to change party's stance on abortion has stunned, and is splitting, conservative forces in the Beltway, given Stone's major role in Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign.

. .Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that 46 per cent of American women over 45 have had an abortion. .. In massive late-April right-to-life rally in Wastington, one poster said it all: "It's a Child, Not a Choice."