Letters

National Interest, The, Fall, 2000

Disappointingly, Kurth cites Huntington's alarmist, fatalist view of a Sino-Islamic military alliance. These two cultures share no common identity (in fact, the communists have done much to repress Muslims in the province of Xinjiang), save a general anti-American consensus. Furthermore, China's military is largely composed of outdated Russian hardware. The troops are poorly organized, lack focus, and are completely inferior to modern Western forces....

Living with China is an important issue. But, as Americans, we must not forget that they must also live with us.

STEPHEN R. GOOCH

Austin, TX

Remembering the Future:

Paul Wolfowitz's "Remembering the Future" (Spring 2000) offers important historical lessons from recent decades of American foreign policy in which the author played an important role at the Pentagon and at the State Department. But by covering the period 1946-91 and not just the seventies and eighties, he opens up some "neoconservatives" that roost at The National Interest to an examination of their own evolution, from the radical Left to the radical Right.

Wolfowitz begins his essay derisively: "Given the rate at which many politicians and commentators have been revising their recollections of their own stances during the period 1946-91 ... it seems that now, safely after the event, we have all become cold warriors.... Far from believing that the Cold War was a clear struggle between good and evil", Wolfowitz instructs, "the leaders of the Democratic Party attacked President Reagan as a war-mongering ideologue when he declared that the Soviet Union was an 'evil empire.'"

Wolfowitz's study of the tricks that history plays on us should have induced a little humility when it comes to asking "Where were you?" or "What was your stance?" in the Cold War. Where I take strong exception is when he seems to be playing off the same sheet of ideological music recently featured in oped pieces by Charles Krauthammer, Lawrence F. Kaplan and Richard Perle. For when you get right down to it, Wolfowitz--a member of The National Interest's editorial advisory board--and the others are suggesting that those who opposed President Reagan's policies on the Strategic Defense Initiative or Central America or elsewhere were somehow unpatriotic and on the wrong side of "history."

But it is not a "fanciful conceit"--per Kaplan--to make the claim, regarding the latter half of the Cold War, that the leadership of both parties generally shared in a consensus as to where the United States stood vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.

The neocon revisionists would now purge our public memory at the end of the millennium. They peddle their own distortions of history so as to lead us to the conclusion that Ronald Reagan rode in on a white horse in 1981 and "won the Cold War" by the time he departed in 1989. This is history for simpletons. Strangely missing in at least a co-equal leadership role is Mikhail Gorbachev. By the time George Bush became President in 1989, it was the actions of Gorbachev, above all others, that ensured that the Wall came down peacefully, the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union disintegrated--despite his desire to save the "socialist system" through reforming it.