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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by Chris Trotter that was first published 02 March 2020.
Rueful of the Lost Western Dream
WHY COULDN’T WE save ourselves? Once the Western nations stood as examples of what a modern state should look like. Liberal, democratic, secular, prosperous and strong. Millions of people aspired to the rights and wealth Westerners enjoyed. Those who assailed the West were dismissed as tyrants and fanatics – enemies of the future. In the 20 years that followed the end of World War II, the Western template had no serious challengers. The closer the developing nations came to replicating it, the freer and wealthier they hoped to become.
No one expressed the values of the Western nations more eloquently than the young American President, John F. Kennedy. His inspirational Inaugural Address of 20 January 1961 laid down the challenge “to friend and foe alike” that if they had something better to offer their peoples than the rights and freedoms of representative democracy and the clear social dividends of John Maynard Keynes’ intelligently regulated capitalism, then they should demonstrate their system’s political and economic superiority openly and peacefully. Kennedy’s stirring rhetoric, however, made very clear his firm belief that the best men had already won.
It was Kennedy, too, who made the most crushing case against the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev’s, boast that socialism would “bury” capitalism. Speaking to a vast sea of West Berliners on 26 June 1963, the American President declared:
“There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin!”
I am not such a hopeless political romantic to suggest that had JFK not been assassinated five months later in Dallas, the West’s confidence and eloquence would have remained undiminished. What I think it is fair to say, however, is that the angelic and demonic impulses battling for mastery within the soul of President Lyndon Baines Johnson were writ large in American domestic and foreign policy in the five years following Kennedy’s untimely death. The decision to escalate the war in Vietnam, in particular, fractured American society and fatally undermined the West’s moral superiority. With gathering speed, the US establishment retired what Abraham Lincoln had referred to as America’s “better angels”. Increasingly, its first instinct was to secure the West’s security and prosperity by force – rather than by example.
How much sooner would the Soviet Union have collapsed if Kennedy’s determination – which only grew stronger in the final months of his life – to negotiate a comprehensive peace agreement with the Russians had not been terminated by Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullets? The haunting passage of his commencement speech to the students of the American University in Washington, on 10 June 1963 still echoes tragically with unfulfilled promise:
“So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”
It is a measure of the power and subtlety of the Kennedy Administration that just 16 days after the President so eloquently reminded the Soviets – and his fellow Americans – that they were mortal, he could stand above the Rudolph Wilde Platz and deliver his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. Seldom has the offer of so sweet a carrot been followed so swiftly by the waving of such an admonitory stick. No wonder Khrushchev remarked: “one would think that the speeches were made by two different Presidents.” Nevertheless, Kennedy’s call to action was received loud and clear by the Kremlin. Within five months, the Administration’s Nuclear Test Ban Treaty had been signed by the USSR and ratified by the US Senate.
How far below those extraordinary moments in Washington and Berlin has the West fallen over the course of the past 55 years. How tragic that when the ice-floes of the Cold War were finally broken-up and dispersed, it was by a Soviet, not an American President.
American conservatives like to attribute the tearing down of the Berlin Wall to their hero Ronald Reagan, but the man who truly made it possible was Mikhail Gorbachev. So dumbfounded were the Americans by the sudden implosion of the Soviet Empire that they could think of nothing better to do than dust off the post-World War I plans of the British statesman, Lord Curzon, and (scorning George H.W. Bush’s specific pledge to Gorbachev to keep NATO out of Eastern Europe) establish a cordon sanitaire of newly-minted NATO member-states hard up against the borders of the Soviet Union’s much-diminished successor, the Russian Federation.
Equally tragically, the capitalism that established itself in the new Russia was a far cry from the managed capitalism of the Kennedy and Johnson eras. The new unregulated capitalist beast, red in tooth and claw, was set loose among the Russian people to tear and rip and rend with criminal abandon. Presided over by an American-backed and bankrolled drunk, the Russian Federation rapidly devolved into a shameless kleptocracy – half of whose Oligarchs were kept in place by the Russian Mafia, while the other half secured their billions by paying off the former KGB bosses in the FSB. Democracy had absolutely no chance in such an environment. The world is fortunate that the man who finally whipped the federation into some semblance of order was the product of the old Soviet system and not some psychopathic gangster from the Russian underworld.
The final tragedy, of course, is that the historic choice presented to the world that snowy Inauguration Day in Washington DC: between a Western world of personal freedom, representative democracy and capitalist prosperity; and a Soviet empire of sullen citizens, empty shops and jam-packed gulags; has been twisted and contorted into something altogether and grotesquely different.
The choice presented to today’s global citizens is between a smirking, narrow-eyed autocrat in the Kremlin and a preening, populist plutocrat in the White House. How curious that the collapse of “actually existing socialism”, rather than ennobling the West and universalising its values, merely revealed how many of its grand political and economic narratives had been created in response to the Soviet threat. The Berlin Wall may have come down, but Communism wasn’t the only ideology that disappeared beneath the rubble.
“Who,” the ghost of Nikita Khrushchev may well ask, “has buried who?”
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