THE REALISM OF IDEALISM

THE POWER OF FREEDOM (Natan Sharansky, April 15, 2003, Jerusalem Post)

As I retold the story of Pessah through the small window of my punishment cell to two fellow inmates, they too could immediately identify with its universal message.

The reason was simple. This isolated group of dissidents in the Soviet Union had already experienced the power of freedom to transform an individual and understood its power to transform a society. They needed no reminders. The idea that a nation of slaves could win its freedom and defeat the most powerful empire in the world was to us not an ancient legend, but an eternal truth. We knew that missiles, planes and tanks were in the end no match for the inner strength of people willing to resist tyranny. We also understood the undeniable logic in one of our fellow dissident's prediction that the arms of a state that always had to point a gun at its own subjects would eventually tire. To us, the collapse of the Soviet Union was as inevitable as freedom's march was inexorable.

Such thinking was extremely rare outside the Gulag. Western policy makers had largely forgotten the power of freedom. To them, sentiments about the triumph of liberty may have been inspiring, but they were hardly practical. Like a Pessah tale that was nice to read but which no ?serious? person would believe, most paid homage to the values of a free society but dismissed as hopelessly naive the notion of an imploding evil empire. Instead, these skeptics preferred a more ?realistic? approach. Detente, and its various policy offshoots, was the product of such realism, and opposition to it, whether it came from the likes of a Senator Jackson or a President Reagan, was considered reckless, if not dangerous.

But history would show that the so-called ?realists? were completely divorced from reality. Their failure to appreciate the awesome power of freedom blinded them to the inevitable collapse of the Soviet superpower. They were the ones exposed as hopelessly out of touch, and the so-called dreamers proved astute pragmatists.

More than a decade later, after hundreds of millions have been liberated, many have again forgotten the power of freedom to change the world. Promoting democracy among the Arabs, as a few have boldly called for, is again cast as naive adventurism. The Arabs, we are told, have never lived under democracy. Their culture and religion, we are assured, are inimical to the idea of liberty. The realists dangle the ?pragmatic? alternatives before us: Cut a deal with ?friendly? dictators. They will fight terror. They will preserve order. They will make peace.

For the past 10 years, Israelis have witnessed the horrific consequences of this type of realism. Rather than place its faith in the power of Palestinian democracy, Oslo placed its faith in the power of Yasser Arafat's dictatorship. Arafat, we were told, was a man with whom we could do business. We would give him unlimited power and in turn he would protect us from terror and make peace with the Jewish State. Even today, after Arafat's 30-month terror war against Israel and 10-year reign of terror over the Palestinians, the lessons have not been learned. Again, the rush to create a Palestinian State with ?a man we can deal with? before Palestinian democracy has a chance to take root is in full swing. And again, it is being sold as the product of hard-headed realism.

In sharp contrast to this latest turn of events, last summer the power of freedom was remembered. In his historic speech, President Bush articulated a vision that Andrei Sakharov always championed: Only a country that respects the rights of its citizens will respect the rights of its neighbors. If the Palestinians were to build a society that protected individual freedom, President Bush promised that America would support the Palestinians' legitimate yearning for self-determination. It was not only the most noble vision of peace this region has ever heard, but also the first realistic one.

But predictably, the president's ideas were received by those who have forgotten the power of freedom as ?naive? and ?impractical.?

Robert D. Kaplan is one of the foremost proponents of the "realist" school of foreign policy, which makes all the more remarkable a confession he drops in a generally positive profile of arch-realist Henry Kissinger:

In perceiving the Soviet Union as permanent, orderly, and legitimate, Kissinger shared a failure of analysis with the rest of the foreign-policy elite--notably excepting the scholar and former head of the State Department's policy-planning staff George Kennan, the Harvard historian Richard Pipes, the British scholar and journalist Bernard Levin, and the Eureka College graduate Ronald Reagan.

Time will tell whether George W. Bush is naive or a visionary in the Reagan, Pipes, Solzhenitsyn mold, but the ease with which he dispatched Yasser Arafat, especially when you consider how contemptuous the experts were of the attempt, suggests that he sees the world more clearly than they, sees what is written on the heart. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 5, 2003 4:31 PM