AMERICANISM IS A YOUTH MOVEMENT:

World's youth movement colored by red, white and blue (Melana Zyla Vickers, 12/14/04, USA Today)

An opposition victory in Ukraine will share a common trait with the "people power" revolutions that upended the former Communist ruling elites in countries including Georgia in 2003, Serbia in 2000 and Czechoslovakia and Poland long before that: All have been backed or heavily supported by young students who've learned about American-style democracy — and want it for themselves.

To a United States that is short on international friends, the advantage of this youthful, pro-U.S. sentiment can't be underestimated. The Bush administration's foreign-policy team is being revamped ahead of the president's second term. What better time for U.S. policymakers to explore new ways of building beneficial friendships where there has been great animosity, especially in still-Communist and Islamic-authoritarian countries?

The "New Europe" countries are becoming our most reliable allies:

•Poland now supports U.S. foreign policy, including the intervention in Iraq.

•The Czechs, unlike most Europeans, support U.S. policies critical of the human-rights records of Communist China and Cuba.

•Serbia's student protests drove the ouster of U.S. foe Slobodan Milosevic and delivered him to The Hague for a war-crimes trial.

What's more, the friendliness toward the U.S. appears to be long-lasting. More than 20 years have passed since Poland's successful Solidarity revolution and 15 since Czechoslovakia's. The younger generations in these countries, while distinctly European in their tastes and culture, often reserve a special political fondness for the U.S. that is rarely, if ever, evident in the streets of Paris or Berlin.

That's because the young East Europeans have firsthand knowledge of U.S. support during these people-power revolutions and during their childhoods.

During the Cold War, the U.S. government beamed radio programming to them, taught them and their parents about the freedoms they could aspire to, supported the dissident movements that produced their current national heroes and called their government in Moscow "evil." And since the Cold War's waning days, the U.S. government has spent millions of dollars supporting pro-democracy efforts.

The strategic calculus is straightforward: If the United States continues to support such efforts, both in the region and more widely, it can help usher in governments and politicians that share its values, and that may also support its policies and aid its long-term security. Amid a global war on terrorism, such allies have perhaps never been more important.

Potentially, the "sow pro-Western democracy, reap long-term friendship" quid pro quo is as applicable to Ukraine, Poland and Czechoslovakia as it is to other countries where authoritarians still have a chokehold on power: neighboring Belarus, Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea and, of course, much of the Islamic world.

Alternatively, the ones we made democratic that don't like us--Old Europe, for instance--are totally impotent.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 14, 2004 11:16 PM