The twentieth century enters its final decade much as it entered its first decade. The fashionable view then held that "modern conditions" of communications, dialogue, and respect for law had made large-scale war forevermore obsolete. This view was nicely summarized by a young Winston Churchill:
“War is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the Twentieth Century….Civilization has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, liberal principles…have rendered such nightmares impossible.”
After presenting this position, Churchill asked pointedly: "Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong."
It was a pity, as the wholesale carnage of World Wars I and II lay ahead. With the same view now prevailing - we presume with more merit than back then - it would still be a pity to be wrong.
For eternal peace to break out is a consummation devoutly to be wished for. But to believe it has already happened constitutes an act of faith, something akin to what Dr. Samuel Johnson called second marriages - a triumph of hope over experience.
Human nature does not change that rapidly. The new world we face is fraught with unpredictability, wherein defense needs have not vanished. No one should embark upon a race to determine who can disarm America the quickest to become the weakest soonest. "The moment we knew the armistice was to have been signed, we took the harness off," President Woodrow Wilson explained in his annual message to Congress in 1918. That, too, was a costly error.
As encouraging as events in the onetime Soviet bloc have been, there is nothing in history to convince anyone that the world will suddenly, miraculously become free and peaceful. Wars rage, rebellions erupt, freedom (as in China) is crushed. In fact, the month or so after the Berlin Wall came down, the United States employed arms in three instances - in Panama to oust Gen. Manuel Noriega, in the Philippines to boost President Corazon Aquino, and in El Salvador to help spring Americans briefly held hostage. Yet aspects of the threat facing America from the Soviet Union are changing rapidly. What a turnabout in Soviet affairs from the 1964 to 1984 period - the much-maligned " stagnation years" of Leonid Brezhnev - when practically nothing changed. While some octogenarians then shuffled positions atop the Lenin tomb each year (made than it deserved), the basic tone and tenor of that state stayed constant. Since 1984, though, events have moved at an ever accelerating pace.
Indeed, any writing on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe nowadays had best be done in pencil. Events there now change so swiftly as to risk instant obsolescence. Yet those planning and/or managing Western security cannot sit back and let events take their natural course. They must plan and manage, even in today's murky and shifting security environment. Just as the forces assuring U.S. defense during the Bush administration were funded and built during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations, so today's plans and programs will affect the post-Bush era.
A grand
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