The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today. To mark our 10th anniversary, we invited several of our valued contributors to reflect on the decade past and, at least indirectly, on the years ahead. More specifically, we asked them to address this question: "On what issue or issues (if any!) have you changed your mind in the last 10 years- and why?" Their responses follow.
AT MY AGE it is difficult to learn, but it's still possible to relearn. From 9/11, the salient event of the last 10 years, I relearned the distinction between friend and foe. For the United States to be hit in a manner so viciously effective was quite unexpected, and it put me in an extraordinary anger that has not subsided. The attack had its preliminaries now visible from hindsight, but nothing seemed to predict the appalling success for evil that occurred.
A sudden, successful attack by evil men is always a shock. Not only does it interrupt the routine and rhythms of peace (which include of course much partisan infighting), but it also challenges our belief in justice. For justice demands to be enacted and made good. You cannot believe in justice without believing in the viability of justice, and that means justice enforced and justice in peace. It is not only peaceniks who believe in peace. But peace is always a particular peace, the peace of our particular justice, not universal or perpetual peace. The peaceniks reveal this in their bumper stickers that say that if you want peace, first get justice. Their justice, however, tries to overcome the distinction between friend and foe so as to include everybody. When everybody is included, peace will be universal and perpetual because nobody will have a claim that peace as it stands is unjust to him or to his party. This would be peace with a capital P, and it would supersede all the particular peaces resulting from particular claims to justice.
Liberalism in its 18th-century phase had a notion of universal peace that was based on universal commerce. It said that if nations could not agree on justice they could at least agree on the benefit of trade with one another, putting aside questions on which they could not agree. But the peace liberals of our day are not friendly to commerce, which brings selfish benefit unequally. (Which is worse, selfishness or inequality?) They prefer culture to commerce. But to be inclusive, culture must be multicultural. To have this, one must go beyond setting aside awkward questions and become nonjudgmental--actively nonjudgmental with a compassion that embraces differences in the Other. Our natural human desire for justice returns, however, in the dislike of the multiculturalists for those who insist on justice: They are the ones who must be excluded. Peacenik peace is not really for everybody as it claims.
The peace liberals have their counterpart in the Islamic fascists, who oppose peace as such, as if they were prepared to enter a perpetual war. It is not easy to reason with unreason, but let me try. They say that the West likes life and they like death, meaning that the West is given to peace because it is too attached to life. There is more than a little truth in this criticism, but again it goes too far. It implies that the Islamic fascists have a notion of justice, too, and therefore a notion of peace. They do not want merely to destroy and expel the West but also to replace it--after which there would be peace of a very different kind from that which we intend.
The distinction between friend and foe arises from human partiality, from our bias on behalf of our own. Because of our desire for justice we can never be content with partiality, but at the same time we can never overcome it. In our time we have those professing faith in enlightenment who want peace at any cost and those professing faith in Islam who want war on every occasion. What a spectacle for theory, what a problem for citizens.
Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan Jr. professor of government at Harvard.