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.
I REMEMBER WALKING down by the Capitol one day in 1999, brooding about empire--specifically, the power position of the United States on the eve of the new millennium as compared with that of the Roman Empire 2,000 years before. By now, such comparisons are banal, but at the time, there was much fresh in them to ponder as one tried to get a fix on what the world looked like.
I concluded, mid-brood, that there were really only two regions of the world where the United States had no serious interests: sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia. This bothered me. I would have welcomed a far broader geographical expanse in which the United States did not have to remain engaged, where we were not committed as the guarantor of security or protector of interests vital to us and to others happy to leave us the trouble and expense of defending them. Our colleague P.J. O'Rourke published a book in 1995 called All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty. Comedy aside, "all the trouble in the world" struck me as a pretty good description of what the United States would have no choice but to deal with for the foreseeable future--welcome exceptions duly noted.
If Africa was a slough of incompetent dictatorial government, brutal politics, rampant disease, and outbursts of genocide, well, this was tragic, but it did not greatly impinge on the United States, and we were busy with other problems, such as containing Saddam Hussein, facing down Slobodan Milosevic, securing a Western orientation for the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, keeping China from taking Taiwan by force, coping with Russian backsliding and the problem of loose nukes, maintaining access to oil, and so on. And while loose talk about revisiting the Great Game of nineteenth-century empire-building in Central Asia was newly in vogue, it seemed obvious to me that the only sure way to avoid coming out a loser in the Great Game was not to play.
Needless to say, after 9/11 we realized that we do indeed have interests in Central Asia. And the problems posed by "failed states," such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, loomed newly large as well. It was not, however, chiefly on the calculation of national interest that my thinking then was wrong.
If the American way of life (or "Western civilization") is worth defending, and it is, that's not just because we are Americans (or Western in origin or orientation), but because of the substantive content of our way of organizing political and social relations--the classically liberal character of our open, pluralistic, democratic, bourgeois societies.
Yes, for our own sake, we do indeed need to face down those violently opposed to our liberal order. We must defend ourselves. But that's not enough. We need to attend also to the needs of those who do not have the advantage of living in societies like ours. If we believe all people have a right to liberty, then we have a responsibility to help them overthrow governments that oppress them and build something better. If we believe our own claims about a right to life possessed by all people, then we have a responsibility to help vindicate the rights of those who are unable to protect themselves in instances of genocide, mass killing, and ethnic cleansing.
No, we must not be reckless. Recklessness would weaken us, and we need strength to pursue our ideals. On which we must be clear: Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, along with everywhere else, matter in the first instance not just because of our interests, but because of the people there.
Contributing editor Tod Lindberg is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor of Policy Review.