Governor Harold E. Stassen United Nations Lecture Series
Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota. January 8, 1999

Robert A. Flaten - Speaker
Former U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda
Member Board of Directors, United Nations Association of Minnesota

Introduction
Thank you for your generous introduction. I'm glad you noticed that I was from St. Olaf, an Ole; in fact I was fed on the rivalry between Carleton and St.Olaf from the day I was born. As Oles, we would look across the river, occasionally, reluctantly admit that Carleton students were smarter than we were, and seemed to have more fun. We, of course, made up for it by being Norwegian, and, besides, also being Lutheran we weren't sure it was OK to have fun.

Returning to Northfield after nearly 40 years, I find that the Ole-Carl relationship is a little more mature than it once was, characterized by what one might call competitive cooperation. For me as an Ole, the invitation to this Convocation is an enormous honor and perhaps symbolic of better relations across the Cannon River. I can also conclude that the Competitive Cooperation in Northfield is a great leap above what I will call the COLD PEACE in international relations.

The Challenge I would like to leave with you is to do something in your life time to make today's Cold Peace a little warmer and more permanent.

My generation just doesn't seem to get it. Our bequest to you as we enter
the next millennium is this: you are exquisitely educated, uniquely free citizens of the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world. What we haven't been able to leave you is an adequate legacy of how to use that wealth and power. This is up to you. There is a thoughtful discussion, from the recent article by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Foreign Affairs, and the book by former Secretary Warren Christopher: In the Stream of History to a recent debate in Foreign Policy magazine over the pros and cons of American Hegemony as a policy. There are thoughtful insights in each about where we should be going. There are also some rather silly arguments and an abundance of self-righteousness. But there is no adequate vision to replace the lost consensus over policy during the Cold War. We are at Peace, but it's a Cold Peace.

Although I am not a trained historian, I am old enough to claim a right to suggest a few perspectives on our recent history, perspectives that may lead us in a slightly different direction in pursuit of a more viable peace.

I. WW II AND THE COLD WAR

A. World War II was the defining event of my childhood, not the St. Olaf -
Carleton competition, as I implied earlier. Millions of people lost their lives; the
devastation was enormous; even in the United States, everyone's life was affected. After the war ended, we did three things:

        l.     We created the United Nations with the fond hope that it would enable us to prevent the devastation and human suffering of another war. That was the vision of Harold Stassen, the vision we honor today along with the man who helped bring the UN into being. With the United Nations, we created a whole series of related institutions: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, FAO, WHO, ICAO, UNDP, UNESCO, UNICEF, IAEA, and later the High Commissioners for Refugees and Human Rights; and we associated preexisting international organizations such as the ILO, IMCO and ITU with the world body.

        2.     Second, we decided to assist the reconstruction of our former enemies, a process which led to the Marshall Plan for European recovery, fully involving Germany, with a similar approach to Japan. No reparations. No territorial aggrandizement.

        3.     Third, we almost completely dismantled our armed forces, leaving us
essentially helpless when our former allies in the Soviet Union moved into Eastern
Europe. We could not respond, even if we had fully understood the events and had
wished to. But the key problem was that having dismantled our forces we offered no
deterrent to Soviet power grabs. Nor were we able to deter the Korean war.

B. THE COLD WAR. The defining event of the past 50 years has been the
Cold War. It permeates our thinking about almost everything. So, when it ended:

        l.     We did not dismantle our military machine. We weren't going to make that mistake again. Although we have reduced our forces, we still commit over $270 billion to our defense budget, and the Administration is requesting an increase for next year. We cling to a doctrine of being able to fight two significant wars simultaneously, and we refuse to abandon the threat of first use of nuclear weapons, a doctrine probably useful in deterring a major aggressor, but of questionable utility in today's world.

        2.     Second, although we have offered some assistance to the former
Soviet Union, it does not compare to the magnitude of the Marshall Plan.

        3.     Perhaps more important, we seem to be dismantling our diplomatic establishment. For lack of funds, we are closing Embassies and Consulates, and, perhaps more significant, at least in symbolic terms, endangering our participation in the United Nations where we are unwilling to pay even the $1 billion we admit that we owe in arrears.

As many of you know, the UN payment is being held up at the moment over a disagreement between the Congress and the Administration over language to instruct the UN how to deal with countries which encourage abortion. I would not suggest that this is not a serious issue, but I would ask if anyone here could imagine that the Congress would hold up funding for the Defense Department over this issue. During his confirmation hearing in January 1993, six year ago, Warren Christopher said: "I will work to ensure that we pay our outstanding obligations..." to the UN. So, what happened?

When we attacked Iraq last month, Senator Lieberman said: "We can't let Saddam get away with thumbing his nose at the UN". And Senator Warner said "It is imperative that we and our allies support the rule of Law." Yet the United States thumbs its nose at our legal obligations to the UN to pay our assessments. Are we engaged in a deliberate attack on the UN? Does the American public support this attack? I hope not, but this generation appears not to have the vision or the will to support vigorously the institutions which we helped create to support peace. Again, I fear, it may be up to you.

II. PRICE OF COLD PEACE

A. So, we won the Cold War, but seem to have little vision for how to preserve
the peace. Don't misunderstand, I think its OK to be proud of an outcome which came out favorably without a major war. Historically, most confrontations which involved the level of power and ideological conflict of the Cold War have resulted in enormous bloodshed. We have serious differences among Americans about which were the greatest factors in the peaceful end of this conflict, but we did end it without destroying our enemy and the rest of the world with it.

        l.     Some insist that it was our overwhelming military superiority and
the toughness of one Administration which brought down the Soviet Empire, thereby ending the Cold War. A corollary of this is that it was the strength of our capitalist economy which bankrupted the Soviets trying to keep up with our military machine.

        2.     Some of us would like to think that skillful diplomacy, including
use of the UN machinery , played a major and perhaps decisive role.

        3.     Others would emphasize the failure of the Marxist ideology as
practiced by the Russians which failed to either create wealth or convince non-aligned and undecided people. A huge part of this Soviet failure was its blindness to fundamental human rights. A longing for individual freedom, respect for human rights and the democratic process were, and continue to be, the most powerful ideas in most of the world.

For example, When I presented my credentials to the President of Rwanda, he
asked if the United States would be willing to help him build democracy in Rwanda. I replied that we would be delighted, but I warned that it was a long process; we have been working on the democratic process for over two hundred years, and haven't perfected it yet. (that was before the Washington of ordeal of the past few months which has demonstrated our imperfections).

The point is that people in most of the world would give almost anything to
enjoy the democratic process which we take for granted. Ask any Consular Officer in
any of our Embassies or Consulates how many people desperately want to get visas
for the US. Not only are we seen to have unlimited economic opportunity, but also we
do not have to worry about arbitrary arrest, torture, or denial of due process, and we
enjoy a democratic system that is so strong that we can watch the impeachment of the
President without fear of losing jobs, civil war or even economic disruption.

B. Others Paid. Clearly a combination of the military, economic, diplomatic
and ideological factors enabled us to end the cold war. It is useful to evaluate these
factors as we think about how to approach the future. It seems to me, however, that
we also need to look at who paid the price for our victory in the Cold War.


        l.     People of the Soviet Empire. The cost of change is pretty high for
the people of Russia and most of the former members of the Soviet Union as well as
for the other Warsaw Pact countries. Civil war in several Central Asian Republics, economic chaos in Russia itself, and unemployment throughout, as economies struggle to become profitable. The fact that many were active and willing participants on the other side of the Cold War does not reduce their suffering.

        2.     People in the so called Third World. The greatest victims of the Cold War, often largely ignored, are the citizens of the Third World. The third world was the battleground of the Cold War. We recognize Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea as victims of the Cold War. But we hear a lot less of the price paid by the people of Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Somalia and the Congo(Zaire). The human suffering created by the Cold War in these and other places is as great as if they had been caught between the armies of Patton and Rommel in World War II, only it never
ends. It goes on and on;
In Afghanistan
In Somalia
In Angola
In Congo
In Rwanda

AFGHANISTAN
A buffer between the British Empire and the Russian Empire in the 19th and
early 20th centuries, Afghanistan took on that buffer role again in the Cold War, and
for a while benefited from large amounts of assistance from both sides.
Then a Soviet sponsored coup created an unpopular Communist regime in
Afghanistan in 1978. It was so unpopular that Soviet troops were sent in to save it in
1979. In the process, the American Ambassador, my friend Spike Dubs, was
murdered. Five million Afghans, almost one third of the population, fled into Pakistan
and Iran. But the Afghan rebels never stopped attacking the Soviet intruders. They
were so effective that we saw an opportunity to hurt our Cold War enemy and began
to supply the rebels, at first clandestinely, then increasingly openly with more and
more sophisticated weapons. Supplies went through Pakistan which had its own
ideas about the future of Afghanistan. So when the Soviets finally withdrew in`1989,
there were many heavily armed groups and tribes in the country, and no consensus
on how it should be governed. The civil war is still going on, and three million
Afghans are still refugees. Truly victims of the Cold War.

ANGOLA
Cuban troops, paid for by the Soviet Union were sent to Angola to defend
the Soviet sponsored government of Angola after a tardy end to Portuguese colonial
rule. We allied with the apartheid government of South Africa and Mobutu's corrupt
dictatorship in Congo(Zaire) to support Savimbi's UNITA in a Civil War which
continues to this day. In fact the latest word is that the war has heated up again in the
past few weeks, a UN sponsored ceasefire having broken down again. This was a
major Cold War battleground where the victims don't seem to have benefited from the
end of the Cold War.

CONGO(ZAIRE)
Of course one of the reasons we continued to support Mobutu was for his
support of our policy in Angola. But we decided much earlier to keep Mobutu in
power as the surest means we could think of to keep the Soviets from gaining a
foothold in the enormously rich major state of central Africa. We told ourselves that
Mobutu was the only guarantee of holding Zaire together, of preventing it from
splitting up into hostile mini-states subject to Soviet influence. So we watched as
Mobutu raped one of the richest countries in Africa, took the rewards as his personal
fortune, and squandered billions of dollars worth of foreign aid. Not until 1991, after
the end of the Cold War, did we begin to insist that Zaire reform. Now Congo(Zaire) is
in ruins, its infrastructure in shambles, and suffering from its second civil war in 3
years, with a dozen other African armies choosing up sides active within the country,
and no apparent hope for the future. One can say that the Congo has always had its
problems, but much of the current disaster can be attributed directly to our support for
the rapacious Mobutu.

SOMALIA
Somalia was a major prize for cold warriors. Commanding the entrance to the
Red Sea, it offered the Soviets the possibility of cutting off essential oil supplies to
Europe and to NATO. So they moved, and we counter moved, in fact actually
outbidding the Soviets in order to eliminate the Soviet base then under construction.
I remember well helping to persuade the Congress that the cost was worth it. And I
remember some arguing that Somalia would not be a particularly good ally. Part of the
price was to provided Siad Barre with military equipment which he then used in self
defense, but mostly against his internal enemies. When he was no longer able to
control the country, it collapsed into chaos, the chaos we saw on our TV screens five
or six years ago. When you saw those pictures of starving children in Somalia, did it
occur to you that they were at least partly victims of the Cold War? We apparently
gave Barre the means to completely eliminate his opponents, to eliminate the political
system which preexisted.

When we tried to help the starving people of Somalia, we made an error of
judgment, leading to the deaths of 18 American peace keepers, and our humiliation as
their bodies were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.

RWANDA
For me, there is a Rwanda connection. The humiliation of our troops in
Mogadishu made it politically impossible for Washington to assign American troops
to the Peacekeeping mission in Rwanda. Worse, it made Washington reconsider the
whole question of peace-keeping, so the UN force that did enter Rwanda had a
mandate that was too weak to do the job it was sent to do. This was important
because the United States, along with France, Belgium, Tanzania and the UN had
helped negotiate a peace agreement between the then Government of Rwanda and the
rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front, the RPF, and an essential ingredient of the agreement
was a peace keeping force under UN control that would help the warring parties separate and then integrate their armies and create a new political system, sharing power between the two major ethnic groups. Without a strong UN peacekeeping presence, Rwanda disintegrated when President Habyarimana's aircraft was shot down in April 1994. When the killing stopped, over 500,000 people had been killed. So, in a way, even the genocide in Rwanda can be attributed to the events of the Cold War, even though Rwanda was not itself a battleground.

There were, of course, other battlegrounds in the Cold War. I chose these
examples because I have had some experience with them.

And I am not suggesting that our policies in all of these regions were wrong.
That's a topic for another lecture. What we did seemed at the time necessary to the
global dimensions of the Cold War. In hindsight, it is easy to see mistakes and
unnecessary suffering. But at the time, the Cold War issue dominated.

What I am suggesting is that people in many countries paid a heavy price,
and we have received the benefit. Some Washington pundits have chosen to call
some of these countries "failed states", thereby absolving ourselves of
responsibility. It seems to me that how we deal with our responsibility for these
tragedies will help define Americans for the future.

C. American Price. We also paid a price to end the Cold War. But it is hard
to measure. We are richer than ever, and we will write the history of the cold war.
Except for casualties and the turmoil of Vietnam, and a few diplomats and American
civilians murdered by cold war related terrorism, Americans seem to have paid very
little price for the Cold War "victory".

We can't quantify the cost of a legacy which continues to see the world in
confrontational or Cold War terms. We look for enemies, we continue to write and
read spy thriller novels, and build our video games as though the world of good guys
vs bad guys still exists. We don't seem to be able to adjust to the fact that there is
only one super power left, and its role in the world has to be different than it was
before. We have the luxury of engaging in a debate over whether our policy should
be one of American Hegemony.

Perhaps I'm overstating the point. We have been adjusting, but I'm not sure
it's a positive adjustment. We are now able to bomb Iraq without fear of Soviet
intervention, so we make different calculations. Furthermore, our technological
superiority is such that we can engage in military activities without risks to American
lives. In other words, war without domestic political consequences.

It may have been wise and even necessary in the case of Saddam Hussein,
but let us consider the precedent. And the political process. Congress said yes to
bombing Iraq the morning after it began with virtually no debate, after devoting a
month to the impeachment debate. Is killing Iraqis less important than the President's
failings? Can we only gain consensus on military issues?

Our enemies accuse us the Arrogance of Power. Recently, some of our
friends have been saying the same. Are we approaching a point where we actually
resemble the description of our least generous critics? Is this the price that we have
paid for the Cold War Victory? If so, does this define our national character? Are we
content with a Cold Peace at the end of the Cold War?

III. UN ROLE

A. Fortunately, even without our contribution, the UN will continue to exist.
It is a forum in which we can look for answers to some of these questions. We will, of
course, get better answers the more willing we are to listen to others. And the
questions of responsibility for the victims of the cold war is something we share
widely with our Cold War allies. With them and the representatives of some of the
victims, we should be able to find means to identify, and redress some of the costs
paid by others for our victory. But right now, on a per capita basis, the United States
offers a smaller percentage of its wealth in foreign assistance than any of the other
rich nations.

B. The UN system is not just the General Assembly and the Security
Council. The specialized agencies have accomplished enormous benefits for us as
well as for the rest of the world. I like to call them the International Public Utilities.
We can't get along without them any more than we can get along without the electric
utilities, snow removal or garbage collection. Not in health, in agriculture, in control
of atomic energy, air traffic, telecommunications, and in the monetary controls and
assistance to the poorest countries. This entire international system is absolutely
essential to the interdependent world in which we live and work, travel and prosper. It
promotes a vision of the world which we have promoted in its High Commissioners for
Refugees and for Human Rights.

The institutions for cooperation in the global community exist and function. As a responsible member of these institutions, we have a right and an obligation to insist on certain standards of efficiency and responsibility. We have promoted reform in the UN system, up to and including replacing the Secretary General, over the objections of most of our friends. But I do not believe that we have the right to impose our internal political differences on the world bodies, especially if we are not willing to pay our dues. The UN bodies were a forum for debate during the Cold War. Cold War issues emerged in all of the agencies, sometimes with negative results, but in most cases at least kept the conflict verbal rather than violent. Differences will continue in all of the agencies, but a more positive view would be to see them as forums for cooperation. If we participate in these agencies with cooperation as our primary perspective, they may help us avoid some of the temptations of the arrogance of power.

Harold Stassen continues his devotion to the UN, recently proposing strengthening the system by, among other things, creating a world network of mediators, a UN military legion to support them, and a source of revenue for the UN independent of member states' contributions. These ideas deserve serious discussion and debate in the United States. Americans should be aware of what is at stake. But most of us are not even aware of the issues.

IV. CONCLUSION; POWER AND PEACE

To conclude, this generation inherits a level of individual freedom and
opportunity which is shared with only a small number of other people. With it you
inherit leadership of a nation of unprecedented wealth and power. Unlike older
generations, you also inherit international institutions which can be used toshape the
world consistent with your vision.

But you also inherit a Cold Peace and a need to overcome the mentality of
the cold war which seems to have hypnotized your elders.

One way to begin to repoen our minds would be to study again the concepts
and ideals which inspired the creation of the UN. Then we could attempt to refocus
our resources toward diplomacy and international cooperation. Why not take just one
percent of the Defense budget and devote it to international cooperation. Just one
percent a year over three years would double our assistance budget, and put us back
in our rightful place as leaders in the development of the future.

As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright wrote recently, the challenges now
faced are every bit as challenging as those faced at the end of World War II. The
response then of the Marshall Plan was described by Winston Churchill as "the
wisest and most unselfish" act in history. So let us try to revisit some of the idealism
which led Harold Stassen and those with whom he worked to build the UN, and the
vision of those around George Marshall which helped the victims of World War II
recover and prosper.

Let us seek a comparable vision to support the victims of the Cold War,
including ourselves.

The end.

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Last modified: August 13, 2007