Don't Cash the Peace Dividend

By Charles Krauthammer

The country, the Congress and the media are demanding a peace dividend. Papa Bush sternly refuses to give it to them. For that he is assailed as being out of sync, out of touch, overprudent, weird even.

Papa Bush is right.

There is nothing wrong with a gradual reduction of American forces in response to the Soviet eclipse. There may even be some merit to skipping one generation of weapons and investing instead in research and development of the next generation (as suggested by former Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle). Both of these approaches, however, rest on the premise that the U.S. must maintain a large, technologically advanced, worldwide military force. The logic of the peace dividend is the opposite: now that the cold war is won, it is time to demobilize.

Postwar demobilization is a very American idea. We have a penchant for demobilizing the day after the war is won. After World War I, we rapidly demobilized and disengaged from Europe. With no countervailing American force to contain the rise of the monstrous totalitarianisms of the '30s, the way was cleared for World War II.

Which we also won. And after which we demobilized again: 9 million men in the first year after the Japanese surrender. Stalin was slower to embrace the pleasures of civilian life. He kept 3 million men under arms, the U.S. half that number. Stalin kept a massive occupation force in Europe. The U.S. decided this time that leaving Europe entirely would be a mistake, so, having radically demobilized, we chose to stay on the cheap -- with nuclear weapons, an expediency that kept the world on the nuclear precipice for 40 years.

We are now, once again but without realizing it, in an immediate postwar period. The cold war was world war in every respect but one. It was a great struggle between two massive alliances conducted on every continent and at every level of struggle -- economic, political and military -- save one: the existence of nuclear weapons outlawed direct military engagement between the great powers. Which is why the cold war is not recognized for what it was -- World War III. And in 1989 it ended just like the first two: we won.

Seeing the cold war as World War III is not just a metaphor. It helps to explain the current rush to demobilize. We are again in the grip of a postwar euphoria, and our instinct is to do what we have always done: demobilize first, ask questions later.

It is in the American soul. Contrary to the fantasies of the recent left about an imperial Amerika, it is hard to think of a great power with less taste for empire than the United States. Empire? The most universal response to the hegemony that our Asian and European alliances brought us is the chorus of Washington voices demanding allied "burden sharing." For Americans, empire is a pain.

Empire? Even when we do invade, whether it is Normandy or Panama, the first question to arise is always, When do we get out? Luigi Barzini once observed that for America interventionism is often just an expression of "impatient isolationism," wanting to get the job over with and back to, "in the words of Theodore Roosevelt (who deplored it vigorously), 'the soft and easy enjoyment of material comforts.' "

Americans like to think -- they thought so in 1919, in 1945 and now again in 1990 -- that having conquered the great evil of the day, they have conquered evil, that having defeated today's mortal threat, they have banished threat.

"Who's the enemy?" a reporter pointedly asked President Bush at a recent press conference. The implication being, "If you can't name the enemy, there is none. And if there is no enemy, why $300 billion for defense?"

It is true that no one can give a precise answer as to where the next threat will come from. That does not mean -- as the peace dividenders of today loudly pretend -- that there is none.

To assume that there is no threat is to assume, first, that the Soviet threat is completely dead, that even a disintegrating Soviet empire, home to 25,000 nuclear warheads, will not disturb the peace. History does not support the proposition that collapsing empires go quietly.

It is to assume, second, that the Soviet threat cannot be succeeded by a Russian threat. A Russia shorn of empire and taken over by embittered nationalists could easily revert to the kind of dangerous revanchism that seized other defeated powers in this century, notably interwar Germany.

It is to assume, finally, that threat, even if banished from the East, will not come from elsewhere. We simply have no idea where Germany, China, Japan are headed. We don't know how the Balkans will evolve. We do know that with the Soviet decline other forces will occupy the vacuum, among them long- dormant nationalisms and newly awakened Islamic fundamentalism, neither of which is necessarily friendly to American interests or values. We also know that in a high-tech world, dozens of regimes are acquiring weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, biological) and the means to deliver them to almost any place on earth.

It is naive and highly dangerous, therefore, to pretend that with the end of this latest war, war is abolished. Yet that is what we want to believe. In 1943 Secretary of State Cordell Hull returned from the Moscow Conference that set the foundation for a United Nations and told a joint session of Congress that as the provisions of the conference were carried out, "there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests."

Sound familiar?