Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 16, 1993 TAG: 9304160446
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
ADJUSTING TO PEACE
FOR NEARLY half a century, the United States and the Soviet Union have waged what the world was pleased to call a "Cold War" on each other. Its terms were purportedly ideological - one set of ideas, one form of government against another. In fact, it was equally an economic conflict in which each tried to outspend the other in the development of deadlier and deadlier weapons.Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and as it did, the nation's leaders and ordinary Americans began to realize that the "Cold War" had been the very center of their lives. The nation's economy was built upon it. Its central pursuits were shaped by the way they affected the conflict. Whether they were conscious of it or not, whether they liked it or not, American citizens' thoughts had "Cold War" as their gyroscope.
Now come the needs of a society that has neglected itself in the pursuit of a war that has ended. And its leaders so far show little understanding that its end raises profound national problems.
Among them:
When will the nation abandon its destructive policy of arming the rest of the world? Now unrivaled as international arms merchant, the United States sells more weapons abroad than all other nations combined. By the mid-1990s, experts believe, it will be selling 70 percent of the world's armaments. The result is to fuel the quarrels of the Third World and to feed the ambitions of its own possible enemies.
How can an economy built on military spending and production absorb both the unemployment and the economic collapse that plant and base forcings foretell, not to mention the unemployment produced by drastically downsized armed forces?
Can the technological skills and manpower produced by a military economy be retrained and reharnessed to the redevelopment of the nation's faltering schools, social institutions, urban areas and physical infrastructure?
Ronald Reagan was too somnolent to see the future, George Bush too stubborn to admit its existence. And Bill Clinton, alas, shows no appetite for its crushing reality.
Swords and ploughshares have been polar opposites throughout most of human history. But until the 20th century, wars ended, more or less; peace broke out, more or less; and something called normal times reappeared, more or less.
The problem in our own century is that wars have been not only larger and deadlier than ever before, but nearly continuous as well. For many nations, this rendered the shift from war thinking, planning and execution to peacetime pursuits both brief and difficult - if not futile, half-hearted, inconclusive and, later, frequently regrettable.
Yet that is one of the greatest problems facing the United States in the wake of the Cold War that ended so suddenly, it seems, no one had thought to prepare for it. Nor have most Americans, it also seems, absorbed the reality that their long hostility to the Soviet Union is over - or that because it is over, life in the world and in their own land is irrevocably changed.
The "civilized" world has been at war since 1914; and though the nominal "causes" for war have varied from decade to decade, virtually every developed nation, including those of what we used to call the "Far East," has been engaged, to one degree or another, in conflict bloodier than anyone a century ago would have believed possible. Many of the undeveloped nations have warred on each other, or on themselves, on the side, and since the end of colonial rule after World War II such "regional" wars have been commonplace.
What nations have had to face, once conflict had exhausted the warriors, was that they had devoted so much energy to fighting they had forgotten what peace was like.
And that is the dilemma facing the United States now, as it faces the nations that made up the one-time Soviet Union and as it faces the rest of the world in the wake of the Soviet collapse.
Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.