THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 12, 1994 TAG: 9409100026
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A8 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
President Clinton has taken heat over foreign-policy crises in Haiti, Cuba, Bosnia and other world trouble spots. A little perspective, however, can be restored by noting what has happened in Germany in the past few weeks.
First, the last Russian troops left Berlin and the former East Germany, followed last week by the departure from this once-divided city of the last Allied troops.
For the first time since the end of World War II, foreign forces no longer play a role in the governance of Germany's largest city. That brings to a close, more or less peacefully, one of the postwar world's great foreign-policy and military dilemmas.
It's hard to believe now, nearly five years after the Berlin Wall so unexpectedly fell, that such a moment could ever come in our lifetimes. Half-a-million Soviet troops occupied Central Europe, propping up the Iron Curtain that Churchill noted ran from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Now they are gone. Europe has been liberated.
That hardly means the Western world can rest entirely easy, however. Russia's transition from communism has been anything but smooth, and the economic meltdown taking place there carries with it the specter of chaos and renewed militarism. The conflict in the Balkans and in the Caucacus region are reminders that plenty of discord still simmers in Europe.
It's popular among many people in the United States to bemoan the American political system, to lament that our politicians can't get anything right. But victory in the Cold War shows that our system worked pretty well, while that of the old Soviet Union - based as it was on the fallacy of changing human nature - rotted from within and finally fell apart.
Not that it didn't have a strong push, of course. A great deal of the credit must go to President Reagan, who stuck to his policy of firmness in the face of tremendous pressure from many in the West who wanted him to seek what amounted to accommodation on Soviet terms. President Reagan refused to concede Soviet control of nations such as Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Angola, arming anti-communist movements there. He challenged the communist system morally and spiritually as well.
Far from stumbling into victory, evidence has come to light (particularly in Peter Sweitzer's book Victory) of a conscious effort to bleed and destabilize the tottering but still dangerous Kremlin empire. Key was the defense buildup, capped by the Strategic Defense Initiative and undergirded by the economic expansion of the 1980s. In desperation, the Soviet elites turned to Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended up destroying the system by seeking to reform it.
The Western world will face other tests in the future. But the peaceful end of a contest that threatened to destroy civilization is a proud hour for those who always believed freedom was worth defending. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
RONALD REAGAN
by CNB