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Feature
The
Smart Way to Beat Tyrants Like Chávez
Donald
Rumsfeld
By Donald Rumsfeld
Today
the people of Venezuela face a constitutional referendum,
which, if passed, could obliterate the few remaining vestiges
of Venezuelan democracy. The world is saying little and doing
less as President Hugo Chávez dismantles Venezuela's
constitution, silences its independent media and confiscates
private property. Chávez's ambitions do not stop at
Venezuela's borders, either. He has repeatedly threatened
its neighbors. In late November, Colombia's president, Alvaro
Uribe, declared that Chávez's efforts to mediate hostage
talks with Marxist terrorists from the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia , or FARC, were not welcome. Chávez
responded by freezing trade with Colombia.
With diplomatic, economic and communications institutions
designed for a different era, the free world has too few tools
to help prevent Venezuela's once vibrant democracy from receding
into dictatorship. But such a tragedy is not preordained. In
fact, we face a moment when swift decisions by the United States
and like-thinking nations could dramatically help, supporting
friends and allies with the courage to oppose an aspiring dictator
with regional ambitions.
The best
place to start is with the prompt passage and signing of
the Colombian free trade agreement, which has been languishing
in Congress for months. Swift U.S. ratification of the pact
would send an unequivocal message to the people of Colombia,
the opposition in Venezuela and the wider region that they
do not stand alone against Chávez. It would also provide
concrete economic opportunities to the people of Colombia,
helping to offset the restrictions being imposed by Venezuela
-- and it would strengthen the U.S. economy in the bargain.
The importance of the Venezuela-Colombia clash goes beyond
turmoil in the U.S. back yard. The episode can help us understand
what's at stake in a new age of globalization and information,
an age in which trade networks can be as powerful as military
alliances. Extending freedom from the political sphere to the
economic one and building the global architecture, such as
free trade agreements, to support those relationships can --
and should -- be a top priority for the United States in the
21st century.
Since the first years of the Cold War, 10 presidential administrations
have operated within an institutional framework fashioned during
the Truman administration: NATO, the United Nations, the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the CIA, the Defense
Department, Voice of America and the National Security Council.
Over six decades, the United States and the rest of the free
world have benefited from those institutions, which led to
victory in the Cold War and helped maintain international order
thereafter.
But with the passage of more than half a century, the end
of the Cold War, the attacks of 9/11 and the rise of an Islamic
extremist movement that hopes to use terrorism and weapons
of mass destruction to alter the course of humankind, it has
become obvious that the national security institutions of the
industrial age urgently need to be adapted to meet the challenges
of this century and the information age.
At home, the entrenched bureaucracies and diffuse legislative
processes of the U.S. government make it hard to creatively,
swiftly and proactively handle security threats. Turf-conscious
subcommittees in Congress inhibit the country's ability to
mobilize government agencies to tackle new challenges. For
example, U.S. efforts to build up the police and military capacity
of partner nations such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan to
fight al-Qaeda and other extremists have been thwarted over
the past six-plus years by compartmentalized budgets, outdated
restrictions and budget cycles that force a nation at war to
spend three years to develop, approve and execute a program.
The United States has also lost several tools that were central
to winning the Cold War. Notably, U.S. institutions of public
diplomacy and strategic communications -- both critical to
the current struggle of ideas against Islamic radicalism --
no longer exist. Some believed that after the fall of the Soviet
Union such mechanisms were no longer needed and could even
threaten the free flow of information. But when the U.S. Information
Agency became part of the State Department in 1999, the country
lost what had been a valuable institution capable of communicating
America's message to international audiences powerfully and
repeatedly.
Meanwhile,
a new generation of foes has mastered the tools of the information
age -- chat rooms, blogs, cellphones, social-networking
Web sites -- and exploits them to spread propaganda, even while
the U.S. government remains poorly organized and equipped to
counter with the truth in a timely manner. The nation needs
a 21st-century "U.S. Agency for Global Communications" to
inform, to educate and to compete in the struggle of ideas
-- and to keep its enemies from capitalizing on the pervasive
myths that stoke anti-Americanism.
Many existing international institutions are also falling
short. The United Nations -- which elected Syria and Iran to
a commission on disarmament, Sudan to one on human rights and
Zimbabwe to one on sustainable development -- can hardly be
considered a credible arbiter of international issues and dialogue.
Endemic inertia and corruption threaten to render the United
Nations even less effective in the 21st century.
NATO, the great bulwark against communist expansion, could
be usefully reoriented toward today's threats to the nation-state
system -- global problems that can be successfully dealt with
only by broad coalitions of nations capable of efficiently
executing collective decisions. By building bilateral and regional
partnerships with other like-thinking countries -- such as
India, Singapore, Australia, Japan , South Korea and Israel
-- NATO could evolve into a diplomatic and military instrument
of the world's democratic and capitalist societies.
We also
must reinvigorate the structures that support global prosperity.
Free trade seems to be slipping out of fashion
in Congress and the presidential campaign, with some candidates
calling for a "timeout" for free trade and the abolition
of current agreements, such as NAFTA and CAFTA. But the world
will need a network of trading nations to provide a way to
change the circumstances of people in poor nations. Strong
U.S. economic relations with the countries of Latin America,
Asia, Africa and the Middle East would encourage international
development and investment even as they build closer ties among
the United States and its allies. The prosperity that trade
pacts foster has proved to be one of the most effective weapons
against internal instability and international aggression.
Today's
global order is threatened not only by violent extremists,
rogue regimes, failing states and aspiring despots such as
Chávez. It is also threatened by the complacent assumption
that our domestic and global institutions, in their present
form, can meet these growing menaces.
In the first years of the Cold War, the free world's leaders
created the new institutions necessary to prevail against communism.
Sixty years later, six years into a new ideological struggle,
in the face of new challenges from asymmetric warfare, in an
age in which information mixes with weapons of unprecedented
lethality, these old institutions by and large remain arrayed
to deal with the enemies of the last struggle, not the enemies
of today.
Pundits tend to focus on individuals, not institutions. Personalities,
after all, garner more headlines than do bureaucracies and
agreements. But when institutions no longer serve our interests
well -- or, worse, hamper important efforts -- we need to hear
more about reform through public commentary, in Congress and
on the campaign trail. The next president will face the issue
of reforming domestic and international institutions -- and
will need to accelerate the efforts begun by President Bush.
We can prevail by mustering the same resolve that President
Harry S. Truman and others demonstrated 60 years ago.
Donald
Rumsfeld is a former secretary of defense. Petroleumworld
not necessarily share these views.
Editor's
note: This
commentary was originally published by Donald
Rumsfeld, on Sunday,
December 2, 2007; B03.
Petroleumworld reprint
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