"The principal business of government is to promote human strivings."
Wilbur L. Cross

I suppose Wilbur Cross probably had in mind individual governments, but the promotion of human strivings makes a pretty good mission statement for foreign policy as well. But as a foreign policy goal, it's important to differentiate between human strivings and American strivings. The whole world is not America, nor does it always want to be America, a truth we sometimes find hard to choke down. There was a day when the whole world seemed to want to be us, but no more. There are other dreams out there and they are not in every case our dreams.

That said, there is no doubt our foreign policy ought to support our national goals and ambitions, as long as those ambitions don't get severely in the way of another culture. There are cultures in this complicated world that don't want to join the Pepsi generation. In the post WWII birthing of independent nations, all seems to us to be in a state of confusion as the descendants of colonial empires fall into class and religious struggles that seem chaotic to our sense of order. And yet, only from this chaos can the strivings of national entities be reborn in a way that reflects the huge diversity of world cultures.

The trouble spots of the world have in large part been the result of outside powers drawing arbitrary national borders. Any cursory glance at the Balkan states or the configuration of African nations shows immediately the negative influence of forced borders. Is it any wonder that "ethnic cleansing" and "tribal massacre" are prevalent among countries that have been so summarily constructed?

The forty-year "cold war" was marked by the arming of various factions in these misshapen countries and now we and they are left with the legacy of modern armaments. Suppliers of these armaments profited obscenely, ourselves as well as others. Smoldering racial hatreds within artificially drawn borders are now being renegotiated with rocket launchers, burp-guns and a new system of anarchy fed with armament sales. Is it any surprise? Yet a machete is weapon enough, where grenades are scarce.

Is there an answer?

Of course there are answers, we are drowning in answers. But solutions may be entirely another matter and we have to ask ourselves whether we want solutions or answers.

An answer is to step into Bosnia as we have and stand between the combatants, because we can't stomach the bloodshed day after day, month after month. But for how long? And to what avail? It's an answer, but not a solution and our military commanders know this, hence their unwillingness to creep outside the mission they already know is impossible.

A solution would be to contain the fighting within the wrongly established borders of the old Yugoslavia and let them fight it out, finally establishing with what's left of their humanity, a country sent back to the stone age. But we are not willing, nor perhaps should we be willing to see that happen, to watch a part of the world destroy itself. It smacks of Hitler's solutions and yet the answer we currently provide is no answer at all. The same could be said within Africa.

What we are doing does not work and cannot work. So what then?

Another answer that may even border on a solution, might be to recolonialize these troubled areas of the world, establish a democracy of sorts over twenty or thirty years, allow the renegotiation of their borders in a way more amenable to ethnic and religious structure and bring them piecemeal back into nations. It's not a popular concept, this re-establishment of colonialization, but civil populations are paying an insupportable price in the power struggles that threaten to wipe out entire nations.

But who would do it? Certainly not the United States, we have no world mandate for such an action and certainly no stomach for it. Perhaps the United Nations, but such a huge work is without precedent. In the meanwhile, much of the world looks in our direction and we are proven time and again not to be up to the task. It's a very serious mistake to sound like we can do what we have no hope of doing.

In countries of the world that are not so explosive, our foreign policy might better be served with less public rhetoric and more quiet diplomacy. The nations of the world that are not so free as we would wish, are not likely to become free by rhetoric or economic pressure, but only as they are allowed to participate in global economies, only as their citizens share the fruit of human striving. If that sounds naive, so be it, but no system yet has failed to increase its support of personal freedoms as an economic middle-class emerged. No system.

It is this goal for which we should set our foreign policy.

Railing publicly at China over civil abuses only sets their chin. China is improving the lot of their population and along with that has come the easing of personal restrictions that cannot be held back. Perhaps not fast enough for us, but happening. Russia may yet succeed on its way to a politically plural society, not by re-establishing communism, but by the irreversible process of human striving achieved, at however slow a pace.

The world will not go back to totalitarian governments once these doors have seen the crack of light. But portions of the world will edge forward at differing rates, dependent upon their culture and history and our willingness to trade with them, rather than arming dissident factions.

It should not be lost on us that Czechoslovakia split itself into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic peaceably and without confrontation, reflecting the ethnic, economic and cultural differences of the single nation so arbitrarily combined after WWI. It re-mapped itself by referendum, split up its military, divided the tanks and planes, decided upon flags, agreed on economic relationships and settled the multiplicity of detail by negotiation.

It is my opinion that Rand McNally will be busy for a century, re-mapping the world along new borders. Some of those borders will displease us.

Our foreign policy can either bloody itself endlessly, insisting upon what human striving will not support or providing as much encouragement as possible through economic exchange. That and the reality of man's desire to live in harmony among those with whom he feels most comfortable. A lot of borders will be changed in the process and many toes will be stepped upon.

It's interesting to me that no Marshall Plan nation has seen the desire to attack its neighbor. It's more interesting yet to see how the wars of the world follow economic hardship and concentrate themselves among the nations where human striving is not valued or allowed to blossom, where power and profit divides itself at the top.

The lesson of George Marshall's genius has been too quickly forgotten in the past fifty years. Virtually destroyed after WWII, Germany and Japan might have been abandoned to whatever chaotic government they could devise, left to the tyranny of gang-rule and the impossible burden of reparations. In place of that, Marshall and MacArthur, two generals of war, forced upon them democratic governments and the will to see those governments through. Rebuilding their industrial and economic base, as well as establishing free self government has resulted in the rebirth of two of the free world's most staunch and able supporters. It took money and power, as well as the discipline to get out when the time came to get out, but the lesson is there to be studied.

Peace will not come to the world by some mysterious philosophical persuasion. It will come by way of nations too busy trading with one another to go to war.

Our foreign policy would do well to support such activity and depend to a lesser degree upon the delicate and impossible balance of arming competing power structures in countries where human striving is not valued.

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