Starting in the 1970s, Rwanda used to be a favorite laboratory for international aid. Largely because it was so small, it was considered a fine place to test how effective various development strategies could be in a land with a cooperative government and good transportation.Now it is a laboratory of a different sort - a microcosm from which to learn what can happen when politicians seek to ride sectarian forces of hate. This is, after all, not a question just for a tiny country in East...
Every once in a while, some of our best thinkers seem to agree in a new synthesis of America's role in the world. So I have sensed it recently, in the important ongoing debate about spreading American democracy throughout the world.First, last spring, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser under the Carter administration, reflected in a major speech: "What we see before us is not a New World Order but global turmoil and philosophical confusion. It is...
EVEN IF you doubted the Pentagon's persistent characterization of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc as 10 feet tall, the pace of events there now is truly breathtaking.I remember prowling around Eastern Europe in 1982 and the Soviet Union in 1983 and asking myself how such backward and repressive countries could possibly be as strong militarily as they were said to be by the U.S. State and Defense Departments. Here were societies that couldn't make their...
WHEN THEY jeered and jostled Vaclav Havel, Slovak nationalists were giving a demonstration of the overheated ethnic passion that has become the leading threat to their country. Mr. Havel, the president of Czechoslovakia and a genuine democrat, is regarded in the West as a hero. But to Slovaks, or at least to some of them, he has become a much resented symbol of Czech influence and, as a Marxist would say, hegemony. The nationalists are now calling for secession Is this going to be the fate of...
WASHINGTON - Every once in a while, some of our best thinkers seem to agree in a new synthesis of America's role in the world. So I have sensed it recently, in the important ongoing debate about spreading American democracy throughout the world.First, last spring, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser under the Carter administration, reflected in a major speech: "What we see before us is not a New World Order but global turmoil and...