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Published on 07/13/1998 All articles from this issue

Freedom: An American heritage

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By William J. Perry

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry was the keynote speaker at a July 4 veterans' memorial monument dedication in Shoup Park. Perry served in the position from February 1994 to January 1997 and still advises the Clinton administration on foreign policy matters. Perry currently resides in Los Altos Hills and works on the Stanford University campus for the Center for International Security and Arms Control. The following is the full text of his speech.

We are approaching the end of the 20th century. And what a century it has been - a century of triumphs and a century of tragedies. The tragedies included two world wars and a Cold War. The world wars resulted in the deaths of tens of millions, soldiers and civilians alike. We owe our freedom today to the veterans of those wars, both living and dead. I would like to ask the veterans of the world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Desert Storm to stand for recognition by this audience. And I would like to ask for a moment of silence for all those veterans who lost their lives in these wars.

As tragic as these wars were, the Cold War would have been even more tragic if the "balance of terror," which characterized the Cold War, had failed. Indeed, the failure of deterrence would have resulted in a supreme tragedy - no less than the end of civilization. But deterrence was successful, and that tragedy was averted. We owe this successful deterrence to the men and women of our armed forces today, who serve our nation so well. I would like to ask all of the members of the armed forces who are here today to stand for recognition. This audience should understand that our American military is the most powerful armed force in the world today. I can tell you that I was proud to be their secretary of defense; indeed, all Americans can be proud of them, and all Americans should support them.

The century also has seen the collapse of the great European monarchies, and the rise of fascism and communism. And finally the century has seen a veritable explosion of democracy, especially in Eastern Europe and Latin America. This explosion of democracy is surely one of the great triumphs of our time, and a most hopeful note on which to end the century.

Thomas Jefferson, whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed that our nation was "conceived in liberty," also believed that this conception of liberty would spread to all nations of the world. Let me read from one of his last letters to John Adams: "I shall not die," he wrote, "without a hope that light and liberty are on a steady advance. We have seen once with the record of history the complete eclipse of the human mind continuing for centuries ... even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and liberties of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore the light and liberty to them. In short, the flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them."

On this Fourth of July, 222 years after Jefferson declared that our nation was "conceived in liberty," his vision that this liberty would spread to other nations is finally coming true.

Democracy really is on the march. But why is democracy so important to the world? The German theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, expressed it best: "Man's capacity for good," he wrote, " makes democracy possible; his capacity for evil, makes democracy indispensable."

Because Americans believe that, we support young and fragile democracies all over the world and we work to promote democracy in those countries still ruled by authoritarian regimes.

The most obvious example of a major country where democracy has not yet prevailed is China. To support the peaceful evolution of democracy in that country, American policy under our last six presidents has been one of constructive engagement with China. This engagement policy began with the signing of the Shanghai communiqués in 1972 by President Nixon. Since then, it certainly has had its ups and downs; it went:

up with the recognition of China in 1979 by President Carter;

down with China's suppression of the Tienanmen demonstrations in 1989 and the subsequent sanctions by the U.S.;

up with President Clinton's resumption of engagement in 1994;

down with China's firing of missiles bracketing Taiwan in 1996 and the subsequent deployment of two American carrier battle groups to Taiwan;

and up with the meeting last year in the U.S. of President Jiang Zemin and President Clinton.

In January, I visited China, spending three days in Beijing, two in Shanghai, one in Hong Kong, and three in Taiwan. In Beijing I met with the president, the defense minister, the vice foreign minister, and the chief of general staff. When I returned home, I reported to our government that the mood in Beijing is very positive for a continuing strengthening of our engagement, but that difficult problems will persist for many years, especially in our continuing differences over human rights. I also reported that the economic boom continues in China, manifested most dramatically in Shanghai, which is looking more and more like Manhattan; and that the transition in Hong Kong is going remarkably smoothly. And I reported on my efforts to rekindle the cross-strait dialog between Taiwan and the mainland; Taiwan will continue to be a flash point as long as the two sides do not encourage cross-strait traffic, trade and dialog. In short, I encouraged the President to make his planned visit to China as soon as possible.

Just yesterday, President Clinton completed his historic visit to China in which he spoke directly to hundreds of millions of Chinese, telling them that all Americans believed that the brutal suppression of the democratic movement in Tienanmen Square was wrong. And, as he left China, he told them and all the world that he believed that authoritarian government in China was on the wrong side of history, that China was destined to have a democratic government, and that this democratic government would evolve peacefully in the next few years. Certainly a democratic China is in our interest, and in the interest of world peace, and we should do everything we can to encourage that development.

I have myself just returned from a three-day meeting with senior officials of the Chinese government, where we worked on plans to further our bilateral cooperation designed to improve the security and stability in the western Pacific, and to provide an environment where democracy can take root in China. Success is far from guaranteed in these efforts with China, but considering what is at stake - a nation that has more than a billion people; a nation that has nuclear weapons; a nation that has one of the fastest growing economies in the world - I believe that we should make every effort to succeed, whatever the difficulties.

We also need to work to support the fragile governments in nations that have recently opted for democracy, especially in Latin America and Eastern Europe. The most important such example is Russia, since they have been in recent history an enemy whose nuclear arsenal threatened our very survival.

I can characterize our present concern with the future in Russia by asking a question: "What if Russia, early in the next century, were to go the way of Germany in the 1930s?"

By asking the question this way, I am recalling the fate of Germany's Weimar Republic after the first world war, which has been stated brilliantly by the Stanford historian, Gordon A. Craig: "While totalitarian regimes were consolidating their power in Russia and in Italy after World War I," he wrote, "an experiment was being conducted in Germany to determine whether a democratic republic could be made to work in that country. After 15 years of trial and crisis, it failed, and the ultimate consequences of that failure were a second world war and the deaths of millions of men, women, and children. If some benevolent spirit had granted the peoples of Germany and the neighboring states even a fragmentary glance at what lay in store for them in the 1940s, it is impossible to believe that they would not have made every possible sacrifice to maintain the viable Weimar Republic against its enemies, but that kind of foresight is not given in this world, and the German Republic always lacked friends and supporters when it needed them most." We should never believe that a failure of democracy in Russia would affect only Russians.

Indeed, it is clear that our long-term security depends on dealing, and dealing effectively, with the security problems associated with the bold attempts of the Eastern European countries to restructure their political and economic systems.

We already have a rich menu of preventive defense programs designed to assist the nuclear nations of the former Soviet Union in their transitions. Even though, as the secretary of defense, these programs were my highest priority, I expect that many of you are not familiar with them so let me give you the highlights of just one.

During my tenure as secretary of defense, I authorized the spending of more than $2 billion of defense funds to facilitate the dismantling of 4,000 nuclear weapons, the destruction of 800 launchers, and the total elimination of nuclear weapons in three nations (Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan). Ukraine was particularly significant, since they had the third largest nuclear force in the world. The so-called Trilateral Agreement, under which Ukraine became non-nuclear, was reached in January 1994. I set about immediately to implement it.

In March 1994, with the permission of President Kravchuk of Ukraine, I visited the missile field in Pervomaysk - the crown jewel of the ICBM sites in the former Soviet Union. A Russian general took me deep underground to the control center, where two officers demonstrated a simulated launch, up to but not including the release of weapons. Never shall I forget that experience, watching these young officers rehearse launching 700 nuclear warheads, all aimed at targets in the U.S.

After the visit to the control center, I witnessed the removal of the first group of the 700 warheads. I returned to Pervomaysk in March 1995, and witnessed the removal of the first group of missiles. I returned again in January 1996, and the Ukrainian minister of defense, Russian minister of defense and I participated in the destruction of the first group of silos.

In the summer of 1996 I made my last visit to Pervomaysk, where I joined with the minister of defense of Russia and the minister of defense of Ukraine, and together we planted sunflowers in soil that used to contain a nuclear missile silo.

Ukraine is now nuclear-weapons free, and the Pervomaysk missile field is now a productive sunflower field.

I have given you one of the highlights of the programs that the United States is undertaking to transform our Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union and China into today's efforts to build security and stability - to finally fulfill Thomas Jefferson's vision of a democratic world - a world "conceived in liberty."

As we work to realize this vision, we should be guided by Elie Wiesel: "We must remember," he wrote, "that peace is not God's gift to his creatures - peace is our gift to each other."

That is, peace will not just happen; it is not the natural order of things; but peace does go hand in hand with democracy. So we must work together to support democracy around the world, so that we may give this gift to each other: a secure and peaceful world for our children and for our grandchildren.