And in a quiet, residential neighborhood of Kiev, we received a tour of the Ukraine’s version of the Centers for Disease Control, a modest three-story facility that looked like a high school science lab. At one point during our tour, after seeing windows open for lack of air-conditioning and metal strips crudely bolted to door jambs to keep out mice, we were guided to a small freezer secured by nothing more than a seal of string. A middle-aged woman in a lab coat and surgical mask pulled a few test tubes from the freezer, waving them around a foot from my face and saying something in Ukrainian.
“That is anthrax,” the translator explained, pointing to the vial in the woman’s right hand. “That one,” he said, pointing to the one in the left hand, “is the plague.”
I looked behind me and noticed Lugar standing toward the back of the room.
“You don’t want a closer look, Dick?” I asked, taking a few steps back myself.
“Been there, done that,” he said with a smile.
There were moments during our travels when we were reminded of the old Cold War days. At the airport in Perm, for example, a border officer in his early twenties detained us for three hours because we wouldn’t let him search our plane, leading our staffs to fire off telephone calls to the U.S. embassy and Russia’s foreign affairs ministry in Moscow. And yet most of what we heard and saw — the Calvin Klein store and Maserati showroom in Red Square Mall; the motorcade of SUVs that pulled up in front of a restaurant, driven by burly men with ill-fitting suits who once might have rushed to open the door for Kremlin officials but were now on the security detail of one of Russia’s billionaire oligarchs; the throngs of sullen teenagers in T-shirts and low-riding jeans, sharing cigarettes and the music on their iPods as they wandered Kiev’s graceful boulevards — underscored the seemingly irreversible process of economic, if not political, integration between East and West.
That was part of the reason, I sensed, why Lugar and I were greeted so warmly at these various military installations. Our presence not only promised money for security systems and fencing and monitors and the like; it also indicated to the men and women who worked in these facilities that they still in fact mattered. They had made careers, had been honored, for perfecting the tools of war. Now they found themselves presiding over remnants of the past, their institutions barely relevant to nations whose people had shifted their main attention to turning a quick buck.
Certainly that’s how it felt in Donetsk, an industrial town in the southeastern portion of Ukraine where we stopped to visit an installation for the destruction of conventional weapons. The facility was nestled in the country, accessed by a series of narrow roads occasionally crowded with goats. The director of the facility, a rotund, cheerful man who reminded me of a Chicago ward superintendent, led us through a series of dark warehouse-like structures in various states of disrepair, where rows of workers nimbly dismantled an assortment of land mines and tank ordnance, and empty shell casings were piled loosely into mounds that rose to my shoulders. They needed U.S. help, the director explained, because Ukraine lacked the money to deal with all the weapons left over from the Cold War and Afghanistan — at the pace they were going, securing and disabling these weapons might take sixty years. In the meantime weapons would remain scattered across the country, often in shacks without padlocks, exposed to the elements, not just ammunition but high-grade explosives and shoulder-to-air missiles — tools of destruction that might find their way into the hands of warlords in Somalia, Tamil fighters in Sri Lanka, insurgents in Iraq.
As he spoke, our group entered another building, where women wearing surgical masks stood at a table removing hexogen — a military-grade explosive — from various munitions and placing it into bags. In another room, I happened upon a pair of men in their undershirts, smoking next to a wheezing old boiler, flicking their ashes into an open gutter filled with orange-tinted water. One of our team called me over and showed me a yellowing poster taped to the wall. It was a relic of the Afghan war, we were told: instructions on how to hide explosives in toys, to be left in villages and carried home by unsuspecting children.
A testament, I thought, to the madness of men.
A record of how empires destroy themselves.
THERE’S A FINAL dimension to U.S. foreign policy that must be discussed — the portion that has less to do with avoiding war than promoting peace. The year I was born, President Kennedy stated in his inaugural address: “To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required — not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” Forty-five years later, that mass misery still exists. If we are to fulfill Kennedy’s promise — and serve our long-term security interests — then we will have to go beyond a more prudent use of military force. We will have to align our policies to help reduce the spheres of insecurity, poverty, and violence around the world, and give more people a stake in the global order that has served us so well.
Of course, there are those who would argue with my starting premise — that any global system built in America’s image can alleviate misery in poorer countries. For these critics, America’s notion of what the international system should be — free trade, open markets, the unfettered flow of information, the rule of law, democratic elections, and the like — is simply an expression of American imperialism, designed to exploit the cheap labor and natural resources of other countries and infect non-Western cultures with decadent beliefs. Rather than conform to America’s rules, the argument goes, other countries should resist America’s efforts to expand its hegemony; instead, they should follow their own path to development, taking their lead from left-leaning populists like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, or turning to more traditional principles of social organization, like Islamic law.
I don’t dismiss these critics out of hand. America and its Western partners did design the current international system, after all; it is our way of doing things — our accounting standards, our language, our dollar, our copyright laws, our technology, and our popular culture — to which the world has had to adapt over the past fifty years. If overall the international system has produced great prosperity in the world’s most developed countries, it has also left many people behind — a fact that Western policy makers have often ignored and occasionally made worse.
Ultimately, though, I believe critics are wrong to think that the world’s poor will benefit by rejecting the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy. When human rights activists from various countries come to my office and talk about being jailed or tortured for their beliefs, they are not acting as agents of American power. When my cousin in Kenya complains that it’s impossible to find work unless he’s paid a bribe to some official in the ruling party, he hasn’t been brainwashed by Western ideas. Who doubts that, if given the choice, most of the people in North Korea would prefer living in South Korea, or that many in Cuba wouldn’t mind giving Miami a try?
No person, in any culture, likes to be bullied. No person likes living in fear because his or her ideas are different. Nobody likes being poor or hungry, and nobody likes to live under an economic system in which the fruits of his or her labor go perpetually unrewarded. The system of free markets and liberal democracy that now characterizes most of the developed world may be flawed; it may all too often reflect the interests of the powerful over the powerless. But that system is constantly subject to change and improvement — and it is precisely in this openness to change that market-based liberal democracies offer people around the world their best chance at a better life.