Real Peace Read Free Page B

Soviet Union into a much stronger adversary.
    Yet today there are many, especially in the Western business community, who share Lloyd George’s view. Their optimism, though commendable, is again based on faulty logic. Peace-through-trade did not work before, and it will not work now. As Konrad Adenauer told me in 1967 just before his death, “Trade is trade.” Nations enter into trading relationships in the hope of making a profit, and any nation with aggressive ambitions can be expected to use its profits in the pursuit of those ambitions.
    In both world wars nations that had traded with each other fought each other. Before World War II Japan had trade tieswith the U.S. that had been painstakingly built up since the nineteenth century. Germany traded extensively with each of the countries it invaded.
    In the end both nations’ leaders found their grievances and territorial ambitions to be far stronger than their desire to remain at peace and engage in peaceful commerce with their neighbors. Believing that they could profit more from war than from peace, they went to war. Their choice proved that just as weapons are dangerous only insofar as they may be used to resolve political differences, commerce with an adversary contributes to peace only if it is part of a larger structure designed to reduce political differences. Otherwise, by trading with an aggressive, expansionist power you are fueling a fire that could eventually consume you.
    The Myth of Peace Through Friendship . Some of the useful idiots put no faith in leaders. Others put far too much. The latter believe that if leaders would only meet and get to know one another, peace would follow as a matter of course. Since they think international conflict results primarily from misunderstanding and bad communication, they assume that friendships between nations and treaties and agreements designed to set the world right will inevitably result from friendships between national leaders.
    This has never been the case, in our century or in any other. William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson’s first secretary of state, believed war could be prevented if nations would agree to meet amicably to settle their disputes, and he signed treaties with 30 nations creating mechanisms for doing so. World War I followed fast on Bryan’s heels. In the 1930s Imperial Japan’s promise to observe the integrity of China did not prevent or delay its Invasion of Manchuria. In World War II Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, thus violating the two-year-old Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact.
    History is a pathetic junkyard of broken treaties. Yet naive idealists persist in believing that summits, state dinners, windy toasts, tearful bearhugs and abrazos, and solemn signing ceremonies are the very essence of diplomacy. They putgreat faith in good relations among leaders, and their hearts swell when they turn on the evening news and see two “former” adversaries grinning and tipping glasses at each other.
    The media frequently mistake such atmospherics for real diplomatic progress because they only scan the surface of events, accumulating photographs of smiles and handshakes to print and copies of agreements to excerpt and summarize. Following such a meeting the diplomatic correspondents count up all the smiles, handshakes, and agreements, scrutinize the texts of the dinner toasts, study how pleased the officials are with themselves on the flight home, determine how many souvenirs the diplomats’ wives bought, and then, relying on a journalistic calculus known only to themselves, pronounce the event a success or a failure. In the end they and their readers will probably learn little or nothing about what actually happened when the leaders sat down by themselves and tackled the substantive issues. In front of the cameras the leaders had been friends joined in the pursuit of peace, but behind closed doors they reverted to their real selves: aggressor,