And now, Liberia, which should have been so different . . .
Liberia, after all, was to be not only an experiment in civilization, but an example. Founded by freed American slaves in the early 1800s, the small country in west Africa had land, independence and a reasonably educated population.
Yet this week the United States sent military helicopters to evacuate Americans from the capital of Monrovia. The country had again slipped into savage killing between ethnic factions. And young thugs, often dressed garishly in women’s wigs or running naked through the streets of destruction, set off on new rampages.
It may seem that there is nothing the world can do, faced with these “Liberias.”
But that is too oversimplified, too pessimistic. For the still-civilized countries can do something–and it is time we got on with it.
No one has diagnosed the illnesses better than author Robert Kaplan, who has traveled by land all over these disintegrating societies, finding everywhere “young men with restless, scanning eyes . . . young men everywhere, hordes of them . . . like loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting.”
In his brilliant new book, “The End of the Earth,” Kaplan finds that these societies with their “premodern formlessness” of the wars were “not merely sideshows of the Cold War but were harbingers of the post-Cold War world, which would include more of the same in Bosnia, the Caucasus, Somalia, Liberia, Kashmir, Sierra Leone, and so on.”
That turbulent post-Cold War world did not come out of nowhere. As Soviet communism was collapsing, the ideological and repressive center, which held many of its own republics and many countries of the Third World together, was no longer there. Disparate peoples across the globe did indeed become “loose molecules.”
Despite the enormous appeal of both democracy and free enterprise to the entire world after the Soviet Union began collapsing in the late 1980s, the Western democracies ironically subverted themselves in a peculiar way.
Instead of adopting an aggressive political and military approach, the democracies adopted odd policies of neutralism toward conflict in the world. Sociologists such as Texas A&M’s Stipe Mestrovic have traced how a non-judgmental, well-meaning but essentially naively neutralist “post-modernism” has met post-communism head-on in forgotten corners of the globe like Liberia.
In fact, acted out before our eyes every day in one part of the world or another is the greatest mismatch of power since Vietnam.
In Vietnam in the 1960s and early ’70s, the United States employed a vast, traditional, technologically supreme military machine against a mobile, impeccably disciplined and ideologically convinced enemy. We never addressed the real terms of the war.
In this post-Cold War world of the 1990s, we are moving from a liberal world view that eschews any hint of that old American “triumphalism” and addresses a Liberia in disintegration, as well as the new “situations” in Russia and even China, with tools of negotiation, conflict-resolution and persuasion that would be more appropriate for a Vermont town meeting.
And so, day after day, from one end of the globe to the other, we see our military–the symbol of our power and determination–become evacuators of embassies, peacemakers, humanitarian workers, cheerful assistants, neutral negotiators and non-judgmental exhumers of the remains of massacres, crash-site investigators and honor-guards for funerals of dead Americans.
And, inside Liberia itself, there actually is an African peacekeeper force, which could be the harbinger of future interventions for peace and justice. But as the brilliant Ghana-born political scientist, George Ayittey of American University, points out, those peacekeepers “have no mandate to take an aggressive stance. We should see the Liberian fighters for what they are–bandits and loafers. These are the new wars of the opportunists. There is nothing in African tradition to support them. If the international community could rid us of these vermin, fine.”
This is not to say that Liberia would change overnight, even if the United States were to adopt a more forceful and sure use of its power. The civil war, which started there when the “loose molecule” backwoodsmen and violent teenagers overthrew the old traditional ruling class in the early 1980s, has gone too far.
But a reassertion of American power in the world–to replace this present self-imposed ineffectiveness–would be a first step toward coherence.
The next step would be to “triage” certain hopeless countries–to write them off, at least for today’s policy-making–and focus instead on creating strong examples of healthy countries. And the final steps would be to identify the disintegrating crises at their inception and address them, and to strengthen on every level the socialization and employment of the “loose molecule” youth of the world.
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All of this will take time–but what doesn’t? The goods news is there is plenty we can do.