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UNITED NATIONS — President George W. Bush had the courage and the conviction to state "No more Munichs" and "No more Yaltas." Proclaiming these stirring words on Polish soil added extraordinary political symbolism and evoked a historical comparison to President Ronald Reagan's imploring admonition in Berlin to the Soviets — "Mr. Gorbachev Tear Down This Wall." This time however, the seismic scale remained stable.
` Why? To state the obvious, the West won the Cold War and Central Europe is free of the Soviet Imperium. Recalling unpleasant history has a genuine resonance among the long suffering and spirited Poles and stirs resentment among the equally long suffering Russians; but for many West Europeans and Americans it creates a collective "Duh."
Munich 1938 alludes to the shameless sellout of Czechoslovakia to Hitler by an appeasement happy Britain and France, generally paving the way for WWII. The Yalta agreement of course refers to the de facto 1945 "partition" of Europe into the Soviet and Western spheres, signed on to by FDR and Uncle Joe Stalin after the Second World War.
Speaking in Warsw, President George Bush stated, "Yalta did not ratify a natural divide. It divided a living civilization. The partition of Europe was not a fact of geography. It was an act of violence." Bush added, "Our goal is to erase the false lines which have divided Europe for too long."
The problem in evoking the restive memories of Munich or Yalta is that for many people in the U.S. and Western Europe the terms are little more than obscure signposts to a historically illiterate generation. For George W. Bush to speak such stirring words with resounding rhetorical cords, rings hollow for the mass of this expensively educated but alas, historically illiterate generation.
We are too anesthetized by MTV and the cacophony of what purports to be music, and the drip feed of cable TV entertainment, that we can only deal in "sound bites" and simple ones at that . Why be complicated? The last President to possess a rhetorical gravitas was Ronald Reagan--Bill Clinton was marvelously glib but that's different.
I regularly and quite deliberately use such seminal events as the 1956 Hungarian Revolution or the 1968 Prague Spring as a historical pillars on which to build my opinions and analysis; I oft discover that such references carry about as much weight with many as speaking of the Battle of Borodino or for that matter the Brooklyn Dodgers.
President Bush was wise to speak in Warsaw--Poland, after all brought us Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, Solidarity, and indeed lit the match to the powder keg of the Evil Empire. The Poles particularly appreciated the visit and as members of NATO and hopefully soon the European Union, will be "good Europeans"--which by the way they always were despite being subsumed in the collective stupidity of the Soviet Empire.
The Poles, the Czechs, and the Hungarians are as European as the French or Irish. The Baltic states--Estonia, Latvia an Lithuania are European too and if anyone has bothered reading history, quite a bit more Western than their longitude would suggest.
President Bush is pressing to bring the Baltic states into NATO.
Interestingly the Euroclass which met with Bush amid the street battles of Eurorabble in Gothenburg, Sweden has been less than cordial to the new inhaibtant of the White House. The answer is as simple as old time politics--with few exceptions (Spain, Austria, Italy) each of the European Union governments are Socialist--they logically prefer a fellow Social Democrat in the White House.
One may contrast this with Ronald Reagan who faced genuinely serious foreign policy challenges in Europe but could always cajole and charm the allies--yet the allies were people like Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, and even Francois Mitterrand.
Today at best we have Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, and Lionel Jospin. What do you expect from a Clinton Clone in 10 Downing, a Third Way socialist in Berlin, and an ex-Trotskyite in Paris? Compare such names to Churchill, Adenauer, and De Gaulle and you really want to cry.
President Bush made a magisterial address in Warsaw evoking the obvious but forgotten; the right from wrong; and renewing an American political benediction to the newly freed lands of Middle Europe. Well said W!
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
