AN OPEN LETTER TO
THE U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE
R.K.Kent, Historian Secretary of
State,
Dear
Secretary of State (and former
Colleague at Stanford) In December
of 1992, I sent a 19-page memo to Your Predecessor Warren
Christopher. Although the
rest of the memo focused specifically on
“We are now the sole remaining super-power. What we do or fail to do in
the immediate future will undoubtedly have some lasting consequences. We might
be able to arrive at some sort of benign Pax Americana not
only among the formal states but also within them. On the other hand, our New
World Order bears an almost uncanny resemblance to the Nineteenth-century
Mission Civilizatrice; and we could thus become the most hated nation in the
world without really resolving any of the more serious internal conflicts. Where
the Communists repressed nationalisms, leaving them to smolder, we could easily
encourage their most irrational components by taking local sides. This is hard
to avoid, as will be illustrated in the case of
It is clear
that we cannot hide from the world’s problems
through Isolationism. No American would
wish our country to be widely hated because of its inept entries into local
conflicts. If isolationist perceptions are incompatible with
the status of a super-power and if an acceptable Pax Americana is to prevail, we
must do three fundamental things. One is to learn in-depth local histories in
order to find the context of each conflict and come to understand the
mentalities of nationalisms we must deal with. The second comes in two parts. We
need a really tough law barring our Congressional Representatives from lobbying
AGAINST particular ethnicities around the
globe. At the same time, we should not allow our media to stampede our
government into military actions. Objective and dispassionate journalism is
steadily losing ground to journalistic advocacy, probably the
most shallow enterprise at the moment. Thirdly, with
sophisticated knowledge of local histories we should be able to appeal to the
positive aspects of each nationalism.
Calls for Democracy and free markets alone
are not enough to end local conflicts and may even make them more intractable.”
Warren Christopher is a person of exceptional civility. He never even
acknowledged what turns out to be a prophetic statement with concrete ideas that
no one heeded some thirteen years ago or almost a decade before
9/11. I should
tell you that I am an American of Serb origin who has spent his professional
years in reconstructing the hitherto
denied
History of Africa, which I taught to both
undergraduates and graduate students at It is
entitled “Poisonous Trees and
History
Department, Berkeley,
CA. 94720 (510/642-1971)
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