Global Perils in Perspective.

• Author: Conquest, Robert
• Position: Brief Article

War, revolution, and peace are the themes to which the Hoover Institution, of which I am a fellow, is formally dedicated. The first two are what we cope with. The last is what we hope and work for; it now prevails over a large, but by no means as yet decisive, part of the earth.

Revolution, in the extreme twentieth-century sense of the seizure of power by a fanatic ideological group, has largely faded. But we do see destructive revolutions fueled by lesser aims, and the heirs of the old totalitarian revolutions remain in power in a number of untrustworthy countries, some of them equipped with nuclear weapons.

As for war, minor wars keep breaking out and the threat of larger and worse conflicts still looms.

From the knowledge accumulated on the background and history of the world, what have we learned? We can certainly see that the lessons have not been properly attended to--in part because of Western failure to see that the necessary education is given to our citizens and politicians.

What, then, are the lessons that need learning? First, history is an immensely complex weave of facts and forces that produces unforeseeable concatenations, especially so in what has become a global, and thus even more complex, perspective. We must cover what may appear to us now as unlikely eventualities.

Another major lesson from history is that powerful human beings and movements have acted irrationally, both in the sense that they harbored insane ideas and in the sense that they miscalculated and misunderstood the motives and intentions of others.

The world will not be safe unless the open society, and nations not possessed by modern fanaticisms and archaic enmities, prevails everywhere. Clearly the largely Western political culture is the hope and can be the core of such a development.

But the necessary...