Lenin is dead - but we're joining the party

The Telegraph UK:

It is 25 years since the birth of the Solidarity movement. With Iraq in political turmoil, the US administration is turning to post-communist Europe for inspiration

Dan Fried was a young desk officer at the State Department in Washington in August 1980 when a Polish electrician with a droopy walrus moustache climbed the walls of the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk to join the striking workers inside. Lech Walesa’s act of defiance was to mark the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire.

Not that anybody imagined at the time that emergence of the Solidarity trade union was any real threat to the monolithic communist bloc. Fried remembers well the comfy consensus that a divided Europe was a stable Europe and that talk of spreading democracy received little more than lip service in Western capitals.

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A quarter of a century later, as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, he is joining the celebrations in Gdansk marking the 25th anniversary of the creation of Solidarity. Walesa is there as well naturally, alongside the Polish president Alexander Kwasniewski, a former communist who is now one of President George W Bush’s closest European allies.

All very interesting as a historical reminder of those not-so-long ago days – though sometimes it feels like another age - when Europe seemed irrevocably split by the Iron Curtain and dictatorship was a way of life for half the Continent. But is it any more than that? Very much so, Fried told me before his trip.

For a plethora of senior State Department officials who cut their diplomatic teeth in Eastern Europe – including of course Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, a Russia expert – the experience of watching a transition to democracy that contemporary wisdom held to be impossible has shaped their world view.

So even as Iraq’s squabbling ethnic factions wrangle over the country’s proposed new constitution, to the delight of the told-you-so sceptics who have long predicted disaster for America’s ambitious goal of advancing democracy in the Middle East, Fried and friends are taking a very different view from Foggy Bottom (the Washington district that is home to the State Department).

“I’m proud to go there, not simply to commemorate a great democratic success of the past, but also because the lessons of Solidarity and what it taught us about freedom in the world is not confined to Eastern Europe. What was seen as impossible suddenly appeared inevitable,” he explains.

“Democracy has succeeded in countries of all the world’s great religions and on all the world’s inhabited continents. And if democracy can succeed anywhere in theory, it can succeed everywhere, also in theory. That does not mean it will, but it does mean that it can. And it does mean, most importantly, that there can be no principled reason why democracy cannot apply to one country or another country.”

Fried is of course not suggesting that the success of Solidarity means that freedom will inevitably reign in Iraq and the broader Middle East. Islamic terrorists and communist totalitarians are very different animals. “But it does mean that the old argument that certain countries are civilisationally ill-disposed to democracy is demonstrably false,” he insists.

Now, cynics would say there is a self-serving element to all of this. With American casualties in Iraq heading relentlessly towards the 2,000 mark, the political situation in Baghdad turmoil, US commanders giving confusingly mixed signals on plans for troop withdrawals and the outspoken mother of a dead soldier setting up an anti-war peace camp on the doorstep of Mr Bush’s Texas ranch, the Administration certainly needs to find solace where it can. And this week’s Gdansk celebrations clearly offer that.

But this is not just about Iraq. America’s ally Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian leader, is about to hold his country’s first multi-party presidential elections. Lebanon is all-but free of its long-term Syrian shackles. The former Soviet republics of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgizstan have dumped autocratic leaders.

Against that backdrop, maybe Washington is not being so naïve in hoping that events in a port on the Baltic 25 years ago have a resonance now for people living by the Tigris and Euphrates.

At the State Department, Fried is the part of the Rice revolution (he followed her there from the National Security Council in the White House where he held a similar portfolio). In the first term, Rice’s predecessor Colin Powell struck an often forlorn figure, regularly losing out in DC turf wars to the Pentagon and Vice-President Dick Cheney.

In barely six months in the job, Rice has reclaimed ownership of US foreign policy, thanks to her closeness to the president. In one of the most tangible results of this, she has been free to maintain a hectic travel schedule, while Powell often felt obliged to remain in Washington to try to defend his patch.

It has been a marked turnaround. Even among seasoned career diplomats who take changes in administration in their stride, there is a new spring in their step. “We’ll always be suspect because we’re foreign service men rather than political appointments, but it’s kinda nice not to be seen as the enemy anymore,” one high-ranking State Department official recently confided to me at a Washington steak house with evident relief.

Bush’s complete trust in his Secretary of State has also allowed her to pursue the sort of diplomatic initiatives that were off-limits to Powell.

For example, Christopher Hill, another veteran of eastern Europe and now the US delegate to the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear programme, has been allowed to hold one-to-one meetings with his Pyongyang counterparts – something that was off-limits during Powell’s tenure when the White House thought that agreeing to them would be seen as a sign of weakness.

Just as significant have been the personnel changes at the Pentagon, from where US foreign policy was effectively run during the first term in combination with Cheney’s office.

Although Donald Rumsfeld remains as Defence Secretary, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and number three Doug Feith have both moved on (to head the World Bank and spend more time with his family, respectively). The two men’s replacements are notably less ideologically-driven than their predecessors.

The result is that the confrontational first term style diplomacy – most notably with the likes of France and Germany over the Iraq war – has been replaced by more subtle, if ultimately no less determined, approach (with admittedly the marked exception of appointing John Bolton as the take-no-prisoners ambassador to the United Nations).

So although Mr Fried identified a greater support in Europe for pushing for democratic reform in the Middle East – singling out French president Jacques Chirac’s backing for the so-called Cedar revolution in Lebanon - he declined to declare this a victory for Washington over its former transatlantic critics.

Tellingly, when I referred to Mr Rumsfeld’s description of Old and New Europe (in which “Old” was a distinctly pejorative term for western European critics of the war), the Assistant Secretary said with a twinkle in his eye: “We don’t look at the debate in terms of Old and New Europe? How very first term.”

And how very second term that from their Foggy Bottom redoubt, State Department officials can now laugh off first term Pentagon doctrines in an on-the-record briefing.