Victor Ponta who is the prime minister of Romania , has
penned an article that was published in the March 21, 2014 issue of the Wall
Street Journal under the title: “Forging a Trans-Atlantic Superpower” and the
subtitle: “To defend the West, we must form a full-fledged EU-U.S. Economic
union.” The remarkable thing about this piece is that it exposes the state of
anxiety in which the former Eastern European countries now live, and the grand
solutions they believe could save them from what lies ahead.
The anxiety is not caused by the fear they may be invaded by
Russia as it is by the sense that the benefits accruing to them from their
integration into the club of the Western Democracies may have run its course,
and has reached a plateau after which very little will be added to their
societies. He does not admit to any of that, of course, but he tries to make
use of the security issue to argue for an economic policy he believes will
benefit his country for a while longer as well as the other nations that left
the Soviet orbit.
He begins his presentation with a thud: “The dramatic events
in Ukraine
illustrate a historic moral hazard.” He goes on to say that the hazard created
a mindset which got the countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to
neglect their security. They were not ignorant of what was going on, he hastens
to say, but their membership in the EU and in NATO made them believe – like
everyone else – in the “end of history.” And so they turned complacent when it
came to matters relating to national security.
Those matters out of the way, the leaders of the countries
in the region spent their time settling old domestic scores, something that got
them to lose the “instinct for thinking big,” he says. He then explains
something that many of us old-timers knew too well. It is that Romania , of all
the Eastern European nations, displayed megalomaniac tendencies of the most
extreme kind under the reign of Ceausescu. He now begins to make his pitch for
a new world order: “Only together do Europe and the U.S. stand a chance of keeping
liberal democracy as the doctrine for organizing world affairs.” That's
thinking big, alright, perhaps as big as the massive buildings that Ceausescu
loved to build all over the country before his people shot him and his wife to
death.
But Victor Ponta does not sound convincing when he talks
about spreading liberal democracy around the world. He knows this will happen
if and when the local people are ready for it, not when democracy is imposed on
them from the outside. However, this kind of talk is what sells in America today,
and so he links it to his favorite subject: the economy. He put it this way:
“the recent events in Ukraine
show that wielding power internationally depends on a player's ability to both
impart and withstand economic shocks.” In other words, he is saying to America and to Western
Europe : If you want the world to become liberal and democratic,
you will have to strengthen your economies; something you can only do by fully
integrating with us.
Here are his words: “The solution lies in deeper economic
integration within the Western world … between Europe and the U.S. … The
endgame is an Atlantic economic superpower … whose hard security would be
guaranteed by NATO.” And make no mistake about it, dear reader, this is not
something he thought about on the spur of the moment or even yesterday. It is
something that has fully matured in his head over a long period of time;
something for which he even worked out the details.
He missed nothing, and left none of the details to chance:
“before we can begin to work toward full trans-Atlantic economic union, we must
first...” He goes on to list and discuss conditions that range from dealing
with the psychology of distrust among the citizens to economic fairness, the
environment, social mobility and entrenched thinking on both sides.
When done with this, he promises that thinking big will
return to these nations, and the “grand Western Project” will be realized. And Romania will be
there, he says: “strong and dignified” shouldering its share of responsibility
within the Atlantic superpower, throughout all stages of the project's coming
into being.
What seems to escape this man is that Western
Europe does not look forward to reviving the glory days of a
bygone era. What these people seek is a steady state sort of existence that
aims not to challenge and beat all the others, but to cooperate with them for
the good of mankind. With the exception of a handful of backward looking
hotheads in America ,
the average American today is beginning to think that way also.