To Move the World

To Move the World by Jeffrey D. Sachs

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Authors: Jeffrey D. Sachs
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that peace would have to be built step by step:
    Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions—on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace; no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation.
    Kennedy thereby arrived at his second definition: “For peace is a process—a way of solving problems.”
    But how can peace be reached with such an implacable foe as the Soviet Union? Begin, said Kennedy, with a realistic assessment of the conditions for peace:
    World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor, it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.
    Moreover, echoing the historian and theorist B. H. Liddell Hart, Kennedy reminded Americans that:
    history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors.
    “So let us persevere,” said Kennedy.
    Balancing idealism and practicality, the grand vision of peace with the specific steps to get there, Kennedy charted the way forward with a lesson in good management that can serve a thousand purposes:
    By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all people to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly towards it.
    Here, in one sentence, is the art of great leadership. Define a goal clearly. Explain how it can be achieved in manageable steps. Help others to share the goal—in part through great oratory. Their hopes will move them “irresistibly” toward the goal.
Our Attitude Toward the Soviet Union

 
    U.S. foreign policy speeches from 1945 until the Peace Speech contained a litany of sins committed by the Soviet Union, matched by proclamations of America’s unerring and unswerving goodwill. Kennedy sought to make a very different point. He was not interested in condemning the Soviet Union, in “piling up debating points,” as he put it later in the speech, but rather in convincing Americans that the Soviet Union shared America’s interests in peace, and so could be a partner in peace.
    Kennedy began this next section of the speech with a passing critique of Soviet propaganda, dryly commenting on it by quoting the scriptures: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.” (Secretary of State Dean Acheson had used the same biblical reference in 1949 congressional testimony about Soviet opposition to NATO.) But Kennedy quickly turned the tables. He did not want to castigate the Soviet Union but to warn Americans “not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”
    For Kennedy’s real intention was to humanize the “other side,” to show Americans the Soviet interests in peace. He started by reminding Americans not to demonize the Soviet people, however much Americans might abhor the communist system:
    No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage.
    Peace, Kennedy was emphasizing, requires respect of the other party, a fair and

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