Johns Hopkins dean Paul Wolfowitz '65 discusses world's dangerous future

Johns Hopkins University dean Paul Wolfowitz speaks to a fellow classmate from Cornell's Class of '65, Lynn Korda Kroll, following his talk June 9 in the Proscenium Theatre of the Center for Theatre Arts. Robert Barker/University Photography

By Susan Lang

As the bloodiest century in history closes, this year's college graduates enter a world "that has been incredibly transformed since we were undergrads living through the Cuban missile crisis," said former ambassador and Cornell alumnus Paul Wolfowitz '65, currently dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He addressed his Cornell classmates and Reunion 2000 participants in a forum June 9 at the Center for Theatre Arts, sponsored by the Class of 1965.

"For much of my life, I thought communism was going to be an evil fact of life," Wolfowitz said, but recently, he added, the world has changed with the fall of both the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, the peaceful dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, the dwindling of military dictatorships, the development of commonplace negotiations between the Arabs and Israelis and the springing up of democracies throughout East Asia.

"The international experience of today's graduates, who were born after the Vietnam War, has been extraordinarily benign," said Wolfowitz who, before he became a dean at Johns Hopkins in 1994, was U.S. under-secretary of defense for policy -- the principal civilian official responsible for strategy, plans and policy -- under Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. From 1986 to 1989, he served as U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia. Wolfowitz also has held various federal government positions in the state department and teaching positions at Yale University and the National War College. Raised in Ithaca, where his father was a professor of mathematics at Cornell, Wolfowitz also is a graduate of Ithaca High School.

But this changed world is more than a series of "pleasant surprises," he continued. "There are fundamental trends that make me extremely optimistic as to where we are heading." He pointed to striking similarities to the world 100 years ago, such as globalization, "incredible economic progress," technological advances that transform lives and economies and an absence of any major war or threat of war among major powers. Today's world also enjoys, he said, "the extraordinary acceptance of democracy" in more countries than ever.

"But we cannot adopt a 'what me worry?' complacency," Wolfowitz warned. "We have to peek around the corner."

What Wolfowitz sees as one more similarity to the world a century ago -- that is "not so cheery and puts a question mark over the great hopes for peace, prosperity and progress," he said -- is a world that has to grapple with emerging economic powers that could become major military powers. A century ago the emerging threats were Germany and Japan; today they are countries in Asia and Latin America that are coming out of poverty at extremely rapid rates.

"The 20th century was great for us but not so good for others. We have an astonishingly short memory -- historical amnesia -- that leaves us unprepared to deal with future dangers," he said, and he recalled George Santayana's warning: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Our advantage, he said, is that we're part of a powerful Western alliance that includes Japan and has a common view of what the world should be like. And he stressed that we all need to remember that individuals can make a difference.

In the question-and-answer session, Wolfowitz said the U.S. strategy for dealing with pockets of the world that are "breeding grounds for problems," such as the Balkans, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, should be to find regional successes and reinforce them. From these pockets of hope and success, he said, neighboring countries of similar cultures will say: "If they can do it, why can't we?"