The Audacity of Hope

jeans, sharing cigarettes and the music on their iPods as they wandered Kiev’s graceful
boulevards—underscored the seemingly irreversible process of economic, if not
political, integration between East and West.
That was part of the reason, I sensed, why Lugar and I were greeted so warmly at these
various military installations. Our presence not only promised money for security
systems and fencing and monitors and the like; it also indicated to the men and women
who worked in these facilities that they still in fact mattered. They had made careers,
had been honored, for perfecting the tools of war. Now they found themselves presiding
over remnants of the past, their institutions barely relevant to nations whose people had
shifted their main attention to turning a quick buck.
Certainly that’s how it felt in Donetsk, an industrial town in the southeastern portion of
Ukraine where we stopped to visit an installation for the destruction of conventional
weapons. The facility was nestled in the country, accessed by a series of narrow roads
occasionally crowded with goats. The director of the facility, a rotund, cheerful man
who reminded me of a Chicago ward superintendent, led us through a series of dark
warehouse-like structures in various states of disrepair, where rows of workers nimbly
dismantled an assortment of land mines and tank ordnance, and empty shell casings
were piled loosely into mounds that rose to my shoulders. They needed U.S. help, the
director explained, because Ukraine lacked the money to deal with all the weapons left
over from the Cold War and Afghanistan—at the pace they were going, securing and
disabling these weapons might take sixty years. In the meantime weapons would remain
scattered across the country, often in shacks without padlocks, exposed to the elements,
not just ammunition but high-grade explosives and shoulder-to-air missiles—tools of
destruction that might find their way into the hands of warlords in Somalia, Tamil
fighters in Sri Lanka, insurgents in Iraq.
As he spoke, our group entered another building, where women wearing surgical masks
stood at a table removing hexogen—a military-grade explosive—from various
munitions and placing it into bags. In another room, I happened upon a pair of men in
their undershirts, smoking next to a wheezing old boiler, flicking their ashes into an
open gutter filled with orange-tinted water. One of our team called me over and showed
me a yellowing poster taped to the wall. It was a relic of the Afghan war, we were told:
instructions on how to hide explosives in toys, to be left in villages and carried home by
unsuspecting children.
A testament, I thought, to the madness of men.
A record of how empires destroy themselves.
THERE’S A FINAL dimension to U.S. foreign policy that must be discussed—the
portion that has less to do with avoiding war than promoting peace. The year I was
born, President Kennedy stated in his inaugural address: “To those peoples in the huts
and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge
our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not
because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because
it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few