April 08, 2005, 12:49 p.m.
Warm Cold Warrior
The Pope against the Soviet Empire

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the April 25, 2005, issue of National Review.

Where were you when Karol Wojtyla was elected pope? The question is not a flippant one because if you remember, you may also recall what a very different world you were living in. The differences went far beyond bell-bottom trousers and those curious male hairstyles that looked like melting helmets. Our assumptions about the world had been set by events such as OPEC's oil-price hikes, the conquest of South Vietnam by the North, the sudden presence in several African countries of Cuban troops, and the "stagflation" that was enfeebling Western economies. It definitely seemed like — in Cyril Connolly's phrase — "closing time in the gardens of the West," which was reeling under attacks from Communist guerrillas, oil monopolists, and Middle Eastern terrorists. Soviet leaders and theoreticians speculated confidently that the international "correlation of forces" had shifted against the West decisively. What realist would then have thought that a pope — a pope! — could make a difference to these decisions by the God of Historical Inevitability?

Not me, I will confess. As it happens I saw the emergence of Pope John Paul II on a television set in a Hong Kong hotel. If I was slow to recognize that something of great historical significance had happened, that was perhaps because of the drama of the previous pope's election and sudden death. Italian friends had told me he was a strong anti-Communist. His death suggested that even that slender source of resistance to the general European drift leftward had been removed by fate.

Also, I was in the middle of a month-long visit to Asia, which then seemed to be the preserve of non-Christian faiths. Rome was far away. What I noticed mainly was how nations like Thailand were gradually shifting their political orientation. A tourist guide in Bangkok fed me the official line: Thailand, which had historically maneuvered to retain its independence from European colonists, now had to reflect the U.S. defeat in Vietnam by shifting toward Hanoi and Peking. Visits to Burma — a ramshackle and corrupt leftist military dictatorship — and Taiwan demonstrated the clear superiority of free-market capitalism over Asian socialism. But would Asia be allowed to choose freely? Or would Communist China draw all into its economic and political sphere of influence?

When I arrived back in London, I found great excitement about the new pope. But it was a curiously apolitical (and even areligious) excitement. The very fact that he was a vigorous and active prelate — he was rumored to ski — seemed to be the basis of his popularity. The additional fact that he was Polish was then felt to be as much a threat to the Vatican's Italian bureaucracy as to the Kremlin.

In almost all other respects nothing seemed to have changed. The intellectual and moral atmosphere of the West was exhausted and defeatist. This was the age of "malaise" — no, Jimmy Carter never used the phrase; he didn't need to; he embodied it — and of "limits to growth." We were about to run out of every raw material our industries used, except for those we might be allowed to buy at sky-high prices from vengeful Third World monopolies. Either way, we would have to accept a steady reduction of our standard of living. Living in these reduced circumstances, the U.S. would necessarily have to abandon its "inordinate fear of Communism" and learn to live with Brezhnevism...

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