political and military leadership. The founding of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 institutionalized this leadership,
and provided the member states with the means “to safeguard the
freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on
the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”^52
Starting with the Bandung Conference (1955) and the creation of
the Non-Aligned Movement (1961), which resulted from an unpre-
cedented Afro-Asian initiative, the defense of the free world was
actively extended to developing countries. This broadening of the
battle lines was a direct response to the anti-colonialism and oppo-
sition to all forms of international domination that defined the Non-
Aligned Movement from its very inception. A number of conservative
politicians and pundits, who viewed the ideology of non-alignment as
a radical rejection of Western policies, maintained that the emerging
North–South confrontation was just an outgrowth of the East–West
conflict.^53 However reductive that interpretation may have been, it
was not entirely baseless. For even though many Third World gov-
ernments kept close ties with the West, the critique of the world order
they articulated collectively was in many ways similar to the official
discourse of the socialist countries.
For four decades, the rhetoric of the free world legitimized the
West’s hard line against communism and relative tolerance of right-
wing dictatorships. In a famous 1979 article, Jeane Kirpatrick, who
later became Ronald Reagan’s first ambassador to the United Nations,
explained that it was perfectly legitimate to be more aggressive toward
communist regimes than toward traditional autocrats like Augusto
Pinochet in Chile or Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.^54 After all,
history had often witnessed the evolution of authoritarian states toward
democracy, whereas until then there had not been a single example of
a communist country making such a transition.
The two main instruments in the struggle against communism were
nuclear deterrence and the policy of containment. Conservatives in
both the United States and Western Europe pressed their political
(^52) North Atlantic Treaty Organization,The North Atlantic Treaty, Washington,
53 DC, April 4, 1949 (www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/treaty.htm).
Rosemary Righter,Utopia Lost: The United Nations and World Order,
New York, Twentieth Century Fund, 1995, p. 20.
(^54) Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,”Commentary,
November 1979, 34–45.
The age of universality (1945–1980) 123