Events

In late September, 1992, AFPC sponsored a trip for senior policy analysts to Russia. The delegation sought to achieve a deeper understanding of the difficult and complicated circumstances there. The purpose of the trip was to study the economic, political and social situation in the country through a number of channels including meetings with Parliamentary leaders, government officials, journalists, business executives and others, and through general exposure to life in Moscow and its environs.

Through the generous support of the Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the American Foreign Policy Council has been able to conduct an in-depth study of the U.S. foreign aid program. This study project has culminated in a book entitled Modernizing Foreign Assistance: Resource Management as an Instrument of Foreign Policy. With the final manuscript now with the publisher, Praeger Publishing of New York, the book is scheduled to be released in Summer 1992.

The American Foreign Policy Council traveled to Prague, Czechoslovakia this past July to co-sponsor the “Peaceful Road to Democracy” conference.  The three day event was initiated at the request of President Vaclav Havel, in coordination with his group, Charter 77, and was directed by the American Foundation for Resistance International.

The central theme of the “Peaceful Road to Democracy” conference, sponsored in Prague by Resistance International and the American Foreign Policy Council, addressed the difficult task of transition: How do we build a free-market economy and a democratic society “from under the rubble” (in Solzhenitsyn’s phrase)?  “Mr. Gorbachev is turning the Soviet Union into one giant Beirut,” said Vladimir Bukovsky in his opening remarks at the conference.  “State structures remain the greatest obstacle to human freedom, and…socialism cannot be restructured or reformed: it can only be eliminated.”

The American Foreign Policy Council traveled to the Soviet Union this past June to co-sponsor the Moscow Summer School.