Building support: the National Endowment for Democracy is one federal program conservatives should defend enthusiastically.

As conservatives confront the responsibilities of governing, a key question will be how to reassert America's leadership in the world. The Contract with America acknowledges the importance of re-establishing a strong national defense by calling for restoration of "the essential parts of our national-security funding."

But protecting American niational security involves more than building up our armed forces, however important that is following a period of imprudent retrenchment. We must also come to grips with the continued existence of corrupt and tyrannical regimes that place the United States economic and security interests at risk even as they deny fundamental freedoms to the people.

Our national security demands tnat we address the threats posed by these dictatorships through political, not just military, means, by supporting forces for democratic change. Our most effective instrument for doing so is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), created a decade ago by the Reagan Administration to help advocates of democracy abroad build effective non-governmental organizations and advance the values of freedom.

The NED is based on the recognition that it is essentially a political struggle in which our friends abroad are engaged. They need the resources to help them stand up to ruling authorities and powerfully entrenched interests. In the Middle East, for example, the NED is working with those who offer a democratic alternative to Islamic radicalism. In the case of Communist states such as China and Cuba, it supports networks of dissidents both within those countries and in exile.

Despite the dramatic changes of the past decade, we should not deceive ourselves into thinking that the oppressive regimes of the Evil Empire have been replaced by anything resembling Western-style democracy. Civil society, obliterated everywhere the Communists were in control, will take years to rebuild. Those who have spent a lot of time in the region--as I have during the last four years, were not surprised to see former Communists return to power in Poland, Hungary, and Lithuania, and understand all too well the fragile state of the former Soviet republics, including Russia itself.

Although the NED has enjoyed bipartisan support, it has also been attacked throughout its life by those, primarily on the Left, who consider it--accurately--a Reagan-era vehicle to project American values abroad. In the 1982 speech to the British Parliament that helped launch the NED, President Reagan declared:

Our military strength is a prerequisite

to peace, but let it be clear we maintain

this strength in the hope it will never be

used. For the ultimate determinant in the

struggle now going on for the world will

not be bombs and rockets, but a test of

wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve:

the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish,

the ideals to which we are dedicated.

In the same speech, the President outlined his objective: "to foster the infrastructure of democracy--the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities--which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means." What he was describing was "a hope for the long term--the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history." Pretty remarkable stuff in 1982, at a time when all the "experts" were saying that none of us would live to see the lifting of the Iron Curtain.

In assessing the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, it should never be forgotten that U.S. non-governmental groups funded by the NED provided a lifeline to the heroes of the people's revolutions--Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Vitautas Landsbergis, and the others--who brought Communism to its knees. In fact, these leaders were among the scores of democratic activists (including the Dalai Lama and Fang Lizhi) who rose up to support the NED when its existence was threatened in the summer of 1993, convinced that its destruction would be a grave setback to the cause of freedom. (As Landsbergis expressed it, "There is no guarantee that democracy will flower in the soil that was polluted for fifty years by Communism."

The vast majority of the NED'S grants are used to provide indigenous with the resources to carry out programs in democratic education, human rights, and respect for the rule of law. Where there is training involved, the NED does not pay the large consultant fees to "development specialists" that have eaten up so much of government-to-government assistance over the years and created resentment among intended beneficiaries. Rather, its training programs are conducted by committed political activists working strictly pro bono.

This was precisely how the NED was conceived by Ronald Reagan and the rest of the bipartisan group that created it: not as a government bureaucracy but as a people-to-people program. In fact, the NED fits squarely within the American tradition of using ideas and ideals, especially the ideals of personal liberty and democracy, as channels to the rest of the world. The NED is also encouraging the establishment of pro-democracy entities in countries such as Taiwan, whose own transition to democracy provides an excellent model for Mainland China, the world's most populous country.

A Program That Works

IT WAS through my own political training work abroad that I first became familiar with the National Endowment for Democracy. I should add that although the Free Congress Foundation has managed two small grants from the NED, I have no personal stake in the program. But I know the NED works, with a cost-effectiveness virtually unheard of among federal programs. (Last year it funded projects in more than eighty countries on a budget of just $35 million.Only once in my three decades in Washington have I appealed to Congress to support a government spending program. In 1993, Newt Gingrich and I spoke to the House freshmen on behalf of the NED.

Conservatives need to support the NED, not simply because of its origins in the Reagan Administration, but because it reaches out to those who share America's most fundamental values of liberty and economic freedom. We should be bold in cutting unnecessary government expenditures. But when it comes to this program, we should pay heed to the comments on the House floor of Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.) , a vociferous critic of foreign aid, during last year's debate on the NED'S budget:

This is not about cutting government

spending. This is about whether or not we

are taking our commitment to democracy,

freedom, and human rights seriously.

Whether those who long for freedom can

look to us, not for a handout, but for leadership,

for a commitment.

If we vote to kill NED today, and tomorrow's

world turns out to be haunted

by despots and dictators, we will have

only ourselves to blame.

Finally, let me address those conservatives who acknowledge the useful work being done by the NED but argue for privatizing it. Insofar as it serves a national-security purpose, NED should no more be dependent on private funding than the Pentagon. And to the extent that it embodies our deepest beliefs and values, tying it to corporate and other private donors would diminish its ability to speak on America's behalf This is one federal program that conservatives should support with enthusiasm.

Mr. Weyrich is president of the Free Congress Foundation and of the Krieble Institute, which has trained more than 100,000 people in democracy and free enterprise in the former Soviet Union.