But Andropov is no fool. He is also aware of the profound weaknesses of the Soviet Union. Its economy is in desperate shape. Western economies have been through some rough seas, but the Soviet economy is dead in the water. The growth rate is plummeting. Productivity is dropping. Absenteeism, corruption, malingering, and drunkenness are rife. The standard of living is sinking, so much so that the life expectancy of Russian men is actually going down. The average wage of workers in the Soviet Union is lower than Brazil’s minimum wage. Japan, with one-half the population of the Soviet Union, less arable land than California, no oil and very few natural resources, has a gross national product almost as large as that of the Soviet Union and a per capita income three times as high.
Andropov’s vastly overblown military budget only increases the problem. It is twice as large as ours in terms of the proportion of GNP it consumes. That creates an enormous drag on the economy, reducing the incentives for individuals to produce goods and limiting potential future growth. After 60 years of big promises and poor performance, the stark truth is there for all to see. Soviet socialism does not work.
The ideology of communism has lost its appeal. Communists have never won a majority in a free election anywhere in the world. The crisis in Poland is only the most visible example of the popular discontent that is heating up just beneath the surface and threatens to boil over throughout Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union itself. A scene I remember from my trip to Poland in 1959 illustrates this. Even now I can see the members of a crack Polish honor guard standing on a flatbed truck, cheering, and raising their hands in the “V-for-victory” sign as our motorcade left the Warsaw airport. The Kremlin’s military planners are daydreaming if they are counting on the loyalty of Polish troops in the event of a war in Europe.
Never in history has an aggressive power been more successful in extending its domination over other nations and less successful in winning the approval of the people of those nations. As has been the case since the end of World War II, millions of refugees are on the move today. The traffic is all one way—from communism to freedom.
The costs of Soviet conquests are a massive drain on its desperately weak economy. The British may have been enriched by their empire, but the Soviets are being impoverished by theirs. Andropov must pour huge economic resources into his empire to keep his shaky political investments afloat. Cuba costs him $14 million a day. Angola, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Nicaragua cost him over $5 million a day. Afghanistan has cost him millions of dollars and thousands of casualties. The resistance Soviet puppet regimes are meeting in Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua proves that the Soviet Union is increasingly unable to digest what it swallows.
On its Western front, the Soviet Union faces a newly united NATO. America’s allies, without whom a comprehensive peace would be impossible, are acting with vision and strength under the leadership of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl and anti-Soviet socialists like François Mitterrand and Bettino Craxi. The alliance is united behind a program to redress the European balance of power by deploying American Pershing II and cruise missiles. The Soviet propaganda campaign has failed. Andropov must now know that these deployments will begin by the end of the year unless he concludes an arms control agreement in Geneva.
On its Eastern front, the Soviet Union faces its greatest long-term challenge: Under the leadership of Yasuhiro Nakasone, Japan, an economic giant but a military pygmy, is beginning to address the question of improving its national defenses. China, still a potential enemy, is not a military threat to the Soviet Union today. But it looms as an awesome danger for the future because of its one billion people and enormous resources. As historical determinists, the Soviets look at events with the long term in mind. For them, threats in the future are problems in the present.
Andropov can boast of great gains for the Soviet Union in the Third World, but his position with the world’s major powers must give him pause. Mao Zedong’s military manual called for isolating the cities by capturing the countryside. Andropov’s policy is right out of Mao’s book. He seeks to strangle the industrial West by cutting off its supply of key resources from the Third World. This strategy might work in the long run, but its most profound immediate effect is to isolate the Soviet Union. Andropov has no allies among the major nations of the world. He faces potential adversaries in Western Europe, Japan, China, Canada, and the United States. Together these countries represent over 60 percent of the world’s economy and present the Soviet Union with the grim prospect of having to face powerful enemies on two fronts.
When Andropov totals up the balance sheet of Soviet strengths and weaknesses, he cannot be encouraged. The debits are the tremendous problems he confronts both inside and outside his country. The assets are his military power. Great as they are, his assets are ill-suited to solving his problems.
Andropov is motivated by personal factors as well. He is a man in a hurry. He is ten years older than Brezhnev was when he came to power, eight years older than Khrushchev, 23 years older than Stalin. No one questions his mental alertness, but his physical health is suspect. And while he has taken the reins of the Soviet government, he is not yet firmly in the saddle. He needs a foreign policy initiative.
He has to be looking for ways to deal with his problems or at least to mitigate them. That fact makes the prospects for real peace great. Putting it simply, both sides want peace—the United States because we believe in peace, the Soviets because they need it.
The time is ripe for a deal.
• • •
If war in the nuclear age is so disastrous and if economic cooperation is so beneficial, it would seem that striking a deal for peace should be a natural. But that is not the case. The Soviet leaders are not the same kind of people we are. Their political system promotes individuals who view the world in a completely different way and who put an entirely different value on human life.
As Russians, they will weep over the millions of deaths their country suffered in World War II. But as communists, they will defend the actions of a government that killed millions of other Russian citizens. In meeting with Soviet leaders, I often thought of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as the warm, friendly Russian of our social conversations transformed himself into a cold, heartless communist as we got down to business. Within minutes, someone who appears to be a warm-hearted pacifist turns into a ruthless thug.
There are many views about how we should deal with the Soviet leadership. At one extreme, we have the superhawks. They argue that because the Soviets are in deep trouble and are out to do us in by any and all means, we should build up military superiority and try to isolate them by cutting off all trade and negotiations. If we do that, they contend, the rotten Soviet economy will eventually collapse, bringing down the communist system with it.
That is an appealing scenario, but not a realistic one. The superhawks are correct in recognizing the Soviets for what they are. But while their premise is correct, their conclusion is wrong. The Soviet system will not collapse. The Kremlin leaders have never won a free election, but they are masters at getting and keeping power. They have ruthlessly squeezed their people with brutally austere economic policies before, and they will do so again if that is necessary to keep themselves in power. Confrontation and isolation can strengthen a dictatorship. Hard-headed negotiation and contact with the outside world can weaken it.
The superhawks also fail to realize that in a democracy it is impossible to sustain such a policy. The American people and our allies in Europe will shoulder the burden of armaments and bear the risks of military conflict only if they believe their leaders are actively trying to reduce international tensions. The people need to be given hope, for without hope the support for defense expenditures will crumble and the pressure for an ill-considered accommodation with the Soviets will build.
Even if we assume that the superhawks’ policy would work and would command the sustained support of the American people, we would still be wrong t
o adopt it. It is irresponsible for the world’s two greatest military powers not to have maximum communication with each other and not to try to negotiate their disputes. This would put our relations in a highly combustible atmosphere of semi-belligerency, with both sides building up armaments without restraint while firing salvos of hot rhetoric. Our interests would inevitably rub together in the powder kegs of the world like the Middle East, possibly sending off the spark which would ignite a nuclear war.
Sir William Slim, a Governor-General of Australia and one of Britain’s greatest generals in World War II, made this point in a conversation with me 30 years ago. He was a dedicated anti-communist, but he was also a realist. He believed even then, when the United States had overwhelming nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union, that we should move from confrontation toward negotiation. He told me, “We must break the ice. If we don’t break it, we will all get frozen into it so tight that it will take an atom bomb to break it.”
In contrast to the superhawks, we have the superdoves at the other extreme. They argue that the Soviet Union fears the United States and arms only because we arm. They excuse virtually every instance of Soviet aggression, from the Cuban missile crisis to the invasion of Afghanistan, on the basis of the Kremlin’s need to feel safe from an aggressive West. They contend that if we reassure them that we want peace, they will cease to prepare for war. They say that if we set a peaceful example—by cutting our defense budget—the Soviets will do likewise.
They are wrong. By portraying the Soviet Union as a defensive power beset by foes on all sides, they are doing the same thing Abraham Lincoln wryly accused his political opponents of doing when they twisted his policy statements to serve their purposes: “Turning a horse chestnut into a chestnut horse.” A major nuclear power is not threatened by Afghan tribesmen and a country fearful of invasion by its European neighbors does not project its military power into southern Africa and the western hemisphere.
President Carter, with the best of intentions, followed the advice of the superdoves until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. He cancelled, delayed, or cut back one after another of our arms procurement programs and made a series of conciliatory gestures toward the Soviets. The Kremlin leaders reacted by increasing their arms programs and pushing forward with their armed conquests.
Unlike the superhawks, the superdoves do not recognize the Soviets for what they are. Their argument is flawed at its premise and leads to a dangerous conclusion. We do not have to convince the Soviet leaders that we want peace. They know that. What we need to do is convince them that they cannot win a war. If we take the superdoves’ advice, war would become more likely because the risks for an aggressor would be less.
There is also a third group—the defeatists. They argue that we are “better red than dead.” They look with horror upon the awesome power of nuclear weapons, see communism as the wave of the future, and conclude that we are better off capitulating quietly. They have little faith in the strength of Western ideals, and value them still less.
What they fail to recognize is that there is a third choice. We can be alive and free.
• • •
To keep the peace and defend our freedom, we need to adopt a policy of hard-headed detente. “Detente” has become a notorious codeword. The debate over the word has become so charged with emotion that substance gives way to semantics. We must therefore be clear about what hard-headed detente is and what it is not.
Hard-headed detente is a combination of detente with deterrence. It is not an entente, which is an agreement between powers with common interests, nor is it a synonym for appeasement. It does not mean that the United States and the Soviet Union agree. Rather it means that we profoundly disagree. It provides a means of peacefully resolving those disagreements that can be resolved, and of living with those that cannot.
Hard-headed detente must be based on a strength of arms and strength of will sufficient to blunt the threat of Soviet blackmail. This should be combined with a mixture of prospective rewards for good behavior and penalties for bad behavior that gives the Soviet Union a positive incentive to keep the peace rather than break it. We must make it clear to the Soviets through our strength and our will that when they threaten our interests, they are risking war. If we simultaneously engage them in a process of resolving our differences where possible, we can turn their attention toward the promise of peace.
There are those who say that detente was merely an attempt to contain the Soviet Union by tying it down in “a delicate web of interdependence.” Hard-headed detente as we practiced it did not rely on anything so flimsy. We were prepared to stop Soviet aggression, direct and indirect, not only with diplomatic pressures, but also military ones. We did not reassure those who were threatening our interests that we would not use force unless attacked. Instead, we told them that we would do whatever was necessary to defend our interests and those of our allies. What was even more important, they knew we had the will to back up our words. We did not wring our hands when it became necessary to use military force or the threat of force. Our record established our credibility, and the Soviets respected it.
As we practiced it from 1969 through 1974, hard-headed detente worked. During that period, we used a combination of military and diplomatic pressures to block Soviet advances. We were prepared, if necessary, to give direct or indirect military aid to any country they threatened. We also undertook negotiations with the Soviets on a broad range of issues. Some, like arms control and the settlement of World War II debts, were of mutual interest. Others, like the granting of Most Favored Nation status and the purchase of American grain, were of particular interest to the Soviets. That gave us leverage over them. When they threatened our interests, we slowed or suspended those negotiations. When they relented, we proceeded with them.
As a result, not one nation was lost to the Soviet bloc during this period. Under pressure from us, the Soviet Union in 1970 retreated from its attempt to establish a nuclear submarine base at Cienfuegos in Cuba and from its effort, through Syria, to topple King Hussein of Jordan. It backed away from its support of India’s attempt to gobble up West Pakistan in 1971. It abandoned its threat to send Soviet forces into the Middle East during the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.
On the eve of the summit meeting in 1972, we ordered the bombing and mining of Haiphong in order to stop the North Vietnamese offensive. Those who did not understand hard-headed detente thought it would torpedo the summit. They were wrong. It strengthened our hand and helped pave the way for a broad range of agreements.
After this initial success, detente is widely thought to have failed. Detente did not fail, but Congress between 1974 and 1977 and the Carter Administration between 1976 and 1980 failed to implement it in a hard-headed way. Detente without deterrence is a sure-fire recipe for retreat and defeat.
In Southeast Asia, the Congress cut Administration requests for military aid to South Vietnam by half in 1974 and another third in 1975. Also, by passing the War Powers Act and resolutions banning the use of American air power in Indochina, the Congress denied the President the power to enforce the Paris peace accords. The Soviet Union at the same time increased its military aid to North Vietnam. Indochina was lost because the Congress would not allow the United States to do as much for its allies as the Soviet Union did for theirs. This pattern was repeated in Angola in 1975.
Between 1968 and 1975, the Congress cut a total of $40 billion from the defense budgets submitted by the White House. Beginning in 1977, the Carter Administration compounded the problem by unilaterally cutting back on U.S. weapons programs. During this same period, the Soviet Union continued and accelerated its arms buildup. It was inevitable that the Soviet Union would move from strategic parity with the United States in 1974 to a position of decisive superiority in land-based nuclear weapons, the situation that confronted President Reagan when he took office in 1981.
President Carter had tried to practice detente without deterrence. The results were a disaster. The Sovie
ts expanded their domination in the Arabian Peninsula, in southern Asia, in Africa, and in Latin America. The lesson is clear. We can influence Soviet policies but only if we recognize that they will react to our policies. If we block their advances, they will choose restraint and negotiate. If we give an inch, they will take a thousand miles.
The Soviet Union and its apologists are quick to blame the United States for the demise of detente. There is fault on both sides, but far more on the Soviet side.
The practice of hard-headed detente requires the use of both the carrot and the stick. When the Congress refused to grant the Soviet Union Most Favored Nation status, it took away the carrot. Its cuts in the defense budget coupled with President Carter’s cancellations and delays of major arms programs left us with a weak stick.
But it was the Soviets who put the nails in the coffin of detente. They destroyed detente by their support of the North Vietnamese offensive in South Vietnam that violated the Paris peace agreements and by their expansionism throughout the Third World. When they invaded Afghanistan, the Soviets made it impossible for President Carter to get SALT II approved by the Senate, and at the same time gave those who opposed detente an effective political issue.
President Reagan has restored the policy of deterrence. He has initiated a major buildup in our military forces in order to reestablish the balance of power, and he has made it clear that he will intervene with those forces to defend our interests and those of our allies and friends. The Soviets as a result have made no geopolitical gains since he came to office.
The President has won Soviet respect with his actions. By standing up to the Soviets, he has made them eager to sit down with him at the negotiating table. This puts him in an ideal position from which to open a new relationship with the Soviet Union that will advance the cause of real peace.
Real Peace Page 3
