Real War (35 page)

The West towers over the communist world by a four-to-one margin economically, yet the Soviets have equalled us in military might. It is clear that they are channeling their economic resources into activities they think will enable them to
win World War III. We must use our greatest advantage, our economic power, to match or better their military efforts, and at the same time to bring a new life of peace and prosperity to the peoples of the world.

Richard
McCormack again states the challenge clearly:

Our strategy should be to unlock private capital on a world-wide basis and get it back into growth and development. To do this, we must systematically begin to attack and overcome the fear, instability and economic policies which collectively are strangling investment, and with it the hopes for world-wide economic growth and development. This will involve helping to provide greater physical security for societies now being preyed upon by the Soviet Union, terrorists, guerrillas and Cubans.

If we do thus use our economic power, we will be fighting World War III according to our rules; then we will be winning it, and the world will also win.

The crocodile is a more primitive zoological specimen than the human being: but if a man steps blindfold and naked into a crocodile's river, it is the crocodile who will prevail.

—
Hugh Seton-Watson

One of the lessons of history that one has to learn, although it is very unpleasant, is that no civilization can be taken for granted. Its permanency can never be assumed; there is always a dark age waiting for you around the corner, if you play your cards badly and you make sufficient mistakes, and we must never think that this can't happen to us. It can happen to us, as it has happened four or five times in the history of the world. . . .

I've no doubt at all that America has not only the physical resources, but equally important, the moral resources to reassert its leadership of the world and to pursue that leadership role vigorously. . . . I think America has to make a tremendous act of will, and the sooner it makes it, the easier it's going to be.

—
Paul Johnson

Not long ago I asked Dr. Edward Teller, the nuclear physicist who is often called “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” what he thought things would be like in the United States in the year 2000. He thought for a long while, and then replied that he believed
there was a 50 percent chance that the United States would not be in existence. I asked whether he meant physically or as a system of government. He said, “Either—or both.”

This may seem apocalyptic. But as Samuel Johnson once said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Our task today is to concentrate the mind sooner, and thus to avoid the hanging.

One characteristic of advanced civilizations is that as they grow richer and fatter, they become softer and more vulnerable. Throughout history the leading civilizations of their time have been destroyed by barbarians, not because they lacked wealth or arms, but because they lacked will; because they awoke too late to the threat, and reacted too timidly in devising a strategy to meet it.

Optimists, unable or unwilling to confront the magnitude of the challenge, assume that the West will somehow survive; that free societies, having withstood so many past challenges, will withstand this one as well. Pessimists see the advance of “socialism” as an inevitable tide, with resistance ultimately futile. Both prefer not to think about nuclear war. Pessimists willingly trade a country here, a country there, for a few more years of ease and comfort. Optimists speak of the perfectibility of man, and suppose that if we smile enough at the Soviets, their hearts will melt and their policies will mellow.

•  •  •

A colder-eyed appraisal would see neither victory nor defeat as inevitable. Both sides are immensely strong. Each has a lot to fight for. Each has different strengths and different weaknesses, just as each has different goals.

One thing we should not expect is that the Soviet Union is going to mellow, or that Soviet values and ambitions in the next twenty years are going to be markedly different from what they consistently have been during the sixty-plus years since Lenin seized power. The Soviets have made clear what they want. We know what the United States and its allies want. We know the means by which the Soviets pursue their goals. We know the resources each side has at its disposal. The crucial uncertainty is not in the Soviet thrust, but in the West's response. As Winston Churchill II recently wrote, “The days of effortless supremacy for the West are now gone.”

The U.S.-Soviet contest is a struggle between two opposite poles of human experience—between those represented by the sword and by the spirit, by fear and by hope. Their system is ruled by the sword; ours is governed by the spirit. Their influence has spread by conquest; ours has spread by example. This struggle is not new. It did not begin with the end of World War II, or with the Russian Revolution. It is as old as civilization. And history gives no sure guide to the outcome, for it shows us that through the centuries first one side has prevailed, and then the other. The struggle is as old as the drive of rulers to impose tyranny and of people to escape it; as old as the effort of one nation to conquer and of others to resist. Tyrannies have risen and fallen; so have democracies. Man has struggled against oppression and won; oppressors also have won.

Edith Hamilton, a historian of ancient Greece, once wrote, “To the Greeks of that day their most precious possession, freedom, was the distinguishing mark between East and West. . . . ‘You do not know what freedom is,' Herodotus reports a Greek saying to a Persian. ‘If you did you would fight for it with bare hands if you had no weapons.' ” Freedom is still the distinguishing mark between East and West.

Gandhi once said, “No society can possibly be built on a denial of individual freedom.” But as a young dissident Soviet historian,
Andrei Amalrik, observes, the ideas of self-government, of equality before the law, and of personal freedom “are almost completely incomprehensible to the Russian people. . . . As for respecting the rights of an individual as such, the idea simply arouses bewilderment.”

To most Americans, the Russian experience is similarly incomprehensible. The illusion is widespread that because the Soviet way of life is unnatural to Americans, it is unnatural to Russians; that if only the Soviet people were exposed to the ways of the West, they would quickly change. The Westerner believes the Soviet system is bound to change simply because people cannot live that way. But they do, and this is the point that the West must grasp. We can hope that the Soviet system eventually changes, but we act at our peril if we expect it to change and base our policies on that expectation.

The Soviet sword has been annealed in the fires of centuries
of suffering. To the Soviets, the greatest brutalities are not unthinkable, because they have been part of their experience. We know freedom, liberty, hope, self-indulgence; they know tyranny, butchery, starvation, war, and annihilation. Those qualities that make Soviet victory so frightful a prospect for the world are the same ones that make it possible.

•  •  •

Throughout its first 200 years the United States has had a rare luxury. Protected by two oceans from the swirling conflicts of Europe and Asia, we could develop the dream that inspired our creation. We could concentrate on taming a continent, on building the most powerful industrial machine the world had ever seen, on improving our democracy and making it a beacon to the world.

We could caustically examine our own shortcomings while ignoring those of older—and newer—nations, because our own were the ones for which we were responsible. We did not have to measure ourselves by reference to the rest of the world. The rest of the world was distant, almost irrelevant. From time to time it encroached on us; in two world wars we had to step in, after those wars had begun, in order to ensure that the side of freedom won. But we remained essentially apart. When new barbarisms appeared, other nations were first in their line of march. Others bore the brunt of aggression, while we moralized from afar. André Malraux once commented to me that the United States was “the only nation ever to become the most powerful in the world without seeking to.” Because we did not seek that power, we were unprepared for its exercise when we assumed its responsibilities.

Now we ourselves are on the front line, and the adversary we confront is tough.

•  •  •

Those who get to the top in the Soviet system do so by being more cunning, more brutal, and more ruthless than their rivals. Leon Trotsky wrote that “Lenin, at every passing opportunity, emphasized the absolute necessity of terror.” Lenin himself declared bluntly in 1920 that the “scientific concept of dictatorship means neither more nor less than unlimited power, resting directly on force, not limited by anything, not
restricted by any laws, nor any absolute rules. Nothing else but that.”

Stalin killed nearly a million people per year in the quarter century of his rule. Khrushchev and Brezhnev both served their apprenticeships under Stalin, not by distributing food stamps or serving in a Peace Corps, but by efficiently eliminating those whom Stalin saw as threats to his power. Khrushchev was sent to the Ukraine by Stalin in 1938 to conduct a political house-cleaning. Within a year 163 of the 166 members of the Central Committee there had been liquidated. Khrushchev was then promoted to full membership in the Politburo.

The Darwinian forces of the Soviet system produce not only ruthless leaders, but clever ones. Former Ambassador
Foy Kohler writes of Khrushchev:

To me he came to be the embodiment of the almost untranslatable Russian adjective
khitryi
. . . . According to the dictionary it means sly, cunning, artful, intricate or wily. But it really means more than this; it also means unscrupulous, smart, clever, quickwitted. Roll all these adjectives into one and you have the
khitryi
Khrushchev—a bootlicker or a bully as circumstances required, a demagogue and opportunist always.

Often we in the West are overly impressed by the style, manner, and education of leaders of other nations, forgetting that elegant manners do not make a strong leader. Education may strengthen the brain but weaken the backbone.

At first, many American experts on the Soviet Union tended to downgrade Khrushchev, noting that he was poorly educated, spoke bad Russian, drank too much, and had boorish manners. But they missed the point. John Foster Dulles saw through the façade. At a National Security Council meeting just after Khrushchev took power he put it sharply. “Anyone who survives and comes to the top in that communist jungle,” he told Eisenhower, “is bound to be a strong leader and a dangerous enemy.”

Dulles was right. Anyone who gets to the top in the Soviet Union has climbed over a lot of corpses to get there. He would not have made it unless he gave others reason to fear him more
than he feared them. By going through the fires of purges, intrigue, and cutthroat competition for power, the Soviet leaders come out as tempered steel.

If the Soviet leaders are tough, so are the people. Every suffering the leaders have inflicted, the people have endured. Adversity is a good teacher, which makes the Soviet people well schooled indeed. Noting that he knew people who had lived through the Revolution, the farm collectivization, Stalin's terror, and the German invasion in World War II, Soviet dissident Lev Kopelev commented to an American, “Think how much more experienced we are than you.”

All of this is not to say that the Soviet people, or even necessarily the leaders, are inherently bad. There is an old saying that “I can hate the sin, but never the sinner.” I like the Russian people. I like the Chinese people. I hate communism and what it does to people. The communist leaders are products of a cruel system and inheritors of a harsh tradition. They act by instinct, just as the man-eating tiger or the piranha does.

By and large, the people of the Soviet Union are warm, generous, good, and very able in many respects. They have suffered brutally, both before and since the Revolution. They tend to get along extremely well with Americans. Many of the Soviet leaders are capable of behaving with great charm, and they can become genuinely emotional when they discuss their hopes for the next generation or the devastation their people suffered in the war. In 1973 I gave a small private dinner for Brezhnev at my home in San Clemente. I delivered a warm, personal toast. Tears came to his eyes as it was translated, and he rose impulsively from his chair and folded me in a Russian bear hug. But later that same night he brought Gromyko and Dobrynin to my study and launched into a brutal three-hour attack on our policies in the Middle East.

The fact that the Soviet leaders can be personally very friendly even while they plot the destruction of the other person's country is a dichotomy, but not a contradiction. They operate on several levels at once. They can be as warm and effusive as individuals as they are ruthless as wielders of state power. For that is the way the Soviet system is. Generosity, love, tenderness, charity of spirit, all have their place in the
Russian soul, but not in the actions of the Soviet government. This is a distinction too few Americans seem able to make.

The totalitarian nature of the Soviet system is at once its chief strength and its chief weakness. Interestingly, it was Benito Mussolini who introduced the word “totalitarianism.” Writing in 1932, he gave this authoritative interpretation of the fascist system:

The Fascist system stresses the importance of the State and recognizes the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the state. . . . The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values may exist, much less have any value. . . . For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups are admissible insofar as they act in accordance with the State.