1999 (4 page)

The Soviets are committed to the goal of a communist world. We are committed to the goal of a free world where all people have the right to choose who will govern them and how they should be governed. The Soviets believe that history is on their side. We must make sure that when the history of the next century is written, it will have been on our side.

N
early one hundred fifty years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed with incredible foresight that the future of the world was in the hands of two profoundly different nations: the United States and Russia. “The principal instrument of the former is freedom, of the latter servitude,” he wrote, adding that their size alone meant they were bound to play decisive roles. “Their starting point is different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”

Tocqueville could not have contemplated at that time the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century—the two world wars, the invention of the atomic bomb, or the Russian Revolution of 1917, in which an absolute monarchy was replaced by a far more repressive communist dictatorship. But what he predicted about the destinies of the United States and Russia in 1840 is true now and will continue to be true into the twenty-first century. The gulf between the United States and the dictatorship in the Soviet Union today is far greater than that between the United States and absolutist Russia in the nineteenth century.

The United States and the Soviet Union have never been enemies in war. We were allies in World War II. But as World War II drew to a close, Tocqueville's prophecy became reality. Stalin set
the Soviet Union on a collision course with the rest of the world. The Third World War began before the Second World War ended. While the United States demobilized its armies and the other major allies began to rebuild their countries, the Soviet Union embarked on a drive for brazen imperial conquest. In less than five years, Moscow annexed Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and parts of Finland and Japan, imposed communist puppet governments on the peoples of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and northern Korea, and made unsuccessful attempts to grab Greece, Turkey, and parts of Iran. Over the next thirty years, the Kremlin created satellite states in East Germany, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. Without ever issuing a formal declaration, the Kremlin has been at war against the free world for over forty years.

We are in a war called peace. It is a conflict that has not ended and that will probably continue for generations. The Soviets do not use armies or nuclear weapons to wage this war. Their principal weapons in the struggle with the West are propaganda, diplomacy, negotiations, foreign aid, political maneuver, subversion, covert actions, and proxy war. In this conflict, not only our own freedom but that of the rest of the world are at stake. Whether freedom survives depends on the actions of the United States.

Since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power three years ago as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, there have been no signs that the Soviet Union has altered its international goals. His personal style, so refreshingly different from that of his predecessors, has captured the imagination of many in the West. If we underestimate him by continuing to mistake style for substance, he may capture the rest of the West as well.

Under Gorbachev the Soviet Union's foreign policy has been more skillful and subtle than ever before. But it has been more aggressive, not less. If his dramatic domestic reforms are as successful, in the twenty-first century we will confront a more prosperous, productive Soviet Union. It will then be a more formidable opponent, not less, than it is today.

That some observers believe the emergence of Gorbachev is a hopeful sign for the United States is an indication of how thoroughly
they misunderstand the true nature of the U.S.–Soviet relationship. The beginning of the Gorbachev era does not represent the end of the U.S.–Soviet rivalry. Rather it represents the beginning of a dangerous, challenging new stage of the struggle between the superpowers. He has already earned our respect as the keenest, ablest adversary the United States has faced since World War II. Contrary to the wishful pronouncements of some political-science professors and editorial writers, Gorbachev does not seek peace in the way we do.

In the past forty years, I have had the opportunity to meet a number of great leaders—Churchill, de Gaulle, Adenauer, de Gasperi, Yoshida, Mao Tse-tung, and Chou En-lai. Gorbachev is in that league. Only a heavyweight should get into the ring with him. America is the only country capable of countering Gorbachev's Soviet Union. Whether peace and freedom are secure as we enter the twenty-first century will turn on whether we set the right strategy and adopt the right foreign and defense policies today.

Nuclear weapons have made war obsolete as a means of resolving conflicts between great powers. In the nuclear age, our goal must be peace. But perfect peace—a world without conflict—is an illusion. It has never existed and will never exist.

Real peace is not an end to conflict but a means to living with conflict. Once established, it requires constant attention to survive. Americans are idealists, and idealists long for a world without conflict, a world in which all differences between nations have been overcome, all ambitions forsworn, all aggressive or selfish impulses transformed into acts of individual and national beneficence. But conflict is intrinsic to mankind. History, ideas, and material aspirations have always divided the peoples of the world, and these divisions have continually led to conflict and war. That will not change. We must accept the permanence of conflict and devise policies that take this immutable fact of international life into account.

We must not vainly search for perfect peace but turn our efforts to creating real peace. Perfect peace assumes the end of conflict. Real peace is a means of living with unending conflict. Real peace
is a process—a continuing process for managing and containing conflict between competing nations, competing systems, and competing international ambitions. It is the only kind of peace that has ever existed and the only kind we can realistically hope to achieve.

Americans have often confused real peace and perfect peace. For most of its history, the United States was invulnerable to threats from external foes. Its great size and its location between two vast oceans allowed the United States to opt out of international affairs. For 150 years, it stood back in blissful isolation while the nations of Europe jousted in dozens of crises and wars. Americans felt so secure that in the early 1930s their army was the sixteenth largest in the world, ranking just below that of Romania.

America's unique history taught Americans the wrong lessons. Many came to believe that the only obstacles to world peace were either selfish and cynical leaders who were unwilling to put aside parochial national interests in the interest of peace or the regrettable lack of international understanding among leaders and nations. For them, idealism and determined effort were all that was needed to produce peace.

Those characteristics have not been lacking in American diplomacy. U.S. statesmen have almost always led the efforts to create an idealistic perfect peace. It started with Woodrow Wilson's campaign to make World War I “a war to end all wars” through the creation of the League of Nations. It continued in the late 1920s when U.S. diplomats drafted the Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw war. It persisted with Franklin Roosevelt's trust in the ability of the United Nations to restrain aggressors. Even today many Americans cling to the belief that the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union would evaporate if the leaders of the two countries would just sit down at the negotiating table, “get to know each other,” and hammer out their differences.

We will never have real peace unless Americans shed their idealistic delusions. Conflict is the natural state of affairs in the world. Nations are bound to come into conflict over a variety of issues and through a variety of means, and the danger will always exist that those conflicts will lead to violence. Our task is not to try to eliminate all conflict—which is impossible—but to manage conflict so that it does not break out into war.

We are not helpless in a chaotic world. We have the necessary tools to build real peace. Those who might initiate aggression will do so only if they believe they will profit from it. No state will go to war unless its leaders believe they can achieve their goals at an acceptable cost. We can affect that calculus of costs and benefits by ensuring that no potential aggressor can conclude that aggression pays. Our goal must be to take the profit out of war.

There is a double lock on the door to peace. The Soviet Union and the United States both hold a key. We cannot achieve real peace without at least the tacit cooperation of Mikhail Gorbachev.

I have met with three of the principal postwar leaders of the Soviet Union—Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 and 1960, Leonid Brezhnev in 1972, 1973, and 1974, and Gorbachev in 1986. Gorbachev is by far the ablest of the three. In just two years, he has become an international superstar. At age fifty-five, much younger than his immediate predecessors, he can expect to rule the Soviet Union for over a generation, facing as many as five U.S. Presidents. That makes him a far more formidable adversary. But it also opens up greater possibilities for real peace.

Many Western reporters and diplomats have tripped over themselves in gushing over Gorbachev. But, like self-proclaimed Soviet experts in the past, they have generally been totally obsessed with style. After meeting Joseph Stalin, an American diplomat commented, “His brown eyes are exceedingly wise and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap, and a dog would sidle up to him.” When Khrushchev rose to power, some pundits wrote him off as a buffoon because he wore ill-fitting clothes, was poorly educated, spoke bad Russian, drank too much, and had crude manners. Brezhnev received higher marks—he wore silk shirts with French cuffs—but was ridiculed for his earthiness and his awkward public manner. Newspapers across the ideological spectrum from the
Washington Post
to the
Wall Street Journal
had feature stories on the fact that Yuri Andropov played tennis and liked American jazz, Scotch whisky, and abstract art.