1999 (8 page)

Soviet foreign policy is a deadly mix of traditional Russian expansionism and the revolutionary drive of ideological communism. It is imperialism multiplied by a factor of two. Even without communism, Russia would still be an expansionist power. Communism, however, adds impetus to the quest for global predominance. For the Soviets, expansionism is the status quo. As Khrushchev told President Kennedy at Vienna in 1961, “The continuing revolutionary process in various countries
is
the status quo, and anyone who tries to halt this process not only is altering the status quo but is an aggressor.”

Anyone who wants to understand the intentions of the Kremlin leaders should go to Afghanistan. In 1979, when Soviet forces invaded the country to prevent the Afghan people from overthrowing a universally despised communist government, I was writing
The Real War,
and I cited Moscow's invasion as the most recent step in a long-term strategy to win control over the oil resources in the Persian Gulf. Moscow knew that the invasion would carry great political and military costs, but it took the decision to intervene as coolly as a master chess player makes a bold but well-studied gambit.

For over eight years the Soviet Union has been waging one of the most vicious wars ever waged against a defenseless people. No brutality has been beyond the imagination of Moscow's forces.
Soviet troops once came into a village, bound the hands and feet of the civilians, stacked their bodies like cordwood, and burned them alive. That was not an accident or the result of overzealous troops. It was part of a systematic policy to terrorize the population and to depopulate the countryside so that the Afghan resistance would be deprived of its base of support. Of the prewar Afghan population of fifteen million people, five million have fled into Pakistan and Iran and one million have been killed. Comparing Moscow's genocide against the Afghan people with Hitler's against the Jews is not overblown Cold War rhetoric but cold, hard fact.

In 1985, I traveled through the areas in Pakistan that border on Afghanistan and saw the squalor in which millions of proud Afghans now live. The final chapter of the Afghan story has yet to be written, for the Afghan resistance will not soon die. But so far the principal lesson of the Soviet–Afghan war is that the Kremlin leaders are willing to inflict tremendous human suffering in the pursuit of strategic gains. That lesson must not be lost on the rest of the world. Even if the Soviet Union withdraws from Afghanistan in the next few years, we should not forget what the Kremlin leaders have been doing to the Afghan people for the last eight years.

While we must have a clear-eyed understanding of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, we must always be careful to distinguish between the leaders in the Kremlin on the one hand and the peoples of the Soviet Union on the other. The latter are every bit as much victims of the Kremlin's oppression as those countries Moscow has conquered. A peasant in the Ukraine shares the same fate as a shipyard worker in Poland.

While the government of the Soviet Union is aggressive and capable of the greatest inhumanities, anyone who wants to understand the peoples of the Soviet Union should travel through their country, meet them, and talk to them.

I have been to the Soviet Union on six occasions—once as Vice President, twice as President, and three times as a private citizen. I have chatted with shoppers in markets in Moscow, Samarkand, and Alma-Ata, coal miners in Sverdlovsk, and factory workers in Novosibirsk. I never failed to be impressed with their strength and vigor as people, their proud patriotism and their deeply felt desire for peace. I also found that despite government propaganda the
average citizen had a genuine respect and even admiration for the United States. I cannot imagine that more than a small fraction support the Kremlin's war in Afghanistan.

The peoples of the Soviet Union are great peoples. A testament to their greatness is the fact that despite the suffering inflicted upon them by revolution, two world wars, and terrible repression, the Soviet Union has still emerged as a superpower. Other peoples would have collapsed under the pressure, but the peoples of the Soviet Union survived and propelled their country forward.

In 1986, Gorbachev commented to me that since the American and Russian people had so much in common—great-power status, a global rather than a parochial outlook, similar interests in sports and entertainment—the two nations should be able to overcome their mutual hostility and mistrust. I am sure he believes that. But while the parallels he drew were correct, the conclusion he reached was wrong.

The American people and the peoples of the Soviet Union can be friends. But because we have irreconcilable differences the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union can never be friends. We must always remember, however, that our differences are with the Kremlin, not with the peoples ruled by the Kremlin. This is true for the Russian people, but particularly for the non-Russian peoples who view Moscow's rule as imperial rule. Stalin's brutal collectivization campaign in the Ukraine killed over eight million people. Russian immigration into Kazakhstan in Central Asia has made the Kazakhs a minority in their own land. Byelorussians, Georgians, Tadzhiks, Turkomens, and scores of other non-Russian nations share similar legacies. Lenin's characterization of Russia as the “jailhouse of nations” fits as well today as it did in the times of the czars. The fast-growing populations of the non-Russian nations—which will eventually make the Russian people a shrinking minority within the Soviet Union—are a time bomb ticking in the walls of the Kremlin.

Our policies must always take into account this distinction between the central government of the Soviet Union and its highly diverse peoples. We must not allow our differences with the Soviet government to prevent us from expressing our friendship with the Soviet people. We must seek to increase contacts between the
West and the peoples of the Soviet Union. It must be done in ways that do not aid the Soviet Union's aggressive ambitions. But contact with the free peoples of the West is bound in the long run to foster internal pressures on the Soviet government to grant its peoples more control over their own lives.

Our political differences with the Soviet Union are real, not the product of misunderstanding or paranoid imaginations. Anyone who has doubts about it should ask the Afghans or the other peoples whose nations have been forcibly incorporated into the Soviet empire. Soviet–American friendship societies or vodka toasts at summit meetings will not produce real peace. Real peace between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union cannot be based on mutual friendship because the values and goals of the two superpowers are totally at odds with one another. It can only be grounded on mutual respect for each other's strength and legitimate interests.

While our differences are profound and unbridgeable, the United States and the Soviet Union have one overriding common interest: to avoid nuclear war over our differences. While the United States and the Soviet Union can never be friends, they cannot afford to be enemies. Our irreconcilable differences prevent us from making peace. Nuclear weapons prevent us from settling our differences by war. This common interest in survival makes real peace possible despite the political differences that make continued conflict inevitable.

We must not pursue the unachievable—perfect peace—at the expense of the attainable, real peace. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union will cast aside its values or compromise its interests. But if we are to live with our differences instead of dying over them, we must devise a process for settling them short of war. We should seek to create peaceful rules of engagement for our a conflict that will last until 1999 and well into the next century. This will never satisfy those in the West who march in the streets for perfect peace and instant brotherhood. It will not satisfy them—but at least it will keep them alive and healthy, and also free to march some more.

In the eleven years before 1999, we should adopt foreign and defense policies aimed at accomplishing the three requisites for real peace.

First, we must avoid nuclear war.
Each superpower now has over ten thousand nuclear warheads on its strategic weapons and thousands more on its intermediate-range and tactical nuclear weapons. A war at the nuclear level would lead to the destruction of civilization.

Radiation released from the Chernobyl nuclear-reactor disaster contaminated food over a thousand miles away. Western experts have calculated from official Soviet estimates of the amount of released radiation that as many as 45,000 more people will die from cancer in the Soviet Union. Yet detonating just one nuclear warhead would release a hundred times more fallout than Chernobyl. In addition to killing hundreds of millions of people instantly, a full-scale nuclear war would not only poison the earth but also create an epidemic of cancer that would make the Black Death of the sixteenth century look like a bout with the flu.

Second, we must avoid defeat without war.
No one in the Kremlin underestimates the danger of a nuclear war. But neither do the Soviet leaders adhere to the trite belief that the invention of nuclear weapons has rendered military power irrelevant. For the Kremlin, all that nuclear weapons have changed is the means through which it pursues its traditional ends.

The pages of history are littered with the ruins of countries that were indifferent to an erosion of the balance of power. Losses on the periphery, where a country's interests appear marginal, never seem to merit a response or warrant a confrontation with the enemy. But small losses add up. Expansionist powers thrive on picking up loose geopolitical change. If their aggression goes unchecked, a clash becomes unavoidable. When it comes, it usually takes place under the worst possible circumstances for those on the defensive. The greatest conflict in history, World War II, was an unnecessary war. If Britain and France had blocked Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, when Nazi Germany was still weak, they would never have had to face the decision of whether to go to war in 1939, when Hitler commanded the most powerful armed forces in the world.

The United States must recognize that it cannot remain indifferent to conflicts in the distant corners of the world. America's loss in Vietnam in 1975 led to the Soviet acquisition of naval bases at Cam Rahn Bay and Danang from which its naval forces can today threaten Japan's oil lifeline to the Persian Gulf. The consolidation of Sandinista communist power in Nicaragua could force the United States to commit troops to defend the rest of Central America and thereby undercut U.S. capabilities to act in crises in Europe, Korea, or the Middle East. We cannot afford to sit idly by while the Soviet Union tallies up a string of small victories. If we do, we will wake up one day to find that the global balance of power has tilted fatally against us.

That does not mean the United States should be cavalier about military interventions or commit itself to the defense of every square inch of the whole world. As Frederick the Great warned, “He who tries to defend everywhere defends nothing.” But it does mean that the United States must place equal emphasis on avoiding a nuclear war and on preventing defeat without war. Since both superpowers know the dangers of a nuclear war, defeat without war becomes the greater threat.

Third, we must actively engage in peaceful competition with the Soviet Union,
not only on our side of the Iron Curtain but also on theirs. Whether we like it or not, we are rivals with the Soviet Union. If we do not actively compete with Moscow, the Kremlin will rack up gains on its own. As Trotsky once said, “You might not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.”

We must recognize that foreign policy is not directed simply toward short-term interests. It is about shaping the future of the world we live in. We oppose Soviet expansionism not out of a lust for power but because Moscow would destroy our values if it were to prevail. We must therefore adopt a long-term strategy for competing with Moscow.

Our rivalry will focus primarily on the countries of the Third World. In the next century, when it will be ever more costly to engage in overt aggression, economic power and ideological appeal will become decisive. We must prepare ourselves to compete on those terms. But in our rivalry it makes no sense to restrict the competition to the free world. Soviet leaders take the position that
what's theirs is theirs and what's ours is negotiable. We should never acquiesce in that unbalanced and dangerous approach.

Whenever the Soviet empire expands, human rights are denied to millions of other people. We should be just as concerned about these people as about those living within the Soviet Union. We can be more effective in preventing the extension of Soviet repression abroad than in reducing its repression at home. But we must also recognize that its external aggression is only an extension of its internal repression. While Soviet foreign policies are more important to our survival than their internal ones, we must not make the mistake of ignoring the latter.