LETTER TO HERBERT E. MEYER FROM NORMAN PODHORETZ

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• Collection: General CIA Records
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• Publication Date: February 22, 1985
• Content Type: LETTER

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NORMAN PODHORETZ, EDITOR
February 22, 1985
Mr. Herbert E. Meyer
Vice Chairman
National Intelligence Council
Room 7E47
Washington, D.C. 20505
Dear Herb:
Just in case you have trouble locating "The Future Danger,"
I've decided to send you a copy. If you keep your promise
to read it, you will see how uncannily close it comes to the
kind of discussion you wish to promote. I also neglected to
mention yesterday that the Committee for the Free World is
planning its next conference, to be held in Washington in
the fall, on the very questions you have raised. Midge will
probably give you a call one of these days about her plans.
Best,
Norman Podhoretz
enclosure
NP/rk
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Commentary
The Future Danger
NorAan Podhoretz
EVERYONE-or nearly everyone at any
rate?now recognizes that a change
of major proportions came over the United States
after the seizure of the hostages in Iran in Novem-
ber 1979 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
which followed hard upon its heels. Yet putting
the case in such precise temporal terms is slightly
misleading. It suggests that the change in question
occurred overnight and all at once, whereas what
actually happened was the dramatic crystallization
of a process which had been developing and gath-
ering momentum for five years and possibly even
more. Having thus matured, this great change
went on to demand?and achieve?full political
expression and representation. Within a year after
the hostages were seized, Ronald Reagan, who em-
bodied the new mood more fully than any other
candidate for the Presidency in 1980, had first
swept away all his Republican rivals with relative
ease, and had then gone on to inflict a humiliating
defeat on the sitting Democratic President.
Reagan's victory was all the more significant in
that Jimmy Carter had in response to Iran and Af-
ghanistan made his own adjustment to the new
mood, and was much more closely attuned to it
than Edward Kennedy, his chief rival within the
Democratic party. But Carter's adjustments were
too hasty, too little, and too late to overcome his
identification with the now discredited attitudes of
the recent past and the policies generated by those
attitudes.
In winning the Presidency by a landslide, then,
Ronald Reagan confirmed, and in unmistakable
terms, that a new consensus had indeed come into
being. Specifically his election demonstrated that
two related arguments which had been raging in
the United States for the past decade or so were
now finally settled. The first concerned the growth
of Soviet power, and the second had to do with
the decline of American power.
IN RETROSPECT it seems strange that
there should have been any argument
at all, let alone a ferocious one, over the growth of
NORMAN PODHORETZ is the editor of COMMENTARY. His most
recent books are Breaking Ranks and The Present Danger,
and his most recent article in COMMENTARY is "The New
American Majority" (January 1981).
29
Soviet power. After all, the basic facts were availa-
ble and they were reasonably clear. It was no se-
cret that in the course of the negotiations to re-
solve the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, one of the
Soviet representatives, Vassily Kuznetsov, told a
member of the American team, John J. McCloy,
that the Soviet Union would never let such a
thing happen to it again. In an "eyeball-to-eye-
ball" confrontation with the United States, the So-
viets had been forced to back down by superior
American power. Their naval power had been no
match for ours, and the strategic nuclear balance
looming behind the conventional match-up had
been even more overwhelmingly favorable to the
United States. In short, the Soviets knew that they
would be beaten in a limited naval engagement,
and that if such an engagement should escalate
into a nuclear exchange, their country would suf-
fer much greater damage than they could inflict
upon us. It was this situation that, Kuznetsov
vowed, the Soviets would never allow to arise
again.
Nor was it any secret that the Soviets proved as
good as Kuznetsov's word. They embarked on a
military build-up so steady and of such impressive
breadth and scope that concealment would have
been impossible even if it had been the objective.
In every category of military power, conventional
and nuclear, strategic and tactical, on land, on the
sea, and in the air, the Soviets moved relentlessly
forward. Quantities were increased year by year
while the quality and sophistication of these ever
larger arsenals were simultaneously being im-
proved and refined.
The facts, as I say, were known. There might be
uncertainty or disagreement over the exact dimen-
sions of the Soviet build-up. Inside the CIA, for
example, analysts examining the data came up
with a lower estimate of the sums the Soviets were
spending on the military than a group of outside
analysts ("Team B") looking at the same mate-
rial. But there was no disagreement among the in-
formed over the upward direction of the general
trend.
Nevertheless, while not exactly denying the facts
of the case, many people simply refused to pay any
attention to them. This refusal was manifested in
a tendency to discuss the American defense budget
as though it were a purely domestic issue?how
much money the "Pentagon" could get for itself as
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compared with the Department of Health, Educa-
tion, and Welfare. Rarely if ever in the debates
over spending for defense from the late 60's
through the mid-70's did anyone emphasize the
major threat that American military power existed
to defend against. One heard next to nothing in
those years about the Soviet build-up in conven-
tional forces and how it might affect our own mili-
tary needs. Mainly what one heard about was the
putatively bloated American military establish-
ment whose size was evidently a function of self-
aggrandizing machinations by the military-in-
dustrial complex and had no relation whatever to
anything the Soviets were doing in the field of mil-
itary force.
One did, to be sure, hear a good deal even in
those years about Soviet advances in the nuclear
area, especially in connection with the negotiations
that eventually led to the signing of SALT I in
1972. Yet here too an effort was made to prevent
the facts from speaking for themselves. Instead of
simply being disregarded, as in the case of the
build-up of Soviet conventional forces, the build-
up in strategic nuclear forces was explained away.
As Richard Pipes* described the process: "The
frenetic pace of the Soviet nuclear build-up was
explained first on the ground that the Russians
had a lot of catching up to do, then that they had
to consider the Chinese threat, and finally on the
grounds that they are inherently a very insecure
people and should be allowed an edge in deterrent
capability." The Soviets could not in this view be
expected to engage in serious arms-control negotia-
tions so long as they were in a position of inferior-
ity. But the minute they "felt themselves equal to
the United States in terms of effective deterrence,
they would stop further deployment"?and they
would then cooperate with us in setting a cap on
the "arms race."
When, however, these expectations were disap-
pointed by the refusal of the Soviet Union to re-
main content with parity after it had achieved it,
the response was to dismiss its drive for superiority
as meaningless. Henry Kissinger's "What in the
name of God is strategic superiority . . . at these
levels of numbers?" (a rhetorical question to which
some years later he would give a different answer
from the one implied here) was the most famous
American expression of this attitude. But it was by
no means the only one. Thus McGeorge Bundy,
who had preceded Kissinger as a National Security
Adviser, acknowledged in 1972 that the Soviet
Union was engaged in "a very expensive" program
of "strategic rearmament," but he characterized
the entire effort as "essentially useless." It was, he
added, "no more than another demonstration of
the folly that seems to be a frequent accompani-
ment of essentially sober national policies."
Four years later, P.aul Warnke, just appointed
head of the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency and chief American negotiator at the
SALT II conference, spoke in similar terms of
"the primitive aspects of Soviet nuclear doctrine"
in accordance with which they were building an
arsenal clearly designed to fight and win?rather
than merely deter?a nuclear war. Instead of pay-
ing attention to such primitive ideas and policies,
Warnke said, "we ought to be trying to educate
them into the real world of strategic nuclear weap-
ons. . . .PI
Tins debate over the Soviet military
build-up was pretty much confined to
the experts, the lay public being effectively ex-
cluded by the repellent vocabulary in which the
discussion was conducted and the esoteric statistics
that served as counters in the argument. But there
was also a political side to the debate having to do
with Soviet intentions, and demanding no special
technical expertise.
On this issue the people who believed that the
Soviet Union was either not really interested in
achieving strategic superiority, or that if it was, it
was wasting its time and money in a primitive
folly, tended to line up with the people who be-
lieved that the Soviets no longer had expansionist
aims and that whenever they did expand it was
because they suffered from insecurity and para-
noia. As Stanley Hoffmann of Harvard confidently
asserted (in an article which had the misfortune
of being published just as the invasion of Afghani-
stan was being launched),t the Soviet Union had
now become a "status-quo power." Yet before Af-
ghanistan had come Angola and South Yemen?
both taken over with the direct participation of
Soviet military surrogates?while Laos, Ethiopia,
Mozambique, and Cambodia were being pulled
into the Soviet orbit with the help of massive So-
viet military aid. Thus the refusal to face the facts
of growing Soviet military power was matched by
a commensurate refusal to face the escalation of
imperial adventurism that was its predictable ac-
companiment.
It is an exaggeration to say, as Robert G. Kai-
ser** does, that "the argument that the Soviets
were not really aggressive . . . simply disappeared"
after the invasion of Afghanistan. For not even
that cataclysmic event could change the minds of
certain political commentators about Soviet inten-
tions. Intransigent proponents of the theory that
Soviet actions, including the invasion of Afghani-
stan itself, stemmed entirely from defensiveness
ranged in intellectual weight from George F. Ken-
nan to Ronald Steel, and they had their counter-
parts in politicians like Senator Kennedy and Sen-
ator McGovern.
Still, as the weeks and months wore on, the posi-
* "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight 8c Win a
Nuclear War," COMMENTARY, July 1977.
t "Muscle and Brains," Foreign Policy, Winter 1979/80.
** "U.S.-Soviet Relations: Goodbye to D?nte," Foreign
Affairs, Special Issue (Vol. 59, No. 3).
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THE FUTURE DANGER/31
tion of these intransigents did suffer a greater and
greater seepage of influence. Suddenly somber
stories about the Soviet military build-up were ap-
pearing in sectors of the media which only yester-
day had been notable for ignoring or downplaying
or even decrying as hysterical and alarmist the
Churchillian warnings of groups like the Commit-
tee on the Present Danger and individuals like
Senator Henry M. Jackson and Governor Ronald
Reagan: Time, Newsweek, the New York Times,
the commercial television networks, and even, on
an amazing occasion or two, public television.
Suddenly too it became respectable to talk and
worry about the uses to which this increase in mil-
itary power was being put in the present, and the
future strategic designs it might also be relied
upon to serve. In the recent past the tendency had
been to poke fun at anyone who so much as sug-
gested that the Soviet Union even had a strategic
design. Such a suggestion was likely to be carica-
tured as a belief in the existence of a detailed
blueprint and a specific timetable for world domi-
nation and accordingly as too primitive to merit
the consideration of a sophisticated mind. Now,
however, respectful attention began to be paid to
the view that the Soviet Union, far from being a
status-quo power, had moved into a dynamically
expansionist or imperialistic phase. In this read-
ing, the pattern of Soviet international activities
pointed toward a strategy aimed at encircling the
Middle East, gaining control of its oil fields, or at
least of access to them, and thereby making possi-
ble the "Finlandization" of Western Europe,
Japan, and ultimately even the United States.
It was not that this interpretation achieved uni-
versal acceptance; far from it. But certainly the
Churchillian view, at least in its broad outlines?
that a Soviet military build-up had been taking
place and that this build-up signified aggressive in-
tent?was now in the ascendant in the world of
ideas.
So FAR as public opinion in the wider
sense was concerned, however, it would
be a gross understatement to say that the Chur-
chillian view was merely in the ascendant there;
the more precise word would be triumphant. The
pollsters Daniel Yankelovich and Larry Kaagan*
have summarized the evidence as follows:
For the public, . . . the invasion [of
Afghanistan] confirmed fears that had been
growing for years, fears that the Soviets were
taking ever more advantage of American weak-
ness to strengthen their position in the Middle
East. Surveys taken in the aftermath of the inva-
sion showed 50 percent of the American people
concluding that the "Russians feel they now have
military superiority over the United States and
can get away" with such a move. And a 78 per-
cent majority maintained that, unthwarted by
American strength, the Soviets were motivated
by an opportunity to gain "more influence over
the oil-producing countries of the Middle East."
It would probably be unfair to read President
Carter's response to Afghanistan as nothing more
than an election-year deference to this shift in
popular sentiment. When Carter said that the in-
vasion had "made a more dramatic change in my
own opinion of what the Soviets' ultimate goals
are than anything they've done in the previous
time I've been in office," he was admitting that he
had accepted the view of Soviet intentions which
had been standard among the academic experts
and the foreign-policy establishment, but that he
could no longer do so in the face of so blatant a
living refutation of the assumptions behind that
view.
Kennedy, on the other hand, held onto the con-
ventional wisdom of the pre-Afghanistan period.
He called the invasion a merely "regional crisis"
and associated himself with the positiOn?argued
by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., among others?that it
was an index of Soviet weakness rather than of So-
viet power. This was not the least important cause
of Kennedy's failure to take the Democratic nomi-
nation away from Carter who, whatever else might
be troubling his candidacy, was at least more
closely attuned to what the voters were feeling and
thinking on this highly critical issue.t
But Reagan of course was even more closely in
touch with public sentiment than Carter?much
more. Reagan had long been expressing anxiety
over the Soviet military build-up, and he did not
need the evidence of Afghanistan to persuade him
that Soviet expansionism was posing a mortal
threat to the United States and the West in gen-
eral.
In warning that we would not tolerate a Soviet
effort to seize control of the oil fields of the Per-
sian Gulf, Carter undoubtedly had public opinion
behind him. But by now public opinion had al-
ready moved beyond the Carter Doctrine and was
ready to support an even bolder statement of the
Soviet threat: and this was not the least important
cause of Reagan's overwhelming victory. He was
elected on a platform that emphasized "the pres-
ent danger"; soon after becoming President he
spoke of "world revolution" as the Soviet goal;
and he appointed a Secretary of State, Alexander
M. Haig, who talked about "the transformation of
Soviet military power from a continental and
largely land army to a global offensive army, navy,
and air force, fully capable of supporting an impe-
rial foreign policy."
*"Assertive America," Foreign Affairs, Special Issue (Vol.
59, No. 3).
tAlthough we keep hearing that the economy was the
main or even the only issue in the 1980 election, Yankelovich
and K-aagan report that at the beginning of 1980 a 42 per-
cent plurality of Americans named foreign policy as "the
most important problem facing the country today?ahead of
the economy and substantially ahead of energy concerns."
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The distance between all this and the statement
of Haig's predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance, that the So-
viet leaders had "similar dreams and aspirations"
to those of our own for stability and peace is a
measure of how far the new consensus on the issue
of Soviet power had traveled from the old.
II
THE second major element of the new
consensus is the obverse of the first.
That is, as Soviet power is now generally recog-
nized to have been rising, so American power is
now seen to have been declining; and as the in-
crease in Soviet power is now understood to repre-
sent an index of aggressive designs directly threat-
ening to us, so the decline of American power is
acknowledged to have brought consequences al-
ready bordering on the intolerable, with the al-
most certain prospect of worse to come unless dras-
tic steps are taken without any further delay.
The distance traveled here from the conven-
tional wisdom of the recent past is perhaps even
greater than in the case of Soviet power. Even in
the early 70's, at the height of American euphoria
over d?nte, there were skeptics with solid creden-
tials who expressed non-dismissible doubts about
the putative transformation of the Soviet Union
into a status-quo power. While, for example, the
chairman of Pepsi Cola and other luminaries of
American business with more strategically impor-
tant goods to sell were rushing to Moscow laden
with the "rope" that Lenin famously predicted the
capitalists would provide for their own execution
at the hands of Soviet hangmen, the AFL-CIO
under George Meany and Lane Kirkland was
thinking, and voicing, other thoughts. Nor did
most Americans surrender their suspicions about
Soviet intentions as readily as their leaders and
supposed betters in the State Department, the
White House, and the foreign-policy establish-
ment.
So far as the issue of American power went,
however, there was much less dissent in any quar-
ter from the idea that the problem was not too lit-
tle but too much. Almost everyone in those final
years of the Vietnam war and their immediate aft-
ermath seemed to agree that the defense budget
was "bloated." The only real argument was over
the amount that could or should be cut.
Thus at a time when the defense budget was
running to about $75 billion, proposed cuts
ranged from $10 to $30 billion; and there was
hardly a weapon in the American arsenal that was
spared the hostile scrutiny of one or another critic
of the "Pentagon" (the spreading use of this
vaguely sinister term to describe our own military
establishment was itself a significant symptom of
the general mood).
In 1972, the New York Times, declaring that
"America's defense budget is exploding, becoming
itself a threat to the security and well-being of the
nation," called for "deep cutbacks" in both nu-
clear and conventional forces. Public opinion soon
began diverging from this attitude, but in the
early 70's at least, there was no gap at all: only 11
percent of the American people then favored in-
creases in the defense budget. So powerful was the
anti-defense tide that even Senator Henry M. Jack-
son, regarded in those days as an unreconstructed
cold warrior and the very model of a hawk, had
to make some accommodation to it: he favored
small defense cuts and "a prudent defense pos-
ture."
By 1975, in what came to be called the Great
Debate over post-Vietnam foreign policy, one Sen-
ator after another, sounding like Goneril and
Regan asking King Lear why he needed so many
knights in his entourage ("What need you five-
and-twenty, ten, or five?" "What need one?") rose
to the floor to rail against "the degree to which it
[America's destructive force] goes beyond what we
really need" (Patrick Leahy), against our "fanati-
cal desire to be always No. 1 in the ability to kill
people in war" (Mark Hatfield), against "a de-
fense structure that is artificially high, redundant,
or unnecessarily provocative" (John Culver). No
wonder, then, that Jimmy Carter was able to win
the Presidency in 1976 on a platform calling for
cuts in defense spending on the order of $5-7 bil-
lion.
This readiness, nay eagerness, to cut back on
American military power was encouraged by sev-
eral ideas that gained widespread acceptance in
the same period. The most influential of these was
the doctrine of mutual assured destruction
(MAD). According to the MAD theory, it was
both unnecessary and undesirable to build a stra-
tegic nuclear force capable of more than a devas-
tating retaliatory strike against the major Soviet
population centers: anything beyond this (includ-
ing defensive systems like the ABM) was "over-
kill" or provocative, or both. Since, as Senator
John Glenn put it in opposing the B-1 bomber in
1975, "we are already so far above anything we
need with respect to ICBM's, ... to talk about
needing another weapon to deliver nuclear weap-
ons is . . . wishful thinking of the highest order."
Senator John Culver, basing himself on the same
reasoning went even further in declaring that "we
have obscene overkill capacity that is totally un-
conscionable and unjustifiable."
This particular line of argument was restricted
to strategic nuclear weapons. But there was a
kindred approach to conventional forces which be-
came almost equally influential. Again sounding
like Goneril and Regan, critics asked why the
army needed so many men, why the navy needed
so many ships, why the air force needed so many
fighter planes. The very existence of such swollen
arsenals and capabilities constituted a standing
temptation to put them to use. Would we have
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THE FUTURE DANGER/33
gone into Vietnam, for example, if we had not
been itching to test our new anti-guerrilla forces
and our advanced technologies of destruction?
And if one great "lesson" of Vietnam was that
what used to be called standing armies led inexor-
ably to ill-advised wars, another was that under
contemporary conditions military power was no
longer the decisive factor?not in political conflict
and not even in war itself. For had not our con-
ventional forces, powerful beyond the dreams of
traditional military planners though they were,
still proved insufficient to win the day? And in any
case, what good did military power do in an inter-
dependent world in which the great issues were
economic rather than political? After all, had not
the militarily powerless oil-producing nations suc-
cessfully imposed their will on the infinitely more
powerful nations of the -West, including the
United States?
THREE major events came together
after 1976 to damage and even dis-
credit these arguments and the policies they simul-
taneously sired and justified. The first was the
signing of the second Strategic Arms Limitation
Treaty. Much to the surprise of the opponents of
SALT II, the debate over the treaty turned into a
means of persuading a great many people, includ-
ing many Senators who supported ratification,
that there were serious deficiencies in our strategic
posture, that we were falling behind, and that?as
the then dovish Foreign Relations Committee put
it in reporting the treaty favorably?"additional
defense efforts by the United States will be neces-
sary to preserve deterrence and essential equiva-
lence in the 1980's and beyond."
In other words, the problem was not too much
American power, as the consensus of 1975 had it,
but too little. Accordingly, the Gonerils and Re-
gans of 1975 now reappeared, as one might say, in
the guise of Cordelia, declaring that "we must im-
prove our defense capabilities" (Gary Hart), that
"we have been woefully remiss in allowing our
military preparedness to erode to its pr,esent un-
happy state" (John Glenn), that "it is remarkable
how much consensus there is ... as to what we
really have to do to strengthen our military capa-
bilities" (John Culver). Only a few short years be-
fore, the debate had been over how much to cut
from the defense budget. Now everyone agreed
that defense spending had to be increased by a
minimum of 3 percent in real terms, and the de-
bate was over how much to add over and above
that figure.*
The second great milestone on this particular
journey was the seizure of the hostages in Iran. To
the questions once posed by the Gonerils and Re-
gans of the defense debate, our impotence in the
face of this blatant act of aggression provided what
seemed to most Americans an irrefutable answer.
Surely we ought to have been able to respond
through covert action or with a successful rescue
mission. But the CIA had for all practical pur-
poses been robbed of the capacity to engage in
covert action, and the fiasco of the rescue mission
provided the sorriest demonstration imaginable of
how poorly maintained our military equipment
was and to what a low estate in preparedness and
skill our forces had finally sunk.
This experience of impotence was deepened by
the third great event in the emergence of the new
consensus: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In
addition to discrediting the idea of the Soviet
Union as a status-quo power, the invasion simulta-
neously made vast numbers of people aware that
we had nothing with which to answer a possible
Soviet drive on the oilfields of the Persian Gulf?a
drive, that is, against the life-line of our civiliza-
tion?but the threat of full-scale nuclear war. We
had no bases, we had no rapid-deployment force,
and the only way we could strengthen our military
presence in the region was by stretching our naval
power thin.
The same change which had become so strik-
ingly evident in the Senate during the SALT II
debate was now making itself felt in the media as
well. Just as stories about the Soviet build-up were
appearing in places where little or no attention
had been paid to it before, so reports on the de-
plorable state of American military power began
showing up in many of the same papers and on
many of the same programs. Perhaps the most tell-
ing example was a series of prominently featured
articles that ran day after day for a full week in
the New York Times documenting in great and
painful detail the deteriorating condition of our
military defenses from every point of view.
But dwarfing even these great signs of change
was the seismic upheaval in American public opin-
ion. Between 1971 and 1979 (before the taking of
the hostages) the proportion favoring more spend-
ing on defense rose steadily from 11 percent to 42
percent. "Since that time," Yankelovich and Kaa-
gan write, "growing majorities have endorsed
higher defense spending, and the events in Af-
ghanistan pushed support for an enlarged military
budget up to 74 percent." As of June 1980, the
only area of federal spending that fewer people
wished to see cut than the defense budget was so-
cial security. After Afghanistan, moreover, a solid
majority of Americans came to favor reinstate-
ment of the draft, and after Iran an astonishing 79
percent came out for "overhauling and stepping
up" the activities of the CIA.
If Ronald Reagan was a more credible repre-
sentative of the new attitude toward Soviet power
than Jimmy Carter, he was even more closely in
*For a fuller account of these particular developments,
see Joshua Muravchik's "Turnabout in the Senate" (Com-
MENTARY, November 1980), on which I have been drawing
here.
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34/COMMENTARY APRIL 1981
tune with the new attitude toward American
power. It hardly mattered that Carter (who had
been elected on promises to cut the defense budget
by at least $5 billion and never to lie to the Amer-
ican people) now boasted of having increased de-
fense spending and committed himself to further
increases in the years ahead, or that he instituted
registration for the draft, or that he authorized the
building and deployment of a rapid-deployment
force and the MX missile. Nor, on the other side,
did it matter that Reagan came out against a
peacetime draft and talked skeptically about both
the rapid-deployment force and the MX. Most
people knew that Carter was wary of American
power and inhibited almost to the point of paral-
ysis in the use of it, just as everyone knew that
Reagan believed in American power and could be
trusted to rebuild it and to use it if the need
should arise.
And so Reagan was elected on a platform prom-
ising to restore American military superiority
(later modified by the exigencies of the campaign
to "a margin of safety"). The early indications
were, moreover, that he would work much harder
to keep this promise than Carter did (or was able
to do, given the nature of things) to keep his
pledge to cut defense spending.,
III
WE HAVE, then, a new consensus on
the need to respond more firmly
and resolutely to the growth of Soviet power and
to take extraordinary steps (extraordinary in that
the defense budget is exempt from the demand aris-
ing out of the domestic side of the new consensus
to cut federal spending all across the board) to ar-
rest and reverse the decline of American power.
This new consensus embraces a solid majority of
the American people, and it is also bipartisan,
with Democrats (and a few Republicans like
Mark Hatfield) dissenting only at the margin and
on questions of degree. Even some of the most out-
spoken critics of American defense spending in the
Senate supported an increase last year and voted
to build the MX; and there are very few Demo-
crats holding or aspiring to office who are willing
to say in public (whatever they may think in the
privacy of their own minds) that the growth of
Soviet power is a statistical illusion conjured up
by the Pentagon, or that the Soviets are interested
only in security and peace and therefore pose no
threat to the United States or anyone else.
Broad and solidly rooted and national though it
is, however, the new consensus is as yet minimal.
In saying this, I intend no denigration of what in
my opinion is an immense achievement. The
change in American political culture represented
by the new consensus took years of ferocious strug-
gle at those "bloody crossroads" where the late
Lionel Trilling once said politics and culture
meet. Some of the heroes of that struggle have
now been rewarded with success at the polls. Oth-
ers who work not in the polity but in the world of
ideas and attitudes?the universities, the media?
have been left with grievous wounds to their repu-
tations that will not easily be healed and damage
to their positions that will not easily be repaired
even by the vindication they have now received.
Indeed, although the influence of the new con-
sensus is evident even in the universities and the
media, they remain, to a greater degree perhaps
than any other sector of our culture, mired in yes-
terday's conventional wisdom. On these issues, as
on so many others, the universities and the media
?usually considered to be on the front lines of
change, in the vanguard of opinion?have become
the repository of discredited ideas and shopworn
attitudes, a kind of shrine at which the cultists of
a dying religion gather to genuflect, chanting
mindless invocations they imagine arise out of rea-
son to a moribund god they still believe incar-
nates the living truth.
Nevertheless, these cultists, though a small mi-
nority, remain numerous enough and sufficiently
well placed to obstruct or retard the progress of
the new consensus beyond the minimal point it
has already, after so much struggle, managed to
reach. They will continue their efforts to prove
that it is the growth of American power rather
than the growth of Soviet power which is the
problem to be addressed. With a greater or lesser
degree of candor, they will resist the new consen-
sus and keep faith with the one it has replaced (in
this at least establishing their claim to be dissen-
ters?a claim that was fraudulent in the heyday of
the old orthodoxy to which they slavishly adhered).
And they will be ready to pounce at the first de-
velopment?perhaps an American intervention
or a new Soviet peace offensive?that might seem
to confirm their case.
Among the expressions of the old orthodoxy
there is a variant that cleverly builds on the new
consensus in order to arrive at a strategy that is
the exact opposite of the one to which the new
consensus actually points. This variant does not
deny that the Soviet Union has become more pow-
erful and that the position of the United States
has become much weaker than it once was. But in-
stead of drawing the conclusion that we must act
to restore or reverse the balance, it calls for a re-
turn to isolationism. Earl C. Ravenal,* the most
outspoken and articulate exponent of this point of
view, puts it this way: "In the aftermath of Af-
ghanistan, the comfortable middle options have
dropped away. The only alternative now to the of-
ficial strategy of resuscitated military intervention-
ism is an isolationist foreign policy."
Nor does Ravenal shrink from the implications
of his position. "The casualties of a general nu-
* "Doing Nothing," Foreign Policy, Summer 1980.
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clear war," he says, "might be 125 million Ameri-
cans; the casualties of even a conventional re-
gional war [to prevent the oil fields from falling
into hostile hands] might be 50,000-100,000, and it
would lose the oil anyway. The other way, Ameri-
cans would live less well, but live."
What we have here, of course, is an updated ver-
sion of the "Better red than dead" slogan of
twenty years ago, but Ravenal is even bolder than
his predecessors in this tradition. He is willing, as
few of them were, to apply the saline logic retroac-
tively to the struggle against Hitler. "If . . . the
United States has really reached 1939, it should re-
think World War II, not prepare to fight World
War III. Imagine Hitler with nuclear weapons.
Who would fight and who would negotiate? Who
would be the villains and who the heroes? Who
would be ready to put 125 million of his fellow
citizens' lives on the line to defend his values?"
The intellectual honesty here is as admirable as
the position it serves is dishonorable. But moral
considerations aside, the strategy of isolationism
and appeasement cannot deliver on its promise of
"survival for ourselves and perhaps for future gen-
erations." When Churchill said that World War
II had been an unnecessary war, he meant that
Hitler might have been stopped short of war if the
democracies had rearmed in time. Since they did
not, they led themselves ineluctably into a choice
of surrendering or fighting; faced with that choice
they decided (in defiance of Hitler's expectations
?he thought they were decadent) to fight.
The prospect we face today?the future danger
?is not, in my judgment, an unnecessary war but
rather an unnecessary surrender. "Imagine Hitler
with nuclear weapons," says Ravenal; it is easy to
do so, one need only think of the Soviet Union.
"Who would fight and who would negotiate?" As-
suming no change in the present balance of power,
and given the conviction of the Soviet Union that
a nuclear war is not only thinkable but winnable
?as against the American belief that a nuclear war
would be the end of the world and therefore in-
conceivable if deterrence should fail to enforce
restraint on the Soviet Union?the high probability
is that in a situation comparable to 1939, the
United States would surrender. "Who would be
the villains and who the heroes?" There would be
no heroes, but it is easy to say who the villains
would be: those like Ravenal who by counseling
and supporting a policy of appeasement had led
us into such a situation when, by rebuilding our
military power in time, we might have been spared
both the need to fight and the need to surrender.
For the moment the counsels of appeasement
are muted, but this school of thought will always
be potentially influential, appealing as it does to
natural fears and to fantasies of evasion, all
couched in the language of "realism," "national
maturity," and "survival." A scare similar to the
Cuban missile crisis, only this time with the roles
reversed and the United States forced to back
away from an "eyeball-to-eyeball" confrontation,
could energize the case for appeasement overnight,
smoothing our slide into Finlandization with the
assurance that if we surrendered all that would
happen is that we "would live less well, but live."
IT IS, I take it, precisely this hideous con-
junction of circumstances that Paul H.
Nitze wishes to head off in telling us how to devel-
op a "strategy from relative weakness."* Nitze, of
course, accepts the new consensus. In fact, as much
as any single individual in this country, he may be
said to have created it. A founder and leader of
the Committee on the Present Danger, and a tire-
less Churchillian voice sounding the alarm over
the growth of Soviet power and the decline of our
own, be has brought into play the unique author-
ity of his long experience as a specialist in defense
as well as in arms control (he helped to negotiate
SALT I and then led the fight against ratification
of SALT II).
From all this we would expect him to recom-
mend an urgent program of rearmament; and he
does. But he begins with a rehearsal of the facts
that lead him to conclude that the military bal-
ance is already unfavorable to the United States
"and that over the next five years it will probably
become more unfavorable."
Thus: in the area of strategic nuclear weapons,
the balance is now such that "If there were a stra-
tegic nuclear war, U.S. fatalities might be between
five and twenty times those of the Soviet Union"
and such a war would "end up with more power-
ful Soviet than U.S. strategic nuclear forces re-
maining after the exchanges as well as faster So-
viet recovery times."
So too "the theater nuclear balance has also
swung to a position adverse to the United States."
As for the balance of conventional forces, it "has
favored the Soviet side ever since World War II,"
and with "the decline in combat quality of the
U.S. Army since Vietnam and the institution of
the volunteer army, that balance has become even
more negative."
So much for the land and the air. On the sea
there are still areas where the balance remains fa-
vorable to the United States, but Nitze believes
that "one cannot say that the overall naval force
balance ... is favorable." What all this means is
that we would be unable to defend Saudi Arabia
in the event of a Soviet invasion?certainly not
with conventional forces and not even by threaten-
ing nuclear war:
. . . the strategic nuclear balance has shifted so
that any [conventional] moves on the Eurasian
landmass would be affected by Soviet escalation
* "Policy and Strategy from Weakness," in From Weak-
ness to Strength, W. Scott Thompson, ed. (Institute for
Contemporary Studies, 1980).
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control: that is to say, Soviet nuclear predomi-
nance carries the implied threat of an ability to
escalate a conflict up the nuclear ladder just as
the U.S. predominance in the Cuban missile cri-
sis in 1962 implied such a threat to the Soviet
Union.
The promise that Kuznetsov made to McCloy has,
then, been kept. The danger we face is a Cuban
missile crisis in reverse?and with our most vital
interests at stake.
In spite of all this, Nitze, it goes without saying,
counsels neither appeasement nor surrender.
Speaking the language of the new consensus, he
calls for a crash program of rearmament, with first
priority given to repairing the strategic nuclear
umbrella and the second to repairing the navy; he
speaks also of reinstating the draft and of under-
taking a program of civil defense. The trouble is
that the time it takes to build new weapons systems
is so great that "Even if we move resolutely and
wisely to correct the adverse trends, [we] cannot
do much to change the balance in less than ten or
fifteen years."
What then are we to do in the meantime? We
will, says Nitze, have to learn how to conduct
"strategy from relative weakness." We will have to
"recognize that the correlation of forces now is
negative for us, that it is going to be negative for
the next five years at least, and that the object of
policy should be to throw dust in the enemy's eyes
while getting on with reversing the trends and
making them positive."
Throwing dust in the enemy's eyes involves be-
coming' more aggressive in the waging of ideologi-
cal and psychological warfare. Yet while I myself
am if anything more enthusiastic than Nitze
about the possibilities of greater aggressiveness in
the war of ideas, I find it hard to understand why
the Soviet Union should stand by passively while
we are reversing the balance of power. We of
course did precisely that in relation to them, when
we deliberately decided to give up our advantage
in strategic nuclear weapons in the expectation
that the Soviets would rest content with parity
and then cooperate with us in putting an end to
the "arms race." But Nitze of all people should
know?in fact, does know and has said many times
?that the Soviets have been pursuing superiority
in order to intimidate and ultimately dominate
even without having to fight. Why then does he
think that they will now follow in our footsteps,
applauding (as we did with them) every step we
take to close the gap between us?
"There is," Nitze writes, "no inherent reason,
save a willful?and we hope unlikely?desire of
the Soviet Union to confront us militarily in the
near future, why we as a nation cannot conduct
policy from an honest appraisal of our current po-
sition while refashioning our policies and forces
and thus improve our position eventually to an
honest parity." But on Nitze's own analysis, the
Soviets have every reason "to confront us militar-
ily in the near future." It is, as he himself tells us,
in the near future that they will continue to enjoy
a superiority which could easily be canceled by the
coming together of a serious program of American
rearmament and the decline in their own eco-
nomic and technological capabilities that most ex-
perts expect to set in (for demographic and other
reasons) during the latter part of the 80's.
With the stage thus set in the Persian Gulf for a
Cuban missile crisis in reverse, why should the So-
viets not provoke it, forcing us to back down as
they seize control of the oil, and with it the power
to dominate the West?
TO THIS question Nitze has no answer;
he only has a hope. So of course do we
all, but intellectual honesty requires us to place a
minimum of faith in that hope and to acknowledge
that if Nitze is right in his analysis?and he may be?
then all is lost. If he is right, it can only be a year
or two or three, no more, before a Cuban missile
crisis in reverse is staged in the Persian Gulf, with
the Finlandization of the West following inexora-
bly in its wake.
Is Nitze right? About the present military bal-
ance he is almost certainly right: in that sense the
obverse analogy with the Cuban missile crisis
holds (though our strategic advantage in 1962 was
much greater than theirs today). But as Robert
W. Tucker points out,* there is a crucial differ-
ence between "the balance of interest" then and
the balance of interest today. That is, Cuba was
much less important to the Soviet Union in 1962
than the Persian Gulf is to the United States
today. "By confronting us in the Gulf, the Rus-
sians would in effect confront us in Europe. ... In-
deed, by threatening our position in the Gulf, the
Russians would in effect threaten our position
everywhere but this hemisphere." (I would include
this hemisphere.)
What this means is that our incentive to fight is
so great that it must give the Soviets pause. They
must assume that to confront us in the Persian
Gulf?especially when we are so decisively out-
gunned in conventional forces?is to risk an all-
out nuclear war.
Whether their estimate of the nuclear balance
coincides with that of the optimists in this country
who claim that a condition of rough strategic par-
ity now exists (hardly anyone still believes that we
still enjoy superiority); or whether the Soviets
share Nitze's belief that they now enjoy a clear
"nuclear predominance," and that they could fight
a nuclear war and emerge as the victor?they
would still obviously prefer to avoid the worst. Es-
pecially would they prefer it if they could prevail
without fighting. Therefore, so long as they be-
* "American Power & the Persian Gulf," COMMENTARY,
November 1980.
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THE FUTURE DANGER/37
lieve that we would fight a nuclear war rather
than surrender our vital interests to their control,
they will probably be deterred from trying to stage
an obverse Cuban missile crisis in the Persian Gulf.
This is why Tucker advocates the stationing of
American ground 'forces in the Persian Gulf.
Though part of their function would be to de-
fend against non-Soviet threats to our access to the
oil, they would also serve the same deterrent func-
tion our troops have served in Europe against a
direct Soviet invasion.
By invading, the Soviets would automatically be
at war with the United States; and given their ad-
vantage in conventional forces, such a war would
almost certainly become nuclear.
So, at any rate, goes the theory upon whose
credibility peace between the two nuclear super-
powers has rested for more than thirty years. (Of
course if the day ever arrived when the Soviets be-
came convinced that we would back down even if
our vital interests were at stake rather than risk,
let alone fight, a nuclear war, the theory would
collapse along with the United States itself. It
would also collapse if the Soviets ever achieved a
clear first-strike capability and could thereby pre-
sent us with the choice of surrender or certain
suicidal defeat.)
Thus for the time being there is a better chance
than Nitze's analysis allows to avert a reverse Cu-
ban missile crisis in the Persian Gulf. But it is a
chance that depends on more than a strategy of
throwing dust in the enemy's eyes while embarking
on a five-to-ten year program of rearmament. The
long-range program is certainly necessary, but in
the meantime Tucker is right in arguing that we
will, at a minimum, have to station ground forces
in the Middle East. Otherwise there will be no
credible deterrent to a Soviet invasion, or a Soviet-
sponsored coup.
Granting this, the question arises as to what we
can or should do beyond it. In other words, what
is to be the guiding principle of the refurbished
strategy of containment called for by the new con-
sensus?
INT
N another piece, an ambitious and
I densely reasoned essay entitled "The
Purposes of American Power,"* Tucker attempts
to answer this question. "The containment of
today and tomorrow," he says, will have to be
more "limited" and more "moderate" than the
containment of yesterday. Our "First priority is
the restoration of American power generally and,
above all, in the Persian Gulf"?and this, he reit-
erates, entails the stationing of American ground
forces there.
While, in opposition to Nitze, he thinks that we
are still powerful enough to undertake such a pol-
icy of containment, he also thinks that we are not
powerful enough to return even to what he him-
self characterizes as "the moderate containment of
the late 1940's." "The containment of today and
tomorrow will have to make concessions and com-
promises in areas of contention where concession
and compromise were once spurned."
Specifically, we are not to concern ourselves with
the domestic character of other countries, and we
are almost certainly not to intervene in support of
one side or another in an internal dispute. We
may not like it when a "radical"?that is, Marxist,
or Marxist-Leninist, or Communist?regime comes
to power, but (except in the Persian Gulf) the
only "coherent policy is to observe a hands-off po-
sition."
Courageously taking on the argument at its
most prickly point, Tucker applies this rule even
to Central America. Even though it is an area that
falls within our historic sphere of influence and
one where "our pride is engaged as it cannot possi-
bly be engaged" in Africa or in Southeast Asia,
"In Central America there are no vital raw materi-
als or minerals whose loss might provide the basis
for legitimate security concerns." Therefore we
should "view with equanimity" the coming to
power there of radical Marxist regimes?so long,
that is, as they do not "enter into a relationship
with, the Soviet Union that resembles the relation-
ship with Cuba." This would in Tucker's judg-
ment affect our vital interests.
? That there are difficulties with this position is
obvious. Thus, for example, even though in Africa
there are "vital raw materials ... whose loss might
provide the basis for legitimate security concerns,"
Tucker would presumably oppose intervention
there, including when (as in Angola) Soviet in-
volvement is unambiguous. Conversely, one won-
ders how serious he is about supporting interven-
tion to prevent the establishment of another Cuba
in Central America when the evidence of indirect
Soviet and direct Cuban influence in Nicaragua
and El Salvador nevertheless leads him to advo-
cate giving economic aid to the pro-Soviet Sandi-
nistas in Nicaragua and cutting off military aid to
the anti-Soviet junta in El Salvador.
It is perhaps for this reason that Tucker's posi-
tion has found support among political commen-
tators like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times
who have generally been hostile to the very idea of
American power and who might otherwise have
been expected to react with horror to his call for
so strong an anti-Soviet stand. In Tucker's concep-
tion of containment, it may be, such commenta-
tors have found a way of accommodating them-
selves to the new consensus without seriously en-
dangering the essence of the old orthodoxy?that
American power cannot be used to block Soviet
expansionism and should not be used to prevent
"radical" or "revolutionary" (i.e., Communist) re-
gimes from establishing themselves in the Third
* Foreign Affairs, Winter 1980/81.
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38/COMMENTARY APRIL 1981
World. Lewis well knows that it will always be dif-
ficult to prove direct Soviet involvement in a
given conflict?not even the overwhelming evi-
dence compiled by the State Department in the
case of El Salvador has convinced everyone?and
that if American intervention has to wait upon
such proof, the chances are that it will wait forever.
But leaving tactical problems aside for the mo-
ment, how viable is the overall strategy of moder-
ate containment outlined by Tucker? On paper it
is undoubtedly viable in the sense of being realis-
tic in its view of the world and coherent in con-
ception. It represents, moreover, a great advance
over the prevalent ideas of the recent past. There
are no illusions here about the transformation of
the Soviet Union into a status-quo power, or
about its readiness to cooperate with us in "crisis
management," or about our ability to induce it to
behave moderately. In fact, some of Tucker's best
pages are devoted to a devastating critique of the
strategy of "containment without confrontation"
recommended by those like Robert Legvold* who
use this phrase as a euphemism for a resurrected
policy of d?nte. (Tucker's main point is that if
the Soviets confounded our expectations of 1972
in a period when their incentives to cooperate
were much greater, why should they behave better
today, when the military balance has shifted in
their favor and the temptations to score gains in
the Third World have increased?)
In addition to being realistic about Soviet
power and Soviet intentions, Tucker is hard-
headed about the necessary American response.
We need "to redress the overall arms balance, to
insure Western access to the oil supplies of the
Persian Gulf, and generally to restore confidence
abroad that America has the understanding and
the discipline to maintain a solvent foreign policy."
Though he describes these steps as "moderate
containment," he himself is wryly aware that there
are those to whom it would seem deserving of the
epithet extremist. And indeed, this "moderate" or
"limited" strategy of containment does call for
very strong measures and very resolute nerves. It
even goes so far as to insist upon the necessity of
extending the threat of nuclear war from Europe
to the Persian Gulf. It is limited, then, not in the
military measures it contemplates but in the defi-
nition of the enemy. The enemy to be contained
by this strategy is the Soviet Union, nothing and
no one else.
What we have here, then, is containment as
Realpolitik. Tucker is by no means blind to the
importance of values or ideology in the conflict be-
tween the Soviet Union and the United States,
and he pauses from time to time to pay his obeis-
ances to such factors. But like all writers in the
Realpolitik tradition, he is much more comfortable
with the categories of physical security and mate-
rial interest, becoming suspicious and uneasy
whenever the discussion shifts from geography or
commerce or raw materials to talk of ideologies
and values, of democracy and Communism. He
dislikes "the sweeping language of the Truman
Doctrine" (e.g., "We must assist free peoples to
work out their destinies in their own way") and
he fears "its sense of universal crisis" ("At the
present moment in world history every nation
must choose between alternative ways of life"). In
language like that, he says, "we can see the subse-
quent course of a policy that led to the equation
of American security with world order, world
order with the containment of Communism, and
the containment of Communism with the conflict
?Vietnam?that brought an end to the policy of
global containment."
For Tucker the great lesson of Vietnam, and the
one that should guide us in fashioning a new pol-
icy of containment, is that an emphasis on "ideol-
ogy" over "security" leads to disaster.
ATTRACTIVE though this position is,
however, it no more amounts to a
truly viable strategy than Nitze's "throwing dust
in the enemy's eyes." In the case of Nitze's pre-
scription, it is the Soviets who are the obstacle. In
the case of Tucker's, it is the American people.
Analysts and theorists of the Realpolitik school
have always lamented the absence in the United
States of a geopolitical tradition in the shaping of
foreign policy. From Hans J. Morgenthau and
George F. Kennan in the 50's to Henry Kissinger
and Robert W. Tucker today, they have been tell-
ing us that the time has come for the United
States to stop oscillating so wildly between isola-
tionism and Wilsonianism, between withdrawing
from the world and sallying forth on moral cru-
sades to save it.
Yet the truth is that however desirable it might
be for the United States to "Europeanize" its rela-
tions with the rest of the world, no amount of ex-
hortation is likely to transform the character of
this country as it expresses itself, and has always
expressed itself, in the conduct of foreign policy.
(Considering that the European tradition of con-
ducting international affairs has resulted in two
world wars in the 20th century alone, one won-
ders, indeed, what makes it so self-evidently supe-
rior a model.) For better or worse, the Americans
have always been and still are a people who have
no fondness for "standing armies," and who are
very reluctant to support such armies?let alone
their deployment in war?merely for the sake of
maintaining a balance of power among nations
competing with more or less equal justification for
position and advantage.
One of the "lessons of Vietnam" that is rarely
mentioned is that public support became impossi-
ble to maintain in the absence of a convincing
* "Containment Without Confrontation," Foreign Policy,
Fall 1980.
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THE FUTURE DANGER/39
moral rationale for our effort there. Having, para-
doxically, gone into Vietnam for idealistic reasons
(in the strict sense that there was no vital geopo-
litical or material interest at stake, and that what
we were actually trying to do was save the South
Vietnamese from the horrors of Communist rule
that have now befallen them), we then tried to
justify our involvement in the lAiguage of Realpol-
itik. But no good case could be made in that lan-
guage for American military intervention; and
even if it could, it would not in the long run have
convinced the American people.
The same lesson can be drawn from the decline
of support for military spending in the 1970's. To
some extent the anti-defense .climate that devel-
oped in those years was a product of revulsion
against Vietnam. But the policy of d?nte was an
even greater source of nourishment. By represent-
ing the Soviet Union as a competing superpower
with whom we could negotiate peaceful and stable
accommodations?instead of a Communist state
hostile in its very nature to us and trying to ex-
tend its rule and its political culture over a wider
and wider area of the world?the Nixon, Ford,
and Carter administrations robbed the Soviet-
American conflict of the moral and political dimen-
sion for the sake of which sacrifices could be intel-
ligibly demanded by the government and willingly
made by the people.
No wonder, then, that the country drifted into
apathy in response to the growth of Soviet power
on the one side and the decline of American
power on the other. What, after all, did it matter?
Even if the Soviet Union really were to seize the
oil fields of the Persian Gulf, what real difference
would it make to us? To Tucker the Persian Gulf
"forms the indispensable key to the defense of the
American global position, just as it forms the in-
dispensable key without which the Soviet Union
cannot seriously aspire to global predominance."
But if the Soviet Union is only another superpow-
er?just as we ourselves are?why risk nuclear war
to hold it back? If the Soviets were to take over the
oil fields, might they not even prove a more relia-
ble supplier than the Arabs?
There have been those who thought so. In an
editorial bouncily entitled "Soviet Gas Won't
Choke the Allies" (January 16, 1981) and support-
ing an arrangement that would make the West
Europeans highly dependent on the Soviet Union
for supplies of natural gas, the New York Times
assured us that "The Soviet Union is probably a
much more reliable supplier than OPEC, certainly
more reliable than the mercurial regimes of Iran,
Libya, and Iraq" and expressed its confidence that
the Soviets would never use the threat of a cut-off
to enforce political demands.
As has so often been the case in recent years, the
attitude of the American people on this issue is
sounder than the ideas of their leaders and puta-
tive betters. American public opinion, as we have
seen, has not viewed Soviet control of our energy
supplies with equanimity. But would public opin-
ion continue to support the huge increases in de-
fense spending that even Tucker's strategy of lim-
ited containment requires, and the risks of con-
frontation that he freely admits would flow from
such a strategy, if the Soviet Union were seen as
nothing more than another superpower bent on
aggrandizing itself? Would not a nearly irresistible
isolationist pressure arise from the depths of the
national psyche, allowing the Soviets to control
what they could (including even Western Eu-
rope), seeking protection from actual Soviet con-
quest of the United States in an invulnerable sec-
ond-strike capability?the kind of nuclear Magi-
not line recommended by theorists of "minimal
deterrence"?and counting on the Soviets to be-
have toward us in strict accordance with whatever
economic deals we might persuade them to accept?
What I am suggesting, in short, is that a strategy
of containment centered on considerations of Real-
politik would be unable to count indefinitely on
popular support. Sooner or later (probably sooner
rather than later) it would succumb to a resurg-
ence of isolationism, leaving a free field for the ex-
pansion of Soviet power. Since in my judgment
the United States would be unable to maintain it-
self for very long as a free society if it were an is-
land surrounded by a sea of varying shades of red,
the strategy of limited containment would turn
out to be a long detour on the road to Finlandiza-
tion.
V
BUT if the Soviets will not allow us to
follow Nitze's strategy of throwing
dust in their eyes while we are racing to close the
military gap between us, and if the American peo-
ple will not allow us to follow Tucker's strategy of
containing Soviet expansion while looking with
equanimity upon the expansion of Communism,
what is to be done? The obvious answer is that we
will have to adopt a strategy aimed at containing
the expansion of Communism.
In its recent "white paper" on El Salvador, the
State Department made surprisingly free use of the
word Communism, but anyone attempting to in-
troduce, or rather reintroduce, that word into the
discussion of these matters within the intellectual
community is certain to encounter shock and re-
sistance. This, more than anything else, is the
ironic legacy left to our political culture and our
political disconrse by McCarthyism. Euphemisms
like "radical" or "revolutionary" or "progressive"
or "far-Left" or "Marxist" or even "Marxist-Len-
inist" are permitted, but the word Communism it-
self has been interdicted, banished, excommuni-
cated. So effective has the ban become that even
when someone joins the Communist party and
proudly calls himself a Communist, the term is
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avoided in the press. Thus, for example, Angela
Davis, who not only belongs to the Communist
Party U.S.A. but ran for Vice President on its
ticket in the 1980 election, is still rarely described
by the media as a Communist; she remains a
"black militant."
It is understandable that a word whose loose ap-
plication once damaged many people of whom it
was mistakenly or ignorantly or maliciously used
should have become suspect in itself. It is also un-
derstandable that the term Communist, which in
the past accurately designated obedience to the
dictates of a party under the control of the Soviet
Union, should have been discarded as misleading
once several national parties, most notably the
Chinese, had broken out of the Soviet orbit. The
term Communist once clearly meant pro-Soviet
or Soviet-controlled; by now it can mean anti-
Soviet, or pro-Chinese, or even neutral with re-
spect to both.
Nevertheless, to deny ourselves the use of this
term is to make intellectual clarity, and therefore
also clarity of purpose, more difficult to achieve.
To begin with, until we can talk about Commun-
ism again, we will be unable to explain?above all
to ourselves, but also to others?why the Soviet
Union poses so mortal a threat. There are those
who tell us that Communism is no longer, a signifi-
cant factor in Soviet policy, that no one there still
really believes in Marx or even Lenin. Some who
tell us this admit that the Soviet Union is expan-
sionist, but the purpose as they interpret it is not
to export Communism. Rather it is to follow
through on age-old Russian imperial ambitions
(the Czarist search for a warm-water port, for ex-
ample, forming in this view the ground for the in-
vasion of Afghanistan).
Unlike the idea that the Soviet Union is neither
Communist nor expansionist, this interpretation
at least has the merit of recognizing the Soviet Un-
ion's imperialistic ambitions. Indeed, the model
pointed to by this school of Sovietology is Ger-
many in the pre-World War I period?an expan-
sionist power whose objectives, however, were lim-
ited to achieving what it regarded as a fair share
of the imperial spoils. In other words, while this
Germany, Wilhelmine Germany, was expansionist,
it did not seek to overthrow the going interna-
tional system. Its conflict with its adversaries was
not a struggle between competing civilizations or
ideologies but a quarrel within the same family of
nations (literally so, since the monarchs of most of
these countries were cousins).
But if the Soviet Union of today resembles the
Germany of the past, it is not the Germany of Kai-
ser Wilhelm but the Germany of Adolf Hitler.
Unlike Wilhelmine Germany, but like Nazi Ger-
many, the Soviet Union is a totalitarian state. Un-
like Wilhelmine Germany but like Nazi Germany,
the Soviet Union represents a radically different
idea about how to organize social, political, and
economic life on this earth from the one that pre-
vails in the world of its adversaries. And unlike
Wilhelmine Germany but like Nazi Germany, the
Soviet Union aims to overthrow the present inter-
national system and to replace it with one in
which its own power is dominant and its own po-
litical culture becomes the model and the
norm.
IN sum: the conflict between the United
States and the Soviet Union is a clash
between two civilizations. More accurately, it is
a clash between civilization and barbarism. What
makes the Soviet Union barbaric is, precisely, Corn-
munism?a system that assumes the right of total
control over every aspect of life, that denies any de-
gree of freedom to the individual, that brings eco-
nomic misery and cultural starvation to all who live
under it. Whether or not the rulers of the Soviet
Union "believe" in Communism, they are them-
selves slaves to it in the sense that it supplies the
only legitimation of their rule (who elected them?
who appointed them?); and whether or not they
"believe" in expansionism, their claim to leader-
ship cannot be validated unless they remain true
to the international mission dictated by the same
ideology that keeps them in power at home.
One need not go as far as Solzhenitsyn does in
seeing Russia as the entirely innocent victim of an
alien ideology to recognize that the threat we face
comes not from Russia but from the Soviet Union
?that is, from Communist Russia. A non-Commu-
nist Russia might still be expansionist and still
pose problems, but it would hardly pose the kind
of menace to us that Communism has made of
that country. For since the defeat of fascism in
World War II, Communism has emerged as the
single greatest threat to liberty on the face of the
earth. It is, today, the only such threat that is
backed by the military might of a major power?a
nation, as Sakharov says, "armed to the teeth" and
inescapably committed to the evangelism of the
sword. But whereas fascism?and still more Nazism,
its most malignant variant?lacked widespread id-
eological appeal and depended entirely on force to
impose its influence (a condition that remains
true of fascist regimes today), Communism has
proved itself a threat to liberty in the world of
ideas as well.
This ideological threat has undoubtedly grown
weaker in recent years than it used to be (just as
the military component of the threat has grown
stronger). Neither in the Soviet Union, nor in its
East European colonies, nor at the moment in
mainland China do the doctrines of Marx and
Lenin or the "praxis" of Stalin and Mao seem to
arouse much enthusiasm. Yet what this demon-
strates is only that the people who actually live
under Communism sooner or later cease believing
in it and even come to hate it. In the non-Commu-
nist world, on the other hand, illusions about
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Communism continue to enjoy an amazingly
hardy existence.
? It is true that some Communist parties in the
West which used to look to the Soviet Union as a
workers' paradise and as a model for their own fu-
ture have lost a bit of their pro-Soviet fervor. But
despite optimistic forecasts, these parties have not
renounced Communism (nor, except as concerns
Soviet intervention into other Communist coun-
tries, have they opposed Soviet foreign policy to
any significant degree). All they have done is to
shift their utopian claims from the Soviet present-
to a thus-far nonexistent future when, against all
the evidence of the past sixty years, "Communism
with a human face" will make its smiling appear-
ance in the world.
It is also true that many non-Communist intel-
lectuals in the West, and especially in France,
have with, the help of Solzhenitsyn's books finally
begun freeing themselves from the mystique of
revolution which turned so many of them for so
long into apologists for the Soviet Union. Some,
like Bernard-Henri Levy, have even gone further
and located the seeds of the Gulag in the pre-
viously sacred scriptures of Marx himself. Yet the
poisoning of the intellectual wells, the corruption
of key terms like freedom and democracy by Marx-
ist thought and Communist praxis, remains an ob-
stacle to a proper appreciation of the free societies
of the West, and the concomitant willingness?or
indeed ability?to defend them against ideological
attack.
Iis, however, in the Third World
rather than in the United States or
Europe that Communism remains the greatest ide-
ological menace. We are often told that the Marx-
ist-Leninist rhetoric of Third World leaders
should not be taken seriously; all they really are is
nationalists struggling to achieve independence
and an identity of their own. But it was ideas?
Communist ideas, some of them absorbed in the
caf?of Paris?that turned Cambodia into the
Auschwitz of Asia, that created a new Gulag in
Communist Vietnam, that sent Cuban troops into
Africa and the Middle East.
All these countries are Soviet clients and de-
pendencies. But whether they are allied to the So-
viet Union or not?and even though the appeal of
Soviet-style Communism may have declined in
Western Europe?it is the Marxist-Leninist ideol-
ogy of such movements as SWAPO in Namibia, the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the leftist guerrillas
in El Salvador, that accounts for the sympathy
they invariably get in the West.
When, for example, the Socialist International,
representing the social-democratic parties of the
West, throws its support behind these movements,
the assumption is that they will create better re-
gimes than the ones against which they have gone
to war. There was a time when democratic social-
ists like Willy Brandt understood that Communist
regimes could not be expected to make things bet-
ter for the people who lived under them, but that
time has long since passed. Today Brandt and his
fellow socialists are a major exception to the rule
that non-Communist intellectuals in Europe have
become more critical of the Soviet Union and of
Communism in general than they used to be; the
Socialist International has been moving in exactly
the opposite direction. And nowhere does this new
tendency show itself more clearly than in the SI's
policy toward Central America.
Yet if we wonder on what the assumption guid-
ing this policy is based, the answer cannot be
the experience of Third World countries under
Communism. Are the Cubans today better off than
they were under Batista? Ask the many thousands
who have already left and the countless other
thousands who are clamoring to get out. Are the
South Vietnamese better off under the rule of the
North than they were under Thieu? Ask the boat
people. Are the Cambodians better off as Kampu-
cheans? Ask the grave.
Why then take it for granted that the Sandinis-
tas, once they consolidate their power, or the FDR
in El Salvador if it succeeds in toppling the junta,
will be different? The only answer can be that the
ideological commitment to "socialism" is enough
to establish a legitimate claim for support of a
movement fighting any regime of the Right.
So much for the contention that ideology has
become irrelevant; so much too for the argument
that Communism no longer has any ideological
appeal. But a word also needs to be said about the
obstacle posed by Communism?again, whether or
not allied to the Soviet Union?to the develop-
ment of institutions under which human rights
can flourish.
The fact that talk of human rights trips so
glibly off the tongues of many whose sympathies
lie with Communist insurgencies like the one in
El Salvador should not blind us to the moral im-
pudence involved here. For human rights have in-
variably fared worse under Communism than
under the regimes it has replaced. I have already
mentioned the most hideous illustrations of this
rule, but it is important to understand that the
horrors perpetrated by Communists in power are
not accidental or arbitrary. They follow from the
totalitarian nature of Communist regimes.
As writers from Hannah Arendt in the 50's to
Jeane Kirkpatrick today have been trying to tell
us, there is a fundamental distinction between
Communist regimes and the more traditional au-
thoritarian regimes of the Right we are familiar
with in the Third World. The main and often
only source of repression in the latter is their de-
termination to eliminate political opposition.
Communist regimes, by contrast, permit no area of
life to escape the control of the state. Even author-
itarian regimes at their worst generally allow more
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freedom?economic, cultural, religious?than the
mildest of Communist states; this indeed is the
main reason non-Communist autocracies can some-
times be overthrown or even peacefully replaced'
by democratic regimes (as in Spain, Portugal, and
Greece). But not a single country has ever broken
free once the Communist yoke has been forced
onto its neck; and to this day not a single country
(with the possible exception of Chile where Al-
lende was elected by 35 percent of the vote and
where he was overthrown before he had a chance
to turn the country into a full-fledged Communist
state) has ever voluntarily submitted to that yoke.
Not one, not ever.
To oppose Communism in the world of ideas
and ideOlogies is therefore in itself a necessary con-
dition of fighting for human rights; anyone who
fails to oppose Communism forfeits the intellec-
tual and moral right to speak in the name of
human rights. And this is equally true of opposing
the spread of Communism?which means the es-
tablishment of totalitarian rule and the virtual de-
struction of any hope of eventual democratization
?in practice.
In an attack on the signs of a resumption by the
Reagan administration of friendly American rela-
tions with Argentina and South Korea, the col-
umnist Richard Reeves,* misapplying a statement
once made by Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the
UN, writes: "We are Americans. If we are not for
freedom, what are we for?" Indeed we are for free-
dom, which is why we should prefer authoritarian
regimes of the Right to the totalitarian states of
the Communist world.
At the same time, where a democratic opposi-
tion exists in those authoritarian regimes, our sym-
pathies will naturally be drawn to it. But the
question always arises as to whether encouraging
such an opposition and putting pressure on the
authorities to give it freer rein will so weaken
them as to lead eventually to their overthrow and
replacement by something worse?worse both
from the point of view of the people there and
from the standpoint of American interests.
As the case of Iran demonstrates, the worse al-
ternative need not be a Communist state; yet as
things go in the contemporary world, it usually is.
When another columnist, Hodding Carter IIIt
(who served as the State Department spokesman
under Carter), sneers at the welcome given by
President Reagan to "that resolute guardian of his
subjects' freedom, the current South Korean dic-
tator," his smug sarcasm blinds him to the fact
the Chun is the resolute guardian of South
Korea's freedom: its freedom from a takeover by
North Korea which would result (as the example
of Vietnam should have taught Mr. Carter and
everyone else once and for all) in a society that
would make South Korea even at its most repres-
sive look like a libertarian paradise.
Is there then nothing the United States can do
to encourage the gradual liberalization of coun-
tries like South Korea, Taiwan, Argentina, etc.?
The answer is that there are things we can do, but
our pressures have to be guided by the rule of pru-
dence. They must be informed, that is, with a
greater sense of the local conditions and dangers
than we have shown in the recent past. Otherwise,
in the name of promoting humah rights, we will
?as we already have in Iran and Nicaragua?find
ourselves cooperating in the replacement of a
lesser evil by a greater one.
VI
MHE same rule of prudence?the same
practical political wisdom?is the
only protection against the obverse danger of a
strategy aimed at the containment of Communism.
This danger is the "globalism" that so worries
Tucker and others because in their view it is what
drove us into Vietnam in the past and could be
expected to generate an equivalent disaster in the
future.
But was it anti-Communism that drove us into
Vietnam? In a sense, of course, it was: we went in
to prevent a Communist takeover of the South.
Yet even at the time there were those like Hans J.
Morgenthau who opposed military intervention
not because they were against the objective of
holding the line against the spread of Commun-
ism (or because they thought we had no moral
right to do so, or because they sympathized more
or less frankly with the Communist side). They
opposed intervention because they believed that
Vietnam was "the wrong war in the wrong place
at the wrong time." This was a prudential judg-
ment that turned out to be right: the United
States was in the event unwilling to pay the price
of victory, and was therefore doomed to lose the
war and suffer consequent political damage both
at home and abroad.
Of all the putative "lessons of Vietnam," the
most important is the one least frequently men-
tioned: never to undertake a military operation
without the will and the means (including the do-
mestic political support) to win. The "best and
the brightest" who led us into Vietnam were in
fact neither the best nor the brightest. Typically
they were arrogant and singularly unendowed
with prudential intelligence. Is there any guaran-
tee that an anti-Communist strategy of containment
Would be applied in the future with greater pru-
dence?with a more finely tuned feel both for the
limits and the extent of our power? The answer is
no?although those who are now warning us
against indiscriminate interventionism remind me
of the Pope in Latin America warning people who
have only just begun to afford wearing shoes
* New York Daily News, February 19, 1981.
t Wall Street Journal, February 19, 1981.
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THE FUTURE DANGER/43
about the dangers of consumerism and rampant
materialism. No doubt the danger is there, but it
is not the most urgent or immediate one we face.
The other great criticism of an anti-Communist
strategy is that it would rob us of the ability to ex-
ploit the many divisions in the Communist world.
Most significantly, would it not rule out coopera-
tion with China? No more, and no less, I would
say, than the fight against Hitler ruled out an alli-
ance with Stalin, an equally malevolent totalitar-
ian tyrant. For here too the rule of prudence ap-
plies, permitting tactical flexibility within an over-
all strategy. As Hitler was the more dangerous evil
at that moment, and as Stalin for reasons of his
own (which were not the same as ours) joined in
the war to defeat the common enemy, we were jus-
tified?indeed required?by prudential considera-
tions to do what we did.
There is thus no reason why an anti-Commu-
nist strategy would preclude a temporary tactical
alliance with Communist China against the Soviet
Union. But the same rule of prudence that allows
for this alliance also provokes serious doubts
about its advisability. In World War II, the Soviet
Union was strong enough to make a major contri-
bution to the defeat of Nazi Germany. But is
Communist China a comparable asset in our strug-
gle with the Soviet Union? In terms of actual mili-
tary capability, obviously not. Admittedly a hos-
tile China requires the Soviet Union to pin down
some 45 divisions on its eastern borders that might
otherwise be deployed in the West. Yet those divi-
sions were not put on the Chinese border in the
first place because of anything we did or did not
do. Nor are they likely to be removed by any act of
our own.
Therefore it is hard to see what benefits accrue
to us from helping to build up the Chinese eco-
nomically and militarily. On the other hand, it is
easy to spell out the risks. In helping one Commu-
nist country while struggling against another, we
risk a loss of clarity about our purposes just at a
time when we have a chance to regain such clarity.
We also risk helping to create an additional men-
ace to our children and grandchildren.
Of course if, as we often hear, China is really in
the process of abandoning Communism and le-
coming "Americanized," these risks would simply
evaporate. But while the evidence for this theory
of Chinese development is intriguing, the histori-
cal record must inspire skepticism. No Communist
regime has ever abandoned Communism. Further-
more, there are precedents in the Soviet experi-
ence itself for the kind of internal changes now
taking place in China, as well as for alliances with
"bourgeois" nations. Yet neither the loosening up
of the Soviet economy at various times nor the
popular-front strategy of the late 30's resulted in
an alteration of the country's basic totalitarian
structure or in the discarding of the ideological
imperatives of Marxism-Leninism. If there is any
reason to believe that China will prove to be dif-
ferent, it has yet to make itself manifest.
THE third .great argument against an
anti-Communist strategy of contain-
ment is that it would, in the words of the regnant
clich?f this debate, "put us on the wrong side of
history." The theory here is only a version of the
historical determinism that forms so crucial a part
of the Marxist scheme of things. It is an atten-
uated version in that it assumes a vague tendency
toward the triumph of the Left rather than an
iron law dictating the eventual overthrow of the
bourgeoisie by the proletariat; and it is sanitized
in that it does not refer explicitly to the Commu-
nist party as the only possible leader of the proc-
ess. Translated into these relatively bland terms,
with the radical spice and bite removed, the idea
has been rendered fit for liberal consumption.
From the tenacity with which it has taken hold,
one might suppose that the evidence for it is so
overwhelming as to be irresistible to any rational
person. Yet the odd truth is that, like so many
ideas in the Marxist canon, this one has been con-
founded over and over again by that very history
whose laws Marx purported to have discovered. If
anything is clear from the experience of these mat-
ters over the past century, it is that the only inevi-
table law of history is that Marx's predictions will
not come true. Thus in defiance of the condi-
tions Marx had specified, Russia became the first
Communist state; Germany, which he supposed
would enjoy this honor, declined it and went the
other way; nor did the "internal contradictions"
of capitalism lead to the increasing impoverish-
ment of the working class or to the emergence of a
revolutionary proletariat; and so on and on into
the endless night of a tiresome debate that, on the
evidence, should have been settled ages ago.
Belief in the inevitable triumph of "socialism"
has led to the conviction that the United States
should not oppose, and in some instances should
even sponsor, the establishment of "socialist" re-
gimes. In addition to putting us on the side of the
"progressive" tide of history against the "reaction-
ary" forces trying in vain to hold it back, this
strategy has sometimes been represented as a bet-
ter way of containing Soviet expansionism than a
policy that defines Marxists as the enemy. By op-
posing the Marxists, we "drive them into the
arms" of the Soviet Union; conversely, by helping
them, we can limit the extent of Soviet influence.
I once described this peculiar strategy of con-
tainment as "saving Communism from the Rus-
sians,"* and I pointed to the comedy of the fact
that so many people who had always ridiculed the
old Wilsonian idea of using American power to
make the world safe for democracy were urging us
*"Making the World Safe for Communism," COMMEN-
TARY, April 1976.
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to use it for the truly ridiculous purpose of "mak-
ing the world safe for Communism in a variety of
national forms." I found it hard then, and I find
it hard still, to understand why the United States
should cooperate in the spread of a political cul-
ture hostile to our own and inimical to the wel-
fare of the people under its sway.
It may well be that in certain instances we can
do nothing to prevent the spread of this culture;
and where that is the case, we have no prudent al-
ternative but to make the best of things. But why
should we help it along? And why should we not
stand in its way wherevep we can prudently do so?
Such a policy cannot put us on the wrong or in-
deed on the right side of history: history has no
side. But it can put us on the side of liberty,
which is where we belong and where we have a
duty both to our own interests and to our ideals to
be.
VII
T N ADVOCATING an anti-Communist strat-
egy of containment, however, am I
calling for an eternity of confrontation and the
risk of war without let-up, without surcease, and
without any hope of victory at the end? It would
be dishonest and a species of cant to deny that this
might indeed be the prospect. It is a horrifying
prospect from which one's first impulse is to
shrink. But the prospect from the other side is
more horrifying still: a universal Gulag and a life
that is otherwise nasty, brutish, and short.
If, however, it would be cant to deny that an
anti-Communist strategy holds out the possibility
of an endless stalemate?a kind of cold-war equiv-
alent of World War I?it would be conversely
wrong to fall into what the late C.P. Snow once
called "sentimental cynicism" by failing to acknowl-
edge the possibility of a much brighter prospect
as well.
Almost thirty-five years ago, when George F.
Kennan (under the pseudonym of Mr. X) out-
lined the original strategy of containment in his
historic essay, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct,"
he addressed himself to the same question of what
could be hoped for from "a long-term, patient but
firm and vigilant containment of Russian expan-
sive tendencies" involving "the adroit and vigilant
application of counter-force at a series of con-
stantly shifting geographical and political points,
corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of So-
viet policy." Kennan's answer was that by holding
the Soviets behind the lines drawn at the end of
?World War II, we would promote "tendencies
which must eventually find their outlet in either
the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet
power."
? This would, Kerman thought, take about fifteen
years. Fifteen years later, however, came the
Cuban missile crisis, which as we have seen pro-
moted neither the breakup nor the mellowing of
Soviet power but a tremendous increase in that
power, and the beginnings of American involve-
ment in Vietnam, which led to an equally spectac-
ular decline of American power. Yet even though
his timing was so badly off, Kennan's prediction
may still have been at least partially sound.
Today, thirty-five years after his essay was pub-
lished, hardly anyone but Kennan himself still
hopes for the mellowing of Soviet power, but
there is a more reasonable ground than ever for
hope of a breakup of Soviet power.
To Kennan in 1947 it seemed "that Soviet
power, like the capitalist world of its conception,
bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that
the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced."
They were not, evidently, quite so well advanced
as he imagined. Today, however, buds and even
flowers have begun to become visible.
Within the heartland of the Soviet empire both
the agricultural and the highly developed technol-
ogical sectors remain dependent on Western help.
Economic and demographic problems are bound
to grow more and more severe as the Russian ma-
jority begins giving way to a less advanced and less
productive Muslim population. We even hear of a
"health crisis" which has brought life expectancy
within the Soviet Union to a lower point than it
was under Stalin, when so many millions were
murdered.* Moving outside the heartland and into
the empire, we find Poland to the West exerting an
even greater political challenge to Communist
rule than Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in
1968; and we find Afghanistan to the South still
offering resistance against a Soviet army 85,000-
strong.
There are those who cite these facts, and others
like them, to support the argument that the
United States has nothing to fear from the Soviet
Union. We do not, they contend, need to rearm or
to strengthen our position in the Persian Gulf; we
need only stand by and watch as the Soviets sink
helplessly into a Vietnam-like "quagmire" in Af-
ghanistan and as they lose control of their East
European satellites. But the only reason Vietnam
became a quagmire for us is that the Soviet Union
gave the Communists there the arms with which
to fight and ultimately win. Unless we do the same
for the Afghans, the Soviets will simply wipe out
the resistance at a cost they are entirely willing
and easily able to afford.
Interestingly, those who counsel passivity to-
ward Afghanistan are invariably among the voices
calling on us to help the Communist authorities
in Poland satisfy the economic demands of the
newly?and temporarily??independent unions.
As Congressman Les Aspint puts it: "...we could
help underwrite a peaceful resolution of the eco-
* Nick Eberstadt, "The Coming Health Crisis in the
USSR," New York Review of Books, February 19, 1981.
t New York Times, February 6, 1981.
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THE FUTURE DANGER/45
nomic and political crisis. For Warsaw and Mos-
cow, the price would be toleration of an independ-
ent source of political authority: Solidarity." Wil-
liam Safire* of the New York Times, recognizing
that the Soviets are unlikely to accept such a con-
dition, or to honor it if they did, has a better
suggestion: "Let the Russians," he writes, who im-
posed an unworkable economic system on Poland
which has pushed it into bankruptcy, "bail it
out": "If they cannot pay the costs of their imperi-
alism, let them withdraw to their own borders."
Safire knows, of course, that they will not with-
draw; therefore "we should let history take its
course." This means refusing to help the Soviets
evade the choice of once again using military force
to repress a movement for greater freedom within
its imperial domains.
4 ISTENING to certain Europeans and their
American counterparts, we hear no
expressions of admiration for the nobility?another
word that ought to be reintroduced into our po-
litical discourse?shown by the Afghans and the
Poles. We hear only of hypocritical plans for the
neutralization of Afghanistan and plaintive proph-
ecies to the effect that a Soviet invasion of Poland
would be the worst thing that could happen to the
Poles. How do these people know? Might not a
Soviet invasion be the worst thing that could hap-
pen to the Soviets? Might they not encounter a
degree of resistance from the Poles they did not
meet with in Hungary or Czechoslovakia? And
might this not trigger other uprisings against So-
viet rule?
In any case, if the people of Poland, fighting for
freedom, are willing to risk a Soviet invasion, how
dare we join with their totalitarian rulers in
trying to buy them off? Have we sunk so low in
our fear of trouble that we are no longer even able
to respond with anything other than trepidation
to the spectacle of political courage?
It is ironic?to use the mildest possible term?
that the very people who keep informing us that
imperialism has had its day simultaneously talk
as though the Soviet empire, the last great em-
pire on earth, must be regarded as eternal. The
Roman empire was not eternal, the British empire
was not eternal, but the Soviet empire is. If we ask
why, their answer is that its breakup would be too
dangerous. It would be a convulsion sucking oth-
ers in and leading in all probability to a new
world war.
Unquestionably the breakup of the Soviet em-
pire would be dangerous. But the alternative is
even more dangerous: it is, in the words of Deputy
Prime Minister Rajaratnamt of Singapore, "a so-
cialist world order under Soviet leadership." He
goes on:
If the non-Communist industrial powers cannot
roll back the rising tide of Soviet power, then
the small nations of Asia and of the Third
World generally must come to terms with the
new Caesar. In fact, I know that many Asian
countries are already, mentally, trying out Pax
Sovietica for size. "Better red than dead," if re-
peated long enough might, hopefully, exorcise
their time-sanctioned fears about having to live
under a Communist world leader.
What Rajaratnam is saying is that the internal
problems of the Soviet Union, and even the prob-
lems at its imperial frontiers, can be overcome by
the classic imperial technique of further expan-
sion.
If, however, we can deny them this outlet, the
internal pressures already boiling behind their
present imperial borders will mount of their own
accord. To deny them means refraining (as in Po-
land) from cooperating with them in cooling such
pressures off. It also means turning up the heat
where the opportunity presents itself. Sending
arms to the Afghans is one example; another is
backing the pro-Western guerrilla force of Jonas
Savimbi against the Soviet puppet regime in An-
gola. These are measures that carry a very low risk
of direct confrontation with the Soviet Union. In-
deed, they amount to nothing more than doing
unto them what they have been doing to us for a
very long time.
VIII
THERE
are commentators like Tucker
who think the new consensus pro-
vides no mandate for so ideological a policy and
one so global in its reach. Others believe that the
new consensus would be only too happy to sup-
port an anti-Communist foreign policy, but they
fear the domestic repercussions. Going on an anti-
Communist "crusade" would, they warn, bring
back all the horrors of McCarthyism; already they
detect a "whiff" of it in the air. But if McCarthy-
ism means holding people guilty by association and
damaging them with loose charges, then there has
in recent years been not a "whiff" of it in the air
but a powerful stench, only it has come from the
Left rather than the Right.
Naturally it is the McCarthyites of the Left who
are now raising the loudest alarms over a resurg-
ence of the old McCarthyism (which they some-
times seem almost to crave in the expectation that
it might pump the blood back into their harden-
ing ideological arteries). A good example is the
Nation, which has run several pieces since the
election of Reagan announcing the arrival of the
new McCarthyism. One of these pieces was written
by the same member of the editorial board who
produced an attack on Jeane Kirkpatrick, after
her appointment as Ambassador to the UN, in
which he referred to "two brothers, Lyman and
Evron Kirkpatrick. The former served for years
* New York Times, February 12, 1981.
t Washington Star, February 1, 1981.
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46/COMMENTARY APRIL 1981
with the Central Intelligence Agency. The latter
[was] Jeane's husband. . . ."* Now Lyman Kirkpa-
trick is not the brother of Jeane Kirkpatrick's hus-
band; they are in fact not related at all, and his
service with the CIA (at least that detail is accur-
ate) has no bearing of any kind on her. Though
some of us may have difficulty in understanding
why there is anything wrong with working for the
CIA, if we remind ourselves that what Commun-
ism was to Joe McCarthy, the CIA is to the Na-
tion, we can recognize here a classic McCarthyite
smear: the assumption of guilt by association with
even the evidence for the association turning out
to be false.
Be that as it may, at a time when it is still
widely regarded as illegitimate to call a Commu-
nist a Communist, the fear that liberals or social-
ists are in imminent danger of being smeared as
Communists seems at the very least premature. It
is the political counterpart of the fear that we are
about to overreach ourselves in the use of military
power when the real question is whether we have
enough power at the moment to do anything with
it at all. This fear of overreaching easily translates
into an argument for a "restraint" indistin-
guishable in practice from supine passivity. Simi-
larly, the alarm over a new McCarthyism becomes
a polemical weapon with which preemptive strikes
are launched against any criticism; when criticism
does manage to get through, -the same weapon is
used to discredit it.
It is, indeed, precisely because the only effective
way to fight such ideas is with strong and candid
criticism that those within the New Right who
want to revive instrumentalities of the old Mc-
Carthyism like the congressional investigation are
making a great mistake. First of all, a new wave of
congressional investigations into "internal securi-
ty"?even if it were conducted with a scrupulous
regard for due process and avoided all the sins of
the old?would only create sympathy for what
would be represented as a martyred cause. Sec-
ondly, it would disarm those of us trying to fight
the radical Left in the world of ideas (which is,
after all, where its power mainly resides). We
would be inhibited in our criticism for fear that it
might call the authorities down upon the heads of
people whose proper punishment is to be discred-
ited intellectually and morally and thereby de-
prived of influence in the court of informed opin-
ion rather than in a court of law. The old Mc-
Carthyism led to the crippling of anti-Commun-
ism in the intellectual community for an entire
generation, with immense consequent damage to
the political consciousness of the past twenty
years. A new McCarthyism would do even greater
damage in the climate of today.
For despite the hysteria of both the Left and the
Right, the climate of today?the new consensus?
is not a mandate for "counterrevolution" and
"witch-hunts." What it demands at this stage is a
massive effort to reverse the decline of American
power and to hold the line against the Soviet drive
for imperial hegemony. There is no trace of vin-
dictiveness in this demand. On the contrary: its
emotional quality is best reflected in the amazingly
even-tempered but strong personality of the man
it chose to satisfy it.
T N THE early days of Ronald Reagan's ad-
1 ministration, he has shown every sign
of fidelity to the new consensus, both in spirit and
in substance. Without resort to demagogy and with-
out even attacking his opponents, he has, as he
promised he would do, moved to reverse the de-
cline of American military power by exempting de-
fense spending from the budgetary cuts which form
part of his strategy for reversing the correlative de-
cline of American economic power. He has moved
toward an unambiguous stand against Soviet ex-
pansionism in the Western hemisphere. And he
has spoken of stationing American ground forces
in the Middle East as a deterrent and a trip-wire.
It is important to recognize that none of this
goes beyond the strategy of "limited" containment
as outlined by Tucker. Even the very strong stand
on El Salvador taken by the new Secretary of State
bases itself on the need to hold back Soviet expan-
sionism and not on the wish to prevent the estab-
lishment of a Communist regime there.
Indeed, when Secretary Haig speaks of establish-
ing "norms of international behavior" to govern
the conduct of both the Soviet Union and the
United States, he even seems to be invoking the
1972 Basic Principles of D?nte as the objective
toward which a new strategy of containment should
aspire. Yet as he must surely know, experience
suggests that no such arrangement is possible.
Within months of signing the 1972 document, the
Soviets violated one of its main provisions by en-
couraging the Egyptian attack on Israel instead of
using their influence to dampen down a conflict
between third parties that could?and in the event
did?pull the superpowers themselves into a direct
confrontation.
Since then, the Soviets have made it plain over
and over again that they will never bind them-
selves to the "rules" of any "game" which would
prevent them from intervening to consolidate
"socialism" where it already exists (this is known
as the Brezhnev Doctrine) or from helping to es-
tablish it wherever the opportunity arises. "The
armies of socialism," they say, "march in only one
direction." The Soviets justify all this not in terms
of national security nor even in the language of
Realpolitik but on moral grounds: "socialism" is
superior to any alternative system and they have
a duty to make it prevail.
We for our part have not yet begun saying as
much for liberty. We have not, for example, been
* "Jeane's Designs," Nation, February 7, 1981.
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THE FUTURE DANGER/47
saying that taking steps to save El Salvador from
Communism is more than a matter of preserving
an American sphere of influence; that it is also a
matter of sparing the people of that country from
the ravages of a system far worse in itself than the
government it seeks to replace and far more de-
structive of the chance of future improvement. Nor
have we been emphatic enough in rejecting the
argument that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
is morally comparable to American intervention in
Latin America. And we have not been saying .that
a Soviet invasion of Poland would be immoral less
because it would violate another country's territor-
ial integrity?Poland, after all, is already a colony
of the Soviet empire?than because it would rep-
resent the extirpation of a nascent possibility of
freedom by the armies of Communist totalitarian-
ism.
The Reagan administration, in short, while los-
ing no time in coping with the present danger, has
thus far taken no clearly visible steps to deal with
the future danger?the danger that a strategy of
containment which defines the problem as Soviet
expansionism alone will be unable to sustain the
requisite political support and will therefore lead
almost as surely as the retrenchments of the Carter
era to the Soviet-dominated world that Rajaratnam,
writing toward the end of that era, pronounced to
be "inevitable" by the end of the 1980's.
A strategy of limited containment to deal with
the present danger does not go far enough to head
off this, the future danger. Only a strategy based
on the containment of Communism can confound
Rajaratnam's prophecy. That there are terrible
risks in implementing such a strategy is true and
has to be acknowledged and faced. But what has
to be equally emphasized is that an anti-Commu-
nist strategy holds out a double hope. It holds out
the hope of a breakup of the Soviet empire, and it
thereby offers the prospect of a world in which for
the first time since the Russian revolution coun-
tries under Communist rule might succeed in
throwing off the yoke, in which Communism
would lose the last vestiges of its appeal, and in
which the free institutions and the prosperity we
in the West have enjoyed would have a much
better chance of spreading and finding local nour-
ishment.
If such a world is not worth taking risks for,
what is?
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Ideology & Supply-Side Economics
Irving Kristol
THE terms being applied?by the media,
by politicians, by economists?to
President Reagan's economic program, and most
particularly to the tax-cutting aspect of this pro-
gram, are "bold," "revolutionary," "a risky experi-
ment," and so on. Clearly, a great many people are
nervous about "supply-side" economics, and seem
to have difficulty understanding its rationale. This
is quite odd. For these is nothing really bold, or
revolutionary, or experimental about this program.
Nor is it at all difficult to understand.
Indeed, the trouble with the thing we call sup-
ply-side economics is that it is just too simple, too
easy to understand. Accustomed as we are to the
increasing complexity of the natural sciences, and
the occult jargon of the social sciences, we are in-
clined to be suspicious of transparent simplicity,
which we are likely to equate with naivet?r
wishful thinking. The average person, listening to
an exposition of supply-side economics, will nod
his head at every point?but, after it is done, will
remain incredulous: if it is that obvious, what is
the fuss and controversy all about? The average
economist, on the other hand, is only too likely to
be indignant, outraged, and contemptuously dis-
missive: what is the point of his hard-won exper-
tise in sophisticated economic theory if economic
policy can be reduced to such plain terms?
It must be said that the term itself, "supply-side
economics," may be a source of initial confusion.
It originates in deliberate contrast to the prevail-
ing Keynesian approach, which emphasizes the
need for government to manage and manipulate?
through fiscal and monetary policies?aggregate
demand so as to maintain full employment. Sup-
ply-side economists say government cannot really
do this, no matter how many clever economists it
hires, but that if business enterprise is permitted
to function with a minimum of interference, it will
invest and innovate, so as to create the requisite
demand for the goods it produces.
There is certainly a difference in perspective
here. Supply-side economists look at the economy
from ground level, as it were?i.e., from the point
IRVING KRISTOL is co-editor of the Public Interest, a mem-
ber of the Wall Street Journal's Board of Contributors, and
the author of Two Cheers for Capitalism.
?
48
of view of the entrepreneurs and investors who are
identified as the prime movers. Keynesian econo-
mists look at the economy from above?from the
standpoint of a government that is a deus ex
tnachina, and which, in its omniscience, intervenes
discreetly to preserve a harmonious economic uni-
verse. But it is wrong to infer that we live in a
Manichean world in which Supply and Demand
are' continually at odds, so that we always are hav-
ing to declare allegiance to one as against the
other. They are, rather, opposite sides of the same
coin, coexisting of necessity, and there can be no
question of choosing between them.
More precisely, it is absurd economically to
think in terms of such a choice. Beyond a certain
point, a tax on production becomes a tax on con-
sumption?the goods become too expensive and
demand falls. Similarly, beyond a certain point
a tax on consumption becomes a tax on production
?the decrease in demand inhibits supply. Shifting
taxes from the one to the other may provide mar-
ginal benefits on occasion. But a tax on commer-
cial transactions and economic activity is always a
tax on both production and consumption.
When, however, one moves from a purely ana-
lytical-economic mode of thought to a political.
ideological one?when, in short, one moves from
economic analysis to economic policy?then the dif-
ference in perspective has significant implications.
Supply-side economics naturally gives rise to an
emhasis on growth, not redistribution. It aims at
improving everyone's economic circumstances
over time, but not necessarily in the same degree
or in the same period of time. The aggregate de-
mand created by economic activity, as seen from
the supply-side, is indifferent to the issue of equal-
ity. Its bias is consequently in favor of a free
market for economic activity, because this provides
the most powerful economic incentives for invest-
ment, innovation, and growth. Those, on the
other hand, for whom economic equality is at least
as important as economic growth will always want
to see government "restructure" this aggregate de-
mand and will be indifferent to the issue of eco-
nomic incentives.
However, there is another?incidental but im-
portant?source of controversy which has already
been referred to, and that is the threat that sup-
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