The situation today is ominously reminiscent of the period preceding World War II which Walter Lippmann described so perceptively:
The American people were as unprepared in their minds as in their military establishment. Could the democracies be rallied, could they be collected and nerved for the ordeal . . .? They had the superior assets. . . . But did they have the insight, the discipline to persevere, and the resolution to go through with it? Though they had the means, did they also have the will, and did they know how? . . . They were reacting to events and they were not governing them. . . . They had refused to take in what they saw, they had refused to believe what they heard, they had wished and they had waited, hoping against hope.
There are two aspects to national will. There is will as demonstrated by the nation itself, and there is will as perceived by the nation’s adversaries. In averting the ultimate challenge, perceived will can be as important as actual will. Although an American President would launch a nuclear strike only with the most extreme reluctance, the Kremlin leaders must always assume that he might; and that if the truly vital interests of the nation or of the West required the use of nuclear weapons, that he would do so. If they are to be effectively deterred from the ultimate provocation, they must perceive that such a provocation carries with it the ultimate risk.
National will involves far more than readiness to use military power, whether nuclear or conventional. It includes a readiness to allocate the resources necessary to maintain that power. It includes a clear view of where the dangers lie, and of what kinds of responses are necessary to meet those dangers. It includes also a basic, crystalline faith that the United States is on the right side in the struggle, and that what we represent in the world is worth defending.
For will to be effective, it must necessarily include the readiness to sacrifice if necessary—to defer those goals that are merely desirable in order to advance those that are essential; to pay the costs of defense; to incur risks; to incur the displeasure of powerful constituencies at home and of raucous voices abroad.
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America’s failures of will in recent years have been partly the product of weariness after nearly forty years of bearing the burdens of world leadership. They clearly result in part from the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. But more fundamentally, they reflect the failures of America’s leadership class. Too many of those who profess to be the guardians of our ideals have instead become the architects of our retreat.
The answer cannot be to replace one leadership class with another. That is not going to happen. Individuals may change, one political party may lose ground to another, different factions may move into or out of intellectual fashion; but essentially, those groups to which the nation looks for leadership will remain pretty much the same throughout these critical two decades. What has to be done is to wake those who exercise leadership to the responsibilities of leadership.
In 1919 a starry-eyed Lincoln Steffens, after visiting the Soviet Union, exulted, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” In our own time other starry-eyed reporters have glorified the “Brave New Worlds” of Maoist China, Vietnam, and Cuba. This romanticizing of revolution, this willful blindness to the human costs of tyranny as long as tyranny speaks the hypocritical language of the Left, permeates the ranks of those who report and those who teach, and it leaves a disastrous imprint on the minds of millions who read and listen.
Revolution itself is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. But what the United States confronts today is the advance of a tyranny marching under the banners of revolution: one that seeks to replace democracy with despotism in the name of “the people.” But in these “people’s democracies” the people have no meaningful vote; they have no voice; they have no freedom; they have no choice. The Soviet Union has built the most powerful war-making machine ever possessed by an aggressive power, not for the benefit—or by the choice—of the Russian people, but to extend the dominion of the Kremlin leadership.
Unfortunately for the West, a large segment of the American intellectual establishment, including many in the business establishment, falls for the sort of con-man spiel the Kremlin and its propagandists use. Just as the con man knows how to play on his victim’s greed and self-importance, so does the Kremlin know precisely how to play on its target’s romantic idealism and on his grandiose dreams of remaking whole societies in his own image.
With Africa now a crucible of great-power maneuver, we cannot afford to have our Africa policies hostage to the bitter memories still cherished by those who struggled for racial equality in America. We cannot let Africa become a stage on which Americans act out their psychic traumas. We must address it as the vitally important strategic battleground that Soviet adventuring has made it.
Nor can we ignore any part of the world as being too far from our concerns to care about. As the 1980s began, this was being vividly illustrated by events in Afghanistan—a fact that provided its own peculiar irony, because for many years American newsmen disparagingly referred to analyses of trends in distant lands as “Afghanistanism.” Afghanistan—remote, landlocked, a harsh mountain region of primitive tribesmen as rugged as the land they lived on—was treated as a metaphor for all the dull and distant events that glazed the eyes of the American reader.
But in real life Afghanistan is much more than that. Despite its poverty and the harshness of its land, Texas-sized Afghanistan has long been a cockpit of great-power intrigue for the same reason that it used to be called “the turnstile of Asia’s fate.” With Iran on the west, Pakistan on the south, China to the east and a thousand-mile border with the Soviet Union on the north, Afghanistan has traditionally been one of those points where the great thrusts of empire met.
Throughout its history Afghanistan has been a crossroads for conquerors; Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane have all ridden across Afghanistan’s dusty hills in their quest for empire. The King of Afghanistan recalled for me when I visited him in 1953 that it was there that Alexander the Great said, “I have no further worlds to conquer.” In the nineteenth century Great Britain and Imperial Russia played what Kipling called the “Great Game” in Afghanistan as they dueled all across Central Asia in a struggle for control of the continent. The British knew that Afghanistan’s rugged Khyber Pass was the gateway to the Indian subcontinent, and they fought two brutal wars to deny the Russians control of it. Today Afghanistan is a testing ground for an ominous, brazen new phase in the Soviet expansionist drive.
A bloody Soviet-backed coup in April 1978 suddenly ousted President Mohammed Daoud, who was promptly murdered, and installed in his place a stridently anti-Western, Marxist regime under the leadership of Prime Minister Noor Mohammed Taraki. Taraki renamed his ruling party the “People’s Democratic Party,” and renamed his country the “Democratic Republic of Afghanistan,” adopting as its new flag a bright red banner with the party symbol and a star in the corner—almost indistinguishable from the Soviet flag. Soon nearly every government ministry, as well as the 100,000-man Afghan Army, had Soviet “advisers,” many of them Tadzhiks from Soviet Central Asia who speak a dialect most Afghans understand.
This abrupt renewal of centuries of Russian pressure against its repeatedly extended Asian borders sent shock waves through Afghanistan’s already weakened immediate neighbors, Pakistan and Iran—vulnerable not only because of geography but also because of tribal ties. Baluchi tribesmen range through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran; Pushtuns through Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. Less than ten months later, in fact, the Shah’s regime had fallen, and leftist guerrillas staged their first takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on the same day that the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan was dragged from his car and murdered.
In the United States reaction to that initial Soviet seizure of power in Afghanistan was largely a yawn. The New York Times headlined an editorial “Keeping Cool about Kabul.” The “so what” school—those whose reflexive response to Soviet s
ubversion or Soviet militarism is to say, “So what?”—said “So what?” about Afghanistan, if they paid even that much attention.
After the communist regime came to power, however, fiercely independent Moslem tribesmen launched a jihad, or holy war, in a struggle to the death for control of their country and of their lives. Insurgents sold their cattle and their wives’ jewelry to buy ammunition. The rebels fought Soviet-made tanks by starting landslides. They rushed directly into the machine-gun fire of the tanks and overwhelmed them, armed with nothing more than wooden sticks and iron bars.
The government’s army suffered from purges, desertions, and defections to the rebels; by late 1979 it had reportedly dwindled from more than 100,000 to 50,000, with a hard core of no more than 10,000 to 15,000 effective troops. It was doubtful that the communists could have survived another spring offensive by the rebels.
In a September 1979 coup, Taraki was ousted and executed by his number-two man, Hafizullah Amin, who installed himself as President. But Amin made little headway in putting down the rebellion. In a carefully prepared and brazenly executed move, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve. Hundreds of Russian transport planes airlifted thousands of Soviet troops into Kabul; tens of thousands of other pre-positioned Soviet forces quickly moved across the border; Amin and his family were killed; a reliably pliant Soviet puppet, Babrak Karmal, whom the Russians had kept hidden away in reserve in Eastern Europe, was put in as Amin’s replacement. He beamed his first message as President to the Afghan people from a radio station in the Soviet Union. Izvestia had the gall to denounce the deposed communist leader Amin as a tool of the CIA, while Brezhnev warmly congratulated Kamal on his “election.” The proud people of Afghanistan were crushed in the iron fist of the Soviet Union, and Russia came one country closer to achieving its goals—now within tantalizingly short reach—of a warm-water port on the Arabian Sea and control over the oil of the Persian Gulf.
In neighboring Pakistan a high-ranking official who had been privately warning of Russia’s expansionist ambitions told an American friend, “You see, this is what I have been telling you and now it’s come true. You Americans don’t seem to understand the world anymore. Next comes the Finlandization of Pakistan, and subversion of our country by the Russians. There is a very real possibility—likelihood even—of Soviet hegemony in this whole part of the world. Don’t your people in Washington care?”
The Soviet seizure of Afghanistan is a continuation of the old tsarist imperialism—the relentless outward pressure that has continued since the Duchy of Muscovy threw off Mongol rule in 1480. It also is a stark reminder that America no longer has the luxury of considering any place on earth too remote to affect its own security.
What made the fall of Afghanistan so significant a loss to the West was not just the fate of its 18 million people, 90 percent of whom are illiterate, and whose $160 per capita annual income makes Afghanistan one of the poorest countries of the world. Not even its strategic location would make its loss so significant, if that loss had occurred in isolation. But it did not occur in isolation. It was part of a pattern. And that pattern is what presents the challenge. It is a pattern of ceaseless building by the Soviets toward a position of overwhelming military force, while using subversion and proxy troops, and now even its own, to take over one country after another, until they are in a position to conquer or Finlandize the world.
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Looking at the changes in the world since World War II, we can see grounds for pessimism and grounds for optimism.
Communist regimes have taken power not only in Eastern Europe, but also in China, North Korea, all of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, and Cuba. So far, no country that has come completely under communist control has escaped from that control. Twenty-one countries are now in the communist orbit. Territorially, the communist powers are advancing all over the world, and the West is retreating.
In terms of nuclear weapons, the United States had an absolute monopoly at the end of World War II. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the United States still had an overwhelming nuclear superiority, in the range of 15 to 1 or even more. In 1973, when we ordered a worldwide alert in order to keep Soviet forces out of the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War, the United States and the Soviet Union were approximately equal in both strategic nuclear capability and theater nuclear capability. But since 1973 the Soviet Union has been spending three times as much as the United States on strategic weapons alone.
With their rapid advances in nuclear missile technology and their vigorous development of new weapons systems—while new American weapons systems have been systematically canceled or postponed—the Soviets are quickly closing the gap in those areas in which we are ahead and increasing their superiority where they are ahead.
The Soviets have an enormous advantage in conventional ground forces. To some extent this should be expected, since the U.S.S.R. is primarily a land power, with two fronts to defend—against Europe and against China. But Russia’s huge armies also pose a formidable threat to its neighbors, because while Russia has two fronts for defense it has three fronts for attack. Soviet military power threatens Europe in the west, China and Japan in the east, and the countries of Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and Africa to the south.
Beyond this, the dramatic buildup of Soviet sea power has been particularly ominous. While the United States still has an advantage in aircraft carriers, the Soviets now have half again as many major surface combatant ships as the United States and three times as many submarines.
Unless the United States drastically increases its military budget, the Soviet Union by 1985 will have unquestioned nuclear superiority, overwhelming superiority on the ground, and at least equality at sea. In sum, unless we act fast, the period of the mid-1980s will be one of maximum peril for the United States and the West. In a nutshell: The Soviet Union will be number one; the United States will be number two.
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Taken by themselves, these trends would be grounds for acute pessimism. If projected into the 1980s, they would give the Soviet Union the capacity to impose its will militarily on targets of its choosing around the globe.
But there is another side. Dwight D. Eisenhower was a shrewd strategist. I remember that during his presidency, when talk around the National Security Council table grew gloomy as its members surveyed the world, Eisenhower used to remind us that one of the first requirements for a successful military commander is the capability to assess realistically both the strengths and weaknesses of his own forces. But equally important, he added, is the ability to recognize not only the strengths but also the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the opposing forces.
When we do that, we find major vulnerabilities on the Soviet side, and major strengths on the Western side.
The most dramatic of those vulnerabilities lies in the deep and perhaps irreconcilable differences between the Soviet Union and China. China’s economy is still weak, and its nuclear capability is still relatively primitive. But with a billion of the world’s potentially most able people on its longest frontier, under control of a government that looks toward Moscow with bitter hostility, the leaders of the Kremlin have reason to be apprehensive. In the long run China may pose an expansionist threat to the West. But for the present China fears the Soviet Union and needs the West.
A second vulnerability stems from the nature of the communist system. No people has ever freely chosen to live under communism. No nation remains under communist rule except through force. No system of government has been more successful at extending its domination over other nations and less successful at winning the approval of the people of those nations.
The tragic boat people of Vietnam, the dissidents attempting to leave the Soviet Union, the people who flee when they are able from Eastern Europe—all are dramatic proof that when people have a choice, they reject communist rule. Ironically, it was Lenin who said that
refugees are people who vote with their feet. In that balloting, peoples in all parts of the world, frequently at risk of their lives, are overwhelmingly pro-freedom and anti-communist.
A third vulnerability, one that is potentially a decisive Western advantage, lies in the fact that economically, capitalism works and communism does not. As we survey the world’s economies, we find that the United States, Western Europe, and Japan together have a gross national product four times as great as that of the entire Soviet bloc.
The communist nations have the advantage that being totalitarian, they can allocate their resources as their leaders choose, to serve the ambitions of the rulers rather than the needs of the people. Thus even relatively nonproductive economies can support enormous military establishments. But if there is to be an arms race, and if the West decides to compete, the West has the economic power to win it. The Soviets know this.
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At the end of World War II the West, swept by waves of relief and exhaustion, let down its guard. We disarmed while Stalin used his armies to seize all the territory he could. Even tually, alarmed, the West mobilized to meet this new Soviet threat. Moscow then moderated its tone and became more cautious in its expansion. This was a change of the head, not a change of the heart. When China shifted its emphasis from external adventuring to internal development—and to shoring up its defense against what by then it perceived as a looming Soviet threat—that, too, was a change of the head.
This change of the head is what made our first steps toward détente possible. We must understand that détente is not a love feast. It is an understanding between nations that have opposite purposes, but which share certain common interests, including the avoidance of nuclear war. Such an understanding can work—that is, it can restrain aggression and deter war—only as long as the potential aggressor is made to recognize that neither aggression nor war will be profitable.
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