Real War

by Richard Nixon

  They try to strike where least expected, when least expected, in the least expected way. Their preferred method is to provoke disorder and chaos in a targeted country, and then to move in and pick up the pieces after the established order has collapsed.

  They are professional revolutionaries, and one of the tenets of their professionalism is to stay out of sight while the old regime is being brought down, leaving the amateurs—the genuine patriots, the nationalists, the idealists—out front. Television shows us the amateurs storming into the streets; it does not reveal the professionals calling the shots from behind the scenes, plotting the capture of the new regime even while directing the overthrow of the old.

  With seductive slogans designed to deceive, with a small but efficient cadre of ruthless terrorists, with cynical leaders willing to promise anything for the future as long as they can gain power now, the professional revolutionaries move like hot knives through butter in societies that have come untracked. As chaos spreads in the wake of upheaval, they alone are marching silently in lockstep—their eyes fixed on the armories, the secret police files, the key posts in the new government, the malcontents in the armed services, the labor unions that run crucial industries, the newspapers, the radio stations, the vacant police chief jobs. Positions are won, workers are stirred up, opponents are arrested, political rivals are assassinated, and when all is ready the coup de grâce is delivered.

  This is the communist recipe for revolution. It enabled Lenin to depose the moderate Premier Alexander Kerensky only eight short months after Kerensky’s forces had ousted the Tsar in the first Russian Revolution. Lenin himself summed up its essential cynicism when he declared privately that “we will support Kerensky as the rope does the hanged man.” Since 1917 the Soviets have bottled their patented product and exported it to the rest of the world.

  The Soviets thrive on chaos, confusion, fear; they know that in desperate circumstances people will reach for desperate means. Communism offers the slogan of “liberation,” the promise of order; it tells the “outs” that it will put them “in,” the underdogs that they will be top dog. It speaks in terms of passionate certainty, and this appeals to people awash in uncertainty.

  The Soviets know that war, revolution, and economic depression can destroy the fabric of a society and make the siren song of communism sound sweeter. When people feel panic, tyranny can look attractive if it promises order. Chaos, war, and revolution are thus the natural allies of communism, just as famine, conquest and slaughter ride alongside the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, death.

  Knowing this, the Russians try, by whatever means they can, to exacerbate tensions, to stir up discontent, to foment wars and revolutions. They do not want human needs met. They do not want problems between nations solved. They want to exacerbate the problems in order to seize the nation.

  Because the Soviets are poised to exploit them, disorder and chaos are the greatest enemies of freedom today. Those who are unrealistically impatient for progress do the world a great disservice when they convulse vulnerable societies with non-negotiable demands; however pure their own intentions, the convulsion may open the door to a totalitarian regime. Looking back, we must ask ourselves: What would have happened if the Soviet Union had been on the scene during the American Revolution?

  The American colonies fought a war of independence for seven years. It took six more years before the Constitution was adopted, and two more after that before the Bill of Rights was added. Even then, tensions and inequities persisted that eventually led to a brutal civil war. Our country had time to sort out its problems, protected as it was by two oceans from the outside world. People striving for liberty today do not have the same luxury. The road for them will be much more difficult. They too need time. They too need protection.

  The Danger: Defeat by Default

  The Russians play chess. In chess a player gains an advantage by eliminating as many of his opponent’s men as possible. But chess masters know that the game can be won when there are still many pieces left on the table. All that is necessary is that the opponent’s king be immobilized, hemmed in by threats on all sides so he cannot move.

  The king in the Western chess set is the United States. We are the principal obstacle between the Soviet Union and its goal of world domination. The Soviets know they will never be able to outproduce us economically. They also know they can only hope to overwhelm us militarily if our guard remains down long enough to let them get a decisive advantage. But in our will they sense a weakness that could offset the margin of safety our other strengths give us. The Soviets know their multiplication tables. Looking at Sir Robert Thompson’s equation, national power equals manpower plus applied resources, times will, they understand that if the will factor is zero the whole equation is zero.

  As British military historian B. H. Liddell Hart has noted, “Lenin had a vision of fundamental truth when he said that ‘the soundest strategy in war is to postpone operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the delivery of the mortal blow both possible and easy.’ ” This is the Soviet strategy. They seek first to demoralize us so that they can then destroy us. They want to end World War III not with a bang, but with a whimper.

  They do this in three ways. First, they try to deceive us, in order to disguise their intentions and make us relax our will; second, they try to make us feel guilty and defensive, even about our most dramatic successes, so that our will is paralyzed; third, they try to break our will by bullying us with threats and bluffs.

  I vividly recall my old friend, NATO Secretary General Manlio Brosio, who had served for five years as Italy’s ambassador in Moscow, emotionally telling me in 1967, “I know the Russians. They are great liars, clever cheaters, and magnificent actors. They cannot be trusted. They consider it their duty to cheat and lie.”

  To the Soviet Union, the United Nations is not a place where differences between nations can be settled amicably; it is a place where propaganda points can be scored, where the West can be condemned, where the jailers can parade as the justices. This elaborate masquerade is performed in order to deceive others and to make us doubt ourselves. Over the course of many years even the most absurdly misapplied words, if repeated often enough, have an effect. Some begin to believe that “Democratic” Kampuchea is actually something besides the contemporary equivalent of Hitlerian genocide, or that “People’s Liberation” forces actually liberate people.

  A refugee who fled from South Vietnam in 1979 after he had stayed to greet the communists said he had learned the hard way that the communists consider the lie “a weapon, a legitimate and honest weapon, to be used by the weak to defeat the strong.” If the Soviets can, by their lies, make us forget who they are and doubt who we are, this weapon in World War III will have served its destructive purpose.

  One of the Soviets’ favorite tactics is bluster. Even when they were vastly inferior to us in power, Nikita Khrushchev would rattle his nuclear sabers, hoping to instill in the West a fear of Soviet might. Our leaders at the time were not fooled; they knew that Khrushchev had no intention of committing national suicide, but public opinion was strongly affected.

  During the Cuban missile crisis Khrushchev overplayed his hand, Kennedy called his bluff, and the Soviet leader backed down. But since that time the Soviet Union has pressed forward with a sustained and intensive military buildup while the United States has let its nuclear superiority wither away. If in the future the Soviet leaders feel they have attained clear nuclear superiority, they will try once again to break our will, only this time it will be a substantive threat rather than a bluff.

  The greatest danger we face in World War III is that we will lose it by default.

  In 1975 the North Vietnamese went unopposed by a war-weary United States in their invasion of the South; in 1978 they invaded Cambodia. In 1975 and 1976 the Cubans met only a feeble response from the West when they went into Angola; in 1977 they showed up in Ethiopia. In April of 1978 the pro-Soviet coup in Afghanistan
brought hardly a murmur from Western leaders; in June there was one in South Yemen. Then on Christmas Eve, 1979, the Red Army rolled into Kabul to suppress an anti-communist revolt in Afghanistan. The dominoes have always taken the “domino theory” seriously—only in the fashionable salons of the West was it scoffed at.

  As social critic Irving Kristol has pointed out:

  The nations of this world admire winners, not losers—not even ‘nice’ losers. . . . When a democratic nation . . . and most especially the leading democratic nation, engages interminably in Hamlet-like soliloquies on the moral dilemmas of action, the world will seek its political models elsewhere. . . .

  We know that power may indeed corrupt. We are now learning that, in the world of nations as it exists, powerlessness can be even more corrupting and demoralizing.

  In World War III, as in other human activities, small problems neglected have a way of growing into large ones. The old adage that a stitch in time saves nine is as true in diplomacy as it is in the household. Acquiescence in one aggressive move invites another. A timely response at one level can avert the need for an escalated response later. Momentum is a powerful force among nations. Wavering leaders sense a shift in the balance of power and the direction of history, and they accelerate that shift by joining it. The key to winning World War III is to shift that balance, that momentum, in our direction.

  3

  The Visible Hand

  There are, at the present time, two great nations in the world which seem to tend towards the same end, although they started from different points: I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and whilst the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly assumed a most prominent place amongst the nations; and the world learned of their existence and their greatness at almost the same time. . . .

  The American struggles against the natural obstacles which oppose him; the adversaries of the Russian are men; the former combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civilization with all its weapons and its arts: the conquests of the one are therefore gained by the ploughshare; those of the other by the sword. The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided exertions and common-sense of the citizens; the Russian centers all the authority of society in a single arm: the principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter servitude. Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

  —Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835

  Communism became the force it is today largely by historical accident—because the first state whose system took its name was Russia. Soviet Russia is a peculiar, fascinating amalgam of past and present, and an insight into its past is essential to an understanding of its present.

  Fifty years ago I saw Russia for the first time—through the eyes of Leo Tolstoy. At the urging of Dr. Albert Upton of Whittier College, I spent the summer between my junior and senior years reading everything Tolstoy had written. I came away with a feeling of sympathy, respect, and affection for the Russian people and with a profound dislike for tsarist imperialism and despotism.

  During World War II I became strongly pro-Russian as the Soviet Union fought alongside us in the war against Hitler. My attitude began to change in 1946, in part because I was impressed and disturbed by the warning to the West that Winston Churchill delivered that year at Fulton, Missouri—his “Iron Curtain” speech. At first I thought that Churchill might have gone too far, but these doubts were soon removed by Stalin’s actions. When President Harry S. Truman asked for aid to Greece and Turkey and initiated the Marshall Plan, I strongly supported both in Congress.

  In 1948 the Alger Hiss case brought me face to face with the ugly realities of Soviet subversion in the United States.

  In my travels as Vice President, I saw tens of thousands of refugees from communism in all areas of the world. In 1958 Mrs. Nixon and I were almost killed by a communist-led mob in Caracas, Venezuela.

  In July of 1959 I became the first U.S. Vice President to visit the Soviet Union. In what was in effect a two-month cram course, I read books on Russia and thousands of pages of analyses of the Soviet Union prepared by the State Department, the CIA, and the Defense Department. Among those from whom I received briefings on Nikita Khrushchev and the other Soviet leaders were British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, two former ambassadors to the Soviet Union, William Bullitt and Charles E. Bohlen, journalist Walter Lippmann, New York Times editor Turner Catledge, and publisher William Randolph Hearst.

  But no amount of briefing could have prepared me for what I encountered when I arrived in Moscow. Khrushchev was tougher and smarter than most of the briefers had indicated. All the Soviet leaders I met were communist to the core, but at times they were more Russian than communist. They pointed with pride to what they claimed communism had achieved in the Soviet Union. But they also showed pride in the glories of Russia’s past as they escorted me through the Kremlin, the Winter Palace in Leningrad, and other points of historic interest.

  Khrushchev was at his vociferous communist best, or worst, in an impromptu no-holds-barred debate between the two of us at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. But at a luncheon in an ornate room in the Kremlin immediately afterward he was all Russian—directing his guests to throw their glasses into the fireplace after we had had our vodka and champagne.

  The Russian people impressed me tremendously with their strength and warmheartedness. In the heart of Siberia, in Novosibirsk, away from the tight control of the central government of Moscow, thousands of Russians swarmed around us shouting “Mir y druzhba”—“Peace and friendship.” Schoolchildren stopped our car as we traveled through the Ural Mountains and threw flowers into it, shouting “Friendship.” My Russian host told me that friendship was the first word in English that Russian children were taught in school. The people wanted friendship; the leaders, however, made no bones about the fact that they wanted something different. As Khrushchev put it coldly, “Your grandchildren will live under communism.”

  After our visit to Moscow we went to Poland. Over 200,000 cheering Poles gave us a tumultuous welcome, shouting “Niech zyje Ameryka”—“Long live America.” Polish soldiers clapped and held up the “V” sign. In Moscow Khrushchev had bitterly assailed the Captive Nations resolution that had just been passed by Congress. The Polish people were vividly demonstrating why, and the Kremlin leaders must also have had doubts about the loyalty of those within the Soviet Union itself.

  • • •

  In 1972 I became the first U.S. President to visit the Soviet Union. Leonid Brezhnev was different from Khrushchev. Brezhnev’s humor was earthy whereas Khrushchev’s had been vulgar. Brezhnev wore tailored shirts with French cuffs instead of the plain-sleeved shirts Khrushchev preferred. He sat in the back seat of a limousine rather than the front seat with the chauffeur as Khrushchev had done. He was outwardly cordial while Khrushchev had been blustery and aggressive. But though the players had changed, the game remained the same. Brezhnev’s goals were the same as Khrushchev’s: the increase of Soviet power, the extension of Soviet control, and the expansion of communism throughout the world. He did not have the obvious inferiority complex that Khrushchev had had because, from a position of overwhelming inferiority thirteen years before, the Soviet Union had now virtually caught up with the United States in military power. But catching up was not enough for Brezhnev. He wanted unquestioned superiority. Neither Brezhnev nor his predecessors engaged in negotiation to achieve peace as an end in itself. Rather they sought peace so that they could use it to extend communist domination without war in all areas of the world.

  This time Mrs. Nixon and I stayed in a splendid apartment once used by the Tsars of Imperial Russia. Now even more than in 1959 our Soviet hosts emphasized the glories of Imperial Russia’s past rather than communism’s a
chievements in the present. Both in 1972 and again in 1974, when I returned to Moscow, I was a guest at musical performances in the ornate, gilded splendor of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, where I sat with the Soviet leaders in the Imperial Box. Premier Alexei Kosygin confided to me that he preferred the Bolshoi to the sterile, modernistic new auditorium that had been built within the Kremlin walls. The Soviet leaders clearly were still dedicated communists but it seemed that they had also become more Russian.

  • • •

  My views have changed since that time fifty years ago when I first saw Russia through the eyes of Tolstoy, and Russia itself has changed since Tolstoy’s time. But understanding the Soviet challenge requires an understanding of how Russia has not changed as well as how it has. The answer to many puzzles of Soviet behavior lies not in the stars, but in the Tsars. Their bodies lie buried in Kremlin vaults, and their spirits live on in the Kremlin halls.

  In many respects the revolution that brought the communists to power in Russia was less a change from the tsarist ways than it was a refinement and reinforcement of those ways. Russia has never not been an expansionist power. Nor, except for a few brief months in 1917, has it ever not been either an authoritarian or a totalitarian state. There simply is no tradition in the Soviet Union of freedom internally or of nonaggression externally. Territorial expansion comes as naturally to Russia as hunting does to a lion or fishing to a bear.

  • • •

  If we take the trouble to study it, the past is a highly visible hand pointing the directions of history. It shows the courses along which nations are propelled by their particular combinations of interests, tradition, ambition, and opportunity. It shows the directions in which the momentum of past events continues to move us today.

  Seven centuries ago two great events took place that set the courses of two civilizations. These are the courses Alexis de Tocqueville described a century and a half ago.