In the late 1930s the nations in Hitler’s path had time to stop World War II before it started, but they ignored the warnings and frittered away that time.
In his “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946 Winston Churchill recalled:
Last time I saw it all coming, and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention. Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind.
There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented, in my belief, without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honored today; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool.
The nations in Moscow’s path today have time to avoid the fate of those in Hitler’s path in the 1930s; but only barely.
The outcome of the “protracted conflict” between East and West will depend on our military arsenals, our strategic vision, and our control of those material resources that are needed to build the weapons of war and the sinews of peace. But it will also turn on how we use another resource, the most precious of all, and the one that for each and every one of us is finite: time. If the West loses this conflict, MacArthur’s warning will be its epitaph: “The history of failure in war can be summed up in two words: Too Late.”
The whole history of freedom is a narrative of the struggle to become free and remain free. Freedom is not cheap and maintaining it is not easy. Fate, history, God, chance—to whatever we may ascribe it, we hold a responsibility to the future unique to our time and place. Nothing that today’s generation can leave for tomorrow’s will mean more than the heritage of liberty. That heritage is under more severe threat now than ever before.
Today’s “new frontiers,” unfortunately, are the frontiers of Soviet expansionism: the frontiers of Soviet advance in Africa, in the Middle East, in central Asia; the frontiers of more and more commanding Soviet influence through indigenous Communist parties in Western Europe, through “liberation” movements, through the calculated rewriting of history, through agitation and propaganda and attacks on those institutions and those governments that stand in the way of Soviet ambitions.
The plain, harsh fact is that on all of these fronts the West is in retreat and the Soviet Union is advancing; freedom is in retreat, and totalitarianism is on the march.
The Soviet Union has 6 percent of the world’s population and 10 percent of its production; yet it successfully bullies its neighbors and threatens the world. The other 94 percent of the world’s people, with the other 90 percent of its production, seem increasingly helpless in the face of Soviet ambitions.
Why should this be?
The answer is that it shouldn’t be and it needn’t be.
Unless a great power acts like one, it will leave a power vacuum that another great power will fill. The United States has been floundering, uncertain and irresolute, and the Soviet Union has rushed to fill the vacuum created by our inaction. The United States and the U.S.S.R. form the two sides of the basic power equation that will dominate the final decades of the twentieth century. The direction of future world history will be set by the direction in which the balance between our two nations appears to be shifting.
The Soviet leaders may be crude philosophers but they are sophisticated wielders of power. Lacking those qualms of conscience that inhibit the West, they can be utterly ruthless and totally opportunistic in their uses of power. In a time of power equivalence this makes them a formidable adversary. Only if the West develops a sense of purpose equal to theirs—though different from theirs—can we hope to shift the balance in our favor.
• • •
There was a famous Frenchman, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyés, who somehow managed to get through the ten grim and tumultuous years between 1789 and 1799, between the time when the Third Estate met in the tennis court at Versailles and the time when the Consulate was established. When he was asked much later, “What did you do in all those years of revolution?” he replied, “I survived.”
This is the immediate task the defenders of liberty face in the grim years just ahead: to survive, and by surviving to keep liberty itself alive. Unless the West survives these decades Western civilization as we know it, with all its ideals, its culture, its high aspirations, will crumble into the dust of history.
With this priority clearly in mind, the West can survive. Without it, the dawn of the twenty-first century may be the opening chapter in a new age of barbarism on a global scale. For survival is no longer automatic. We are entering a period in which we have to work to ensure it, in which we have to sacrifice other priorities in the name of that supreme priority. We will have to compromise some of our cherished ideals, as well as spend more of our wealth than we would wish on weapons and other forms of defense.
To say that we must oppose the march of the new despotism with every effort required does not mean launching a holy war; it does not mean launching a war at all. It does, however, mean arming sufficiently to dissuade the other side from launching a war; and it does mean active intervention where necessary to thwart Soviet expansion at those points at which Moscow is testing the limits of its new frontiers.
It would be comforting to rely on Napoleon’s comment that “There are only two powers in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.” But the comment says more for Napoleon’s modesty as a soldier than it does for his accuracy as a historian.
The spirit may prevail in the long run, if we measure the long run in millennia. But in the shorter run of decades, generations, and even centuries, time and again the spirit has been extinguished by the sword. For the generation whose cities are sacked, whose sons are killed, and whose liberties are crushed by a conquering army, the prospect that a millennium hence the spirit might rise again is cold comfort. In that short run in which we all live, the sword is the essential shield for the spirit.
One of our strengths in this struggle, however, is that the spirit itself can be a weapon—and while the Soviets have the sword, ours is the side that has both the sword and the spirit.
In 1839 the Marquis de Custine visited Russia and noted: “One word of truth hurled into Russia is like a spark landing in a keg of powder.” Today, the fact that the Soviet system lives on lies makes it extremely vulnerable to the truth. Truth can penetrate borders. Truth can travel on its own power, wherever people and ideas of East and West meet. Russia has heavy censorship, but its people are starved for the truth. Sending the West’s message through every totalitarian barrier—whether by exchange of visitors, or books, or broadcasts—will give hope to millions behind those barriers, and will gradually eat away at the foundations of the Soviet system just as seeping water can erode the foundation of a prison.
We should not shrink from the propaganda war, either within the Soviet empire or in the rest of the world. We should revitalize Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, and set up counterparts of them that can compete directly with Soviet propaganda in those areas of the Third World the Soviets have targeted for aggression.
Khrushchev often challenged the West to competition with communism. In 1958, in an address I made to the English-Speaking Union of the Commonwealth at Guildhall in London, I urged that the West both accept the challenge and broaden it. I said then:
We say—broaden this competition and include the spiritual and cultural values that have distinguished our civilization. . . .
Man needs the higher freedoms, freedom to know, to debate freely, to write and express his views.
He needs the freedom that law and justice guarantee to every individual. . . .
He wants the freedom to travel and learn from other peoples and cultures.
He wants freedom of worship.
To us, the
se are the most precious aspects of our civilization. We would be happy if others were to compete in this sphere and try to surpass our achievements.
Whether or not the Soviets choose to compete in these areas, we should compete with all the vigor at our command. Let the idea of liberty hammer at the barricades, reach through the bars of the prisons, take tyranny by the throat and shake it. The Soviets need contact with the West. They need our technology and our trade. They cannot keep out our radio broadcasts. They cannot seal themselves off totally from the world. When they crack open the door to reach out for what they want, we should push through it as much truth as we can. And in those parts of the world where their police power does not reach—in the target areas, where the immediate battles of World War III are being waged—we can wield truth as a sword.
Marx dismissed religion as the opiate of the masses. Today’s Kremlin leaders are finding it an unbreakable rock. Pope John Paul II’s triumphal return to Poland forced the Soviets to chew hard on Stalin’s words in the 1930s, when he contemptuously asked, How many divisions has the Pope? The Pope does not have armored divisions, but the forces he has cannot be crushed by Soviet tanks. The emotions he has unleashed reach to the core of the human spirit; religious faith is a force often underestimated by those who do not understand it.
In the final analysis victory will go to the side that most effectively builds, maintains, concerts, and uses its power—not just its military power, but all of its strengths combined.
The road to victory is circuitous. Like a mountain trail, it sometimes doubles back before going on. Like a mountain trail, it requires patience and perseverance to traverse. The one who tires and drops by the wayside does not attain victory.
Power is the ability to make things happen, to influence events, to set the course of history. Some kinds of power operate effectively in the short term; some only over the course of many generations.
Traditionally, the Chinese think in terms of millennia, the Russians in terms of centuries, the Europeans in terms of generations, and we Americans in terms of decades. We must learn to take a longer view. Then we will be more likely to take the actions in the short term that are necessary to achieve the results we want in the long term. Then we will recognize that victory, if it comes, will come incrementally, and therefore that each front in World War III is important, that each battle is important, that all of them will combine to bring us either defeat or victory.
• • •
Woodrow Wilson spoke of making the world safe for democracy. Our task today is to make the world safe for liberty.
Democracy is political, a system devised by human reason. Liberty is personal, a striving of the human spirit. Democracy is a particular form of government, which evolved out of the parliamentary traditions of Western Europe, which was brought here to North America by the European settlers and then developed as our country grew. Liberty is a human condition.
Liberty can survive and even flourish in other systems besides democracies. In this country, thanks to centuries of political evolution, we are fortunate enough to have liberty and democracy. We should not make the mistake of attempting to impose instant democracy on nations not ready for it, and in the process pave the way for the destruction of such liberties as they have.
Making the world safe for liberty, then, does not mean establishing democracy everywhere on earth. It does mean making liberty secure where it exists: secure against overt aggression, and also against externally supported subversion. If we make liberty secure where it exists, then by the force of its example liberty will become the wave of the future.
To the extent that the United States prevails, the world will be safe for free nations. To the extent that the Soviet Union prevails, the world will be unsafe for free nations. Soviet-style tyranny survives by expanding. Liberty will expand by surviving. But to expand, it must first survive.
De Gaulle once said of France, a great nation is never its true self unless engaged in a great enterprise. Ensuring the survival and ultimate triumph of human liberty is the greatest enterprise to which a nation can be summoned.
• • •
Victory without war requires that we resolve to use our strength in ways short of war. There is today a vast gray area between peace and war, and the struggle will be largely decided in that area. If we expect to win without war, or even not to lose without war, then we must engage the adversary within that area. We need not duplicate his methods, but we must counter them—even if that means behaving in ways other than we would choose to in an ideal world.
The uses of power cannot be divorced from the purposes of power. The old argument over whether “the end justifies the means” is meaningless in the abstract; it has meaning only in concrete terms of whether a particular end justifies a particular means. The true test of idealism comes in its results. Some ends of transcendent moral value do justify some means that would not be justified in other circumstances.
Preserving liberty is a moral goal, defeating aggression is a moral goal, avoiding war is a moral goal, establishing conditions that can maintain peace with freedom through our children’s generation is a moral goal. Failure to take whatever means are needed to keep liberty alive would be an act of moral abdication.
Victory does not mean being “the world’s policeman.” It does mean establishing, very explicitly, that we regard the frontiers of Soviet advance as the frontiers of our own defense, and that we will respond accordingly. And it does require a firm, unflagging faith, as Lincoln would put it, that we are on God’s side, that our cause is right, that we act for all mankind.
It may seem melodramatic to treat the twin poles of human experience represented by the United States and the Soviet Union as the equivalent of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, God and the Devil; yet if we allow ourselves to think of them that way, even hypothetically, it can help clarify our perspective on the world struggle. As the British writer Malcolm Muggeridge has pointed out, “Good and evil . . . provide the theme of the drama of our mortal existence. In this sense, they may be compared with the positive and negative points which generate an electric current; transpose the points and the current fails, the lights go out, darkness falls and all is confusion.”
The United States represents hope, freedom, security, and peace. The Soviet Union stands for fear, tyranny, aggression, and war. If these are not poles of good and evil in human affairs, then the concepts of good and evil have no meaning. Those who cannot see the distinction have little claim to lecture us on conscience. It is precisely because so many have “transposed the points” that the light of reason has dimmed and a dangerous confusion has spread. Ending that confusion is the first step toward seeing the path to victory.
America recently celebrated the tenth anniversary of man’s first walk on the moon. That adventure captured the human imagination as few events in history have, but the venture that now beckons is in its own way greater still. In traveling to the moon, man stepped into the heavens. In meeting this great challenge here on earth, we can make the world safe for liberty and thus achieve what for centuries philosophers have set as mankind’s goal.
Space caught man’s imagination less for its technical wizardry than for its mystery. And yet it was not mystery that took us there. It was the genius, vision, courage, perseverance, and the dogged hard work of thousands of human beings joined in a common enterprise.
The obstacles confronting us in our present enterprise are no less formidable—and like our venture into space, this too is achievable.
This is a struggle of titans, the like of which the world has never seen. We cannot prevail by the short-term expedient of declaring a sudden emergency, and creating the illusion that the challenge can be dealt with quickly and then put behind us. The challenge we face will not end in a year, or a decade; to meet it we have to prepare ourselves for a sustained level of will and fortitude. Victory in this struggle will come through perseverance, by never giving up, by coming back again and again when things are
tough. It will come through the kind of leadership that in one crisis after another raises the sights of the American people from the mundane to the transcendent, from the immediate to the enduring.
If we determine to win, if we resolve to accept no substitute for victory, then victory becomes possible. Then the spirit gives edge to the sword, the sword preserves the spirit, and freedom will prevail.
Selected Source Notes
Chapter One
William Manchester, American Caesar (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978), p. 182.
Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955), p. 4.
Chapter Two
“An Interview with Teng Hsiao-p’ing [Deng Xiao-ping],” Time, February 5, 1979, p. 34.
Brian Crozier, Strategy of Survival (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1978), p. 9.
“This war is not as in the past..”: see Michael B. Petrovich, trans., Conversations with Stalin by Milovan Djilas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962), p. 114.
“the capability to control. . . . ”: see Charles M. Kupperman, “The Soviet World View,” Policy Review, Winter 1979, p. 45.
Francis X. Maier, “The Jonas Savimbi Interview,” The American Spectator, January 1980, p. 8.
“Dangling from the trees. . . . ”: see Uwe Siemon-Netto, remarks to an Accuracy in Media banquet, The AIM Report, November 1979, p. 2.
B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy, 2nd ed. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), p. 164.
Refugee quote from Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1979, Part 1, p. 13.
Iving Kristol, “Foreign Policy: End of an Era,” Wall Street Journal, January 18, 1979.
Chapter Three
Henry Reeve, trans., Henry Steele Commager, ed., Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, Book I, Chap. XIX (London: Oxford University Press.)
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