Article published June 1978

 

In a recent interview with U. S. News and World Report, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski listed what he called the five “priorities” of the Carter Administration’s foreign policy. One comes to expect a fair amount of piffle when listening to `official spokesmen’ for any large organization, public or private. Such people find controversy at once painful and all too easy to come by, so they take care to sedate us with vagueness, irrelevance, and cant. (Those of us old enough remember President Eisenhower will recall his mastery of such techniques; once, when an aide worried about the possibility of hostile questioners at a press conference, Ike is said to have assured the fellow, “Don’t worry–I’ll just confuse them.”)

Dr. Brzezinski is no Eisenhower, but his piffle quotient surely makes many a functionary envious. The first priority he listed was “to infuse American foreign policy again with a certain measure of moral content.” This amounted to a slap at his predecessor, Henry Kissinger, whose alleged Metternichean realism offended liberals and conservatives alike. While one may have little admiration for Kissingerian moral gravitas–the gravitas is heavy but the morality isn’t–the Carter Administration’s “human rights” campaign’s “certain measure” of morality doesn’t have nearly enough of the right kind.

The second “priority” is to “concentrate on strengthening our ties” with allies and “with many regionally or internationally important powers that have surfaced in the last two or three decades”–this, “instead of being preoccupied with the contest with the Soviet Union”; Brzezinski quickly added, “that conflict still exists,” as indeed it does. But in view of the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union are the only genuine worldwide powers, such a redirection of emphasis obscures realty. One might well strengthen ties with old and new allies (Israel, for starters) with a view toward the underlying rivalry with America’s true opponent, but never at the expense of becoming distracted from that rivalry. The hackneyed but true observation that we live in a complex world necessitates more clarity of thought, not make-nice muddle-headedness. That isn’t the right measure of morality.

Speaking of muddle-headedness, the third priority is “to contain U. S.-Soviet competition, particularly through a SALT agreement that would inhibit the arms race.” “This,” Dr. Brzezinski images, “would help generate broader cooperation.” Beyond détente, it seems, Dr. Brzezinski envisions entente. At the risk of disturbing the dreamer, we must ask: cooperating on the basis of what? The extraordinary qualitative differences between the United States and the Soviet Union–moral, economic, social, legal, political, spiritual–simply offer little basis for genuine détente, let alone entente. That isn’t the right measure of morality, either.

Dr. Brzezinski claims that the Carter Administration “gives more direct attention to those crises in the world which, if left unattended, have the potential for escalating and generating a serious threat to world peace.” Insofar as this refers to the Middle East it is preposterous. One might object to the goals Kissinger wanted, and the means he used in attempting to achieve them; one cannot say he did not give as much attention to this region as Carter and Brzezinski do. Moreover, the United States government is now studiously ignoring the major Soviet-Cuban intervention in the Horn of Africa, satisfying itself with a mild protest or two, hoping that this will be “Russia’s Vietnam.” But Russia helped make America’s Vietnam by massive infusions of aid to the Hanoi government. We can only suppose that the present Administration prefers “developing closer relations” with those newly-emerged countries that the Soviets haven’t bothered to get around to, yet. What is the measure of morality in that?

Finally, the Administration would “sensitize world public opinion as well as foreign governments to the importance of such new globally significant issues” as nuclear proliferation and arms transfers. Fine: but a pattern appears. Of these five “priorities,” four have to do with comfortable self-preservation and its twin, the fear of violent death. Only the “human rights” issue, with its “certain measure” of morality, adds the leaven of self-sacrifice–or, more modestly, concern for anything other than our bodies–to this half-baked dough. “The central issue,” according to Dr. Brzezinski is that the United States is “again perceived” as “helping to shape a more congenial and decent world.” Congeniality and decency are the sort of pleasant virtues one finds at the cocktail parties Dr. Brzezinski attended when he was an academic. What participants in such gatherings frequently lacks counts more in world politics: the tougher, sharper virtues such as courage and justice that make a statesman less popular but better respected.

Article published January 1980

When this article was written, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts was challenging incumbent president Jimmy Carter for the Democratic Party nomination. Although President Carter had brokered a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, Senator Kennedy supposed that he could broker an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

Senator Kennedy has angered many friends of Israel by proposing that the Arab Palestinians be given Judea and Samaria. He adds that U. S. troops should guarantee Israel’s protection–something Israel has never requested. He naively assumes that such a “resolution” of the Mideast conflict would assure a trouble-free flow of oil to America. Among other things, this assumption overlooks two obvious problems: it would not satisfy the Arabs, who really prefer that Israel not exist at all; there is more than one Mideast conflict, and therefore no trouble-free oil flow would result.

The same friends of Israel may imagine that Kennedy, who never fails to insist on his support for Israel, surpasses Republican candidate [and former Texas governor] John Connally in sensitivity and prudence in matters where Israel is concerned. He has told Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that Israel should have “secure, defensible and recognized borders”; and he has refused to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization, which continues to call for the erasure of Israel. But a careful look at the Senator’s character, record, and rhetoric conceals a far weaker position than those dazzled by `the last Kennedy’ see, or dare to see.

The Senator’s character has excited much comment, most of it tendentious. Understandably so: shabby doings pockmark the biography from its beginning. Many critics have asserted that Kennedy’s most notorious misadventure, which involved the death of Mary Jo Kopechne and numberless clouds of evasion, reveals a man incapable of dealing with crisis, a man incapable of enduring the still more serious pressures imposed on a U. S. president. Few can listen without contempt when Kennedy hagiographer Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. straight-facedly contends that the Chappaquiddick disaster put “iron in Kennedy’s soul.” For what we have seen before and since is the same old all-too-human clay, mixed with precious little soul and even less iron. Yet such critics miss part of the point: anyone can botch things in a crisis, but Chappaquiddick and other Kennedy scandals bare not just had crisis management but the thoroughgoing weakness of a lifelong hedonist.

Kennedy’s hedonism shows itself not only in private acts but in public words. Unlike other liberals (his older brother, J. F. K., and Lyndon Johnson), who promised Americans more butter while insisting on defending it, and them, with guns, the left-liberals of the Democratic Party (Henry Wallace yesterday, Senator George McGovern and Senator Kennedy today) promise more butter with a reduction in guns. They overlook the fat that those who have butter always face–indeed, attract–enemies with guns who at very least would take the butter away. Hedonism without some sort of moderating self-discipline eventually gets squashed–one of the few moral lessons history upholds.

Kennedy’s hedonism extends to public acts as well as to public words. In a recent issue of the liberal American weekly, The New Republic, journalist Morton Kondracke lists some of these acts, and it is a record to be wondered at. In 1975, for example, the Senator voted against President Gerald Ford’s request for $522 million extra aid to South Vietnam and Cambodia–contending, in effect, that wouldn’t make any difference. Maybe yes, maybe no, but, given the mass murders committed by communist rulers in both of those countries in the intervening years, might it not have been worth trying?

In 1976, Senator Kennedy supported a proposal to withdraw U. S. troops from Europe at a time when the Soviets had already achieved marked conventional military superiority over NATO. Responding in 1978 to the determined Soviet effort to equal and surpass overall U. S. military strength, Kennedy voted to transfer four percent of the defense budget to domestic programs. In fact, he voted against almost every new seasons system developed in the decade, including anti-ballistic missiles, the B-1 bomber (which alone can match the Soviets’ Backfire bomber), the cruise missile (a second-strike, hence defensive weapon), the neutron bomb (a tactical weapon designed to prevent a Soviet-led tank attack on Western Europe), aircraft carriers (essential for trouble spots like the Mideast), and Trident submarines (an upgrade to the only class of nuclear weapons that is relatively invulnerable to a Soviet first strike).

Prudence? Iron will? Sensitivity? Kennedy also voted against the AWACS early-warning system, without which in the event of a nuclear attack, his fellow Americans will never know what hit them. There may be a sort of sensitivity in that.

On the diplomatic front, the senator would threaten dictatorial allies like Chile, Argentina, and South Korea with withdrawals of American aid, while offering aid to dictatorial enemies like the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea. If he did that, you see, he could then threaten to withdraw aid from America’s enemies and encourage America’s erstwhile enemies, so that they too might qualify for aid. Alice, meet Wonderland.

Whereas Connally would make Israel an outright American protectorate while amassing the military power to make that stance believable, Kennedy would applaud Israel’s independence while weakening one of the bases of that independence: America’s military power, the now-weakened bulwark of the democracies.

Kennedy, whom so many Americans prize for his `charisma,’ his `qualities of leadership,’ in fact would preside over–aid and abet–a decline of the very power that buttresses leadership, makes it real., not a sustained act of pretension. The senator has just published a book entitled Our Day and Generation: The Words of Edward M. Kennedy. Reviewers have complained that it reveals nothing of Edward Kennedy, the man–consisting as it does entirely of statements of public policy. But the critics misspeak. For the Senator’s words–banal snippets from the kind of politely meaningless speeches senators give when asked–are much less prominent than the photos, all of which burnish the Kennedy image instead of foregrounding the Kennedy substance, of which little can be seen.

How much substance is there? Someone described Stalinist Russia as a mystery wrapped in an enigma; Edward Kennedy is banality wrapped in an image. Or, perhaps more accurately, he is a vacuum wrapped in an image. In revealing nothing he reveals himself.

2016 NOTE: President Carter went on to defeat Senator Kennedy in the Democratic Party primaries before losing the presidential election to Ronald Reagan. Senator Kennedy returned to Capitol Hill, where he eventually gained a reputation for hard work on behalf of the left-liberal economic and social programs he favored. All three men might be said to have gone to their proper reward that year–four, if you include Connally, something of a wheeler-dealer who took his act into the private sector, where scrutiny is less intense.

Article published September 1979

This article was written in response to an interview with George F. Kennan published in U. S. News and World Report. Kennan was then attached to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton University, after his distinguished career in the United States State Department. The Carter Administration had continued the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, more or less as designed by President Nixon, continued by President Ford, and implemented under both of those administrations by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The argument against détente was gaining traction, however, and the policy would be jettisoned in the subsequent administration of President Reagan. Kennan’s interview was intended to answer the critics of détente.

George F. Kennan is rivalled only by Henry Kissinger as the most influential scholar-diplomat of postwar America. In his seminal article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published in 1947, he warned that the Soviet tendency to dangle the bauble of cooperation before wishful American eyes was a tactic, not an offer, unworthy of “gleeful announcements that `the Soviets have changed.'” He proposed the policy of “containment,” whereby the West would apply “counterforce as a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points,” counterforce that was to be “political,” not military. Indeed, in 1947 the Soviet Union did not pose a military threat to the United States, so the `militaristic’ interpretation of the Kennan article, widely made at the time, was incorrect. Whether the article itself was incorrect in its “political” (that is, diplomatic) approach to the Soviet Union is a question for thoughtful historians.

Today the relevant question is the one Mr. Kennan raises in his most recent interview: is a policy of military containment, as advocated by the critics of U. S.-Soviet détente, mistaken and dangerous? His answer is that such a policy is indeed dangerous, that we must avoid war and try to “break out of the straitjacket of military rivalry and to strike through to a more constructive and hopeful vision.” Detente’s critics are “alarmists.”

They are alarmists, he contends, for several reasons. The Soviet nion has no purpose for which to fight a war, and countries do not fight without reason. Marxist ideology predicts the triumph of communism by means of “the action of the proletariat and of right-thinking people within the countries themselves”–“an action in which the Soviet armed forces help,” but only help. And there are practical reasons, Kennan says, for the Soviets to avoid war: the Chines threat being the most important, but also the danger of unrest in eastern and central Europe and within the Soviet Union itself. Soviet leadership is “very conservative,” “composed very largely of people quite advanced in age,” with “many problems to solve at home (most of them economic, some “spiritual”), ruling subjects who “feel very strongly” opposed to any prospect of a Third World War.

American statesmen, Kennan argues, should contribute to an “environment” which includes “incentives to move” in the direction of better relations, so that Soviet rulers of today and tomorrow are not forced into continued military escalation. This is especially important because “life is better than death.” “Countries do survive all sorts of vicissitudes short of annihilation. They survive occupation, they survive being satellites, and eventually people get their own independence again… I would say, `Rather red than dead'”–better a subject under a communist regime than killed in a war over communism.

Rarely have the assumptions that underlie détente received such precise expression. In this Kennan has out-Kissingered Kissinger. Such a precise expression deserves an equally precise refutation.

The argument that Marxist ideology precludes military triumph over its enemies, that military action must be the handmaiden of revolutionary class struggle is, at least, novel. Characteristically, the détentists contend that the Soviets have abandoned Marxism for nationalism. Perhaps seeing such an abandonment, if real, would make the Soviet Union as dangerous as “before,” Kennan avoids it like the intellectual plague it is. But instead of the plague he succumbs to the pox, for the Soviets never hesitated to impose their revolution on such countries as Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia (both in 1948 and in 1968 under Premier Brezhnev’s “conservative” leadership). If yours is “the country of the Revolution,” if your people, and especially your leaders, embody the vanguard of the international proletariat, you can easily justify a war of `liberation’ based, if not on actual indigenous sentiment, then on the `objective’ interests of oppressed people.

The practical reasons for avoiding war which Kennan imputes to the Soviet leadership might be convincing if they were not based on his failure to account for the advance of modern technology. Domestic unrest and `pacifism’ in the Soviet Union, the danger o European and/or Chinese attack–all of these will eventually come to nothing as Soviet military technology progressively widens the gulf between rulers and ruled, between major power and secondary powers. The Soviet-style mass revolution based on the 19th-century barricades and the power of `the people’ is today impossible in extended and technologically advanced dictatorships. A ruler without humanitarian scruple, whether of the `Left’ or the `Right,’ can easily crush such movements long before they gain momentum. As for China and Europe, the former will never equal the Soviets’ technological prowess unless it contrives to skip all intermediate stages–an unlikely trick. Meanwhile, Western Europe lacks the political will and the political unity to match the Soviets step for step, and Eastern Europe is already broken. Only the United States can equal, perhaps surpass, the Soviet Union in the invention and deployment of the weapons that will eventually render nuclear missiles as obsolete and the barricades and pickaxes of the 19th century. In assuming that nuclear weapons are `the ultimate weapon,’ Kennan reveals himself as hopeless reactionary.

Finally, there is the moral argument. Life is indeed better than death if that life is not lived under tyranny. The ideology of Marxism and the genuinely revolutionary technological means that it will soon possess makes Kennan’s naïve pronouncement on “time softening these things” a symptom of a peculiar disease caused by the twin viruses of cowardice and complacency. His “more constructive and hopeful vision” is a fever-dream mistaken for a prophecy.

The ongoing technological revolution will bestow even more extraordinary power upon those who control the machines. The victory of the Soviet Union at this crucial juncture of world history–a victory for which every statement and every action of the Soviet leadership prepares–would end the brief life of political liberty on earth.

2016 NOTE: This article was one of several written in collaboration with Professor Paul Eidelberg, who was then teaching at Bar Ilan University in Israel.  As in any such collaboration, some articles were written mostly by him, some mostly by me, and some by both.  The articles posted here are the ones I wrote, with editing by him.

The article fails to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet empire, some ten years later. But that occurred after Reagan ended the policy of détente and began to apply pressure to the Soviets in collaboration with U. S. allies–perhaps most notably the Saudis, who lowered oil prices at exactly the time when the Soviets desperately needed oil revenues. That weakened the Kremlin’s grip on Central Europe and led to exactly the kind of popular uprisings that I didn’t foresee when American foreign policy was trending in the opposite direction