The World–As It Is, and As It Can Be
Article published March 1980
President Jimmy Carter came into office in January 1977 believing that the policy of détente with the Soviet Union could be continued and extended. The Soviets had other plans, proceeding with the modernization of their military forces and invading Afghanistan in 1979, thereby moving a step closer to the oil resources of the Persian Gulf–oil resources that resource-rich Russia did not need for itself, but which were crucial to the economies of the United States and western Europe.
President Carter aspires, belatedly, to realism in foreign policy. Three years ago he was telling the American people that the “Cold War” was over, and that our fear of communism was “inordinate.” True, Mr. Carter was only echoing the wishful thinking of countless experts on international relations, such as his national security adviser Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, a reputed hawk. Let us not minimize the fact that politicians are very dependent on such experts for their understanding of the character methods, an d objectives of the Soviet Union. Détente was endorsed by intellectuals before it became the dogma of statesmen.
Given Mr. Carter’s recent turnaround, have Americans finally awakened from their dogmatic slumber?
In his State of the Union Message, Mr. Carter told the American people that “to be secure, we must face the world as it is,” and the world as it is contains an aggressive, powerful Soviet Union. “Now, as during the last three-and-a-half decades,” the U. S.-Soviet relationship “is the most critical factor in determining whether the world will live in peace or be engulfed in global conflict.” The Soviets, Mr. Carter now sees, are the people with the guns, and guns bring raw materials to those who know how to shoot. If the Soviets could block Arab shipments of oil to the free world, the U. S. would enter a depression; the European and Japanese economies would collapse. He might have added that Soviet control of the Persian Gulf would give Russia a position of almost unassailable world dominance.
Carter now proposes to threaten to fight if the Soviets go further; limit U. S.-Soviet commerce; boycott the Moscow Olympics; strengthen U. S. and allied armed forces (including the revival of draft registration, if not the draft itself); continue attempts at independence from oversea energy sources; and, of course, more diplomacy.
The reaction to this rather mild list of actions surprises only those unacquainted with the cowardice of the American let and the hypocrisy of American presidential candidates. Several of the latter complained about the embargo of grain to the Soviet Union; the former complained of “Cold War II” and the “immorality” of sacrificing blood for oil. The fact that even voters in the farm state of Iowa approve of the grain embargo, along with the fact that a large majority of voters favor draft registration, must have disconcerted the many political pros who had imagined otherwise. Unfortunately, fact rarely disconcert the American left or American presidential candidates.
The appeasement lobby ignores the fact that Soviet encroachment on Mideast oil fields would enable the Kremlin to threaten the United States with considerably more harm than any self-imposed restrictions on commerce. These same moralists who would rather see the Soviet spill oil than blood also overlook the lives of millions of non-Americans around the world–present and potential victims of Soviet aggression. When America was doing the killing in Vietnam, was this not termed `racist’ and `genocidal’? Evidently, there is moralism and then there is moralism.
Far from being too `tough,’ President Carter hasn’t done enough to punish the Soviets and to deter future attacks. The first thing he should have done was to sack the purblind advisers who eased him into this mess–starting with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Brzezinski, both of whom supposed that we had seen “the end of ideology” and, with it, the need to store away anti-communism as a relic of the Cold War.
Governor Ronald Reagan has offered a more coherent geopolitical policy. He observes that the Soviets, too have vulnerable spots. Cuba is one of them; he suggests a blockade. We add that no one should overlook Granada, which is Cuba’s own satellite, even as Cuba is Soviet Russia’s. And Angola, where Jonas Savimbi’s troops beg for support in their fight against Kremlin-backed Marxists, ought to be added to the list. We can do more to back the anti-Soviet guerrillas in Afghanistan, too.
We also suggest that the U. S. work harder at undermining another Kremlin client, the Palestine LIberation Organization, which not only backed Khomeini’s coup against the Shah of Iran but also supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Closing down the PLO office in Washington is the very least that could be done. Helping the Christian forces in Lebanon against the PLO there is another.
In view of the Soviet use of embassies for spying (300 agents operate out of the United Nations delegation alone), the U. S. should require the Soviets to reduce the size of their embassy staff in Washington. The U. S. should also consider closing Soviet consulates. It’s unlikely that U. S. consulates in Russia give America as much information about the Soviets as the Soviets get in America from theirs.
Furthermore, we should actively engage in subversion within the Soviet Union itself. The New York-based political commentator Barry Farber has long advocated the use of language as a tool in this regard. The Soviets, he has remarked, train their agents to speak not only excellent English but excellent Arabic, Chinese, Bantu, etc. The more the West can do to damage Soviet interests within its polyglot empire, the less energy the Kremlin will have for projects abroad.
America may or may not need to return to conscription. If so, there must be no deferments of service for college students this time, as there were during the 1950s an 1960s. College students–many of whom went to college only to avoid the draft–stewed in their own juice while on campus, worrying about having to go into the army, and perhaps into war. Because they had time on their hands and fear in their minds, they engaged in numerous disruptive and hysterical demonstrations during the period of the Vietnam War–until, of course, President Nixon ended the draft and with it the commotion. If youths are to be conscripted, let it be before college; then, once they arrive there, they will be more likely to concentrate on books, beer and other traditional collegiate matters.
But the immediate problem has nothing to do with the draft and training more spies. American `conventional’ military weakness requires us to lean more heavily on our nuclear weapons as a deterrent than we might like. Carter should allow it to be known that a Soviet attempt to dominate the Persian Gulf will `force’ him to use one or more submarine-launched ballistic missiles to destroy Iranian oilfields and kill Soviet troops in the area. This threat would buy some time until `conventional’ forces can be strengthened.
Given pending Soviet upgrades in its own nuclear arsenal, by 1982 a nuclear threat will not impress the Kremlin so much. For that reason, the strategic nuclear strength of the U. S. must also be increased sufficiently so as to minimize the length of what has been called the `window of vulnerability’ now foreseen to extend from 1982 to 1985.Along with the deployment of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons America must not neglect research and development. While Defense Secretary Harold Brown has noted correctly that military leaders can become “entranced” with technology thereby wasting money contriving complex but fragile weapons systems, technology, rightly used, also saves money and yields more efficient weapons. And technological advance, not clever diplomacy, will be the thing that eventually renders nuclear weapons obsolete.
With a modernized weapons systems–strategic and tactical, nuclear and ‘conventional’–at hand, America will have the makings of a sound military. And if American soldiers serve a country that also subverts its adversary with the same enthusiasm and skill with which its adversary attempts to subvert us, if they serve a country that uses patient diplomacy and intelligent propaganda to mobilize world opinion against the world’s real enemy, and if they serve a country that combines economic strength with political cohesion, they will find themselves on he winning side, again.
By far the most controversial proposal here was the recommendation that the United States threaten the Soviets with the use of submarine-launched ballistic missiles against targets in Iran if the Soviets invaded that country from their bases in Afghanistan. Unknown to the general public at that time, the Carter Administration had made a conceptually similar but morally and tactically much better move. At one point, when Soviet troop movements did indeed indicate a possible invasion across the Iranian border, Carter signaled his willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons against any troops that did so. Whereas submarine-launched ballistic missiles are powerful weapons that would cause immense damage to civilian populations, tactical nuclear weapons are battlefield weapons that can be aimed at enemy soldiers. Their use was much more plausible and morally defensible than the one I proposed. Both ideas were intended to deter the Soviets in a circumstance where they had substantial ground troops and America did not.
By the end of the year, Carter had lost his bid for re-election to Governor Reagan, who then implemented a tougher line toward the Soviet Union and did indeed put the U. S. on what I called “the winning side” in the Cold War.
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