CONTAINMENT PLUS-- AN AFFIRMATIVE STRATEGY
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Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST):
CIA-RDP87M00539R003205240004-9
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RIPPUB
Original Classification:
K
Document Page Count:
41
Document Creation Date:
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Document Release Date:
January 7, 2010
Sequence Number:
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Publication Date:
November 13, 1985
Content Type:
REPORT
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EXECUTIVE SECRETARIAT
ROUTING SLIP
Remarks
FYI - the attached document was received from
the National Defense University,
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4939
Containment Plus-- 13 November 1985
An Affirmative Strategy
Discussion Paper for a Colloquium
on the Future of Containment
National Defense University
Washington, D.C.
November 8, 1985
by
Eugene V. Rostow*
There is a disquieting gap between the official statements
of United States foreign policy, on the one hand, and, on the
other, the current American literature on the subject and the
implicit foreign policy agenda suggested by the pattern of
American budgets, actions, and failures to act in world
politics. Moreover, the gap is widening.
Except in one important particular which will be discussed
later, the official foreign policy of the United States is firm
in the faith of the gospel according to President Truman and
Secretary of State Acheson. That creed was announced nearly
forty years ago. It has been followed and developed by the
*Distinguished Visiting Research Professor of Law and
Diplomacy, National Defense University. Formerly
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs (1966-69) and
Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1981-83).
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United States and its allies with varying degrees of energy,
imagination, and success ever since. President Reagan's
distinctive amendment to the policy, if it becomes a reality,
should be a positive factor in its effectiveness.
But the major theme of the non-official literature and of
actual practice is how to retreat from the Truman-Acheson
foreign policy. Those who advocate retreat speak in many
voices. They rarely tell us how far to retreat. Sometimes
they do not speak at all, but simply act. They all have
different hobby horses and put special emphasis on different
points. Some are less opaque than others. But all their
counsel points in the same direction.
What the chorus is saying, over and over again, is that the
United States is over-committed; that after Korea and Vietnam
the American people will not tolerate military adventures much
beyond Martha's Vineyard and Pearl Harbor; that we cannot
afford the security expenditures required to keep up with the
Soviet Union and its allies, and anyway that our own allies are
not doing their share in the common effort. Therefore, the
prophets of retreat tell us, we should cut our military
budgets, reduce our forces in Europe, the Middle East, and
Asia, and gradually pull back to our own shores. Some advocate
an even more bizarre policy, which they call "unilateral
internationalism"--a program which would apparently require the
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.1 a
United States, freed of the tiresome obligations of alliance
diplomacy, to protect its world-wide security interests single-
handed.
The arguments for retreat are reinforced by the state of
the nuclear balance, and by the magnitude and momentum of the
Soviet nuclear buildup. For many Americans and Europeans, that
phenomenon is alone enough to justify policies of withdrawal,
neutrality, and accommodation, which they fondly imagine are
available to Europe, Japan, and the United States as an
alternative foreign policy. The nuclear-oriented apostles of
retreat start with the arresting proposition that "great powers
do not commit suicide for their allies." They continue by
pointing out that the Soviet-American nuclear balance is such
that the United States could never make good on its guaranties;
that "extended deterrence" is now a myth and perhaps always was
a myth; that Soviet nuclear strength makes it impossible for
the United States and its allies to use conventional force in
defense of their interests; and therefore that the West should
accept the inevitable and make the best deal it can with the
Soviet Union.
This paper rejects the arguments for an American retreat to
or toward isolation root and branch, in all their protean
variety. Its thesis is that for the most permanent and
fundamental reasons of national security, the United States
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cannot and must not retreat, but on the contrary must go
forward. The Truman-Acheson foreign policy should not be
abandoned but renewed and improved in the light of the changes
which have occurred since the late Forties. The Western
objective in this effort, based on prudent policies of allied
solidarity, should be not alone the containment of Soviet
expansion achieved by aggression, but also, and above all,
genuine peace with the Soviet Union.
The United States is not over-committed; its commitments
correspond to its geopolitical interests in a world political
system where only the United States can lead the coalitions
required to protect the world balance of power. The American
people are not in the least hysterical in the aftermath of
Korea and Vietnam; every election and every serious poll shows
that they are staunch, patriotic, and ready as always to
support the national interest, if their leaders have the
courage to lead and the ability to explain what is required and
why. Of course we can afford the costs of national security,
and of course our allies are doing their share--far more than
most people realize. In any event, the performance of our
allies is irrelevant. We have guaranteed their security for
reasons of our own national interest, not of philanthropy. As
a nation, we cannot afford to allow vast centers of power like
Western Europe and Japan to fall under hostile control. And it
is ridiculous to imagine that we are incapable of the marginal
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effort required to maintain our capacity for nuclear
retaliation, the basis for extended deterrence as well as the
deterrence of nuclear attacks on the United States itself.
Mr. Gorbachev says his foreign policy goal is what he calls
a "modus vivendi" with the United States. By this revealing
phrase he seems to have in mind a political condition which
would be something less than peace, but somewhat less tense
than that of the moment. In short, Mr. Gorbachev is proposing
yet another agreement of detente like those which led to such
bitter disappointments for the United States after the Soviet-
American proclamations of improved relations in the "spirit" of
Geneva in 1955 and Camp David in 1959; the moment of euphoria
after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; and the summit meetings
and other Soviet-American agreements achieved by President
Nixon during 1972 and 1973. What Mr. Gorbachev's modus vivendi
means is that the United States and its allies should remain
passive while the Soviet Union outflanks them by means of
aggressive campaigns of expansion conducted in the first
instance throughout the Third World, particularly near
strategic choke points and other areas of strategic importance.
By such a strategy, they believe, they could achieve a basic
change in the balance of world power by bringing Japan, China,
and Western Europe under their dominion.
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To follow Mr. Gorbachev's use of Latin, a Soviet-American
modus vivendi now would be an ignis fatuus, which the oxford
Dictionary defines as a fire of swamp gas, a delusive and
bewitching flame leading the unwary into pools and ditches.
The realistic objective for Western policy toward the
Soviet Union is not a modus vivendi, like that of 1972 and the
other failed agreements of the past, but one committing both
the United States and the Soviet Union to peace itself. A
condition of peace between the United States and the Soviet
Union would require each side to abide scrupulously by the rule
of the United Nations Charter against aggression, which
President Reagan made the centerpiece of his speech before the
United Nations on October 24, 1985. Such a goal is well within
the capacity of the coalitions and potential coalitions led by
the United States in the Atlantic and Pacific Basins, the
Middle East, and Southern Asia. It would build on the strength
and good sense of President Truman's containment policy, which
has served the nation well in the years since 1947, but go
beyond it in pressing for peace with the Soviet Union, rather
than waiting patiently for the Soviet Union to break up or to
realize how foolish and costly its present policies are. A
Western policy built on this principle is the only way to end
Cold War, which could easily get out of hand in any one of a
dozen flash-points around the world.
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It is important to recall that the policy of containment
which is the focus of this conference was not the first but the
second post-war policy of the West toward the Soviet Union.
The first American policy proposal was one of full cooperation
with the Soviet Union in repairing the physical damage of the
war and restoring the state system in accordance with the
principles of the United Nations Charter. That goal remains
and will remain the lodestar of American and Western foreign
policy, to be pursued despite all obstacles.
The policy of containment was announced in 1947, two years
after the end of the Second World War. During those two years,
the hopes and dreams of the war period about the possibility of
achieving relations of continued cooperation with the Soviet
Union turned to ashes. Above all, it became clear that the
Soviet Union had no intention of abiding by the rule against
aggression which is the foundation of the state system
organized under the banner of the United Nations Charter.
During the war, Soviet-Allied relations were characterized
by episodes of nearly unbelievable Soviet hostility. The
governments of the United States, Great Britain and France
thoroughly understood the nature of Soviet policy. There was
great foreboding within the Western governments and a
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correspondingly intense determination to make every possible
effort to sustain and improve the wartime pattern of Soviet-
Allied collaboration. There were high hopes throughout the
West that the Soviet government would choose to continue its
wartime association with the Western allies. More
particularly, it was hoped that the Soviet Union would join its
erstwhile allies in managing the state system much as the great
powers cooperated in conducting the Concert of Europe during
the nineteeth century. Soviet diplomats commented later that
if the San Francisco Conference had been delayed for a year,
the United Nations Charter would never have been signed. There
is nothing mysterious about their observation. As Stalin told
Ambassador Harriman near the end of the war, during a
conversation in which Harriman was trying to persuade Stalin to
accept an American post-war reconstruction loan under the Lend-
Lease Act, "We have decided to go our own way."
Stalin's policy was carried out with a vengeance. The
Soviet government attempted to seize Greece and the Northern
provinces of Iran, threatened Berlin and Turkey, and intervened
in Czechoslovakia. It brusquely rejected the Marshall Plan and
the Baruch Plan, which offered the Soviets reconstruction loans
and nuclear cooperation; took over Eastern Europe, repudiating
its promises to hold free elections in that critical area;
refused to discuss or modify its policy of indefinite expansion
either in Europe or elsewhere in the world; and rejected any
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and all proposals to create the decisive great power
peacekeeping forces called for by the Charter.
Facing these bleak realities, the West decided to adopt the
course of deterring and containing Soviet aggression, and
defeating it when necessary, rather than eliminating the Soviet
Union's capacity to commit aggression in a more conclusive way.
For reasons which reflect the finest features of our national
character and of Western culture at large, the Western nations
undertook instead to follow the advice of George Kennan's
classic article in Foreign Affairs--contain Soviet expansion
and give the benign influence of Russian high culture time to
mellow the Soviet leadership, in the hope that one day--within
a period of ten or fifteen years, Mr. Kennen thought--the
Soviet Union would either break up or abandon its imperial
ambitions, and settle down to cooperate with the other powers
in keeping the peace.
Thus in 1947 the West launched the policy of containment--
the foundation for an ambitious foreign policy of economic and
social progress, of political solidarity, and of international
cooperation in the control of nuclear weapons and nuclear
technology.
For two decades, the Western foreign policy developed by
President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson was moderately
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successful, except in the area of achieving effective
international control of nuclear weapons and nuclear
technology. It was the engine of reconstruction and economic
growth in the capitalist world, the third world, and the world
of Communist states, and it sustained an impressive cultural
and political renaissance in many parts of the world. But from
the beginning, it failed in its most fundamental goal--the
restoration of the state system as an effective check on
aggression. The West hesitated before the challenge of
enforcing the Charter rules against Soviet aggression in
Eastern Europe. With some success, it moved to defeat Soviet
supported aggression in the Third World, only to discover that
successful instances of Western defense--in Berlin and Korea,
for example--did not deter further aggression, but simply led
to an increase in the intensity and scale of the violence the
next time. The Soviet Union did not break up or mellow in the
sunshine of Russian high culture, as George Kennan had
anticipated. On the contrary, its program of expansion and
aggression became steadily worse. Finally giving up hope of
achieving Soviet compliance with the Charter rules anywhere,
the United States came to rely more and more on what we
supposed were bilateral Soviet-American codes of crisis
management and crisis prevention.
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The increasing concentration- of Western thought on problems
of crisis management rather than of foreign policy was a
register of defeat--an admission that the expectation of peace
of the early post-war period had faded, and that we were in
fact living under seige within a contracting perimeter,
responding to attack--sometimes--in ways we hoped would be
effective without provoking all-out war.
What are the supposed canons of crisis management and
crisis prevention on which we have relied to minimize ultimate
risks?
The first and most basic is that the armed forces of each
side not fire at the armed forces of the other. Manifestly,
such a rule should make it easier for each side to avoid war by
inadvertence or escalation. The only major exception to that
rule, so far, has been the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when
the United States boarded and turned back a Soviet vessel bound
for Cuba. The Soviet government did not use armed force to
interfere with the Allied airlift which saved Berlin in the
late Forties, nor with the flow of supplies and troops to the
allied forces in Korea and Vietnam. It has, however, used
force with deliberate brutality to sabotage the arrangements
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for inspection established in Germany immediately after the
In the West, many students and officials once thought that
there would be a second tacit rule of prudence in the conduct
of the Cold War--that each side would respect certain special
security interests of the other. Thus the West did not
interfere with the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern
Europe. But it soon became clear that the Soviet Union would
not reciprocate. Instead, it tried to take over Greece, Cuba,
Iran, Turkey, and other countries or areas which we thought
they had agreed were in our sphere of influence.
During the last twenty years, there have been a number of
efforts to develop crisis management and crisis avoidance
techniques. The "hot-line," permitting rapid and direct
communication between the two heads of government, is one
example. Another is the Standing Committee on Accidents at
Sea, which has had a positive influence on the number of
collisions and near collisions between Soviet and American
naval vessels.
The attempt to obtain Soviet-American agreements which
could control nuclear weapons in the interest of peace is the
most conspicuous of all the American efforts to achieve Soviet-
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American arrangements for crisis management and crisis
avoidance.
We went through a long period of trial and error in trying
to discover the significance of nuclear weapons in war and
diplomacy.
In 1945 and 1946, some Americans thought that a single
waggle of our nuclear finger would dissuade the Soviet Union
from any kind of adventure. Perhaps this was the case in the
first crisis of the Cold War, that in Northern Iran in 1946.
But the Soviet Union persisted in probing our responses to
their experiments in expansion. And it soon became clear that
there were many situations in which we would not use or
threaten to use nuclear weapons. In those situations, the
Soviets could use conventional forces, guerrillas, terrorism,
or subversion to accomplish their purposes, confident that if
we resisted at all, we would do so only locally, and only with
conventional forces.
During the Fifties, John Foster Dulles announced the
doctrine of "massive retaliation," threatening a nuclear
response against the Soviet Union as a means of deterring or
resisting Soviet-backed aggression in important but secondary
theatres of Soviet expansion. The doctrine was stillborn. It
was soon apparent that the United States was not likely to use
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nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union in situations like
Korea or Vietnam, although after several bitter years of
warfare two credible nuclear hints did bring the Korean War at
least to an armistice. But the same procedure did not work in
Vietnam, at a time when the Soviet-American nuclear equation
was more nearly in balance and Sino-Soviet rivalry for
political leadership in the area had become acute.
During the 1960s, the doctrine of "flexible response" was
articulated to govern the role of the nuclear weapon in the
defense of Europe and other vital American security interests.
It remains the theoretical basis of our policy for the military
use of the nuclear weapon.
Ever since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the United
States has pressed the Soviet Union to accept rules that might
ensure the deterrent stability of the Soviet-American nuclear
balance. To the American mind, the Cuban Missile Crisis
dramatized the explosive potentialities of nuclear anxiety, and
demonstrated the utility of agreements or understandings that
might minimize uncertainty about the nuclear forces and nuclear
intentions of the other. We took it for granted that the
Soviet leadership took the same view of the problem.
The Cuban Missile Crisis remains in many ways the most
illuminating and instructive of all the Soviet-American
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confrontations since 1945. The nuclear element in the crisis
was conspicuous, and its implications remain pertinent.
The focal point of the crisis--eighteen months after the
Bay of Pigs fiasco--was the secret Soviet plan to deploy
intermediate range ground based nuclear weapons on Cuban soil.
The United States had announced publicly that it would not
tolerate the Soviet emplacement of "offensive" weapons in Cuba.
The Soviet Union had denied that it was preparing to make such
a deployment, both publicly and diplomatically. But it was
doing so. The United States, with the support of the
Organization of American States and of its NATO allies,
assembled an expeditionary force of 250,000 troops in Florida,
established a partial blockade of Cuba, and intercepted a
Soviet vessel approaching the island with a load of missiles.
After a round of hectic diplomatic exchanges, agreement was
reached and the missiles were withdrawn, although Castro was
left in power.
On what legal basis did the United States use a limited
amount of force in self-defense? There was no armed attack on
the United States, and no threat of an armed attack, nuclear or
otherwise. The nuclear balance in 1962 was so favorable to the
United States that a direct Soviet attack was inconceivable.
Cuba had the legal right to request Soviet assistance in
defending itself against possible attack--a concern which had a
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certain plausibility in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs
affair. Yet the United States and the world generally agreed
that a sudden, secret, and deceptive change in the Soviet-
American nuclear balance was in itself an illegal act of force
justifying a legally appropriate American reponse--that is, a
limited and proportional use of enough force to cure the Soviet
breach of international law. It is important to emphasize, as
Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter pointed out at the time, that
the threat against which the United States was reacting in Cuba
was primarily political in character, a threat designed to
weaken the alliance systems of the United States by means of
nuclear intimidation.
The American threat to invade Cuba with conventional forces
was credible to the Soviet Union because of the state of the
Soviet-American nuclear balance in 1962. The principal moral
of the Cuban Missile crisis is that Western conventional forces
can be used only with the implicit protection of a believable
American capacity to retaliate with nuclear weapons if the
Soviet Union should intervene. Thus in 1983, when the United
States, France, Italy, and Great Britain landed forces in
Lebanon, some experienced American foreign policy experts
criticized the move because it might lead to a nuclear
confrontation with the Soviet Union. The critics were in error
on the facts, but their argument brings out the relationship
between the state of the nuclear balance and our capacity to
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use conventional force. In Lebanon as in Cuba, Korea, and
Vietnam, the United States could use conventional force because
we had the capacity to retaliate against the Soviet Union if it
interfered. The Allied debacle in Lebanon was not a response
to Soviet nuclear threats. The Allies simply failed to take
advantage of an important strategic opportunity.
The link between the nuclear balance and the capacity of
the West to use conventional force is the heart of the nuclear
problem as a political as well as a military matter. Unless
the United States retains a strong nuclear retaliatory
capacity, it will be unable to carry out the foreign and
defense policies it must pursue to protect the nation's
security interests in world politics.
The future of America's nuclear retaliatory capacity is the
key issue--indeed the only issue--with which Soviet and
American negotiators have been wrestling since the beginning of
the nuclear weapons arms control talks in 1969. The goal of
the Soviet Union in these talks has been to attain
unchallengeable superiority in intermediate range and
intercontinental ground based ballistic missiles--thus far the
most accurate and destructive nuclear weapons, and the weapons
least vulnerable to defenses of any kind. Such an advantgage,
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the Soviet experts believe, would destroy the deterrent
credibility of American nuclear guarantees, and lead the United
States to withdraw its forces from Europe, the Mediterranean,
and the Far East, and adopt a posture of neutrality in the
event of an attack on American allies or other interests. The
Soviet nuclear strategy echoes the strategy of Germany in
building its high-seas fleet before 1914. The German objective
was not to fight the Royal Navy, but to force Great Britain to
remain neutral in the event of a war on the Continent of
Europe.
Nuclear arms agreements ratifying a Soviet nuclear
advantage would facilitate the achievement of the Soviet
Union's main strategic objective, the separation of the United
States from Europe, and the subjugation of Western Europe,
Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Far East as a consequence.
In 1972, when the SALT I agreements were signed, the United
States and the Soviet Union had approximately the same number
of warheads on intercontinental ground based ballistic
missiles, and the United States had a comfortable lead in sea-
based and airborne forces. The American capacity for nuclear
retaliation was beyond question. In 1985, the Soviet Union has
a lead of more than 3.5 to 1 in the number of warheads on ICBMs
and a lead of more than 4 to 1 in the throw weight of these
weapons. Its sea based and airborne nuclear forces have made
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comparable if slightly less spectacular gains. In addition, it
has a near monopoly of advanced intermediate range ground-based
weapons threatening targets in Europe, Japan, China, and the
Middle East. This development occurred during a decade in
which the shift in the Soviet-American intercontinental nuclear
balance raised serious doubts about our ability to deter
attacks against our security interests most fundamental to the
balance of power, the independence of Japan, China, Western
Europe, South Korea, and the Middle East.
The prospect of a Soviet first-strike capacity--a capacity
to destroy a large part of our retaliatory forces with 25
percent or 30 percent of their ICBMs alone--is proving to be a
political influence of incalculable power, pushing the United
States towards the mirage of isolation and its allies towards
the corresponding mirage of neutrality and accommodation. No
one in the West has the slightest inclination to find out
whether the arcane calculations of a Soviet first-strike
capacity would prove accurate if put to the test.
As the Scowcroft Commission concluded in 1983, the United
States cannot permit the Soviet-American nuclear imbalance to
continue. There are only three ways in which nuclear
stability, predictability, and deterrence might be restored:
(1) a crash American building program involving MX, Midgetman,
cruise missiles, Pershing II, and all; (2) the development of
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defensive weapons which might transform the nuclear equation by
requiring 80 percent or 90 percent rather than 25 percent or 30
percent of the Soviet nuclear force to execute a first-strike;
or (3) an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union based on
the principle of Soviet-American deterrent retaliatory
equality.
The only significant difference between the Soviet Union
and the United States in the Geneva nuclear arms talks between
1981 and 1983, and in the new round of the talks which began in
1985, concerns this crucial issue--Soviet-American equality.
The United States has pressed for agreements based on this
principle, offering amendment after amendment in the hope of
inducing the Soviet Union to compromise; the Soviets have
adamantly refused, holding out for what they call "equality and
equal security," a phrase that would entitle them to a force
equal to the sum of all the other nuclear forces in the world.
The Soviet goal in the negotiations is to induce the United
States to acknowledge the Soviet Union's "right" to nuclear
superiority. That is why they have pressed for the inclusion
of British and French forces in the INF talks, although they
know that those forces are no threat to the far superior Soviet
arsenal, but exist for quite different national purposes. And
they hold out for agreements based on the principle of equal
reduction--so far primarily in launchers rather than in
warheads or throw weight--not reduction to equal levels. The
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Soviet approach both in the 1981-1983 INF and START
negotiations and thus far in the new round of three-sided
nuclear arms negotiations in Geneva would make the crucial
Soviet advantage in ground based ballistic missiles even bigger
and more intimidating than it is now. And they have the
temerity to demand an end of American research and development
of defensive weapons, although they themselves are spending
more on defense against nuclear weapons than on the manufacture
of offensive nuclear weapons.
The public reports on the substance of the new round of
negotiations show considerable movement at least in the form of
the Soviet positions. The basic Soviet proposal adopts the
structure of the American START position which has been on the
table in Geneva since 1982. It calls for a reduction of what
Mr. Gorbachev calls the number of "nuclear charges" to equal
levels on both sides--we must make sure that the word "charges"
means warheads, not launchers--with a sublimit providing that
no more than a given fraction be in any one category. Of
course the Soviet proposal is characterized by fancy arithmetic
and peculiar definitions which will have to be dealt with in
the negotiations. But the Soviet Union has adopted the
American approach. The American position remains what it has
been in principle, although it has been modified in detail. It
is that the unit of account in the negotiations should be
warheads and their destructive quality, not launchers, and that
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the outcome must be equality betwen the two sides, not a Soviet
right to a first-strike capacity. Naturally, the significance
of these changes in the Soviet position are being carefully
explored.
Of course the Soviet advantage in ground based missiles may
erode in time if the new weapons for our Trident submarines
turn out to be as accurate and as formidable as expected.
Again, cruise missiles or other small, accurate, and
mobilieweapons may guarantee nuclear stalemate, and the
development of defensive weapons may in the long run completely
transform the nuclear equation as it stands today. But for
many years, we shall continue to depend upon deterrence through
the threat of retaliation with offensive weapons.
The nuclear arms situation of the last twenty years cannot
continue indefinitely. It may be that the variables in the
nuclear equation are becoming so numerous, so mysterious, and
so complex that the Soviet Union will come to agree that the
nuclear component of world politics cannot be managed without
Soviet-American cooperation.
We have no alternative but to try for such a goal, but the
record since the 1960s offers little ground for optimism. The
Soviet objective in arms control negotiations, like the rest of
Soviet foreign policy, has not been stability but instability;
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not equality with the United States but domination over the
United States; not mutual deterrence but American acceptance of
a Soviet capacity for nuclear blackmail. There is no objective
reason for expecting the Soviet leadership to change this
position soon.
But even if we should wake up one morning and discover that
the Soviet Union had agreed to a good arms control agreement--
an agreement based on the principle of Soviet-American equality
in deterrent power, taking offensive and defensive weapons into
account--we should have accomplished little. There is no sense
in an arms control agreement which promises immunity from
nuclear war, but in effect licenses conventional war without
limit. Since the most likely cause of nuclear war is
escalation from conventional war, such an agreement would be a
deception from the start. The United States and the other
Western powers would have to maintain a secure retaliatory
nuclear capacity in any event, just as they do now.
V. What's to be Done?
Obviously, the United States cannot continue to muddle
along in the pattern of pure containment. We have waited long
enough for George Kennen's prophecy of a Soviet mellowing or a
break-up of the Soviet Union to materialize. Forty years of
patient waiting is enough. The post-war era is over. The ice
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is breaking in the state system. The present is one of those
rare historic moments of choice, like President Truman's
creative term of office.
If we put aside counsels of despair and surrender, there
are two approaches to the problem of Soviet-American relations
which have some plausibility at the present time--the approach
of a new agreement of detente, a "modus vivendi," as Mr.
Gorbechev calls it; and the approach of peace itself, a
determination on the part of the Western nations to insist that
the Soviet Union give up the practice of aggression and live
within its legitimate borders like other states, in conformity
to the rules of the United Nations Charter. Secretary of State
Acheson put the issue sharply a generation ago in responding to
a Soviet proposal for a non-aggression pact with the United
States--a hardy perennial in Soviet diplomatic practice. "We
already have a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union,"
Acheson said. "It is called the Charter of the United Nations.
Any special agreement between us could only weaken and qualify
the influence of the Charter, and we must not follow that
road."
Henry Kissinger has put forward the most cogent and
realistic sketch of a possible reduction of tensions through a
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new Modus Vivendi agreement with the Soviet Union. It is well
worth examining in detail.
"For too long," Mr. Kissinger wrote, "the
Western democracies have flinched from
facing the fundamental cause of tensions,
the ground rules the Soviets have succeeded
in imposing on the international system.
Everything that has become Communist remains
forever inviolate. Everything that's non-
Communist is open to change: by pressure,
by subversion, by guerrilla action, if
necessary by terror. These ground rules if
not resisted will inexorably shift the
balance of power against the democracies."
Mr. Kissinger's article admirably defines the central dilemma
of Western foreign policy. He does not concentrate on how to
achieve a nuclear arms control agreement with the Soviet Union
and other secondary issues. Instead, he directs attention to
the primary problem: what to do about the continuing process
of Soviet expansion accomplished by the illegal use of force.
Unfortunately, the remedy Mr. Kissinger prescribes would make
the crisis worse.
As Mr. Kissinger points out, the Soviet Union is pressing
us to accept the singular thesis that it is above the law
against aggression applicable to all other states. Soviet
expansion achieved by direct and indirect aggression is
changing the world balance of power. And, unless countered,
the increasing Soviet advantage in ground-based ballistic
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nuclear misiles and other nuclear weapons will soon make it
impossible for the Western nations to resist Soviet aggression
through the use of conventional forces. Facing these presures,
the West has "flinched" and is still flinching rather than
accept the true character of Soviet policy. For the moment,
the West is mesmerized, like a bird confronted by a snake.
As a result, Mr. Kissinger tells us, the international
order is lurching toward a systemic breakdown like that of
August, 1914. He concludes that unless the Soviet Union and
the United States reach agreement soon on viable rules for
peaceful coexistence, a major confrontation between the Soviet
Union and the United States is nearly inevitable, a
confrontation neither side could expect to control. The reason
such an outcome is so likely, Mr. Kissinger believes, is that
the existing ground rules for Soviet-American coexistence are
both unacceptable and dangerous.
Thus far, Mr. Kissinger is on solid ground. My
disagreement with him concerns the next stage of his argument.
To eliminate the threat of an uncontrollable crisis in a
nuclear setting, Mr. Kissinger recommends a secret Soviet-
American negotiation to achieve "specific agreements that
define the true vital interests of each side and the
permissible challenges to them." Mr. Kissinger writes, "In the
past such agreements have been confined to generalities that
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created an illusion of progress. Let us now work on a concrete
and definite program."
A substantial fraction, perhaps a majority, of Western
opinion agrees with the judgment behind Mr. Kissinger's
proposal, i.e., that we lack the power and the will to require
the Soviet Union to live in peace with its neighbors in
accordance with the United Nations Charter. People of this
persuasion therefore seek a "pragmatic" modus vivendi with the
Soviet Union. They advocate a spheres-of-influence agreement
which would define a Soviet-American relationship short of
peace but less explosive than that of the last 40 years, a deal
which they hope would head off the climax Mr. Kissinger rightly
perceives as nearly inevitable if present trends continue. Mr.
Nixon, for example, calls such a relationship "hard-headed
detente."
No American could possibly object to a Soviet-American
understanding that would reduce tensions and make the
international environment less fragile. Indeed, American and
Western opinion has greeted with relief and enthusiasm each
proclamation since Yalta that the Soviet Union and the Western
powers have achieved such an understanding. But the record of
Soviet international behavior makes it obvious that the
advocates of yet another modus vivendi agreement with the
Soviet Union are whistling in the wind. In the small,
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dangerous, interdependent, and volatile nuclear world of the
late twentieth century, there is no possible state of "detente"
halfway between war and peace. Eager as the West is for
"detente" and truly "peaceful coexistence" with the Soviet
Union, more than 40 years of diplomatic frustration make it
apparent that the West can accept no definition for these terms
except peace itself: that is, a political condition governed
by the rules of the United Nations Charter purporting to govern
the international use of force.
Two classes of reasons compel this conclusion: reasons or
experience and reasons of analysis.
The United States and the Western nations as a group have
reached modus vivendi agreements with the Soviet Union many
times since the summit meetings at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam.
They have all failed. Some were general in their language but
many were extremely concrete and specific. For example, the
Soviet-American agreement of October, 1962, negotiated by
Governor Harriman, was crystal clear. In that agreement, the
Soviet Union promised us that North Vietnam would withdraw its
troops from Laos and respect the neutrality of that unhappy
land. Many students of the Indochinese wars believe that
President Kennedy's failure to insist on the enforcement of the
1962 Laos agreement led straight to the Vietnam tragedy.
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The Indo-Chinese Agreements of January and March, 1973,
were comparably "concrete and definite." They purported to
provide a great-power guaranty for the enforcement of the Laos
Agreement of 1962 and for the rights of self-determination of
the South Vietnamese people. Similarly, the Nixon-Brezhnev
agreement of May 1972, not only promised Soviet-American
cooperation in managing future crises peacefully, but
categorically assured us of Soviet support for efforts to
achieve peace in the Middle East in accordance with Security
Council Resolution 242.
The Soviet Union breached the Middle Eastern feature of the
1972 agreement a month before it was signed by promising Sadat
full support for the Yom Kippur War of 1973. And it treated
all the other agreements mentioned here as scraps of paper
before the ink of their signatures was dry. A high-ranking
Soviet official referred to one of the most important of these
agreements--the Indo-China agreements of 1973--as a typical
attempt by an American President to deceive American public
opinion.
Nothing could have been more "concrete and definite"--or
more important--than the assurance of free elections in Eastern
Europe given us by the Soviet Union at Yalta and Potsdam.
President Kennedy once told a Soviet interviewer that there
could be no peace between the Soviet Union and the United
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States until those promises were carried out. But they have
not been carried out. One could list other modus vivendi
agreements of the same type: the McCloy-Zorin agreement, for
example, the Helsinki Final Act, the statements issued after
summit meetings without number. They have all had the same
melancholy fate.
It is hard to imagine why the Soviet Union should be more
willing now than in the past to fulfill agreements of this
kind. The Soviets are still enlarging their lead over the West
in most categories of military power. Despite political
setbacks in Egypt and in China, they continue to gain
politically in many important areas of the world. And they
remain convinced believers in the un-Marxist view that the
future of world politics will be determined by the correlation
of military forces.
But there is an even more fundamental reason why proposals
that we try to negotiate a new "detente" arrangement with the
Soviet Union are devoid of promise. There is no way in which
the United States and the Soviet Union could define and agree
to respect each other's national-security interests until the
Soviet Union gives up its dream of empire.
The most basic national security interest of the United
States is to prevent any one power from controlling the full
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Eurasian land mass, a reservoir of power which the coastal and
island states, including the United States, Great Britain, and
Japan, could not hope to defeat., But the manifest goal of
Soviet foreign policy is to gain control of the Eurasian land
mass--to achieve hegemony both in Europe and in Asia, and
therefore to impose its will in Africa, Latin America, the
Middle East, and many other parts of the world as well. The
present foreign-policy objectives of the United States and the
Soviet Union cannot be reconciled by negotiation, however
secret and ingenious.
The United States has always been conscious of its
geopolitical interest in opposing hegemonial power in Europe
and in Asia. When Napoleon invaded Russia, Thomas Jefferson
saw at once, despite his strong sympathies with France and the
French Revolution, that a French victory over Russia would
endanger the United States. The same perception led the United
States to fight in the two world wars of this century in order
to prevent Germany from dominating Western Europe and Russia.
And we helped organize NATO in 1949, and have participated in
its activities ever since, to keep the Soviet Union from
achieving the same end. The identical principle led us to
fight in four Asian wars since 1898 and, more recently, to
guarantee the security of Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan,
the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, Thailand, and
Pakistan. Modern Japan is obviously a vital security interest
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of the United States exactly as Western Europe is, and for the
same reason: to keep so great a center of power independent.
Korea is important in itself and vital to the defense of Japan.
Europe could be outflanked and neutralized from Soviet bases in
the Middle East. The United States and its allies and
associates must oppose hegemonial power in Asia and the Middle
East as well as in Europe. The world, after all, is round.
In trying to deal with the dynamic process of Soviet
expansion, now extending to every corner of the globe, can any
geographical areas be listed in advance as beyond the possible
security concerns of the United States? In recent years we
have perceived significant if not vital threats to our national
interest in Central Africa, Afghanistan, South Yemen, and
Thailand as well as in Central America and East Asia. In the
context of the Soviet Union's flexible strategy of expansion,
these perceptions were well founded. As Alexander Hamilton
pointed out in Number 23 of the Federalist, the circumstances
which may threaten the safety of nations are infinitely varied.
They cannot be defined in advance with precision. We should
avoid the temptation to try.
The United States and most other nations of the world want
an open state system of sovereign and independent states,
conducting their affairs autonomously in accordance with the
rules of international law. The Soviet Union is still pursuing
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a course of indefinite expansion achieved by aggression, a
policy which can end only in dominion or disaster. The
relation between the United States and the Soviet Union is
therefore like that between Great Britain and the nations which
bid for dominion between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries:
Spain in the time of Philip II, France from the age of Louis
XIV to that of Napoleon, and Germany in the first half of this
century. Now, in a global state system which is no longer
Euro-centered, the Soviet Union is seeking mastery with the aid
of the nuclear weapon, more specifically, with the political
aid of a visible and plausible first-strike capacity against
the United States. Of necessity, the United States must be
what Great Britain was for so long, the arbiter of the world
balance of power. There is no other nation or combination of
nations which could offset the Soviet nuclear arsenal and other
aspects of Soviet military power as a paralyzing and
neutralizing political force.
A modus vivendi of the kind Mr. Kissinger recommends would
involve a narrowing of our present defense perimeter, perhaps a
radical retreat. At a minimum, it would result in an agreement
through which the Soviet Union would promise to withdraw from
the Western Hemisphere in exchange for the neutralization of
Western Europe and Japan, and therefore the withdrawal of the
United States from the Middle East and Southern Asia.
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But we cannot retreat to a narrower perimeter of defense
without allowing a catastrophic and nearly irreversible change
in the world balance of power to'take place. In the nuclear
age, peace really is indivisible. The "Balkans" detonating the
contemporary state system could be Baluchistan, Afghanistan,
Iran, Korea, or Southern Africa as it once was Sarajevo,
Manchuria, Abyssinia, and Spain. If the United States tries to
retreat to isolation and neutrality, a Soviet-dominated world
system would emerge automatically. It is a fantasy to suppose
that such a system would tolerate American individualism and
American freedom.
If the foreign policy we have employed since 1946 has
resulted in a great increase in the power and aggressiveness of
the Soviet Union and a corresponding decline in the security of
the United States and the Western world more generally, and if
a new modus vivendi agreement would have even less promising
prospects than its predecessors, what should be done to rectify
the situation?
The cure for the crisis, in my judgment, is to create or
re-create the state system in whose stability and successful
functioning every state has an equal and inescapable interest,
the state system posited by the United Nations Charter. One of
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the many great advantages of such a system is its political
neutrality. Its rules protect East Germany as categorically as
they protect South Korea or Israel. Such an international
order could only be based on a stable balance of world power.
There are no shortcuts to this goal, no cheap substitutes for
directly addressing the problem of Soviet aggression. Spheres-
of-influence agreements, arms-control agreements, economic
carrots and sticks, and other half-measures are a snare and a
delusion unless they are backed by arrangements of collective
security to protect the balance of power.
A first step to this end, after suitable consultations,
would be to supplement President Truman's policy of
containment, the cornerstone of Western foreign policy since
1947. Concretely, this would require President Reagan to
inform Mr. Gorbachev that unless the Soviet Union gives up its
policies of aggression, the United States and its allies will
have to reconsider their own commitment to the Charter rules.
Perhaps such an approach should not be described as a
"supplement" to the policy of containment but a new emphasis in
applying it. After all, Mr. Kennan's article recommended that
we counter "the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy" by "the
adroit and vigilant application of counter force at a series of
constantly shifting geographical and political points."
Whether Mr. Kennan meant that we should counter Soviet policy
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only by policies of pure defense or go further is in a sense
irrelevant. The pattern of American action in carrying out the
Containment policy has been negative and constrained. What is
required now is a policy that could induce the Soviet Union to
abandon of aggression as an instrument of national policy.
The Soviet practice of aggression is eroding the political
foundations of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, the
basic organizing principle of the state system since the
Congress of Vienna. The Charter prohibits any international
use of force against the territorial integrity or political
independence of a state, save for purposes of individual or
collective self-defense. As a rule of law and a political
principle, this prohibition must be generally respected or it
will not be respected at all. The state system cannot function
under a double standard. Unless the Soviet Union gives up the
practice of aggression, it cannot expect other states to regard
Article 2(4) of the Charter as the Eleventh Commandment. Adlai
Stevenson said a generation ago that we will not stand by and
be nibbled to death. When Alexander M. Haig was Secretary of
State, he warned that continued Soviet violations of Article
2(4) would deprive the provision of all influence over the
behavior of states. And Secretary of State Shultz commented in
February 1985, in a speech at the Commonwealth Club of San
Francisco, that it was ridiculous for the Soviet Union to claim
a right to send arms and men to fight against the authority of
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a state and then object if the United States did the same
thing.
This is not a development the United States wants. On the
contrary, such a development would violate every precept for
which the United States has labored in world politics for two
centuries. But it will come, inevitably, if world politics are
governed by instincts of self-preservation rather than by the
rule of law.
The step recommended here is not to be undertaken lightly.
It would be worse than useless if it were considered to be a
bluff. And it will not be easy or cheap to carry out. But, in
my view, it is the only course available to the United States
and the West. The Soviet Union will not be swayed from its
course by sweet reason alone. It will undertake to live under
the Charter rules only when it is convinced that all the
alternatives are less attractive.
President Reagan's address of October 24, 1985, to the
United Nations General Assembly takes a long step toward making
this policy explicit. It describes the basic cause of tension
between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world with
indispensable clarity and candor: the cause of tension is
Soviet aggression throughout the world, the President said, not
simply the problem of reaching a nuclear arms agreement. The
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arms race and the special intricacies of the nuclear weapon are
not causes but symptoms of the underlying problem. The
President invited the Soviet Union to join the United States in
seeking to settle some of the most acute conflicts now raging
around the world in accordance with Article 2(4) of the United
Nations Charter, which he quoted.
The prospect of a Soviet-American summit meeting later this
month is generating enormous political pressures on President
Reagan. Those pressures reflect the natural yearning of the
Western peoples for an end of the Cold var. It remains to be
seen whether the President will yield to those pressures by
accepting Mr. Gorbachev's offer of a partial modus vivendi, or
continue to insist that there is no possible basis for true
detente between the Soviet Union and the United States save
reciprocal respect by both nations for the rule of the United
Nations Charter against aggression.
A policy to achieve peace cannot be fulfilled in a moment,
or in six months. There is much damage to be overcome before
it could become effective. But the most important component of
social cohesion, as social philosophers in the tradition of
Montesquieu and Ortega y Gasset have perceived, is not a shared
past but a shared vision of the future. Lord Carrington
recently warned that the greatest weakness of the Western
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alliances today is precisely that they lack a shared vision of
the future and agreement on practical means for achieving it.
The nature of the choice before the United States, its NATO
and ANZUS allies, Japan, China, and the many other nations
which share the American desire for a genuine peace was well
formulated some years ago by Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, then
Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, in these terms: "Unless
the Soviet challenge is made the core of United States foreign
policy and met with the same resolve and sense of realism that
the Soviets bring to their cause, then a Pax Sovietica is a
high probability in the 80's. This is not what we in Asia
want, but if that is the only item on the shelf that is what we
shall have to settle for."
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