More Precious Than Peace

...Like Lenin, Wilson offered a vision of a postwar world transformed and redeemed—but in Wilson's view, redemption would come not from the "international working class," but from the triumph of democracy and national self-determination...

...Not only did he himself read the 20,000-word speech, but Kennedy distributed copies to his top aides, ordering them to "read, mark, learn and inwardly digest it...

...To prevent "wars of national liberation" from sweeping the Third World, we would have to draw the line somewhere, and the place Kennedy decided to draw it was Vietnam...

...both were sufficiently self-confident to imagine they could reshape the Third World in their own respective images...

...As late as 1947, Stalin's hatchet man, Andrei Zhdanov, delivered a major address dividing the world into two camps, Communist and capitalist, and demanding that Third World leaders openly declare themselves for one or the other...

...America's foreign-aid programs thus fell far short of their goals, as had Khrushchev's "non-capitalist path of development...

...More Precious Than Peace offers a persuasive argument that America did not win the Cold War because our leaders were cleverer than the Soviets, or because our diplomats and social scientists had deeper insights than theirs...

...Rodman argues that the defeat inkfghanistan had an even greater effect m the Soviet Union than Vietnam had m the United States: The American system, with its capacity for self-renewal, rebounded after Vietnam, drawing on its own moral resources and democratic resilience...

...In 1943 he told his son Elliott, "When we've won the war, I will work with all my might and main to see to it that the United States is not wheedled into the position of accepting any plan that will further France's imperialistic ambitions, or that will aid and abet the British Empire in its imperial ambitions...

...0 66 The American Spectator February 1995...

...The "Reagan Doctrine"—a term coined by journalist Charles Krauthammer and never actually used by the administration—was a determined effort to roll back Soviet gains in the Third World by providing military support to forces resisting Communist aggression...

...Stalin then turned his back on the Third World and set out to build "socialism in one country"—his own...

...Their anti-imperialist campaign began taking shape in 1920, when the Second Conference of the Communist International instructed Communist parties throughout the Third World to enter into temporary alliances with "bourgeois-nationalists" in order to defeat the colonial powers...

...and for undercutting Moscow's claim that it alone was the champion of Third World independence movements...

...both believed that the global balance of power—or, as the Soviets would say, "the historical correlation of forces"—depended on the outcome of their rivalry in the Third World...

...under Nixon, a test case of American credibility...

...But anti-imperialism was not merely a Democratic fixation...

...Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, loyally observed that America's policy was a second "declaration of independence," and he was exactly right...

...Hostility to Western imperialism was, for the Soviets, a basic tenet of Leninist political faith...

...Yet Kennedy decided that America's vital interests required us to prevail in the Third World...

...To help win the battle for freedom, Kennedy's theoreticians—political economists associated with Harvard and MIT—developed an approach that might be called "the non-socialist path of development...

...the crusading zeal of the neoconservatives in the State Department and the Pentagon, who were militant supporters of democracy...

...The upshot, according to Rodman, was a sudden onset of "strategic panic...

...To justify this new course, Khrushchev's theoreticians began to fiddle with Marxist theory...

...Since most of these leaders preferred to play the neutralist game, Zhdanov's speech was Stalin's way of telling them that, as far as he was concerned, they could all go to hell...

...Yes, there was a reaction against excessive secrecy in government and a struggle over accountability between Congress and the President...

...With America seemingly out of the picture, Brezhnev proved, as a Soviet scholar later put it, "unable to resist further temptation to become involved in the complex internal affairs of other countries...

...The leader of Kuomintang, however, Chiang Kai-shek, had apparently read the resolutions of the Second Comintern MORE PRECIOUS THAN PEACE: THE COLD WAR AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE THIRD WORLD Peter W. Rodman Charles Scribner's Sons / 672 pages / $35 reviewed by JOSEPH SHA'TTAN 64 The American Spectator February 1995 Congress...

...It seems I was wrong...

...Rodman's depiction of FDR alters our conventional view of his presidency: Clearly, Eleanor wasn't the only left-wing ideologue occupying the White House...

...Eisenhower eventually decided it was not, while Nixon declared, thirty years after Suez, that the Eisenhower administration had committed "the greatest foreign policy blunder .. . since the end of World War II...

...Franklin Roosevelt was, if anything, even more of an anti-imperialist than Wilson...

...Whether the defeat of British imperialism was a sensible American objective, however, is a different question...

...Rodman makes a convincing case that what really motivated Soviet leaders was . . . the domino theory...

...Once these powers were defeated, Communists were to turn against their nationalist allies and prepare the way for revolution...

...In 1927, he massacred Communist cadres in Shanghai, evidently deciding to get them before they got him...

...and both committed terrible blunders, suffering grievous (and in the Soviet case, irreparable) harm in consequence...

...But in the USSR the very core of the system was held to blame—the arbitrariness of dictatorial rule, the party's monopoly of power, and the complete absence of accountability...

...Instead of telling Third World leaders, as Stalin had done, "If you're not with us, you're against us," he effectively said, "If you're not against us, you're with us...

...Many an autocracy has been discredited and undermined by failure in war...

...He became alarmed by a 1961 Khrushchev speech extolling the "mighty upsurge of anti-imperialist, national-liberation revolutions...

...For the United States, however, hostility to imperialism seemed an inevitable corollary to democratic faith, the belief that government is legitimate only by consent of the governed...

...Stalin was the Soviet leader most closely identified with the policy of encouraging a Communist-Kuomintang alliance, and the Shanghai massacre caused him major embarrassment...

...A close associate of Henry Kissinger's during the Nixon and Ford administrations, and a senior foreign policy official under Reagan and Bush, Rodman is that rarest of figures, a foreign policy generalist in an age of specialists...

...The doctrine was, Rodman says, a compound of many elements: the astuteness of conservative staffers on the National Security Council, who recognized in Soviet overextension a strategic opportunity for the West...

...Never far from the surface of official thought was Eisenhower's "domino theory," the contention that the fall of South Vietnam would encourage Communist takeovers of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and perhaps even the Philippines...

...Even more harmful than Kennedy's economic activism were his political and military policies...

...We won because our system was more resilient: We could come back from defeat...

...Through theoretical contortions like these—as well as more practical actions like military aid—Khrushchev believed he could shift the "correlation of forces" to Moscow's favor.p resident Kennedy believed him...

...and, most importantly, the ideological vigor and passion of a president who did not suffer from self-doubt, and who believed that the "evil empire" was destined for defeat...

...Khrushchev's successors were neo-Stalinists domestically, but their foreign policy was even more "adventurist...

...In addition to Communist and capitalist countries, they argued, the world also consisted of newly independent nations that had embarked upon the "noncapitalist path of development...

...Khrushchev was fascinated by the Sukarnos, the Nassers, the Ben Bellas, and the Nkrumahs, and set out to win them over to the socialist camp...

...The process of unraveling the British Empire, begun by Americans in 1776, was completed by Eisenhower in 1956...

...As economists Max Millikan and Walt Rostow explained it, judicious grants of foreign aid would "promote the evolution of societies that are stable in the sense that they are capable of rapid change without violence, effective in the sense that they can make progress in meeting the aspirations of all their citizens, and democratic in the sense that ultimate power is widely shared through the society...

...T he first president to articulate America's anti-imperialist vocation was Woodrow Wilson, and, according to Rodman, he did so in part to counteract Lenin's anti-imperialist propaganda...

...FDR was especially suspicious of the British: "The only thing that could upset the apple cart after the war is if the world is divided again, Russia against England and us...

...And in that contest, we cannot stand aside...

...I came to Washington in the aftermath of the Afghanistan invasion, and, like many hawks, I was convinced that Soviet policy was part of a wider strategy aimed at gaining control of the Persian Gulf...

...That's our big job now, and it'll be our big job tomorrow, too: Making sure that we continue to act as referee, as intermediary between Russia and England...

...This one should be added to the list...

...Republican presidents were equally prepared to march under the anti-imperialist banner...

...In the West, it was widely predicted that the formidable Soviet machine would win the war quickly, and the Politburo no doubt expected a cakewalk also...

...Their revolution is the greatest in human history...

...In fact, says Rodman, "the most important domino to fall" as a result of our defeat in Vietnam "was the American people and their willingness to remain engaged in the world...

...Such predictions ignored two things: the martial ferocity of the Afghan people and the ideological ferocity of the Reagan administration...

...He concluded that "bourgeois-nationalists" were not to be trusted, and that small Third World Communist parties were insignificant, while large ones were potential rivals...

...Taking Khrushchev at his word, the Kennedy administration decided that "the global balance of power was being decided in the Third World—and we were losing...

...Roosevelt's intense anti-imperialism may explain his often crude attempts to score points with Stalin at Churchill's expense during the Teheran and Yalta summits...

...The East German ambassador to Afghanistan had been correct: Moscow's defeat sent the Communist dominoes toppling, and the last to fall was the Soviet Union itself...

...We went boldly down the path of intervention and expansion that we had beaten so assuredly...

...Both the United States and the Soviet Union regarded themselves as anti-imperialist powers...

...It was Ike, the conservative Republican, who, hoping to ingratiate the United States with the Arabs, laid the full weight of American disapproval against the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Suez in 1956, thereby bringing the British to their knees...

...Eisenhower believed, correctly, that the speech was mainly a lot of empty bluster, but Kennedy, in Rodman's words, "treated the speech as a shot across the bow, a grave challenge to the West...

...But there is nointrinsic connection between development and democracy...

...Even if these countries lacked Communist parties, they would eventually build socialism, provided they remained allied to the Soviet Union, which would act as a surrogate Communist party...

...under Johnson, a test case of Mao's "People's War" strategy...

...The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today," he told Congress in 1961, "is the whole southern half of the globe—the lands of the rising peoples...

...Anti-imperialism also appeared to be a way of differentiating ourselves from the hated British, French, and Dutch colonialists, Joseph Shattan is a writer living in Silver Spring, Maryland...

...They could not...

...The book illuminates the astonishing degree to which the American and Soviet experiences in the Third World resemble each other...

...It also seemed to make great strategic sense—the perfect way for them to forge a united front with the anti-colonial movements and governments of the Third World...

...0 f America's ordeal in Vietnam, suffice it to say that the rationale for our involvement kept changing: Under Kennedy, Vietnam was seen as a test case of Khrushchev's "national liberation" strategy...

...The basic assumption of these analyses, one that the Kennedy administration accepted, was that promoting economic development in the Third World was akin to promoting democracy as well...

...Neither Kennedy nor his advisers thought, as the radical left was then arguing, that Western prosperity depended on economic access to former colonies...

...After Saigon fell in 1975, America withdrew into itself, leaving the Soviet Union, at least as far as The American Spectator February 1995 65 the Third World was concerned, the sole superpower...

...As the East German ambassador to Afghanistan put it, "If the Soviet Union allowed a pro-Soviet communist government in a border state to collapse, it would have an unsettling effect on other border states within the Soviet orbit...

...Throughout much of his career he has dealt with the Soviet-American fight for the Third World, and in More Precious Than Peace, Rodman has produced a study of that conflict that, like all distinguished works of history, enables us to see both ourselves and our adversaries in a fresh, new light...

...It led us through Ethiopia, Yemen, a series of African countries, and eventually into Afghanistan...

...Khrushchev reversed this course, but the paradox, writes Rodman, was that "this pioneer of internal thaw and East-West détente was also the Soviet leader who launched a bold political offensive against the West in the Third World, letting loose three decades of often violent conflict...

...Dutifully complying with this directive, the fledgling Chinese Communist party made common cause with the nationalist Kuomintang, which was also receiving substantial assistance directly from Moscow...

...Iran under the Shah developed very rapidly, without its subsequent political evolution becoming democratic...

...T he Soviets committed their share of blunders, too...

...The most serious blow to British and French ambitions in the Third World was struck by Dwight Eisenhower...

...And so, with great hoopla, Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress, along with lesser aid projects...