The Phony War

...When Orweli wrote Nineteen EightyFour, television had by no means reached its present range and influence as an instrument for propagating a universal materialist-humanist orthodoxy, called the consensus...

...There have been, after all, notable conversions throughout history, and more recently than on Saui's journey to Damascus...

...Analogies are never precise, but an appropriate analogy does come to mind--not, however, the analogy which would compare the present period with the 1930s...

...In fact, it is the Russians themselves who, retroactively, give the lie to Carter's new "hard line...

...And he could make some allowance for the present circumstances of the Navy, whose shipbuilding program he cut in half...

...Part of the answer must refer to procurement schedules, badly wounded by Carter's cuts of the past three years...

...This is precisely the case with the Persian Gulf...

...Not only does this please the Soviets, but it also pleases Carter, who, in the perverse logic of SALT, will be more than happy to cancel the thing as soon as these failings are demonstrated...

...It still took two days for Chamberlain to admit that a state of war existed, and even then it wasn't waged...

...Nuclear war, should it come to that, would of course be worst of all...

...Edward Luttwak has written that strategy is the opposite of the usual (and peculiarly Anglo-Saxon) practice of isolating "the practical problem at hand...

...I n light of these manifest failures, it is clear that, though the paradigm upon which the administration based its willfully naive policies has proven wholly unsound, and though there seems to be a new line in Washington, things haven't really changed, because the players haven't changed and the telling decisions are not being made...

...De jure SALT may be moribund, but de facto it is alive...

...increasing our own major equipment production--as well as procuring in advance of inevitable arms transfers to our friends and allies...

...Hitler intended to use military force to control Europe and, ultimately, probably the world...

...A year from now, a revived and fortified Navy could do more good for the Western position in the Indian Ocean than anything else, but in his love for hollow gestures of strength Carter is mortgaging that possibility now...

...And behind our rhetoric and gesture there is a good deal of confusion, especially about what constitutes meaningful action...

...THE PHONY WAR Talk is cheap...

...A president truly serious about meeting the Soviet threat would hardly have begun by surreptitiously implementing SALT II...

...Considering what has been happening in Southwest Asia, the African Horn, the Caribbean, and Indochina, I think not...

...Not a cent has been added since the invasion...

...O Q O Q O O I O O O O O O O m O I Q 4 O a O B Q 4 O O O O Q O O O O O Q ~ O 6 Q Q Q Q O O a Q i 6 ~ . . . . . . O g Q Q O O O O O Q O 9 6 Q O O O 6 1 ~ i W Q q q O O O O Q Q Q Q O O ~ O . . . . t O Q O O . . . . g Q Q I O O O O O B B O Q O O O Q O O ~ I O O O O O g I Q Q O O O O t ~ O O ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE EIGHTIES Three great utopias stand ready to fail...

...But only if they are directed toward good goals and combined with political wisdom, the ability to be guided by higher interests and to separate them from petty short.term advantages, and the ability and desire to look into the future and assess the consequences of o n e ' s p r e s e n t a c t i o n s in advance...

...What is the point of putting so much of our naval power in the Indian Ocean right now, extending the cruises of already frayed sailors and prompting many to resign their commissions, when it isn't enough to deter the Russians anyway...

...But this is what Carter has done...

...I n his autobiography, the German physicist Max Planck observed that " a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it...

...When he saw he didn't, he proposed to cut a deal with Sam Nunn for an increase of 5 percent...

...Last summer Carter opposed the Senate on defense increases because he thought he had the votes for SALT II...

...True, he has retreated somewhat recently by promising not to honor its terms without closely consulting with Senate leaders, whatever that means...

...The strategically superior Soviets could implement their "A senior KGB official, in an interview with Die Welt, put it best: "Rapid deployment force...

...And if we cannot react with naval firepower, can we escalate to theater nuclear weapons...

...It is, rather, to connect the "diverse issues into a systematic pattern of things," and then to "craft plans--often of long range--for dealing with the whole," something which Jimmy Carter, as Pravda observed, is unable to do...

...increasing our near-term airlift and sealift capabilities...

...He could implement the MAPS (multiple silo) program, which could begin today with our Minuteman missiles and could later be used for the long-delayed MX missile...

...He goes on: Such an appropriation could begin the serious multi-year business of: increasing our current readiness...

...Although we have been living through a time of appeasement, there are important differences between then and now: most 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 notably, today there is a high rhetoric (as we have observed) of anti-Sovietism (even though there seems to be an almost direct relationship between the former dovishhess of our leaders and their high rhetorical posture today...

...You simply cannot stretch an institution as far as the Navy has been stretched and expect it to do all its jobs...

...Leaving what ? Searching about in my mind at the beginning of the seventies for a name for that decade, I hit upon "The Decade of the Great Liberal Death-Wish," since, in my estimation, the process of death-wishing in the guise of liberalism, which had long been eroding what remained of Western civilization, was about to reach its apogee...

...But of course SALT is more than its particulars: It is a state of mind, a state of mind that the President has not abandoned in the wake of Afghanistan, despite his rhetoric, his symbolic gestures, and the new "hawkish" atmosphere that is said to reign in Washington these days...

...During the flap that began over Africa in the summer of 1978, after Carter gave his one hard-line speech prior to Afghanistan, Pravda, in the most important editorial during Carter's term, said, It seems that " f i r m n e s s " and " h a r d line" have become extremely popular words in America and have turned into the latest craze...

...As the seventies unfolded, I felt that my prognostications were proving to be, in essentials, well founded, and now, looking into the eighties, I see the same process continuing, to the point of total disillusionment with the utopian expectations on which Western man has been living since he became persuaded that he was in charge of his own destiny, and responsible for creating his own heaven on earth...

...Surely not...

...Malcolm Muggeridge, whose "Operation Death-Wish" appeared in our tenth anniversary issue, is working on the third volume of his autobiography...

...There is also the possibility that he remembered the date from a book he greatly admired, Jack London's The Iron Heel, an imaginary account of the setting up of a fascist regime in America in which the enslaved proletariat are forced to build a great metropolis, completing the work in 1984...

...It is not enough to inconvenience the Soviets with grain embargoes...

...Given the proximity of the Soviets' Backfire Bomber, this would be still worse, even if the escalation were to end there...

...Leonard Sullivan, the senior systems analyst for the Pentagon during the Ford administration, has calculated conservatively that just "to keep our forces from aging and becoming obsolete" would cost $60 billion...

...And, as I have intimated, Carter could increase overall defense spending significantly...

...It was only a "revolt of conscience" (as the historians Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott put it) in the back benches that forced the war...

...Perhaps not...

...Although the thermonuclear relationship forecloses that part of the analogy which would have us "declaring war" on the Soviets, we are now engaged in mouthing criticisms of Moscow and applying economic sanctions without, as I have tried to show, making the kinds of decisions that would signal a true commitment to our allies or even to our own security...

...Are the basic lines of Soviet strategy, despite the camouflage of d~tente, any more hidden to us than Hitler's were after Poland...

...Systematically, stage by stage, our way of life had been dismantled, our values depreciated, our certainties undermined, and our God dethroned--all this in the name of promoting the health, wealth, and happiness of one and all...

...Of course, he has done this kind of thing before...

...Our policy of appeasement has been less conscious than Chamberlain's, but that may be a disadvantage, for, as Bacon said, "truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion...

...Leaflets were dropped over Germany, while the Luftwaffe strafed Poland...

...A depressing thought--but does it also apply to politics...

...We, on the other hand, still react to the "problem at hand," which is why we are concerned with a so-called Rapid Deployment Force (RDF), which, incidentally, isn't rapid, isn't deployed, and isn't a force...

...And even assuming that we could communicate with these submarines, would we suicidally use their relatively small and inaccurate warheads to bomb Soviet cities (they wouldn't be useful against hardened military targets) when the Soviets still possessed much of their huge land-based missiles with which to blow up America...

...There is a further point in the analogy, in the extent to which the two hands, Nazi and Soviet, had been fully revealed by the analogous times--September 1939 and today...

...In the meantime, there continues to be a practical injunction to our defense planners to address our security from the treaty's point of view...

...He could move our bombers off the seaboards, where they are almost instantly vulnerable to Soviet submarine and cruise missile attack, and into the interior...

...Our position in the world, both politically and militarily, has deteriorated over recent years because we have appeased, and, I suggest, it will probably continue to deteriorate because we will probably continue to appease...

...T h e i r strength is but a strength of words...

...So that "The Decade of Lost Utopias" seemed like an appropriate sequel to "The Decade of the Great Liberal Death-Wish," more particularly as George Orwell's nightmare forecast of the ultimate consequences of the pursuit of power for power's sake alone is put in the eighties...

...It is quite another for those who, by their inaction, created the present condition to continue the old refrain, that is, to continue to advocate pusillanimity in the face of truculent Soviet adventurism...

...The urgency of all this, an urgency that makes Carter's continued inaction even more reprehensible, comes clear when one addresses the important strategic question: Will our position be better in five years, or worse...

...In any case, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a brilliant analysis of how totalitarian dictatorship works in our time, of its brainwashing techniques, and of its sloganeering and terrorism, resulting in not just destroying any practical possibility of individual freedom, but, like the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, rooting out in those subjected to it the very wish to be free, the very concept of freedom...

...Carter's converted self than the rhetoric and gesture of political expediency...

...But there is more to the fecklessness of W. Scott Thompson is associate professor of international politics at the Fletcher School o fLaw and Diplomacy...

...Until we have land-based forces alongside the Persian Gulf and a much larger Nav.y there (in my analysis, at least the equivalent of four carrier task forces), the Soviets will have no trouble overcoming any response of ours...

...They abet revolutionary movements all over the world (including the Western Hemisphere), they threaten our access to essential minerals through proxies in Africa, and now they threaten our access to oil from the Persian Gulf--all against a background of growing strategic superiority...

...I have yet to see an engineer or scientist, in or out of government, discuss the planned "race-track" scheme without a smirk on his face...

...He could begin by calling up the reserves, which would be infinitely more eloquent than anything he has done so far...

...Moreover, courage in politics is by no means the same thing as bravado and the readiness to resort to strong expressions and brandish a club...

...increasing our war reserve stocks and spares...

...Even so, it is one thing for defense analysts to argue that prudence is of the essence right now, given our political and military weakness...

...That much, I am certain, Jimmy Carter has yet to learn...

...This could best be achieved by enacting a very substantial FY80 defense supplemental appropriation--on the order of [an additional] $25 billion...

...Yet our new procurement budget is only $40 billion, so we are not even keeping pace with depreciation, let alone building a new force...

...The apologists had simply been wrong, and the decent among them were quick to admit it...

...Especially on the eve o f . . . elections...

...When Afghanistan finished the burial of SALT II, Carter retreated to his previous posture: the fewest increases in defense spending possible...

...The irony is that without a comprehensive strategy, and I think it clear (for reasons I shall address in a moment) that even after Afghanistan Carter has no intention of adopting one, addressing "the problem at hand" becomes both more difficult and more dangerous...

...His last book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, has served to give this date a widespread aura of momentousness, though Orwell himself chose it quite arbitrarily by transposing the last two digits in the year 1948 when he was working on the book in his house on the remote Isle of Jura, already gravely ill with the tuberculosis from which he died two years later when he was 47...

...He could a b r o g a t e the ABM t r e a t y , if we developed useful point defenses...

...No one believes it to be cost-effective, or to be useful in timely numbers--which is precisely the point...

...Even after Hitler's attack on Poland, the British government tried, not to put too fine a point on it, to welsh on its commitment to the Poles...

...In an astonishingly candid interview with Die IVelt, Boris Davydov, a KGB official, put it rather well: "The Americans are much too conceited," he said...

...If we wanted to we could harm the United States 20 times more than it would harm us...

...the President has dictated that we abide by its terms...

...in fact, cuts are now coming, owing to the effort to pare the budget and reduce the deficit...

...By his attack on Poland, Hitler ended the debate about his intentions...

...The Soviets clearly have a strategy...

...We must begin to impress them," Sullivan writes, "by inconveniencing ourselves...

...And Jimmy Carter, who had been born again some years before in any case, revealed to us recently that his view of the Russians has been changed more by their invasion of Afghanistan than by anything else of the past three years...

...The Navy, for example, is now down to its smallest number of ships since before World War II...

...ours has the unusual characteristic of having nurtured its own destroyers at the public expense, and dreamt up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elite...

...There is perhaps good reason to suspect the authenticity of this last conversion, but even if it is true we still have good reason to doubt whether it is going to make an important difference in the way Jimmy Carter conducts foreign policy...

...But, it went on, firmness and courage are useful qualities for any political leader...

...Little more than a year ago Henry Kissinger discovered that, now that we had lost it, nuclear superiority brought all manner of benefits, something he had tried to deny while in office...

...increasing our almost non.existent industrial mobilization capabilities...

...For one thing, with much of his response to Afghanistan, especially with his rhetoric about the need for military preparedness, he is manifestly reacting politically to those who, vindicated by Afghanistan, demand a realistic foreign policy grounded in a credible military deterrent...

...Given all of this, there is perhaps less reason to worry that Jimmy Carter will do nothing, if new pressures arise in the Persian Gulf, than that he will do something...

...To draw a line beyond which the Soviets will not be allowed to go, as Carter has done, without the means of enforcing the claim, is pure bravado...

...I believe we have demonstrated that in Afghanistan" THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 11 civil defense plan, destroy our land-based missiles, knock out our bombers and our submarines in port, and reduce us to the " d e t e r r e n t " of our submarines at sea...

...but he had already grasped its potentialities, as the role of Big Brother THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1980 13...

...Past civilizations have collapsed through being overrun by barbarians from without...

...And on its present schedule, the MX will not be fully deployed until late in the 1980s, though it is the sole weapon now being seriously considered that rivals the latest generation of Soviet missiles, deployed some five years already...

...The evidence for this lies in what he has not done that he could, and should, do, given the nature of the Soviet threat...

...Not a drop of British blood was shed in Poland's defense during the phony war...

...That we are still committed to the mobile-based MX, because it was negotiable, instead of cheaper and more effective systems is the best evidence of this...

...and beginning the construction of a modern three-ocean naval and marine force...

...This confirms what a neutral diplomat in middle Europe told me recently: that the Soviets are openly acknowledging that d&ente, joke that it was, worked longer than expected: but now it is time to go on to the serious business of turning military realities into political realities...

...What is 'rapid deployment...

...Political courage consists in something e l s e - - t h e ability to set and consistently follow a principled political course, and the ability to control one's emotions and show restraint and discretion . . . . No matter the source, it has seldom been said better...

...There is a useful analogy, however, between the phony war of 1939-1940, after the attack on Poland and before the occupation of Norway, and the period into which the West is now going...