This War Called Peace

...With the failure of both the carrot (detente) and the stick (containment) to bring about any appreciable change in Soviet behavior, many in the West have pinned their hopes on two new panaceas: summits and arms control...

...It may well be that the West was too exhausted by the war to deal with the Bolsheviks, but it is puzzling that so many historians feel it was illegitimate to try...

...I sincerely hope that Professor Pipes is right, and that Messrs...

...and the denial of economic and other forms of aid...

...First obsessed with the peace negotiations, then felled by a stroke that rendered him unfit to discharge the duties of the presidency, he ignored the difficult problems of reconversion to a peacetime economy, cashiered independent in most books on Soviet affairs, a point invariably arrives when the author unveils his Plan...

...Crozier, Middleton, and Murray-Brown are wrong...

...Unfortunately, Crozier and his co-authors seem to rule out this alternative as well...

...Most historians of this conflict take the view that it was an extremely dangerous episode which, happily, is behind us, though just how and when it endedwith Stalin's death in 1953...

...changes to six A.M...

...He did everything he could to appease the Russian dictator `Uncle Joeand all that...

...There we have it, then: The Soviet system is inherently expansionist, and cannot be reformed...

...with the onset of detente in the late sixties?-remains controversial...

...Woodrow Wilson's power to affect events was limited...

...And while it is still possible, nowadays, to speak of "selective containment," that is, the defense of certain vital strategic zones, Kennan's prediction that containment would lead, after fifteen years or so, to the collapse of the Soviet regime has proved spectacularly wrong...

...And though his handling of the Paris negotiations was by contrast masterful, its outcome was far worse than anything that had yet happened south of the border...

...In common with most writings on the subject, the book's tone is generally apologetic over the intervention...

...He put himself on record in favor of the League, but with reservations designed to protect U.S...

...wanting to bring the blessings of democracy to a downtrodden people, he managed the effort so maladroitly that it angered all sides and nearly led to a full-scale war that would have been disastrous .-both countries...

...Throughout his presidency, Wilson's foreign policy typically suffered from the defects of the classic American liberal approach to diplomacystubborn self-righteousness and a narrow moralism...

...But I would argue that his greatest mistakes were substantive products of his worldview...

...essay by one of his stylistic mentors, F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the subject of early success...

...Somehow he believed that if all nations adhered to a world organization structured democratically and empowered to apply sanctions, including armed force, against aggressors, the result would be a lasting peace...

...freedom of action...

...It was a dreary end to what had been the nation's greatest endeavor...

...In any event, McInerney himself has turned into a kind of media doll...

...With Brezhnev's detente came the invasion of Czechoslovakia, crueller measures against Soviet dissidents, and an ever widening spread of subversion and terror...

...The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M...

...It argues that his errors were primarily tactical-that he should have appointed prominent Republicans to the peace commission, stayed in the United States, delegated authority better than he did, and compromised on key points...

...becoming well-nigh irresistible...

...The tragedy of Wilson's last two years in office was almost total...

...It seems that everyone who is halfway serious about contemporary fiction has read it with relish...

...The West can promote these forces by a combination of active resistance to Soviet expansion...

...Not only has he become a household fixture at places like Vanity Fair, but Women's Wear Daily and Mademoiselle have accorded the photogenic young author the sort of treatment normally reserved for Sting or Richard Gere...

...Do Crozier and his colleagues genuinely believe that the West is doomed...

...11 Soviet Union has been waging a relentless, pitiless war against the West, and none of the West's leaders, not even so great a figure as Winston Churchill, has proved equal to this epic struggle...

...But why...

...You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head...

...After Vietnam in 1961 came the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis, as though Khrushchev were deliberately giving the young Kennedy a slap in the face...

...If the nations and leaders of Europe deserved most of the blame, Wilson and America had done their part to bring about a world in which the probability of a general war within a generation was actually greater than it had been in 1914...

...He was indeed partisan, vindictive, and altogether unattractive...

...In 1983-84, during the START talks, the Soviet strategic arsenal had increased to nearly 8,000 warheads...

...Professor Pipes would thus have the West pursue a "coordinated policy of economic denial" vis-a-vis the Soviet Union...

...A novel which relies heavily on gags and one-liners can be a let-down the second time around...

...When it appeared last autumn, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City created the kind of commotion which seldom accompanies a new work of fiction anymore...

...the rhythm is just right: You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning...

...A year after the 1955 meeting in Geneva came the brutal crushing of the Hungarian bid for freedom...

...The West has proved largely incapable of dealing effectively with Soviet expansionism, is subject to all sorts of illusions, and to top it all, is spiritually impoverished...

...In particular, the belief that suffering has purified the Russian nation, making it spiritually superior to the decadent West, is a central tenet of the Russophile school of thought...

...The cruelest thing anyone can do with Portnoy's Complaint, a critic once observed, is to read it twice...

...Thin enough to slip under a door, and sporting a cover which deliberately mimics a New Wave rock album, the book has achieved the pale literary equivalent of going triple platinum...

...A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already...

...I devoured Bright Lights, Big City when it came out a year ago and hesitated recently before reading it again...

...Alas, this reviewer is not one of those people...

...Tell us that war is inevitable and that we are likely to lose, and we are apt to become quite depressed...

...Under these circumstances, there can hardly be any doubt as to the ultimate outcome of the East West struggle...

...One did not have to wait for Stalin's example to discern in 1919 that here was a new force in world politics determined to destroy those humane values of Western civilization that Wilson loved dearly...

...At best, only superficial improvements are possible...

...The opening takes us right into the dark heart of the new Manhattan night...

...Crozier and his co-authors, however, bluntly point out that an "undeclared state of hostilities, largely though not entirely falling short of military confrontation between the Soviet Union and the Western powers," is a permanent feature of the Soviet system...

...The book has been dubbed the first Yuppie novel...

...Also like Crozier and his colleagues, Pipes is often critical of the ways in which Western statesmen have responded to the Soviet menace...

...Although the authors seem a bit uncertain about why this should be so-at one point they say that "ideology commands expansionism abroad," but elsewhere they discount ideology and emphasize "power for power's sake alone" as the motivating force behind Soviet policy-at least they are fully alert to the built-in imperialistic drive of the Soviet system...

...What are we to make of all this...

...The policy of containment, for instance, which according to its foremost theorist, George Kennan, was supposed to confront the Russians "with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world," has obviously not succeeded in bottling up the Soviet Union within its borders...

...Lodge, by contrast, argued from a perspective of realism and self-interest appropriate to the world of power politics, if not to the utopia that Wilson hoped to create...

...Doubtless there are some people in the West who find this viewpoint both congenial and persuasive, especially when it is propounded by so powerful an advocate as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom Crozier and his co-authors often cite...

...Ferrell gives attention to another issue that hung over the Allied leaders at Versailles, the Bolshevik revolution...

...To the extent that any lessons were learned from the experience of World War I, Professor Ferrell concludes, they were learned during the Great Depression and World War II...

...As Lord Gladwyn, a key member of the British delegation to Yalta, recently put it, "I had a most deplorable impression of Roosevelt...

...Unlike the authors of This War Called Peace, though, Pipes believes that the Soviet system can be transformed from within, and that the West is capable of formulating a longterm strategy to hasten this transformation...

...While they do not quite come out and say that we are doomed, the frequent comparisons they draw between the modern West and the late Roman Empire hardly suggest a spirit of optimism...

...The one glaring failure of his first term had been his intervention in the Mexican revolution...

...The peoples of the victorious nations were obsessed with the notion of punishing Germany rather than rehabilitating it, whatever the ultimate political and economic cost to the entire continent...

...Be that as it may, I strongly advise anyone tempted, after reading This War Called Peace, to stick his head in the oven, first to consult Professor Richard Pipes's important study, Survival Is Not Enough...

...Although Crozier and his colleagues readily grant that over the course of the Cold War, the West has enjoyed a few good innings, the record that emerges from their study of Soviet-American relations is, by-and-large, a melancholy one...

...The Stalinist system now prevailing in the Soviet Union has outlived its usefulness," Professor Pipes writes, and "the forces making for change are 'Available in paperback from Simon and Schuster/Touchtone Books, $9.95...

...Professor Ferrell recites what has become the routine critique of Wilson...

...As for the efficacy of recent arms control accords in curbing the Soviets, one statistic says it all: In 1970, when SALT I was being negotiated, the Soviet Union had about 1,400 strategic warheads...

...But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy...

...More intriguing still is the book's popularity among young professionals...

...The authors surely are correct, too, in taking issue with much that has passed for Western statesmanship during the past forty years...

...as soon as feasible, however, he withdrew them...

...Needless to say, things haven't quite worked out that way...

...with Khrushchev's announcement of "peaceful co-existence" in the midfifties...

...As a consequence, in 1941, the Western democracies would be compelled to buy their survival by embracing the Bolshevik power they had failed to eradicate in 1919...

...Only John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces comes to mind...

...Their characterization of FDR, for example, as Stalin's "appeaser-in-chief" will seem unduly harsh only to those who are unfamiliar with his behavior at the Yalta Conference...

...But McInerney's breathless tale of a young man's fast fade on the club-andcocaine circuit holds up nicely...

...On the contrary, Moscow currently has client-states in Africa, Asia, Central America, and the Middle East...

...Professor Ferrell aptly describes it as "a regime that had made peace with the Germans to the immense peril of the Allies, pronounced a curse on capitalism everywhere, and murdered tens of thousands of dissidents among its citizens...

...Leaderless, the country careened through a boom-andbust economic cycle, a hysterical Red Scare, rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, and an electoral debacle for the Democratic party in 1920...

...And so, at each stage, the story repeats itself...

...If this is arms control, what's an arms race...

...Ever since Yalta, they aver, the Joseph Shattan, a frequent contributor, is a writer living in Washington, D.C minded advisers, isolated himself from public opinion, persisted in stubborn insistence upon his League of Nations rather than Lodge's, received neither, and clung to unrealistic hopes of a third-term nomination...

...Yet the logic of their argument suggests a deeply-held historical pessimism, a pessimism memorably articulated by Whittaker Chambers, who once told his wife that in going from the Communist to the anti-Communist camp, he was knowingly choosing the losing side...

...Like Crozier and his col leagues, Pipes has a very realistic view of Soviet foreign policy...

...If only we rid ourselves of our illusions and grasp the essential truths, if only we do this or refrain from doing that, war can be averted and a just and lasting peace obtained...

...Unless the West is "able to learn from the Russian people that its true strength lies in its spiritual resources" (and the prospects of this happening, Crozier and his colleagues make clear, are none too bright), we are pretty well done for...

...The authors are also clear-headed about the nature of the Cold War...

...Nor has the West's other grand strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union, detente, fared any better...

...Then again, it might not...

...The President acquiesced in an Allied request for American troops as part of a larger antirevolutionary force...

...One can't help suspecting that the authors share this assessment and that the shrillness with which they denounce contemporary Western (and especially American) civilization derives from a private sense of despair...

...Human beings are such emotional creatures...

...it may be that video ennui is setting in and Yuppies are discovering alternate means of communication...

...it is like visiting an amusement park the morning after and seeing the faded sign boards and flaked paint on the Tilt-aWhirl...

...Though there is something ritualistic about this exercise, it is comforting nonetheless...

...The quirky second-person singular narra tion works against all odds...

...About what first novel in recent years could this be said...

...No doubt, they would fiercely deny it: If the West would only repent, if it would renounce its decadent ways and emulate the example of Solzhenitsyn, it could still snatch victory from the jaws of defeat...

...Today it seems clear that, in essence, detente marked a return to the illusions of Yalta: If only the West would treat Moscow like a responsible member of the international community, Moscow would reciprocate by behaving like a responsible member of the international community...

...McInerney seems to be enjoying himself, but he might want to go back and read the cautionary George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...

...On the other hand, their characterization of Churchill as a "strangely disturbing personality" who became an "accomplice in Stalin's crimes," is most unfair, though it cannot be gainsaid THIS WAR CALLED PEACE Brian Crozier, Drew Middleton, Jeremy Murray-Brown Universe Books/$17.95 Joseph Shattan 47 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 that for a while, at least, Churchill was beguiled by Stalin's enigmatic personality...

...Consider, to begin with, the book's grim characterization of Soviet Communism as "a system of power which of necessity has to spread itself or die...

...All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder...

...The Cold War has never ended because the Soviet ruling elite, the all-powerful Nomenklatura, knows no other way to conduct foreign policy except by waging cold war...

...The story of a young New Yorker's slide down the evil powdered slope appears to have keen resonance for MBA's who earn twice their age...

...Those who have witnessed the sad history of the United Nations must admit that he was also right...

...Crozier and his colleagues presumably believe that such a policy would ultimately be pointless-nothing can dislodge the entrenched power of the Nomenklatura...

...The Soviet system," they write, "cannot reform itself without the risk of collapse, since ideology remains its only source of legitimacy and justification...

...nevertheless, he used what power he had poorly...

...You know the moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line El BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY Jay McInerney/Vintage Books/$5.95 paper RANSOM Jay McInerney/Vintage Books/$5.95 paper George Sim Johnston 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985...

...To those who follow the writings of the contemporary Russian nationalist ("Russophile") opposition, much of this indictment will sound familiar...

...In This War Called Peace, Brian Crozier, Drew Middleton, and Jeremy Murray-Brown depart from this bynow traditional approach to their subject...

...The conclusion seems inescapable, therefore, that if containment doesn't work, if detente doesn't work, if summitry doesn't work, and if arms control doesn't work, the only way the West can curb Soviet expansionism is by helping to promote some sort of internal transformation of the Soviet system which would reduce the power of the Nomenklatura and increase the power of Soviet society...

...On the contrary, "After Yalta and Potsdam came the extinction of political life in Eastern Europe, culminating in the communist coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia in 1948...

...Wilson's postwar successors showed no greater diplomatic vision...

...His one idea was to play up to Stalin, and oil up to him as much as he possibly could...

...The problem lay not with his Fourteen Points as a whole, but with the fourteenth, the League of Nations...

...Moreover, Western civilization itself is in grave disarray: Its people have been corrupted by materialism, its intellectuals are arrogant and deluded, and a basically irresponsible media calls the shots...

...The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge...

...But as Crozier and his co-authors note, summit meetings have never produced any positive gains for the West...

...With a blind faith in the universal goodness of the common man and in the principle of majority rule, Wilson made full adherence to the League the keystone of his peace plans...

...The alternative is really much too depressing to contemplate...

...But while I am out of sympathy with much of the book's tone, many of the political arguments developed in This War Called Peace seem tome quite sound...

...As for the view that by expanding economic cooperation with the Soviet Union, we could curb Soviet expansionism by entangling it in a "web of interest," that, too, has proved illusory...