Has the Cold War a Future?

...Parenthetically, in this respect, Peking and Moscow interests in Western Europe are opposed: China favors a strong U.S...

...The Soviet Union has strengthened its naval presence in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and Moscow has embarked on a diplomacy designed to enhance Soviet influence around the southern periphery of China and to seek, over time, a new relationship with Japan...

...It also depends upon the continued willingness of the Soviet Union to forego the use of force, nuclear or conventional, to destroy China's nuclear capability before it is adequate to provide a credible second strike against the Soviet Union...

...For the Soviet Union, the importance of the Middle East will grow...

...Moscow seeks to avoid any abrupt change in the American relationship which might lead the Europeans to political unity or a major defense effort and the formation of a European nuclear force...

...The eventual neutralization of Western Europe would ease the Soviet task of communist control in East-Central Europe and strengthen Moscow in its confrontation with China over the next decade...

...Moreover, the Soviet Union seeks to outflank China by developing new relationships with countries of the Asian rimland, and especially India...

...The future prospects for an improvement in Soviet-American relations then depend upon the course of Sino-Soviet relations after Breshnev and Mao, both of whom can be expected to depart from the leadership scene before the end of this decade...

...In Europe and Japan, major new centers of economic power have been built on the ruins of World War II...

...wheat and technology, President Nixon's visit to Moscow in May, 1972, just after the mining of North Vietnamese waters and the intensification of bombing...

...It follows, then, that a major improvement in Sino-Soviet relations would threaten much of the basis for an improved U.S.-Soviet relationship, and in fact would place in jeopardy the structure of an international system based either on a triangular relationship between Moscow, Peking, and Washington or a more multipolar system including as principal actors Western Europe and Japan...

...In this changed world of the 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union have entered a new period in their relations...

...In certain categories of strategic systems, (i.e., launch vehicles, throw-weight, and warhead size) the Soviet Union has achieved a quantitative lead over the United States, although the United States retains an advantage in numbers of warheads, deliverable megatonnage, missile accuracy, and new technology, for example in MIRV...

...While the Soviet Union strives to become the dominant power in Europe, the United States seeks to build a partnership with Western Europe capable of developing greater unity and providing more adequately for its own defense...

...In recent years, both the United States and the Soviet Union have faced disintegrate forces in their alliance systems, and the Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s has been replaced by deeply-rooted animosity between Peking and Moscow...

...Over the past decade, both the Soviet Union and the United States have acquired vast, highly advanced weapons systems of mass destruction...

...While the Egyptian expulsion of Soviet advisers and technicians in 1972 may have pointed up the limits of Soviet influence in the Arab world, Moscow retains extensive ties with other Arab states, including Iraq and Syria and even Egypt...

...The evidence marshalled in support of this "new wisdom" is impressive: a series of arms control accords between the two superpowers, the apparent interest of the Soviet Union in the dampening of tension in Europe and elsewhere, and, in the Moscow Summit Conference of 1972, agreement by the United States and the Soviet Union to a Declaration of Principles calling for" peaceful coexistence" and the development of "normal relations based on the principles of sovereignty, equality, noninterference in internal affairs and mutual advantage...

...globalism have advocated), the prospect for continued U.S.-Soviet competition looms large...

...In sum, only if the United States were prepared to redefine its national interests to exclude all regions beyond North America and to acquiesce in a clearly inferior strategic posture vis-a-vis the Soviet Union (a prescription that not even some of the severest critics of U.S...

...At the same time, the United States has entered a period of greater preoccupation with domestic affairs and intense introspection and doubt about the premises which shaped its global policies and interests during the past generation...

...It is a widely accepted proposition that the United States and the Soviet Union have entered a new phase in their relations, and that the fierce competition and hostility of the Cold War have given way to an era of detente, cooperation, and negotiation...

...Thus, in Western Europe the basic interests of the United States and Soviet Union remain divergent...

...To be sure, the world of the 1970s differs in several important respects from the world of the 1950s or even the 1960s...

...additional powers - Britain, France, and China - have built national nuclear capabilities and many other states now have the technological know-how to produce such weapons...

...Basic to the thesis that the Cold War has ended is the assumption that the bipolar world of U.S.-Soviet confrontation has been replaced by an international system in which Moscow and Washington find broadening areas of harmony of interest, or at least the possibility of accommodation...

...Both sides will strive for technological breakthroughs designed to enhance the deterrent value of their strategic forces...

...Fundamental to the U.S.-Soviet relationship in the 1970s is the Sino-Soviet conflict...

...Just as the United States seeks to strengthen its links with Peking, the Soviet Union makes a concerted effort to build new relationships with the West European allies of the United States, notably the German Federal Republic...

...Yet, this may become progressively more difficult either as a result of the growing western dependence on Middle East oil or the continuation of conflict between a strengthened, modernizing Arab world, supported by the Soviet Union, and Israel, backed ultimately by the United States, fighting to retain all or some of the occupied territories acquired in the June 1967 war to achieve 'secure boundaries...

...From its position as a clearly inferior power in the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union of the 1970s, with a rapidly expanding modern navy, casts the shadow of its influence into regions of the globe from which Soviet power was historically excluded...

...Both, for their own reasons, will attempt to exacerbate the tensions within each other's alliance systems and form new relationships with allies of the other...

...As a result of adroit diplomacy in recent years toward the German Federal Republic, the Soviet Union has achieved one of its long-held goals: international recognition of the postwar frontiers of East-Central Europe and the international acceptance of the German Democratic Republic...

...In Europe, the Soviet Union has altered its tactics rather than its overall strategy...

...If this is not the "Cold War" of the decade after World War II, it is nevertheless a far more complex form of competition whose outcome will shape the international system as well as the role of the United States in the remaining decades of this century...

...Over the next decade, American and Soviet interests are likely to continue to diverge in other parts of the globe, for example, in the Middle East...

...military presence and a unified Western Europe in order to divert Soviet power from the long Sino-Soviet frontier...

...As symbolized in the Strategic Arms Limitation Accords of 1972, the Soviet Union has achieved strategic "parity" with the United States...

...This has already conferred upon the United States considerable leverage in its dealings both with the Soviet Union and China...

...If they have found common interest in limited arms control agreements and in negotiations on other issues, Washington and Moscow continue, nevertheless, to compete for influence in Europe and Asia, as well as in the Middle East...

...As a result of rapidly rising energy needs, three of the major world power centers - the United States, Western Europe, and Japan - will become more heavily dependent on Middle East oil...

...So long as this conflict persists, both Moscow and Peking will seek to prevent each other from strengthening its ties with Washington at the other's expense...

...Hence the importance to the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, of restricting Soviet influence in the Middle East will increase...

...It made possible, together with the Soviet need for U.S...

...Both will seek to preserve and extend their influence in the Middle East and in other areas of the Third World deemed vital to security...

...The gradual disengagement of American military power and the neutralization or "Finlandiza-tion" of Western Europe remains a Soviet goal...

...Both will continue to have different, and even divergent conceptions of "peace," differences in the principles for organizing their domestic societies, and differing conceptions of national interest underlying their respective foreign policies...

...Conversely, the persistence of the rift makes it possible for the United States to develop with the Soviet Union and China a less hostile relationship than either communist state can develop with the other...

...Moscow and Washington will continue to seek to prevent tensions in the area from escalating to a direct confrontation between the superpowers...

...Even now, the world demand for oil has enhanced the importance of the Middle East to the West, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, to the Soviet Union...