The Nation's Pulse

...The closing ceremony featured what has long been de rigueur at such affairs, namely, the formal signing of an "official declaration" (in this instance entitled, with somewhat more pretension than usual, "The Final Act...

...This is not the case with conservative thought...

...For we are not in this business of international relations solely to sell wheat or even solely to avoid war...

...Ultimately, it is this last which stands as the most frightening aspect of Helsinki...

...They assumed I was a conservative because in my book The News Twisters I had come up with findings of political bias that supported many charges of the Republican and conservative world, among others...

...But, hesays, he can spot a liberal at fifty paces...

...After each of the assembled statesmen had inscribed his name, the green-leather bound document was placed in a vault some 60 feet below the surface of the earth, there to rest, presumably throughout eternity, symbol of the latest in a seemingly endless series of meetings, conferences, agreements, and accords carried on in the name of detente...

...The Helsinki conference was the high point of Ford's fifth foreign trip in the first year of his Presidency...

...There are those, no doubt, who think that our inability to establish a democracy in Hungary tomorrow renders meaningless a posture of official disapproval of what exists in Hungary today...

...But this never seems to occur...

...It is rare indeed to find...

...The answers might beinaccurate, they might often contradict themselves, and members of these groups might protest that the explanations are caricatural...

...Much of this jaunt was devoted to the form of international statecraft our Chief Executives seem most dearly to love—i.e., planting trees in Yugoslavia, getting gifts of native dolls from Polish children, joining in a Rumanian folk dance in Bucharest, or getting a 250-pound cake in West Germany...

...And in terms of evaluating what the...

...affirmative presentations of conservative political theory on which all or most conservatives would agree...

...Rather, their actions over the last several decades—if not always their words—indicate that their ultimate ambition, their only obsession, remains pretty much what it has always been...

...But the point is, nobody would stare blankly and answer: I haven't the faintest idea...

...Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked recently in New York, "How do you warn a people who have never suffered...

...What, one may respectfully ask, did we get in return...

...And our adopting a moral position, let it be emphasized, is indeed significant...

...The experience is strangely akin to eating a Chinese dinner...

...Judging from SALT and Helsinki, the lengths we are prepared to go and the concessions we are willing to make in order simply to achieve this occasional, fleeting feeling of relaxed reassurance about the future of mankind in a nuclear age, are becoming truly astounding...

...They have only to repeat the same well-meaning, short-sighted behaviour towards the new problems which in singular resemblance confront us today to bring about a third convulsion from which none may live to tell the tale...

...Actually I am not a conservative, but a lifelong liberal who, twenty years ago, after growing disenchantment with proliferating governThe Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 9...

...We 8 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 will hardly be in a position to criticize them as they too make adjustments and rapprochements in their relations with the East, however politically, militarily, or economically discomfitting such actions may, in the future, prove to us...

...Why we should expect the leaders of the Russian Communist Party to pay more attention to such declarations when signed at Helsinki than they do to the similar sentiments expressed in their own constitution is past reasonable comprehension...

...Our position on this issue was apparently a matter of some import to the Soviets...

...at Helsinki, this policy was in effect abandoned...

...The Soviets seem remarkably unafflicted with similar obsessions in the conduct of their own foreign policy...

...Nevertheless, Ford's little valedictory, and the general coverage of Helsinki as a predominantly ceremonial event, seem sufficiently off-mark to warrant further comment...

...Helsinki itself, although it was the largest European summit since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 (where Metternich, Castlereagh, Hardenberg, and Alexander I divided up post-Napoleonic Europe), seemed in many ways merely a more serious version of such showmanship—drama, instead of light operetta, one might say, but theater nonetheless...

...The nation that sponsors Radio Free Europe and observes Captive Nations' Week thereby informed the citizens of Poland, East Germany, Latvia, Estonia, Rumania, and all the rest that their governments were perfectly legitimate as far as we were concerned, thank you...

...no one anticipates a successful counterrevolution in the foreseeable future in any of the satellite states...

...In the past, we had sworn never to sign a peace treaty as long as Europe remained divided...

...They constitute about thirty to forty percent of the people and they even have a national political party—the Republican Party, most of which considers itself conservative...

...Typically, a conservative is given the chore of rounding up a collection of writers or lecturers to answer that mysterious question: What do conservatives think...

...But why is all this that important...

...And Ford himself seemed to encourage this understated view of the summit, noting at its close that "History will judge this conference not by what we say here today, but [by] what we do tomorrow...

...The answer is distressingly clear—virtually nothing...

...The point is rather that our posture will inevitably affect their own, and that the direction we are currently pursuing is highly unlikely to yield a positive impact...

...One can only respond that such individuals are grossly insensitive to the potential moral significance of any foreign policy stance that lies between the extremes of leading a counter-revolt and simply being resigned...

...Soviet domination of Eastern Europe is, after all, a fait accompli...

...I am not sure how one answers that, finally...

...One would think that such a group would be ideally situated to make known its dominant values, principles, and goals...

...The second flaw in the "Helsinki can do no harm" theory is that it ignores the impact of such conferences on our allies, particularly those in Western Europe...

...No one suggests that there is anything dramatic the United States will (or, possibly, can) do about it...

...It is almost, in the words of George Ball, as if detente were "more an obsession than a policy...

...Nothing save our own wistful and self-deceptive think-ing has ever really suggested otherwise...

...For conservatism is generally graspable or intelligible only in this negative aspect—in the dissection and flagellation of liberal and radical irrationality...

...United States achieved, that judgment should not be flattering...

...Finally, Helsinki makes little sense even if one prefers to ignore its moral implications or its possible deleterious impact on the policies of our allies...

...Defining Conservatism This is particularly odd, since there are so many conservatives around...

...and Strength, moreover, could have been used in righteous causes with little risk of bloodshed...

...No one expects them to respond to our cozying up to the East by going off in a corner to sulk...

...One begins to suspect that obtaining this ephemeral, falsely comforting sense that "we can get along with them" and "there doesn't have to be a war" is what detente is really all about...

...Now, other political philosophies and movements do not induce a comparable amnesia...

...Edith Efron Conservatism: A Libertarian Challenge • (This essay has been adapted from a lecture given by Miss Efron at the Harvard Institute of Politics...

...All anybody ever really seems to remember about conservatism—and this apparently includes most conservatives themselves —is that whatever liberals are for, conservatives are against...

...This last step is at best gratuitous, and at worst represents disregard and even rejection of moral principles about how men deserve to be governed which we have long trumpeted to the rest of the world...

...For Helsinki is, I believe, one conference that history should judge by The Finland Follies what was said, as much as by what may subsequently occur...

...Such questions can be readily answered even by casual observers...

...Certainly, it seems less and less a responsible course of action...

...Helsinki's significance revolves around its only major substantive development: the ratification by the United States (and by the West in general) of the post-World War II division of Europe...

...The first is that it pays no heed to the importance of the moral posture of American foreign policy...

...The Communization of Eastern Europe—warned against by Churchill near the war's end, seemingly but grudgingly acquiesced in at Yalta, enforced with typical Soviet subtlety in Hungary and Czechoslovakia—thus received, for the first time, the official sanction of American foreign policy...

...In their loss of purpose, in their abandonment of even the themes they most sincerely espoused, Britain, France, and most of all, because of their immense power and impartiality, the United States, allowed conditions to be gradually built up which led to the very climax they dreaded most...

...not by the promises we make, but by the promises we keep...

...Particularly in light of developing events in Portugal, in which Moscow's involvement is only slightly veiled, our sudden grant of legitimacy to the map of Eastern Europe seems fatuous...

...So isn't it just as well to recognize reality...

...Now this statement seems true enough, and since the usual problem with these highly publicized conclaves of leaders is that people overrate their significance, one is tempted to let it drop...

...We received formal Soviet endorsement of vague, rhetorical affirmations of the importance of a whole laundry list of civil liberties—all of which, of course, will be absolutely unenforceable...

...But had our British, American and Allied affairs been conducted with the ordinary consistency and common sense usual in decent households, there was no need for Force to march unaccompanied by Law...

...I began to look for such affirmative presentations when people started calling me conservative...

...Rather, we have the distinct responsibility to nurture and protect a uniquely moral vision of man and of how his affairs should be organized—a vision that should not be lost by those entrusted with the heady task of conducting the foreign policy of the world's still most powerful nation...

...So much for the Cold War and, to use the quietly derisive phrase of Newsweek (August 11, 1975), "what some still called the Iron Curtain...

...I have always been ready to use force in order to defy tyranny or ward off ruin...

...William F. Buckley, who is widely viewed as the father of the modern conservative movement, confesses with perverse pride: "I have never failed to dissatisfy an audience that asks the meaning of conservatism...

...by Peter J. Rusthoven The Nation's Pulse A few weeks ago, America's Gerald Ford, the Soviet Union's Leonid Brezhnev, and the presidents, prime ministers, premiers, and/or party leaders of some 33 other nations concluded with appropriate pomp the "Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe," held at Helsinki, Finland...

...The commentators were agreed that little of substance occurred at the meeting...

...And in that context it may well be the wiser course to maintain formal relations and communication with those regimes...

...No one, with minimal political literacy, would find it too difficult to tell you what black militants advocate, what Communists seek, how liberals perceive the role of government, or what values are stressed by the New Left...

...but it cannot hurt to recall the 1948 remarks of Winston Churchill in The Gathering Storm: "There can hardly ever have been a war more easy to prevent than this second Armageddon...

...In part, Helsinki represented American recognition of what Sir Robert Thompson has described (in Peace Is Not at Hand ) as one of the Communists' "advantageous ground rules" in the international arena: "Communist countries are off-limits while the rest of the world is a free-for-all...

...Only, for some reason, if, two months later, you ask those who have read the book or attended the lectures to explain what conservative philosophy is, their answers will be extremely vague...

...Beyond that, we got little more than the dubious pleasure of seeing Fordand Brezhnev in innumerable moments of good-natured, back-slapping, hail-fellowwell-met bonhomie, which is supposed to make us breathe a sigh of relief at this "visible relaxation of tensions" between the superpowers...

...While one anticipates that Helsinki will be defended in precisely such terms, there are at least three things wrong with this deceptively simple, straightforward, seeming Realpolitik approach to our recent activities in Finland...

...Our allies in the Western half of the continent have no option but to exist in close proximity to an extremely powerful nation whose aggression we have now (albeit belatedly) endorsed...

...Granted, these nations were all present in Finland, joining in the dinners and ceremonies and signings with everyone else...

...It is not uncommon in the intellectual world for an occasional course to be given in conservative thought—either in the form of a published anthology or a university lecture series...

...It happens about once every four years...

...Indeed, Buckley collapses, however wittily and eloquently, whenever he tries to present conservatism in a coherent fashion...

...If nothing else, ratifying the current political division of Europe should have been viewed as an important bargaining counter in what former President Nixon styled an "era of negotiation" rather than "confrontation...

...But it is quite another thing solemnly tobless Communist (and in many ways Soviet) hegemony in this section of the globe, to endorse this state of affairs as legitimate...

...What possible harm can come from Helsinki...

...He is most successful when—to use John Roche's apt description—he sets out "to smite the liberal hip and thigh," to impale "the contradictions, the hypocrisies, the pretensions of liberal and radical pontiffs," and to publish journals and anthologies of writers doing the same...

...We are not, it is true, in a position to substitute the type of government which reasonable men, sensitive to human freedom and dignity, would prefer for the various Worker's Paradises that currently envelop the Eastern European scene...