Editorials
¦ ¦mi* _____¦!. '..!¦¦ '«'iV. GIVE SALT A CHANCE Some weeks have gone by since the trials of the dissidents inside the USSR, but they do not look any better from this distance. Indeed, the Soviet...
...Meany's description, but it is not really very helpful nonetheless...
...Typical was New York University, the largest private university in the U.S., which canceled all exchange programs with the Soviet Union...
...FOR PEACE Egypt and Israel continue to drag their feet as the Middle East peace treaty remains unsigned...
...The New York Times/CBS News Poll shows that a majority of the American people want both to achieve a strategic arms agreement and also to "get tough" with the Russians...
...How real this need is was discussed in a Washington Post article by Thomas W. Lippman...
...And the answer, unfortunately, is not much...
...As a result of this impasse, about the only step he has taken since the trials of the dissidents has been to cancel the visit to Moscow of various American delegations, including one important scientific group...
...Each superpower could inflict over 100 million deaths on the first day of nuclear war through the heat, blast, and immediate radiation from these weapons...
...Schulze appears to have done little more than continue his policy of acquiescence...
...Recession Charlie seems doubtful, for Mr...
...It is said, for example, that we are now in the last stages of an "elderly" business expansion—at least before the administration pulled the plug with its massive defense of the dollar and its curtailment of the money supply...
...That the regime in Moscow is a "barbaric order" is one thing, and beyond dispute...
...One way, to which we have obliquely referred, is by the date of elections...
...Let Doubting Thomases compare such worries with the price of Middle East unrest and a potential Arab oil cut-off...
...Small wonder, then, that President Sadat's countrymen have reacted enthusiastically to his efforts for peace...
...and the Soviet Union are the two giants in our world, and a U.S.-Chinese alliance would only harden the Soviet position...
...They argue that a link should be created between some goal sought by the Soviets —grain sales or technological exchanges, for example—and increased freedom inside the USSR...
...We would like to be proved wrong, but the election being over, it looks like another recession...
...anyone who desires to emigrate risks being branded as a traitor...
...WHOSE RECESSION...
...Arguments can be made against the SALT treaty, but these should be considered on their merits...
...As Sanford Gottlieb points out in the current issue of Dissent, the United States deploys 9,000 strategic warheads that can reach the Soviet Union on long-range missiles and bombers and submarine-launched missiles, within half an hour...
...The inevitable danger is popular disillusion with the course President Sadat has followed— particularly his rejection of an Arab League offer of $50 billion over ten years if he canceled peace talks with Israel...
...foreign reporters are again branded as germ-carriers...
...Recession Jimmy is obvious, but Recession Mike might be more appropriate, in consideration of Mr...
...On the other hand Mr...
...the Russians completely refused to go along with any attempt to influence internal Soviet policy, rejecting the trade agreement and at that time cutting rather than increasing the number of emigrants...
...But we have a better suggestion...
...If no one can recognize the good times, how will we recognize the bad...
...That it "threatens the freedom of every man, woman and child in the world" is another, and a much more complicated, 24 November 1978: 739 proposition...
...On the one hand the President is committed to his human rights crusade...
...But the area where such a setback should not be allowed, for all our sakes, is in the arms talks...
...Even here, however, care must be exercised not to do more harm than good...
...No one had thought to set in place all those mechanisms of unemployment rates and Gross National Product that we now take for granted among the modern conveniences of life...
...We should remember that the United States is not doing the Soviet Union a favor by trying to limit nuclear weapons...
...In the Soviet Union daily life makes a mockery of what we consider due process, and the Russian people have now been warned again that dissenters are to be treated like lepers...
...Egypt, it said, has lost 100,000 men, devotes 25 percent of its resources to defense, spends 36 percent of its income to pay its debts and keep 750,000 men under arms...
...Without an agreement setting out limits on strategic arms, both sides will continue to expand their collection of horror weapons...
...The state of freedom inside China is hardly better than that in the USSR, and while it will be someday, China is not yet a superpower...
...The possibilities before us are limited, then, however great our repugnance for the Soviet pattern of behavior...
...Carter wants a recession...
...Bad times come in the year after elections, good times in the year before...
...We can express our disgust at Soviet transgressions in various ways, such as holding back certain items of trade and by canceling U.S...
...The administration is not beaten yet, but imperiling the whole discussion is the threat that the proposed treaty will be sunk simply because of the way the dissidents were treated...
...This should hot be allowed to happen...
...But perhaps we haven't come as far from that as we had thought, or perhaps we have come too far, so surrounded with indicators and charts and dials that we can't tell in which direction we are heading...
...There have been so many recessions, and mini-recessions, and mini-mini-recessions, and recessions in the black community, or among engineers, or Ph.D.s in medieval literature, that we seem to recess pretty steadily...
...Thus, Recession Dick, Recession Arthur, Recession Gerald, etc...
...Care would need to be taken in such a program, of course...
...Blumenthal's determined efforts to sell the administration its current policy...
...would have to be careful not to seem to be imposing its will on Arab nations possibly reluctant to follow Egypt's example...
...Historically the relationship between internal repression and external aggression is not simple: democratic states have sometimes been expansive and belligerent...
...Like it or not, the U.S...
...However, the Jackson amendment which attempted to link increased Jewish emigration with trade advantages for the Soviet Union proved a failure on this score...
...But is the cause of freedom inside the USSR actually aided by such a move...
...The result, said the Egyptian paper, is that the average Egyptian makes less than two dollars a day and more than a million workers are unemployed in a nation of 40 million...
...Indeed, for Communist true believers it is essential to maintain the image of a permanently hostile and encircling world, thus legitimizing the lack of freedom inside the USSR, and to them a setback in relations would not necessarily be unwelcome...
...but it is no good confusing that problem with the one of Russia's internal order...
...the U.S...
...The cold fact is that between us the superpowers have the capacity to destroy each other and most of the rest of the world in the bargain...
...All Commonweal: 740 this makes particularly significant the proposal of Senator Henry M. Jackson that the United States offer the Middle East an American aid program, patterned after the Marshall plan, as a material incentive in the search for peace...
...as a result he has made strong public demands for major internal changes inside the Soviet Union...
...Looks like, that is, because one is never quite sure anymore...
...Carter does not want to lose the benefits of de'tente, for it has become increasingly clear that if care is not taken all hope of substantive improvement in the relations between the two countries is doomed...
...That is why the show trials of the Russian dissidents—however offensive to free men— cannot be permitted to interfere with the arms limitation talks or with responsible Senatorial consideration of a subsequent treaty...
...Each recession can be named after the official most active in bringing it about...
...delegations to the Soviet Union and vice versa...
...Few authorities would now argue that Stalin himself conducted foreign policy on the basis of a scheme of world conquest...
...But is a business expansion just a mini-recession that comes on the heels of a real recession...
...there is nothing the Russian secret police would like more than to choke off all contact between their closed society and the Western world...
...These should be prudently countered (without forgetting that the U.S., too, is a great power, etc...
...In fact, peace will enable Egyptian leaders to turn their attention to pressing domestic problems and will help in the long run, but experts warn that the effect of peace on the local economy will be small at first...
...The AFL;CIO points out that we will be heading into the forthcoming recession with a million more people already out of work than when we headed into the last one (whenever that was...
...But with that caveat noted, it should be possible for the United States to help show that peace and prosperity can go together in the Middle East...
...Russia has at its disposal approximately half that number of strategic nuclear warheads...
...The course some recommend, in reaction to both Moscow's involvement in Africa and its outrages to human rights, is that we "play the Chinese card," and this is a gambit the administration sometimes seems tempted to...
...In short, the Carter administration is torn in two directions, and this ambivalence is matched by the public...
...The problems the Egyptian people face are multiple: deteriorating physical facilities crumbling under overcrowding and neglect, a decline in agricultural productivity, a population explosion, an appalling housing shortage, widespread unemployment and illiteracy...
...Much of Egypt's present plight can be traced directly to its wars with Israel...
...SALT should not be damned simply because of the dissidents...
...President Carter has very wisely resisted pressure to delay or abort the arms negotiations, and they are reportedly making reasonable progress, although ratification of a treaty is now further threatened by the defeat in the mid-term elections of five Senate Democratic liberals who had been counted on by the White House to support an arms agreement...
...To begin with, it exhibits a confusion that has hampered American thinking about foreign policy all along, especially in regard to the Soviets...
...But Egypt's pressing need for peace grows no less...
...Chances are that most Americans could be moved to agree with Mr...
...Not unnaturally, Americans who have toNvitness what goes on in Russia, from President Carter on down, are deeply disturbed...
...Secretary of State Cyrus Vance says the action by the Soviet Union against the dissidents has produced a setback in U.S.-Soviet relations, but he too stressed that both countries still place the "highest priority" on achieving a new strategic arms agreement...
...The newspaperAlAkhbar printed a summary of the price of these conflicts...
...Indeed, a serious problem right now is the popular tendency to think that all economic problems will vanish if a peace accord is signed...
...The question then follows: what can be done about it...
...Business has not seemed much happier with its expansion: profits up but stock market down...
...During the Great Depression, there were real debates about whether there actually was a depression...
...It will be easier to remember them this way, to tell them apart, and to take note of when they are beginning or ending...
...We don't think that Mr...
...We do think he knows the advantage of risking one in 1979 and not in 1980, in fact the advantages of having one in 1979 rather than 1980...
...With a little luck of timing, things may be on the upswing by November 1980—and then there will be a second term in which to get one's name in history...
...George Meany of the AFL-CIO went further, declaring that Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev "who cultivates the image of a man of peace, stands revealed for what he is—the leader of a barbaric order that threatens the freedom of every man, woman and child in the world...
...Would the cost of such a program be prohibitive in a year when President Carter is pledged to slash the budget...
...Yet this too is an illusory solution...
...The Soviet Union is a great power with imperialist drives and ambitions which threaten some people's freedom as well as international stability...
...dictatorial ones, cautious or defensive...
...To the "stick" of China, some would also add a "carrot...
...Basically that is the answer President Carter has been running into as he seeks a correct stance vis-a-vis the USSR...
...Millions more would die from the longer-term effects...
...The smallest of these warheads is three times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb...
...Indeed, the Soviet way of treating dissent is always a chilling reminder of the nature of the Russian regime, if any reminder is needed...
...The immediate question is who should be honored by the next recession...
...In the cause of clarity, we propose that recessions be named like hurricanes...
...This is what the SALT talks aim to prevent, to say nothing of limiting the impossible monetary burden of a constantly escalating arms cache...
...Leaders across the United States plainly wanted to do something about the Soviet trials, but what...
...Whoever's name is selected, the others should not be discouraged...
Vol. 105 • November 1978 • No. 23
