Two Views of the World Scene

...And yet, increased trade might be highly advantageous to both sides...

...I fear that they are nil, and that this grand proposal is but a poorly thought-out gimmick...

...This viewpoint, Kennan asserts, is so strong in Congress, in certain segments of Washington officialdom, and in vast sections of the country at large, that it tends at times to cancel out the wholly different policy the executive branch is prepared to follow...

...Much of Etzioni's book consists simply of another survey, and a rather superficial one, of the current world scene...

...but in these days of Goldwater ascendancy it is nevertheless important that what he has to say be reiterated again and again...

...Not that there is much new in these pages...

...But in any case this small book is a genuinely wise contribution to the continuing debate about the goals and means of American foreign policy in the sixties...

...Bdt what are its chances of realization...

...Both the Russian shortage and the American surplus are the results of irrational agricultural policies pursued by both sides for ideological reasons...

...Individual Communist countries now have a far wider range of choice in their relations with the non-Communist world than was the case a few years ago...

...In a second chapter on "East-West Trade," Kennan attacks the prevalent idea that maintenance of an economic blockade against the Communist countries of Eastern Europe can harm them in any serious way...

...The author clearly has not had the time or the energy to study in any depth the many issues he discusses, and so we get once more a tedious recounting of the failures of containment and deterrence, of the emergence of China and France as autonomous world powers, etc...

...By this he means an agreement between both sides that they refrain from shipping arms and armed force, overtly or covertly, into non-aligned areas and that they prevent their allies from sending such forces...

...I have high respect for Etzioni's more technical works...

...it has become catastrophic since...

...One attempts to secure a long-range and flexible policy toward the separate nations of the Communist world...

...The general conclusion that Etzioni seems to draw from his survey is that the bipolar world of the recent past is likely to give way to an increasingly pluralistic universe, but that Soviet and Western thinking is still fixated upon the bipolar state of the fifties...

...Etzioni urges therefore a new strategy that would focus on interests and responsibilities that the two camps have in common...

...This would amount to an agreement that non-Communist Asia and Africa as well as Latin America be treated as Austria is treated now...

...There is, surely, a danger lest history record that Westerners of the twentieth century alienated just as many more through lack of imagination and feeling toward those who were in the power of their ideological adversaries...

...Since then the unified and disciplined bloc of Stalin's days has disintegrated into an uneasy alliance between two ideologically related groupings: one centered around China, the other around the Soviet Union...

...This would permit Western Europe to conduct an experiment in increased trade which American obsessions about "trading with an enemy" prevent us for the moment from trying...

...An economic blockade would make sense only if Western Europe would be prepared to join it...

...Finally...

...along Etzioni's lines, they would, of course, be accused by the Chinese of having abandoned solidarity with the Communist movements of the world, of having sold out to America...

...More particularly, he urges that they mutually accept a set of rules under which their global contentions might be carried out with less danger...

...would be curtailed," and popular revolutions against oppressive regimes would hence be easier to carry out...

...Yugoslavia, in addition, is not being embraced in either of these alliances, and Albania, while allied with China, still belongs to the Warsaw Pact...

...Tito suggested that one could be a perfectly good Communist without taking orders from Moscow...

...In fact, we have today two contradictory foreign policies pursued simultaneously...

...Etzioni's most specific suggestion concerns what he calls "remote deterrence...

...The significance of export controls, he argues, has lain more in the subjective satisfactions they have afforded American public opinion than in any objective effect they may have had...

...A most appealing picture...

...Under these circumstances, says Kennan somewhat sardonically, "the United States, by selling its wheat, would make it possible for the Russians to go on giving their farmers inadequate incentives for the production of grain...

...with the reduction of armed forces, government use of them to impose its rule on the political opposition...

...now the Soviet, the Polish, the Yugoslav, the Chinese model compete...

...They also have considerably more freedom to shape their internal institutions and policies than they possessed in the past...

...Were they to come to an agreement with the U.S...

...Are the Russians likely to be interested in what Etzioni reckons to be in their interest...

...Etzioni's proposal amounts to telling the Russians that it is in their interest to give up their long ideological tradition of helping revolutions in other countries and to throw the last vestiges of the Leninist world view overboard...

...Kennan and others have argued along similar lines before...

...In his concluding chapter, Kennan attempts to come to grips with the new polycentrism of the Communist world...

...But our clinging to poicies not basically changed from the days when the goal was containment of a monolithic Communist power puts us into a poor position to encourage a further development of polycentrism...

...A professor of sociology at Columbia University, he is clearly on the side of the angels...

...Remote deterrence would prevent armed interbloc confrontations in third countries and, furthermore, "once armed intervention is ruled out, they [third countries] would need much smaller military establishments," and hence foreign aid could be channeled into development and modernization...

...Under these circumstances, Kennan suggests, we might at least stop nagging our allies about trade with the Soviet bloc, since this is not going to accomplish much in any case...

...A defection to the capitalist camp by a renegade would have been comparatively easy to digest, but a heresy that obstinately clung to the major goals of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy created permanent damage to the monolithic orthodoxy of the Soviet bloc...

...The West might now, ideally speaking, influence by its own behavior the choices that the satellite regimes make...

...This policy, Kennan argues, was utterly untenable long before the atomic bomb...

...Those who prattle of victory despair of living with Communist power and seek only its destruction...

...The other asks, "Why not victory...

...For example, a certain note of frustrated bitterness, perhaps connected with his recent experiences as ambassador to Yugoslavia, sometimes creeps into Kennan's pages, and projects a more pessimistic view of American policy than the facts sug gest...

...In the nineteenth century, Kennan concludes, the colonial mothercountries alienated millions of people in the colonial world through lack of imagination and feeling toward those who were in their power...

...The Russians are at the present engaged in a fateful contention with the Chinese for hegemony in the world Communist movement...

...they, by purchasing it, would make it possible for the United States to go on giving its own farmers too much...

...But this is not the case...

...Had Tito started something like a counterrevolution, the effect on the bloc would have been less drastic than his policy of maintaining a basically Communist regime while rejecting the discipline of Moscow...

...For example, a long-range deal in wheat would be mutually satisfactory...

...In his first chapter, "The Rationale of Coexistence," Kennan argues that "a great and important body of opinion in this country—and a growing one, I fear," is prepared to reject "every possibility other than the most relentless and embittered and uncompromising struggle [against Communism], and to pursue a policy which . . , could lead only, and with inexorable logic, to the final and irreparable disaster which is in all our minds...

...This superficial book, catchy title and all, however, does not add to his reputation...

...Both Moscow and Peking court the satellites, and they can hence no longer effectively discipline them to the same degree as in the past...

...the other thinks in terms of a violent and short-term disposal of the Soviet problem, and views the Communist world in terms of a monolithic unity which has in fact not existed for a considerable time...

...Would that I could be equally positive about Etzioni's book...

...We do about $200 million worth of trade with the entire Soviet bloc per year, while Western Europe does something like $5 billion, twentyfive times as much...

...Earlier there was only one model...

...He argues that the unity of the Soviet bloc never fully recovered from the Yugoslav defection...

...One need not agree with everything Kennan has to say...

...The Communist world is now so highly differentiated that the global term "Communist" has lost a large part of its validity...

...But good intentions may still produce a mediocre work...

...One policy strives to lay down the basis for a permanent coexistence with the Communist world...