DÉTENTE-SHADOW OR SUBSTANCE?
Clark, Joseph
Some rather hard-headed observers, not ordinarily given to the strategy of appeasement as a means of achieving peace, have been heard to argue recently that increasing contacts with the Soviet...
...and the U.S.S.R...
...It contained over seventy main items and more than eighty items of medical supplies— from tanks, planes and destroyers down to army boots (of which the Russians asked for 400,000 pairs monthly) and shellac (300 tons monthly...
...This occasioned strenuous protests from Stalin and other Soviet spokesmen...
...Handler cabled the protest of the U.S...
...Hopkins discussed this with General Eisenhower on May 1 and practical and comparatively simple plans were drawn up in the War Department by which the planes would be flown directly from aircraft factories all over the United States to Soviet fields in Siberia within a few days...
...From the Stalin Auto Works in Moscow to the Molotov complex in Gorki, from the Stalingrad Tractor Works on the Volga to the big electrical manufacturing plants on the Dnieper, I saw an amazing amount of American machinery...
...Production in the U.S.A...
...Therefore, they will do their utmost to avoid military confrontations...
...and the U.K...
...and the U.S.S.R., a case for agreement between the non-Communist and Communist powers was made most forcibly by an unlikely proponent of detente, General Douglas MacArthur...
...For dissidents in the Soviet Union it brought no surcease, but continuing persecution...
...Opportunely, a recent letter to the New York Times quoted a report by Averell Harriman to the State Department made right after World War II: Stalin paid tribute to the assistance rendered by the United States to Soviet industry before and during the war...
...The director, who was conducting my tour, explained that three of them were Soviet-built because the Americans had placed restrictions on strategic exports to the Soviet Union...
...Sherwood describes how smoothly American pilots and planes set up in Britain for combined operations against the Nazis...
...Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences...
...Before pursuing the subsequent results of this trade and aid, it is important to put the quantity and quality of that trade and aid in perspective...
...Considering the recent alliance between Hitler and Stalin, the worldwide Communist movement's agitation and sabotage of the "imperialist war" as its contribution to that alliance (producing, in the U.S., the imaginative slogan, "The Yanks Are Not Coming"), and considering the depth of isolationist and America First sentiment in this country, it was remarkable how President Roosevelt succeeded in mobilizing material and military aid for the Soviet war effort even before Pearl Harbor...
...After the war with Germany was won, there was a sudden termination of American LendLease supplies...
...To a startled audience of Daughters of the American Revolution in Los Angeles, General MacArthur brought the word that war with the Communists was out...
...exNOTEBOOK 445 panded, the profits of the capitalists doubled, many countries incurred debts of hundreds of millions of dollars to America...
...For Continental Grain it was most profitable...
...I am not about to offer such opposition...
...They also said, "Both sides recognize that efforts to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other, directly or indirectly, are inconsistent with these objectives...
...and the U.S.S.R...
...But put aside a mellowing of the system...
...government "had interpreted this in its broadest sense" and had included, in addition to munitions of war, considerable nonmilitary items...
...Unfortunately for some of the current discussion about d6tente, there is insufficient regard for history, even rather recent history...
...Payment would not have to begin until five years after the war and at no interest...
...But they did not touch America...
...But at the end of May 1945, Harry Hopkins was in Moscow to explain again that this sudden termination was not American policy "and that it had been countermanded promptly within twenty-four hours...
...Incredible...
...I for one consider it a goal of inestimable importance to a troubled world in the nuclear age...
...But surely the great grain deal of 1972 is a lesson that Americans cannot forget—trade and aid don't necessarily result in mutual gain...
...But, The problem of getting aircraft to the Soviet Union was much harder to solve...
...During nearly three years in the Soviet Union, 1950-53, I had rather more opportunity than most resident correspondents to visit Soviet industrial plants...
...It has been suggested that trade might enable the Russians to relax their emphasis on heavy and military industry and provide some consumer goods for their long deprived citizens...
...Millions were transported to forced labor camps, and the "Rights" and the "Lefts" were killed by the tens of thousands...
...For the American consumer it was a blow and deprivation...
...Then there was the Moscow agreement of May 29, 1972, signed by Nixon and Brezhnev, which declared that "The U.S.A...
...Some rather hard-headed observers, not ordinarily given to the strategy of appeasement as a means of achieving peace, have been heard to argue recently that increasing contacts with the Soviet Union, especially expanded trade, will encourage the Soviets to assume more liberal attitudes in both external and internal affairs...
...pressure, together with indications of good will—all these are required to make the relationship of some value to us and to the rest of the world...
...firmness, together with readiness for mutual compromise...
...The problem is, rather, that gentlemen cry detente when there is very little of it...
...will inevitably produce a mellowing effect on the Soviet regime...
...That this had been done by the heroism and blood of the Russian Army...
...When word came that the great Soviet physicist and humanitarian Andrei Sakharov was being harassed and threatened by Soviet authorities, Dr...
...There followed an outpouring of military and civilian supplies—in such quantity, with such speed, and at such hazard—as had never before gone from one country to another...
...For the Soviet regime that was certainly a good deal...
...It will become an ugly word indeed if we continue to call the shadow that exists today detente, instead of the substance that must mean true agreement, true collaboration in and for peace and, above all, mutual trust based on such substance...
...How can one possibly oppose detente in a nuclear era, especially with regard to the nuclear powers...
...Rather early in the period of nuclear confrontation between the U.S...
...To the contrary, the 1930s saw a proportionate investment in heavy industry far greater than had ever been made before, yet the expanded East-West trade that followed brought no easing of the plight of the Soviet working people...
...There were important negotiations for limitation of nuclear armaments (not reduction, unfortunately) in the SALT talks...
...The long, sad history of Soviet relations with foreign countries shows that a constant vigilance, together with flexibility, is necessary on our part...
...Trade increased and the Moscow trials flourished...
...Yet, as the avalanche of aid to the Soviet Union mounted so did a grotesque series of episodes: at a time when Americans were fighting with their Russian allies, Soviet suspicions and continuing opposition to "bourgeois democracy" were such as to hamper American efforts to speed the flow of planes and other material from the U.S...
...The problem today is not that we have detente and must like it or leave it...
...These wars laid waste almost all the countries of the world, carried off millions of human beings, resulted in enormous destruction...
...It is still exciting to read in Robert E. Sherwood's book, Roosevelt and Hopkins, how on October 1, 1941, The first "confidential protocol" between the U.S.A., and U.S.S.R...
...But how much mellowing did all this trade and aid and understanding occasion after World War II...
...Hopkins also went out of his way to stress American appreciation of the fact that "we never believed that our Lend-Lease help had been the chief factor in the Soviet defeat of Hitler on the Eastern front...
...and U.S.S.R...
...was signed and sealed by Harriman, Beaverbrook, and Molotov...
...But it surely is not a maneuver under whose guise the Soviets can stimulate the bloodiest Middle East War...
...It profited particularly at the time of the two world wars...
...Ours are better, he said...
...The following was poured into the minds of Soviet children by way of Pionerskaya Pravda in an issue of August 12, 1947: The United States of America is the richest capitalist country...
...Detente is devoutly to be desired...
...to help the Soviet struggle for survival...
...Stalin said that about twothirds of all the large industrial enterprises in the Soviet Union had been built with United States help or technical assistance...
...attach major importance to preventing the development of situations capable of causing a dangerous exacerbation of their relations...
...yet this was one of the proposals on which the always suspicious Russians proved obdurate and, although they agreed "in principle," it was a painfully long time before they would make the actual necessary arrangements for putting into operation the sensible delivery route by way of Fairbanks, Alaska...
...There was increasing, but still modest, Soviet-American trade in subsequent years, and proponents of the argument that trade brings more liberal foreign policies can point to the "popular front" period as a possible result of greater trade contacts...
...There must be mutual advantage to trade and aid, to cultural exchange, and to all the increasing contacts that should take place between nations truly at peace...
...He argued that the new technology of warfare had rendered war obsolete...
...It was clear in the early 1950s that, quite apart from the American exports to the Soviet Union before the war, the Soviets had made strenuous efforts to take the LendLease of the latter part of the war in the form of industrial machinery and industrial raw materials...
...I remember touring the Dnieper River Power station, originally built under the direction of an American engineer, Hugh L. Cooper, and largely destroyed by the retreating Russians and then by the occupying Germans, and then rebuilt after the liberation of the Ukraine from German invaders...
...Handler had been assiduous in helping to develop scientific contacts and exchange between the U.S...
...Some personal testimony in this respect may be in order...
...Thus the commercial -accord signed in Moscow between the United States and the Soviet Union in July 1935 provided for tariff concessions on our part...
...Besides, everyone knew the most of it would never be paid for, and it wasn't...
...Two dissident Russian Jewish intellectuals who came to this country a year ago have expressed a realistic and constructive viewpoint on detente...
...LEAPING FROM THE HISTORY PAGES of trade and aid in the 1930s, to the World War II alliance, over the coldest years of the Cold War, and to the thawing of Soviet-American relations, along with the U.S.-Chinese reconciliation of the 1970s, we confront the issue of detente...
...Consider simply that during the period of the greatest contact and friendship, the Soviets themselves were 444 NOTEBOOK the biggest obstacle • to getting American sup plies into Russia for the Soviet battles for survival...
...It went free, Lend-Lease...
...Handler declared: Were Sakharov to be deprived of his opportunity to serve the Soviet people and humanity, it would be extremely difficult to imagine successful fulfillment of American pledges of binational scientific cooperation, the implementation of which is entirely dependent upon the voluntary effort and good will of our individual scientists and scientific institutions...
...There was a far easier more obvious route by way of Alaska to Siberia...
...Academy to its Soviet counterpart...
...To the United States fell the remunerative role of supplier of weapons and other goods to the belligerent armies...
...Military commanders could no longer attain tradiNOTEBOOK 443 tional objectives through warfare, certainly not through nuclear war...
...Perhaps they were, but no one could miss the gigantic impact of American trade and aid on the Soviet Union...
...As a goal, it is difficult to find fault with detente—or with the pursuit of greater and mutually advantageous economic relations with the Communist countries...
...There is a fairly widespread impression that Soviet industrialization was entirely a bootstrap Soviet process...
...and U.S.S.R...
...In the light of this recent history, Theodore Draper is on target when he refers to the Nixon-Brezhnev declaration as "one of the most delusory documents in American diplomatic history...
...America was aware of this effort even though it meant bending the law under which Lend-Lease operated...
...After the winter interlude of counterattacks, the Russians now faced the spring and summer months of renewed German offensive and their most pressing need was for fighter aircraft rather than bombers...
...Heresy was hunted whether it existed or not...
...The record shows that trade, in and of itself, won't produce a liberalization of the Soviet regime or of its foreign relations...
...And in their interview in the New Yorker they also said, "Bills like the Jackson Amendment, linking trade concessions to the Soviets with freedom to emigrate, are quite useful, because their goal is not to change Soviet society, which would be unrealistic, but to force the Soviets to follow their international obligations...
...to seek real arms control, truly mutual, a balanced reduction of forces, and a much freer exchange of people and ideas so that detente involves the people as well as the governments...
...Hopkins also tried to explain to Stalin that "the basic Lend-Lease Act made it clear that materials could only be delivered which would be useful in the process of the war...
...THEORY HAS IT that trade contacts between the U.S...
...On the heels of this agreement came the intensified Soviet military supply project that facilitated the Egyptian-Syrian aggression of October 6, 1973...
...They urged the U.S...
...1914-18 and 1939-45...
...Since there were no pursuit planes at that time with sufficient range to fly the Atlantic at any point, grievous shipping problems were involved, although they could be reduced to a certain extent by assembling the planes in Africa and flying them into Russia by way of Iran...
...There were increased cultural and commercial contacts...
...Hopkins added that the U.S...
...Six of the nine giant generators were made in America...
...446 NOTEBOOK...
...Within the Soviet Union, however, the 1930s became years of the harshest tyranny and mass murder...
...When Hitler launched his armies against the Soviet Union, there ensued a period of alliance against the common foe as never existed before, or after, between the U.S...
...It seems to me that a proper and effective attitude on detente has been demonstrated by Dr...
Vol. 21 • July 1974 • No. 3
