AFTER AFGHANISTAN

...BUT THEN, have the Soviets changed, as the same Henry Kissinger now argues...

...THERE IS, of course, a sense in which crises abroad can always be seen as favoring the right, since they downgrade the importance of the domestic reforms that are virtually the raison d'ètre of the left...

...Even then we were unable to prevent Soviet control of Eastern Europe...

...Now I must confess that this comment goes a bit too far in revising anti-revisionism and that I suspect that Stalin always wanted to keep a firmer hand on the East European approaches to the 137 Soviet Union than on Finland...

...If the hawks of the Committee on the Present Danger have often seemed fixated on the Soviet threat to Europe in the '50s as the eternal norm for American foreign policy, the protesters on the left take their norm from Vietnam...

...The Soviet Union "does not take unnecessary risks...

...On February 22, 1946 Kennan sent an 8,000wo rd telegram from Moscow to Washington opening with a statement made by Stalin to a 141 delegation of American workers in Moscow in 1972...

...For this reason, it can easily withdraw—and usually does—when strong resistance is encountered at any point...

...Many of those who have recently abandoned chiliastic or doctrinaire radicalism will, one hopes, become recruits of the "democratic left...

...Moscow's brutishness in invading Afghanistan has been widely viewed as if it had no recent history...

...More important, when danger looms abroad, the American electorate usually favors leaders perceived as moderate over either belligerent hawks or moralizing doves...

...Senators Jackson and Moynihan, the AFL-CIO leadership, and Commentary cannot, whatever their errors of judgment and rhetorical excesses, be equated with the likes of Senator McCarthy, General MacArthur, and the columnists of the Hearst and McCormick press back in 1950, or even with Goldwater in 1964...

...The Dutch and Belgian Socialists offer a good model...

...q The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a blatant and imperialist violation of the right of national self-determination—it was not a radical new departure in Russian policy...

...Olympic Boycott...

...The Russian dictator could not believe that the Americans actually took their democratic commitment to a free Poland seriously...

...impotent in defending "vital interests" 7,000 miles from its shores...

...It is the fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability...

...with U.S...

...Afghanistan, unlike Hungary and Czechoslovakia, had not previously been under Soviet domination, so its occupation is a more blatant act of aggression in defiance of the international status quo...

...The American problem in all this—a point sometimes lost by Realpolitiker in these matters— was not its commitment to the right to selfdetermination...

...for a long time...

...The Soviet Union has acted before with brutal decisiveness along its own borders when the Western powers were preoccupied elsewhere...

...The United States was the only true world power immediately after the Second World War, a situation that could not last...

...Today this has to mean freeing ourselves from dependence on Middle East oil, strenuous efforts to solve the energy crisis, to curb inflation and ward off recession...

...The United States had, as a matter of fact, given the same pledge back in 1957...

...How tenacious that belief is was impressed on me again in a recent conversation with an elderly, highly intelligent, former member of the Communist party, who left it under the hammer blows of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and, above all, because of the virulence of Soviet anti-Semitism...

...The year after Kennan sent the "long telegram" he wrote the "X" article in Foreign Affairs (July 1947...

...Nor can one be confident that American political leaders and public opinion are more realistic than in the past in facing up to the necessity of dealing with unsavory allies without forgetting their unsavoriness...

...The new international crisis is as likely to scuttle such new right-wing proposals as the Kemp-Roth bill or imitations of Proposition 13 as to forestall extensions of the welfare state that had not really been in the cards anyway...

...If American prospects now look grimmer in the more unstable area from the Levant to India (not to speak of the other side of India), at least the fear of nuclear war has been considerably dispelled since the 1950s with the acceptance by both great powers of the "balance of terror" or "mutual assured destruction...

...And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it...

...True, thunder on the right after the Chinese Communist victory rigidified our Cold War positions, contributed to the sickening simplifications and pieties of "Cold War propaganda," and helped bring about the disaster in Vietnam when three presidents kept imagining they still heard it rumbling in the distance...

...Given what the Russians like to call "the relationship of forces," on Christmas day last year the Soviets moved into Afghanistan...

...What one former American diplomat wrote about "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," shortly after World War II, is more cogent today than most recent analyses...

...Though properly critical of the Administration's thundering talk of war Kennan joins Carter in expressing surprise about the invasion of Afghanistan...

...I think not...

...It does, however, have the very real consequence of feeding a Cold War atmosphere in the United States, of sowing illusions about the possibilities of intervention, and so on...

...For the moment, these efforts are restricted to certain neighboring points conceived of here as being of immediate strategic necessity, such as Northern Iran, Turkey, possibly Bornholm...

...Fourth, containment of Soviet expansionism requires, in my opinion, universal (including military) service because it is more democratic and effective than a mercenary army, which exploits the plight of the poor and of minorities...

...See, for example, the forthright and sensible statement by David Horowitz, a former editor of Ramparts and "revisionist" historian of the Cold War, in the Nation, December 8, 1979...

...WHAT CAN WE DO in a world where both sides are armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons...

...Yet one cannot help but be depressed by the general readiness to dwell on the possibility of nuclear war on the part both of those who are prepared grimly to accept it as a "thinkable" response and of those too fearful to consider seriously any resistance to Soviet power falling short of it yet ending the illusions of detente...

...What then will the Soviets do...

...Whatever one's criticism of such governments, they are by far the most humane now in office and include people who will at least be influenced by the sort of radical ideas espoused by such magazines as Dissent...

...But proxy wars in the Middle East seem no longer possible, while the direct use of military force also appears to be precluded lest general war ensue...

...If we are to act upon this ill-defined pledge on this disadvantageous terrain, we will either have to readopt the failed, but very dangerous, Dulles doctrine of "massive retaliation" or, as Defense Secretary Brown has already intimated, challenge the Russians to a European war if they poach in the Persian Gulf...

...Carter did not act, but Senator Kennedy has proposed a most significant step: coupon rationing for gasoline...

...While critical of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, my friend nevettheless "understood" it in the light of American machinations against the Soviet Union...

...Intervention in the Middle East, whether by Russia in Afghanistan or by the U.S...

...And externally, what will the Soviets do...

...From the Soviet point of view, China could represent the worst fears instilled in Wilhelmine Germany by the Franco-Russian alliance: irredentist claims, a rapidly expanding economic and military potential, the added explosive of racial fear...

...There was a post-Vietnam mood of tentative withdrawal from international commitments, but this was an understandable and even healthy response to the wounds inflicted by the debacle in Southeast Asia as well as by the Watergate scandal in which Nixon so readily invoked the shibboleth of "national security" to justify his most questionable actions...

...We shouldn't hold our breath while waiting for that eventuality, but it does seem to me an attainable goal by the 21st century, maybe sooner...

...They will not be forthcoming if the price is political surrender in the full view of the public...

...Said Stalin: In the course of the further development of the international revolution there will emerge two centers of world significance: a socialist center, drawing to itself the countries which tend toward socialism, and a capitalist center, drawing to itself the countries that incline toward capitalism...

...After all," he asserted, "didn't American troops land at Archangelsk after the Russian revolution, to overthrow the Soviet government...

...It was our acting rigidly and legalistically, on the basis of the principle that may well have resulted in our being, as Kissinger suggests, even less able to defend it to the limited extend then possible...

...In effect, they offered to give up a bargaining chip before it was built in return for real concessions...

...So Stalin concluded that Washington must be engaged in a sweeping anti-Soviet offensive, and he responded in ways that made the American fear of a sweeping Soviet offensive headed toward Western Europe all the more compelling...

...It represents a totalitarian regime, but a decaying one...

...First, there is the accelerated rise in military spending, which between the first and the fourth budget submitted by President Carter amounts to more than 40 percent, with an increase of nearly the same magnitude scheduled through fiscal 1983, and spending then to top $200 billion...

...It was a fear of precisely this last possibility that caused the Socialist International Leaders' Conference in Vienna in early February to condemn the Afghanistan invasion and insist that the West continue to seek detente...

...They can be (a) wasteful and inflationary (the economic impact of Cold War II will be stagflationist and not, as in Cold War I, economically expansionist...

...Yet, even before Afghanistan, unpleasant realities were beginning to break through to the radicals weaned in the late '60s: most of all, the horrors of Cambodian genocide and Vietnamese mass expulsion of their Chinese minority, the only actions since 1945 comparable to Hitler's...

...Its power to project itself beyond Russia's border is thus, in the longer term, limited...

...As the Saudi Arabia of the Organization of Wheat Exporting Countries, the United States has taken a morally questionable tack of dubious economic and political value...

...In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics...

...Most of Truman's administration was surprised by this abrupt turn of the Soviet leaders, after four years of comradeship-in-arms, which defeated the fascist Axis...

...We ought to give up the bad habit of thinking of foreign policy in left/ right terms that are really a projection of the politics of the "democratic class struggle" in advanced Western societies...

...But now he's as astonished as the President said he was...

...In contrast to Vietnam, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf are vital to the interests of the West and Japan, primarily but by no means solely because of oil...

...They are developed, rather, as a "worst-case" response even though I do not think we are confronted by a "worst case...

...Third, social regression in the U.S...

...While the "multipolarity" of the '70s and '80s is replacing the "bipolarity" of the '50s and '60s, thus perhaps calling into question the concept of a balance of power, the greatest dangers originate at home...

...Battle between these two centers for command of the world economy will decide the fate of capitalism and of communism in the entire world...

...Kennan then argued that "the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies...

...This commits America to police an area 7,000 miles distant from its shores but quite close to the Soviet Union, in which there are only unstable regimes and a probability of indigenous revolutions that could relate to Russian power in ambiguous ways...

...Carter has approached the issue in the worst way, by means of a take-it-orleaveit ultimatum...

...Republican presidential candidates seemed more upset by how Carter's grain embargo of the Soviet Union would affect Iowa farmers than by the Soviet action that provoked it...

...The President 138 and to an even greater extent the Congress are committing the error that Nixon wrongly ascribed to the Great Society: assuming that gross percentage increases in budget outlays are necessarily good and purposive...

...He knew, for example, how different Stalin was from Lenin and how much Stalin had altered the Soviet scene...

...By contrast, the Kennan who was in Moscow early in 1946 sought to clear up the bewilderment in Washington caused by the intensified cold-war moves of the Soviet government...

...The Russian imperialism of which I speak is hardly benign, as the Hungarians, the Czechs, and now the Afghans can attest...

...But my policy proposals do not rest upon that thesis, which is, of necessity, somewhat speculative...

...Kennan was not suggesting that there had been and would be no changes in Soviet policies...

...q One is reluctant to comment about current and changing events, with a two-month lapse between writing and publication...

...American politics, however, were hardly moving to the left before Afghanistan, unless one makes the dubious assumption that Senator Kennedy could have rallied the country behind his bid for the presidency...

...Similarly, Arab oil will remain hostage to global instability for years ahead, the more so as vested interests here resist effective conservation measures...

...We were right then, and the frightening possibilities that now emerge confirm it...

...These events have had an impact on the remnants of the New Left comparable to that of Stalinism on an earlier generation...

...Kennan's interpretation of the Soviet uses of Marxism, contained in the "long telegram," stands up marvelously as an answer: It was no coincidence that Marxism, which had smouldered ineffectively for half a century in Western Europe, caught hold and blazed for the first time in Russia...

...He answers: It indicates that the Soviet party line is not based on any objective analysis of the situation beyond Russia's borders . . . that it arises mainly from inner-Russian necessities which existed before the recent war and exist today...

...A hard-line move, such as the invasion, was likely, in Kennan's view, only upon the retirement of Brezhnev and other older Politbureau members...

...Here, for example, is a striking statement of this new consensus: . . . I am inclined to doubt that Stalin originally expected to lock all of Eastern Europe into his satellite orbit...

...Russia's invasion of Afghanistan might be understood in these terms—which will set the framework for the struggle between the U.S.S.R...

...how could the Kremlin have thought them to be less weighty than grain or computer deliveries or the Olympic games...

...0 143...

...with the military potential of China being inexorably strengthened—can it be expected that Moscow, a giant with feet of clay not unlike Japan in the 1930s, will not secure strategic advantage wherever it can be gained...

...So Kennan proceeded to explain what was constant in Soviet behavior...

...The idea of the use of tactical nuclear weapons to combat a Russian invasion of Iran, broached in a Pentagon report, represents at best a counsel of despair: warnings that combatengaging tactical nuclear weapons could easily escalate to strategic nuclear war have run like a red thread through Department of Defense annual reports...

...Without it they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced the country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regimes...

...For Kissinger— and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and many others—now see Stalin as an essentially defensive totalitarian in the immediate postwar period...

...This and the absence of allies, not inadequate preparedness, renders the U.S...

...It will rather strengthen the present centrist leadership, in part because a centrist president happens to be in office...

...I AM FOR a measured reaction, making plain that we still seek detente—not only SALT II but SALT Ill—because the chain of events since late December has emphasized that the world is even more unstable, more dangerous, than in the days of Cold War I. There is, we said in those days, no alternative to negotiations and disarmament...

...I am obviously influenced in my thinking by the conclusion that the Soviets are acting as usual, that there is not a new and sweeping offensive, as Carter, Kissinger, and others think...

...However, other points may at any time come into question, if and as concealed Soviet political power is extended to new areas...

...The crucial question remains: is war inevitable with the Soviet Union, as it became inevitable with Hitler's Germany, following Western appeasement of the Nazis and that ultimate of appeasement, the Nazi-Soviet pact...

...will intensify, as amply evidenced by the two most recent federal budgets...

...I regret that the United States did not respond more forcefully to the Soviet use of Cuban janissaries in Africa, which undoubtedly contributed to the decision to invade Afghanistan...

...The internal dissension in that country surely threatened one of the Kremlin's basic ideological tenets, viz...

...That is why Soviet purposes must always be solemnly clothed in trappings of Marxism, and why no one should underrate the importance of dogma in Soviet affairs...

...But, as Russia's invasion of Afghanistan demonstrates, the "unthinkability" of a general war doesn't necessarily reduce the uncontrollability of events that might end in one...

...presence in the oil fields of Arabia wouldn't be sustainable...

...The Americans did not understand that it was essential to Stalin's concept of security to control that country...

...These increases reflect internal pressures far more than external ones, having been exacted by "hard-liners" in Congress, partly as a condition for ratifying SALT II and acceded to by President Carter from political weakness and opportunism...

...Therefore, a confrontation would spell a war fought wherever either one of the adversaries can maximize its advantage—i.e., a general, a world war...

...That they feared religious and political infections spreading to millions of Soviet Moslems is a certainty...

...The U.S., like Russia, has thus far been successful in circumventing this crisis by means of proxy wars, and occasionally by the show of force...

...c) useful for national security...

...That the Russians felt menaced by a Moslem uprising in Afghanistan goes without saying...

...For almost the first time since 1917 there is not a single nation anywhere in the world that can plausibly be presented as a model by those 136 leftists who labor under a compulsion to see their ideals embodied in a real, if very faraway, place...

...That was admirable, and in the case of the Berlin airlift happily triumphant...

...But he also knew there was continuity between Lenin and Stalin and continuity going back to before the Bolshevik coup...

...Equally important, detente promotes the forces of economic and social development in Eastern Europe and Russia, the foundation for any democratic socialist evolution there...

...Today they cannot dispense with it...

...That aspect is the continuity of Soviet policy...

...The Briton, unlike the others, would be "laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia," thus regenerating Asian society...

...Second, the reelection of social democratic governments, particularly Schmidt's in Germany, is now put in question...

...and the rise of native bourgeoisies, upon which Marx banked for the economic development of India and parliamentary governments, is prevented by the spread of military client regimes...

...Soviet power, he said in the "long telegram," is "neither schematic nor adventuristic...

...But—and I now turn to my second point—even if Carter is right and there is a much more sinister turn of events than I suggest, Carter is wrong in his response...

...It would have been a devastating response to the Soviets...

...But Mr...

...Coming after total failure in Vietnam, where the lessons of previous successes in Western Europe were misapplied, perhaps this time the United States will proceed with caution and avoid the excesses of our earlier ideological mobilization...

...That weakened both America and the struggle against the real Communist threat, the Soviet accretion of power in the world...

...Looking back, I was struck by the degree to which almost everyone had become a revisionist of sorts...

...How could these actions have failed to elicit counteractions on Moscow's part...

...He added, "if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so...

...Thus a "friendly" Persian Government might be asked to grant Russia a port on the Perisan Gulf...

...Why then, Kennan asks, have these theses been reinstated by the Soviets and placed at the center of their postwar policies...

...At least the seizure of the American embassy and the anti-American mob scenes in Teheran make it unlikely that anyone will be tempted to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson on Diem and describe our possible future ally, the Ayatollah Khomeini, as "the Churchill of the Persian Gulf...

...Kennan argued, with firm reliance on the record of history, that Soviet power is quite different from Hitlerite Germany...

...Finally, these events should not allow us to forget the truest cliche of the 20th century: the only alternative to nuclear war in these unstable times is nuclear disarmament and even, one day, peace.q Afghanistan's strategic significance for Moscow has increased with the change since the mid'70s in Washington's China policy toward military linkages...

...The Carter Doctrine...

...But there is also the history of global American actions...

...Yet, politically the worst dangers lie along the following three lines: 140 • First, the end, however temporary, of detente spells the repression of dissidence in Russia, for which detente represents an indispensable supply of oxygen, as well as the threat of repression of popular movements, quite possibly by Soviet troops in such countries as Poland...

...Chinese and Vietnamese military aggressions in Southeast Asia...

...the willingness of Cuba to serve as an instrument of Soviet ambitions...

...If they persist in their "hawkishness"—and there are signs that some of them, e.g., Senator Moynihan, are counseling caution now that they think Carter has seen the light—they will end up as isolated as the "radical right" of the '50s...

...intensive military-industrialization...

...naval forces massing in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean...

...First, what not to do...

...Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either Internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means...

...As in the case of the Czech invasion, the sending of troops into Afghanistan may have been the outcome of a power struggle in the Politbureau—set off probably by Brezhnev's impending death or retirement—but I doubt that it represents the first step of a grand design to dismember Iran, set up a puppet state in Baluchistan or seize the Arabian oilfields, although it clearly puts the Soviet Union in a better position to capitalize on unrest throughout the region...

...Let us review them briefly...

...This is not to say that the defenders of America's role in the original Cold War had adopted the extreme versions of the revisionist thesis—that a conspiratorial, capitalist America with a nuclear monopoly had pounced on a peace-loving Russia out of pathological antiCommunism...

...The Food Weapon...

...Do Russian (and Cuban proxy) interventions in Angola, Zaire, Ethiopia, Yemen, and now Afghanistan add up to a radical new departure...

...Surely, not as an act meant to promote detente...

...its consequences are limited and controllable...

...This was true in the '50s when opposition to the Truman administration and the Eastern Republicans behind Eisenhower came from a Republican right animated by a "politics of revenge" against the New Deal and the ideological aura under which we fought the Second World War...

...defense spending rising rapidly, and U.S...

...In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand...

...Democratic socialists must fight for detente, first because the now intensifying struggle between Russia and the U.S...

...Before trying to outline that first proposition about the nature of the Soviet threat, let me emphasize the qualification in my second point...

...but neither is it bold and aggressive...

...Yes, there are conceivable situations in which an American military response 135 might be necessary—I hope the United States would undertake it as reluctantly as "we" would endorse it...

...If the President had, in his State of the Union message, taken this real-world step to radically reduce our dependence on the Persian Gulf, if he had focused the patriotic anger and frustration of recent months on this achievable and effective goal, it would not only have improved the American economy...

...But the passive interlude of a few years was needed to come to terms with the defeat in Vietnam and to get rid of such relics of earlier Cold War ventures and postures as the overextended CIA and J. Edgar Hoover's archaic, superpatriotic FBI...

...By an accident, I happened to be reviewing the history and literature on Cold War I when the possibility of Cold War II arrived with the Soviet troops in Kabul...

...threatens once again to become the most reactionary factor in political life...

...And in the light of Soviet patterns of behavior, it is only 142 natural for them to seek a "friendly" government in Iran, also a warm-water port, and above all power to shut off the supply of oil to the West and to Japan...

...In the final analysis, the Kremlin must base itself upon a society whose development is the source of its strength but also its undermining...

...No one has suggested how a mass draft—with a six-month training period that could only be initiated after still another congressional approval once funds for registration are voted— responds to the Persian Gulf threat...

...Let me deal with his reactions ad seriatem...

...The 1946 Kennan, the prescient Kennan, replied: Wherever it is considered timely and promising, efforts will be made to advance the official limits of Soviet power...

...But perhaps the weightiest factor in this history, i.e., in Moscow's decision to disrupt detente, has been the playing of the "China card...

...maximum development of armed forces...

...Hungary was invaded in 1956 at the time of the Suez war, Czechoslovakia in 1968 when the United States was involved in a war in Southeast Asia that was the major issue in a bitter presidential campaign...

...it cannot be a substitute for such a base...

...In this, as in all other reactions, the possibility of Russian concessions must be taken into account...

...This move could haunt us...

...America, alas, did not heed that warning and did start along an imitative path when McCarthyism held sway...

...The so-called Carter doctrine pledging defense of the Middle East and Persian Gulf is important only as a symbolic gesture of American firmness...

...it is self-interest and survival for both...

...Kennan finds the Soviet action so "bizarre" that he is certain it lacked the approval of Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Gromyko...

...Registration for the Draft...

...The Czarist scene in Russia seems so remote from the ideology of Marxism that the immediate question intrudes: how can one speak of continuity of attitude and behavior from old Russia to the present...

...However, even if it were—even if Jimmy Carter's worst fears are confirmed—Washington's response is erratic and counterproductive...

...The real problem is not a direct Soviet military threat but the endlessly recurring one of the consequences of giving political and military support to authoritarian governments in the area (including China), most of which are of doubtful stability and therefore vulnerable to internal subversion aided by the Soviet Union...

...Often too young to recall what was at stake in Europe in 1946-55 (or even in the Second World War), they refuse to acknowledge the reality of a world power struggle with the Soviet Union that cannot be dismissed as a cloak for "American imperialism" or "capitalist" expansionism...

...and the Soviet Union in these days can be won by either side," said Secretary of 139 Defense Brown recently (Wall Street Journal, February 1, 1980...

...It claims the right to destroy the national independence of any neighbor and will fish happily in any troubled American waters...

...We held the Soviet Union to the postwar military lines of demarcation, but our success in Western Europe is not a proper standard by which to judge our more recent failures in other regions, because the nations of Western Europe, though weakened by the war with Germany, were mostly democracies sharing with us a common culture and the determination to resist submission to Soviet totalitarianism...

...The vogue of scholastic Marxism in the universities also seems to have peaked, and one runs into more and more young academics who are actually thinking their way out of it...

...In military terms this is a symbol...

...So far, there is no sign that the Administration or the Congress is going to make these distinctions...

...So, with all the enormous panoply of military power, its direct use between the two adversaries cannot be countenanced by either...

...The Kennan of 1946 forecasts: "Internal policy devoted to increasing in every way strength and prestige of the Soviet state...

...Thus American hegemony is generally in no way preferable to the Russian kind...

...A U.S...

...Second, and more important than hydrogen bombs, is "the health and vigor of our own society...

...On the left, one observes some utterly predictable hand-wringing about Carter's "overreaction" and even hears plaintive cries that this sort of thing was supposed to have been ended forever by the Vietnam disaster...

...Even more startling is how much more appropriate that 34-year-old analysis is than the revision of his views offered in George F. Kennan's New York Times Op-Ed article of February 1, 1980...

...This Russian imperialism is, of course, an antimodel of socialism (or, what is the same thing, the very model of socialism for antisocialists)— but, under certain circumstances, the United States should, can, and must make a deal with the Soviets out of national self-interest as well as in order to avert nuclear holocaust...

...No comparable faction eager to exploit antiCommunism for domestic political ends exists in American politics today...

...The Russians have the same trouble with their client states—that is, after all, why they invaded Afghanistan—but they are the challenging power, operate nearer their own borders, and do not have to submit their actions to public debate at home...

...But these relations have been gradually transformed to a point where they suggest increasingly close military policy links: by Washington's tolerance of China's attack on Vietnam and of China's support of the unspeakable Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and more recently by Secretary Brown's visit of Chinese military installations...

...I think it's a mistake for anyone to assume that a war between the U.S...

...It is a political response...

...Also, U.S...

...American power in the world has clearly declined as measured by reduced ability to influence events far from our own borders, but this was largely an inevitable development...

...SALT II, and even more urgently, SALT III, are in the national interest and in the interest of civilization, anywhere...

...Such a war may indeed be unthinkable...

...These increases, budgeted before the Afghanistan invasion, came or will have come in the presence of an overwhelming arsenal of conventional and nuclear armaments whose technological obsolescence, moreover, is ensured by enormous boosts in research and development expenditures (45 percent between fiscal 1978 and 1981...

...and it apparently communicates to the Soviets a sense of our outrage...

...I think Soviet history reveals a pattern of moving out when the other centers of power in the world are either too weak or lack the will to oppose Soviet expansionism...

...With nuclear missiles now to be stationed on the European continent...

...faces the risk of having to confront the Soviet Union directly, in an area where it cannot win militarily...

...And this bears, as we will see in a moment, upon one's estimate of what the Soviets are up to now...

...The egregious danger of this game was well stated by Miles Kahler in an article in Foreign Affairs, Winter 1979/ 80: Soviet fears of encirclement should be taken seriously...

...Though the Soviet Union, Kennan wrote, is "impervious to logic and reason . . . it is highly sensitive to the logic of force...

...Nothing we've seen or heard from Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Gromyko, whether healthy or ill, suggests that they have discarded Stalin's homily...

...Second, there is the decision to station several hundred medium-range nuclear and cruise missiles on the West European continent—another concession to the right...

...I agree with Stanley Hoffmann...

...That this doctrine must be challenged wherever possible goes without question, although insofar as the challenge is military, it should be posed only by those defending their own independence...

...and the U.S...

...both must be opposed...

...After establishment of the Bolshevist regime, Marxist dogma, rendered even more truculent and intolerant by Lenin's interpretation, became a perfect vehicle for the sense of insecurity with which Bolsheviks, even more than previous Russian rulers, were afflicted...

...In principle, I am in favor of this move...

...But it withdrew from Iran in the '40s, from Austria and China in the '50s, from Egypt and Somalia in the '70s—and it negotiated with Richard Nixon while the latter was trying to bomb North Vietnam back to the stone age...

...But those volcanoes—to mix my metaphors—are extinct...

...Kennan's 1946 telegram goes on to argue that the alliance against Hitler surely disproved all the trite Soviet dogmas about capitalist encirclement, the internal conflicts of capitalism, how international capitalist conflicts generate war and intervention against the Soviet Union, and the evils of Social Democracy, "the greatest enemy" of the working class...

...It is to argue that practically all accounts of that conflict now recognize a complex and reciprocal causation...

...But I find it fascinating that this assessment was made last year by Henry Kissinger in White House Years...

...How was Moscow to construe this, considering that its own medium-range missiles had been targeted upon Western Europe for 20 years as an offset to America's "nuclear umbrella" over the area...

...But it is reasonably safe to appraise one aspect of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Soviet attitude to the kidnapping of American embassy personnel in Iran...

...These foundations are themselves increasingly at risk, owing to militarization and bureaucratization...

...In the Foreign Affairs article he made it clear that containment was a policy for peace, not war, because: . . . the United States has it in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection than it has had to observe in recent years, and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power...

...IN TWO AREAS, I think the Carter response involves bad versions of good ideas: • Technology Limitation...

...b) destabilizing, as is the case with the extremely expensive and very dangerous MX system...

...It is this doctrine, enunciated by Brezhnev when he sent Russian tanks into Prague in 1968, that probably united all factions of the Kremlin...

...They neither accepted nor rejected NATO's Euromissiles but called for six months of negotiations with the Soviets over the SS-20 missiles before a decision would be taken...

...But there has also been deMaoization in China and the revelation of how little Maoism had overcome Chinese backwardness...

...Karl Marx could write 127 years ago that "the question . . . is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton" (On Colonialism, p. 81...

...The planned "rapid deployment force," a device both fatuous and dangerous, is like trying to get fish to swim without water...

...Isolationism tends to be the left's most "natural" posture, as has again become apparent after the period of nearly 40 years during which the left embraced the Popular Front and the war against Hitler and acquiesced in the Cold War out of disillusionment with Stalinist Communism...

...THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE United States and Russia is a struggle between two hegemonial powers that holds no promise but poses only vast dangers to the future of humanity...

...Soviet dogma views the "outside world as evil, hostile, and menacing," wrote Kennan...

...Throwing Money at Problems...

...THE NEW INTERNATIONAL SITUATION IS no more likely to produce a domestic shift to the right than to the left...

...Without going any further into this complex history, let me suggest that in part—and only but unmistakably in part—the Soviet Union and the United States may have blundered into the extremes of Cold War 1. If Cold War II is infinitely more volatile and explosive than its predecessor, that counsels a careful, sober response to recent events...

...As part of a firm, rational response to the Soviet invasion—which also includes equally firm offers to begin negotiating once again that Carter neglects—this is a step of limited effectiveness (because of other sources of supply) but worth taking...

...attempts to recreate a political base, lost with the fall of the Shah, in some other Middle Eastern country are likely to continue to fail...

...The restoration of normal diplomatic relations between Peking and Washington was surely desirable...

...that so-called socialist revolutions, least of all those in countries bordering the U.S.S.R., must not be perceived as being reversible...

...That this can transform an invasion of a foreign country into a "defensive" move is the logic of Soviet "dialectics...

...This is not of advantage to us or the Soviets exclusively...

...One of the main reasons— the only real reason—why the Persian Gulf is of "vital interest" to the United States is our criminally wasteful energy system...

...and the atavistic turn of the Iranian Revolution...

...More broadly, let me state a conclusion for which I do not have the space to argue: that the United States confronts not "Soviet" imperialism but Russian imperialism—i.e., not the expansionism of a nation in the grip of a messianic internationalist ideology for which it is willing to make national sacrifices but the expansionism of an ancient, bureaucratic (whether Stalinist or Czarist) society with almost endless borders as a stimulus to paranoia...

...There is no longer any domestic constituency for the anti-Communist war cries of the past...

...For Soviet leaders obsessed by Bismarck's cauchemar des coalitions, the China card is a nightmare that might drive them to extremes...

...These "disparate events" are "tied by two threads: low risks, and opportunities provided by previous Western mistakes, defeats or (as in Afghanistan) indifference...

...In one area Mr...

...Kennan had sober advice, that the "greatest danger that can befall us . . . is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping...

...With the loss of political intermediaries, such as the Shah, and tomorrow perhaps the Saudi princes or military dictators like Zia, the U.S...

...The apparent renewal of the Cold War should put an end to querulous talk about the "failufe of nerve" of American leadership and its "guilt complex" toward poor, non-Western societies allegedly fostered by leftist ideologues...

...eesewhere, remains anathema to the nations there...

...At the bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is the traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity...

...For that matter, one can go all the way back to the Nazi-Soviet pact with its secret clause partitioning Poland and the invasion of Finland later that year when Stalin's German ally was at war with Britain and France...

...his first postwar steps—such as permitting free elections in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, all of which the Communists lost—suggest that he might have been prepared to settle for their having a status similar to Finland's...

...The record from Stalin in the Second World War to the Shah just the other day is a long and discouraging one...

...Third, it does require a continued and more effective effort to secure the limitation, and more important, the reduction of nuclear armaments...

...It was this constant that Kennan tried to convey to the folks back in Washington who oscillated between periods when they would have liked to wipe the Soviets off the map and times when their approval of good old Uncle Joe induced a positive euphoria...

...Detente is necessary to speed this decay...