A Cold War Deterrent
FISCHER, LOUIS
PROPOSAL FOR A NEW KIND OF DIALOGUE A Cold War Deterrent By Louis Fischer The United States is a rich, powerful, growing nation. Its manpower and material resources have never been stretched...
...The underdeveloped countries should be warned against this phenomenon, and Khrushchev should be warned by President Kennedy that the United States is increasingly impatient with and irritated by Soviet efforts to disrupt the normal evolution of the less developed countries...
...Power madness at home spills over into power madness abroad...
...accepts commitments in Japan, South Vietnam, Laos, Berlin, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and so forth...
...The dawning integration of Western Europe is one of the most fascinating developments in the annals of man...
...But as long as India feels itself menaced by China and Pakistan it will not disarm...
...At that point, the cold war will have come to an end...
...But nuclear bombs, with their capacity for annihilation of whole nations, have put an end to war as national policy...
...Ban imperialism...
...This is often the role of the Communists in underdeveloped countries...
...America's past exertions abroad are beginning to bear luscious fruit...
...it would not have a money economy based on piece work, profits, and sharp income and status inequalities...
...Throw the Portuguese out of Angola and the Russians out of Hungary...
...Somewhat fewer cigarettes smoked (and fewer lung cancer cases), a little less liquor consumed, a fraction of our latent idealism harnessed to practical tasks, and we could contribute far more to the peace, health and culture of the world...
...He can help but not hamper...
...The Soviets will arm in response and, as a result, the prospect of improving Soviet living standards must fade...
...The Soviet people and the Soviet government do not want war...
...Let us work out a single-standard agreement to aid but not to dominate...
...Lenin reprimanded Stalin in 1920 for launching a so-called "Soviet Republic" in Iran's northern province of Ghilan...
...All of the major international crises since the War fit this formula: Where either the United States or the Soviet Union was so committed, so deeply involved in a given situation that the entry of the other would have resulted in a third world war, the other did not enter...
...It has not happened and I am not convinced that it will...
...then we can ban the bomb...
...feels it, too...
...The West has now outgrown it...
...To attempt to induce Asian countries to vault from pre-capitalism to Socialism or Communism is merely a disguise for drawing them into the Soviet orbit...
...For the present, whether we like it or not (and 1 do not), the possession by both sides of atomic and hydrogen bombs and the means of delivering them is the guarantee of peace...
...The incendiary is at an advantage: With a match and a rag dipped in kerosene, one person can demolish in an hour a building erected in a year by a thousand men...
...Some of the latter group are really 18th century, and some countries are simultaneously 19th and 20th century...
...Russia was vastly more developed in 1917 than any of the newly independent countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America is today, and to inspire underdeveloped lands to emulate the Soviet example of collective farms and super-rapid industrialization is to induce Stalinism and reduce the standard of living for the greater glory of the monolithic dictator state...
...In the long run, this is not the way to run a railroad or conduct a foreign policy...
...Accordingly, the U.S...
...West Berlin is the nub of Europe, the key to the security of Western Europe...
...Soviet public opinion is beginning to count...
...A plausible presentation, by an American, of Soviet policy could begin somewhat as follows: The Soviet government is exerting a variety of pressures along a wide arc extending from Japan, South Vietnam and Laos to the Middle East, Africa, Berlin, Finland, Germany and Latin America...
...In 1916, Lenin wrote that imperialism was the highest—by which he meant the last—stage of capitalism...
...But this omission does not justify Soviet action in Cuba and elsewhere...
...Russian policy is impoverishing both countries...
...I believe the Soviet peoples want real peace...
...France has recently made the last big step...
...was determined to participate...
...helped create today's Cuban situation by errors of omission years ago...
...The present world conflict arises from a disparity of development, from the century that divides the two camps...
...Yet no country has disarmed, not even the most enthusiastic advocates of other nations' disarmament...
...In fact, Russia is black conservative...
...Nor will Pakistan while it feels imperilled by India, nor Egypt while it is at war with Israel, etc...
...They put their daily consumer needs above world revolution and territorial expansion...
...These events took place in the days when Soviet Russia was sloughing off empire...
...But to attempt to drag African countries from tribalism to Communism is harmful to those countries...
...Moscow has hurt, not helped, Cuba by impelling Fidel Castro into Communism...
...The U.S...
...The purpose of the confrontation I am proposing would be to present the American view to Chairman Khrushchev and to hear his response...
...Neither Russia nor China is likely to invite their use...
...Prosperity through human ingenuity (technology), not through empire, and the elimination of war—these developments make European unity possible...
...Capitalist imperialism is out or on the way out, and Soviet imperialism is a major fact in world affairs...
...should therefore serve notice on Khrushchev that we do not propose to pay the cost of his competition with Mao Tse-tung...
...All of Western Europe, with the exception of Portugal, is retiring from empire...
...The world may be divided into 20th century countries (Western Europe and the United States) and 19th century countries (the Soviet Union, Asia—including China—Africa and Latin America...
...Despite the abolition of private business, whose special sin, in Communist eyes, was competition, the Soviet Union, is the world's most competitive country both internally and in its foreign affairs...
...Lenin said that Iran, having no proletariat, was unripe for such a revolution...
...Khrushchev can therefore allow the anticolonial revolution and the revolution of rising expectation to take their buoyant course throughout the world...
...Given proper management and the necessary conviction, this country is capable of doing infinitely more in the interest of its defense and in the pursuit of aims which will make mankind happier...
...If Khrushchev wants American disengagement from Europe, the U.S...
...Or they build fires where there need be none...
...Russia did not enter...
...Soon the U.S...
...But the cold war continues to rage, causing international instability, heavy expense, deep commitments, constant irritation and mounting armaments...
...will not permit Russia to swallow West Berlin...
...And power is such an illusory value...
...Khrushchev must be told to cease intervening...
...Khrushchev calls such action "liquidating the vestiges of World War II...
...Russia is a 19th century country, and Nikita Khrushchev has a 19th century mind...
...The Soviet Union is not a communist or socialist or Marxist country...
...We will draw a line, say, from Amsterdam to Milan and pull back our armed forces 3,000 miles to the U.S.' Atlantic seaboard, provided Russia withdraws her armed forces an equal distance behind its side of the line...
...In a real sense, the U.S...
...Thus, the hot war is blocked...
...West Berlin will not be taken from the West by arguments about "liquidating the vestiges of world war II," or any other illogic...
...Hence Japan's domestic tensions...
...President Kennedy might admit that Moscow is not the cause of all the world's problems...
...The Kremlin has admitted that Peking's 1958 Great Leap Forward caused China to break its limbs...
...It did not intervene...
...is not overcommitted in foreign affairs...
...and the USSR...
...In Hungary, Moscow appeared to be unalterably committed to keeping its colony...
...We must not accept as true what its leaders say of their social forms...
...Louis Fischer, a long-time New Leader contributor, is author of The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Russia Revisited and, most recently, Russia, America and the World...
...We read and hear much about nuclear war by accident...
...Russia is still deep in it...
...Now Moscow is seeking empire...
...we should not be misled by names...
...This demonstrates that in the nuclear age, the age of total potential destruction, an unprecedented inhibition, an allpowerful instinct of self-preservation, operates to prevent major war...
...Late because of the two World Wars, the 20th century first appeared in Europe in about 1950...
...Countries should not be differentiated according to their internal isms or the nature of their social and economic systems...
...Imperialism began in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries and flowered under capitalism in the 19th century...
...Khrushchev should be told to leave it in peace...
...But it is the mother of sustained poverty at home and abroad...
...In a revolutionary transformation, Europe is graduating from nationalism to internationalism...
...In the Congo, the Soviet government did not seek tranquility or unity, or the welfare of the Congolese...
...Hitler thought he could win, and he very nearly did...
...But we should not employ them when they distort the truth...
...Neither does any other nation...
...The 20th century has at last arrived...
...A similar Communist revolt erupted in independent Indonesia in 1948 and was quickly put down...
...As long as the problems of Berlin, Southeast Asia, China and other areas remain unsolved, as long as Moscow proclaims its intention of "burying" us by means of "peaceful" yet unfriendly "coexistence," disarmament remains cynical propaganda misleading the many good people who want it...
...They are the distinguishing marks of the 20th century...
...But if this is so, then the other results of the War should also be liquidated: Russia ought to give up territories annexed by agreement with Hitler and surrender the satellites absorbed into the Soviet Empire by actions of the Russian Army and secret police...
...therefore nobody will start one...
...No Western imperialism in Latin America, Asia and Africa...
...Soviet national security and the Soviet social system at home are threatened by no one, President Kennedy should stress...
...conditions in underdeveloped countries...
...The result of such operations is to encourage one-man dictatorships, corruption, expensive displays of national pride, and the destruction of the buds of individual freedom...
...And the July 26, 1923, joint statement signed by Adolf Joffe, Soviet Ambassador to China, and Dr...
...Our proposal should be: Hands off Cuba, and hands off Finland...
...This is the keynote of the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit conversation I envisage...
...Marx was a 19th century man who evolved his theories and programs from 19th century facts...
...In our world of struggle and balance of power it is apparently inevitable that great powers should compete for influence in non-aligned lands...
...This would not be summitry for the sake of negotiation—I see no virtue in that—but rather a summit conference for the sake of communication...
...The U.S...
...The expansion of Soviet power at the expense of weak peoples unable to oppose Communist infiltration should not be tolerated...
...It sought power...
...Japan, for instance, is in the 20th century industrially and technologically, in the 19th or earlier centuries socially, displaying remnants of feudalism and paternalism...
...Small wonder the conference got nowhere...
...Self-determination for Algeria and selfdetermination for West Berlin...
...Total or partial disarmament of all countries would be a happy event...
...Trouble would have arisen in Cuba if the Soviet Union had never existed...
...Moscow sits at the center of the circle and acts upon a number of points and segments of the arc...
...Internationalism, which represents the future, means more than freer trade...
...Welfare states divested of empire are the new image of an emerging, still far-from-perfect 20th-century international society...
...Above all, President Kennedy would do well to emphasize once more that the U.S...
...One merely has to study his foreign policy to see that...
...Disarmament is regarded by some as a step toward the solution of world problems...
...Stop Communist incendiarism in the less developed regions of the world...
...Yet one can imagine the initiative being taken in the form of a statement which President Kennedy might present in a personal meeting with Chairman Khrushchev...
...There will not be a third world war because the leaders of the U.S...
...If the Soviet Union were socialist or communist, it would not be imperialist...
...In Korea, for instance, the U.S...
...should agree...
...The Marshall Plan, the best thing America has done since World War II, required a huge effort on the part of this country, and it is paying more than economic dividends...
...Sun Yat-sen, President of China, opposed revolution in China "because there do not exist the conditions for the successful establishment of either Communism or Sovietism...
...Nor should we give the Soviet Union the advantage of using the name it has chosen...
...In the past, America has sought to cope with these pressures as they manifest themselves on the arc...
...Then it will see the folly of imperial power, shed its inferiority complex, which fills it with childish boasting and dreams of supremacy, and catch up with the West...
...In the same way, Asian Communists, acting on Moscow's instructions—Communist defectors have supplied the secret documents—ordered insurrections in Burma and Malaya which lasted more than 10 years (the Burma revolt still smolders) and drained the resources and tormented the people of those countries...
...and the USSR know the damage nuclear arms can inflict and will not invite such damage...
...Navy will have a fleet of such undiscoverable avengers...
...It might work...
...and, of course, American foreign policy...
...No Soviet imperialism in Latin America, Asia or Africa...
...The exception of Portugal is proof that it lags behind, still in the 19th or perhaps the 18th century...
...Meanwhile, the Soviet leadership exploits its workers, peasants, and intellectuals for the greater power of the State...
...If it is argued that one antagonist might achieve a scientific breakthrough, the answer is that he could not be sure the second had not invented the same dread instrument...
...Nobody can win a nuclear war...
...But since nations arm because of the existence of real or imaginary political problems, they will disarm only when those problems begin to be solved...
...Electricians, however, might string up a direct telephone line from Khrushchev's bed to Kennedy's...
...Already, only 17 years after the most devastating war in history, Western Europe, with a population larger than that of the United States, or that of the Soviet Union, has not only recuperated but is now becoming our strong partner in aiding the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America...
...Perhaps there is also some way of establishing a cold war deterrent, an arrangement which would reduce the virulence of the costly competition between the U.S...
...Moscow parades as the champion of nationalism and the defender of the poor...
...both sides have the deterrent...
...it is undercommitted...
...It would be comic if it were not sad that the foreign ministers convened to discuss disarmament in Geneva in March, 1962, only to find the Soviets dropping aluminum chaff in the Berlin air corridors...
...The nations of Europe cannot, will not, go to war with one another any more...
...The West has outlived 19th century exploitive capitalism and has entered the era of the welfare state where exploitation wanes and welfare waxes...
...The Russians are pouring oil on small fires to make big fires...
...Aiding others unselfishly is always in the national interest...
...Moscow did not start these processes and should not interfere with them for selfish Soviet-imperialistic reasons...
...In some measure, Russia's subversive efforts in the less developed regions during recent years have been due to its competition with China...
...History has proved him wrong...
...In the minds of many intellectuals and others in less developed countries and even elsewhere, the terms communist, socialist and Marxist are compliments, shining symbols, words of praise...
...The question arises of whether and how the Soviet government can be turned away from its present policies of power-expansion...
...They think God is a white man and Russia is red...
...The Soviet Premier would do well to realize that he is being pushed by Mao and his own obsolete aims into a world mire of mischief...
...In this connection, President Kennedy could point out to Khrushchev that fomenting Communist or proletarian revolutions in underdeveloped countries is antiMarxist, anti-Leninist and unintelligent...
...For the present, both Russia and America have the nuclear war deterrent...
...The U.S...
...They have lied to us too much...
...Persons rich in imagination explain how geese, squirrels, a berserk pilot, or some other fantastic agent will destroy the earth...
...Cuba cannot afford to sell sugar and tobacco for heavy arms, any more than Egypt can afford to exchange cotton for MIGs and tanks...
...They do not cause the same revulsion throughout the world that they do in the United States...
...The attraction is irresistible...
...The Soviet government need merely pursue the same end to achieve friendly coexistence with America...
...Any suggestion for a cold war deterrent involves highly complicated issues: the Soviet domestic situation...
...The United States now proposes to deal with the sources of these pressures, together with Moscow, in the hope of ending them...
...Moscow does not wish to be outflanked on the Left by China or supplanted as a power by China...
...Sino-Soviet relations...
...If the USSR had entered that war, a Russo-American world war would have commenced...
...The Ethan Allen, America's new nuclear submarine, carries 16 Polaris missiles whose destructive power is equal to that of all the bombs dropped by all the belligerents in World War II...
...Its manpower and material resources have never been stretched to the limit as were Great Britain's, Russia's and Germany's, for example, in World Wars I and II...
...If it bothers him, it is a sign he needs to put his own imperial house in order—if he can...
...It would be succeeded, he said, by socialism...
...But what would such withdrawal mean for either side when rockets can zoom across 3,000 miles in a few minutes...
...Apart from making dishonesty a policy and spreading lies at home and abroad, and apart from the millions of Soviet citizens Stalin did to death in the last 19 years of his life, the worst Soviet sin has been to spur unprepared countries to make "great leaps" forward in industry and to collectivize agriculture...
...This must mean that Russia is a capitalist country—which I believe it is— state-capitalist...
...American governments and American business should have helped Cuba—and other Latin American countries—achieve economic independence to fortify the political independence already theirs...
...It also means a freer man, free from narrow prejudices, free from segregation...
...It is altogether inexcusable and in fact damnable, however, to be an incendiary in countries where the first floors of buildings are just being built...
...The exertion would merely reduce our national fat...
...The Netherlands, with only 11 million people and no natural resources, is better off though it has lost the East Indies (Indonesia) with 90 million inhabitants and a treasure house of oil, tin, rubber, tobacco, etc...
...Western Europe is leading the world in the transformation of international politics...
...If Washington had intervened, it might have precipitated a third world war...
...As long as the Soviet government presses on West Berlin we will have to arm to deter Russian aggression...
...then Russians can live better and we can reduce our commitments, yet do more good...
...By the year 1990 or 2000 the Soviet Union may arrive in the 20th century...
...It is indeed legitimate that both Russia and the United States should court India, for instance, with aid and other forms of support...
...And when the state is the sole capitalist, sole employer and sole exploiter, the people have no power and suffer more than under private capitalism...
...It is inconceivable that England will again fight France or Germany, or that Germany will again fight England or France or the United States...
...Already, the Soviet Ambassador in Guinea, Daniel Solod, has been expelled by President Sékou Touré for too much meddling...
...Great Britain will ultimately join United Europe...
...it would not oppress its population through low pay and high prices...
...That way lies confusion...
...Encouraged by the U.S., which is also ready for the 20th century, Europe is uniting for greater growth, prosperity and peace...
...The Soviet people will suffer unless the Kremlin stops tormenting foreign peoples by political arson, intrigue and subversion...
...In the U.S., too, we have 19th century vestigial elements waging desperate struggles to hold back the clock...
...The success of Khrushchev's program for Soviet prosperity in 1980 is incompatible with his present expensive foreign policy...
Vol. 45 • June 1962 • No. 13
