Is Three a Crowd?
HOPKINS, MARK
THE GLOBAL TRIANGLE-2 Is Three a Crowd? BY MARK HOPKINS JUST AS America and Russia spent a large part of the '60s devising alternatives to nuclear war, it now seems they will be devoting much of...
...The Soviets, moreover, can say approximately the same of the United States...
...Both minimize showy Soviet-American summits, partly because they prefer more effective alternate diplomatic channels, and partly because they want to avoid raising expectations that cannot be satisfied...
...In other words...
...Taken together, these were viewed by Moscow as blatant threats...
...If their dealings suffer a paucity of innovation and daring, at least they are cast in hard, realistic terms...
...The ability of each side to see its acknowledged adversary in shades lighter than black has had a calming effect on their relations...
...What confuses and divides American as well as Soviet opinion about the opposing camp is the surviving cold-war vocabulary, saturated with boasts of missile prowess and fearsome warnings about the predatory nature of Communism or imperialism...
...One reason is that the men who set policy for both governments have been at it off and on for nearly a generation...
...But there is nothing fixed or inviolable about this relationship...
...But China will have something to say about this...
...Biological weapons are out...
...They were soon unsettled by two developments: the escalation of the Vietnam war, and a U.S...
...Similarly, Russia's flirtation with Chile's Marxist government is what Nixon's Administration would expect from Moscow...
...Moscow, no less than Washington, worries about a "first strike"—a sudden, fatal change of the ground rules...
...When Lyndon B. Johnson became President, the Soviets seemed to believe that the rapport established between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev could be maintained...
...If this appeared to signal an "era of confrontation," the similarities between the Nixon and Brezhnev leaderships remained intriguing...
...it is a wholly pragmatic arrangement...
...If any euphoria lingered from the Kennedy-Khrushchev days, that killed it...
...Even though Johnson minimized Soviet support of North Vietnam, succeeded in arranging the unproductive Glassboro meeting with Premier Aleksei Kosygin and hoped almost to the end to begin SALT, the presence of more than half a million American troops in Indochina, backed by a growing domestic war machine, had a sobering effect in Moscow...
...Once Russia matched the U.S...
...It was not until the invasion of Cambodia that the Kremlin's confidence was shaken, as later the Soviets' stealthy placement of missiles near the Suez Canal—and scouting of Cuba for a nuclear submarine base —jolted Washington's assumptions...
...Meanwhile, the "MIRVing" of American nuclear missiles is seen by the Kremlin as a deliberate attempt to maintain a "position of strength...
...aggression and provocation, then went on to declare a seemingly authentic willingness to improve Soviet-American relations...
...And just as the two superpowers are trying to negotiate an end to the arms race at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), so they appear to be striving for a kind of diplomatic parity in their relations with Peking...
...Yet aside from Strangelovc contingencies, Soviet-American relations now display a certain old-shoe familiarity...
...The ground rules still do not encompass all regions, of course, but they have been refined by successive leaderships in the USSR and the U.S., and so long as they serve the national security of the two countries they are likely to be observed...
...less powerful Asian nations will want to be under someone's umbrella...
...Small wars involving Soviet and U.S...
...The Soviet press began asserting with increasing conviction that America was on an expansionist, imperialist course...
...China's inevitable reaching out into the world, combined with the Soviet Union's ever more conspicuous extension of military and economic influence, seems certain to force some significant diplomatic readjustments...
...Out of these has come the vocabulary of cooperation and coexistence that usually punctuates speeches of American and Soviet leaders...
...Nixon's state visits to Rumania and Yugoslavia—two conspicuous dissidents in or near the Soviet sphere—were the type of diplomacy that the Soviets understand, even if they object to it...
...BY MARK HOPKINS JUST AS America and Russia spent a large part of the '60s devising alternatives to nuclear war, it now seems they will be devoting much of the '70s to accommodating the People's Republic of China...
...in ICBMS, the reasoning went, it would confidently agree to a freeze...
...Through alternating cycles of amity and hostility, the superpowers have evolved methods other than summit conferences and threats of Armageddon to settle differences...
...The counteraction, equally sobering in Washington, was the Soviet Union's largely unexpected invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...Subsequently, it produced cultural exchanges, technical and commercial agreements, written and unwritten accords on spheres of influence and use of military power, particularly nuclear...
...Instead the Soviets sailed right past parity, and at last public count had 1,440 ICBMS in place to America's 1,054...
...Today the spectrum of issues has expanded and become enormously more complex, but at least Soviet-American relations run on two fairly predictable, if sometimes widely separated tracks...
...Some of the more sophisticated and expensive new hardware may be resisted if SALT succeeds...
...forces should be fought by proxy—as they have been in Indochina and the Middle East—and large ones are to be avoided altogether...
...Perhaps that also explains their nagging distrust of each other's intentions...
...Most nuclear testing is off-limits...
...Ten years ago, when the United States was still indisputably the strongest power on earth, its chief argument with the Soviet Union was over Europe, specifically Germany...
...It is hard to imagine Nixon and Brezhnev in warm, personal embrace, but in private conversation they would probably understand one another perfectly...
...Japan and India will need reassurance...
...Ultimately, three could prove to be a crowd...
...In the latter half of the '70s, the Pentagon projects, its Army will have operational nuclear missiles capable of striking Soviet and American targets...
...In short, global competition will continue throughout the '70s...
...Originally, for example, Washington's argument for SALT hinged on the parity concept...
...While the major nuclear powers will retain superiority in strategic weapons, Peking's diplomacy will surely become more authoritative once it has long-range rockets in hand...
...Neither a Vietnam war, nor a Peking-Moscow split, nor a Middle East entanglement, nor the presence of Soviet warships and "first-strike" missiles complicated relations...
...missile buildup on land and at sea that did not level off until 1967...
...It will be tested in the '70s by Soviet global expansion—which will be neither comfortable for nor always acceptable to the United States—by the so far compulsive arms race and, lastly, by China's emergence onto the world scene...
...Thus Moscow and Washington may hope to keep China suspended between them in a manner that will not upset the delicate world balance of power they have established during the last decade...
...Carried by the momentum of history, Leonid Brezhnev's address to the 24th Party Congress condemned U.S...
...President Nixon and his advisers are probably right in believing the "Soviet Union wishes to see our influence [in Asia] diminished and yet fears that diminution as enhancing the possibility of expanded Chinese influence...
...the U.S...
...Both hew to traditional power politics...
...Nonetheless, Russia and America have roughly defined the tolerable limits of their confrontation...
...a peace treaty ending the cold war has yet to be signed either in Moscow or Washington...
...The "era of negotiations" actually began in the late 1950s with the Eisenhower-Khrushchev "Spirit of Camp David...
...NIXON TOOK OFFICE with surprisingly favorable credentials in the Soviet Union, where journalists reporting the election campaign were instructed to avoid recalling Nixon's Communist-hunting past...
...Evidently Moscow concluded that if Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey on the promise of having a plan to withdraw from Vietnam, he would have to pull out...
...Similarly, Nixon's "State of the World" message asserted that "intransigence remains a cardinal feature of the Soviet system," but apparently not such an obstacle that common problems could not be fruitfully negotiated...
...and the USSR seem to know where they disagree, and where there is opportunity for cooperation...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 11
