Is the Cold War Really Over?

...As Henry L Stimson, Roosevelt's Secretary of War, tells in his Diary, that was the question the President presented to the War Cabinet on November 25, 1941 Knowing that the American people would not commit itself to an aggressive war, Roosevelt kept insisting into the first days of December 1941 that no ultimatum had been sent to Tokyo, on the contrary, only a few weeks earlier he had been considering the details of a modus vivendi Stimson told a congressional committee in 1946 "We ieahzed that m order to have the full support of the American people it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese people be the ones to [start the fighting] so that there should remain no doubt in anyone's mind as to who were the aggressors' The Johnson Administration never achieved this coalescence of a moral objective with a military outrage against the American people Whatever the import of the congressional resolution that followed in its wake, the Tonkin Gulf incident was not the functional equivalent of Pearl Harbor And a higher international ethic never sufficed as a justification for the years of sacrifice in an inconclusive, seemingly endless conflict Governed by our moral objectives, the war was conducted with self-denying mandates precluding offensive operations in North Vietnam or a blockade of its ports The Johnson Administration seemed to expect that other nations, especially the North Vietnamese, would become more understanding as they recognized America's moral concerns But the moral foundation of U S foreign policy was precisely what the world found so hateful And as the war dragged on, the immense domestic popularity the Johnson Administration had enjoyed rapidly eroded The New Wave of opmion tended to obliterate the facts of the cold war with its own curious morality This was remarkably evident at a press conference the President held the day after a half-million Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia Not a single correspondent raised any question about it, as the New York Times ruefully observed The New Wave also resuscitated the Communist charge that Israeli Zionism was an instrument of American imperialism Actually, America's aid to Israel was but another example of ethical motives contravening the purely pragmatic, had American foreign policy been shaped by its oil interests in the Middle East, the U S would never have thrown its support behind Israel Again, it was the moral ingredient that infunated New Leftists The Johnson Administration tried to appease its Leftist critics It allowed a long procession of them to make illegal hegiras to Hanoi In books, articles and pamphlets, writers reveled m a masochistic display ot passion for the North Vietnamese and Vietcong Old Leftists had an ideological holiday as they incanted phrases once more about "imperialism" and the "proletariat," were flattered by the attentions of Communist functionaries, and went swimming with them in Tonkinese waters New Leftists and Renewed Leftists returned to America to assure their listeners that the North Vietnamese Communists were a distinctive breed ot human being who would never massacre anybody Yet was the "Vietnam war a total defeat for the United States...

...A year later many Frenchmen ridiculed the notion of dying for Danzig As late as 1941...

...though President Roosevelt had taken executive steps to hamper Japanese expansion into Indochina and Southeast Asia, he would not risk any appeal to public opinion or a congressional vote of war against Japan Only the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor enabled Roosevelt to enlist practically unanimous support for the War As in the case of the atomic issue, the postwar years saw America remain loyal to a politics of morality The Eisenhower Administration, for example, influenced by the clerical ethics ot John Foster Dulles, inflicted a humiliating blow on its allies, Britain and France, when it compelled them to withdraw from the Suez Canal in 1956 The decision also contravened American interests and subserved those of the Soviets, who, beset by the Hungarian Revolution, were then in a shaken state Nonetheless, Dulles was obedient to his code, ignoring the truth Walter Lippmann had ably set forth in The Stakes of Diplomacy Where a vacuum of political power exists, some external force will move in Ethical foreign policy opened the Middle East to Soviet penetration Finally, it was a predominantly ethical consideration that led Presidents Kennedy and Johnson into Vietnam In a sense, Vietnam was the concluding chapter of the World War waged by the architects of the New Deal The place of immediate crisis was the same Indochina The moral arguments advanced in 1965 were those employed in 1941, a junior echelon of the New Deal, nsen to leadership in 1965, spoke with the identical moral conviction that had inspired them undei Roosevelt 25 years earlier Lyndon Johnson, Adlai Stevenson, Dean Acheson, Abe Fortas, Thurman Arnold, all abided by the New Deal ethic Their problem was the same one Roosevelt had faced Where moral objectives make Amencan involvement in war against an amoral enemy desirable, how can the enemy be maneuvered to fire the first shot...

...BY LEWIS S FEUER UNDERLYING the general indignation over our entanglement in Southeast Asia is the premise that the cold war is over Subscribers to this sanguine view feel the trouble with American foreign policy is that it has remained static in a changing world And they cite the Pentagon Papers as damning testimony to the grip of the outmoded "domino theory" on a Washington Establishment obsessed by the specter of a disciplined, monolithic, international Communist conspiracy The Wise Old Men and their Associates in Memoranda, it is charged, have not taken heed of the historical dynamic—especially of the rupture between the Soviet Union and Communist China, which with the legacy of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution is scarcely prepared to embark on international adventurism The globe is thus held—by, among others, New York Times Washington Bureau Chief Max Frankel—to have become intrinsically more stable than it was in 1955, when James Reston delivered a memorable lecture at the University of Minnesota entitled "An Appraisal of the Cold War " "In the present barbaric state of the world," Reston asserted, "the United States strategic air force, scattered around the periphery of the Communist world, is still the greatest deterrent to large-scale war " He warned America that it must move "not on one but on many fronts for the police problems we face in the jungles of Asia are in some ways more similar to the tasks of the French and Indian Wars than to anything else " We must not repeat the mistake the British made before each of the two World Wars, said Reston, in failing "to keep the Germans from thinking that they could win without being severely punished " He declared that "if a country seems to be on the verge of disappearing under the Iron Curtain, there is no limit to what we will spend at the last minute to try to save it " Are these assumptions of the cold war now as obsolete as the Eisenhower era9 Are they locked in the tediously repeated phrases of liberation, bnnksmanship and agonizing reappraisal minted by John Foster Dulles...

...Everyone knows what Josef Stalin would have done in the same situation He would have sent ultimata to virtually every nation, demanding capitulation on pain of extinction, then his secret-police agents would have descended on them, and where there was one Jan Masaryk, murdered in Czechoslovakia's Communist coup of 1948, there would have been thousands Bertrand Russell believed the United States should act swiftly and not lose its brief tenure of monopolized atomic power, he called on America to send its ultimatum to the Soviet Union When Stalin was refractory toward international control of the bomb, Russell, in the House of Lords on April 30, 1947, called for "an attempt to coerce the Russians, because I do not believe that they would willingly submit to inspection " He regarded the Russians as "completely mad and foolish'' in their opposition to international control, and the Americans as having "a sense of responsibility" exceeding that of his own countrymen But at that time all segments of American society were engaged in a discussion of the morality of the atomic bomb In the interests of a higher ethic—moved by doubts, some guilt, and above all a wish for others to see that it sought just relations among nations—America renounced atomic blackmail in favor of the United Nations forum It renewed its faith in a politics of morality Apolitics of morality, however, invariably finds itself counterposed to recalcitrant self-concern In 1938 Neville Chamberlain complained that Czechoslovakia was "a far-away country", how could Englishmen fight for it when they didn't even know wheie it was...

...Has the fact that the Communist world is now duohthic increased the chances for world peace9 LEWIS S FEUER, Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and a veteran NL contributor, is the author of The Conflict of Generations and the editor of Karl Marx's Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy In foreign policy as in other things, every generation likes to try its own unique style, that is the law of generational fashion Isolation alternates with internationalism, an enthusiasm for disarmament with a penchant for arms Wilsoman idealists are viewed by their successors as the dupes of munitions makers Today's young people want to bet on peace, to proclaim the cold war extinct They wish to close the books on Soviet imperialism and Chinese expansionism Yet these cyclical patterns can lead to catastrophe, for social realities do not necessarily alternate in phase with generational moods In the mid-'30s, for instance, Britons were in a fervor of pacifism, in 1935, 11.5 million of them petitioned for a "Peace Ballot" They were tired of statesmen like Winston Churchill who emotionally were still living in 1914 This raises the critical question Does the current desire to scrap our old attitudes as inapplicable to a duohthic Communism spring from a similar misreading of the international situation9 There are those who take it for granted that every split in the Communist world automatically reduces the likelihood of aggression Such was actually the case in 1948 when Yugoslavia left the Stalinist fold Tito and his comrades repudiated Stalin's nonethic that the end justifies any means, they were ready to mcorporate liberal democratic values into their Communist system, if only partially and hesitantly, they discarded the Leninist diatribes against "bourgeois imperialism' In addition, Tito brought back into socialist doctrine the almost forgotten "revisionist" ideas of Eduard Bernstein, the first heretical Social Democrat In the split between the Soviet Union and Communist China, however, Mao presented himself as the advocate of an international re-Staliniza-tion at the very time that Nikita Khrushchev was experimenting with a "de-Stalinization" of Soviet society It was the Stalinist system and mentality, we should bear in mind, that spawned the cold war Stalin wanted to impose his terrorist type of regime on as much of Europe as his military power could command He was prepared to ignore all previous understandings, whether for free elections in Poland or a unified Germany Indeed, more than half a century has gone by since the last free election took place in the Soviet Union itself, the Communists lost that vote in January 1918, and have yet to permit a free election in any country they controlled WHEN THE CHINESE assumed the mantle of neo-Stalinism, the Russians were obliged to compete for the ideological-political hegemony of the Marxist sphere Since ideological supremacy meant control of the Communist cadres—and neither side has forgotten Stalin's dictum that m the struggle of factions, control of the cadres is decisive—the USSR and People's Republic each had to exhibit diplomatic, political and military victories against the capitalist countries Before China became a rival for Marxist-Leninist predominance, the Soviet Union was in the comfortable position of a monopolist manufacturer, its market secure, its status unthreatened But the transition to a duopolistic Marxist system m the 1960s produced a political disequilibrium, just as it would have in the economic world And the balance could be restored only if Peking abandoned its quest for hegemony That Mao himself was intent on an expansionist, mili-tanst course we know from both Khrushchev's revelations concerning therr discussions and the famous 1965 article by Mao's Minister of Defense and designated heir, Lin Piao Mao urged the Soviet Premier to create an incident that would lead to war with the Umted States "Listen, Comrade Khrushchev," he said, "all you have to do is to provoke the Americans into military action, and I'll give you as many divisions as you need to crush them?100, 200, 1,000 divisions " If one refuses to give credence to the book Khrushchev Remembers, there is still the vivid recollection of the 1967 TV interview in which Khrushchev told how Mao had argued that even in the aftermath of an atomic war with the U S 300 million Chinese would survive Khrushchev was also certain that the Chinese were playing the paramount role in formulating North Vietnamese policy "When the rupture between the Communist party of the Soviet Union and the Communist party of China came out into the open, China began to lead the Vietnam Laborers' party around by a halter," he said "I don't think China will release Vietnam from its paws " Mao's plan, Khrushchev declared, "was to rule first China, then Asia, then what1...

...Admittedly, Stalinist terror within the Soviet Union has abated in its dimension Nevertheless, there is more repression m the USSR now under Brezhnev than in 1955 under Khrushchev This, in turn, is reflected in its external expression ALTHOUGH THE domino theory of Communist expansion has been much derided by critics of the Vietnam war, almost all Leftists, Old and New, today accept it They take it as a law of modern Asian history that a Communist triumph m Vietnam will be followed in due course by successive seizures of Thailand, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, and India In fact, Leftists regard it as typical of liberal naivete that the liberals expend their energies polemicizmg against the domino theory It is an aspect of the inherent contradictions of imperialism, Leftists say, that the imperialists begin to act self-destructively, failing to recognize their own self-interest Asian scholars who return nowadays to the guidance of Owen Lattimore find in his writing a more elegant version of the domino theory the "doctrine of the irreversible minimum " He saw in the Soviet mode of expansion—a series of irreversible steps toward hegemony —the very pattern Khrushchev saw in Mao's policy And what is the domino theory in its As an form if not simply a component of Lenin's 1923 statement that there would be a military conflict between the most civilized countries of the world and the orientally backward countries"0 The outcome of this struggle, wrote Lenin, "will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe " The competing expansions of the Soviet Union and Communist China have been ineluctable world realities As Adlar Stevenson observed toward the end of his life, in July 1965 "So far, the new Communist 'dynasty' has been very aggressive Tibet was swallowed, India attacked, the Malays had to fight 12 years to resist a 'national liberation' Today the apparatus of infiltration and aggression is already at work in North Thailand I do not think the idea of Chinese expansionism is so fanciful that the effort to check it is irrational " Yet here was the one assumption of the U S government that ran counter to basic political wisdom No people will support a war merely because the goal is rational, or moral, it must feel a commitment The trouble with our role in Vietnam was that its morality was too abstract Critics denounced the war as immoral, but in truth, sending American troops to fight on behalf of an international order, thousands of miles away from home, where we had no direct economic or security interests, was the highest act ot an ethical foreign policy Stalin long ago perceived this trait in American policy, the U S , he felt, was the one country that entered World War II for unselfish reasons As Robert E Sherwood reported in Roosevelt and Hopkins An Intimate History, when Stalin proposed the health of President Roosevelt at Yalta in February 1945, "He said that he and Mr Churchill in their respective countries had had relatively simple decisions They had been fighting for their very existence against Hitlerite Germany but there was a third man whose country had not been seriously threatened with invasion, but who had had perhaps a broader conception of national interest and even though his country was not directly imperiled had been the chief forger of the instruments which had led to the mobilization of the world against Hitler " Behind the hatred tor the United States that is so much a part of the conventional political stance among intellectuals abroad is the repressed knowledge that the Americans, for all their mistakes, have pursued a foreign policy more ethical in its motivation than any the world has seen No other country, past or present, with the atomic monopoly America had in 1945, would have refrained from imposing its will on the globe...

...In many ways, I think it will come to be looked upon as a proud period in our history, this was not the first time that the right side sustained defeat When the cacophony of critics' shouts has subsided, the judgment will be that for a few years the Americans fought a war to advance a higher morality of international relations, only to find themselves ultimately isolated as international selfishness and jealousy merged with irrationality In the era we are now entering, the U S will be compelled to play the game of global politics by more conventional rules A degree of psychological withdrawal is already apparent Americans are today inclined toward allowing others to go their own way, whatever the direction Significantly, when catastrophe visited Pakistan with flood, famine and mass murder, for the first time there was not a spontaneous outpouring of American aid to the victims If the U S was derided for havmg presumed to be the "world's policeman," it is now less disposed to be the world's donor Its chanties, beginning with the American Relief Administration to the Soviet Union during the famine of 1921-23 (which may well have preserved the Bolshevik Revolution), have scarcely brought it much affection As one of Stnndberg's characters said "Why do you hate me so much9 I have never tried to help you " After years of being told by its critics that violence is as American as apple pie, the U S is drawing back from a world where violence is as Pakistani as nee curry, as Arabic as lamb pilar, as Irish as Irish stew, as Russian as borscht By contrast apple pie seems a dish for pacifists The Vietnam war has had some more concrete results, though For one thing, it held a line in Asia through the years when Mao Tse-tung and his doctrine were in the ascendant It was on Septembei 3, 1965, that Lin Piao published his ominous document defining Mao's conception ot the next historical stage?the "rural areas of the world" (Asia, Africa and Latin America) encircling and defeating the "cities' (North America and Western Europe) He and Mao envisaged an intercontinental struggle—ranging from guerrilla operations to "wars of national liberation"—that would destroy Western civilization This strategic conception underlay the hatred for science and scholarly values, the affirmation of anti-intellectulism and guerrilla ideology that marked the Cultural Revolution While that upheaval succeeded in humbling the elder intellectuals, power almost completely devolved on the Army Unlike Soviet Communism, the Chinese model is ruled by a military, not a party, apparatus The Armed Forces accede to the use of Mao's quotations as a catechism, but appraise the configuration of military realities more soberly Thus the United States has managed to maintain the defensive line in Asia until the day when an aging, declining Mao has become a decorative figurehead and Peking's less fantasist leaders are prepared to deal with the Americans Relations among the Soviet Union, Communist China and the United States are governed by three simple truths (1) the Soviet Union wishes a war between Communist China and the U S , preferably nuclear, (2) Communist China would like to see the Soviet Union and the U S at war, preferably nuclear, and (3) America hopes tor a Communist civil war, but with conventional weapons In the domino game that China and Russia are playing against each other no less than the West, the initiative is in Chinese hands Mao's revolutionary appeal to the economically backward peoples, colored races, youth, and would-be guerrillas leaves Boss Brezhnev hopelessly behind And unless Brezhnev is prepared to discard the whole ideology of an international Communist movement, he cannot afford to be remiss in his competition with Mao To match every success of Chinese policy in Asia, Brezhnev has to search for some balancing victory in Europe or the Middle East He has to outscore the Americans at least as often as the Chinese do Were the Chinese to decide that war was less likely with the Americans than with the Russians—who would have no compunctions about using nuclear weapons?all wisdom would advise a rapprochement with the Americans in exchange for an agreement that they abstain from direct military involvement m Asia The Soviet Union, the only European imperialist power in an expanding phase, would then find itself at odds with the Chinese throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America To avoid having to deal with both China and the U S, Moscow would most probably decide to cultivate better terms with Washington, so that it could feel moie secure on its far-flung Asian borders The Russians are gradually becoming more apprehensive about their long-term situation in the Far East and Central Asia Their birth rate continues to decline, the non-Russian part of the Soviet population is a vigorously growing minority, and Chinese overpopulation threatens to spill over Soviet borders A hundred years ago Karl Marx thought he had pulverized the arguments of Thomas Malthus But the old parson, it appears, had a logic and perception which have withstood all Marxian dialectical thiusts In short, as race and population emerge as the unsolved problems for the 21st century, the ideological wai will tend to subside Such at least will be the course of European development it the Soviet Union puisues a rational policy But a margin of error always remains in the persisting irrational forces in Soviet society The mediocrats in the Party might decide to recoup their waning fortunes by trying to build a Soviet empire in the Middle East and Africa, making client states of especially those countries whose ruling elites fear Maoist levolutionanes At the same time, one can expect the liberals in the Soviet Union to have an opportunity tor much greater leverage on public opinion than they have had in many years Indeed, a strengthenmg of Soviet liberalism may be one of the best fruits of an American-Chinese rapprechement...

...In the Kremlin, the domino theory is less a hypothesis than an accurate description of Chinese actions in Southeast Asia The Soviet hope has been that the next steps toward the dominoes' collapse would occupy China for some years, leaving the USSR free of conflict over its own Asian borders (As recently as 1969, according to Chou En-lar, the Soviets let the Chinese know that if they remained mtransigent on the border issue, nuclear bombs might be unleashed on them ) Buying time in the short run is the one policy the Soviets find viable They regard Chinese expansionism as axiomatic, only its direction is indeterminate Meanwhile, the Soviets' own imperialist drive has become as pronounced under Leonid Brezhnev as it was under Stalin In the summer of 1968, a few days after Brezhnev embraced Aleksandr Dubcek and reiterated warm assurances of Czechoslovak independence, a half-million Soviet troops occupied the country and Soviet secret police kidnapped its Prune Minister In the summer of 1970, after solemn vows to the United States that it would honor the terms of a military truce with Israel, the Soviet Union blatantiy violated its word, continuing to arm the Suez region and embroidering each day's violation with added lies and vituperation Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko prevaricated with the same impassive professional skill he had shown President Kennedy in the case of the missile emplacements in Cuba (One remembers the scene of Gromyko issuing from the White House and telling newspapermen, as self-satisfaction escaped his controlled fixity, that he had enjoyed a "useful" discussion ) Brezhnev, moreover, has dared to do something his piedecessors never tried Stalin said his only concern was that Soviet security be guaranteed The current Party boss has gone further, promulgatng a doctrine that makes the Monroe Doctrine sound like the gentle suasion of a Unitarian ministei As explained in Pravda on September 26, 1968, the Brezhnev Doctrine abrogates the JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY claims of other Communist countries to sovereignty because these are based on an abstract, nonclass approach " "This means," wrote Pravda's commentator Sergei Kovalev, "that every Communist party is responsible not only to its own people but also to all the Socialist countries and to the entire Communist movement The weakening of any link in the world Socialist system has a direct effect on all the Socialist countries, which cannot be indifferent" Where, therefore, any Socialist country is judged by the Soviet Union to be ignoring the "decisive fact of our time the struggle between the two antithetical social systems—capitalism and socialism," Moscow claims the right "to act" militarily in "resolute opposition to the anti-Socialist forces " The Brezhnev Doctrine goes on to reaffirm the Stalinist principle that the end justifies the means "Those who speak of the illegality of the allied Socialist countries' actions in Czechoslovakia," Piavda observed, "forget that in a class society there is and can be no such thing as nonclass law Laws and the norms of law are subordinated to the laws of class struggle and the laws of social development " But Stalin at least would not venture to topple Tito militarily, despite the declaration of respect for Yugoslavian sovereignty that Brezhnev signed m Belgrade last month, under his doctrine the Soviet Union reserves the right to send its Armed Forces into Yugoslavia to secure a favorable regime Perhaps it is waiting for the opportune moment—when Tito dies and a succession crisis ensues—to accept the "invitation" of Yugoslav "patriots" to intervene Any departure by the Egyptian government from its plan to Socialize the society would likewise warrant Soviet reprisal Should Cairo try to expel the Soviet forces now within its borders, or administer the Suez Canal in ways Moscow deems mimical to itself, or fail to provide bases for the Soviet Mediterranean fleet, then the Brezhnev Doctrine can be invoked to bring it into line Proclaiming the "Soviet mission to Socialize," the doctrine becomes the Communist version of the "white man's burden" and "la mission civihsatrice ' In principle, of course, the Soviets can do to China what they did to Czechoslovakia A preemptive strike at Chinese nuclear installations would surely be accompanied by a Pravda statement that this action was required to safeguard the gams ot the world Communist movement In these circumstances, can one rightly say the Communist world has so been altered that the ideas of the last four decades are no longer valid, that appeasement no longer breeds aggression9 Has the "barbaric state" of the world described by Reston in 1955 really changed...