DANCING IN THE DARK

...The movement is divided, and it has had as much difficulty in developing a coherent response to the tragic events in Poland as the governments have had, but it is very much alive...

...This concern is not supported by a careful reading of recent history...

...Here was a place at last where our military could demonstrate its muscle and change history...

...Aiming more missiles at the Soviet Union will inevitably result in more missiles aimed at the United States...

...But increasingly, the leaders of other countries are coming to the conclusion that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union has useful ideas for the times we live in, that we are both frozen in the past...

...The U.S...

...President Reagan's notion that the Soviet Union could be pressed to drop out of the arms race by a major U.S...

...Under the cover of a massive nuclear rearmament campaign, the Reaganites are committed to resuming counterinsurgency warfare against national liberation movements...

...A real security policy would begin with some fundamental questions—not about the Russians, the Chinese, much less the Libyans, but about ourselves...

...The Carter Administration had proceeded with production of the neutron bomb and deployment of theater nuclear weapons...

...Yes, the Soviet leaders might decide one day to launch their missiles against the United States...

...Why should they...

...A new government struggling to remake a poor country desperately needs capital, and will not reject opportunities to earn it...

...Yes, the leaders of Western Europe might bow to Soviet blackmail and abandon the Western alliance, although the Reagan Administration is doing a much better job than the Russians at this point in pushing them out...

...rapprochement with China, and the Soviet Union's emergence as the only nation in the world surrounded by hostile communist powers, that particular fiction has been hard to maintain...

...Just as it was easy for De Gaulle to use Vietnam to dramatize France's independence from the United States, it became morally and politically satisfying for today's leaders of Holland, Germany, and France to oppose the United States on an issue in which they had so little at stake themselves...

...A serious program of conversion would require the leaders on both sides to confront powerful interests that have a bureaucratic and ideological commitment to the arms race...

...His most recent book is "Real Security: Restoring American Power in a Dangerous Decade," published as a Simon and Schuster-Touchstone paperback...

...Excessive military spending produces the same consequences as military defeat: It gives foreign governIdeas, not arms, have spelled American influence in the world merits greater control over the life of the country...

...A national security policy in a democracy can be successful only if it meets two tests: It must provide as much realistic protection as possible in a dangerous world, and it must make people believe they are reasonably safe...

...For the President, Poland was a cheap Cold War victory...

...Depending on the day and the persuasiveness of his most recent visitor, Secretary Haig favors "linkage"—conditioning arms talks on Soviet good behavior in Poland and elsewhere—or rejects the idea...

...The great war that took the flower of a generation and doomed great empires broke out because no one could think of a way to stop it...

...National liberation struggles have occurred and continue around the world...

...That in itself would be impressive evidence of a turn toward peace...

...If we are to take seriously the counterinsurgency goal, even the projected military budget is not nearly large enough...

...To think that an uneducated, unemployable population of young people does not pose a threat to the security and stability of the country is to live in a dream world...

...Independence movements and social forces, which by nature are unpredictable, have been viewed consistently as threats for two reasons: First, it is assumed they will inevitably come to be dominated by the Soviet Union...

...Unless we do so, there will be no security for Americans...

...Quite simply, the United States lacks the military power to carry out a worldwide policy of counterrevolution...

...Moderation, which Carter had shown in Nicaragua, was being abandoned in El Salvador before he left office...

...policy bear heavy responsibility...

...But it is a serious error to ascribe all these developments to the plans, prejudices, and politics of the Reagan Administration...

...European leaders perceived that the Reaganites were poor practitioners of Real-politik...

...The Reagan Administration has^ cut at the very investments that would most improve our security—investments in the future of the United States...

...The United States can only temporarily prevent such movements from coming to power...

...Government is devoting its diplomatic energies to isolating itself...

...policy but dares not act on every irresponsible impulse...

...embargo has made necessary...

...The political problems facing the industrial world and the East-West confrontation itself are further complicated by the now-chronic economic crisis of the West...

...bit for as long as anyone could remember...

...refusal to accept a "no first use" policy heightens anxiety not only in the Soviet Union but in Europe, particularly when the President speaks openly of plans for a limited nuclear war...

...A careful reading of the Pentagon budget does not show that the additional billions for "defense" will provide significant additional military capabilities...

...Indeed, much evidence suggests that revolutionary regimes may try to change the terms on which multinational corporations are permitted to participate, and may strike a harder bargain in selling resources—but sell them they will...

...The Vietnamese, the Angolans, and other national liberation movements have consistently sought diplomatic relations and mutually advantageous commercial relations with the United States...

...A substantially less crowded parking lot at the Pentagon and at the Ministry of Defense in Moscow, or the conversion of military plants to civilian production, would provide more reassurance than satellite photos of missile silos, as important.as they are...

...What used to be advanced by the Left as a scandalous critique of American imperialism is now routinely invoked by generals and admirals testifying before Congressional appropriations committees: that the mission of our military is to protect corporate access to raw materials around the world...

...Vietnam has become heavily dependent on the Soviet Union, but only after hopes of entering into normal relations with the United States were dashed...

...To cut back on investment in safe, renewable sources of energy in the name of economy is to leave the country dangerously vulnerable...

...Clear political commitment in the direction of demilitarization offers the most reliable evidence of peaceful national intentions...

...By the time Reagan took office, a number of his basic assumptions had already been accepted at least as working hypotheses by the Carter Administration...

...Barnet is a senior fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C...

...The freeze would symbolize surrender of the fantasy of nuclear victory...

...How much protection is possible in the nuclear age...

...The Reagan ideology calls for delaying negotiations with the Soviet Union until the needed increments in U.S...

...The role of the Catholic Church, especially with respect to El Salvador, imposes an important political limitation on the White House...

...It was a small country on which the Soviet Union had no claims—one that had been unmistakably in the American orRichardJ...

...might in virtually every sphere...

...But in the nuclear age, when the weapons became suicidal, the connection between violence and politics snapped, even though it still shapes our thinking...

...President Eisenhower was able to threaten the Chinese with use of the atomic bomb to end the Korean war...

...It is the growing recognition of this reality in Europe and now, increasingly, in the United States that is fostering a new peace movement and a revived search for an alternative security system...

...It is clear that the Cubans did not and still do not desire the degree of ecoOur foreign policy is most alarming in its continuity nomic dependence on the Soviet Union that the U.S...

...Carter entered the White House with some intimations, at least, of the dangers we face, while Reagan seems to have none...

...More than sixty-five years of experience suggest that the Soviet leaders are quite capable of exacting whatever sacrifices may be necessary from the Soviet people to continue the arms race, and that they have been determined since the Cuban missile crisis not to fall behind...

...The starting point of an American security policy must be coexistence with the Soviet Union...

...An arbitrary percentage increase in the military budget had been ordered, not on the basis of a new analysis of American military needs or a clearer understanding of the functions of the new weapons but as a symbolic measure to stem "the decline of American power...

...The war fever would feed the public enthusiasm for the $1.5 trillion the Administration planned to spend on the military...

...The El Salvador intervention has elicited the most effective public protest in the United States since the Indochina war...

...A national security policy must, therefore, aim at producing as stable an international environment as possible for the orderly evolution of American Society...

...For 10,000 years or so, the grisly arithmetic of the arms race did make a difference: It was undoubtedly better to have more bows and arrows than the other side, and it was better still to have more tanks and ships and aircraft...

...At a time when the Soviet Union is more isolated than it has been since 1945, the U.S...

...There will be no prosperity for the West if the world population continues to grow but billions remain outside the economy, unable to act either as producers or consumers...

...We cannot approach such a goal without the hard work of developing a new international monetary system, of dealing with the problem of world debt, especially in the Third World, of establishing new ground rules for integrating the former colonial nations into a world economic order...

...But to isolate ourselves from great historical currents, either by ignoring them or by trying vainly to turn them back, is to condemn ourselves to impotence...

...Americans find it especially difficult to think realistically about nuclear weapons because for about twenty years after they were first devised, this country alone derived power and influence from them...

...Asecond conspicuous failure of Ronald Reagan's first year in office was U.S...

...Indeed, the Reagan Administration has shown greater willingness to moderate its rhetoric out of deference to the European allies than Carter demonstrated at the time of the Soviet attack in Afghanistan, when he plunged ahead unilaterally with a range of sanctions the Europeans could not support...

...crime so widespread that fear stalks the city...

...The peace movement is growing in the United States, too...

...The United States, despite its revolutionary origins, is by nature a conservative country...

...Liberals criticize the Administration for doing what it said it would do—promoting a mindless arms race in the name of national security, supporting murderous regimes in places such as El Salvador in the name of anti-communism, and striving clumsily to organize the world into an anti-Soviet crusade...

...Aserious national security policy would confront the historic moment we now face...

...it would have to be followed by serious negotiations for radical reductions in nuclear stockpiles...

...Reagan could lament the fate of the Polish workers on the international airwaves while rolling back the rights and privileges of American workers, but he could not work his will in Eastern Europe any more than he could in Western Europe or Central America...

...The assumption that there was a connection between Pentagon funding and American power to influence allies, to manage crises like that in Iran, and to prevent the Soviet Union from building up its arms preceded Reagan...

...Even Poland illustrates how difficult it is to turn Reagan rhetoric and ideology into policy...

...armaments buildup is a fatuous hope...

...position—a demand for the removal of all Soviet missiles in Europe in exchange for a U.S...

...But the Administration wisely shies away from conscription because it recognizes that the draft would be a referendum on foreign policy, and that while fighting the "Russians" in El Salvador or Libya may be a stirring idea for Reagan's right-wing backers, it looks quite different to those who would have to go do the fighting...

...Over its 200-year history, the United States has exerted more influence in the world through its ideas than through its weapons...

...The world would still be a dangerous place...

...It provided a pretext for trying to squeeze the Soviets with a series of sanctions that offer no hope whatever of reforming the Kremlin leaders...

...But instead of signaling the final victory over the "Vietnam syndrome," the Reagan Administration's call to arms in Central America proved that many Americans had, indeed, learned the lessons of Vietnam...

...The web of relationships we have developed with the other leading industrial countries of the world in the last three decades is seriously frayed...

...Yes, the Russians could invade Western Europe, but for thirty years or more no Western intelligence service has put much credence in that threat...

...promise not to put some in...

...There is overwhelming evidence that virtually every national liberation movement has sought to avoid dependence on any great power...

...It is even less clear what new political options such new capabilities would offer...

...The industrial powers of Europe and Japan are no longer clients, and cannot be treated as such...

...The headlines would focus on the brave little war in El Salvador and would crowd out the pictures of unemployed on the street, soup kitchens, and other politically burdensome aspects of the Reagan recovery plan...

...Secretary of State Alexander Haig spent his early days creating headlines on the subject, sending high officials to Europe to enlist them in the new crusade against the peasant guerrillas in that tiny country...

...It is easy to point to a succession of foreign policy failures, difficult to find the successes...

...Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger's posturing over the neutron bomb—he convened a press conference to inform the world we were building the weapon whether the Europeans liked it or not—and the redoubled effort to force the early deployment of European theater nuclear weapons brought more than two million people into the streets in protest...

...The choice, the Reagan-ites believed, was between the sentimentality of Jimmy Carter's human rights policy and the historic dictates of the Monroe Doctrine...

...In recent years the situation has become far more dangerous...

...But so isolated are the nuclear theologians from popular attitudes, so little understanding do they have of the way things have changed since the days of John Foster Dulles and Konrad Adenauer, that the President was amazed when his words produced panic...

...But guerrilla movements around the globe are better armed than they were in the 1960s, thanks to the generosity of both superpowers in spreading sophisticated hardware around the Third World...

...policy toward Europe...

...But by the time the last explicit nuclear threat was made—President Carter's "Doctrine" that called for using nuclear arms to keep the Russians in check in the Persian Gulf—it was no longer credible...

...In their rush to respond to the new anti-communist crusade, more nettlesome issues that divided the alliance would conveniently be forgotten...

...Still, billions of dollars go year after year into an incredible defense against that threat, based on plans to blow up Germany with nuclear weapons...

...but since such governments do not exist in most places in the world, we will not hesitate to support dictatorships of the Right in order to suppress national liberation movements...

...we must have close relations with other countries, and must work with them to create the conditions in which prosperity and democracy can be maintained here...

...it is absolutely crucial that both sides recognize that military superiority is unattainable...

...Political movements are certainly no easier to destroy with weapons in the 1980s than they were in the 1960s and 1970s...

...That Cuban soldiers were offered as guards for the Gulf Oil refinery in Angola, and that Gulf accepted them, are better indications than Reagan's rhetoric of world realities...

...How much can we do by ourselves...

...To be sure, progress in these matters is modest compared to the need, but there has been no learning at all, and no change, with respect to the most basic problems of national security...

...But ever since the Sino-Soviet dispute, the U.S...

...Recently, there have been some encouraging examples of social learning and change: Serious environmental damage has been reversed, in some instances, by human intervention, and the industrial nations have figured out how to use less energy...

...The foreign policy of the United States is now in crisis...

...A national security policy that promotes stability for the United States must rest on a fundamentally different conception of the U.S.-Soviet relationship from that put forward by the present Administration or by its predecessors...

...Both sides should state explicitly that they will refrain from using or threatening the use of nuclear weapons except in response to a nuclear attack...

...a drug trade so pervasive that its underground economy—millions of dollars over which neither the government nor legitimate business have any control—is about the only growth industry...

...Just as in Indochina more than fifteen years earlier, an American government sought to legitimate its intervention into a civil conflict by arguing that it was really an international war...

...But nothing worked according to plan...

...As a result of a coup in 1979 followed by a government in which some progressive Christian Democrats briefly took part, the ruling junta could be presented as a moderating voice seeking to mediate between the extreme Right and the extreme Left...

...It is a sign of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of our politicians that they confront these problems by threatening the industrious Japanese and Europeans instead of taking the innovative steps that would make us better competitors...

...Some time ago, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt pointed to some of the similarities between our time and the period before World War I. Then, too, the flow of world politics was out of control...

...The economic system on which our power rests is in deep trouble...

...The Reagan Administration shows almost no interest in these problems and, indeed, suggests that somehow they are annoying byproducts of U.S.-Soviet confrontation...

...However, the U.S.-Soviet relationship cannot be stabilized by a mere freeze...

...When some of our cities look as if the war has already occurred, when millions of young women and men face only the most dismal future, the level of alienation and distress in the society threatens its very cohesion...

...An observer from space looking down at Washington, D.C., where decisions are made to spend trillions to counter the Russsian threat, would see the capital city in an advanced state of social dissolution: many thousands ill-housed and ill-fed...

...Most historians ascribe the second and greater catastrophe which began in 1939 to world economic breakdown...

...Increasingly, the churches here and abroad are raising fundamental moral and political questions about nuclear "defense...

...But there can be no coexistence with the Soviet Union on any basis other than the principle of sovereign equality...

...The power we need is not the power to destroy other societies, or even to remake them, but to renew our own society...

...Because we have failed to develop a national security policy that provides real protection for American citizens against real dangers, Japanese car makers and Arab oil producers have been able to inflict needless damage on millions of Americans...

...The Administration is now caught in El Salvador...

...Right-wing ideologues attack the President with rising fury because he does not do any of these things swiftly enough to suit them and has shown himself to be more "pragmatic" in some respects than they would like...

...the U.S...

...Americans— and Russians—are less secure today than they were in the mid-1970s...

...As Michael Klare has pointed out, this Administration's approach bears a certain resemblance to the Kennedy Administration's...

...By Inauguration Day, the United States was once again hostage to a hopeless client...

...Fortunately, disturbing historical analogies do not have the force of physical laws, but they do provide us with essential opportunities to learn and change...

...In Europe, El Salvador quickly captured the public imagination as Vietnam had...

...The purpose of our national security policy is to protect people, property, and the values we cherish...

...The American view remains today what it was in the time of John F. Kennedy: We will seek to support governments that are non-repressive and forward-looking...

...The United States and the Soviet Union must also seek equality in the order of battle...

...That is the legitimate purpose of a national security policy...

...Those relationships have long been in need of repair, but they cannot be ignored or scrapped, as some of the Reagan people seem to believe, without courting great dangers...

...This is a dangerous Administration that wishes to adopt the paranoid credo of the Committee on the Present Danger as official U.S...

...The United States is prepared to abandon its stated ideals and expose itself to the world as a force favoring reaction and repression because it fears popular movements...

...The brutal economic medicine of the Reagan Administration inspires little confidence even among those who benefit spectacularly from the tax write-offs, subsidies, and other transfer payments from the poor to the rich...

...Once the button is pushed there is nothing we can do to defend the country, nor is there much more we can do than we have already done to discourage such a lunatic decision...

...A democratic system, however imperfect, struggling to achieve human values and offering unprecedented levels of comfort for the ordinary citizen, has excited hope throughout the world...

...At the same time, the Soviet Union is a formidable military power bent on achieving the capacity to match U.S...

...El Salvador seemed to provide a perfect test...

...The opposition, which has included powerful elements of the Catholic hierarchy, became so strong that the State Department abruptly reversed itself and told the press it was making too much of the little war in Central America...

...In a dangerous age, economic and political stability is a more important national goal than ever for the United States...

...indeed, three factors have made the task harder...

...Moving quickly to convert its ideology into policy, the Administration sought to drum up support for its huge military program by invoking that old standby, the Soviet menace...

...There can be no stability without an end to the U.S.-Soviet arms race, which cannot be ended unless we change the internal structures within each society that keep the arms race going...

...The task of our age is to create the political machinery, the economic structure, and above all the new modes of human relationship that could convert this idea from a pious phrase in Jimmy Carter's Inaugural Address into a practical political vision...

...Unless efforts are made to isolate revolutionary struggles from U.S.-Soviet military competition, superpower confrontations in the Third World are likely to spark general war...

...When democratic governments resort to strategies of annihilation, they can't avoid alarming and outraging their own populations...

...We need mutually agreed-upon restrictions on how each superpower can deploy its military power— rules that would outlaw future interventions of the kind we have seen in Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Angola, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Afghanistan...

...But from the start, economic realities such as the grain trade with the Soviet Union could not be jeopardized...

...If Soviet consumers began to get the priority attention showered on the Soviet military-industrial complex, if Soviet tanks began to look as dowdy as Soviet hotel elevators, one could reasonably conclude that something important had happened...

...The alternative is war, and war would mean the end of the American experiment, if not the end of civilization or even of the species...

...So also are the alternative economic systems, including social democracy and socialism...

...It cannot be made less dangerous by playing on the paranoia of its leaders...

...investments will no longer be welcome and our country will be denied access to vital resources...

...But a serious critique must dig below the eccentricities of Alexander Haig, the self-pronounced "vicar" of American foreign policy, and his recent nemesis, Richard Allen, to understand that the most alarming aspect of the policy is its continuity...

...Third, the ideological foundations of counterinsurgency have been destroyed...

...The Reagan Administration's stated objective of military superiority must once more be abandoned...

...It has been clear for a long time that we cannot honor that purpose acting alone...

...To carry out such policy without conscription would be unthinkable, for the costs of maintaining a volunteer military force adequate to the security tasks this Administration has defined would be prohibitive...

...The traditional guns versus butter argument misses the point...

...Such relationships are not built by multi-million-dollar arms deals or obsolete alliances, but by new rules of international society that can create economic and political stability...

...We are heading toward an all-out arms race, the consequences of which we do not comprehend...

...Americans are becoming less and less secure because we are pouring our money and our energy into pointless efforts to head off these remote threats or into trying to thwart nationalist revolutions in poor countries that need not be threats at all...

...But by the end of his first year in office, the President was forced to give a ringing endorsement to arms limitation in Europe—in the so-called Zero Options speech—to stem the rising tide of Continental protest...

...It is clear that the Soviet Union cannot be threatened into reform or into withdrawal from regions it controls...

...near-monopoly that made earlier threats look serious had been lost...

...The Reaganites were confident that the American people were spoiling for a war to win—a war that would blot out the ignominy of Vietnam...

...Most significant, neither political party seems ready to offer a plan for harnessing this nation's enormous strengths to produce a stable, prosperous society...

...Second, the "Vietnam syndrome" is still with us...

...The greatest threat to the United States is posed not by Russian missiles, much less Soviet ideas, but by our failure to manage our own society...

...The threats at which we throw most of our money are rather implausible compared to the more urgent threats that face the American people...

...Power is, indeed, indispensable to national security in a dangerous world...

...Other forms of military intervention have also been announced as the United States sinks deeper into involvement in what is now a regional conflict in Central America—a conflict for which decades of U.S...

...The lack of effective domestic policy poses a critical threat to national security in several ways...

...But we must not continue to blind ourselves to the true sources of our power...

...Negotiations have begun on an inherently non-negotiable U.S...

...We are at the end of a 500-year period of colonialism and imperialism...

...Why have we been so slow to learn the basic lessons of national security in the nuclear age...

...Whether the oil glut continues or not, there is nothing that would improve the security of the nation and the stability of the economy as much as an orderly transition to a safer, less vulnerable energy system...

...The Administration, like much of the press in the United States, underestimated and misunderstood the European peace movement...

...The situation in El Salvador proved far less tractable than the Reagan Cold Warriors had anticipated...

...What should we ask of other nations...

...The national interest of the United States is stability...

...The official unemployment rate (which understates the problem) is approaching 9 per cent as a national average, and is far higher in distressed areas...

...The Reagan Administration seems unwilling to face the decisions its own policy is forcing on the nation...

...If Pax Americana could no longer be maintained throughout the non-socialist world, it could at the very least be enforced in our traditional backyard...

...The shadow of nuclear weapons hung over the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962...

...The military spending under Reagan is greater and cuts in domestic programs more severe than contemplated by Carter, but his Administration, too, had planned major additions to the nuclear arsenal...

...What are we trying to protect...

...According to the Reagan game plan, the United States could be mobilized around the El Salvador issue, and so could the allies who, conventional conservative opinion had it, would be greatly reassured by the decisions of the new Administration...

...But Reagan succeeded only in terrifying many Europeans about the nature of American intentions...

...We face the most dangerous moment in our national history since World War II...

...military buildup are in place...

...It is an Administration that can easily be ridiculed for its Pax Americana is a flop, even in our backyard incompetence...

...In the Reagan Administration, belligerent talk, the willingness to conduct a full-scale counterinsurgency war in El Salvador, dogfights with Libyan aircraft, and the preference for hectoring the Soviet Union instead of negotiating with it have all contributed to the deterioration of the international situation and to the insecurity of the American people...

...Carter set some admirable goals, but failed to attain them because he was unable to explain or defend his more realistic concerns and his more sophisticated approach toward the world force of revolutionary nationalism...

...Most of the expense of the military goes not to nuclear weapons but to the "general purpose" forces whose primary function it is to keep nationalist left-wing governments from coming to power in "strategic" areas...

...Unaccountably, the United States has given advanced rockets that can sink an aircraft carrier to some of the very countries we wish to impress by parading our Navy in their waters...

...Even as the civil war intensifies, and headlines report massacres on an ever-larger scale, Washington certifies that human rights are now respected to the point that military aid can be substantilly increased...

...We need simple, clear rules prohibiting the further deployment of Soviet as well as American military forces outside their own borders...

...A nuclear-free world is the only stable environment for a secure human race...

...There is little hope of significant recovery of the economic momentum that characterized the brief period of Pax Americana (19451971) without fundamental reform of the world monetary system and a new set of ground rules for conducting world trade that would make it possible for billions of people in the Third World to participate for the first time in international society...

...The most immediate and conspicuous failure is in El Salvador...

...But in the chaos of this moment, the United States has greater means than any other nation to develop a new democratic economy that meets basic needs, encourages creativity, and civilizes power...

...While squandering funds and talent on the remote threats, we are diverting energy and resources in a way that threatens our very survival as a free society...

...The brutality and sacrifice involved in conducting highly visible and brutal wars against bands of peasants can be legitimated only if the guerrillas are seen to be part of a worldwide communist conspiracy...

...Both superpowers should accept clear ground rules that bar the use of military force by themselves or their proxies in the Third World...

...We should offer the Soviets a broad agreement that embodies the principle of parity on which they have long insisted—a concession that sacrifice's no legitimate interest of the United States...

...This point can be telegraphed in many ways...

...While welcoming the loopholes, subsidies, and bail-outs provided by Uncle Sam, large investors do not seem to have much confidence in the long-term prospects of the economy...

...First, it undermines the morale of the people...

...A second and increasingly significant argument for our counterrevolutionary preoccupation has to do with resources...

...From a moral standpoint, it turned out to be the worst battlefield imaginable—a tiny country run by a government that, according to the Catholic Church, has murdered 30,000 people and turned 13 per cent of the population into refugees...

...We should have learned something from the 1954 CIA-arranged coup: Short-term military success does not buy long-term stability...

...The economic rivalry and confusion produced the soil of desperation in which Hitlerian madness could flourish...

...A proposal to freeze further production of nuclear weapons and to ban the deployment and testing of such weapons under international agreement, subject to easy verification by satellite, would be an important contribution to stability...

...But it is a hopeless goal unless it becomes the central task that commands our energy, imagination, and resources...

...The policy-making professionals, recalling Reagan's campaign promises to make "coherence" the guiding principle of his foreign policy, look on in amazement as the competing barons of the new foreign policy establishment carry on open warfare in the press...

...However, the concept of stability shared by both major parties and embodied in bipartisan foreign policy for a generation and a half is hopelessly obsolete...

...The arms race reflex, commitments hastily made, a preoccupation with national prestige instead of national welfare—these all contributed to the first catastrophe of the century...

...Our Government is engaged in a massive military buildup without any sign that it has a political or military strategy that would carry out its stated objectives...

...At its heart is a growing fear that the traditional security policies the United States is urging on the governments of Europe will lead straight to nuclear war...

...As we hover on the threshold of a new century, the most urgent national security requirement is the establishment of a world security system from which the shadow of war can be lifted...

...Modest shipments of Soviet arms by way of Nicaragua and Cuba provided a perfect pretext for U.S...

...an education system in such a shambles that a whole generation is irretrievably handicapped...

...Despite the diffusion of power in the world, it still possesses the most powerful economy and the longest geopolitical reach...

...The Administration came into office determined to demonstrate that military force could once again be used to stem "the decline of American power...

...I do not mean to ignore some important differences between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan...

...From the outset, the Administration deceived itself—much as the Johnson Administration had in Vietnam— by underestimating the degree of popular revulsion in El Salvador against the government and by exaggerating the relatively small factor of outside aid...

...No sooner was Reagan installed in the White House than El Salvador became the war cry...

...A quarter of the country is in the hands of a guerrilla movement that regards the United States as the enemy, the sponsor of a generation of official terrorism...

...A recent Gallup poll in the United States found that 47 per cent of the respondents believe a nuclear war within five years is "likely," and many believe they would have no better than a fifty-fifty chance of surviving...

...As its top officials look out from the Kremlin, they see a net tightening around them: a U.S.-Chinese military alliance, Europe and Japan being pressed by the United States to rearm, and increasing restlessness among the nations of Eastern Europe...

...In part, because our evolutionary history is against us...

...If the Soviets are not sobered now by the near-certainty that some large portion of the 30,000 nuclear weapons in our arsenal would strike their territory in a retaliatory attack, it is difficult to see why they would be deterred if we doubled the number...

...The weapons stockpiles would remain, but the superpowers would have made clear to one another that they had abandoned the hope of a technological breakthrough in the arms race...

...When Reagan himself speculated about the possibility of nuclear war in Europe, he was, indeed, expressing nothing more than nuclear orthodoxy, and his intent was to reassure the Europeans that the nuclear umbrella was still there...

...intervention...

...First, the proliferation of advanced weaponry has given advantages to small nations and insurrectionary movements...

...There is a strong suggestion that where such governments come to power, U.S...

...Finally, a new national security strategy must recognize the true sources of this nation's strength...

...Our greatest success in counterinsurgency warfare was achieved in Guatemala almost thirty years ago, and today Guatemala is engulfed in a civil war rooted in the unresolved conflicts of that time...

...The Soviet Union faces some severe problems...

...By both criteria, the Reagan foreign policy is a fiasco...