1999 (17 page)

Moscow understands how to compete despite the existence of nuclear weapons. Since World War II, it has geared its global strategy to exploit geopolitical opportunities that have not involved a risk of nuclear war. When the United States enjoyed nuclear superiority, the Soviet Union was cautious, taking few initiatives and withdrawing at the first sign of American resolve. That changed after Moscow acquired nuclear parity in the early 1970s. While we had used our nuclear umbrella to protect allies in Europe and the Far East, the Soviet Union employed its nuclear umbrella as a cover for aggression in the Third World. In less than five years, between 1975 and 1980, over 100 million people were either conquered by the East or lost by the West.

Nuclear parity has changed the nature of the American–Soviet conflict. We could not threaten nuclear war to stop the Soviet Union from supplying arms and ammunition to the communists in the Vietnam War. Nor can we threaten the apocalypse to block Soviet moves in Africa, the far-flung reaches of Asia or even in Latin America. That does not mean the United States must abandon its interests in those regions. It does mean that in addition to maintaining adequate nuclear deterrent forces the United States must learn to compete without direct military intervention.

We should not make the mistake of believing that simply because the Soviet Union's superpower status depends on its military
power Moscow has no other assets. As James Sherr warns, “This leads to a tendency to slight the nonmilitary instruments of power and influence available to the Soviet Union, some of which are uniquely available to her and unfamiliar to ourselves.” Kremlin leaders are masters at strategic deception, disinformation, subversion, and other tactics which democracies cannot employ. As a result, we must develop six key capabilities to be able to compete effectively with Moscow:

Ideological power.
Our competition with the Soviet Union is military, economic and political, but the root cause of the Soviet–American rivalry is ideological. The Soviet Union wants to expand communism and destroy freedom, and the United States wants to stop communism and expand freedom. All our weapons, treaties, trade, foreign assistance, and cultural ties will amount to nothing if we lose the battle of ideas.

We hold high cards in the ideological competition with the Soviet Union. Our values of freedom and democracy have a tremendous appeal around the world. Their strength is that they do not prescribe how people should live but only that individuals and nations should be free to choose how they live. And while not all peoples are capable of governing themselves democratically, almost all wish for democratic rule.

No one who knows what life is like in the Soviet Union would want to live there. It should be no contest. But they have done a good job of selling a poor case, and we have done a poor job of selling a good case. Moscow devotes enormous resources to ideological competition. It transmits Radio Moscow in scores of languages to every corner of the world, publishes and distributes thousands of books and newspapers abroad, and provides scholarships at Soviet universities for almost 100,000 foreign students.

Too often, the United States steps onto the battlefield of ideas unarmed. One of the most effective foreign-policy programs the United States has ever undertaken has been its support for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. These stations alone have prevented the complete indoctrination of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The problem is that they stand virtually alone as examples of American action on the ideological front.

We need to expand vastly our programs in this area. We must
match Radio Moscow's foreign broadcasting. That does not mean we should fill the airwaves with crass propaganda. We should never broadcast lies or disinformation. The problem is that our programs are often not worth listening to. We must stop transmitting the pap that passes for programming on the Voice of America. It is often so trivial that Gorbachev has announced that the Soviet Union will no longer bother to jam its frequencies. We must also find ways to exploit the new information technologies—microcomputers, satellites, and videocassette recorders—to fight the battle of ideas.

Our overhaul of American foreign broadcasting should redirect it to serve two purposes. Where state censorship exists, we should seek to tell the people what their own governments refuse to tell them about their own countries. Also, we must ensure that American positions on world issues and American ideas and values get a fair hearing in the world. At present, they do not.

Diplomacy.
Since World War II, diplomats as much as generals have altered the balance of power between the superpowers. For Moscow, soldiers and diplomats serve the same purpose: both are instruments to achieve Soviet strategic objectives. The Soviets have mastered the art of integrating their diplomacy into overall strategy. While the United States has had some diplomatic successes, there have been far too many instances where we have failed to recognize that diplomacy is not just a means for compromise but is a tactic of competition. We must always remember that for the Soviets the purpose of negotiation is not compromise but victory.

We should steer our course between two extremes. On the one hand, too many professional diplomats tend to believe that there is no substitute for negotiation. Whenever our interests are challenged, their first—and often only—reaction is to negotiate with the adversary. They reflexively treat disputes as if they were simply great misunderstandings rather than insurmountable differences. They fail to understand that adversaries sometimes use talks as a play for time and that, in addition to negotiating, the United States often needs to take other actions to create incentives for the other side to come to terms. We sometimes even have to use force at the same time as we negotiate. If Eisenhower had not
threatened in a back-channel message to use nuclear weapons in Korea, the communists would not have agreed to an armistice. If the United States had not bombed Hanoi in December 1972, the North Vietnamese would not have signed the Paris cease-fire agreements in January 1973.

At the other extreme, there are those who believe that to accept the need to negotiate is to fall into a communist trap. They argue that if the United States talks with its adversaries it will be paralyzed and fail to take needed stronger actions. In their view, talking with communists is tantamount to trafficking in communism. But they fail to recognize that we have achieved a great deal through negotiations since World War II. Our diplomatic support for and contacts with Yugoslavia enabled Tito to break with Stalin in 1948. Our role in the Austrian Peace Treaty freed the country from Soviet occupation in 1955. The Berlin agreement of 1971 ended Soviet harassment in the corridor between Berlin and West Germany, which had been a potential flashpoint for superpower conflict for twenty-five years. Our participation in the diplomacy to end the Yom Kippur War widened the split between Egypt and the Soviet Union in 1973. Our secret negotiations with the Chinese communists brought about the Sino–American rapprochement in 1972. President Carter's Camp David Accords established a peaceful relationship between Egypt and Israel and finalized the political break between Egypt and the Soviet Union. That does not mean that talking is a substitute for acting. It does mean that we must think of negotiations as a tactic to achieve our objectives.

Economic aid.
Never has the United States had a greater competitive edge over the Soviet Union than in foreign economic assistance, and never has the United States failed so abysmally to capitalize on its advantage. Since the American economy is twice the size of that of the Soviet Union, we have the resources to race ahead of the Soviets in this area. In terms of dollars we have, but in terms of impact we have not.

Since World War II, the United States has loaned or given foreign governments more than $134 billion in economic aid, and the Soviet Union has provided less than $50 billion. While our overall foreign-aid program has concentrated on economic assistance, Moscow has given four times as much military aid as economic.
While our assistance has gone to over 150 developing countries, the Soviet Union has focused its aid on its communist client states. While our aid has been in most cases primarily altruistic, Moscow's assistance has been solely directed toward increasing its global influence.

Foreign-aid programs have never been politically popular in the United States. Because of the budget crunch, support for such programs today is at an all-time low. They must be radically revived if they are to survive. But in doing so we have to overcome the myth that foreign aid is just a waste of money. That is true if the money is used poorly. The $3 billion the world sent to Tanzania in the last ten years subsidized the worst economic policies in Africa. Much of the money we contribute to international agencies for distribution to Third World governments is misspent on boondoggles or diverted by corrupt officials. But foreign aid is not wasteful if spent wisely. Certainly the $14 billion we expended on the postwar reconstruction of the nations of Western Europe and Japan was not a waste. Our economic aid did more to prevent communist expansion in those countries than ten times as much military aid would have done.

We need to learn to serve our strategic purposes with our foreign aid. Our economic and political support for the Central American democracies and for Pakistan are excellent illustrations of how we can succeed. Our assistance has prevented an economic collapse and a communist victory in El Salvador. It has reduced the potential for political instability in Pakistan and has enabled Islamabad to resist Soviet military intimidation on the issue of Afghanistan. In 1986 we spent $435 million on aid for El Salvador and $628 million for Pakistan. That is far less than we would need to spend if a deteriorating situation forced us to use American troops to defend our interests in Central America and Southwest Asia—and far less than it would cost if we forfeited those interests.

We must exploit our economic superiority in the American–Soviet competition. We should therefore substantially increase the amount we invest in strategic foreign assistance and should enlist our allies to increase their aid programs as well. But we must target our aid to achieve strategic purposes. We must not simply pour
our money into global pork-barrel projects. That would disserve not only our interests but also those whom we seek to help.

Military aid.
Americans instinctively cringe at the thought of shipping off tons of weapons and military equipment to countries around the world. They do not want to think of themselves as arms merchants. But military aid is often the best way to protect our interests and those of our friends and allies. It is also the principal way in which the Soviet Union will seek to challenge our interests in the coming decades.

Since the late 1940s, Moscow has used its own forces to annex a country to its empire only once—in the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In every other Soviet expansionist push, the Kremlin recruited a proxy force and supplied them with the arms to do the job. North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950. North Vietnam subverted and invaded South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia starting in the mid-1950s. Cuban proxy forces put communists into power in Angola in 1976. Soviet aid through Cuba propelled the communists into power in Nicaragua in 1979. In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union delivered twice as much military aid to its proxies in the developing world as the United States did to its allies and friends.

It is not philanthropy but expansionism that drives the Soviet Union to pump weapons into the Third World. Its goal in exporting arms is exporting communism. The Kremlin's modus operandi is far more sophisticated today than it was when North Korean armies marched across the South Korean border. Instead of going over borders, the Soviets now go under and around them. Sometimes the Soviets spark a revolution; other times they capture a revolution already taking place. In both cases, Soviet military assistance is Moscow's principal weapon to undermine American friends and allies.

In response, we must do at least as much for our allies as the Soviets do for theirs. Many argue that it is morally wrong to supply arms to peoples engaged in distant conflicts. They contend that this merely adds fuel to the fire. But it was not wrong to send military aid to Greece and Turkey to block Soviet-sponsored subversion after World War II. Nor was it wrong to aid anticommunist
forces in Indochina. North Vietnam overran South Vietnam in 1975 not because the communists were more motivated or more popular. Hanoi won because after the Paris peace accords of 1973 the Soviet Union increased military aid to its allies in Hanoi while the Congress cut American aid to Saigon by 75 percent over two years. What resulted was not only a tragedy for the people of Indochina, but also a growing threat to Western interests in the region, as Soviet ships operating from Vietnamese harbors acquired the capability to threaten sea lanes vital to Japan.

People will not fight for freedom if they must stand alone while their enemies enjoy carte blanche at the near-limitless Soviet arsenal. If we fail to provide our allies and friends with adequate military assistance, Moscow's clients will advance on every front. We will then face a stark choice: we can either forfeit our interests or forfeit the lives of American troops to defend them. We must recognize the fact that if we spend a little money on military assistance now, we will avoid having to expend blood, as well as money, later.

Military power.
Since the Vietnam War, many have argued that military power no longer has any utility in international politics. American military interventions or American security guarantees and military presence have prevented 707 million people from falling under Soviet domination. Without American support, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the countries of Southwest Asia would all now have to defer to the demands of the Soviet Union. American military power achieved our objectives in Korea in the early 1950s, in Lebanon in 1957, in the Dominican Republic in 1965, and in Grenada in 1983.