Real Peace (2 page)

Because of the realities of human nature, perfect peace is achieved in two places only: in the grave and at the typewriter. Perfect peace flourishes—in print. It is the stuff of poetry and
high-minded newspaper editorials, molded out of pretty thoughts and pretty words. Real peace, on the other hand, will be the down-to-earth product of the real world, manufactured by realistic, calculating leaders whose sense of their nations' self-interest is diamond-hard and unflinching.

Those who make peace at the typing table rather than at the negotiating table have the luxury of being peacemakers without having to grapple with complex problems in the rough-and-tumble world of real international diplomacy. To them the only obstacle to peace is the regrettable lack of leaders who are as selfless and idealistic as they claim to be and who are willing to put aside parochial national interest in the interest of bringing peace to the world. They hope that this era will be the one in which self-interest, the force that has driven history since the dawn of history, will simply evaporate.

Perfect peace has no historical antecedents and therefore no practical meaning in a world in which conflict among men is persistent and pervasive. If real peace is to exist, it must exist along with men's ambitions, their pride, and their hatreds. A peace that fails to take these things into account will not last.

We will meet the challenge of real peace only by keeping in mind two fundamental truths.

First, conflict is a natural state of affairs in the world. Some nations are certain to be unsatisfied by what they have and will try to get more, for a variety of reasons and through a variety of means. Other nations will resist the designs of these acquisitive powers. One way or another nations in such positions will come into conflict, and if they cannot resolve their conflicts peaceably they will eventually try to resolve them violently.

Second, nations only resort to aggression when they believe they will profit from it. Conversely, they will shrink from aggression if it appears in the long run it will cost them more than it benefits them.

Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, liveable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.

• • •

Most of the obstacles to peace today result from the Soviet Union's expansionist policies. But there are also those in the West who impede the peacemakers. A few, their allegiances and their motives clear, do so intentionally. Those who do so inadvertently are far more dangerous.

Lenin was fully aware of how helpful naive Westerners could be to the communist cause. He contemptuously called them “the useful idiots.” More out of ignorance than by design, the useful idiots earnestly plug ridiculously simplistic answers to our most complex problems. They are the sloganeers whose idea of thoughtful analysis is often limited to what will fit on a t-shirt or a bumper sticker. “Make love, not war.” “You can't hug your kids with nuclear arms.” “Honk if you want peace.” Much of this fatuous nonsense is harmless, but unfortunately not all the useful idiots occupy themselves by marching and honking for peace. Some teach in our universities; some write newspaper columns; others pontificate on television.

The complexities of the modern world are so baffling to them that they seek comfort in simple answers. What they fail to recognize is that for every complicated problem there is
always
a simple answer—and it's usually wrong.

Building a real peace will be arduous, frustrating work, and it is not surprising that some fall for shortcuts that promise to get them what they want quickly, painlessly, and cheaply. These shortcuts never work, and we should not expect them to work.

In his heart everyone knows that the only people who get rich from the “get rich quick” books are those who write them. But just as there are countless “get rich quick” schemes there is also a wide array of seductively appealing “get peace quick” schemes.

These are the myths of peace. Myths are fairy tales that people make up about things they otherwise would not understand. The ancients devised them to “explain” lightning and the changing of the seasons; today many concoct them to “explain” international relations. They are profoundly reassuring
to those who otherwise would be profoundly confused by the complex dilemmas we face. But these myths are doubly dangerous: dangerous because they can distract and confound our leaders and clog decision-making channels, and also because of the chance that one of them might actually become official policy.

The Disarmament Myth
. This is the granddaddy of peace myths, a favorite of generation after generation of idealists. Founded on a logical fallacy in which human intentions are equated with the means men use to carry out their intentions, the idea of disarmament has alternately seduced and disappointed peacemakers throughout history.

“Disarmists,” those alarmists who think the world's greatest evil is the arms race, believe that it is the
existence
of arms that causes war rather than the political tensions which lead to their use. Because of this fundamental misconception, the disarmists' best hope for peace is a prescription for international disaster.

If we are to make any progress toward real peace we must accept the fact that war results from unresolved political differences, not from the existence of arms. Pursuing arms control talks without dealing with our other nation-to-nation problems at the same time would be the ultimate example of treating a symptom while letting the disease run its brutal course. It is like a doctor prescribing aspirin rather than penicillin as a cure for pneumonia.

One of the few arms control pacts of the twentieth century was concluded in 1922 at the Washington Naval Conference. The U.S., Britain, and Japan agreed to limit their naval forces by adopting a battleship ratio of 5-5-3; Japan had also signed a treaty with eight other powers agreeing to observe the integrity of China. But Japan's ambitions in the Far East and its resentment of the Western powers were both far greater than its commitment to the agreements it had signed. In 1931 it invaded China, and in 1941 it struck our naval forces at Pearl Harbor.

World War II resulted not from arms buildups but from the
territorial ambitions of Japan and Germany. Germany's and Japan's arms buildups were a result of these ambitions, not the cause of them. The current arms race is between a similarly ambitious Soviet Union and a free world that has determined not to be caught off-guard again. The root causes of that conflict must be addressed before arms control can have any purpose.

The one sure way to prevent a nuclear holocaust would be to eliminate all nuclear weapons. But complete nuclear disarmament is an impossible dream. The reason is simple: nuclear weapons are simple. The principles of physics that make them possible are widely understood by governments, by terrorists, even by college undergraduates. The materials for making them are within the grasp of virtually every modern nation.

Some, out of desperation or supreme naivete, have suggested that an international authority be established to banish nuclear weapons and make sure they are never built again. Because such an authority would by necessity be privy to the inner workings of every government in the world, it would itself be the most powerful and ultimately the most dangerous institution on earth. Incredible political force would have to be brought to bear to keep nuclear weapons from being built, and that force would be so vast as to change the character of life on earth. Like the seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the disarmists are in effect asserting that we must offer ourselves and our liberties up to some superstate so that it can protect us from being devoured by each other in the nuclear state of nature.

That the disarmists would propose some outlandish “world government” shows that most of them, to put the most charitable light on the matter, are living in a dream world in which problems between nations can be solved by some authority other than national governments. This delusion is a form of radiation sickness. If you look directly at an atomic blast you may go blind; apparently intellectual blindness can result from contemplating the nuclear weapons issue for too long.

Nuclear weapons will always exist. We must learn to live with what we know rather than wasting our energies in the
pretense of not knowing it. But while we cannot eliminate nuclear weapons, we can do a great deal to prevent them from being used. It is only by learning to live in peace with our adversaries that we will learn to live with nuclear weapons.

The World Government Myth
. After the cataclysm of World War II, in which 55 million people died, those who had served and survived returned home to the happy news of the United Nations conference in San Francisco. Everyone was hopeful that through this new organization we would debate about our disagreements rather than fight about them.

But as was the case with the League of Nations after World War I, the promise of the UN was illusory. The League of Nations and the UN were both noble but unavailing attempts to turn man's most idealistic impulses about peace into reality. Envisioned as the peacekeeper of the postwar world, the UN has been unable in most cases either to forestall war or to end a war once it was begun. One expert has concluded that of 93 separate conflicts between 1946 and 1977, the UN held limited debate on 40, did not debate at all about 53, and did not significantly contribute to the resolution of any.

Many nations are ably represented in the UN by dedicated, highly intelligent delegates, and the organization as a whole does important work in such areas as health and hunger relief. At its best the United Nations serves as a forum for the views and complaints of smaller nations that otherwise might be ignored in a world dominated by the superpowers. But at its worst it is more often than not a propaganda arm of the Soviet Union and its satellites and shills, a hall of distorting mirrors where peace-loving Russian armies are “invited in” by their victims, where the aiding and abetting of terrorism is actually “supporting wars of national liberation”—where, as in the world of George Orwell's
1984,
“war is peace” and “freedom is slavery.” The UN has exacerbated many conflicts either by cavalierly blaming the U.S. or by ignoring the involvement of the Soviet Union. While 160 flags fly at the UN, the one that flies the highest is the double standard.

No major power will submit an issue affecting its basic interests to a forum in which it can be overruled by smaller powers. The UN's failure shows that international problems must be solved by negotiations between autonomous governments or they will not be solved.

The Myth of Peace Through Trade
. Optimism, like hope, springs eternal, and from each generation of leaders spring the eternal optimists who say that trade between aggressive adversaries softens their belligerence. Five years after the Russian Revolution David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, said that trade with the Soviets would “bring an end to the ferocity, the rapine, and the crudity of Bolshevism surer than any other method.” Many in the West, eager for what they called “peaceful coexistence” with the new communist government, agreed. Western businessmen scrambled for access to what they hoped would be rich new Soviet markets, and the Russians obligingly granted over 300 “concessions” to Western companies. Eventually all these manufacturing firms were expelled, but not before Soviet engineers had studied and copied Western industrial technology and methods and put them to work during Stalin's massive industrial buildup in the 1930s.

That first round of economic cooperation in the 1920s did not bring the West and the Soviets closer together. It did help turn the Soviet Union into a much stronger adversary.

Yet today there are many, especially in the Western business community, who share Lloyd George's view. Their optimism, though commendable, is again based on faulty logic. Peace-through-trade did not work before, and it will not work now. As Konrad Adenauer told me in 1967 just before his death, “Trade is trade.” Nations enter into trading relationships in the hope of making a profit, and any nation with aggressive ambitions can be expected to use its profits in the pursuit of those ambitions.

In both world wars nations that had traded with each other fought each other. Before World War II Japan had trade ties
with the U.S. that had been painstakingly built up since the nineteenth century. Germany traded extensively with each of the countries it invaded.

In the end both nations' leaders found their grievances and territorial ambitions to be far stronger than their desire to remain at peace and engage in peaceful commerce with their neighbors. Believing that they could profit more from war than from peace, they went to war. Their choice proved that just as weapons are dangerous only insofar as they may be used to resolve political differences, commerce with an adversary contributes to peace only if it is part of a larger structure designed to reduce political differences. Otherwise, by trading with an aggressive, expansionist power you are fueling a fire that could eventually consume you.

The Myth of Peace Through Friendship
. Some of the useful idiots put no faith in leaders. Others put far too much. The latter believe that if leaders would only meet and get to know one another, peace would follow as a matter of course. Since they think international conflict results primarily from misunderstanding and bad communication, they assume that friendships between nations and treaties and agreements designed to set the world right will inevitably result from friendships between national leaders.

This has never been the case, in our century or in any other. William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson's first secretary of state, believed war could be prevented if nations would agree to meet amicably to settle their disputes, and he signed treaties with 30 nations creating mechanisms for doing so. World War I followed fast on Bryan's heels. In the 1930s Imperial Japan's promise to observe the integrity of China did not prevent or delay its Invasion of Manchuria. In World War II Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, thus violating the two-year-old Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact.