Real Peace (3 page)

History is a pathetic junkyard of broken treaties. Yet naive idealists persist in believing that summits, state dinners, windy toasts, tearful bearhugs and
abrazos,
and solemn signing ceremonies are the very essence of diplomacy. They put
great faith in good relations among leaders, and their hearts swell when they turn on the evening news and see two “former” adversaries grinning and tipping glasses at each other.

The media frequently mistake such atmospherics for real diplomatic progress because they only scan the surface of events, accumulating photographs of smiles and handshakes to print and copies of agreements to excerpt and summarize. Following such a meeting the diplomatic correspondents count up all the smiles, handshakes, and agreements, scrutinize the texts of the dinner toasts, study how pleased the officials are with themselves on the flight home, determine how many souvenirs the diplomats' wives bought, and then, relying on a journalistic calculus known only to themselves, pronounce the event a success or a failure. In the end they and their readers will probably learn little or nothing about what actually happened when the leaders sat down by themselves and tackled the substantive issues. In front of the cameras the leaders had been friends joined in the pursuit of peace, but behind closed doors they reverted to their real selves: aggressor, victim, cat, mouse, hawk, chicken, winner, loser.

Handshakes do not change national ambitions or interests. “Friendship treaties” do not necessarily express or create friendship. When two leaders sit down to talk, they do not turn into philanthropists. They do not give away anything without getting something in return which they value as much or more. Good personal relations do not ensure good state relations. All leaders, not just communist leaders, put their nations' interests above their personal likes and dislikes.

Leaders go to meetings with adversaries in pursuit of good press back home, in search of leverage to use in relations with other nations, or in the hope of exploiting the other side's weaknesses or irresolution and coming out ahead as a result. International relations are not like lunch at the club or a round of golf with friends. They are more like entering a snake pit where good intentions and good manners, adhered to slavishly in the face of your enemy's malevolence, are bound to be distinct hindrances. No leader should meet with an adversary
unless he is fully aware of his own strengths and weaknesses and those of his opponent; unless he has something he wants to bargain for and something to bargain with; and unless he is prepared to be worked over by professionals.

Face-to-face meetings between leaders of hostile powers always have been and will continue to be useful for only two reasons. First, they help the leaders get each others' measure and as a result help them avoid potentially disastrous miscalculations later on. Second, they provide a setting for the exceedingly delicate, difficult process of making agreements the observance of which will serve both sides' interests simultaneously. Unless agreements are self-enforcing they will not last. It is a reflection of the great difficulty of meaningful negotiation between adversaries that such agreements, amid all of history's friendship treaties and nonaggression pacts, have been few and far between.

• • •

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars. Men praying to the same God killed each other by the thousands in America's Civil War and by the millions in World War I and World War II. Unless men change, a real peace must be built on the assumption that the most we can do is to learn to live with our differences rather than dying over them.

The door to real peace must be unlocked. Two keys are required to open it. The United States has one; the Soviet Union has the other. Unless the superpowers adopt a new live-and-let-live relationship, the world will not see real peace in this century. If we fail to work toward that end, suicidal war is inevitable. If we succeed in reaching it, not only does world war become avoidable, but world peace becomes possible. Working against each other, the superpowers will enter a spiral of escalating differences that could lead to war. Working together, they can be an irresistible force for peace not only for themselves but for others as well.

Never has real peace been so necessary and yet so difficult to achieve. The stark truth is that the ideologies and the foreign policies of the superpowers are diametrically opposed. The struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States is between an avowedly and manifestly aggressive power and an avowedly and manifestly defensive one, between a totalitarian civilization and a free one, between a state that is frightened by the idea of freedom and one that is founded on it.

The United States wants peace; the Soviet Union wants the world. Our foreign policy respects the freedom of other nations;
theirs tries to destroy it. We are interested in peace as an end in itself; they are interested in it only if it serves their ends. The Soviets pursue those ends unscrupulously, by means short of all-out war. They lie, cheat, subvert governments, disrupt elections, subsidize terrorists, and wage wars by proxy. For the Soviets, peace is a continuation of war by other means.

Russians and Americans can be friends. But the governments of the Soviet Union and the United States can never be friends because their interests are irreconcilable. The peace we seek cannot be based on mutual friendship. It can only be grounded on mutual respect for each other's strength.

We will continue to have political differences that will drive us apart. We must also recognize, however, that the United States and the Soviet Union have two common interests that can draw us together. As the world's two greatest military powers, we both want to avoid a major war that neither of us would survive. As the world's two major economic powers—each with enormous resources and capable people—we can cooperate in ways that could benefit both of us immensely.

We must not delude ourselves into believing that the East-West struggle is the result of a giant misunderstanding that can be overcome if we sit down and talk it over. We can form Soviet-American friendship societies or tip vodka glasses with Kremlin leaders, but it will not lead to peace. That approach assumes the Soviets share with the West a “sincere” desire for peace. But as Ambassador Charles Bohlen told me in 1959, “Trying to determine whether the Soviet leaders are sincere about anything is a useless exercise.” Pointing to a coffee table, he added, “They are pure materialists. You can no more describe them as being sincere than you could describe that table as being sincere.”

If our differences are so intractable, is peace possible? Our differences make a perfect, ideal peace impossible, but our common interests make a pragmatic, real peace achievable. We are entering a new phase of the East-West struggle. In view of the verbal missiles rocketing between Washington and Moscow,
we might conclude that the chances for peace are remote. But if we look beyond the rhetoric to the realities, we can be more optimistic. The table is set for a breakthrough toward real peace.

In working for peace, we must not pursue the unachievable at the expense of the attainable. Neither we nor the Soviets can compromise our basic values. Only if we recognize that we are not going to settle our differences can we avoid going to war over them. The most we can hope to achieve is an agreement establishing peaceful rules of engagement for our continuing conflict. If we cannot walk arm-in-arm down the road toward peace, we must try at least to walk side-by-side.

• • •

The enormous military strength and the aggressive policies of the Soviet Union lead many in the West to conclude that the prospects for peace are virtually nonexistent. Their concerns are justified, and I have addressed them in
The Real War.
But our analysis of the Soviet position cannot stop with their troop and weapons count. In designing our foreign policy, we must know not only our adversary's strengths, but also his weaknesses. We must not wallow in despair about Soviet might, for then we will fail to focus our attention on Soviet vulnerabilities.

No man knows the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet Union better than Yuri Andropov. For fifteen years he was the head of the KGB, the Soviet espionage and police apparatus. There he received reports from the vast network of Soviet agents at home and abroad and travelled extensively throughout the Eastern bloc. We can be certain that as he steps up to bat, he knows the score, knows the other team, knows how to play the game, and is prepared to put more than pine tar on his bat.

The West knows little about Andropov himself. When he came into power, he was the subject of intense speculation in the West. Some media observers suggested that he was a closet liberal, a pussycat who would be easy to deal with because he liked American jazz and drank Scotch rather than vodka. Such
commentators are forever confusing style with substance. They are suckers for style because style is their bread and butter. In the 1950s, they dismissed Nikita Khrushchev as a lightweight because he spoke bad Russian, drank too much, wore ill-fitting clothes, and had crude manners. They were wrong about Khrushchev, and they are wrong about Andropov. Anyone who claws his way to the top in the murderous jungle warfare of the Soviet hierarchy is bound to be a formidable adversary. Only the strong survive and reach the top in communist regimes.

We know this for sure about Andropov. He is an intelligent, dedicated, ruthless communist who shares the global ambitions of every Soviet dictator since the Bolshevik Revolution. Those who expect the Soviet Union to moderate its belligerence as soon as Andropov consolidates his power are deluding themselves.

Fortunately, however, he is a hard-headed pragmatist, not a madman. This makes him less dangerous in the short run but potentially more dangerous in the long run, unless we develop pragmatic policies that will affect his interests.

Andropov knows the strengths of the Soviet Union. He can point to some significant achievements over the past decade. Since 1974, over 100 million people have come under communist domination or have been lost to the West. Most ominously, the Soviets have gained superiority over the West in the most powerful and accurate nuclear weapons, land-based strategic and intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

Today the Soviets, through their Cuban and Nicaraguan surrogates, are threatening to make Central America the next East-West battleground. Through their Libyan proxies, they are advancing in Central Africa. They are inching, via Afghanistan, toward the Persian Gulf. Through their support of Syria and the radical Palestinians, they are trying to exacerbate the Arab-Israeli conflict. By supporting both Iran and Iraq they are positioning themselves to pick up the pieces after that war in the oilrich Persian Gulf. Their propaganda machine is operating at full throttle, helping fuel the disarmament movement in
Western Europe and thus continuing their 35-year-old campaign to divide the West against itself. The overall picture they present to the West is one of enormous power that backs up a menacing, expansionist foreign policy.

But Andropov is no fool. He is also aware of the profound weaknesses of the Soviet Union. Its economy is in desperate shape. Western economies have been through some rough seas, but the Soviet economy is dead in the water. The growth rate is plummeting. Productivity is dropping. Absenteeism, corruption, malingering, and drunkenness are rife. The standard of living is sinking, so much so that the life expectancy of Russian men is actually going down. The
average
wage of workers in the Soviet Union is lower than Brazil's
minimum
wage. Japan, with one-half the population of the Soviet Union, less arable land than California, no oil and very few natural resources, has a gross national product almost as large as that of the Soviet Union and a per capita income three times as high.

Andropov's vastly overblown military budget only increases the problem. It is twice as large as ours in terms of the proportion of GNP it consumes. That creates an enormous drag on the economy, reducing the incentives for individuals to produce goods and limiting potential future growth. After 60 years of big promises and poor performance, the stark truth is there for all to see. Soviet socialism does not work.

The ideology of communism has lost its appeal. Communists have never won a majority in a free election anywhere in the world. The crisis in Poland is only the most visible example of the popular discontent that is heating up just beneath the surface and threatens to boil over throughout Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union itself. A scene I remember from my trip to Poland in 1959 illustrates this. Even now I can see the members of a crack Polish honor guard standing on a flatbed truck, cheering, and raising their hands in the “V-for-victory” sign as our motorcade left the Warsaw airport. The Kremlin's military planners are daydreaming if they are counting on the loyalty of Polish troops in the event of a war in Europe.

Never in history has an aggressive power been more successful in extending its domination over other nations and less successful in winning the approval of the people of those nations. As has been the case since the end of World War II, millions of refugees are on the move today. The traffic is all one way—from communism to freedom.

The costs of Soviet conquests are a massive drain on its desperately weak economy. The British may have been enriched by their empire, but the Soviets are being impoverished by theirs. Andropov must pour huge economic resources into his empire to keep his shaky political investments afloat. Cuba costs him $14 million a day. Angola, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Nicaragua cost him over $5 million a day. Afghanistan has cost him millions of dollars and thousands of casualties. The resistance Soviet puppet regimes are meeting in Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua proves that the Soviet Union is increasingly unable to digest what it swallows.