Those whose business it is to conduct foreign policy must have in their minds some picture of the reality in which they are acting, as well as some kind of broad principle that guides their action. When Britain and France tried to deal with Italy’s war on Ethiopia in 1936, when Roosevelt delivered his “Quarantine Speech” in 1937, when Truman initiated a “police action” in Korea, the prevailing picture was evidently that of a world which by common agreement had renounced war, so that “aggression” could be looked upon as a kind of atavistic-abnormality that must be contained lest it spread like a contagious disease. That brave hope did not survive the Korean War, after which there was a return to the imagery and principle characteristic of the nineteenth century, which went under the name of “balance of power.” The choice was made somewhat uncritically. Nobody seemed to have considered that the international realities of the mid-twentieth century might possibly be as far from nineteenth century power rivalry as the nineteenth century had been from the foreign affairs of the Middle Ages. The “balance of power” concept seemed to be the sole available alternative to international idealism.

Could the “balance of power” principle fit the politics of ideological conflict? Balance of power was essentially conceived as an equation with two variables. The first consisted in the comparative and somewhat quantifiable ratio of power instrumentalities (weaponry, manpower, resources, and terrain) which, secondly, was assessed in view of the intuited relation of what Bismarck called “The imponderables,” i.e. elements of judgment, intention, and emotion influencing leading statesmen. This much is elemental. There is, however, still one more aspect of the “balance of power” which one may call “the externality” of foreign policy. Nineteenth century statesmen were able to take the solidarity of their nations pretty much for granted, so that their decisions could confine themselves to the instrumentalities of external power and the imponderabilities of external relations. One’s nation’s unity for purposes of external action was taken for granted, which meant that foreign affairs was one thing and domestic politics another. This externality of foreign policies was mutually sustained. Thus the makers of foreign policy could be specialists in “external affairs,” i.e, in relations in which nations figured as given integers, as if they were persons, and the problems of which were characteristically international.

In an age of ideologies the solidarity of states and peoples can no longer be considered a given. We have been late in acknowledging this fact, even though wehad considerable early warning. New ways of looking at politics wereproclaimed as early as 1848 when Marx declared that the relevant concept of political unity was not a people but class, that workers have no country, that revolution ignores all boundaries. Lenin’s Imperialism, published in the year before he came to power, projected Marx’s concept of class struggle into world politics. Lenin described capitalism as a single world-wide system, to which he opposed, three years later, a single system of Communist parties bound to the Soviet center in the loyalty of common defense. Lenin distinguished between wars made by imperialist countries for “The distribution and re-distribution of the world” and wars between capitalist and colonial countries, the latter conflict assuming the functions of Marx’s revolution. Lenin attributed different “class” characteristics to wars, and called for the conversion of an “imperialist war” into a civil war. Lenin thus construed the known facts of world politics as aspects of a revolutionary process in which power between nations was seen not as a problem of equilibration but rather as a means for turning societies, cultures, and human beings upside down.

Another fact of contemporary life is that the Russian Revolution brought to power not a group pursuing the interests of its own state and people, but rather one engaged in a global enterprise and claiming authority beyond its national boundaries, like a church though not being a church, then again, like a government though not being a normal government. This enterprise has followers in other countries who in turn prepare themselves to seize power over their state. This means that an expansion of Soviet power is both something like an international sphere of influence yet also the subversion of another people’s way of life, and the conversion of another state into a venture to “build a Communist society resembling the Soviet model.” Soviet foreign policy, then, remains “external” only in the sense that Soviet rulers, relying on their monopoly of power, can afford to take the unity of their subjects for granted. On the other hand, any successful expansion of Soviet influence amounts to moral, cultural, and human disasters for the people unfortunate enough to fall under Communist control, so that these results are not merely in the realm of external power, but mainly in the internal order of a state and even of human personalities. The foreign policies of the ideological group controlling the Soviet Union are therefore subjectively external but objectively internal.

Communist-controlled countries are not all the ideological reality there is in the world today. Ideological notions clustering around both the Marxist and the Anarchist model are widely spread among the peoples of the world. They give rise to loyalties other than to country and state, yardsticks other than the humanistic respect for life, liberty, property, and dignity. They have aroused extraordinarily intensive passions for disruptive organization and action. Ideologically motivated people no longer care for the order of a common life but give their loyalty to a cause of irreconcilable struggle against the world. A total critique of society, a sweeping condemnation of everything that exists, is characteristically attached to any and every grievance caused by concrete failings or shortcomings. In the eyes of ideologically infected groups, all actions by society’s representatives are tainted by what one may call “systematic suspicion.” The on-going existence of a people in a system of order and peace is constantly and unfavorably compared with some “possible reality” that has no existence, past or present, except in the heated fantasy of the ideological mind. This attitude gives rise to both an activist-militant and a passive-lethargic variant. The activists see it their duty to join their own country’s enemies, display the enemy’s symbols, visit the enemy’s leaders, support the enemy’s cause rhetorically and politically. Thus an internal alienation produces external effects, a domestic dissension becomes a power factor in international conflicts. The politics of ideologies in non-Communist countries are subjectively internal but objectively external.

This situation has further domestic consequences affecting the nation’s power to act, in that representative leaders, unable to distinguish between ideological subversion and legitimate political argument, become unsure of themselves and tend to suffer from what has been called a “loss of nerve,” guilty conscience destroying the ability for action. With the combination of alienation among the citizens, attraction of ideological causes based on foreign countries, and the weakening of leadership, a nation may well decompose to the point of no longer being capable of any external action, and that not for want of power instrumentalities. The manpower may remain the same, the arsenals may be full, the resources available; but in the absence of national one-mindedness the instrumentalities cannot be put to use. Under such circumstances it no longer makes any sense to conceive foreign policy as “the right use of power.” Policy then ceases to be amenable to an understanding as an equation with two variables. One may still continueto see a “balance” of external power as desirable, but that can no longer be considered an end of the matter. The various aspects of external power are interlocked, in the Free World, with the complexities of generating and protecting the very conditions of that national unity which underlies national power.

+++

Let us now attempt a brief sketch of how the Soviet Union and the West handle themselves in this situation. Soviet strategy combines four aspects: (1) “Peaceful coexistence” (or detente), a complex of limitation and reduction of armaments, trade and cultural exchange parts, regional declarations of peace, gestures of mutual consultation and apparent good-will; (2) expansion of Soviet influence through the use of “national liberation” movements and wars, and “popular uprisings,” and including unsettling deliveries of Soviet arms, active support of native military or paramilitary forces aiming at the creation of leftist regime’s, inciting of conflicts between such forces and the United States; (3) stepping up the increase of armed strength of the Soviet Union and its satellites, including conventional forces, nuclear armaments, and acquisition of new bases in various parts of the world; (4) the continuation and intensification of “ideological struggle.” Others have written and spoken sufficiently on the first three aspects of this strategy, even though there is a tendency to deal with them separately rather than as a whole. The fourth aspect, however, is usually passed over in silence. Brezhnev said recently: “Detente does not in the slightest way abolish, and cannot abolish or change, the laws of class struggle.” Other Soviet leaders have emphasized that the “Spirit of Helsinki” does not apply to ideological struggle. For twenty years the Soviets have insisted that “peaceful co-existence” is a form of class struggle, and that the ideological struggle must be intensified in the presence of peaceful external co-existence.

What does “ideological struggle” mean? Why has this aspect of Soviet policy been passed over in silence by the West? Could it be because one believes that one can dismiss the phrase as windowdressing? That assumption can be made only by neglecting what social science knows about the continuing identity of cultural structures. Henri Frankfort1 has introduced the terns “form” to designate the enduring principle of changed identity that maintains civilizations for very long periods and through changing internal and external circumstances. Frankfort’s research, it is true, deals with civilizations. Norman Cohn’s work2 on medieval millennarion movements, however, has shown that such movements also have a “form” and maintain their principle of identity over long periods, and that this identity comes to an end not as a change of the “form” but rather through extermination or attrition of the membership. The “form” of the Communist movement is its universal and uncompromising hostility to the entire existing world, in the name of an alleged new world that must replace the existing one, the replacement to be effected by a protracted but irreconcilable struggle. As historical movements go, the Communist Party is not yet old. All the same, it has gone through considerable internal and external changes while its “form” has continued the same. From it flows the raison d’être of the Party. The Soviet insistence on the combination of “peaceful co-existence” with “ideological struggle” is nothing but a manifestation of the enduring “form” of the Communist movement. The Party manifests its concern with dangers threatening its “form” in a period of “peaceful co-existence” which to some might suggest the cessation of class struggle. This concern cannot be dismissed as mere rhetoric. “Ideology” in Communist eyes means not so much attention to a formula but rather a way of existence, existence in hostility to the class enemy and in protracted struggle led by the Party. That existence is predicated on the attribution of the world’s evil to the class enemy, and on the presumption that Communists constitute that part of mankind which possesses the alternative to those evils. It is an existence positioning “high terms of separation between such and the rest of the world” (Richard Hooker’s words analyzing the sixteenth-century Puritans) so that between the two parts of mankind no common obligation is conceived. It is dangerous to dismiss such attitudes as “mere mythology.” Class is, indeed, the Communists’ myth, but so was “race” the Nazis’ myth, and Dachau still bears gruesome witness to the evil deeds spawned by a “mere myth.”

“Ideological struggle,” then, means that the axiom of ultimate and universal hostility to the class enemy, meaning us, continues as the background to even the Soviets’ peaceful moves, by virtue of the “form” of the movement’s continuing identity. Circumstantial evidence corroborates this thesis. We notice, for instance, that the policy of detente has been adopted not only by the Soviet Union, where one could attribute it to reasons of state security, but also by the Communist parties of Italy, France, the U.S., and Japan. These parties are not defending a position but rather aspiring to get into power and to control the government. The new strategy calls for a public image of Communists implying reasonableness, respectability, and demonstrative dedication to the people’s daily well-being. That image would go far to dispel the strong emotional resistance that so far has blocked Communist ruling power in those countries. On the other hand, one finds that the new strategy is obviously morethan a mere expedient to help this or that Communist party to the seats of power, with a view to help solving its own country’s problems. Such conferences as those of chairman Miyamoto of Japan’s Communist Party with Secretary General Carillo of the Spanish Communist Party (March 30, 1976) and Secretary Marchais of the French Communist Party (April 8, 1976) indicate an international orchestration of the various Communist parties’ domestic policies.

“Ideological struggle,” we must conclude, means that Communists in the Soviet Union and Communists in Western countries agree in their ultimate expectation of Communist regimes to be established in the leading countries of the world. In that perspective all more immediate policies take their place as partial moves toward a grand objective. It also means that the Communists are giving top priority to the political aspects of power, on the premise that the measure of their power is but a function of our resistance. Their strategy envisages a combination of such pressures and illusions acting on the West as will melt the residue of anti-Communist resistance. It was anti-Communist attitudes which in the past generated NATO, Western re-armament, the deployment of U.S. troops in defense of allies in various parts of the world, and sufficient programs of internal security. Solzhenitsyn has remarked that he, Sakharov, and other dissidents enjoyed a modicum of safety in the Soviet Union because of the pressure of aroused public opinion in the West. If we should ask ourselves in astonishment, what would the Soviets have to fear from the West if they killed Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and others who think like them, the answer is that the Soviets have reason to fear a re-kindling of that Western indignation that flamed up when Czechoslovakia was first raped in 1948, when Greece seemed on the point of succumbing to invading Communist guerrillas, when South Korea was invaded, when the West’s access to Berlin was blocked. That indignation was the sap of our strength. It provided a will to maintain armaments in such quantity that the Soviets could not afford to disregard them, to set limits to Soviet expansion, to confront them even at the risk of war. Later that Western indignation was officially pronounced obsolete by the same American President who had drawn strength from it in order to force Khrushchev to remove his missiles from Cuba. During the Vietnam War, President Johnson and his advisers, failing to understand the ideological dimension, took deliberate steps not to arouse it again, and thus conducted the war from the outset in a twilight of ambiguity that prevented the people from grasping its meaning. In the climate of well-orchestrated propaganda against America’s “imperialism” the Vietnam War was lost primarily on the political home front. “Ideological struggle,” in sum, turns around the Soviets’ determination to keep their own hostile will at high pitch while weakening ours to the point of ineffectiveness. That requires both steps creating the illusion of “peace in our generation” and avoidance of steps that would renew anti-Communist indignation. The dispelling of anti-communism as a political force in the West is a matter of highest priority, so stated in the 1961 Program of the CPSU. To that end, the Soviets have officially renounced or postponed both a military showdown between their forces and those of the West, and the overthrow of Western governments by violent revolution. They are willing to seek intermediate changes from which they could hope for better conditions favoring their political operations. “Ideological struggle” in the short run aims at removing institutional, organizational, legal, and emotional obstacles to Communist propaganda and organization. They are convinced that with much patient political preparation, they will need neither an international war nor civil war to pluck the fruit of power in the world’s leading industrial countries.

One interpretation of “ideological struggle” seems to be absolutely excluded: it does not mean that the Communists, having renounced international war and violent revolution, have placed their reliance wholly on persuasion. They remain aware that the Communist Party is not a ruler one might eventually accept as legitimate, respect, cherish, and willingly obey. They know that a deep gulf separates them not merely from capitalists, but also from socialists in the West, or rather, the Free World. They see that their cause cannot recommend itself to the world by virtue of the justice it might be seeking. They have declared themselves at war with everything that has traditionally made for order in human life. Thus they cannot escape operating on fear and force, falsehood, terror, guile, blackmail, dictatorship, and penal servitude. Persuasion presupposes belief in a humanity participating in common reason by virtue of its participation in a common order of being. That idea is one which no Communist can understand, let alone accept.

+++

Now let us likewise examine the conduct of the West. Our policy goes under its own name: detente. In asking ourselves what that is, we are facing greater difficulties than in the case of Soviet policy. Kissinger himself has provided a brief formula: “To create the maximum incentives for a moderate Soviet course.” This is admirable, but not very clear. The Truman Doctrine, after all, was a maximum incentive for a Soviet moderate course, so was the Berlin airlift, Dulles’s “massive retaliation,” and Kennedy’s partial mobilization to counter Khrushchev’s Cuban missiles. What is more, these and similar measures had the desired results. They manifested our capabilities and signaled our determination to use them, so that while we held this firm course, no major power position was lost, none was added to the Soviet Union, and Azerbeidjan and Austria were even recovered. Detente, having begun before the Nixon era, hit its full stride with the opening to Peking, truly a landmark event. That was followed by the liquidation of the Vietnam War and the subsequent indifference of the United States to Hanoi’s violation of the agreements which made the eventual Communist conquest of all of Indochina inevitable. Next came the opening of trade relations with the Soviet Union, leading to the sales of vital wheat and, more important, advanced technology. This went hand-in-hand with Brandt’s Ostpolitik, implying the West’s acceptance of the status quo in Central Europe. The chief attraction to the West was the prospect of an eventual agreement with the Soviet Union limiting and reducing armaments both strategic and deployed, a hope kept alive by a series of conferences the main purpose of which seemed to be precisely to keep alive a hope. The same may be said of the Helsinki Pact, an agreement the nature and meaning of which has remained most unclear, Soviet interpretations differing sharply from those in the West. The entire policy was underscored by the willingness of the United States to lower its requirements of national security, abandoning the criterion of “superiority” and falling back on the standard of “sufficiency,” again a term without precision.

The key to the logic holding these main pieces together may be locked forever in the secretive mind of Henry Kissinger. Taken by themselves, the pieces do not fit into a self-evident pattern. We know that containment consisted in the judicious combination of various types and locations of tangible pressures to prevent further Soviet expansion. Detente has claimed to be the opposite of containment. Still, the opening of relations with Communist China may also be seen as the creation of new pressure on the Soviet Union, almost like the opening of a Second Front in World War II. Only in that the new pressure was created wholly by diplomatic means was it novel, a bold and imaginative step. That step, however, did not call for subsequent detente with the Soviet Union. Detente, in that it relieved the Soviet Union of pressures, even nullified the benefits the West had received from Nixon’s trip to Peking. Similarly, the policy of negotiations which Nixon proclaimed had no need to include either direct or indirect approval of Soviet practices, power, and aims. Other countries had previously negotiated and maintained fairly close relations with the Soviet Union while continuing an unwavering opposition to communism as a potential regime. Again, a moderation of the arms race is an undeniably worthwhile objective, but it does not necessarily entail a lowering of national security requirements for the United States. If, then, the pieces of detente do not fit easily together, there must be an additional and intangible element, probably a psychological element, which has not been expressed but contains the unifying principle. Kissinger’s and Sonnenfeldt’s presentation to the meeting of American ambassadors in London has been read as a revelation of this so far hidden rationale of detente. The unraveling of detente, however, is not our problem here. We are engaged in an examination of its ideological dimensions.

If detente is the opposite of containment, and if containment relied on tangible pressures, then detente would consist in removing pressures, or at least irritations. One might even surmise that it would seek to create attractions for the other side, which brings to mind the title of one of Pirandello’s plays: As You Desire Me. Again, if containment operated on conditions under one’s own control, trying to shape those conditions into a complex that would give one the most potent leverage in response to the other side’s potential actions, detente would amount to a self-adjustment to the other side’s moods in an attempt to change the other side’s attitudes and priorities. It would operate, then, on the basis of psychological speculations. That would give us a clue to the West’s ultimate expectations underlying the policy of detente: it must be an expectation to see an emerging Communist Party of the Soviet Union that is worthy of the West’s trust and friendship. Let us keep in mind that the Soviets’ ultimate expectation is to see Communist regimes in the leading nations of the world. Detente, then, roots in the psychological speculations that it may be possible to have Communists give up the notion of class struggle, of the class enemy, and of the redeeming mission of communism, or, alternatively, on the speculation that the Soviet leaders may already have abandoned those notions (a speculation as wishful as conflicting with the record of Soviet conduct).

Detente is a relationship, and thus it must affect both sides. Each side, however, seems to be sure that itself will be immune against any ill effect and that only the other side will be subject to far-reaching changes. There is this difference, however: The Soviets did take positive measures to counteract potentially weakening effects of detente on themselves, precisely their new emphasis on “ideological struggle,” while no need for similar precautions seems to have been perceived by Western leaders. Yet it is the West which is ideologically more vulnerable, since it publicly tolerates any degree of ideological dissent including open subversion, while the Communist Party has built into it a principle of ideological discipline. It would seem that the most undesirable effects on the West would occur by way of mutation in its public assessment of communism.

A parenthetical remark is in order here. In the course of normal foreign relations no moral judgment of other nations is required, because of that mutually sustained “externality” of foreign policy that was earlier mentioned. If such a judgment does take shape among citizens or leaders (as it did, for instance, in Britain regarding Turkey, at the beginning of this century), that is a kind of private self-indulgence of little or no consequence. In the presence of such phenomena as communism or Nazism, however, the formation of a judgment about them must be called a political necessity. For these movements appear in the world with a claim to universal authority which implicitly sets them up as a potential alternative to every political order in the world. That means that the evil they practice as their official policy of ruling must also be seen as the potential lot of any nation, nay, as a potential personal fate of every man, woman, and child in the world. Thus approval or disapproval of this potentiality is inescapable. By comparison, no moral judgment is a political necessity in relations with, let us say, the Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguay, or the Park regime in South Korea, both of which may be viewed as mere givens in the realm of external affairs, without any actual or potential reach beyond their own boundaries.

Detente, a policy of accommodation to Soviet moods and aspirations, expecting eventually to attain full trust and friendship with Soviet leaders, is bound to affect the public’s judgment of communism. Detente inclines to ignore or even deny the fact that the Communists to this day have not yet learned to live in peace with their own subjects. The decrease of media reporting about the treatment of intellectual dissidents in the Soviet Union, and President Ford’s snubbing of Solzhenitsyn are cases in point. In 1963, the term “Communist threat” was declared taboo in the United States; now detente has added any notice of Soviet terror to the taboo. The pattern of public actions under detente implies an image of the Soviets as a normal, respectable, reasonable, peace-loving, right-thinking government. That image is bound to remove the emotional and moral rejection of communism which has prevailed in the West and has mobilized Western nations to both internal and external resistance. In the course of time, it will become more and more difficult to utter any objection to the admission of Communists into the government, which means that Communists will come into demand as political partners of legitimate parties, and will be able to attain positions of power as members of a coalition. Czechoslovakia in 1948 shows how such ventures end.

Among others effects there would be a growing unwillingness to vote appropriations for armaments and armed forces, to maintain troops at foreign bases, and to shoulder the responsibilities of sharing defense with one’s allies. The most serious effects, however, would come through situations in which the requirements of detente would move our leaders to sacrifice the freedom and lives of other peoples to Communist expansion. A case in point is the so-called Sonnenfeldt doctrine which says that in the interest of peace with the Soviet Union the United States favors the conversion of a presently crude presence of Soviet force in Eastern Europe into an “organic relationship.” Eventually, dramatic situations would produce themselves, for instance, if we should similarly favor the abandonment of 16 million peaceful, orderly, and prosperous Taiwan Chinese to “an organic relationship” with mainland Communist rule. Two or three precedents of this kind, each reeking with official cynicism, will cause a real erosion of Western citizens’ trust in the protective nature of their society. If today trusting allies can be sacrificed to the expediency of power relations, why would not I be the next? There might emerge a kind of Watergate psychosis in reverse, as everybody feels that he is potentially in line to die on the altar of god Moloch, which in the government is officially called “peace.” A peace agreement with evil demands human sacrifices. Since that evil is not confined to its state boundaries but potentially reaches right into our living room, it is clear that the accommodations of detente may well bring about a protracted crisis of civil confidence in government—any Western government. In the presence of universal, potentially world-conquering ideologies foreign policy has thus an inescapable moral dimension, so that a foreign policy of principled compromise can directly affect the moral foundation of our country.

Into this situation President Carter’s emphasis on human rights introduced a moral note which seemed equally suited to protect us against the erosive effects of detente as are the Soviet efforts to maintain “ideological struggle.” That new emphasis would once again fan the flames of public indignation about any Communist regime which, never achieving something like peace with its own subjects, and never enjoying the intangible benefits of legitimacy, had to rely on the limitless efforts to attain total power enforced by a lawless police terror. Detente and public emphasis on human right in U.S. foreign policy therefore are in tension with each other. If the American President insisted on noting the endemic disregard for human rights by the Soviet regime, he would contribute to forces apt to increase Western armaments, strengthen the West’s will to resist communism, and determination to fight if necessary. The test of this policy was identified with the concept of “linkage,” i.e. a quid-pro-quo relation between Soviet conduct and either disarmament negotiations or U.S. policies in the Mideast or Africa. Officially, “linkage” has been denied; unofficially it has been effective. Its effect has been ambiguous, so that one must assume that both President Carter’s insistence on human rights and his efforts to obtain a SALT agreement will be negatively affected and U.S. policy will be denied success across the board.

The Soviets, reacting sharply to criticism of their domestic policies, have been able to force the voice of criticism to become muted and, indeed, intermittent, with the result that the full weight of American moral censure has fallen not on the Soviets but on America’s allies who have no leverage by which to tone us down. In one respect this has produced a warping of our foreign policy perspective, in that Rhodesia, South Africa, and post-Allende Chile now appear to be dangers outranking the Communist threat. On the other hand, however, relations with the Soviet Union have not been restored to the openness of the Kissinger period. The impression of confusion in U.S. foreign policy is thus not an assessment of President Carter’s personality but rather the observation of several wills conflicting with each other in the design and execution of our foreign conduct. In spite of a declared moral intention, U.S. foreign policy has given the impression of less moral substance than the preceding detente, which had in its favor the doubtful but yet single-minded logic of a “peace-in-our-time” morality.

It was the moral substance of Rome which enabled the Senate, in one hopeless situation after another during the Punic wars, to rise to that supreme effort by which they eventually turned seemingly fatal defeats into an ultimate victory of Rome. Centuries later, a morally drained Roman empire no longer could muster such determination, and helplessly watched the barbarians take over, bit by bit, the empire’s territory and government. “You have the impression,” Solzhenitsyn says to us, “that democracies can last. But you know nothing about it. Democracies are lost islands in the immense river of history. The water is always rising. . . . The existence of the civilization the West created is going to be at stake in the next years. I think it is not aware of this.”

+++

Notes

  1. Henri Frankfort, Before Philosophy (Pelicanpaper-back).
  2. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (Harper Torchback).