Convergence or Confrontation

I. Soviet Foreign Policy

Those who do not heed the lessons to be learned from the past history of Soviet foreign policy and of Soviet-American relations are doomed to learn them the hard way. This fact may be entirely satisfactory to those who, by philosophy or temperament, are disposed to deal pragmatically with the problems posed by the Soviet Union, but the cost of this approach and the high risk contained in it suggest that we would do well to draw on some of the achievements of Western man in analysis and reasoning which permit us to be more rational, critical, and prudent.

The Soviet system of power is as clear an example as we have of an enterprise operated by people who act consistently with their beliefs—and who act consistently and systematically because their beliefs are consistent and systematic. Throughout its history, the Soviet Union has conducted its affairs on the basis of firmly held and well-structured assumptions and concepts, which have permitted a maximum of resourcefulness and flexibility in practical decision-making. This flexibility is readily apparent in the continuous and often startling changes and elaborations that have characterized the political behavior of the Soviet regime—behavior which, it should be stated at the outset, has led many observers of Soviet affairs to infer that Soviet foreign policy is arbitrarily formulated and executed more or less in response to the international situation at any given moment in time.

Notwithstanding this kind of mistaken analysis, it is essential to bear in mind that the assumptions and concepts which under-gird Soviet foreign policy have traditionally been, and continue to be, remarkably evident in Soviet foreign policy decision-making. These assumptions and concepts have been internally consistent both ideologically and metaphysically and have been neither ignored nor compromised during the first five decades of Soviet rule.

Unless—or at any rate, until—the Soviet leadership ceases to act politically in conformity with its established ideological vision and conceptual political framework, or changes substantially its ideological and operational principles, these will also provide the basic premises with which Soviet international political behavior must be consistent in the future. When employed as one of the constant factors in trying to predict Soviet behavior, an awareness and understanding of them is one of the essential ingredients of successful analysis.

Not only have the basic and currently unrepudiated concepts and principles of Soviet foreign policy been consistent sincetheir earliest formulations, which makes an understanding of the history of that policy relevant to its current analysis and to the anticipation of its future, but Soviet foreign policy has also been, throughout, dynamic and outgoing, not to mention aggressive. This fact has crucially affected the dynamics of international relations because the Soviets have taken initiatives and created realities which have necessitated responses by the other powers.

Fundamentally, Soviet foreign policy has been unlike that of most non-Communist states whose interest in international politics is basically regulatory, mainly concerned with relations among states and with stabilizing those relations. It has, rather, been concerned not with preserving the existing order, but with transforming it—on three levels. The first level of this transformation of the international order was to make room in it for the Soviet Union as a state of conventional form but unconventional purpose, to defend it and to secure acceptance for it. The second level comprises the struggle for strategic power in the world. On the third level, Soviet foreign policy is concerned with the fulfillment of the visionary rationale of the Soviet system, the transformation of not only the world state system, but of the very structure and nature of the social order, from its pluralism of evolved forms to the so-called socialist form—that is, toward the ideal of the totally rational, perfectly managed society.

Historical materialism, which expresses pseudo-scientifically but sincerely the Communist understanding of the world social revolution, not only states that communism exists because the irrational old order is doomed to be replaced by the new order—whose only legitimate master is the “proletarian vanguard,”—but makes the pursuit of that vision the sole reason and condition for being a Communist. All this is meant to suggest that it was the Soviet Union which exercised the bulk of the initiative in its relations with other states and societies in the past, that not only political realities but also a fundamental ideological commitment made the Soviet dynamic and aggressive initiatives expectable and necessary, and that any analysis of Soviet foreign policy is likely to be sound only when it is assumed that nations or groups of nations, in their relations with the Soviet Union, over the long run do not act, but react to Soviet initiatives, subtle though some of these may be.

This view of Soviet foreign policy as the systematic implementation of a firmly held, long-range vision and as an aggressive contributor to the dynamics of international relations is,of course, only one of several interpretive frameworks. It will be necessary to make a case for this interpretation, and to present it along with a critical discussion of other existing approaches. This having been done, it will be possible to identify the main features of both the theory and practice of Soviet foreign policy over the past fifty years. Finally, a correlation of what the Soviet leadership has done, and is now doing in its foreign enterprises, to its stated primary goals and concepts will allow of some careful surmises of what may be expected of it in the near future, and of what place the United States occupies in the Soviet scheme of a transforming world order.

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II. Other Views

Since our academies have so far withstood the assaults of those who wish to whip them into goose-stepping conformity with thesocial revolution, and the essential institution of controversy has thus been preserved, differing interpretations are not only expectable but also creative. But the savage competition of ideas bordering on academic civil war has deeper roots. Consuming passions and ambitions are involved in the elaboration of interpretations because they are often meant to serve as operational doctrines for official policies and because they inescapably must engage both our understanding of the world and our hopes for it.

It is fair to say that the bulk of scholarly production on Soviet foreign policy expressly denies that there is any significant consistency in Soviet political behavior, either in time or with ideology, or that there is a fundamental aggressiveness in Soviet policy, or that it has provided the major initiatives in international political relations.

Challenging the contention that Soviet foreign policy can be understood by taking seriously the ideological beliefs of the Soviet leadership are the cynics—those who, professing to live and act according to no beliefs and principles of their own, find it impossible to accept that anyone else does. The cynics see in the Soviet leadership an essentially good-natured group of problem-solvers, reasonable and intelligent though fallible men who pragmatically do the best they can in maintaining the Soviet position in international relations from one day to the next, with no more than a normal attachment to the past and to ideology, and with no more concern for the future than is absolutely necessary. One can start with the New York Times inlooking for such views.

Whether or not human behavior in fact consists of only conditioned reflexes or whether ideas are a basic prerequisite for action are questions which are too ambitious in this context. They are, at any rate, irrelevant, since neither the Marxists nor the authentic pragmatists (i.e., those who have thought about pragmatism) claim ideas to be superfluous or of secondary importance. To project onto the Soviet leadership an indifference to ideology which one mistakenly attributes to oneself is an error. This projection may very well be the basis for rejecting the notion of fidelity to ideology among the Soviet leaders, since the pose as a non-ideological problem-solver has become very fashionable in American and European politics of late. It is no more than a pose. Even our own leading politically ambitious “problem solver,” Senator Charles Percy, once organized the compilation of “Goals for America.”

James Burnham, as long ago as the Eisenhower administration, identified the earnest, decent, competent men who could grasp every problem except that of communism as something more than another conventional nation-state. It is, indeed, astonishing that intellectuals have been able to attribute enormous ideological obsessions to Germans, Catholics, Arabs, Ku Klux Klanners, Rhodesians, Gaullists and to almost everyone else except to the Soviet leadership. If the test of any proposition is to be found in practice, those who maintain that the Communists are not only pragmatic but also intelligent ought to consider the possibility that the Soviet leadership crushed Czechoslovak reform, imprisoned intellectuals, and produced cliché-ridden propaganda, among other things, not because these are the least offensive and most effective ways to win friends and influence people, but because Communist ideas and beliefs are at stake, not their political prosperity.

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Another school of thought appears to believe that the kind of ideological and political single-mindedness and toughness which makes a foreign policy both consistent and aggressive can appear only in a monolithic system. One meets them at cocktail parties, among other places, terminating even the most carefully hedged warnings against certain Soviet objectives with the grand phrase that “of course everyone knows that the Soviet Union is no longer a monolith,” expecting thereby to have proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that it is sheer insanity to consider the Soviet Union as anything other than peaceful and progressive, or to think about her at all. One might argue that what is said at cocktail parties is irrelevant, but then there is more than a presumption of evidence that a considerable amount of diplomacy is conducted through this institution, and a good deal of foreign policy is formulated there.

To say that the Soviet system is no longer monolithic, whatever is meant by that, is neither startling nor original. It never has been monolithic; if anything, the intraparty and intramovement struggles are better managed now than they were in the past. Perhaps Trotsky, the Purges, and the dissolution of the Comintern have been forgotten. Nor does the break-up of a monolith turn political wolves into sheep. The Hitler-Mussolini-Tojo axis was nonmonolithic but was able to create considerable damage nevertheless. National Socialism became most bestial and war most total after one axis partner broke away and the relationship with the other had become virtually meaningless and after the empire began to fall apart from the inside. The maintenance of the established pattern of Soviet foreign policy requires a very high concentration of command functions in the Soviet Union and within the Communist state system, but disintegrative events and processes have so far not limited Soviet behavior or objectives, though they obviously affect Soviet capacity.

More credible is the position of those who maintain that Soviet foreign policy was, indeed, at one time nothing less than systematic aggression, but that the character of the leadership and the institutional nature of the system have changed, that the ideological obsessions and the revolutionary élan have disappeared as the Soviet Union has moved from revolution to restoration and has become a status quo power which has taken its proper place in the world community of conventional states. Thus, the interests of the Soviet Union in its early years are no longer her interests today, or so it is said, and even though claims and ideologies have not been jettisoned, reasonable men in the Soviet Union are bound to seethat their interests are served best when the interests of the world community are served, or so it is hoped. This view appears to be taken for granted by the establishment, i.e., the Democratic (and probably the Republican) administration, their ideological mentors, and the mass of newspaper writers and readers. Official documents, expert opinion, scholarly studies, newspaper comment, and political rhetoric make it clear that a large part of the public and of the policy-making establishment is convinced that profound changes have occurred in Soviet thought and practice (which ought not to be denied), and that these changes have led to the unilateral cancellation of the Cold War by the Soviet Union (which ought to be questioned). One prominent newspaper, in fact, termed the invasion of Czechoslovakia a Soviet declaration of Cold War II, implying that Cold War I had ended sometime before. From this view emerges the conclusion, fuelled by fear of nuclear war, that a period of cooperation and detente between the United States and the Soviet Union has become possible, a period which will result in a mutual interrelatedness and in a political stabilization of world politics (the Teheran-Yalta-Potsdam vision of Big Power peacekeeping appears at long last in view), assuring a general peace.

Détente and cooperation are, of course, highly desirable. The question is how one goes about achieving both, and what conditions and terms of such a reconciliation and mutual moderation of goals and power will have to be accepted. The attempt has already been made in the Soviet-American partition of the world at the end of World War II, and in an explicit commitment at Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam, and elsewhere to cooperate in the maintenance of world peace, guaranteed by (choose one:) two, three, four, five big powers. That attempt has failed. The Soviet Union has, since 1945, projected her power far beyond her “assigned” sphere of influence, particularly into the third world, and has promoted international conflict rather than reducing it.

More important, since those facts could be explained as necessary actions in international balance-of-power politics, there has been no change whatsoever in the basic Soviet theoretical statements which describe any state of cooperation and détente as necessarily temporary. Peaceful coexistence loses its meaning, according to every relevant Soviet statement, when the achievement of a preponderance of Soviet power and a shift of the nuclear balance favorable to the Soviet Union make it possible to proceed with the “unfinished business of the revolution”—the social transformation of the world and the elimination of inferior, i.e., non-Communist, social systems. If a preponderance of power is achieved by the Soviet Union sometime in the future, those Communists who wield that power will not be compelled and, therefore, not inclined to discuss any terms of détente (no more than the Germans were asked in 1945 under what terms they would be willing to normalize their relationship with the rest of the world).

Until the Soviet leadership conclusively, in theory and practice, makes a presently temporary commitment to détente and coexistence permanent, it would be well to discuss and scrutinize the terms severely to avoid another disappointment when a program of international cooperation once again turns out to have promoted Soviet power rather than world peace. No one, at any rate, here or in the Soviet Union, really knows whether certain temporary Soviet commitments to international cooperation, nonviolent competition, and the maintenance of the status quo will in fact become permanent. It is simply too early to tell whether the presently cooperative aspects of Soviet policy will ultimately turn from a tactical and strategic expedient into a permanent posture. While such a transformation must be hoped for_. and promoted, premature and careless initiatives toward détente and cooperation ought not to be permitted to provide a sanctuary for Soviet strategic growth and encouragement for renewed aggression.

It is also too early to tell whether, as is often claimed, the Soviet leadership has abandoned its original revolutionary posture, whether the Soviet Union can now be characterized as a conventional nation-state, and whether Soviet international behavior is, therefore, no longer irrational, aggressive, and inscrutable, but rational, cooperative, and predictable.

For historical reasons—the Soviet Union does occupy somewhat the same territory and confronts somewhat the same powers as did the Russian Empire—and for ideological reasons, Soviet theory holds that in the time between the assumption of power by the Communist party and the consolidation of domestic and world-wide control, Socialism must have a fatherland and conventional political institutions must be maintained. There is more than a surface resemblance between much of Soviet political behavior and, on the one hand, traditional tsarist patterns and, on the other, the international political behavior of other nation states. Here again, it is a question of whether the Soviet Union will ultimately abandon political practices temporarily taken over from the old order which it was otherwise determined to repudiate and annihilate, or whether these patterns will significantly alter Soviet political behavior against original goals. It is also a question of whether the fact that the Soviet Union is forced by the realities of power and international environment, as is ideologically acknowledged, to behave according to established patterns of international relations for as long as it does not enjoy a preponderance of power over all other nations will in time produce permanent changes in the goals and methods of Soviet foreign policy.

The Soviet leadership has clearly stated that during this phase (the length of which cannot be predicted) of forced coexistence and competition with conventional nation states, the Soviet Union is required to behave in some essential respects like such states. It has stated just as clearly that it intends, during that phase, to continue to pursue its advantage until a sufficiency of power permits the liquidation of this stage and the establishment of an ideological world hegemony and a world-wide social transformation. The ultimate outcome can only be ascertained and verified by historians, and they can do so only when this historical episode has come to a close.

The political and academic analysts of Soviet foreign policy who appear to have been most influential are those who share the basic belief that the Soviet Union pursues power in the conventional sense, and that this power is pursued and maintained by means of rational politics. They insist that the study of Machiavelli, the correlation of Soviet behavior with that of other nations, and the observation of that behavior will yield a correct understanding, while ideological statements are irrelevant and their evaluation misleading.

The Soviet leadership, in short, is said to have limited or abandoned proclaimed Communist objectives, to have accepted the principle of a multi-centered world political structure, and to haveadopted a disposition towards cooperation because these are reasonable.

Aside from reiterating the view that the permanent character of these postures cannot now be established, it is necessary to state that the concrete evidence for this analysis is not conclusive and frequently contrary. Since empirical and immanent analysis is therefore problematical at best, while statements of policy and theory are unambiguous, it would appear to be wise for the purpose of scholarly investigation and essential for the purpose of policy determination to rely primarily on the latter as indicators of Soviet objectives and guides to analyzing and predicting Soviet international behavior.

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While many of those who question relevance of ideological and conceptual commitments to the formation of Soviet foreign policy concede that Soviet behavior can in fact be characterized as having been aggressive and dynamic, there are others who reject that premise as well. Prominent among them are people with affinities either for the convergence school of thought or for the theory of the capitalist encirclement of the Soviet Union. Basic to the convergence view is the assumption that developmental laws or changing realities are inexorably moving the Soviet Union away from those patterns of politics which require of her leadership an aggressive, expansionist posture and are making a defensive, cooperative attitude not only worthwhile but indeed inevitable. While it is necessary to point out that the convergence theory is completed by insisting that the United States inexorably moves in the opposite direction until all contradictions (and, therefore, if Marx is correct, tensions) between them disappear in the resulting institutional homogenization, one does the theory no favor by doing so. One can, for instance, inquire why two social systems should develop in exactly opposite directions (one toward pluralism, the other toward centralism) for exactly the same reason: increasing industrial complexity. One could also wonder why the United States should move to converge at all because, if the movement of Soviet society in theAmerican direction will render the Soviets more cooperative, then presumably an American drift in the Soviet direction will render the United States less cooperative and more aggressive. Since the prospects for any kind of significant convergence are, at any rate, exceedingly dim, and since the history of mankind is replete with many fearful wars between states which appear institutionally to have been highly compatible (or “converged”), we need do little more with the theory than to state its existence.

Another view is that advanced in a sizable body of literature, both Communist and revisionist, which has its roots in the assumption that the Soviet Union has, from its inception, been surrounded by enemies bent on its destruction and that any Soviet diplomatic or military action which exceeded purely domestic aims has been preventive or defensive in nature. This, like the view that the United States has never sought to force her influence on any outside state or society, is essentially a metaphysical proposition which is believed not because it has been proven to be true but because it stills ideological thirsts, however pretentious the scholarly apparatus of the supporting arguments may be. One does not dispute statements of faith; one either accepts or rejects them. Since even those Soviet statements which characterize the first fifty years of Soviet foreign policy as an attempt to break out of the capitalist encirclement are advanced within the context of arguments that the successful defense of the Soviet Union must necessarily be followed by Communist expansion, there is no reason whatsoever for accepting this interpretation.

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III. Ideological and Institutional Mainsprings

It is one thing to insist that Communist theory provides a broader and more meaningful basis for analyzing Soviet foreign policy than the observation of political behavior alone. It is another to define and describe that theory. Our concern must be with ideology as the metaphysical basis for all political action and with the operational aspects of Communist theory, that is, those propositions which directly determine and delimit concrete goals and action.

It appears unreasonable to assume that the Soviet leaders, alone among all men who have ever held political power, plan their political roles solely as the servants of the Soviet state and the promoters of universal tranquility and prosperity or that, in the Machiavellian sense, they exercise that power because it is there and someone has to do it. Power is sought and held either for the sake of that power and the psychological appetites its possession creates or fills or for the sake of a non-immanent vision of a more or less perfect, more or less universal social order. Usually it is both vision and power which provide the drive and basic incentive.

While it is necessary to say that the sweep of the vision and the claim for power can be satisfied only by the so-called world revolution, it is also, alas, necessary to insist that the Communist world revolution is very much more sophisticated and real a matter than the notions of bomb-throwing anarchists, Trotskyite rabble-rousers, sinister spies, shoe-pounding missile-wavers, and martial conquerors maliciously or naively associated with that term. The Soviet leadership pursues power for the sake of a vision of a perfect universal social order in which it believes. It is in this respect that ideology is important. The Soviet leaders believe themselves to be acting not by preference, but according to the ineluctable process of history, a proposition which has not changed in any respect from Marx’s earliest writings to the most recent official Soviet formulations. They believe themselves to be in possession of the scientifically verified laws of history according to which the entire old order (i.e., non-Communist world) is doomed and deserves to be doomed because it is not rational and therefore has prevented mankind from achieving full happiness. Man will be perfectly happy, they believe, in a rationally and scientifically regulated social and political environment which satisfies all his material and physiological wants (or at least needs), and from which the element of competition and tension has been removed. The means for achieving this millennium, Communists believe, have been placed in their hands, and with it they claim to have been charged with the duty to bring this utopia into being, regardless of human or other cost. From this certainty that they are the saviors of mankind, they derive their militancy and their stubborn pursuit of world revolutionary goals in almost every corner of the globe—even at this point in time, when it would be clearly to their advantage to abandon them and to consolidate the enormous gains they have made in the past fifty years.

This was Lenin’s vision. All Soviet leaders since 1924 have claimed to be Leninists—and we may take them at their word. Virtually all analysts agree that Lenin took his ideology seriously, applied it creatively and flexibly to changing conditions without changing its basic tenets, pursued Soviet power for the sake of the utopian vision, and left to the Soviet leadership a legacy and trust which has to this day not been repudiated, not even in China.

As a social and political system, the Soviet Union represents a unique type. If the word is to be left with any meaning at all, the Soviet state is most decidedly not a socialist state, whatever may be meant by that in Sweden, Yugoslavia, Great Britain, or in the Great Society. It is also far from being either a conventional, multi-centered nation-state or a modern totalitarian manifestation of dictatorship. It combines, instead, three major historical trends in the organization of political power which give it an inner cohesiveness, a concentration of power and resources, and an outer toughness never before achieved by any state. Its base is the structure of an Asiatic despotism, that is, a political system in which a single ruler, with the assistance of a ruling bureaucracy, dominates a society which is politically, socially, and economically atomized. This society does not have the institutions through which it can effectively limit the power of the state. Added to this are techniques of dictatorship developed in Western Europe partly from enlightened absolutism and modern forms of dictatorship. Finally, the motivating element behind this system of power is a messianic ideology which makes a total claim on the allegiance of man.

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There are undoubted signs of disintegration evident within the Soviet Union, and the Soviet leadership faces domestic crises of enormous magnitude. But the anticipation of an imminent collapse of the Soviet system, or its even less likely transformation into an open, cooperative society must be tempered by the realization that systems of total power far weaker than the Soviet Union have withstood challenges far more serious than those confronting the Soviet leaders at the present time. Experience indicates that internal opposition to a centralized state can be successful only if the system is also assaulted from without. There exists no significant outside threat to the Soviet system today; those who are disposed to challenge the Soviet Union are unable to do so effectively, viz., Czechoslovakia or perhaps Communist China. And the policies of the leading non-Communist powers, including the United States, are based on the assumption that the interest of world stability is best served by promoting the stability of the Soviet system.

Because of these policies, which may be defended on other grounds, the Western powers are, as they have been on several previous occasions, providing crucial support to the Soviet leadership in maintaining the integrity of its system. They may, ironically, be preventing those changes from taking place which convergence and evolution theorists have noted or predicted. To be fair, a body of unilateralist opinion, private and official, has advanced the theory that in time the Soviet leadership will have to, or want to, respond positively to such generous concern for its own welfare and for unilateral stability. These unilateralists propose that Western initiatives will be predictably responded to by a rational Soviet leadership, that exchanges of signals will reveal to each side what the other expects of it and is prepared to accept, and that out of a period of signal-communication there will emerge a modus of mutual cooperation.

The signal-calling, which has been in progress since 1961, has revealed some truths, among them some highly unexpected ones. The outlook, particularly since 1965, has become dimmer rather than brighter for Soviet-American cooperation as indicated by Soviet responses and actions. The Soviet Union has dramatically increased, not reduced, its role in Vietnam, has been hell-bent on the development of sophisticated arms systems while talking of nuclear controls and limitations, has penetrated, not left, important strategic areas such as the Middle East, and has crushed institutional and artistic liberalization and reform at home and in the satellites. While our signal-callers have prophesied an end to Stalinist aggression and oppression, the Soviet leaders have restored not only the memory of Stalin but much of his outlook and statecraft as well.

The Stalinist period has been mistakenly identified as shaped by Stalin’s personality rather than Communist theory and structure. It will be equally misleading to interpret the new Soviet course or mood as the expression of the personalities of this or that faction. Soviet theory embodies long-range planning and objectives, and Soviet operational doctrines and institutional realities strongly bind and influence succeedinggenerations of leaders. Style and tactics may reflect personality and factional politics. Concepts and objectives reflect Soviet ideology and institutions.

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IV. Fundamental Strategic Concepts of Soviet Foreign Policy

The fundamental thing . . . is the rule which we have not only mastered theoretically, but have also applied practically, and which will, until socialism finally triumphs all over the world, remain a fundamental rule with us, namely, that we must take advantage of the antagonisms and contradictions between two capitalisms, two systems of capitalist states, inciting one against the other. As long as we have not conquered the whole world, as long as, from the economic and military standpoint, we are weaker than the capitalist world, we must adhere to the rule that we must know how to take advantage of the antagonisms and contradictions existing among the imperialists.”¹ Here, and in the remainder of this speech, given in September, 1920, Lenin bares what have been the two major premises of Soviet foreign policy since 1920. The first is the assumption that, for a considerable period of time, the socialist powers will be weaker than the non-Communist states, and will, therefore, in order to defend the revolution and to create opportunities to advance it, have to operate within the existing international order. The second is the assumption that during this “third stage,” as Stalin called it, a strategy of promoting and inciting major international conflicts among non-Communist states must divert the energies and efforts of non-Communist states and peoples to serve Soviet ends. I would call this the jiu jitsu style of foreign policy: the technique of turning political energies of non-Communist states against themselves. This makes diplomacy, propaganda, and political manipulation the primary means of securing and advancing Communist power.

Reliance on theoretical statements here does not constitute citatology, or the custom of finding an explanation for Soviet behavior in this or that obscure quotation from Communist scriptures. Not all Communist statements are of equal weight, nor do they refer to matters of equal magnitude. The Leninist concepts referred to here, which have been constantly reiterated ever since his time by other Communist leaders, established principal goals for a major period of Soviet policy. Every significant concrete initiative in the past fifty years has reflected them, which alone would indicate that they should be taken seriously. Disregarding these concepts, Soviet policy may be interpreted in many different ways. With them, the task of evaluating Soviet behavior becomes not only more manageable, but the likelihood that our analysis reflects actual immanent goals, rather than imputed motivation, becomes very much greater.

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Observing both theory and practice, and departing from Lenin’s 1920 formulations, these have been the major sets and levels of contradictions around which the operational basis of Soviet foreign policy has been constructed.

1. An actual and potential conflict between the United States and Japan over strategic mastery of the West Pacific and East and Southeast Asia was identified early. While there is no justification for arguing that Soviet policy is solely responsible for the U.S.—Japanese war, though it had been called for by the Communists, more thorough investigations of the pre-war Soviet apparatus in Japan and the work of Communist and pro-Communist elements in the Japanese government and army (and in other states) may well yield indications that, along with known Soviet political activities, the diversion (and even development) of Japanese initiatives toward the United States and China and away from Siberia and the Soviet Union was influenced by them. The Moscow-initiated Communist-Nationalist united front of 1937 in China did engage Japan in China, the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact of April, 1941, did leave the latter free to prepare for her confrontation with the United States, and the Japanese occupation of large areas of East and Southeast Asia did provide the Communists with the opportunity to establish Communist party hegemony over the various national-liberation movements which laid the basis for the successful as well as unsuccessful post-war takeover attempts. Soviet interest throughout was both defensive and expansionist. With the exception of the hoped-for major tensions between Great Britain and the United States, Soviet expectations materialized to a great degree. If it goes too far to credit Soviet diplomacy with responsibility for conflicts which might have come about without it, it nevertheless did play a role at crucial junctures in maximizing, rather than minimizing conflict when the Soviet Union had an opportunity to do the latter.
2. Stalin had characterized Germany as the “mine under Europe.” This phrase reflectsthe earlier Leninist and present Communist conviction that the latent conflicts between Germany and the major Western powers, and among the latter over Germany, have the greatest potential for intra-Capitalist wars from which the Soviet Union can gain, and for the prevention of that general solidarity among the major non-Communist powers which would be disadvantageous to the interests of the Soviet Union and the Communist movement. Lenin and Stalin foresaw a magnificent opportunity to exacerbate deep hostilities between “vanquished” and “semi-colonial” Germany and the victorious and domineering Western powers into a general world conflagration, preferably with the Soviet Union as an uninvolved bystander. The main results of this posture were expected to be the prevention of an anti- or non-Communist alliance against the Soviet Union, the greatest possible perpetuation of European political, social, and economic instability, a general European war providing the Soviet Union with a variety of opportunities for political and territorial expansion, a weakening of the Western powers to reduce their ability to resist Communist advances into dependent and semi-dependent non-Western areas (decolonization) and a preoccupation with Germany as the major problem of world diplomacy to divert attention from the problems and challenges posed by the Soviet leadership. All these expectations were fulfilled to a remarkable degree. While the Japanese policy has had to be downgraded after World War II for a number of reasons, Germany remains today the principal focus of the Soviet strategy of maintaining, to its advantage, a divisive worldwide concern with that country.

   The Soviet German policy could not have been more consistently applied in the pastfifty years. It began with Soviet support for German revisionist anti-Versailles interests and the secret rearmament of Germany in the Soviet Union after World War I, was reflected in the Communist efforts to undermine the Weimar Republic, explains the crucial assistance provided by the German Communist Party to the National Socialists in their struggle against the republic and German social democracy from 1928 to 1933, was behind the Soviet efforts in the formation of an anti-German alliance in the nineteen-thirties, and reached its peak in the Soviet-German nonaggression pact and partition of Poland which permitted the commencement of the tragic chain of events leading to World War II from which the Soviet Union, despite her own destructive and unanticipated involvement, emerged as a major world power.² After an initial post-war attempt to mobilize hoped-for German resistance to integration with the Atlantic powers, the Soviet Union returned, with the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956, to a persistent policy of promoting, through diplomacy and propaganda, anti-German postures among her potential and actual partners, with the goal of perpetuating Germany’s position as an object of big-power competition and of undermining her role as a productive partner in a general rapprochement and integration. Concrete gains are expected from external tensions over Germany and from internal disintegration and radicalization, both of which are actively being promoted.

3. While the strategy of dividing the principal non-Communist powers has been primarily defensive and only occasionally expansionist, a strategy was devised for expanding into the strategically weak area of the so-called third world of underdeveloped, backward, or neutral nations while the main powers were being limited, co-opted, or paralyzed. Lenin drew on the experience of the Russian October revolution which, as organized by him, had placed a small Communist elite at the head of a general anti-autocratic movement, of liberation with the mass support of the peasantry whose adherence had been gained by offering them a fraudulent land reform program. The road to Paris was said to lead through Peking, a formulation which expresses the Communist judgment that the prospects for major revolutionary gains are for the time being greater in the so-called colonial countries than in the capitalist societies which had unexpectedly withstood the revolutionary tide which had emerged in 1918, and that the establishment of Communist control over colonial areas—on which the Western powers were believed to depend for economic survival—would weaken those powers in preparation for a later direct confrontation.

   The class struggle was now redefined as including antagonisms between oppressor nations and all the peoples, including the national bourgeoisie (the class enemy of tomorrow), of the colonial countries, and the presence of a mass revolutionary force was seen in the peasantry whose land-hunger was noted. The strategy of the Communist movement now had become the organization and control of movements of national liberation which were, when they had succeeded, to be converted into Communist regimes. As particularly exemplified by Comintern efforts in China, the expectation in the 1920s was that a Communist-infiltrated nationalist movement would achieve independence and power, whereupon a coup would convert the new regime into a Communist dictatorship, with those having ridden the tiger ending up inside. In the 1930s, Communist movements frantically attached themselves to nationalist movements and regimes to remain viable, and to influence national policies as much as possible to contribute to the polarization of the world that was desired, namely the emergence of opposing blocs of “fascist-militarist” and “democratic-imperialist” states. In the 1940s, Moscow-led Communist parties “became” anti-fascist resistance movements and “leaders” in the struggle for national liberation from fascist and militarist oppression, a strategy which resulted not only in a great number of outstanding recruits and much good will, but in the political and military base essential to the post-war efforts to establish Communist regimes wherever conditions permitted them. During that time also, “agrarian reform” became an important strategic factor through which was won not only great support among the masses, but from Western intellectuals, propagandists, and governments as well. In the 1950s, the third-world strategy was attached to the so-called process of decolonization, and non-Communist nationalist regimes were enlisted in a general posture of neutralism which, while it was not particularly helpful to Communist expansion, was immensely harmful to the strategic position and moral prestige of the West. The offensive to form Communist-led national-liberation movements and to convert extreme nationalist regimes through Communist coups was resumed in the late 1950s and continues into the 1960s. While hitherto there has been a cannon-fodder approach to such movements and regimes, with the Soviet Union providing little concrete assistance, or pretending not to, the 1970s quite likely will see an increase in both the militancy of national-liberation wars and movements, and in direct strategic Soviet support for them. The anticipated result will be a far-reaching Soviet hegemony over a substantial portion of the world’s territory and population which, together with major advances in Soviet strategic military power and a disintegration of the cohesiveness, power, and will of the non-Communist nations, will decisively tip the balance in favor of the Soviet Union and permit it to proceed with the next two points on the original Leninist agenda, the mobilization of another round of intracapitalist confrontations, and the final showdown between the “two camps.”

4. Lenin and Stalin had identified the latenttensions between the United States and her democratic allies as the fourth major set of contradictions which would weaken the non-Communist world and provide expansionist opportunities for Soviet power. Clearly documentable applications of this strategy of driving wedges between them can be found consistently since the 1920s, and its intensification, and success, in the past few years are so evident as to scarcely require mention. The thrust of the bulk of Communist propaganda, Communist-led opposition movements, and bona fide dissident expression has been that the United States is morally and strategically unfit for leadership of the non-Communist world. The aim has been to create a crisis of confidence between the United States and other states and peoples leading to the isolation of the United States as a world power. Opposition to the Vietnam War, to the American strategic and developmental presence in various parts of the world, the denigration of American culture, exposure of American racial and social problems have centered around the point that the United States must not beemulated, followed, cooperated with, or respected. Ironically, American inability or unwillingness to provide decisive assistance or leadership has also been used in propaganda intended, to convey the message to some nations that dependence on an unreliable super-power is unwise. There is a multitude of ways, some simple and others very subtle, to promote discord and distrust among non-Communist nations, and the Soviet leadership has missed few opportunities to seek to alienate the United States from the rest of the world.

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V. Prospects for Soviet Foreign Policy and Soviet-American Relations

The fifth major set of contradictions identified by Lenin in 1920 was the struggle for strategic power between the United States and the Soviet Union, in which the issue over which social system prevailed would be finally decided. Available evidence would indicate that it is premature to assume the Soviet Union to now be determined to avoid such a clash. At the same time, the existence of nuclear and other horror weapons has made a direct confrontation improbable and the experience with Communist China has indicated the strong likelihood that communism, once established world-wide, will promptly break up and disintegrate. I believe that the Soviet leadership has adjusted to these realities by aiming now at absolute strategic hegemony over the world, but not a political and military conquest or occupation.

Highly effective systems of rule over large foreign areas have been maintained in the past through select and largely remote controls rather than by a physical mass presence. One such historic “occupation by strategic controls” was experienced by the Russians in the Mongol period; the most recent example of a state which achieved virtual world hegemony through a highly limited apparatus of strategic, military, economic, and cultural controls was nineteenth-century Great Britain. I see strong indications that the new Soviet style of world politics is going to resemble more and more the old British style of empire-building. The Soviet leaders have been slow to push for the establishment of bona fide Communist regimes in various areas of the world, creating instead a whole series of dependent relationships as if aware that hegemony is, in the long run, more effectively maintained by control than by occupation. A whole array of military and particularly naval developments and the imminent succession by the Soviet Union to strategic bases (especially those which would permit the Soviet Union almost total domination over the Near and Middle East) vacated by Great Britain point to a preoccupation with techniques of empire by strategic control. The emergence of the Soviet Union as a substantive provider of developmental aid (with strategic strings attached to much of it), as a marketer of major competitive goods (oil, advanced airplanes, etc.) and as a factor in the international money market indicate a growing capacity in this medium of political controls. Finally, and there is no British corollary here, while various arms limitation agreements were sought under the assumption that both the capacity and the willingness to develop further major weapons had leveled off here and in the Soviet Union, it is no longer denied even by the Department of Defense that the Soviet Union has made major developmental and production advances in strategic military capacity.

The long-range aims seem, for the moment, to be reasonably evident. The Soviet Union will pursue, in every way possible, strategic, political, economic, psychological, and every other advantage in order to achieve a monopoly or such a preponderance of power over all other nations that, without a world-wide occupation, which would be self-destructive, and without a direct confrontation with the United States, which would be even more so, an ideological and political hegemony, a Pax Sovietica, canbe established in the shadow of whatever social transformational goals remain to be accomplished.

To compare this concept of empire to the British example is not, of course, meant to obscure the fact that enormous differences existed between pluralistic, democratic England and the single-centered, despotic Soviet system, and that the result of British rule was often (as Marx, for one, acknowledged) progress and the export of democratic institutions and ideals, while no such gains will accrue to the beneficiaries of the new Soviet imperialism.

The German strategy, the national-liberation strategy, and the strategy of isolating the United States as a world-power will dominate operational aspects of Soviet foreign policy in the foreseeable future.

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After nearly a century of incessant anti-German propaganda in the West, and after the Hitler period, Communists have no difficulty in finding responses to propaganda aimed at persuading people, for perfectly good reasons of their own, to undermine German-Allied cooperation in the interest, unknown to them, of the Soviet Union. But there is more to it than propaganda. It has been suggested that the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in August, 1968, amounted to a major Soviet strategic troop deployment in preparation for an attack on West Germany. If American guarantees for the defense of Germany were to wither and if political disintegration within Germany were to render the constitutional government impotent, such an invasion would not only be possible, but likely. Soviet leaders, at any rate, have said so. While I do not believe the German option to have the highest Soviet priority, I do believe it to be active, because it is reasonably possible. There are political candidates in the United States who a) could be elected and b) would reduce the American commitment in Germany. And Communist agitational work in West Germany has become so effective and organized that the Bonn Republic may well go the way of the Weimar Republic, which was undermined by smaller groups of political and ideological degenerates and wreckers than are today assembled in West Germany—which, if anything, is more permissive of such things than the old republic.

Wars and movements of national liberation will intensify and promise to be particularly rewarding to the Soviet leaders in Africa and the Middle East. There, they can be supported far more directly and effectively than in Vietnam, the slogan “No more Vietnam’s, especially in Africa” will paralyze American response for a long period, and if initial national-liberation wars are directed against regimes which the United States is presently pledged to isolate and eliminate, such as Rhodesia and Angola, the Communists can also have their forces supported by the United States.

There has been a concentration of attention on developments and events within the Soviet Union which point to the making of a serious internal crisis of control. communism is popular only where it is either unknown or misunderstood, and the Soviet people are no doubt fed up with the system at a time when the disparity between Soviet life and the outside world becomes not only greater but also better known to them. To conclude, however, that a dramatic crisis, which at any rate is limited to a challenge by men and women with convictions and ideals (which leaves out the cynics and managers who may complain but who have neither the guts for nor the interest in revolt at the peril of their status), can only lead to a deliberate loosening up of control and more cooperative international behavior is to overlook the abundant power and potential for domestic repression and foreign expansion.

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The Soviet system of today is, indeed, not the crude and blundering revolutionary and expansionist enterprise of yesterday. Its apparatus for analysing and appraising social and political conditions around the world is highly sensitive and sophisticated. Soviet foreign policy is opportunistic in the best sense of the word. Equipped with overall analytic concepts and strategic goals, every discontent, every conflict, every manifestation of unintegrated power is evaluated and creatively exploited. The Soviet leadership, in addition to its troubles, also has a good many things in the world today favoring it, not the least of these being the fact that no Soviet initiative has been and will be resisted when it is not recognized or understood. The Soviet leaders are not omnipotent supermen. They owe their successes to the fact that they were able to so organize and arrange their advances that there would be no enemies.

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Notes

1. Lenin, V.I., Selected Works (New York, International Publishers, 1943) vol. VIII, 279–280. Cf. also Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow, 1966), 448–450 and Stalin, J., Works, vol. 6 (Moscow, 1954), 98–110, 267–295.
2. In anticipation of one objection, let it be understood that, whatever may be saidto minimize Sovietculpability in the origin of World War II, the Soviet Union did not have to support Hitler’s ambitions at thispoint by signing the pact. And whatever may have been said about this matter in the Soviet Union subsequently, the Soviet leadership clearly stated its interest in a revisionist, i.e., anti-Western Germany and a general capitalist war before 1939.