Real War (2 page)

To be effective, our response to the Soviet challenge must integrate long-term and short-term measures. It must also integrate the various levels on which it is mounted—military, economic, philosophical, political, diplomatic. We must recognize the relationships between what happens in Asia and what happens in the Middle East, between strategic resources and patterns of world trade, between economic productivity and military might, between philosophical commitment and national will, between national will and the effectiveness of a nation's military forces in preventing conflict.

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We are at war. We are engaged in a titanic struggle in which the fates of nations are being decided. In war the fact that a surrounded garrison surrenders without any shots being fired makes its capture no less a military victory for one side and a defeat for the other. When the Soviet Union advances by using proxy troops, its conquests are still Soviet victories and Western defeats.

Since World War II the Soviet military buildup has been continuous and the Soviet expansionist pressure has been relentless. Moscow has fished assiduously in the troubled waters left in the wake of the dismantlement of the old colonial empires. It has blockaded Berlin, fomented revolutions in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, aided aggression by North Korea and North Vietnam. It has trained and subsidized guerrillas, disrupted elections, shot down unarmed planes, sponsored coups, shot refugees, imprisoned dissidents. It has threatened, blustered, connived, conspired, subverted, bribed, intimidated, terrorized, lied, cheated, stolen, tortured, spied, blackmailed, murdered—all as a matter of deliberate national policy.

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The basic rule of Soviet behavior was laid down years ago by Lenin: Probe with bayonets. If you encounter steel, withdraw. If you encounter mush, continue. The question is which will the Soviets encounter: steel or mush?

The answer to that question lies with America's leadership. Not just its political leadership. What kind of world view the American President has, how well he understands the uses of
power and the nuances of diplomacy, whether he has a strategic vision and the will and shrewdness to carry it out—all these are vital, even indispensable, elements. But more broadly, the answer lies with those segments of American leadership whose attitudes determine the limits of the possible for American policy.

Unfortunately, America is still suffering from the legacy of the 1960s. A rabid anti-intellectualism swept the nation's campuses then, and fantasy reigned supreme. Attacks on anything representing the established order were in fashion. The discords of that decade and of its aftermath critically weakened the nation's capacity to meet its responsibilities in the world, not only militarily but also in terms of its ability to lead.

Ironically, even as anti-intellectualism ravaged the campuses, the 1960s also saw an overly “intellectualized” new fashion take hold among many of those who thought professionally about arms and particularly about arms control: the notion that above a certain minimum, the less military strength you had, the better. The hope arose that if the United States limited its own arms, others—particularly the Soviets—would follow. But the Soviets did not perform according to theory. In fact, during the same period when this arms-control doctrine was winning favor among American theorists, and the theorists were winning influence, the Soviet five-year plans were charting ever greater increases in military spending, clearly guided by coherent strategic objectives. The Soviets were not bogged down in theory; they were driving toward supremacy.

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There are many today who suggest that American civilization is suffering a terminal illness, that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the West. Some American opinion leaders view this with despair. Some, especially in darkest academia, see it as the logical and overdue result of our being on the wrong side. Like the classic definition of fox hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable,” they see America as the aggressive in support of the oppressive. As playwright Eugene Ionesco reported after a recent visit to the United States, American intellectuals tend to be “masochists who want to be blamed for everything wrong in the world.” When he told American liberal friends that the United States
was not as bad as other nations, “the liberals looked at me askance. For in order to be appreciated in America, one must, above all, never say that Americans are not the worst criminals of humanity.”

What America does suffer from is not itself a terminal illness, but rather a sort of creeping paralysis that could become terminal unless treated. Together with our allies in the Western world, we have the capacity to survive, to prosper, to turn back the challenges to our security that are being mounted with increasing force. The question is whether we will use that capacity.

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Nations live or die by the way they respond to the particular challenges they face. Those challenges may be internal or external; they may be faced by a nation alone or in concert with other nations; they may come gradually or suddenly. There is no immutable law of nature that says only the unjust will be afflicted, or that the just will prevail. While might certainly does not make right, neither does right by itself make might. The time when a nation most craves ease may be the moment when it can least afford to let down its guard. The moment when it most wishes it could address its domestic needs may be the moment when it most urgently has to confront an external threat. The nation that survives is the one that rises to meet that moment: that has the wisdom to recognize the threat and the will to turn it back, and that does so before it is too late.

The naïve notion that we can preserve freedom by exuding goodwill is not only silly, but dangerous. The more adherents it wins, the more it tempts the aggressor.

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The central thesis of this book is that the West, today, has crossed the threshold of a period of acute crisis in which its survival into the twenty-first century is directly at stake. We have the material capacity, the economic and technological strength, to prevail—which means to maintain our freedom and to avert a major war. But the capacity alone is not enough. Sir Robert Thompson, the British expert on guerrilla warfare, has trenchantly defined national power as manpower plus applied resources,
times
will. We have the resources and the manpower. Have we the will to use them?

The situation today is ominously reminiscent of the period
preceding World War II which
Walter Lippmann described so perceptively:

The American people were as unprepared in their minds as in their military establishment. Could the democracies be rallied, could they be collected and nerved for the ordeal . . .? They had the superior assets. . . . But did they have the insight, the discipline to persevere, and the resolution to go through with it? Though they had the means, did they also have the will, and did they know how? . . . They were reacting to events and they were not governing them. . . . They had refused to take in what they saw, they had refused to believe what they heard, they had wished and they had waited, hoping against hope.

There are two aspects to national will. There is will as demonstrated by the nation itself, and there is will as perceived by the nation's adversaries. In averting the ultimate challenge, perceived will can be as important as actual will. Although an American President would launch a nuclear strike only with the most extreme reluctance, the Kremlin leaders must always assume that he might; and that if the truly vital interests of the nation or of the West required the use of nuclear weapons, that he would do so. If they are to be effectively deterred from the ultimate provocation, they must perceive that such a provocation carries with it the ultimate risk.

National will involves far more than readiness to use military power, whether nuclear or conventional. It includes a readiness to allocate the resources necessary to maintain that power. It includes a clear view of where the dangers lie, and of what kinds of responses are necessary to meet those dangers. It includes also a basic, crystalline faith that the United States is on the right side in the struggle, and that what we represent in the world is worth defending.

For will to be effective, it must necessarily include the readiness to sacrifice if necessary—to defer those goals that are merely desirable in order to advance those that are essential; to pay the costs of defense; to incur risks; to incur the displeasure of powerful constituencies at home and of raucous voices abroad.

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America's failures of will in recent years have been partly the product of weariness after nearly forty years of bearing the
burdens of world leadership. They clearly result in part from the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. But more fundamentally, they reflect the failures of America's leadership class. Too many of those who profess to be the guardians of our ideals have instead become the architects of our retreat.

The answer cannot be to replace one leadership class with another. That is not going to happen. Individuals may change, one political party may lose ground to another, different factions may move into or out of intellectual fashion; but essentially, those groups to which the nation looks for leadership will remain pretty much the same throughout these critical two decades. What has to be done is to wake those who exercise leadership to the responsibilities of leadership.

In 1919 a starry-eyed Lincoln Steffens, after visiting the Soviet Union, exulted, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” In our own time other starry-eyed reporters have glorified the “Brave New Worlds” of Maoist China, Vietnam, and Cuba. This romanticizing of revolution, this willful blindness to the human costs of tyranny as long as tyranny speaks the hypocritical language of the Left, permeates the ranks of those who report and those who teach, and it leaves a disastrous imprint on the minds of millions who read and listen.

Revolution itself is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. But what the United States confronts today is the advance of a tyranny marching under the banners of revolution: one that seeks to replace democracy with despotism in the name of “the people.” But in these “people's democracies” the people have no meaningful vote; they have no voice; they have no freedom; they have no choice. The Soviet Union has built the most powerful war-making machine ever possessed by an aggressive power, not for the benefit—or by the choice—of the Russian people, but to extend the dominion of the Kremlin leadership.

Unfortunately for the West, a large segment of the American intellectual establishment, including many in the business establishment, falls for the sort of con-man spiel the Kremlin and its propagandists use. Just as the con man knows how to play on his victim's greed and self-importance, so does the Kremlin know precisely how to play on its target's romantic idealism and on his grandiose dreams of remaking whole societies in his own image.

With Africa now a crucible of great-power maneuver, we cannot afford to have our Africa policies hostage to the bitter memories still cherished by those who struggled for racial equality in America. We cannot let Africa become a stage on which Americans act out their psychic traumas. We must address it as the vitally important strategic battleground that Soviet adventuring has made it.

Nor can we ignore any part of the world as being too far from our concerns to care about. As the 1980s began, this was being vividly illustrated by events in Afghanistan—a fact that provided its own peculiar irony, because for many years American newsmen disparagingly referred to analyses of trends in distant lands as “Afghanistanism.” Afghanistan—remote, landlocked, a harsh mountain region of primitive tribesmen as rugged as the land they lived on—was treated as a metaphor for all the dull and distant events that glazed the eyes of the American reader.

But in real life Afghanistan is much more than that. Despite its poverty and the harshness of its land, Texas-sized Afghanistan has long been a cockpit of great-power intrigue for the same reason that it used to be called “the turnstile of Asia's fate.” With Iran on the west, Pakistan on the south, China to the east and a thousand-mile border with the Soviet Union on the north, Afghanistan has traditionally been one of those points where the great thrusts of empire met.

Throughout its history Afghanistan has been a crossroads for conquerors; Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane have all ridden across Afghanistan's dusty hills in their quest for empire. The King of Afghanistan recalled for me when I visited him in 1953 that it was there that Alexander the Great said, “I have no further worlds to conquer.” In the nineteenth century Great Britain and Imperial Russia played what Kipling called the “Great Game” in Afghanistan as they dueled all across Central Asia in a struggle for control of the continent. The British knew that Afghanistan's rugged Khyber Pass was the gateway to the Indian subcontinent, and they fought two brutal wars to deny the Russians control of it. Today Afghanistan is a testing ground for an ominous, brazen new phase in the Soviet expansionist drive.

A bloody Soviet-backed coup in April 1978 suddenly
ousted President Mohammed Daoud, who was promptly murdered, and installed in his place a stridently anti-Western, Marxist regime under the leadership of Prime Minister Noor Mohammed Taraki. Taraki renamed his ruling party the “People's Democratic Party,” and renamed his country the “Democratic Republic of Afghanistan,” adopting as its new flag a bright red banner with the party symbol and a star in the corner—almost indistinguishable from the Soviet flag. Soon nearly every government ministry, as well as the 100,000-man Afghan Army, had Soviet “advisers,” many of them Tadzhiks from Soviet Central Asia who speak a dialect most Afghans understand.

This abrupt renewal of centuries of Russian pressure against its repeatedly extended Asian borders sent shock waves through Afghanistan's already weakened immediate neighbors, Pakistan and Iran—vulnerable not only because of geography but also because of tribal ties. Baluchi tribesmen range through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran; Pushtuns through Afghanistan and Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province. Less than ten months later, in fact, the Shah's regime had fallen, and leftist guerrillas staged their first takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on the same day that the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan was dragged from his car and murdered.