In his attempt to mobilise public opinion in favour of the Administration in its struggle with Congress, Mr. Kissinger is faced with the extremely difficult task of at once defending the policy of detente with the Soviet Union and emphasising the need to “contain Soviet power”. But it is becoming increasingly doubtful that he will succeed in selling this highly complex approach. For, like their counterparts anywhere else, the American people favour simple single-track policies. For them the Soviet Union cannot for long be a partner and an adversary at the same time. It has to be one or the other and the chances right now appear to be that it will be cast in the role of the main adversary.
The Soviet Union was already moving towards military parity with the United States in 1969 when Mr. Nixon took over as his country’s chief executive and appointed Mr. Kissinger as his principal foreign policy adviser. But American and Western public opinion then was generally not fully cognisant of this fact. And Washington was for the first four years so preoccupied with the war in Viet Nam that it thought of even improving relations with the Soviet Union, and of opening a dialogue with China, at least partly because it wanted to persuade them to utilise their influence in Hanoi in favour of peace terms which the United States could accept without too much loss of face.
CONCERN
It is a different story now. Hardly a week passes when some influential person in the United States or Western Europe do not draw attention to Soviet military power. The point is not whether the figures that are given from time to time in respect of Soviet arms deployment in Europe and production – the latter are far more significant because they suggest that Moscow is currently turning out, for instance, 2,400 tanks a year against 450 produced in the US, 1,400 heavy artillery pieces against 156 in the US, 36 surface ships against half a dozen similar ships in the US and twice the number of tactical aircraft – are accurate or not. It is that these figures have come to be widely accepted and are beginning to cause concern which Mr. Kissinger and other advocates of detente cannot easily remove.
Mr. Kissinger has not addressed himself to these aspects of Soviet power. His carefully prepared San Francisco address of February 3 – it is said to have gone into ten drafts before it was finalised – in fact leaves little room for doubt that he continues to attach the greatest importance to the proposed SALT II agreement with the Soviet Union because he is convinced that failure in this regard would provoke a highly costly and futile nuclear arms race between the two super-powers and greatly poison the atmosphere between them. He may well be right. But he must also know that a SALT-IT accord, however welcome in itself, would not settle the larger issue of relations with the Soviet Union. Indeed, he himself acknowledged in San Francisco that the national debate seems to have “come full circle” with the result that those “who pressed for concessions and unilateral restraint towards Moscow now accuse the government of being too conciliatory.”
Public opinion in America is, of course, moving in two contradictory directions. Those who favour a hard line towards the Soviet Union have in recent months been more than matched, specially in Congress, by those who have been opposed to US involvement in Angola, however indirect, and those who have been anxious to expose the covert activities of the CIA. But this may well turn out to be a transitional phase, not in the sense that the American people will soon get over the trauma of Viet Nam and be ready to send expeditionary forces to other countries but in the sense that they are likely to emphasise once again the overriding importance of military power. This may in fact be already happening. After all the new US Defence Secretary, Mr. Rumsfeld, has not reduced the military expenditure that the allegedly hawkish Mr. Schlesinger had proposed.
EMPHASIS
This process can be accelerated if the Kremlin continues its military assistance to the MPLA regime in Angola, the Cuban troops there do not withdraw reasonably quickly and insurrectionists become active in Zaire and Zambia on the one hand and White-ruled South Africa and Rhodesia on the other. As it is, Africa has been drawn into the Soviet-US competition as a result of recent developments in Angola – Mr. Kissinger has already promised favourable consideration to requests by President Mobutu and President Kaunda for military assistance – and things can easily worsen if regimes which Washington considers friendly come under increased pressure.
An excessive emphasis on military power is, of course, not likely to be more productive of results in coming years than in the past. But the United States is at bay and needs an outlet for its tremendous energy which, on present reckoning, it is likely to find in military expansion.
America is at bay for a variety of reasons. While it remains the world’s most productive and innovative society, it has lost the economic pre-eminence it enjoyed in the ’fifties and the ’sixties and it cannot regain it. It can neither restore the dollar to its earlier status as the world’s principal reserve currency nor reduce its growing dependence on the import of industrial raw materials, specially oil. It cannot recover its old place either as the leading aid-giver or as the most influential power. For, it does not have the will to assist the poor nations of the third world on a big enough scale and what it is prepared to do for them, they regard as less than their due on the ground that it and its West European allies have for decades manipulated the terms of trade and recklessly exploited the resources of developing countries. Its capacity to intervene directly and at will in the affairs of other regions is much less than in the past and, unlike other major powers, it has not quite learnt to adjust itself to the harsh realities.
Thus it is more than possible in the psychological sense that Mr. Moynihan represents the American mood better than the more careful and calculating Mr. Kissinger. Mr. Moynihan’s basic analysis was wrong. Countries like India have not remained poor just because their elites have accepted, as he said in his article in Commentary last year, concepts associated with Fabianism, a typical British product. The malaise is far deeper and to an extent beyond their control. And he did not break up, indeed could not break up, the third world grouping at the United Nations and elsewhere by his attacks on some of its rulers or threats of withholding aid. But all this is far less relevant than the fact that his utterances have served as a tonic to a large number of Americans who are anxious to be told not only that theirs is still the best society but also that it is within their capacity to destroy all hostile alliances.
Mr. Schlesinger represents the other face of the same coin, in fact one-half of the same face inasmuch as he has been telling the American people that they have been too good. But essentially his other role has been far more important. He has been offering a way out of the dilemma which the United States can adopt unilaterally – military expansion. The solution may be partly ersatz but it is also practical insofar as it is within that country’s capacity to recover the lead it enjoyed in the past over the Soviet Union in terms of military hardware. US industry has only to be given the green signal and it can outproduce Russia in military hardware in no time.
TRAGEDY
It will be a great tragedy if this assessment turns out to be accurate and the United States once again takes to road of military expansion. For, it is in many ways better equipped than any other country to take the lead in giving a practical shape to the ideal of a new international economic order. But the fact has to be faced that this constructive approach does not possess even a truly influential spokesman in that country, apart from Mr. Edward Kennedy, who is not yet a presidential candidate, and the atmosphere is not conducive to his being heard, much less heeded. Yet much will also depend on how the Soviet leadership acts.
Mr. Brezhnev appears to appreciate the danger of a renewed arms race and that is presumably one reason why he remains anxious to persuade Washington that he has not deviated and does not propose to deviate from the policy of detente. That may also account for his conciliatory stand on issues connected with the proposed SALT II agreement. But there has to be progress on the question of the mutual reduction of forces in Europe by the two alliance systems and the issue of limiting conventional forces has to be taken up between the two super-powers if another arms race with its dangerous consequences has to be avoided. They face a choice between widening the area of co-operation quickly and returning to cold war. There is no third option.
The Times of India, 18 February 1976