It is not for us to say whether the Americans are looking for a scapegoat and whether Mr. Kissinger will have to fill the role. But it is obvious that they are baffled and angered by the new complexities that confront them in their dealings with the world and that a person taller than the present Secretary of State is not in sight.
Mr. Kissinger has alienated powerful interests and groups in the United States. The pro-Israel Jewish lobby, for instance, is sore because it has fallen to him to adjust his country’s West Asia policy to the realities of the Arab world’s oil and the West’s critical dependence on it. The “hawks” are angry because he has been the principal champion of the policy of detente towards the Soviet Union. And the liberals detest him partly because he took five long years to extricate America from the war in Indochina and partly because with every disclosure it has become increasingly clear that it was he who masterminded the CIA’s activities in Chile, Angola and elsewhere.
There is clearly little merit in the criticism of Mr. Kissinger on the first two counts. After the Yom Kippur-Ramadan war of October 1973, he or anyone else in his place could have pursued the old policy of supporting Israel at the cost of the Arabs only at grave risk to the United States, its principal allies, the alliance systems it heads in the West and the East, and indeed, the stability of the entire non-Communist world. The surprise, if any, is not that he has modified America’s West Asia policy slightly in favour of the Arabs but that he has done this in a manner which has bought Israel considerable time and has not hurt its legitimate interests.
A Lead
Similarly, while there can be little doubt that in the last five years when the policy of detente has been in operation, the Soviet Union has acquired a lead over the United States in respect of nuclear throw-weight – Russia’s SS 18 and SS 19 ICBMs can carry much bigger payloads than America’s Minutemen III and it has caught up with the latter in regard to MIRV (multiple independent re-entry vehicles) – it is absurd for anyone to blame Mr. Kissinger or even his former boss, Mr. Nixon, for it.
Anyone who has followed the nuclear weapons debate in the US over the years will know that the basic decision to limit the size and number of ICBMs was taken in the mid-’sixties by the Johnson Administration. Most US experts were agreed at that time not only that America possessed more than enough nuclear weapons for its purpose but also that it was necessary to allow the Soviet Union to catch up in the interest of the stability of the system. This view has powerful supporters even today.
Its proponents argue that the greater accuracy of the US missiles offsets the Soviet advantage in throw-weight. But that is less relevant than the two points Mr. Kissinger makes. First, that the Nixon and Ford Administrations are not responsible for the alleged nuclear gap and, secondly, that nothing the United States could have done would have halted the evolution of the Soviet Union into a super-power.
Mr. Kissinger is obviously much more, indeed wholly, vulnerable on the third count. For, there can be no question that he has sought to fill the gap in the post-Indochina American policy arising out of nearly unanimous popular opposition to direct military intervention in the affairs of other countries with covert actions through the CIA and other agencies. Also, there can be no doubt that in some ways he remains a cold warrior. In Chile, for example, he acted out of the atavistic conviction that Mr. Allende was a clever, and therefore more dangerous version of Dr. Fidel Castro and in Angola out of an equally untenable view that the MPLA in power would work for the expansion of Soviet influence in the whole of southern Africa.
Ascendancy
This is, however, one side of the American picture. Many of Mr. Kissinger’s critics, too, talk and act as if the American people are prepared to pay the price necessary to regain, if that is at all possible, the old ascendancy over the Soviet Union in the military field and reduce the growing US dependence on Arab oil. This is, of course, not the case. Which only makes it all the more intriguing why the critics talk the way they do.
One possible explanation doubtless is that all sides make partisan statements in a debate in a democracy. But the more important fact is that the American people themselves are ambivalent in their attitudes. They want a relaxation in tensions with the Soviet Union and their country’s pre-eminence at the same time. While they are opposed to covert activities in third world countries, they are by and large apathetic to their economic needs, little realising that this must inevitably breed resentment and despair.
There are doubtless some liberals in the US who favour generous assistance to third world countries. But aid for poor countries is more or less a lost cause there so much so that even an otherwise besieged Mr. Kissinger appears to have convinced himself that this is an issue on which a tough stance by him can pay dividends in terms of personal popularity at home.
It would have been a different matter if the third world countries had by and large made common cause with Soviet Union against the US, or if they were really engaged in an attempt to “extort” what they cannot legitimately claim as their due, or if their performance was truly abysmal. But there has been no such development.
No major third world country has either subordinated its national interests to the Soviet Union or engaged in a long-term anti-West crusade. On the contrary, Moscow has suffered a series of reverses since the ‘fifties – in Indonesia, Ghana and Egypt – and no one can in all conscience argue that India, Algeria, Syria and Iraq, the other main recipients of Soviet military equipment, have subserved its alleged global aspirations. Indeed, the economy of third world countries remains almost wholly tied with that of the West which accounts for 75 per cent of their trade. It is, therefore, only natural that in their search for stable and remunerative prices for their exports, they should turn to it.
Growth Rate
Similarly, it is hardly a debatable issue that a large number of third world countries have done fairly well in the economic field. Their rates of growth compare favourably with the best achieved in the West in the nineteenth century and until the Second World War in the twentieth century. In fact, if some of them like India and Pakistan are seen to be facing massive problems, it is mainly because in the wake of independence they have been only too successful in eliminating the great killers like malaria, smallpox and cholera, in reducing the infant mortality rate and in spreading mass education.
Why then the talk of “confrontation”, “extortion” and “failure” and why the aid weariness? The American people are known to be impatient. But that also cannot account for their attitude to the third world. Ironically enough, one cause of the apathy is the widespread belief that the Soviet challenge has been met and another that the United States, in cooperation with its principal allies, is strong enough to defy the third world. Yet when Mr. Moynihan began to articulate an approach reflecting the latter sentiment, he found himself at odds with a significant section of American public opinion and was disowned, albeit privately, by President Ford and Mr. Kissinger.
Thus as one looks at the US scene from a distance, one feels compelled to draw two inferences. First, while the American people and their leaders are struggling to fashion a foreign policy more in consonance with the present realities, they are finding it difficult either to reconcile themselves to the self-evident proposition that there can be no return to the ‘fifties and the ‘sixties when they enjoyed an overwhelming military superiority over the Soviet Union or to face up to the fact that the principal problem facing them and other industrialised countries is how best to establish an economic order which the third world regards as just and equitable. Secondly, in this painful transition from old responses to new ones, Mr. Kissinger has been caught, unfortunately for him, in the middle with results that are there for anyone to see.
The Times of India 24 March 1976