Real Peace (10 page)

China's leaders have two often contradictory interests. The first is communist ideology. The second is survival, which means not only physical survival but also economic growth and development. Under Deng Xiaoping and his pragmatic colleagues, survival is in the ascendant over ideology. We can help keep it that way by making sure China's faith in the West is constantly renewed and strengthened. If China loses confidence in our military power and our will to use it to deter Soviet aggression, it will have no choice but to seek a rapprochement with the Soviet Union. By the same token, if China's hopes for economic progress through increased trade with the West prove illusory, they will be tempted to turn toward the Soviet Union, despite their distrust and dislike of the Russians. An enlightened, hard-headed U.S. and Western policy to meet China's needs for both security and economic progress will assure that China is not faced with that Hobson's choice.

Too many people assume that the United States has the primary responsibility for satisfying China's need for economic progress. Our role is significant. But Western Europe's trade with China in 1982 was equal to ours, and Japan's was twice as much. Europe and Japan have as great a stake as we do in helping China develop its economic strength so that it will be able to build the necessary military power to deter Soviet aggression.

The Sino-Soviet split in 1961 and the U.S.-China rapprochement in 1972 were the most significant geopolitical events of the post-World War II era. The West has no higher priority than to pursue policies which will convince the Chinese leaders that their hopes for security and economic progress will be realized if they turn West rather than turning to the polar bear in the north. There can be no real peace in Asia if China comes under Soviet domination.

The greatest threat to peace comes not from the possibility of a direct conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, but from the chance that a small war in the Third World will drag in the two superpowers and escalate into a world war. If our goal is real peace, we must address ourselves to the conditions in the Third World that bring about conflict and war.

Three and a quarter billion people live in the developing nations of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, the vast majority of them in abject poverty. Their average per capita income is $600 a year, compared with $10,000 in the United States. Their societies are starkly divided between the very rich and the very poor. Their governments are seldom democratic and often corrupt.

Poverty and bad government are nothing new. What is new is that millions who endure poverty and bad government can now know what they are missing. To see how the other half lives all they have to do is switch on their television sets. Their realization that those who live in the West are far more wealthy, far more comfortable, and far better fed has created
enormous frustration and tension throughout the developing world.

This tension and frustration make revolutionary change inevitable. The question is whether change will come by peaceful means or by violence, whether it destroys or builds, whether it will leave totalitarianism or freedom in its wake.

Although the Soviet Union is the source of many of the conflicts in the Third World and profits from most of them, it is not the only cause. If the Soviet Union did not exist there would still be regional conflicts and civil wars. The Palestinian people would still fight for a homeland, Iran and Iraq would still be at war, and India and Pakistan, two of the world's poorest countries, would still be spending $8 billion a year on defense—not because they fear the Soviets, but because they fear each other.

Still, even in these conflicts the Soviet Union is sometimes an instigator, sometimes a facilitator, occasionally an observer waiting for the right moment for taking an active role. In virtually every region of the world—the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Southeast Asia, the Asian subcontinent, Latin America—the Soviets are involved in one way or another in doing what they do best: making bad situations worse. Their long-term goal is to initiate or assist in the overthrow of any government that is not under communist domination, especially in the Third World where regimes are often temptingly unstable.

The stakes are high, for it is not just the Third World that is at stake. When the interests of the great powers collide in areas like the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, any small war between their respective allies can rapidly escalate into a world war. In the Middle East crises of 1956, 1958, 1967, and 1973, for example, the superpowers were drawn toward the precipice of direct conflict by the actions of their allies in the region. The world saw how easily the cradle of civilization could become its grave.

The most immediate threat to peace in the Third World is Soviet adventurism—not overt aggression across borders by
Soviet troops as in Afghanistan, but covert aggression under borders by Soviet proxy forces.

The Soviets are shrewd observers of the international scene who know what the geopolitical market will bear. They avoid promoting invasions across borders such as North Korea's invasion of South Korea. In that case communist aggression provided a clear rationale for response by a united West.

Since the West is moved to outrage in such matters of sharp black and white, the Soviets have learned to do much of their dirty work in gray areas. Theirs is a thoroughly modern technique of expansionism. They provide arms, training, and propaganda support to revolutionary forces within a country. Their recent victories—in Yemen, Ethiopia, Angola, and Nicaragua—have been sleights-of-hand, backdoor operations in which their involvement was hidden behind local forces or proxies.

Overt aggression across a border entails great risk and cost in terms of worsening relations with the West, as was the case following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Aggression-by-proxy is a low-cost, low-risk enterprise that can therefore be carried out on a far vaster scale. An indication of the success of this tactic is that nine countries and 100 million people have come under Soviet domination since 1974. Until Afghanistan no Russian soldiers were lost in combat in the process of bringing these victories about. Such conquests cost only as much as the weapons do. And the risk to Soviet interests is minimal, because the West usually directs its response against the proxy forces, not the source.

The West has not yet found an effective way to combat indirect Soviet aggression, and our weakness in this regard is one of the Soviets' greatest strengths. Their policy is one of sheer, ruthless opportunism; the West, meanwhile, struggles to find ways to combat covert Soviet aggression that are in accordance with accepted rules of traditional warfare. As a result we have found ourselves outgunned and outmaneuvered time and time again in the Third World because we have been unwilling to do what is necessary to win.

It is not that we should “sink to their level” in combating the Soviets. It is simply that we should be just as aggressive in promoting our ideals and in assisting our friends in the Third World as the Soviets are in promoting and assisting theirs. At a time when the Soviet Union's entire strategy is based on using covert rather than overt tactics, for instance, it would be the height of stupidity for the United States to castrate our CIA.

Our first step in building real peace in the Third World should be to end our romance with left-wing revolution. The catharsis of violent revolution has been so common in this century that many have come to think of it as inevitable. If we are to play a productive role in the Third World, and if we are to stop playing into the Soviets' hands, we must stop assuming that violence is the only road to change that developing nations can take.

Revolutions can begin without outside support. But they cannot survive and prevail without weapons, logistical expertise, food, medical supplies, communications equipment, and training. These things must be provided from outside the country. The North Vietnamese could not have conquered the South without the support of the Soviet Union. In Nicaragua the Sandinistas would have been hard-pressed to take power without the backing of the Soviets and the Cubans. And while there would have been a guerrilla insurrection in El Salvador without outside support, the guerrillas could not survive without the weapons they receive through Nicaragua, again from the Cubans and the Soviet bloc.

One nation falls after another, often with the help of communist leaders in nations that fell before. But eventually all roads and supply lines lead back to Moscow. In recent months shipments from the Soviet bloc have been intercepted en route to Central America. Crates marked “medical supplies” have been found to contain arms. Here in a nutshell is the essence of the Soviet policy in the Third World: the weapons of war wrapped in the empty promise of peace; the promise of soothing misery, the reality of exacerbating it.

We are a nation of idealists, yet we are often blind to the cynicism of Soviet foreign policy. The Russians make revolutions, and they feed on them. Like a vulture hunting fresh carcasses the Soviet Union scans the globe for potential trouble spots, places where people are groping for a better way or suffering through periods of instability. Poverty and injustice do not produce communism; communism produces poverty and injustice. But the Soviets are skilled at exploiting peoples' grievances in order to bring about communist takeovers.

The Soviet challenge is total. Our response must be total. We must provide military and political support to governments threatened by Soviet-supported revolutionary forces. While this sometimes poses a difficult choice, it is rarely between a bad regime and a potentially good one. Rather it is usually a choice between an imperfect regime and a post-revolutionary regime that would be far worse. The liberal critics cannot bring themselves to recognize this stark fact of international life. Time and again they have glorified and celebrated revolutionaries, no matter how inflated their promises or how vicious their tactics. And yet when have the critics been right? Do they believe now that Iranians are better off under Khomeini than the Shah, that Cubans are better off under Castro than under Batista, or that the Vietnamese are better off under the communists than under Thieu?

Still, simply opposing violent, communist revolutions is not enough. We must be able to convince people that they should fight against insurgents not just because of the fear of communism but also because of the promise of freedom. The people in these countries have terrible problems. The communists at least talk about the problems. Too often we talk only about the communists. It is not enough for us to point out that going down the communist road is the wrong way. The only effective answer is for us to offer a better way.

That is our task today in Central America.

In the 1970s the United States failed a critical test in Indochina. Central America, which has triggered the most bitter American foreign policy debate since Vietnam, is also the most
important test of American fortitude since Vietnam. We have had nearly a decade to study the lessons of our past failure. If we fail again there will be no excuses and little hope that we will ever again be able to defend our interests beyond our borders.

El Salvador is only today's crisis. As long as Soviet ambitions remain there will be other ones like it. This newest instance of Soviet aggression on our doorstep, however, challenges us to find both an effective way to counteract a Soviet-backed insurrection already under way and also to stop future such insurrections before they are hatched. How we meet these challenges in the Third World will decide whether we will preserve Western civilization or preside over its demise.

Two things are at stake in El Salvador: American interests and the interests of the people of El Salvador. As far as resisting communist aggression is concerned, our interests are identical.

America's new isolationists are living in a dream world when they contend that what happens in “little” El Salvador does not threaten our interests. Apart from our concern that in the event of a communist takeover hundreds of thousands of refugees would flood into high-unemployment areas of Texas and other border states, the U.S. has a vital strategic interest in the outcome in El Salvador. Nuclear missiles based there would take only eight minutes to get to Washington. If the Panama Canal were blocked by hostile forces American shipping would be paralyzed. If the communists, who now have a foothold on our continent in Nicaragua, extend that foothold into El Salvador they will have a secure basing station for further forays—both to the south into South America, and to the north into Mexico and beyond.

The refrain of the new isolationists is unchanging and unending. In the 1960s, after Castro's revolution, they asked: “What can little Cuba do to hurt us?” Cuba became a proxy of the Soviet Union, a supplier of crack shock troops for conquests in Africa and elsewhere. One of its victims was Nicaragua, and after the Sandinistas took power there in 1979 the
new isolationists were again in full chorus: “What can little Nicaragua do?” The Sandinistas, having made a mess of their own country by replacing a right-wing authoritarian regime with a left-wing totalitarian one, began to export
their
revolution. One of
their
targets is El Salvador. And just as they were not satisfied with Nicaragua the communists would not be satisfied with conquering the 2.4 million people of El Salvador. If the communists win there they will look elsewhere: Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama—and eventually the Soviets' big enchilada, Mexico.

Like many who were born and raised in southern California and the Southwest, I have great respect and affection for Mexico and its people. I went to school with Mexican-Americans for 16 years. Mrs. Nixon and I spent two weeks in Mexico in 1940 on our wedding trip. Our daughters' second language in college was Spanish. We have been back to Mexico many times for both public and private visits. As Vice President-elect in 1952 I attended the inauguration of President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines. He made a profound impression on me as being one of the free world's ablest and wisest statesmen.