Real War (11 page)

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If the spiritual heritage of today's communism derives less from Marx than from the Tsars, the reverse of that coin is that the new Russian empire differs from the old in the intense missionary zeal, the ideological fervor, of Marxism as reinterpreted by Lenin and his heirs. These provide a rationale for tyranny, a banner under which to rally the desperate and the discontented.

The ideological fervor and framework with which Soviet leaders approach the world provides a historical rationale, a dialectic, that is a mandate for change. According to it, “stability”
or “normalization” of relations is a contradiction. It combines with a totalitarian political regime to make “forward progress” of socialism mandatory; for socialism to succeed, and to be compatible with the security of the Soviet Communist Party and state, it must be advanced and controlled by the Kremlin. All of this tends toward a preoccupation with change in the world.

Communism has created a new alliance between Russian imperialism and “revolutionary” movements worldwide. It disguises despotism in the language of radical idealism, thus entrancing idealists. The banner of revolution gives despotism a new semblance of legitimacy, and despotism gives the “revolutionary” movement arms, money, membership in a global club, and a full array of modern techniques of conquest and control.

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After 1917 the techniques of the tsarist secret police were taken over by the communist revolutionaries and a vastly more powerful entity, the KGB, was created. The Russian tradition of militarism was wedded to communist techniques of subversion and the marriage produced a new danger to sovereign states—unscrupulous Communist parties controlled by Moscow. The traditional Russian fear of invasion was redoubled as the entire world automatically became Moscow's ideological enemy. Finally, the Russian habits of expansion and conquest were given a new lease on life when Moscow proclaimed that it was Russia's holy duty under Marxism to liberate the doomed “capitalist” world. Tsarist imperialism was fused with communist revolution and a terrible new force entered on the world's scene: the “imperialist revolutionaries.”

Lenin ruled the Soviet Union for barely six years before his death in January 1924; Stalin ruled for more than a quarter century before his death in March 1953. Lenin set the course, but Stalin established the iron rule. Stalin massacred the small landholders, collectivized the farms, built the secret police, conducted the purges of the thirties, and spread the terror of the Gulag Archipelago.

The post-Stalin leaders have moderated some of the earlier brutalities, introduced some individual freedoms—which would not be recognized as freedoms in the West, but that by contrast with what prevailed before are a step forward—and
become a more polished, more sophisticated, at times more mannerly force in the world. But the power structure remains. The absolute dictatorship remains. The totalitarian state remains, because this is the essence of the neo-tsarism on which the whole authority of the Soviet state is built. The relentless drive toward expansion remains. The Soviet leaders have a military machine beyond the dreams of the Tsars, and they have spread their power beyond the farthest reach of tsarist ambition.

At the start of the twentieth century the relentless outward thrust of Russian expansion was blocked chiefly by five great containing powers. The gates were guarded by Germany and Austria-Hungary in Europe, by the Ottoman Empire to the south, and by Japan in the Far East. Throughout the heartland of Asia, in Persia, Afghanistan, India, Tibet, and the rest, the British played what Kipling called the “Great Game” with Russia, strengthening local powers so that they could stand up to the Russians, stepping into the breach themselves when necessary. These powers managed to keep the restless Russian giant confined; they kept it a continental rather than a global power, extending its rule to the edges of the Eurasian continent only in its forbidding northern and eastern reaches.

World Wars I and II destroyed the European-made world order. They brought the communists to power in Russia and China. They destroyed the five great containing powers that had kept Russia penned in. They catapulted the United States to the center of world politics before it was ready.

For the United States the twentieth century has meant the end of innocence. For Europe it has meant the end of empire. For the peoples of Russia, China, and more than a dozen other countries it has meant the horrors of communist rule. For the rulers of the Soviet Union it has meant the end of the great power constraints that had previously kept Russian expansion in check.

In World War I Germany was struck down and its empire reduced. Austria-Hungary was split apart, vanishing from the map. The Ottoman Empire disintegrated. Britain and France, although nominally victors, were gravely weakened.

What World War I began, World War II completed. As Charles de Gaulle told me in 1969, “In the Second World War all the nations of Europe lost, two were defeated.” Germany was partitioned, Japan was disarmed, and Britain was so weakened that the dissolution of its empire began almost immediately. In thirty years' time the powers that had contained Russia in the nineteenth century either had been crippled or had vanished from the world scene.

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Americans paid little attention. True to our isolationist past and to the naïve idealism that infused our approach to world affairs, we approached World War II as if it were a sporting match with no other goal but victory. Churchill and Stalin, by contrast, were aware of the cataclysmic changes taking place and had their eyes less on the immediate military task than on the political aftermath. On the Western side, Churchill was overruled. Stalin was able to make a clean sweep through Eastern Europe, getting his armies in place to begin the new conquests that would follow the defeat of Nazi Germany. We soon had to pay for our carelessness. The failure of the United States to block Soviet expansionism during the war led to a situation in which we had to scramble to do so after the war, when much territory had already been lost.

In Greece and Turkey, where the power of the Ottoman Empire and then Great Britain had previously held Russia in check, a power vacuum emerged in 1947 that the Soviets were eager to fill. We were obliged to respond with the Truman Doctrine. In Europe, where Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the other great European powers had once stood, there was now chaos. We came up with the Marshall Plan and NATO to replace the former containing powers there. In the Far East we replaced the former containing power of Japan when we stopped the Korean invasion in 1950 in concert with the U.N.

Finally, with the worldwide retreat from empire by Britain and France and the other European powers, we picked up many of their former obligations in the Middle East, in South
and Southeast Asia, in Africa, and in the Persian Gulf. At the same time, we continued to play our traditional protective role in Latin America. We had become the world's gyroscope, single-handedly maintaining the balance of power all across the globe, taking over the responsibilities that five great empires had previously borne both in containing Russia and maintaining world order.

This unprecedented burden would not have been easy even if the United States had been well prepared to assume its new responsibilities. As it was, Americans were unfamiliar with many of the subtleties of dealing with the various peoples of the world and unaccustomed to power on a global scale. The end of innocence has been a long, confused, and sometimes difficult process for us.

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For all the vigor of its frontier spirit, and for all the harsh obstacles it had to overcome in taming a continent, in international terms the United States grew up in a protected environment. As the modern world's first democracy, America was nurtured on the faith that, in the words of one observer,
“the United States was not merely to be a beacon of a superior democratic domestic way of life. It was also to be an example of a morally superior democratic pattern of international behavior. The United States would voluntarily reject power politics as unfit for the conduct of its foreign policy.”

Shielded by 3,000 miles of ocean from the wars and intrigues of Europe, America was well able to avoid those “entangling alliances” against which Washington warned. While European nations vied with one another to establish dominion over vast reaches of Asia and Africa, the United States—with a few exceptions, as when it took the Philippines as spoils of war from Spain—bent its efforts toward linking its Atlantic and Pacific coasts and developing the land between.

The result was a continental power with a continental, even an insular, outlook. In sharp contrast Britain, from its small “sceptered isle” off the coast of Europe, had in its heyday ruled more than one-fifth of the world's land mass and one-fourth of its population. For the British and their rivals in the colonial race, empire was a source of power. It was also a consequence of power, a reason for power, and an arena for its exercise—and
they developed a natural familiarity with the uses of power.

Generations of British statesmen learned to think naturally, automatically, in global terms. What happened halfway around the globe was news in Britain because it mattered in Britain. To the British mind, empire was not “exploitation,” it was destiny. Britain stood at the head of a Europe that was, as historian
Hajo Holborn put it, “the center of the expanding world economy as well as the heart and brain of Western civilization, which was thought to be destined to transform all the other civilizations after its own image.” Victoria reigned, Britannia ruled, and if soldiers died on dusty fields in distant places, the British saw that as the price not only of progress, but also of peace. Those who administered the empire sought to curb ancient rivalries and check tribal wars, often with considerable success. And Britain itself shifted its weight now one way, now another, to maintain a stable balance of power in Europe and thus to maintain the peace.

Americans, by contrast, regarded involvement in the affairs—and the wars—of Europe as an aberration, a burden to be borne only for as long as necessary and then to be cast aside in a return to the normality of its western hemisphere isolation.

Veteran diplomat
Charles E. Bohlen wrote that

when I joined the foreign service on March 1, 1929—the United States had had about as safe, secure, and easy a position as any great nation on the face of the earth. We had neighbors to the north and south of us who constituted no conceivable threat. We were protected by two wide oceans, which in those days meant that no foreign nation could reach us. To the south we had Latin America, where we had relations that were on the whole friendly and even protective in continental terms. But more importantly, vast areas of the world were held by the two democracies who had been allied with the United States in World War I, namely, England and France. . . . At the end of the 1920s we were totally protected, and we acted accordingly.

At that time the nation's total military budget was less than $1 billion, and that of the State Department was only $14 million.

In the 1930s American isolationism was so strong that in 1938 the House of Representatives came within twenty-one
votes of passing the Ludlow Amendment, which would have required a national referendum before war could be declared. A Roper poll in September 1939 showed only 2.5 percent in favor of any form of intervention in the war in Europe. In October 1940, campaigning for reelection to a third term as President, Franklin Roosevelt drew cheers with his declaration that “I have said this before but I shall say it again and again and again, your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war.”

During World War II America's naïveté about the nature of the postwar world was epitomized by Secretary of State Cordell Hull's declaration to Congress that with the creation of the United Nations, “there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the separate alliances through which in the unhappy past the nations strove to safeguard their security or promote their interest.”

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World War II radically changed the world situation without radically altering the attitudes of most Americans. After the war only America was left to lead, but Americans had little taste for leadership. It was difficult. It was a burden. It required sacrifices.

World leadership also requires something that is in many ways alien to the American cast of mind. It requires placing limits on idealism, compromising with reality, at times matching duplicity with duplicity, and even brutality with brutality. After a century and a half of holding the world at arm's length, of declining to be contaminated by contact with its intrigues and its tyrannies, it requires marching onto the field and playing the game of power diplomacy as a contact sport—no matter who is in the lineup on the other team. And it requires doing so even when the rules imposed on the game are rules that we would not have chosen.

Moralizing is always easier from behind the lines than it is at the battlefront, and many have a way of ascribing their good fortune to their own high virtue. Growing up with two oceans to protect it, America could look with disdain on the conflicts of Europe, while cherishing the illusion that its own security derived somehow from its democratic system. In fact, the United
States in its younger days was one of the chief beneficiaries of the British Navy. As long as Britain ruled the seas, the “island continent” was secure.

The lessons of world leadership come hard. In earlier days we could look with curious fascination at the alien ways of distant Russia. Now we have to cope with the massed power of the Soviet Union. In earlier days we could take pride in our democratic tradition, secure in our splendid isolation. Now we have to defend that tradition, not only for our own sake but also for that of all others who share this tradition. In his prescience de Tocqueville defined the challenge. But we have to provide the answer. Of the two nations, each “marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe,” which will prevail?