Real War (46 page)

Until they do, suppressing their urge to freedom will be a constant drain on Soviet resources. When they do, the Soviets may find that they cannot post a “quarantine” sign on their own borders to keep out the contagion of freedom.

Among the strongest potential allies we have in the struggle against the Kremlin leadership are the people of the Soviet Union. As one of the most powerful voices of the Russian people, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has pointed out: “All oppressed peoples are on the side of the West: the Russians, the various nationalities of the U.S.S.R., the Chinese, and the Cubans. Only by relying on
this
alliance can the West's strategy succeed. Only together with the oppressed will the West constitute the
decisive force on earth. These people are communism's Achilles heel. They can be freedom's secret weapon if we recognize their immense strategic importance.”

History shows that among nations, alignments change. In World War II we and the Soviet Union fought together against Germany and Japan; now Japan and West Germany are our allies against the Soviet Union. China was our ally in World War II, then our enemy in Korea and Vietnam; now China is, not our ally, but our friend, and the enemy of the Soviet Union.

As we look at the potential strengths of the Western side, we can count among them not only our allies but also those other nations that stand in an uneasy relation to the Soviet Union, half in and half out of the Soviet embrace. Even if they do not come over to our side, we gain when they move away from the Soviet side.

The freely associated nations of the West can use all their forces to ward off aggression. The Soviet Union has to use part of its forces to keep its “allies” under control. The Western alliance is strengthened by the innate desire of man to be free. The Soviet Union is vulnerable to the innate resistance of man to tyranny.

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In this struggle, the strength of the Soviets is military. They seek victory through aggression and intimidation; in order to achieve this, they seek military superiority. They rule by force, and they seek to extend their rule by force.

We must check this ambition. We must have the strength and the will to prevent their winning by force. But then we must carry the struggle into those areas where they are weak and we are strong. Despite their strength militarily, they fail utterly at providing what people want.

People want peace. They want material progress. They want to be free from foreign domination. They want the “higher values”—freedom of speech, travel, worship, choice; liberty in all its aspects.

The Soviets promise peace, and bring war; they promise economic progress, and bring poverty; they promise “liberation,” and bring a new imperialism; they promise freedom, and bring slavery. In all these areas, their own record is the best answer to their rhetoric. Wherever the Soviets and the West are matched in competition, there simply is no contest.

We must hold the line against aggression, both direct and indirect, so that those who opt for the West need not fear that they will be on the losing side. We must stand by our friends, so that those who want to be our friends will not fear to be our friends. We should use our enormous economic power to further the progress of our friends, and to squeeze our potential enemies.

•  •  •

In the short term—if we restore the strength of our defenses—we can halt, and then turn back, the tide of Soviet advance by concentrating our efforts in the immediate target areas and showing a steadfast determination to do what is necessary to keep aggression from succeeding. As the nations of the West grow stronger, as they visibly muster their will, as they demonstrate that they will not repeat the mistakes of Munich, two things will happen. Third World leaders who want to ride with a winner will look more respectfully on the West, calculating the advantages that friendly relations with us can bring. And the Soviet leaders will reevaluate the costs of adventurism, recognizing that as the strength, cohesion, and will of the West increase arithmetically, the costs of aggression will go up geometrically.

Over the longer term we can encourage peaceful evolution within the Soviet Union itself. However, this is a task not of decades but of generations. Pressed too rapidly, it would bring a brutal repression; developed gradually, so that it less directly threatens those in power at any given time, it can gradually show results, just as it did under the Tsars in the nineteenth century.

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The task that confronts us is not one for the United States alone. As the present threat to the Persian Gulf makes starkly clear, the entire West has an immediate stake in the struggle. So do the threatened nations themselves. It makes no sense for the United States to provide the arms, the money, and the men to meet every crisis. There are more than 3 billion people outside the Soviet bloc, of which only 200 million are Americans. As the French have shown in Africa, sometimes our allies can respond more effectively than we can, especially in areas with which they have a long familiarity. The oil-rich Moslem nations of the Persian Gulf share a common interest in defending their
own independence, and Islam, against any expansion of the Soviet thrust into Afghanistan. But the West does look to the United States for leadership. And the Soviets do look at the United States in calculating what they can get away with.

If the Soviet leaders look westward and see an American leadership that eyes their moves in a measured way, that clearly refuses to bow, that walks without faltering, that knows what it is doing, that is determined to do whatever has to be done in order to ensure the survival and security of the West, then those Soviet leaders will not be tempted to gamble all in a high-stakes throw of the dice. They will make their cost-benefit analyses, and postpone or abandon ambitions that no longer seem worth the candle. Then we will see how preparation for war can help avert war; how having strength can free us from the necessity of using it.

I have often cited Sir Robert Thompson's equation: national power equals applied resources plus manpower times will. The will to use power multiplies its effectiveness; when that will is clearly perceived by the adversary, the actual application of power may be unnecessary.

Power by itself is neutral; it can be used for good or for evil. Its results are not measured by intentions. Power used with good intentions, but ineptly, can be as destructive as power used with bad intentions. The greatest tragedy of all, however, occurs when those who have power fail to use it, and because of that failure lives and even freedom itself are lost.

The human spirit has time and again transcended the most terrible assaults on it; civilizations fall to barbarians, but eventually barbarism succumbs to civilization. But this victory of the spirit takes place over a very long term. Our challenge now is to show that a particular civilization—ours—can triumph over a particular barbarism—Soviet communism—so that freedom will be preserved for our children and grandchildren.

There are only two powers in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.

—Napoleon

Britain's former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, still crisply lucid at eighty-five, recently compared the present situation in the world with that in Europe before World War II. “Speaking honestly,” he declared, “I would say that we are now at 1935 or 1936.” He went on to warn: “We can save ourselves only by looking at the realities, and by organizing the resistance which we must create if what we have won in two world wars we shall not lose in the third.”

In the late 1930s the nations in Hitler's path had time to stop World War II before it started, but they ignored the warnings and frittered away that time.

In his “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946 Winston Churchill recalled:

Last time I saw it all coming, and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention. Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind.

There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great
areas of the globe. It could have been prevented, in my belief, without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honored today; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool.

The nations in Moscow's path today have time to avoid the fate of those in Hitler's path in the 1930s; but only barely.

The outcome of the “protracted conflict” between East and West will depend on our military arsenals, our strategic vision, and our control of those material resources that are needed to build the weapons of war and the sinews of peace. But it will also turn on how we use another resource, the most precious of all, and the one that for each and every one of us is finite: time. If the West loses this conflict, MacArthur's warning will be its epitaph: “The history of failure in war can be summed up in two words: Too Late.”

The whole history of freedom is a narrative of the struggle to become free and remain free. Freedom is not cheap and maintaining it is not easy. Fate, history, God, chance—to whatever we may ascribe it, we hold a responsibility to the future unique to our time and place. Nothing that today's generation can leave for tomorrow's will mean more than the heritage of liberty. That heritage is under more severe threat now than ever before.

Today's “new frontiers,” unfortunately, are the frontiers of Soviet expansionism: the frontiers of Soviet advance in Africa, in the Middle East, in central Asia; the frontiers of more and more commanding Soviet influence through indigenous Communist parties in Western Europe, through “liberation” movements, through the calculated rewriting of history, through agitation and propaganda and attacks on those institutions and those governments that stand in the way of Soviet ambitions.

The plain, harsh fact is that on all of these fronts the West is in retreat and the Soviet Union is advancing; freedom is in retreat, and totalitarianism is on the march.

The Soviet Union has 6 percent of the world's population and 10 percent of its production; yet it successfully bullies its neighbors and threatens the world. The other 94 percent of the world's people, with the other 90 percent of its production, seem increasingly helpless in the face of Soviet ambitions.

Why should this be?

The answer is that it shouldn't be and it needn't be.

Unless a great power acts like one, it will leave a power vacuum that another great power will fill. The United States has been floundering, uncertain and irresolute, and the Soviet Union has rushed to fill the vacuum created by our inaction. The United States and the U.S.S.R. form the two sides of the basic power equation that will dominate the final decades of the twentieth century. The direction of future world history will be set by the direction in which the balance between our two nations appears to be shifting.

The Soviet leaders may be crude philosophers but they are sophisticated wielders of power. Lacking those qualms of conscience that inhibit the West, they can be utterly ruthless and totally opportunistic in their uses of power. In a time of power equivalence this makes them a formidable adversary. Only if the West develops a sense of purpose equal to theirs—though different from theirs—can we hope to shift the balance in our favor.

•  •  •

There was a famous Frenchman, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyés, who somehow managed to get through the ten grim and tumultuous years between 1789 and 1799, between the time when the Third Estate met in the tennis court at Versailles and the time when the Consulate was established. When he was asked much later, “What did you do in all those years of revolution?” he replied, “I survived.”

This is the immediate task the defenders of liberty face in the grim years just ahead: to survive, and by surviving to keep liberty itself alive. Unless the West survives these decades Western civilization as we know it, with all its ideals, its culture, its high aspirations, will crumble into the dust of history.

With this priority clearly in mind, the West can survive. Without it, the dawn of the twenty-first century may be the opening chapter in a new age of barbarism on a global scale. For survival is no longer automatic. We are entering a period in which we have to work to ensure it, in which we have to sacrifice other priorities in the name of that supreme priority. We will have to compromise some of our cherished ideals, as well as spend more of our wealth than we would wish on weapons and other forms of defense.

To say that we must oppose the march of the new despotism with every effort required does not mean launching a holy war; it does not mean launching a war at all. It does, however, mean arming sufficiently to dissuade the other side from launching a war; and it does mean active intervention where necessary to thwart Soviet expansion at those points at which Moscow is testing the limits of its new frontiers.

It would be comforting to rely on Napoleon's comment that “There are only two powers in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.” But the comment says more for Napoleon's modesty as a soldier than it does for his accuracy as a historian.

The spirit may prevail in the long run, if we measure the long run in millennia. But in the shorter run of decades, generations, and even centuries, time and again the spirit has been extinguished by the sword. For the generation whose cities are sacked, whose sons are killed, and whose liberties are crushed by a conquering army, the prospect that a millennium hence the spirit might rise again is cold comfort. In that short run in which we all live, the sword is the essential shield for the spirit.

One of our strengths in this struggle, however, is that the spirit itself can be a weapon—and while the Soviets have the sword, ours is the side that has both the sword and the spirit.