Soviets Aren’t the Point of Conflict : While We Curse the Old Foe, Threats From Third World Grow

The American people have some reason to take comfort from the missile treaty that their government is about to conclude with the Soviet Union. Some, but not much.

Armament and disarmament are the symptoms of relations between states, not their causes. Even if we were to proceed to the elimination of intercontinental rockets (something that is not probable at all), it would not matter very much because during the 40 years of Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States there has not been the slightest evidence that the former has ever wished or planned to destroy the latter. Even apart from the obvious fear of American retaliation, that was never in their interests, and it is not now.

The missile treaty is one of the events that may be significant rather than important. Even that is not altogether certain. A significant event is something that indicates a change in tendency. On a large, solid surface the first small crack may be significant though not yet important. There are not many reasons to believe that the tendency of Ronald Reagan in viewing the world has changed. To me the most telling indication of his views was not his remark about the “evil empire” but his first reaction when the Falklands war had broken out between Argentina and Britain: He wondered aloud whether the Soviets were not behind that. It is a view that finds it agreeable and comfortable to attribute everything that is wrong in this world to communism and the Soviet Union. It is a view dearly held by most of his supporters, including the “conservative” and “neo-conservative” intellectuals, his secretary of defense and the National Security Council types exemplified by Lt. Col. Oliver North. It is a view that is not merely the result of ignorance, or even of a desire for popularity. It issues from a need for psychic comfort, of wishful thinking about one’s country and the world.

It is lamentable that none of the Democratic candidates seem to have anything resembling an intelligent alternative to such views of the world. This was painfully evident in 1984 during the “debates” between Reagan and Walter F. Mondale. When the Democrats pick at Reagan’s foreign policy, they babble about “issues” that are of fifth-rate importance and sometimes of no significance at all: the democratic credentials of Sandinistas and contras , “human rights” within the Soviet Union, and the Democrats’ own versions of rocket numerology, fed to them by an eager and ignorant horde of “experts,” speech writers and pollsters.

For more than 40 years the United States and the Soviet Union have been the two superpowers in the world. That has not yet changed, and that condition alone gives the lie to the accepted idea according to which we live in a world of maddeningly rapid change. Sixteen years ago, and more than 13 years after the first conflicts between the Soviet Union and China began to appear, President Richard Nixon and his globular globalist adviser Henry Kissinger flew off to China to open up a new configuration of superpowers. They thought that they were playing the China card; in reality it was the Chinese who were playing the American card. Yet it is obvious that, all those statistics of its 950 million people notwithstanding, China is not in the same league with America and Russia.

There have been changes in the policies of the latter. Who would have believed, even 10 years ago, that Moscow would tolerate what for all practical purposes is a national opposition in Poland exemplified by a person of worldwide renown? Who would have believed that most West Germans would trust Mikhail S. Gorbachev more than Ronald Reagan?

For 20 or more years we have been hearing (and paying billions of dollars accordingly) that the Soviets built the greatest navy in the world. Yet when President Reagan, for whatever reason, chose to land American Marines in Lebanon (6,000 miles from the United States, only 300 miles from the Soviet Union) or to treat the Persian Gulf as a primary sphere of American security (7,000 miles from the United States, 400 miles from the Soviet Union), the Soviet navy did nothing.

Nor was it the Russians who installed the present deplorable government in Managua. They have not been so stupid as to send Soviet soldiers or sailors or airmen to Nicaragua; they have refused the Nicaraguan government advanced arms; lately they have not even given them the oil that they wanted. Yet when Col. North kept orating about Nicaragua being “a Soviet base,” no one on that famous investigating committee thought of asking him a question about that.

None of this means that the governors of the Soviet Union have been affected by a change in their hearts. What this means is that they know, better than our government, where their vital interests are involved and where they are not. Whenever the vital interests of the Soviet Union are threatened, we ought to know that they would react with the same kind of unscrupulous brutality that marked Russian statecraft in the past.

We live in a world--and by no means only because of the existence of horrible rockets and such weapons--in which the vital interests of the United States and of the Soviet Union conflict at few points, if at all. It is a world in which one important change has occurred: the emergence of the inchoate, undisciplined and frequently fanatic peoples of the so-called Third World that, in different ways and in different places, threaten the United States and the Soviet Union.

This is a reason why the superpowers must compose some of their differences. There are places--yes, Iran is one of them--where the Soviet Union and the United States have common interests and where they should attempt to act in accord with each other. Our present leaders and their ideological advisers cannot see this. Their Democratic challengers understand little or nothing of this, either, because of their historical and geographical ignorance, but also because of their myopic obsession with publicity and popularity.

Oddly (or perhaps not so oddly--Edmund Burke said that “the people must never be regarded as incurable”), the American people sense this, deeper and perhaps better than their politicians: that the main problem is not how many rockets are buried in Idaho or Kazakhstan; that the main problem is not which band of unruly fanatics are already in power in Tehran or Kabul or Managua; that our main dangers may no longer come from the Soviet Union but that they may come from the Third World, whose masses may not be a true menace--yet.