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I am honored by the opportunity to address this distinguished group, in a country whose future evolution is of great, perhaps decisive importance for the prospects of the entire continent, if not of world politics.

And it is, as well, a daunting assignment. For South Africa is geographically almost as far from America as it is possible to be on this globe. Its problems reflect a different history and its domestic structure a contrasting set of values regarding the problem of race. At the same time South Africa has many ties to the industrialized countries and its strategic importance to the free world is undisputed. Thus America's attitude to your country is inevitably ambivalent--a constant tug of war between geopolitical and moral considerations. As I shall point out later, it is in the interest of freedom everywhere that this gap be progressively narrowed and ultimately eliminated.

My assignment here is to describe the international situation as it appears from an American perspective. It must be remembered that from the vantage point of the United States, Africa and southern Africa are part of a larger picture of global concerns, and our attitude toward this continent is incomprehensible otherwise. I will try to trace some of those broad perspectives: the American foreign policy in general; East-West relations; America and Western Europe; and the problems of the developing world. Only in this context can one speak meaningfully about how America regards southern Africa and this country.

## The American Perspective

The American perspective on world events has undergone dramatic changes in the last generation.

Americans do not have a long experience with foreign affairs. Our founding fathers were quite sophisticated in manipulating the European balance of power to secure

our independence. Since then, however, a century and a
half of isolation encouraged the illusion in America that
we did not really need a foreign policy--or rather, that
foreign involvement was purely a matter of choice for us;
we could involve ourselves, or not, as we preferred. It
took two world wars in this century to shatter this illu-
sion, but certain preconceptions lingered in the American
psyche for some decades afterward.

Americans in the isolationist period tended to look
down on what they considered the sordid power politics
of Europe. Our avoidance of involvement in the balance
of power appeared to us not as a boon conferred by dis-
tance and the protection of the British Navy, but as a
virtue, as a sign of our moral superiority. Since 1945,
we are permanently active in world affairs and have
reluctantly had to face the realities of power. Never-
theless, we still tend to view the world in moral terms
and to hold ourselves--and our friends--to a high standard
of moral conduct as we see it. We fall short of it from
time to time but only at heavy cost: the sacrifice of the
domestic support needed to sustain American leadership
in the world.

For a time after 1945, it seemed relatively easy for us
to equate power and morality--the secret American dream.
In the aftermath of the second World War, the United States
produced the amazing figure of over half of all the goods
and services in the world. We were so overwhelmingly
powerful that our allies tended to follow our prescrip-
tions; since we offered them military protection and sub-
stantial economic aid, it was a relatively harmonious
partnership. The principal developing countries looked
to us as the source of capital for their economic develop-
ment. All this gave Americans a distorted picture of
what foreign policy was about; it caused us to identify
a fortunate and temporary concatenation with a permanent
state of affairs. The Marshall Plan was in effect a
projection of our domestic experience--an overseas appli-
cation of the New Deal, in which economic progress brought
with it political stability almost automatically. And
the security problem represented by the Soviet Union,
which prompted the Truman Doctrine and the foundation
of NATO, seemed analogous to the threat posed by Hitler--
that of unambiguous aggression by organized units across
recognized frontiers.

It was a creative and brilliantly successful period of American foreign policy, yet never to be repeated. For our world leadership then was grounded in an inherently ephemeral set of conditions.

Since then we have seen that economic progress does not automatically produce political stability--sometimes quite the opposite. And threats to security can be much more manifold than attacks across national borders. Above all, from the late 1960's, for the first time, the United State was in the position that it had to conduct a foreign policy as most other nations in history: as one country among many, unable either to dominate the world or escape from it; forced to seek by persuasion, accommodation, negotiation what it could no longer achieve by unilateral fiat; obliged to learn the traditional techniques of balancing incentives and penalties; required to be steady, reliable, sensitive to marginal shifts in the balance of power and aware of the interconnections between events. Today political, economic, and military power are much more widely diffused and the United States represents only about 21 percent of world GNP--powerful but no longer dominant.

The very balance of power which we have deplored through most of our national experience must henceforth be one of the guiding principles of our foreign policy. Our position toward the rest of the world has become analogous to that of Britain towards Europe for the better part of three centuries. Britain could not permit Europe to be dominated by any single power regardless of its peaceful professions. Britain knew that its resources could not match those of the entire continent; therefore a Europe united against it would sooner or later be able to impose its will. America's global position is no different. If most of the rest of the world fell under hostile control--directly or indirectly--we would be outmatched. Maintaining the balance of power is not a favor we do others but an imperative of our survival.

This confronts us with three major difficulties. Despite the claims of its detractors, America is, as I pointed out, reluctant to base its claims on its power, preferring to prevail by the purity of its maxims.

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Americans also are uneasy with--indeed they resent--
relative answers, which are the essence of a policy of
equilibrium. Throughout our history every problem
we have recognized as such proved soluble--that is to
say, we found a final answer--if only to overwhelm it
with resources. A world in which part of our task is
maintaining the balance of power is by definition
relativistic, inconclusive, morally unsatisfying.

Therefore, it is no accident that the main lines of
the foreign policy that the United States has conducted
for most of the postwar period have been attacked con-
sistently by both ends of the political spec-
trum on the ground that it did not live up to American
ideals and offered no final answers--by liberals because
it was not sufficiently conciliatory, by conservatives
because it was not adequately principled. One extreme
tends to view foreign policy as a branch of psychiatry:
the basic requirement of diplomacy, in this view, is to
generate goodwill. Adversaries are believed to be hostile
because they fear or resent us, because we have failed to reassure
them that our objectives can be harmonized with theirs.
Conflicts are seen to be an aberration from an otherwise natural
state of harmony. This school of thought emphasizes
unilateral gestures of conciliation; it seeks negotiations
regardless of Soviet acts of intransigence--and sometimes
especially then. Communists in their view share some
similar objectives; Third World nations--no matter how
radical their professions--will rally to our standard if
we only cleanse ourselves of our past errors.

The opposing school of thought tends to treat foreign
policy as a branch of theology. Communism is consummate
evil; there is no compromise with the devil. The new
nations are either adversaries or cowards. In this view
negotiation with the Soviet Union only confuses the
American public and is itself a form of moral disarmament.
And the new nations should be treated with indifference
until they rally to our side. What is needed is to sound
the trumpet, confront our enemies--and the walls of Jericho
presumably will crumble.

Both these strains in American thinking, of course,
share some features in common. Neither is comfortable
with the notion of a long-term struggle without a final
resolution; with a world in which ideals can be realized,

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at any point in time, only imperfectly and always gradually. Americans are, in some sense, in a state of permanent rebellion against the contemporary realities of world affairs.

Secondly, these psychological difficulties are compounded by the inherent complexity of assessing the balance of power in the modern period. Historically, military, economic, and political power were roughly congruent. In our time this is no longer necessarily the case. Some countries are strong militarily but stagnant politically, for example the Soviet Union. Some countries, such as several oil producing states, are powerful economically but weak militarily. Some Third World nations have attimes had a political influence out of proportion to their military and economic strength: India in the fifties and early sixties is a good example.

And the time scale for redressing the various balances is not identical. Restoration of the military balance is occurring more rapidly than the economic or political one. But success in one category of power does not guarantee success in others.

These tensions produce a third obstacle to a consistent American diplomacy: our tendency to decide foreign policy issues by analogy to domestic disputes. This causes problems to be segmented into a series of individual decisions resolved by compromises between adversarial positions. In domestic legislation, where each issue is essentially discrete and completed with the passage of a law, this has proved quite effective--especially as in the democratic political tradition, the loser accepts his setback with grace (also with the knowledge that he has a chance to renew the battle and perhaps prevail on another occasion). But foreign policy is a seamless web. Compromise between philosophical positions may yield the least common denominator, not the best conceived outcome in terms of a coherent, consistent long-term national strategy. The continual renewal of our domestic debate produces the lack of continuity about which some of our allies especially have complained. Each new administration seems to pride itself on repudiating the methods and assumptions of its predecessor. Leaving aside the merits, such a practice makes for no little uncertainty on the part of other nations.

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It causes friendly nations which depend on us to hedge
their bets; it leaves adversaries confused.

For America, Vietnam was the catharsis that taught
us our limits; but reality would have imposed itself in
any event. The trauma of having to come to grips with a
world of incomplete solutions and relative power is the
mark of the American foreign policy debate in the seventies.
And we are emerging from it considerably wiser. The re-
flexive aversion to the balance of power has given way
to a recognition of its essentiality. The period of self-
doubt has come to an end. While tactical oscillations
continue, the main trend of the current foreign policy has
wide support.

But our friends must never forget the dual strains
of American policy and the powerful impact of our histori-
cal convictions. Whatever the importance of geopolitics
and equilibrium, however salient they may become in
American foreign policy deliberations, the moral dimension
of our national tradition will never disappear. At some
point our foreign policy will always return to the well-
spring of America's aspiration to promote justice, human
dignity, and equality. And it will always give these terms
a universal cast--not confined to a particular people. The
task of American statesmanship is to combine these two
strands into a consistent, coherent, and effective
foreign policy.

US-Soviet Relations

With this as background, let me turn to the East-West
conflict. The Soviet Union presents us with a multifaceted
challenge: a superpower militarily, stagnant politically,
in a crisis economically. The Soviet Union is clearly
militarily extremely powerful. Even as the moral claims
of its ideology prove more and more hollow, the Soviet
system is growing in military strength and geopolitical
reach. Historically, the emergence of a new power usually
produced a coalition against it, and a new equilibrium
could be achieved only after a test of strength. In the
nuclear age, such a war would threaten global cataclysm.

The maintenance of peace is therefore a task of
unprecedented complexity. It is obviously the duty of
the West to maintain the military balance and to resist
Soviet expansionism. The Soviet Union must learn--
through the West's vigilant resistance--that encroachments

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on the global equilibrium will not be tolerated. It cannot be beyond the West's capability--superior as we are in economic strength--to accomplish this.

However, a great change has taken place in the nature of military power. Strategic nuclear power is no assurance that challenges will be deterred, or countered, locally. In the fifties the industrial democracies relied on their strategic nuclear arsenal, substituting technology for the burden of conventional armament. But the American nuclear superiority began to disappear in the sixties. Technology tended toward equality, and numbers approached levels beyond which additional increments of destructiveness lost all relationship to the objectives likely to be in dispute. Arms control theory and practice, with their formal emphasis on equality, accelerated and legiti- mized this trend.

Logically, once the Soviet Union acquired the capacity to threaten the United States with direct nuclear retaliation, the American pledge to launch an all-out nuclear war on behalf of Europe was bound increasingly to lose its credibility and public acceptance--and so would NATO's defense strategy. For that strategy now rested on the threat to initiate mutual suicide. But governments were reluctant to face the financial and domestic implications of the conventional-force buildup that was required. They continued the existing strategy, seeking to compensate for the implausibility of the pledge of all-out nuclear defense by more emphatic reiteration of it.

The legacy we are left with is a precarious combination of a reliance on nuclear defense, trends toward nuclear stalemate, growing nuclear pacifism, and continued deficiencies in conventional forces. If the democracies are reluctant to resort to nuclear weapons, and if they continue to evade the necessity of building up their conventional forces, then the Western Alliance is left with no defense policy at all, and we are risking the collapse of the military balance that has made possible thirty-five years of Western security, prosperity, and democracy. We will in effect have disarmed ourselves unilaterally while sitting on the most destructive stockpile of weapons that the world has seen.

In these circumstances, the West faces a profound moral as well as practical challenge. The risks of nuclear war produce a feeling of revulsion verging on

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abdication. Yet if, in the democracies, avoidance of war becomes the sole objective of foreign policy, the world is open to the domination of the most ruthless. The deepest challenge to the democracies is to build support for the proposition that peace must be based on freedom as well as restraint; that leaving the world to the totalitarians can produce horrors even greater than the risks of resistance: witness Indochina.

Thus the West, while maintaining the balance of power, must not lose sight of the moral and political framework that gives it meaning. It is clear that public sentiment in the democratic nations will not sustain a policy of equilibrium without a parallel effort to end or reduce conflict. Electorates will not support defense programs or a vigorous foreign policy if they imagine that their governments are the cause of tensions or if serious efforts are not being made to push back the specter of nuclear war.

It is for this reason that arms control and efforts to reduce tensions have been on the agenda of US-Soviet relations for most of the last fifteen years. Arms control is not a substitute for a secure military balance, but it can be a way of maintaining it at lower levels of forces or of reducing the risks of the outbreak of nuclear conflict by miscalculation or panic. President Reagan has made forthcoming proposals for strategic arms reductions. He has wisely focused not only on reducing the numbers of nuclear weapons, but on those types and characteristics of strategic weapons that most pose the danger of surprise attack or first strike. And he has stressed as well the need for restraint in superpower conduct.

Thus a long-term strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union must combine power and diplomacy; both resistance to challenges and a willingness to resolve political problems through negotiation; both defense of Western values and a recognition that we are forced to coexist on this planet in an era of thermonuclear weapons.

This becomes all the more important, because the inherent instabilities of the Soviet system will make negotiations inevitable sooner or later.

Both sides in the East-West confrontation are betting on history. And one of the ironies of the postwar period is the extraordinary structural weakness that is now seen to lie beneath the impressive surface of Soviet power.

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The Soviet economy is a vast cumbersome machine burdened with administrative bottlenecks, pervasive inefficiency, and a level of performance that tends toward stagnation. It seems to require a black market, that is, a secret free market, to function at all. The dilemma of Communism is that it seems impossible to run a modern economy by a system of total planning; yet it may not be possible to maintain a Communist state *without* a system of total planning.

In the 65-year history of the Soviet state, it has never managed a legitimate, regular succession of political leadership. The system has failed to deal seriously with the aspirations of the intellectual and managerial elite that industrialization inevitably spawns; instead the Soviet intelligentsia is a cynical, careerist "New Class" corrupted by privilege, its creativity stifled by heavy-handed political rigidity. And the system has yet to cope with the looming reality of its growing non-Russian population, soon to be a majority, with the severe social and political tensions this will entail.

Finally, in every Communist state--it is almost an historic joke--the ultimate systemic crisis, latent if not evident, is over the role of the Communist Party. What is the function of a Communist Party once it is entrenched in power? It is not needed to run the government, or the economy, or the military. It is the guardian of an ideological legitimacy that has long since lost its motivating appeal. The Party's functionaries specialize in dealing with internal crises which their centralized system has created and external crises into which their ambitions tempt them. In Poland, the Communist Party was nearly swept away because of its irrelevance, impotence, and total repudiation by the Polish workers in whose name it claimed to rule. It is another historic joke that the only spontaneous revolutions in industrialized countries have been against Communist governments.

And we are only at the beginning of that process of transformation. If Moscow is prevented by a firm Western policy from deflecting its internal tensions into international crises, it is likely to find only disillusionment in the boast that history is on its side.

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Then the time for serious negotiations on a broad front will have arrived. The industrial democracies must convey now that they stand ready to negotiate seriously, and that they will respect the legitimate security interests of a Soviet Union conducting the policies of a national state and not of a revolutionary power seeking to over-throw or subvert the existing order. But diplomacy toward the Soviet Union is at the core of some current disputes between the United States and its European allies.

## America and Europe

Relations between America and Europe have undergone many periods of stress in the past generation. To a significant degree, this is the result of one of the great successes of American policy: our support for the economic recovery of Europe and Japan, and for European integration. To some extent, American expectations were exuberant and perhaps somewhat naive. It was thought by some of the sponsors of European unity that a revived and unified Europe would share our burdens and continue to follow our lead; it was not considered that a stronger Europe would inevitably assert its own identity and role. Hence the occasionally petulant reaction. In fact, a stronger, unified Europe is in America's interest even if its perceptions at times differ from ours.

It would be idle to deny that fundamental differences have arisen over an exorbitant number of issues. Some difference of perspective is, or course, inevitable in any coalition of sovereign states. But today the Western Alliance is at odds over central issues of East-West diplomacy, international economic policy, the Middle East, Central America, and relations with the Third World. Indeed, it is hard to find an important issue on which the allies are united. Sooner or later such divisions *must* affect the field of European security as well. For too long the allies have evaded uncomfortable questions that divided us; our evasions are now coming home to roost.

In too many NATO countries, the impression is created that it is America's attempt to restore the military balance which threatens the peace and must be resisted. Little attention is paid to the colossal Soviet military buildup over the last twenty years or to a whole series of aggressive Soviet actions, from the dispatch of Cuban troops to Africa through the occupation of Afghanistan

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to the repression of freedom in Poland, which threaten
the global equilibrium.

Even less attention is paid to some basic facts of postwar history: that but for Stalin's pressures in the immediate postwar period American troops would have been withdrawn from Europe in the forties, as indeed they were from Korea; that but for the Korean War the US military budget would have shrunk to derisory levels; that it was the threat to the freedom of Berlin in the late fifties which accelerated the American military buildup; that for a variety of reasons the United States stopped expanding its strategic arsenal in the late sixties and slowed its modernization for the better part of the seventies; and that *all* wars in the postwar period have broken out where there were *no* American forces and *no* nuclear weapons, while Europe under American nuclear protection has enjoyed the longest period of peace in its history.

The clamor in much of the West is therefore addressed to the wrong governments. Unmatched as it is by comparable agitation in the East, it poses the danger that a psychological imbalance, indeed a form of unilateral disarmament, will compound the regional military imbalances which have already produced such a sense of insecurity in almost all countries around the periphery of the Soviet Union.

But the basic problem within the Alliance does not derive from public demonstrations; it resides in the attitudes of governments. Three major differences have arisen: over military strategy and its corollary of arms control, over the nature of East-West relations, and over East-West trade.

The transformation of the military balance has affected European-American relations acutely. So long as America possessed strategic nuclear superiority, the agreed strategy relying on nuclear defense coincided with the determination to banish war from European territory. But the growth of the Soviet nuclear stockpile puts a premium on the West's capacity for local, conventional defense. Many in Europe recoil before that prospect, and not only because of the economic burden involved. They shy away from building a credible European conventional defense for fear that American troops will feel free to go home, and they shy away from any serious conventional capability for fear that it will weaken the American commitment to resort to strategic nuclear retaliation. Yet evasion of conventional defense in the longer term only makes the current American deployment in Europe untenable. Too strong for a trip wire, too weak for

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local resistance, the current NATO military establishment persists in a never-never land which encourages public escapism and inter-allied quarrels over security.

Some allies seek in arms control an escape from this dilemma. But arms control can stabilize or reduce only those armaments which exist; it cannot substitute for an adequate defense policy. If used to evade complex choices, it can have a doubly harmful impact: freezing an untenable strategy while creating the illusion of political progress. The Alliance must agree on a coherent strategy if it is to give meaning to its defense policy and direction to East-West negotiations on the limitation of arms.

The second problem concerns East-West relations in general. The myth has developed in many quarters in Europe that the American administration is needlessly confrontational, too obsessed with the military balance, and too little interested in détente. It is an interesting and ironic reversal of historical roles. In the closing years of the Second World War, there were significant differences of philosophy between America and Britain. Many Americans thought Churchill needlessly preoccupied with the postwar balance of power, too rigidly anti-Soviet, too "colonialist" in his attitude to what is now called the Third World, and too little dedicated to building the fundamentally new, pacific international order toward which American idealism has always tended. Churchill undoubtedly saw the Americans as naive, moralistic, eager to evade the realities of security and their own share of responsibility for maintaining the global balance of power. While the United States has never abandoned its earlier moralism, it has been forced by postwar realities to deal, however reluctantly, with the problems of equilibrium. Concurrently, many in Europe seem paradoxically to have moved to the positions that America vacated and to have adopted some of the illusions to which Americans clung in years of isolation from global responsibility.

Whether the U.S. Government's tactical judgments are always correct need not be debated in this forum. But, in my view, America's insistence that true détente be based on maintaining the balance of power is correct; I believe that any attempt to base East-West relations on general goodwill or economic relations is doomed. The threat to world peace has not been American rhetoric--

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even in its most exuberant versions--but the Soviet military buildup and the Soviet geopolitical offensive from Angola and Ethiopia, South Yemen and Afghanistan, to the crackdown in Poland, and the Soviet Union's continuing support to various terrorist subversive groups around the world. Our objective is not to promote conflict, but to bring an end to Soviet assaults on the global equilibrium through a substantial reduction of military forces and a code of restrained international conduct.

As I have suggested, I expect that the Soviet system will have to come to grips with its internal and external stresses within this decade. At that point a major responsible negotiation can and must take place, but such a negotiation can succeed only if the West does not give up its assets unilaterally ahead of time.

This is at the heart of the dispute over East-West trade, of which the recent European uproar over President Reagan's decision to block construction of the Siberian natural gas pipeline is symptomatic.

The fundamental problem can be defined as follows: Theoretically, trade reflects the mutual benefit of both parties. But East-West trade is distorted by two factors: By any objective analysis, the Soviet Union and its satellites are infinitely more dependent on East-West trade than the industrial democracies. The Soviet Union cannot feed itself without the non-Communist world's grain; it cannot develop without Western technology and capital. The typical Western product for sale in the East contains advanced technology, hence new ideas; what the Soviet Union has to offer in return is raw materials--products which contain no conceptual input. The inequality in benefits would long since have reduced trade to a trickle had not Western governments stepped in with direct or hidden credits, which now amount to nearly $90 billion for the Communist world. In addition, many export prices are subsidized by West European governments directly or indirectly. The Communist countries thus are not only gaining a relative advantage in trade; they are being financed by the nations against whom they are simultaneously conducting a geopolitical offensive. Lenin's dictum that capitalists would compete to sell the rope with which they are to be hanged is coming true with a vengeance--for Lenin never guessed that Western governments would provide the money to buy the rope and subsidize the price to facilitate the purchase.

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For these reasons, the issues raised by President Reagan with respect to the Soviet pipeline are central--whatever the views of the immediate tactics. If the industrial democracies subsidize exports and credits and provide large foreign exchange earnings to the Soviet Union during a period of a Soviet military buildup, proxy forces in Africa, brutal pressure on Poland, and occupation of Afghanistan, what possible incentive can the Soviet leadership have for the fundamental negotiations I outlined earlier?

Trade justified by commercial considerations is one thing--though even there I have always believed that the United States has been too profligate in the use of its agricultural resources. But subsidies or concessionary credits or bargain prices determined by other than strictly commercial considerations should certainly be made the subject of political negotiations. So far as one can tell, no serious study was made of possible alternative sources of energy for Western Europe, such as the largest deposits of Norwegian natural gas. If the industrial democracies feel the necessity of subsidizing their exports by easy pricing and credit policies, the creative area for such efforts is in the developing world, particularly in the moderate, market-oriented countries, not in the Soviet bloc.

It is urgent for the industrial democracies to end the petty and unworthy disputes over tactics and concentrate on developing a common strategy. They must decide on a united approach to credit, exports, and alternative energy supplies.

## The Developing Nations: Africa

These issues may or may not seem of direct interest to South Africa, but they define the context of American views of Africa and of your own country. And the American perspective on Africa is part of an over-all perception of the developing world.

The emergence of the developing countries no doubt will one day be seen as one of the seminal events in world history. In 1945 there were some 50 sovereign states; after a generation of decolonization the number had tripled. Never before had foreign policy to be conducted with such a multiplicity of states in a world of instantaneous communication, shadowed by the specter of nuclear war and under the pressures of a

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complex economic interdependence. For while the developing nations could not hope to achieve their aims without the aid of the industrialized states, the latter in turn could not sustain their prosperity without an assured supply of energy and raw materials at a fair price.

Mutual need did not necessarily--or at least immediately--produce mutual understanding or even serious dialogue. A vast philosophical gap separated the two sides. Many in the West saw in the new nations a replica of their own constitutional evolution; on the contrary, the new states were quite often in active rebellion against not only the tutelage but the institutions of the colonial powers. There was the naive Western assumption that the challenge to political stability was largely economic; that economic growth would more or less automatically produce political stability. In fact, in many countries economic development undermined the traditional elements of political order. Iran is a good example. The Shah--for many years hailed as a modernizing secular reformer--was overthrown by a coalition of forces that felt threatened by social progress, led by reactionary feudal landlords who resisted land reform, by Mullahs who objected to mass education, women's rights, and the cultural influences of the modern world, and by professionals threatened by the inflation inseparable from industrialization. And the same process could repeat itself elsewhere, under conditions of the success of economic and social advance. The corollary is of course that economic and social advance not buttressed by corresponding political change makes an explosion inevitable.

Many new nations, after an initial flirtation with parliamentary democracy, chose some version of Marxism as their model. They did so ironically not because of the efficacy of Marxist economics but rather because its political theory provided a kind of answer to the riddle of political legitimacy. Marxism furnished a justification for oligarchic and occasionally one-man rule without the inconvenience of elections. But it brought with it as well the usual baggage of Marxist economic planning with the well known consequences of stagnation, administrative rigidity, and corruption.

For a while, these Marxist regimes sought to use the so-called non-aligned movement to exact by political pressure the economic development assistance that their system wasted and their politics made meaningless. The secretariat of the so-called group of 77 fell more or

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less into their hands. I once reviewed the declarations of the non-aligned conferences in the late 1970's and I found not a single statement of approbation for anything done by the United States nor any criticism of actions by the Soviet Union. Now it is statistically impossible for the United States to be wrong 100 percent of the time and for the Soviet Union never to make a mistake. And it is absurd for a group to call itself "non-aligned" while professing such one-sided views.

Something deeper, more intangible was involved. There existed, to be sure, a certain ideological affinity for "socialism" which came to be identified with the Soviet Union and an understandable resentment of historical colonialism. More important was the consciousness that criticism of the United States involved next to no risk while the penalties for opposition to the Soviet Union could be severe. This was all the more true because many developing countries, and almost all of those of Africa, faced exactly the opposite of the problem of their Western counterparts at a comparable stage of historical evolution. Most Western countries were nations before they formed states; in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world, the state often preceded the nation. Boundaries were frequently artificial, reflecting the convenience and territorial compromises of former colonial rulers. In these circumstances the concept of a loyal opposition--the essence of modern democracy--is difficult to implement. For reality supports the natural temptation of political leaders to consider an assault on their personal position as a threat to domestic cohesion. By the same token, an outside power known to have a considerable capacity for subversion can gain a disproportionate influence.

And yet sooner or later reality will impose itself. The Soviet Union can threaten subversion but offer no useful development program. It exports weapons and proxy troops but no hope for economic or diplomatic progress. Developing countries have learned to rely on it for neither. The non-aligned movement may at last begin to live up to its name. We are thus in a position to think of a serious and realistic economic and political dialogue with the developing nations of Africa and elsewhere based on true reciprocity and without ideological blinders.

The following principles should govern this dialogue:

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As a superpower the United States has an interest--together where possible with its allies--to prevent the Soviet Union from exploiting the uncertainties, dislocations, and occasional turmoil of the process of development. Americans are beginning to learn that the danger of subversion or of exploited local discontent must be dealt with in a timeframe more immediate than even the best designed process of development and reform. We know that once Soviet totalitarianism--or its various proxy forms--is established, the process is very difficult to reverse. Indeed under the Brezhnev doctrine the Soviet Union claims the right to impose this irreversibility by force. For all these reasons the United States will not abdicate its strategic interests even when it is less than satisfied with all local circumstances. We will not fail to respond if the Soviet Union or its proxies seek to dominate areas of vital concern to us.

At the same time the developing world, and Africa especially, should not be viewed simply or even primarily as an arena of superpower confrontation. For the objective of our foreign policy must be to create an international system that most of its members wish to maintain. No international order can survive unless the more than 100 new and developing nations become supporting participants in it. And they will feel that only if they have a stake by sharing in the fruits of progress. The true challenge to the West is not to our economic capacity, but to our political understanding. We should not let ourselves be blackmailed; but we cannot make our contribution to international peace unless we help fulfill the hopes and aspirations of the responsible African states and other members of the developing world. In a broad sense, this is an important component of America's strategic interest in a stable and peaceful international order.

The conditions for such a dialogue have improved considerably in recent years. Developing countries, especially in Africa, need not listen to Western preachments about the hopelessness of the Marxist system: All they have to do is survey the results of African experiments with it. In case after case, socialist models have brought near-bankruptcy to countries richly endowed with natural and human resources and vast potential. This need not continue to be so, but to reverse the trend toward stagnation and decay will require a new look at reality.

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[c]

It is also becoming clear that tactics of confrontation are self-defeating. Developing nations in Africa are increasingly learning that if they rely on Soviet or proxy forces they will mortgage their independence. And more and more members of the so-called non-aligned grouping are coming to the realization that they must find some relationship between their political rhetoric and their economic and social aspirations. They are sovereign states; they have a right to whatever domestic system and foreign policy they choose. But the industrial democracies are also sovereign, and have a right to give assistance to friends rather than congenital opponents. We have political, economic, and moral reasons to give aid, but Third World nations cannot expect both to conduct foreign policies consistently hostile to us and at the same time to receive our economic support. They will have to decide.

Finally, in a period of austerity in the industrialized world, official aid budgets are not going to be substantially increased. Developing countries will have to adjust to the reality that foreign private investment is the most promising source of development capital. And they will have to reflect about the political and economic incentives to attract such capital.

As for the United States, there is every reason to hope that we have transcended our traditional oscillation between considering the developing nations simply as cold-war pawns and the sentimentality of seeking to win over radicals by pretending to share their slogans. Revolutionaries will not be charmed out of the convictions of a lifetime by invocations of abstract goodwill. The United States is at last prepared for a mature partnership based on mutually realistic expectations. We must find the means both to help the developing countries toward sustainable economic growth and to expand the world trading system which is the key to the well being of all societies. On this basis there is an unusual opportunity for a new constructive relationship.

[L]

-19-

## South Africa

And so I come at last to my host country, the Republic of South Africa. I am not here with a blueprint of how to solve problems that the centuries have spawned and decades have made intractable. I want to describe how your country's international situation appears to a well-disposed outsider. There seem to me to be four fundamental realities.

**First:** In terms of resources and technical skill, South Africa is in a unique position to promote the peace and progress of the continent. There would be extraordinary prospects were South Africa able to achieve an accommodation with its neighbors.

**Second:** Black Africa has an immense stake in the shared enterprise of building security and prosperity in Africa: the potential value of constructive relations with its neighbor to the south should be clear. Black Africa pays an enormous price, moreover, when its countries allow themselves to be occupied by tens of thousands of non-African combat troops--irrespective of the pretext for their being there. There is no profit for Africans if the continent remains a battleground for superpower contention in its crudest form. Those in Moscow and Havana who seek to perpetuate the presence of foreign troops in Africa do not have Africa's interests in mind; they undoubtedly prefer the perpetuation of tensions and seek to prevent conditions of cooperation and mutual security among the nations of the continent.

**All** African states need to face up to this truth. A better alternative is available.

**Third:** South Africa is of the greatest strategic importance to the non-Communist world, not only geographically but in terms of resources, some of them nearly irreplacable elsewhere.

**Fourth:** However, this last reality has one powerful limiting condition. Even the best-disposed Americans are shaped and bound by their country's deeply held ideals of liberty. South Africans must not deceive themselves with comforting thoughts about strategic geography and resources, into believing that severe moral and political differences will not override them. Nor can even the most geopolitically-oriented American statesmen fail to take into account the aspirations and convictions of the preponderant majority of this continent, as they have been impressed upon me in recent days in Zambia and Zimbabwe.

27

But the basic difference does not derive from public
demonstrations. It resides in the attitudes of
governments. Three major differences have arisen: over
military strategy and its corollary of arms control; over
the nature of East-West relations and over East-West trade.

The change in the nature of the military balance has
affected European-American relations in a particularly
acute manner. So long as America possessed strategic
nuclear superiority the prevalent strategy coincided with
the determination to banish war from European territory.
But the growth of the Soviet nuclear stockpile produces
the need of local defense. Many in Europe recoil before
that prospect. In their defense effort they stop well
short of creating a meaningful alternative to general nuclear
war and thereby evade the key contemporary defense issue.
In the longer term this makes the current American deployment
in Europe untenable. Too strong for a trip wire, too weak

28

for local defense, the current NATO military establishment persists in a never-never land which encourages public escapism and internecine Allied strife.

Some allies seek in arms control an escape from this dilemma. But arms control can stabilize or reduce only those armaments which exist; it cannot substitute for an adequate defense policy. If used to escape complex choices it can have a dually negative impact: freezing an untenable strategy while creating the illusion of political progress. There is an urgent necessity of developing a coherent strategy for the Alliance to give meaning to defense and direction to East-West negotiations on the limitations of arms.

The debate over deployment of American intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe illustrates the problem. Too often it has been portrayed as an American attempt to shift the risks of nuclear war to Europe or to use Europe as a forward base for strictly American purposes. This

29

is absurd. To the extent that intermediate-range weapons
are needed for American nuclear strategy, they can be deployed
in various modes at sea. The real argument for placing
intermediate-range nuclear weapons on the soil of the European
continent has always been two-fold: to reduce the possibility
of selective Soviet nuclear blackmail against Europe alone,
and to link the nuclear defense of Europe indissolubly
to the strategic deterrent of the United States. The Soviet
Union could not risk attacking Europe with conventional
weapons without destroying our intermediate-range missiles
also, lest they devastate Soviet command centers in a retaliatory
blow. And it could not seek to destroy the missiles in
Europe while leaving our strategic arsenal in America
unimpaired for a possible strike against Soviet ICBMs.

Far from giving us the possibility of separating the nuclear
defense of Europe from that of the United States, intermediate-
range missiles in Europe indissolubly link the two. They

30

increase the risk to America, not to Europe; logically
the public demonstrations against them should be on the
American side of the Atlantic.

I believe that our allies should now decide that aspect
of the requirements of their defense without further American
hectoring. By the same token, our proposals in the INF
talks should be made on their merits, independent of
considerations of shoring up the domestic support for our
deployment in various European countries. Such a course
would restore balance to the transatlantic dialogue and,
frankly, a sense of proportion to the domestic deliberations
of our allies.

The second problem concerns East-West relations in
general. The myth has developed in many quarters in Europe
that the US administration is needlessly confrontational.
Underlying it is a shift in emphasis between Europe and
the United States amounting to a reversal of historical

31

roles. In the closing years of the Second World War, there
were significant differences of philosophy between America
and Britain. Many Americans thought Churchill needlessly
obsessed with the postwar balance of power, too rigidly
anti-Soviet, too colonialist in his attitude to what is
now called the third world, and too little dedicated to
building the fundamentally new, pacific international order
toward which American idealism has always tended. Churchill
undoubtedly saw the Americans as naive, moralistic, eager
to evade the realities of defense and security and their
own share of responsibility for maintaining the global
balance of power. While the United States has never abandoned
its earlier moralism or fully developed a concept of
equilibrium as Europeans had long understood and maintained,
it has been forced by postwar realities to deal however
reluctantly with the problems of equilibrium. Today many
in Europe seem paradoxically to have moved to the positions

32

vacated by America and to have adopted some of the illusions
to which Americans clung in years of isolation from global
responsibility.

Whether American tactical judgments are always correct
need not be debated in this forum. But I believe that
America's insistence on a detente which has a geopolitical
basis is correct and that the attempt to deal with East-
West relations by analogy to personal relations is doomed.
The threat to world peace has not been American rhetoric--
even in its most exuberant version--but a series of Soviet
aggressive actions extending over several decades and especially
during the past seven years ranging from the dispatch of
proxy Cuban forces to Angola and Ethiopia, to sponsoring
Communist coups in South Yemen and Afghanistan to the invasion
of Afghanistan, the intelligence and logistic support to
various terrorist and subversive groups, and the military
pressures on Poland. The American objective is not--as

33

is often alleged--the collapse of the Soviet system but
an end to Soviet assaults on the global balance through
a substantial reduction of armed forces and a code of
restrained conduct.

As I have pointed out, I expect that the Soviet system
will have to come to grips with its internal and external
stresses. At that point a major and responsible negotiation
can and must take place. And the Soviet leaders should
know that the West stands ready to negotiate seriously
within a framework that respects the legitimate security
interests of a Soviet Union conducting the policies of
a national state and not of a revolutionary power seeking
to overthrow or subvert the existing order. But such nego-
tiations can succeed only if the West does not give up
its assets unilaterally ahead of time.

34

Reagan's pipeline decision is symptomatic. The fundamental problem can be defined as follows: Theoretically trade reflects the mutual benefit of both parties. But East-West trade is distorted by two factors: By any objective analysis, the Soviet Union and its satellites are infinitely more dependent on East-West trade than their trading partners, the industrial democracies. The Soviet Union cannot feed itself without the non-Communist world's grain; it desperately needs Western technology. The typical Western product for sale in the East contains new ideas; what the Soviet Union has to offer in return is raw materials--products which contain no conceptual input. The inequality in benefits would long since have reduced trade to a trickle had not Western governments stepped in with direct or hidden credits, which now amount to nearly $90 billion for the Communist world. In addition, many export prices are subsidized by governments directly or indirectly. The

35

Communist countries thus are not only gaining a relative
advantage in trade but they are being financed by the nations
against whom they are simultaneously conducting a geo-
political offensive. Lenin's dictum that capitalists would
compete to sell the rope with which they are to be hanged
is coming true with a vengeance--for Lenin never guessed
that Western governments would provide the money to buy
the rope and subsidize the price to facilitate the purchase.

This problem is compounded by the fact that the Soviet
Union deals with the industrial democracies through a single
unit--a purchasing commission subject to strict political
direction. The industrial democracies are divided into
competing units.

For these reasons the issues raised by President Reagan
with respect to the pipeline go to the heart of the matter.
If the industrial democracies subsidize credits and provide
large foreign exchange earnings to the Soviet Union during

36

a period of a Soviet military build-up, Soviet proxy forces
in Africa, Soviet pressure in Poland and Soviet occupation
of Afghanistan, what possible incentive can the Soviet
leadership have for the fundamental negotiations I outlined
earlier?

I am not opposed to trade justified by commercial
considerations--though I have always believed that even
here the United States has been too profligate in the use
of our agricultural resources. But what goes beyond this
in the way of direct or indirect subsidies should be made
the subject of political negotiations.

This presupposes a common strategy by the industrial
democracies. So far as one can tell no serious study was
made about alternative sources of energy, for example, the
large deposits of Norwegian natural gas. If the industrial
democracies feel the necessity of subsidizing their exports
by easy pricing and credit policies, the creative area for

37

such efforts is in the market oriented, moderate developing
countries, not in the Soviet Union or its satellites.

Unfortunately, the industrial democracies have no
common forum for addressing the range of political, economic,
and military issues that are the subject of dispute. The
NATO alliance has no institutional machinery for addressing
economic or Third World issues, or long-term political
strategy. The European Community, while increasingly
successful at political coordination, has no mechanism
for formulating a coherent European view on matters of
defense. The economic summits of Western and Japanese
leaders, begun in the mid-70s when President Ford was in
office, are an attempt to surmount this procedural impasse,
but they can do little more than call key leaders' attention
to key problems in an informal, unsystematic way. Procedures
do not solve substantive problems. Nevertheless, the West
must find some forum to address its common future in

38

a concrete way.

The Developing Countries

I have spent so much time on issues not subject to
frequent debate in South Africa because they define the
context of American views on Africa and on your own country.
And even the American perspective on Africa is part of
an over-all perception of the developing world.