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dilemma in the area as a whole which stems from the political effects of nationalism and economic modernization. While some of the Communist Parties in Eastern Europe have been able to harness nationalism to their own purposes -- this is most clearly the case in Rumania -- the effect generally has been to increase pressures for a greater degree of autonomy from Soviet control. The process of economic modernization has led the states of Eastern Europe to experiment in varying degrees with economic reforms, which in turn have involved political consequences -- some decentralization, wider latitudes of political control over public life, and a growing interest in economic and technological contact with the West. The Soviet response, subject to the vicissitudes of internal debates, has been a groping effort to find a pattern of control which would be resilient enough to accomodate some degree of local autonomy without jeopardizing local party control or the integrity of the bloc.

Meanwhile, the Western policy of "bridge-building" and the West German *Ost-politik* both proceeded on the assumption that the Soviet Union would accept a weaning away of the states of Eastern Europe if the process were gradual enough. The use of troops against Czechoslovakia and the sharp Soviet response to the West German policy showed, among other things, that the Soviet threshold of response was lower than had been assumed. This may have been particular to the Czechoslovakian case, where acute strategic interests and ideological anxieties for the contagious effects of heretical political ideas combined to activate both military and ideological interest groups within

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the Soviet leadership. In any case, the experience has high-
lighted the contradiction implicit in the Western policy of
trying to build bridges to Eastern Europe within a framework
of détente with the Soviet Union. While the situation remains
inflamed, it seems likely that any bridges to be built will
have to be cantilevered from the Western shore. Over a longer
period, however, the dilemma for the Soviet Union remains
inherent in the situation, and the use of force can at best
postpone the need for a more flexible accommodation of these
irresistable pressures.

The case of Yugoslavia is of course in a category
of its own, as a result of earlier Soviet miscalculations.
The effect of the Yugoslav example of demi-nonalignment and
of economic and political experimentation will depend upon
how successfully Yugoslavia meets its problems of federalism,
succession, and a sagging economy. If the general direction
of Soviet policy were to turn toward greater flexibility, as
the Yugoslavs, the Rumanians and the Italian Communist Party
have been urging, the position of Yugoslavia could be turned
to advantage by the Soviet Union as a rallying-point for
neutralist tendencies in Western and Northern Europe, but
to the orthodox elements of the Soviet leadership this seems
to have appeared a risky course.

With regard to China, the Soviet leadership has been
playing a waiting game, hoping that the outcome of the
factional conflict in Peking would be the emergence of those
elements in the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese army
which would be disposed toward a _modus vivendi_ with the Soviet

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Union. In the meantime, they have not sought to force the issue, responding minimally to the propaganda broadsides from Peking, comforted by the effect of the "Cultural Revolution" in reducing Chinese influence abroad. Even so, the Chinese have captured the imagination of the Left wing of many communist parties around the world, and of romantic revolutionaries outside the parties, and this continues to be a serious problem for the Soviet Union and especially for its ideologists, to whom the unity of the communist movement under Soviet leadership is a first article of faith. A victory of moderate elements in the Chinese party would ease one source of complication in the fragmented communist movement. If on the other hand the conflict in Peking were to result in the breakdown of central authority in China, the Soviet leadership would then be confronted with a decision whether or not to intervene, knowing that the effect of such an intervention upon the international communist movement would make the experience in Czechoslovakia seem minor by comparison.

Before concluding this brief review of some main features of Soviet foreign policy in the present period, we should take account of some internal aspects of the Soviet system that are relevant to our inquiry. Although the character of the Soviet system is not a proper object of United States foreign policy, we are necessarily interested in how domestic trends may affect relations between the two countries. The stability of the regime, the balance of forces within the leadership, the degree of dependence of the regime upon external tensions, the effect of economic pressures -- these are among

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the questions in which Russia's neighbors have a natural
interest.

A subject of considerable speculative attention
abroad has been the effect of advancing industrialization
upon the Soviet political system. As the problems of
administration have grown more technical and complex, there
has been a tendency in recent years for the Communist Party
to separate the functions of specialists and administrators
from the functions of the Party, which center on political
control and fundamental policy-making. This separation has
also had the tendency to strengthen the role of the Party
bureaucracy as the guardian of ideological doctrine. The
self-interest of the Party bureaucracy is reenforced by the
fear of irrelevancy and lost of control, if the central task
of economic advancement becomes the province of other groups
and if foreign policy is steadily less revolutionary in
practice. As a consequence, the increasing reliance of the
leadership upon a pragmatic problem-solving approach to such
major policy issues as economic reform have been accompanied,
paradoxically, by an increasing insistence upon ideological
conformity in the arts, among the nationalities and in public
discussion. The inertia of the Party bureaucracy is still a
powerful factor in Soviet behavior, which works in favor of
rigidity and militant zeal on selected issues. Whether this
inertia will become so demonstrably a brake on economic progress
that other forces in the society will be led to challenge and
transform the bureaucracy, and to redefine the functions of the
Party in an advanced industrial society among more creative

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lines, is a matter of the purest speculation.

For the present, however, the interplay between
these contradictory tendencies makes it difficult to answer
the question whether the system intrinsically requires
external tension for its political cohesion, and whether it
is inherently driven to external expansion. A simple answer
would be that it depends upon the balance of forces between
the guardians of dogma and the pragmatists. The ideologues
see the world in terms of conflict, and have a vested interest
in the tension of revolutionary élan; they require the dynamism
of forward motion to preserve the muscularity of their movement.
The economic pragmatists, on the other hand, have more to gain
from economic growth at home than from tension abroad; their
brand of communism would win and hold its support by effective
performance. In practice, of course, this dichotomy is too
simple, but it illustrates the theoretical point that a communist
system may or may not be inherently expansionist. Given the
present balance of forces in the Soviet Union, the practical
answer is that it may depend primarily on the external circumstances --
whether they invite expansion and militancy or not. This may
have a considerable influence upon the internal balance of
forces.

Some writers have raised the question whether the
two societies are moving toward convergence, in response to the
imperatives of industrialization. Because of the extreme
differences in historical experience between the United States
and the Soviet Union, it seems unlikely that this is true in
any significant way, but even if this were true it would be less

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critical to their relationship than the question of the
balance of forces within the two societies. Structural
similarity between two countries would be no assurance of
amity if competitive military interests and jingoists exerted
a preponderant influence within either one or both.

In drawing this characterization of Soviet foreign
policy to a close, we return to the question that is central
to our own thinking: is Soviet policy expansionist? The
answer may be a transitional one; for the present it would
be yes, but it is necessary to clarify in what sense this is
true. Our experience does not warrant the stereotype of the
Soviet Union as actively promoting the revolutionary overthrow
of non-communist governments, nor of a power committed to
military conquest. On the other hand, it is clearly not a
status-quo power, except in its determination to hold on to
its position in Eastern Europe, and it does not accept the
present international order as a basis for stability. It is
expansionist in the sense that it actively seeks to increase
the political power and influence of the Soviet state wherever
opportunities exist for such gains without undue risks, and
particularly short of the risk of general war, subject to
its calculation of that risk in particular situations.

If this correctly characterizes Soviet policy, the
two significant elements are a competitive striving for increase
in power and influence relative to that of the United States,
and caution regarding the risk of nuclear war. These are the
elements that create the basis for a limited adversary relation-
ship between the Soviet Union and the United States.

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V

We come now to the question of policy choices.
Anyone who has had anything to do with any government knows
what a conventional fiction it is to speak of governments
making policy decisions as though this were a detached and
rational process. More often than not, decisions tend to
build up like coral reefs from the accretion of small
unobserved deposits. And if in addition we take due account
of the complexity of forces in the world largely outside the
control of even the super-powers, and the contradictory
considerations and domestic compromises under which any
government has to operate, we are less likely to approach
the subject of policy alternatives in the expectation that
detached reason will govern the course of events.

Still, there are choices to be made, and they will
have fateful consequences. The more we try to stretch our
political imaginations to anticipate what the consequences
may be of alternative courses of action, or of inaction, the
more rational our choices can be.

Our concern is mainly with policy alternatives for
the United States, but it would be a useful discipline to
review first, very briefly, some policy choices facing the
Soviet leadership, since this is part of the uncertainties
we must weigh.

As we have seen, the central choice for the Soviet
leadership is not between extremes, but between degrees of
inflection of the policy of "peaceful coexistence," which

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means calculations of margins of risks, costs and gains of somewhat more competitive rivalry with the United States as against somewhat more effort to damp down tension. In a broad sense, these decisions depend upon whether the Soviet leadership as a whole is governed by a broad or a narrow view of Soviet self-interest, a long-term confidence in history or an impatience for quick gains. But in a more immediate sense, the decisions may depend upon the balance of forces within the leadership, and this in turn may be deeply affected by such external factors as Chinese developments and the course of American policy.

The traditional bent of the Communist movement is against letting itself be out-flanked on the Left, so the outcome of the political struggle within the Chinese Communist Party may be an important determinant. If the Chinese continue to mount a militant challenge against the Soviet leadership, the effect by induction upon Soviet policy will be toward a more active exploitation of unrest in the developing areas, and a continuing reserve in its relations with the United States. However, although this has been the automatic response in the past, it is subject to a continuous tactical judgement on the part of the Soviet leadership whether an energetic use of the "peace" issue might be more effective than "out-Chineseing the Chinese," either in rhetoric or in practice. The leadership has wavered on this point, but if it were to decide to wage its intra-bloc fight on the issue of Soviet peacefulness against Chinese bellicosity, an inhibition would be removed from a more thorough development of the "peaceful coexistence" strategy

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and a more explicit acceptance of the evolution toward "creative Marxism," without fear of making the Soviet Union vulnerable to the charge of "revisionism." A movement in this direction would also be responsive to the evident tendency to "turn inward," which is as strong in the Soviet Union as it is in other major countries in this period, and would enable the Soviet leadership to concentrate its attention and energies upon domestic economic and political problems. If this were to be the dominant tendency, those elements of the Soviet leadership concerned with the improvement of the Soviet economy would emerge as the strongest spokesmen for a policy of moderation and restraint abroad. Their natural interests, as we have seen, would argue for a downturn in the strategic arms race, but we should remind ourselves again that the extent of their influence as against those elements committed to activism abroad and military advantage may be more a matter of internal politics, trade-offs and log-rolling than of detached analysis of policy alternatives.

Flowing from these general determinants are a number of clear policy choices toward particular areas. In Europe, the Soviet Union can decide to continue its effort to isolate the Federal Republic of Germany or to exercise an alternative option of seeking to encourage neutralist trends in that country; it can decide to continue to try to push the United States out of Europe, or to work with the United States in the interest of European stability; and if the former, it can make the tactical decision to rely on a broad-front "anti-imperialist" campaign rather than a narrower

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reliance upon Party and proletarian support. In Eastern Europe, it can decide whether to accept a more flexible relationship, which would derive advantages from a network of closer trade relations between East and West Europe, as against a continued effort to enforce a rigid control over a self-contained Eastern bloc.

Among the many other specific areas of decision, one of the most influential will arise from the turbulence of the developing areas. The Soviet leadership can decide whether to ride the crest of revolutionary violence in the Third World, or to make an effort toward collaboration in international procedures to contain and pacify these conflicts. Which will be the guiding example: the gamble of the Middle Eastern adventure, or the statesmanship of Tashkent? In the latter case, a statesmanlike effort to compose rather than exploit a conflict situation was dictated primarily by tactical considerations vis a vis the Chinese, and the decision in subsequent cases will depend upon how the Soviet Union weighs its triangular interests, against the Chinese along one side, and against the West, along the other.

Of course these questions are at best rhetorical in their simplicity, but they serve to remind us, in thinking about our own alternatives, that we start from the realization that Soviet policy is a range of possibilities rather than a fixed constant, and must remain aware how much our own behavior in turn is part of the Soviet calculations.

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In weighing our own policy alternatives, it may
be useful to begin by identifying the main issues involved
in United States relations with the Soviet Union which call
for choices to be made.

These would include the following:

1) The military competition.

2) Other matters involved in direct bilateral
relations -- trade, cultural relations, etc.

3) Political competition in Europe, West and
East.

4) Political competition in the Third World.

Let us now examine the main alternative approaches
to each category of the issues represented above. For purposes
of discussion, we will here deal only with the non-extreme
range of positions represented in public consideration, and
we will not attempt to fill in all the degrees of gradation
and shading between the major alternatives.

First, the military competition. Clearly one major
tendency in American thinking emphasizes the importance of
military superiority over the Soviet Union. Starting from a
skeptical view of present or future Soviet leaders, this
approach argues that our military lead should be substantial
enough in all significant categories of weapons to remove any
temptation to Soviet use or threat of force for aggression.
Further, it says that our military capability should be more
than enough to deter; it should be large enough to provide for
uncertainties, and large enough to "prevail" in the event that

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deterrence should not work. For the same reason (which reflects a lack of confidence in the rationality of the Soviet leadership in crisis situations) this position tends to favor not only the earliest possible deployment of the Sentinel "thin" anti-ballistic missile system, but also would argue for moving ahead to a "heavy" ABM system oriented against the possibility of a Soviet attack, which it regards as a possible eventuality. Moveover, this approach urges a very high level of military research and development to guard against Soviet efforts to achieve short-cuts by technological break-throughs, and it pushes for the earliest possible deployment of MIRV (the multiple individually-guided reentry vehicles) in our Poseidon and Minuteman III missiles, in order to establish a clear superiority over whatever level of strategic force the Soviet Union may be building.

This approach goes further: it argues that the considerable advantage enjoyed by the United States in its economic and technological base means that it can outpace the Soviet Union in the military race, and that when this is demonstrably clear to the Soviet leaders, they will then be more likely to negotiate seriously or make concessions, or in any case, to experience strains which will limit their capacity for expansionist activity.

The contrasting approach to the military competition starts from a central preoccupation with the hazards of the arms race. This position argues that the quest for superiority inevitably results in a continuing arms spiral, and that the risks of war from this spiral are greater than the risks of

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tacit or explicit arms control agreements. It tends to recommend a moderate and stable deterrence level of strategic weapons -- that is, that we limit ourselves to what is required to ensure that we could retaliate against an attack with an "unacceptable level of damage," and it assumes the Soviet leadership would not contemplate any policy that resulted in substantial devastation of its country. This approach places more value on stability in the military confrontation than on superiority, arguing that superiority does not in fact confer any usable political advantage and that the quest for superiority only drives the confrontation to levels which are more costly, less stable and therefore less secure. Those who share this approach tend to doubt the effectiveness of an anti-ballistic missile system, particularly one oriented against the possibility of a Soviet attack, and believe a deployment of the "Sentinel" system now costs more in terms of accelerating the arms race than it is worth. While they do not oppose a moderate level of military research and development to insure against future technological advances, they do oppose the present deployment of MIRV on the grounds that for the near future at least the United States strategic arsenal is ample, and that the installation of MIRVs will greatly reduce the possibility of an arms limitation agreement with the Soviet Union. The grounds for this argument are that once multiple-warhead missiles are used, any agreement would require a more complicated on-site inspection than would now be needed.

Those who argue for an "arms-control" approach to the military competition regard a United States effort to out-

-40-

spend the Soviet Union in a military race as reckless and
efficient; reckless because it would give plausible grounds
to those in the Soviet Union who have genuine doubts about our
intentions, or to whose who would use this as evidence to
strengthen the position of militant and military elements
in the Soviet system, and would therefore run counter to our
long-term interest in the moderation of the Soviet system;
and ineffective, because they feel the Soviet control system
can accommodate if necessary the social and political strains
of putting a very high proportion of Soviet resources into
defense. It is also argued, as part of this case, that an
effort to "over-strain" the Soviet economy would require of
the United States so high a level of tension and mobilization
as to have destructive consequences at home.

The differences between these two approaches center
around the question of the meaning and usefulness of military
superiority. The first approach reflects the traditional
frontier confidence in the six-shooter; the second position
reflects the belief that the destructiveness of new weapons
qualitatively changes existing conceptions of security.

The second set of issues concern other aspects of
direct bilateral relations between the United States and the
Soviet Union, and the alternative positions here carry over
many of the differences reflected in the discussion of the
military competition.

Those who argue for military superiority also tend
to be deeply skeptical about détente, tension-reduction measures
and summit meetings, on the grounds that these "atmospheric"

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changes work unequally to our disadvantage. While the Soviet Union has used previous periods of détente to build up its military capabilities, it is argued, the United States and its allies tend to disarm unilaterally in a climate of optimism: military appropriations are harder to get, conscription becomes politically difficult, military laboratories tend to wither away and military scientists to drift away. Moreover, it is said, the spirit of détente may actually increase the risk of war by misleading the adversary about the firmness of our commitments, and by tempting him into miscalculated adventures. In this same sense, a reputation for firmness in the use of our power to defend our interests is urged as a better guarantee of peace than a conciliatory attitude. Arguing by analogy from the experience with Hitler, this approach maintains that concessions to an adversary with unlimited aspirations only tend to feed the appetite for greater demands; it is particularly wary of the "salami tactics" by which political objectives are achieved slice by slice.

Correspondingly, from the point of view of this general approach, cultural relations with the Soviet Union would not be encouraged on the grounds that such exchanges permit the Soviet Union to strengthen its power by borrowing liberally from Western technology, administrative experience, etc., while Western scholars and students are severely limited in return. Similarly, United States trade with the Soviet Union is regarded from this point of view as disadvantageous: it helps the Soviet Union to overcome shortcomings in the Soviet economy and thus to lessen political strains which would otherwise

-42-

circumscribe its freedom of action; it also hastens Soviet economic and technological advancement, which augments Soviet power that may be used against us. This position would not prohibit all business with the Soviet Union, but it would argue that such business should be conducted on the basis of normal short-term commercial credit; anything longer would be regarded as a form of concealed foreign aid without any *quid pro quo*. For this reason, such sales as the "wheat deal," which was dictated more for reasons of domestic than of foreign policy, are looked upon as unwise from this position, because they make it harder to hold the line with our allies on the list of strategic goods now prohibited by agreement, as well as the agreed limitation on longer-term credit.

Some who share this general outlook would not only warn against the dangers of détente, but would go further to urge a more active political offensive against the Soviet Union. They would publicize the record of broken treaty obligations, keep alive the claims of the "captive nations," and take the political initiative to call attention to the shortcomings of the Soviet system and to exploit its troubles and contradictions.

The major alternative approach to bilateral relations with the Soviet Union would, on the other hand, accept tension-reduction measures and a climate of détente as desirable even if they were more symbolic than substantive in effect. The argument is that tension-reduction measures, even if only symbolic, create a climate which makes more substantive agreements possible or at least results in tacit and reciprocal measures

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of restraint. Although recognizing that tension-reduction
measures create complications for the alliance, this position
would argue that tensions do more harm than good: they make
problems more difficult to handle, increase diplomatic
rigidities, strengthen the military influence in policy-making
on both sides, and encourage neo-Stalinist tendencies within
the Soviet Union.

Those who share this general approach also favor
an emphatic effort to enlarge cultural contacts and trade with
the Soviet Union. Part of the case for the former rests upon
a faith in the intangible value of the increase of mutual
knowledge in dispelling misconceptions and misunderstandings,
and a faith in the dissemination of Western democratic con-
ceptions through widened contacts. It is also argued that
United States understanding of the workings of the Soviet
system has been greatly increased as a result of the cultural
exchanges. As to trade, the argument rests upon a belief in
the calming effect of increasing economic interdependence, and
some would emphasize the evolutionary effect upon Soviet society
of increasing economic well-being (the so-called "fat-man thesis")
while others support an expansion of trade for reasons of
economic self-interest. In any case, the volume of potential
trade under discussion is not considerable.

As might be expected, those who share this general
approach would tend to eschew an active policy of political
warfare on the grounds that it congeals differences, degrades
the international discourse, and isolates the United States
from its allies by blurring the Soviet responsibility for

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the continuation of the Cold War. Similarly, this approach would tend to be reserved about pressing abrasive issues in the United Nations and would on balance prefer to operate within that organization to the limits that great power harmony permitted rather than pressing for action which would further estrange the Soviet Union from some degree of commitment to the United Nations.

It may be observed that the first approach would minimize direct bilateral relations with the Soviet Union, and the second would seek to maximize them. Both accept some belief in the possibility of long-term changes in the Soviet system, although they may differ in their judgment of the pace at which this process has worked, or is likely to work in the future, and perhaps may also differ in their assumptions as to whether that evolution necessarily works in a benign direction. The first approach would put its reliance mainly on Western strength and firmness as an instrument inducing such change; the second would prefer a little more carrot and a little less stick.

The third set of issues concern the political competition in Europe, West and East. The corner-stone of one position here would surely be the fundamental importance of the Western alliance, which would mean giving primacy to the effort to maintain and strengthen NATO, and to the maintenance of confidence and intimacy in relations with the Federal Republic of Germany. There are, as the chapter in this volume on United States relations with Europe shows, many approaches to the question of how this can best be done, but the point that is relevant here is that to the extent that a contradiction is

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perceived between our relations with Western Europe and
our efforts to improve relations with the Soviet Union or
to advance the interests of arms control, the adherents of
this position would resolve the contradiction clearly in
favor of the Western alliance. One illustration of this
problem occurs in the case of the non-proliferation treaty.
Adherents of this position would tend to give more weight
to the adverse political effects of this treaty upon our
relations with Western Europe and particularly Western Germany
than would those who give primacy to arms control or to
improving relations with the Soviet Union. (This leaves aside
for the moment the question of whether the treaty is to be
regarded mainly in its Soviet-American context, or as a
function of our other arms control concerns.)

Another general proposition that would be advanced
by many who share this approach would be that the advancement
of Western European integration or the Atlantic association
should be given primacy over efforts to bring East and West
Europe closer together, to the extent that these purposes may
interfere with one another. This choice rests upon the argument
that the development of relations between East and West Europe
belongs to a longer time perspective than the integration of
Western Europe, and indeed that the unity of East and West
Europe could only be achieved on Soviet terms if West Europe
were not unified beforehand. Recognizing the Western European
interest in developing closer trade and cultural relations with
Eastern Europe, this approach would seek as unified a Western
policy as possible on this matter, and would not be constrained

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by considerations of a détente with the Soviet Union from
encouraging an enlargement of the Western influence in
Eastern Europe.

The alternative approach is essentially the converse of the above, in the sense that it would resolve the apparent contradictions in the other direction. Some who share this general approach would entertain proposals for a reduction in the Western military presence in West Europe, possibly including demilitarization or denuclearization zones, in the hope of working toward a European settlement with the Soviet Union. Some would encourage the Federal Republic of Germany to move more rapidly toward juridical acceptance of the German Federal Republic, as part of such a European settlement.

Although there are differences within this general approach as to whether the purpose of this effort would be to encourage greater autonomy among the Eastern European states or not, the general disposition of this position would be to favor a more active exploration at the present time for some formula which would accept some degree of neutralization of Europe in return for "normalization," which is generally taken to mean the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Eastern Europe. Among the many variants within this general approach are differences in the degree of acceptance of the legitimacy of Soviet vital interests in Eastern Europe. Perhaps the most sympathetic statement of this view is that it would see some advantages in ambiguity rather than in clear resolution of this point.

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[L.C]

It is clear that the differences between these two approaches rest upon fundamentally different assessments of Soviet intentions and of the depth of the Soviet commitment to retain its position in Eastern Europe, and particularly in Eastern Germany. They also rest upon different assessments of the importance to the United States of internal political developments within West Germany, and of the prospects for Soviet efforts to derive advantages from these developments.

Finally, we come to the issues involved in the Soviet-American competition in the Third World. This can be dealt with briefly because it is discussed at greater length in several other chapters in this volume. The major difference here would be between those who would emphasize the continuing validity and importance of containment not only of the Soviet Union but of China at various points in the developing world, as against those who would challenge either the feasibility or the desirability of this policy. The Vietnam experience of course exercises a dominating influence on this discussion, intensifying the convictions of those who hold any view whatsoever. Those who favor a continuing or more active commitment by the United States against further "Wars of National Liberation" argue not only the strategic importance of particular areas, but the general issue of increased Soviet naval and local war capabilities as reflecting an intention to intervene more actively in Africa, Asia and later Latin America.

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The alternative approach argues that the United States has become overcommitted around the world, and that it should contract these involvements in the expectation that other states would assume a larger responsibility for the maintenance of international order, or in any case that prospective threats to that order would be less dangerous to the United States interests than it has tended to assume.

It is clear that these alternative approaches to policy reflect quite different assumptions about the processes of change within the Third World, as well as about the nature of the communist challenge. The first approach emphasizes the military character of the challenge, and its central direction from Moscow or Peking; as a consequence it tends to see United States interests as deeply involved (the "domino effect"). The second approach on the other hand emphasizes the local political forces at work, whether communist or not, and either dismisses United States interest in the outcome or places its reliance upon the force of nationalism to preserve local independence from the control of the Soviet Union or China.

This brief survey of some major alternative policy approaches to the various categories of issues involved in the United States-Soviet relationship illustrates how deeply policy preferences reflect fundamental differences of assumptions, which are often not made explicit in the public discussion. It is also clear that these differences in assumptions are not a purely intellectual matter, but often

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reflect a natural tendency, in dealing with the unknown, to
project hopes and fears according to ones temperament or
political predilection. Where our knowledge is not sufficient
to dispel such differences, it is at least useful to be
conscious of how much of our thinking involves the projection
of these assumptions.

Since action cannot be postponed to a time of
greater certainty, the question to which we turn now in our
concluding section is: given the characterization of Soviet
policy sketched in the preceding pages, and with due regard
for the uncertainties that remain, what course of action on
our part is most likely to move our relations with the
Soviet Union in the direction we would like to see them move?
We speak of directions rather than of goals, not only because
we are conscious how many elements of this complex relationship
lie beyond our power to direct, but because of a fundamental
conviction that it is more consonant with the democratic spirit
to regard change as a continuing process, rather than as a
movement toward total realization.

VI

Starting from a recognition of the mixture of
conflict and interdependency involved in the relationship
between the United States and the Soviet Union, and of the
interplay of internal forces within each of the two countries
as it affects this relationship, what can we derive as guiding
principles to govern United States policy toward the Soviet
Union?

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First, with regard to the military competition between the two countries, it is clear that we must never allow ourselves to lose sight of the inherent dynamism of this competition to edge closer to war. We have no choice in the immediate present but to learn to live with the possibility of mutual destruction, and to seek some kind of equilibrium in this confrontation, but we must broaden our conception of security from its past reliance upon superiority. This means that we must go beyond a mutual recognition of the unacceptability of nuclear war as an instrument of policy to assert the mutual advantage in achieving a stable balance at the lowest levels possible. Even during the present period when the mutuality of this conception is not yet well established, restraint and a sense of proportion in our own military preparations is more consonant with our long-term interest than a policy which, by striving for maximum superiority, has the effect of stimulating the military competition.

It is not easy to define the meaning of this restraint in practice, because either too little attention to our military capabilities or excessive zeal in striving for superiority could encourage militant tendencies within the Soviet leadership. As a guiding principle, however, we should give great weight to our interest in the stability of the deterrent balance in strategic nuclear weapons.

This does not mean that both sides must have the same number of the same kind of weapons. Stability can be based upon an asymmetrical balance, which would enable each side to maintain a deterrent force that takes account of

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differences in the respective geographical situations and in
the different characteristics of respective weapons systems.
To maintain this balance at moderate levels means that the
political authorities on both sides must exercise restraints
upon the natural tendency of professional military interests
to press for ever higher levels in the military competition.

If we conceive of our security interests in these
terms, it is apparent that arms control must be an integral
part of our defense policy. Arms control does not depend upon
millenial changes in the Soviet system or our own; it does not
depend upon a surcease of the political rivalry between the
two countries. It does depend upon a recognition that we
both have an interest in reducing the risk of general war,
whether or not we may be engaged in clashing political interests.
It is therefore vitally necessary to educate our public opinion
and the public opinion of our allies to understand the separation
between arms control and the political conflict. This means,
for example, that the talks between the United States and the
Soviet Union to damp down the strategic arms race should not
be treated as an occasion symbolic of political harmony between
the two countries; nor should this effort be suspended to
indicate our disapproval of Soviet behavior in Czechoslovakia,
or to signify Soviet disapproval of our actions in Vietnam.
This would be short-sighted, and when it comes to nuclear
weapons, myopia can be a fatal illness.

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The second set of issues concerns other forms of bilateral contacts between the two countries. The tone and scope of these relations should reflect our awareness of the limited adversary character of the relationship in the present, and our desire to move the balance between these two elements in the direction of greater cooperation in the future. In the first instance, this requires the continuation and extension of good diplomatic channels of communication, characterized by privacy, confidence and knowledgeability of each other's internal political life. This can be done quietly and constructively, without illusions of false harmony or exaggerated swings in the public mood.

Our earlier discussion spelled out the advantages and disadvantages of an expansion of trade and cultural relations with the Soviet Union. Legitimate considerations are involved on both sides of this controversy, but on balance the risks of these forms of contact would seem to be less serious than their possible long-term usefulness. Although these are not likely to exceed a modest scale for the present, or to achieve any major transformations in the relationship, they do contribute to mutual knowledge and insight, and have already begun to influence prevailing stereotypes in the thinking of each country regarding the other. The entrenched police bureaucracy in the Soviet Union remains a formidable barrier to the extension of cultural relations, but it would be self-defeating for us to emulate this example. The present political leadership in the Soviet Union survived harsh in-fighting to make its way to the top, and the qualities that make for survival under these conditions are not necessarily those that make for broad statesmanship. Forms of contact

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that diminish parochialism about the outside world on the part of the present or future generation of leaders seem likely to contribute more on balance to constructive relations in the future than to diminish our relative advantages in knowledge or techniques.

The Soviet interest in Western technology and administration provides a positive motivation to which we can usefully respond; such technical borrowing also has some effect in reducing the isolation of important segments of the Soviet population from the Western world. Further, new developments in science and technology offer some important opportunities for Soviet-American collaboration: de-salting projects, weather and pollution control, oceanographic research and exploitation of ocean resources, international satellite communications, and many others. These projects would not only be of intrinsic usefulness; they would be a means of encouraging a shift in the emphasis in the relationship over the coming years from conflict toward collaboration.

Whereas the two foregoing sets of issues concern the direct relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, the following sections deal with policy toward the political competition between the two countries in Europe and in the Third World. The preferred policy here must start with the probability that some level of rivalry is likely to continue for some time to come, and it seeks to move toward a clearer codification of the terms of this political competition. If what the Soviet Union means by "peaceful coexistence" is the competition between the two systems (or the "struggle," as

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it is more often expressed) by all means short of war, there
is no reason why the United States should not accept this as
the "Marquis of Queensberry rule" of political competition.
Our ability to do this obviously depends upon the effectiveness
of other aspects of our policy in various parts of the world.

In Western Europe this means first of all giving
our attention to the sensibilities of our European allies,
leaving them in no doubt about our continuing commitment to
their defense. This also means an effort to understand the
transitional forces which are in the process of transforming
European thought and political life, and to demonstrate that
there is room for a European sense of identity in our common
efforts to work toward a world environment in which our shared
values can survive. In particular, this means that we not
lose sight of our vital interest in maintaining a relationship
of confidence and common purpose with the moderate and demo-
cratic leadership of the Federal Republic of Germany against
all Soviet efforts to weaken this bond, for the continued
strengthening of democracy in Germany is essential to the
future peace of Europe.

In Eastern Europe, we are obliged to recognize the
dilemma implicit in "bridge-building," and to seek to reconcile
our interest in the autonomy of this area with Soviet
sensitivities for its security interests, by making it as
clear as we can that Soviet security does not require political
control over the countries of Eastern Europe. This clearly
represents a long-term process through a period of flux and

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ambiguity, during which we can give moderate and differentiated
encouragement to multitudinous forms of functional arrangements
across the continent of Europe as the situation permits.

In the Third World, our interests are served neither
by trigger-happy interventionism nor by withdrawal into complacent
isolationism, the two extremes most actively represented in
current American discussion, either of which would have the
effect of encouraging a more active and militant Soviet policy
in these areas. What is required is an active extension of
assistance to processes of peaceful change and development,
without pressing for political alignment or relying upon
military intervention as an instrumentality, while giving as
much encouragement as we can to international instruments of
peacekeeping and _ad hoc_ arrangements for reducing the flow of
weapons to troubled areas, including the Middle East.

This policy starts from the conception that political
and economic access to these countries does not require
political control; it emphatically rejects hegemonial rule
as a backward step. This means that not every expansion of
Soviet trade and contact should be regarded as against our
interests, providing it does not involve the imposition of
political control. This also means more discriminating
attention to the internal political forces within other
countries, instead of the automatic assumption that any local
variant of communism is necessarily an anathema; it may be a
complicating factor rather than a prime cause of local turbulence.
The issue for us therefore is not whether to be a presence in

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the Third World, but what kind of presence is consistent with
these purposes.

Finally, we come back to the question of the
direction in which we would like to see our relationship with
the Soviet Union move over in the future. The important point
here is that the relationship has to be visualized as proceeding
through a series of stages over a considerable period of time.
For the present, we are obliged to recognize and respond to the
elements of conflict in the relationship, and perhaps the most
we can reasonably hope to do is to take steps to moderate the
arms race. In an intermediate stage, we can hope to codify
and restrain the political rivalry and encourage some extension
of economic and technological cooperation. It should be an
essential part of our conception that this is intended to prepare
the way for a later stage of increasing political cooperation in
strengthening international institutions and the international
order, whenever later generations of Soviet leaders recognize
an enlightened self-interest in this kind of world.

This stage may at best be decades away, but we should
keep alive a present consciousness that it is our intention to
move in that direction, so that measures we take to meet the
day-to-day crises of the present are not violative in manner
or in substance of our longer-term intentions.

Recently the Soviet physicist, Academician Sakharov,
addressed an appeal to the leadership and citizens of his country
and to people of good will throughout the world, asking them
to contemplate the effect upon mankind of the present divisions
of the world. The breadth of his vision was painfully contrasted
with the mean and sterile reactions it evoked from the guardians

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of dogma. Academician Sakharov has addressed us all in the name of values which transcend the present divisions of the world -- our concerns about war, hunger, the pollution of our planet, the degradation of mass culture. May he know that his message finds resonance abroad and will endure as a testament to the proposition that the true alliances of our times are those that unite the people of all countries who speak for the humanity of man.

###

AGENDA FOR THE NATION

Strategy, Military Forces, Arms Control (preliminary outline)

1. International scene, a brief tour d'horizon.

1.1 U.S. - S.U. strategic positions.

1.2 S.U. - W. Europe.
E. Europe - W. Europe.
NATO - Warsaw pact.

1.3 U.S. - China.

1.4 The Third World
Asia
Middle East
Latin America
Africa

1.5 Summary: five years ahead vs. 1961 - 1968

2. Strategic Forces (cf. Foreign Affairs Article).

2.1 Prospects.

2.2 Arms control opportunities.

3. NATO and the European military balance.

3.1 The balance of forces.

3.2 Opportunities for arms control agreements; parallel reductions of forces, and unilateral reduction of forces.

3.3 Relation of above to structure of NATO.

4. General purpose forces outside NATO.

4.1 East and South Asia.

4.2 U.S. reaction forces.

5. Arms Control possibilities outside U.S. - S.U. strategic forces, and NATO - Warsaw pact.

5.1 Trade in conventional arms.
Significance, relation to U.S. military assistance programs and credit sales of arms.

5.2 Peacekeeping arrangements and forces.

6. U.S. force levels and the draft.

7. Summary:

Possible budget levels, relation to arms control.

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D. Element of truth in all of foregoing (C) underlines fact that U.S. is not just another country when it comes to correcting balance of payments--wide ranging repercussions on rest of world and feedbacks to U.S. transactions. Balance of payments policies may badly damage international relations, and set undesirable example for others.

### III. The Tasks Ahead

A. Necessity to bring U.S. deficit "under control" for psychological reasons: possible instruments

1. Wider exchange margins

2. More flexible fiscal policy, with Administration discretion

3. Flexible tax on capital outflows

4. Machinery for coordination of balance-of-payments adjustment measures.

B. Gradual elimination of the monetary role of gold: evolution of the two-price system and of special Drawing Rights in international reserves. Establishment of a reserve conversion account to ward off speculative conversions of dollars to gold.

C. Continued use of the dollar in private international commerce. Implied vulnerability to "run on the dollar" covered by extensive system of swaps plus gradual endowment of IMF with lender-of-last resort powers.

D. Machinery for international economic cooperation should be greatly strengthened, including areas outside of balance-of-payments adjustment and reserve creation, e.g. antitrust regulation, regulation of government aids to industry.

THE MIDDLE EAST

American administrations may come and go. The Middle East we have
always with us. Its problems have a persistence and a sameness which would
be little short of boring to the American public, as to the old hands in the
State Department, were they not charged with those special kinds of explosives
which produce international crisis and war. The problems remain unsolved.
The conflicts remain irreconcilable. But the demands of the situation change,
and the United States must periodically assess where it stands, how its
resources match its commitments and interests, and what is to be done.

The new administration, at the very start, will have to find answers
to hard and pressing questions. We might list a few. Should the United
States continue to push for a negotiated settlement between the Arab states
and Israel if the United Nations' effort has run its course without success?
Should we provide more arms to Israel, in particular the advanced types of
aircraft and missiles it desperately wants? Should we continue to support
our Jordanian friends, who are under relentless pressure from, among others,
our Israeli friends? Can the United States really do much to stabilize the
situation in the Middle East without the cooperation of the Soviet Union, and
is it worth trying to get that cooperation?

For answers to such questions past policy is no infallible guide, for
the old problems have new dimensions. Yet, like the hodja who rode out of
town seated backwards on his donkey, we have to know where we have been
before we can think clearly about where we are going.

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II

American policy in the Middle East since the Second World War has been
bound up in two problems which brought us into the politics of the area from
two quite different sets of circumstances.

The first was the problem of coping with the expansion of Soviet power,
or as official statements usually put it, helping to safeguard the independence
of the Middle Eastern nations. In brief, considerations of global strategy
and balance of power pushed the United States into the Middle East with its
Truman Doctrine in 1947 and have kept it there ever since. Conditions in
the area have changed over the years. In Washington, as political leadership
has shifted from Democrats to Republicans and back again over the years, dif-
ferences have appeared in approach and in emphasis, but not in basic policy.

The second problem has grown out of American involvement in what is
still listed on the U.N. agenda as the question of Palestine but has now
assumed the broader description of the conflict between the Arab world and
Israel. The United States, from the start has had a special relationship with
Israel because of our role in its creation, the general sympathy which it
enjoyed among the American public as the refuge and the hope of a cruelly
persecuted people, and the intimate ties between a sizable and influential
body of American citizens and the people of the new state. At the same time,
the United States was developing in the Arab world friendly relations with its
newly independent countries and interests important to our global strategic
position, to our economy, and especially to the needs of our European allies.
These Arab countries, moreover, were vulnerable to Soviet pressures or
blandishments unless Western relations with them, especially during the diffi-
cult period of transition from colonial rule to independence, could be kept on
a sound basis. And with the Arab world too there were bonds of culture and

good will dating well back in history.

When it appeared, following the partition of Palestine, that the Arab-Israel conflict was irreconcilable, it was inevitable that some of the elements making up U.S. policy should also prove irreconcilable with one another and that a goodly amount of partisan heat should be generated in the public discussion of that policy. One school of thought regarded a pro-Israel policy as reckless, gambling with vital interests in security and oil. Supporters of Israel stressed moral and humanitarian considerations but also pictured democratic Israel as America's truest and most reliable friend in the Middle East.

With many zigs and zags and with failures to match its successes, the United States developed an over-all policy aimed at maintaining tolerable relationships with all Middle Eastern states, generally supporting the independence of all of them against any attempt by Soviets to move in, and keeping the Arab-Israel conflict within bounds while avoiding a clear choice for one side at the cost of alienating the other. This was a policy at first carried out in cooperation with other Western powers. The Soviet breakthrough to the Middle East by the arms deal with Abdel Nasser in 1955 and the fading of British and French influence after the disastrous Suez adventure in 1956 changed the ground rules, but the United States stuck to its general purpose of safeguarding the peace and its declared policy of impartiality between the Arab states and Israel.

The great difficulty in this sort of situation is the inability of any outside power, no matter how strong or how benevolent, to maintain an essentially *status quo* policy under the pressure of dynamic local forces which a rival outside power is only too happy to turn to its own advantage. Added to the deep hatred between Israel and the Arabs were the bitter feelings of Arab

nationalists against what they saw as Western imperialism and colonialism and also the conflicts which divided Arab states and factions from each other. American attempts to build defensive alignments against the Soviet Union amid these clashing forces seemed to make a mockery of our proclaimed impartiality, for the radical Arab nationalists led by Abdel Nasser regarded American policies as openly partial to all whom they opposed: the Zionists, the European imperialists, and the conservative Arab regimes. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, as the enemy of their enemies, was their friend.

It would be unfair and even probably dishonest to maintain that the United States could and should have avoided the conflict with radical Arab nationalism. Failure was not for lack of trying. American opinion was instinctively anti-colonialist despite common interests with Britain. It welcomed both the Egyptian revolution of 1952 which brought Abdel Nasser's group to power and the agreements for British withdrawal from the great base at Suez. Even after the sharp disagreements with Nasser over the Baghdad Pact and his seizure of the Suez Canal, America broke with its own allies when they attacked Egypt in 1956. Later, when a series of crises and setbacks brought a reassessment of policy, American diplomacy attempted to reestablish a normal relationship with Egypt, and in the early 1960s large quantities of American food were sent to that country. The idea was to maintain a channel of contact with Nasser's government, to show concern for the needs of the Egyptian people, and to provide a means by which Nasser, who professed neutralism and the need for freedom of action, could avoid total dependence on the Soviet Union.

The experience was disillusioning. President Nasser went out of his way to oppose American policies all over the world and to whip up his own people

against "American imperialism." Psychologically and politically he needed an enemy, and the leading power and symbol of the West was the logical choice. The reasons for the United States to pursue a policy of understanding might be valid, but by the mid-1960s it was no longer a practical possibility; it was too much to expect the U.S. Congress to vote aid to a country where officially inspired street mobs had just burned the official American library or whose head of state had told America to drink up the Red Sea. In such circumstances it takes a lively imagination to see how "coming to terms with Arab nationalism," as represented by its principal exponent, could be the coping stone of American policy in the Middle East.

Future circumstances might be different, but the fact was that at this particular juncture the radical Arab nationalist leaders had chosen to play the Russian cards as their best chance of gaining their own ends. The working alliance between revolutionary Arab nationalism and Soviet power and diplomacy had proved to be a formidable combination. The wonder is that the United States, laboring under serious handicaps, was able to maintain its general policy as well as it did in the fact of hostile political activity and propaganda, massive Soviet arms deliveries and extensive economic aid. The Arab-Israel dispute had been kept within bounds since the Sinai war of 1956. The moderate and conservative Arab states held their own. The Yemen war took some of the starch out of Nasser's drive for leadership of the Arab world. The Soviets did not find all Arab radicals tractable, especially in Iraq and were gaining some experience with the political headaches and economic burdens bound to follow the early harvest of cheap advantages that flowed from their entry as a great power onto the Middle Eastern scene.

Then came the six-day war of June 1967 between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

III

As Charles Yost has said, it was a war nobody wanted, except perhaps the irresponsible leaders of the Syrian Arab Republic. The leaders of the Soviet Union appear to have envisaged a political triumph which they would share with their Arab clients. Abdel Nasser had the same idea until he was carried away by the momentum of his own warlike acts and of the bellicose frenzy which swept through the Arab world. The United States urged restraint on Israel, but did not itself guarantee what Israel saw as its vital interests. The Soviet Union urged restraint on Nasser, but only when it was too late. Israel wanted no war, hesitated as long as safely permitted, and finally took action to defend its existence.

Whatever the opinion one may have of U.S. diplomacy in the weeks preceding June 5 -- and some of the criticism has been sharp -- the war itself clarified many things in the Middle Eastern picture for the United States as it did for others and forced a reappraisal of interests and policies. The prospect of a major Arab and Soveit victory, military or political, had evaporated. The leading exponent of hostility to "American imperialism" in the Arab world had suffered a crushing defeat that could not be hidden from the Arab peoples by any amount of propaganda. The Soviet leaders, faced with the danger of military involvement, had hastened to assure Washington that they were staying out. The United States did not have to decide on military action to stop the war or to save Israel, because the war was virtually over on each front by the time the U.N. Security Council passed its cease-fire resolutions and Israel saved itself.

The saying that war solves nothing is rarely borne out by the facts. This particular war solved some immediate and pressing problems. That it

could also open the way to resolution of deeper and longer-term problems was the hope of Israel, of the United States, and of other nations which came together in the United Nations to debate what was to be done. Would the Arab states, having experienced the reality of an encounter with Israel's power, forsake their dream world in which Israel did not exist and accept the need to live in peace with a sovereign Israeli state? Would both sides, recognizing that the old jerry-built structure of armistice agreements, demilitarized zones, and ineffective U.N. supervision had not worked, be ready to reach agreement on a new and firmer foundation for peace? Could the process of settling the immediate questions which had given rise to or resulted from the war be extended to the liquidation of long-standing disputes that were the legacy of the Palestine war of 1948?

The United States, as President Johnson's speech of June 19, 1967 indicated, decided that the effort should be made. The five points of that speech called for a settlement which would include the right of each nation to live, respect for the independence and territorial integrity of all in the context of recognized and secure frontiers, free navigation of international waterways, justice for the Arab refugees, and international control of the arms race. It was a statesmanlike plan. U.S. representatives repeated its points at the United Nations and got a good deal of support from other nations. But the only real chance of early acceptance by the Arabs would have come from shock at the magnitude of their defeat or from an abandonment of their cause by the Soviet Union. In fact, the shock was not all that great, and the immediate Soviet reaction to the outcome of the war was to rebuild Arab military strength and Soviet prestige in the Arab world as quickly as possible, and to call for a special session of the General Assembly to back the Arab demand for unconditional withdrawal of Israel's forces. As various resolutions were

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debated at the United Nations, the Arab League at Khartoum decided on the
need for a political solution but on a basis of "no negotiations with Israel,
no peace with Israel," and Soviet arms again were pouring into the U.A.R.,
Syria and Iraq.

One point is worth special emphasis. At the end of the fighting Israel's
forces were at the Suez Canal, the Jordan River, and on the Golan heights in
Syria. The intention of the Israeli government was that they should stay
there until peace could be negotiated; the terms of withdrawal would be a
part of a negotiation which would cover all the other points in dispute. Thus
the occupied territories would be used as bargaining power to induce agreement
on a peace settlement. The United States, in putting forward its own recom-
mendation for a "package" solution, implicitly adopted that same view. This
was a different stand than the one President Eisenhower had taken in 1956
when he insisted on Israel's evacuation of Sinai and the Gaza Strip. This
time there were reasons for a different policy: Israel's attack on Egypt in
1956 came out of the blue by deliberate Israeli decision, whereas the respon-
sibility for the war crisis of 1967 lay, if anything, more on the Arab side;
more important, the return to the *status quo ante* in 1956-57 had not brought
peace, and there seemed no sense a decade later in merely putting things
together again for a new war in the future. The reasons were sound, but it
should not be overlooked that unless there should be a rapid and successful
negotiated settlement, the United States had chosen to put aside the principle
that territory cannot be legitimately acquired by force of arms and also its
own oft-repeated statements that it supported the independence and territorial
integrity of all states in the area.

This point, of course, was made much of by the Arabs and their supporters, whose entire campaign stressed Israel's withdrawal as the first requirement in any settlement and indeed a matter of right and justice wholly apart from a settlement. The U.N. Security Council resolution of November 22, 1967, which was passed by unanimous vote and raised no protests either from Israel or the Arab states (except Syria), left the point not wholly clarified -- without some obscurity a resolution could hardly have been passed at all. In any event, all governments concerned were free to put their own interpretations on it and did so. The resolution contained references, incidentally, to all the points of President Johnson's speech of June 19 except arms control.

Under the U.N. resolution Ambassador Gunnar Jarring set forth upon his task, as Special U.N. Representative, to persuade Israel, the U.A.R., and Jordan to negotiate a comprehensive settlement. Washington gave his mission its blessing and then took a back seat, urging all concerned to give him all possible cooperation. The difficulty of his assignment, about which he had no illusions, soon manifested itself in disagreement on matters of procedure, and the deadlock held for month after month. But events in the Middle East did not stand still awaiting the results of quiet diplomacy. While officials of the U.A.R., Jordan, and Israel talked with Jarring, Nasser made fiery speeches to his people saying that what had been taken away by force must be regained by force. Arab guerrillas based in Jordanian territory carried out acts of sabotage and terror against Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and Israel replied with military strikes against Jordan. Meanwhile Israel seemed to be writing its own terms of settlement wherever it had the power to do so: such acts as joining the former Jordanian sector of Jerusalem to its own sector in a united city, establishing Israeli settlements in the

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occupied territories, and refusing to allow Arabs who had fled across the
Jordan during the war to return to their homes on the West Bank.

The United States, with its real interest in a settlement and its close
ties with both Israel and Jordan, could not avoid involvement. It urged
restraint; cajoled, occasionally deplored, sometimes warned, and always
pressed for cooperation with the Jarring mission. As the situation deterior-
ated, however, it had to deal increasingly with urgent specific questions:
how to keep Israel from acts which made a settlement all the harder to attain;
how to hold friendly Arab countries like Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia on
a moderate course when Israel showed no moderation; whether and how to meet
requests from both sides for more arms; above all, what to do if the Jarring
mission should come to nought.

Before taking up these questions, which are those we confront today, it
would be useful to consider the policies of the Soviet Union and then to
survey the prospects across the whole Middle Eastern region so that perspec-
tive on the broad range of American interest is not lost in obscure concentrations
on the one point of most frequent explosion.

IV

To those inclined to the belief that the cold war is a thing of the
past it is worth pointing out that the Soviet Union whatever it may be doing
elsewhere, is not practicing détente with the United States in the Middle
East. It has eased the pressures on our allies, Turkey and Iran, promoting
economic cooperations and in Iran's case, even providing military aid, but for
the obvious purpose of weakening their ties with the United States. In the
Arab world, using the twin themes of anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, the
Soviets seek to consolidate the footholds they have gained, especially in
the U.A.R. and Syria, and to spread their influence to other countries. They

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have bolstered their political strategy with new military capabilities: a sizable naval force now permanently stationed in the Mediterranean, access to facilities in Egyptian and Syrian ports which for all practical intents serve as bases, and increased all-purpose forces for action well beyond the frontiers of the U.S.S.R. The aim, as it was in Khrushchev's day, to weaken America's influence and to establish the Soviet Union as the preeminent outside power in the region. "Cold war" may no longer be the right descriptive phrase, but there is still a grim competition for power.

To state those facts is not to say that Soviet strategy is primarily military or that the response to it should take the form of military buildup and organization for defense. The Soviet Union is not preparing a military advance into the Middle East. A decision to unleash force on Czechoslovakia, a desperate defensive reaction to trouble in its front yard, does not tell us that the Soviet Union will challenge the United States with force in Europe or anywhere else; if anything, it tells the contrary. Soviet strategy in the Middle East has been and remains essentially political, using diplomacy, propaganda, subversive activity, economic aid, and military dispositions as instruments of that strategy.

The Soviet leadership, however, has been increasingly aware of the advantages the United States has derived from the range and flexibility of its military power. Russia, for all its nuclear might, has been by comparison a muscle-bound Eurasian giant unable to project usable military power to areas beyond. It wishes to act, and to be recognized, as a world power like the United States. What more logical place to begin than the Mediterranean, where for nearly two centuries Russian rulers have wanted to sail their men-of-war? Where else in the Third World can Soviet naval forces be so close to home and yet make their presence felt in a wide area where Soviet influence has already made substantial gains?

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This is no cause for alarm. The Soviet naval force is not a match for the U.S. Sixth Fleet, though it might come close to it with the addition of air power based on the territory of nearby friendly Arab states. The purpose of the Soviet buildup is not to shoot it out with the Sixth Fleet but to neutralize the influence its presence may have on the decisions of local governments. Some analysts of Soviet behavior believe that the creation of long-range conventional forces, against the background of the strategic nuclear balance, heralds an adventurous policy of intervention in local conflicts the world around at the risk of limited war. There is good reason to question that theory. American power in the Middle East, unless we are so unwise as to remove or reduce it, is too formidable to be lightly challenged. The possibilities of Soviet military intervention in a local situation on a get-there-first basis, leaving to the United States the decision to initiate or shy away from a direct clash, would deserve serious attention. But the record of the past is consistent and compelling: Soviet leadership, whether exercised by Stalin, Khrushchev or their successors, has shown a great wariness of any situation which might pit Soviet and American forces against each other in combat. Neither they nor we wish to test in practice whether a limited Soviet-American war in some part of the Third World would remain limited.

Considerations of military strength and balance are important because, in the absence of an established international order and of any basic agreement between the two great powers concerned, they form the background against which the game of political action and diplomacy is played. Even if the cold war may be receding, military posture remains an element in the peaceful competition and we are far from the disappearance of military dangers. We must,

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accordingly, maintain our alliances with Turkey -- a key country in any
crisis which may arise between ourselves and the Soviets -- and with Iran.
We must have the means of deploying forces, which require a necessary
minimum of transit and base rights.

Concentration on military factors and on the Soviet Union, however, will
give us an inadequate and distorted picture of the tasks ahead. It no longer
makes sense to begin an assessment of American policy with a description of
the Soviet threat and then proceed to figure out how to meet or contain it.
The problem today is to find a basis for constructive relationships with the
peoples of the Middle East. Both the Soviet Union and the United States are
trying to protect their interests or pursue their ambitions in an area where
success or failure depends largely on the attitudes, actions and decisions of
local leaders and peoples. The test of the policy of any outside power will
be less in the stroke and counterstroke of the cold war than in the ability
to make its way amid the complexities of their politics and to find some common
ground with them as their societies move haltingly into the modern world.

V

The Middle East shares many of the characteristics of other parts of the
Third World. Economically, its nations are far behind the industrial societies
of the West; in the current tactful phrase, they are "developing" rather than
"developed." Socially, they are groping for a new order as traditional
institutions crumble under the impact of the West and the emergence of new
ideas and aspirations, new classes and leaders. The political scene reflects
all these strains and stresses in a bewildering variety of forms of government
from the survivals of traditional absolutism and tribal factionalism to the
latest models of "Arab socialism" and military Caesarism.

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It is no wonder that disorder is endemic. The pace of change does not give peoples whose experience of independence and self-government is limited the time to pull their own societites together. Nationalism is the dominant ideology but nationalism without self-discipline and without focus except hatred of the foreigner is no guide to social order or economic progress. We often speak of the virtues of stability and the need of an American policy that will maintain it. There will be no stability in the Middle East, only varying degrees of instability and always a condition of simmering unrest. periodically erupting into violence. Scarcely a single government will be free of the threat of civil strife or military coup d'état. The question is how to keep the instability within bounds, so that it does not condemn these peoples to frustration and chaos or breed large-scale violence that can en-gulf them and the rest of the world.

Such conditions may no be so different from those of other regions of Asia and Africa. What distinguishes the Middle East (together with North Africa) is that so many of its countries have the common bond of historical experience, culture and nationhood that is described by the term "Arab."

There are other important countries which are Muslim but non-Arab. Iran and Turkey have faced the same problems of social change and adaptation to the modern world which challenges Arab society, but they have had the advantage of long and continuous experience as independent states and periods of strong leadership by rulers determined on fundamental reforms. Turkey and Iran, both with over two centuries of conflict with Russia, have not been hesitant to seek reform and progress in cooperation with the West, and in the past two decades especially with the United States.

- 15 -

We should not draw too rosy a picture here. Turkey's democratic order was distorted by Adnan Menderes and the Democratic Party in the 1950s, was renewed only after the army took over in 1960, and even now rests on foundations not guaranteed to bear the weight of intense political strife looming ahead. Iran, helped by its booming oil industry, has made remarkable progress but the relatively stable political order rests precariously on the continued presence at the helm of a single man, the present Shah, and even he has not solved the problem of creating political institutions which give Iran's increasingly important middle class a share in political life. Even so, Turkey and Iran represent success stories. Our aid has helped them, and they in turn have helped us. We should continue to provide it in future -- not just to humor the desire of Turkey's generals or of the Shah for modern arms, but to cement political relationships important to us and to invest in success.

The Arab record has been different for a variety of reasons, only a few of which need be recalled: centuries of domination by other peoples; separation of the different branches of the Arab people as a result of geography, experience under different foreign masters, and the late blooming of the nationalist movement; and a great uncertainty as to where political loyalties lay, in the vague idea of a single Arab nation or in the reality of an Egypt, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, each with its own government, institutions, and national interests. From all the evidence, the Arab world can produce no Bismarck and no Prussia to bring it strength and unity, the recent endeavors of Abdel Nasser being but the latest proof of that proposition.

The result has been that much of Arab energy has been consumed in inter-necine strife. Arab nationalism was successful in bringing an end to the rule of France and of Britain, but there seems still to be a need to do combat

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with the ghost of British imperialism to the last insignificant sheikhdom on
the Persian Gulf instead of turning to the real problems of the Arab world.

The Arab situation was difficult enough without the issue of Palestine.
The loss of most of Palestine to alien intruders who organized their own
state in the heart of the Arab world was to the Arabs a historic injustice,
not modified in their eyes by the fact that the European Jews who found a
haven in Palestine were themselves remnants of a long-persecuted community
which had suffered a more horrible injustice, a deliberate attempt at genocide.
Israel was Western imperialism with a difference. The Jews came not as overlords to rule and eventually go home but as colonists to stay. Being a
talented European people with a mission to accomplish, they were able to make
good the claim to independent statehood which the United Nations accepted in
1947. When the Arabs did not accept it and resorted to arms, the new state
of Israel defeated them on the field of battle and enlarged its territory at
their expense, as most of the Arabs of Palestine became homeless refugees.

When Arab raids and sabotage menaced Israel's security, Israeli military
forces dealt heavy blows to Arab towns. When it came to full-scale war in
1956 and again in 1967, the Arabs tasted only defeat, though on the first of
these occasions they were rescued from its consequences. Arabs of both high
and low estate in all the Arab countries remain bitter and unreconciled. The
conflict with Israel thus colors the internal and the external policies of all
Arab governments and factions. It reflects and in turn intensifies the
difficulties in the way of a Western power, particularly the United States with
its record of support for Israel, to establish constructive relations with the
Arab world, just as it opens the doors to Soviet influence and keeps them open.
These considerations, combined with the mood in this country of disillusionment

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and frustration with the Vietnam war, raise a legitimate question: Should we even try?

VI

The cry "No more Vietnams" is more than a human reaction to the loss of life, the endless expenditures which could be constructively used elsewhere, and the rifts appearing in our own society as the war has dragged on. It expresses also a deeply questioning attitude toward the totality of commitments and ill defined "vital" interests which could involve this country in similar situations at other points on the map. As both national budget and international payments show continuing deficits, people question where the resources are to meet the social crisis at home. The United States cannot be the policeman of the world, they say, and the politicians of both parties nod their heads in agreement.

The Vietnam war has its lessons on the making and interpretation of commitments and on the scale of military involvement in peripheral wars. But the lessons will be lost if we follow no guideline except retrenchment and retreat. The United States need fear no further "Vietnams" unless it deliberately chooses them. In the Middle East it is hard to see where and why we would be committing hundreds of thousands of men to fight Russians or Arabs or anybody else.

The United States has an obligation to defend Greece and Turkey under the North Atlantic Treaty. It has a security agreement with Iran. There is little doubt that we would not permit the destruction of Israel, although no treaty to that effect exists. Those commitments are part of the pattern of policy by which we uphold what are our only vital interests in the area: that events there lead to no decisive shift in the world balance against us

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and to no catastrophic war. Those who fear over-commitment should take a
cold look at the alternatives.

This country also has interests in trade, in transit rights and in the
production and transport of oil. It has close relations with a number of
Arab countries based on a common interest in stability and in existing ar-
rangements for security and mutual economic benefit. None of these, however,
is an interest which we should try to protect by military force. This is the
province of diplomacy, economic action, and other instruments of policy.

Because oil is often cited as the one reason for America's presence in
the Middle East, a few words may help to put it in perspective. The Middle
East, with Arab North Africa, produces ________ per cent of the world's oil
(1967). Produced in large part by U.S. companies, it is important in terms
of investment, revenue, and the balance of payments. But it is not essential
as fuel supply to the United States. For some years to come, however, it will
be indispensable to the industrial life and progress of Western Europe and
Japan. The responsibility for assuring continuing access to it falls mainly
on those consuming countries. They have bargaining power against cuts in
production or shipment because the producing countries need the markets as
much as the consumers need the oil. Europeans have a hedge against closure
of pipelines to the Mediterranean or of the Suez Canal in the use of super-
tankers which can make the long haul around the Cape of Good Hope.

In a political crisis one or more Arab countries may embargo oil, but
that 11 Arab countries and Iran would do so simultaneously is most unlikely.
Soviet seizure of Middle East oilfields or collusion with producing countries
to shut off the supply to Europe and Japan is a remote and unreal prospect.
Nationalization of the producing companies is always possible, but that would
be no disaster if the oil continued to flow to its natural markets. The real

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It is not easy to stay aloof. The United States has good relations with most of the traditional and moderate Arab regimes. They give us friendly cooperation. They are against communism and against radical Arab nationalism, and the spokesmen of those two movements lump American imperialists and Arab reactionaries in the same category of enemies to be destroyed. Yet we should have learned by now the dangers of identifying U.S. prestige and interests with individual rulers and regimes against their domestic opponents and their neighbors. It cannot be assumed that the new generation pushing toward the seats of power in all the conservative countries from Iran to Libya will be automatically hostile to the United States. American policies must be supple enough to accommodate revolutionary change.

If we possessed the gift of unerring prediction, we could identify now the political forces which represent the wave of the future and throw our support to them. It was commonly said a few years ago that Abdel Nasser and his colleagues in Egypt, the Baath party in Syria, and the young military officers who swept aside the kings and old politicians in several other countries held the key to the future. In the light of the record that theory does not look very convincing now. Nasser has squandered his substance on foreign adventures. The Baath has divided itself to the point of impotence, and its left-wing remnant in Syria has produced nothing more constructive than revolutionary propaganda. Iraq, under a succession of military cluques, has actually gone backward since the days of Nuri as-Said. "Arab socialism" is far from meeting the wants of the simple Arab citizen and far from giving Abdel Nasser, his imitators in other Arab countries, or the men in the Kremlin the mastery of the new Middle East.

The temptation is always present to work closely with those governments which are friendly and support them against their rivals. But there are two

serious reasons for caution, aside from the point already made that American policy and prestige may share the fate of a regime that disappears from sight. The first is that we often have interests and good relations on both sides of local rivalries and cannot come down decisively in one camp without losing ground in the other. For example, Iran and the Arab states in the Persian Gulf area, which cannot agree even on the name of that body of water, have ambitions almost certain to clash as the British withdraw from their historic position there. Staying out of such disputes or trying to mediate is no easy course, but it preserves a freedom of action we cannot afford to lose. The Soviets, now that they are seeking the co-operation of existing governments, rather than their subversion through Communist parties, are up against the same hard choices.

Or take the case of the U.A.R., from which the United States has been frozen out since Abdel Nasser broke relations in 1967. The United States has no interest in seeing the U.A.R. win military or political victories--quite the contrary. But neither does it have an interest in siding fully with all those forces in the region which fear and distrust Nasser (Israel, Iran, and the conservative Arab rulers) in a campaign to bring him down. Even if successful, it could wipe out all chance of maintaining American connections and providing some counterbalance to Soviet influence in a country which is and will continue to be the most important in the Arab world.

The second reason is that an outside power, in identifying its own policy with those of friends and clients in the whirlpool of political rivalries in a region like the Middle East, may find that the strings are being pulled from the other end. Both the United States and the Soviet Union have to weigh the danger of losing control of vital decisions against the possibly

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ephemeral gains to be made in adopting as their own the cause of some local sheikh on the Gulf coast whose minuscule domain is floating on oil or that of armed gangs proclaiming the virtues of Marxism-Leninism in the remote hills of southern Arabia.

The United States must have a political strategy in the Middle East, that is true--but not one which allows it to be drawn into a morass of criss-crossing ambitions, rivalries, conflicts and revolutions. It is not clever political maneuvering that we require nor vast quantities of intelligence on individual leaders, but rather an increased affirmation of the longer-term aspirations and needs of these now disoriented societies. At the risk of banality, we could do worse than to recall and repeat some of those principles and generalities that appear in public speeches and are often dismissed as empty rhetoric, such as respect for the rights of national self-determination and of independence and willingness to help in expanding the horizons and raising the living standards of the peoples of the Middle East.

America's relations with the Arab world are difficult, may become worse, but are not hopeless. We do not get very far in explaining our motives or our policies to the Arabs because they do not see things as we do. Their view of the world and of us is determined not only by what we would call objective facts, which are damaging enough, but by a subjective interpretation which often seems to us a monstrous distortion. More explanations and expressions of goodwill over the Voice of America will not change that. Increased contact and exchange might help to do so over the long run. More important for the near future is a combination of deeds and words which takes account of what has happened to the Arab peoples in the past twenty years; which recognizes that there are injustices to be corrected (particularly the fate of the Palestine refugees), and that they are entitled to dignity and not

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to the world's contempt. We should make it clearly understood that the existence of an independent Israel is an irreversible fact of life in the Middle East so far as the United States is concerned; but that there remains a wide scope for cooperation which will serve Arab interests.

The United States cannot have a successful policy in the Middle East that dismisses the Arab world, or a large part of it, either as irretrievably lost or as not worth bothering about. The alienation of Arabs from the West has its origins deep in history. But it comes to a focus now in the unresolved question of Palestine and the role of Israel. Because America's position and interests in the Middle East are so dependent on its relations with the two parties to that conflict, and because the conflict itself is critical to peace, this is one problem which cannot be left to find its own outcome. The United States has been involved from the start. It has responsibility which will keep it involved. It has every interest in helping to find the basis for a settlement, or if that is impossible, a *modus vivendi* at least tolerable to the contending parties to the rest of the world.

These arguments bring us full circle to the alternatives which now confront the American people as a new administration takes office.

## VII

The desirability of a negotiated settlement scarcely needs arguing. It would not end mutual antagonism. It would not reconcile Arab opinion to the events of 1948. The need for vigilance to keep the peace would not evaporate. Yet a treaty or declaration by which the Arab states renounced the status of belligerency and accepted the existence of the sovereign state of Israel would be a triumph for reason and sanity; and the agreed withdrawal of Israeli forces from the bulk of the territories they occupied in 1967 would

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remove for the Arabs much of the sting of their defeat. The United States
might be able to arrest the steady erosion of its interests and its influence
in the Arab world.

In a year of tireless and patient negotiating efforts, however, Ambassador Jarring has had little to show in the way of progress toward a settlement. Israel's government, facing a general election in 1969, and divided in its views on what to do about the occupied territories, has not been prepared to move beyond its demand for direct negotiations, reluctant even to declare its acceptance of the U.N. resolution for fear of pressure for withdrawal before its demands are satisfied. The governments of Jordan and the U.A.R. speak of the need to "implement" the resolution, by which they mean Israel should be required to withdraw its forces as the first step of implementation.
Moderates on both sides might be able to come close to agreement on terms of a settlement. But nationalist pressures hold them on the politically safer line of not yielding an inch to the enemy.

Nothing is to be gained by holding more debates in the United Nations.
The resolution of November 22, 1967 is a good one. If Jarring does not continue, the Secretary General should be empowered to appoint someone in his place. An available neutral go-between, especially when the issue of direct or indirect negotiation is so crucial to the parties, is indispensable. It would be a real surprise if a successor had any better luck than Jarring himself, but all the states concerned, even the Soviet Union, believe that he should exist. The Jarring mission has been more than a potential means of making peace; it has been a very useful buffer between the outside powers and the thorny choices of dealing directly with the dispute itself.

Some may feel that the United States, with more diplomatic muscle than a
U.N. representative and a greater capacity to push Israel toward agreement,

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should itself take on the burden of good offices or mediation. That might
make sense near the final stage of a negotiation when an extra push could
bridge the remaining gap. At this stage, with a gap as big as all outdoors,
to take on the responsibility would be folly without an assurance of Soviet
cooperation. To exert great pressure on Israel to move toward agreement,
without any clear idea whether or how far the Arab states would move from
the other direction, would be impossible to justify to American opinion and
would embitter relations with Israel to no avail. We have precious little
diplomatic muscle to exert on the Arab states. Not even Jordan, which
looks to the United States for arms and for diplomatic help, would heed ad-
vice to make a deal with Israel without first getting the consent of the
U.A.R.

If the prospects for a settlement are dim, and it is hard to reach any
other conclusion, the United States will no longer be able to take refuge in
its continued support of the U.N. conciliation effort as the answer to a
situation that has left conciliation behind. New decisions will have to be
made, and we have already seen ample evidence of the troubled atmosphere
and the dangerous situation in which those decisions are to be taken.

Briefly, it is a situation of rising violence. The regular armies of
Syria and the U.A.R. are not engaged in military operations, as they go
through the rebuilding process, with Soviet weapons and Soviet training, to-
ward the declared goal of renewing the war at some later day. The army of
Jordan (probably with that part of the army of Iraq which is based in Jordan)
is marginally engaged--to the extent of involvement in the clashes with
Israeli forces which have become a daily occurence across the cease-fire line
on the Jordan River. The real initiative for violence has largely passed
into the hands of the guerrilla organizations of Palestinian Arabs, which from
training bases in Syria and the U.A.R. and operational bases in Jordan are

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trying to carry a "war of national liberation" to Israel and the Israeli-
occupied areas to redeem their homeland of Palestine.

These armed fedayeen are grouped in several rival organizations, some
with ties to Arab governments but none really controlled or controllable
by anybody. Their exploits, highly exaggerated in their own announcements
and in the Arab press, have been hailed enthusiastically in the Arab world.
These young heroes, so the comment runs, are the only ones doing anything
for the Arab cause; they are puncturing the myth of Israel's invincibility
and restoring pride in Arab valor.

Israel takes effective security measures which make the forays of
fedayeen a highly dangerous proposition for the latter. The Arabs of the
occupied West Bank and of Israel, whatever their feelings may be, have re-
mained passive. The limited space and open vistas of Palestine are not
ideal territory for the strategy of Ho Chi Minh or Che Guevara. But some
fedayeen get through, they plant their bombs and mines, and they take Israeli
lives. Israel's response is a periodic massive blow carried out by the
regular military forces against fedayeen bases and populated areas in Jordan.

These Israeli strikes are intended to cripple the fedayeen in their
lairs and to deter future attacks by demonstrating they will be repaid tenfold
or more in casualties and damage. It has been accepted theory and standard
practice since Ben-Gurion began it in the 1950's, despite the fact that the
results give more substantiation to the theory that reprisals only breed
more violence. The fedayeen feed on these strikes. They take their losses,
reap gains in prestige and support, and come back to plant more bombs.

Another and possibly more serious consequence is the political effectin
Jordan. Of all the Arab states, Jordan under King Hussein has been the one
which most needs a peaceful relationship with Israel and might go some distance
to get it. Yet →

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Israel's raid on the town of Es-Samu in November 1966 was a major factor in Hussein's fateful decision in the crisis of the following year to join Nasser in the war with Israel. Since the war, while the search for a settlement has gone on, Israel has rained severe blows on Jordan, tangling with the Jordanian army, and gravely weakening the position of the King. The more his authority is put in doubt, the stronger became the **fedayeen** and those political forces in Jordan which decry his pro-Western orientation and see no answer but to get arms from the Soviet Union and fight back at Israel. The radical regime in Syria, no friend of King Hussein, sends **fedayeen** over into Jordan to increase the pressure on him; and the raids they mount from there against Israel provoke further Israeli retaliation against Jordan. For the United States these are uncomfortable developments. Hussein and a moderate Jordan, which we have supported diplomatically and with arms and economic aid, have been a main hope for maintaining a balance and a chance for peace in the Middle East.

The rise in violence tends to close the minds of leaders and the public on both sides to any serious consideration of negotiation or peaceful settlement. Those moderates who have tried to nurture the possibilities of agreement are silent, while each side by its acts gives substance to the image which the extremists on the other side have had of it: of aggressive Zionism bent on carving out an empire from the Nile to the Euphrates; of fanatic Arabism determined to annihilate the state and the people of Israel.

Where will the cycle of violence lead in the next few years? Israel is not likely to lose its military superiority in that time. If the Arab armies attack in desperation, they will get worse than another bloody nose. But the consequences may not be limited to that. Will the Soviet Union stay on the sidelines again? What if the Israelis march on Cairo and Damascus?

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promise of success would be slight and the loss of American influence and
prestige serious.

Three other courses are possible. Without writing off the effort
to promote an agreed settlement, we could concentrate on the need to keep
the peace on the existing ceasefire lines. Or we could choose full and
consistent support of Israel as the simplest and most effective policy.
Finally, we have the option of staking out a new position which does not
abandon hope of settlement but is responsive to the realities of what may
be a long period of stalemate. All three courses deserve further discussion.

The history of the Arab-Israel dispute well illustrates the rule
that it is only the provisional that endures. The armistice lines of 1949
were intended to be temporary pending a political settlement. They lasted
for eighteen years as de facto boundaries between Israel and its Arab neigh-
bors. They were buttressed by international arrangements for observation
and peacekeeping: first, the U.N. Truce Supervisory Organization (UNTSO)
with headquarters in Jerusalem and observation posts on the borders; and
after 1956 the U.N. Emergency Force stationed on the Egyptian side of the
armistice line in that sector and at Sharm-el-Sheikh at the Strait of Tiran,
the narrow passage connecting Israel's southern port of Eilat with the open
seas and a crucial item of dispute in the two crises of 1956 and 1967.

Neither side was happy with the armistice lines. The Arabs violated
them by infiltration, sabotage, and terrorist raids, the Israelis by larger
military operations including a major military campaign in 1956. The system
of demilitarized zones was so complex that it could not be policed and en-
forced. The UNTSO had limited authority: it could observe, it could pass
judgment, but it could not prevent violations of the armistice. The UNEF
helped keep the Egypt-Israel border quiet, but it was there on the sufferance

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of Abdel Nasser who in May 1967 decided to suffer it no longer. Still, the lines endured. The Western powers under the Tripartite Declaration of 1950 buttressed them until the unfortunate Suez-Sinai affair of 1956 when France and Britain conspired with Israel to violate them. The U.N. Security Council at least debated the more flagrant instances of recourse to violence although the conflicting views of the great powers prevented it from doing anything about them, and the diplomacy of successive Secretaries General surely helped to keep the peace as well as it was kept over those eighteen years.

Since then Israel has won a war, the balance in the region has changed, and there is a new territorial status quo. It is labeled as temporary, due to be changed as peace is negotiated, but for all we know it may last another eighteen years. Israel is settling down in its new position. For security it vastly prefers the present cease-fire lines--shorter, more easily defensible, farther from the centers of population--to the old armistice borders. If representatives of the Arab states will not sit down at the negotiating table with Israel, then Israel may well negotiate with representatives of those Arabs now under its control, those who are in the occupied areas of Palestine. Some groups in Israel demand outright annexation of the occupied territories, but that is not now the majority view. According to some kind of autonomy to the West Bank and perhaps the Gaza Strip, many Israelis are convinced, could not only provide a way out of the Palestine problem consistent with Israel's security but also open up channels to the rest of the Arab world and eventually lead to peace.

Whether or not Israel's reasons are accepted, the continued presence of Israeli forces in the occupied territories will be accepted in fact for the simple reason that no state or group of states is prepared to take action in

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support of Arab demands that they be thrown out. If the world is stuck
with the status quo then, should not the United Nations try to keep the
peace by putting some authority behind the cease-fire lines it established
in June 1967? Some of its members have proposed that U.N. observers, as
are now stationed along the Suez Canal, be placed on the line between Israel
and Jordan where most of the action is. But the difficulties into which
that minor suggestion ran are an indication of the major obstacles to an
effective scheme requiring U.N. peacekeeping forces on both sides of the
line with substantial authority, not just to observe and report, and with
a guarantee against summary removal by order of the host countries. The
consent and cooperation of the parties would be essential, but the Arabs
will oppose anything which seems to give permanence to the present cease-
fire lines, while Israel has not been entranced with the role of the United
Nations in the Palestine question since 1948 and deplores its propensity to
"meddle" in matters best left to the parties concerned. Besides, the United
Nations did not prevent the vicious pattern of terrorist raids and massive
retaliation before, and probably could not do so again.

The other major question relevant to a policy of enforcing security
on the cease-fire lines has to do with the permanence of Israel's presence
in the occupied areas: whether the United States and the international
community should help to consolidate and appear to guarantee the acquisition
of territory and of subject populations by force. The question bears on
the larger one of America's relationship to Israel and thus on the two re-
maining policy alternatives.

The first is a policy of full and frank support of Israel as a matter
of the highest priority. Its essence would lie in a decision that the peace
and security of the Middle East and American interests there can best be

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preserved by a strong Israel backed by the United States with arms, politi-
cal and financial help, and a guarantee against attack. To the earlier
arguments that Israel deserves support as a sturdy democracy friendly to
the United States and sympathetic to its international policies can now be
added the fact that Israel counts for something in the military balance.
The picture of a beleaguered fledgling state uncertain of survival in a
hostile environment has given way to that of a strong, self-confident nation-
al community capable of defeating any potential enemy other than a great
power. If the United States makes sure that Israel retains its military
superiority over the Arab states in conventional arms, it is argued, there
will be no war in the Middle East and Israel will feel no compulsion to make
nuclear weapons.

The objection to such a policy is that it takes little account of the
wider interests of the United States. This country would lose much of its
independence of choice in the entire area. It would be committed to the
needs of Israel's security as Israel interpreted them. It would have little
left in the way of useful or tolerable relationships with Arab countries,
from Lebanon to Kuweit and perhaps across North Africa as well. Even with-
out waving the red flag and pointing to the political gains the Communists
would make, it is pertinent to point out that the Soviet Union would have
no incentive to reach any agreements at all with the United States about the
Middle East.

Actually, the choice of policies here is not such a clear-cut matter as
the preceding paragraphs suggest. The United States has a good relationship
with Israel. Common interests are many. The American people recognize
that in serving its own interests Israel has often served ours as well. They
admire Israel for its remarkable achievements. Sentiment for Israel and

pressure of public opinion on its behalf are not confined to the American Jewish community. But there is a difference between a sympathetic and cooperative relationship and an exclusive one, between willingness to act on the conviction that Israel has the right to live and *carte blanche* to Israel to realize an undefined manifest destiny with automatic American approval and support.

An administration in Washington doubtless feels more comfortable at home when it is following a policy favorable to Israel. The organized American Jewish community exerts a potent political influence not primarily in votes at election time but rather in its financial contributions to political causes and in the prominence of its members in the media of communications and other fields of public and private life. It is partly responsible for the great interest which the United States has taken in Israel. Yet it is by no means the sole or dominating interest, and it would be wrong, indeed a slander on the integrity of our public officials, to say that American policy in the Middle East has been determined by "Zionist pressure" on behalf of a foreign government. At times in the past American policy has run counter to that of Israel, as when President Eisenhower opposed Israel's attack on Egypt in 1956 and insisted on the withdrawal of Israeli forces behind the existing armistice lines.

American opinion applauded Israel's military victory in 1967, for it was President Nasser who provoked the crisis and was openly boasting that the time had come to crush Israel once and for all. American opinion also supported President Johnson's policy of trying to seize upon the new situation to bring about, through the United Nations, a real peace settlement to replace the armistice regime and to solve the thorny disputes over recognition, belligerency, freedom of navigation, and the status of refugees which had

- 34 -

menaced the peace for so many years. That was a statesman's decision, appreciated by Israel and generally acceptable to the international community as indicated by the unanimous adoption of the Security Council resolution.

That was a year ago. The parties to the dispute have not yielded to pleas for reason and restraint, and so the problems have not yielded to solution. It is not difficult to sketch out the essentials of compromise arrangements between Israel and the U.A.R. and between Israel and Jordan which many people in those countries would find generally acceptable. The Arab states wish an end to the humiliating occupation of their territories, and Israel would prefer tranquillity on secure and recognized frontiers to retention of the Sinai desert and a mass of indigestible Arabs in the West Bank area. But the Arab leaders are stuck with their "no negotiation, no recognition, no peace" formula and with the intransigent opinion they helped to create. Israel cannot overcome its distrust of a declared enemy who will neither talk directly nor sign a treaty of peace.

We have to understand the mood of the people of Israel, for it is a significant political fact. For them the prewar crisis in 1967 was a time of supreme peril, the climax of twenty years of living under the threat of extermination. They felt alone, with no real assurance of help from the United States, the United Nations, or anyone else. They then summoned their strength and spirit to repulse the threat. But the swiftness of their victory and the relief and rejoicing it brought were mixed with a grim feeling of "never again." Hence much of the hardness in Israel's postwar attitude, the insistence that guarantees of security be in its own hands and not in the paper pledges of others. Hence the determination to hold the present lines of defense until the Arabs offer equivalent security by making peace.

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The United States cannot be indifferent to another nation's will and determination to survive. Americans have an obligation to themselves, however, to find a sound position on which this country can stand over an indefinite period in which there is no settlement in the Middle East. That position should rest on two principles which represent at the same time the surest foundations of a just and peaceful order between the Arab states and Israel and the means by which this country can put its relations with both sides on a durable basis. The first is the right of Israel to be treated as a sovereign state free from aggression by its neighbors. The second is the right of the Arab states to return of the territories occupied by Israel in the war. The first principle is absolute. The second is dependent on the first. It is also tied to agreement on what adjustments are to be made in the old armistice lines, which would then become recognized international boundaries. Nor would it apply to two specific areas: Jerusalem, the status of which must be regulated in accord with the interests of Israel, Jordan, and the world religious communities to which the city is sacred; and the Gaza Strip, which was never a part of Egypt and probably should be put under international administration at least for a time.

The first principle needs no discussion. It is held by virtually the entire international community, which cannot accept the proposition that the Arab states, whose representatives sit with those of Israel in the United Nations, can deny to Israel the right of existence.

The second principle rests on the United Nations Charter and on a record of policy which the United States has followed on the Arab-Israel dispute since the Tripartite Declaration of 1950. The President's "five points" and American support for the Security Council resolution of November 1967 were consistent with that policy, for the resolution envisaged within a

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reasonable time a settlement of which Israeli withdrawal would be a part.
But as the prospects for settlement recede, the perspective changes.
Israel remains in the occupied territories. Its government says nothing
about eventual withdrawal. Differences of view within its own ranks may
be responsible for its silence--a general election is due in 1969. But
domestic political rivalry is not a convincing argument in international
discourse. The impression made on the outside world is that Israel intends
either to annex the occupied territories or to hold them indefinitely until
the Arab states meet each and every one of Israel's terms, both procedural
and substantive.

The United States, because of its general advocacy of a negotiated
settlement through the Jarring mission, has not taken a public position in
any way divergent from that of Israel. It has opposed, for good reason,
the campaign of Arab states and others to make Israeli withdrawal a condition
precedent to action on any other matters in dispute or to set a timetable of
actions to "implement" the U.N. resolution with this particular action at the
head of the list. It is not and should not be the policy of the U.S.
government to insist on withdrawal without regard to changes in attitude and
policy on the Arab side. What is important is that the principle be accept-
ed and that the obligation of Israel to withdraw when certain basic conditions
are met by the other side be made clear. Whether or not Israel is prepared
to take such a position, the United States should not delay indefinitely in
stating it as its own position.

An American stand stressing the temporary character of Israel's
possession of Arab territory taken in the June war should clear the air with
both sides. In recognizing Arab rights, it should give the lie to those who
charge the United States with 100 per cent backing of Israel no matter what

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the rights and wrongs. If some Arab governments continue to rant about
the imperialist-Zionist conspiracy, the record will be there for the Arab
peoples to see, now and in the future. As for Israel, no derogation of
its rights or interests is involved. No break or showdown is necessary.

It is especially important that Israel take account of America's
reluctance to be committed to an Israeli security policy based only on the
military considerations of the present situation, for such a policy offers
no way out of the arms race and the cycle of war. Declared willingness
to give up at the appropriate time the strategic lines of defense won in
1967 is a touchstone of Israel's view of the future. It provides the key
to American and international action to provide support and guarantees for
the consolidation of peace in the Middle East. We may deplore the acts of
violence on both sides which ignore the current cease-fire lines. But we
cannot make the commitments to maintain those temporary lines that we could
to guarantee frontiers agreed upon in connection with an Israeli withdrawal.
That is the key also to the vexing question of the sale of advanced American
aircraft to Israel. An Israel which had given up its forward positions in
a basic agreement with Arab states should have what it needs to maintain its
deterrent power. An Israel which declared its willingness to do so on con-
dition of Arab acceptance of its sovereign existence should have the same
opportunity. But an Israel which gives no sign that it will ever give up
the occupied territories should receive no special consideration from the
United States.

IX

A comprehensive settlement seemed logical in 1967 because all the prob-
lems were interlocked. But the very complexity of the whole collection of

- 38 -

problems, plus the fact that as the legacy of the partition of Palestine
in addition to the recent war they raised issues regarded on both sides
as vital to national existence, made a settlement by negotiation a virtually
impossible task. That the Jarring mission bogged down on questions of
procedure was a sign of how deep the substantive differences are. It does
no good to condemn the obduracy of leaders in Jerusalem or Cairo. Each
side has weighed the consequences of yielding positions and getting on to
serious negotiations against the consequences of living with the situation
as it is and as it may become.

If, as seems likely, hope for a comprehensive "package" settlement
recedes into nothingness, what next? Partial settlements or even unilater-
al actions could perhaps resolve some troublesome problems and open the way
to broader agreements later on. We cannot expect Israel and the Arab states
to give way on principles in little deals if they will not do so in a big
deal. Yet if Arab solidarity should crack to the point of permitting
separate negotiations with Israel, a breakthrough on at least one front is
possible. A more realistic prospect is that of practical _de facto_ arrange-
ments offering mutual advantage which finesse the questions of principle.
There are also some matters in which states other than the disputants have
specific interests of their own at stake and could press effectively for
solutions.

Four possible areas of limited settlement are (a) separate bilateral
settlements between Israel and individual Arab states, (b) economic and other
special arrangements, (c) the problem of refugees, and (d) the Suez Canal.

As time passes and governments change, separate bilateral arrangements
between Israel and one or more of its Arab neighbors may become possible.
Jordan, with its survival at stake, could some day come to the decision for

- 39 -

a separate peace that King Hussein cannot make now with President Nasser's consent. Or a government in Cairo might conclude that its urgent and primary tasks lay in Egypt rather than in the unending struggle over Palestine, and that it was worth paying a price to do away with the humiliating Israeli presence on Egyptian territory. In either case (or in that of Syria too if the time ever comes when a Syrian government will talk reason instead of unceasing propaganda) the basis of a deal can be rather simply outlined: evacuation by Israel of the bulk of occupied territory, which would then be demilitarized, and a formal declaration or agreement confirming obligations on the Arab side to the State of Israel. Certain difficult issues with special international aspects such as the continued occupation of Sharm-el-Sheikh, the future of the Gaza Strip, and the international status of Jerusalem could be left for future settlement.

All this is a large order, dependent on a change of heart and perhaps only slightly less improbable than a general settlement. It may be more practical to encourage more modest bilateral arrangements or unilateral moves which do not face frontally the question of formal peace and recognition. Here the main opportunities lie in the economic relations between Israel and Jordan. A considerable traffic in persons and goods already exists between Jordan, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and Israel itself. It could be broadened by the independent decisions of both governments. Tourism, with Jerusalem as its focal point, has been in the past an important source of revenue to both Israel and Jordan. Pending a political settlement covering the West Bank and Jerusalem, it cannot reach its full potential; yet even now a minimum of practical cooperation could open the way for tours including visits to Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and Israel. Another possibility is for Israel to make available transportation routes and port

- 40 -

facilities so that Jordan's trade would have access to the Mediterranean.
Mentioned in the past as a possible item in a general settlement, it could
be done earlier if each side were prepared to overcome its political hesita-
tions.

All such economic arrangements, of course, would be much easier to put
through if Israel could make a significant gesture on the political side.
With appropriate arrangements to avoid prejudice to its security, Israel
could turn over a portion of the West Bank to provisional Jordanian admin-
istration. That would be a clear and convincing sign of an intention to
come to an eventual settlement with a Jordanian state again spanning the
Jordan River. It would be a bold stroke, not easy for Israel to take, but
surely a more hopeful direction for boldness than that of annexation or of
creating its own Arab satellite state in Palestine.

Another matter which need not await a comprehensive political settle-
ment is the fate of the Palestine Arab refugees. Twenty years of debate
and resolutions in the United Nations made the world aware of the dimensions
of the problem as the refugees, by now numbering over 1.3 million, continued
to live on U.N. charity at the margin of existence in the countries surround-
ing Israel. The June war made some of them refugees again as they fled
from Israeli-occupied areas and added to their numbers some 250,000 more
West Bank Palestinians and Syrians who had resided in those areas.

The June war, however, though it made the situation worse, so changed
the political landscape that at least a possibility arose of some movement
toward making it better. For two decades the refugee problem had been
locked into the conflict which created it, the partition of Palestine and
the creation of Israel. The Arab governments used it as a weapon to assert
the right of the refugees to return to their homes in what had become Israel

- 41 -

and thus reaffirm the Arab character of Palestine. The Israel Government, engaged in settling thousands of Jewish immigrants, maintained a firm resistance against taking back more than a handful of Arabs. No room for compromise could be found. President Johnson's speech of June 19, 1967 and the U.N. resolution of the following November both mentioned "justice for the refugees" as one of the items on the agenda for a comprehensive settlement. If both sides held to their former positions, it was hard to see from where the "justice" was going to come. But new facts were at hand, the most important one being Israel's physical control, through occupation of the territories where they resided, over roughly one-half of the refugees of 1948 vintage.

Here again the problem is one that principally concerns Israel and Jordan, and the former is in a position to take certain steps that do not require an overall settlement. First of all, it could permit the return to the West Bank of all those Arabs who fled to the East Bank at the time of the war of 1967 and wish to come back. Such an act would at the same time provide a modicum of justice to the refugees and a sign of Israel's recognition that the West Bank will remain Arab and rejection of a policy of driving out the Arab population to make room for Jewish settlement.

Another step could be a program of development in the West Bank area which would provide jobs for refugees and absorb them into the economy, take them off the relief rolls and out of refugee status. One of the sore points over the years has been Israel's refusal to provide compensation to refugees for the property they abandoned in that part of Palestine which is now Israel. Repatriation and compensation were the two alternative means which the United Nations had repeated again and again in urging Israel to do justice to the refugees. While repatriation to Israel except for a few

- 42 -

individual refugees who might personally choose it and be accepted, is not a practical proposition at this late date, compensation should be on today's agenda. It is immensely complicated and would require much study and negotiation involving the rights of all the refugees and the cooperation of many governments, but there is no reason why Israel could not provide payments at an early date, as an installment on the final reckoning, to certain refugees to help them get training and jobs.

Any major move by Israel which can be pictured as an attempt at unilateral disposition of the rights of the refugees and of Arab states might raise more trouble than it was worth and possibly prejudice other Arab-Israel arrangements. The fact remains that any action which can transform some of the West Bank refugees from objects of charity into self-respecting citizens is to be welcomed. In the overcrowded and barren Gaza Strip not much economic development is feasible; the only hope there lies in a substantial movement of population elsewhere, a delicate political problem not easily solved at this juncture.

The world has a humanitarian concern, and also a financial one. Those countries which contribute to UNRWA, the U.N. agency which bears the bulk of the responsibility for providing food, services, and education to the refugees, are going to be looking impatiently for ways in which these unfortunate human beings can be given a choice for a new life and a helping hand to get there, and for ways in which funds can be used to reduce and eventually liquidate the problem itself rather than to support year after year a growing number of people in conditions of misery and hopelessness. The U.S. Congress, as the chief provider of funds to UNRWA, has already shown signs of restiveness and may not be prepared to wait indefinitely.

Finally, something might be done about a problem where local deadlock

- 43 -

directly prejudices the interests of many nations and of world commerce: the closed Suez Canal. Israel accomplished in 1967 what Britain and France failed to do in 1956. It put its military forces in physical possession of the east bank of the canal. Thus it gained a strong defensive position against any Egyptian attempt to return to Sinai, denied to Egypt a major source of revenue, and it held a valuable bargaining counter to win the kind of settlement with Egypt which it wanted, including the right of Israeli-flag ships to use the canal. Until some move toward satisfaction of its demands takes place, Israel is content to leave things as they are. The U.A.R., which is receiving payments from the oil-rich Arab states to replace canal revenues, has been content to do the same.

Meanwhile other nations, suffering serious inconvenience and financial loss, are not so content. British losses in shipping costs have been running into the hundred of millions of pounds annually, although Middle East oil is still available by supertankers making the long haul round the Cape. Even the Soviet Union is inconvenienced by inability to send naval vessels through to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and to move its shipments to Vietnam by the shortest sea route. The United States has no reason to urge that the canal be reopened now, other than to help serve the interests of friendly countries and of international trade. It might prefer to have it remain closed in order to keep the Soviet Union at a disadvantage.

Two strong considerations, however, argue that an effort be made at some point to reopen the canal. The first is that, regardless of momentary advantage or disadvantage, the Suez Canal is an international waterway of present and future as well as past importance and cannot be allowed just to fill up with sand and be forgotten. The second factor is the possibility of breaking the impasse between Israel and the U.A.R. on this front.

- 44 -

If the Cairo government wished to clear and reopen the canal and set
out to do so, perhaps with the help of other countries, it would immediately
run into the possibility of the use of force by Israel to prevent it. To
avoid a situation which might bring on a renewal of the war, a group of
states which favored reopening the canal might first approach Israel to find
some basis for compromise and then serve in an intermediary role. The
obvious bargain would be for Israel to agree not to interfere and perhaps
even to withdraw its forces a number of miles from the canal, and for the
U.A.R. to agree to the right of passage for Israeli ships. Agreement on any
pullback by Israel would not be easy to reach, but it could be the start of
a process by which withdrawal from the remainder of Sinai would be matched
by agreement on other matters in dispute.

All these are speculations, not meant as specific proposals but as illus-
trations of the point that a variety of opportunities for partial settlement
may appear even though an overall package has no chance at all. If the
United States succeeds in establishing a sound position in relation to the
two sides, it may be able to help in the exploration of such opportunities
for peace.

X

From Israeli friends an American listener will hear that unless the
United States gives full support to Israel, the Arab radicals inevitably
will win out in one country after another and that the real victor will be
the Soviet Union, the real loser the United States. From Arab friends the
same listener will hear that it is American support for Israel which drives
all Arabs into the radical camp and into the arms of the Russians, and that
there is no surer way to sacrifice American interests in the Middle East.

- 45 -

Perhaps two conclusions can be drawn from these conflicting pieces of advice. One is that, granting the self-interest of the speakers, what they say has enough validity to illustrate the "heads you win tails I lose" character of some of the choices before us. The second is that the United States, looking beyond any simple formula, must reach its own conclusions on the interaction of Soviet and American interests and policies as they are involved in the turmoil and conflicts of this region.

Ironically, after 20 years of pursuing its aims in the Middle East by efforts to thwart the Soviet Union and keep its influence to a minimum, the United States now seems more and more dependent for the attainment of those aims on some substantial measure of agreement with its adversary. One example: we have favored and worked for a general Arab-Israel settlement through the Jarring mission, all the while knowing that probably the only way it can be brought about is by concerted Soviet and American pressure on the respective parties to force them into agreement. Another example: we have found no answer to the spiralling arms race in the area, in which the two great powers and others are arming all and sundry, other than to appeal for a system of arms control which must rest on Soviet cooperation.

The argument should not be overdrawn. Waiting for the men in the Kremlin to make agreements which would serve our purposes may mean waiting forever. They will move toward agreements only when they can thereby advance their own purposes, and that point has not yet been reached in the Middle East. Whether and when it will be reached depends both on what success the United States has with its own policies in the area and on what problems and difficulties beset the Soviet Union. On both counts we may be permitted a feeling of tempered optimism for the long run if not for the present.

- 46 -

Positions and policies which may serve the United States in what is likely to be a period of transition have already been described: maintenance of our military strength; full cooperation with Turkey and Iran; sound political positions from which we can deal equitably with both sides in the Arab-Israel conflict and contribute to the settlement of differences as that becomes possible; friendly relations with the moderate regimes while seeking not to lose contact with the radicals, keeping out of inter-Arab quarrels if we can and looking toward constructive relations with the Arab people in the future regardless of changes in political regimes.

On the economic side, we should be ready to help these nations which need and can profitably use such help--bearing in mind that in the Arab world the main need is not for outside aid (other than technical) but, once the situation permits, for an agreed distribution of the income from the vast oil wealth which nature has distributed unevenly. Americans are wont to put faith in bold regional economic schemes as a way toward peace in troubled areas. We should have no illusions that building huge nuclear desalination and power plants will do much to bridge political differences. A development bank for the Middle East might help, but only if it grows out of local initiative when the political climate is favorable. All in all, the policies called for in the near future are not such as to require from the United States a vast outlay of material resources. The crucial requirements are imagination, steadiness, and highly competent diplomacy.

If the United States encounters difficulties and setbacks--as it will--so too will the Soviet Union. Given the heavy demands on its lesser resources for the strategic armaments race, the space race, maintaining control of Eastern Europe, and the demands of the domestic economy, it may not be able to pour large sums into challenging American military power in its

- 47 -

strong suit or meeting the pleas of Middle Eastern clients. Syria and Iraq have deep economic troubles. If Jordan should turn to the left, would Moscow be ready to replace subsidies paid in the past by London, Washington, and the conservative Arab states? As for Egypt, to assume responsibility for the continuing growth of its economy would be to take on the task of Sisyphus; and not to do so would raise trouble with Cairo. If the Soviet presence grows, moreover, friction with the Egyptians will also grow, as is already apparent in the military field.

The Soviets may win propaganda victories in the Arab world, but unless they can deliver victories over Israel or guarantee the fulfilment of promises the Arab leaders have made to their own people, they may pay the price of Arab frustration. Arab nationalism, which Moscow has done so much to encourage, is hostile to domination by all outside powers, including the Soviet Union. The ideological ties, the common devotion to the ideas of socialism about which much is heard from both sides, would fade away once the "Arab socialists" saw behind the proclaimed solidarity a Soviet attempt to impose its own type of socialism on them. Moreover, the radical Arab states such as the U.A.R., Syria and Iraq are engaged in a shifting competition among themselves, causing their patron to do a balancing act in trying to maintain influence with all of them. In the conservative oil-producing states there is little chance for Soviet gains short of revolution, and the revolution itself would be nationalist rather than socialist.

All this is no prediction that Soviet policy will come to grief in the swamp of Arab politics. It is merely an indication that the Soviet Union is limited in what it can accomplish and may see its troubles mount and its victories turn sour. The day may come when its leaders will begin to count the costs of cold-war competition in the Middle East and measure them against

- 48 -

the results. Both powers may in the end come to the reasonable conclusion that neither is going to dominate the Middle East, and that the aim of denying it to the other may be achieved with less danger and at much lower cost by tacit or explicit agreement than by frenzied competition.

The United States should by no means act as if that day is here before it arrives. Official Soviet thinking is encrusted with habits and slogans of the past. There is no steady march toward greater liberalization at home or greater cooperation with the United States in matters of foreign policy. The struggle against imperialism and the inexorable forward march of socialism are concepts which have reality in the Soviet leaders' minds so far as we can read them. Yet these same leaders can coolly assess the national interest in terms of risk and of cost, and they have made agreements with the "imperialists" when areas of common interest appeared.

Whether and when the two great powers will find common interests in the Middle East, beyond the existing interest in avoiding nuclear war, is an open question. The United States has made it publicly known that it favors agreement on arms control there, and a Soviet statement of July 1, 1968 stated a similar interest; but it would be rash to predict an agreement in that field for some time to come. Both powers profess a desire for a political settlement between the Arab states and Israel, and both accept Israel as a sovereign state; but a common endeavor to bring about a real settlement seems as far away as ever.

We should work to enlarge these possibilities, recognizing that they may depend more on the totality of the Soviet-American relationship than on the respective calculations of the two governments about the Middle East. Whether the trend is toward agreement or away from it, the United States can best prepare for either contingency by moving steadily to establish its own relations of confidence and cooperation with all peoples of the Middle East.

REVISED DRAFT

9/20/68

# The U.S. and the Low Income Countries

## I. The Foreign Policy Framework

There has been mounting confusion, uncertainty, and debate in the last few years among the public, the Congress, and the informed intellectual community over what should be our relations with the ninety-odd countries of the underdeveloped world of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These countries, which include some two-thirds of the world's population, are all desperately poor in contrast to the more developed countries of North America, Western Europe, Russia and Japan, and virtually all share the problems of an effort to make the transition from traditionally rigid societies to modern participatory ones. Before World War II our concern with this range of countries was marginal. In the fifties and early sixties we focused increasing attention on the underdeveloped world, partly because most of the post-war international crises had their proximate origins there, from Korea, Suez, Cuba, and the Congo to the Dominican Republic, Rhodesia, and Vietnam, and partly because we viewed the underdeveloped world as a principal arena of the cold war conflict. We developed a whole new range of foreign policy instruments including technical assistance, capital grants and loans, food for peace, cultural exchange programs, information programs, and the Peace Corps and new forms and emphases for the more traditional instruments of diplomacy and military assistance to deal with this essentially new dimension of our foreign policy concerns.

The doubts and uncertainties increasingly voiced of late about our policies toward the Third World have been reflected in sharp cuts in our foreign aid program, which encompasses the principal new U.S. instruments

- 2 -

for dealing with these countries. Proposals are rife for further reduction
and major reorganization of this program, but the organizational debate
conceals deeper foreign policy issues. The uncertainties have been accen-
tuated by the domestic controversies generated by our involvement in
Vietnam, by the strains on our economy posed by both a mounting government
budget and balance of payments difficulties, and by the growing recognition
of the urgency of some of our domestic problems of which we have recently
become more aware and which are treated elsewhere in this volume. Faced
with an increasing confusion of purpose, we badly need a new articulation,
in the light of changes in the international environment, of the range of
U.S. concerns with the low-income countries. While virtually all the
elements of such a fresh articulation are to be found in one place or another
in doctrines developed over the past 20 years, a new emphasis and balance
among those elements is required as a foundation for the more pragmatic
discussion of instruments and organizational alternatives which follows.

From the initial enunciation of the Truman Point Four Doctrine in 1947
down to the present it has been conventional to distinguish increasingly
sharply between a hard-nosed concern with the U.S. national interest and
a moral and humanitarian concern with poverty. In the view of this writer,
continued emphasis on this distinction has led to some distortion of the
problem. Analysts of the U.S. interest have often focused quite narrowly
on the impact of the international distribution of power on our security
position viewed in relatively short-run terms. Recent changes in our
perception of the forces at work in the world have rendered the cold-war
security arguments of a decade ago decreasingly persuasive.

On the other hand, a growing doubt in some quarters as to the
validity of U.S. intervention in the political and social affairs of other

["Inability of a State to participate in the political and social affairs of other\nmember states of a State is a basic element of the asymmetry between the two\nmember states. On the other hand, a showing doubt in some characteristics of the\nsecurity instruments of a state, or the asymmetry between the two\nmember states, is a basic element of the asymmetry between the two\nmember states. On the other hand, a showing doubt in some characteristics of the\nsecurity instruments of a state, or the asymmetry between the two\nmember states. On the other hand, a showing doubt in

- 3 -

countries has led us to focus our humanitarian concerns increasingly narrowly on the war on hunger and disease and to depoliticize at least the rhetoric of our aid activities by shying away from a concern with the quality of political and social life abroad. Meanwhile, the force of the foreign projection of our humanitarian motivation has been greatly weakened by the recognition that we have crucial moral and welfare problems at home.

Our sense of disquiet about our activities in the underdeveloped world has been greatly increased by the growing feeling that pursuit of our alleged security interests through military assistance, counterinsurgency activities, and even open warfare in Vietnam has been in sharp conflict in some countries with our professed moral concerns with people and their welfare, with open societies, and with government by consent of the governed. Both at home and abroad a gap has increasingly been perceived between our actions and our rhetoric as we have supported regimes that are repressive, engaged in military programs that restrict rather than expand popular participation and strengthened the resistance of some traditional regimes to the kinds of changes that the social and political development which we profess to favor in fact requires. One reaction to this gap, that is to the dilemma posed by the conflict between our actions taken in defense of our security interests and the rhetoric with which we define our moral purpose, is to urge that we cease the actions, which by many are no longer perceived as necessary, and that we abandon the rhetoric which in view of past actions is no longer credible; that is that we withdraw or greatly reduce our activities in the underdeveloped world, concentrate on reconstructing our own society, and suspend all but token

- 4 -

efforts in the Third World until we understand better the revolution
of modernization that we all know is in progress there.

The alternative to this view, and the thesis this writer would
strongly support, is that when reexamined in the light of an updated
appraisal of the world situation and a corrected interpretation of both
our national interests and our moral and humanitarian values, most of the
dilemma disappears. Properly understood, our long-term security interests,
our economic interests, our cultural and social interests, and our deep
historical moral concerns with the welfare of common men everywhere come
together and can all abe advanced by the right kinds of policies toward
the low-income countries. There will, of course, continue to be conflicts
in detail in particular places and at particular times among our various
objectives. We will have to live with these. We will have to live with
and tolerate for a long time to come a high level of instability and
probably frequent outbreaks of local violence and political upset in the
underdeveloped world which may impinge unfavorably on a number of our per-
ceived short-term interests. But over the next few decades we have a
compelling interest both national and moral in the emergence of a compatible
and congenial environment in a more and more interdependent world of
increasingly modernized states.

Thus viewed our broad interest parallels that of a good many other
governments and peoples, especially in the less developed countries. There
are some leadership elements who do not share our growth and social
development goals enough to make cooperation possible. But with many others
in the Third World, though we will have frequent frictions and differ-
ences on means of implementation, our national interests properly defined
are not competitive, and our moral values are not a unique American export.

- 5 -

There need be no arrogance in cooperative efforts to pursue mutually
shared goals of modernization and participation, particularly when both
parties to the cooperation are aware that both have unsolved problems.
To see what this means we must explore a little further the content of
U.S. security, economic, and social and civic interests in the less
developed world as they are affected by recent changes in the world
environment.

## Our Security Interests

Our security policy is treated in another paper, but it has been such
an important component of our past policies in the less developed world
that we must review it here at least briefly. In the bi-polar postwar
world of the fifties, as Europe stabilized politically and exhibited vigor-
our growth economically, both the United States and the Soviet Union came
to look upon the underdeveloped world as an important--perhaps as the most
important--arena of conflict between what was viewed as a still monolithic
international communist movement and a still reasonably cohesive "free
world." It was widely believed in the United States, and very possibly
also in the Soviet Union, that the transfer of any new country to what
was conceived to be the enemy camp was very dangerous. While even the
largest of the underdeveloped countries did not then and do not now possess
the resources to pose a serious direct security threat to either of the
super powers, even a marginal addition of both manpower and economic
resources to one bloc or the other was regarded as dangerous by its opponent.
More important, it was believed that the transfer of even a relatively
small country would have symbolic and psychological consequences which
might set off a dangerous chain of reactions. Whether this was a correct

- 6 -

appraisal even then is not at issue here. It was widely enough held to
have a significant impact on U.S. policy and in particular on the alloca-
tion of U.S. military and economic aid resources.

Several developments of the past decade have changed this appraisal
markedly. The first and most frequently noted is the fragmentation and
dispersion of power among countries in both the communist world and in the
free world camp. Fragmentation in both camps has meant that the capacity
of each to control what it thought were its clients in the underdeveloped
world has been greatly reduced. Czechoslovakia, far from being an excep-
tion to this generalization, supports it strongly. Further, the
psychological consequences of additions of states to either fragmenting
group are now both less clear, and less serious.

Secondly, both we and the communists have discovered painfully that
those whom we thought of as our clients in the underdeveloped world have
been much more resistant to our influence and much less subject to our
control than we had expected. The diversity of goals and the capacity
for independent action of underdeveloped country leadership have turned
out to be much greater than was originally expected in both Washington
and Moscow. In some cases, as with Castro, Sekou Toure, Nasser, and
Ayub Khan, the leadership, pursuing its nationalist objectives, has refused
to follow dutifully the sponsor's line. In other cases leaders regarded
by one side or the other as potential clients have been unable to main-
tain their own positions of authority, as happened with Sukarno, Nkrumah,
and Diem. It is interesting to note that in several cases autocratic and
repressive leaders, whether of the left like Sukarno or the right like
Trujillo have fallen before pressures for participation from elements of
the population which a few decades ago would have been apathetic or

- 7 -

powerless. Participation has sometimes been anarchic, has frequently produced conflict, and has seldom been channeled by effective institutions in constructive directions, but it has been growing, and has frequently thwarted both communist and traditional authoritarian efforts to control and suppress it.

The conclusion that increasingly emerges is that the "two-camps" model does not apply as we once thought it did. Because both we and the Soviets and the Chinese have experienced great difficulty manipulating our presumed clients, our security interests are much less likely to be predictably affected by switches of the international posture of individual countries, and particularly of the smaller ones, than we once were inclined to believe. This suggests that we can afford to take a much cooler view about particular threatened or actual shifts of leadership in individual underdeveloped countries, even when the threat is of a shift in a strongly leftist and anti-Western direction. There are likely to be many more such instabilities in the underdeveloped world over the next two or three decades, and we no longer have a cold war case for rushing in on what appears to be the anti-communist side of each.

This change in our perception of the environment emphatically does not mean that we no longer have any security interests in the Third World. In the first place there are a few cases like South Korea and Taiwan--and some would add Vietnam--where we have commitments of such long standing that to retreat from them now would severely damage our reputation for reliability and constancy in our dealings with other countries. Fortunately the first two cases cited are ones in which recent economic and social progress has been so dramatic that the conflict between our security interests and our moral principle is no longer severe.

- 8 -

Secondly, there are a number of larger underdeveloped countries each of which has the capability over the next decade or two to acquire significant nuclear capabilities. None of these has the potential capability in the foreseeable future to pose a direct major threat to the United States, but the consequences of the employment of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world are so difficult to foresee and the risks of even a slight chance of escalation are so perilous that it is urgently important that we do everything in our power to avoid serious alienation of these countries from the international community. Economic development will not insure their cooperative behavior, but great power assistance in their development efforts combined with increased effectiveness of international peacekeeping machinery will greatly reduce the risk that they will behave in internationally irresponsible ways.

Thirdly, we have a generalized interest in reducing the level of tension and violence in the world, particularly as between states. The fact that we may have limited interest in the specific outcome of particular disputes does not of course mean that we are indifferent to processes of adjudication of disputes which avoid violence. It does mean that in pursuing our security objectives in the third world we can and should place much greater stress on operating with and through the United Nations and other international organizations than we thought possible a decade ago. However, we must bear in mind that the effectiveness with which these international institutions can operate will continue to be critically dependent upon the extent, quality, and cooperativeness of bilateral relations outside the security area in such fields as economic and social development between each of the super powers and the majority of states in the underdeveloped world. We can afford to be cool and avoid involvement

- 9 -

on one side or the other in specific disputes, but we cannot afford to be indifferent and unconcerned.

Similar considerations apply to our concern with internal stability and civil violence within the borders of underdeveloped states. Our experience should have taught both us and the communists that effective insurgency can seldom be generated from outside unless there are genuinely serious tensions and frustrations within the society of the target country.

We should also have learned that where such tensions exist, our active participation in counterinsurgency programs runs a serious risk of increasing rather than reducing these domestic tensions and frustrations. Again this does not mean that we are indifferent to the level of civic order and violence within countries of the underdeveloped world. The distinctions between internal disorder and external aggression, always obscure, are getting harder and harder to draw in an increasingly interdependent world, and whatever our degree of involvement in particular disputes, the dangers that internal violence will spill over into the international arena will continue to be severe. While there is profound truth in the current cliche that we cannot and should not be the world's policeman, there is equal validity in the observation that we have a deep and generalized interest in devoting some of our resources and energies to helping to channel the changes that modernization inevitably brings in orderly and constructive rather than violent and anarchic directions.

We may frequently be faced with a choice between long-term tension reduction and short-term stability. Modernization requires revolutionary change in the structure and distribution of power, and stabilization measures which inhibit or delay change may make an ultimately destructive explosion more likely. This analysis suggests that in these cases we

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should be much more relaxed about short-term instabilities and much more
concerned about long-term tension reduction than we have been in the past.

What this view of our long-term security interests implies is that
we can adopt somewhat different priorities than were implied by our
earlier cold-war focus on short-run stability. With this reinterpretation,
our security interests are less likely to be in conflict with our other
economic and social goals. As Carl Kaysen explains, our security require-
ment for military and communications bases in the low income world is no
longer dominant, and history has largely destroyed whatever case there
once was for competing with rival great powers for loyal clients. Thus
we can and should support governmental regimes in underdeveloped countries
dedicated to the economic development of their countries and the diffusion
of participation in decision-making and the wider sharing of the benefits
of social and economic development whatever their international political
posture. More important, we need no longer in most cases support for
security reasons regimes which are either not interested in these goals
or incapable of promoting them. In a very few cases, we may be constrained
by past commitments from following criteria based on our human values, but
the number and importance of these unpleasant cases, if Vietnam should
somehow be resolved, should shrink to insignificance.

## Our Interest in Economic Development

Our support for the economic development efforts of the underdeveloped
countries has since 1947 been based in part on the notion that this was
a worthy end in itself which deserved some American attention and resources.
It started in the original Point Four program with the notion that the
main requirement was for a transfer of American technical know-how. We

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moved in the Eisenhower and early Kennedy administrations to a recogni-
tion that in some countries substantial capital assistance was important.
There was a phase of emphasis on human and institutional development and
most recently the favored focus has been on agriculture, nutrition,
population control, and education.

But the defenders of aid have always felt that they had to build
their case on a presumed relation between economic development and other
U.S. security and political goals. When the two-camps model was at the
forefront of our foreign policy thinking, there was a presumption that if
we could create a few showcases of how productive our system could be, this
would discourage fence-sitting neutrals from opting for a communist
development strategy and thus implicitly for a communist political system.
As the two-camps model began to lose its persuasive force, this was modi-
fied to a vaguer argument that economic development would bring with it
a reduction of tensions and of the disposition to violence. The case
was even made in some official and private statements of the rationale
that economic development by itself would result in an almost automatic
growth of democratic institutions and a rapid spread of popular participation.
Unquestionably some part of whatever disillusionment currently exists with
respect to the effectiveness of our aid programs is attributable to the
disappointment of exaggerated expectations as to both the speed and extent
of these presumed favorable effects of economic growth. Continued crisis
in the underdeveloped world have forced a recognition of the fact that
many of the roots of conflict both within societies and between nations
are traceable to deep forces unrelated to economic conditions. Beyond this,
economic growth itself, by shaking up the stable patterns and expectations
of traditional society, may at least in the short run be destabilizing.

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There have been cases like Stalin's Russia or pre-Castro Cuba in which substantial economic growth as measured by the conventional indicators has been accompanied by increases in repression and autocratic measures, and other cases as in the Middle East in which it has provided resources for the more vigorous conduct of international conflict. One conclusion that some observers would draw is that since it has at least so far turned out not to be the miracle cure for many of the ills of the Third World that some of its advocates had suggested it was, the case for devoting substantial U.S. resources and attention to it has been largely demolished.

In the view of this writer this reaction has gone much too far. While we badly needed increased sophistication about the difficulties and limits of economic growth and its complex relations to our other long-run goals relating to the world environment, it still deserves a very high priority as both a U.S. and an international objective of policy.

In the first place the above argument, of course, leaves untouched the case for economic development as an end in itself. Most Americans will not be at ease living in a world about which they will be increasingly well informed, and which will be increasingly well informed about them, two-thirds of whose people do not have access to the most elementary material requirements of civilized life, if they feel there is anything the U.S. can do about it. The level of family income which the U.S. Government defines as drawing the boundary between intolerable poverty for an American and minimal access to basic necessities--about $3,000 in most U.S. communities--is five to ten times the average family income for the entire population of most countries in the underdeveloped world. The only effective thing we can do about it is to devote a very modest share of our

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resources and a more substantial amount of effort and energy to the pro-
motion of economic growth in the underdeveloped world. Even the narrowest
interpretation of our moral responsibility to the rest of the international
human community, namely to help combat hunger and permanently crippling
malnutrition--and on reflection most American would think our responsibili-
ties are broader than this as explained in the next session--even this
limited interpretation would call for economic development assistance
substantially larger than we are now supplying. For as will be explained
later, significant nutritional improvements in most of the low income
world can be accomplished only in the context of vigorously expanding
general economic activity.

Our short-term foreign policy lenses have led us frequently in the
past to write off too casually our long-term national economic interest
in the growth of the economies of the low income countries. It is of
course quite true that currently European markets, European investment
opportunities, and European sources of supply are quantitatively much more
crucial to the welfare of the U.S. economy than those of the underdeveloped
world. We are decreasingly dependent on raw materials and tropical pro-
ducts from the underdeveloped world, and in any case our access to these
imports is related to the economic growth of the supplying countries only
very indirectly if at all. Apart from these products, opportunities at
present levels of underdeveloped country income for mutually beneficial
trade and investment are quite limited, especially in the poorer of the
low income countries. But if in the next 20 or 30 years per capita incomes
in some of the larger countries were to double, a wholly achievable
target, the world economic environment for the United States could be very
substantially improved. We have seen in parts of Latin America and most

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notably in Japan, now our second most important trading partner, how rapid
domestic economic growth can, in a decade or two, radically alter trading
opportunities. If economic growth stalls or is retarded in a large part
of the Third World, prospects for the expansion of trade, for access to
markets and investment opportunities, and even for international monetary
stability are all rather bleak. If it is accelerated, an improving inter-
national economic climate is of course far from assured. Political
disruption, restrictive practices, and a breakdown of international
cooperation would still be possible, and would unquestionably occur at
some times and in some places. But without growth these unhappy prospects
are much more than possible--they are virtually assured.

Our Interest in Social and Civic Development

The final dimension of our concern with the modernization process in
the low income countries is one that it is not easy to talk about because
we have not yet found the right summary language in which to describe it.
It has to do with our concern with the emergence of the common peoples of
the underdeveloped countries into a modern participatory world in which
the potentials of human beings have a fuller chance to be realized in
open societies reflecting individual freedom and opportunity. It brings
together our national interest in a compatible and congenial world environ-
ment for the United States and our humanitarian interest in an improved
quality of life for average men everywhere. The dichotomy between national
interests interpreted narrowly in power and security terms and humanitarian
interests interpreted equally narrowly in terms of feeding and housing the
miserable has led to a neglect both at home and abroad of this rich dimen-
sion of our national purpose. It has something to do with the spread of
the idea of democracy. This word has been identified by some with too

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narrow a range of peculiarly American institutional forms, and has been
used by others, as in the various "peoples' democratic republics,"
to label societies which violate its spirit. It has something to do with
what is sometimes called political development, but this term likewise has
acquired many inappropriate overtones. Elements of it have been identi-
fied by the Congress in provisions of the various foreign assistance acts,
perhaps most notably in Section 281: Title IX of the Foreign Assistance
Act of 1966 which directs that "emphasis shall be placed on assuring
maximum participation in the task of economic development on the part of
the people of the developing countries through the encouragement of demo-
cratic private and local governmental institutions."

This notion of expanded popular participation as an aspect of
modernization is a broad one encompassing a number of elements. Three
in particular may be noted. First, it includes the notion of broadened
participation in decisions affecting the quality of life of the people,
whether they be political, economic, or social decisions. Second, it
involves the notion of increasing opportunities for people to acquire
and use productively the full range of skills that characterize modern
man, to participate in the psychologically satisfying processes of
modernization. Third is the notion that there should be the widest pos-
sible participation in the distribution of the economic and social fruits
of development by all elements in the world's populations. We and our
colleagues abroad in both developed and underdeveloped societies are only
beginning to have a glimmer of understanding of what this participatory
dimension of our common goal requires. At a minimum we are beginning to
see that it requires in all cultures a greatly enriched pattern of insti-
tutions for channeling creative and innovative energies in constructive

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rather than destructive directions. It requires greatly accelerated progress in education, a massive expansion of facilities for communication, transport and sources of energy. It requires greatly increased capabilities of both governmental and non-governmental institutions at national, regional and local levels to respond effectively to the demands it generates. And it requires if it is not to be disruptive a rough balance among all these economic and non-economic elements of the modernization process.

Accepting this goal of expanded popular participation in all of the senses discussed broadens our moral and humanitarian objectives beyond the elimination of hunger, disease, and material deprivation to a deeper concern with the widespread diffusion of fundamental human satisfactions. Most Americans share with many people abroad a faith that in the long run this multi-dimensional human development will greatly increase the prospects for a world environment of more open, more cooperative, and more liberated societies interaction with which can greatly enrich our own culture intellectually, aesthetically, and socially as well as economically. Those who would have us promote these participatory goals more vigorously in the low income countries, as Title IX of the Assistance Act enjoins us to do, must recognize that in many traditional societies as presently constituted these are profoundly revolutionary aims, and their effective pursuit may well be resisted by present power holders who regard themselves as our friends. Where they are so resisted, we have little option but to keep our distance and wait for internal historical forces to change the situation. But where, as in an increasing number of countries, our help in social and civic development is sought, there is much we can do in cooperation with the leadership to promote it.