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resist, and thus to achieve victory without war. The Soviet Union has only used more
orthodox methods of warfare in areas like Afghanistan which it thinks we do not
regard as vital to our national security. But against Western Europe, Japan, China,
and a number of other countries, it has relied--so far--mainly on indirect methods.
After all, the Soviet leadership does not want to inherit the great Western centers of
economic power as smoking ruins, contaminated by radiation and poison gases.

Sun Tzu, writing twenty five hundred years ago, said that indirect methods of
warfare were the supreme expression of the military art, far more elegant and
effective than crude blood-letting. For the Soviet leaders, who never forget that
Red Army troops in large numbers surrendered to the Nazis as liberators in 1941 and
helped the Hungarian revolutionaries in 1956, Sun Tzu's methods are also attractive
for another reason. They cannot be sure that their European troops would fight the
Western Allies.

The Soviet Union has long believed that the most powerful modern weapon in its
Sun Tzu arsenal would be a clear-cut Soviet first-strike nuclear capacity. The Soviet
leaders have devoted a stupendous effort to achieving a nuclear force of that
character. They are altogether correct in believing that the political impact of an
unequivocal Soviet first-strike capability would split and paralyze the West, inhibiting
the possibility of any Western response, conventional or nuclear, to the indefinite
expansion of Soviet power. No Western government wants to test the arcane
calculations of a nuclear first-strike exercise in practice.

What the Soviet leaders think a clear-cut first-strike nuclear capability could
accomplish for them is brought out in Gorbachev's interview with the Czech

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newspaper *Rude Pravo* on September 9, 1986. In the course of that interview, Gorbachev complained about many American defense activities since the Geneva Summit in 1985. Among them he listed "bandit-style, strong-arm, neo-globalist action against Libya and Nicaragua." The term "neo-globalist" has suddenly become a staple of Soviet propaganda. It recalls the definition of detente offered by Gorbachev's patron Andropov on August 5, 1978. In view of the Soviet Union's military superiority and the nature of nuclear weapons, Andropov said, detente between the Soviet Union and the Western nations was inevitable:--an obligation of humanity. The model for detente, he went on, is the friendly and cooperative relation between the Soviet Union and Finland. However one judges the wisdom, prudence, and effectiveness of recent American actions against Libya and Nicaragua, it is breath-taking for the Soviet Union to suggest that the United States is exceeding its proper role in world affairs by attempting to protect its security interests in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt would not have been amused by the claim that the Mediterranean and the Caribbean are Soviet lakes.

II

Since 1945 the Western nations have been pressing the Soviet Union to engage in serious discussions about the central problem of world politics and of American national security, the Soviet program of indefinite expansion achieved by the aggressive use of force. The possibility of direct Soviet moves against Western Europe and Japan was contained and deterred during the Truman Administration, and a Soviet nuclear threat against China was successfully met by Nixon. In recent years, the most active part of the Soviet campaign of expansion has been directed against

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strategic targets in the Third World--targets of importance in out-flanking and enveloping the major centers of power, the United States, its NATO allies, China, Japan, and a few other key countries.

The genteel vocabulary of Western diplomacy now labels Soviet attempts to exploit or exacerbate Third World conflicts as "regional problems." Reagan sought to have this issue placed on the agenda at Reykjavik. Gorbachev wanted to confine the Iceland Summit to the intricacies of nuclear arms control negotiation, an addictive and sometimes dangerous pastime which has absorbed the attention of Western governments and the Western public alike while the process of Soviet expansion proceeded. Except for a few formal American comments about regional conflicts and human rights for the record at Reykjavik, the Iceland Summit seems to have been limited to the problem of nuclear arms control, as Gorbachev wished.

Western officials and private citizens have persistently raised the question of Soviet expansion with Soviet officials during the last forty years. Thus far, they have been brushed off.

The most common Soviet response to such probes is a lengthy pseudo-legal defense of the Soviet action arousing particular concern at the moment, followed by the charge that the West too has violated international law in Korea, Guatemala, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Grenada, and other trouble spots around the world. Usually, such conversations end with the Soviet comment that there is no use in discussing problems on which we can never agree.

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A few very high Soviet officials have had the temerity to say, "You are asking us to abandon a policy rooted in our nature as a society and a state:"--a nearly incredible claim that the Soviet Union is exempt from the normal rules of international life, and above the law. Less candid Soviet officials propose non-aggression pacts with the United States or the NATO alliance as a whole, or, in recent years, the equivalent and equally meaningless gesture of discussion and resolutions achieved through the so-called Helsinki process.

At the Geneva Summit of 1985, when Reagan raised the problem of Soviet behavior in "regional" conflicts, Gorbachev responded by promising to cooperate in seeking agreement on the subject at the Stockholm Conference on Security and Confidence Building Measures in Europe. Inexplicably, the United States accepted Gorbachev's answer, although American and European security interests go far beyond the European region, and there is no excuse at this late date for treating such conferences and the agreements they produce as anything more than political theatre. Political theatre has some utility in helping to satisfy and inform Western public opinion and maintain the solidarity of the American alliance system, but it should never be mistaken for a serious act of policy.

Secretary of State Acheson rejected the first Soviet proposal for a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union on the ground that there already was a non-aggression pact between the two countries. "It is called the United Nations Charter," Acheson said, "and we must do nothing to weaken or qualify its force and generality." Five or six learned committees and commissions have struggled in vain since then trying to codify the law purporting to govern the international use of force. The

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Stockholm resolution can be no more successful than those proposed by the earlier
conferences, which have kept diplomats and international lawyers busy for years, but
have had no influence on the Soviet practice of expansion achieved by the aggressive
use of force.

The most arresting feature of the Iceland meeting was the apparent willingness
of the Soviet Union to discuss radical reductions in nuclear arms. In this respect, the
Soviet posture in Iceland was altogether different from its positions in 1981-83 and in
1977, when Gromyko himself vehemently and publicly rejected Carter's proposal for
radical reductions.

The radical reductions in nuclear arms considered in Iceland, to say nothing of
the idea of Soviet-American sharing of S.D.I. technology, the possible abolition of all
nuclear ballistic missiles, all strategic nuclear weapons, and perhaps even all nuclear
weapons are unthinkable unless the Soviet Union gives up the practice of aggression
and decides to live within its legitimate boundaries like other states. The same
question must be addressed with the utmost care if during the next year or so the
negotiations produce a "great compromise"--a nuclear arms control agreement
providing for reductions of approximately 50% to agreed levels of offensive weapons,
with appropriate sublimits, plus a seven and a half or ten year commitment not to
abrogate the A.B.M. Treaty, and to interpret it restrictively. The more Utopian
elements in the package considered at Reykjavik would be inconceivably risky until
Soviet foreign policy undergoes a sea-change. Is this obvious truism the key to
Reagan's negotiating strategy, the lever on which he is relying to break out of the
sterile and exhausting straight-jacket of the Cold War? Or, at a minimum, is it a
device to dramatize the link between nuclear arms control negotiations and Soviet
expansion?

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If Reagan's radical nuclear proposals force the world opinion and the Soviet Union
itself finally to confront the strategic implications of the Soviet program of expansion, it
will be the first potentially constructive change in the pattern of the Cold War since it
began. In the next stages of the Soviet-American negotiating process, the American and
Allied position on this primordially important subject should change. Instead of retiring in
frustration in the face of Soviet stone-walling or double-talk as we have done since 1945, we
should make it plain to Gorbachev, by actions and not necessarily by words, that the process
of Soviet expansion has gone too far, and that its continuation could well have consequences
he can neither predict nor control.

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In 1947, George Kennan assured the West that if we contained the outward thrust of Soviet power for ten or fifteen years, Soviet policy would mellow. Kennan's thesis became the intellectual major premise for Western policy towards the Soviet Union. It remains its major premise, despite the fact that Soviet policy has not mellowed, but become much worse since Stalin's time. For nearly forty years we have followed George Kennan's advice. It was reasonable advice forty years ago, and we have given it a conscientious try, but forty years is long enough. Even good arms control agreements stabilizing nuclear arsenals, or a Utopian agreement abolishing nuclear weapons, would not be worth having if they simply made the world safe for conventional war. And conventional war, it should never be forgotten, is by far the most likely source of nuclear war. Unless the Soviet Union adopts the policy of peaceful co-existence, in the Western sense of those famous words, the United Nations Charter will cease to have any influence whatsoever on the policy of Western nations. This is not a development the Western powers want, but it will happen if the Soviet Union continues to pursue the will-o-the-wisp of dominion. The state system cannot survive on the basis of a double standard, with one rule for the Soviet Union and its satellites and quite another for the rest of the World. The West is being forced by the pressures of Soviet expansion into a policy of more active defense. Tit-for-tat may not be a rule of international law, but it is the way people behave. And it is the essential implication of the Reagan Doctrine.

This is not a warning to be delivered lightly. It must be carefully and thoroughly prepared and backed by the visible reality of possible action by wide and determined allied coalitions. Its objective is not another agreement to be added to the long list of political understandings the United States has made with the Soviet Union, starting with the Yalta and Potsdam agreements which promised free

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elections in Eastern Europe. The list includes the agreements of 1962 and 1973 about Indo-China, committing the Soviet Union to get North Vietnamese troops out of Laos and to permit self-determination for South Vietnam; the agreements of the Moscow Summit of May, 1972, which promised "detente,"--the substitution of "cooperation" for "confrontation," as Nixon claimed; and others as well. Ambassador Dobrynin once said that the Soviet-American agreement which produced Security Council Resolution 242 in 1967--the Resolution which promised peace and territorial adjustments between the Arab States and Israel--was the first occasion in the history of the Cold War when the Soviet Union used the phrase "package deal" in a positive sense. The Soviet Union has broken that agreement as it has broken all the others. What is required now is not a ceremonial photograph of great men signing a document, but the silent withdrawal of Soviet forces to a defensive stance in the Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union is convinced that the United States and its allies are serious, the East-West dialogue will at last be focussed on reality.

Is there any chance that Gorbachev will accept such a change in policy, with the dramatic example of Germany, Japan, South Korea, and China before him, the escalating costs of the Soviet Empire, and the manifest futility of a bid for mastery which cannot succeed if the Western powers behave with moderate rationality? As yet, there is no sign that the Soviet Union is close to being ready for such a change. But for the deepest reasons both of our security and of our national character, we have no choice but to try to bring it about.

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III

The Soviet policy towards the secondary issue of arms control has two themes, one tactical and the other substantive and strategic.

The tactical reason for the Soviet desire to make nuclear arms control the centerpiece of the Soviet-American dialogue is the Soviet belief that a nearly mystical faith in arms control has become the opium of Western opinion. In this view, the Soviet tacticians are right.

An enthusiasm for arms control and disarmament agreements is an integral feature of the American culture. and its widely shared, particularly in Protestant countries. From the beginning, the American mind, largely shaped by British Low Church Protestantism, has had a special faith in law as a shaping influence in the social process. The word "covenant" has great resonance in the American language. We take a keen interest in disarmament and arms control treaties for the same reasons which led us to draft and adopt the Constitution and endow the Supreme Court with extraordinary power as its prophet. Thus the United States proposed an agreement demilitarizing the Great Lakes as early as 1783, and has been for over two centuries a vigorous advocate of international arbitration and many other initiatives in the same spirit. Our first reaction to the nuclear weapon after the Second World War was to propose the Baruch Plan, to be embodied in a treaty bringing all forms of nuclear energy under the control of an international agency, and prohibiting any national nuclear forces, including our own, which were then a monopoly.

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The American effort to obtain nuclear arms control agreements slowed down after the Soviet Union rejected the Baruch Plan, but was revived and accelerated by the Cuban Missile Crisis, which we saw as a demonstration of the risks of nuclear uncertainty. Arms control agreements, most Americans thought, could help to bring some stability and predictability into the contentious rivalry of the great powers, and keep that rivalry from escalating into nuclear war.

With the steady expansion of Soviet power since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the rising pressure of the Soviet military build-up, the traditional Western enthusiasm for arms control agreements has become an obsession. The Western peoples realize that the policy of containment has not fulfilled their expectations and that no policy with more promise for assuring their security has emerged to supplement or replace it. The process of Soviet expansion, like a tide, goes on and on, radiating menace from every corner of the world. In a mood which contains disturbing elements of hysteria, the people of the democracies are more and more attracted by the glitter of panaceas, and above all by the illusion that arms control and disarmament agreements are assurances of peace, a ritual which could achieve peace without tears. That illusion was equally popular in the 'Thirties, when Western governments kept pressing disarmament treaties on Hitler while Germany rearmed and began its career of conquest. The persistence of the view, despite the failures of arms control efforts during the inter-war period and the last twenty years, has offered the Soviet government a dazzling opportunity to divert attention from the real problems of Western security. The Soviet leadership has taken full advantage of its opportunity.

Thus the Soviet propaganda apparatus, led by Gorbachev himself, has been preaching the virtues of a moratorium on testing nuclear weapons, of a

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comprehensive test ban, and of the limited test ban treaty confining nuclear testing both in number and in scale.

The movement for a moratorium on testing and a comprehensive test ban treaty is a cruel and pathetic deception. Its unstated premise is that if tests are forbidden, the existing stock of nuclear weapons will die, and no new nuclear weapons could be made. Both parts of the premise are incorrect. No one knows how long existing nuclear weapons could be fired, but all are agreed they will remain usable for many years. And new weapons modelled on existing weapons can be manufactured without further tests. But a moratorium or a comprehensive test ban would prevent the development of smaller, cleaner, and more accurate nuclear weapons, which would be less dangerous than existing weapons to the environment and to non-combatants. The United States has steadily replaced older weapons with such modern weapons, and greatly cut the size of its nuclear arsenal in the process.

There was an informal test moratorium during the late 'Fifties and early 'Sixties which the Soviet Union broke without warning, leading President Kennedy to remark that we should never make such an agreement again. During the moratorium period, many of the scientists working on the improvement of the American nuclear arsenal took more active jobs, and a number of years were required to restore the vitality of our laboratories. The Soviet Union has no such problems; its scientists do as they are told.

All the nuclear powers and many others oppose the idea of a test moratorium or a comprehensive test ban, although most of them give lip service to the idea. The United States has usually opposed these ideas and explained why. After an

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international meeting devoted to such a discussion, a brilliant Ambassador from a friendly country asked an American official why the United States couldn't be more cynical on the issue. The American replied that cynicism was not a part of the American national character. We were capable of hypocrisy, he said, but not of cynicism. If we tried to be cynical, we wouldn't do it very well. Moreover, he added, if we took such a posture, the story would be in the newspapers and on television the next morning.

The ten-year old Threshold Test Ban and Peaceful Nuclear Explosion Treaty is another matter. It would limit the scale of underground nuclear tests. Although the reports from Reykjavik do not agree on the point, some American officials have said that the Soviet Union has accepted, others that it is ready to discuss an American proposal on testing which it had previously rejected--a proposal to improve the verification provisions of Threshold Test Ban Treaty and then ratify it. Such a step would not be a serious military burden, and it might reduce the irrational clamor for a comprehensive test ban. On the other hand, it might have the opposite effect.

Beyond the level of tactics and political theatre, there is a weighty, substantive reason for the Soviet Union's desire to limit the Soviet-American dialogue to nuclear arms control issues. Nuclear arms limitation agreements are far more than political theatre, after all. Even though a deliberate nuclear war among the nuclear powers is the least likely of possible scenarios for the future, the state of the nuclear balance is a critical and under many circumstances a decisive factor determining the ability of those powers to use or threaten to use conventional force. The link between the nuclear balance and the use of conventional weapons was brought out dramatically in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. In that confrontation the Soviet Union retreated in

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the face of an American threat to invade Cuba with conventional forces backed by a
nuclear arsenal obviously capable of retaliation against the Soviet Union for any use of
nuclear weapons against the United States. At that time, the United States could have
controlled the possible escalation of any conflict over Cuba, so that even a local use of
conventional force by the Soviet Union would have been futile.

Soviet policy took this aspect of the Cuban Missile Crisis to heart. The Soviet
leaders perceived arms control agreements as devices which could allow them to build a
nuclear first strike capability, and prevent the United States from matching such a
capability. The Soviet Union has acted on that principle, transforming a nuclear force
which was far behind that of the United States in 1962, and significantly inferior in 1972,
when the SALT I agreements were signed,* to one which is larger than that of the United
States in land-based ballistic missiles, and growing more rapidly than that of the United
States in every weapons category.

In its Report of July 16, 1986, Where We Stand on Arms Control, the Committee on
the Present Danger set out detailed criteria for evaluating the utility of possible nuclear
arms control agreements. The Report analyzed the negotiating problem in the Soviet-
American nuclear arms talks as follows:

"The goal of the United States in the nuclear arms control talks since 1969 has been agreement based on the principle of U.S.--Soviet equality in nuclear deterrent capability. Agreements which meet this standard would deny either side the capacity to tilt the nuclear balance in its favor by executing a preemptive first-strike, but would allow each side to protect its vital interests by nuclear retaliation in the event of attack. It has been and remains the U.S. and Western view that such agreements would be stabilizing even in times of crisis and would therefore reduce the risk of war.

* By 1972, however, the Soviet Union had already achieved parity with the United States in the number of ICBM warheads.

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"The Soviet negotiating pattern since 1969, however, has been quite different, and is consistent with only one hypothesis: that the Soviet objective in the negotiations is to obtain U.S. and Western acquiescence in a Soviet right to massive nuclear superiority, especially in land-based ballistic missiles. The 1972 Interim Agreement on Strategic Offensive Arms accepted a Soviet advantage in ICBMs, and the Soviet Union has been trying through arms control to get its superiority in ICBM warheads and throwweight recognized as a law of nature".*

The consequences of an agreement based on the Soviet approach are described in these terms by the distinguished French expert, Ambassador Francois de Rose:

"A disarming first-strike capacity of the land-based components of strategic forces would create a situation of permanent insecurity, no longer balanced by the certainty of retaliation at the same level. Under such circumstances, the victim state under threat would be faced with the choice between accepting defeat or resorting to a second strike at the risk of annihilation.

"It would appear, therefore, that the only principle which would meet the legitimate security requirements of all parties would be an agreement that would protect everyone against a disarming first strike. What Helmut Schmidt rightly called the 'subliminal' political influence of such a first strike capacity is already palpable both in Europe and in the United States. It arises from the present state of the Soviet-American nuclear balance because of the Soviet Union's heavy advantage in intercontinental and intermediate-range ground based missiles.

"The best way to eliminate the dangers that would surely arise if present trends in this regard are allowed to continue would be for the Soviet Union and the United States to agree on a plan that would restore the entire Soviet-American nuclear equation to a condition that would permit deterrent, retaliatory capacity on both sides, but not the capacity to execute a preemptive first-strike."**

* P.6. See also pp. 7-16.

** Beware the Loss of Fear, Atlantic Community Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1, (Spring, 1986) p. 4.

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Before one can apply these standards to the ideas which emerged from the Reykjavik Summit, it is necessary to reduce them to coherent form. What were those ideas? And how should they be characterized?

No agreements were reached at the Iceland meeting, although Gorbachev talked about a number of positions which differed somewhat from those previously taken at Geneva by the Soviet negotiators. Most of the positions discussed at Reykjavik and then considered in Geneva were originally placed on the negotiating table by the United States since 1981 and somewhat modified thereafter in the light of the negotiation. There are only three exceptions to this generalization:--the Soviet announcement that it would not agree to limit offensive weapons until the United States agreed to confine its S.D.I. program to the laboratory; the American proposal to abolish all ballistic missiles as a class; and the Soviet proposal to abolish all strategic weapons and then all nuclear weapons.

In Iceland, Gorbachev said that the Soviet Union would make no agreements limiting either intercontinental or intermediate range offensive weapons unless the United States agreed to modify the A.B.M. Treaty and agreed also not to abrogate that Treaty for a period of ten years. The purpose of these proposals, clearly, was to destroy the American S.D.I. program or confine it entirely to laboratory research. The United States rejected the Soviet proposal, and proposed signing agreements on strategic and intermediate range offensive weapons as soon as such agreements became possible, although it did indicate that it might be willing to agree not to abrogate the A.B.M. Treaty for ten years, as part of a larger package.

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In response, apparently, to Soviet arguments about the first-strike implications of a successful American S.D.I. program, the United States advanced a dramatic proposal to abolish all long-range and intermediate range ballistic missiles by 1996, in two distinct stages. During the first five years, there would be an approximately 50% cut in all strategic forces to equal levels of 1600 delivery vehicles for each side, (including bombers), carrying no more than 6,000 warheads. A sublimit would substantially reduce the present Soviet lead in ground based intercontinental ballistic missile warheads, specifically including the Soviet "heavy" missile systems which were not affected by the 1972 SALT I agreements and have been sacrosanct ever since. During the second five-years contemplated by the American proposal, all remaining ground-based and submarine-based strategic ballistic missiles would be eliminated.

The Soviet counter-proposal appeared to raise the President's bid. It called for the destruction of all remaining strategic forces during the second five year period: that is, it would include bombers as well as ballistic missiles. The question of sea-launched cruise missiles would be taken up in the next round of negotiations; air launched cruise missiles would be counted as one warhead each, and bombers carrying bombs or cruise missiles would count as a strategic nuclear delivery vehicle for purposes of the first five-year stage.

The issue of reducing and restructuring intercontinental nuclear forces was matched by proposals and counter proposals for an agreement on intermediate range forces, which include both ground based ballistic missiles and ground based cruise missiles capable of being fired from the Soviet Union to reach targets in Europe, the

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Middle East, Canada, Japan, China, and smaller North East Asian countries, but-- except for Alaska and the Pacific Northwest--not the United States. The final position at Reykjavik both for the Soviet Union and the United States was that there be no intermediate range weapons in Europe and parts of Western Siberia from which European targets could be reached by such weapons, and that the Soviets could have 100 INF warheads on SS-20S in the Far Eastern part of the Soviet Union, matched by 100 INF warheads on United States territory. The parties discussed the question of limits on shorter range Soviet ballistic missiles which threaten targets in Western Europe, China, and the Middle East, and agreed to negotiate on the problem six months after the signing of an INF agreement. They are still far from an agreement on this subject, despite its obvious relevance. The Soviet Union wants a freeze at current levels, the United States, equal ceilings for both sides.

Since Reykjavik, there have been strong suggestions from Europe, Japan, and the United States than an INF solution providing for small equal limits on each side for Europe and the Far East would be preferable to the original American position at Reykjavik.

The pattern that emerges from the reports about the Iceland conversations, then, can be summarized in these terms: both sides seemed to favor deep cuts in strategic and intermediate range offensive weapons. The United States favored reductions which would achieve deterrent equality for each side, measured by the number of warheads and their destructive capacity. The Soviet position on this crucial issue remains equivocal.* The Soviet Union sought to stop the American program for developing defense against nuclear weapons; this was also one of its

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principal goals in the 1972 SALT I negotiations which produced the A.B.M. Treaty and
the Five-Year Interim Agreement Limiting Strategic Offensive Weapons.

The Soviets effectively exploited their positions as "public diplomacy"; some--
such as the proposal to abolish all nuclear weapons--seemed to have no other purpose
than propaganda. The Soviet experts in propaganda, who dominated the Soviet team
at Reykjavik, succeeded in projecting the thesis that Reagan's "blind and irrational"
enthusiasm for S.D.I. was denying the world a fleeting opportunity to liberate
mankind from the nuclear curse. They were less successful--but not entirely
unsuccessful--in portraying the President and his staff as clumsy diplomatic
amateurs, bewildered by the clever footwork and rapidly changing focus of a
negotiation in which they were being constantly surprised by topics and tactics for
which they were "unprepared." They made the American negotiators seem on
television like a cricket team which suddenly found itself playing basketball against
world champions.

---

*Since the Summit, Gorbachev has indicated that the Soviet position still is to
support equal percentage reductions, not reductions to equal levels. For example, in
his televised speech of October 14, 1986, Gorbachev said, "Let us reduce [the
weapons of all three parts of the nuclear triad] by fifty percent, then we don't have
to talk about levels, we don't have to talk about sub-levels. We don't have to talk
about numbers. Just reduce all three types by fifty percent." This is an old Soviet
formula for avoiding an agreed data base and convincing verification procedures. It
has created nothing but doubt and mistrust over the years both in the nuclear arms
negotiations and in the endless Vienna talks about conventional force levels on the
Central Front in Europe. Such arrangements would do more harm than good. Where
the Soviet Union is ahead--and; it is far ahead in some of the most important
categories of nuclear weapons--equal reductions would of course increase its lead.
However, the Soviet negotiators in Geneva did formally table a position on
November 7, 1986, based on the Reykjavik formula of 1600 launchers and 6000
warheads.

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Against the background of the Soviet-American nuclear arms control
conversations since the Glassboro Summit in 1968, it is apparent that the substantive
part of the exploratory talks at Reykjavik were useful, if sometimes dismaying, in
helping to break the rigid pattern which had come to characterize the on-going SALT
process. If one measures the tentative pattern they suggest against the criteria
recommended in the July, 1986, Report of the Committee on the Present Danger and
the standard urged by Ambassador de Rose, the following conclusions seem
warranted.

First of all, there should be no agreement at all unless all aspects of the
problem are dealt with together: intercontinental, intermediate range, and shorter
range nuclear offensive weapons, and defensive systems as well. As Ambassador de
Rose points out, one must examine the entire Soviet-American nuclear equation
before deciding whether either side has or can achieve a first strike capacity. The
United States took this approach in the SALT I negotiations in 1972, where we said
we should abrogate the ABM treaty as contrary to our "supreme national interests"
unless there were also an agreement on offensive weapons. That policy was only
partially successful in 1972, since the agreement on offensive arms was of five years
duration and unbalanced as well. This time we should insist.

Of course Gorbachev is still demanding that the United States abandon its S.D.I.
program, leaving the Soviet Union free to develop its present advantages in space
technology and in the development of systems to defend against nuclear attack as a
monopoly. While American space technology may be more sophisticated than that of
the Soviet Union, the Soviets have been far more, active than we in space, especially

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in unmanned probes, and are ahead as well in S.D.I. and in anti-satellite weapons.

The Soviet lead in space programs has been characterized as "almost frightening" by the Jane's research organization in London, and the same group has found that the Soviet Union is ten years ahead of the United States in the development of missile defenses. Other studies reach similar conclusions.*

The Soviet effort to kill S.D.I. is an absurdity which no American President should ever consider accepting. It would give the Soviet Union the possibility of developing an impregnable first strike capacity. Obviously, if one side has even a partial defense against nuclear weapons, and the other side none, the nuclear equation would be decisively changed even if each side had the same arsenal of offensive weapons. This is not to say, however, that an agreement meeting the standards spelled out in the Report of the Committee on the Present Danger and in Ambassador de Rose's article can be drafted without taking both offensive and defensive systems into account. Manifestly, one must consider both offensive and defensive systems before concluding that one side or the other has or can readily obtain a first strike capability.

-------

* "Jane's analyst says Soviets have lead in Space Program," *Washington Post*, June 17, 1986, p. A13; "Publication gives edge in space to Soviet," *New York Times*, June 17, 1986, p. C5; "Soviets reportedly 'years ahead' of U.S. in 'Star Wars'," *Washington Times*, Oct. 27, 1986, p. 6A. Jane's Weapon Systems 1986, published November 24, 1986, discussed in *Washington Times*, Nov. 25, 1986, p. 7A; "The Soviets and S.D.I.," by Robert Gates, Deputy Director of the C.I.A., speech before the World Affairs Council of Northern California, Nov. 25, 1986.

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Nominally, the Soviet-American argument about defensive weapons involves the interpretation of the ABM Treaty of 1972. Thus far, the argument has generated more heat than light. Article V of the Treaty bans all ABM systems except for the land-based systems specified in the Treaty--one for each side, defending either its capital or a missile site. The Soviet Union has an elaborate defensive system for Moscow, which is now being extensively modernized; the United States abandoned efforts to defend its I.C.B.M. missile site in North Dakota some years ago.

The issue in contention is whether the ban of Article V of the ABM Treaty applies only to defensive systems based on technologies known at the time the Treaty was signed or whether it applies to systems based on future technologies as well. The United States sought to have the Treaty prohibit defensive systems based on future as well as known technologies, but the Soviet Union refused, pointing out that it was not possible to legislate in advance about the application of technologies whose potentialities were completely unknown. As a result, Agreed Statement D was appended to the Treaty, providing that "in the event ABM systems based on other physical principles...are created in the future, specific limitations on such systems and their components would be subject to discussion." John B. Rhinelander, then counsel to the American SALT delegation, wrote in 1973 that "the treaty prohibits the deployment (but not the development and testing) of 'future' ABM systems based on components capable of substituting for ABM missiles, launchers, or radars."* In short, as the Report of the Committee on the Present Danger concludes, "(t)he development and testing of defensive systems based on new technologies is entirely --

*"An Overview of Salt I", *American Journal of International Law*, Proceedings Vol. 67, No.5 (November, 1973), p.32.

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consistent with the ABM Treaty, which carefully provided that the implications of
such developments should be discussed by the two countries before they were
deployed to see whether new agreements about such weapons or amendments to the
ABM Treaty were desirable. It is hard to imagine how responsible negotiators could
have intended anything else."*

After the Treaty was signed, however, some American officials treated the
issue as if the Soviets had accepted the American view and Agreed Statement D were
mere surplusage. The Soviet Union remained silent on the subject, but actively
pursued research and development on defensive systems based on "other physical
principles." Judge Abraham D. Sofaer, Legal Adviser to the State Department, has
recently issued an opinion which gives proper weight to Agreed Statement D and the
negotiating history of the Treaty, and has testified and published an article on the
subject.**

There is natural anxiety among our allies about S.D.I., because the prospect of a
successful American defensive system carries the frightening possibility of the
United States retiring safely to its astrodome and ignoring its security interests
around the world. The United States is trying to overcome that concern by involving
the other industrial democracies in the program, and by consulting extensively with
Allied governments about the military and political significance of S.D.I. in Europe,
the Middle East, and Asia.

* Where We Stand On Arms Control, July 16, 1986, p. 32.

**Judge Sofaer testified before the Subcommittee on Arms Control, International Security, and Science of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives on 22 October 1985. Excerpts from his testimony, and that of Ambassador Paul H. Nitze on the same occasion, appear in the Fall, 1986, issue of the *Atlantic Community Quarterly* at p. 255. Judge Sofaer's article, *The ABM Treaty and the Strategic Defense Initiative*, was published in 99 Harv. L. Rev. 1972 (1986).

27

Both at home and abroad, opinion is recovering from the first shock of S.D.I.'s, and coming to realize that the United States had no choice but to undertake an enlarged program of defense against nuclear weapons. The West could not leave the field to the Soviet Union. It is also coming to realize that even moderately effective Western defensive systems could nullify the formidable Soviet lead in ground based ballistic missiles, and deny the Soviet Union the first-strike capability it has been trying so hard and so long to achieve. It is equally apparent that defensive systems could be useful against the shorter range ballistic missiles not yet dealt with in the nuclear arms negotiations. The Soviet Union is deploying such weapons on an increasing scale and even providing them to client states like Syria and Libya. Furthermore there is a serious trend towards the development of relatively short range ballistic missiles by other industrialized Third World nations.

Secondly, it follows that a separate INF agreement would now be a fundamental mistake. It is far too late in the day to indulge in the wistful hope that progress with the Soviet Union can be made step by step, and that an agreement on one aspect of the problem leads naturally to another. There is nothing in our experience with the Soviet Union to encourage such fantasy. The nature of the problem of guarding against a Soviet first-strike capacity requires a comprehensive solution.

The INF problem is more political then military. From the point of view of security indeed, there is no INF problem. Soviet intercontinental weapons can be fired at targets in Western Europe, Japan, or the Middle East as well as in the United States. But the development of Soviet intermediate range weapons has immense political significance. It is a most effective device to put political pressure on

28

[10]

Western Europe, China, and Japan at a time when the change in the Soviet-American intercontinental weapons balance is increasing doubt about the credibility of the American nuclear guaranty. A separate INF Treaty without an agreement on intercontinental offensive weapons and defensive systems as well would tend to erode our security treaties and other security arrangements with our NATO Allies, Japan, China, Pakistan, Israel, and South Korea, without compensating advantages.

The United States undertook separate INF negotiations in 1981 because we thought that any agreement on the subject based on the principle of deterrent equality was bound to help restore the over-all nuclear balance. At that time the Soviet Union had a monopoly of intermediate range ground-based missiles. The "zero option," abolishing all intermediate range nuclear weapons for both sides, or an agreement giving each side the same right to deploy a small number of such weapons, would therefore have been worth while arithmetically for the West. The zero option always had "decoupling" implications for the relationship between the United States and Western Europe, on the one hand, and between the United States and its Asian Allies and associates on the other. Nonetheless, in 1981 and 1982 the United States continued to support the zero option, which had been suggested originally by Helmut Schmidt, because of the contribution it could make to redressing the overall nuclear balance. For fundamental reasons of national security, the United States must consider threats or attacks on its allies and other vital interests as attacks on itself.

These considerations remain operative, but are no longer decisive. The INF agreement nearly reached at Reykjavik would reduce the present Soviet advantage in ground based ballistic missiles. But that consideration is offset by other factors. The zero option only for Europe, would have highly disturbing political consequences in Europe, in China, and in Japan. It should be rejected by the United States. It represents only the persistent Soviet

29

effort to separate the United States from its allies in Europe and in Asia, and to divide the
Asian from the European Allies. There is no justification for dealing with Europe and the
Far East differently. In view of all that has happened since 1981, and the present state of
uncertainty in the West about Soviet intentions, a separate INF agreement would be
politically too risky to consider. And for fundamental reasons of alliance solidarity, the INF
component of an overall nuclear arms agreement should provide small equal quotas for each
side, both for Europe and for Asia.

Thirdly, the United States should withdraw its proposal to abolish offensive ballistic
missiles entirely within a ten year period. There are conflicting reports about the geneus of
the idea. Some attributive it to a letter Reagan sent to Gorbachev in July, 1986, and others
to a note passed by Richard Perle to Shultz during a meeting at Reykjavik. Both reports are
correct.

There is also some conflict about exactly what the United States proposed. In his
statement before the First Committee of the U.N. General Assembly on October 20, 1986,
Kenneth Adelman, the Director of ACDA, described that offer as follows: "both sides would
begin over a five year period a reduction of all strategic nuclear arms--bombers, air-
launched cruise missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine launched ballistic
missiles and the weapons they carry. These weapons would be reduced 50% in this five year
period. During the next five years, we would continue to eliminate all remaining offensive
ballistic missiles of whatever range," and continue with the development and testing of
defensive weapons, in accordance with the ABM Treaty.

(Lc)

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[L]

The report of the Committee on the Present Danger, _Where We Stand on Arms Control_, warned that 50% cuts in ground based and especially in sea based ballistic missiles might be too drastic to preserve an unchallengeable American retaliatory capacity, even though equal limits and a strict sublimit on the Soviet heavy missiles were prescribed.

A 50% reduction has an attractive ring, but there is no special virtue in the fraction as such. What is required of an agreement from the point of view of American security would be the elimination of a potential Soviet first-strike capability, taking into account the fact that the Soviet Union has far more potential targets than United States, many of them dispersed and heavily protected in silos hardened to withstand greater blast pressure than those of the United States.

Commenting on the American proposal of November, 1985, the Report of the Committee on the Present Danger concluded:

"The Administration's revised formula would fail in its primary objective. It would not eliminate the Soviet Union's first-strike capability, or even reduce it much. It would, however, severely diminish the capabilities of all three strategic force components of the U.S. TRIAD, leaving the United States with a greatly diminished deterrent capacity. The most severe cuts would be made in the most survivable element of U.S. strategic forces, and the one with the most warheads--the sea-based deterrent.

"The Administration's proposed ceiling of 4,500 deployed ballistic missile warheads and sub-ceiling of no more than 3,000 deployed ICBM warheads is strategically unsound. A probable outcome of these limits would be the deployment by the United States of 2,000 ICBM warheads (a combination of 500 MINUTEMAN IIIs and 50 MS, for example), and just under 2,500 SLBM warheads. Such an outcome would diminish the number of deployed sea-based ballistic missile warheads from the present level of nearly 6,000 to less than half this number. Barring any further reduction in the U.S. land-based force, the number of U.S. ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) would decline by almost two-thirds -- from the present level of 36 to 13. Adding an additional 1,000 ICBM warheads (for example, 1,000 MIDGETMAN ICBMs) would reduce U.S. SSBNs to 9. Given the fact that about half of the U.S. sea-based deterrent is in port at any given time (and therefore vulnerable to destruction) and the portion of the fleet at sea is widely dispersed, such a reduction would undermine the retaliatory capacity and credibility of the sea-based deterrent. It would therefore have a destabilizing effect.

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[L]

"Soviet forces could absorb similar cuts in deployed strategic ballistic missile systems -- especially in ICBMs -- with lesser impact as a result of the Soviet advantage in "cold-launch" techniques (which allow launchers to be re-used), the thousands of non-deployed ballistic missiles in the Soviet inventory and the lack of any U.S. ballistic missile defense. Against a greatly diminished U.S. target base, such a Soviet force would serve as an ominous reserve."

The current American position in Geneva, following the Reykjavik meeting, is based on the same approach as the proposals we made in November, 1985, and February, 1986, and seems to be subject to the same criticism.

That criticism can be met, and major reductions effected, although perhaps not at the 50% level. On these terms, it would be worth while seeking a sharp reduction of strategic nuclear weapons, including ballistic missiles, to equal levels, with special sublimits for the Soviet heavy missiles. The new levels for each side should be defined in terms of warheads and their destructive capacity, and the throw-weight of missiles, not the number of launchers, which are no longer are appropriate unit of account for a nuclear arms treaty.

It is, however, impossible to discern any convincing rationale for completely eliminating ballistic missiles even if the formidable problem of monitoring compliance could be solved.

In the first place, abolishing ballistic missiles completely is a chimera. The same physical principles are applied to launch satellites, nuclear weapons, and space vehicles. Knowledge of the relevant technology is spreading rapidly. And many countries, large and small, now possess the capacity to make ballistic missiles.

32

[LC]

Secondly, an agreement to abolish ballistic missiles would violate the prudent policy of maintaining the triad in our nuclear weapons program--the policy of developing land-based, sea-based, and air-based weapons. That policy is based on the possibility that technology might suddenly make one or another class of weapons obsolete, or partially obsolete. The maxim about not putting too many eggs in one basket remains sound. And the chances for inducing the Soviet Union to give up its policy of expansion in the near future are surely not great. If we try to anticipate the longer future, other predator nations may appear, and bid for hegemony in their turn. And there is always the risk that an irrational political leader may acquire nuclear weapons. That being the case, we shall continue to need a deterrent retaliatory nuclear capacity for as far ahead as we can see. The force behind deterrence should be as strong and flexible as possible. Existing and prospective Soviet defensive systems can stop some of our bombers and cruise missiles, which are slow and vulnerable. Soviet defenses against ballistic missiles are not as yet nearly so effective. Ballistic missiles are therefore indispensable to the fulfillment of the nuclear strategy. We have developed stage by stage, since the Second World War.

Some administration spokesmen have said that the United States has proposed to eliminate ballistic missiles as a class because they are the only weapons now capable of a first-strike. This is surely an error. Against a non-nuclear power or an inferior nuclear power, any system for carrying the nuclear weapon is capable of executing a first-strike. The only nuclear weapons thus far used in war, after all, were carried by bombers. Beyond a certain technological threshold, the principal distinction between first-strike and retaliatory weapons is their number and quality.

33

Of course ballistic missiles are still the most accurate, speedy, and destructive
nuclear weapon carriers, and the ones least vulnerable to defenses. But their
capacity to execute a first-strike depends upon their number in relation to the types
of targets to be attacked, the enemy's defenses, and the opposing forces capable of a
response.

It remains true, as Secretary of Defense Weinberger commented in a speech on
November 17, 1986, that while all nuclear weapons threaten massive destruction, only
offensive ballistic missiles "threaten to overwhelm us in the blink of an eye."
Therefore they should, as he said, "be at the core of arms reduction agreements." It
does not follow, however, that they can be dispensed with altogether.

It is widely assumed that we could protect our security effectively with
conventional forces if nuclear forces were radically reduced or even if all nuclear
weapons were eliminated. In that form, the familiar assumption is untenable. Two
reasons compel the conclusion that we shall be dependant indefinitely on the threat
of effective nuclear retaliation to deter nuclear or conventional force attacks on
ourselves, our allies and other vital interests around the world. The first is that for a
variety of reasons the West cannot match the Soviet Union and its Allies in
conventional forces in all the relevant theatres where the Soviet Union is operating
or may strike. The second is that we shall have to retain a fully effective nuclear
retaliatory capacity because we can never be sure that the Soviet Union will not
make an attack "with all weapons"--that is, with nuclear, chemical, or biological
weapons--despite possible reductions in its nuclear forces and a possible "no-first-
use" pledge. Former Secretary of Defense McNamara made the point emphatically

34

[L]

when he proposed that the United States adopt a no-first use policy in 1984. We should have to maintain a nuclear retaliatory capacity, he said, because we could never be confident that the Soviet Union would honor its own no-first use pledge.

A certain number of Americans who advocate the total abolition of ballistic missiles, like some who favor the American proposal to abolish mobile missiles, intend only to make a propaganda gesture, demonstrating that the United States is fashionably anti-nuclear. They meet criticisms of the proposal by assuring their critics that the Soviet Union will reject it, so there is nothing to worry about. There can be no worse ground for supporting a policy, as Gorbachev demonstrated at Reykjavik, where he leap-frogged and trumped the American proposal to abolish ballistic missiles (without embracing it), by proposing to abolish all strategic weapons and then put forward the old Soviet proposal to abolish all nuclear weapons.

For others, the American proposal to abolish ballistic missiles is a confession of defeat. During the 'Seventies, the United States foolishly allowed the Soviet Union to achieve a looming first-strike capability. Neither Ford nor Reagan could persuade Congress to restore the balance by building more Minutemen, MX, or submarines. Giving up in the face of these defeats, people of this persuasion turn to the notion of abolishing all ballistic missiles as an alternative--a way of restoring nuclear parity by persuading the Soviet Union to make unilateral reductions. And many Congressmen and other Americans believe that in the end we have enough nuclear weapons to deter an attack on the United States itself, and that protecting our interests abroad doesn't really matter.

The issues have to be faced directly. We can hardly expect the Soviet Union to

35

save us from our own mistakes.

The Congressmen who justify their votes against maintaining the nuclear deterrent for these reasons are wrong on both counts. The deterrence of attacks on the United States and on American Allies and other interests abroad requires exactly the same measure of American nuclear retaliatory capacity, as the experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 demonstrates. And the protection of American interests abroad is absolutely essential to the independence of the United States, which cannot hope to survive unless a world balance of power is maintained.

Until American public opinion comes fully to accept these two propositions-- that the liberty of the United States depends upon the balance of world power, and that the deterrence of attacks on the United States and "extended deterrence," that it is, the nuclear protection of American allies and interests abroad, call for the same American nuclear force--it will be difficult if not impossible for the United States to formulate and carry out an adequate and effective foreign policy. But there is no reason to suppose that the task is hopeless. On the contrary, on these issues American public opinion is probably more realistic than that of their leaders.

The same reasoning requires us to withdraw the proposal to abolish mobile land-based ballistic missiles. That proposal, now several years old, is apparently still on the table in Geneva. Small, mobile, land-based missiles--the Midgetman, now in development--could make an important contribution to the essential task of restoring the nuclear balance. It should make our ICBM force less vulnerable, and thus reduce the pressures for a "launch-on-warning" policy. And it should make it easier to maintain an effective nuclear deterrent. Midgetman was urged as a necessity by the Scowcroft Commission. No convincing reasons for abandoning Midgetman have been offered. It seems clear that the reason the proposal was made is that the

36

[L.C.]

Administration despaired of persuading Congress to authorize mobile missiles after
the plan for deploying mobile MX missiles failed in Congress.

Finally one should mention the Soviet proposal to eliminate nuclear weapons
altogether.

Beginning with Truman, all American Presidents have declared their support in
principle for the ultimate abolition of nuclear weapons, and in 1946 we proposed the
Baruch Plan for the strict control of all nuclear energy by an international agency.

As Soviet spokesmen point out, Gorbachev's call to abolish nuclear weapons
revives a plan Gromyko tabled in 1946, after the Soviet Union had rejected the
Baruch Plan. At that time, the Soviet proposal was dismissed by the West as
transparent propaganda, and has been similarly treated at intervals since 1946 when
the Soviet Union revived it in one form or another. The Soviet proposals have
invariably depended on national rather than international action, with minimal
arrangements for the verification of compliance. Without complete confidence in the
enforcement of compliance, such a treaty would be a trap for the obedient. By hiding
100 weapons in a cave, a treaty-violator could emerge as the overlord of world
politics.

But the debate about alternative plans for nuclear abolition is irrelevant. A
non-nuclear world can never be restored. Any moderately industrialized country can
make nuclear weapons, and any rich country can buy them. The West will always
need some nuclear weapons against the chance that a strong hostile power or a state
under the control of an irrational leader will obtain them. The Reagan

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[L]

Administration is urging defensive systems as an answer to the possibility of such cheating. But S.D.I. can never be more than a partial answer. What if the attack is made or threatened against an American ally which does not have an effective defense against nuclear weapons?

Even if a non-nuclear world could be imagined, would it be in the interest of the United States to help achieve it? If the American nuclear deterrent were to be removed, could any force prevent the Soviet Union from gaining control of the great centers of power by the use of conventional forces or the threat to use them?

Recognizing that the answer to this question is "No," many in Europe, the United States, and Canada imagine that they could live as autonomous islands of peace in a world otherwise dominated by Soviet power. This idea is a suicidal illusion. The Western powers, including China, have too much specific gravity to be allowed to flourish indefinitely as neutrals in a world order dominated by the Soviet Union. The Soviet leaders would calculate that the Western powers might, after all, wake up with a roar and change their minds.

There is another dimension to these proposals, another perspective in which they should be viewed. Many throughout the West are now paralyzed by fear, as their parents were during the 'Thirties, by fear of the growing military power of the Soviet Union and especially of its nuclear power. While there is every reason for prudence in dealing with the Soviet Union, there is no objective reason for fear or panic. The Western states and their allies and associates have more than enough power to insist on peace. And there is no way short of peace to define the national security interests of the United States and of the West more generally. We have tried modus vivendi agreements and spheres of influence deals with the Soviet Union over and over again since 1945. They have all failed.

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[L]

The essential security of the United States and the Western powers can only be protected by a balance of world power which keeps any one state from becoming too strong. No one described our dilemma better than Jefferson in his comment on the implications for the United States of Napoleon's attempt to conquer Russia. Jefferson said:

"Surely none of us wish to see Bonaparte conquer Russia, and thus lay at his feet the whole continent of Europe. This done, England would be but a breakfast ... [P]ut all Europe into his hands, and he might spare such a force to be sent in British ships, as I would as leave not have to encounter, when I see how much trouble a handful of British soldiers in Canada has given us. No. It cannot be to our interest that all Europe should be reduced to a single monarchy."*

IV

Thus the most important lesson of Reykjavik is simple and somber: Soviet foreign policy under Gorbachev has ceased to be patient and long term. Gorbachev wants answers now. If his goal is peace, he is concealing it effectively. It may be that he will turn to peace when he realizes that no American President and no American Congress will give him the bargain he is trying to extract from Reagan. If such a turn in Soviet policy should occur, it would be greeted with rejoicing throughout the West. Meanwhile, however, the West must assume that the Soviet Union will continue to pursue its program of expansion, and that it will continue to regard nuclear weapons and nuclear arms control agreements as the ultimate instrument of that program.

*Letter to Thomas Lier, January 1, 1814, Paul Leicester Ford, Ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1898), Vol. 9., at p. 445.

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[lc]

In terms of that assumption, Gorbachev's tactics at Reykjavik and since become transparent. Taught to believe that the correlation of military forces will determine the future of world politics, Gorbachev is demanding that the United States draw the obvious conclusion from the fact that the Soviet Union is a stronger military power than the United States, and that its military strength is growing more rapidly than ours, despite our rearmament efforts of the last ten years. Gorbachev knows as well as we do that the Bolshevik Revolution has failed economically, socially, politically, and ideologically. He is determined to utilize its military superiority before it evaporates. Thus his violent rush to intimidate Reagan at Reykjavik.

The Iceland meeting was dominated by a single question: Is the West still "containing" the expansion of Soviet power and trying to induce the Soviet Union to become a cooperative member of the society of nations? Or is the Soviet Union "containing" the industrialized democracies, steadily forcing them into a narrowing perimeter, and trying to split them from each other by the pressure of nuclear blackmail?

After examining the episode at Reykjavik as closely as the available evidence permits, one is left with a sense of mystery. The meeting must be characterized as one of exploration rather than of negotiation. The record is a strange mixture of elements one rarely finds together--dreams, yearnings, ideals, frustration, shameless hypocrisy and posturing, combined with the conduct of ordinary diplomatic business under most extraordinary circumstances.

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[L]

In the end, my dominant impression is that the meeting was an explosion of frustration on both sides. Reagan expressed the frustration of all Americans at the fact that the Cold War continues, and is getting worse. After more than forty years of costly effort to contain Soviet expansion and achieve an understanding with the Soviet Union, the dream of watching Reagan and Gorbachev walk off-stage hand in hand towards the sunset is more remote than ever. For Gorbachev the frustration is quite different, but equally real. The government of the Soviet Union has sacrificed the standard of living of two generations of its people in order to gain great military power. It is now on the verge of achieving overwhelming strength, and the momentum to generate much more strength, especially in its nuclear arsenal and its command of outer space. Gorbachev must be asking himself why the stupid Americans don't realize that they are defeated, and behave accordingly. So, at Reykjavik, the two leaders spoke in different tongues--Reagan painting a vision of peaceful cooperation in a world without nuclear weapons, while Gorbachev, reciting the same litany, pressed for American capitulation.

Some kind of nuclear arms agreement will probably be reached, because the Soviets must recognize the importance of minimizing nuclear uncertainty as clearly as we do. But the United States can no longer afford to sign a nuclear agreement like those of 1972 and 1979 which would allow the Soviet Union to consolidate a first-strike capability. The Soviet Union therefore faces a fateful choice: it can have a real reduction in nuclear risk if it gives up its quest for hegemony; or it can have a nuclear regime of clear-cut and more stable Soviet-American duopoly and face increasing and more versatile resistance to its programs of expansion. It cannot have both.

41

Violent Peace and the Management of Power:
Dilemmas and Choices in U.S. Policy

A Lecture at the
1987 Current Strategy Forum of
The Naval War College
Newport, Rhode Island

16 June 1987

by
Eugene V. Rostow*

I congratulate whoever was responsible for naming this forum "Maritime Power in an Era of Violent Peace." "Violent Peace" is a brilliant phrase, which throws a vivid light on the nature of the security problems facing the United States and the worldwide coalitions grouped around its military power.

In a legal perspective--and the words war and peace are legal terms, so a legal
perspective is appropriate--"Violent Peace" characterizes the present state of world
politics far more accurately than "Cold War" or "Armed Truce." During this century the
relatively tranquil peace of the Victorian age has disintegrated into a more and more
violent and anarchic condition. For compelling reasons of policy, however, it is a
condition we should still define as one of peace, that is, of general peace punctuated by
episodes of limited war. As compared to "Cold War" or "Armed Truce," the phrase
"Violent Peace" has the advantage of conforming to the vocabulary of international law,
and thus directing attention to the inescapable role of law in the social process. The
widespread neglect and even dismissal of law in studies of security policy, international
relations more generally, and diplomatic history is a major intellectual weakness of the
literature and of Western policy making as well.

*Distinguished Visiting Research Professor of Law and Diplomacy, National Defense University.

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[LC]

I should make it clear at once that I am not using the word "law" to mean a
static collection of formal rules set down in the books. The law on the books is
important, but it is never the same as the law in action, the living law, the law at
the end of a policeman's stick, as Justice Holmes once remarked. The law on the
books does not of itself determine the behavior of states or of individuals. In many
cultures, notably our own, people are greatly influenced by formal rules, and tend
to respect them. But the relationship between rules and behavior runs in the
opposite direction, too. Legal rules are much more influenced by patterns of
behavior than patterns of behavior are influenced by rules. The law of a society
reflects its customs, its mores, and its aspirations--that is, the patterns of behavior
it deems right, seeks to achieve in the future, and finds essential to its well being
or indeed to its survival. Since society is a living organism, its customs and mores
change. So do its aspirations, as its moral code improves or deteriorates.
Therefore its law, the external deposit of its moral history, changes as well.

To put the argument of this lecture into the proverbial nutshell, the essence of
our security problem is to transform the presently violent and volatile condition of
world politics into a more stable state of peace before it explodes into unlimited
and unthinkable war. To state the same idea in the language of law, the goal of our
national security effort must be to bring the real law, the living law of
international society, from its woeful condition of near anarchy much closer to the
standard of the United Nations Charter, which embodies the norms of international
conduct on which the nations profess to agree. No lesser goal can assure the
survival of the nation and the fulfillment of its heritage.

2

[LC]

Some international lawyers have suggested the possibility of identifying a political condition half way between war and peace, the only two categories used by international law. I looked into the literature on the subject a few years ago, and concluded that it is impossible and would in any event be undesirable to establish a third classification to take account of the Cold War and its ramifications. The most important reason for this conclusion has to do with the level of warfare tolerated under the two rubrics we now use, war and peace. Bad as the state of violent peace is, it is preferable to an even more violent state of war, especially in a nuclear environment.

In times of peace, as international law defines the word, some international uses of force have always been permitted. The books say that in peacetime states are entitled to use whatever force is reasonably required to cure breaches of international law of a violent character, when peaceful means are unavailable or would be unavailing. Such uses of force are supposed to be limited and in fact they are limited and more or less proportional to the breaches of international law they are intended to cure. Episodes of this kind are frequent and familiar, probably more frequent today than ever before. They range from uses of force to rescue citizens in distress abroad, at one end of the spectrum, to campaigns of individual or collective self-defense, at the other. The Entebbe affair eleven years ago is an example of the first category; the defense of Greece, Berlin, South Korea, Grenada, and South Vietnam and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 illustrate the scope of the second.

3

[LC]

In all these cases, even when prolonged campaigns were needed, the use of force was confined. For example, we responded to the Soviet blockade of Berlin only in the area of Berlin and only by an airlift. And during the Korean War the Soviet Union made no attempt to interfere with allied ships or planes bringing troops or supplies to the Korean Peninsula or to Taiwan. The tacit rule of engagement in the Cold War, which in this respect reflects the nominal rule of international law, has been quite consistently respected, for obvious reasons of prudence. In each case, the Soviet Union was attempting a probe or a limited gain and was not prepared for escalation to the state of war. And, in Vietnam, we chose to withdraw rather than to escalate further, perhaps because the war had become so unpopular at home, perhaps also because the nuclear balance was no longer so favorable to us as it had been at the time of Korea.

I do not mean to suggest that the rules of international law purport to confine the scope of self-defense against a violent breach of international law in peacetime entirely to the place where the breach occurred. Many such episodes have involved crossing frontiers to deal with the attackers in their camps or bases. The law does not recognize sanctuaries. One of the most frequently cited precedents in this branch of the law involved a British incursion into Northern New York State in 1837 to disperse an armed band planning to join a rebellion against British authority in Canada; another concerned an American foray into Spanish Florida in 1819, to eliminate a group of freebooters who had been raiding towns in Georgia. But the law, sustained by an acute consciousness of the risks of going too far, has so far imposed limits on the degree of violence which can be tolerated in times of peace.

4

[LC]

In contrast, the distinguishing feature of the state of war under international law--that is, full, general, notorious, and declared war, in the language of international law and the Constitutional law of the United States--is that it contemplates the unlimited use of force, tempered only by the humanitarian conventions of the law of war. The belligerents are not obliged to confine hostilities to the area of the original episode of violence, if there was one, but may bring force to bear on each other wherever they think it might be effective in coercing the enemy to bow to their will: to give up territory, for example, submit to belligerent occupation, overthrow an aggressive government or regime, or abandon a cause. States hesitate before crossing the legal threshold between peace and war, at least while their memories of the preceding war remain alive. In the nuclear age, they should hesitate with particular care, and so far they have done so. But memories fade and emotional surges of fear, anger, and injured pride can outweigh cool calculation in the minds of those who govern us. Talleyrand is supposed to have said that after the Napoleonic Wars the statesmen of Europe were intelligent enough not to go to war with each other, but too stupid to agree. His comment has a certain bitter resonance still.

The categories of war and peace in international law, then, constitute the background for my assignment today, which is to discuss the dilemmas and choices of American security policy with regard to the management of power. Let me make it clear at once that in my opinion we have lots of dilemmas and very few choices. Dean Rusk once remarked that no country has less sovereignty than the United States. There is a great deal in his observation, as there is in everything that wise and staunch man has said, written, and done.

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II.

[LC]

The title given to my talk quite properly assumes that the managing the use of power in international society is the business of governments, and particularly of the major powers which possess preponderant military strength. This assumption is a modern idea which was strongly asserted in the seventeenth century after the Thirty Years' War, and became a maxim of statecraft after the Napoleonic Wars.

The emergence and partial acceptance of that idea marked the beginning of a new era, the era in which we are now living. For the first time, the states recognized a serious challenge to their sovereign privilege of making war at will: the notion that each nation's supreme security interest is not aggrandizement or dominance or glory or revenge for ancient wrongs but the effective functioning of the state system in peace. Since the state system can never be altogether self-regulating, like the solar system, only the major powers have the power to manage it. The essence of the mutation achieved by the Congress of Vienna was the principle that the great powers should manage the use of power in the common interest. What emerged was a condition of unresolved tension between the historic privileges of national sovereignty, on the one hand, and the claim of a general interest in maintaining world public order, on the other. During the nineteenth century, the claims of the general interest in peace often prevailed over the lure of national expansion. In the twentieth century thus far, the balance has tipped in the opposite direction.

But the nineteenth century experience has decisively influenced our memory and our aspirations. It is a fact--a shaping fact, part of our collective unconscious,

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that for a century after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the great powers of Europe practiced a diplomacy of restraint, conciliation, and compromise. There were exceptions and backslidings, like the Crimean War and the Franco-Prussian War, and great changes occurred, but the state system somehow absorbed these shocks without major war. Germany and Italy were created as modern national states. Nationalism began to weaken the Austro-Hungarian empire and to accelerate the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Germany and Russia both pursued policies of expansion, and the orientation of world politics changed in response to the perceived threat of German ambitions. France and Russia became allies. Britain and France reached an understanding. But the new alliances did not come soon enough nor decisively enough to prevent the First World War, the tragedy from which all the other tragedies of the twentieth century have flowed. Germany was pursuing goals incompatible with the practices of the Concert of Europe, and the system collapsed under the strain. The British Foreign Minister of the day, Sir Edward Grey, invoked the procedures of great power consultation which had defused so many crises during the nineteenth century; in 1914, these procedures failed.

The moment the First World War was over, the nations sought to restore and improve the system of concert which had served them well during the nineteenth century. This time the state system was organized on a world scale, to take account of the fact that world politics was no longer Eurocentered. The nineteenth century practices of consultation and cooperation were institutionalized in the League of Nations, staffed by an international secretariat. And a conscious and important effort was initiated to make the system of world order not only peaceful, but more just as well, in terms of the moral standards of the society of nations.

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But the League was weak and the nations behind it even weaker in accepting
responsibility for maintaining the peace. The United States refused to participate in
world politics altogether, and for fifteen years the Soviet Union was partly isolated
behind a Cordon Sanitaire. When, during the thirties, Germany, Italy, and Japan began
to make war against the territorial settlement of 1919, the other powers refused to
recognize the danger, and dithered until it was too late to do anything but fight.

Immediately after the Second World War the nations again sought to recreate and
strengthen the state system, as they did in 1919, this time under the banner of the
United Nations Charter. The United States and the Soviet Union were participants
from the beginning. The European Empires were dissolved, save for the old Russian
Empire, and more than a hundred new states were formed. On paper at least, the
United Nations Charter was stronger than the League Covenant in its prohibition of
aggression as a principle of law, and the Security Council was endowed, with far greater
power than the Concert of Europe and the Council of the League of Nations.

Once more, however, the dream of achieving a just and lasting peace has been
thwarted. The Security Council has never attained the specific gravity of the
nineteenth century diplomatic Congresses at which Bismarck, Disraeli, and their peers
averted war and settled the fate of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

Why is the United Nations going the way of the League of Nations? The reason is
hardly obscure. It is indeed so obvious that even the historians, who naturally prefer
complex theories, are coming around to the view that the simple explanation of the

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phenomenon is correct. The Cold War was not caused by missed diplomatic opportunities, or American imperial arrogance, or mutual misunderstandings. There were lots of mistakes but no mutual misunderstandings and no missed opportunities. And the United States has engaged in international politics since 1945 reluctantly and spasmodically, driven by instincts of self-preservation, not imperial ambition.

The Cold War--the violence of the peace since 1945--was caused by the Soviet Union's imperial appetite. During the early post-war years, the Western allies made every effort to induce the Soviet Union to take its position as a cooperative member of the Security Council and a responsible great power in the nineteenth century tradition, but it rejected all such overtures. As Stalin said to Ambassador Harriman in 1944, when Harriman was pressing him to accept a reconstruction loan Stalin had requested some months before, "We appreciate what you are trying to do, but we have decided to go our own way."

The Soviet Union is still in the imperial mood of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It refused the Marshall Plan offer and forced the countries of Eastern Europe to withdraw their acceptances of the Marshall Plan proposal. And it rejected the 1946 American proposal to give up its nuclear weapons monopoly and put all nuclear technology under international control. Instead, from the beginning, the Soviet Union has acted as if it were exempt from the rules of the United Nations Charter with regard to the use and threat to use force. Starting well before the end of the war, it has pursued a policy of indefinite expansion based on the aggressive use of military power, beginning in Eastern Europe, Iran, Greece, and Turkey, shifting to Berlin, then to Korea, South-East Asia, and the Middle East, later still to the Caribbean and Africa.

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At the end of the war, the Soviet Union held not only its own territories but the Baltic states, East Germany, the states of Eastern Europe, and North Korea. In addition, it was helping the Chinese Communists in their bid for power, and Communist parties all over Europe and Asia in their attempts to do likewise. The goal of Soviet expansion was not the bauble of prestige or a place at the high table. They were and are interested in more serious things. In 1945, Soviet Union already possessed a massive geopolitical and military advantage. Adding Western Europe and Japan to the list would make the Soviet advantage overwhelming. If the Soviet leaders could win just one more battle, they thought, they would achieve the prize which had eluded Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler:--mastery of the entire Eurasian land mass, and all that would flow from it.

In the late 'Forties, the West Europeans and the United States became acutely conscious of the magnitude and gravity of the Soviet thrust for dominance. They banded together in the classic response of the balance of power minuet. President Truman raised the banner of resistance in announcing the Truman Doctrine forty years ago, and NATO was born. Japan, then China and many smaller nations followed suit.

In his famous article on *The Sources of Soviet Conduct* in 1947, George Kennan supplied the intellectual foundation for the policy of containment. He assured the West that if we contained the outward thrust of Soviet power for ten or fifteen years, Soviet policy would mellow under the influence of Russian high culture, and the Soviet Union would become a responsible partner in the tasks of world politics.

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For nearly forty years, the coalitions led by United States have followed George Kennan's advice. It was persuasive advice forty years ago, and the West has given it a conscientious try. But Soviet policy has not mellowed. It has become bolder and more persistent in its threat to Western security.

There have been Western successes in this period. Soviet threats to the key elements in the balance of power--Western Europe, Japan, and China,--have been deterred or contained, although the Soviet Union never stops probing to gain control of them. With American support, China, Yugoslavia, and Egypt have detached themselves from the Soviet sphere. Soviet supported military moves--notably those against Berlin, Greece, Turkey, Malaysia, South Korea, and Israel--have been turned back. But Soviet set-backs have not brought about a sea-change in Soviet policy. If Soviet efforts at expansion are stopped in one place, the Soviet Union tries again in another. After the failure of the Soviet effort to take Berlin, the Soviets switched to Korea, then to Vietnam, to Cuba, and the Middle East.

There has been no change in this pattern under Gorbachev. The nearly unbelievable build-up of Soviet military power continues at the pace which the Soviet Union has maintained since the mid-fifties. If anything, the Soviet military build up is gaining in momentum. The military threat of the Soviet nuclear arsenal has become a powerful political tide, tending to divide the United States from its allies and associates, and to weaken Western confidence in its ability to resist Soviet pressure. Under Gorbachev, the Soviet position in the Middle East is bolder and more intransigent than has been the case for years. More supplies seem to be going to the Caribbean and to the rebellion against the government of the Philippines. While Gorbachev has been an agile juggler in

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the nuclear arms negotiations, tossing nuclear statistics into the air with the verve of a
magician, there is no reason as yet to suppose that he has changed the long standing
Soviet objective in these negotiations--to induce the West to accept massive Soviet
nuclear superiority as the rightful foundation for the new world order. On the contrary,
both his performance at Reykjavik and his present maneuver about INF confirm the
hypothesis that Soviet nuclear policy is still exactly what it has been.

III.

The Soviet thrust for dominion is now more than forty years old. The limits of
Soviet hostility are obvious. They are implicit in what Soviet writers frequently call
"the correlation of forces", that is, the military balance, and especially the nuclear
balance. The Soviet leaders consider nuclear war both risky and unnecessary. If the
United States fails to maintain a credible retaliatory nuclear deterrent, the Soviet
Union will be able to attain its strategic objectives through diplomatic pressure alone.
And the super-powers cannot engage in open conventional warfare, since the greatest
risk of nuclear war is through escalation from conventional war. The Soviet Union
therefore relies more and more on political, psychological, and indirect methods of
warfare, and on flanking actions in the Third World directed against the great centers
of Western power. As Raymond Aron commented in his last book, the Soviet leadership
has reversed Clausewitz' celebrated maxim. Clausewitz said that war is an extension of
politics by other means. The Soviets, Aron said, make politics an extension of war by
other means.

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Someday the Soviet leadership will realize that the imperial dream is a costly delusion which has usually ended with a bang, not a whimper. If the West is even moderately rational--and we cannot expect a higher level of performance by our leaders--the Soviet Union can never achieve its goal of dominion.

Western opinion is frustrated and depressed by the prospect that the Cold War shows every sign of continuing indefinitely. The Western peoples are tired of living under siege; appalled by the costs they have been forced to pay both in blood and in treasure in order to maintain the balance of power; and increasingly irritated with each other under conditions of prolonged stress. Obviously, it is safer to be angry at your friends than your enemies. The Western public and their politicians are casting about to find an easy way to bring this gruelling test of wills to an end.

What are the choices facing the United States and the other Western nations as they confront this bleak prospect?

First, I shall take up four popular and much discussed choices or options the United States does *not* have:

The first is the mystical idea that we can attain salvation and security without tears by reaching arms control and disarmament agreements with the Soviet Union, particularly about nuclear weapons. The second is the chimera that by pursuing the policy former President Nixon calls "Hard Detente" we could reach a new modus vivendi with the Soviet Union, an understanding about spheres of influence and rules of the game which would make world politics less violent and reduce the risk of an uncontrollable explosion. The third is closely related to the second, but it

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goes one step further. It is the notion that we should abrogate our alliances and go
it alone--the option of global unilateralism, as it is sometimes called. The fourth,
the option of isolation and neutrality, sounds less radical than global unilateralism,
but would be just as suicidal in fact. Advocates of this view contend that we
should cut our policy to fit our resources; pull back from the bogs and pitfalls of
the Third World; draw up the wagons around the United States alone, or the United
States, Western Europe, and perhaps Japan, and let the rest of the world fall into
the Soviet orbit.

First, let me comment briefly on arms control agreements as a panacea.

Arms control agreements and especially nuclear arms control agreements
should be viewed as a means to the end of peace, not an end in themselves.
Conceivably, good arms control agreements could help to stabilize great power
relationships and contribute to the effectiveness of crisis management in times of
unusual turbulence. They could reinforce a regime of peace achieved by firm and
prudent policies of collective self-defense. But they cannot be a substitute for
such policies. Bad arms control agreements, on the other hand, could gravely
weaken the security of the United States, as the SALT I agreements did, by
allowing the Soviet Union to seek nuclear superiority and thus expose the United
States and its allies to nuclear blackmail. And even the best conceivable arms
control agreement would be worthless if it were in effect a license for Soviet
aggression through the use of conventional force. The Western nations should not
be interested in arms control as a way to make the world safe for Soviet expansion
achieved by conventional weapons, subversion, and terror.

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In approaching the subject of nuclear weapons, one should recall that their role in world affairs is far more political than military. While the risk of nuclear war can never be entirely excluded, it cannot be considered great, at least among the industrialized nations. But the threat of nuclear attack, however veiled, has been and will continue to be a potent deterrent in circumstances of sufficient gravity to make such a threat plausible. And for the United States and the coalitions it leads, a clear-cut American capacity for nuclear retaliation is indispensable to the possibility of using conventional forces when necessary to protect their interests.

For more than thirty years, Soviet policy with regard to nuclear weapons has been firmly based on these two closely related ideas. The extraordinary Soviet nuclear build-up during the last generation is designed not to fight a nuclear war, but to achieve overwhelming nuclear superiority, especially in ground based ballistic missiles, and thus isolate and neutralize the United States. The United States nuclear arsenal is intended to deter Soviet or Soviet-supported attacks on American vital interests. The Soviet force, on the contrary, is designed to deter any American assistance in the defense of countries subjected to such attacks. The policy of the two nations in the nuclear arms control negotiations since 1969 reflects this fundamental difference in goals. The United States has been seeking agreements that would make it possible to maintain its nuclear deterrent, while the Soviet Union has sought agreements that would allow it to attain overwhelming nuclear superiority. In short, the United States perceives nuclear arms and nuclear arms agreements as instruments of collective self-defense, while the Soviet Union sees them as weapons of aggression, designed to make collective self-defense impossible.

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The second option often urged as a policy the United States should pursue in order to escape from the burdens of the Violent Peace is a modus vivendi agreement with the Soviet Union, as Gorbachev often urges. Forty years of searing experience should long since have convinced Western opinion that no Soviet-American rule of engagement which compromises with the United Nations Charter—that is, with the rule of peaceful peace—has worked or can work. The United States has made many modus vivendi agreements with the Soviet Union since Yalta and Potsdam. The Soviet Union has broken them all. As the Committee on the Present Danger has said, the goal of Western policy must be "sound conditions of peace with the Soviet Union, not illusory detente."

The Yalta and Potsdam agreements were perhaps the most important of the Soviet-American political agreements since World War II. They promised free elections in the countries of Eastern Europe, whose independence remains indispensable to the possibility of achieving and maintaining a stable balance of world power. In a message to the Soviet people, President Kennedy said that there could be no peace between the Soviet and the American peoples until the Soviet promise of free elections in Eastern Europe is carried out. That judgment is as sound now as it was in 1962; Central Europe continues to be a pivot of the world system of power, as Mackinder pointed out.

The list of modus vivendi agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union includes a long series of agreements about Indo-China, starting with the Geneva settlement of 1954, which recognized the partition of French Indo-China into the separate states of Laos, Cambodia, and North and South Vietnam, and the agreements of 1962 and 1973, committing the Soviet Union to get North

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Vietnamese troops out of Laos and South Vietnam and permit self-determination for South Vietnam. Another important agreement of this kind was that of the Nixon-Brezhnev 1972 summit in Moscow, which set out a code of conduct for the Cold War, and promised "detente"--which, according to President Nixon, would substitute Soviet-American "cooperation" for "confrontation."

Ambassador Dobrynin once said that the Soviet-American agreement embodied in Security Council Resolution 242 after the Six-Day War in 1967--the resolution which promised peace and territorial adjustments between the Arab states and Israel--was the first occasion in the history of the Cold War when the Soviet Union used the phrase "package deal" in a positive sense. The Soviet Union broke that agreement as it has broken all the others.

But the record of broken promises is not the fundamental reason why modus vivendi agreements, spheres of influence arrangements, and the like, cannot reduce East-West tensions and lead to peace. That fundamental reason is simple: there is no way in which the United States and the Soviet Union can define and agree to respect each other's national security interests until the Soviet Union gives up its drive for dominant power and finally settles down to live within its legitimate boundaries in peace.

The facts which compel this conclusion are so familiar they are easy to ignore. The most basic national security interest of the United States is to prevent any one power from controlling the Eurasian land mass, a reservoir of power which the island and coastal states, including the United States, Great Britain, France, and Japan, could not hope to defeat. Thomas Jefferson defined that aspect of the American national interest vividly when he wrote of Napoleon's invasion of Russia:

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"Surely none of us wish to see Bonaparte conquer Russia, and thus lay at his feet the whole continent of Europe. This done, England would be but a breakfast...[P]ut all Europe into his hands, and he might spare such a force to be sent in British ships, as I would as leave not have to encounter... No. It cannot be to our interest that all Europe should be reduced to a single monarchy."

The first American national security interest today remains what it was in Jefferson's time: never allow an adversary or potential adversary to become too strong. Jefferson's rule is a conditioned reflex as old as history. Thus the United States fought in the two World Wars of this century in order to prevent Germany from dominating Western Europe and Russia. And it helped organize NATO in 1949 and has participated in its activities ever since in order to keep the Soviet Union from dominating Germany and Western Europe. American policy in the Pacific Basin rests on the same principle. We have fought in four Asian Wars to prevent the emergence of a hegemonic power in the Pacific Basin. That principle, spelled out in the Shanghai Communique of 1972, is explicitly the basis of our relationship with China today.

This pattern of behavior is determined by geo-political reality. If the Soviet Union gains control of the 300 million people of Western Europe, and of its skills, capital, productive capacity, and geographical position, China, Japan, and a great many other countries around the world would conclude that the balance of world power had turned irreversibly against the United States. As a consequence, they would reach the best possible accommodation the Soviet Union would allow them, and the United States would be left isolated and impotent, too weak to protect its territorial integrity and political independence, but too strong to be ignored by the Soviet Union and allowed to remain neutral indefinitely. Soviet hegemony in Asia

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would have precisely the same consequences for Europe and the United States. The Western-oriented nations would face the nightmare so brutally described by Thucydides in the debate between the general of an invading Athenian military force and the leaders of Melos, a Spartan colony which sought to remain neutral. The Melians pleaded for mercy in the name of justice. The Athenian replied:

"You know as well as we do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept."

The third alternative security policy frequently urged upon the American people--the policy of abrogating our security treaties and trying to protect our national security single handed--founders on the same rock as the second: it flies in the face of the arithmetic of power. Strong as it is, the United States does not have the power to defend its security without allies in the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Middle East, and Southern Asia. We are in the position Great Britain held for four centuries between the reigns of the two Elizabeths. Britain was never as strong as the successive bidders for European hegemony--Spain, France, and Germany. But Britain skillfully maintained the balance of power in Europe by a policy of astute alliances backed by its money, its sea power, and the armies its navy deposited on near and distant shores.

The fourth alternative security policy often advocated for the United States--that of confining our defense perimeter narrowly--is a variation on the same theme. The advocates of global unilateralism accept Jefferson's principle that the security of the United States depends on maintaining a world balance of power. Their mistake is to imagine we could achieve that end by our own exertions, or

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with ad hoc alliances made at the moment of crisis. The advocates of withdrawal either to a purely national or a purely North Atlantic defense line, on the other hand, simply ignore the problem of the balance of power. It is fantasy to suppose that if we did abandon the security policy we have pursued since the late 'Forties we should be allowed to live as Switzerland does now, safe within a stable state system governed by generally respected rules of international law. We are too big, too rich, and potentially too dangerous to be left untouched in such a world.

If the United States follows the counsel of those who advocate pulling our troops and fleets out of Europe and Asia, the American nuclear guaranty would lose all credibility, Western Europe, Japan and China would become neutral, at a minimum, and the United States would be truly isolated and at the mercy of events. With a minute fraction of the world's population and less than 22% of the world's global output the United States could not defend itself against the Soviet Union if the Soviets controlled Western Europe, China, and Japan, a combination astronomically stronger than the United States in every way. In Jefferson's words, we should be "but a breakfast" for the Soviet Union and the fact would be self-evident.

Moreover, even a hint or expectation of an American withdrawal from forward positions in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East would have another consequence: it would necessarily trigger the rapid spread of nuclear weapons and the breakdown of the regime of the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1967. The influence of that Treaty has not been negligible. There are many fewer nuclear powers today than most observers thought likely twenty years ago when the Treaty was signed. But if the United States reduced its forces abroad, many countries which now rely on the

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nuclear power of the United States would feel driven to become nuclear powers themselves. The world political system would become far more volatile and unpredictable. And the Soviet Union would have a plausible excuse for attacking Germany and Japan under Article 107 of the United Nations Charter, which provides that nothing in the Charter "shall invalidate or preclude action, in relation to any state which during the Second World War has been an enemy "of any signatory of the Charter," taken or authorized as a result of that war by the government having responsibility for such action."

The increase in isolationist sentiment in the United States, caused in the main by the fear of nuclear war, has an ironic dimension: as an isolated "neutral" state, we should have to maintain at least as large a nuclear arsenal as we do now. The retaliatory nuclear force required to keep the Soviet Union from attacking Western Europe, China, or Japan is mathematically the same as that required to prevent attacks on the United States itself. Our defensive needs are determined by the nuclear forces of the Soviet Union, not by the particular target chosen for a Soviet attack. This is one of the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Because we had full nuclear retaliatory capability then, the Soviet Union could not have opposed an American invasion of Cuba, and therefore withdrew its missiles in the face of American preparations for an invasion. If the nuclear balance were unfavorable to the United States could we oppose a Soviet landing in Florida?

The strong regional combinations we have helped organize since 1947 to thwart the Soviet bid for mastery have a powerful internal coherence. There is no escape from their logic. Only the United States can frustrate the formidable nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union, so the United States is an indispensable member of

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each combination. And only by maintaining its nuclear quarant for its allies and
other vital interests can the United States sustain the balance of power on which
its own primitive safety depends.

IV.

If these four familiar approaches to the problem of defining the national
security objectives of the United States are not in fact available, what choices do
we have? Two, I think, and only two. The first is to muddle through along the lines
of our present policy, the policy of containment and collective self-defense as it
has evolved since the time of President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson.
The second, which I much prefer, would be to renew and modernize the policy of
containment, and supplement it with a policy of active defense.

Muddling through is an unacceptably dangerous course. By ceding the
initiative entirely to the Soviet Union and to chance, it would permit the Soviet
leadership to pursue a costless strategy. It could try one probe after another
without fear of the military consequences. If the probe failed, the Soviet Union
would be no worse off than before. And it could bombard Western solidarity with
an endless stream of political, psychological, and nuclear threats of the kind which
has already had such a devastating effect on Western domestic politics and foreign
policy. A continuation of the Cold War as we have known it is a strategy doomed
to fail. True, the United States and its allies have managed so far to prevent the
worst. Western Europe, Japan, China, South Korea, Israel, Iceland, the Azores and
a few other key countries have not yet been invested by the Soviet Union. But the

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Soviet attempt to dissolve the nuclear cement which holds the Western alliances
together is making great progress, and Gorbachev is showing new flexibility and
ingenuity in his choice of tactics to exploit every opportunity given him by the
turbulent politics of the West.

One of the difficulties of the concept of containment is that its outer limits
are necessarily vague. Certain places are obviously essential components of the
balance of power--Western Europe, Japan, China, India and Pakistan, for example.
Others are important or even essential to the defense of the critical areas or the
sea lanes, or as sources of raw materials, as Korea is important to the defence of
Japan, or the Middle East to the defense of Western Europe. This is not the
occasion to analyze the problem in depth. I should simply recall that the world is
round, and that it is impossible in advance to exclude any area from the purview of
our concern in the context of the Soviet Union's program of expansion.

Standing in a posture of static defence for forty years, waiting for one's
enemy to see the light, is hardly a strategy for victory. The West can no longer
afford to retire in frustration in the face of Soviet stonewalling and double-talk on
the primordially important issue of Soviet expansion. The threat to the balance of
power is too great, and the political impact of the Soviet military build-up on the
solidarity of the West is too insidious and pervasive to be tolerated indefinitely.
Forty years of the Cold War are enough. The West must make it plain, by actions
rather than by words, that the process of Soviet expansion has gone too far, and
that its continuation could have consequences which cannot be predicted and could
not be controlled.

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The world-wide state system cannot survive on the basis of a double standard, with one rule about the international use of force for the Soviet Union and its satellites and quite another for the rest of the world. The West is being forced by the pressures of Soviet expansion into a policy of more active defense. Tit-for-tat may not be a formal rule of international law, but it is the way people behave. It is the essence of the Reagan Doctrine, as the Soviet Union fully understands.

The principle of a more active defense embodied in the Reagan Doctrine was part of George Kennan's original formulation of the policy of containment. The Soviet pressure on the free institutions of the Western world cannot be "charmed or talked out of existence," Kennan wrote, but can be "contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy."

Over the years, the West has neglected this aspect of the policy of containment. The doctrine of "massive retaliation" against the Soviet Union for its Third World campaigns proved to be an empty threat. The West has tended only to respond directly to Soviet and Soviet sponsored attacks. It is time seriously to consider the use of limited counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points as an important tool of Western policy.

Thus far the Reagan Doctrine has been explained in terms of ideology rather than the geo-politics of the national interest. The first few tentative American and Allied moves in the direction of a more active defense--in Lebanon, in Libya, and in Nicaragua, for example--have been poorly planned and badly executed. But in democracies the first few steps toward a new policy usually have that character. If we learn from our mistakes, the Reagan Doctrine could become an indispensable

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supplement to the policy of containment which has been the cornerstone of
Western foreign policy since 1947. The West cannot remain mesmerized forever
within the limits of its 1947 posture, waiting for Soviet policy to mellow.

Ideally, the policy of active defense should be undertaken by groups of allies
and the United States working together, not by the United States alone. This is
much the better course both from the military and the political points of view. I
can imagine no better antidote for the frustration and irritability which now
characterize allied relationships than allied cooperation in mounting successful
applications of counterforce at outposts of the Soviet Empire and shifting
geographical points around its periphery.

The Soviet Empire is extremely vulnerable to such a Penninsular strategy. As
even a glance at the map suggests, it has given many hostages to fortune on the
assumption that the West is so completely possessed by a Maginot Line conception
of defense that it would never undertake more open, fluid, and mobile operations.
Standing in this hall, conscious of the presence of Mahan, I do not have to underline
the fact that an active defense would necessarily be based on the special
capabilities and advantages of sea power, as well as the offensive potential of
highly mobile modern land and air forces functioning as a team.

In this connection, I am much encouraged by the fact that the North Atlantic
Council recently reviewed and reaffirmed the Harmel Report of 1967 on the
Future Tasks of the Alliance. I regard that study as a valuable and realistic vision
of the future both for NATO and for the other Western regional security coalitions.
One of its most important features is that it contemplates the collaboration within

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the NATO framework of key allies who wish to concert their policies with regard to threats to allied security arising outside the treaty area. The Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and Africa are obvious examples of areas where the United States should be patiently taking the lead in bringing together groups of allies to undertake careful contingency planning and preparations for combined action should such action be required. The normal difficulties of such an effort are increased at the moment by the memory of the badly handled allied mission in Lebanon a few years ago. But such difficulties can be overcome. And we must try to do so.

Would a policy of modernized containment plus active defense in the Penninsular mode be a step towards full scale war or towards a less violent peace? Would it be more or less dangerous, more or less promising than a policy of muddling through? Or would it be the one policy open to us that might persuade the Soviet Union that its adventures in imperialism can never succeed, and that it would be wise to follow the examples of Germany and Japan, and settle down to genuinely peaceful coexistence?

V

My instructions for this lecture included the admonition that I pose questions for further discussion. I have just done so, I hope, by identifying four popular options we do not have and two which are available, and which should be examined carefully.

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I close with the proposition I advanced at the beginning--that the supreme
national interest of the United States as an open democratic republic is to achieve
a stable and favorable balance of world power and an effective and pluralist system
of world public order based on it. In defining the national interest in this way, I
suggest that we are like M. Jourdan in Moliere's play: we have been talking prose
throughout our history without realizing it. As a group of British colonies and then
as a small and medium sized nation, we always were part of the European balance
of power, which in the early days was also the world balance of power. Since 1914
we have been necessarily engaged in the prolonged struggle to achieve and
maintain a world balance of power managed by the great powers in accordance
with just rules of international law. There is no alternative goal for the United
States if we wish to survive as a free democracy facing the excessive ambitions of
the Soviet Union, the predator of the moment, or the threats to world public order
which will doubtless arise after the Soviet Union has decided to rejoin the society
of nations.

This is a perfectly feasible goal, in terms of what Soviet experts like to call
"the correlation of forces," if we face the facts as they are. Our problem is
intellectual, but not exclusively or even primarily intellectual. It is, like all
situations of conflict, above all a matter of spirit and will.

There is no ground for discouragement in the fact that there have been so many
battles lost in the quest for world public order since the Congress of Vienna. There
have been successes too. There is nothing unusual in this history of success and
failure in an effort to change the living law by governmental action.

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[LC]

The objective of achieving peace through the management of power was and is an attempt to impose new norms of law on habits of war which have the momentum of the millenia behind them. What is remarkable is not that success has been intermittent. That was to be expected. The significant feature of the story is that the effort is so persistent. Each time the nineteenth century equilibrium is disturbed, the states seek to restore it and to improve its functioning. They no longer believe that the quest for peace is a quixotic and utopian activity, a waste of time for practical men. On the contrary, they are convinced that peace is a moral necessity in the contracting, integrated, and dangerous world in which we have no choice but to live. In this way, a new norm of law is struggling to prevail, the idea of peace achieved through the international management of power. The story is the same for all attempts to change customary law through statutes or constitutions. In our own law, it took one hundred years for the Fourteenth Amendment to begin to flower, and its promise is not yet fully realized. And the national government envisioned by the authors of the Federalist Papers and John Marshall, the great Chief Justice, was achieved in the end only by a great war.

I do not mean to suggest that it will take a great war to fulfill the ideal of international peace which has been gaining ground in the mind of the West for more than three centuries and is now embodied in the United Nations Charter. Our task is to attain that goal without a major war, through calm, steady diplomacy backed by visibly deterrent force and will. The tides of history and technology give us no choice. The burden cannot be escaped. But the burden is also an immense privilege. Can you imagine a destiny for Americans more worthy of our past than to lead in the quest for a peaceful peace?

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