Real War (37 page)

There is a sort of Gresham's Law that applies to public discussion: bad ideas drive out good, and attention given to empty posturing shuts the door on serious debate.

In a less hazardous age we could afford to indulge the prancing of the trendies on the stage of public debate. But now our national survival depends on learning to distinguish between the meaningful and the meaningless.

The issues that confront us are complex and the answers are by no means all clear. But this increases rather than decreases the need for calm, rational examination of alternative courses and alternative consequences. It also increases the need for the most meticulous care in ensuring that we decide on the basis of fact, not fantasy.

The defining characteristic of today's intellectual and media elite is that it swims merrily in a sea of fantasy. The world of television is essentially a fantasy world, and television is today's common denominator of communication, today's unifying American experience. This has frightening implications for the future.

Ideas that fit on bumper stickers are not ideas at all, they simply are attitudes. And attitudinizing is no substitute for analysis. Unfortunately, too often television is to news as bumper stickers are to philosophy, and this has a corrosive effect on public understanding of those issues on which national survival may depend.

•  •  •

Only in very recent years has the notion taken hold that life is meant to be easy. Coddled, pampered, truckled to, a generation of Americans has been bred to believe that they should coast through life—and that any disparity between American society as it is and a gauzy, utopian ideal is evidence that society is corrupt. The principal threat to a highly developed society is not that overconsumption depletes its resources, but rather that insulation from the hardscrabble challenge of basic existence dulls its sense of reality and leaves it prey to the barbarians who are always at the gates. Where abundance comes easily, it becomes too easy to assume that security comes with comparable ease. “Street smarts,” jungle savvy, that edgy wariness that comes naturally to those whose precarious existence keeps them ever on the alert—these atrophy in the cushioned luxury of a life in which ease and deference are taken for granted.

Given the choice, most people would rather cruise the Caribbean
than drill with the militia. It thus becomes very tempting to consult our hopes rather than our fears, and to drape an optimistic view of human nature with the cloak of moral virtue. It becomes much easier, much more indulgent, to denounce as alarmists those who tell us we must prepare for the worst in order to preserve the best. It takes an effort of will to rouse ourselves from lethargy, to put aside the pursuit of pleasure, to defend our liberty. Laxity is the affliction of the comfortable, and this is why every past civilization that has achieved comfort has been destroyed by another less advanced. Our task is to make sure that this does not happen to us.

•  •  •

If the West loses World War III, it will have been because of an unwillingness to face reality. It will have been because of the compulsion to live in a dream world, to infuse the public dialogue with romantic fantasies and to imagine that cold steel can somehow be countered with simplistic moralisms.

The key thing to recognize about America's decline in will is that it has not been a failure of the people; it has been a failure of the leaders. Robert
Nisbet notes: “We appear to be living in yet another age in which ‘failure of nerve' is conspicuous; not in the minds of America's majority but in the minds of those who are gatekeepers for ideas, the intellectuals.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn has pointed to “a decline in courage” as the most striking feature of the West: “Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. . . . Should one point out,” he asks, “that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”

America is a sleeping giant. It is time to wake up that giant, to define his purpose, restore his strength, and revitalize his will. Nothing less will save the West and the institutions of freedom around the world from the merciless barbarism that threatens us all. As Solzhenitsyn has also argued, “no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of will power. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side.”

The war in Vietnam was not lost on the battlefields of Vietnam. It was lost in the halls of Congress, in the boardrooms of corporations, in the executive suites of foundations, and in the
editorial rooms of great newspapers and television networks. It was lost in the salons of Georgetown, the drawing rooms of the “beautiful people” in New York, and the classrooms of great universities. The class that provided the strong leadership that made victory possible in World War I and World War II failed America in one of the crucial battles of World War III—Vietnam.

They had their excuses. They said it was the wrong war in the wrong place (as if any war were ever the right war in the right place). They said Thieu was a corrupt dictator. They said that by aiding South Vietnam, we were only bringing death and destruction. They said South Vietnam was unimportant and not worth saving. Since then the flood of refugees from Vietnam and the tragic fate of the people of Cambodia have torn at the consciences of many. Now they have both an obligation and an opportunity to help restore the strength of America's leadership, and thus to ensure that such tragedies are not repeated on an even larger scale.

•  •  •

The greatest institutional change in America's leadership class has been the development of enormous new power in the hands of the media. But the failures of the leadership class go beyond the intellectual and media elite. The leaders of “big business” once were a bastion of support for American strength, just as they once were rigorously independent. Now, with some admirable exceptions, they have become timid, reluctant to roil bureaucratic waters or offend consumer spokesmen; as huge corporations have become huge bureaucracies, corporate leaders themselves have become bureaucratic. There are few big business leaders I would have put in the ring with a healthy Brezhnev. A George Meany or a Frank Fitzsimmons, however, would have held his own. When the chips were down, when America's future was on the line and I needed support for the really tough decisions, I seldom got it from the corporation chairmen or university presidents. I did get it from labor leaders, from smaller businessmen, from “middle America.” They had the strong heart, the solid will, the guts, that have saved America before and will save it again.

Now that the passions of Vietnam have subsided and the Russians are brazenly using the Red Army itself to absorb countries directly into their empire, there are stirrings among
the intellectual elite of a new awareness that the Soviet challenge is real. France, where the Left was so long ascendent in intellectual circles, is now producing some of the toughest and most realistic thinking in the West. I hope that this is a trend throughout the West and that those in America whose natural function is to lead will soon begin once again to lead in those directions that national survival requires.

America must come to grips with the realities of power. It must accept power, accept its existence, accept its exercise, and accept the ambiguities of result that are sometimes inherent in its use in a conflict-ridden, imperfect world. The time has passed when we could afford to temporize, to equivocate, to hesitate, when we could indulge the luxury of moralistic pettifogging as an excuse for keeping our feet out of the muddy waters. In today's world, purity is no excuse for pusillanimity. Every day lost in mounting our own strategic counteroffensive narrows an already perilously thin margin of safety.

Perhaps a nation that equates celebrity with wisdom, that looks to rock stars and movie actresses as its oracles, deserves to lose; and yet there is more to America than that. There is more backbone, more common sense, more determination—if only the public can be wakened to what the reality is. And make no mistake about it: If the American people do wake up one day to find themselves confronted with the stark choice between war and slavery, they are going to fight. They are going to fight with missiles, with airplanes, with ships, with tanks; they are going to fight, if need be, with sticks and stones and with their bare fingernails.

Americans have not known suffering on such a scale as the Russians have. But we have known it, and we have overcome it. The frontier was not a garden party. World Wars I and II were not Woodstocks. The immigrants who came to our shores in prewelfare days scrabbled for existence, and they grew strong in the process. We have not confronted suffering on the Soviet scale because we have not had to. But we have shown time and again that what we had to do, we could do, once we recognized the necessity for doing it.

If those who have never known the absence of freedom are slow to recognize how much it means to them, it is equally true that those who have never lived
in
freedom may underestimate
the strength of a free people's gut determination to preserve it. Faced suddenly with the prospect of its loss, they are going to discover its value. And this, in the final analysis, is what must give the Kremlin leaders pause.

Meanwhile, we must underscore that basic truth with actions that drive its meaning home. We must show the Kremlin that its drive for military supremacy is ultimately futile. We must recognize that what we are engaged in is a war, even if not in the conventional sense in which our history books have defined it. If this war is not to escalate to the level of an actual armed clash, we must fight it effectively on the nonmilitary level.

The crucial element in developing a strategy to win victory without war is willpower. Military power and economic power are necessary, but they are useless without willpower.

It has been said that where there is a will there is a way. As we have so often proved in the past, by summoning up our will we can find the way.

Presidents must have a will to power or they will not be successful presidents. They must constantly search for power, building it, if necessary, out of every scrap of formal authority and personal influence they can locate. They must constantly guard whatever power they have achieved. They must hoard power so that it will be available in the future.

—
James MacGregor Burns

When to pause, lower one's voice; when to thrust out one's jaw in defiance?

—
Hugh Sidey

When I first entered Congress more than thirty years ago Truman was in the White House, Stalin was in the Kremlin, MacArthur ruled Japan, and Europe lay in ruins. Since then I have watched nations advance and decline, and have seen leaders succeed and fail. America has been through seven presidencies. It has confronted many crises, fought two wars, and narrowly averted fighting others.

As I have watched the unfolding of world events over these years, it has become clear to me that the one factor most crucial to the strength and cohesion of the West, and to the chances for peace, is the leadership provided by the President of the United States.

The President has great power in wartime as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. But he also has enormous power
to prevent war and preserve peace. Having had both responsibilities, I know that the latter can be even more important than the former. It can also be more difficult to exercise effectively, especially in this era of a “war called peace.”

Americans prefer to conduct their peacetime contests in the international arena by Marquis of Queensberry rules. For the Soviet leaders, however, the same rules apply in peace as in war, and those are the rules of the street-fighter: anything goes. To meet their challenge, the American President must use all the power at his command in an effective and responsible way. “Responsible” here includes the specific responsibility that he alone bears for ensuring the nation's survival and the free world's future.

This requires that he think realistically, not naively; that he be a skilled diplomat; that he know when to go to the summit and when not to go, and what to do when he gets there; that he never give our adversaries something they want unless he gets from them something we want; that while respecting the principle of openness when feasible, he preserve secrecy when necessary; that he recognize that gathering intelligence and conducting covert activities are justified as much to prevent war as to wage it; and finally that he accept the reality that moral perfection in the conduct of nations cannot be expected and should not be demanded. A President needs a global view, a sense of proportion, and a keen sense of the possible. He needs to know how power operates, and he must have the will to use it.

The effective use of power, especially on the world scene, is a skill that only experience can teach. But we can learn from the experience of others. We can draw on the wisdom of others. In the heyday of the British Empire young Englishmen grew up with their eyes on the far corners of the earth. The British had a national tradition of ruling a vast empire from a small island; this is one reason they were so adroit at it. A global view came naturally, and so did a familiarity with the exercise of power and with the ways of the world. In the postwar world America has assumed global responsibilities; we must try to prepare our next generation to carry them. We must understand that while the President is chosen by Americans, that choice can determine the future of free people everywhere.

If I could carve ten rules into the walls of the Oval Office for my successors to follow in the dangerous years just ahead, they would be these:

1
 Always be prepared to negotiate, but never negotiate without being prepared.

2
 Never be belligerent, but always be firm.