Real War (47 page)

In 1839 the Marquis de Custine visited Russia and noted: “One word of truth hurled into Russia is like a spark landing in a keg of powder.” Today, the fact that the Soviet system lives on lies makes it extremely vulnerable to the truth. Truth can penetrate borders. Truth can travel on its own power, wherever people and ideas of East and West meet. Russia has heavy censorship, but its people are starved for the truth. Sending the West's message through every totalitarian barrier—whether by exchange of visitors, or books, or broadcasts—will give hope to millions behind those barriers, and will gradually eat away at the foundations of the Soviet system just as seeping water can erode the foundation of a prison.

We should not shrink from the propaganda war, either within the Soviet empire or in the rest of the world. We should revitalize Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, and set up counterparts of them that can compete directly with Soviet propaganda in those areas of the Third World the Soviets have targeted for aggression.

Khrushchev often challenged the West to competition with communism. In 1958, in an address I made to the English-Speaking Union of the Commonwealth at Guildhall in London, I urged that the West both accept the challenge and broaden it. I said then:

We say—broaden this competition and include the spiritual and cultural values that have distinguished our civilization. . . .

Man needs the higher freedoms, freedom to know, to debate freely, to write and express his views.

He needs the freedom that law and justice guarantee to every individual. . . .

He wants the freedom to travel and learn from other peoples and cultures.

He wants freedom of worship.

To us, these are the most precious aspects of our civilization. We would be happy if others were to compete in this sphere and try to surpass our achievements.

Whether or not the Soviets choose to compete in these areas, we should compete with all the vigor at our command. Let the idea of liberty hammer at the barricades, reach through the bars of the prisons, take tyranny by the throat and shake it. The Soviets need contact with the West. They need our technology and our trade. They cannot keep out our radio broadcasts. They cannot seal themselves off totally from the world. When they crack open the door to reach out for what they want, we should push through it as much truth as we can. And in those parts of the world where their police power does not reach—in the target areas, where the immediate battles of World War III are being waged—we can wield truth as a sword.

Marx dismissed religion as the opiate of the masses. Today's Kremlin leaders are finding it an unbreakable rock. Pope John Paul II's triumphal return to Poland forced the Soviets to chew hard on Stalin's words in the 1930s, when he contemptuously asked, How many divisions has the Pope? The Pope does not have armored divisions, but the forces he has cannot be crushed by Soviet tanks. The emotions he has unleashed reach
to the core of the human spirit; religious faith is a force often underestimated by those who do not understand it.

In the final analysis victory will go to the side that most effectively builds, maintains, concerts, and uses its power—not just its military power, but all of its strengths combined.

The road to victory is circuitous. Like a mountain trail, it sometimes doubles back before going on. Like a mountain trail, it requires patience and perseverance to traverse. The one who tires and drops by the wayside does not attain victory.

Power is the ability to make things happen, to influence events, to set the course of history. Some kinds of power operate effectively in the short term; some only over the course of many generations.

Traditionally, the Chinese think in terms of millennia, the Russians in terms of centuries, the Europeans in terms of generations, and we Americans in terms of decades. We must learn to take a longer view. Then we will be more likely to take the actions in the short term that are necessary to achieve the results we want in the long term. Then we will recognize that victory, if it comes, will come incrementally, and therefore that each front in World War III is important, that each battle is important, that all of them will combine to bring us either defeat or victory.

•  •  •

Woodrow Wilson spoke of making the world safe for democracy. Our task today is to make the world safe for liberty.

Democracy is political, a system devised by human reason. Liberty is personal, a striving of the human spirit. Democracy is a particular form of government, which evolved out of the parliamentary traditions of Western Europe, which was brought here to North America by the European settlers and then developed as our country grew. Liberty is a human condition.

Liberty can survive and even flourish in other systems besides democracies. In this country, thanks to centuries of political evolution, we are fortunate enough to have liberty and democracy. We should not make the mistake of attempting to impose instant democracy on nations not ready for it, and in the process pave the way for the destruction of such liberties as they have.

Making the world safe for liberty, then, does not mean
establishing democracy everywhere on earth. It does mean making liberty secure where it exists: secure against overt aggression, and also against externally supported subversion. If we make liberty secure where it exists, then by the force of its example liberty will become the wave of the future.

To the extent that the United States prevails, the world will be safe for free nations. To the extent that the Soviet Union prevails, the world will be unsafe for free nations. Soviet-style tyranny survives by expanding. Liberty will expand by surviving. But to expand, it must first survive.

De Gaulle once said of France, a great nation is never its true self unless engaged in a great enterprise. Ensuring the survival and ultimate triumph of human liberty is the greatest enterprise to which a nation can be summoned.

•  •  •

Victory without war requires that we resolve to use our strength in ways short of war. There is today a vast gray area between peace and war, and the struggle will be largely decided in that area. If we expect to win without war, or even not to lose without war, then we must engage the adversary within that area. We need not duplicate his methods, but we must counter them—even if that means behaving in ways other than we would choose to in an ideal world.

The uses of power cannot be divorced from the purposes of power. The old argument over whether “the end justifies the means” is meaningless in the abstract; it has meaning only in concrete terms of whether a particular end justifies a particular means. The true test of idealism comes in its results. Some ends of transcendent moral value do justify some means that would not be justified in other circumstances.

Preserving liberty is a moral goal, defeating aggression is a moral goal, avoiding war is a moral goal, establishing conditions that can maintain peace with freedom through our children's generation is a moral goal. Failure to take whatever means are needed to keep liberty alive would be an act of moral abdication.

Victory does not mean being “the world's policeman.” It does mean establishing, very explicitly, that we regard the frontiers of Soviet advance as the frontiers of our own defense, and that we will respond accordingly. And it does require a firm,
unflagging faith, as Lincoln would put it, that we are on God's side, that our cause is right, that we act for all mankind.

It may seem melodramatic to treat the twin poles of human experience represented by the United States and the Soviet Union as the equivalent of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, God and the Devil; yet if we allow ourselves to think of them that way, even hypothetically, it can help clarify our perspective on the world struggle. As the British writer
Malcolm Muggeridge has pointed out, “Good and evil . . . provide the theme of the drama of our mortal existence. In this sense, they may be compared with the positive and negative points which generate an electric current; transpose the points and the current fails, the lights go out, darkness falls and all is confusion.”

The United States represents hope, freedom, security, and peace. The Soviet Union stands for fear, tyranny, aggression, and war. If these are not poles of good and evil in human affairs, then the concepts of good and evil have no meaning. Those who cannot see the distinction have little claim to lecture us on conscience. It is precisely because so many have “transposed the points” that the light of reason has dimmed and a dangerous confusion has spread. Ending that confusion is the first step toward seeing the path to victory.

America recently celebrated the tenth anniversary of man's first walk on the moon. That adventure captured the human imagination as few events in history have, but the venture that now beckons is in its own way greater still. In traveling to the moon, man stepped into the heavens. In meeting this great challenge here on earth, we can make the world safe for liberty and thus achieve what for centuries philosophers have set as mankind's goal.

Space caught man's imagination less for its technical wizardry than for its mystery. And yet it was not mystery that took us there. It was the genius, vision, courage, perseverance, and the dogged hard work of thousands of human beings joined in a common enterprise.

The obstacles confronting us in our present enterprise are no less formidable—and like our venture into space, this too is achievable.

This is a struggle of titans, the like of which the world has never seen. We cannot prevail by the short-term expedient of
declaring a sudden emergency, and creating the illusion that the challenge can be dealt with quickly and then put behind us. The challenge we face will not end in a year, or a decade; to meet it we have to prepare ourselves for a sustained level of will and fortitude. Victory in this struggle will come through perseverance, by never giving up, by coming back again and again when things are tough. It will come through the kind of leadership that in one crisis after another raises the sights of the American people from the mundane to the transcendent, from the immediate to the enduring.

If we determine to win, if we resolve to accept no substitute for victory, then victory becomes possible. Then the spirit gives edge to the sword, the sword preserves the spirit, and freedom will prevail.

William Manchester
,
American Caesar
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978), p. 182.

Walter Lippmann
,
The Public Philosophy
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1955), p. 4.

“An Interview with Teng Hsiao-p'ing [Deng Xiao-ping],”
Time,
February 5, 1979, p. 34.

Brian Crozier,
Strategy of Survival
(New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1978), p. 9.

“This war is not as in the past..”
: see Michael B. Petrovich, trans.,
Conversations with Stalin
by Milovan Djilas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962), p. 114.

“the capability to control. . . . ”
: see Charles M. Kupperman, “The Soviet World View,”
Policy Review,
Winter 1979, p. 45.

Francis X. Maier
, “The Jonas Savimbi Interview,”
The American Spectator,
January 1980, p. 8.

“Dangling from the trees. . . . ”
: see Uwe Siemon-Netto, remarks to an Accuracy in Media banquet,
The AIM Report,
November 1979, p. 2.

B. H. Liddell Hart
,
Strategy,
2nd ed. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), p. 164.

Refugee quote from
Los Angeles Times,
July 11, 1979, Part 1, p. 13.

Iving Kristol
, “Foreign Policy: End of an Era,”
Wall Street Journal,
January 18, 1979.

Henry Reeve
, trans., Henry Steele Commager, ed.,
Democracy in America
by Alexis de Tocqueville, Book I, Chap. XIX (London: Oxford University Press.)

The nineteenth-century writer quoted is Tibor Szamuely
,
The Russian Tradition
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1974), p. 25.

The description of the Novgorod attack taken from Szamuely
,
The Russian Tradition,
p. 33.

“virtually a Soviet colony”
: see Harry Schwartz,
Tsars, Mandarins, and Commissars
(Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott and Company, 1964) p. 118.

“long-mute Russia”
: see Bertram D. Wolfe,
Three Who Made a Revolution,
4th ed. (New York: Dell Publishing, 1978), pp. 17, 24.

Robert Conquest
, “The Human Cost of Soviet Communism” (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, Document 92-36, July 16, 1971), p. 23.

The statistics on deaths in the forced-labor camps and during the famine taken from Harris L. Coulter and Nataly Martin, trans.,
Warning to the West
by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Alexis Klimoff, ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976), p. 19; and Thomas P. Whitney, trans.,
The Gulag Archipelago,
Vols. I and II, by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 432-435 and 438-439.

The quote from Molotov is from Victor Kravchenko
, I
Chose Freedom
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946), p. 87.

Winston Churchill
,
The Unknown War
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931), pp. 1-2.

“An inordinate . . ambition . . . ”
: see Phyllis Penn Kohler, trans. and ed.,
Journey for Our Time
by Marquis de Custine (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1951), p. 363.

“The Russian people will . . . ”
: see Szamuely,
The Russian Tradition,
p. 133.

Zbigniew Brzezinski
,
Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), p. 132.