Why aren't these people smiling?

National Review, Nov 4, 1991 by Arch Puddington

The genial Left has been aching for the end of the cold war-but not this way.

JOHN Kenneth Galbraith has summed up the differences between capitalism and Communism with the line that capitalism features the exploitation of man by man, while under Communism the situation is just the reverse. This bit of cleverness has usually been employed on behalf of Galbraith's theory that the Soviet and American economic models were exhibiting increasing signs of "convergence." But it was also meant to ridicule the cold war. Why, Galbraith seemed to suggest, should intelligent men waste their talents in an absurd conflict over competing economic systems, each with its obvious imperfections and inequities?

Is it churlish to remind the world of the infamous-or, in Galbraith's case, silly-opinions expressed by the democratic world's progressive intellectuals on the subject of Communism? Not really, given the role they will play in shaping the post-Communist foreign-policy debate. Galbraith, for example, having been wrong, wrong, and wrong again about the Soviet economy, is even today cautioning the Russians and others against putting too much faith in the market.

Galbraith's views were shared by most of America's liberal intellectuals and foreign-policy specialists, as well as those of a more leftward bent. Mainly the critics of the cold war were concerned with Washington, not Moscow. The cold war, they claimed, did not entail a commitment to the spread of freedom, but rather signified, in the words of Ronald Steel, "numerous interventions conducted in the tired vocabulary of anti-Communism, .. the sacrifice of ... unmet needs to an insatiable war machine, and . . . the deliberate deceit practiced by [America's] leaders."

Written in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Steel's words remind us that over the past twenty years victory over Communism did not figure prominently among the priorities of the intellectual elite. For in the ideal scenario, the final chapter of the superpower conflict was not to have brought unilateral Soviet surrender, but rather some sort of mutual accommodation which would leave both systems more or less intact. Thus where once it was smugly proclaimed that Mikhail Gorbachev's reform course had deprived Western anti-Communists of their life's passion, it now seems that those encountering the most difficult adjustment to the cold war's winding down may be those who opposed the cold war all along.

The refrain of the late socialist leader Michael Harrington was: "We are not naive about the Soviet Union." In fact, a measure of willful naivete was necessary if one was actively to promote a policy of American global disengagement. For it was well understood that public support for detente would be forthcoming only if the Soviet Union was perceived as less brutal and less imperialistic than was actually the case. The Soviet leadership proved the biggest obstacle to this effort. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's pronouncement that Presidents Carter and Brezhnev had "similar dreams and aspirations" was

repeatedly mocked by reports of poets being packed off to mental hospitals, the production of more and more accurate missiles, or the presence of Soviet tanks and advisors in some wretched Third World country.

The real crime of the apostles of disengagement was the unwillingness to engage in a reassessment of their world view in the light of Soviet rigidity, Communist global gains, and the retreat of democracy in the immediate post-Vietnam era. Indeed, Communist triumph provoked ever more tortured alibis for the Kremlin's internal totalitarianism and global aggression.

We were told that the sole purpose of Brezhnev's military buildup was to achieve parity with the U.S., an objective that was justified because Russia had so often been the victim of foreign invasion. In expanding its influence in the less developed countries, the USSR, it was said, was only doing what the U.S. had done in the past; as George Kennan observed, it was absurd to think that the Soviets could ignore the pleas of fraternal socialist regimes given their position as leader of the world Communist movement.

By the time the Red Army had rolled into Kabul and the Sandinistas had declared America the "enemy of mankind," a revised line of reasoning had to be elaborated. A few complained that the hostile U.S. stance was denying the USSR the world stature which was its right. Stephen F. Cohen, for example, drummed home the notion of a "parity principle" by which he meant a co-equal role for the Soviets in settling political problems all over the globe. Incredibly, there were those who contended that a policy of restraint was needed given the Kremlin's awesome military might and the prospect that conflict in some Third World outpost might escalate to full-scale atomic war-a policy, in other words, of flat-out appeasement.

High-Wire Act

HERE INDEED was a dizzying high-wire act. For it mattered hardly at all whether the advocates of disengagement saw the Soviet Union as ideologically relaxed and uninterested in expanding the empire, or as an increasingly unpredictable military juggernaut. The advice to the American government was always the same: Don't overreact.