The statement Mr. Podgorny made in Calcutta last Sunday on his way back to Moscow from Hanoi can leave no room for doubt that the present Soviet leadership will not deviate from the policy of détente with the United States whatever happens in Viet Nam. No amount of propaganda by interested persons and groups in India or elsewhere can obscure this basic fact of international life today.
Those who doubt the accuracy of this assessment and do not trust what has appeared in respectable American newspapers and journals since Mr. Nixon’s visit to Moscow last month, will do well to read the authoritative article “Principled and Consistent” in the May 4 issue of New Times, Moscow, by Mr. Vadim Zagladin, deputy chief of the foreign affairs department of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party.
The article proclaims proudly, almost arrogantly, that “Soviet foreign policy is a truly national policy determined by the fundamental interests of the working people of our country”. It defines these interests in wholly conventional terms – peace for the country, peaceful conditions for its development, national security and “inviolability of all that the Soviet people have created by their heroic labours”.
Ritual
Mr. Zagladin doubtless makes a ritualistic reference to the internationalist duty of the Soviet people, but is quick to make two qualifications. First, the task of building communism in the Soviet Union itself takes precedence, as it did under Stalin, over the duty to render “effective support to revolutionary forces” in other countries, and this obligation does not abrogate or compromise the principle of peaceful co-existence. Secondly, it is wrong for anyone to suggest that “in reply to one or another ‘tough’ action by imperialism, the socialist countries and primarily the Soviet Union should likewise harden their position” because “socialist policy never derived its strength from primitive, stereotyped patterns and least of all from imitation of devices and methods employed by the class enemy”.
As if all this is not a clear enough hint that the Soviet leadership would urge Hanoi to adopt a more flexible approach to the United States, he goes on to add: “Only a proper combination of diverse methods of struggle – military; political and diplomatic – has enabled the heroic people of Viet Nam and their leadership to achieve the signal success in their liberation struggle which we are now witnessing.”
The nationalistic reasons, political and economic, which have persuaded the Kremlin to acquiesce in the wholly illegal American action of mining North Viet Namese ports and in what has rightly been described as the most savage bombardment of ….. …. of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been discussed at length in these columns. But behind them lie basic changes in the international environment which have hardly received any attention at all.
These changes have been obscured by a variety of factors – the failure of the United States to win the war in Viet Nam, the divisions this ghastly and senseless involvement has provoked in American society, the neo-isolationist trend in that country, Soviet naval expansion, the continuing turmoil in the Arab world as a result of its refusal to come to terms with the reality of Israel’s military and technological superiority, and Moscow’s willingness to pour military and economic aid into these countries with a view to undermining the West’s position in this oil-rich region and increasing its own influence there. As such it is understandable that busy men concerned with day-to-day developments have either missed them or failed to grasp their importance. But after the Peking and Moscow summits there can be no justification for ignoring them.
Fundamental
In the perspective of history, three developments of fundamental importance have taken place since the early ‘fifties when Mr. Nehru fashioned the policy of non-alignment with its emphasis on opposition to imperialism, especially to that of the US variety, Afro-Asian cooperation and growing understanding with the communist group of nations.
First, communist countries have failed to solve the problem of equitable relations among themselves. This observation refers not only to the Sino-Soviet split but also to tensions within the Warsaw Pact and the Comecon. The situation is so confused that the Soviet Union itself does not know whether and to what extent it should respect the sovereign right of other socialist countries to shape their economic and foreign policies. Also, these countries have achieved only a limited success in coping with the challenge of the technological revolution, so much that most of them are seeking access to the capital, technical knowhow and markets of the United States, its West European allies and Japan in order to modernise their economies.
Secondly, having achieved political freedom, most Afro-Asian countries have failed to evolve stable political systems, master their economic problems, reduce their dependence on Western aid, promote co-operation among themselves and settle mutual conflicts through peaceful negotiations without invoking external support and interference. The situation, of course, differs from region to region. A number of Asian countries have, for instance, not accepted the status of economic colonies as a majority of African nations have done. But the former, too, have not as a rule been able to do without Western aid and investment.
Finally, the capitalist West and Japan have achieved undreamt of levels of prosperity on the strength of the phenomenal growth of technology in the post-war period, avoided depression and demonstrated that they are no longer critically dependent on the markets and raw materials of developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. As for the last point, the reverse has, in fact, been true with the result that the terms of trade have steadily worsened for the producers of primary commodities in the last few decades.
None of these developments is new. The inability of socialist countries to establish a socialist commonwealth was, for example, evident at the time of President Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948 and it was confirmed by the rise of ideological differences between the Soviet Union and China in 1956. Similarly, the hollowness of the concept of Afro-Asian-unity was dramatically exposed by China’s decision to question the validity of the Indian borders in 1959 leading to the border war in 1962. The essential strength and resilience of the capitalist system was already beyond dispute in the mid-fifties. But somehow throughout the ‘sixties the belief persisted that these were temporary phenomena. The Peking and Moscow summits in the shadow of the American bombing raids on North Viet Nam have destroyed the credibility of this view. It can no longer be disputed that the world has entered a new era on the basis of new power equations.
However, distrustful one may find Mr. I. F. Stone’s conclusions as stated in his article “The New Shape of Nixon’s World” in The New York Review of Books (No. 12, 1972) one cannot disregard them. His contention that America’s primacy as the world’s number one military and economic power has been established by Mr. Nixon’s gamble over Viet Nam and Moscow’s and Peking’s acquiescence in it, that the world may be bipolar but it is not symmetrical because the United States remains overwhelmingly superior to the Soviet Union in economic and conventional air and naval power, that Washington has established and Moscow has accepted, a link between Russia’s political behaviour and American credits and these imbalances are not likely to be corrected in the foreseeable future in view of Russia’s poor economic performance on the one hand and America’s substantial technological lead in the nuclear field as illustrated by the MTRV on the other.
It is impossible for anyone at this stage to sketch out the likely course of developments in the ’seventies and beyond. There are too many question marks to permit that. But it is obvious that the Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist and Nehruvian views of the world have been invalidated by cents and that this makes it obligatory for Moscow, Peking and New Delhi to review and revise their policies.
This observation is not make in any spirit of denigration. None of the leaders in question could in fairness to them have been expected to anticipate the consequence of the technological revolution, the weakness of centralised planning and the willingness of the managers of the capitalist system in different countries to accept a certain measure of planning, state direction and control.
All the same the fact remains that the world in the early seventies has turned out to be very different from what most of us thought it would be and we cannot cope with it unless we first grasp the new realities. As Mr. Nehru said in a different context, we cannot afford to live in a world of make believe divorced from realities.
The Times of India, 21 June 1972