We have carried a two-part article by Mr. Richard Nixon in order to draw attention to certain aspects of US foreign policy. Understandably, the former US president has dealt with specific issues and not with the basic difficulties American policy-makers have encountered in the pursuit of their central objective of containing the Soviet Union and the oscillations which these difficulties have produced in the conduct of American policy. This is a lacuna in Mr. Nixon’s presentation which interested readers would not miss. It is not possible to go into details here. But certain broad points may be made with a view to focusing attention on the central dilemma American policy-makers have faced in dealing with the Soviet Union.
Their task was relatively simple up to the death of Stalin in March 1953 despite the Berlin blockade which he had imposed for a variety of reasons. For, Stalin himself was interested above all in consolidating Soviet power in its sphere of influence which, in 1949, came to include China as well. The challenge which the US has not been able to dispose of began in 1955 when President Nasser sought, and the Soviet leadership agreed to provide, arms. For this marked the Soviet Union’s arrival in the third world. The Americans have since tried to limit, if not exclude, the Soviet presence in the third world. And they have failed, the Nixon-Kissinger team not being an exception. This has been an unavoidable outcome and could have been easily anticipated. The third world is turbulent; it is full of conflicts of all kinds, as such, it provides endless opportunities to a great power like the Soviet Union.
It is open to question whether the Soviets would have cooperated with the Americans in establishing a reasonably stable world order if the latter had been prepared to concede them an equal status. Ideological and other issues would almost certainly have intruded to complicate the effort. But the fact remains that the Americans have not been willing to concede equality to the Soviets. As it has happened, the Soviet economy has been too weak to enable it to serve as the nucleus of a rival world-wide grouping. At the best of times, in the late fifties and the sixties, Moscow limited its economic assistance to a few select countries. This constraint has cast it more in the role of a spoiler of the western effort to build a world order of some kind than of a rival power centre.
Most Americans have not seen their central dilemma in these terms. Their debate has centred on different formulations. Is the Soviet Union an expansionist power? Is this expansionism motivated by ideological or by normal power considerations? Can US military superiority help contain it? And so on. But the Soviet Union has not been and is not a nucleus for an alternative world order. The Nixon-Kissinger theory of linkages – economic rewards for political and military restraint – was as inadequate for coping with the Soviet Union as a spoiler power as has been the military build-up, first under President Truman, then President Kennedy and now President Reagan. The Soviet Union seized the opportunity in Angola when the policy of detente, as formulated by Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger, was still on.
The Reagan administration has, of course, made a major departure. While all previous US administrations since World War II had believed that it would be possible to reduce the turbulence in the third world to manageable proportions with the help of bilateral and multilateral aid on a substantial scale, the present set-up wants all countries to rely on commercial credits. It does so in utter disregard of the fact that most of the poor countries cannot afford the much costlier commercial credit, that this may not even be available to many of them, that all third-world countries need to make large investments in the infrastructure, and that these investments cannot possibly produce quick returns. In plain terms, the Reagan administration has decided to drop the economic underpinnings of the containment policy. The consequences can easily be predicted, especially in the context of recession in the industrialized West and the resulting shrinkage of markets. Turbulence in the third world is going to increase in a big way and with it the opportunities for the Soviet Union as a spoiler power. Apparently, this problem does not preoccupy Mr. Nixon. But this has been one of the central issues in the first cold war and it will not go away during the second, which has now begun.