Power & Policy
Grave New World.
by Michael Ledeen.
Oxford. 256 pp. $17.95.
“The U.S. is short of breath. You can always wait them out.” This comment was made by Syrian foreign minister Abdul-Halim Khaddam in February 1984, and it proved painfully prophetic. The Lebanon crisis offered one more example of muddled American policy aims and the halfhearted use of military power.
Of course, foreign-policy headaches are not an exclusive American preserve; lately the Soviets have had some distinct problems of their own. The campaign against the installation of Cruise and Pershing-2 missiles in Europe was crude even by Soviet standards, and the attempt to kill the Pope bore all the marks of panic. A sense of impatience and frustration suffuses Soviet actions, a feeling which has been heightened by the longstanding leadership problems.
This sense of superpower drift has encouraged smaller players on the world stage, such as Libya and Cuba, to take a more independent role, thereby increasing the risk that the great powers will be drawn into conflict by accident. And these are the underlying themes of Grave New World by Michael Ledeen, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, an adviser to former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and a frequent contributor to COMMENTARY. In this book Ledeen examines the historical and structural causes of the present superpower quandaries and goes on to suggest some possible areas of improvement for Western policy.
According to Ledeen, the Soviet Union is at the moment experiencing severe internal strain, the result of decades of economic mismanagement. As many Soviet economists realize, the only real answer lies in decentralization and new incentives. The trouble here is that this will invariably weaken the power of the ruling elite; the fate of Nikita Khrushchev was an object lesson to Soviet leaders in the risks involved in modernization. With domestic reform severely constrained, Soviet leaders have naturally looked to foreign policy to justify their rule. As the late Leonid Brezhnev put it: “Foreign policy is our most important domestic problem.” Unfortunately for the rest of the world, foreign policy is the one area in which the Soviet Union as a centralized state enjoys certain advantages.
But an important new factor has entered Soviet deliberations: time. Confident of eventual triumph, the Soviet leadership has traditionally acted as if time were of minor consequence. If objectives were not achieved in the first round, there would always be a second. Discredited as the Soviet model has become around the world, this may no longer be the case. Moreover, the Soviets now have the Reagan rearmament program to contend with. The awareness that long-term trends are running against them, writes Ledeen, might tempt the Soviets to try to translate their military advantages into quick political gains. He warns that the standard and somewhat comforting image of the Soviet leadership as a group of conservative and extremely cautious operators may now be less accurate than ever. A new generation in particular, such as is represented by Mikhail Gorbachev, may feel the need to flaunt Soviet power on the international scene.
A sensible Western counter-strategy would naturally seek to limit access to Western technology and credits, thereby forcing the Soviets to effect internal changes and to drain away funds from the military. Under such a strategy the West would also continue a steady military build-up and engage in a more active campaign to enable Third World guerrilla movements to fight Soviet/Cuban oppression—that is, give the Russians a dose of their own medicine. But if these measures seem logical, the test lies in the ability to implement them. Ledeen spends the bulk of his book discussing the circumstances that make it difficult for the United States to respond effectively to the Soviet challenge.
Historically, the U.S. has enjoyed the advantage of a fortunate geographical position, protected by two oceans. Whereas most other nations have had to rely on military power and political cunning for their survival, the U.S. has been able to entertain the illusion that foreign policy was a matter of morals and good intentions. Even in the nuclear age these notions have persisted. Americans have continued to treat foreign policy as a rather episodic and unconnected affair, and their active efforts have most often assumed the character of fire-fighting.
These natural isolationist tendencies were reinforced by the Vietnam experience, where they took on a new twist. Traditional isolationists had held that the U.S. was too good to get involved in the affairs of others; after Vietnam, many saw the United States as itself the cause of world problems, a rogue elephant that had to be restrained. The use of force to achieve diplomatic objectives came to be considered immoral. In the Carter administration, Ledeen notes, an alliance was struck among naive moralists, holier-than-thou types (personified by the President), and the New Left, with disastrous results for American interests in the world.
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The handling of the Iranian crisis offers a classic case study in the interaction between abstract moralism and historical ignorance. Finding the Shah's rule distasteful and (thanks to cuts in the CIA) not knowing much about the rival forces, the Carter administration hesitated when the regime came under attack. Instead of expressing immediate support for the Shah, as urged by National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the State Department engaged in a desperate search for people of the proper democratic stripe; for a while it even dabbled with thoughts of creating a constitutional monarchy in the British or Swedish (!) style. Brzezinski's later recommendation, that the army be given the go-ahead for a takeover to restore law and order and then cautiously be encouraged to make improvements, was equally ignored. When Carter finally decided to follow Brzezinski's advice, it was too late: the army leadership had disintegrated, executions had begun on a scale surpassing anything Iran had experienced under the Shah, and the West had lost one of its most important allies in the region.
The Iranian crisis teaches us the futility of searching for some magic middle in a civil war where, by definition, the moderate Center has ceased to exist. By refusing to choose between unpleasant alternatives, by only going for the ideal, Ledeen warns, one may end up losing even the merely tolerable. The national interest occasionally dictates that the U.S. work together with repressive rulers. But the crucial point is that it is possible to influence the behavior of Western-oriented, authoritarian regimes—Ledeen singles out the recent history of Spain as an example of the kind of evolutionary change the U.S. should seek to encourage—while no such opportunities exist once a country has fallen prey to chaos and Communism.
As Ledeen shrewdly concludes, a foreign policy based primarily on abstract moral principles is often pursued at the cost of those very principles. The cause of freedom is better served by pursuing more limited, sharply defined, and concrete goals.
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But foreign-policy fiascos are not to be blamed on the politicians alone. Much of the responsibility rests with educational institutions, with the intellectuals, and especially with the media, three forces that help set the national agenda and thereby decide what is important and what is not.
Ledeen takes note of studies showing the unrepresentative nature of the media elite—81 percent of the nation's leading journalists voted for George McGovern in 1972—and shows that they have an instinctively critical if not hostile attitude toward American policies and purposes. As examples of press failure Ledeen cites the conspiracy of silence among Western correspondents stationed in China during the Cultural Revolution and the reports of Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh that the South Vietnamese inmates in Hanoi's “reeducation camps” rather enjoyed their lot, this at a time when thousands of boat people were perishing at sea.
Most striking is the way the U.S. media covered the plot to kill the Pope in 1981. Although by normal journalistic criteria this should have been the story of the year, the media first stubbornly denied, then downplayed the implications of Soviet involvement in the plot. As late as 1983 the Washington Post dismissed allegations of KGB involvement, while Flora Lewis of the New York Times, acknowledging the facts, warned her readers not to become too exercised over them lest St. Peter's Square become a new Sarajevo. Typical was the Times editorial exonerating former KGB chief Yuri Andropov of personal involvement by suggesting that “his people became mired in a sleazy conspiracy on imagined authority, a likelihood Americans should be the first to understand.” Here the customary American self-lashing is combined with a rather touching ignorance of how the Soviets operate: as Ledeen rightly notes, authorization for a deed of this magnitude would have to have come from the Politburo, which meant Brezhnev, Andropov, et al.
As Ledeen sums it up, the effect of media suppression is to deprive the public of a necessary debate over foreign policy and to leave Americans with a totally distorted view of the evils of the world. If foreign policy is to improve, media responsibilities will have to be clarified. In addition, Ledeen proposes a number of concrete practical steps to be taken by government, such as greater accountability in the bureaucracy and a greater reliance on the common pool of expertise available in the West. As part of the general education effort, he recommends that the President use the “bully pulpit” of his office to explain his policies fully, frankly, and consistently, and that this be done in an extended campaign rather than as one-shot media events.
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Above all, in Ledeen's view, a major effort should be made to restore bipartisanship to foreign policy. American national interests remain the same no matter who happens to be at the helm, yet as experience in Vietnam and now in Central America shows, partisan division between Congress and the President gives enemies of the United States a chance to win in Washington what they could not achieve on the battlefield. Ledeen does not challenge the legitimacy of congressional oversight of foreign policy; what he objects to is the attempt to exercise day-to-day control over the conduct of international affairs. The constant policy reviews and the threats to cut off aid only invite violence, and put off even further the prospect of fulfilling any agreed-upon goal. Besides, only the naive can believe that fully-fledged democracies can emerge overnight.
Finally, as Ledeen reminds us, without firm and consistent policies the West will deprive itself of the possibility of influencing or forestalling events. Forced merely to react, we will only be able to improvise from day to day, blundering from one crisis to the next. Such a fate can be averted; but unless we take the necessary steps, it will become the fate we deserve.
