Can the West Regain the Initiative?

IF THE Russians, by launching the Sputniks, testing intercontinental missiles, and pushing the Middle East to the brink of war, have shocked the Western allies out of their recent trance-like condition, they will have made the disastrous events of 1957 a turning point for the saner policies in the Free World. For some years, we have had neither Western unity nor Western policy. The partners have disarmed themselves, fallen into economic stagnation, quarreled with one another, and lost sight of any larger objective. If, from this combination of complacency and inefficiency, the Russians have pried us loose, Sputnik may after all prove a benevolent satellite.

But the question remains: Toward what ends should a revived sense of Western purpose be directed? There are, after all, two choices. One is to do what we say we have been doing but in fact have failed to do: to make real again a policy of effective containment. Its steps are to reverse Atlantic disarmament, to pull level in the missile race, to strengthen with more aid and arms the anti-Communist forces round the world, and to make a new effort to woo neutral opinion, particularly in countries such as India and Egypt, where economic pressures are acute and growing worse. Such consistent and powerful containment, though expensive, would undoubtedly be better than the phony cut-rate containment we have been trying to practice. But its limitation is that it gives no wider perspective to Western diplomacy than that of countering Communism. This leaves the initiative where it lay through most of 1957 — in the Russians’ hands. Moreover, it rivets Western attention to the aims and practices of Communism, whereas it is highly arguable that Communism today is a symptom of our real problems and not their first cause.

Communism alone cannot be blamed for the economic stagnation and currency troubles within the Atlantic community. Communism is only one factor in Eastern Europe’s restiveness under Russian imperial control. A greater danger lies in some new explosion of outraged local nationalism — in East Germany, in Poland. In the Middle East, the real danger is the manipulation by Russia of local national ambitions in such a way that they, too, may explode into war between local blocs, each backed by a rival great power.

And in the Middle East as in Asia, poverty and frustration lend an extra edge to the clash of nationalist rivalries. Communism does not account for Egypt’s declining standards, as the birth rate increases and irrigation does not. In Java and in the Indian state of Kerala, recent Communist electoral victories followed and did not cause the unemployment, the pressure on resources, the frustrated literacy which reach their Asian peak in these two underdeveloped areas.

THE LAWLESSNESS OF FORCE

The real dangers are deeper, older, and more widespread than Communism, the first and worst among them being the world’s total anarchy of national sovereignty. Every nation claims in the end to be judge in its own cause and to keep its own armed force as final arbiter. Whether it is Russia clamping down its control on Germans, Poles, and Hungarians, or China suppressing Tibetan resistance, or Egypt struggling for Middle Eastern leadership against Iraq, or Syria accepting Soviet arms presumably to fight Israel, or India rejecting all compromise over Kashmir—the root cause is the same: the lawless claim that force decides the final issues. Nor are the Western powers themselves out of the jungle. In spite of their decencies and inhibitions, the British were ready with force over Suez, and America’s methods were not very different in Guatemala.

Moreover, the anarchy is becoming steadily more dangerous. This is not only because annihilation lies within the range of modern weapons. The revived divisions of the Cold War increase the risk that these weapons be used. Politically, no more certain recipe for war exists than the grouping of small powers into hostile blocs, each under the patronage of a rival great power. Today the fatal pattern is being repeated which turned the Balkans into a cockpit for five decades and ended in World War I. At the same time, nothing makes local nationalist rivalry grow more steadily toward flash point than the deterioration of economic standards and the failure of hope. That condition, too, is present in the Middle East and Asia. Thus while the Western powers talk of Communism, what they have on their hands is something much more dire — it is the classical recipe for growing turbulence and final war.

ALTERNATIVE TO WAR

It is for this reason that the Western powers should be prepared, in the face of recurring crises in the Middle East and Europe, to reconsider their policies. No doubt they can once again make containment effective. Rocket for rocket, they can catch up with the Russians. But speeding up the arms race will not end the tension. Is there an alternative, an alternative, that is to say, which does not entail the appeasement of Russian imperialis?

In theory, there is an answer, and one to which most of us give a rational assent — together with the proviso that it is, of course, perfectly impracticable. The alternative is to achieve in the international community the conditions which alone spare us from killing and being killed inside domestic society. There, we give up the right to private violence and accept peaceful methods for settling disputes. We accept a police force and a system of justice and arbitration. Also, by a more recent insight, we try to prevent the economicpressures and despairs of society from envenoming disputes to the point where violence is their natural denouement. Welfare is seen to be the prop of justice. No society has ever evolved any other way of achieving civil peace.

This is the rational solution. But the immediate question is whether, in the present crises of arming and counterarming, of rockets poised in threat and nations brought to the brink of war at shorter and shorter intervals, the alternative of international control and pacification has any practical value.

Here the test must lie where the present risk is greatest — in the Middle East. Different elements of an international settlement have been proposed, discussed, and even partially practiced in the last ten years, but they have not been incorporated in a coherent policy, and they have never achieved the assent of all the powers concerned. An international guarantee of Middle Eastern frontiers was foreshadowed in the 1950 agreement between France, Britain, and America to stabilize Israel’s boundaries. America’s failure early in 1956 to reaffirm this pledge was one element in the tragedy of Suez. But it has been partially redeemed by the Eisenhower Doctrine, which guarantees the local states of the area against one form of disorder — an attack from Russia. One can say, therefore, that an international guarantee is not a totally new departure.

Nor are the sanctions needed to secure it. The Middle East is already the scene of experiments in the international policing of troubled frontiers. The UN observers supervising Israel’s frontiers, the Emergency Force dispatched after the Suez crisis, the immediate UN cognizance of danger on the Turkish-Syrian border are all precedents for an orderly long-term international policing system throughout the area designed to underpin the general guarantee of good order. Such a system would, however, run into impossibly heavy weather if the Middle Eastern states continued their efforts to pile up armaments. So far, the Russian suggestion of an agreed limit to the flow of arms has been dismissed as a subterfuge aimed at dismantling the defenses of the pro-Western nations in the area. But as one element in a genuine policing system it is worth examination.

In the Middle East — as indeed anywhere else — hopes of orderly pacification turn ultimately upon “the general welfare,” and there are few areas where this wears a more dubious aspect. The oil states have the resources; Kuwait is swamped in them. But Egypt’s poverty is intensified by each year’s increment of births; Jordan is a pensioner; and Turkey, supposed bastion of the West, has lived on the edge of desperate economic stringency ever since its plea, in 1954, for a stabilized loan of $300 million was rejected.

Here, again, there is no shortage of proposals for greater economic stability. The project of a general development bank financed out of a proportion of oil revenues contributed both by governments and by oil companies has its supporters. Egyptian irrigation and the development of the Nile valley had reached the blueprint stage before a Western withdrawal from the scheme was carried out, with the maximum loss of face for Egypt. Now the catastrophes of the last year could be used as a spur to a new effort — preferably under the auspices of the World Bank — to make a joint attack on the obstacles to development in the region.

RUSSIA IN THE MIDDLE EAST

It is thus not impossible, by picking over existing policies in the Middle East, to piece together a coherent scheme for international guarantees, policing, and economic rehabilitation. But would it offer any hope in terms of practical politics? The first objection is that it brings the Russians squarely into the Middle East. Their guarantee would be essential; they could make or break the arms embargo; they would insist on the Communist bloc taking some share in the police forces; and their economic aid would remain competitive and subversive unless it was geared to a wider international development scheme. But of all the fanciful thinking current in the West today, perhaps the most naïve is the idea that the Russians are not in the Middle East already. Geography, not ideology, puts them there.

If great powers are going to bid for local supporters in the Middle East — and that, after all, is how the Baghdad Pact looks in Russian eyes — Russia will be in there playing politics too. And she has two trumps. The West, not Russia, was until fairly recently imperial master in the Arab world. And Russia has abandoned Israel, the only natural enemy the Arabs universally recognize. There is thus no way of organizing an antiCommunist alliance in the Middle East which does not invite an answering Communist-backed bloc. The only way out of the impasse is no blocs at all — either the weak, defenseless absence of blocs called neutralism or the international control which is here proposed. We do not know whether the Russians, having achieved such gratifying results from their anti-anti-Gommunist policies, will now accept a policing system which transcends the competition of rival blocs. The best hope for their acquiescence is that they are cautious enough to feel the risk of the local situation getting out of hand.

But can one call the Arabs cautious? Would the smaller powers accept an alternative to the heady mixture of men marching, MIGs flying, and fresh imperialist plots uncovered on alternate Mondays? Cest magnifique even if it is very nearly la guerre. Yet there perhaps lies the hope. At first, playing one great power off against another gives a pleasurable sense of importance and skill. But it is not long before the player becomes the plaything. The October crisis suddenly showed the proud Arab world not as an autonomous, self-determining area but as a football in world politics. The graver Arabs — and among them one can on occasion include President Nasser — may not be averse to an international policy which permits them to retreat from the physical risk of war on their own territory and from the psychological humiliation of appearing as puppets in someone clse’s show.

Moreover, the scheme has positive inducements. The guarantee of frontiers covers the risk which the Arabs conceive, probably rightly, to be more real than a direct Russian attack. The Israeli army can make short work of any Arab force, and Israel is growing. Outside help might counter this imbalance, but only at the risk of devastating local war. Guaranteed frontiers are thus the best security available.

The Western powers have not really considered seriously the role of economic inducements. Tension in the Middle East rose to crisis pitch and has remained there ever since the breaking off of the Aswan Dam negotiations. The conjunction is at least significant, and Egypt may not be lost to moderation if moderation irrigates more land and feeds the hungry new mouths.

There is, however, one psychological difficulty which probably cannot be overcome within the framework of the Middle East. The Arab states are most unlikely to accept any solution which appears to set them apart as a group of immature, untrustworthy, second-class world citizens. At the time of the Suez crisis, one reason for Egypt’s passionate rejection of international control of the canal was its belief that the Western powers wanted it to safeguard themselves against Egyptian inefficiency and untrustworthiness. The British, Egypt pointed out, had rejected international control when they were in charge. The Americans ruled it out for Panama. So the scheme appeared to be simply discrimination against them as Egyptians. They are unlikely to feel more reconciled to a general international control system which singles out the Middle East for discriminatory treatment. Is there any way to convince them that, on the contrary, it is simply the local application of a general rule?

THE TENSIONS IN EUROPE

It is at this point that the ambiguous Western attitude toward international solutions begins to be apparent, for in fact we do tend to think of them as more applicable to others than to ourselves. It is not, of course, impossible to conceive of policies which might convince the Arabs — or the Asians or the Africans — that white men no longer consider themselves as a race apart. The tensions in Europe are no less dangerous than those of the Levant and in some degree spring from the same cause — the existence of rival blocs of states supported in their hostility by outside great powers. If there is an argument in the Middle East for seeking to substitute an international system of control for local armed rivalry with outside backing, the argument is as strong in Europe. In fact, it is stronger, for the division of Germany is a refinement of instability not present in the Middle East.

The Russians have proposed in the past the withdrawal from Europe of American and Russian forces and the establishment in their place of a mutual, general security pact. Whether, after Eastern Europe’s demonstration of its fanatical anti-Communism, they would be prepared to follow up the proposal, is an open question, but it is an added argument for the Western powers to try to find out. The Western fear is, of course, that the withdrawal of the American “tripwire” would leave Russians able to dominate Europe by sheer bulk. But neither a general security pact nor an international security system entails the ending of the American or indeed the British commitment to Europe. In fact, they postulate what might be called an Eisenhower Doctrine for the whole area. The difference would lie in the “tripwire.”Under a general security system set up under the auspices of the United Nations, a control commission with regional officers and police groups would have the supervision of troubled areas and would provide the warning signal for any growing risk of aggression. And if, in spite of international supervision, the Russians were tempted to reinvade, the deterrent would be — as it is now — the risk of American bombs and rockets on Moscow.

The rational hope, however, would be that a withdrawal of both great powers from the brinks which their policies have helped to create — in the Levant, in Europe — would lead gradually to a detente and in time to a readiness to include not only their neighbors but themselves in the orderly working of an international system.

This, we should make clear, the Western powers do not propose at present. Their careful joint plan before the Disarmament Commission covers the controlled reduction of some arms and the elimination of others. But apart from inspection, it leaves the principle of national, sovereign armies intact. It is in fact a retreat from the bold approach of America’s Baruch Plan, which proposed the international monopoly of all atomic energy and hence of the ultimate weapons. Yet so long as national armies retain their autonomy, there is probably no method by which local areas can be pacified by international means. Small states will demand military sovereignty — and atomic bombs — in the name of equality. Anarchy will remain the final condition.

The myriad sovereignties of the world can in fact be brought under minimum control only when states, like individuals, give up the right to settle disputes by violence. The fervent, newly enfranchised nationalisms of Asia and Africa cannot be expected to give a lead here. It can come only from mature, settled, national states of the West. If, the next time Mr. Khrushchev proposes with his usual exuberance: “Let us scrap our armies now,” there were an instant urgent Western response: “Yes, and let us establish and arm an international police force to take their place,”it might be possible to let into the whole stale, weary disarmament wrangle a larger aim, a wider vision.

The Russians may well refuse. Then let them be faced in season and out of season with the West’s standing offer. Let representatives of neutral opinion be added to the Disarmament Commission to learn at first hand the West’s sincerity. The Western powers need not be content with conditional offers. As a pledge of their determination, they could propose international authority at once for areas where Russia’s writ and veto do not run. Nothing prevents America from proposing for Panama the international regime it supported at Suez. A British offer of Cyprus as an international police base with local autonomy might create conditions to which Greek, Turk, and Briton could agree.

THE RULE OF LAW

The effort of imagination needed to make such a break from the closed arena of the Cold War is no doubt tremendous — though presumably it is no greater than the thrust of mind that is sending satellites into outer space. And it is rooted in two of the West’s most fruitful insights into the nature of peaceful society: the supremacy of law and the acceptance of the common welfare.

Today, is it too visionary to suggest that a start be made to base world order on these two minimum principles? It cannot be a fully articulated legal and political system. It will break down if it seeks to set up a formal world government with states’ rights and suffrages. But it can begin with an agreement to abandon violence in the settlement of issues and to police that agreement through minimum organs of international supervision. In aiming at such a system, and giving it a solid background of economic development and hope, the Western governments would be taking a first step toward repeating in world society the ultimate safeguard of their domestic security.

It is not only their own positive principles that the Western powers would be advancing with such a policy. They could do something more. They could begin again to speak for the submerged hopes of all mankind. The language of antiGommunism does not lend itself to deeper human aspirations. It insists too much on the world’s divisions. It proposes side-taking. It has, all too often, an unattractive ring of righteousness as though the Western powers were absolutely free of the self-seeking and self-regarding nationalism which underlies the world’s tragic anarchy. In Asia, especially, where four hundred years of colonial experience dictate the determination not to take sides, much deep and genuine emotion for peaceful order has been lost in stagnant neutralism. Yet India is the land where the tradition of Asoka’s peaceful statesmanship based upon the orderly renunciation of violence is still a great community-making ideal and, in the Ghandian tradition of nonviolence, presided at the birth of India’s independence. Contact could be made with these ancient traditions if the Western powers would seek with all the passion and urgency at their command to establish the rule of controlled and policed “nonviolence” and to back this rule of law by generous, sustained, and farsighted economic aid.

It is even within the bounds of possibility that such a new direction of allied policy could ultimately have its effect on the Communist great powers. The Communist states are in theory committed to the vision of a peaceful, coöperative world. At present, the gap between action and theory creates some of the most repellent characteristics of Soviet and Chinese policy. We have rightly coined phrases such as Newspeak and Doublethink for a propaganda which talks of “people’s democracies” or “the liberation” of Eastern Europe. But Doublethink could conceivably work in reverse. Millions of educated Russians are being taught the slogans of brotherhood and international unity. Suppose they believe what they are taught? Suppose, instead of Doublethink, they think? We know there were disturbances in Russian universities after the Hungarian revolt and, as every absolute regime has learned, the most dangerous questions are the questions asked by the young. Threats of encirclement, of foreign hostility, of a world-wide anti-Communist plot may silence the questioning. But the Kremlin’s task in convincing the Russians of this threat would be infinitely more difficult if Western insistence were not upon anti-Communism but upon that peaceful, coöperative world order in which Communists are taught to believe.

THE CONDITIONS OF SURVIVAL

But none of this is possible without a radical recasting of Western policy, and the tragedy is that an anti-Communist crusade coupled with a string of defensive alliances and an all-out search for the ultimate weapon fits into the old familiar pattern of international anarchy. It leaves the illusion of absolute national self-determination intact. Even though one wind blowing unexpectedly may send a neighbor’s strontium 90 across the defenseless frontiers of the air, down below on solid earth we cling to those frontiers as though they still were under our control.

If, however, we had meant to leave total state sovereignty intact, we should have shackled the scientists before they split the atom and traveled faster than sound. No society can survive if everything changes but its institutions; no society can stay sane if no one is to innovate except the technologists. Our tragedy, our madness today is that our deepest instincts resist the innovations our reason tells us are the condition of survival.

In the age of atomic power, guided missiles, and supersonic flight, we cling to the illusion of inviolate frontiers, for they are the frontiers of the myth of absolute self-determination. Total sovereignty is to the state what egoism is to the individual — the last, holiest, most highly treasured source of all disaster. We gain personal happiness only by transcending this vociferous self. We gained order in domestic society by abandoning the citizen’s claim to settle his disputes in his own way. Now science has thrust at us a new choice: to transcend the claims of total state sovereignty by creating minimum standards of international order. We in the West will be untrue to all that is best in our great humane tradition if, at this last supreme test, our courage, imagination, and faith in man’s rational future are not equal to the task.