Balance Sheet

In politico-military matters it is not always easy to see the wood for the trees. Looming close, one particular aspect of the international scene, like an individual tree trunk in the foreground, can so monopolize the vision as to leave no room on the retina for anything else.

This is particularly true with regard to the menace of Communist-imperialism which hangs over the Western world like an abiding thundercloud. With the Kremlin’s technique of alternating threats with specious hints at accommodation, it is difficult even for the most percipient individual to keep track of constantly fluctuating events and apportion to each and every one of them the degree of significance appropriate to it.

What should never be lost sight of is the fact that to create this perennial condition of anxious uncertainty is the primary purpose of the Kremlin’s kaleidoscopic diplomatic shifts and perpetual changes of emphasis. Abroad, this organized equivocation plays upon and wears down the public nerve, encourages a tendency to take that short view which is death to all long-term planning, confuses inter-allied relations and exposes them to a weakening strain, exhausts energies and resources from which the processes of internal expansion would greatly benefit, and drains away the spiritual and material capital of every nation not yet under Communist domination.

At home, it keeps the Russian people in a state of permanent tension, which leaves them with no time in which to reflect on their unhappy lot. Their only concern is that their rulers should find a way out of the latest deliberately fomented “crisis.” Furthermore, to magnify external “trouble” is a well-tried device for distracting attention from the struggle for power within the hierarchy itself, upon which it would be impolitic to permit the general gaze to become too concentrated. And, since the death of Stalin, the need for this sort of red herring has arisen with almost predictable regularity!

In this particular, Communist Russia’s technique has always followed the same pattern, although the fundamental purpose from which the men in the Kremlin never deviate has not always been clearly apprehended. With the pace at which events have come to crowd upon each other’s heels, Party leaders suffer the same difficulty as lesser folk in distinguishing between the wood and the trees. Thus, after the Yalta conference of February, 1945, for example, the contemporary British Premier (Winston Churchill) found it possible to inform the House of Commons: “The impression I brought back from the Crimea is that Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honorable friendship and equality with the Western democracies. I felt that their word was their bond. I decline absolutely to embark upon a discussion about Russian good faith.” It was a fond delusion with which the American President and his more intimate advisers had already identified themselves. Yet with what incredible naivete Communist intentions had been interpreted. How successfully the erroneous belief had been fostered that the Russians were leopards whose spots could be changed by stroking them. How guilelessly, in short, the two Western leaders had permitted the wool to be pulled over their eyes. This is starkly revealed by study of a speech by Dimitry Z. Manuilsky, on record at the time, but unrecalled or willfully disregarded. In the course of this oration the Kremlin spokesman unreservedly declared:

“War to the hilt between Communism and Capitalism is inevitable. Today we are not strong enough to attack, but our time will come. To win we shall need the element of surprise. The bourgeoisie will have to be put to sleep. We shall begin by launching the most spectacular peace movement on record. There will be electrifying overtures and unheard of concessions. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to co-operate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends. As soon as their guard is down, we shall smash them with our clenched fist.”

Admittedly, this blunt exposure of intention was made some years before the outbreak of World War II. But it is clear that, with certain modifications imposed by the unwinding pattern of world events, the technique prescribed has governed, as it continues to govern, Soviet policy throughout all its ineludible mutations. The only conspicuous feature missing from its development has been anything noticeable in the way of concessions!

For the appearance of Soviet representatives on the rostrums of sundry international organizations or around the table at various Foreign Minister confabulations and ‘Summit’ meetings has contributed nothing whatsoever to the stabilization of world peace. Their attendance has reflected no more than the Kremlin’s recognition of the fact that there is nothing more baffling than to alternate threats with a spoonful of soothing syrup; a blow-hot, blow-cold technique, a “strategy of ambiguity” as Henry A. Kissinger has termed it, by which Soviet diplomacy abides with unswerving fidelity.

The Communists indeed invariably welcome any suggestion for a conference, since experience of them has confirmed them in their belief that such high-level meetings can always be made to pay handsome dividends— for the Russians. Ever since the days of Teheran and Yalta they have regarded any round-table parley as a giant confidence trick—the Westerners furnishing the (misplaced) confidence while the Russians take the tricks. Since they appear at the board entirely opposed to reaching reasonable agreement—let alone abiding by such grudging boons as they go through the motions of conceding—such international jamborees are, in effect, nothing more than gratuitously organized opportunities for the Communists to line their pockets and, in the process, stir up further mischief. As Khrushchev himself has sardonically admonished, “Anyone who mistakes our smile for a withdrawal from the policies of Marx and Lenin is making a great mistake.” And the “policies of Marx and Lenin” are based upon the fundamental premise that “So long as Communism and Capitalism exist, there can be no peace”¹—an obvious truism, since a moment’s thought renders it crystal clear that the two systems are irremediably incompatible and mutually destructive.

The tenets of Communism make the fabled laws of the Medes and Persians look like an essay on flexibility. Their rigidity is such that if a single brick in the structure were removed, the whole monstrous edifice would collapse. Real compromise, therefore, is out of the question, and any bargain that is arrived at resembles nothing so much as the purchase of a rug in an Oriental bazaar—a transaction in which the poor innocent of a buyer is inveigled into parting with far more than the value of a prime genuine article, only to discover himself the possessor of something of little more value than a dish- clout. The “Summit” meeting of 1956, for example, at which the Russian vendors turned on their most vulpine salesman’s smiles, ended in Anthony Eden being sold the idea of opposing Admiral Radford’s promising plan to deal with the crisis in Indo-China. The outcome of this futile attempt at negotiation was, therefore, that a million professing Christians were left to be butchered, as another cauldron of seething Communism came, unhindered, to the boil; whence jubilant encouragement has streamed forth to the Reds in Malaya, as infection has spread to a ramshackle and unstable Indonesia.

Shortly after the consummation of the October Revolution of 1917, Lenin gave it as his settled opinion, “A great deal in the matter of our construction depends upon whether we succeed in delaying war with the capitalist countries, which is inevitable, but which may be postponed until the proletarian revolution ripens in Europe, or until colonial revolutions come fully to a head, or finally, the capitalists fight among themselves over the division of the colonies.”

In effect, it was necessary, temporarily, for Communist world revolution and its sponsors in the Kremlin to “watch their step,” to “make haste slowly.” Red Russia, therefore, up to the war of 1939-45, might be thought of as a festering nuisance but was scarcely regarded as an active, universal menace. World conflict, however, wrought a tremendous change in Communist-imperialism’s design to achieve global domination. Western solicitude for Russia’s power of resistance, based upon entirely groundless fears that a leader and party whose very lives depended upon keeping the Nazis at bay, might “go out of the war,” endowed Stalin and his henchmen with an unprecedented bargaining position. Of this they took the very fullest advantage, without an iota of scruple, with all the Asiatic cunning of which they have such plentiful command, and without conceding anything whatsoever in return. With the premature dissolution of the all-powerful Western forces in Europe, inspired by a touching faith in Communist good intentions and a typically servile political response to the insensate clamor to “get the boys home,” the way was left clear for Communist-imperialism confidently to step up the pace of conquest. In the outcome some 763,940 square miles of alien territory, bearing a population of 134,188,000, were assiduously brought under the sway of a regime whose program had swiftly been translated from the doctrinaire to the dynamic.

Chilled and aghast at the evil djinn their misguided good intentions had served to release from the bottle, the Western Powers took such comfort as they might from the knowledge that with them reposed the secret for the manufacture of the atomic bomb.

But there were other forces at work bent on their discomfiture. The campaign against “colonialism” espoused by so many single- minded liberal-humanists in the West, however unimpugnable its ethical motivation, could scarcely have been more disastrously mistimed. For as militant racialism blossomed under “progressive” encouragement all over the East, Communist-imperialism avidly seized upon and exploited it to further its own ends. In the outcome, what in many lands had started as a rather naive and heady nationalism, speedily came under the leadership of skilled agitators whose training had been in Moscow. The vacuum created when certain Western Powers were hectored into renouncing all further responsibility for a number of backward, inchoate Eastern racial groupings, was promptly filled by emissaries working under the direct control of the Kremlin. Thus in seeking to redress what he quite genuinely believed to be an intolerable wrong, the self-styled democratic-progressive helped enormously to increase the dangers by which the Western Democracies find themselves confronted. It is a process the full consequences of which have yet to reach fruition.

All this can be put on the credit side of the Communist ledger. But that is not to say that their blundering has not occasioned the inscription of some very heavy items on the debit side of the account. These entries “in the red” may be summarized as follows:

(a) Communist eagerness to frustrate and embarrass the Western Powers by blockading Berlin gave rise to the concept of NATO, the establishment of at least a token force to bar any Red Army advance across the borders of Eastern Germany, and the steady build-up of a Strategic Air Force ringing the Soviet “heartland” from Iceland to Japan.

(b) The invasion of Korea, although it was allowed to terminate in a stultifying stalemate, had the infinitely far-reaching effect of dissipating the last lingering wisps of American isolationism and of hastening the United States’ open assumption of the role of leading world power.

(c) Russia’s partial success in sabotaging the European Defense Community led to Western Germany’s emergence as a sovereign power, whose organization of an army to take post amongst the NATO forces will add very appreciably to their strength.

(d) Soviet attempts to wreck ANZUS had the ultimate effect of erecting the “Northern Tier” association of Greece, Turkey, Irak, Iran, and West Pakistan, to guard a hitherto exposed and entirely unprotected flank.

In more recent times, however, another power vacuum has been created in the Middle East, where Western authority and influence have been all too dangerously impaired by the uncoordinated, pull-devil, pull- baker attitude adopted towards Colonel Nasser and the future of the Suez Canal, the machinations of the rival Hashemite and Saudi power groups, and the intractable problem of Israel. The situation has been further exacerbated by the Soviet’s provocative intrusion on the scene as the professed “friend of the Arabs.” For in Russia’s original plan for the conquest of Europe—developed as soon as the defeat of the Nazis loomed in sight—the design was to outflank the West by absorbing Greece and Turkey, since neither peninsula could defend itself were the other in Red Air Force hands. With Turkey and Greece absorbed, Italy’s fall would be virtually automatic; whereafter the Iberian peninsula could be isolated, such spasmodic resistance as might be forthcoming from Communist-riddled France brushed aside, and the pincers closed on the European mainland by the advance of Red Army forces based on East Germany.

Publicly, however, Khrushchev rhetorically demands, “Why talk of war?” And from his point of view the trend of events appears—at least superficially—to be so much in his favor that the attainment of his purpose without recourse to conflict must seem at least a lively possibility.

For whereas in 1939 not more than one- tenth of the world population had come under the Communists’ sway, nowadays the total stands at one-third and mounts steadily as more and more racialist movements are taken over and exploited by the Reds. India is enclosed north, east, and northwest by countries that are either controlled outright by Communists or are in the throes of fighting attempted Communist domination. In the heart of the land itself that Trojan Horse, the State of Kerala, with a population of 13,600,000, has openly adopted the evil gospel according to Marx and Lenin. Singapore could be overrun by Mao Tse-tung’s henchmen at a word. Malaya has had “independence” thrust upon it while its jungles still teem with militant Reds. Lee Kuan Yew, like Abdul Rahman in Malaya and Bandaranaike in Ceylon, stands for a twittering “neutralism” that does nothing but invite strong- arm intervention in the interests of the Kremlin. Elsewhere, the red virus has spread to poison the Istaqlal in North Africa and the A.K.E.L. in Cyprus and to pervert its dupes from Kenya to British Guiana, where an avowed Communist only awaits his masters’ orders to make an open bid for power. In Europe, the Western European Assembly and the Council of Europe are virtually moribund; while NATO’s “conventional” forces have dwindled or been deliberately scaled down precisely at the moment when Communist Russia has demonstrated that where scientific research applied to the potentialities of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles is concerned, a reassuring lead is no longer with the West. The “inevitability of gradualism” has taken on a global significance it would be fatal to underrate.

It is none the less a reasonable deduction that, even if it dreads conflict less than the West, Communist Russia has no more desire for a full-scale nuclear war than the United States and her associates. The men in the Kremlin have no use for a Europe reduced to a heap of smouldering, infected rubble. What they want is Europe as a going concern, with all its manufacturing plants and communications systems intact.² It is probable, therefore, that even were the “cold” war transmuted into a large scale “hot” war, Russia would eschew resort to major nuclear weapons save in the event of her suffering so overwhelming a reverse that no means could be neglected which might serve to restore the situation in her favor.

It is to be borne in mind, however, that the West had announced its resolve to resort to unrestricted nuclear warfare only as a measure of “massive retaliation” to an all-out nuclear assault. If, initially, the Communists, in their own long-term interests, confined themselves to waging war with “conventional” weapons, the West would find itself committed to “horde warfare” in which only a tremendous superiority in fire-power could hope to counterbalance and ultimately overcome the Reds’ outstanding superiority in manpower. For with the native Russian and satellite peoples on which to draw, the Communist leaders control populations that aggregate 300,000,000. It is certainly open to question, therefore, if the employment of purely tactical atomic weapons would give the West the advantage they needed. In the event of the means at hand proving inadequate, the demand to increase the scale and weight of the nuclear component would be wellnigh irresistible. Yet to yield to it would be to evoke all-out retaliation by the Communists—and thus bring about the apocalyptic holocaust that both sides, at the outset, would have been anxious to avoid.

Rather than provoke world catastrophe, the Western Powers would find themselves condemned to fight under a handicap which they could only reduce by signing their own death warrant as well as that of their enemy.

In the circumstances it would seem highly desirable for the West to make quite sure that it is not over-insured for nuclear warfare at the expense of those “conventional” forces whose task, in the event of hostilities, it would be to fight the more likely of the two types of conflict.

Judged by superficial appearances, Khrushchev has some excuse for riding high. But closer examination reveals several burrs under the saddle on which he is cocked so jauntily.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand”; and the cracks in the grandiose Soviet facade scarcely constitute an argument in favor of that “solidarity” which is essential if the Communist edifice is to stay erect. Hungary and Poland are powder barrels on which it becomes increasingly difficult for the men in the Kremlin to clamp down the lids. Tito’s Yugoslavia exhibits every sign of emulating Kipling’s cat, who was resolved to “walk by himself.” Czech economy—where coal output lags far behind the target set—is rather a source of embarrassment than of help. In the circumstances, a similar judgment might well apply to such satellite troop formations as the Kremlin might succeed in bringing into the field in time of war. In Russia itself, as in the satellites, the forty-year effort to “plan” the peasantry is still obstructed by that obstinate individualism which even Stalin’s drastic purge of 1932-33 could not succeed in overcoming. As an innate small-holder-proprietor, the peasant—as Mao Tse-tung has also discovered—is stubbornly opposed to collective farming and integrated agriculture. Even mass martyrdom has shown itself incapable of bringing about a change of view. Recent figures have revealed that grain crops are consistently under schedule and that there are far fewer cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats than in 1916, under the Tsar; while in the period under review the number of cows has fallen from 28.8 million to 24.8 million.³ This, of course, is the ironic outcome of the fact that the Bolshevik revolution, planned to take the fullest advantage of conditions in a heavily industrialized area, could only be engineered in a peasant community—the least promising soil of all in which to cultivate the tenets upon which Communism is founded. If, in these days, Communist Russia holds second place in the world as the fabricator of basic industrial products, it does so at the cost of a belly rumbling with the need for food. Even the hungriest individual cannot eat a sputnik!

In East Germany the Communist leaders face a problem little less intractable than that presented by the intransigence of their own peasantry. When Western Germany’s rearming really gets into its stride, how long will Germans, on either side of an entirely artificial frontier, rest content to remain divided from their compatriots? The fact that a Communist Government had been imposed on East Germany does not mean in any way that the German inhabitants of the territory have accepted Communism. Indeed, in the widespread rioting and rebellion of 1953, the world was given conclusive evidence to the contrary. And however the fires may have been damped down, it would be altogether too large an assumption to regard them as extinguished.⁴

If Communist Russia’s leaders are still intent on pursuing their long cherished policy of postponing war until they are morally certain of winning it, the moment will come when they will be forced to decide whether the risk of withdrawing from East Germany is greater than the hazards entailed in hanging on. If they determine to withdraw, could they extricate themselves in such a way as to deter a united Germany from casting in its lot with the West? With a fully-integrated anti-Communist Germany in being, how long would it be possible to maintain a puppet Communist Government in Poland—in Hungary—in Czechoslovakia? And once the rot started, how long would it be before Communist Russia lost all the buffer states with which she had been so careful to cushion her own frontiers? And how long could she survive the loss of ‘face’ thereafter?

Yet to precipitate war as a means of preserving her buckler of satellites might well serve to spark off wholesale rebellion within them. It would be certain to increase a burden which even in the best of circumstances constitutes a heavy drain on the Kremlin’s by no means inexhaustible resources. For Communist China is, and will long remain, Soviet Russia’s hampering but inescapable Old Man of the Sea.

At first glance the victory of Communism in China was scarcely less of a triumph for the Russians than for Mao Tse-tung. To all outward appearances, the two colossi, towering over East and West alike, presented an awesome spectacle calculated to send a shiver down any anti-Communist spine.

But as Frederick William of Prussia discovered when he was scouring Europe for outsize recruits for his Potsdam Guards, giants are apt to be peculiarly unsteady on their legs—a fact of which the men in the Kremlin have been given more than one painful reminder. And on top of Russia’s own tendency to “give at the knees,” Communist China’s demands for a helping hand to keep her standing erect, even in an era of pseudo-peace, are as incessant as they are inordinate. Even such basic commodities as rice, cooking oil, and cotton cloth are subject to stringent rationing. Unemployment is steadily on the increase as more and more state employees are laid off; and there are insufficient jobs to absorb the million and more youths who reach working age each year. The vast peasant population, moreover, is as stubbornly opposed to “collectivization” as its Russian counterpart.

It follows that in time of conflict—in which his inordinate ambitions with regard to South-East Asia would inevitably impel Mao Tse-tung to take a hand—China’s call for aid would rise to such a pitch that the Russian war economy would be seriously hampered without anything like commensurate help in the conjunct war effort.

Moreover, the attitude of the Chinese, which has never been one of inferiority or subservience, would inevitably harden when, having plunged into war, the men in the Kremlin found it incumbent upon them to sustain their partner’s contribution towards its further prosecution. There are some allies whose high-handedness is in inverse ratio to their usefulness as a co-belligerent. There are some allies whose unending exactions go far to justify the despairful wish that they had stayed neutral.

In any world war Russia’s command of manpower, even without such dubitable forces as the satellites might be dragooned into furnishing, would be immense. But vast bodies of men without competent leadership are no more than “lambs for the slaughter.” And there is no burking the fact that in their struggle with Nazi Germany the best generalissimo the Russians had working for them was Adolf Hitler! It was the Fuehrer’s egregious blundering, combined with the almost insuperable difficulties of climate and terrain, rather than any scintillating genius on the part of the Red Army leaders, that blunted the edge of an enemy invasion which at one stage had achieved a dangerous degree of success.⁵ And although much of the backbiting and denigration of such war-time leaders as Stalin and Zhukov must be attributed to the internecine struggle for power within the Kremlin itself, the fact remains that Russia’s survival in World War II was mainly due to the callous Oriental disregard for human life which plugged gaps with more and more bodies and the unstinted support for the Red Army forthcoming from the United States and Britain.

These considerations offer no grounds for inertia or complacency. Apart from Russia’s present lead in rocket propulsion and the dangerous scaling down suffered by the forces controlled by NATO, there is a lamentable and highly dangerous want of a clear, dynamic policy for dealing instantly with the machinations of Communist-imperialism, whether on a large scale or a small, whatever form they may take and wherever they may arise to disturb the relatively even current of events.

The Western Powers dare not permit a repetition of the situation that arose in Korea, where fear of winning a “small war” lest victory should bring on a big one, gave ample proof that the men in the Kremlin, employing no more than satellite troops, can always stage a campaign to exhaust anti-Communist resources without incurring any risk or burning their own fingers. Such side-line trials of strength are almost bound to recur. For the Communist leaders are perfectly well aware that anything short of outright defeat, even stalemate and a negotiated cessation of hostilities, is tantamount to a victory for the forces of disruption. At all costs the West must remain top dog. Maginot-minded restraint pays as few dividends as passive “containment” or invertebrate “neutralism”—except for the Reds. Courageously to face up to the fact that “a little fire is quickly trodden out, which, being suffered, rivers cannot quench,” and to act accordingly, entails a readiness to fight either “conventional” or nuclear war with equally ample resources. At the moment the Western Powers’ capacity for defense may be adequate. But as the Kremlin is perfectly well aware, their ability—and their will—to take the offensive is in a lower category altogether, a fact which hamstrings their diplomacy at every turn. For policy can never be stronger than the armed force immediately available to support it.

The aim of Communism is so to weaken its prospective victims by fear of war that they ultimately yield to dictatorship. To envisage that aim for what it is, is the first step in the process of defeating it.

The Communist-imperialists are readier for war than the West because they do not scruple to sacrifice their peoples’ living standards to the build-up of their armed forces and their materiel of war. To keep pace and preferably to outdistance them demands a certain degree of sacrifice although, with the West’s infinitely greater resources and superior technological skill, the self-denial demanded of its citizens should never amount to a burden too onerous to bear. It is essential to bring home to the taxpayer, however, that in a military sense “a little of everything” is just not enough. Washing machines are admirable, but they are no substitute for sputniks; and the hard fact needs assimilating that there can be no such thing as social security unless you first make sure of national security.

The choice lies between the defeatist attitude of “Eat, drink and be merry—and let’s have a new Cadillac—for tomorrow we die,” and that minimum of restraint and self- discipline that will ensure survival. Where great and much envied nations are concerned, a peaceful, untroubled way of life is not something that can just be had for the asking. It has to be paid for in constant vigilance and the surrender of self-interest to the continued well-being of the whole. What is more, it has to be paid for in advance. It is only for the bad things that the account has to be settled retrospectively.

Careful examination of the respective balance sheets of the East and of the West reveals that both, to a certain degree, are “in the red.” But if it so wills, the West is in a far better position to reduce its liabilities and increase its assets than the conglomerate of peoples that takes its orders from the Kremlin. The power is there. All that is needed is the resolve to employ it to the full.

With the precarious poise in which the world stands today there are only two alternatives—to be either the hammer or the anvil.