Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Soviet military thinkers have been very reluctant to accept any theories of nuclear deterrence or of limited war under an umbrella of nuclear deterrence. Since war is a struggle to the death by antipathetical societies, such societies will, in war, use any weapons they have. Accordingly, the Soviet Union believes that any general war involving the United States and themselves would be a nuclear war in which their ground forces, with tactical air support and nuclear weapons of all sizes and ranges, would fight its way overland, against nuclear armed enemies, to occupy most of Europe and possibly Asia.

They believe that there are three defenses against tactical nuclear weapons: (1) dispersal of their own forces as widely as possible until the last moment before assault; (2) contact as rapidly and as closely as possible with the enemy in order to deter the enemy from use of nuclear weapons which would also destroy its own forces; and (3) protection of as many of their troops as possible under cover, usually in tanks. The first two of these place great emphasis on rapid mobility of troops, and the third helps to provide this. Accordingly, the Russians anticipate the use of many if not entirely armored forces in overrunning Europe and very extensive use of air transport of troops (with conventional planes, gliders, and helicopters). Such mobility will allow Europe to be overrun rapidly, creating a situation which, they feel, will make a victory for the West impossible, while our strategic attack on the Soviet Union

itself will be reduced and eventually ended by strong defensive measures and retaliation.

However, such a war, which would jeopardize the Communist way of life by threatening the Soviet Union, its only accurate embodiment, is regarded by the Soviet leaders as highly undesirable, and to be avoided at almost any cost, while they, in a period of almost endless Cold War, can seek to destroy “capitalist society” by nonviolent means or by local violence of third parties. This theory of “nibbling” the capitalist world to death is combined with a tactic which would resist “capitalist imperialism” by encouraging “anticolonialism.” Such a change called forth, on the part of the United States, a defensive tactic which shifted from Dulles’s insistence that the “uncommitted nations” must join the West to the more moderate aim of keeping them from becoming Communist.

This shift in aims, in reference to the “uncommitted nations,” occurred both in the Soviet Union and in the United States and is of major importance in creating the contemporary world. Stalin and Dulles saw the world largely in black-and-white terms: who was not with them was obviously against them. Accordingly, the world must be either slave or free, each man applying the former adjective to his opponent’s side and the more favorable, latter term, to his own group. They were enemies, but they agreed basically that the world must be a two-Power system. This meant that each was aggressive in terms of the “uncommitted nations” because each insisted these must either join his own side or be regarded (and treated) as an enemy.

The great change which occurred in the middle 1950’s was that both of the super-Powers had to recognize that most of the “uncommitted nations” were too weak, too backward, and too independent to be forced to be either capitalist or Communist. They had to be something different, something of their own. This view was forced upon the super-Powers, with perhaps greater difficulty in Washington than in the Kremlin, but it was an aspect of reality which had to be recognized. From it came the acceptance of neutralism and the rise of the Buffer Fringe.

This shift was a double one. On the one hand it meant that the super-Powers’ attitudes toward the Buffer Fringe shifted from a basically offensive one to a basically defensive one, shifted from an effort to get them to join one’s own side to an effort to keep them from joining the opponent’s side. And at the same time, it marked the first beginnings of true wisdom and true hope for the world’s future in the recognition that there are more than two alternative fashions for organizing a functioning economic, social, and political system. In the long run, this recognition will be a victory for the West, for the West has always, in its real nature, recognized that reality is diverse and is pluralist, while it has been the Russian way to insist that reality is dualistic with each extreme necessarily monistic and uniform. The acceptance of diversity and of pluralism, by the inevitable failure of both capitalism and Communism in the Buffer Fringe, has forced the West to accept and apply its own, often-unrecognized, traditions.

Moreover, the forcing of this recognition upon both the Soviet Union and the West, in respect to the Buffer Fringe, may have the consequence, in time, of forcing each of these to accept it in respect to their internal systems. Here again this would mark a great victory for the West, because the acceptance of diversity and pluralism is part of the tradition of the West and is not acceptable to Russia (whose traditions have always been basically dualistic, seeing reality as a contrast between an unattainable ideal of perfection and a horrible, sinful morass of ordinary living—the imperfections of the latter being acceptable as a necessary consequence of the unattainability of the former, with both extremes being uniform and one). Such an acceptance will reduce the tension of the Cold War by allowing each polar super-Power to develop features of a mixed system which will make them approach each other in their characteristics of organization, a development which is, of course, already apparent to any unbiased observer.

The shift from dualism to pluralism and from uniformity to diversity was forced upon the Soviet Union in its most critical form by the rise of Titoism. This, of course, was chiefly evident in Europe, where conditions of industrial development make it more reasonable for the Kremlin leaders to expect the Soviet example to be followed slavishly by non-capitalist states. The same lesson should, however, have been learned, even earlier, in Asia, because there it became evident to many observers that most nations were neither able nor willing to follow either the Soviet Union or the United States. This observation, however, ‘was impossible under Stalin because his false theories of the nature of both capitalism and imperialism made him regard the two as identical and thus to regard colonial areas as being parts of the capitalist system.

As a consequence of these intellectual errors, the Kremlin under Stalin was prepared to see the fringes of Asia either continuing as colonial areas or breaking away from European domination to become Communist zones, but it did not see the possibility of them becoming non-Communist and noncolonial independent states. This meant that where Stalin intervened in certain areas of Asia he intervened on behalf of the microscopic Communist parties and rebuffed the local native, nationalist, anticolonialist groups. Khrushchev, as we shall see, did the opposite.

Stalin’s policy was quite bankrupt even before his death, and it was thus fairly easy for his successors to abandon it and to adopt a more feasible policy of Communist cooperation with local anticolonial (and thus largely anti-Western) forces to detach them, as new, independent, but still non-Communist, nations from the West. The Soviet assistance to such new nations was largely economic, although the limited productivity of the Soviet Union’s own economic system, especially in food, made any substantial foreign aid to neutral nations a considerable burden on the Soviet Union itself. For this reason much of the burden of such foreign aid was pushed onto the Soviet satellite states, especially Czechoslovakia.