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

3. Military considerations, and the use of force generally, will always be subordinate to political considerations, and will operate as part of policy in the whole policy context.

4. Armed forces must be fully professionalized, trained and psychologically prepared to do any task to the degree and level they are ordered by the established political authorities, without desire or independent effort to carry combat to a level of intensity not in keeping with existing policy and political considerations.

5. There must be full ability at all times to escalate or to descalate the level of warfare as seems necessary in terms of the policy context, and to signal the decision to do either to the adversary as a guide to his responses.

6. Ability to descalate to the level of termination of violence and warfare must be possible, both in psychological and procedural terms, even with continuance of conflict on lower, nonforce, levels such as economic or ideological conflict.

7. There must exist a full panoply of weapons and of economic, political, social, and intellectual pressures that can be used in conflict with any diverse states to secure the specific and limited goals that would become the real aims of international policy in a period of controlled conflict.

8. Among the methods we must be prepared to use in such a period must be diplomatic or tacit agreement with any other state, including the Soviet Union or Red China, to seek parallel or joint aims in the world. This will be possible if all aims are limited to specific goals, which each state will recognize are not fatal to his general position and

regime, and by which one specific aim can be traded against another, even tacitly. This will become possible for the double reason that professionalization of the fighting forces and the growing productiveness of the Superpower economies will not require either the total psychological mobilization or the almost total economic mobilization necessary in World War II.

9. All this means a blurring of the distinction between war and peace, with the situation at all times one of closely controlled conflict. In this way endemic conflict is accepted in order to avoid, if possible, epidemic total war. The change will become possible because the ultimate policy of all states will become the preservation of their way of life and existing regime, with the largest possible freedom of action. These aims can be retained under controlled conflict but will be lost by all concerned in total war.

In spite of this shift in the whole pattern of international power relations, the Soviet Union will remain for a long time the chief adversary of the United States, a situation for which there is no real solution until a new, and independent , Superpower rises on the land mass of Eurasia, preferably in a unified Western Europe. The fundamental differences between the United States and the Soviet Union will remain for a long time. They are critical, and include the following: (1) a basic difference in outlook in which the outlook of the West is based on diversity, relativism, pluralism, and social consensus, while the Russian outlook is based on a narrow range of competing opinions and little diversity of knowledge, and is monolithic, intolerant, rigid, unified, absolute, and authoritarian; (2) the difference in stages of economic development, in which they are looking forward, with eager anticipation, to an affluent future, while we have already experienced an affluent society and are increasingly disillusioned with it; (3) the fact that the American economy is unique, because it is the only economy that no longer operates in terms of scarce resources. It may be inside a framework of scarce resources, but this framework is so much wider than the other limiting features of the system (notably its fiscal and financial arrangements) that the system itself does not operate within any limits established by that wider framework.

The third distinction may be seen in the fact that, in other economies, when additional demands are presented to the economy, less resources are available for alternative uses. But in the American system, as it now stands, additional new demands usually lead to increased resources becoming available for alternative purposes, notable consumption. Thus, if the Soviet Union embraced a substantial increase in space activity, the resources available for raising Russian levels of consumption would be reduced, while in America, any increases in the space budget makes levels of consumption also rise. It does this, in the latter case, because increased space expenditures provide purchasing power for consumption that makes available previously unused resources out of the unused American productive capacity.

This unused productive capacity exists in the American economy because the structure of our economic system is such that it channels flows of funds into the production of additional capacity (investment) without any conscious planning process or any real desire by anyone to increase our productive capacity. It does this because certain institutions in our system (such as insurance, retirement funds, social security payments, undistributed corporate profits, and such) and certain individuals who personally profit by the flow of funds not theirs into investment continue to operate to increase investment even when they have no real desire to increase productive capacity (and, indeed, many decry it). In the Soviet Union, on the contrary, resources are allotted to the increase of productive capacity by a conscious planning process and at the cost of reducing the resources available in their system for consumption or for the government (largely defense).

Thus the meaning of the word “costs” and the limitations on ability to mobilize economic resources are entirely different in our system from the Soviet system and most others. In the Soviet economy “costs” are real costs, measurable in terms of the allotment of scarce resources that could have been used otherwise. In the American system “costs” are fiscal or financial limitations that have little connection with the use of scarce resources or even with the use of available (and therefore not scarce) resources. The reason for this is that in the American economy, the fiscal or financial limit is lower than the limit established by real resources and, therefore, since the financial limits act as the restraint on our economic activities, we do not get to the point where our activities encounter the restraints imposed by the limits of real resources (except rarely and briefly in terms of technically trained manpower, which is our most limited resource).

These differences between the Soviet and the American economies are: (1) the latter has built-in, involuntary, institutionalized investment, which the former lacks, and (2) the latter has fiscal restraints at a much lower level of economic activity, which the Soviet system also lacks. Thus greater activity in defense in the USSR entails real costs since it puts pressure on the ceiling established by limited real resources, while greater activity in the American defense or space effort releases money into the system, which presses upward on the artificial financial ceiling, pressing it upward closer to the higher, and remote, ceiling established by the real resources limit of the American economy. This makes available the unused productive capacity that exists in our system between the financial ceiling and the real resources ceiling; it not only makes these unused resources available for the governmental sector of the economy from which the expenditure was directly made but also makes available portions of these released resources for consumption and additional capital investment. For this reason, government expenditures in the United States for things like defense or space may entail no real costs at all in terms of the economy as a whole. In fact, if the volume of unused capacity brought into use by expenditure for these things (that is, defense, and so on) is greater than the resources necessary to satisfy the need for which the expenditure was made, the volume of unused resources made available for consumption or investment will be greater than the volume of resources used in the governmental expenditure, and this additional government effort will cost nothing at all in real terms, but will entail negative real costs. (Our wealth will be increased by making the effort.)