Year 501 Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky. Published by South End Press.
Chapter 3: North-South/East-West Segment 4/14
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Though US planners did not expect a Soviet attack on the West, they were concerned about Soviet military power, for two fundamental reasons. First, they feared that the USSR might respond to the US takeover of the world, not recognizing the "logic" in our "illogicality." Particularly ominous from the Soviet point of view was the reconstruction and rearmament of Germany and Japan, two powerful traditional enemies, and their incorporation within the US system of power, which was intent on exterminating the Soviet virus. That these developments posed a major threat to Soviet security was well-understood by US planners, who therefore feared a possible reaction.

Second, Soviet power served to deter US violence, impeding US actions to ensure that the "periphery" fulfills its service function. What is more, for its own cynical reasons the Kremlin often lent support to targets of US attack and subversion, and sought to gain advantage where it could. The very existence of Soviet power provided a certain space for maneuver in the South. As a counterweight to US power, it opened the way toward nonalignment, which, US planners feared, would deprive the West of control over the domains required to maintain traditional privilege and power. Exploiting these openings, Third World leaders sought to carve out an independent role in world affairs. By the 1960s, the UN, previously a docile instrument and hence much admired, fell under "the tyranny of the majority." The growing influence of undeserving elements set off intensive US efforts to destroy the errant organization, which continue under a different guise with the UN, at last, safely back under control.9

In short, the USSR was not only guilty of ultranationalism and undermining "stability" through the rotten apple effect. It was committing yet another crime: interfering with US designs and helping the victims resist, an intolerable affront that few in the South could match, though Cuba did as it blocked US-backed South African aggression in Angola. Accordingly, there could be no accommodation, no détente. Even as the Soviet Union collapsed through the 1980s, the test of Gorbachev's "New Thinking" put forth in the liberal press was his willingness to allow US violence to proceed without impediment; failing that criterion, his gestures are meaningless, more Communist aggressiveness.10

For such reasons, the US had no serious interest in resolving the Cold War conflict except on terms of Soviet submission. Though we lack Soviet records, and therefore can only speculate on what internal thinking may have been, what is available suggests that Stalin and his successors would have been willing to accept the role of junior managers in the US-dominated world system, running their own dungeon without external interference, and cooperating in joint efforts to maintain global "stability," much as they did in the 1930s, when Communist armies spearheaded the onslaught against the popular social revolution in Spain.

The view from Washington was spelled out clearly by Secretary of State Dean Acheson to an executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he explained the US negotiating position on Germany for the forthcoming May 1949 meeting of foreign ministers. Acheson's stance was "so uncompromising," Leffler writes, that members of the Committee "were stunned." In response to Arthur Vandenberg's concern that the US position would institutionalize a permanent Cold War, Acheson responded that the goal was not to avoid Cold War but to consolidate Western power, under US control of course. "When Senator Claude Pepper urged Acheson to consider the possibility of treating the Soviets fairly," Acheson "scorned the idea," informing the Committee that "he aimed to integrate west German strength into Western Europe and establish a flourishing Western community that would serve as a magnet to the Kremlin's eastern satellites": the result would be not only to undermine Soviet power but also to restore quasi-colonial relations with the East. When the foreign ministers meeting broke down in a predictable stalemate, "Acheson was elated," Leffler continues. The Soviets "are back on the defensive," Acheson declared: "They are visibly concerned and afraid of the fact that they have lost Germany."11

As discussed, apparent Soviet interest in a peaceful European settlement in 1949 was regarded not as an opportunity but as a threat to "national security," overcome by the establishment of NATO. On similar grounds, the US never even considered Stalin's proposals for a unified and demilitarized Germany with free elections in 1952, and did not pursue Khrushchev's call for reciprocal moves after his radical cutbacks in Soviet military forces and armaments in 1961-1963 (well-known to the Kennedy Administration, but dismissed). On the eve of his election, Kennedy had written that Russia was attempting to conquer Europe "by the indirect route of winning the vast outlying raw materials region," the conventional reference to Soviet support for nonalignment and neutralism. Gorbachev's efforts to reduce Cold War confrontation in the mid-1980s (including unilateral force reductions and proposals to ban nuclear weapons tests, abolish the military pacts, and remove naval fleets from the Mediterranean) were ignored. Reduction of tension is of little value, short of the return of the miscreants to their service role.12

The Soviet Union reached the peak of its power by the late 1950s, always far behind the West. A 1980 study of the Center for Defense Information (CDI), tracing Russian influence on a country-by-country basis since World War II, concluded reasonably that Soviet power had declined from that peak to the point where by 1979, "the Soviets were influencing only 6 percent of the world's population and 5 percent of the world's GNP, exclusive of the Soviet Union." By the mid-1960s, the Soviet economy was stagnating or even declining; there was an accompanying decline in housing, commerce, and life expectancy, while infant mortality increased by a third from 1970 to 1975.13


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9 Leffler gives a detailed and largely sympathetic account of the actual fears and their basis. On the UN, see references of n. 10, ch. 2.

10 DD, 103.

11 Leffler, Preponderance, 284-5.

12 DD, ch. 1. Khrushchev's moves were revealed by Raymond Garthoff, International Security, Spring 1990, as an "interesting precedent" to Gorbachev's; see p. 365, below. Kennedy, Strategy of Peace, 5; cited by Leacock, Requiem, 7.

13 Defense Monitor, Jan. 1980. Zeman, Communist Europe, 267-8.