American Policy towards the Soviet Union in the 1980s: Objectives and Uncertainties
Anyone who is reckless enough to accept as impossible an assignment as to write on the goals and uncertainties of American policy towards the Soviet Union in the 1980s should at least — to use one of Secretary Haig’s contributions to political discourse — caveat his answers in so many ways that the caveats risk filling the whole of the Paper. This is even more so when the writer, aware of his own characteristics, has to top it all with a caveat about his caveats.
The New Europe: From Cold War to Hot Peace
For almost ten years now, Europe has been emerging from the postwar or cold war era. In retrospect i96i-2 seems to mark the great divide. The Berlin wall and the abandonment of Khrushchev's Cuban ultimatum meant the end of any direct challenge to the territorial status quo, of any hope of a German and European settlement in the grand sense. At the same time, the failure of the grand designs of both Khrushchev and Kennedy marked the end of a period when the initiative and leadership of the superpowers were uncontested; and the emergence into the open of the SinoSoviet split along with the French and Roumanian attempts to pursue independent foreign policies challenged the very idea of a bipolar, ideological and military confrontation. The remarkable feature of these ten years, however, has been the resilience of the international structure thus challenged, and the unclear and contradictory character of the new European order which was supposed to be emerging. First, by any classical definition of the balance of power in terms of territorial borders, of military force, or of diplomatic alignments the basic structure of the continent has remained what it was: two alliances led by the two superpowers facing one another across a Berlin, a Germany, and a Europe divided still along a line corresponding to the respective military positions of the two sides at the end of World War ii.
The United States and the Third World: A Basis for Accommodation
THE United States has passed in the last decade from the United Nation's most influential state into a position of accelerating isolation as it confronts a very large proportion of the member states over a long agenda of contemporary issues. This is a truly novel development, one which threatens to poison international relations at a time that shrieks with the need for uniquely broad essays in interna tional cooperation. Three issues shape what may be called the North-South confronta tion. One is the question of how global income and wealth and deci sion-making authority with respect to international economic prob lems should be distributed. A second issue is the attitude of the United States toward the two white-supremacist regimes in Southern Africa. And the third is the U.S. role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Although each issue represents a distinct axis of confrontation, they are linked by a single world view, a kind of ideology, which imparts to them an in tense emotional coherence. That ideology is not, as suggested recently by Ambassador Moynihan, "socialist," unless one follows Durkheim in defining socialism not as a political program but rather as "a cry of pain." It does indeed incorporate certain themes which recur in British socialist thought, just as it patches in a number of convention ally liberal ideals such as self-determination. But socialist and liberal fragments are reshaped by a special historical experience to produce in practice a distinct amalgam which can most usefully be described as the developing states in fact describe it: "anticolonialism."