Does a Bear Sit in the Woods?
WASHINGTON D.C.
ONE QUESTION THAT Ronald Reagan’s great electoral landslide seems to have settled beyond dispute is this: Is there a bear in the woods? There is. At least the American people believe there is a bear. At least they wish to be well armed to protect themselves against the bear –– if there is a bear. The Gipper’s charming campaign commercial, which whimsically conveyed the core of our Cold War fears, will now be translated into tangible political action. American taxpayers, if the defense secretary prevails, will throw another $40 billion at the bear, bringing next year’s military budget to $334 billion, approximately double what it was four years ago.
The U.S.A. will continue to deploy thousands of new nuclear weapons, all aimed at this fearsome enemy. When the task is completed, America will have more than 14,000 strategic nuclear bombs ready to launch, not counting another 16,000 tactical nukes stationed on ships and tanks. Then America will begin putting its weapons in space.
Meanwhile, our agents will continue to search for the bear’s traces in many distant lands, from the jungles of Nicaragua to the riot-torn cities of Chile and the Philippines. If we find him there, we will shoot at him.
Of course, this all sounds daffy –– a great and energetic nation obsessed by a crudely simple image of distant danger. But the Cold War rivalry between this country and the Soviet Union has always operated on emotional punch, not reason. America’s defense and foreign policies are as rational as a witch doctor’s incantations before a primitive tribe. We try to ward off evil spirits with the burnt offerings of our money or by raising new totems to the war gods, totems called nuclear missiles.
Americans are so brainwashed with fear of Russia that it might seem futile in the present climate to focus on rational alternatives to the Cold War. Yet earnest, able people are doing that, trying to construct a new foreign policy that matches reality. One challenging set of answers –– at least a first step toward reason –– is being published by a small New York foundation, the World Policy Institute, in its new quarterly, The World Policy Journal, and in an ongoing blueprint for new policies called the Security Project. “Our job,” Archibald L. Gillies, the institute’s president, explained to me, “is to show that we can have a different set of policies that hang together and really address world realities, that don’t give away the store and that will work better than the national-security policies we have now.”
In the Security Project, Gillies and his colleagues propose three fundamental perspectives that ought to displace America’s obsessive fear of the Russians:
First, the economic forces that threaten American prosperity have to be viewed as complex global problems in which everything is interconnected, from the horrendous federal deficits to the loss of American industrial jobs, from the Third World debt that threatens the U.S. banking system to our bloated defense budgets, from oil shortages to hunger. If there is a bear in the woods, this is it. Because the world is now one marketplace, both for products and for labor, we can’t solve the problems of Detroit without also dealing with the problems of Brazil. This is not sappy do-good sentiment –– it’s calculated self-interest. Brazil’s middle class buys the durable goods that America makes; if Brazil is going down the tubes, so are a lot of American jobs. Our economy will grow faster if theirs does.
Second, the U.S. has to stabilize its relations with the Soviets, offering both sides the immediate economic reward of shrinking defense budgets and new trade. The Russians need what we have to sell, mainly modern high tech, and if we don’t sell it to them, Japan and Western Europe will.
Third, America needs to adopt a noninterventionist policy toward Third World countries. Of course, if you believe that every revolutionary struggle or change of governments is a Commie plot run by Moscow and designed ultimately to threaten us, then the idea of reducing our military strength worldwide sounds like lunacy. But the realities of Vietnam, Iran, Nicaragua, Chile and the Philippines, to name a few, do not match that simple-minded fear. Our national security would not be affected in the least if, for instance, democracy were restored to Chile or even if a Marxist government took over. As of now, we have about 550,000 troops overseas, many of them stationed in tripwire positions like the one in South Korea, where Americans would not really wish to fight a war if one started. This is dangerous. It also puts us in permanent conflict with the natural aspirations of impoverished peoples for economic and political justice.
Gillies is surprisingly optimistic about selling these ideas to Americans, notwithstanding the recent election returns, because he and his colleagues see the competing economic and political realities closing in on the Cold War dogma. The danger, he concedes, is that Americans might pull back from the world into a “Fortress America” mentality that would be repressive and self-destructive.
The institute’s Security Project has outlined what is actually a modest proposal for a gradual reduction of the American military –– changes like shrinking seventeen army divisions down to eleven, reducing strategic nukes to about 6000, settling for six aircraft carriers instead of fourteen. One of the designers, a defense expert named Gordon Adams from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, argues that in this cutback the Pentagon would not lose any of its basic capabilities: deterring Soviet nuclear attack, keeping open the world’s sea lanes, defending the continental United States, even intervening militarily with the marines. But the savings would be extraordinary – as much as $470 billion over the next five years, plus another $1 trillion accumulated in savings during the following five years.
Does a Bear Sit in the Woods?, Page 1 of 3