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  Contents

  Introduction

  1. No Time to Lose

  2. World War III

  3. The Visible Hand

  4. The Oil Jugular

  5. The Vietnam Syndrome

  6. The Awakening Giant

  7. Military Power

  8. Economic Power

  9. Willpower

  10. Presidential Power

  11. No Substitute for Victory

  12. The Sword and the Spirit

  Selected Source Notes

  Author’s Note

  Index

  To Our Grandchildren

  Introduction

  The Real War was the right book at the right time. To some readers it may seem like a relic of a forgotten time in this era of improved superpower relations, when editorial writers and TV commentators have proclaimed the end of the Cold War. Writing in 1978 and 1979, I described the Soviet Union as “the most powerfully armed expansionist nation the world has ever known,” one that could win a war against the West or, more likely, could win without war. Today the Soviet military is leaner but more powerful than it was a decade ago, and it still has an aggressive foreign policy that threatens our interests in Asia, the Mideast, Africa, and Latin America. But because of the wide international popularity of Mikhail Gorbachev and his reforms, rhetoric such as that in The Real War would be considered unfashionably harsh today.

  And yet when it was published in 1979, it exceeded all my commercial expectations and the publisher’s as well. It rose to number one on Time magazine’s best-seller list and was also a New York Times best-seller. The secret of its success was that it was a book that cried out to be written—I called it a cri de coeur— because of America’s alarming isolationism and impotence at the time. As such, the book passed the test I always apply to any project I undertake to determine whether it was worth the time and effort. More than any other book I have written, it made a difference.

  When I left office in 1974, I was associated with a policy toward the Soviet Union called détente—a winding-down of tensions between two superpowers with diametrically opposed ideological interests but a common interest in avoiding an apocalyptic nuclear war. Our policy was hard-headed détente. Better relations with the Soviets has not meant more territory for the Soviets. During my time in office not one square mile was lost to communism. In the mid- to late seventies, when hard-headed détente became soft-headed détente and President Carter warned against “the inordinate fear of communism,” one hundred million people came under Soviet domination or were otherwise lost to the West as pro-Western regimes fell in South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Ethiopia, Angola, Nicaragua, Mozambique, and, finally, Iran.

  After the period of isolationism that followed our defeat in Vietnam, I felt the American people needed to be reminded that, to paraphrase Trotsky, while they might not be interested in geopolitics, geopolitics was interested in them. In the hope of preventing more losses to the Soviet juggernaut, I spelled out a new strategy combining the effective use of military power, economic power, Presidential power, and will power. What made the book especially timely was that the Red Army invaded Afghanistan just before its publication. Even President Carter said that the invasion had changed his views toward the Soviet Union, and The Real War—which, if it had not been for Afghanistan, my critics might well have called a minor conservative tract by a forgotten politician—suddenly became a rallying point for mainstream thinking.

  Today, as commentators debate the merits, successes, and failures of Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, some have even questioned whether the Soviet threat ever existed. This new edition of The Real War should serve to remind people how different the world looked just ten years ago—before a President like Ronald Reagan who was willing to rebuild America’s defenses and a Soviet leader like Gorbachev who recognized that his country would become irrelevant in world affairs unless he tried to reform his stagnant economy.

  Even in 1979, some critics pooh-poohed my aggressive chapter titles such as “No Substitute for Victory” and “The Sword and the Spirit.” They felt it was irresponsible to suggest the Soviet Union might weaken in the face of aggressively promoted Western ideals. But judge this passage in the light of the events of 1989:

  The peoples of Eastern Europe hate their Russian overlords . . . Eastern Europe will remain a perpetual problem for the Soviet Union. The peoples of Eastern Europe have tasted freedom, something the Russian people have never tasted, except for a few brief months in 1917. Eventually, unless the Soviet Union first succeeds in its goal of world domination, the nations of Eastern Europe will become free.

  Or this one:

  The Soviets need contact with the West. They need our technology and our trade. They cannot keep out our radio broadcasts. They cannot seal themselves off totally from the world. When they crack open the door to reach out for what they want, we should push through it as much truth as we can.

  Was I a prophet? Of course not. I and many other American leaders had been saying the same thing throughout our careers. During the Eisenhower Administration, John Foster Dulles was unremittingly criticized by the Left for saying that communists could be driven out of power in Moscow and the capitals of Eastern Europe. His rhetoric of rollback and peaceful liberation, his critics maintained, was “destabilizing.” Today, as democratic ideals triumph in Eastern Europe and have even begun to make inroads in the Soviet Union, rollback is finally becoming a reality. It can safely be said that the communists have finally lost the Cold War. But the West has not yet won it.

  —RN

  February 26, 1990

  Saddle River, New Jersey

  1

  No Time to Lose

  The history of failure in war can be summed up in two words: Too Late. Too late in comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential enemy; too late in realizing the mortal danger; too late in preparedness; too late in uniting all possible forces for resistance; too late in standing with one’s friends.

  —General Douglas MacArthur

  As I write this book, a third of a century has passed since I first entered Congress; five years have passed since I resigned the presidency.

  When I resigned that office, I left unfinished the work that meant more to me than any I have ever been engaged in: the establishment of a new “structure of peace” that might prevent a major war, and at the same time maintain the security of the Western world during the balance of this century. Since that time, the position of the United States relative to that of the Soviet Union has seriously worsened, and the peril to the West has greatly increased. That “structure of peace” can still be completed, but it will be more difficult now, and there is less time in which to build it.

  Since resigning, I have reflected at great length on the ways in which the world has changed during my third of a century in public life, and on the ways in which it has not. I have also reflected at length on the challenges that my successors in the presidency have faced and will face. The President of the United States wields enormous power. The fate of the West depends on how well and how shrewdly he uses it. He can wield it to far greater effect if the American people understand what he confronts, and why the use of American power is necessary; if, in effect, they become partners with him in preserving the security of the West and the peace of the world. He cannot do it alone, and he cannot do it at all if the obstructionists block his way.

  During most of my presidency
America was fighting a bitter war in Vietnam. During all of my presidency we were engaged in a “war” with the Soviet Union. That struggle with the Soviets will continue to dominate world events for the rest of this century.

  This book is about that struggle, and about the ways in which American power can be used to win it. We cannot win it unless we understand the nature and uses of power. Our adversaries understand these all too well.

  I have dealt directly and sometimes bluntly with the leaders of the Soviet Union, of China, of Europe, and of the developed and developing nations of all continents. I have used both force and diplomacy in world affairs, and have seen how they are used by others. I have encountered the steel will of the Kremlin leaders, and have had to match their determination with my own. I have seen that they know what they want and will resort to any means to get it.

  • • •

  This book is a cri de coeur, addressed not only to our political leaders but to leaders in all walks of life—to take hold before it is too late, and to marshal America’s strengths so as to ensure its survival.

  The Soviet Union today is the most powerfully armed expansionist nation the world has ever known, and its arms buildup continues at a pace nearly twice that of the United States. There is no mystery about Soviet intentions. The Kremlin leaders do not want war, but they do want the world. And they are rapidly moving into position to get what they want.

  In the 1980s America for the first time in modern history will confront two cold realities. The first of these is that if war were to come, we might lose. The second is that we might be defeated without war. The second prospect is more likely than the first, and almost as grim. The danger facing the West during the balance of this century is less that of a nuclear holocaust than it is of drifting into a situation in which we find ourselves confronted with a choice between surrender and suicide—red or dead. That danger can still be averted, but the time in which we can avert it is rapidly running out.

  The next two decades represent a time of maximum crisis for America and for the West, during which the fate of the world for generations to come may well be determined.

  Other nations have much longer experience than we have in the use of power to maintain the peace. But they no longer have the power. So, by default, the world looks to the United States. It looks today with nervous apprehension, as the bulwarks against Soviet expansion crumble in one nation after another, and as the United States appears so lost in uncertainty or paralyzed by propriety that it is either unable or unwilling to act.

  • • •

  Soviet ambitions present the United States with a strategic challenge of global proportion, which requires a renewed strategic consciousness and response. It requires a coherent national strategy based upon informed public support. Piecemeal temporizing will not do. Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, South Yemen, Mozambique, Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam, all have been brought under communist domination since 1974; nearly 100 million people in the last five years. Iran has been plunged into bloody chaos and turned overnight from a bastion of Western strength to a cauldron of virulent anti-Westernism, its oil treasures lying provocatively exposed to lustful Russian eyes. Cuba acts increasingly as an agent of wide-ranging Soviet ambitions. These are examples of how the pieces will continue to fall if we take a piecemeal approach. We have to recover the geopolitical momentum, marshaling and using our resources in the tradition of a great power.

  The old colonial empires are gone. The new Soviet imperialism requires a new counterforce to keep it in check. The United States cannot provide this alone, but without strong and effective leadership from the United States, it cannot be provided at all. We cannot afford to waffle and waver. Either we act like a great power or we will be reduced to a minor power, and thus reduced we will not survive—nor will freedom or Western values survive.

  To be effective, our response to the Soviet challenge must integrate long-term and short-term measures. It must also integrate the various levels on which it is mounted—military, economic, philosophical, political, diplomatic. We must recognize the relationships between what happens in Asia and what happens in the Middle East, between strategic resources and patterns of world trade, between economic productivity and military might, between philosophical commitment and national will, between national will and the effectiveness of a nation’s military forces in preventing conflict.

  • • •

  We are at war. We are engaged in a titanic struggle in which the fates of nations are being decided. In war the fact that a surrounded garrison surrenders without any shots being fired makes its capture no less a military victory for one side and a defeat for the other. When the Soviet Union advances by using proxy troops, its conquests are still Soviet victories and Western defeats.

  Since World War II the Soviet military buildup has been continuous and the Soviet expansionist pressure has been relentless. Moscow has fished assiduously in the troubled waters left in the wake of the dismantlement of the old colonial empires. It has blockaded Berlin, fomented revolutions in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, aided aggression by North Korea and North Vietnam. It has trained and subsidized guerrillas, disrupted elections, shot down unarmed planes, sponsored coups, shot refugees, imprisoned dissidents. It has threatened, blustered, connived, conspired, subverted, bribed, intimidated, terrorized, lied, cheated, stolen, tortured, spied, blackmailed, murdered—all as a matter of deliberate national policy.

  • • •

  The basic rule of Soviet behavior was laid down years ago by Lenin: Probe with bayonets. If you encounter steel, withdraw. If you encounter mush, continue. The question is which will the Soviets encounter: steel or mush?

  The answer to that question lies with America’s leadership. Not just its political leadership. What kind of world view the American President has, how well he understands the uses of power and the nuances of diplomacy, whether he has a strategic vision and the will and shrewdness to carry it out—all these are vital, even indispensable, elements. But more broadly, the answer lies with those segments of American leadership whose attitudes determine the limits of the possible for American policy.

  Unfortunately, America is still suffering from the legacy of the 1960s. A rabid anti-intellectualism swept the nation’s campuses then, and fantasy reigned supreme. Attacks on anything representing the established order were in fashion. The discords of that decade and of its aftermath critically weakened the nation’s capacity to meet its responsibilities in the world, not only militarily but also in terms of its ability to lead.

  Ironically, even as anti-intellectualism ravaged the campuses, the 1960s also saw an overly “intellectualized” new fashion take hold among many of those who thought professionally about arms and particularly about arms control: the notion that above a certain minimum, the less military strength you had, the better. The hope arose that if the United States limited its own arms, others—particularly the Soviets—would follow. But the Soviets did not perform according to theory. In fact, during the same period when this arms-control doctrine was winning favor among American theorists, and the theorists were winning influence, the Soviet five-year plans were charting ever greater increases in military spending, clearly guided by coherent strategic objectives. The Soviets were not bogged down in theory; they were driving toward supremacy.

  • • •

  There are many today who suggest that American civilization is suffering a terminal illness, that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the West. Some American opinion leaders view this with despair. Some, especially in darkest academia, see it as the logical and overdue result of our being on the wrong side. Like the classic definition of fox hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable,” they see America as the aggressive in support of the oppressive. As playwright Eugene Ionesco reported after a recent visit to the United States, American intellectuals tend to be “masochists who want to be blamed for everything wrong in the world.” When he told American liberal friends that the
United States was not as bad as other nations, “the liberals looked at me askance. For in order to be appreciated in America, one must, above all, never say that Americans are not the worst criminals of humanity.”

  What America does suffer from is not itself a terminal illness, but rather a sort of creeping paralysis that could become terminal unless treated. Together with our allies in the Western world, we have the capacity to survive, to prosper, to turn back the challenges to our security that are being mounted with increasing force. The question is whether we will use that capacity.

  • • •

  Nations live or die by the way they respond to the particular challenges they face. Those challenges may be internal or external; they may be faced by a nation alone or in concert with other nations; they may come gradually or suddenly. There is no immutable law of nature that says only the unjust will be afflicted, or that the just will prevail. While might certainly does not make right, neither does right by itself make might. The time when a nation most craves ease may be the moment when it can least afford to let down its guard. The moment when it most wishes it could address its domestic needs may be the moment when it most urgently has to confront an external threat. The nation that survives is the one that rises to meet that moment: that has the wisdom to recognize the threat and the will to turn it back, and that does so before it is too late.

  The naïve notion that we can preserve freedom by exuding goodwill is not only silly, but dangerous. The more adherents it wins, the more it tempts the aggressor.

  • • •

  The central thesis of this book is that the West, today, has crossed the threshold of a period of acute crisis in which its survival into the twenty-first century is directly at stake. We have the material capacity, the economic and technological strength, to prevail—which means to maintain our freedom and to avert a major war. But the capacity alone is not enough. Sir Robert Thompson, the British expert on guerrilla warfare, has trenchantly defined national power as manpower plus applied resources, times will. We have the resources and the manpower. Have we the will to use them?