Moscow talks
The end of détente ?
Gerald Segal
The President of the United States, Richard Macon, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger are in the Soviet Union this week surely aware that the detente policy they have pursued for the past three years is in total ruin. The worrying question is whether the President because of his need for a foreign policy success however, feigned to compensate for the crisis of confidence arising from the Watergate affair, or Kissinger, by virtue of his intellectual commitment to the doctrine, can face up to the ',Ample reality: there is no detente.
All the signs are that they cannot, which ' provokes the thought that those who can may be behind the pressures now building up on Henry Kissinger which take the form of accusing him of lying to a US Senate Committee about his involvement, in electronic spying on his own colleagues, and more damaging, that he came to a secret understanding with the Soviets in 1972 which allowed them more nuclear missiles 'than were stipulated in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreements. Theoverall aim of such criticisms can only be to undermine his prestige in the public estimation and thereby limit his authority to negotiate with the Soviets. Even if this suggestion should prove to be far-fetched, the truth is that a strong case can be made out to show that both Nixon and Kissinger have, at any rate in their public speeches, misled themselves about the realities of the detente policy and may mislead the rest of us.
Consider Nixon's remark a couple of weeks ago to the effect that the United States would not like it if the Soviet Union sought to interfere in her affairs and by the same token the United States had no right to interfere in the affairs of the Soviet Union_ He added that, "we cannot change the Soviet system." All of which doctrine — the doctrine of non-interference — sounds reasonable until one comes to analyse it, when it is immediately seen as 'Tricky Dicky' at his best or worst.
Two weeks before Nixon made that speech the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, was visited by the leader of the American Communist Party, Gus Hall. Lengthy discussions were held, ranging from the needs of world peace to the future of the capitalist system. Was Brezhnev interfering in the internal affairs of the United States with a view to altering its social order or was he not? And lest anyone thinks it right to snigger that the American Communist Party does not matter a damn and we can afford to let them interfere in that — and in so doing avoid the issue of principle involved — let him consider some other examples of how they the Soviets interpret the concept 'non-interference', which they would have us believe should constitute a key factor in any East-West detente. When Brezhnev sends letters of congratulations to the French Communist Party leader, Georges Marchais, on the performance of the party in the French elections (December 1972), is he interfering in the affairs of France?
To take some more recent examples. In the past few months, delegations from the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party have visited France and Luxembourg to acquaint themselves with the organisational practices and general role of the Communist Parties of both those countries. Is that interference in the affairs of sovereign national states on the part of the Soviet Union or isn't it?
If it isn't, and Nixon's apparent acceptance of it implies that the leaders of the western world do not think it is, then it follows that they have come very close to accepting the Marxist-Leninist conceptual framework of the contemporary world. Recalling the remark which the late President John F. Kennedy made to Brezhnev's predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev, "What your policy amounts to is that what's yours is yours and what's mine is negotiable," it is as though Nixon is concurring in such a policy.
Equally disturbing and dangerous is the fact that the question of the nature of 'non-interference' is often linked to the question of the rights of Soviet Jews to emigrate. And yet nothing reveals more clearly the extent to which the West has been outmanoeuvred in its thinking on the detente issue. Assume that by the end of this week, or month, or year, all those Soviet Jews who wish to emigrate will have done so and that for one reason or another the entire question of Soviet Jewry is no longer on the East-West agenda in any form. Will there then be détente? Will it be possible then to say that the tensions to which the West has felt itself subject, and in response to which the 'Cold War' was inaugurated, no longer exist? Will there then be a situation of no East-West tension; in the strictest sense, a situation of detente? The answer is clearly 'No,' for nothing will have been done to attenuate that threat to the Western conception of the rights of man which is perceived in Leninist totalitarianism and the messianic impulse of those who believe in it to impose the doctrine on the rest of us. And the fact that we will also, if Nixon and Kissinger are allowed to get away with their acceptance of the Soviet view of non-interference, be continuously exposed to a one-way subversion process, is likely to raise the hopes of the Soviet leadership that their cause may yet triumph.
We may note, too, the skilful way in which Brezhnev is using the Western error in linking the question of the right to emigrate of Soviet Jews with detente. A few months ago the emigration flow was cut down and this was immediately interpreted in the West, and in particular publicly by Kissinger, as the Soviet response to Western attempts to interfere in their affairs. All the evidence is against this interpretation and for the view that it is only as a result of Western pressure (interference by another name) that anyone, Jewish scientist or Russian Orthodox writer, has ever been allowed to leave the Soviet Union. The Soviet leadership made no comment, and Kissinger's view was largely ignored while the US Congress continued to insist on emigration as a precondition to the granting of 'most favoured nation' treatment and other favourable trade terms to the Soviet Union.
Now the story is being put about (apparently by sources close to Kissinger) that the Soviet Union is prepared to agree to an annual emigration of some ,40,000 Soviet Jews. And the reason for that? The explanation is immediately at hand and it is precisely contrary to that which was originally offered to explain the holdup in emigration: it is that Brezhnev wants detente and it is in the interests of detente that he is prepared to relent. The truth is, and it stares -one in the face, that in exchange for allowing 40,000 Soviet Jews to emigrate, Brezhnev gets vital American credits and technology, an Increased supply or available housing in Russia and a stronger Western delusion about the realities of his policies.
For while Brezhnev appears to yield in the shadow boxing over the emigration-detente issue, he has adamantly refused any compromise at the Geneva talks on European security on the real detente issue — the right to the free exchange of people and ideas. If he had, the right of Soviet Jews. to emigrate would have been nothing more than a derogation of the more universal rights of man but it was precisely on this issue that Brezhnev as a good Leninist refused to yield. On the contrary, when once it was clear that the West, having supported Brandt's Ostpolitik not only to the extent of West German recognition of the borders with Poland and Czechoslovakia but beyond that to the recognition of East Germany as an independent sovereign state in the interests of detente, steps were taken to whipthe Communist bloc into a hard-line Leninist stance.
A series of ideological conferences beginning last autumn were called which precisely aimed (as the Hungarian government changes testified) at bringing about a united front to resist the Western demand for the free exchange principle. The overall result of three years of talk of detente is that little has changed except that world armaments, including those of the two super-powers who are supposed to be limiting their arms in agreement with each other, have increased, and the West, at any rate in Europe, is now in a weaker position than before all the talk of detente began.
Gerald Segal is The Spectator's correspondent in Brussels and an expert on East-West relations.
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