opinion: must we always be tough?

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Opinion: Must We Always Be Tough?Author(s): Christopher LemanSource: Foreign Policy, No. 11 (Summer, 1973), pp. 93-101Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1148040 .

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Opinion

MUST WE ALWAYS BE TOUGH?

by Christopher Leman

"A missile," said Robert McNamara, "is a missile. It makes no great difference whether you are killed by a missile fired from the Soviet Union or from Cuba." This was the position of the Secretary of Defense in the early stages of the Cuban missile crisis, which followed American discovery in October 1962 of covert Soviet deployments in the Caribbean. We are all familiar with the cataclysmic potential of those days of tension and maneuver. Perhaps we miss in retrospect the possibility that if McNamara's view had prevailed, there would not have been a crisis, nor even a need for one. Those 13 days have generated a great many ideas on how best to "(manage" a crisis, extracting the most value while ending it safely. Few lessons have been drawn about the nature of the conflicts that prompt crises, and hence about whether brinkmanship is the only effective policy.

Conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union do not reach, nor often approach, nuclear war, a prospect that neither side desires. Each has learned to avoid those issues that conscience and convention define for the other as worthy of war. The mechanism for this stable and peaceful system is what strategists content themselves with calling "resolve." Resolve is the credibility (not necessarily the honesty) that invests each party's threats with the power to dissuade the other from adventuring at its expense. This image of resolution is communicated to one's antagonist in many ways, but most directly by actually "standing up to him" when he has transgressed. Soviet introduction of missiles onto

The editors of FOREIGN POLICY are pleased to continue their series of guest editorials with this ar- ticle by a Harvard undergraduate.

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Cuban soil was a grave breach of this portentous etiquette, and it is understandable that President Kennedy gave little thought to inaction. In fact, Kennedy deserves infinite respect for resisting the much less restrained strategies that were suggested. Nevertheless, the President himself estimated afterwards that his course brought the chance of war to "between one out of three and even." Perhaps these risks were worth accepting to reprove the irresponsible Soviet move and restore the delicate structure of heeded threats. But it is worth inquiring whether the choice was not less stark than simply between confrontation and humiliation.

Resolve as a Relativism

Secretary McNamara knew that the Russians could soon devastate the United States with missiles launched within their borders, even after absorbing a surprise attack-just as we already could do to them if it came to that. Moreover, he believed there was nothing the United States could reasonably do to prevent their eventual attainment of this "assured destruction capability." Thus McNamara saw the Cuban buildup as only a nettlesomely early appearance of that inevitable vulnerability. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze held that the range and location of the missiles enabled a surprise attack on our bomber fleet. Whatever the value of Nitze's argument (and it has fared well among retrospective analysts), the rest of the President's advisers were not persuaded by it. Most accepted McNamara's view that there was little immediate military danger involved. However, these men did not draw his calm conclusion, as the change seemed loaded with symbolism. They argued that the Kremlin, our allies, nonaligned nations, and the Republicans saw the Soviet move as a test of the President's resolve, a challenge he could decline only with serious damage to American foreign policy.

President Kennedy himself did not see the Soviet initiative as a threat to the military balance. He later argued that, if allowed to succeed, it "would have politically changed the balance of power. It would have appeared to, and appearances

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contribute to reality." Although Kennedy may have been fatalistic about the connection, he was correct in stressing the impact of imagery. Diplomats do trade as much in images as in legal, military, or economic facts. Symbols are especially important in the development of nuclear deterrence, for resolve, by its very nature, cannot be established as fact. It is at best a prediction, and one whose full confirmation would be self- defeating. Less than ever can we look to traditional military calculations to understand international conflict or quiescence. The currency of nuclear politics is fixed only in the sense that some level of destructive power is needed to deter nuclear attack or lesser aggression. Beyond that substantial hurdle, deterrence is profoundly dependent on the perceptions and values of the partners in stalemate. It is precisely this anchorless quality that offers some surprising opportunities for maneuver.

In an unsparing critique of "relativity" in policy-making, 1 Thomas L. Hughes deplores a fashionable tendency to reduce all alternatives to the same analytical level, for this may obscure the basis for choosing among them. Hughes' argument is very effective in highlighting demoralization in the State Department that results from hot-shot analysis and the doctrine of open options. It is less helpful in approaching our Councils of Grand Strategy, which instead have suffered from an abundance of absolutism. The technicians of the nuclear standoff are no less flexible than the constrained-or hidebound- specialists at State, but that is scarcely an accomplishment. For, unlike the steadfast uniformities of diplomacy, strategy's truths are often tractable. Relativity is the governing principle of resolve. There is no question that this perspective can be over-applied or misused. But it is not the perverse invention of an ambitious nihilist.

Except at such moments of truth as the Cuban missile crisis, a government must rely on indirect evidence of its opponent's resolution. This usually consists of commitments that signal his willingness

1Thomas L. Hughes, "Relativity in Foreign Policy: The Storage and Retrieval of Conviction," Foreign Affairs, July, 1967.

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to risk war in defense of certain objectives. The world arrangement becomes an index of resolve; changes assume profound significance. But the link between an event and its interpretation is hardly automatic. It is only with difficulty that a nation spreads its nuclear umbrella in the first place. And no umbrella can protect against splashes from below. Thus Robert Jervis has pointed out that just as a nation can identify its reputation with the defense of a part of the status quo, it may wish to "decouple" the two. Interestingly, prior to and during the missile crisis there seems to have been little thought devoted to the possibility that a "concession" could be made to seem insignificant.

Not only was there no attempt to downplay issues of prestige; the conflict was strongly framed in those terms. Of course, Kennedy was boxed in from the beginning, for he had explicitly forbidden the action. But he might have tried to convince the Russians and the world that though he might acquiesce in this case, his resolve would remain strong when it came to more corporeal challenges. However, if there were risks in the strategy the President actually chose, there are also risks in this one. For even a leader who knew his resolve to be unimpaired might nevertheless be forced to bow to an enemy that no longer felt deterred. The other side could misinterpret or misrepresent his consent as cowardice. Although this unfortunate prospect may be enough to lessen the appeal of conflict-avoidance as a strategy, it is interesting that we are less apt to credit similarly determinate irrationalities on our own side of the nuclear fence. Was Robert McNamara too obtuse to see the symbolic implications of the technically unthreatening missiles? Perhaps, but his was a naivet" that might have actually deprived a supposed Soviet victory of any meaning or usefulness.

Strength in Skepticism

The initial reactions of American officials to the Soviet action are instructive. If Secretary McNamara underestimated the issue's component of resolve, others in the government elevated resolve to the necessity of a physical law. Neither position

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fully admits the dependence of conflicts over resolve upon the antagonists' definitions of the situation. But each in its own way makes use of this relativism. Thus resistance and avoidance are both workable strategies to preserve the efficacy of one's resolve. There was not just one unique path by which the United States might have surmounted the missile issue.

In focusing on McNamara's position early in the crisis, I do not want to stereotype him as a prophet or prisoner of pure reason. Indeed, he soon discarded his position and championed the strategy eventually adopted: blockade. He may now regret his early stand--or he may not. What concerns me here are not the analytical merits of his position, but its uses and durability in an atmosphere that otherwise admitted only possibilities of Soviet retreat or incipient war. It may be the sort of behavior to encourage.

Robert McNamara's visionary equanimity amidst general distress is an interesting model for behavior that might transcend or redefine disputes over resolve. His almost Scholastic devotion to the calculus of nuclear strategy excluded less quantifiable questions of image and belief. Hughes argues that narrow analytical thinking paralyzes foreign policy by undermining the necessarily imprecise theories that guide us. He calls for a "retrieval of conviction" so that we can again have something to act upon. It is not necessary, however, to see McNamara's initial approach as formless negativism. Indeed, his reductionism was another kind of conviction. Analysis may well play a formative, even revolutionary, role. Strategists have pondered the "rationality of irrationality" without seeing the similar uses of their own approach. A government of McNamaras, unshakable in its belief that a missile is a missile and that a symbol is a trifle, might frustrate enemy hopes of portraying inaction as weakness. I do not want to argue that professed unconcern was a realistic stand for the U.S. government. Obviously, few officials felt comfortable with the Secretary's unconventional argument. Still, it might have been useful to convey the impression to the Kremlin that his viewpoint prevailed. Of course, even this could

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have been rendered ineffective by unwillingness of the American public to go along. The President himself thought he would have been impeached had the missiles remained. But the very fact that he could consider such intramural contingencies only emphasizes that the international circumstances were somewhat more flexible than Kennedy's argument about the tyranny of appearances supposed.

Yet Kennedy's behavior suggests he knew that conflicts over resolve are more relative than are diplomatic issues. Late in the crisis, he received a Soviet offer asking that in exchange for withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba, "the United States will evacuate its analogous weapons from Turkey." Kennedy had long before ordered these outmoded Jupiter weapons removed anyway, and accounts of the crisis show he deeply regretted that this had not been done. Nevertheless, he seemed unwilling to include them in a trade because this might be seen as proof of weakness in Washington. Instead, the President took the risky course of replying to an earlier and more generous offer apparently penned by Premier Khrushchev alone. Of course, even in this communication Kennedy offered what later observers have viewed as a significant quid pro quo: his promise not to invade Cuba. Moreover, it is conceivable that the Soviet request was made less from respect for the aging Jupiters than in anticipation of the problems the United States would have in making their withdrawal palatable to its NATO allies. For both of these reasons, the President's apparent refusal to accept the later offer may be more understandable.

But Kennedy was more flexible, if not more magnanimous, than his interpreters recognize. The President in effect did include the Turkish missiles in his final offer. When Robert Kennedy delivered the ultimatum to Ambassador Dobrynin, he stressed that "there could be no quid pro quo or any arrangement made under this sort of threat or pressure," but that "within a short time after the crisis was over, those missiles would be gone." And indeed they were, within four months. It is difficult to see how that statement could be taken except as the offer it claimed not to be. The Soviet

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Union got the desired concession, but under circumstances that rendered it meaningless. For the Attorney General showed that the United States had no interest in keeping missiles in Turkey, that in fact we wanted them removed anyway. Furthermore, Kennedy insisted that the deal, if deal it was, be kept secret and unofficial. This allowed the U.S. government to make use of the protean nature of resolve, but to preserve the appearance of rigidity for the benefit of its less adaptable allies. As any diplomat knows, friends are more trouble than enemies.

The President and the Precedent

Although in his settlement President Kennedy proved willing to make use of resolve's indeterminate nature, earlier in the crisis he had felt compelled to make a supreme issue of the missiles in Cuba. Today his successor can hope to weasel out of a confrontation over even the latter. The U.S.S.R. clearly wants to base missile submarines in Cuba, its only outpost in the hemisphere. When Soviet submarines and tenders began visiting Cuban ports in 1970, the United States strongly opposed this as a breach of the understanding reached by Kennedy and Khrushchev in 1962. George Quester has commented that the President might "have cause to regret the position so handily captured by Kennedy." 2 Yet Nixon's was a rather broad reading of the admittedly broad agreement. Hurried consultations between the governments soon led to permission for Soviet crews to use Cuba as a rest station, although servicing of missile submarines in the Caribbean was still proscribed.

Should the United States resist attempts by the U.S.S.R. to expand this arrangement? Much of the debate on this question centers on the motives behind such an effort: are the Russians now mellowed enough to be purely interested in the very real technical attractions of a Cuban base, or do they still seek symbolic victories at our expense? Unfortunately, there may be no satisfying answer. For that reason, it is pertinent that the strategy of conflict-avoidance does not depend on the goodwill

2George Quester, "Missiles in Cuba, 1970," Foreign Affairs, April, 1971, p. 500.

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of the other party. Indeed, this whole discussion has assumed malevolent intentions in conflicts of resolve. Even if the Soviet leaders do see the issue as a probe of our will to resist them, we might escape both crisis and later bullying by showing rational or even naive unconcern with their initiative. A submarine base is even less threatening than Robert McNamara found the missiles of 1962. It would be of only marginal help for a surprise attack which, if it were feasible, would require only a temporary concentration of submarines near our shores. Rather, a Cuban base would enhance the efficiency of the Soviet force for regular patrols. Quester strikingly argues that it is now in America's interest to encourage the U.S.S.R. to complete its sea-launched deterrent. And though we might find it hard to convince the Russians or ourselves that we actually welcome their submarines to Cuban waters, we could still take the position that the change is not worth worrying about, and dismiss the issue of resolve.

In 1970, President Nixon chose to view the new Soviet policy as a challenge to his resolve, but he could have altered the circumstances from which the enemy and the world would generalize. I

Indeed, the very fact that he had chosen not to respond might reduce the significance of their "victory" even in the eyes of those in the Kremlin. In spring, 1972, a Soviet submarine with short- range missiles visited Cuba, but this time the President did not respond publicly. It is ironic to find such torpor over an issue that nearly drew us into war 10 years ago. Perhaps some credit for the lessened tensions can go to the single-minded strategic thinking typified by Robert McNamara's reaction to the missiles discovered in Cuba. The superpowers may confront one another about other things, but they are unlikely to worry much about the symbolic dimension of nuclear forces. This calming skepticism can reinforce the same thinking on the other side, just as cold war sensitivities on both sides once conspired to produce the Cuban missile crisis.

3Henry Brandon fails to consider this possibility in his uncritical account of the incident in "Nixon's Way With the Russians," New York Times Magazine, January 21, 1973, pp. 36-39.

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The Costs of Conviction

Here is the dilemma that Thomas L. Hughes sees in the making of foreign policy:

Once the necessary but negative work has been done in exploding the myths and clarifying the choices, there follows the insistent question: What next? Where do the values come from?

This may be the problem in everyday diplomacy and even in planning, but Hughes' eloquent advice is singularly alarming when applied to nuclear politics. The world does seem stabilized by deterrence based on deeply felt but modest visions of national interest, and in that sense convictions are necessary. But there are some such guides for action to which we might prefer paralysis. Although it is obvious that we must avoid seeming too flexible, it is not so clear that we need avoid actually being so. If determination is what we want to project, it need not require subjection to deadly determinism. The frightening thing about a doomsday machine is not that it can destroy the world, but that it will do so with such slight cause.

Hughes' argument implies, perhaps unwillingly, that some policies depend for their very survival on being sheltered from rigorous study of their ambiguities. This need not be a decisive objection to his call for conviction. There is, after all, a real possibility that our only safety is in armed complacency. But that would hardly enhance the moral or intellectual appeal of such a policy. If analysis so easily vitiates our strategic assumptions, can it be solely at fault? Not every argument from relativity is an abuse of the concept. For as I have tried to show, analysis can play an independent role if unhindered, recasting the situations we normally think of as immutable. And even if thorough skepticism is sometimes unsettling, there is no substitute for careful and candid study of these all-important issues.

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