If my feet were on the ground metaphysically as well, this was in part because I had followed closely the speeches and writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn since he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. But the first time I saw and heard him speak was in an interview he gave to Michael Charlton on the BBC television programme Panorama in March 1976. It made a deep impression on me; I subsequently kept the transcript amid the bundle of papers I regularly referred to when in need of inspiration.
The predominant Western view at the time was that in the end the Soviet system would, by a process of ‘convergence’, turn into something not very different from Western society, which would itself evolve in the direction of social democracy. Solzhenitsyn challenged this complacency. The real question, according to him, was not whether and how the Soviet system would change, but rather whether the West itself could survive. This was not because of the strengths of communism but rather because of the weakness and cowardice of Western leaders. Until a few years before the cause of the dissidents in the USSR had been making real if slow headway. But now the Western nations had allowed the balance to shift dramatically against freedom. Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of the Helsinki process made my own, which had caused such controversy the previous year, pale into banality. Solzhenitsyn asked:
How do you explain that over the last few months there has been hardly any news coming out of the Soviet Union of the continuing persecution of dissidents? If you will forgive me, I will answer this myself. The journalists have bowed to the spirit of Helsinki. I know for a fact that Western journalists in Moscow, who have been given the right of freer movement, in return for this, and because of the spirit of Helsinki, no longer accept information about new persecutions of dissidents in the Soviet Union. What does the spirit of Helsinki and the spirit of détente mean for us within the Soviet Union? The strengthening of totalitarianism.
As I have noted, the revival of Western morale and defence preparedness altered this entire equation. But Solzhenitsyn’s words are an interesting testimony to the corrosive effect of Helsinki under conditions of détente.
Now, however, the election of Jimmy Carter as President of the United States at the end of 1976 brought to the White House a man who put human rights at the top of his foreign policy agenda. One could at least be sure that he would not make the mistake of his predecessor, who had refused to meet Solzhenitsyn for fear of offending the Soviet Union.
President Carter was soon to be tested. In January 1977 the text of ‘Charter 77’, the manifesto of the Czech dissidents, was smuggled into West Germany and published. The following month Jimmy Carter wrote personally to Professor Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear scientist and leading dissident. This change of tone was reassuring.
But I soon became worried about two other aspects of the Carter Administration’s approach to foreign policy. First, human rights issues were treated without reference to broader political and strategic considerations, and indeed with some moral naivete. Even the most idealistic proponent of a policy inspired by moral considerations has to be practical. There were many regimes which abused human rights — for example, some military governments in Latin America and the Middle East — but which may have been less oppressive than the totalitarian alternative.
Moreover, the primary duty a free country owes, not just to itself but to countries which are unfree, is to survive. So there is no need to apologize for supporting an unsavoury regime which temporarily serves larger Western interests, although we should always use our influence to ameliorate its worst abuses. Unfortunately, muddled thinking and divisions within the Carter Administration prevented it from pursuing such a balanced approach. As we shall see, the Carter stress on human rights in Iran helped to undermine the Shah and to replace him with the far more oppressive, and anti-Western, regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini. As Pascal points out, the first principle of morality is thinking clearly. And in this case failing to think clearly produced a markedly worse result for both human rights and Western interests.
My second criticism was that human rights policy cannot stand on its own, for the simple reason that rights have ultimately to be defended by force. In the circumstances of the 1970s, this required the United States to be militarily strong enough to resist and reverse the threat to world freedom posed by the Soviet Union. Yet President Carter had a passionate commitment to disarmament, demonstrated both by his early cancellation of the B1 strategic bomber and the renewed impetus he gave to SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), which President Ford had initiated with the Soviets. Ironically, therefore, President Carter found that he could only take action to improve human rights against countries linked to the West, not against countries that were hostile and strong enough to ignore him.
As for the SALT II negotiations, it was possible to argue about the particular formulae, but the really important strategic fact was that the Soviet Union had in recent years been arming far faster than the Americans. Any mere ‘arms limitation’ agreement was bound to stabilize the military balance in such a way as to recognize this. Only deep arms cuts on the one hand, or a renewed drive for stronger American defences on the other, could reverse it. If, however, neither of these was a real possibility in the prevailing state of public opinion, then something on the broad lines of a SALT agreement was to the West’s advantage, since it would at least halt the Soviets’ advance. Either way, the United States had already lost its nuclear superiority at a time when the West had long since abandoned any attempt to keep up with the Warsaw Pact in conventional weapons. Crude as such calculations inevitably are, the scale of the change is shown by the following table:
Indeed, the position would further worsen as the Soviets produced their Backfire Bombers, multiplied their nuclear submarines and started to deploy SS20 nuclear missiles focused on Western Europe.
These facts and figures were available to anyone who was interested, which far too few journalists were. But did they actually underestimate the danger? I had followed closely the accounts given by Major-General George Keegan, recently retired as Chief of the US Air Force Intelligence, of Soviet research into charged particle beams, which might provide a technology that would revolutionize defence assumptions by providing a far more effective shield against ballistic missiles. The Carter Administration belittled this threat, and only when President Reagan launched his Strategic Defence Initiative were the dangers properly understood and countervailing action taken. As early as March 1977, however, the magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology published observations by General Keegan on the dimensions of the overall Soviet threat. He argued that the Americans had consistently underestimated the scale of Soviet military strength and preparedness, coming to the devastating conclusion that ‘the Soviet Union today has a capability to initiate, wage, survive and emerge from a global conflict with far greater effectiveness than the United States and its allies’. It would take the invasion of Afghanistan, two years later, before most Western politicians began to think in these terms.