Communist Strategy

June 1, 1959

We got into the Foreign Ministers’ meeting at Geneva, and into all the plans for a “summit conference,” by yielding to Soviet propaganda and pressure. There never has been any sincere desire in Moscow for “peaceful coexistence” or for a just “settlement.” “Negotiation,” to them, is merely a technique of warfare. They want the West to negotiate its own surrender—or, failing that, to make concessions that will further weaken its military or moral position. At the very least they want a conference to give them a world loudspeaker for their propaganda against the West.

We have been lured into these conferences by not knowing how to get out of them. How can we refuse to “negotiate” for peace? But the question confuses means with ends. The goal is peace with justice. A summit conference, or even a Foreign Ministers’ conference, is at best a means. Both means are unpromising for the West. Neither is necessary. The West could have said long ago, and there is time to say still; that if Khrushchev has any proposals for a Berlin, a German, or any other settlement to make to us, our Ambassadors in Moscow are always there to hear them, to transmit them, to negotiate concerning them. This in fact is the precise reason why our Ambassadors and their staffs are there.

AMBASSADORIAL LEVEL

If the Foreign Ministers’ conference fails, therefore, we could keep the door open, instead of passing the problem on to a futile summit conference, by suggesting that the negotiations be continued quietly at the ambassadorial level. This is the chief raison d’être for the whole traditional ambassadorial system. If it is to be bypassed every time matters of importance arise, it becomes an expensive farce.

At a press conference on May 5, President Eisenhower seemed to minimize what the forthcoming Foreign Ministers’ meeting could achieve by saying: “All of us do know that within the Soviet regime there is only one man who can talk authoritatively.” But the fact that the consent of a head of state is necessary for final ratification of an agreement need not mean that all negotiations must be with him directly, and by other heads of state. The very day before the President said this, our Ambassador at Moscow had presented to Khrushchev a demand for information on eleven American fliers, missing since the crash of a C-130 transport in Soviet Armenia last September. This is the proper procedure. If it is not effective, it is because the head of state does not really want a settlement.

FEAST–OR FAMINE?

These thoughts are suggested by an important book that has just appeared under the auspices of the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania—Protracted Conflict, by Robert Strausz- Hupe, W.R. Kintner, J.E. Dougherty, and A.J. Cottrell (Harper, $3.95). The book is the most acute study of Communist international strategy that I have yet seen. It describes in detail the political, economic, psychological, and military techniques that the Communists have been using against the West since 1945, as well as the sporadic, halfhearted, and purely defensive responses of the Western democracies. There are separate chapters on the Soviet’s “Monopoly of the Initiative” and on their strategy of “Deception and Distraction.” And one of the devices of deception treated is the “deliberate falsification of economic data.”

This continues to be successful because gullible Westerners continue to play into the Communists’ hands. Even within the last two weeks Lord Boyd Orr, for example, speaking from Moscow, endorsed the extravagant claims of the Chinese Communists by saying that they appeared to have raised food production by “50 to 100 percent” in three years. Yet three days after that estimate, a dispatch from Hong Kong in The New York Times reported that “residents of Shanghai have been unable to get bread of any kind for two and a half months,” while “the rice lines in all large cities were increasing steadily in size and rations were decreasing.”

Those who are so ready to give credence to Communist lies about production betray a weak faith in our free economic system.