Outer Space Communications

This is John F. Lewis reporting, each year the Foreign Policy Association, in cooperation with the National Association of Educational Broadcasters presents a series of discourses that offer background information to community and campus discussion groups who seek a broader understanding of the major world affairs issues of our times. World Communism Today. How Great the Danger. Number one, in a series of special reports on topics selected by the Foreign Policy Association for discussion in the Great Decisions forums for 1964. To discuss the subject of this initial program for 1964, we turned to Walt Whitman Rostow. Counselor and chairman of the Policy Planning Council of the United States State Department.

Mr. Rostow has long been one of the most powerful figures in our government. And his lengthy experience, both in and out of government, has given him an exceptionally broad insight into the subtleties of world affairs. The interview with Mr. Rostow was one of those rare experiences for a newsman in that our talk was so completely relaxed and yet to the point. Mr. Rostow, is there a policy of containment of communism really working? I think it is. I've never been more confident that the main lines of our policy are in the right direction and making headway. To understand that, you've got to look back a bit. We faced, in the post-war years, two major communist offensives. One was Stalin's and the other was Khrushchev's. Stalin's began perhaps in February 1946 in a speech he made in Moscow.

Now, when he made clear that he was going to operate despite the problems of devastation in Russia, on the basis of hope for the extension of communism, thrusting outward and not turning inward to reconstruct his country. And this was based, I think, on American demobilization and the opportunities that he saw in Western Europe and in Asia. And that offensive strained us around the whole periphery of the block before it was finished. In Iran, first, and then Greece, Turkey, Berlin, with the thrust of the communist parties in Italy and France. And it fetched up with a great test of the Berlin blockade. And the western part of that offensive, I think, was finished with the success of the airlift. But then he turned east with the victory of the Chinese communists.

And there was a guerilla war mounted in almost every country in Asia, the exception of Japan and India, Indonesia, Burma, Malaya, into China. And then, of course, the great climax in Korea. But Stalin's offensive was over with the great battles of April and May of 51. And then there was a pause in the Cold War. Stalin died. His successors rethought their policy. And they designed a new policy, which was based on two elements in it. One was the attempt to use Soviet nuclear and missile capabilities for blackmail, notably on Western Europe and notably on Berlin. And the other part was a great thrust into the underdeveloped areas, where they used guerilla warfare, subversion, aid, trade. And we're very confident of that.

That policy can be dated in its great phase from the launching of Sputnik. And in fact, what we've seen between roughly Sputnik and the Cuba missile crisis of 62 is the second great post-war offensive of communism. When President Kennedy was inaugurated, that offensive was in full cry. In 58th, elements of it were turned back in the Lebanon-Jordan crisis in Kamoy Matsu. But we stood. We had, in 61, the Alameda-Manberlin, the thrust into Southeast Asia, thrust into Central Africa, and of course, the Castro and the Caribbean. Now, since then, that offensive has been sealed off, turned back, and lost its momentum. And we are now in another period of pause. Be clear, the dangers of communism have by no means been ended. But the policy of containment successfully carried out in the period 46 to 51.

And then again, roughly 61, 62 has worked. And it has had important playback effects in the communist bloc. The communists have failed to control nationalism within their bloc. You see this in the Sinosoviet split in many other manifestations. They've run into very deep economic troubles in both communist China and a different kind in the Soviet Union. In Eastern Europe, there are forces of fragmentation. And so I would say that the policy of containment is working. It's a policy which depends for its results. Working with long-run forces, no one wishes to see a war as the climax of the Cold War. But as we look out over the scene at this stage, I think we've got every reason to feel confident

that we're on the right track, and that if we stay the course and persist doubly in our policies with great patience, and strength behind us, the possibilities of ending the Cold War on terms compatible with principles of human freedom, with independence and nations, this is within the grasp of this generation. Mr. Rostov, along that line, however, we do have a hot war in Vietnam, Southeast Asia, generally as you've indicated. We also have a war of subversion in Latin America. This is an extension of certainly the communist movement. And I wonder if you care to comment on whether or not just what the extent of the penetration in Latin America by Castro's brand of communism is, and whether or not we're going to be able to contain it there. As I said a moment ago, the dangers of communism are by no means an end.

And as President Johnson is underlined time and time again, his very great concern with the situations in both Southeast Asia and in the Caribbean. There you still see a continuance of the mounting of subversive activities across international boundaries, the movements of men and arms, and demonstrate that this kind of game is unprofitable and unacceptable, is I think one of the major tasks still on the agenda of the free world. So far as Latin America is concerned, I think we have a great problem working with our partners in Latin America, a task of frustrating this form of subversion. It's perfectly clear and Castro has made it clear that his primary ambition is not to grow sugar in Cuba.

It is to extend his methods of guerrilla warfare and onto the mainland of Latin America. In these last three years, I think the attractiveness of Castro, his powered influence events in Latin America has diminished. This is partly a result of the clarity with which Castro has defined himself as a communist, a greater sophistication about the methods that he is using and fostering. It's also true to the fact that he's made such a mess out of Cuba, that he's failed as a communist to make Cuba an effective economic and social society, and it's also due to the perfectly obvious dependence of Castro on direct Soviet support. The Latin Americans, even the Latin Americans quite far to the left, may find in nationalism and some of the methods of socialism things that are attractive,

but Latin Americans are proud people, and the notion of making themselves dependent on an extra continental power is not attractive. What we have done, for example, at the Punta del Este meeting early in 1962, where the whole hemisphere agreed that it would take measures against the sign of Soviet offensive. What we have done to deal with that offensive, what we have done in the Alliance for Progress, about which I am a long-run optimist. I'm not at all pessimistic about this great and difficult long-run venture. What Castro has done, and Castro has said, how does I think diminished considerably the immediate dangers of the spreading of his methods under Latin America, although it's an active account.

We are fighting a Latin American friends who are fighting every day, an active war against that kind of low-grade, very dangerous aggression. In any analysis of world communism today, and in particular reference to the remarks you've just made, I have the feeling at times that perhaps the communist world, meaning Russia primarily, finds it difficult to afford a Castro that they would prefer to be the needling minority in many of these underdeveloped or emerging countries of the world. Is this a fair suggestion that they can't afford too many Castro's? Well, you've got to talk about communist in general and the Soviet Union in particular. It's clear that to maintain Castro in relative stagnation is very expensive to the Soviet Union. And the truth is that they are sending to Cuba enough to keep the place going, but not enough to build it.

And that undoubtedly is a consideration in Moscow. On the other hand, Moscow still is struggling to maintain its leadership of a world movement and communists who are not in power in their countries. Are very anxious to carry on activities that you'll get them closer to power. So that these fellas are pressed pretty hard, like this very small minority in Venezuela who's made a lot of trouble, but who proved in the election in Venezuela to be quite ineffective. It doesn't take many people, that's the tragedy of this game. It doesn't take many people in Vietnam or in Latin America to disrupt a society that's going through its own changes and is vulnerable. But I would say that we shouldn't take excessive comfort from the fact that some fellas in Moscow may be scratching their heads and saying this is an expensive game.

They are caught with a commitment to lead a communist movement and deeply built into that communist movement ingrained in its habits is the thrust for power. So that until much more fundamental changes take place in the minds of the men in control, affairs in Moscow, they must continue to lead these aggressive communist efforts around the world to acquire more power. Now we've talked about the communist world as a unit, but there's a big sism now between the Goliaths of Russia and Red China over ideologies. Do you think this dispute is beyond the stage of reconciliation and would you put the dispute into some perspective in terms of America's long-range interests? You've got to understand in the Sino-Soviet dispute. That the Russian and Chinese Communist parties have a long history of difficult and rather arms-length relations.

In the 1920s, for example, Stalin's agents told him to try to seize power in the city and the Communist Party barely survived the failure of that. They devised their own method of working through rural insurrection. They came to power on their own with very little Soviet help. Stalin never believed they'd be able to make it after the war. And at no time since 1949, did Moscow ever control the instruments of power in China? That didn't control the secret police, or the Chinese Communist Party, or the army? Now, the split, I think, is rooted in the fact that the Chinese Communist intended to pursue power on the world scene on their own, not as simply an agent of Moscow. They are extremely orthodox communists, but they also have in them a deep Chinese nationalism.

The critical issue, I think, that tended to trigger this, was the argument about nuclear weapons in the late 1950s, in which Russia made it clear that it was not going to turn over nuclear weapons or even a nuclear weapons know-how to the Chinese. They then assessed their position and decided that they would do better to go for broke in terms of Chinese power within the world communist movement, rather than remaining a simple agent of Moscow. And what you see is a worldwide struggle for power between Russia, the Russian Communist Party, and the Chinese Communist Party, which affects the life of every Communist Party in the world. And it has added to a natural trend in other communist parties towards increasing national assertiveness. In fact, I think you've got to look at the Sino-Soviet split. As a demonstration, that one of the proudest boasts of Marx and the communists is false. Their proud boasts was, they were a modern party, with a modern conception that transcended boundaries, that would be able to organize the world across these lines.

And they've proved quite clearly that nationalism continues to assert itself and that communism has no effective method for organizing relatively independent national movements. And I would underline that the Sino-Soviet split is not the only manifestation of this tendency for nationalism to assert itself. In Eastern Europe there's no doubt, no doubt at all, that the most fundamental force at work in societies, in Eastern European countries, is nationalism. Communism has taken only very shallow hold there. These people are turning to their own religions, their own national cultures, their own national interests increasingly. Moscow still exerts very great power in Eastern Europe. But if you look at the whole trend of events since 1945, there's only one way you can draw those curves, and that is away from communism towards nationalism.

And this is one of the major facts in the world, overshadowed a little by the drama of the Sino-Soviet split. On another theme, there's been a lot of talk about the Soviet Union becoming increasingly affluent in terms of its people. Is it realistic to suggest that Russia may ultimately adopt, or even is now adopting more and more of what we might call a capitalistic complexion? Capitalism as a system of diffused ownership and decision making in the economy of a society is a long way off. What's happening is that they are running into profound weaknesses in the whole communist concept as their economy becomes more elaborate and modern.

The greatest of these weaknesses obviously is in the field of agriculture. And there, as I said in an article I wrote in the 1950s, a fundamental problem is that Marx was a city boy. He never understood that there weren't enough police in the world or communist agents to follow a farmer, make sure he did the things you've got to do to grow food efficiently. You can do that in a machine shop or you can do it in a block of flats in the city. But without the deep personal motivation, a farmer just won't get up in the morning at 5 o'clock and won't do all those things you've got to do. And they're hard things to make food grow efficiently and they've been dragging anchor. And now it's getting serious. So much so that they have had to buy food abroad and they are going to try without giving up collectivization to solve this problem by producing a lot of chemical fertilizers.

But the truth is that Russian agriculture in my view at least is going to remain grossly inefficient until they make this change back to a system of private incentives. But this means really a deep ideological defeat and they'll fight against it for a long time. Now in other areas they're having trouble. Their growth was built. Their high rates of growth in the 30s and 50s. A set of heavy industry sectors, steel, cement, general-purpose machine tools and so on. They developed quite efficiently, kind of standard products. And they were picking up backlogs and technology and they looked awful good in terms of overall growth rates. But now those old sectors are decelerating.

You know, after a while, steel comes out your ears. You've got to use it for something. And they're getting to a stage where they need not general-purpose machine tools but special-purpose machine tools. And they cheated on chemical chemicals, including chemical fertilizers, they cheated on housing. And now they're up against the problems of going to a more sophisticated industrial society. And there the kinds of planning methods were barely workable in kind of Stalin's days when they were just a heavy industry, concentrating on heavy industry effort. Don't work. And that's why you find Soviet economists and planners beginning to discover honest pricing. They write articles about the market mechanism, about honest interest rates. All of these problems are technical problems which derive from things that must be done, problems that must be solved if they're to move forward. And you see a clash between the solution of those problems and their ideology.

Now when they finally face up to the fact that some of the basic presuppositions of their system are technically wrong for economic development. In other words, they face up to the fact they're not only inhumane as a society but also inefficient. I don't know, but history is grinding them up against the set of problems. And they must move, in my view, to a society with much greater freedom of choice for consumers, much greater freedom of decision making by people in the economy. And how they do that, I don't know, but the 60s is not going to be a very glamorous period in the Soviet economy. This is just an aside, but it's hard to believe that 10 years ago or 15 years ago that the premiere of Russia would have shown such concern for the people at home as to risk the world embarrassment of going out and beg borrowing and buying bread, for instance, or the ingredients for it.

Well, that was a very difficult decision to make. And it was a sort of dramatic way of revealing the depth of their weakness in agriculture. On the other hand, the member Stalin in the 30s at one time, I guess, about the time of the purges, you know, put more money into consumers goods. The Soviet rulers even Stalin had to understand that there were limits to the constraints which you could place on your people. I think that in the post-Stalin period where the secret police is no longer a simple instrument in the hands of one man, and the coming end of a new generation, the rise of more literate and sophisticated citizenry in the Soviet Union, and de-stalinization itself and all that it released, makes it harder for them to clamp down as tightly the Stalin did.

But they have always been the communists in Moscow pretty hard-headed in knowing that there were limits beyond which they couldn't press their people. Finally, Mr. Rustow, is the Western world, those societies that face their governments on constitutional government. Are we being dynamic enough? Are we being as dynamic as we might be in selling our ideas as the communists? Is it an area that's always concerned me a little bit? Have we exploited the opportunity to sell our ideas positively just as the communists try to do? Well, you've got to sell your ideas to other people by proving that those ideas help them solve problems that concern them. I don't think abstract ideas do as much good, nor do I think it does as much good to tell them how rich we are in the United States.

What they're concerned about is what do we have to contribute to the solution of their problems? By and large, I'd say the situation is something like this, that Marxism and Communism as an ideology is on the wing. I think that it's more and more by young people in these developing areas regarded as a voice from the past. The job is for us, as if we're not telling them about it, necessarily the Communism is bad, but we want to underline the weaknesses of Communism and I. I spend 24 years developing an alternative to Marxism, which is now circulating in the United of Optares. That's part of the job, but the real job is to develop ideas and then work shoulder to shoulder with these people and helping to solve their problems. In fact, the general truth about Communism is that it is only prospered where Freeman failed to do a good job.

Communism has been the scavenger of Western free societies. It's moved in only when we've done a grossly bad job. I don't fear for the future of our relations with the underdeveloped areas or for their future. If we stay at it, we have just passed through a period in 61-63, which could be the Gettysburg of the Cold War, the Great Turning Point. The whole series of events leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, I think, will rank or could rank as the time when the tide turn the Cold War began to move towards its end and to move our way. But the condition for that, this won't happen automatically, is if we stay the course, if we bring the bear in the underdeveloped areas in our relations with Europe and indeed in our relations with the Communist world. All the imagination and the persistence and stubbornness that we can bring to bear. I think that victory in the Cold War is thoroughly possible.

That was Walt Rostow, Councillor and Chairman of the Policy Planning Council of the United States State Department, participating in today's Great Decisions discussion of World Communism today. This program, the first of a series of eight such special reports, is produced on behalf of the Foreign Policy Association for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters by your narrator, John F. Lewis. For further details about the Foreign Policy Association's Great Decisions discussion series for 1964, address all communications to the Foreign Policy Association 345 East 46th Street, New York, or contact your local community or campus World Affairs Council. This program has been prepared and distributed by the NAEB Radio Network.