POLITICS
Hoping that nothing much will come of the agreement
FERDINAND MOUNT
`A historic turning point'? Not bad, but it needs a bit more oomph. 'A victory for common sense' then? No, we had two of those last week. How about 'one small step, but a giant leap for mankind'? Per- fect, spot on — what's that, the Observer used it last Sunday? Oh, bother.
Good taste has, I think, somewhat inhi- bited discussion of the agreement to agree about Intermediate Nuclear Forces. Any arms control deal, it seems, has to be given some kind of general welcome. Only after respecting the pieties may one express a few misgivings or hesitations. I suspect, however, that it may be best to start the other way round, by attacking in gross, even abusive terms the general principle of the enterprise before reaching a more cautious, even charitable judgment on its likely effects, which might turn out to be quite modest.
First then, President Reagan's approach is damned by historical precedent. To start the 'disarmament process' by getting rid of a specific type of weapon which is most conspicuously deployed on the central European front has two features that are familiar to us from pre-war experience. It is precisely that 'qualitative disarmament', undertaken for short-term vote-catching reasons, against which Churchill warned in the early 1930s. All attempts to distinguish morally between 'offensive' and 'defensive' (or between 'first-strike' and 'second- strike') weapons were then and are now highly suspect, 'because almost every con- ceivable weapon may be used in defence or offence; either by an aggressor or by the innocent victim of his assault'.
The second feature of the INF-treaty approach is that it seems to be part of a belief in emptying as much space as possi- ble between two potential adversaries. Geographically separating the two sides, like keeping two dogs apart, is held to be a prime method of 'building peace'. Space- emptying may apply to any type of weapons. President Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, be- lieves that the next step after removing cruise and Pershing should be to propose the creation of a 'tank-free zone' in central Europe. There would be no tanks in West Germany and the Low Countries and none in East Germany, Poland and Czechoslo- vakia either.
Or again, there is the British Labour Party's suggestion that 'all nuclear and chemical weapons and their delivery sys- tems should be withdrawn from a corridor 150 kilometres deep on both sides of the dividing line, as already proposed in the agreement between the West German So- cial Democrats and the ruling party in East Germany' (note the charming delicacy of 'ruling party'). The West German Social Democrats hanker after the idea of Titoe4- que guerrilla warfare to see off any inva- sion, something rather on the lines of the Dad's Army which caused Mr Kinnock so much embarrassment during the election campaign. The Labour Party also wanted to supplement this 150-kilometre corridor with Mr Healey's famous exploding slurry ditch.
All these wheezes have the same inten- tion behind them, to emphasise the purely defensive posture of the Western Alliance. Thus they all clearly belong to the same family as the dear old Maginot line, which came not only to dominate French military thinking between the wars but also to take the lion's share of French military expendi- ture. They are thus vulnerable to the same criticisms as those made by Colonel C. de Gaulle in Vers r armee de metier (1934), that by proclaiming her intention to con- centrate her efforts on defending her fron- tier, France merely encouraged the enemy into adventures — political or military or both — in the exposed and undefended areas beyond it, the Saar, the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland and so on. It is undefended space that is the lure to acts of aggression, not territory bristling with troops, tanks and missiles.
The constant theme today is that we must not alarm the Russians, we must not feed those tendencies to paranoia which their appalling losses in the second world war have entrenched in their psyche. This theme, however, seems to contradict the other prominent theme, that the Russians respect strength and that it is the West's sustained display of resolution which brings them to the conference table with a serious will to negotiate. Far from being nervy, suspicious and vengeful, according to this theory, the Russians are manly and sensible chaps who react in an entirely rational way.
Lurking somewhere in the politesses about the INF deal there seems to be another contradiction. On the one hand, we are to be delighted because this is a giant step forward for mankind; on the other, we are not to worry about the dangers of any reduction in deterrence, because these weapons form only about four per cent of the total stocks of nuclear weapons and their deployment in the first place was purely cosmetic and 'political'. While being as sceptical as anyone of the chances of effectively dispersing the cruise missiles from Greenham round the New- bury by-pass in the rush hour, this ambi- guous reassurance sounds a bit odd to me.
The enthusiasts say that the deal's virtue lies not in itself but as an earnest of future deals. But that is not terribly encouraging either, since according to General Rogers and General Galvin, the past and present allied commanders, it is the wrong kind of deal, one which diminishes security rather than enhancing it. Suppose it leads to further space-emptying, qualitative deals of this sort, which involve pulling back or destroying tanks or battlefield nuclear wea- pons, then we would undoubtedly be well beyond the realm of the cosmetic and lock- ed into a process which we had, publicly and irrevocably, blessed as the right one.
The alternative is not a central European front bristling with weapons until the end of time. The agreements which can be welcomed are, first, those, like the Stock- holm Accords, which familiarise the two sides with each other's troop movements and battle plans, so diminishing surprise and the fear of being surprised; and, second, agreements which genuinely achieve mutual and balanced reductions in troops and weapons, but which also take account of geography, in particular, of the USSR's ability to reinforce agreed levels much more quickly than the Americans.
No doubt, as Mr Brzezinski says, 'The pull-out of Soviet tanks from Eastern Europe would assist progressive peaceful change, as should be clear to anyone in the West who knows how tanks figured in the events of 1953, 1956, 1968 and 1981' which is why it is rather unlikely to happen in the near future. Perhaps the least bad outcome of the INF deal will be that nothing much comes of it. That, after all, is quite often one of the consolations of politics — a suitably autumnal reflection to leave you with.
Noel Malcolm takes over as political corres- pondent next week. Ferdinand Mount will be contributing regularly to the Spectator on a variety of topics.
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