DUKAKIS'S NUCLEAR ALLERGY
Defence is the only issue that really matters for the West in this US election, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Washington FLICK through the 1988 editions of Fore- ign Policy, Foreign Affairs, or the National Interest and see how many articles question the nature of America's commitment to European security. For years a consensus held together around the shaky supposition that the United States would risk its own annihilation by using strategic nuclear weapons to defend Europe. The deploy- ment of Euromissiles kept the consensus alive. Now the INF Treaty, which takes the missiles out again, has shattered the con- sensus once and for all. It is no longer safe to assume that Washington's foreign policy establishment will impose a bipartisan orthodoxy on whoever becomes .president, whether it is George Bush or Michael Dukakis.
From the British point of view, defence is the one issue that really matters in this election. Neither candidate differs much on macro-economic policy. Dukakis is not leading a Keynesian counter-revolution against the supply-side ascendancy. He might bring down the budget deficit slight- ly faster than Bush, but both will essential- ly depend on the exploding surplus of baby boomers' pension contributions to do the job for them. Dukakis has sharpened his campaign rhetoric with 'yellow peril' de- magoguery, but Japan-bashing does not come naturally to him. By temperament he is no more protectionist than Bush.
On defence they are chalk and cheese. You would not know it from the shopping list campaign. Bush accuses the governor of opposing 'every weapon since the sling- shot'. Dukakis counters indignantly that his list is almost as long, which is true, until you read the escape clause in the fine print assuming cost-effectiveness, pending negotiations with the Soviet. Union, etc. Voters can be forgiven for supposing that the candidates differ only in military ton- nage. In fact, both plan to hold the defence budget at its current level of about six per cent of GNP — (if we are to believe Dukakis. He is on the board of a pacific organisation called 'Jobs For Peace' that lobbies for a 25 per cent reduction in defence spending.) But taking Dukakis at his word, the real difference is conceptual. Bush thinks nuclear, Dukakis thinks con- ventional.
The Dukakis campaign likes to present this as a matter of nuance. 'It is a question of where your marginal investments should go,' explains adviser Robert Murray in a tone of voice as if to say 'you see what a sensible candidate we have'. It is decep- tive. Bush is toying with 'competitive strategies', which means that instead of falling into the trap of symmetry and trying to match the Red Army tank for tank at huge expense, America exploits her tech- nological edge in rocket artillery, for exam- ple, or unmanned drones, to inflict max- imum damage at minimum cost on Soviet weak spots. Dukakis talks of going much further. He quotes General John Galvin, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, who said last March that he could `guarantee only two weeks against an all-out Warsaw Pact attack — then we would have to use nuclear weapons'. In the heady days of last summer Dukakis said he wanted to raise the nuclear threshold by putting enough muscle into Nato to win a conventional war.
Eyebrows were raised. America moved from conventional to nuclear deterrence because nuclear weapons are cheap, 'more bang for the buck' as Eisenhower put it. Strategic nuclear systems now make up only 13.4 per cent of the defence budget. People, not weapons, take the lion's share.
Is it true that the Elephant Man is dead?' The money goes to pay for the dental care of Sergeant Smith, and his wife, and his three daughters. Unless Dukakis has con- scription up his sleeve he will need an exorbitant conventional build-up to be sure of defeating a Soviet invasion. Yet he only tinkers at the margin.
It is unwise to talk about winning a conventional war that would be fought on German soil. Some would judge that an ambivalent West Germany has been held in the alliance by the American nuclear guarantee, and that the further Washing- ton moves towards denuclearisation the sooner Bonn will bolt from Nato. The visit of Chancellor Kohl to Moscow earlier this week is a reminder that Ostpolitik is attractive for West Germany. Dukakis gives no hint of having wrestled with this problem. His recent enthusiasm for tank warfare looks to me like camouflage. It gives him a defence policy that passes superficial scrutiny, and frees him to pur- sue nuclear disarmament without seeming to be a peacenik. His instincts are apparent in his support for the nuclear freeze in 1982, and in his refusal in 1986 to let Massachusetts participate in a nationwide communications network on the grounds that 'it might make leaders more inclined to let a nuclear war begin'. The whole point of nuclear deterrence is that America is willing to fight. A president who flinches is exceedingly dangerous, for he might, in some unforeseen circumstances, tempt the Soviet Union, making nuclear war more rather than less likely.
The accusation that Dukakis pays only lip service to nuclear deterrence infuriates his Harvard defence coterie. They say he listens attentively to their arguments and point out that he resisted Jesse Jackson's attempt to include a resolution of 'no-first- use' of nuclear weapons in the Democratic platform at the Atlanta convention. There is some reassurance in this. But he still goes around the country like an Episcopa- lian minister lamenting that the US arsenal `is big enough to blow up the Soviet Union 40 times over.' It is either rhetoric or ignorance, and I cannot write with confi- dence that it is just rhetoric. Dukakis accepts the broad framework of the nuc- lear triad — air, sea, and land. He does not seem to accept that each leg needs periodic modernisation to ensure that it can survive as the Soviet Union develops counter- measures. After confusion in the primaries Dukakis has been talked out of opposition to the D-5 Trident submarine missile and the Stealth bomber (which he once criti- cised for being, amazingly, too stealthy!). That leaves the land leg of the triad. It is the most vulnerable of the three. The time is near when the Soviet Union may have enough accurate SS-24 missiles to destroy the American land-based arsenal in its missile silos. The solution preferred by moderate Democrats is the Midgetman mobile missile. Dukakis has excoriated the Midgetman, claiming it would cost $50 billion over 15 years, though a simplified version could be developed for closer to $17 billion. Instead Dukakis talks vaguely about a cheaper missile. No such missile exists and since he advocates a ban on flight-testing it could not be deployed anyway.
Such incoherence would matter less if there was evidence of perestroika in the Red Army. Frank Carlucci, the soft- spoken secretary of defence, says the Soviet Union continues to spend 15-17 per cent of its GNP on defence at a time when US spending is falling for its fourth con- secutive year. They have 'more divisions in Czechoslovakia than the US has in all of Europe, and more divisions in East Ger- many than the US has in its entire active army,' he wrote in the Wall Street Journal after visiting Moscow in the summer. 'Soviet forces are still organised and equip- ped to initiate powerful offensive strikes to seize and hold territory.' His judgment is endorsed by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in its lateSt report. Gor- bachev has not yet tamed the Soviet armed forces and his doctrine of 'reasonable sufficiency' lies on the drawing board.
Nevertheless, Dukakis puts his trust in dialogue and exhortation. In a Chicago speech, touted by his campaign as the manifesto of his foreign policy, he said he would 'challenge Mr Gorbachev to elimin- ate the Soviet advantage in tanks and artillery. . . challenge him to draw his troops back into the Ukraine' and so forth. How will he back up his challenges? How will he mix force with diplomacy? Comb the text, there is not a clue. He does not acknowledge the lesson of this decade that peace is upheld by strength. He persists in seeing the INF Treaty as an outbreak of goodwill, unrelated to Nato resolve in matching the Soviet deployment of the SS-20. He attributes Gorbachev's reforms entirely to the pressures of economic crisis, as if the costs of military adventure had not been driven up by American rearmament in the early Eighties and as if the penalties of empire had not been made intolerable by American support for insurgencies in Afghanistan and Angola. Forty years ago George Kennan predicted that if the Bol- sheviks met hard steel and could not legitimise their rule through ideological crusade abroad, they would be unable to contain their failures at home. At last we begin to see to it. Does Dukakis? He has not told us.
The Western alliance would get stability with George Bush. He would keep the dying doctrine of nuclear deterrence on life-support because there is still no alternative. Dukakis would probably fol- low suit if there was strong pressure from the Congress and the commentators. But with confusion over strategy in Washington and a premature notion that the Cold War is already won, there is a danger that his pacifist instincts and his nuclear allergy would not be forcefully checked.
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