In dictating the original draft of my letter to you about your general
paper, I included some purple prose on the subject of disengagement
which I later struck out, as not essential to the purpose of the letter.
Unwilling, however, that any literary flower should blush unseen, I send
you this excerpt, from which you will observe the obdurate and
unregenerate state of my mind.
Enclosure
Above all, I could not favor the admission of Germany to NATO and the development of West
Germany’s resources and territory as a major component of NATO strength. I considered that this
would obviously make impossible, for an indefinite time to come, any
withdrawal of the Soviet military presence from Eastern Germany and
Eastern Europe, and that it was thus in conflict with our stated
desire to see a loosening of the Russian hold on Eastern Europe.
All this is diametrically opposed to the concepts expounded in your
paper. The paper repeatedly professes an interest in loosening the
bonds that now hold the satellite countries to Moscow and even in
extending to those countries the “frontiers of freedom.” All this,
it seems to me, is quite in conflict with those sections of the
paper which deal with NATO and the
military strengthening of Western Europe. You are pressing for the
escape of the Eastern European countries from Moscow’s domination,
and at the same time you are rigidly denying them any place to
go.
I have conducted this argument too long already; and I am reluctant
to beat my drum any further. But can you not understand that the
Eastern European countries cannot reasonably be expected to
associate
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themselves with a military alliance directed against the Soviet
Union, unless they are willing to stage a dramatic and provocative
demonstration of defiance of Moscow on the political and military
plane? Is it not clear that to remain passive in the face of such a
demonstration is more than could be expected of any Russian
government, communist or otherwise? Why do you wish to close the
door in Eastern Europe’s face, by insisting that there must be no
neutral area in Central Europe to which an arrant Eastern European
state could conceivably attach itself, and by even making the Common
Market as impervious as possible to entry by anyone from the East?
Is it not clear that our military policy in Europe binds the Eastern
European countries to Russia in the most inexorable manner? Ask any
Pole. Ask any Hungarian. And not only does it bind these countries
to Moscow, but it denies any place to a country such as Yugoslavia
which tried at an earlier date to extract itself from the Eastern
bloc. As of today, Yugoslavia has no place to go but to the East;
and while this is partly the result of her own leaders’ mistakes,
our own policies, which afford to Yugoslavia no choice but to join a
western military and political alliance, to go East, or to suffer
isolation, have contributed importantly to this unhappy state of
affairs.
On top of this, we have the dangerous conflict in which we have
involved ourselves in our policy toward Germany through just these
same
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contradictions. Is it really not apparent that a policy which seeks
the unification of Germany is in conflict with a policy which says
in effect that East Germany could be reunited with Western Germany
only at the cost of a total military defiance of Russia: a
withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and an association with NATO? Can there be any doubt that
this would involve a major displacement of the military balance in
Europe, to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union? What gives us the
right to pretend that these are trivial contradictions, and that
these two policies are theoretically compatible? The failure to face
these things finds its expression at many points in the paper; and
in this respect I would have to disagree down the line.
