WASHINGTON'S OVERTURES TO MOSCOW AND EASTERN EUROPE
By George Novack
The realists in Washington take diversified attitudes towards the various workers states. It judges each of them, not by the features of its internal regime, but by the main thrust of its foreign policy and influence. The State Department is up in arms whenever it considers these to be an imminent and potent threat to the strategy and interests of U.S. imperialism. Thus Washington feels friendly toward Tito's Yugoslavia and extremely hostile toward Castro's Cuba. :
Comparable differences are manifested in Washington's present postures toward the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. While the U.S. strives to tighten the encirclement of Communist China and moves its military might ever closer to the southern border, its diplomats are hopeful of improving relations with the Kremlin despite the escalation of the war in Vietnam.
They have recently been taking small but significant steps along this line. The latest move of this kind came on November 28 when the U.S. raised its diplomatic relations with Hungary and Bulgaria from the legation to the ambassadorial level.
This decision was announced by the White House and State Department soon after the Bulgarian Communist party had concluded its congress at Sofia and while the Hungarian Communist party congress was going on. One of the principal topics of public and private discussion at both congresses was the proposal tendered by the Soviet and Bulgarian party leaders to call a "summit conference" of the world Communist movement to deal with the Chinese problem. This proposal is being resisted, for various reasons, by the Romanian, Yugoslav, Italian, many Asian and other representatives.
Washington's current diplomatic maneuvers with the Communist governments are designed to serve four aims. The State Department seeks to further China's isolation; induce the Kremlin to put pressure on Hanoi to negotiate a settlement of the conflict in Vietnam on terms acceptable to Johnson; draw the East European countries away from dependence upon Moscow and closer to the United States; and prepare the ground for a larger settlement of the most important issues in dispute between Washington and Moscow.
The White House did not start the process of reconciliation until it had first tested the real disposition of the Soviet leadersiip by checking its reactions to the developments in Southeast Asia. The feeble response of the Kremlin to the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong reassured Washington that its intervention in Vietnam did not bar friendlier relations between the "Big Two."
The administration set out to woo the Soviet bloc with the president's October 7 speech in New York where he enunciated an important change in European and Soviet policies. Johnson in effect renounced the "rollback" policy toward communism in Eastern Europe held by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. He called for the transformation of coexistence into "peaceful engagement" between the Soviet Union and the United States. .
"It is not our purpose tu overthrow other governments," he stated. Germany can be reunited only "through a growing reconciliation" of East and West. The split in Europe "must be healed with the consent of Eastern European countries and consent of the Soviet Union. We respect the integrity of a nation's boundary lines." This meant that the United States no longer challenges the legitimacy of the present governments in Eastern Europe or seriously questions existing frontiers there.
This new doctrine was presented three days before Russian Foreign Minister Gromyko held an amicable meeting at the White House which Johnson characterized as "helpful" and "fruitful." The president went on to tell reporters: "I believe it will be productive. I don't want to get your hopes up...but I feel good about our meeting and I said to him that we would welcome a visit by the leadership of his country to this country."
Obviously Kosygin and Brezhnev could not dare to duplicate Khrushchev's visit to the United States in 1959 and revive the "Spirit of Camp David" while American planes were raining bombs on north Vietnam. Brezhnev replied that Johnson suffers from a “strange and stubborn delusion" in thinking that Soviet-American relations can be bettered regardless of the Vietnam war.
Nevertheless, this formal turndown of Johnson's invitation has not hindered the
emergence of several signs of welcome to Johnson's overtures.
Mr. Gromyko has publicly recognized the U.S. desire to seek a nuclear nonproliferation treaty as "sincere." Up to now Soviet sources had termed the American efforts to reach agreement on this matter as hypocritical.
Washington removed 400 commodities from the list of goods banned for export to Eastern Europe which has pleased those governments eager to do more business with the United States. ;
The Export-Import Bank henceforth will be permitted to guarantee commercial credits to four additional East European countries -- Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia.
Direct airline service between Moscow and New York will commence in the spring. Congress will be asked to approve a U.S.-Soviet consular agreement.
These concessions have been made to show Moscow and the East European capitals that Washington is serious about friendship with them. This is not a one-way street.
The New York Times: divulged on November 22 that, during his talks with President Johnson and Secretary of State Rusk, Foreign Minister Gromyko discussed the presumably provocative attitude of a nuclear-armed Peking and the danger of war involved in border clashes between the two countries. (See World Outlook, December 2, 1966, p. 8.)
Six days later the Soviet embassy in Washington took the unusual action of denying the Times account of Gromyko's conversations and dismissed them as "mere inventions." It asserted that the publication of the allegations about Russia's apprehensions concerning China "was evidently designed for use by certain circles who are looking for any pretext to smear the Soviet Union and who are interested in worsening Soviet-Chinese relations."
While the Times stood by its story, a State Department spokesman made a formal disclaimer that Gromyko had expressed concern to U.S. officials over rising border tensions. But the Department did not specifically deny that the Soviet and American diplomats had discussed Sino-Soviet relations, China's development of nuclear weapons, proposals for an anti-proliferation treaty, and Russia's dispatch of additional troops to the border area in recent months.
In any case, it is difficult to see how Sino-Soviet relations could get much worse, short of a complete diplomatic rupture between the two governments. Their representatives walked out of each other's National Day celebrations rather than listen to invectives from the podium. Even cultural ties have been reduced to the minimum with the expulsions of their exchange students from the two countries.
In the latest exchange, Moscow and Peking have assailed each other in the most vehement tones. An editorial in the November 27 Pravda declared that Peking's "splitting" and "chauvinist" policies were imperiling the world Communist movement. Its indictment of Mao Tse-tung and his supporters included the following bill of particulars:
-- Abandonment of the world-Communist line adopted at the Moscow conferences of 1957 and 1960.
-- Jeopardizing of the Chinese party by the purging of members opposed to Chairman Mao's policies.
-- Damaging the war effort of north Vietnam by refusing to cooperate in joint aid.
-- Brainwashing of the Chinese people to instill anti-Soviet hostility.
-- Discrediting the idea of Communism by the excesses and violence of the cultural revolution.
-- Harming the liberation movement in colonial dependencies and newly developing nations.
Pravda stated that there was "growing dissatisfaction" over Chairman Mao's policies among Chinese party members, intellectuals and army leaders. "Mao Tse-tung and his entourage could not disregard the fact that the party cadres, who went through the school of revolution, despite the anti-Soviet campaign of the past years, came to realize increasingly all the harm for China of the line of the split with the
Soviet Union and other socialist countries," the editorial said. "This is why Mao Tse-tung and his group chose the road of defamation and destruction of the party cadres, or best representatives of the working class and intellectuals, using. for this purpose a part of the students and pupils and military and administrative apparatus."
The Soviet party organ called for overcoming all these pernicious policies, presumably by removing Mao and his associates from their positions of power.
In introducing Brezhnev at an assembly of factory workers in Budapest December 1, Zoltan Komicsin, the Hungarian Communist party's specialist in foreign affairs, attacked Mao in a way that was widely interpreted as an appeal to oust him from leadership in Peking. :
"We can also infer from the events taking place in China," said Komicsin, "that there are people among the party's cadres who have recognized that the pseudo-leftist anti-Soviet divisive line has misguided the Chinese Communist party and that they want to return to the commonly accepted party line of the Communist and workers parties.
"We are sure that the future, at whatever price of turmoil and sacrifices, will justify those Chinese comrades who represent unity against great power chauvinism and fraternity toward the Soviet Union and other socialist countries."
Peking has reciprocated in kind. An‘article in Jenmin Jih Pao, the party news-— paper, labeled the Soviet leaders as “a group of renegades" who “will all be overthrown, defeated and eliminated by the revolutionary people." The article, entitled "Great Call for Battle," accused’ the Soviet government of pursuing a "policy of collaboration with the United States for world domination" and "of playing the part of an accomplice of United States imperialism in suppressing the revolutionary movement of the peoples of the world.
The sole beneficiary of the deepening division between the two major Communist powers are the U.S. imperialists who view it as a golden opportunity to promote their military plans in Southeast Asia and their diplomatic designs on the world arena. Thus, while Moscow and Peking were hurling anathemas against each other, the General Assembly in New York defeated a resolution to seat Communist China in place of Chiang's puppet regime in the United Nations by a vote of 57 against 46.
The result was accounted a gain for the United States which has consistently opposed China's entry. Last year's vote on China's membership was 47 to 47 with 20 abstentions.
According to the New York Times correspondent, “some delegations from non-aligned states said the Soviet Union and its allies had been less energetic in support of Peking's admission this year than in the past. They attributed this to Moscow's fear that the Chinese Communists might use the United Nations as an arena for their ideological dispute with the Soviet Union."
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Under present circumstances the Soviet leaders are restricted in their response to Washington's overtures. They cannot possibly go "all the way with LBJ." They cannot risk undertaking initiatives for a compromise with the United States on Vietnam which would substantiate Chinese charges of a sellout. Moreover, neither Hanoi nor the National Liberation Front are retreating from their stand that the United States must withdraw from Vietnan.
But by blaming the Chinese for sabotaging a united Communist effort to secure victory in Vietnam, Kosygin and Brezhnev have an alibi in reserve for subsequent behind-the-scenes negotiations with Washington on this problem. Unfortunately, Mao's adamant refusal to consider any form of common action with the Soviet "renegades" and "revisionists" in defense of Vietnam plays into Moscow's hands while weakening the international front against American aggression.
When Peking accuses the Kremlin of complicity with the United States, it has in mind not only its past performance and the growing indications of an entente between the Big Two but the underlying long-range motives of their diplomatic machinations. The Soviet leaders attach far greater value to strengthening their national security in Europe than to assuring victory for the colonial freedom fighters in Vietnam. They would like a guaranty from Washington that Germany will never again be allowed to menace Russia or to acquire nuclear arms.
The policymakers in both Washington and Moscow look ahead to a broad settlement
of world affairs at some propitious point in which the United States will pledge to deter German reunification by force and help contain West Germany in return for a Soviet promise to work with Washington in isolating Communist China.
Peking is well aware of these mutual objectives. Its leaders can hardly be expected to keep silent about a projected diplomatic deal which, like the partial nuclear test ban treaty, will be directed against them. Considerations of this sort which lurk in the background of the present situation keep envenoming Sino-Soviet relations and widening the breach between the two Communist countries. Meanwhile the U.S. State Department cautiously works toward closer ties with Eastern Europe and gradually prepares for a détente with Kosygin and Brezhnev through the mediation of Foreign Minister Gromyko and its newly appointed, experienced envoy to Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson.
WASHINGTON