The View from Red Square

Our containment is their encirclement

The Carter Administration's tough new policy toward the Soviet Union is the latest phase of a continuing U.S. effort to keep the Kremlin from getting its way in the world. But what are the exact objectives of Soviet foreign policy? TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott and Moscow Bureau Chief Bruce Nelan collaborated on this analysis:

What the U.S. sees--and seeks--as "containment" of Soviet power, the Kremlin sees and fears as "encirclement" by its enemies. That fear has driven Soviet foreign policy since 1917. The Bolsheviks were then surrounded and even invaded by hostile capitalist countries. The word Kremlin means fortress--an accurate reflection of the mentality there.

The Soviet regime has often treated its internal opponents--whether Trotskyites in the 1930s or dissident intellectuals in 1980--as traitors and fifth columnists. Ideology is important partly because it gives the Soviet leaders a sense of global mission and distinguishes their imperialism from that of the czars. But even when promulgating slogans about their obligations to the international working class, Lenin, Stalin and their successors devoted themselves to shoring up the security of the U.S.S.R. Making the world safe for socialism has always been a euphemism for protecting Soviet interests, just as championing "wars of national liberation" has been a pretext for installing comradely governments and thwarting the U.S. in the Third World. While paranoid in motivation, such a policy is often predatory in practice. The men in the Kremlin would not feel entirely secure unless the whole world were made up of "fraternal" (i.e., satellite) or at least Finlandized countries.

The Soviets are most on the defensive and therefore most likely to take the offensive along their own borders. Their invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was a case in point. So is the invasion of Afghanistan. The Kremlin leaders want to position their forces as advantageously as possible for the chaos still to come in Iran and possibly in Pakistan as well. The Soviets would dearly love eventual access to the oil and warm waters of the Persian Gulf, but those are not their immediate goals. They have moved into Afghanistan primarily because the Muslim insurgency there threatened to turn a friendly neighbor into an unfriendly one.

The Afghan rebellion is doubly dangerous because it has Chinese backing. China represents one of the two strategic obsessions of the Soviet Union; the other is upheaval in Eastern Europe. Many sophisticated Russians believe war with their largest and most unfriendly neighbor is inevitable. The fear of China was one of the main incentives for Leonid Brezhnev to embark upon a policy of detente with the West. He did not want to wage cold wars--with the ever-present threat of hot ones--on two fronts. One reason why detente has all but failed is that the Soviets believe the Carter Administration is rushing headlong into an alliance with China. That raises the old specter of encirclement.

The Soviets have had 30 years' experience confronting American presidential doctrines about containment. But much has changed in the Soviet Union's favor since Harry Truman's time. Most significant, the U.S.S.R. now enjoys equality with the U.S. in intercontinental nuclear weapons and superiority in conventional forces. Whatever their historical insecurities, the Soviets have a new-found military self-confidence that translates into political boldness. They are much more inclined than in the past to go out into the hostile world that surrounds them to buy friends and bully enemies.

At huge financial cost, they have underwritten Cuban adventures in Africa and Vietnamese expansion in Indochina, thus challenging both the Chinese and Americans for influence in those areas. The Soviets' 1971 friendship treaty with India looks like an excellent long-term investment now that Indira Gandhi is back in power. Their naval buildup in the Pacific and reinforcement of the islands they occupy north of Japan are meant to intimidate Tokyo.

The Soviets have even made inroads in NATO: Western Europe has only reluctantly followed the American lead on the deployment of a new generation of nuclear missiles, Greece has granted port facilities to the Soviet fleet, and Turkey has balked at allowing the U.S. to use its airspace for U-2 overflights.

But the Kremlin may have jeopardized many of those gains by its invasion of Afghanistan. The Cubans and Vietnamese have suffered guilt by association, especially within the nonaligned movement and at the U.N. Even some radical Arab states, such as Libya and Iraq, seem somewhat chastened in their anti-Americanism. The Afghan invasion has driven China, the U.S., NATO and Japan closer together, thus perhaps making encirclement a self-fulfilling Soviet nightmare.

The Kremlin's biggest dilemma now is how to proceed in its relations with Washington. The Soviet rulers, facing an inevitable change in leadership, can ill afford an all-out renewal of the arms race and the cold war. Just as the Carter policy requires cutbacks in U.S. domestic programs, so the Politburo faces hard choices between guns and butter. The Soviets will probably now play a waiting game through the U.S. elections, hoping that Carter will be replaced by a President who, in their view, is less capricious and naive, less enamored of China cards--and less under the sway of the Kremlin's bete noire, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Given that preference, the Politburo must be dismayed by the signals from Iowa last week that the Afghan invasion and its aftermath have helped the very man who so concerns them: Jimmy Carter.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.