The Art of Making Threats

By Roger Rosenblatt

As of Palm Sunday, the big red machine had not yet rolled across the Polish border, so for the time being at least the world was breathing easier. In fact, there has been easier international breathing for over a week now, ever since April 7, when Leonid Brezhnev, his chest heavy with medals, stood in Prague's Palace of Culture and informed 1,700 attentive delegates to the 16th congress of the Czechoslovak Party that he was confident that the unruly Poles would come to their senses after all. TASS then announced that the three-week-old Warsaw Pact military exercises, with their World's Fair name of Soyuz '81, were coming to a close. Brezhnev's speech was all the more welcome following the growls of Czechoslovak President Gustav Husak the day before. The game was good-cop-bad-cop, but it worked. So much, then, for the impressive show of force. To be sure, the Soviets might be lying about the troop withdrawal, might be pulling another Czechoslovakia '68 by cutting out temporarily only to set up an imminent invasion. But, at least for the moment, many observers seemed content to consider peace in our time, simply because a threat had not been carried out.

The interesting thing about certain kinds of threats when posed by certain kinds of powers, however, is that they do not need to be carried out in order to do their damage. The law knows this, which is why it distinguishes between assault and battery, yet labels assault a crime in itself. If the threat is made by a seasoned threatener like the Soviet Union, the threatened party will flinch as a matter of reflex or good judgment. That is the immediate effect, and the less enduring. A far deeper effect, and the one that tyrants crave, occurs when a victim is so cowed that he anticipates the threatener's desires, and behaves accordingly.

He may go even farther: if the threatening power is truly devastating, like the Soviet Union again, the victim will sometimes make the ultimate accommodation of taking on the worst and most fearsome characteristics of the threatener itself--first as an act of necessity, then of fealty, and finally of free will. The modern Greek poet C.P. Cavafy wrote "Waiting for the Barbarians" to make just that point. The poem consists of a dialogue between an individual citizen and a crowd assembled in the forum of an unspecified city. When the citizen asks why the legislators are not at work as usual, he is told that the barbarians are due to arrive that day; so what would be the purpose of making laws? When he asks why the city's leaders are at the city gates bearing a scroll and wearing jewels, the crowd answers that the barbarians are dazzled by such things. He asks why all the orators are silent; he learns that the barbarians are bored by rhetoric. Finally, he asks why there is a sudden confusion, and why the people are apparently so lost in thought. Because, he is told, the barbarians have not come as expected, and it is nightfall, and there is even some talk at the border that the barbarians have pulled out.

This is not to say that the Soviets have announced the curtailment of their troop maneuvers simply because the Poles are showing signs of becoming their own oppressors. To the contrary; many Poles seem to grow more obstreperous by the day, to the point that Lech Walesa, whose eyes gleamed with anarchy last summer, when he seemed to represent the extremes of rebellion, often appears now like any bedraggled labor negotiator, cursing out the hotheads. But the Poles and their present government, which is far more scared of the Soviets than Solidarity appears to be, are simply in a bind. They cannot beat the Soviets in a fight, so they must cool things down, thus taking the first rational step of a threatened nation. What the Soviets would like to determine is if still deeper stages of subservience are forthcoming:

By now the Soviets have threat-making down to an art, having come quite a way from the days when their leaders made threats by banging their shoes. Every threat worth the name needs a history of action to back it up, and the Soviets have gone to a great deal of trouble in past years to establish a high credibility rating. Even Brezhnev's conciliatory speech replaced one form of threat with another. In case anyone on earth might miss the point of his choosing Prague as the site for his remarks, he said: "I am sure we have a common stand with Czechoslovakia, just as with the other countries of the socialist community." The statement seemed to be a nod to Husak's bad-cop routine, but its effect was to remind Polish listeners that it was not so long ago that the loyal Czechs were as obstreperous as they.

"A captain who besieges a city," said Machiavelli, "should strive by every means in his power to relieve the besieged of the pressure of necessity, and thus diminish the obstinacy of their defense. He should promise them a full pardon if they fear punishment, and if they are apprehensive for their liberties, he should assure them that he is not the enemy of the public good, but only of a few ambitious persons in the city who oppose it." Machiavelli would have been much pleased by Brezhnev's speech. It singled out the ambitious "enemies," and was rich in references to "genuine patriots," "Poland's independence," the people's "genuine interest," "honor" and "security"--all the attributes in fact that the Soviets would like to keep as far away from Poland as possible. Yet such things are good to mention in a threat. They imply that the oppressors' goals are no different from those of the masses, and that the enemies who say otherwise are misleading the people. They imply that the enemies do not share such goals. The force of the threat is that since there is no real ideological dispute between the powers and the people, the powers will feel no moral compunction about marching in and doing right in the people's behalf.

Whatever Machiavelli may have forgotten to say about the art of the threat, Karl von Clausewitz included by implication in his brilliant little book On War. The Soviets did not need Clausewitz to teach them that war is an extension of politics by other means, since in effect they have lived both by that dictum and by the reverse. Also, Clausewitz's tactical advice--"to bring up superior numbers to a certain point at a certain time"--while fitting neatly with the Soyuz '81 maneuvers, is merely common sense. Where Clausewitz applies most directly to the art of threat-making, as practiced by the Soviets and others, is in his basic premises: war is "an act of force to compel our adversary to do our will," and war is also "the province of danger." Brezhnev & Co. have clearly understood that a good threat, by definition, is the exercise of danger on the adversary's will.

It helps, of course, that the Soviets are living in the Age of Threat, an era contributed to not by the U.S.S.R. alone but by the U.S. and several other well-armed countries, which from time to time have felt compelled to make a point. Thomas Hobbes would have understood our age perfectly, since he believed that the nature of war consists "not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition there to during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary." The term "deterrence" is a political science word for threat. Likewise, "the cold war." So in a way is "detente," since the easing of discord is necessarily precarious. Most of the world's major crises since the end of World War II have involved the collision of threats--Quemoy in 1958, Cuba in 1962 and Berlin and the Middle East seemingly forever. Once the world got the Bomb, war was largely defined as threat--threat being the demoralizing equivalent of war--so it may be said for the Soviets that they have merely adjusted skillfully to the requirements of the times.

Basically, however, they simply know how a threat works on the mind. When either a nation or an individual is confronted with a threat, whether physical or verbal, he has but two choices of response: to pay attention to the threat or not. The latter choice is more than a bit difficult when one's opponent is as big as the Soviet Union, but it is never easy. Even in the case of a total stranger threatening to jump from a roof, everyone feels a general moral threat, or ought to, thus, when it comes to the endangering of one's own life or any aspect of it, one needs extraordinary strength to ignore it. Certain animals pay so much attention to threats that their battles are decided by the ritualized display of power: by strutting or color or plum age. No feathers fly, no blood is drawn.

The key to such rituals lies in the imagination of the threatened party. When you threaten someone, you rely on his foresight cooperating with his memory. Bruno Bettelheim in The Informed Heart, a study of the concentration camps, described the power that the SS used on prisoners: "Childlike feelings of helplessness were created much more effectively by the constant threat of beatings than by actual torture. During a real beating one could, for example, take pride in suffering manfully, in not giving the foreman or the guard the satisfaction of groveling before him. No such emotional protection was possible against the mere threat." So, too, with the American slaves who often acquiesced in their own servitude because their imaginations were finely tuned and played upon. Perhaps the most terrifying place in all literature is Room 101 in George Orwell's 1984, not because it is where one's nightmares are realized, but because it is where one realizes that he can become his own nightmares.

Given all this, there ought to be less puzzlement than there is about the Soviet decision to call a halt to Soyuz '81 after leading the world to believe that an invasion was at hand. One theory has it that the Soviets originally made a decision to intervene, and then changed their minds. A second is that the exercises were a contingency measure. Yet there is a third way of looking at it; that the threat was the invasion. The Soviets withdrew because they felt they had temporarily accomplished their purpose. Even if they decide to invade after all, the threat will already have done a certain amount of damage. Anticipation always goes deeper than surprise. And the Poles will have been attacked in the war of nerves long before those famous tanks can begin to peek like rhinos around Warsaw's corners.

In a sense, then, the Poles are imperiled either way. Yet, in another sense, they are not. For, if there is little choice whether they pay attention to the Soviet threat, there is still a good deal of choice in the way they pay attention to it, how deeply and for how long. The citizens of Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians" were so neutralized by threat that they became their own worst enemies. The Poles are not that--so far at least, which is exactly why the Soviets amassed so many men and arms in the first place. A master threatener knows a real threat when he sees one. --By Roger Rosenblatt

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