In our May issue, THE WORLD & I published an article in this section titled "Proposal for Peace" by Dr. Morton A. Kaplan, in which he proposed a three-phase withdrawal of U.S. and Soviet conventional forces and nuclear weapons from the European continent. Dr. Eugene V. Rostow has written a rebuttal to Dr. Kaplan's piece.
Professor Kaplan is an eminent and usually a realistic scholar. But in his paper, he succumbed to a familiar and insidious academic temptation--the appeal of escaping from the intractable problems of the real world into the delights of constructing a utopia. His article recalls Keynes' comment on a complex monetary plan that a writer of the 1930s had proposed as a magic cure for the Great Depression. "If the governments and central banks were ready to recognize the problem they face," Keynes said, "they could find a much simpler way to deal with it."
Importance of Eurasia
Kaplan's major premise is absolutely sound. The most important national security interest of the United States, he says, is to prevent any one power from dominating the vast landmass of Eurasia, a reservoir of raw materials, skilled labor, technological resources, capital, and entrepreneurship far greater than that of the United States alone. As Sir Halford John Mackinder pointed out two generations ago, the dominance of Eurasia by a single power would automatically make that nation the arbiter of global destiny. The islands of the world, like Britain, Japan, and the United States, could not oppose the weight of its power and would have to submit to its overlordship.
Our security interest in the balance of world power is not peculiar to the United States. It is shared by most other nations of the world and in particular by the larger states--our NATO allies, Japan, and China--which together with the United States and Canada, have more than enough power to achieve and maintain the balance against a Soviet thrust for mastery. Once the Soviet Union recovers from its doomed obsession with hegemony, it will realize that its security too depends upon a stable and well-managed system of balanced power.
The American educational system has not trained our people to speak and write in the vocabulary of geopolitics. We discuss international affairs in a special language that combines power politics and moral enthusiasm.
But the international behavior of the United States has always been governed by the basic rule of the balance of power system: never allow a potential adversary to become too strong. Our domestic, social, and political lives are organized on that principle by a federal, tripartite Constitution and by antitrust laws and banking statues designed to prevent a monopoly of power in any one institution, region, or class. In international affairs, we were safe for a century before 1914 as the beneficiary of the Concert of Europe and the protection of the British fleet. Like Sweden or Switzerland today, we enjoyed free security.
When the Concert of Europe lost the capacity and the will to maintain world public order, the United States responded--unwillingly, to be sure, but decisively nonetheless. In this century we have fought in two wars to prevent Germany from conquering Russia and Western Europe, and thereby coming close to dominion. And
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