No More Learning

? ? In effect, it was Khrushchev's turn to cross a border. Iraq or Jordan might not have been worth a war to either of us but by getting troops on the soil- or, as we used to say, the American
? flag -
we probably made it clear to the Kremlin that we could not gracefully retreat under duress. It is harder to retreat than not to land in the first place; the landing helped to put the next step up to the Russians.
Coupling Capabilities to Objectives: TheProcess of "Commitment"
In addition to getting yourself where you cannot retreat, there is a more common way of making a threat. That is to incur a political involvement, to get a nation's honor, obligation, and diplomatic reputation committed to a response. The Formosa resolutionof 1955,alongwith the military assistance agreement then signed by the United States and the National Government of the Republic of China, should probably be interpreted that way. It was not mainly a technique for reassuring Chiang Kai-shek that we would defend him, and it was not mainly a
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quid pro quo for something he did for us. It was chiefly important as a move to impress a third party. The primary audience for the congressional action was inside the Soviet bloc. The resolution, together with the treaty, was a ceremony to leave the Chinese and the Russians under no doubt that we could not back down from the defense of Formosa without intolerable loss of prestige, reputation, and leadership. We were not merely communicating an intention or obligation we already had, but actually enhancing the obligation in the pro- cess. Thecongressionalmessagewasnot,"Sinceweareobliged to defend Formosa, we may as well show it. " Rather: "In case we were not sufficiently committed to impress you, now we are. We hereby oblige ourselves. Behold us in the public ritual of getting ourselvesgenuinelycommitted. "
9. There is also sometimes available an internal technique of commitment. It is, in the words of Roger Fisher, "to weave international obligations into the domestic law of each country, so that by and large each government enforces the obligation against itself. " Fisher discussed it in relation to disarmament commitments; but it may apply to the use of force as well as to the renunciation of it. A Norwegian directive (Kgl res 10 Juni 1949) stipulates that, in event of armed attack, military officers are to mobilize whether or not the government issues the order, that orders for discontinuance issued in the name of the government shall be assumed false, and that resistance is to continue irrespective of enemy threats of retaliatory bombing. Similarly a Swiss order of April 1940, distributed to every soldier in his livret de service, declared that in event of attack the Swiss would fight and that any order or indication to the contrary, from any source, was to be considered enemy propaganda. The purposes appear to have been internal discipline and morale; but the possible contribution of such internal arrangements to deterrence, to the credibility of resistance, is worth considering. Many governments have had constitutional or informal provisions for increasing the authority of the armed forces in time of emergency, thus possibly shifting government authority in the direction of individuals and organizations whose motives to resist were less doubtful. As mentioned in an earlier footnote, legal automaticity has sometimes been proposed for the French nuclear force. Internal public opinion can be similarly manipulated to make accommodation unpopular. All of these techniques, if appreciated by the enemy to be deterred, are relevant to the process of commitment. They canalso,ofcourse,bequitedangerous. Fisher'sdiscussionisinhischapter,"Internal Enforcement of International Rules," Disarmament: Its Politics and Economics, Seymour Melman, ed. (Boston, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1962).
That kind of commitment is not to be had cheaply. If Con- gress passed such a resolution for every small piece of the world that it would like the Soviets to leave alone, it would cheapen the currency. A nation has limited resources, so to speak, in the things that it can get exceptionally concerned about. Political involvement within a country is not something that can be had for the price of a casual vote or a signature on a piece of paper.
Sometimes it comes about by a long process that may not even have been deliberately conceived. As far as I can tell, we had only the slightest commitment, if any, to assist India in case of attack by the Chinese or the Russians, if only because over the years the Indians did not let us incur a formal commitment. One of the lessons of November 1962may be that, in the face of anything quite as adventuresome as an effort to take over a country the size of India, we may be virtually as committed as if we had a mutual assistance treaty. We cannot afford to let the Soviets or Communist Chinese learn by experience that they can grab large chunks of the earth and its population without a genuine risk of violent Western reaction.
Our commitment to Quemoy, which gave us concern in 1955 and especially in 1958, had not been deliberately conceived; and it appeared at the time to be a genuine embarrassment. For reasons that had nothing to do with American policy, Quemoy hadbeensuccessfullydefendedbytheNationalistswhenChiang Kai-shek evacuated the mainland, and it remained in National- ist hands. By the time the United States assumed the Commit- ment to Formosa, the island of Quemoy stood as a ragged edge about which our intentions were ambiguous. Secretary Dulles in 1958 expressed the official view that we could not afford to vacate Quemoy under duress. The implication seemed to be that we had no genuine desire to take risks for Quemoy and mighthavepreferreditifQuemoyhadfallentotheCommunists in 1949;but our relations with Communist China were at stake once Quemoy became an issue. So we had a commitment that we might have preferred not to have. And in case that commit- ment did not appear firm enough, Chiang Kai-shek increased it
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for us by moving enough of his best troops to that island, under conditions in which evacuation under attack would have been difficult, to make clear that he had to defend it or suffer military disaster,leavingituptotheUnitedStatestobailhimout.
Some of our strongest commitments may be quite implicit, though ritual and diplomacy can enhance or erode them. Com- mitments can even exist when we deny them. There is a lot of conjecture about what would happen if the NATO treaty lapsed after its initial twenty years. There has recently been some conjecture whether the developing community of Western Europe might be inconsistent with the Atlantic Alliance. It is sometimes argued that the Soviet Union would like Europe so self-reliant that the United States could ease itself out of its commitments to the present NATO countries. I think there is something in this- our commitment to Europe probably dimin- ishes somewhat if the NATO treaty legally goes out of force- but not much. Most of the commitment will still be there. We cannot afford to let the Soviets overrun West Germany or Greece, irrespective of our treaty commitments to Germany or to the rest of Western Europe.
I suspect that we might even recognize an implicit obligation to support Yugoslavia, perhaps Finland, in a military crisis. Any commitment we may have had toward Hungary was apparently not much. But Yugoslavia and Finland have not quite the status that Hungary had. (Conceivably we might cross the border first, under invitation, and leave it up to the Soviets to decide whether to incur the risk of engaging us. ) I wonder whether the Kremlin thinks that, if it should get genuinely impatient with Tito or if there were some kind of crisis of succession upon Tito's death, the Red Army could simply invade Yugoslavia or the Kremlin present an ultimatum to the country without any danger of a counter-ultimatum from us or another preemptive landing of troops as in Lebanon. I can only wonder; these are all matters of interpretation, both as to what our commitments really would prove to be and what the Soviets would believe them to be.
Actually, our commitment is not so much a policy as a prediction. We cannot have a clear policy for every con- tingency; there are too many contingencies and not enough hoursinthedaytoworkthemalloutinadvance. Ifonehad asked in October 1962 what American policy was for the contingency of a Communist Chinese effort to destroy the Indian Army, the only answer could have been aprediction of what the American government would decide to do in a contin- gency that probably had not been "staffed out" in advance. Policy is usually not a prefabricated decision; it is the whole set of motives and constraints that make a government's actions somewhat predictable.
In the Indian case, it turns out that we had a latent or implicit policy. For all I know, Mr. Nehru anticipated it for ten years. It is conceivable- though I doubt it- that one of the reasons Nehru was so contemptuous of the kinds of treaties that the Thai and Pakistani signed with us was that he felt that his own involvement with the West in a real emergency might be about as strong without the treaty as with it. It is interesting that any "commitment" we had to keep India from being conquered or destroyed by Communist China was not mainly a commitment totheIndiansortheirgovernment. We wanted to restrainCom- munist China generally; we wanted to give confidence to other governments in Asia; and we wanted to preserve confidence in our deterrent role all the way around the world to Europe. Military support to India would be a way of keeping an implicit pledge but the pledge was a general one, not a debt owed to the Indians. When a disciplinarian- police or other- intervenes toresistorpunishsomeone'sforbiddenintrusionorassault,any benefit to the victim of the intrusion or assault may be inciden- tal. He could even prefer not to be fought over; but if the issue is maintenance of discipline, he may not have much say in the matter.
This matter of prediction may have been crucial at the start of the Korean War. There has been a lot of discussion about whether we were or were not "committed" to the defense of South Korea. From what I have seen of the way the decision to
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intervene was taken, first by participation of American military assistance forces, then by bombing, then with reinforcements, and finally with a major war effort, one could not confidently have guessed in May 1950 what the United States would do. One could only try to estimate the probable decision that the President would take, depending on what it looked like in Korea, who was advising him, and what else was going on in the world.
You will recall discussion about the importance of a particu- lar speech by Secretary of State Acheson in suggesting to the Soviets that South Korea was outside our defense perimeter. (As far as I know, there is no decisive evidence that the Russians, Chinese, or Koreans were particularly motivated by that statement. ) His stated position was essentially that we had a defense perimeter that excluded South Korea, that we had various other obligations, especially to the United Nations, that would cover acountry like South Korea. Apparently the Soviets (or Chinese, or whoever made the decision) miscalculated; they may have thought we were damning our commitment with faint praise. They got into an expensive war and a risky one and one that might have been even more dangerous than it was. They may have miscalculated because the language of deterrence, and an understanding of the commitment process in the nuclear era, had not had much time to develop yet. They may interpret better now- although the missile adventure in Cuba shows that the Soviets could still misread the signals (or the Americans
could still fail to transmit them clearly) a decade later.
And we seem to have misread the Chinese warnings during our advance toward the Yalu River. Allen Whiting has docu- mented a serious Chinese Communist attempt to warn the Americans that they would engage us militarily rather than let us occupy all of North Korea. l o Whatever we might have done had we understood them, we manifestly did not understand. The one thing we would not have done, had we received their warnings correctly, was to extend our forces as vulnerably as we did. We either did not get their message, did not comprehend it, or
10. China Crosses the Yalu (New York, Macmillan, 1960).
did not find it credible, though the Chinese Communists may have been doing the best they could to get the message to us and to make it credible. When communication fails, it is not easy to decide whether the transmitter is too weak for the receiver or the receiver too weak for the transmitter, whether the sender speaks the receiver' s language badly or the receiver misunderstands the sender's. Between the two of us, Americans and Commu- nist China, we appear to have suffered at least one communica- tion failure in each direction in 1950. "
The Interdependence of Commitments
The main reason why we are committed in many of these places is that our threats are interdependent. Essentially we tell the Soviets that we have to react here because, if we did not, they would not believe us when we say that we will react there.
By now our commitment to Berlin has become so deep and diffuse that most of us do not often have to think about whom our commitment is to. The reason we got committed to the de- fense of Berlin, and stayed committed, is that if we let the So- viets scare us out of Berlin we would lose face with the Soviets themselves. The reputation that most matters to us is our repu- tation with the Soviet (and Communist Chinese) leaders. It would be bad enough to have Europeans, Latin Americans, or Asians think that we are immoral or cowardly. It would be far worse to lose our reputation with the Soviets. When we talk about the loss of face that would occur if we backed out of For-
11. It is not easy to explain why the Chinese entered North Korea so secretly and so suddenly. Had they wanted to stop the United Nations forces at the level, say, of Pyongyang, to protect their own border and territory, a conspicuous early entry in force might have found the U. N. Command content with its accomplishment and in no mood to fight a second war, against Chinese armies, for the remainder of North Korea. They chose instead to launch a surprise attack, with stunning tactical advantages but no prospect of deterrence. It may have been a hard choice with the decision, finally, a pessimistic one; if so, it was probably a mistake. It may have been based on an overriding interest in the territorial integrity of a Communist North Korea; if so, accommodation was probably impossible anyhow. Or it may have been just a military obsession with tactical surprise, at the expense of all deterrence and diplomacy.
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mosaunder duress, or out of Berlin, the loss of face that matters most is the loss of Soviet belief that we will do, elsewhere and subsequently, what we insist we will do here and now. Our deterrence rests on Soviet expectations.
This, I suppose, is the ultimate reason why we have to defend California- aside from whether or not Easterners want to. There is no way to let California go to the Soviets and make thembelieveneverthelessthatOregonandWashington,Florida and Maine, and eventually Chevy Chase and Cambridge cannot be had under the same principle. There is no way to persuade them that if we do not stop them in California we will stop them at the Mississippi (though the Mississippi is a degree less implausible than any other line between that river and, say, the continental divide). Once they cross a line into a new class of aggression, into a set of areas or assets that we always claimed we would protect, we may even deceive them if we do not react vigorously. Suppose we let the Soviets have California, and when they reach for Texas we attack them in full force. They could sue for breach of promise. We virtually told them they could have Texas when we let them into California; the fault is ours, for communicating badly, for not recognizing what we were conceding.
California is a bit of fantasy here; but it helps to remind us that the effectiveness of deterrence often depends on attaching to particular areas some of the status of California. The principle is at work all over the world; and the principle is not wholly under our own control. I doubt whether we can identify our- selveswithP&stan inquitethewaywecanidentifyourselves with Great Britain, no matter how many treaties we sign during the next ten years.
"To identify" is a complex process. It means getting the Soviets or the Communist Chinese to identify us with, say, Pakistan in such a way that they would lose respect for our commitments elsewhere if we failed to support Pakistan and we know they would lose that respect, so that we would have to support Pakistan and they know we would. In a way, it is the Soviets who confer this identification;but they do it through the
medium of their expectations about us and our understanding of their expectations. Neither they nor we can exercise full control over their expectations.
There is an interesting geographical difference in the Soviet and American homelands; it is hard to imagine a war so located that it could spill over by hot pursuit, by interdiction bombing, by inadvertent border violation, by local reprisal bombing, or evenbydeliberatebutlimitedgroundencroachmentintoAmeri- can territory. Our oceans may not protect us from big wars but they protect us from little ones. A local war could not impinge on California, involving it peripherally or incidentally through geographicalcontinuity,thewaytheKoreanWarcouldimpinge on Manchuria and Siberia, or the way Soviet territory could be impinged on by war in Iran, Yugoslavia, or Central Europe. One can argue about how far back toward Moscow an "interdic- tion campaign" of bombing might have to reach, or might safely reach, in case of a limited war in Central Europe; and there is no geographical feature- and few economic features - to present a sudden discontinuity at the Soviet border. A comparable question hardly arises for American participation in the same war; there is one discontinuity leading to submarine warfare on the high seas, and another, a great one, in going in- land to the railroad tracks that carry the freight to the Baltimore docks. The vehicles or vessels that would have to carry out the intrusion would furthermore be different in character from those involved in the "theater war. "
Possibilities of limited, marginal, homeland engagement that might be logically pertinent for California or Massachusetts are justgeographicallyinapplicable. ThisgivestheAmericanhome- land a more distinctive character- a more unambiguous "homeland"separateness- thantheSoviethomelandcanhave. Thenearestthingto"localinvolvement"onecanimaginemight be Florida bases in case of an air war with Cuba; that would be a possible exception to the rule, while for the Soviet Union most of the hypothetical wars that they must have to make plans about raise the problem of peripheral homeland involvement of some sort (including intrusive reconnaissance and other air-
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space violations even if no dirt is disturbed on their territory). The California principle actually can apply not only to terri- tories but to weapons. One of the arguments that has been made, and taken seriously, against having all of our strategic weapons at sea or in outer space or even emplaced abroad, is that the enemy might be able to attack them without fearing the kind of response that would be triggered by an attack on our homeland. If all missiles were on ships at sea, the argument runs, an attack on a ship would not be quite the same as an at- tack on California or Massachusetts; and an enemy might consider doing it in circumstances when he would not consider attacking weapons located on our soil. (An extreme form of the argument, not put forward quite so seriously, was that we ought to locate our weapons in the middle of population centers, so that the enemy could never attack them without arousing the massive response that he could take for granted if he struck our
cities. )
There is something to the argument. If in an Asian war we
flew bombers from aircraft carriers or from bases in an allied country, and an enemy attacked our ships at sea or our overseas bases, we would almost certainly not consider it the same as if we had flown the bombers from bases in Hawaii or California and he had attacked the bases in those states. If the Soviets had put nuclear weapons in orbit and we shot at them with rockets the results might be serious, but not the same as if the Soviets had put missiles on home territory and we shot at those missiles on their home grounds. Missiles in Cuba, though owned and manned by Russians, were less "nationalized" as a target than missiles in the U. S. S. R. itself. (One of the arguments made against the use of surface ships in a European Multilateral Force armed with long-range missiles was that they could be picked off by an enemy, possibly during a limited war in which the Multilateral Force was not engaged, possibly without the use of nuclear weapons by an enemy, in a way that would not quite provoke reprisal, and thus would be vulnerable in a way that homeland-based missiles would not be. )
Theargumentcangoeitherway. Thiscanbeareasonforde-
THE ART OF COMMITMENT 59
liberately putting weapons outside our boundary, so that their military involvement would not tempt an attack on our home- land, or for keeping them within our boundaries so that an attack on them would appear the more risky. The point here isjust that there is a difference. Quemoy cannot be made part of California by moving it there, but weapons can.
Actually the all-or-nothing character of the homeland is not so complete. Secretary McNamara's suggestion that even a general war might be somewhat confined to military installa- tions, and that a furious attack on enemy population centers might be the proper response only to an attack on ours, implies that we do distinguish or might distinguish different parts of our territory by the degree of warfare involved. And I have heard it argued that the Soviets, if they fear for the deterrent security of their retaliatory forcesinapurely"military"warthattheAmeri- cans might initiate, may actually prefer a close proximity of their missiles to their cities to make the prospect of a "clean" strategic war, one without massive attacks on cities, less prom- ising- to demonstrate that there would remain little to lose, after an attack on their weapons, and little motive to confine their response to military targets. The policy would be a dangerous one if there were much likelihood that war would occur, but its logic has merit.
Discrediting an Adversary's Commitments
The Soviets have the same deterrence problem beyond their bordersthatwehave. InsomewaystheWesthashelpedthemto solve it.
All kinds of people, responsible and irresponsible, intelligent and unenlightened, European and American, have raised questions about whether the United States really would use its full military force to protect Western Europe or to retaliate for the loss of Western Europe. Much more rarely did I hear anyone question- at least before about 1963- whether the Soviets would do likewise if we were provoked to an attack against the homeland of Communist China.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? The Soviets seem to have accomplished- and we helped
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them- what we find difficult, namely, to persuade the world that the entire area of their alliance is part of an integral bloc. In the West we talked for a decade- until the Sino-Soviet schism became undeniable- about the Sino-Soviet bloc as though every satellite were part of the Soviet system, and as though Soviet determination to keep those areas under their control was so intense that they could not afford to lose any of it. We often acted as though every part of their sphere of influencewasa"California. "IntheWestweseemedtoconcede to the Soviets, with respect to China, what not everybody con- cedes us with respect to Europe.
If we always treat China as though it is a Soviet California, we tend to make it so. If we imply to the Soviets that we con- siderCommunistChinaorCzechoslovakiathevirtualequiva- lent of Siberia, then in the event of any military action in or against those areas we have informed the Soviets that we are going to interpret their response as though we had landed troops in Vladivostok or Archangel or launched them across the Soviet- Polish border. We thus oblige them to react in China, or in North Vietnam or wherever it may be, and in effect give them precisely the commitment that is worth so much to them in de- terring the West. If we make it clear that we believe they are obliged to react to an intrusion in Hungary as though we were in the streets of Moscow, then they are obliged.
Cubawillcontinuetobeaninterestingborderlinecase. The Soviets will find it difficult politically and psychologically to get universal acquiescence that a country can be genuinely within the Soviet bloc if it is not contiguous to them. The Soviet problem was totry togetCubainto the status of a Soviet "Califor- nia. " It is interesting to speculate on whether we could add states to the Union, like the Philippines, Greece, or Formosa, and let that settle the question of where they belong and how obligedwearetodefendthem. Hawaii,yes,andbynowPuerto Rico; but if we reached out beyond the areas that "belong" in the United States we could probablyjust not manage to confer a genuinely plausible "statehood" that would be universally recognized and taken for granted.
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And Cuba does not quite "belong" in the Soviet bloc- it is topologically separate and does not enjoy the territorial integrity withtheSovietblocthatnationstraditionallyenjoy. Indiacould take Goa for what are basically esthetic reasons: a conventional belief that maps ought to have certain geometrical qualities, that an enclave is geographically abnormal, that an island in the ocean can belong to anyone but an island surrounded by the ter- ritory of a large nation somehow ought to belong to it. (Algeria would,forthesamereason,havebeenhardertodisengagefrom metropolitan France had it not been geographically separated by the Mediterranean; keeping the coastal cities in "France" while dividing off the hinterland would similarly have gone somewhat against cartographic psychology. ) There are many otherthings,ofcourse,thatmakeCubadifferentfromHungary, including the fact that the United States can surround it, harass it, or blockade it without encroaching on Soviet territory. But even without that it would be an uphill struggle for the Soviets to achieve a credible togetherness with the remote island of Cuba.
Additional "Cubas" would cost the Soviets something. That does not mean we should like them; still, we should recognize what happens to their deterrence problem. It becomes more like ours. They used to have an almost integral bloc, a geographical unit, with a single Iron Curtain separating their side from the restoftheworld. Onecouldalmostdrawaclosedcurvedline on a globe with everything inside it Soviet bloc and everything outside it not. Yugoslavia was the only ambiguity. It in turn made little Albania an anomaly- only a small one, but its political detachment in the early 1960s confirms the point. Cuba has been the same problem magnified. "Blocness" no longer means what it did. In a geographically tight bloc, satellitescanhavedegreesofaffiliationwiththeU. S. S. R. without necessarily spoiling the definition of the "bloc. " Distant satel- lites, though, not only can be more independent because of Soviet difficulty in imposing its will by violence but they further disturbthe geographicalneatness of the bloc. "Blocness" ceases to be all-or-none;it becomes a matter of degree.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? This process can then infect the territories contiguous with the U. S. S. R. And if the Soviet Union tempers its deterrent threats, hedging on the distant countries or on countries not fully integrated, it invites examination of the credibility of its threats everywhere. Certain things like honor and outrage are not meant to be matters of degree. One can say that his homeland is inviolate only if he knows exactly what he means by"homeland"anditisnotclutteredupwithfull-fledgedstates, protectorates, territories, and gradations of citizenship that make some places more "homeland" than others. Like virgin- ity, the homeland wants an absolute definition. This character the Soviet bloc has been losing and may lose even more if it
acquires a graduated structure like the old British Empire.
We credited the Soviets with effective deterrence and in doing so genuinely gave them some. We came at last to treat the Sino-Soviet split as a real one; but it would have been wiser not to have acknowledged their fusion in the first place. In our efforts to dramatize and magnify the Soviet threat, we some- times present the Soviet Union with a deterrent asset of a kind that we find hard to create for ourselves. We should relieve the Soviets as much as we can of any obligation to respond to an American engagement with China as to an engagement with Soviet Russia itself. If we relieve the Soviets of the obligation, we somewhat undo their commitment. We should be trying to
make North Vietnam seem much more remote from the Soviet bloc than Puerto Rico is from the United States, to keep China out of the category of Alaska, and not to concede to bloc countries a sense of immunity. Events may oblige us- some of these very countries may oblige us- to initiate some kind of military engagement in the future;I2and we would be wise to decouple those areas, as much as we can, from Soviet military forces in advance. I3
Sometimes a country wants to get out of a commitment- to decouple itself. It is not easy. We may have regretted our commitment to Quemoy in 1958,but there was no graceful way to undo it at that time. The Berlin wall was a genuine embarrass- ment. We apparently had not enough of a commitment to feel obliged to use violence against the Berlin wall. We had undeni- ably some commitment; there was some expectation that we might take action and some belief that we ought to. We did not, and it cost us something. If nobody had ever expected us to do anything about the wall- if we had never appeared to have any obligation to prevent things like the wall, and if we had never made any claims about East Berlin that seemed inconsistent with the wall- the wall would have embarrassed us less. Some people on our side were disappointed when we let the wall go up. The United States government would undoubtedly have preferred not to incur that disappointment. Diplomatic state- ments about the character of our rights and obligations in East Berlin were an effort to dismantle any commitment we might previously have had. The statements were not fully persuasive. Had the United States government known all along that some- thing like the wall might go up, and had it planned all along not to oppose it, diplomatic preparation might have made the wall less of an embarrassment. In this case there appeared to be some
residual commitment that we had not honored, and we had to argueretroactivelythatouressentialrightshadnotbeenviolated and that nothing rightfully ours had been taken from us.
The Soviets had a similar problem over Cuba. Less than six weeks before the President's missile crisis address of October 22,1962, the Soviet government had issued a formal statement about Cuba. "We have said and do repeat that if war is unleashed, if the aggressor makes an attack on one state or another and this state asks for assistance, the Soviet Union has the possibility from its own territory to render assistance to any peace-loving state and not only to Cuba. And let no one doubt that the Soviet Union will render such assistance. " And further,
? ? ? ? ? ? ? 13. Possibly the single greatest consequence of the nuclear test bar- and I see no evidence that it was intended in the West, or that it motivated the final negotiations
-
implications into the open. What a diplomatic coup it would have been, had it been contrived that way!
was to exacerbate the Sino-Soviet dispute on security policy and bring its military
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peoples in the world to be the decisive factor in deterring the aggressive forces of imperialism from unleashing a world war of annihilation. This mission the Soviet Union will continue to discharge with all firmness and consistency. " But "if the aggressors unleash war, the Soviet Union will inflict the most powerful blow in response. " By implication, what the United States Navy was doing, or even might do, was piracy so far, and not war, and the "peace-loving states cannot but protest. " l 4
The orientation was toward an American affront to Cuba, not a Soviet-American confrontation. The key American demand for the "prompt dismantling and withdrawal of all offensive weapons in Cuba" before the quarantine could be lifted- that is, the direct relation of President Kennedy's action to the Sovietmissiles- wasnotdirectlyaddressed. TheSovietschose not to enhance their commitment to Cuba by construing the United States action as one obliging a firm Soviet response; they construed it as a Caribbean issue. Their language seemed designed to dismantle an incomplete commitment rather than to bolster it.
Butjust as one cannot incur a genuine commitment by purely verbal means, one cannot get out of it with cheap words either. Secretary Dulles in 1958 could not have said, "Quemoy? Who cares about Quemoy? It's not worth fighting over, and our defense perimeter will be neater without it. " The United States never did talk its way cleanly out of the Berlin wall business. Even if the letter of our obligations was never violated, there are bound to be some who think the spirit demanded more. We had little obligation to intervene in Hungary in 1956, and the Suez crisis confused and screened it. Nevertheless, there was a possibility that the West might do something and it did not. Maybe this was a convenience, clarifying an implicit under- standing between East and West. But the cost was not zero.
If commitments could be undone by declaration they would be worthless in the first place. The whole purpose of verbal or
14. David L. Larson, ed. , The "Cuban Crisis" of 1962, Selected Documents and Chronology (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1963), pp. 7- 17, 4 1 4 6 , 50-54.
''The Soviet government would like to draw attention to the fact that one cannot now attack Cuba and expect that the aggressor will be free from punishment for this attack. If this attack is made, this will be the beginning of the unleashing of war. " It was a long, argumentative statement, however, and acknowledged that "only a madman can think now that a war started by him will be a calamity only for the people against which it is unleashed. " And the most threatening language was not singled out for solemn treatment but went along as part of the argument. So there was at least a degree of ambiguity.
President Kennedy's television broadcast of October 22 was directly aimed at the Soviet Union. It was so directly aimed that one can infer only a conscious decision to make this not a Caribbean affair but an East- West affair. It concerned Soviet missiles and Soviet duplicity, a Soviet challenge; and the President even went out of his way to express concern for the Cubans, his desire that they not be hurt, and his regret for the "foreign domination" that was responsible for their predica- ment. The President did not say that we had a problem with Cuba and hoped the Soviets would keep out of it; he said we had an altercation with the Soviet Union and hoped Cubans would not be hurt.
The Soviet statement the following day, circulated to the Se- curity Council of the United Nations, was evidently an effort to structure the situation a little differently. It accused the United States of piracy on the high seas and of "trying to dictate to Cuba what policy it must pursue. " It said the United States government was "assuming the right to demand that states should account to it for the way in which they organize their de- fense, and should notify it of what their ships are carrying on the high seas. The Soviet government firmly repudiates such claims. " The statement also said, "Today as never before, statesmen must show calm and prudence, and must not counte- nance the rattling of weapons. "And indeed there was no rat- ling of weapons in the Soviet statement. The most they said was, "The presence of powerful weapons, including nuclear rocket weapons, in the Soviet Union is acknowledged by all the
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ritualistic commitments, of political and diplomatic commit- ments, of efforts to attach honor and reputation to a commit- ment, is to make the commitment manifestly hard to get out of on short notice. Even the commitments not deliberately in- curred, and the commitments that embarrass one in unforeseen circumstances, cannot be undone cheaply. The cost is the discrediting of other commitments that one would stilllike to be
credited.
If a country does want to get off the hook, to get out of a commitment deliberately incurred or one that grew up unin- tended, the opponent's cooperation can make a difference. The Chinese Communists seemed not to be trying, from 1958on, to make it easy for the United States to decouple itself from Quemoy. They maintained,and occasionally intensified,enough military pressure on the island to make graceful withdrawal difficult, tomake withdrawal looklike retreat under duress. It is hard to escape the judgment that they enjoyed American dis- comfort over Quemoy, their own ability to stir things up at will but to keep crises under their control, and their opportunity to aggravate American differences with Chiang Kai-shek.
Circumventing an Adversary's Commitments
"Salami tactics," we can be sure, were invented by a child; whoever first expounded the adult version had already under- stood the principle when he was small. Tell a child not to go in the water and he'll sit on the bank and submerge his bare feet;
15. The most eloquent rebuff I have come across is the answer the Romans received from the Volciani in Spain, whom they tried to unite with other Spanish cities against Carthage shortly after Rome had declined to defend the allied Spanish town of Saguntum against Hannibal and it had been terribly destroyed. "Men of Rome," said the eldest among them, "it seems hardly decent to ask us to prefer your friendship to that of Carthage, considering the precedent of those who have been rash enough to do so. Was not your betrayal of your friends in Saguntum even more brutal than their destruction by their enemies the Carthaginians? I suggest You look for allies in some spot where what happened to Saguntum has never been heard of. The fall of that town will be a signal and melancholy warning to the peoples of Spain never to count upon Roman friendship nor to trust Rome's word. " The War With Hunnibal, Aubrey de Selincourt, transl. (Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1965), p. 43.
he is not yet "in" the water. Acquiesce, and he'll stand up; no more of him is in the water than before. Think it over, and he'll start wading, not going any deeper; take a moment to decide whether this is different and he'll go a little deeper, arguing that since he goes back and forth it all averages out. Pretty soon we are calling to him not to swim out of sight, wondering whatever happened to all our discipline.
Most commitments are ultimately ambiguous indetail. Some- times they are purposely so, as when President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles announced that an attack on Quemoy might or might not trigger an American response under the "Formosa Doctrine" according to whether or not it was interpreted as part of an assault, or prelude to an assault, on Formosa itself. Even more commitments are ambiguous because of the plain impos- sibility of defining them in exact detail. There are areas of doubt even in the most carefully drafted statutes and contracts; and even people who most jealously guard their rights and privi- leges have been known to settle out of court, to excuse an honest mistake, or to overlook a minor transgression because of the high cost of litigation. No matter how inviolate our commit- ment to some border, we are unlikely to start a war the first time a few drunken soldiers from the other side wander across the line and "invade" our territory. And there is always the possi- bility that some East German functionary on the Autobahn really did not get the word, or his vehicle really did break down in our lane of traffic. There is some threshold below which the commitment is just not operative, and even that threshold itself is usually unclear.
From this arises the low-level incident or probe, and tactics of erosion. One tests the seriousness of a commitment by probing it in a noncommittal way, pretending the trespass was inadvertent or unauthorized if one meets resistance, both to forestall the reaction and to avoid backing down. One stops a convoy or overflies a border, pretending the incident was accidental or unauthorized; but if there is no challenge, one continues or enlarges the operation, setting a precedent, estab- lishing rights of thoroughfare or squatters' rights, pushing the
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THE ART OF COMMITMENT 67
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