Free Real War by Richard Nixon Page A

is actually something besides the contemporary equivalent of Hitlerian genocide, or that “People’s Liberation” forces actually liberate people.
    A refugee who fled from South Vietnam in 1979 after he had stayed to greet the communists said he had learned the hard way that the communists consider the lie “a weapon, a legitimate and honest weapon, to be used by the weak to defeat the strong.” If the Soviets can, by their lies, make us forget who they are and doubt who we are, this weapon in World War III will have served its destructive purpose.
    One of the Soviets’ favorite tactics is bluster. Even when they were vastly inferior to us in power, Nikita Khrushchev would rattle his nuclear sabers, hoping to instill in the West a fear of Soviet might. Our leaders at the time were not fooled; they knew that Khrushchev had no intention of committing national suicide, but public opinion was strongly affected.
    During the Cuban missile crisis Khrushchev overplayed his hand, Kennedy called his bluff, and the Soviet leader backed down. But since that time the Soviet Union has pressed forward with a sustained and intensive military buildup while the United States has let its nuclear superiority wither away. If in the futurethe Soviet leaders feel they have attained clear nuclear superiority, they will try once again to break our will, only this time it will be a substantive threat rather than a bluff.
    The greatest danger we face in World War III is that we will lose it by default.
    In 1975 the North Vietnamese went unopposed by a war-weary United States in their invasion of the South; in 1978 they invaded Cambodia. In 1975 and 1976 the Cubans met only a feeble response from the West when they went into Angola; in 1977 they showed up in Ethiopia. In April of 1978 the pro-Soviet coup in Afghanistan brought hardly a murmur from Western leaders; in June there was one in South Yemen. Then on Christmas Eve, 1979, the Red Army rolled into Kabul to suppress an anti-communist revolt in Afghanistan. The dominoes have always taken the “domino theory” seriously—only in the fashionable salons of the West was it scoffed at.
    As social criticIrving Kristol has pointed out:
    The nations of this world admire winners, not losers—not even ‘nice’ losers. . . . When a democratic nation . . . and most especially the leading democratic nation, engages interminably in Hamlet-like soliloquies on the moral dilemmas of action, the world will seek its political models elsewhere. . . .
    We know that power may indeed corrupt. We are now learning that, in the world of nations as it exists, powerlessness can be even more corrupting and demoralizing.
    In World War III, as in other human activities, small problems neglected have a way of growing into large ones. The old adage that a stitch in time saves nine is as true in diplomacy as it is in the household. Acquiescence in one aggressive move invites another. A timely response at one level can avert the need for an escalated response later. Momentum is a powerful force among nations. Wavering leaders sense a shift in the balance of power and the direction of history, and they accelerate that shift by joining it. The key to winning World War III is to shift that balance, that momentum, in our direction.

3
The Visible Hand
    There are, at the present time, two great nations in the world which seem to tend towards the same end, although they started from different points: I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and whilst the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly assumed a most prominent place amongst the nations; and the world learned of their existence and their greatness at almost the same time. . . .
    The American struggles against the natural obstacles which oppose him; the adversaries of the Russian are men; the former combats the wilderness and savage