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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, SEPTEMBER 21, 1984
PAGE 7
The suspicion is that he [Ogarkov] began to take sides in the
never-ending plots to choose a new leader--perhaps by forcing the
retirement of the aging and ailing president, Konstantin U.
Chernenko, 72, instead of letting him die in office, as his two
predecessors did after illnesses that resulted in the immobility
of the Kremlin's leadership•.••
President Reagan is constantly beset upon by his critics to virtually beg
the sulking Soviets to come back to the arms bargaining talks they left in a'
huff. Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale has made arms nego
tiations a top priority: he has even proposed a temporary U.s. nuclear
freeze as one of his first acts as president. The editors of THE NEW REPUB
LIC (October 1, 1984), however, saw no real danger in what they referred to
as the "Cold Peace" between Moscow and Washington. Beneath the frosty re
lations lies, they said, considerable geopolitical calm:
Tass spelled it out in a recent commentary: relations between the
superpowers have fallen to "the lowest level in their history."
This assessment of u.s.-soviet relations, even if true, may not
be cause for automatic celebration in the West, but we find it
har1 to share the despondency--and worse, the fear--it seems to
occasion among many ..••
The
Soviets
have
decided to cut off almost all high-level commun
ication with the West•••• Relations here means diplomatic rela
tions: exchanges, talks, visits. And, yes, on that plane, things
look glum. But in the real world--on the ground beneath the dip
lomatic atmospherics--there is another kind of relationship be
tween the superpowers. This is the geopolitical relationship,
and today it appears remarkably, even astonishingly, stable.
Look around the world•••• The present stability contrasts sharply
with the tensions over Cuba in the early 1960s, in Indochina in
the late '60s a�d early
1
70s, in the Mideast in 1973, and in the
Persian Gulf in the late '70s. Moreover, the United States is
engaged militarily nowhere in the world. The closest it comes to
direct intervention is in arming the Nicaraguan contras. The So
viets, for their part, are directly engaged in Afghanistan, but
•••that war poses no threat to world peace•••.
Another index is the absence of the word "crisis" in foreign news
reports. It is used almost exclusively to describe the internal
problems of places like the Philippines, Chile, Sri Lanka, India,
and so on down the roster. In consonance with the first law of
thermodynamics, the violent energies of the world, prevented from
crossing inter-bloc lines, are being directed inward•.•. The more
developed countries of the Third World are preoccupied with their
economies: in Latin America with digging themselves out from un
der a mountain of debt, in the Pacific rim with trying finally to
enter the ranks of the developed world.
And even where there are regional conflicts, it
1
s becoming harder
and harder to see them as a new world-threatening Balkans. Only
a few years ago we were convinced that the Persian Gulf was the
cockpit of the world. Now it's a free-fire zone.•.. And even in
Southern Africa, some of the world's most militantly Marxist