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DAVID RIESMAN
widely prevalent idea among many serious and dedicated men that
we "have died for our ideals before" transfers a pre-nuclear morality
into an era when, as Hans Morgenthau has pointed out, the nature
of death is radically transformed by nuclear weapons. Hence the
rethinking that is required is prevented by these false analogies which
the cold war renders at once emotionally patriotic and intellectually
convenient.
The preoccupation with big power politics narrows our view of
human experience and possibility. In the never-ending task of under–
standing man's nature, a preliterate tribe in the South Pacific may
teach unexpectedly much, while the study of Soviet society,
im–
portant as I myself believe this to be, may have surprising limitations.
The cold war tends to tum all roads to understanding into a super–
highway on which only big, fast, non-stop cars travel.
6. We live in a transitional time, still dependent on balance
of power diplomacy, even while seeking to move into a world order
less dominated by force, that is, by the force of a few big powers
and of rival elites within those powers. It seems to me conceivable
that the issues at stake between Soviet and American national inter–
ests are in principle negotiable, in which stability in Eastern Europe,
which the Soviet Union desperately wants, is traded for some sort
of moving but partly stabilized settlement in the Middle East, Mrica,
and Latin America, which we desperately need. I think I recognize
all the enormous and protracted problems of any negotiation with
the Communist powers, and the infinite patience and persistence
necessary in seeking out common interests and in persuading our
adversaries that we share some aims even while differing on others.
We ourselves will find it difficult to do this if we are irrevocably
committed to believing that all immediate Soviet objectives .are simply
gambits in a campaign for world domination; and it seems to me
the task of American policy to explore the possibility that the residual
ideological dynamism in Soviet Communism does not entirely fore–
close the possibility of interim, partial agreements whose result would
be to curb the ambitious and the incautious both in the Soviet Union
and in the United States.
If
by "East" one means the Soviet Union,
I believe agreement
is
madt still more difficult by the fact that each
of the two great powers has allies who profit from heightened tension.
But Communist China is another story entirely and here I am not
i
