A NEW KIND OF WAR
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and will end up going beyond, either political system. We should
recognize these social-historical similarities
exactly because
we value and
want to preserve the political differences. Moreover, the chief
cultural
difference is just that we can be more honest about the whole thing.
Perhaps most important, real probing would bring us within talking
distance of the rest of the world, which is genuinely interested in this
vital comparison.
In the course of the competition we are bound to become more
like them, where they are better or more powerful; and they must
be–
come more like us for similar reasons. That is the iron logic of long–
run competition. The only way the force of this logic can be broken
is for the competition to cease or one party to become a loser. But
in this grandiose competition between the United States and the
Soviet Union,
there must not be a loser.
Any loser would be tempted
to risk nuclear disaster. Putting the worst eventualities aside, there will
be competition without a loser, and in the end we will both be sub–
stantially similar in power and the qualities that would appeal to each
other and the rest of the world.
The Russian challenge to compete offers us,
in
fact, a bright,
new perspective. Abstractly, of course, we did not have to stand by
nursing our budget while the Soviets rebuilt their war-devastated areas
and created armament and a scientific establishment equal to ours.
We could have instituted a real Point Four program, and established
our own unattackable superiority through domestic reconstruction. But
we didn't. Now we must. That is what the challenge has already
accomplished.
Many people who refuse this challenge and perspective do so
in reliance on two contradictory beliefs: that Russia's growth will re–
sult in mellowing, and that they will not,
in
fact, maintain a faster
rate of growth than America, since they lack the genius of capitalist
initiative and are over-burdened with dunderheaded bureaucratic con–
trol. The simple truth is that there is indeed waste
in
their centraliza–
tion, but there is also terrible waste in our decentralization. The worst
they do is to demand too little consumption by their masses or too
much production by their managers, all with the purpose of building
up the capital plant and using it at full capacity. Our worst is under–
production and spotty expansion, all in pursuit of paper-profit and
excessively privileged consumption.
The state played an essential role in the accumulation of capital
in America. Although there were great excesses and consequent hard–
ships for the mass of the people, we were probably fortunate that it
