INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS
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have overlooked it: Americans have the potential to control
American policies in El Salvador, but very little leverage on Soviet
policies in Afghanistan. And in the name of what international
algebra are we to use Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to justify
our mendacious, repressive, and, I am convinced, ultimately self–
defeating policies in Salvador, and in most of Latin America?
Such equations as that Phillips sets up turn political thought
into a right/ left, for us/ against us tropism. That tropism, a pro–
duct of the first cold war, now revived by the second cold war, has
always been a chief object of critique by the intelligent left.
To my mind, the most harmful of Phillips's caricatures con–
cerns what he variously calls the "disarmament" and "unilateral
disarmament" movements, and his criticism of the call for "nego–
tiations" toward the limitation of nuclear arms. Since by now
the roster of those calling for new approaches to arms control
includes such as McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and
Henry Kissinger, Phillips may want to revise his portrait of the
arms control and nuclear freeze movements, which, though di–
verse and eclectic, can hardly be considered a bunch of Aldermas–
ton marchers. It is not (if I may continue to say the obvious) that
"negotiations" are "given miraculous power," but that they are
the only rational approach to a situation which is daily more
alarming, where the Reagan administration's refusal to pursue
negotiations seriously and professionally has created a threat
which now disturbs many on the right as well as on the left.
The premise that unites most of those who are currently
" agitating" against American arms policies was expressed by
George Kennan in an article published in
The New Yorker
a year
and a half ago: "I believe that until we consent
to
recognize that
the nuclear weapons we hold in our hands are as much a danger
to
us as those that repose in the hands of our supposed adversaries
there will be no escape from the confusions and dilemmas to
which such weapons have brought us, and must bring us increas–
ingly as time goes on. " The statement once again tries to connect
international with domestic politics, to show that nuclear idolatry
feeds on unmanaged fear, and to suggest that we have a measure of
control over interna tional tensions through reasoned decisions
about what we need in order to be secure, and to project the image
of security, that can then form the basis for rational and self-pro–
tective negotiations about the arms of others. To suggest that such
