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PARTISAN REVIEW
of nuclear war- in fact, any kind of war- between the United States
and the U .S.S.R. for a generation.
Krauthammer has no patience for those who would support a
nuclear freeze. As he sees it , the freeze is not a plan but only
a
sen–
timent . He admits that the millions of Americans who support the
movement are expressing laudable concern over the proliferation of
nuclear weapons. But as a plan, the freeze fails on its own terms.
"It
seeks safety," he writes, "but would jeopardize deterrence;
it
seeks
quick action, but would delay arms control; it seeks real reductions,
but removes any leverage we might have to bring them about ."
Not that deterrence cannot, in principle, break down. Yet if
you reject a system that has kept the peace for so long, the author
submits , you are obliged to come up with an effective alternative.
Deterrence is Krauthammer's choice because "it is a better means of
achieving the ultimate moral aim of both sides - survival ."
Krauthammer, a self-proclaimed moralist, insists upon making
these kinds of distinctions, on finding a language that will not mud–
dle significant differences . In the essay titled "On Moral Equiv–
alence," he looks at Pol Pot, Jonas Savimbi, Eden Pastora Gomez
and certain Salvadoran Marxist-Leninists, all of whom have taken
up arms against their respective governments, and asks, "Is there
nothing to choose between them?" Krauthammer feels that the im–
portant issue is to look at how they fight. Do they put bombs on
school buses? Mines in harbors? Or do they only attack the other
side's military? He concludes that these rebels all differ qualitatively
and morally, as their goals are not the same. To arrive at a sound
foreign policy, we must separate the totalitarians from the demo–
crats .
"The pox-oneall-their houses sentiment," Krauthammer writes,
"is not just traditional American isolationism making a comeback.
It
is moral exhaustion, an abdication of the responsibility to distinguish
between shades of gray. The usual excuse is that the light has grown
pale; the real problem is a glaze in the eye of the beholder."
Krauthammer's distaste for present-day isolationism has led
him to what is clearly his most unpopular stance (at least for many
readers of
The New Republic):
support for the Nicaraguan
contras.
Justification for this position hinges on one factor-that , in Kraut–
hammer's opinion, there is no other way to move Daniel Ortega's
Nicaragua to pluralism, and that a pluralist Nicaragua is the only
conceivable guarantor of peace in the region. "Is it so hard," the au–
thor asks , "at a time when anti-Communist guerillas are fighting in
at least four parts of the world, for Americans, of all people, to de-
