Russia and the Road to Appeasement: Cycles of East-West Conflict in War and Peace (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Russia and the Road to Appeasement: Cycles of East-West Conflict in War and Peace. By George Liska. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 261 pp. $25. Russia and the Road to Appeasement is George Liska's fourth and final volume focusing on the postwar U.S.-Soviet rivalry. Unlike its three predecessors which dealt largely with U.S. foreign policy and the structure of international politics, the latest Liska book looks primarily at U.S. strategy vis-à-vis Soviet Russia. Liska has produced an extremely stimulating, original, and intellectually logical piece of scholarship. Nothing less was to be expected of him, and yet, the question remains, in this case as in those of his previous books, to what extent Liska's writings are relevant to current American political debates regarding relations with the Soviet Union. In the first volume of his monumental memoirs, Henry Kissinger tells of an early encounter he and several other foreign policy scholars had with Nelson Rockefeller, then special assistant for national security affairs to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. According to the former secretary of state, "one professor after another volunteered clever tactical advice on how to manipulate nations—or at least the bureaucracy; how to deal with a president we did not know; or (the perennial problem of national security advisors) how to prevail over an equally unfamiliar secretary of state." Rockefeller was not impressed. He commented sternly: "I did not bring you gentlemen down here to tell me how to maneuver in Washington—that is my job. Your job is to tell me what is right. If you can convince me I will take it to the president. And if I can't sell it to him I will resign." Since that meeting twenty-seven years ago, academics in greater and greater numbers have left their ivory towers and become active participants in policy battles. They advise presidents and secretaries of state and, on occasion, as both Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski have demonstrated, they turn into important policymakers in their own right. Today a successful foreign affairs scholar is often not measured by the respect he enjoys among his academic peers, nor by 207 208 SAIS REVIEW the critical acclaim his books receive, but rather by how close he is to the centers of power in Washington and by how well he can play the game of bureaucratic politics. The game, as I am the first to admit, is addictive. It is also constructive when knowledge talks to power. This is especially true at a time when the decline of the old Eastern internationalist establishment, and more specifically of the professional foreign service, together with an influx of ambitious but often ignorant and parochial outsiders confident of their ability to reshape the world, make education of policymakers particularly indispensable. But, as always, there is a price to pay, a price so well illustrated by Kissinger in his memoirs—"What you gain in access to power, you lose in clarity and integrity of thought." When scholars act as politicians there is a danger that the depth and detachment of their analysis will be colored by the political needs and pressures of the moment. Whatever scholarship gains in political power, it probably loses in intellectual power. George Liska is in no such danger. He is virtually unique among leading specialists in international relations in terms of his almost total immunity to Potomac fever. Moreover, he is not all that interested in shifts in American political opinion and, more generally, in what kind of policies this opinion can sustain. His is the world of state entities interacting on the global chessboard, competing, cooperating, and on occasion, fighting each other. The policies Liska recommends could probably be embraced only by an enlightened autocrat. It is more doubtful whether they could be sold to the U.S. political process. Liska is only too well aware of this. He doesn't hide his impatience with domestic determinants of U.S. foreign policy. And his distaste for populist reactionaries calling themselves conservatives (whether of neo-conservative or New Right brand) is self-evident. "The right-wing American pseudo-conservative is suspect of lacking a concrete idea of...