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RUSSIA AND THE WEST:_ THE NEXT TO LAST PHASE George Liska ls this is written, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan still exerts a mesmeric effect on American statecraft, also haunted by the specter of an off-again on-again Russian intervention in Poland. And the hypothesis of a Russian-induced or orchestrated oil cut-off in the Persian Gulfstimulates strategic and deranges political thinking. This is a good time for taking a step back in order to review immediate concerns from a larger and longer perspective. After World War II, Europe was the laboratory for outright division ofphysical space between the superpowers. This state ofthings has only lately, and still precariously, been yielding to interpénétration ofinfluence : Soviet diplomatic in Western Europe, Western economic in Eastern Europe. Also lately, the region in and around the Middle East has been poised between two divergent courses: It could travel the European path in reverse and move toward a fixed partition by way ofan aborted spell of mobile interpénétration of superpower access and influence; or that part ofthe world could become a laboratory for routinizing the more dynamic and hopeful approach to regional and global stability. It still can do so, but only under certain conditions. One condition is that the local regimes remain impermeable to integral or irreversible control by either superpower, but continue instead to defend their primacy in managing local conflicts and their implications for regional balances. The other condition is that the superpowers relax their fears and expectations relative to the region. On the Soviet side, these are rooted in the geopolitics of the vulnerable underbelly; on the Western side, in the geoeconomics ofa vital resource. Neither ofthe resulting pretensions is George Liska is Professor ofPolitical Science at The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and at SAIS. He served with the Czechoslovak Ministry for Foreign Affairs from 1945 to 1948, and has written extensively on the theory and practice of international politics. 141 142 SAIS REVIEW fully valid nor can be integrally sustained without gravest dangers for both parties. As for the West alone, so long as policies remain hostage to worstcase scenarios regarding Soviet intentions vis-à-vis the region and the resource, it will not be possible to experiment with the more dynamic approach to regional and world equilibrium in the immediate future. And it will be more than possible to derail irreparably a longer-term approach to the secular problem ofRussia in relation to Europe and the West. That problem is intimately tied up with prospects for a steady and steadying approach to the longest-term issues, posed by the more widely delimited East-West cleavage—or, as now more euphemistically phrased for chiefly economic purposes, the North-South dialogue. Within both the narrower and the wider circumference, the East-West issue will have retained or increased its importance at a time when the technological parameters ofthe energy issue have been largely or completely changed. This is not the first time that international politics has been focused on one commodity or mineral—nor will it necessarily be the last. Primum vivere ... ; but, in order to survive into a livable future, it is also necessary to philosophize here and now. It has been the ill fortune of American foreign policy that it has rarely managed to find and lastingly occupy the ground on which both the mechanical and the organic dimensions ofinterstate relations—the first revolving around the dynamics of thrusts and counterthrusts; the latter concerned with the evolution of longer-term trends—meet and correct each other's opportunities and pitfalls for statecraft. Instead, the tone and inspiration ofAmerican policy has found it easier to oscillate between pragmatism and providentialism under the thin layers of tribal ideology or preachy sanctimony. The alternation can be discerned over both long and short swings of the pendulum: the first, between the only thinly disguised "realism" of especially the later stages of forcible continental or regional expansion and conquest (e.g., Polk and McKinley), and the only deviously ifat all "realistic" illusionism ofthe initial venture in worldwide reformism (or world power-through-reform, Woodrow Wilson); the second, most recently , between the early and pristine Carterism and the equally...

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