Provoking The Hedgehogs

Isaiah Berlin's memorable essay on Tolstoy, The Hedgehog and the Fox, begins with a fragment of Greek verse: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

The distinction is very useful. Consider the United States, the Soviet Union and the quarrels, crises, and wars of the Third World. These "hot-beds" (the Russian word connotes ember waiting to flare into flame) have drawn in the superpowers since 1946, when the United States armed the Koumintang in China against its internal communist enemies. Periodically, as with the Korean war, local quarrels threaten to escalate to world wars. Today Soviet and American military planners share the view that once the superpowers become involved war will spread, and they see the explosive politics around the Persian Gulf as the most likely origin of the next great war.

The Reagan Administration came to power dominated by hedgehogs determined to oppose the "one big thing" of Soviet military power and expansion. It tended to Infer Soviet control of whatever the United States government didn't like, for example the nuclear freeze movement, the Sandinistas, or Muammar Qaddafi. And since Third World outposts like Nicaragua or Libya or Angola were easier to get at than places like Poland or Afghanistan, why not concentrate on these places first? The problem, of course, is the inference of Soviet control. If Qaddafi or the Sandinistas or the Angolan leadership or the Syrians really are the equivalent of the Afghan puppet regime or the Polish dictatorship, then how to thwart or evict them becomes are reasonable question. If, however, they are involved with--but not controlled by--the Soviet Union, then confrontation may drive them irreversibly into the Soviet camp. Consider, for example, Fider Castro.

Foxes, who tend to inhabit universities and the State Department would treat each case as unique and see local causes and particular circumstances. In El Salvador, look at land tenure and understand the role of the army as a way for middle-class men to get rich by killing the poor. Lebanon? The 1943 national pact now underrepresented Shiite Moslems and the Druse, hence they are unhappy. With this sort of perspective, foxes see hedgehogs as ideologues likely to waste lives and money in immoral adventures. Hedgehogs see foxes as blind to the ever-present danger and willing to give away the candy store, the debate is as old as the Cold War and and can be found in today's newspaper.

The character of the Soviet regime isn't the issue. Like most of the hardy few who actually read Politburo statements and obscure Russian articles, I believe Mr. Brezhnev meant it when he told the 1976 Party Congress that "detente does not in the slightest abolish the laws of class struggle," or Mr. Gronlyko when in June 1983 he hammered home to the Supreme Soviet the necessity to defend "our borders" of the entire Earanian empire, presumably against such imperialist agressors as Solidarity, the people of Afghanistan, or the unwitting agents of U.S. "special services" such as those aboard KAL, flight 007. The question is more Soviet priorities and capabilities. The Soviet Union suffers low internal morale and economic stagnation. The technology gap widens every year. Japan has passed the USSR as the world's second industrial producer. Military clout and "defense of the gains of socialism" are all the Party can brag about. Military might surrounding poverty, with patriotism upholding a ramshackle empire (even if the radars don't work) is a mixture as Russian as black bread. So is astute diplomacy and propaganda to manipulate and divert the enemy in times of weakness.

Seth Singleton '62 is currently a Research Associate at the Russian Research Center, working on Soviet policy in Africa.

Times change, By 1980, the Third World had become fearful of Soviet militarism. Burgeoning Chinese-American cooperation (for example, U.S. intelligence facilities in Sinkiang), threatened to become an anti-Soviet alliance. The American military, like that quintessential American character Popeye, was eating spinach and flexing its muscles. In the 1980s the Soviet Union must save scarce resources; split Europe and China from the United States; manage counter in-surgency wars around the world (Afghanistan, Angola, Eritrea, Kampuchea, and (with minimal direct involvement) Nicaragua); and restore their credentials as "natural ally" of Third World causes by pinning the military-imperialist label on the United States.

Hence the provocation of the hedgehogs, which consists of meddling just enough to get Washington to see a Soviet threat, and then waiting for the United States to make enemies. It is useful to have American warships shelling Lebanese villages, U.S. Special Forces on patrol with Honduran soldiers who shoot peasants, or "constructive engagement" of South Africa as the South Africans attack neighboring countries. Encourage, it. Send missiles to the Syrians, arms to Nicaragua through the American flotilla offshore, and--for hard cash--sell Muammar Qaddafi whatever he wants. Train a few hundred guerrillas to blow up oil tanks and airline offices in South Africa. Whenever an anti-American issue comes along, jump on the bandwagon. In the Falklands, trumpet principled support for the just anti-colonial cause of the Argentinean and Latin American peoples against the British accomplices of U.S. imperialism. Never mind that the Argentine junta were recently "fascists" bent on disappearing every communist and leftist they could catch.

Hedgehogs, the real ones, are hard to provoke, and they move very slowly. It would be wise to emulate them and concentrate on long term sources of Western power and influence rather than running gunboats and AWACs from week to week around the world. In the longer run, treating the locals as extensions of Soviet power tends to make them so. Negotiated settlements and peaceful conditions favor the West, because the West can usually deal with both sides while the Soviets cannot and because in peaceful circumstances economic needs supersede the need for weapons, which are all the Soviets can provide Military polarization, with the United States on the unpopular side, is the present Soviet game, and we need not play by their rules.