On the Right

New York, Jan. 28—The impact in Europe of recent developments in international affairs is considerable. Mr. Raymond Aron, Europe’s Walter Lippmann, whose record in the past few years has been friendly to the United States, signals the twin offensives of North Vietnam and the Soviet Union as the collapse of the higher optimism of Mr. Kissinger’s strategy. After all, the entire approach of the Nixon Administration to the Far East supposed that we had found the key to ending the war in Indochina in a way consistent with Western ideas of rectitude. The same momentum that took Mr. Nixon to Peking, there to proclaim his intention of joining in a “long march” with the government of Mao Tse-tung, took him to Moscow a few weeks later. What we were designed to get from it was a cessation of hostilities in Indochina, and an approach to genuine detente.

President Ford’s admonition to Congress—he was complaining of the Jackson Amendment, which required of the Soviet Union a liberalization of the laws against emigration—was abject, and hugely unfortunate. It is true that Mr. Kissinger objected all along to the Jackson Amendment, on the grounds that you cannot hope to reform a country’s internal policies while engaged in Real-politik having to do with international affairs. But Mr. Ford neglected to weigh several factors. The first is that by asking the Soviet Union to liberalize emigration, the American Congress was doing nothing more than asking the Soviet Union to observe its own treaty—to wit, the two conventions relating to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations, ratified, snonte sua, by the Soviet Union during the fall of 1973. Second, the abrupt announcement by the Soviet Union that it would reject the economic treaty probably has very little to do with Soviet pride. If it had, the Soviet Union would have rejected the agreement in the first instance. Why now? One must look for other reasons, and the most likely of these is that the Soviet Union views Most Favored Nation status with the United States as less of an advantage than it had foreseen. For one thing, the Congress had in effect proposed a $300million limit on the credit line. More important, the Arab states are the principal source of credit these days, not the United States; and to make what appears to be a major concession in return for a few dollars’ credit which can be got more easily out of the Arabs makes very little sense to the Soviet powerbrokers, who, simultaneously, feast on the progressive humiliation of the United States at the other end of the world, where Hanoi defiantly breaks the terms of the Treaty of Paris, and the United States Congress talks about giving less and less help to South Vietnam.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

New York, Jan. 28—The impact in Europe of recent developments in international affairs is considerable. Mr. Raymond Aron, Europe’s Walter Lippmann, whose record in the past few years has been friendly to the United States, signals the twin offensives of North Vietnam and the Soviet Union as the collapse of the higher optimism of Mr. Kissinger’s strategy. After all, the entire approach of the Nixon Administration to the Far East supposed that we had found the key to ending the war in Indochina in a way consistent with Western ideas of rectitude. The same momentum that took Mr. Nixon to Peking, there to proclaim his intention of joining in a “long march” with the government of Mao Tse-tung, took him to Moscow a few weeks later. What we were designed to get from it was a cessation of hostilities in Indochina, and an approach to genuine detente.

President Ford’s admonition to Congress—he was complaining of the Jackson Amendment, which required of the Soviet Union a liberalization of the laws against emigration—was abject, and hugely unfortunate. It is true that Mr. Kissinger objected all along to the Jackson Amendment, on the grounds that you cannot hope to reform a country’s internal policies while engaged in Real-politik having to do with international affairs. But Mr. Ford neglected to weigh several factors. The first is that by asking the Soviet Union to liberalize emigration, the American Congress was doing nothing more than asking the Soviet Union to observe its own treaty—to wit, the two conventions relating to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations, ratified, snonte sua, by the Soviet Union during the fall of 1973. Second, the abrupt announcement by the Soviet Union that it would reject the economic treaty probably has very little to do with Soviet pride. If it had, the Soviet Union would have rejected the agreement in the first instance. Why now? One must look for other reasons, and the most likely of these is that the Soviet Union views Most Favored Nation status with the United States as less of an advantage than it had foreseen. For one thing, the Congress had in effect proposed a $300million limit on the credit line. More important, the Arab states are the principal source of credit these days, not the United States; and to make what appears to be a major concession in return for a few dollars’ credit which can be got more easily out of the Arabs makes very little sense to the Soviet powerbrokers, who, simultaneously, feast on the progressive humiliation of the United States at the other end of the world, where Hanoi defiantly breaks the terms of the Treaty of Paris, and the United States Congress talks about giving less and less help to South Vietnam.