The Kremlin’s Undiminished Appetite

The term cold war is a shorthand notation. In our communications with one another, we cannot do without shorthand notations. Without them, our discourse would be unnecessarily tedious and cumbersome. Yet, the more handy and expressive a term-such as the metaphor cold war—the more we must seek to retain its precise meaning lest we use it carelessly, and mistake a simple slogan for a highly complex phenomenon in contemporary world politics. The cold war is much too serious a business to permit of any mistakes about its philosophy and conduct. The hard men who started to wage it against us invested in it their hardest thought and the immense resources of the peoples under their rule. Obviously, in order to defeat their purpose, we need to excel them in intellectual and material power.

The cold war is the latter-day adaptation of a conflict theory which is at least as old as recorded thought about political conflict. This theory is based on observation: in a good many conflicts victory has not gone to the stronger party; the weaker party prevailed. How did the weaker party manage to overcome the superiority of the stronger party? The basic principle underlying this operation is a simple one: Since even the strongest power cannot be equally strong at all places and at all times, the challenging—weaker—power must seek to bypass its opponent’s positions of strength and catch him napping. In this strategy, the conditions of success are high mobility and watchful timing. It has been aptly called the Strategy of the Indirect Approach. It was used by the Roman Republic, possessed of meager means and unlimited ambitions, against mighty, affluent and peaceable Carthage which, after a hundred years’ struggle, succumbed to the cunning and patient Romans. It was used by the semi-barbarous warrior chieftains who, for a long time, nibbled at the margins of the seemingly invincible Roman Empire—and then suddenly brought it down. It was the strategy of the Communists in their long march to power over vast populations in which, at the outset, they constituted tiny minorities. It has been the strategy of Soviet Russia against the rest of the world and against the world’s leading nation, mighty, affluent and peaceable America. It has always been the strategy of revolutionaries seeking to overthrow established order; it has always been the strategy of dynamic aggressors seeking to overthrow superior, though defensively-minded, status quo powers.

RS

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Robert Strausz-Hupe

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The term cold war is a shorthand notation. In our communications with one another, we cannot do without shorthand notations. Without them, our discourse would be unnecessarily tedious and cumbersome. Yet, the more handy and expressive a term-such as the metaphor cold war—the more we must seek to retain its precise meaning lest we use it carelessly, and mistake a simple slogan for a highly complex phenomenon in contemporary world politics. The cold war is much too serious a business to permit of any mistakes about its philosophy and conduct. The hard men who started to wage it against us invested in it their hardest thought and the immense resources of the peoples under their rule. Obviously, in order to defeat their purpose, we need to excel them in intellectual and material power.

The cold war is the latter-day adaptation of a conflict theory which is at least as old as recorded thought about political conflict. This theory is based on observation: in a good many conflicts victory has not gone to the stronger party; the weaker party prevailed. How did the weaker party manage to overcome the superiority of the stronger party? The basic principle underlying this operation is a simple one: Since even the strongest power cannot be equally strong at all places and at all times, the challenging—weaker—power must seek to bypass its opponent’s positions of strength and catch him napping. In this strategy, the conditions of success are high mobility and watchful timing. It has been aptly called the Strategy of the Indirect Approach. It was used by the Roman Republic, possessed of meager means and unlimited ambitions, against mighty, affluent and peaceable Carthage which, after a hundred years’ struggle, succumbed to the cunning and patient Romans. It was used by the semi-barbarous warrior chieftains who, for a long time, nibbled at the margins of the seemingly invincible Roman Empire—and then suddenly brought it down. It was the strategy of the Communists in their long march to power over vast populations in which, at the outset, they constituted tiny minorities. It has been the strategy of Soviet Russia against the rest of the world and against the world’s leading nation, mighty, affluent and peaceable America. It has always been the strategy of revolutionaries seeking to overthrow established order; it has always been the strategy of dynamic aggressors seeking to overthrow superior, though defensively-minded, status quo powers.