President Carter confessed some weeks ago that he had learned a lot about the Soviets since Afghanistan invasion. Unfortunately, he still hasn’t learned enough; he doesn’t yet know who the enemy is.
He thinks his problems are with Khomeini, with the militant hostage-holders, with the Olympic Committee, and with our allies. The truth is that he is caught in a confrontation with the Kremlin, and all the other players are merely pawns in the game.
For weeks, the Carter Administration and the national media have been cautiously including the word “Marxist” in their references to the militant hostage-holders. Other sources state more bluntly that Soviet agents are running the show at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and probably have been from the start.
To anyone who understands Soviet tactics and objectives, it is perfectly plain that the hostage matter follows the typical Soviet pattern of conducting a war of nerves, alternately raising and dashing U.S. hopes, raising rather than compromising demands, and pushing the U.S. down the primrose path of humiliation and retreat. It is a replay of every U.S.-USSR negotiation from the 1943 Teheran conference through SALT I (signed by our President at midnight in Moscow) and now SALT II.
Carter’s grain embargo has hurt the U.S. farmers, not the Russians. Before the embargo, the Department of Agriculture estimated the Russians would import 35 million metric tons of wheat and feed grains between July 1979 and July 1980. Despite the financial sacrifice forced on U.S. farmers, the Russians will actually import 30.5 million metric tons, or five-sixths of their needs, making up the U.S. losses from Argentina and Brazil.
When the chips are down, our so-called allies will structure their national strategy on national survival, not on sentiment. They do not intend to be left out on the end of a limb with the loser in the grand confrontation of superpowers, and the United States is perceived today as the loser.
The world perceives the United States as militarily inferior to the Soviet Union, and no amount of appeals to fraternal or ethnic ties with our allies can conceal that. Not even by the diplomatic Secretary Vance, prayerfully jetting from capital to capital.
The arguments about Afghanistan and the Moscow Olympiad are just tilting with words. The plain fact is that our allies don’t dare to side with us against Russia. Not only their oil and industry, but their very lives, depend on it.
Japan gets 10 percent of its oil from Iran. Ask yourself the question. If you were Japanese, would you give up 10 percent of your entire country’s oil, causing tremendous economic loss and hardship, in a probably futile attempt to save President Carter from the consequences of his own foreign and defense policy mistakes?
Not only do our NATO friends get five percent of their oil from Iran, but they are outgunned at least two-to-one (probably four-to-one) by the Soviet-Warsaw Pact nations. Ask yourself the question. If you were German or French, would you cut off five percent of your oil, and antagonize the Number One power, which has its 31 best divisions ready to overrun and occupy your country within 30 days, by siding with the Number Two power 3,000 miles away?
The Soviet Navy has 1,769 war vessels, the United States has only 450 in the regular fleet. The Soviet navy has started deploying a new 40-knot, nuclear-powered attack submarine which is faster and deeper-diving than the most advanced U.S. sub.
Admiral Thomas Hayward, chief of naval operations, said, “We are being asked to meet increasing demands with a fleet which is roughly half the size it was a decade ago.”
The Soviet Union has four million men under arms; the United States has two million men and women under arms. The Soviets have 50,000 tanks, the U.S. 11,000. The Soviets have 55,000 armored troops carriers, the U.S. 17,600. The Soviets have 22,000 artillery pieces, the U.S. 5,600.
The Soviets have 8,800 planes of all types, the United States about 6,400. Yet President Carter persists in his stubborn refusal to reactivate and build the world’s best bomber, the B-1, which he cancelled early in 1977, and for which he got absolutely nothing from the Soviets in return.
