[The following article appeared in the March 30 issue of the French revolutionary-socialist daily Rouge. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Kissinger has put the Kremlin on notice against launching a "new Angola," warning that the Pentagon's response could be venomous. Ford has dropped the word "détente" from his vocabulary. The formulas of the cold war are reappearing. After being dismissed as secretary of defense, Schlesinger is seeing his line applied. American military spending has been stepped up considerably. Trade negotiations with the Soviet Union have fallen off.
Does all this represent the end of détente? Is it the beginning of a turn in American foreign policy?
In the wake of the massive antiwar movement, the final phase of the Indochina war, the fall of Nixon, and the fallout over Watergate, American imperialism found itself temporarily paralyzed. The domestic situation in the United States for the moment no longer permitted Washington to intervene abroad on a massive scale, with its own troops, to fulfill its role as the world cop of imperialism. This explains its inability to aid adequately its allies and agents in Angola, as well as its astonishing failure to take action in face of Cuba's aid to the Angolan revolution.
The Soviet bureaucracy measured the degree of risk and found it to be within acceptable limits. It gave Fidel the green light, an action for which there still remains a considerable risk of a localized response by imperialism. The international bourgeoisie was deeply shaken. What is taking place now is the search for a countermove. It is being carried out on three fronts.
The first is the fresh increase in military spending. This came at a favorable moment for bolstering the "recovery" of the American economy, which risked being stifled by a lack of productive investment. The American electoral campaign and Ford's efforts to outbid his "opponents," both the Republican Reagan and the Democrat Jackson, have helped create a propitious climate for increased arms spending.
Next comes the question of putting first things first, which does not mean (or does not only mean) Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Africa, but above all capitalist southern Europe. The warnings by General Haig and Kissinger against allowing Communist ministers into governments of the Atlantic alliance are aimed at increasing support to the capitalists who are hesitant to play this ultimate political card. They are designed also to deepen the climate of hysterical anticommunism whipped up in face of the revolutionary upswing in Portugal. They help pave the way, in capitalist Europe as well, for an increase in military spending.
The confidential report by the Belgian General Close, indicating that troops of the Warsaw Pact could reach the Rhine in forty-eight hours, thus neutralizing NA- TO's nuclear arsenal, serves the same purpose.
For the moment, the Giscard regime has lined up with Kissinger. In the longer run, however, the West European imperialists will count increasingly on an "independent" nuclear striking force. This will also be used to justify, in passing, generalization of the concept of the professional army, an essential card to be played against the rising proletarian revolution in southern Europe.
The third front is the effort to strengthen the stand-ins that can temporarily serve as a substitute for the imperialist guardian of order until it regains its capacity to intervene in the political arena (in the military arena its capacity in no way suffered). The coup in Argentina came at a favorable moment, creating in the southern cone of Latin America a military bloc under Washington's tutelage that can dominate the south Atlantic.
None of this should be taken as indicating that peaceful coexistence is going to be ing that peacetul coexistence 1s going to be abolished. This is hardly the case, for the simple reason that far from thwarting capitalism, peaceful coexistence serves its fundamental interests. In face of the rise of revolution, the international capitalist class has more to gain than ever in taking advantage of the Stalinist parties' willingness to serve as a restraining force and to conduct a policy of class collaboration. The imperialists are divided in their assessment of the Stalinists' effectiveness in this role, and in their willingness to pay (or to refuse to pay) a given price in exchange for the role. But the role itself is doing the imperialists no harm-quite the contrary.
So, what is taking place is not a return to the cold war. It is a range of measures aimed at enabling imperialism to break loose from the temporary political paralysis into which it was plunged by the heroism of the Indochinese masses and the power of the antiwar sentiment in the United States. Washington's No. 1 objective is to condition public opinion in the imperialist countries, particularly in the United States itself.
Will the effort succeed? The answer does not depend solely on the ploys and financial resources of the peddlers of myths on both sides of the Atlantic. It depends also and above all on the outcome of the class struggles that are little by little radicalizing Japan and North America itself.