KISSINGER'S WARNING HOW KREMLIN FACTIONS SEE POSSIBLE ECONOMIC CRISIS

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33435, 17 January 1974, Page 14

KISSINGER'S WARNING HOW KREMLIN FACTIONS SEE POSSIBLE ECONOMIC CRISIS

(By

VICTOR ZORZA)

Dr Kissinger’s recent warning that the oil crisis may lead to a world-wide depression carried an implied message for the Kremlin: If : e Soviet Union did not help to resolve the crisis, the resulting economic depression would make it impossible for the Nixon Administration to go ahead with the large trade deals which the Kremlin sees as the main reward of detente.

There are two schools of. thought about Soviet objectives in the Middle East. Dr Kissinger says. The first holds that the Soviet Union wants to maintain tension so that Arab hostility to the United States would enhance Soviet influence there. The other believes that while this may have been the Soviet purpose in the past, the Soviet Union now has an interest in the stability of the Middle East. But this is really another; way of saying that there are two schools in the Kremlin itself, a possibility which Dr Kissinger would not wish to discuss publicly lest he should be accused of interfering in the Kremlin’s internal struggles. The more hawkish Kremlin group w'ould be in favour of exploiting the Middle East tensions, and the oil crisis, in order to gain the greatest immediate advantage from the situation. The more moderate group would prefer to forego immediate gains in the hope that the long-term rewards for helping the (United States would prove greater than the short-run (advantages. | Two Moscow voices The quickest way to end; the oil embargo is to produce an agreement between Israel and Egypt at the Geneva peace talks, since this would remove the excuse for maintaining it. Dr Kissinger believes that the Soviet Union has been quite helpful in the early stages of the Geneva preparations. But while he was asking the Arabs to lift the oil embargo on the grounds that progress was being made toward a Middle East settlement, Mos-

| cow Radio was urging them Ito continue it. I Moscow is speaking with two voices. Do these reflect the policies of the two Kremlin factions? Dr Kissinger’s warnings about a world economic depression would be read differently by each faction. The hard-liners would welcome it as evidence of the West’s vulnerability. They would argue ; that Soviet policies in the ; Middle East have produced |an economic crisis which (threatens to shake the capi(talist system to its foundations. and that the Soviet Union should do nothing to mitigate it. It was long an article of Marxist faith that an economic crisis, of the kind the West suffered in the thirties, would occur again and would leave the Soviet Union in a relatively stronger position. When this failed to materialise in spite of repeated predictions by Soviet economists, the Kremlin began to wonder whether it was really worth waiting for. This was one of the factors in the Soviet decision Ito turn toward political and economic co-operation with; the West. Lenin's forecast The Kremlin faction which : argues that the West has; found a way to deal with economic crises believes that the time has come for the Communist and capitalist economic systems to join into one world-wide production mechanism that would ignore the political distinctions between them. The proponents of this course claim in the Soviet press that “the internationalisation of economic life” foreseen by Lenin is now coming to pass. They argue that the complexity of new industries, of the new technology, and the huge amounts of capital required for them, are such that the resources of any

single countrv. even the Soviet Union and the United States, are no longer adequate to accomplish the new tasks. Hence the need, in their view, to join together the efforts of East and West “for the solution of increasingly urgent problems." Energy always comes first in their list of projects that are ripe for co-operation, but they insist that this is true also in such fields as the protection of the environment, space exploration, food production, and in many others. The world, they’ say. has become interdependent. Selfish policies Those who take this line in the Soviet Union see in the "internationalisation'’ of economic life a way to acquire from the West the capital, the technology and the grain their country may need, but such selfishness is not unnatural. Those who believe that the energy crisis points the way to the solution of much larger problems may even welcome it, as the Kremlin does, though no Western politician would dare to say it in so many words. The energy problem "is the example par excellence of how interdependent the world has become, how impossible purely selfish policies are, and how suidical for everybody it is to pursue totally independent courses.” The quotation, this time, is not from a Soviet publication but from Dr Kissinger's press conference. On the face of it, he was addressing America’s allies, but what he was saying has an obvious bearing on the policies of both the Soviet Union and the United States on such issues as the Middle East and the energy shortage, ard on their policies toward each other. Interdependence is a two-way street.