Defending the Middle East Former US President Richard Nixon has presented to his fellow Americans and to the world at large an enlightening revelation of major error. In his new book, extracts of which have been published, he displays a keen and comprehensive grasp of the frightening facts and implications of Soviet global policy. He is indeed very blunt. "We are at war," he writes, "engaged in a titanic struggle in which the fates of nations are being decided. This war World War III began before World War 11 ended. Since 1945, Soviet expansionist pressure has been relentless... This expansionism, from the seizure of Eastern Europe to the present thrusts into Africa, the Islamic Crescent and Central America, has been accompanied by a prodigious military buildup that has brought the Soviet Union to the verge of decisive supremacy over the West." After giving chapter and verse for his far ranging lament, Mr. Nixon concludes with a grim prognosis: "In the 1980s, America will confront two cold realities for the first time in modern history. The first is that if war were to come, we might lose. The second is that we might be defeated without war. The danger facing the West during the balance of this century is less that of a nuclear holocaust than it is of drifting into a situation in which we find ourselves confronted with a choice between surrender or suicide red or dead." Mr. Nixon's analysis does lack the explicit frankness of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's recent astonishing admission of the inanity of the policy he (and President Nixon) had pursued towards the Soviet Union. Mr. Nixon's analysis makes such a confession superfluous. If the Soviet Union is by now "on the verge of decisive supremacy over the West" as most observers have indeed for some time been asserting who are more to blame than Nixon and Kissinger? They spent their years in office deliberately shutting their eyes to Moscow's expansionist policy; they denied the existence of such a policy, they insisted that, at worst, the Soviets could be appeased, and would be induced to behave responsibly, by means of a tranquillizing diet of Western consumer goods and technological know how; they shut their ears to explicit Soviet asseverations that detente itself was a means of strengthening the USSR at the expense of the West, and would not lessen by one whit Moscow's right and obligation to pursue her various global involvements. They watched indulgently as Moscow changed the balance of military power to the West's disadvantage. In the Middle East they cooperated actively, and exerted pressures, in laying the groundwork and lowering the barriers to Soviet expansion landward in Africa and seaward into the Indian Ocean. That, briefly, notwithstanding occasional anti Soviet rhetoric, was the essential content of their detente policy. Its outcome was demonstrably built in to the visible realities. Those realities, which Mr. Nixon now outlines so forcefully, were spelt out by a whole school of political and strategic thinkers during Mr. Nixon's incumbency when the Soviet drive could have been contained with relatively little difficulty. They incessantly warned Mr. Nixon (and his successor Gerald Ford, as well as their chief adviser Henry Kissinger) of the inevitable disastrous consequences of detente. Indeed, a chilling forecast of what might happen was presented to a Senate committee in November 1967 even before Mr. Nixon took office by a distinguished scholar on Soviet policy, Prof. Philip Mosely. After pointing out that in the past "the strategic inferiority of Soviet power has set definite limits to the extent of the risks that the Soviet policy makers were willing to run," Prof. Mosely went on to offer his prescient warning: "In any future period in which the Soviet Union might attain either nuclear equality or nuclear superiority ... we would be prudent to assume that Soviet policy would be tempted to undertake a more extensive, more acute and more dangerous range of risks in order to pursue its declared long range ambition to reshape the world according to its own dogma." He was followed in later years by a galaxy of thinkers and analysts of international repute, who drew on their knowledge, on their studies and on the evidence of their eyes and ears, and who had to confirm sorrowfully the progressive vindication of Mosely's vision. All in vain. In the controversy that raged over detente, their insistence on facing the glaring facts was decried as panic; their exhortations for a reversal of policy as "cold warmongering." Now the Soviet Union marches forward towards the vision of nuclear superiority; she is ensconced in West Africa and in East Africa, her shadow looms ever larger over countries and peoples of Southern Africa (whence the West derives essential and irreplaceable minerals for its defence equipment); she is taking control of Afghanistan, she has long controlled South Yemen; she pursues unhindered a policy of domination and repression by proxy in the Far East; and the American president who did so much to make this possible records the facts with admirable objectivity. Meantime, Western citizens wonder whether even now their leaders will summon up the will to resist the wave of Soviet imperialism. More particularly, whether Washington will change its policy. In Mr. Nixon's own homely language, "The question is: which will the Soviets encounter: steel or mush?" For a moment it seemed that an unequivocal reply was being given to this fateful question. President Jimmy Carter, after only three years of direct personal confrontation with Soviet policy and methods and albeit only after he had caught Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev out in a direct lie announced his awakening to the realities of Soviet aims. He has taken a number of steps (positive in themselves) which could cause the Soviets some discomfort and embarrassment. No fundamental change has however been made in US global policy in the Soviet Union's immediate target area: the Middle East. The test is a simple one. The Nixon Kissinger policy towards Israel, inherited by the Carter Administration, continues to be pursued with single minded and many pronged persistence. In the early '70s, Washington exerted great pressures for an Israeli withdrawal in Sinai which would facilitate the opening of the Suez Canal. As a natural consequence, the floodgates were opened for the Soviet Union's gigantic leap forward into the heart and the length and breadth of Africa, and into the broad expanses of the Indian Ocean. So now, unabashed and unheeding, Washington is pressing upon Israel a withdrawal which would be at once a threat to her very existence and would hand the Soviets on a platter a major victory in their drive for domination of the Middle East. Consummation of Washington's purpose would bring the Soviet Union into the heart of Eretz Yisrael armed with the relevant credentials as "sponsor and protector of the Palestinian people" not only against Israel, but, if necessary, against the neighbouring Arab states. Israel, the only nation in the Middle East that is both politically stable and still possessing serious deterrent capacity, will have been rendered strategically insignificant. Moreover, Washington's present effort to rest her deterrent strategy on Egypt that is, in fact, on the steadfastness and political immortality of one person, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat is feckless and irresponsible. Only yesterday, the Shah of Iran was such a bulwark. Those in the West who have realized the unprecedented gravity of the Soviet threat, and of the heavy contribution to its efficacy made by fatuous policies in Washington, must now weigh the significance of the incredible perpetuation of these policies. They must realize that the centrality of Israel's deterrent role in the defence of the Middle East, now a matter of immediate concern, cannot be reconciled with the demand, strategically absurd and morally outrageous, that the people of Israel give up the heart and the backbone of Western Palestine.