IN WRITING
Joe Lieberman, Radical Historian
The senator's 1970 book is a masterpiece of Cold War moral
equivalency.
BY IRA STOLL Wednesday, August 30, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT
So you thought Al Gore's book "Earth in the Balance" was flaky?
Check out his running mate Joseph Lieberman's little-noticed 1970
volume on arms control and the origins of the Cold War, "The
Scorpion and the Tarantula." It's a masterpiece of moral
equivalency in which Mr. Lieberman draws a parallel between
Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the American Monroe
Doctrine of maintaining influence in the Western hemisphere.
The book's title comes from a quote from Cold War historian Louis
Halle, who contended that the Cold War "is not fundamentally a
case of the wicked against the virtuous. Fundamentally, it is
like the case of the scorpion and the tarantula in the bottle,
and we may properly feel sorry for both parties, caught as they
are, in a situation of irreducible dilemma." In the preface to
his 1970 book, Mr. Lieberman wrote that "this is the spirit in
which I have recorded what my research has revealed."
The only problem is that, as most Americans have by now
realized--and as those stuck behind the Iron Curtain at the time
knew all too well--the Cold War was a case of the wicked against
the virtuous. The Soviets were the wicked ones, depriving the
Russian people and those in their puppet states of freedom of the
press, of religion, of emigration.
Mr. Lieberman interpreted the communist talk of international
domination as mere bluster, and he wrote that Americans should
have known better than to take it seriously: "One of the primary
causes of the failure to achieve international atomic control and
the concurrent failure to prevent the cold war was the inability
of America's statesmen and people to see through the avalanche of
Communist rhetoric and deal with Soviet foreign policy as
something shaped by Russia's unique history and guided by the
Russians' conception of their national interest. In this more
accurate light, Russia's goals are seen to be more limited and
less in conflict with America's."
When it came to American activity in Latin America, Mr.
Lieberman sounded like a campus radical, or at least George
McGovern. "Consistency was not one of the characteristics that
marked America's side of the argument over the fate of Eastern
Europe," he wrote. "While protesting the creation of a Soviet
sphere of influence in Eastern Europe on the theory that it would
constitute a return to the evil days of international power
politics that has caused two world wars, the United States
nevertheless zealously protected its own sphere of influence in
the Western Hemisphere. From the earliest enunciation of the
Monroe Doctrine right down to the twentieth century, America has
proved itself willing to resort to arms to keep anti-American
governments out of power in Latin America."
Has Mr. Lieberman reassessed his views, or does he still see the
Cold War as a battle between a scorpion and a tarantula, a war
that America shared equal guilt for starting and in which
American calls for democracy and Soviet talk of world domination
were each merely rhetoric? After I inquired about the matter,
the senator issued a statement that distanced himself from the
book without totally disavowing it.
"Few of us view the world through the same lenses in our 50s as
we did in our 20s," the senator said. "The Scorpion and the
Tarantula was written more than 30 years ago and certainly does
not reflect my thinking about foreign policy or our national
security today. As the Cold War progressed, and the actions by
the Soviet Union to subjugate the people of Eastern Europe
intensified and the Soviet military build-up increasingly
threatened the United States and the free world, I became a
strong advocate of military readiness and of using our military
power when necessary to oppose any such tyranny. My voting
record since I have been in the Senate much more accurately
reflects my positions than does this 30-year-old book."
Mr. Lieberman's statement is somewhat reassuring. But rather
than admitting he was wrong at the time he wrote the book, he
tries to explain it by suggesting that the Soviets somehow
worsened their behavior after 1970. In fact, the crushing of the
Prague Spring, the construction of the Berlin Wall and Stalin's
forced collectivization campaign all happened before Mr.
Lieberman wrote his book. The Soviet Union threatened the free
world from the very inception of that totalitarian state in a
coup by a group of Bolshevik thugs, not as a result of some
post-1970 increase in aggressiveness imagined by Mr. Lieberman.
The Cold War is over, and there are other issues to vote on in
November. But there are still plenty of scorpions and tarantulas
out there on the international scene. And when it comes time to
deal with them, you get the sense that the Bush-Cheney team, with
their cowboy boots and Reagan-era foreign policy posse, could
flick the creepy-crawly dictators aside with a lot less
self-doubt and moral equivocation than a Gore-Lieberman team.
Even a Gore-Lieberman team that claims to have matured somewhat
since Mr. Lieberman's days as a radical historian of the Cold
War.
Mr. Stoll is editor of Smartertimes.com, North American editor
of the Jerusalem Post and a contributor to OpinionJournal.com.
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