Keys of This Blood (64 page)

That key term “geopolitical,” in fact, refers primarily to structure, and only secondarily to the ideology, the spirit or ethos (democratic capitalism, Leninist Marxism, or other), infusing that structure. At the present stage of our human experience, we can arrive at a somewhat satisfactory idea of the geopolitical by starting with the structure we have known for a long time: the political.

To be geopolitical, a structure would have to be equipped with legislative, executive and judicial powers over all its inhabitants—and, in this case, that means all the nations. The creation and successful exercise of those powers depends on the unity within which all the inhabitants live. We do not yet know—we cannot even imagine with our fantasy or reason with our minds—what the principle of that unity could be, for all our political unities have been based on common territory, common racial origin, common language, even common religion or—its pale image—common ideology. And all those political unities—nations, states, “countries,” or “powers,” we sometimes call them—rest on apparently inviolable principles of human rights arising from a multiplicity of differences (linguistic, territorial, cultural, racial).

While, as Fukuyama pointed out, “democratic egalitarianism” is leavening all these different unities that make up the society of nations, nothing deriving from that same “democratic egalitarianism” in itself gives any opening for a consideration of a geopolitical structure within which all the different member states could be politically assimilated to one model. For that furthest reach of our political thought presupposes
national
unities. What could be the principle of the geopolitical unity necessary for a truly viable geopolitical structure? The Fukuyama interdict is a two-edged sword cleaving our present from our past but also clearly cutting us from any future based on “democratic egalitarianism” and its political base.

In all our recorded human experience and within the bounds of our reason, we cannot find any satisfactory answer about the principle of geopolitical unity. Our pathway to such an answer is blocked by the way we think, perceive and form judgments about that very familiar category of human grouping we call a nation or a state. The way we think about it is ingrained from centuries of experience.

When the upheavals in Romania freed the population from the iron grip of the Nicolae Ceauşescu government, the desire for change and for a new political structure washed over Romania's eastern border into Soviet Moldavia (part of Romania before Soviet-forced annexation in 1944). One of the Moldavian dissidents, Oazug Nantoy, expressed the terrible difficulty that now arose for Romanians and Moldavians: how to invent national Moldavian politics on the grass-roots level after so many years of Stalinism. “The worst we still have from the Stalin era,” said Nantoy, “is the
way we think
. We cannot obtain new thinking on credit.”

On the much broader and worldwide plane occupied by the society of nations, there is the same difficulty. Leaders and statesmen, as well as Transnationalist entrepreneurs and Internationalist activists, have inherited a way of thinking about internation relations that of itself precludes them from thinking geopolitically. It would be a mighty feat of reason and imagination for them to unthink—to free themselves from—the framework of those relations within which they have lived and thought and planned heretofore, and which is the spontaneously accepted way in which they understand all that is transpiring around them in our world. Unfortunately, as Nantoy remarked apropos of his fellow Moldavians, they cannot obtain “new thinking on credit.”

It is relatively simple to state in so many words what geopolitics implies theoretically. It is very difficult to think in a practical fashion about the society of nations geopolitically and to understand the hard-fact implications of a geopolitical structure housing those same nations. Hence, it is very difficult for most moderns to understand what John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev are about.

Both these leaders are geopolitically minded, and they are both dealing with their individual situations from a geopolitical standpoint and with a geopolitical goal in view. Their statements and actions, their weaving in and out through current events, the welter of facts about them, and the wealth of international commentary on them, all this has a geopolitical thread running through it that is hard to unravel. Geopolitics is, at one and the same time, so grandiose in its assumptions, so broad in its worldwide implications, and yet so dependent on such a complicated machinery, that it lies outside the scope of our normal thinking modes.

Yet, if there is any one overall identifiable trend of internation relationships today, it surely is geopolitical. Even before Western leaders officially joined this trend, they already were conniving at it. Now that the geopolitical trend has become an active element in our world, there
is a “new thinking” abroad—again, on credit from that prime agent of change Mikhail Gorbachev.

At the earliest stages of any deep change in international affairs, there is a time-honored practice that governs the behavior of the great powers of the world. One of the most successful practitioners of that approach—the eighteenth-century French adventurer-statesman, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand—artfully called that secretive process
la connivance diplomatique
. Diplomatic connivance.

Intelligent and farseeing statesmen who contemplate a brusque departure from an established policy, Talleyrand maintained, will keep the public mind and reaction of their nations in view. Consequently, long before they reveal their new policy, they will carry on a private dialogue among themselves, exploring the most sensitive and delicate aspects of their plans.

In the privacy of diplomatic chanceries, in highly classified correspondence, in privileged person-to-person communications, agreements of substance and principle are reached. Agreements about how far each participant is willing to commit itself; about what the overall timing will be; about who other than the main parties should be informed; and about the main steps by which the general public is to be acquainted with the planned change.

Precisely that process had been in operation for more than three years before Mikhail Gorbachev began his tenure as General Secretary of the CPSU in March of 1985, bringing with him changes of a truly shocking nature and extent.

By the time Gorbachev came to the top of the Soviet heap, in fact, knowledge of what was about to come had already begun to filter from
government channels, ministries and diplomatic missions outward to think tanks and paragovernmental agencies, as well as to the most influential financial, industrial, cultural and media centers. All along the way, minds were disposed and acclimatized by a process of discussions and reactions, agreements and preparations.

The surprise for some was that Gorbachev—an untried leader, after all, with no experience on the world stage—seemed to move so rapidly after his advent as General Secretary; that he seemed to master so much so quickly as to take the world by storm, and never mind learning the ropes of the normal process of diplomatic connivance.

Pope John Paul was not surprised, however. For one thing, Gorbachev was better fitted for his new international role than most Soviet bureaucrats. Even in his Stavropol days, he had shown his geopolitical bent, as well as his avid interest in and talent for international networking, on official visits he made to Belgium, Italy, West Germany, France and Canada. But that was far from the whole of it.

By the opening of the 1980s, Gorbachev was entrenched as the special protégé of KGB head Yuri Andropov. In 1982, when Andropov succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary, Gorbachev remained at his side. As the aging Andropov's health declined, it was the young and trusted Gorbachev who functioned as de facto General Secretary, shuttling back and forth between Andropov's sickroom and Moscow's General Secretariat. It was Gorbachev who conveyed the wishes and decisions of the master on matters of deepest confidentiality and high state security to Andropov's bureaucratic underlings. On a need-to-know basis, finally Gorbachev became privy to all there was to know. He knew all the executive decisions taken by Andropov. He saw to the transmission of those decisions into the hands of the relevant executive branches of the Soviet government and the Communist Party.

After the General Secretary's death, in February of 1984, Gorbachev performed the same function for Andropov's successor, Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko. Already seventy-three years old and ailing, Chernenko was a dying man at the time of his election to the highest post in the Soviet Union.

When the time came that Chernenko was no longer able to sit with his Politburo colleagues, press photographs showed Mikhail Gorbachev—now highly experienced, uniquely informed and deeply connected to the sinews of Soviet power—sitting symbolically but discreetly behind Chernenko's empty chair. And during the 175 days immediately prior to Chernenko's death, when he was completely hidden from public view, Gorbachev was at his bedside.

As an accredited member of international leadership, Pope John Paul was another of those privy to the changes being planned. But, thanks to his own independent sources of information, John Paul was also able to correct most of the partisan distortions that inevitably pervade the diplomatic connivance process, as each side seeks its own advantage—including some distortions introduced by members of the anti-Church within his own chancery who never miss a chance in their efforts to transform both Church and papacy.

From his vantage point of the Vatican as a window on the entire world around him, and as a man born and bred to genuine geopolitics himself, John Paul saw at the opening of the 1980s unmistakable signs that a geopolitical strategy far superior to any understanding prevailing in the inner councils of the West had masterfully seized the prime initiative in world affairs. The society of nations was becoming locked into a scenario that appeared to be dominated by Moscow and that would be played out by the turn of the second millennium.

Quickly swept up in that millennium endgame were all of the various factions of the West; all of the diverse religious and antireligious globalist movements of the day; the People's Republic of China; that helpless giant we call the Third World; and the Roman Catholic institutional organization of John Paul, together with other forms of Christianity.

For Pope John Paul II, the most obvious sign that a major process of diplomatic connivance was under way—and that therefore a major departure from the world order that had prevailed for nearly half a century was coming—surfaced in a certain change of attitude that became noticeable in the conversation and behavior of high officials and power brokers in the capitalist nations. The consensus among the Internationalist and Transnationalist leaders of the West began to revolve around the notion that the Soviet leadership had finally realized the simple truth: The whole Soviet economic system was about to implode.

It seemed logical enough to anyone with an ounce of real capitalist sense that after seventy years of unrelenting Marxism—with its GNP being swallowed up in armaments, and with its privileged
nomenklatura
resting atop a hopelessly inefficient bureaucracy—the Soviet Union was at least sending signals that economically, financially, socially and psychologically, the USSR was on its last legs. It seemed inevitable that it would signal for help. And it seemed the Internationalist-Transnationalist moment of triumph was at hand.

Accordingly, signals began to flow back to the Soviet Union from the
West. And the process of diplomatic connivance being what it is, some of the signals were discreet—almost private, you would say. The Soviet submarines' behavior around Sweden's coastline was one such signal. For a number of years, Soviet submarines have been penetrating Swedish territorial waters, probing the accuracy of the rings of submarine sensors that protect Sweden's naval bases, thus testing Sweden's defenses. Under Gorbachev, Soviet violations rose to a record level in 1988. Even after one Soviet submarine, a Whiskey-class vessel armed with nuclear torpedoes, grounded itself on the rocks outside Karlskrona in 1981, the penetrations continued unabated. Why hasn't Sweden protested violently? Why has the United States, with its stake in Swedish defenses—even though Sweden is a neutral—not made it an issue with Gorbachev? Why, finally, does he persist in it? The final answer lies in the quest for signals, signals of permissiveness and nonbellicosity on Sweden's part, signals of the U.S. understanding of Soviet touchiness about its coasts in the Baltic. In a word, it is a diplomatic connivance.

Other signals are more overt. The economic condition of the Soviet Union, known accurately in the West, began to receive a great deal of play in European and American media reports. It became fashionable, for want of a better word, to discuss the opportunities for peace that might be implied by the fact that the Soviet Union could not keep up its foreign subsidies. That it could not rebuild its decrepit infrastructure. That it could not compete in the world economy. That it could not supply needed consumer goods to its own people. That it needed at least two decades—and a huge infusion of Western credits and other help—to correct its dangerous posture.

Rather soon, the companion idea began to surface that, while the failed Soviet economy presented an opportunity for a new approach by the West, there would be a downright danger to everybody should the West be too fainthearted or too doctrinaire to cross the bridge of economic cooperation. If the West were to force Moscow to the brink of its own destruction, the argument ran, what would there be any longer to hold the Soviet hand back from the ultimate strike against the West? Veiled though it generally was, the idea seemed to be that Moscow would not go alone into oblivion.

Somewhat less publicly at first, and during the same time period, the process of diplomatic connivance began to fuel some basic financial and trade initiatives. Two mechanisms were set in motion to supply a certain easing of economic pressures in the Soviet Union.