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It would be wishful thinking to predict that international Communism some day will either self-destruct or so exhaust itself in internecine conflict that other nations will no longer be threatened. That point may come, but it is too early to tell. Another possibility—also remote but still worthy of concern—is that the international conflict, which Communism both feeds and feeds upon, will get out of control in a way that proves cataclysmic for everyone. Lenin's "who" and "whom" will both be losers.
Contemplating the crisis in Poland and its ramifications, commentators in the West have intensified their speculation that the world may be spared a no-win military showdown between
East and West by the breakdown of the Communist system itself. The economic defects of Soviet-style Communism that have long since seemed chronic and incurable may prove terminal. The fundamental deception of Marxism-Leninism—its subjugation of economic health to military strength—will finally cripple the whole, muscle-bound organism. Or if it does not die of creeping economic disorders, it will be incapacitated by what Secretary of State Haig diagnosed last May as "spiritual exhaustion" and "ideological sterility."
There is yet another possibility: the various experimental remedies that authorities in the East bloc are trying for their economic sickness might, over the long run, have irreversible and salutary political side-effects. In order to save itself from economic disaster, the Soviet system will be not only reformed but transformed into something less oppressive and aggressive than it is today. In other words, if the illness does not kill Communism, the cure will.
Maybe. There is no question that the combination of economic stagnation and the reformist tendencies by which various economic stagnation and the reformist tendencies by which various Communist leaders are trying to deal with it are distracting and eroding Soviet power. But the extent to which the interaction of stagnation and reform will fundamentally alter or ameliorate the nature and behavior of the Soviet system is very much in doubt.
The NSC's Pipes has speculated that a post-Brezhnev Kremlin leadership could go in one of two ways: it might be all the more inclined to throw its military weight around the world and seek foreign policy successes in order to compensate for its domestic failures; or the Politburo might eventually come to be dominated by practical-minded nationalists who will turn their attention and their country's resources inward, to the task of rescuing the Soviet economy. Most other experts, regardless of whether they are hard-liners like Pipes, tend similarly to hedge their bets on how the tensions inside Soviet Communism will ultimately play themselves out.
The Limits of Reform
The widespread, deep-seated demoralization of the Soviet empire, while most evident these days in Poland, is also endemic in the U.S.S.R. itself. "What we once