Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

There's a restaurant in... I think I'd better say California without identifying the city, lest you have the horrible sensation that I've finally succumbed to an advertising agency and am starting the letter with a commercial.

I had this second thought just in time because it's a Hungarian restaurant and it's the best I've ever been in. I took an English friend there a couple of months ago and after he'd smacked his lips over the traditional soup, ladled out of a pot the size that the witches in Macbeth use and the veal pancakes and the asparagus soufflé pancakes and the various tarts and bitter chocolate ice cream, the best that we'd ever tasted, he said, 'This is remarkable and judging by the location and the crowd of diners, extremely successful.' 'That it is,' I said.

The proprietress was very attentive to us and my friend, noticing her accent said, 'Surprising, isn't it, that a middle-aged American, well Hungarian-American, should have kept her accent so long?'

'No,' I said, 'it's not.' And I told him her story.

She was an academic, a professor of economics I think, in Budapest. Her opinions were such that when in 1956 the Russian tanks came crashing in she felt that she'd better take off. She managed to escape to Vienna which was, you may recall, the clearing house for the Hungarian refugees and there she met another refugee, also a native of Budapest and a chef. I mean he was the chef. How long they were together there I don't know, but they fell in love. Somewhere along the line they got married and they decided, as many thousands did, to seek a new life in America.

Immigrants, especially enforced immigrants, tend to stick together in the New World, if only to ward off loneliness. If they have a relation already established in America they make a beeline for the place that he or she settled in, whether or not they know anything about it or have the faintest notion where it is. Well, the professor and her new husband had friends who'd gone on ahead to this town in California. So they followed them.

There was no question then of the ladies getting a teaching post at the neighbouring university so they were thrown back on the husband's specialty. They borrowed money and set up a tiny pancake parlour. It prospered slowly and then quickly and they opened a larger restaurant. To cut this happy story short, they eventually were able to buy a splendid suite of rooms high overlooking the sea, turn them into a large restaurant and in the past ten years or so they have prospered exceedingly.

'My god,' said my young friend, 'you mean they are actually the old textbook case of Central Europeans fleeing from persecution and finding the streets of America paved with gold? Imagine!' he said, 'It happened in our own time, only 23 years ago.'

Well, this little incident was the first thing I thought of when President Carter said the other day that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had violated accepted international rules of behaviour and had 'made a more dramatic change – in my opinion – of what the Soviets' ultimate goals are than anything they've done in the time that I've been in office'. In effect, Mr Carter is at one with my young English friend in saying, 'My god, it's happening in our own time!'

In other words, in an open confession he may come to rue, he's giving the impression of saying that tyranny and the desire to rule the world are something that died with Adolf Hitler and that East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Cuba, Ethiopia are unfortunate accidents, failures of negotiation in an era of two superpowers governed by détente and accepted rules of international behaviour.

Finally, it appears Mr Carter has seen that détente had a very brief life through the Fifties at the latest. It lasted as long as the Russians knew that their nuclear power was inferior to the Americans. Once they were equal, the United States and her European allies acted on the assumption that since neither America nor the Soviet Union were going to use the big bomb that would atomise the planet, there would be no more big shifts of power, no more annexations of countries. We call it 'the balance of terror' and lived our lives in the belief that the balance was permanent.

What we did not figure was that any nation would use this taboo on the big bomb to go ahead and build big armies. The United States abolished the draft and now has a volunteer army, navy and air force with not enough volunteering. The Russians have, during the long twilight sleep of détente, built an enormous army and the world's biggest navy and we realise now, along with Mr Carter, that neither the United States nor her allies, nor both of them combined, can possibly match or deter the Soviet Union from asserting its overwhelming power by way of what we call 'conventional warfare'. Now this, it seems to me, is the fundamental plight of our side.

Mr Carter's political opponents know this too but since they are not responsible for handling the Iranian and the Afghanistan crises they can be bolder in their suggestions – and in their complaints which have now, for the first time, turned into criticisms of the president. His confession that overnight he'd realised, for the first time, that the Russians have meant what they've been saying in Tass and Pravda all these years provoked some tart sarcasm from his contenders for the presidency. Ronald Reagan, for instance, said he was glad to see that Mr Carter has made the belated discovery that the Soviet leaders are not to be trusted. Americans, he added, have been aware of this for some time.

Most of the other candidates, except Senator Kennedy who has been strangely silent and is, maybe, working on what his brother used to call 'a position paper', they too are breaking the solid front of strong but silent support for the president. Senator Dole of Kansas, who was Ford's running mate in 1976, urged the president to forget about the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty number two and withdraw it. The president anticipated him by a hair's breadth and has asked the Senate to suspend debate on it, which amounts to the same thing. It's certainly dead for this year.

No one so far has had bold, practical things to say about Afghanistan beyond deploring, as the president does, the Russians' violation of accepted rules of international behaviour which, in fact, the Russians have not accepted for a couple of decades.

On Iran, the most prominent congressman running for the presidency, John Anderson of Illinois, is the only one who has made some practical suggestions. He suggests that we wait no longer than the meeting of the United Nations Security Council and then, if it votes sanctions – and he suspects, probably correctly, that they will be toothless – then the United States should get together with other grain-exporting countries and impose a ban on food exports. I think the trouble with food sanctions is something called 'trans-shipment' whereby if a punished country doesn't get our wheat or fruits or whatever it gets them from another country that we wouldn't dream of punishing. Iran, for instance, already has a generous rice deal with Thailand.

Mr Anderson also suggests a cut-off of mail, cable, telephones and an agreement with maritime insurance companies to cancel insurance on cargoes to and from Iran. A naval blockade of the Gulf has also been proposed but the White House, I think, is better aware than anybody that by stopping shipments from the Middle East we should probably hurt America's allies more than we should hurt Iran.

At the moment then, let's leave Afghanistan to a rhetorical battle between Moscow and Washington in which Moscow, being accused of lying and aggression and hypocrisy, retorts in the old Dr Goebbels fashion by saying that no, WE are the liars, aggressors and hypocrites. They are rescuing a poor helpless supplicant from the meddling aggression of the United States and Britain. And Mrs Gandhi, by the way, is no help here in saying that maybe we are all aggressors.

Well, apart from topic A, I've been wading this week through oceans of prophecy from every pundit in America and Britain who's called on by his paper to look into the 1980s and, you'll be relieved to hear, that any temptation to do this on my part was successfully scotched by my coming on a collection of prophecies from several distinguished thinkers of the past. I offer them as balm to anyone who feels sore or inadequate at not being as wise as the columnists.

Henry Adams in 1903: 'My figures coincide in fixing 1950 as the year when the world will go to smash.'

'By the year 1900, Brooklyn will be the city and Manhattan will be the suburb. Brooklyn has room to spread, Manhattan has not. Can you imagine the New Yorker fighting his way up to the pig farms on 100th Street 40 years hence?' – George Templeton Strong in 1865.

And this is Napoleon after Robert Fulton told him about his proposed steamboat. 'What, sir? You would make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I pray you excuse me, I have no time to listen to such nonsense.'

Simon Newcomb, the famous astronomer, in 1903: 'There are no known substances, forms of machinery or forms of force that can be united in a practical manner by which man shall fly long distances through the air.'

Here's Admiral Leahy speaking to President Truman in 1945 about the atomic bomb. 'That's the biggest fool thing we've ever done. The bomb will never go off and I speak as an expert on explosives.'

Finally, Andrew Carnegie, on New Year's Eve 1900, looked forward into the twentieth century and said, 'To kill a man will be considered as disgusting in the twentieth century as we in this day consider it disgusting to eat one.'

Why Mr Carnegie, it's happening in our own time!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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