PARIS — A driving motivation of the Soviet Union`s leadership since World War II has been to have the USSR acknowledged the ``equal`` of the United States. Before the war, the Soviet Union had deliberately isolated itself. Its role was that of a rogue state, a revolutionary power that challenged all the others.
The terrific victory over Nazi Germany, after an unparalleled ordeal, made it possible for Soviet leaders to think of their nation in a different way. The developing conflict with the United States conformed to the Soviet ideological conception of a world divided between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces, in which nations simple manifest these impersonal forces. But of course this conception, while theoretically attractive, drew its emotional power from its rationalization of traditional Russian nationalism.
Ideology and nationalism are both at work, then, when the Soviet government demands recognition of a Soviet role in world affairs equal to that of the United States, the concession of equal military influence and Russian- American consultations on the Middle East, the crisis in Southern Africa, etc. There are Americans who agree, and who argue that if this were done, Soviet-American relations would enter a happier stage.
The trouble is that saying things are equal doesn`t make it so. No one in the American government, and few informed persons in the world, really think the Soviet Union and the United States are equal powers--other than in the strategic nuclear forces they possess.
The Soviet Union wants something like a condominium with the United States over world affairs. It even thought, a decade ago, that it had it--in detente. The two big powers would take the decisions about arms, the future of Europe, the Middle East, etc. It was not to be.
The fact is that world influence rests not only on military power but the larger accomplishments of a society, the quality of a nation. The Soviet economy, Soviet science, intellectual life in the Soviet Union and the regime the Soviet system has imposed upon the culture and civilization of the nation simply will not sustain the political role claimed by the USSR.
The quality of life and the level of material amenity in Russia certainly bear no serious comparison with what exists in Western Europe and the United States. The Soviet economy is backward and no one has found a way to make it work well within the existing administrative apparatus and planning system. The Soviet Union is culturally stultified, a museum of 19th Century Russian civilization, with innovation forced underground and artists and writers compelled to say what they think only outside the established cultural apparatus.
It is a country rapidly being overtaken in industrial weight by Japan. Important basic scientific research is largely Western. Innovative technology is Western and Japanese; the Soviet intelligence service devotes itself to stealing it. The Soviet system is not a success even by its own material standards.
The Soviet leadership wants the United States and the Western powers to become accomplices in a fiction which would compensate for the failures of contemporary Soviet society, the fiction of a binary global system in which the Soviet Union and the United States preside over history. It cannot have it, and not simply because the U.S. and the West is unwilling.
The Soviet leaders can`t have it because the facts won`t sustain it. The world cannot bestow upon Soviet Russia a status the Soviet people and their society have not earned. That is the dilemma, and one may also say the tragedy, of the USSR today.