Game plan; how to conduct the U.S.-Soviet contest.

• Author: Warnke, Paul C.

Game Plan: How to Conduct the U.S.-Soviet Contest.

Game Plan: How to Conduct the U.S.-Soviet Contest. Zbigniew Brzezinski. Atlantic Monthly Press, $18.95.

Dr. Brzezinski's world is not one that I recognize. I'm glad I don't live there. The basic premise of his interesting, if at times bewildering book, is that the United States and the Soviet Union constitute two imperial systems engaged in a global conflict in which one or the other will prevail. His conclusion is that the present "bilateral imperial coexistence' cannot endure indefinitely. Indeed, Dr. Brzezinski asserts that "the United States and the Soviet Union by all pervious standards should have gone to war against each other on many occasions.' He maintains that the contrasts between the two countries are greater than those that brought us into war against Nazi Germany. As he sees it, "without the fearful restraint generated by the destructive capacity of nuclear weapons, the two superpowers in all probability would have gone to war against each other on more than one occasion.'

Dr. Brzezinski apparently believes the global competition between the United States and the USSR to be so pervasive and so much the product of centuries-old Russian ambition that even a complete and healthy change in the Soviet political and economic system would leave us locked in a struggle for world domination. In his world: "In a paradoxical sense, for America, communism in Russia has been a historical blessing because it has locked the immensely gifted and patient Russian people into a system that stifles, squanders and sacrifices their great potential.'

As I see it, the United States and the Soviet Union have not gone to war because there is no necessary conflict between their genuine "geopolitical interests.' The survival and well-being of neither depends on taking something away from the other. And whatever Mr. Gorbachev's failings, he does not appear to be a Stalin or Hitler and his Politburo colleagues will see to it that he stays that way.

Nor can I see that either power has the attributes of a true imperium. In Dr. Brzezinski's delineation of Moscow's Empire, he includes the 545 million people in the Soviet Union itself, its Eastern European satellite states and what he calls its "imperial clients,' notably Cuba, Nicaragua and Ethiopia. For the United States, its imperial system is said to embrace the 780 million people living here, in allied countries and in those of "dependent clients.' Unarguably outside both purported imperial systems are the People's Republic of China, with a population of over a billion, and India, with about as many people as ascribed to the American empire.

Western Europe, though tightly linked to the United States, is miscast in this analysis. If we elect to treat these vibrant...