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Britain and a sign of greater readiness by Prime Minister Desai for a better balance in India's relations as a non-aligned country and an acceptance of the inevitable benefits of the Commonwealth link. The danger was that Pakistan would feel isolated. Already worried, about Iran and Afghanistan she might feel others were becoming more friendly towards India and therefore seek other friends such as the Soviet Union and pull out of CENTO.
23.
On this issue Dr Owen said that he was not so optimistic. If we did not handle this nexus of problems sensitively, the Soviet Union could improve its position. He was worried about Pakistan's wish to become a nuclear weapon state. It was an important British objective to stop this happening but the danger was that we would further alienate Pakistan and lose our political capital with her. China had a particularly significant role to play here and the two countries should discuss ways of dealing with the problem.
24.
Dr Owen said that he could not deal fully in the time available with the problems of the Middle East and North and South Yemen except to say that in his view the dangers of the Camp David approach were less than the dangers of letting the Middle East issue go unresolved. He therefore supported the attempt.
25.
In conclusion, Dr Owen said that Europe was in a defensive military position but was determined not to let the Soviet Union get a strategic edge. He agreed that if this happened, Europe. would be, in Mr Huang's words, "crippled". But what the world did not realise was how "offensive" a human rights policy was. He never described human rights as "offensive" in public. But he fully understood why the Soviet Union did not like it. This was a question which Britain and China would have to discuss eventually. Dr Owen said that personally he accepted the Soviet Union's pursuit of socialist policies but thought
its philosophic base was simply wrong. He thought that socialism was an inevitable development in the world. But he also believed that the Soviet people's individualism was irrepressible. The need was to accept socialism but at the same time prize individuals. There were many thousands in the Soviet Union who were restless. The West did not want to provoke a military confrontation with the Soviet Union but our best weapon was to attack the Soviet Union's philosophical basis. How to do this was a very sensitive political problem and the process must be very slow. But it held the key to countering Soviet influence world wide (and Dr Owen repeated that he agreed with Mr Huang's analysis of that influence) but the West was not on its back. It had put its colonial past behind it and was now able to be much more aggressive in different ways. Mr Huang might wish to return to this question at their next session. He might also think that Dr Owen was a
/crazy
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