Those of us who have been warning for some years that the military balance was shifting in favor of the Soviet Union, and that the consequences would unfailingly become manifest in harsh reality, have been sufficiently vindicated by events to resist the temptation of celebrating successful prediction—especially since we failed to prevail over the counsels of passivity soon enough to avert our present, sinister, predicament.
It is worth recalling the stages of the debate. In the years of paralysis and confusion of the early 1970’s two arguments were advanced by the respectable to oppose the upkeep of American military strength and the restoration of a foreign policy that would actively resist Soviet power. The first, especially popular in academic circles, was that military power as such had become ineffectual for both the Soviet Union and the United States: the two could not fight one another without suicidal results, and neither could they usefully employ force against others in a world of aroused nationalisms. Armed conflict, then, was simply passé in a world characterized by “interdependence.” When presented in the full-dress jargon of contemporary American political science, such contentions acquired much academic authority, and indeed they still remain lodged in the textbooks that are employed in many of our universities.
The policy prescription derived from this line of argument was simple: since the Soviet Union was merely trying to establish a symbolic parity in arms, the United States need not compete with it. And if nevertheless the Russians foolishly persisted in adding to their armed power beyond that point, the United States would lose nothing thereby, since the Soviet Union would merely ascend to a more costly plateau of impotence.
The second argument was heard from a whole variety of voices, ranging from the eminent retired diplomat, George F. Kennan, to plainly self-seeking businessmen. On the authority of their personal acquaintance with the country and its leaders, such men declared that the Soviet Union had at long last become a status-quo power, satisfied with what it had, and that the Kremlin leaders were “moderate” men, essentially peaceful. By the suggestion that Soviet intentions were not in any case aggressive, the argument that the growth in Soviet capabilities would be harmless was much reinforced. (In Kennan’s view, this meant that only American military power would be harmful, to the national economy and to the conduct of our foreign policy—which a powerful defense establishment would seek to “militarize.”) Here also the policy prescription was self-evident, and devastatingly influential if only because of the eager deference with which such views were publicized in the quality press.
Once the Soviet Union began in 1975 to act in warlike fashion, relying on its new strategic-nuclear strength to provide cover for the whole array of naval forces, long-range air transport, and weapons shipments that sustained the direct combat of Cubans and Vietnamese, both arguments were undone at once. Plainly, the leaders in the Kremlin had not lost the ambition to reshape the world by military force as opportunity allowed. At the same time, their evident ability to use force successfully to decide the outcome of the conflicts in Angola, Ethiopia, and Indochina swiftly demolished the academic theory that held military force to be useless in our time.
By the later 1970’s it had become obvious that behind the two arguments with all their claims and elaborations there was nothing more substantial than one crude generalization, and one inexcusable delusion. In the former, the American defeat in Vietnam was misunderstood to mean that all would fail everywhere, including the Soviet Union in the Third World. In the latter, men claiming great expertise in Soviet affairs had somehow come to believe that the processes of ruthless power accumulation through which party-men gained promotion step by step would produce leaders at the top who would be uninterested in power and its increase.
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Sustained by their resilient authority in the media and the institutions of learning—an authority which owed much to their legitimization of the easy course of abdication and retreat—the advocates of passivity overcame the complete collapse of their arguments with remarkable ease. Leaving the conclusions unchanged, they merely put forward new arguments. Instead of offering us theories of supposedly universal validity, and propositions about the fundamental nature of the Soviet Union, they now admonished us to avoid the superpower provincialism that would relate everything to the East-West conflict: it was local circumstances and local forces that were shaping the contentions of the day. Soviet military power, we were told, was at bottom irrelevant to what happened in Angola, Ethiopia, or Indochina; only the superficial would allow their attention to be detained by the Soviet airlifts and the inflow of Soviet weapons that accompanied such episodes. Actually it was the locals who were truly in control of the action, and the Russians were merely providing the instruments. And we were even invited to speculate on the possibility that Cuban expeditionary forces were actually fighting for the cause of Castro’s revolutionary idealism rather than serving as tools of Soviet policy; the Russians were merely arming, training, and delivering Castro’s men, but for Castro’s purposes and not their own.
Once the argument was thus translated from a strategic into a purely local perspective, the rest was easy. Why should the United States object to what was happening in Angola, etc., when the outcome of each conflict was so positively desirable from our own point of view? In Angola itself, a regime approved by both the Congressional Black Caucus and the Gulf Oil Company had prevailed over rivals tainted by their association with a corrupt Mobutu and, worse, the South Africans. In Ethiopia, the multinational force commanded by Colonel-General Petrov had merely restored the universally recognized boundaries of that country, violated by the Somali invasion and regionalist uprisings. Even in Indochina, where a country’s sovereignty was terminated, the Pol Pot regime thereby displaced was of such outright murderousness that no protest was admissible. Since in each case the effect of the Soviet action was actually constructive from our own point of view, it was foolish vanity to oppose the outcome merely because the issue was decided in Moscow rather than Washington. So we were told.
All this was very persuasive, except that it was a little too obvious that equally persuasive explanations would have attended any other outcome brought about by Soviet power. In Angola, any faction supported by the Soviet Union would ipso facto have become “progressive” and would therefore have gained the support of the Congressional Black Caucus, just as it would have received the endorsement of the Gulf Oil Company because it would have won. With the United States paralyzed, that outcome was inevitable, as was the fact that only the South Africans would remain to support the other side—further proof that the Soviet-backed faction was “progressive.” In the case of Ethiopia, had the Russians chosen to arm and reinforce the Somalis, we would have been told that the “Wilsonian” principle of national self-determination should prevail over the suspect legality of colonial boundaries. The same voices that deplored our refusal to celebrate the restoration of Ethiopian sovereignty over the Ogaden achieved by Soviet power, would have reminded us that the region is inhabited by ethnic Somalis, and they would have asked in rhetorical style why the United States was so obdurate as to stand in the way of nationalism, the strongest (most “progressive”?) force in today’s world. In the case of Indochina, if the Chinese had obtained Hanoi as their own client, the Russians would have emerged as the protectors of Cambodia and Laos, and those who in the event found themselves applauding the downfall of Pol Pot would then have invited us to give due credit to Moscow’s support of the independence of small nations.
Those who for one reason or another refuse to resist power unfailingly find some convenient principle whereby virtue may be seen in the result. Indeed, one consequence of adverse changes in the balance of power is precisely to reshape men’s conceptions of what is tolerable, acceptable, and even desirable. It is precisely by such mental conditioning that military power can earn its keep even without war.
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Thus in the later 1970’s an old story was repeated. Why object if Hitler reoccupies the Rhineland, an integral part of Germany, universally recognized as such? By what right can outsiders object if Austro-Germans and German-Germans are at last reunited in a national state? Why should men in the enlightened 1930’s be bound by the vengeful restrictions fossilized in the Versailles Treaty? Why should a war be fought to suppress the national aspirations of the Germans of the Sudetenland?
In the 1930’s neither great stupidity nor malevolence was needed to embrace the principles that would comfortably justify inaction in the face of power manifest and growing: it sufficed that there be no consistent, that is ideological, objection to totalitarian government. Once the ideological aspect was ignored, perhaps because of a lack of faith in the democratic alternative, it was easy enough to see merit in the results brought about by the growth of German power.
In our own times, the antagonist is very different from Hitler’s Germany, and the conditioning process—the insidious influence of the balance of power on our minds—much more pervasively effective. For one thing, the Soviet Union is much more powerful than Hitler’s Germany, both relatively and absolutely: relatively because there is now no quiescent continental power behind the United States ready to restore a shattered balance, as the United States itself once stood behind an England and a France directly challenged by Hitler; absolutely, because Hitler’s Germany lacked the self-sufficiency of materials and the world-destroying weapons that characterize Soviet power today. And then also, the Soviet Union does not actively dissuade defeatist propensities as much as Hitler did by selective persecutions and flagrant gangsterism. The Russians, even now, are still bound by certain hypocrisies of conduct and by the dim residues of a humanitarian conception which remains lodged in the official ideology. Thus both the greater power and also the less obvious bestiality of the Soviet Union conspire to dull our perceptions.
What on the other hand does recall the 1930’s is that once again it has become distinctly unfashionable to insist that totalitarianism itself must be resisted, and not merely such of its episodic manifestations as are brought to our attention in the travails of famous dissidents. Even many of those who are entirely unsympathetic to the Soviet Union nevertheless much prefer to stress practical motives and tangible interests in arguing the need to resist its expansion—and then of course China becomes part of the solution, instead of being recognized as a variant of the very same problem. Moreover, we have some in this country—a group varied enough to include both Andrew Young and Senator Edward Kennedy—who honestly seem to find it very difficult to concentrate their minds on the permanent evil of totalitarianism, even while being enthusiastic in their condemnation of pro-American but authoritarian states whose very substantial residual liberties they take for granted even when it is those very liberties that allow us to hear the opposition voices which (quite properly) complain of political repression. In any case, to ignore the ideological dimension of the East-West struggle in the attempt to contend directly with the “reality of power” condemns us to a misperception of that very reality. Far from being an impediment to our understanding of the practical strategic problems that confront us, a constant at tention to the ideological struggle is indispensable if we are to assay correctly the balance of military power, and the predicament that the present imbalance has created.
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All this by way of warning. The time allowed us to hesitate before launching broad action to restore our strength has fully expired, and yet even now, in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, newly minted arguments have emerged which minimize the scope of what has happened—arguments which by implication deny the need to restore our military strength and reactivate a foreign policy of broad resistance to the Soviet Union.
The most important of the post-invasion arguments offered by the advocates of passivity is that the Soviet Union acted only in self-protection. Faced with the risk that a fanatically Islamic regime would come to power in Kabul, fearful that such a regime would inspire widespread dissidence among the Muslim populations of Soviet Central Asia, the Kremlin was forced to send its own troops to suppress an “Islamic rebellion” which the Afghan forces loyal to the Soviet-controlled regime could not do themselves. And because the Afghan President actually in power was unwilling to cooperate with an outright occupation (even though he himself was a Soviet client), or perhaps simply because he was judged ineffectual by the Kremlin’s experts, the Afghans had also to be provided with a new President, who was duly delivered in the baggage of the invading Soviet army.
What this theory suggests, of course, is that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is not evidence of a shift in the balance of power but rather merely a symptom of Soviet insecurity. It is thus implied that no further acts of aggression need be feared: the Soviet move, an “essentially defensive reaction,” is inherently limited in scope.
Superficially plausible in its conjunction of the undoubted fact that Soviet Central Asia is full of Muslims with the recent and spectacular outbreaks of Muslim fanaticism in Iran and elsewhere, this theory nevertheless rests on a whole chain of increasingly demanding assumptions: that the Kremlin is afraid of Muslim dissidence in Central Asia (very likely indeed); that the Muslim populations of the USSR could be seriously influenced by events in Afghanistan even though they regard themselves as culturally much superior (doubtful: Portuguese may imitate the revolutions of the French, but not vice versa); that the prospective Muslim regime in Kabul would be perceptibly more militant and inflammatory than the Muslim regime already established in Teheran (very hard to believe); and finally that the Kremlin would consider that the best way of insulating Soviet Muslims from Afghan Muslims was to send tens of thousands of the former to invade the country of the latter, with all the official and unofficial contacts that this must entail (a thing almost impossible to believe).
Add two further facts and what is left of the plausibility of the theory entirely dissolves. First, until now no Islamic government has made any significant effort to arouse the religious sentiments of the Muslims of Central Asia; now, however, several may do so, and the Kremlin must have anticipated the possibility. Second, we have no evidence at all that there is any significant Muslim dissidence in Soviet Central Asia. Nor should that be surprising, since Central Asia is the only portion of the whole empire that actually obtains material benefit from the Soviet system. While the vast majority of the other non-Russian populations of the Soviet Union see that fellow ethnics and kindred folk lucky enough to be outside the USSR enjoy a higher standard of living than themselves, the Muslims of Central Asia are materially far better off than the Muslims of Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey, not to speak of the Muslims of Chinese Turkestan (Sinkiang).
Yet even if one accepts the theory that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan for defensive reasons, it should give no comfort to any not wholly deluded. As the power of empires increases, new layers of insecurity that must be remedied by further expansion are invariably found. Thus Rome conquered the Latium to shield the city itself, Italy to shield Latium, Gaul by stages to shield first Italy and then prior layers of conquest in Gaul, and finally Britain because Western Gaul could not be secured if Gaullish Druids and other dissidents could find ready shelter among their fellows across the channel. In other words, the “defensive” characterization of the Soviet invasion offers no certain security for any country less remote than New Zealand (and considering potential rivalry over the Antarctic, even that is not a safe presumption). Once we dismiss such last-ditch attempts to minimize the import of what has happened, we can begin to confront the crucial question before us: why did the Soviet Union employ its growing power to invade Afghanistan? Obviously, if we knew the strategic purpose of the move, we could usefully anticipate any further moves that might now follow.
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By reason of geographic proximity the Afghanistan-Persian Gulf nexus has an immediate plausibility. In purely military terms, the occupation of Afghanistan has the effect of bringing the Gulf of Oman, which forms the entrance to the Persian Gulf, within the tactical reach of Soviet military power. Operating from bases in southern Afghanistan, Soviet fighter-bombers could now interdict at will the vital traffic of oil tankers entering and leaving the Gulf; they could attack warships too, of course; and, more importantly, Soviet land-based aircraft could now neutralize the air-power superiority that the United States would otherwise enjoy in the immediate area by virtue of its naval aviation on board the great aircraft carriers. Since the navy air wings on board the carriers represent our one last major military advantage in the whole spectrum of non-nuclear forces, any reduction in their freedom of action amounts to a very serious loss in American strength overall.
Still in a purely military context, a Soviet overland drive to the sea could much more easily be accomplished by setting out from bases in southern Afghanistan to cross the deserts of Baluchistan (on the Iranian or Pakistani side, or both) than by way of the 1000-kilometer route that separates the Soviet border in the Caucasus from the nearest shore of the Persian Gulf. The very great advantage of the Baluchistan route is that the area in question is almost devoid of population, while by contrast the Caucasus route cuts across lands inhabited by fifty million Turks, Kurds, Persians, and Arabs. In both cases, poor roads in difficult terrain greatly restrict transit capacity, but against the feeble opposition that would meet them, Soviet forces could afford to travel light, using the roads for troop convoys to create the fait accompli of an occupation of the shore rather than for the heavy loads of ammunition that would be needed for serious warfare.
Along with the direct military advantages, the Soviet Union obtains a diplomatic advantage fully manifest even in the absence of conflict: its ability to intimidate the countries of the area has greatly increased now that the threat of direct Soviet military attack has become so vivid. Certainly it is not by accident, as Pravda would put it, that all the Soviet embassies in the region stand intact. It seems that one is not dealing with blind fanaticism after all: the mob is inclined to attack those who advertise their refusal to defend themselves or to punish such violations—and this is an inclination shared by the local governments which have the choice of controlling the mob or else letting it work its will. While hatred of the Soviet Union has no doubt increased, so has fear, and great military empires do not ordinarily seek love but rather the anxious respect that fear can best inspire.
These, then, would be the incentives of the invasion if its purpose were further to enhance the Soviet Union’s military and diplomatic power over the Persian Gulf. Given the all too obvious importance of the region’s oil resources, the prospect of gaining bases in Afghanistan—either to start war operations of its own, or to oppose an American intervention, or merely to strengthen the hand of its own diplomacy—was certainly a sufficient incentive for the Soviet invasion.
But before we accept this explanation and leave it at that, some objections should be seriously considered. First, how valuable in fact are the Afghan air bases in the light of the already great pre-invasion potential of Soviet air power? To be sure, it is useful for the Russians to have fighter aircraft positioned so close to the shores of the Gulf of Oman. But we must also remember that both the tanker traffic and warship movements in and out of the Persian Gulf could be interdicted even before the invasion, by Soviet medium bombers operating from bases inside the USSR. American aircraft carriers too were vulnerable to the large fleet of Soviet medium bombers and indeed any attacks upon the carriers would most likely rely on anti-shipping missiles, weapons too large to be launched from fighter-class aircraft, but standard equipment on the Soviet navy’s 300-odd medium bombers.
Secondly, what is the net value of the overland route to the sea that the invasion of Afghanistan has virtually opened to the Soviet Union? Certainly, it is better than the direct Caucasus-Gulf route and offers a choice of violations between Persian and Pakistani Baluchistan. But it also has the great defect of leading not to, but away from, the major oil fields, which are clustered around the head of the Gulf a long way from the Baluchi coast, and moreover on the opposite shore. And why employ overland routes anyway? Against the very weak forces of the Saudis and the Sheikdoms, Soviet air-delivered infantry with a few light-armor vehicles (mainly for show) should do very nicely; and even against an American expeditionary force, Soviet airborne divisions would suffice for the position-taking exercise that a Soviet-American confrontation would mainly entail, neither side being at all likely to open fire upon the other.
Thus while the expansion of the Soviet empire into Afghanistan does enhance its power over the Persian Gulf and the whole region around it, these objections are sufficiently weighty to justify a search for alternative explanations of the Soviet move.
To do this our field of view must first be widened, and very considerably: it is the entire strategic picture that we have to consider and not merely the regional circumstances of Afghanistan and the surrounding areas.
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For some time now, there has been talk of a Soviet “window of opportunity”—a period of several years in which the Soviet Union could count on a net advantage over the United States in strategic-nuclear forces. American obstinacy in pursuing arms control by unilateral restraint in the deployment of strategic-nuclear weapons, along with the energetic Soviet production of those weapons, has now brought this unhappy circumstance upon us.
Certainly the United States can no longer rely on a strategic-nuclear advantage to offset weakness in theater forces, and that, among other things, opens vast doubts about the security of the NATO alliance, whose very foundation is the American nuclear guarantee. It is, however, quite wrong to view the U.S.-Soviet strategic-nuclear balance in isolation. In fact, the Soviet armed forces have achieved or are about to achieve superiority not only in strategic-nuclear weapons, and not only over those of the United States, but rather in military capabilities overall, nuclear and not, and against the forces of Western Europe and China as well as those of the United States.
By perverse coincidence, the period 1968-75, in which the United States failed to build up its military forces (first because of vast expenditures in Vietnam and then because of budget cuts), was also a time in which Western Europe reduced defense investment for growth (partly because manpower costs greatly increased). Moreover, this was also, more or less, the period of the “Cultural Revolution” (1966-77) in China, when the ascendancy of the anti-bureaucratic faction (the “Gang of Four”) greatly restricted the flow of new equipment for the Chinese armed forces.
During those same years the Soviet Union continued to invest steadily in the growth and qualitative improvement of its forces, adding each year to its expenditure at a rate usually stated as 4 per cent (real growth). This undramatic but constant increase, kept up year after year, has had its cumulative effects: in detail, the result is manifest in the mass deployment of new aircraft, armored vehicles, warships, strategic weapons, and in the whole connective tissue of supporting and ancillary forces, and also infrastructures; in toto the result is manifest in the fact that the Soviet Union could greatly increase its relative strength as compared to the West even after building a whole new panoply of forces and infrastructures to achieve a net superiority over a China transformed from ally to antagonist.
By any standards, the Soviet achievement has been a very great one, even if much facilitated by the sheer bad luck that made our own misconduct of the Vietnam war (and more foolish anti-war reaction) concurrent with the outbreak of adolescent fury that turned Mao’s disenchantment with the Communist party of China into a force strong enough to disrupt the lives of nine hundred million people. That NATO-Europe then failed to assay the adverse trend, that it failed to recognize the task left to its own statecraft, that it failed to offset American weakness by applying some fraction of its growing wealth to military investment—all this was not of course bad luck, except insofar as the willful descent of entire national elites into self-satisfied provincialism may be so described. In any case, our own military decline was not offset by the growth in the strength of others also ranged against the Soviet Union.
The perverse circumstances that allowed the Russians to gain military superiority over a collection of countries much richer and more populous than themselves now shapes the world-wide military balance. Because of the delay of several years that intervenes between military expenditures and the actual deployment of armed forces, the fruits of the uncontested Soviet effort did not fully emerge until quite recently, and the Soviet advantage will continue to increase for some years almost regardless of what we, Western Europe, and the Chinese might all now set out to do.
Had the United States, Western Europe, and China simply continued to underinvest through the later 1970’s and beyond, the 1980’s would have been characterized by a growing and open-ended Soviet military advantage. Had things turned out that way, the pressure of Soviet intimidation on Western Europeans and Chinese would of course have steadily increased. But on the other hand, we could all have been assured of a time of tranquility, albeit dismal and doomed, since then the Soviet Union could have looked forward with confidence to a period of wholly decisive and uncontested military advantage during the later 1980’s and beyond. Peace would thus have been assured today and over the next few years at the cost of an assured Soviet domination thereafter.
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However, this is not to be. Again by coincidence, the gradual recovery of American realism about the outside world after 1975, the death of Mao and the fall of the Gang of Four in 1976, and the first stirrings of belated alarm in Western Europe have all created circumstances in which the decline in the military effort of each side has been reversed, so that a modest but accelerating recovery is now under way. Even at a net annual growth that is in reality well short of the much-publicized 3 per-cent U.S.-NATO budget target, the trend has now become adverse for the Soviet Union. With a combined economic capacity so much larger than that of the Soviet Union, even a sacrifice so slight does produce results for Americans and Europeans; with armed forces so backward, and arsenals so obsolete as those of the Chinese, even a modest flow of new equipment has an amplified impact on real capabilities.
Thus, instead of being free to expect an open-ended period of growing military advantage, the Soviet Union is now confronted with a transitory period of superiority that will end—on present trends—in the later 1980’s, when the efforts of today and of the next few years will mature in the reality of American and other military forces armed, trained, deployed, and ready.
The lineaments of great danger are easily recognizable in this situation: if an edge in military power can normally be expected to encourage activism (but also make it less necessary since others will pay power its due in their diplomatic concessions), a transitory advantage is apt to make action positively urgent. Since the elements of military power are mostly rather perishable, equipment becoming obsolete and training dulled in a matter of years, the Soviet Union needs a great effort merely to maintain the high quality of its present forces, which have been made much more ambitious in quality as well as somewhat larger in size over the last fifteen years or so. To do more than maintain the relative advantage of today would require a greater effort still, and with roughly one-eighth of the Soviet national product already given over for defense, the Soviet leaders cannot easily offset the reawakening of their competitors by simply imposing a greater sacrifice on their population—whose existence is already a shoddy one, by standards of comparison which they themselves recognize.
Still, even so, one could not go beyond the assessment that there is a danger of war to predict its virtual certainty, if it were not for yet another perverse coincidence that now intervenes: the time period in which the “window” of Soviet military advantage is projected to close happens to coincide with the advent in full force of a restriction on the Soviet economy whose first signs are already with us. It is well known that the Soviet economy is not growing as fast as it used to do,1 and the unfavorable estimate is that its growth will decline to very little or cease altogether by the mid-1980’s, so that Soviet military growth can only continue if its share of the total product is increased pro rata.
One may cheerfully disregard the prognostications of economists, but this one actually reflects the prediction of demographers, and as such it is an altogether more serious matter. Apparently, the European population of the Soviet Union is not growing and is therefore aging; thus a rising proportion of those who enter the labor force are Central Asians and Transcaucasians, mostly Muslim and backward2; with this, worker productivity will decline, and much new investment will be needed just to maintain production levels rather than to increase them.
For the first time ever—if these projections turn out to be as accurate as they are persuasive—the leaders of the Soviet Union will not be able to look forward to the future with optimism as far as the productive capacity of the Soviet economy is concerned. And given the demographic cause of their economic problem, the Kremlin leaders must also be pessimistic about the socio-political future of the Soviet Union, that too being an unprecedented state of affairs. Russian nationalism made a neat replacement for a Communist ideology of waning appeal during World War II and even more so during its victorious aftermath. But it is scarcely a solid foundation for a Soviet regime whose subjects will increasingly be non-Russian, and indeed peoples that were conquered by Russians, often recently enough for the humiliation and sufferings to live on vividly in ethnic memory.
There is, moreover, the primary effect of ideological decline: elderly leaders, still living with a close recollection of the triumph of Bolshevism, nowadays find their own grandchildren thinking more of Gucci and Pucci than of Marx or Engels. That too cannot inspire much optimism about the future of the Soviet regime, even if it were true that the highest leaders are unaware of the cycle of nepotism, cynicism, and pervasive corruption that is now characteristic of Soviet life by all creditable accounts.
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Once these factors are admitted into the overall picture, the danger of conflict is greatly heightened. If military advantage prompts activism, in the search for ways of exploiting power otherwise perishable, and if a transitory advantage adds the urgency of a time limit to that intent, the combination of a short-lived military optimism with a long-term regime pessimism is a most powerful impulse to war—in the attempt to change an unfavorable future by forceful action.
Thus if, by war, the Soviet Union could achieve a permanent enhancement of its position in some decisive map-changing way, all would become easier in the future, even the possibility of reduced military expenditures being imaginable. Alternatively, successful warfare might seize valuable resources for the Soviet state, and then the advantage of such resources might serve to modify the future that now looms so unfavorable.
Either way, it is obvious enough that there is no more certain driving force to deliberate war than the conjunction of short-term military optimism and long-term national (or regime) pessimism. That indeed was the classic mechanism that brought war in 1914, when the Hapsburg army and court elites could see in war the only salvation against ethnic separatism; in war, they believed, all the plain folk would rally around emperor and army—the only multi-ethnic institutions of the empire—abandoning the journalists, teachers, and publicists who were preaching the cause of the Southern Slavs, of Czechs and Slovaks, of united Italy, and of all-Germany. And in 1941, that same conjunction persuaded the rulers of imperial Japan to act, men who obviously had great confidence in their navy but very little in Japan’s ability to hold its empire against a resurgent America that had just begun to build warships and aircraft on an American scale.
Even so, the impulse to go to war might be resisted if the leaders of the Soviet Union lacked operational confidence in their armed forces. Such confidence is not at all the same thing as a generic sense of military superiority. In a pattern of expectations greatly reinforced by the experiences of World War II but in fact very much older, the rulers of Russia could retain faith in their country’s ability to win wars even without having any great operational confidence in their armed forces. The enemy would attack and invade; Russian generals would then be revealed as incompetent, Russian plans irrelevant; ambitious new weapons would not work, and whole Russian armies would be lost. But by its own victorious advance the enemy would then be stretched out across the vast Russian lands, and rains and snow and ice would come to paralyze him; and then through rivers of blood, war-created Russian armies, newly formed, commanded by new battle-educated leaders, using methods newly learned from the enemy, would drive out the invader—and then advance the borders beyond the initial starting line. By such means has Russia expanded in its recent history.
This particular conception of its military strength, which closely paralleled a certain cultural self-image of the Russian as less accomplished but stronger in spirit than the West European, was not one that would incline Russian political leaders to use their military forces in a deliberate search for advantage. (All this indeed applies mainly to war in the West. In the East, against Central Asians and Chinese if not the Japanese, the Russian experience and Russian expectations have been quite different.)
Very different was the German conception of 1914, or the Japanese in 1941. The political leaders of the two countries plainly regarded their armed forces as sharp instruments of precision, which could be trusted to execute military operations just as they were planned, to achieve results set in advance to gain some great, war-winning advantage. It was not on a generic superiority of military resources that the Germans counted in 1914—indeed they saw themselves as inferior in resources overall—but rather on the ability of their forces to encircle and destroy the French armies in one great swift turning move that would require action entirely precise, regulated by marching plans exceedingly intricate. And the Japanese, with far greater eventual success, also trusted their naval aviators to execute an attack of very great difficulty, in extremely demanding conditions. In both cases, the necessary condition of the acceptance of war was, precisely, the operational confidence of leaders in their armed forces, trusting them to deliver what was promised—which was a great deal.
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Until quite recently, such confidence and trust could not be for Russians: their kind of military power, even if massive, had a blundering and uncontrollable quality that would disqualify it as a useful instrument of aggression, deliberate, precise, and purposeful. It was this military fact rather than any innate moderation that endowed Soviet conduct with a degree of prudence—a prudence much exaggerated and altogether misinterpreted by the Kennans of this world who saw as a chosen restraint of ends what was only an imposed restraint of means. It is most unfortunate that this powerful, peace-preserving inhibition upon Soviet conduct has now been removed.
The first clear sign of this undoubtedly momen-tous but largely overlooked change was manifest in 1977, when the Soviet Union stepped in to decide the outcome of the Ethiopian war. Colonel-General Petrov, de facto commander-in-chief of the defense of Ethiopia, embodied in his own person the advent of Soviet operational confidence as he elegantly orchestrated the whole array of local Amhari militias, Cuban armored units, East European technicians, the Soviet airlift, and Soviet arms to achieve the winning combination in that war.
To be sure, Soviet troops were not then directly involved, but Soviet prestige undoubtedly was, and in a most important way. For the Kremlin leaders were obviously out to prove that they, unlike the Americans, would effectively defend those to whom their protection was granted. Admittedly, too, the Somali invasion forces, the regional rebels, and the Eritrean secessionists facing Petrov were not quite up to the standards of the Waffen SS Panzer Korps in its best days. But it must be remembered that when the Russians staked their reputation on the outcome, they were going in to defend a shrinking enclave on the high Ethiopian plateau, whose only land link to the outside world was a single rail line to the sea interrupted by Eritrean sabotage twice a day. One has the uncomfortable feeling that if our own Joint Chiefs had been directed to help the Ethiopians, they would have demanded large forces and prolonged preparations to mount a slow-moving reconquest, to secure first the coast, then the land link, and finally the enclave for a major build-up of forces and logistic stocks prior to any counteroffensive. Petrov, by contrast, was flown in with a small staff to command an improvised multinational force, without having any possibility whatever to redeem failure in the manner traditional to the Russians, by throwing masses of divisions into the fray.
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In Ethiopia we only caught a glimpse, but in Afghanistan the picture was fully revealed. The surprise airborne descent on Kabul, the special operations (including the use of deception and sabotage to paralyze the Afghan forces that might have been hostile), the willingness to rely on the swift follow-up of mechanized forces through narrow roads with many vulnerable tunnels and bridges—all present a familiar aspect, but one not at all Russian in style. It is rather the style of the German conquest of Oslo by a handful of men, of the seizure of the great Belgian fort of Eben Emael by glider toops landed directly on its roof, of the airborne conquest of Crete, of Rommel in Cyrenaica—it is quintessentially the style of the self-confident who mean to prevail over victim-forces (perhaps much larger) by swift, bold action and a simulated omnipresence that paralyzes the will to resist.
The Kremlin leaders who sent such forces into action to use such high-risk methods very obviously had acquired an operational confidence in them and their leaders that they had lacked as recently as 1968, when unresisting Czechoslovakia was flooded with invasion forces in numbers so large that the Soviet logistic system broke down at many points. Such an over-allocation went beyond all the normal bounds of prudence, and was a clear sign of a lack of confidence.
Of course the Afghans were thoroughly penetrated before the invasion by Soviet operatives, to the extent that the whole Afghan air force was seemingly in the Soviet service. Of course the Soviet Union had the capital advantage of territorial contiguity with its latest victim-land. But to assay the significance of the new phenomenon before us—of Soviet military forces not only self-confident but fully trusted to deliver by their political masters—it suffices to note one single tactical fact: it is reliably reported that an Afghan tank division was actually garrisoned in the environs of Kabul quite near the airport where the Soviet airborne troops were to land. A divisional force of full-weight battle tanks, even if very poorly handled, can wreck an airborne descent very easily, merely by driving onto the airfield and shooting at anything that moves. The Russians apparently relied on surprise, deception, and special-purpose covert action to immobilize the Afghan armor—they could certainly not count on being able to defeat it with the small number of light fighting vehicles that were flown in with the troops. To rely on such high-risk means to defeat a threat so inherently formidable to an operation so inherently fragile, denotes self-confidence of a high order, obviously matched by trust equally broad on the part of the leaders who sent in the troops.
If any would scoff at this, let them compare what happened in Kabul to the doings of the British at Suez in 1956, when the whole venture was crippled by the slow and visible preparation of a cumbersome full-scale expeditionary force, and this because of the insistence that all due precautions be taken to protect the British troops dropped by parachute against Egyptian armored forces—and this was armor much more remote from the landing zones than in the Afghan case, available in far smaller numbers, and mostly so newly delivered that Egyptian crews had hardly begun to train with the new Soviet equipment.
And if the British of 1956 are not accepted as a fair test, then let our own military men be interrogated: would they be willing to fly in an airborne division—of necessity lightly armed—in the immediate presence of a potentially hostile armored division? The answer would be a categorical negative, no matter how poorly one could rate the skill, motivation, and readiness of that armored force; it is simply the case that fifty-ton battle tanks can overrun foot infantry and their light air-delivered vehicles almost effortlessly if they catch them in the open spaces of an airfield as they are disembarking. And let our political leaders be interrogated: would they sanction the risk?
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Thus we are now facing a Soviet Union that has changed in a way most ominous. The Soviet Union of ceaseless opportunism that would fill any local vacuum as a sneak thief in a hotel tries every door, but which would not deliberately go to war for fear that its forces would make a mess of things, has now evolved into a different kind of enemy, one that is plainly willing to add direct warfare to its abundant array of expansionist instruments: proxy forces, not only Cuban; arms supplies meant to upset regional balances rather than preserve them; political warfare by all possible means, from forgery to assassination, as well as propaganda, black, gray, and white; and of course a tireless diplomacy of threats and blandishments of punishment and reward—a diplomacy much more coherent than our own in recent years. Even before the new instrument of direct war was added we could scarcely cope with the sheer tenacity of the Soviet policy. Now we face the prospect of war as well.
It might seem, nevertheless, that the great sanction of nuclear destruction would still intervene to avert war. After all, even if the economic and political future which Soviet leaders must now foresee is bleak—and one should not underestimate the system’s ability to retain control even in very unfavorable circumstances—the consequences of nuclear war must be rated as infinitely more catastrophic. To be sure, the Soviet Union’s military superiority is sufficiently pronounced in the nuclear categories, from the “strategic” (intercontinental) to the tactical, to insure that others cannot rely on nuclear means to offset non-nuclear defeat, but its superiority is still not absolute. It does not insure immunity from nuclear retaliation. In technical terms, the Soviet Union does not now have, and cannot soon acquire, a disarming counterforce capability. This being so, one may straightaway rule out a deliberate Soviet war upon the United States directly, and also against NATO in Europe. There is no doubt that the American nuclear guarantee is no longer the reliable protector it used to be, as Henry Kissinger for one has noted. But in the NATO lands there are still many thousands of nuclear weapons large and small, and they are usefully scattered about in different countries: the very fragility of NATO’s non-nuclear defenses makes it more believable that they would be used in the chaos and disaster of a losing war.
Unfortunately, there are several other theaters of action where the Soviet Union could achieve the conversion of its transitory military advantage into a long-term enhancement of its position by resorting to deliberate, purposeful, and safely non-nuclear war. One possibility would be to launch swift invasion columns to cut off the vast territories of Chinese Central Asia from the rest of that country. In the arid, open terrain of the region, the tactical advantage of mechanized Soviet forces over Chinese infantry would be greatest, and the combat value of Soviet air superiority would be maximized. At the same time, the very small population and its heavily non-Chinese composition would render a guerrilla resistance insignificant, while the Russians could count on their vast nuclear superiority to inhibit any suicidal Chinese intent to resort to nuclear weapons. (And against China, the Soviet Union must have a fully disarming counterforce capability.)
The assured strategic benefit would be to shift China eastward by 1,000 kilometers, and a concurrent campaign of non-nuclear bombardment against Chinese industry could retard that country’s development very seriously. One possible benefit might be to precipitate the latent regional separatisms throughout China by exposing Peking’s inability to defend the national territory, thus undermining its chief claim to authority. And since the Soviet Union would under no circumstances annex the area but rather turn it into a “Turkestan People’s Republic,” a nominally independent client-state such as Outer Mongolia already is, the Soviet ethnic problem would not be aggravated, and might instead be alleviated, perhaps in a major way, if immigration were to develop into the new state—an outcome that large-scale Soviet investments and ethnic preference3 might well bring about. For the same reason, the diplomatic repercussions of the venture could be much reduced: the Russians would no doubt claim credit as liberators for engendering the national self-determination of the Turkic peoples till then under Chinese domination.
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Other map-changing opportunities present themselves in Korea, where a Soviet-sponsored unification would greatly facilitate the longstanding Soviet attempt to pressure Japan out of the American alliance and into a weak neutralism. This would be most useful to the Soviet Union even if Japan is too large in population and too recondite in culture to be Finlandized. At the very least, a weak, neutral Japan could be induced to invest heavily in Siberian development, while avoiding investment in China.
As for Pakistan, map-changing could take the easier form of playing anvil to India’s hammer to destroy that country’s independence. As an alternative to the Turkestan scheme—and the two would be incompatible—a unified India would ipso facto be greatly advantageous to the Soviet Union, since then it would be an effective strategic counterweight to China.
And then of course there are the various possibilities in and around the Persian Gulf, from the seizure of Iran’s northern provinces to something on a wider scale; or else, starting from the Soviet base in Yemen, south-to-north political-military action, to change political structures in Arabia, if not the map.
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To predict which course of action will have the most appeal for the leaders of the Soviet Union is not the object here. What we for our part must now recognize once and for all is that such possibilities have now become actual Soviet options. That, finally, is the inevitable consequence of the imbalance of power through which we must now survive. Afghanistan was merely the weakest and least protected of the countries unfortunate enough to be directly adjacent to the Soviet Union. Now the others wait their turn, facing a Soviet military empire once again on the move.
As for us, now that the military advantages of the Soviet Union can no longer be concealed by delusionary or perhaps cynical claims that we are still “number one”; now that the transitory nature of that advantage creates a fixed urgency to convert perishable power into long-lasting results by decisive map-changing war, it is very important that we recognize the full significance of the new phenomenon before us. Never in their recent history have the Russians had this quality of operational confidence in their armed forces, and its emergence now completes the matrix that will lead to war unless we are very much luckier than we deserve to be.
1 CIA “synthetic growth index” (total industry): 1961-65: 6.6; 1966-70: 6.3; 1971-75: 5.9; 1976-78: 3.8 (average annual growth percentages) in F. Douglas Whitehouse and Ray Converse, Soviet Economy in a Time of Change, Vol. I, Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress, October 10, 1979, p. 406.
2 In 1970-79, out of 23.8 million net entrants to the work force, 10.5 million originated in the Russian Republic (RSFSR) and 8.6 million in backward areas. In 1980-89, out of 6.3 million projected net entrants, all but 0.4 million will be from backward areas, with the RSFSR work force actually declining by 1.2 million. Ibid., p. 417.
3 In the Sinkiang there are some five million Uighurs and .7 million Kazakhs; the Soviet Union has 5.3 million Kazakhs and 173,000 Uighurs. They, as well as the Kirgiz (1.4 million), might find a Turkic state attractive; in theory the Soviet Union could extrude more of its minority population by donating territory to the new state.
