Air University Review, March-April 1982
Dr. Geroge H. Quester
Can the sociological trends in the major powers and around the world have an important impact on the political practices and trends of the major powers?
We are used to the fact that command decisions reached in Washington and the Politburo could grievously change the ordinary life of millions of people, a part of the causal and predictive sequence we must never underrate. Yet what about the impact on these command decisions of the sum of all the small changes and choices made by the masses involved? My intent here is to juxtapose the trends of international politics for the remainder of this century with some trends in domestic society, in the hope that the interaction of the two might reduce our uncertainties about the possibilities of war and peace.
What precisely might have been the presumptions and premises that caused so many people, a decade ago, to look ahead to détente, in Richard Nixon’s phrase, to an "era of peace"?
First of all it was assumed that these would be years of greater economic, social, and ecological interdependence, a time of increasing "transnational politics," as the common problems facing all the countries of the globe would confuse and overwhelm the issues that had pitted West against East. Pollution and energy shortages, urbanization and international trade, and the management of monetary matters would cut across the Cold War tensions. Just as domestic unrest had brought the powers together after Napoleon’s defeat in the years of the Holy Alliance, similar problems on the domestic side might leave Moscow and Washington less free to wage a Cold War.
The coming détente was also thus presumed to depend heavily on a resurgence of the old balance-of-power mechanism, whereby states did not form permanent alliances in advance. Rather, they switched sides often, typically intervening late in power struggles to help keep the weaker side from being overwhelmed and absorbed by the stronger.
The elbowroom for such a return to a balance-of-power system, reinforcing and somewhat replacing the nuclear "balance of terror," would come from an enhanced strength of the defense. Defense is preponderant when the military, political, social, and economic situation favor the forces already in an area, against any force trying to fight its way in. Conversely, we would have to say that the offense was preponderant when this situation instead favored whoever was coming in, over the forces already in place. The years immediately after 1945 had seemed to show a great weakness of local regimes in Europe and Asia, such that they all had to look to Washington or Moscow for protection. The years after 1960 had presumably turned this around, letting states forgo adhering to one alliance or the other. China and Romania would be free now to show independence of the Soviet Union, while France and Japan could show their independence of the United States. The maintenance of international peace was thus presumed to depend less on the nuclear threats directed by Washington at Moscow, or vice versa, and more on local defensive strengths, on the likelihood that third, fourth, and fifth powers would continually intervene to prevent significant victories for either the alliances of Moscow or Washington.
In the political science jargon, what was expected was, therefore, a multipolar rather than a bipolar international system, with a number of actors becoming quite unpredictable from issue to issue with Moscow and Washington occasionally even having to get together in a common front, when other states had engineered some sort of "diplomatic revolution" coalition against them.
On the domestic front, such movement toward détente was then expected to be echoed and reinforced by greater anarchy and disrespect for authority. Just as Romania and France no longer saw the need for taking orders from their alliance leaders because the opposing alliance had become less disciplined and orderly, so the ordinary citizens of the various powers would become less willing to volunteer (or be drafted) for military service, and less willing to expend funds on preparations for possible wars, again because an attack from the other camp had come to seem so much less likely.
At the extreme, this anarchical disrespect for authority would move beyond opposition to military service and taxation, to alcoholism or drug-taking, or a general dropping out from society, and then still further to terrorism, with violent attacks on society and the state. Confronted by an array of terrorist activity ranging from the left to the right to the uncatalogable, Moscow and Washington and Bonn and East Berlin might then find themselves sometimes again making common cause against such attacks for fear that the anarchic tendencies and example might otherwise spread too quickly and too far.
Accompanying this was an expectation in the mid-1960s that Moscow and Washington would have to fear, and would have to unite against, the prospect of a spread of nuclear weapons to many more countries. This has a fair amount to do with the mass sentiment stressed in this article, since one important explanation of such proliferation will simply be the world’s demand for energy and electric power. The nuclear reactors that produce electricity will also in the process produce plutonium, a material all too easy to convert into nuclear weapons. Yet many states that had no interest in such weapons would still be reluctant to deny their publics the economic returns expected from such developments of dual-purpose nuclear physics.
Thus, Soviet-American cooperation has been close on preventing the horizontal proliferation of nuclear weapons, just as it had become close at the conferences on the Laws of the Seas, or the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) conferences, or in responding to the threats of terrorism. Such nuclear proliferation would not in and of itself be necessary for détente or the emergence of a multipolar system. Nations that possessed only conventional arsenals could indeed already behave independently, counting on the two superpowers to deter and check each other in any use or brandishment of nuclear weapons. But the Soviet-American cooperation against further proliferation, which indeed reached a very high degree in the joint authorship and presentation of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), was nonetheless symptomatic of détente.
Finally, as the ultimate nightmare for the future, the anarchy and alienation previously discussed might then go beyond ordinary terrorism, moving into nuclear terrorism, as antigovernmental factions in the West or the East were suddenly able to threaten cities with nuclear destruction if they did not get their way. It is far easier to see how one would deter American or Soviet nuclear forces, or even Pakistani nuclear forces, than how one would deter a Baader-Meinhof nuclear force. This is surely something that Moscow and Washington might want to cooperate in heading off.
Nature had thus willy-nilly generated a set of common problems for the two superpowers, rooted in economics and technology and sociology and politics, problems nicely perhaps reinforcing the tendencies toward détente.
Much of the optimism Americans displayed about the prospects for détente has faded. We should therefore proceed to list the contrary explanations and premises for what some would refer to as a new Cold War, what in any event can no longer be so unquestionably seen as détente.
Western observers distrusting the trends of the 1970s would now challenge whether the international system was ever loaded toward the defense enough to discourage attacks all around the system or bring back the stabilizing balance-of-power system in place of bipolar alliance arrays. China, Romania, and North Korea no longer march in step with Moscow, but Cuba certainly does. In many corners of the world, the level of Chinese effort may not suffice to make any difference for military or political outcomes. Communist strength is not really divided against itself in places like Somalia or Angola, but has appeared again as a cohesive whole.
It would be consistent with this view to conclude that the Soviets have remained aggressive in the 1970s and 1980s, so that any appearance of détente was simply the result of a loss of United States self-confidence emerging from the Vietnam War, reinforced all the more by the very societal trends just noted toward challenges to authority. One could comfortably call it détente when fewer opportunities appeared for either side to try to advance. But one would hesitate to use the détente label where one side continues to advance, while the other has ceased to resist.
Regardless of Soviet intentions, nature may have hurt the chances for détente simply by what it now has made possible in the military field. Rather than reinforcing defenses in a stabilizing way at the strategic level, the enhanced accuracies of the ballistic missiles or the cruise missiles on both sides have made a first-strike counterforce attack more thinkable and left second-strike retaliatory capacities less assured. At the tactical level, the growth in troop carrier capacity on both sides increases the possibility of interventions such as that by the Cuban force in Angola.
The Soviets have certainly surprised all outside observers by how much they have invested in missiles, tanks, troop carriers, and naval vessels. New technological opportunities, plus the Soviet response to opportunity, thus combine to weaken many of the reassuring premises for détente.
This view thus saw trouble for the non-Communist world in terms of societal trends, which expected the domestic disarray of the West to be far greater than that of the Soviet bloc, as Moscow would not have to contend with a drug traffic or with waves of draft resistance. Countries cannot fight wars without weapons and soldiers. Moscow has the discipline to maintain, however artificially, a self-confidence in an expansionist ideology, while the West had lost its former ideological consensus backing free press and free elections and the free world.
How are we to judge whether the West’s willingness to engage in military defense had eroded significantly more than that of the East? One special factor has affected the international military strategic balance ever since 1945, through periods of Cold War, détente, and the new Cold War. Because nuclear weapons are so destructive, the logic of mutual restraint and limited war has very much gripped the world since Nagasaki, so that nuclear weapons have not been used in combat and even the ordinary use of conventional forces has been somewhat restrained. We have not seen World War III nor anything like a repeat of World War II, for the threat of nuclear retaliation deters such a repeat just as it has deterred a total nuclear war.
When one considers how much damage nuclear weapons could do to life on earth, one would never regard them as a blessing. Yet, paradoxically, we have, perhaps because of this prospect, seen less investment of human life and economic resources in combat since 1945 than most observers could have predicted. Because of the A-bomb and the H-bomb, the years since World War II have not been particularly warlike by comparison with other periods of history but may have been unusually much the opposite.
One important concomitant of this absence of large-scale warfare is that all sides must now labor under some uncertainty as to how fit they truly are for combat, or on how far the processes of urbanization and socialism and alienation have worked to erode their people’s ability to fight effectively as soldiers. It was suggested that Soviet officers were envious of the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War because of the combat experience which they themselves were unable to acquire. The disillusionments of the U.S. Army in that war suggest that the Soviet officers would not envy the result, even if they envied the test. (One suspects that Soviet officers, by the same reasoning, are now clamoring to be assigned to Afghanistan, rather than seeking to avoid service there, because such service would provide a test of one’s competence and mettle under genuine combat conditions.)
Yet neither Vietnam nor Afghanistan can provide meaningful tests of how an armed force would fare in a conventional tank battle in Europe, in an airborne operation around the Persian Gulf, a tactical nuclear war, or a World War III. Armies are thus left in a position of wondering whether they would do as well in combat as their fathers and grandfathers, with a general suspicion emerging that they might do worse.
This test that the West’s military must apply to itself is of course not quite a fair one. The rules of the nuclear balance eliminate not only full-scale wars comparable in magnitude to World War II but also any quick campaigns with total and gratifying victories. Prolonged wars, amid prolonged periods of economic sacrifice in preparation for war, put great strains on patience and result in boredom, alienation, and questioning of the motives behind it all.
The same rules of the game thus make it harder to test individuals’ willingness to serve their country militarily and also work to erode that willingness, to compound (at least in the West) a loss of respect for authority and loss of consensus about goals in foreign policy. Americans were surely more united about the purposes and approaches of American foreign policy in 1961 than they are in 1981. The Vietnam War caused a great number of Americans to question whether we were supporting the right causes in the world and caused others to wish that we would not support any causes at all.
The trauma of America’s commitment to the Vietnam War and failure to win that war has shown up in many forms. The spectacle of U.S. Army officers’ fearing to order their troops into patrol was matched, at the national level, by Americans’ generally expressing great distrust of their government and of the capitalist nature of their society. Students and many others openly wished victory for the forces of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and for other forces in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that the United States had been resisting since World War II.
A similar loss of confidence in Western society shows up in the other NATO countries, as faculty and students express cynicism about the advantages of Western political democracy; the bulk of the population shows a less resolute opposition to communism than in the days of the Cold War.
Such a political disinterest in military resistance against possible Communist aggression is then conjoined with the effects of the birth dearth of eighteen years ago. Since the numbers of military-age males eligible for armed service will be much smaller, we must deal with simple and inevitable demographic trends that reinforce but otherwise have absolutely nothing to do with the political changes just noted.
Political disenchantment has combined with the generally greater civilian affluence to increase opposition to compulsory military service, and to force shifts throughout NATO toward volunteer military service. While such a shift has some advantages, not the least forcing military and defense planners to take the true cost of labor inputs into account, the worry remains, especially because of the demographic trends just noted: not enough volunteers can be persuaded to come forward, especially in the above-average intelligence categories required by the higher technology of modern warfare.
As illustrated with the draft for ordinary servicemen, and most graphically for military physicians, there is a real risk that we will encounter a backward-bending supply curve, for no increase can be achieved in the number of total volunteers, whether one raises or lowers the pay offered.
The normal supply curve for any commodity or service is shown in Graph A. As the price offered increases, the supply made available increases, while the demand is curtailed, with the result that equilibrium is achieved at some price. We are familiar with this in everyday life: if we want our house painted and cannot get anyone to do it at a certain price, we simply raise the price offered and soon find the necessary volunteers.
But military service, for infantrymen or physicians, is not so pleasant a form of work. It is possible that increases in wages would have to be so great that incentive was lost for staying in the service after the first tour of duty. Infantrymen or physicians with large amounts of money in the bank would move back into civilian life to enjoy or reinvest the fruits of their labor. The result would be a supply curve as shown, very possibly with supply and demand never meeting at any price.
It should be noted that the same kind of argument applies for another situation now distressing Americans, the possibly limited availability of oil from OPEC and other oil-rich states. Again, it is possible that the curve would be backward bending, as a lowering of the world price would not encourage more production. But an increase in price past a point would also not increase production, for producers would be accumulating so many dollars as to make them uninterested in more dollars, preferring rather to keep their oil in the ground.
One rational and inevitable response to the shortage of military manpower has, of course, been a long overdue shift toward more capital-intensive ways of preparing for war. Relying more on machinery and automated weaponry may lead to technological advantage in weapons design. Another response, also probably overdue and rational, has been the opportunity, particularly in the United States, for more military jobs for women.
Good things and bad are thus presumed to combine to produce a general trend against military preparation. Greater literacy (always to be welcomed) and greater urbanization (also perhaps necessary and desirable) blend with greater access to drugs and alcohol and a greater jadedness with life and concepts of duty. As life has generally become easier, it has made people softer; as menial labor constitutes a much smaller fraction of the work that needs to be done, youth come into any military less prepared to be infantrymen. The simple change in land tenure patterns has eliminated some major sources of career soldiers. The second sons of wealthy European landowners were once the natural candidates to become officers of the army, while the second sons of smaller landowners became career noncommissioned officers.
Physical fitness is down, while the craving for creature comforts is up. Modern amenities and modern medicine have made for longer and pleasanter lives, but these are not necessarily lives for which the young feel greater gratitude to their countries or any closeness to their political regimes. Yet another form of "the revolution of rising expectations" is in effect as affluent younger people resent any suggestions that gratitude is in order or that service to one’s country should be considered a duty.
What national purposes would this view then envisage for the United States and its partners in the 1980s and the 1990s? Will we be mostly holding our own, hoping that not too many corners of the world fall under the single-party rule we used to detest? The pessimistic view would see the masses in Britain, Japan, the United States, and West Germany too much scrambling for a continued prosperity, in face of continual threats to Middle East and other oil supplies, so that the ability to present any cohesive resistance to the Russians will fade and with it the ability to support such worthy causes as the workers in Poland or the anti-Communist resistance in Afghanistan. The discontent of workers in Britain and the United States would ironically disable the West from helping or exploiting the discontent of workers in Eastern Europe. There is no doubt that the West’s dependence on oil imports has produced an uncertainty and insecurity unlike anything we have known in the past. This might indeed produce a simple material self-interest in Western Europe, Japan, and the United States that would blot out concerns about much of anything else and could cause these powers to conspire with the Russians or any other dictatorially inclined power, i.e., anyone who could keep the oil flowing.
Lest this be put forward as too clear a projection of current trends, one must remember hearing cries of "wolf" in earlier times when it similarly seemed that young men would no longer be willing to serve their countries in any reliable way. Portions of the British Navy mutinied during the Napoleonic Wars, threatening to leave Britain unprotected by the one wall it had so much counted on. The British fleet thereafter had to rely on impressment and brutal physical punishment well into the nineteenth century, i.e., for much of the period of its domination of the seas; while Britain relished the freedom and autonomy that the English Channel and British naval power provided them, perhaps not enough British seamen would enlist voluntarily to assure the maintenance of this naval power.
Mutinies occurred in the French Army during the worst slaughter in the trenches during World War I, placing France in dire peril had the Germans elected to take the offensive at the right moment. Mutinies among personnel of the German High Seas fleet, who had yet to experience hardship in that war, forced the Kaiser to abdicate in 1918 and Germany to surrender. The mutinies that occurred in the British Army in the early 1920s were viewed as a leftist signal that the military around the world would not so easily let prime ministers and generals deploy them into combat anymore. The Oxford Union resolved that its members would not fight anymore "for King and Country."
And yet, the globe then experienced World War II, a conflict distinguished by great bravery and competence in the German, Japanese, British, Russian, and American military services, and horrendous cost in human lives and economic destruction.
Two measures of output will thus now be continually in doubt: the simple effectiveness of military performance and the loyalty of military people to the purposes of their nation.
More should be said about military effectiveness to put the matter in perspective. Whatever the feelings of the current situation, amid indulgence in drugs and alienation from society, it is probable that contemporary armies are more effective than their World War II counterparts. If nothing else, this would be because their equipment and firepower are far superior to that in the past. A Bundeswehr division could beat a division of the Wehrmacht, and a division of the British Army on the Rhine could beat one of Field Marshal Montgomery’s.
If some of this is simply because of automation and modern equipment that makes the soldier look less manly, it is nonetheless part of what any rational systems analyst or economist would have prescribed as the necessary exploitation of the opportunities, the appropriate adjustment to the returns to labor and capital. Carpentry is also today much more tool dependent than it was in the "good old days," but the true cost-effectiveness of the carpenter has probably gone up.
The world has not yet seen any true "disarmament by sociology" in terms of simply battlefield competence. The doubts about the ability of the West to fight wars stems rather from blending in the additional consideration of loyalty. Are soldiers, however recruited, of whatever sex or educational level, now to be a more uncertain commodity on whether they will fight, perhaps refusing to go into combat as some of their World War I brothers did, perhaps switching sides halfway through the war as also occurred in World War I?
The crucial question for relating what we have just discussed to the likelihood of détente is whether this erosion of military capabilities is showing up on both sides of the Iron Curtain or on only one. Is the evident Western disinclination to participate in military service indeed well founded? Do we have less need to fear a Communist military menace, perhaps because some of such disinclination has emerged in the Soviet bloc also? Or is this "dropping out," on what used to be viewed as a military duty to country, very one-sided, encouraging the Communist powers, especially the Soviet Union, to move forward to fill out a vacuum?
We are especially concerned with the Soviet Union and its more loyal satellites, since we are not sure whether to think of China and Romania as enemies or allies. If a mass alienation from society—coupled with the changes noted hi demography, economics, and culture in general— were to be achieved, we might heave a sigh of relief that the premises of détente were indeed true. If Moscow, East Berlin, Havana, and Hanoi turn out to be relatively immune to these tendencies, we then have a global case of unilateral disarmament rather than mutual disarmament, which any student of international politics would recognize as being much more dangerous.
Some of the signs of symmetry are indeed missing. There has not been any kind of taxpayer’s revolt or legislator’s revolt in the Soviet Union to hold back spending on defense. There is no "hemorrhaging of expenditures" on welfare and the rest of the domestic sector, making it impossible for the U.S.S.R. to fund armed forces fully comparable, and more, to those of the United States.
The internal divisions of the Communist world, as noted, have also not been as comprehensive as expected by the premises of détente. The Cubans have remained loyal to the U.S.S.R. even while the Chinese ceased to be so. The Soviet Union holds a monopoly within the Communist world on the means for moving troops long distances from their home base. There have been no riots in the streets of Havana or Moscow to protest the deployment of troops to Afghanistan, Angola, or Ethiopia. While some soldiers defect, the number of desertions has been very small compared with the U.S. Army rate during the Vietnam War, testifying to the tough and closed nature of Soviet society but suggesting also that any substantial alienation of Communist military masses from their political leaderships cannot be proved.
A related hope of détente was that local forces would display strength in resisting incursions from the outside. The Afghan mountain people have indeed shown their traditional prowess at guerrilla warfare, but this may not impose an intolerable burden on the Russians, who have come in equipped with helicopter gunships (again the application of a capital-intensive technology versus the labor intensive). As a military factor, Black Africa has appeared to be as much a vacuum as ever. Small forces of Cuban or other Communist troops are able to make a great difference, but small French, South African, or other "anti-Communist" forces also make a great difference.
In the categories spelled out of societal contributions to disarmament and détente on the Western side, where are we to find any equivalent in the Communist world?
There is at least a bit of good news for the West and for détente that might be uncovered here. Demographic impact is one sure thing that we can always turn to. The birthrates of eighteen years ago also fell in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as compared with a less affluent and less urbanized earlier time. The U.S.S.R. indeed seems headed for major internal ethnic tensions, in that its Asian citizens continue to produce larger numbers of children while its Great Russian and other European citizens have substantially reduced their birthrates. The prospect looms that the Great Russians in particular will very soon be a minority in the Soviet Union, while Europeans in general may be a minority by the end of the twentieth century.
Probably every military recruiter in the world wishes that he could continue to get the kinds of recruit that he used to get. Soviet military journals run articles lamenting the "poor quality" of recruits, which in part may be a racist reference to the decreasing numbers of Great Russians in the total; other points may refer to lower morale and less inclination to military service among young men being drafted.
The ideal from the Russian recruiter’s point of view would probably be a farm boy of Great Russian stock, fully equipped in the language of command, totally loyal to Mother Russia, uncorrupted by the creature comforts of the city and the example of the stilyagi hoodlums, and not so jaded as to resent authority or be bored by military life. It is inevitable that the Soviet Armed Forces will no longer have so many of this type of recruit, the legendary soldier capable of marching for days on a diet of black bread and borscht.
Pessimists about the West’s ability to stand up to the Soviets sometimes bitterly suggest that quality control is allowed to slip on everything else within the U.S.S.R., yet the cream of good metal, good computers, and good people is somehow skimmed off to ensure the Russians of a first-rate military force.
But it is difficult to tell how assured this is or to predict how long such a double standard can be maintained. Much of the standard practice in the U.S.S.R. is indeed sloppier than ever, and overlaps between civilian and military life cannot be avoided. For example, our fears of a Soviet missile threat would increase if civil defense arrangements were really capable of shielding a large fraction of the Soviet population against our retaliatory attack. Yet, all evidence suggests that the U.S.S.R. civil defense exists more on paper than in practice. The average Soviet citizen is quite cynical and skeptical about the drills and preparations he supposedly is so well versed in.
Apart from basic demographics, are there other trends or signs that would give the West more reason to relax? Cuban military successes may show that Africa is a power vacuum, but the premises of détente would be underscored if it turned out that other regions of the world were less so, governed more (as we had all hoped) by local defensive capacities and local balancing divisions. The Russians have not been totally frustrated in Afghanistan, but they have also not been able to slice through this country as easily as the Cubans did in Angola. The fraction of effective, deployable Soviet strength tied up in the Afghanistan operation is not trivial.
Chinese Communist armed forces did not find it easy to push into Vietnam, illustrating the neglect of Chinese military preparations through the years of the Great Cultural Revolution but also showing that the Vietnamese are adept at defending the territory they began with. Conversely, the same Vietnamese have not found it very easy to subdue Cambodia, even though the Pol Pot regime they ousted was probably as vicious and unrepresentative as any on the globe. The simple traditional hatred Cambodians have for Vietnamese has been a stock in trade for their resistance. This kind of ethnic antagonism is counted on as an underpinning for multipolarity and détente, analogous of course to the projected ethnic rivalries within the Soviet Union.
Even the success of the Cuban offensive in Angola has been only partial, achieving nominal control over the entire country, but ensnaring the Cubans and the regime they are defending in the unrewarding task of a counterinsurgency campaign; as they try to run trains through the jungle, the forces of Unita and the Angolan National Liberation Front (FNLA) employ the tactics of guerrilla ambush.
Regarding soldier loyalty, there is little reason to hope that the average Russian soldier would not be loyal to Moscow if a war were to break out, or that he would begin to desert in large numbers or murder his officers whenever a combat patrol had been ordered. A very different answer emerges, however, for the East European satellite forces, which are the nominal allies of the Soviet Army in the Warsaw Pact. As such countries are invaded by Soviet forces heading off liberalizations of one kind or another, whether these satellite-nation troops would remain loyal depends heavily on the scenario for the start of any future war.
Things would be easiest for Moscow if the Bundeswehr were to invade Eastern Europe trying to recreate the Third Reich. If war breaks out under circumstances less to be blamed on the West, many of the officers and soldiers of these armies may swing to effective neutrality or to outright opposition to Moscow. Many nationalities, including the Poles, East Germans, Hungarians, and Romanians, have historical traditions of animosity toward the Russians and toward each other. Although the Bulgarians and Czechs have had a tradition of friendship for Russia, the Czech tradition is marred by memories of 1948 and 1968.
Doubts and uncertainties about the loyalty of the East European armies (and regimes and peoples) are an old story. The trend is probably that such doubts are increasing, simply in that the hold of the Soviet secret police and its affiliates cannot be as strong as it was. The surprising inability of the Communist Party leadership to keep the lid on events in Poland suggests that Eastern Europe is not becoming a place more stably in line with Moscow.
Alarmed Westerners see Soviet power everywhere on the rise. The contrary view (whether it is the view as seen from Moscow is regrettably impossible to tell) is that the Soviets may well be on the defensive. Was the move into Afghanistan aggression, or was it a move to preempt one more domino of the "Islamic revival"? Is the new surge of Islamic feeling that turned Iran so virulently anti-American, but also anti-Soviet, a surge that might one day affect the Asian republics of the Soviet Union?
Would a Soviet invasion of Poland similarly be an aggression or an attempt to restore a Soviet position that was taken for granted in the 1960s and has since become badly eroded? Soviet influence has grown in some corners of Africa and the Middle East and declined in others. Where Soviet aircraft once flew from bases in Egypt, American aircraft now fly from the same bases, with Egypt and Israel having signed a peace treaty. Ethiopia has fallen into the Soviet camp, but Somalia has transferred out of it and offered its bases instead to the United States. The death of Mao and the apparent renunciation of his principles has not resulted in renunciation of his hostility to the Soviet Union. This surprisingly enough is the only legacy of the Maoist years that the Chinese seem intent on retaining.
It is altogether correct to point out how much the Soviet leadership has chosen to invest in tanks, missiles, troop-carrier aircraft, and naval vessels, rather than the consumer goods we might have hoped would be produced in the U.S.S.R. Yet, the projection of almost every student of Soviet economics suggests that a moment of truth is imminent, when the Soviet economic system will no longer be able to stand the strain. Soviet consumption has indeed been neglected in the 1970s, but so has Soviet investment in the capital goods required to sustain any continued economic growth.
The simple economic austerity into which the energy crisis is plunging the entire world may very likely produce alienation and uncertainty in Eastern Europe just as it does in the West. Workers everywhere are now less attached to their regimes because economic growth rates cannot remain as high as before and some living standards and real incomes may actually have to decline. The continual disagreement and lack of compromise on the distribution of economic shares that has become known as the "English disease" may not just spread to Western Europe but also to the East (this is indeed what the Polish labor crisis may largely be about) and perhaps even into the Soviet Union itself. Communist regimes that were able to keep their workers quiet and their soldiers loyal, under the old prices of fuel, may no longer be able to do so. At the very least, a greater cynicism and distrust will have set in, the kind of distrust that makes sending any army into battle a more uncertain prospect.
Not all of the prospects for disarray within the Soviet camp are so attractive, of course. Polish antagonism toward the Russians may delay the time when the Warsaw Pact rolls westward toward Paris. But such antagonism may cause Soviet tanks to roll instead into Warsaw, in a manner that would very much damage Poland and also threaten world peace. The outside world aspires to a liberalization of arrangements in Eastern Europe for their own sake and for the reassurance this offers for the security of Western Europe. It realizes that this could be accomplished only in a manner which did not threaten the very security of the U.S.S.R., and such a splitting of differences must necessarily come slowly rather than abruptly.
The societal trends of Eastern Europe are clearly supplying a push in this direction, but the task of all who care about peace and human freedom will be to moderate the speed of the push and direct it into channels that have some prospect of success.
What we might very well be aspiring to is a "Finlandization" of Eastern Europe, given that outsiders worry a great deal about such a process affecting Western Europe. Finland is a far nicer place to live than Bulgaria or East Germany, though politically (because its foreign policy is periodically intimidated into cooperation with the Soviet Union) it is not quite as nice a place to live as Denmark or West Germany. We dread seeing Denmark become more like Finland. Would it not be a much larger plus to see Poland or Bulgaria become like Finland?
The expectations of the 1960s were that China would be exporting revolution all around the globe, maintaining an almost total hostility to the United States, somehow holding back what otherwise might have developed earlier as East-West détente. By the 1970s, it was obvious that such predictions were quite wrong, however, as China under Mao instead swung into total hostility to the Soviet Union, thereby contributing to optimism about détente. The end of the 1970s saw China almost becoming an ally of the United States, Japan, and the NATO countries.
Yet how does one explain such Chinese behavior and use it to predict the future? Beijing’s failure to pursue guerrilla war to the hilt in the 1960s struck many observers as a surprise and an anomaly. The paradox in the end was explained by assuming that the Chinese were serious in all their talk about the importance of indigenous roots for rebellions. Everyone who has ever stimulated a rebellion by sending in outside agitators or "focos" in the past has claimed that the rebellion was a spontaneous act of the people already legitimately within the region, but there has always been reason to discount and suspect this as propaganda. After a while, however, it looked like the Chinese Communists were more sincere about this line. Having narrowly escaped becoming a Soviet satellite itself, perhaps China was averse to acquiring satellites of its own.
Yet such ideological sincerity and depth come much into question again with the tremendous upheaval in Chinese domestic practice since Mao’s death. Russian observers, and some others, were predicting that China would give up its hostility to Moscow once Mao had passed away. This was viewed as the Chairman’s personal ideological fetish which had been accepted by the rest of the Chinese. Yet the bizarre sequence is that the Chinese, since 1976, seem to be disowning almost everything else that Mao stood for, while persisting doggedly in their vehement hostility toward the Soviet Union. The ideological model by which Beijing was simply concerned for the purity of Marxism, and thus found Moscow to be a dangerous form of social imperialism and heretical backsliding, might plausibly explain the shifts of the earlier 1970s, but not Chinese policies in the 1980s.
Can the ins and outs instead be explained more easily by a Chinese interest in international power? The totality of the shift toward the United States in the 1970s and the general failure to carry through with the 1960s espousals of guerrilla insurgency make power pursuit also difficult as an explanation of Chinese foreign policy. China would certainly improve its bargaining position if (as many had expected after Mao’s death) it would warm up somewhat to the Russians, leaving the United States more in fear of a fuller Sino-Soviet détente, leading Washington to enter the bidding with greater offers and concessions, and then seeing what counterconcessions the Russians were prepared to come in with, etc.
Two somewhat more elaborate explanations for Chinese foreign policy will have to be introduced here, tied to their implications for our original questions on the more general shape of international relations.
The first, which might be very quickly endorsed by those who perceive a burgeoning Soviet power and a clear end to détente, would be that Beijing’s continuing hostility to Moscow, even after the death of Mao, comes simply in response to a real threat of a Soviet military invasion or intimidation of China. Chinese commentaries never tire of pointing to the numbers of Soviet troops, tanks, and missiles arrayed in Siberia along the Soviet side of the border and in Mongolia, Moscow’s satellite. What happened to Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia, and Cambodia is thus what Beijing is quite genuinely assumed to fear, to the extent that the Chinese have had no choice except to enlist as fullfledged allies of the United States and NATO.
China’s defection from Moscow in the 1970s was viewed as a reinforcement for détente, making the world multipolar rather than bipolar, easing tensions all around. But the Soviet bloc, in this view, is so strong, even after the defection of China, that the world will have to remain bipolar. Beijing’s shift into the Western camp might barely suffice to spare China or the West from Soviet military attack. Just as Chinese strength did not amount to any real counterweight to the Soviet-Cuban expeditionary potential in Africa, it might not have enough weight on its own to play such a role for Asia. When Hanoi’s forces, with Soviet material backing, invaded Cambodia, the Chinese retaliatory invasion of North Vietnam showed Beijing to be relatively weak, rather than an importantly strong counterweight.
Yet there is at least one remaining question begged by this picture of Beijing’s foreign policy being shaped so much by Soviet strength and non-Soviet (here Chinese) weakness. Why did China become so weak? Does this weakness not reflect more than raw power potential, but rather another variant of the undercurrents of mass feeling and ideological disarray that we have been describing for the other major powers as well? The Great Cultural Revolution was assuredly imposed from the top of the Chinese power structure by Chairman Mao and his associates. It also obviously took on a life of its own with the masses in China. The stress on being "red rather than expect" then looks very much like a functional equivalent of our Western tendencies toward rejecting national military competence, toward stressing what is pure in life over what reinforces national power, and toward being skeptical about the priority of foreign threats. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army obviously had to pay the price, the second large army within a decade to be unsuccessful within Vietnam because of attitudes and trends back in its own cities and countryside.
If mass feeling and ideology have a certain life of their own in China, shaping international politics as well as being shaped by it, what does this suggest about the future of China as a factor in détente? The simplest model of viewing Chinese foreign policy as a function of ideology had to be discarded with the passing of Mao, but a more complicated ideological model may still be required (a model which, by the way, would not leave it safe for the West to count forever on continuing Chinese hostility toward Moscow). Just as this ideology has upset détente somewhat by leaving China surprisingly weak (weaker than any power-minded state ought to be), it may yet surprise us with some new turnings of zeal.
While the hostility to Moscow and friendship toward Washington have survived all of its recent shifts, can this international alignment really last indefinitely? If the Chinese can be counted on to care about considerations other than their own power position in places like Angola, Poland, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, will such considerations paradoxically make Beijing a less aggressive and less active state, thereby not playing the requisite role for stabilizing the international system and making this system multipolar?
We are required now to attempt some sort of assessment of how national purposes and societal trends will interact as we move through the 1980s and 1990s. Mass opinion and societal trends based on it have always had some potential for becoming self-confirming. "Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came." Yet the material realities of international power struggle impose a little more determinacy than this on the entire picture. The fears of an uneven and one-sided move away from military preparedness are, therefore, not so readily erased. "Suppose they gave a war, and only one side came."
Will this be a time of greater and greater confusion on all sides, occasionally reducing the likelihood of peace but at many points increasing it? Or will it rather be a time of confusion in the Western world, without a matching societal disarray in the Soviet camp, making for the prospect of unchecked aggressions, and great threats to liberty as we know it?
The U.S. Army did not look as cohesive in Vietnam as it did during World War II. The Dutch armed forces today look more unionized than military. The People’s Liberation Army invasion of Vietnam looked less like the Asian hordes we remember from the Korean War and the Indian-Chinese border war, and more like a force weakened by years of Chinese Cultural Revolution and failure to modernize equipment. It is too early to tell whether the Afghanistan experience will make the Soviet Army look more professional or less so. The expedition in Africa certainly enhanced the world’s view of Cuban military prowess, but the armed forces of Eastern Europe typically look ready to shoot at a Russian or another Communist neighbor just as much as at the soldiers of NATO. And does anyone expect Russian soldiers to be as resolute in the service of the motherland in 1982 as they were in 1942?
As we relate mass tendencies to national purposes, we inevitably move into what has long been a subject of debate in general international relations theory. For China, the Soviet Union, or the United States, we will have to consider whether such states are acting mainly out of material and selfish motives, i.e., mainly pursuing power, or whether there is instead also a substantial concern for ideology— concern for what such ideology prescribes as the correct approach to human happiness.
The skeptical "power politics" analyst would assume that Moscow, Washington, and every other regime will always be interested only in power and the ingredients of that power. Thus the oil and the military bases of the Middle East would always outweigh any concerns about the social, economic, and political life people enjoy there. A radical analyst of international relations would tend to see the Marxist forces of the world operating with more genuine concern for the welfare of man, with the West seeking power and markets. The defender of American foreign policy would see his side pursuing more altruistic goals, while Soviets seek power positions and material advantage.
A fourth possibility to consider is that all sides are engrossed with less narrow and more altruistic ends. But if we assume a greater seriousness for ideology in these states, so that it is supplying reasons for action rather than excuses for action, so that it amounts to genuine motivation rather than simply window dressing, in which direction does such ideology drive the states involved; and what is the net contribution to détente or its opposite, to peace or war?
For both the United States and the Soviet Union, it could be contended that the general drift of ideology in the 1940s through the 1950s and early 1960s was to pull these powers outward, supplying an additional reason for challenging each other around the globe. The United States was a self-satisfied state, seeing its own model as one that all other countries in the world could adopt so as to increase their happiness. The Soviet Union was similarly sold on its own model, convinced that it would conduce to happiness abroad.
This is to contradict any suggestion that altruistic and principled motives were somehow more likely to guide the Moscow regime or the United States government into more agreeable and peaceful policies. A desire to bring the good life to a foreign region might indeed sometimes lead to greater military activism and more trouble for the world than the simple selfish material concerns that the theorists of power politics typically advocate. A concern for the happiness of others (i.e., a serious acceptance of one’s own ideology, rather than simply using it as window dressing) is no more inherently peaceful than it is inherently warlike. It is simply substantially different from the ordinary power-politics concerns of a state not guided by such considerations, such that predictions based on assumptions of power interest will often turn out to be wrong.
Two major differences, however, emerge between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Ideology in the Soviet Union has been a catechism imposed by the regime downward on the rest of the country, while in the United States it is generated from below. Second, self-confidence in the American model faded badly in the 1960s, perhaps thereby generating the very phenomenon of détente, as ideological considerations now pulled the United States inward. Such a fading of self-confidence in the Soviet model has not yet become obvious in the Politburo. Will the tribulations and travails imminent for the Soviet Union at last upset the Kremlin’s ideological self-confidence, or at least generate enough worries to distract all the Russians from ideology, and, thereby, perhaps round out the balance appropriate to détente? Possibly they will.
The Chinese case is again different, for here an ideology imposed from the top has had much the same impact as the post-1967 American spontaneous ideological trends. Because China is ideologically motivated (rather than simply concerned with power as the realpolitik analysts would have it), it is less of a factor on the world scene, the opposite of the impact ideology has had on the Soviet Union, and the opposite of the impact of such considerations in the United States before 1967.
If China were more selfish, more inclined to act like a traditional power-seeking state, it might play more of a role in the world and might bizarrely be more stabilizing now. China’s ideological intensity has tended to make the People’s Republic less of a power counterweight to the Russians around the globe.
The premises of détente were widely endorsed and accepted at the beginning of the seventies, but they were widely doubted at the end of that decade, with this playing an important role in the election of Ronald Reagan as President. Yet we can surely not all agree that détente is an illusion. The United States and the world have not really swung back into the rigid hostilities of the Cold War.
The debate about the relative prospects of détente, the likely shape of international politics, the comparative strength of East and West, and the probability of armed conflict continues in the United States. It will continue in a relatively explicit form among academics, but it will affect the American public as a whole. In the process, it leaves American foreign policy looking far less predictable and organized than in the past. Soviet foreign policy debates will look more organized and resolute by comparison, but the important issue (indeed the center of the entire discussion) is whether it will be so.
Will the Kremlin in fact now be working from strength or from weakness? The social, economic, and political undercurrents of Soviet life suggest that the Communist leadership will also feel more beleaguered in the future. We have indeed been painting a picture in this article of global weakness and global erosion of capacities for armed conflict. If the U.S.S.R. seems expansionist for the moment, this may be less because of strength and cohesion in the Soviet camp and more because of the disarray and weakness in the rest of the world.
The Kremlin must look forward to many problems comparable to those confronting the West. How does a dictatorial regime react to the prospects of once again falling behind the West in industrial potential and concomitant military capability, to the prospects of economic distress and unrest in the Soviet satellites, to the prospects noted of demographic disarray and ethnic unrest within the U.S.S.R?
In the past such regimes have sometimes lashed outwards when they felt that time was running against them, but at other times they have bowed to the inevitable and moderated their behavior. Obviously, our task in the West is to keep the U.S.S.R. continuously deterred from any rash and adventurous act, lest it feel that "now is the time to strike," when compared to a less promising future. At the same moment, our task is to avoid confronting the Soviet leadership with too great a prospect of defeat, lest the Soviet leadership become panicked at some point in the belief that it has nothing left to lose. Finally, the West’s task is to judge Soviet military threats correctly, not overrate them.
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
Contributor
George H. Quester
(A.B., Columbia University; M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University) is Professor of Government at Cornell University and Visiting Professor at the National War College, Washington, D.C. He has also taught at Harvard University (1965-70) and served in the USAF during the period 1958-61. Dr. Quester is author of Offense and Defense in the International System (1977). Navies and Arms Control (1980), Nuclear Proliferation: Breaking the Chain (1981) and numerous other books and articles.Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.Air & Space Power Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor