4

The Closing of an Era

FRUSTRATIONS

The 1980s were to bring startling changes, but few in the Middle East, where, as the decade began, they had seemed likely. Instead, a fundamental stagnation seemed to hang over the region. Tension had been high there in 1980, as it had been for years, and so were the hopes of most interested parties about resolving the problems presented by Israel’s appearance as a successor state to the Ottoman empire in Palestine. Except perhaps among a minority of Israelis, these hopes were to be gravely disappointed. For a time, it had looked as if the Iranian revolution might transform the rules of the game played hitherto and some had indeed hoped so. Ten years later, though, it would still be very difficult to say what it had actually changed outside Iran, or what was the true significance of the uproar in the Islamic world that it had provoked. What had looked for a time like an Islamic resurgence could also be seen as merely one of the recurrent waves of puritanism which have from time to time across the centuries stimulated and regenerated the faithful. Clearly, too, tension owed much to circumstance; Israel’s occupation of the third of Islam’s Holy Places in Jerusalem had suddenly enhanced the sense of Islamic solidarity. Yet the attack by Iraq on Iran in 1980 led to a bloody war lasting eight years and costing a million lives. Whatever else might have been behind it, it also mattered in that conflict that Iraq was Sunni, Iran Shi’ite. Once more, Islamic peoples were divided along ancient lines as well as by contemporary issues.

It soon appeared, too, that although it could irritate and alarm the superpowers (the USSR especially, because of its millions of Muslim subjects), Iran could not thwart them. At the end of 1979, its rulers had to watch helplessly when a Russian army went into Afghanistan to prop up a puppet communist regime there against Muslim rebels. One reason why the Iranians backed terrorists and kidnappers was that that was the best (or worst) they could do. Nor, in spite of their success over the American hostages, could they get the former Shah back to face Islamic justice. By successfully tweaking the eagle’s tail feathers in the hostage affair, Iran had humiliated the United States, but this soon seemed much less important than it did at the time. In retrospect, a declaration by President Carter in 1980 that the United States regarded the Persian Gulf as an area of vital interest revealed more of the future. It was an early sign of the ending of the exaggerated mood of American uncertainty and defeatism. A central reality of international politics was about to reassert itself. For all the dramatic changes since the Cuban crisis, the American republic was still in 1980 one of only two states whose might gave them unquestioned status as (to use an official Soviet definition) ‘the greatest world powers, without whose participation not a single international problem can be solved’. This participation in some instances would be implicit rather than explicit, but it was a fundamental datum of the way the world worked.

History, moreover, has no favourites for long. Although some Americans had been frightened by Soviet strength after the Cuban missile crisis, there were plentiful signs by the early 1970s that the Soviet rulers were in difficulties. They had to face a truism that Marxism itself proclaimed: that consciousness evolves with material conditions. Two results, among others, of real but limited relaxation in Soviet society were an evident dissidence, trivial in scale but suggesting a growing demand for greater spiritual freedom, and a less explicit, but real, groundswell of opinion that further material gains should be forthcoming. The Soviet Union nevertheless continued to spend colossal sums on armaments (about a quarter of its GDP in the 1980s). Yet these could hardly suffice, it appeared. To carry even this burden, western technology, management techniques and, possibly, capital would be needed. What change might follow on that was debatable, but that there would be change was certain.

However, by 1980, there had grown even stronger the most compelling tie between the two superpowers. For all the huge effort by the Soviet Union to give themselves greater nuclear striking power over the United States, superiority at such a level is a somewhat notional matter. The Americans, with their gift for the arresting slogan, concisely summed up the situation as MAD; that is to say, both countries had the capacity to produce ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, or, more precisely, a situation in which each of two potential combatants had enough striking power to ensure that, even if a surprise attack deprived it of the cream of its weapons, what remained would be sufficient to ensure a reply so appalling as to turn its opponent’s cities into smoking wildernesses and leave its armed forces capable of little but attempting to control the terrorized survivors.

This bizarre possibility was a great conservative force. Even if madmen (to put the matter simply) are occasionally to be found in seats of power, Dr Johnson’s observation that the knowledge that you are to be hanged wonderfully concentrates the mind is applicable to collectivities threatened with disaster on this scale: the knowledge that a blunder may be followed by extinction is a great stimulus to prudence. Here may well lie the most fundamental explanation of a new degree of cooperation, which had already been shown in the 1970s by the United States and the Soviet Union in spite of their specific quarrels. A 1972 treaty on defensive missile limitation had been one of its first fruits; it owed something to a new awareness on both sides that science could now monitor infringements of such agreements (not all military research made for an increase of tension). In the following year talks began on further arms limitations, while another set of discussions began to explore the possibility of a comprehensive security arrangement in Europe.

In return for the implicit recognition of Europe’s post-war frontiers (above all, that between the two Germanys), the Soviet negotiators had finally agreed in 1975 at Helsinki to increase economic intercourse between eastern and western Europe and to sign a guarantee of human rights and political freedom. The last was, of course, unenforceable. Yet it may well have had more importance than the symbolic gains of frontier recognition to which the Soviet negotiators had attached much significance. Western success over human rights was not only to prove a great encouragement to dissidents in communist Europe and Russia, but side-stepped old restraints on what had been deemed interference in the internal affairs of communist states. Gradually there began to arise public criticisms that were in the end to help to bring about change in eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the flow of trade and investment between the two Europes began almost at once to increase, though also very slowly. It was the nearest approach so far to a general peace treaty ending the Second World War, and it gave the Soviet Union what its leaders most desired, assurance of the security of the territorial settlement that was one of the major spoils of victory in 1945.

For all that, Americans were very worried about world affairs as 1980, the year of a presidential election, approached. Eighteen years before, the Cuban crisis had shown the world that the United States was top dog. It had then enjoyed superior military strength, the (usually dependable) support of allies, clients and satellites the world over, and the public will to sustain a world diplomatic and military effort while grappling with huge domestic problems. By 1980, many of its citizens felt the world had changed and were unhappy about it. When the new Republican president, Ronald Reagan, took office in 1981, his supporters looked back on a decade of what seemed increasing American powerlessness. He inherited an enormous budgetary deficit, disappointment over what looked like recent advances by Soviet power in Africa and Afghanistan, and dismay over what was believed to be the disappearance of an American superiority in nuclear weapons enjoyed in the 1960s.