As the 1960s moved into the 1970s, there nevertheless remained good reasons why the Washington-Moscow relationship should continue to seem all-important in world affairs. Militarily, the USSR had drawn much closer to the United States, but both were still in a different league from everyone else. In 1974, for example, the United States was spending $85 billion and the USSR was spending $109 billion on defense, which was three to four times what was spent by China ($26 billion) and eight to ten times what was spent by the leading European states (U.K. $9.7 billion; France, $9.9 billion; West Germany, $13.7 billion);145 and the American and Russian armed forces, of over 2 million and 3 million men, respectively, were much larger than those of the European states, and much better equipped than the 3 million men in the Chinese services. Both superpowers had over 5,000 combat aircraft, more than ten times the number possessed by the former Great Powers.146 Their total tonnage in warships—the United States had 2.8 million tons, the USSR 2.1 million tons in 1974—was well ahead of Britain (370,000 tons), France (160,000 tons), Japan (180,000 tons), and China (150,000 tons).147 But the greatest disparity lay in the numbers of nuclear delivery weapons, shown in Table 38.
Table 38. Nuclear Delivery Vehicles of the Powers, 1974148
So capable had each superpower become of obliterating the other (and anyone else besides)—a state of affairs quickly named MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction—that they began to evolve arrangements for controlling the nuclear arms race in various ways. There was, following the Cuban missile crisis, the installation of a “hot line” to allow each side to communicate in the event of another critical occasion; there was the nuclear test-ban treaty of 1963, also signed by the United Kingdom, which banned testing in the atmosphere, under water, and in outer space; there was the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) of 1972, which set limits on the numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles each side could possess and halted the Russian construction of an anti-ballistic-missile system; there was the extension of that agreement at Vladivostock in 1975, and, in the late 1970s, there were negotiations toward a SALT II treaty (signed in June 1979, but never ratified by the U.S. Senate). Yet these various measures of agreement, and the particular economic and domestic-political and foreign-policy motives which pushed each side into them, did not stop the arms race; if anything, the banning or limitation of one weapon system merely led to a transfer of resources to another area. From the late 1950s onward, the USSR steadily and inexorably increased its allocations to the armed forces; and while the pattern of American defense spending was distorted by its expensive war in Vietnam and then the public reaction against that venture, the long-term trend was also toward ever-higher totals. Every few years, newer weapon systems would be added: multiple warheads were fitted to each side’s rockets; missile-carrying submarines augmented each side’s navy; the nuclear stalemate instrategic missiles (provoking a European fear that the United States would not respond to a Soviet attack westward by unleashing long-range American missiles, since that could in turn provoke atomic strikes upon American cities) led to new types of medium-range or “theater” nuclear weapons, like the Pershing II and the cruise missiles being developed as answers to the Russian SS-20. The arms race and arms-control discussions of various sorts were obverse sides of the same coin; but each kept Washington and Moscow at the center of the stage.
In other fields, too, their rivalry appeared central. As mentioned earlier, one of the more notable features of the Soviet arms buildup since 1960 was the enormous expansion of its surface fleet—physically, as it constructed ever more powerful, missile-bearing destroyers and cruisers, then medium-sized helicopter carriers, then aircraft carriers;149 and geographically, as the Soviet navy began to send more and more vessels into the Mediterranean and farther afield, to the Indian Ocean, West Africa, Indochina, and Cuba, where it was able to use an increasing number of bases. This last development reflected a very significant extension of American-Russian rivalries into the Third World, chiefly because of Moscow’s further success in breaking into regions where foreign influence had hitherto been a western monopoly. The continued tension in the Middle East, and especially the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 (where American arms supplies to Israel were decisive), meant that various Arab states—Syria, Libya, Iraq—would remain looking to Moscow for assistance. The Marxist regimes of Southern Yemen and Somalia provided naval-base facilities to the Russian navy, giving it a new maritime presence in the Red Sea. But, as usual, breakthroughs were accompanied by setbacks: Moscow’s apparent preference for Ethiopia led to the expulsion of Soviet personnel and ships from Somalia in 1977, just a few years after the same had happened in Egypt; and Russian advances in this area were countered by the growth of the American presence in Oman and Diego Garcia, naval-base rights in Kenya and Somalia, and increased arms shipments to Egypt, Saudia Arabia, and Pakistan. Farther to the south, however, the Soviet-Cuban military assistance to the MPLA forces in Angola, the frequent attempts of the Soviet-aided Libyan regime of Qaddafi to export revolution elsewhere, and the presence of Marxist governments in Ethiopia, Mozambique, Guinea, Congo, and other West African states suggested that Moscow was winning in the struggle for global influence. Its own military move into Afghanistan in 1979— the first such expansion (outside eastern Europe) since the Second World War—and Cuba’s encouragement of leftist regimes in Nicaragua and Grenada furthered this impression that the American-Russian rivalry knew no limits, and provoked additional countermoves and increases in defense spending on Washington’s part. By 1980, with a new Republican administration denouncing the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” against which massive defense forces and unbending policies were the only answer, little seemed to have changed since the days of John Foster Dulles.150
Yet, for all this focus upon the American-Russian relationship and its many ups and downs between 1960 and 1980, other trends had been at work to make the international power system much less bipolar than it had appeared to be in the earlier period. Not only had the Third World emerged to complicate matters, but significant fissures had occurred in what had earlier appeared to be the two monolithic blocs dominated by Moscow and Washington. The most decisive of these by far, with repercussions which are difficult to measure fully even at the present time, was the split between the USSR and Communist China. In retrospect, it may seem self-evident that even the allegedly “scientific” and “universalist” claims of Marxism would founder on the rocks of local circumstances, indigenous cultural strengths, and differing stages of economic development—after all, Lenin himself had had to make massive deviations from the original doctrine of dialectical materialism in order to secure the 1917 Revolution. And some foreign observers of Mao’s Communist movement in the 1930s and 1940s were aware that he, at least, was not inclined to adhere slavishly to Stalin’s dogmatic position toward the relative importance of workers and peasantry. They were also aware that Moscow, in its turn, had been less than wholehearted in its support of the Chinese Communist Party and had, even as late as 1946 and 1948, tried to balance it off against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. This, in the USSR’s view, would avoid the creation of “a vigorous new Communist regime established without the assistance of the Red Army in a country with almost three times the population of Russia [which] would inevitably become a competing pole of attraction within the world Communist movement.”151
Nonetheless, the sheer extent of the split took most observers by surprise, and was for many years missed by a United States aroused by the fear of a global Communist conspiracy. Admittedly, the Korean War and the subsequent Chinese-American jockeying over Taiwan took attention from the lukewarm state of the Moscow-Peking axis, in which Stalin’s relatively small amounts of aid to China were always tendered for a price which emphasized Russia’s privileges in Mongolia and Manchuria. Although Mao was able to redress the balance in his 1954 negotiations with the Russians, his hostility to the United States over the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu and his more extreme adherence (at least at that time) to the belief in the inevitability of a clash with capitalism made him bitterly suspicious of Khrushchev’s early détente policies. From Moscow’s viewpoint, however, it seemed foolish in the late 1950s to provoke the Americans unnecessarily, especially when the latter had a clear nuclear advantage; it would also be a setback, diplomatically, to support China in its 1959 border clash with India, which was so important to Russia’s Third World policy; and it would be highly unwise, given the Chinese proclivity to independent action, to aid their nuclear program without getting some controls over it—all of these being regarded as successive betrayals by Mao. By 1959, Khrushchev had canceled the atomic agreement with Peking and was proffering India far larger loans than had ever been given to China. In the following year, the “split” became open for all to see at the World Communist Parties’ meeting in Moscow. By 1962–1963, things were worse still: Mao had denounced the Russians for giving in over Cuba, and then for signing the partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the United States and Britain; the Russians had by then cut off all aid to China and its ally Albania and increased supplies to India; and the first of the Sino-Soviet border clashes occurred (although never as serious as those of 1969). More significant still was the news that in 1964 the Chinese had exploded their first atomic bomb and were hard at work on delivery systems.152
Strategically, this split was the single most important event since 1945. In September 1964, Pravda readers were shocked to see a report that Mao was not only claiming back the Asian territories which the Chinese Empire had lost to Russia in the nineteenth century, but also denouncing the USSR for its appropriations of the Kurile Islands, parts of Poland, East Prussia, and a section of Rumania. Russia, in Mao’s view, had to be reduced in size—in respect to China’s claims, by 1.5 million square kilometers!153 How much the opinionated Chinese leader had been carried away by his own rhetoric it is hard to say, but there was no doubt that all this—together with the border clashes and the development of Chinese atomic weapons—was thoroughly alarming to the Kremlin. Indeed, it is likely that at least some of the buildup of the Russian armed forces in the 1960s was due to this perceived new danger to the east as well as the need to respond to the Kennedy administration’s defense increases. “The number of Soviet divisions deployed along the Chinese frontier was increased from fifteen in 1967 to twenty-one in 1969 and thirty in 1970”—this latter jump being caused by the serious clash at Damansky (or Chenpao) island in March 1969. “By 1972 forty-four Soviet divisions stood guard along the 4,500-mile border with China (compared to thirty-one divisions in Eastern Europe), while a quarter of the Soviet air force had been deployed from west to east.”154 With China now possessing a hydrogen bomb, there were hints that Moscow was considering a preemptive strike against the nuclear installation at Lop Nor—causing the United States to make its own contingency plans, since it felt that it could not allow Russia to obliterate China.155 Washington had come a long way since its 1964 ponderings about joining the USSR in “preventative military action” to arrest China’s development as a nuclear power!156
This was hardly to say that Mao’s China had emerged as a full-fledged third superpower. Economically, it had enormous problems—which were exacerbated by its leader’s decision to initiate the “Cultural Revolution,” with all its accompanying discontinuities and uncertainties. And while it might boast the largest army in the world, its people’s militias were not likely to be a match for Soviet motor rifle divisions. China’s navy was negligible compared with the expanding Russian fleet; its air force, though large, chiefly consisted of older planes; and its nuclear-delivery system was but in its infancy. Nonetheless, unless the USSR was prepared to run the risk of provoking the Americans and offending world opinion by launching a massive nuclear attack upon China, any fighting at a lesser level could quickly produce enormous casualties—which the Chinese seemed willing to accept, but Russian politicians in the Brezhnev era were less keen about. It was therefore not surprising that as Russo-Chinese relations worsened, Moscow should not only have shown interest in nuclear-arms-limitation talks with the West but also have quickened the pace of improving relations with countries like the Federal Republic of Germany, which under Willy Brandt seemed much more willing to foster detente than in Adenauer’s days.
In the political and diplomatic arena, the Sino-Soviet split was even more embarrassing to the Kremlin. Although Khrushchev himself had been willing to tolerate “separate roads to socialism” (always provided those routes were not too divergent!), it was quite another thing for the USSR to be openly accused of having abandoned true Marxist principles; for its satellites and clients to be encouraged to throw off the Russian “yoke”; and for its diplomatic efforts in the Third World to be complicated by Peking’s rival aid and propaganda—the more especially since Mao’s brand of peasant-based Communism appeared often more appropriate than the Russian emphasis upon an industrial proletariat. This did not mean that the Soviet Empire in eastern Europe was in any real danger of following the Chinese lead—only the eccentric regime in Albania did so.157 But it remained embarrassing to Moscow to be denounced by Peking for suppressing the Czech liberalization reforms in 1968, and again for its actions against Afghanistan in 1979. In the Third World, moreover, China was somewhat better placed to block Russian influence: it competed hard in North Yemen; it made much of its railway construction scheme in Tanzania; it criticized Moscow for failing to give sufficient support to the Vietminh and the Vietcong against the United States; and as it renewed relations with Japan, it warned Tokyo about a too-heavy economic collaboration with the Russians in Siberia. Once again, this was rarely an equal struggle—Russia could usually offer much more to Third World states in terms of credits and advanced arms, and could also project its influence by using Cuban and Libyan surrogates. But simply having to compete with a fellow Marxist state as well as with the United States was altogether more upsetting than the predictable, bipolar rivalries of two decades earlier.
In all sorts of ways, then, China’s assertive and independent line made diplomatic relationships more complicated and baroque, especially in Asia. The Chinese had been stung by Moscow’s wooing of India and even more by its dispatch of military supplies to New Delhi following Sino-Indian border clashes; not surprisingly, therefore, Peking gave support to Pakistan in its own clashes with India, and was strongly resentful of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. China was further alienated by Moscow’s support for North Vietnam’s expansion in the late 1970s, by the latter’s entry into Comecon, and by the increasing Russian naval presence in Vietnamese ports. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978, China engaged itself in bloody and not very successful border clashes with its southern neighbor, which was in turn being heavily supplied with Russian weapons. By this stage, Moscow was even looking more favorably toward the Taiwan regime, and Peking was urging the United States to increase its naval forces in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific, to counter the Russian squadrons. A mere twenty years after China was criticizing the USSR for being too soft toward the West, it was pressing NATO to increase its defenses and warning both Japan and the Common Market against strengthening economic ties with Russia!158
By comparison, the dislocations which occurred in the western camp from the early 1960s onward, caused chiefly by de Gaulle’s campaign against American hegemony, were nowhere near as serious in the long term—although they certainly added to the impression that the two blocs were breaking up. With strong memories of the Second World War still in mind, de Gaulle seethed at the fact that he was treated as less than equal by the United States; he resented American policy during the Suez crisis in 1956, not to mention Dulles’s habit of threatening a nuclear conflagration over issues like Quemoy. Although de Gaulle had more than enough to keep him busy for several years after 1958 as he sought to extricate France from Algeria, even at that time he criticized western Europe’s subservience (as he saw it) to American interests. Like the British a decade earlier, he saw in nuclear weapons a chance to preserve Great Power status; when news of the first French atomic test of 1960 arrived, the general called out, “Hooray for France—since this morning she is stronger and prouder.”159 Determined to have France’s nuclear deterrent totally independent, he angrily rejected Washington’s offer of a Polaris missile system similar to Britain’s because of the conditions the Kennedy administration attached to it. While this meant that France’s own nuclear-weapons program would consume a far greater proportion of the total defense budget (perhaps as much as 30 percent) than it did elsewhere, de Gaulle and his successors felt the price was worth paying. At the same time, he began to pull France out of the NATO military structure, expelling that organization’s HQ from Paris in 1966 and closing down all American bases on French soil. In parallel with this, he sought to improve France’s relations with Moscow—where his actions were warmly applauded—and he ceaselessly proclaimed the need for Europe to stand on its own feet.160
De Gaulle’s spectacular actions did not rest merely on Gallic rhetoric and cultural pride. Boosted by Marshall Plan aid and other American grants, and benefiting from Europe’s general economic recovery after the late 1940s, the French economy had grown swiftly for almost two decades.161 The colonial wars in Indochina (1950–1954) and Algeria (1956–1962) diverted French resources for a while, but not irremediably. Having negotiated very favorable terms for its national interests at the time of the formation of the European Economic Community in 1957, France was able to benefit from this larger market while restructuring its own agriculture and modernizing its industry. Although critical of Washington and firmly preventing British entry into the EEC, de Gaulle effected a dramatic reconciliation with Adenauer’s Germany in 1963. And all the time he spoke of a need for Europe to stand on its own feet, to be free of superpower domination, to remember its glorious past and to cooperate—with France naturally showing the lead—in the pursuit of equally glorious destiny.162 These were heady words, but they evoked a response on bothsides of the Iron Curtain, and appealed to many who disliked both the Russian and American political cultures, not to mention their respective foreign policies.
By 1968, however, de Gaulle’s own political career had been undermined by the students’ and workers’ revolt. The strains caused by modernization and the still relatively modest size of the French economy (3.5 percent of world manufacturing production in 1963)163 meant that the country simply was not strong enough to play the influential role that the general had envisaged; and whatever the special agreements he proffered to the West Germans, the latter dared not abandon their tight links with the United States, upon which, in the final resort, Bonn politicians knew they heavily depended. Moreover, Russia’s ruthless crushing of the Czech reforms in 1968 showed that the eastern superpower had no intention of letting the countries in its sphere evolve their own policies, let alone become part of a French-led, European-wide confederation.
Nonetheless, for all his hubris, de Gaulle had symbolized and accelerated trends which could not be stopped. Despite their military weaknesses compared with the United States and the USSR, the armed forces of the western European states were much larger and stronger, relatively speaking, than they had been in the post-1945 years; two of them had nuclear weapons and were developing delivery systems. Economically, as will be discussed in more detail below, the “recovery of Europe” had succeeded splendidly. What was more, despite Russia’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the era of the Cold War division of Europe into hermetically sealed blocs was being weakened. Willy Brandt’s spectacular policy of reconciliation with Russia, with Poland and Czechoslovakia, and especially with the (at first very reluctant) East German regime between 1969 and 1973, chiefly on the basis of accepting the 1945 boundaries as permanent, inaugurated a period of blossoming East-West contacts. Western investments and technology flowed across the Iron Curtain, and this “economic détente” spilled over into cultural exchanges, the Helsinki Accords (of 1975) on human rights, and efforts to avert future military misunderstandings and to achieve mutual force reductions. To all this the superpowers, for their own good reasons, and with some inevitable reservations (especially on the Soviet side), gave their blessing. But perhaps the most significant fact had been the persistent pressures by the Europeans themselves to effect the rapprochement;even when relations cooled between Moscow and Washington, therefore, it was going to be extremely difficult in the future for either the USSR or the United States to halt this process.164
Of the two, the Americans were in a much better position than the Russians to adjust to the new, pluralistic international environment. Whatever de Gaulle’s anti-American gestures, they were nowhere near the seriousness of Sino-Soviet border clashes, elimination of bilateral trade, ideological invective, and diplomatic jostling across the globe which, by 1969, were causing some observers to argue that a Russo-Chinese war was inevitable.165 However much American administrations resented France’s actions, they hardly needed to redeploy their armed forces because of such quarrels. In any case, NATO was still permitted to retain overflight rights and the fuel-oil pipeline which ran across France, and Paris kept up its special defense arrangements with West Germany—so that its troops, too, would be available if the Warsaw Pact forces struck westward. Finally, of course, it had been a fundamental axiom of American policy after 1945 that a strong and independent Europe (that is, independent from Russian domination) was in the United States’ long-term interests and would help to reduce its defense burdens—even while admitting that such a Europe might also be an economic and perhaps a diplomatic competitor. It was for that reason that Washington had encouraged all moves toward European integration, and was urging Britain to join the EEC. By contrast, Russia might begin not only to feel insecure militarily if a powerful European confederation emerged in the West, but also to worry about the magnetic pull which such a body would exercise upon the Rumanians, Poles, and other satellite peoples. A policy of selective détente and economic cooperation with western Europe by Moscow was one thing, partly because it could bring technological and trading benefits, partly because it might draw the Europeans further away from the Americans, and partly because of the China challenge on Russia’s Asian front. In the longer term, however, a prosperous, resurgent Europe which would overshadow the USSR in all respects except the military (and perhaps become strong in that area, too) could hardly be in Russia’s best interests.166
Yet if, in retrospect, the United States was better placed to adjust to the changing patterns of world power, that was not obvious for many years after 1960. In the first place, there was a chronic dislike of “Asian Communism,” with Mao’s China replacing Khrushchev’s Russia as the fomenter of world revolution in the eyes of many Americans. China’s border war of 1962 with India, a country which Washington (like Moscow) wished to woo, confirmed the earlier aggressive image emanating from the clashes over Quemoy and Matsu; and détente between the United States and China was hardly conceivable in the early 1960s, when Mao’s propaganda machine was denouncing the Russians for backing down over Cuba and for signing the limited nuclear-test-ban treaty with the West. Finally, between 1965 and 1968 China was in the convulsions of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which made the country appear chronically unstable as well as even more ideologically abhorrent to administrations in Washington. None of this pointed to “a situation in which much progress towards better relations with the United States was likely.”167
Above all, of course, the United States in these years was itself increasingly convulsed by the problems emerging from the war in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese, and the Vietcong in the South, appeared to most Americans as but new manifestations of the creeping Asian Communism which had to be forcibly contained before it did even further damage; and since those revolutionary forces were being encouraged and supplied by China and Russia, both of the latter Powers (but perhaps especially the bitterly critical regime in Peking) could only be seen as part of a hostile Marxist coalition lined up against the “free world.” Indeed, as the Johnson administration escalated its own buildup in Vietnam, decision-makers in Washington frequently worried about how far they could go without provoking the sort of Chinese intervention which had occurred in the Korean War.168 From the Chinese government’s standpoint, it must have been a matter of earnest debate throughout the 1960s about whether the growing clash with the Soviets to the north was as ominous as the ever-escalating American military and aerial operations to the south. Yet while in fact its own relationship with the ethnically different Vietnamese had traditionally been one of rivalry, and it was deeply suspicious of the amount of military hardware which Russia was giving to Hanoi, these tensions were invisible to most western eyes throughout the period of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
In so many ways, symbolic as well as practical, it would be difficult to exaggerate the impacts of the lengthy American campaign in Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia upon the international power system—or upon the national psyche of the American people themselves, most of whose perceptions of their country’s role in the world still remain strongly influenced by that conflict, albeit in different ways. The fact that this was a war fought by an “open society”—and made the more open because of revelations like the Pentagon Papers, and by the daily television and press reportage of the carnage and apparent futility of it all; that this was the first war which the United States had unequivocally lost, that it confounded the victorious experiences of the Second World War and destroyed a whole array of reputations, from those of four-star generals to those of “brightest and best” intellectuals; that it coincided with, and in no small measure helped to cause, the fissuring of a consensus in American society about the nation’s goals and priorities, was attended by inflation, unprecedented student protests and inner city disturbances, and was followed in turn by the Watergate crisis, which discredited the presidency itself for a time; that it seemed to many to stand in bitter and ironic contradiction to everything which the Founding Fathers had taught, and made the United States unpopular across most of the globe; and finally that the shamefaced and uncaring treatment of the GIs who came back from Vietnam would produce its own reaction a decade later and thus ensure that the memory of this conflict would continue to prey upon the public consciousness, in war memorials, books, television documentaries, and personal tragedies—all of this meant that the Vietnam War, although far smaller in terms of casualties, impacted upon the American people somewhat as had the First World War upon Europeans. The effects were seen, overwhelmingly, at the personal and psychological levels; more broadly, they were interpreted as a crisis in American civilization and in its constitutional arrangements. As such, they would continue to have significance quite independent of the strategical and Great Power dimensions of this conflict.
But the latter aspects are the most important ones for our survey, and require further mention here. To begin with, it provided a useful and sobering reminder that a vast superiority in military hardware and economic productivity will not always and automatically translate into militaryeffectiveness. That does not undermine the thrust of the present book, which has stressed the importance of economics and technology in large-scale, protracted (and usually coalition) wars between the Great Powers when each combatant has been equally committed to victory. Economically, the United States may have been fifty to one hundred times more productive than North Vietnam; militarily, it possessed the firepower to (as some hawks urged) bomb the enemy back into the stone age—indeed, with nuclear weapons, it had the capacity to obliterate Southeast Asia altogether. But this was not a war in which those superiorities could be made properly effective. Fear of domestic opinion, and of world reaction, prevented the use of atomic weapons against a foe who could never be a vital threat to the United States itself. Worries about the American public’s opposition to heavy casualties in a conflict whose legitimacy and efficacy came increasingly under question had similarly constrained the administration’s use of the conventional methods of warfare; restrictions were placed on the bombing campaign; the Ho Chi Minh Trail through neutral Laos could not be occupied; Russian vessels bearing arms to Haiphong harbor could not be seized. It was important not to provoke the two major Communist states into joining the war. This essentially reduced the fighting to a series of small-scale encounters in jungles and paddy fields, terrain which blunted the advantages of American firepower and (helicopter-borne) mobility, and instead placed an emphasis upon jungle-warfare techniques and unit cohesion—which was much less of a problem for the crack forces than for the rapidly turning over contingents of draftees. Although Johnson followed Kennedy’s lead in sending more and more troops to Vietnam (it peaked at 542,000, in 1969), it was never enough to meet General Westmoreland’s demands; clinging to the view that this was still a limited conflict, the government refused to mobilize the reserves, or indeed to put the economy on a war footing.169
The difficulties of fighting the war on terms disadvantageous to the United States’ real military strengths reflected a larger political problem—the discrepancy between means and ends (as Clausewitz might have put it). The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong were fighting for what they believed in very strongly; those who were not were undoubtedly subject to the discipline of a totalitarian, passionately nationalistic regime. The South Vietnamese governing system, by contrast, appeared corrupt, unpopular, and in a distinct minority, opposed by the Buddhist monks, unsupported by a frightened, exploited, and warweary peasantry; those native units loyal to the regime and who often fought well were not sufficient to compensate for this inner corrosion. As the war escalated, more and more Americans questioned the efficacy of fighting for the regime in Saigon, and worried at the way in which all this was corrupting the American armed forces themselves—in the decline in morale, the rise in cynicism, indiscipline, drug-taking, prostitution, the increasing racial sneers at the “gooks,” and atrocities in the field, not to mention the corrosion of the United States’ own currency or of its larger strategic posture. Ho Chi Minh had declared that his forces were willing to lose men at the rate of ten to one—and when they were rash enough to emerge from the jungles to attack the cities, as in the 1968 Tet offensive, they often did; but, he continued, despite those losses they would still fight on. That sort of willpower was not evident in South Vietnam. Nor was American society itself, increasingly disturbed by the war’s contradictions, willing to sacrifice everything for victory. While the latter feeling was quite understandable, given what was at stake for each side, the fact was that it proved impossible for an open democracy to wage a halfhearted war successfully. This was the fundamental contradiction, which neither McNamara’s systems analysis nor the B-52 bombers based on Guam could alter.170
More than a decade after the fall of Saigon (April 1975), and with books upon all aspects of that conflict still flooding from the presses, it still remains difficult to assess clearly how it may have affected the U.S. position in the world. Viewed from a longer perspective, say, backward from the year 2000 or 2020, it might be seen as having produced a salutory shock to American global hubris (or to what Senator Fulbright called “the arrogance of power”), and thus compelled the country to think more deeply about its political and strategical priorities and to readjust more sensibly to a world already much changed since 1945—in other words, rather like the shock which the Russians received in the Crimean War, or the British received in the Boer War, producing in their turn beneficial reforms and reassessments.
At the time, however, the short-term effects of the war could not be other than deleterious. The vast boom in spending on the war, precisely at a time when domestic expenditures upon Johnson’s “Great Society” were also leaping upward, badly affected the American economy in ways which will be examined below (pp. 434–35). Moreover, while the United States was pouring money into Vietnam, the USSR was devoting steadily larger sums to its nuclear forces—so that it achieved a rough strategic parity—and to its navy, which in these years emerged as a major force in global gunboat diplomacy; and this increasing imbalance was worsened by the American electorate’s turn against military expenditures for most of the 1970s. In 1978, “national security expenditures” were only 5 percent of GNP, lower than they had been for thirty years.171 Morale in the armed services plummeted, in consequence both of the war itself and of the postwar cuts. Shakeups in the CIA and other agencies, however necessary to check abuses, undoubtedly cramped their effectiveness. The American concentration upon Vietnam worried even sympathetic allies; its methods of fighting in support of a corrupt regime alienated public opinion, in western Europe as much as in the Third World, and was a major factor in what some writers have termed American “estrangement” from much of the rest of the planet.172 It led to a neglect of American attention toward Latin America—and a tendency to replace Kennedy’s hoped-for “Alliance for Progress” with military support for undemocratic regimes and with counterrevolutionary actions (like the 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic). The—inevitably—open post-Vietnam War debate over the regions of the globe for which the United States would or would not fight in the future disturbed existing allies, doubtless encouraged its foes, and caused wobbling neutrals to consider re-insuring themselves with the other side. At the United Nations debates, the American delegate appeared increasingly beleaguered and isolated. Things had come a long way since Henry Luce’s assertion that the United States would be the elder brother of nations in the brotherhood of man.173
The other power-political consequence of the Vietnam War was that it obscured, by perhaps as much as a decade, Washington’s recognition of the extent of the Sino-Soviet split—and thus its chance to evolve a policy to handle it. It was therefore the more striking that this neglect should be put right so swiftly after the entry into the presidency of that bitter foe of Communism Richard Nixon, in January 1969. But Nixon possessed, to use Professor Gaddis’s phrase, a “unique combination of ideological rigidity with political pragmatism”174—and the latter was especially manifest in his dealings with foreign Great Powers. Despite Nixon’s dislike of domestic radicals and animosity toward, say, Allende’s Chile for its socialist policies, the president claimed to be unideological when it came to global diplomacy. To him, there was no great contradiction between ordering a massive increase in the bombing of North Vietnam in 1972—to compel Hanoi to come closer to the American bargaining position for withdrawal from the South—and journeying to China to bury the hatchet with Mao Tse-tung in the same year. Even more significant was to be his choice of Henry Kissinger as his national security adviser (and later secretary of state). Kissinger’s approach to world affairs was historicist and relativistic: events had to be seen in their larger context, and related to each other; Great Powers should be judged on what they did, not on their domestic ideology; an absolutist search for security was Utopian, since that would make everyone else absolutely insecure—all that one could hope to achieve was relative security, based upon a reasonable balance of forces in world affairs, a mature recognition that the world scene would never be completely harmonious, and a willingness to bargain. Like the statesmen he had written about (Metternich, Castlereagh, Bismarck), Kissinger felt that “the beginning of wisdom in human as well as international affairs was knowing when to stop.”175 His aphorisms were Palmerstonian (“We have no permanent enemies”) and Bismarckian (“The hostility between China and the Soviet Union served our purposes best if we maintained closer relations with each side than they did with each other”),176 and were unlike anything in American diplomacy since Kennan. But Kissinger had a much greater chance to direct policy than his fellow admirer of nineteenth-century European statesmen ever possessed.177
Finally, Kissinger recognized the limitations upon American power, not only in the sense that the United States could not afford to fight a protracted war in the jungles of Southeast Asia and to maintain its other, more vital interests, but also because both he and Nixon could perceive that the world’s balances were altering, and new forces were undermining the hitherto unchallenged domination of the two superpowers. The latter were still far ahead in terms of strictly military power, but in other respects the world had become more of a multipolar place: “In economic terms,” he noted in 1973, “there are at least five major groupings. Politically, many more centers of influence have emerged.…” With echoes of (and amendments to) Kennan, he identified five important regions, the United States, the USSR, China, Japan, and western Europe; and unlike many in Washington and (perhaps) everyone in Moscow, he welcomed this change. A concert of large powers, balancing each other off and with no one dominating another, would be “a safer world and a better world” than a bipolar situation in which “a gain for one side appears as an absolute loss for the other.”178 Confident in his own abilities to defend American interests in such a pluralistic world, Kissinger was urging a fundamental reshaping of American diplomacy in the largest sense of that word.
The diplomatic revolution caused by the steady Sino-American rapprochement after 1971 had a profound effect on the “global correlation of forces.” Although taken by surprise at Washington’s move, Japan felt that it at last was able to establish relations with the People’s Republic of China, which thus gave a further boost to its booming Asian trade. The Cold War in Asia, it appeared, was over—or perhaps it would be better to say that it had become more complicated: Pakistan, which had been a diplomatic conduit for secret messages between Washington and Peking, received the support of both those Powers during its clash with India in 1971; Moscow, predictably, gave strong support to New Delhi. In Europe, too, the balances had been altered. Alarmed by China’s hostility and taken aback by Kissinger’s diplomacy, the Kremlin deemed it prudent to conclude the SALT I treaty and to encourage the various other attempts to improve relations across the Iron Curtain. It also held back when, following its tense confrontation with the United States at the time of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Kissinger commenced his “shuttle diplomacy” to reconcile Egypt and Israel, effectively freezing Russia out of any meaningful role.
It is difficult to know how long Kissinger could have kept up his Bismarck-style juggling act had the Watergate scandal not swept Nixon from the White House in August 1974 and made so many Americans even more suspicious of their government. As it was, the secretary of state remained in his post during Ford’s tenure of the presidency, but with increasingly less freedom for maneuver. Defense budget requisitions were frequently slashed by Congress. All further aid was cut off to South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in February 1975, a few months before those states were overrun. The War Powers Act sharply pared the president’s capacity to commit American troops overseas. Soviet-Cuban interventions in Angola could not, Congress had voted, be countered by sending CIA funds and weapons to the pro-western factions there. With the Republican right growing restive at this decline in American power abroad and blaming Kissinger for ceding away national interests (the Panama Canal) and old friends (Taiwan), the secretary of state’s position was beginning to crumble even before Ford was swept out of power in the 1976 election.
As the United States grappled with serious socioeconomic problems throughout the 1970s and as different political groups tried to reconcile themselves to its reduced international position, it was perhaps inevitable that its external policies would be more erratic than was the case in placid times. Nonetheless, there were to be “swings” in policy over the next few years which were remarkable by any standards. Imbued with the most creditable of Gladstonian and Wilsonian beliefs about the need to create a “fairer” global order, Carter breezily entered an international system in which many of the other actors (especially in the world’s “trouble spots”) had no intention of conducting their policies according to Judeo-Christian principles. Given the Third World’s discontent at the economic gap between rich and poor nations, which had been exacerbated by the 1973 oil crisis, there was prudence as well as magnanimity in his push for north-south cooperation, just as there was common sense in the terms of the renegotiated Panama Canal treaty, and in his refusal to equate every Latin American reformist movement with Marxism. Carter also took justified credit for “brokering” the 1978 Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel—although he ought not to have been so surprised at the critical reaction of the other Arab nations, which in turn was to give Russia the opportunity to strengthen its ties with the more radical states in the Middle East. For all its worthy intentions, however, the Carter government foundered upon the rocks of a complex world which seemed increasingly unwilling to abide by American advice, and upon its own inconsistencies of policy (often caused by quarrels within the administration).179Authoritarian, right-wing regimes were berated and pressured across the globe for their human-rights violations, yet Washington continued to support President Mobutu of Zaire, King Hassan of Morocco, and the shah of Iran—at least until the latter’s demise in 1979, which led to the hostages crisis, and in turn to the flawed attempt to rescue them.180 In other parts of the globe, from Nicaragua to Angola, the administration found it difficult to discover democratic-liberal forces worthy of its support, yet hesitated to commit itself against Marxist revolutionaries. Carter also hoped to keep defense expenditures low, and appeared bewildered that détente with the USSR had halted neither that country’s arms spending nor its actions in the Third World. When Russian troops invaded Afghanistan at the end of 1979, Washington, which was by then engaged in a large-scale defense buildup, withdrew the SALT II treaty, canceled grain sales to Moscow, and began to pursue—especially in Brzezinski’s celebrated visits to China and Afghanistan—“balance-of-power” politics which the president had condemned only four years earlier.181
If the Carter administration had come into office with a set of simple recipes for a complex world, those of his successor in 1980 were no less simple—albeit drastically different. Suffused by an emotional reaction against all that had “gone wrong” with the United States over the preceding two decades, boosted by an electoral landslide much affected by the humiliation in Iran, charged by an ideological view of the world which at times seemed positively Manichaean, the Reagan government was intent upon steering the ship of state in quite new directions. Détente was out, since it merely provided a mask for Russian expansionism. The arms buildup would be increased, in all directions. Human rights were off the agenda; “authoritarian governments” were in favor. Amazingly, even the “China card” was suspect, because of the Republican right’s support for Taiwan. As might have been expected, much of this simplemindedness also foundered on the complex realities of the world outside, not to mention the resistance of a Congress and public which liked their president’s homely patriotism but suspected his Cold War policies. Interventions in Latin America, or in any place clad in jungles and thus reminiscent of Vietnam, were constantly blocked. The escalation of the nuclear arms race produced widespread unease, and pressure for renewed arms talks, especially when administration supporters talked of being able to “prevail” in a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. Authoritarian regimes in the tropics collapsed, often made more unpopular by association with the American government. The Europeans were bewildered at a logic which forbade them to buy natural gas from the USSR, but permitted American farmers to sell that country grain. In the Middle East, the Reagan administration’s inability to put pressure upon Mr. Begin’s Israel contradicted its strategy of lining up the Arab world in an anti-Russian front. At the United Nations, the United States seemed more isolated than ever; by 1984, it had withdrawn from UNESCO—a situation which would have amazed Franklin Roosevelt. By more than doubling the defense budget in five years, the United States was certainly going to possess greater military hardware than it did in 1980; but whether the Pentagon was receiving good value for its outpourings was increasingly doubted, as was the question of whether it could control its interservice rivalries.182 The invasion of Grenada, trumpeted as a great success, was in various operational aspects worryingly close to a Gilbert and Sullivan farce. Last but not least, even sympathetic observers wondered if this administration could work out a coherent grand strategy when so many of its members were quarreling with one another (even after Haig’s retirement as secretary of state), when its chief appeared to give little attention to critical issues, and when (with rare exceptions) it viewed the world outside through such ethnocentric spectacles.183
Many of these issues will be returned to in the final chapter. The point about listing the various troubles of the Carter and Reagan administrations together was that they had, taken as a whole, distracted attention from the larger forces which were shaping global power politics—and most particularly that shift from a bipolar to a multipolar world which Kissinger had much earlier detected and begun to adjust to. (As will be seen below, the emergence of three additional centers of political-cum-economic power—western Europe, China, and Japan—did not mean that the latter were free of problems either; but that is not the point here.) More important still, the American concentration upon the burgeoning problems of Nicaragua, Iran, Angola, Libya, and so on was still tending to obscure the fact that the country most affected by the transformations which were occurring in global politics during the 1970s was probably the USSR itself—a consideration which deserves some further brief elaboration before this section concludes.
That the USSR had enhanced its military strength in these years was undoubted. Yet, as Professor Ulam points out, because of other developments, that simply meant that
the rulers of the Soviet Union were in a position to appreciate the uncomfortable discovery made by so many Americans in the forties and fifties: enhanced power does not automatically, especially in the nuclear age, give a state greater security. From almost every point of view, economically and militarily, in absolute and in relative terms, the USSR under Brezhnev was much more powerful than it had been under Stalin. And yet along with this greatly increased strength came new international developments and foreign commitments that made the Soviet state more vulnerable to external danger and the turbulence of world politics than it had been, say, in 1952.184
Moreover, even in the closing years of the Carter administration the United States had resumed a defense buildup which—continued at a massive pace by the succeeding Reagan government—threatened to restore U.S. military superiority in strategic nuclear weaponry, to enhance U.S. maritime supremacy, and to place a heavier emphasis than ever before upon advanced technology. The annoyed Soviet reply that they would not be outspent or outgunned could not disguise the awkward fact that this would place increased pressure upon an economy which had significantly slowed down (pp. 429–32 below) and was not well positioned to indulge in a high-technology race.185 By the late 1970s, it was in the embarrassing position of needing to import large amounts of foreign grain, not to mention technology. Its satellite empire in eastern Europe was, apart from the select Communist party cadres, increasingly disaffected; the Polish discontents in particular were a dreadful problem, and yet a repetition of the 1968 Czech invasion seemed to promise little relief. Far to the south, the threat of losing its Afghan buffer state to foreign (probably Chinese) influences provoked the 1979 coup d’état, which not only turned out to be a military quagmire but had a disastrous impact upon the Soviet Union’s standing abroad.186 Russian actions in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Afghanistan had much reduced its appeal as a “model” to others, whether in western Europe or in Africa. Muslim fundamentalism in the Middle East was a disturbing phenomenon, which threatened (as in Iran) to vent itself against local Communists as well as against pro-American groupings. Above all, there was the relentless Chinese hostility, which, thanks to the Afghan and Vietnam complications, seemed even more marked at the end of the 1970s than it had at the beginning.187 If any of the two superpowers had “lost China,” it was Russia. Finally, the ethnocentricity and narrow suspiciousness of its aging rulers and the obstructiveness of its domestic elites, thenomenklatura, toward sweeping reforms were probably going to make a successful adjustment to the newer world balances even more difficult than for the United States.
All this ought to have been of some consolation in Washington, and acted as a guide to a more relaxed and sophisticated view of foreign-policy problems, even when the latter were unexpected and unpleasant. On some issues, admittedly, such as modifying earlier support for Taiwan, the Reagan administration did become more pragmatic and conciliatory. Yet the language of the 1979–1980 election campaign was difficult to shake off, perhaps because it had not been mere rhetoric, but a fundamentalist view of the world order and of the United States’ destined place in it. As had happened so often in the past, the holding of such sentiments always made it difficult for countries to deal with external affairs as they really were, rather than as they thought they should be.