It a sign of intellectual laziness that political commentators and policy makers the world over continue to refer to the United States and the Soviet Union as superpowers. It would not have mattered if it did not confuse our thinking on international problems but it inevitably does.
A super-power is not just a great power which has come to be armed with nuclear weapons. It would not have been necessary to coin this new term if it was so. A super-power has two distinct features. It has no peer except another super-power, the gap between its power and that of other countries being enormous. And more importantly, it has the will and the capacity, both economic and military, to project its power and influence in any part of the globe and therefore to try to establish a world order under its auspices.
By this criterion, the Soviet Union has never been a superpower. It has at best been half a super-power in that its economy has never been strong enough to enable it to acquire worldwide influence through aid and trade. Indeed, up to the early seventies it was not even half a super-power because it did not possess a blue waters navy capable of projecting its power all over the world. Its weakness in this field was fully exposed at the time of the Cuban crisis in 1962 when, faced with a choice between retreat and a nuclear holocaust, it retreated.
It has since made up its weakness in this field. It has even outstripped the United States in the number of nuclear-powered submarines and it has built aircraft carriers. Some western experts believe that the Soviet navy still lags behind theirs in quality and experience and would fare badly in an actual war. Such a test is, however, utterly unlikely and if and when it takes place, it will lead to a nuclear conflagration in which there can be no victor. That will be the end of civilisation as we know it. But whatever view one takes of Soviet military power, it cannot be seriously disputed that its economy cannot serve as the basis of a world economic order under its aegis. In fact, the Soviet Union needs access not only to western capital, technology and markets to modernise its economy but also to their food reserves to sustain its present nutrition standards.
Heavy Cast
Under Stalin the Soviet Union had a considerable asset in a worldwide communist movement. Even then its unity was far from complete. Tito broke away from the Soviet Union in 1948 because Stalin tried to impose his domination on Yugoslavia as he had done in other East European countries. And it is impossible to say that Mao Zedong would not have followed suit, as he eventually did, if the Truman administration had not been totally unreceptive to his overtures. In any case, the hollowness of the so-called communist monolith was exposed in 1956 when Hungarian communists rose in revolt against the Stalin-imposed system and wanted to quit the Warsaw Pact. By 1957 signs of an impending Sino-Soviet split were visible to perceptive observers. It became public in the early ’sixties.
There can be genuine differences of opinion on whether the Soviet Union has entertained the ambition to dominate the world and impose its variety of communism on it. In rational terms, it does not stand to reason that it should wish to do so after its experience with Chinese nationalism. But its ambitions are quite beside the point in assessing its status. In reality it has essentially been a regional European power which has felt compelled by virtue of the US and later the Chinese challenge to buy at extremely heavy cost influence in such faraway places as Cuba, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Angola and so on. Its investment has gone down the drain in China, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Ghana, Algeria and a number of other countries.
It is another sign of intellectual laziness that many of us who have not accepted the US view of the Soviet challenge have tended to believe that some kind of stupidity alone has prevented American policy and opinion makers from recognising the weaknesses of the Soviet Union and the communist movement. The proposition is so absurd that it is truly extraordinary that it has found widespread acceptance for so long among reasonably intelligent people. The explanation for American “blindness” lies elsewhere. This “blindness” may not have been wholly deliberate. But it has served a purpose. It has “legitimised” in the eyes of the Americans themselves and millions of others the USA’s search for world-wide domination. America has needed Russia as an adversary and has, therefore, been unwilling to recognise its limitations and weaknesses.
Decisive Edge
The new development is that the United States, too, is ceasing to be a super-power. Since the Americans have been preoccupied with the Soviet military challenge, to begin with in Europe, since the very beginning of the cold war, and have viewed the concept of containment essentially in military terms, it is only natural that they should find Soviet parity in this regard galling and unacceptable. President Reagan and his advisers embody this American reaction. That is one reason why they are so anxious to win for their country the decisive military edge it once possessed over the Soviet Union, especially in respect of strategic nuclear weapons.
This is basically a psychological problem. And it is incapable of resolution in favour of the United States because the Soviet Union has the will and the resources to match every new weapons system America may develop and deploy. But even if this was not the case and America was able to achieve nuclear superiority over Russia, it would not settle anything. Moscow sent its tanks into Budapest in 1956 when it was militarily much weaker than Washington. And even if the USA was maintaining a formidable naval presence in the Indian Ocean in the ’seventies as it is planning to do in the ’eighties, it could not have prevented Soviet assistance to the MPLA in Angola, the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia and the Marxists in South Yemen. America’s nuclear superiority is irrelevant even for the security of Western Europe since its present nuclear power is more than sufficient to deter the Soviet leaders from attacking Western Europe.
There has been considerable speculation that the Americans are planning for the contingency of having to occupy Saudi and other Gulf oilfields in the event of an Iranian-type upheaval there with or without Soviet assistance. The quick deployment forces and the base facilities it is acquiring in Kenya, Somalia, Egypt and Oman are certainly relevant for the purpose but not the MX missile or the B-l bomber. And the adversary is not the Soviet Union, its presence in Afghanistan, South Yemen, Angola and Ethiopia notwithstanding, but the forces of change in West Asia in general and the Gulf in particular. Indeed, even the quick deployment force and the base facilities would be of no avail if the revolutionary forces were to become as strong as they did in Iran. These forces are still weak in the Gulf with the result that America’s bluff may not be called. But that is a different proposition.
Economic Strength
The United States has owed its pre-eminence in the past not so much to its military power, formidable though it has been, as its economic strength and its willingness to use it to establish under its auspices a world order which was not too unjust to other countries to be acceptable to them. America has sought not only to build an invisible empire in the sense that it has not acquired colonies, it has also not been too exploitative in the sense of wanting to freeze other countries into providers of raw materials and markets as old empires did. In fact, it can be said to have been positively generous in its assistance to several nations in trouble, not just to its allies. The PL 480 programme, for instance, helped India considerably in its industrialisation efforts in the fifties and the ’sixties.
Not all American actions have been beneficent. Its military intervention in Vietnam finally degenerated into an abomination which horrified the American people as much as anyone else. But no empire has ever in history lavished its wealth so generously on others. The aid has been motivated. It has been part of America’s battle for the hearts and minds of men. But that cannot cancel the fact of its generosity. All that is more or less over. America has ceased to be the leader of aid consortiums. Its aid as a percentage of its GNP has shrunk and most of it has come to be limited to special US allies – Egypt and Israel. It is reluctant to contribute to even such West-dominated institutions as the IMF and the World Bank.
The US economy is still the largest in the world but no longer the most dynamic. Many of its industries cannot compete successfully with their Japanese and Western counterparts. While the US and its allies continue to dominate the world economy despite the stagflation since 1972 and the rise of oil sheikhs as great financial powers, American leadership is no longer as natural and secure as it used to be. The differences of interests are bound to sharpen if the Russians do not frighten the West Europeans and the Japanese into surrender to Washington’s diktats. America is flexing its military muscles to cover up its economic decline. But it is too patent to be denied. The country has not yet gone in for protectionism in a big way but it has become much more aggressive, self-centred and callous towards the problems of others. Reaganism is an expression of that other America – self-righteous and narrow-minded – that has not been much in evidence for four decades. It is not an America which can lead the world in these complicated times and preside over a reasonably just and stable world order.
The Times of India, 18 November 1981