So finally the deployment of Cruise and Pershing-II missiles in Western Europe has begun. This represents a major political triumph for the Reagan administration and its West European supporters and a defeat for the Soviet Union and the anti-nuclear movement, especially in West Germany and Britain where it has been particularly strong.
The Soviet Union has responded to this challenge by walking out of the Geneva talks on limiting the deployment of intermediate nuclear missiles and by threatening to place more missiles in Eastern Europe and close to the United States. It is too early to say whether and to what extent the Kremlin will carry out its second threat. But it is a safe bet that it will not agree to resume talks in Geneva for quite some time. Or else, it would not have sought endorsement of its action by its Warsaw Pact allies. In the existing circumstances, this is bound to aggravate tensions between the two superpowers.
This deterioration in relations with the Soviet Union with the implicit danger of a further escalation in the nuclear arms race will almost certainly heighten anxiety in the United States itself, not to speak of Western Europe. This can in turn strengthen the “peace” movement with its inevitable pro-Soviet bias, addressed as it is, again unavoidably, to Americans and West Europeans. And that can embarrass NATO governments to the advantage of the Soviets.
So it can be argued that the two superpowers and the alliance systems they head are moving in a kind of circle in which one appears to be at the top only temporarily. Or, to put it more simply, it can be said that the US and the USSR are engaged in a senseless game in which there can be no long-term victory even in the political sense; none can be attempted in the military field at all.
This may well be the case in the kind of philosophical terms which many of us in India are prone to employ, used as we are to juxtapose the eternal against the transient. In the world of realpolitik, however, this proposition does not make all that much sense. Analyzed in those terms, recent developments might represent something quite significant on a long-term basis – the relative decline in the power of the Soviet Union and its inability to seize and retain initiative in determining superpower relations and with them to an extent the shape of the world.
Split With China
This is, of course, not a new development. Indeed, it dates back to the early sixties. If the open split with China in 1961-62 was an expression of Soviet inability to preserve the unity, and its leadership, of the communist world, the ugly Berlin wall with its watch towers, electrified fences and army of sentries ready to shoot was an admission of defeat in the competition with the capitalist West. To vary the famous Leninist phrase, the East German people had to be the stopped in this brutal manner from “voting with their feet” against communism.
The wall doubtless stopped the “bleeding to death” of the German Democratic Republic since its best trained people could no longer escape into the Federal Republic in their thousands month after month. But it advertised the unappealing nature of the communist system as the Hungarian uprising has done earlier in 1956 and as the virtual Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and the imposition of Martial Law in Poland were to do later in 1968 and 1982.
Soviet military power has expanded ever since. This power has not been tested in a true sense; Afghanistan is not much of a test. And there are individuals in the West who believe that its effectiveness has been vastly exaggerated. Even so it can be accepted that the Soviet Union has for the first time in its history become a global power and thus an equal of American except in the naval field where the US superiority is still obvious. But this parity might soon begin to erode in view of the new technological breakthroughs in the West as a result of the application of the microchip revolution to the arms industry. In any case, the Soviet advance in the military field cannot cover up its failures in other areas – economic, political and diplomatic. As Zbigniew Brzezinski puts it, the Soviet Union remains a “one-dimensional world power”.
At the time of the 50th anniversary of the Soviet revolution m 1967, Professor Cyril Black of Princeton, wrote:
“In the perspective of fifty years, the comparative ranking of the USSR in composite economic and social indices per capita has probably not changed significantly… the USSR has not overtaken or surpassed any country on a per capita basis since 1917 with the possible exception of Italy and nineteen or twenty countries that rank higher than Russia today in this regard also ranked higher in 1900 and 1919.”
The position has not changed since. According to Brzezinski, “in 1950 the Soviet gross national product (GNP) accounted for 11 per cent of the global product; three decades later it is still 11 per cent”. According to him, “in 1980 the Soviet Union was as behind the United States as it had been a quarter of a century ago. It is now also behind Japan. The vaunted technological space race ended with the American flag on the moon. Today the Soviet economy is widely perceived as being, if not in crisis, then at least non-innovative and confronting increasingly difficult trade-offs.”
Losses In W Asia
The Soviet record in the diplomatic field has been equally dismal. This is best illustrated by its virtual elimination from the critically important oil-rich West Asia. The gains it has made – in Vietnam, Angola, Ethiopia and Syria – mainly on the strength of its military assistance to them – cannot be said to compensate for its losses in West Asia and for all we know, these may turn out to be temporary as earlier in Egypt. Indeed, since the early sixties the Soviet Union can claim to have taken only one successful initiative – the Tashkent conference in January 1966 which led to an Indo-Pakistan accord. But it should be noted that President Johnson fully backed this initiative.
Several factors have helped cover up the Soviet retreat – US inability to grasp the significance of the Sino-Soviet split throughout the sixties; its massive and senseless military involvement in Indo-china for a whole decade (1963-1973) on the absurd plea that the Chinese communists constituted a grave threat to world peace and needed to be contained; and the present American obsession with Soviet military prowess, for instance. But one factor has been paramount above all others – the “supposed” decline in America’s own capacity and willingness to continue to preside over a West-dominated effort to establish a world order which, if not quite just and equitable, would be acceptable to a vast majority of countries outside the Soviet bloc, in fact even inside that bloc.
The word “supposed” is used advisedly here. The intention is not to question the relative decline in America’s economic power and in its aid to third world countries but to qualify this oft-quoted proposition. The decline in the US share in the world GNP is a fact but it is mainly in relation to its own West European and Japanese allies and not in relation either to its Soviet adversary or to the third world. This point too has been noted. What has generally escaped attention is another point which is that the United States has not retreated from the world as, indeed, it could not have. Neo-isolationism cannot be a practical proposition even for the mighty United States in our age of intercontinental missiles, satellites and growing trade and other contacts, in short in an age of shrinking distances.
This confronts us with the problem of defining the new terms on which America is seeking engagement with the rest of the world. Obviously the definition must take into account the twin facts of the decline in the US share in the world GNP and aid on the one hand and of the impossibility on the other of a retreat on its part from what liberal Americans have regarded as over commitment abroad into neo-isolationism.
Reagan’s Tough Stand
It is not easy to provide such a definition of the new US approach to international relations. Indeed, it is open to question whether the Americans have fully worked out this approach and whether and how long it is going to last in our revolutionary age in which rapid change has become the rule rather than the exception. But some points can be made.
First, the parallelism between President Reagan’s approach to America’s own economic problems and to the rest of the world should be obvious on a careful scrutiny. Just as the policy at home is to reduce social welfare and thereby compel the weaker sections of the community to fend for themselves, the line abroad is to help mainly America’s friends who are strategically well placed. Thus the bulk of direct US aid goes to Israel and Egypt and there is no hesitation in providing highly sophisticated equipment, for example, to Pakistan despite India’s protests.
Secondly, President Reagan has shown less respect for the majority opinion at the UN than any American president since World War II. He acts as if he has concluded that while the alienation of third world countries cannot hurt the US because they cannot in the final analysis turn to the Soviet Union for economic assistance, US solicitude for them cannot win their friendship because they cannot but define their identity in anti-Western (anti-imperialist) terms. This assessment is reflected in the US attitude towards the IMF, World Bank, IDA, GATT, the laws for seas and so on. Simultaneously Washington is willing to encourage US companies to invest in third world countries and thus tie the latter more closely than is possible through aid.
Finally, the US has decided to do all in its power to support certain “key” countries such as Israel in West Asia and South Africa in Africa regardless of their unacceptability in their own regions. It is difficult to say whether this will prove a viable policy in the long run. But there can be little doubt that this is the present US policy and that it does not involve disengagement or neo-isolationism.
In sum, America has not abandoned its ambition to build a world order under its auspices. It has only redefined the kind of world order it wants because its present rulers believe that it is a more viable proposition and it fits in better with their own philosophy of life. In theory this approach could have proved a bonanza for the Soviet Union. But the Kremlin is dominated by men who are too old to seize the opportunity and they are presiding over a system which is too rigid and non-innovative to enable them to do so.
The Times of India, 7 December 1983