After Tamerlane (71 page)

This colossal imperium was on an unprecedented scale. No previous world power had entrenched itself at both ends of Eurasia, or had had the power to do so. What made it possible was partly the eagerness with which America's friendship was sought and its leadership welcomed. The Anglo-American alliance was a remarkable example of cooperation between a declining imperial power (which expected to recover) and its most obvious successor. For a crucial period, both parties accepted the myth of equality and practised a form of codominium. In Western Europe, America built an empire ‘by invitation' – in the striking phrase coined by Geir Lundestad.
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In Japan, as we saw, the political elite preferred the onerous terms of the security pact to the risk of a leftward lurch in public opinion. Whether real or imaginary, the fear of Communism and of Soviet expansion was the catalyst of collaboration abroad and fuelled American readiness at home to assume the burdens of power. In no other circumstances could America have won such wide acquiescence in its new world role.

By the early 1950s, geopolitics and ideology had been powerfully reinforced by the third component of American influence. With the gradual recovery of the European and Japanese economies, the pump-priming effect of American Marshall Aid, and the further boost of military spending during the Korean War, international trade burst out of the long stagnation of 1913–50. Exports worldwide doubled in value between 1953 and 1963, and almost doubled in volume.
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The United States had played the most important part in creating the conditions for this extraordinary boom. The International Monetary Fund (to promote exchange-rate stability) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (to liberalize trade) would have come to nothing without its support. Above all, perhaps, it was the American dollar, convertible into gold, which supplied the universally accepted reserve currency on which trade expansion depended. America, of course, was perfectly placed to reap the rewards of the new commercial economy. Between 1939 and 1950 the value of American investment abroad had more than doubled. American industry reached its competitive peak in the 1950s. In dynamic sectors like air transport and mass entertainment, American products were almost unbeatable. The ‘soft power' of economic and cultural influence underwrote the ‘hard power' of strategic might. No country that relied on a trading currency could risk Washington's displeasure, lest in moments of strain the support of the dollar might be withheld.

The huge zone where America provided – or imposed – its strategic protection (by 1955 the United States had 450 bases in 36 countries) overlapped with the sphere of the new international economy of which America was the pivot. Together they formed the Pax Americana. In the 1950s it was consolidated rapidly, though not without friction. A critical year was 1956. Washington's refusal to help the Hungarian revolt against Soviet hegemony marked a tacit acceptance of the European partition of 1945–8. Almost simultaneously, by forcing the British and French (through financial pressure) to abandon their effort to destroy Nasser's regime, Washington served notice that its European allies must manage what remained of their imperial space in ways that conformed with its grand design. The general return to convertibility among the Western currencies in 195 8 signalled the end of ‘emergency economics' and the normalization of the global trading
economy.
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In the Middle East and South East Asia, it seemed that limited intervention was enough to forestall the expansion of Soviet influence and stabilize the frontier between the superpower spheres. With the line of ‘containment' nowtightly drawn across much of Eurasia, and the strategic means (by a nuclear onslaught) to deter a Soviet breakout into Western Europe, the global balance nowlooked firmly tilted towards American primacy.

In fact the global effects of Eurasia's division were not so easily confined. The main reason lay in the astonishing trajectory of Soviet power. In three years of war between 1942 and 1945, the Soviet Union recovered from the brink of catastrophic defeat to play the largest part in the victory over Germany. The reward for this was the massive extension of the sphere of Soviet predominance in East and Central Europe and, above all, a practical veto on the reunification of Germany. This great triumph in the west was the main foundation of Soviet world power. Perhaps the crucial element in the post-war strength of the Soviet imperial system was its geopolitical vantage. Its military salient in eastern Germany threatened the heartlands of Western Europe and neutralized America's lead in high-technology weapons. Its South East European satellites guarded the low road to the Ukraine and South Russia which the Wehrmacht had followed with such devastating consequences in 1941–2. While this
limes
remained in place, the Soviet Union was almost invulnerable in a conventional war. Two things had made it much easier than it might have been to rivet Soviet control over so much of occupied Europe in 1945–8. The first was the lack of any serious threat from post-war East Asia remotely comparable to that of Japan before 1941. Indeed the victory of Mao Tse-tung in the Chinese Civil War was an unexpected bonus. Moscow's whole strength could be turned to the west. The second was the legacy of Nazi imperialism, which had virtually decapitated the political elites of pre-war Eastern Europe (a task the NKVD – Stalin's secret police – eagerly finished off) while sowing bitter divisions between the social, religious and ethnic groups it had favoured or spurned during a desperate conflict.

Even so, the dramatic enlargement of the Soviet sphere into Eastern and Central Europe was a colossal burden, not least in manpower. It fell on a country that had lost in war some 14 per cent of its population
(the staggering figure of 27 million people – the United States lost some 400,000) and perhaps a quarter of its physical assets.
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Harvest failure in 1946 brought large-scale famine. Economic recovery was the final achievement of Stalin's industrial order. Ferocious work discipline, conscripted labour, and the heavy reliance on slave or semi-slave labour were used even more widely than before the war against a cowed, ill-fed and exhausted population.
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Perhaps 10 per cent of industrial output came from the Gulag.
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By the time of Stalin's death, in 1953, the wartime losses had been made good and the Soviet Union reached levels of economic growth that were exceeded only by the ‘miracle' economies of Germany and Japan.
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This was the platform on which Khrushchev would build a further expansion of Soviet influence.

Khrushchev embodied a newSoviet confidence that it could compete with the West upon equal terms, and not just in Europe – a striking change from the ‘bunker' mentality of the Stalinist period. Soviet space scientists were the first to launch an orbiting space vehicle (the ‘Sputnik') in 1957, a hugely prestigious assertion that they had more than caught up with their Western competitors. Khrushchev authorized the expansion of Soviet sea power under the redoubtable Admiral Gorshkov. By the late 1950s its huge submarine force made the Soviet navy the world's second largest,
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designed to shadow America's fleets and deny them ‘command of the sea' – defined as unchallenged control of the world's seaways. Khrushchev was also determined to force Western agreement to the permanent division of Germany – the cause of the Berlin crisis in 1961. The Berlin Wall (which followed Western refusal) signalled the Soviet will to rule over its European
raj
for the foreseeable future. But the most radical feature of Khrushchev's approach was his canny appraisal of what decolonization offered. The cracking of Britain's Middle Eastern hegemony, the rush to independence in colonial Africa, and signs of social unrest in Latin America promised ways of escape from Eurasian containment, a Soviet breakthrough into the Outer World. What the Soviet Union lacked in economic inducements it might hope to make up with the ideological appeal of ‘Soviet modernity'. In many newstates, the Soviet model of industrial growth, the strength and efficiency (so it seemed) of the Soviet party state, and the dazzling alchemy of
authoritarian rule and egalitarian values that Marxism–Leninism proclaimed were deeply attractive. Here was a route to the modern world (tried and tested) which did not lie through continued subservience to the foreign business interests that had ruled the roost in the colonial (or semi-colonial) era.

Khrushchev's aim (we may surmise) was to exploit the new fluidity in global politics before American power and the West-centred economy could become the dominant influence in the post-colonial world. Like the German Empire before 1914, the Soviet Union sought a ‘place in the sun' and the right to shape the emerging world order. By 1960 the signs of rivalry were coming thick and fast. When Washington tried to crush Castro's revolution in Cuba by barring the import of Cuban sugar (a proven tactic), Khrushchev promised to buy it instead. When the Congo exploded, he denounced the failure to support Lumumba's government and portrayed the UN as a tool of the West needing drastic reform. In London and Washington there was deep alarm.
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In 1961 a newfront opened in South East Asia when Ho Chi Minh launched the struggle against the Diem regime in South Vietnam. The Yemen revolution in 1962, and the civil war that followed, made it seem likely that Nasser (who intervened massively on the revolutionary side) would become much more dependent upon Soviet aid and that the Yemeni war would unsettle Saudi Arabia. With great reluctance, the Americans promised their help against any attack on the Saudi state by Nasser's Yemeni clients.
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Most dramatic of all, was the dispatch of Soviet missiles to Khrushchev's new ally in Latin America. The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 was resolved in the end by the removal of the Soviet weapons, in return for a similar concession over American missiles to be deployed in Turkey and (perhaps) an American promise not to invade Cuba. But, although the outcome seemed to be a Soviet climbdown, the crisis revealed the widening scope of Soviet–American rivalry. It confirmed the view of the Kennedy White House that more resolute methods were needed to block the expansion of Soviet influence in the ‘Third World' of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This was the climate in which the threatened collapse of Diem's South Vietnamese government took on what seemed a more than local importance.

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For the next twenty years the superpower struggle for influence was the dominant feature of global politics. The prize was not (as in the 1890s) a great territorial domain, but an informal empire of clients and allies, glued together by arms supplies and military missions, ‘development' aid and commercial credits. In what became a fluctuating, unpredictable contest, five aspects are striking. The first was the reluctance of either power after 1962 to pose a direct challenge in the other's ‘backyard', reinforced by the fact of nuclear parity by the late 1960s. American occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965, like the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia three years later, drew no riposte. The détente diplomacy of the 1970s acknowledged the permanence of Europe's divisions: the Helsinki ‘Final Act' in 1975 was to all intents a European peace treaty by which the European states (including the Soviet Union) bound themselves to accept their existing frontiers. The second was the relative mismatch in the economic strength of the two contestants. Despite the triumphs of its military-industrial complex, the Soviet economy remained smaller and weaker than its American counterpart. Between 1960 and 1975 its share of world exports never rose above 4 per cent.
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America's share of the world's manufactured exports was 13 per cent in 1976.
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The free-market economy of which it formed the pivot took the lion's share of international commerce. The third was the persistent instability of the large ‘frontier' zone where the two world powers strove to assert their claims. This turbulence sprang from the travails of state-building in ex-colonial lands, anti-colonial conflicts in parts of Africa, and economic upheaval in the 1970s (the ‘oil shock' of 197 3 and the drastic rise in the price of fuel). It created a hunger for arms and aid by regimes and their rivals. It ensured a constant demand for superpower sponsors, and fed the domino mentality of superpower strategists. It created an ever-widening sphere in the Outer World where they waged war by proxy. By the mid-1970s Soviet military aid and political influence were reaching deep into the Horn of Africa and the southern third of the continent. The fourth aspect was the consequence (in part) of this instability: the exposure of both superpower competitors to great reversals of fortune. The humiliating defeat of America's effort to preserve South Vietnam as a non-Communist state was the most crushing example. But the sudden
disavowal of its Soviet alliance by the Egyptian government in the following year (1976), and the expulsion of an army of Soviet advisers, was, in geostrategic terms, of hardly less significance.
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Fifth and last, as we might deduce from this, for all the plenitude of their military muscle, there were drastic limits to the control that either superpower could exert over its restless, unruly and self-willed clients. Both ran, as a result, the serious risk of overcommitting themselves to unreliable allies, of being dragged willy-nilly towards confrontation. And, just as it had in the late nineteenth century, China resisted assimilation into any imperial system.

To many contemporary analysts, there seemed no reason why the ebb and flowof this superpower imperialism should not continue indefinitely. To the ‘declinologists' in the United States, the lesson of Vietnam was that American power had been overstretched. The financial strain of the Vietnam War and the sudden rise in the price of oil (part of the Arab states' attempt to apply indirect pressure on Israel) checked the rapid growth of the market economies after 1970. The mighty dollar had to go off gold. Marxists daydreamed of a capitalist meltdown and a ‘world revolution'. Schemes were projected for a ‘newinternational economic order' to stage the transfer of technology and capital to the developing states. The fear in the West was of a radical turn in the ex-colonial world. With global strength becoming more evenly balanced and the developing states making larger demands, the pursuit of influence in the zones of contest looked certain to growincreasingly arduous. The struggle over Angola, where a civil war raged between Marxist and anti-Marxist factions, revealed howquickly such a ‘proxy war' could embroil a whole subcontinent.
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In the Horn of Africa, large-scale Soviet aid to Ethiopia's Marxist leaders was countered by American help to its neighbour, Somalia.
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But direct action was even more alarming. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 was seen in the West as the opening salvo of a ‘new' Cold War, a fresh advance by the ‘evil empire' (Ronald Reagan's memorable phrase) that was ruled from Moscow. Containment had failed, the Secretary of State told the American Senate in June 1983. ‘Soviet ambitions and capabilities have long since reached beyond the geographical bounds that this doctrine took for granted.'
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Far from heralding a ‘world of nations', decolonization's unexpected course
seemed to have set the scene for newkinds of empire. Indeed, it could have been argued that the collateral damage of late-twentieth-century imperialism – the destabilizing effects of covert intervention, the financial succour lent to authoritarian rulers, and the militarization of politics encouraged by the vast traffic in weapons
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– was at least as great as that of its late-nineteenth-century version. It certainly seemed that the dangerous uncertainty of ‘competitive coexistence' (with the appalling prospect of ‘mutually assured destruction' in an atomic exchange) was the inevitable price of a bipolar world. But it did not turn out like that.