Riding the Red Horse (43 page)

After Vietnam

After American forces withdrew from Vietnam, the strategy of making the tigers fight was played out. The Soviets could not expect to entrap an exhausted America again in a conflict with a third party. On the other hand, their very success in weakening America made them greedy. Interpreting Washington’s desire for détente as weakness, Moscow launched an overt bid for world hegemony. The USSR lacked the economic and technological base to support this ambition, but nevertheless began a massive military buildup. They deployed new heavy ICBMs with multiple, accurate warheads that could destroy the American ICBM force, deployed a new theater nuclear missile (the SS-20) to threaten Europe, modernized their ground and air forces, and built a blue-water navy. From 1973 to 1980, the Soviets energetically exploited the geopolitical opportunities created by American retreat, timidity, vacillation, and folly.

President Reagan took office determined to defeat the Soviet offensive and then achieve victory in the Cold War. To neutralize the military challenge, he expanded and modernized the American military, deployed new intermediate-range nuclear forces to Europe (108 Pershing II missiles and 464 Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles), and launched the Strategic Defense Initiative. He strengthened the American economy, and weakened the Soviet economy with attacks on its hard-currency earning capacity. He rebuilt the Western alliance, improving American relations with Britain, Germany, Japan, and China. Finally, noting that the Soviet empire was overextended, he supported resistance movements in Afghanistan, Poland, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, and Cambodia.
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At long last, the Americans watched from the sidelines while the Soviet tiger fought.

From 1967 to the end of the Cold War, Soviet support for international terrorism was a highly cost-effective form of proxy warfare. The technique was all the more useful because terrorist groups were often the surrogates of Soviet surrogates, and thus Moscow could disclaim responsibility. For example, the USSR’s client, Libya, supported numerous terrorist groups in the 1970s and 1980s. These terrorist attacks harassed Soviet enemies and advanced Soviet foreign policy goals. The United States sometimes retaliated against the terrorists themselves or the Soviet client that supported terrorism – most notably, against Libya in 1986 – but rarely called attention to Soviet complicity. By the 1980s, the Soviets had created a global network on Soviet and allied territory for the planning, training, and logistical support of terrorist attacks. The Soviets expected these groups, just like Soviet client states, to accept direction in exchange for arms, advice, and support.
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In the final decade of the Cold War, the Soviets “made the tigers fight” in the Iran-Iraq War. This time, unlike in Korea or Vietnam, the Soviets did not want to precipitate American intervention, and were not weakening an enemy they found threatening. Instead, they were using a Soviet client, Iraq, to force oil-rich Iran into the Soviet camp. The Soviets encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Iran in 1979, and then supported both sides with vast amounts of weapons and supplies.
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A short Iran-Iraq war was undesirable, because Moscow wanted to exhaust Iran so that the Iranian Tudeh (Communist) Party could seize power. As in Korea and Vietnam, Soviet arms supplies were carefully calibrated to control the tempo of conflict. The Soviets tantalized both sides with plausible promises of ultimate victory that never actually materialized. Given the lack of viable alternatives—especially for Tehran—the victims could only grumble and keep fighting. In the end, Moscow failed to overthrow Iran from within during the war despite eight years of exerting pressure on three sides: from Iraq, from the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, and from the USSR itself. Ironically, Iran became a Soviet client after the war ended in 1989, and remains a Russian client to this day.

Conclusions

This paper has examined Soviet efforts to manipulate third parties into conflict with its enemies from 1925 to 1975. The Sino-Japanese War, Korea and Vietnam are discussed in detail because the Soviets successfully used their clients to entangle and weaken Japan and the United States. There are many other cases of Soviet clients challenging American interests during the Cold War without provoking a direct American military response. For example, in the Middle East, the Soviets armed Egypt and Syria to attack Israel, and armed Iraq to challenge Iran. In South Asia, the Soviets armed India, who dismembered Pakistan in 1970. Soviet aid to Cuba enabled Castro to meddle in Latin America and Africa. The actions of these Soviet surrogates demanded American attention, diverted her resources, and forced her to contemplate military responses.

Prior to World War II, Stalin promoted conflict between Germany, Britain, and France, between Japan and China, and between Japan and America. His basic objective was to prevent Germany and Japan from attacking the USSR singly or jointly. This was not a defensive strategy but an offensive one designed to weaken them for future attack. The strategy failed in Europe because the Germans conquered France quickly and then attacked the USSR. On the other hand, the strategy succeeded in Asia. Japan’s protracted wars with China and the United States prevented it from attacking the USSR and left it vulnerable to a last-minute Soviet attack. Washington willingly accepted its role in Soviet strategy. America deterred Japan from attacking the USSR in 1941-42 and then sent lend-lease supplies without which the Soviets could not have attacked Japan in August 1945.

The Cold War is often viewed as a bipolar U.S.-Soviet struggle, but a major third player, China, always influenced the calculations of the two superpowers. In this three-way game, the Soviets wanted China isolated and dependent on them, with America as “odd man out”. Above all, Moscow wished to avoid a Sino-American alliance that isolated them. The Soviets sought to achieve their objectives, first in Korea and later in Vietnam, by promoting conflict between China and the United States. The Soviets sponsored North Korean and later North Vietnamese aggression in order to provoke an American military presence on the Chinese border. In Korea, Soviet strategy succeeded in creating Sino-American conflict, although Truman willingly accepted the disadvantage of fighting China while the Soviets stood aside. In a larger sense, Soviet strategy backfired because the Korean War enabled Truman to rebuild American military power to contain the USSR. In Vietnam, Soviet strategy crippled the United States, undermined containment, and bought time for Soviet missile programs to surge ahead. On the other hand, the strategy failed to drive China back into the Soviet camp, and ironically resulted in the very thing it sought to avoid, Sino-American rapprochement. The overall outcome for the United States would have been far less disadvantageous without the betrayal of South Vietnam and consequent damage to the friendship with China that Nixon brilliantly established.

Soviet strategy had painful consequences for her allies and clients. The USSR was far more of a “frenemy” than a true friend to China from 1917 to 1991; the Soviets feared China but needed to use her against more powerful enemies. The USSR sought to bring about a Japanese invasion of China after 1931, and then to prolong the conflict after 1937. Similarly, Stalin brought China and America to blows in 1950, and prolonged the war after it began. The USSR provided North Korea, North Vietnam, and Iraq with weapons and political support to launch their respective wars of aggression, but tailored Soviet aid to ensure that none of them won a rapid, decisive victory. Hanoi was the only Soviet Cold War client to achieve total victory, and did so at a high price: over a million casualties after sixteen years of war.

Russia’s use of the stratagem discussed herein did not end with the Cold War. In Asia, Russia promoted Chinese confrontation with America, and sold the Chinese the missiles, ships, submarines, and aircraft needed to fight American air and naval forces in the Pacific. Moreover, after 1995, Moscow used a pro-Russian faction within OPEC (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela) to raise the price of oil. To counter this, Bush gave halfhearted support to a Venezuelan coup attempt, persuaded Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi to switch sides, and invaded Iraq. The occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan sought to put pressure on Iran, but like the similar Soviet pincer move in the 1980s, this failed. America suffered relatively few military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan compared to Korea or Vietnam, but the occupations were extremely costly financially. In 2010, the War on Terror already cost 55 percent more in constant dollars than ten years of fighting in Vietnam.
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Russia and China clearly benefited from this prolonged drain of American resources and attention, which among other things delayed the acquisition of the military systems needed to deter or fight them. They sent weapons to the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, and outsourced support for the insurgency to Russia’s clients Iran and Syria. The Iranians did much less to support the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan than they could have; they did not even provide the advanced munitions that they gave to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
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This kept the situation “serious but not hopeless” – and the Americans remained in place. Neither Iran nor Syria had any interest in keeping a large American military force just across their borders; only Russia and China could have convinced them to do so. At the time of this writing, the question of using American ground combat troops in Iraq and Syria remains open, and if so, Russia and China will continue to watch the American tiger fight.

Brad Torgersen’s debut novel,
The Chaplain’s War
, was released by Baen Books in October, 2014. It is Brad’s first published novel, but he’s no stranger to writing science fiction, having two anthologies in print,
Lights in the Deep
and
Racers in the Night
, both published by Wordfire Press. Brad’s also twice won
Analog
magazine’s “AnLab” reader’s choice award, a Writers of the Future Award, and in 2012, he was a triple-crown nominee for the Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell awards.

Brad works full time in Health Care and he is also a Chief Warrant Officer in the US Army Reserve. That, plus his devotion to his faith, goes a long way toward explaining some of the expertise and perspective he brings to his subject when writing fiction. He’s also, like your intrepid editors, a charter member and Legionary First Class in the Evil Legion of Evil, a super-secret society devoted to such heinous activities as committing thoughtcrime, writing crimethink, and laughing at the preposterous pretensions of the modern Social Justice Warrior. Some of us in the ELoE like to tease Brad about being our token liberal. In some sense, he is, but he represents the better, truer aspect of liberalism, now mostly lost to the of mindless modern progressivism of the shrieking harpies, glittery hoo-haas, and those immortalized by the inimitable Kate Paulk as
Tempests in B Cups
.

With Brad’s present offering, “The General’s Guard”, the casual reader might be tempted to dismiss it as just another “anything boy can do girl can do better” propaganda piece, written in placative submission to the tripartite goddess of modern feminism: Hysteria the Relentless, Outrage the Untiring, and Unreason, handmaiden of PMS. That would be both a mistake and a misreading. Look for the 90-pound superwaifu in this story; you will search in vain. She may be off getting a pedicure somewhere else, but she’s not in this story. And as for the woman warrior who can best Conan, Elric, and the Dorsai with one hand tied behind her back, she too fails to make an appearance.

No, Brad’s purpose is different. Don't be misled by what might initially appear to be conventional SF dogma about women in combat, when you read
The General’s Guard
, think of a name, in American history a very particular and important name. The name in question? Why, it’s Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben.

Joonta stood at the position of attention: head facing forward, chin up, arms straight down to her sides and her knees bent just enough to keep her blood moving. Her dark red tunic was sashed tightly at the waist and her knee-length grass-green silk pants were clean and free of holes. It was the closest thing she had to a dress uniform. She’d put it on hastily, the moment the district messenger had informed her of the arrival of a very important visitor.

Joonta was not alone.

The mass formation was fifty heads long and five ranks deep, composed of women from every clan in the city-state of Coam. Archers all. Their recurve bows were strung for display only, and the hafts of their small swords—mainly ceremonial, with a differently styled haft for every Coam clan—gleamed dully at their belts. It was hot out, midday, so each woman’s brow beaded with sweat. But no one spoke and no one moved. Their discipline was on full display for the great Syqarian general who presently inspected the lines.

Erel the officer was legendary: a warrior’s warrior, fit like unto the gods, tall as a pine tree, with the eyes of a bird of prey, and a strategic mind so sharp that it had taken overwhelming numbers to crush the Syqarian tyrant-king’s forces under Erel’s command. Thus bringing both Syqar and its military into the embrace of the polyglot civilization known as the Longstar Combine.

But Erel the man was short. Shorter than some of the archers he inspected. And his face was drawn and weary, with lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth. His hair was going silver, and he walked with a pronounced limp. Unlike other Combine militia officers, Erel did not wear a decorated, polished-steel breastplate. Rather he had on a khaki kilt, with an ash-grey topshirt cut sleeveless at the shoulders. The general’s arms were scarred and lean. Sinew and muscle bulged under his brown skin, but only because there seemed to be no fat on the man. His sandals crunched the gravel as he walked.