THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  It may be difficult to see such crises as taking the place of “battles” within the Long War. We are accustomed to thinking of battles fought with shock and fire and leaving behind casualties. But if we bear in mind the perspective of the Long War, however, which was punctuated by conventional battles as well as crises, we can see that its crises really had more in common with the battles of the eighteenth century than with the crises of the nineteenth. In the eighteenth century the extreme expense of highly professionalized armies made them far too precious to be risked in battle once technological innovations in warfare made actual fighting so lethal; advantages accruing to the defense imperiled any army that actually sought battle.19* Battles became actions of maneuver, culminating in the tactical withdrawal of one party once it was forced into an untenable position. Similarly, in the second half of the twentieth century, nuclear weapons—which, once mutual and secure against pre-emption, gave to the defense an asset of infinite value—made the hot battles of the First and Second World Wars too risky for the U.S. and the USSR. Crises served as battles of maneuver, with one side—as in Cuba—retreating when it became clear that, if things played out, that side would find itself in a losing position from which there was no escape.

  Some historians believe that Kennedy, but for the constraints imposed by anti-communist domestic political pressures, was willing to go further to end the crisis by simply accepting Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Such a concession, coupled with the crisis/battles over the Berlin Wall and the Bay of Pigs, would have amounted to an American strategic defeat, in Long War terms. A remark allegedly made by Robert McNamara during the Crisis, that “a missile is a missile is a missile” (equating Soviet missiles in Cuba with American missiles in Turkey), is, obviously, dealing with the issue from a far different perspective than that presented here.20 Perhaps, from the view of systems analysis, IRBMs are more or less fungible, regardless of who possesses them, if they are placed to threaten similar or comparable targets. Should those missiles have been fired, one can imagine that Moscow would have been destroyed at about the same time as Washington. From the perspective of the Long War, however—where crises stand in place of battles to have accepted the Soviet adventure in Cuba would have been an American loss precisely because it would have amounted to an acceptance of a kind of “equivalence,” publicly conceding to the Soviet Union that it had every bit as much right to threaten the United States as the United States had to threaten it.

  For the United States to achieve its strategic goals—for it to win the Long War—it had to contain communism within its Second World boundaries and thus prevent this movement from taking over fresh societies that would enrich its system with the accumulated human capital and other resources of the states it took over. If containment could be managed, then—so the Americans believed—the steady impoverishment of the socialist system would begin to tell. Like an engine requiring oxygen but producing carbon monoxide, the Soviet system would steadily grow more anaerobic until it collapsed. For the USSR to achieve its objectives—its leaders believed—it had only to maintain communism in a great power until the steadily declining business cycles and ever more severe economic depressions of the capitalist states provoked internal revolutions. Sergei Khrushchev recently quoted his father as saying—in classic nation-state terms—“between communism and capitalism, that system will win that presents the better life to the people.”21

  The Soviet Union had world-dominating ambitions in a sense, but Russian strategic goals were not to be realized in conquests of the kind that brought them the satellite regimes of Eastern Europe. This distinction is underscored in a memorandum from Charles Bohlen* to Paul Nitze† in 1950:

  It is open to question whether or not, as stated, the fundamental design of the Kremlin is the domination of the world. [Putting it this way] tends… to oversimplify the problem…. I think that the thought would be more accurate if it were to the effect that the fundamental design of those who control the USSR is (A) the maintenance of their regime in the Soviet Union and (B) its extension throughout the world to the degree that is possible without serious risk to the internal regime.22

  This nicely captures the inner/outer nature of a constitutional conflict. Widespread extension of communism was unlikely so long as the United States continued its commitment to containment. In this light, the internal exile of millions of East Germans and the public humiliation of a Third World client though tactical successes were hardly strategic triumphs for the Soviet Union, the former because it tended to destabilize the Communist system in the Warsaw Pact states, the latter because it alienated revolutionary parties abroad. (And indeed the Cuban Missile Crisis—and the Sino-Soviet split—were two of the factors cited by the group that ousted Khrushchev in October 1964.) This difficulty for the Soviet Union should remind us that its interests were not entirely coextensive with those of the ideological adversary against which the West struggled. To defeat communism did indeed mean that the Soviet Union would have to be defeated, but it did not follow that every triumph for communism strengthened Russia. The success of a communist insurgency that took over an otherwise independent state might or might not be in the interests of the Soviet Union, much less Russia; the new regime might, as happened in Yugoslavia, turn against its Soviet sponsors, just as the Vietnamese communists quickly turned against China. In terms of the historic struggle between communism and parliamentarianism in the Long War, however, success for a communist takeover would amount to a defeat for the United States and her allies in any case because communism, and not merely any particular state, was the enemy. Some commentators of this period were fond of pointing out that communism was not a “monolith,” a fact they took to imply that the United States should not engage itself in struggles against communist movements not directly controlled by the Soviet Union. Viewed from Moscow, the increasing fragmentation of the world communist movement was indeed a source of alarm. But from a Long War perspective, this insight is, at best, beside the point.

  In some ways, the U.S. role was easier than that of the Soviet Union, although it scarcely appeared so at the time. By the mid-sixties the United States had become deeply involved in Southeast Asia. To Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson the principle of containment required military assistance to the newly established Republic of South Viet Nam and, at least, a stalemate to the efforts of communist North Viet Nam to unify the country by force. By 1969 the United States had stationed 500,000 troops in the region, and by 1968 had defeated the communist insurgency in the South (although this fact was little credited by the public and the media at the time). But the American strategy of graduated response did not defeat the North Vietnamese, who were highly motivated, had secure bases in the region outside South Viet Nam, and were well supplied by other communist states. When it became apparent that American public opinion would not support the lengthy and costly commitment required to defeat North Viet Nam, President Johnson halted the bombing of the North and opened peace talks in Paris; not surprisingly the North Vietnamese stalled the negotiations in the hope of a further decline in U.S. popular support for the war and perhaps the election of an American president who would cut and run. In the ensuing five years, public opinion in the United States pressed ever more passionately for a disengagement. Eventually a ceasefire and peace treaty were negotiated that provided for an American withdrawal and a guarantee of nonaggression by the North Vietnamese. When the withdrawal was completed in 1973, however, the North immediately renewed its attack, correctly judging that the U.S. Congress would not permit the United States to re-introduce forces in the region in retaliation for the treaty breach. By 1975, the Congress, doubtless reflecting American public opinion, had even cut off military assistance to its ally in the South, and communist forces were able to overrun South Viet Nam as well as Cambodia and Laos.

  It was a military defeat of historic consequence and continues to distort the American debate over war powers and foreign policy. But it was not, however, a decisive defeat for the Am
erican position in the Long War, of which the Vietnamese War was but a single, peninsular campaign. Indeed if we bear in mind the strategic objectives of the United States in the Long War, her ability to prevent a North Vietnamese victory for thirteen years, virtually without assistance from any major ally, in a remote theatre dominated by a civil war, was a remarkable achievement. American strategy revealed both the tactical weaknesses of containment—that it surrendered initiative to the adversary, allowed the enemy to choose the terrain and type of battle, committed the United States to marginal theatres of little intrinsic significance to American fortunes—as well as its strategic strengths, namely, that delay coupled with conflict on the periphery tended to play into the long-term interests of the West. During those thirteen years pro-Western governments consolidated their power in Indonesia,23 Malaysia, and Singapore while economic growth ignited in the region's key pro-Western states, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan. By 1975, the year of the worst U.S. military humiliation since 1943, the threats to all these states and territories, from within and from a hostile China, had far receded from their level in the late 1950s. In every one of these now prosperous and fast-growing states, the essential issues of the Long War had been decided in their domestic polity and had been resolved against communism (although the long-term fate of Taiwan may still be in jeopardy, depending on what path the mainland Chinese leadership chooses).

  The Communist victory in Viet Nam did strengthen communist movements everywhere, as we know from the remarks of a wide variety of national liberation and communist state leaders. And the small “dominoes” of Laos and Cambodia did fall once the Americans withdrew. But the long struggle required to achieve that victory hardened the divisions between the Soviet Union (whose client was North Viet Nam) and China (which supported the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and invaded Viet Nam in February 1979). As in the Korean War, the imposition of civilian restraints on military operations in Viet Nam, though much criticized, succeeded in keeping Long War objectives in mind and in not permitting the goal of vic-tory in battle to obscure the pursuit of victory in war.

  Between 1968 and 1980, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and deposed a communist regime in Prague; embarked on a breathtaking buildup of nuclear weapons; invaded Afghanistan, deposed and murdered its communist leader; attacked Chinese positions across the Ussuri River and maintained a force in readiness there of some fifty divisions; offered the United States a condominium in international affairs; and signed the Helsinki Accords, effectively ratifying the Soviet sphere of influence over Eastern Europe. Many persons saw this period as one of Soviet dynamism, and from a certain perspective, this was undoubtedly so. But viewed from the perspective of the Long War, it represented a collapsing position. Mao's designated successor, Lin Piao, of all people, read this well enough when he observed:

  Since Brezhnev came to power, with its baton becoming less and less effective and its difficulties at home and abroad growing more and more serious, the Soviet revisionist clique has been practicing imperialism more frantically than ever. Internally it has intensified its suppression of the Soviet people. Externally it has stepped up its collusion with the U.S., intensified its control over and its exploitation of the various east European countries… and intensified its threat of aggression against China. Its dispatch of hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Czechoslovakia, and its armed provocations against China are two [such] performances.24

  What the Chinese clearly saw, and what the West appeared to miss, was that Russians were anxious to rid themselves of socialist solidarity in favor of a world role within, and legitimated by, the great power system.25

  When Gorbachev succeeded Brezhnev in 1985, after two brief intervening premierships, the Soviet Union found a leader with the energy and will to break openly with the Communist method of total state planning. Gorbachev's initial goal was the restructuring of the Soviet economy, a restructuring that he originally advertised as a reorganization of the government bureaucracy to make it more efficient and to bring about greater quality control without fundamentally altering the basis of the command economy. This restructuring he called “perestroika.” Gorbachev's campaign of reform ran into such opposition within the bureaucracy and the Party, however, that in 1986 he called for greater openness in debate in order to mobilize public pressure for reform. This policy he called “glasnost.” Within the Soviet Union a civil breakdown began to occur as credibility drained away from the Communist Party; the economy worsened, and food shortages began to appear as uncertainty enveloped the underground market. In a second attempt to harness popular opinion in order to bring about reform, Gorbachev called for greater democracy and pluralism. This, however, prompted the Baltic states to agitate for their independence. In Poland, a noncommunist government was formed in the summer of 1989 and, in October, the communist government of Hungary bowed to demonstrations and accepted a new constitution. In the interim, Hungary had permitted East Germans to use the Hungarian borders to escape to Western Europe. This refugee exodus led to massive antigovernment demonstrations within East Germany and, on November 9, 1989, crowds broke through the Berlin Wall. In October 1990 Germany was unified. By June 1990, democratic elections in Czechoslovakia had produced a noncommunist government, and a parliamentary constitution followed.26

  The Long War was over. It officially ended in November 1990 when the thirty-four members of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE)—including the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—met in Paris and signed an agreement providing for parliamentary institutions in all the participating states. This was the Charter of Paris, which was the centerpiece of the more comprehensive Peace of Paris.

  Formal peace was signed with the agreements at Paris in November 1990. Then a reunited Germany, a chastened Soviet Union, a reconciled Poland and Czechoslovakia, a benevolent Britain, France and United States, all behaved with a rational civility hardly seen in European relations. Unfortunately because of the collapse of the Soviet Union shortly thereafter and the confusion that followed it, the event passed almost unnoticed.27

  On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union formally dissolved. Now all the great powers that had begun the turbulent search in 1914 for a legitimate and legitimating constitutional order to succeed the empires of the nineteenth century had reached consensus. Between 1914 and 1990, the population of the world tripled—but an estimated 187 million persons, about 10 percent of the population of 1900—were killed or fated to die by human agency.28

  The end of the Long War is not the end of the need for history-making by the State if by that one means the achievement of a final state paradigm, nor the end of war. But it does represent, as Francis Fukuyama memorably showed, the final “perfecting”—in the legal sense—of the nation-state.29

  It is possible to live within the culture of war for so long that the end of a particular war seems like the end of all violent political struggle, and the temporary quiet that follows seems to promise a perpetual, peaceful, and exhausted stasis. This feeling is all the more likely if it accompanies what appears to be a moral consensus. The Long War was in a deep sense a moral struggle. Each of the three contending state systems was the out-come of a particular nineteenth and twentieth century attitude about mankind, attitudes that I will roughly call the biological, the sociological, and the legal. The fascists believed in a sort of social Darwinism for states, by which the competition for survival among species was mirrored in the struggle among, and the domination of, genetically determined national groups among human beings. For all their differences about political action, on this fundamental social scientific point they were united. The communists took a sociological view of man, by which man could not only be wholly described according to his behavior in groups, but could be changed by manipulating the incentives of groups transcending states. Though they differed dramatically on many theoretical points, and endlessly debated whether socialism should be strengthened in a single state at the
expense of world revolution, whether the Marx of the Grundrisse or the Marx of the later works was to be preferred, and so on—for the whole point was that the theoretical could guide the practical—they agreed on this assumption. The partisans of the liberal democracies also agreed on a basic element of the parliamentary attitude: that the impartial rule of law, and not simply the political power of the individual or group, should govern the outcome of state decisions. Each of these attitudes is not so much a reaction to the others, as it is to the nineteenth century self-consciousness that delegitimated the dynastic territorial states of the eighteenth century. Each tries to escape the problem of this loss of legitimacy by bringing an external, validating resource to bear. Each promises that it can best deploy the State to enhance the welfare of the nation. And to some degree, the residue of all these attitudes was present in every society—perhaps in every human heart—that contended in the Long War. What had ended was not just the Cold War, but a century of conflict over the basis of the State itself. And this accounts for the sense of bewilderment that followed. It wasn't like the usual end of an ordinary war but rather like the end of a way of living.