The Intelligent Conversationalist

by Imogen Lloyd Webber

  Reagan Doctrine (president 1981–1989): All about supporting “freedom fighters”—that is to say, anyone opposing communism.

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  We’ve previously talked in other Cheat Sheets of the financial phenom that was the Marshall Plan, of containment and triangular diplomacy and détente. There were moments, as you can see in the box below, when the cold war heated up

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  NOTEWORTHY NUGGETS: NINE TENSEST MOMENTS OF THE COLD WAR

  1. The Berlin Blockade (1948–49)

  A legacy of World War II was that Berlin was effectively divided into two: West (democratic) and East (communist). Now, here’s the thing—Berlin was COMPLETELY surrounded by East Germany. I’d forgotten that until I wrote this book. During the Berlin blockade, Stalin stopped supplies arriving via ground to West Berlin, so the US, Britain, and co. started the Berlin airlift to fly them in. Apart from during the blockade, it was possible to travel through East Germany from West Berlin via certain trains or roads—but this involved paperwork and checks.

  2. The Korean War (1950–53)

  First military action of the cold war. The Soviet-backed North Korean People’s Army invaded the pro-Western South. The American government was concerned it was the first step in a plan for communist world takeover, so it intervened. Result? Stalemate in 1953.

  3. The Suez Crisis (1956)

  The 120-mile Suez Canal in Egypt links the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. It opened in 1869 and had a massive impact on world trade. For years it was a neutral zone under British control, hence the big defense of it by the Brits during World War I against the Ottoman Empire and their subsequent lingering interest.

  In 1948, the US recognized Israel, which upset the Arab nations and drove them toward the Soviets’ arms. When Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser started cozying up to the USSR, the US refused to honor its promise to help him construct the Aswan Dam on the Nile River. So Nasser nationalized Suez and the Israeli (their troops were having sporadic battles with Egyptian ones on their shared border), French (thought Nasser was supporting rebels in the French colony of Algeria), and British armies invaded Egypt. This nearly brought the Soviet Union directly into the conflict, not just via proxy. President Eisenhower and the Americans effectively coerced the British, French, and Israelis into some restraint. Ultimately the British, French, and Israeli governments withdrew their troops. Suez permanently weakened Britain and France on the international scene. And the UN proved useful, as it took charge of the area.

  4. The Berlin Crisis (1961)

  Last big incident of the cold war re Berlin. West Berlin had become a loophole thanks to its location—thousands of East Germans used it to flee to the West. This caused much fury on the Soviet side, the culmination being the building of a wall that totally encircled West Berlin on August 14, 1961. Worth noting that despite being completely surrounded by Soviet-controlled territory, West Berlin had the most inhabitants of any cold war German city.

  5. The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)

  Kennedy’s biggest foreign policy success and failure both involved Cuba. There was the Bay of Pigs fiasco—CIA-trained Cuban exiles failing to incite an uprising and bring down Castro—and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the USSR and USA got to direct confrontation. The standoff brought the world to the brink of destruction, but ultimately both Kennedy and Khrushchev accepted that if blood was spilled, it would be almost impossible to stop the situation from spiraling out of control. Kennedy was helped in no small part by the insight into Khrushchev given to him by the CIA and British SIS (the proper term for MI6) agent Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, deputy head of the foreign section of the GRU (the Soviets didn’t just have the KGB, don’t you know). Some historians have gone as far to label Penkovsky as the spy who saved the world from nuclear war. His HUMINT, human intelligence, helped, but IMINT, imagery intelligence, from the new satellite technology and aerial photography played its part as well. Each verified the other. The best intelligence is always confirmed from different sources, both human and technological.

  6. Vietnam (1955–75)

  The communist threat now appeared to be coming from the unstable postcolonial third world. The Vietnam War was a result of the collapse of the French colonial regime and a power struggle between the US-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Initially many Americans believed that it was in their national interest to defend South Vietnam from communism. If they didn’t, other revolutions might be more likely to occur against free governments elsewhere. But as the human and financial costs spiraled and the impact of the draft made itself felt (NB: if you went to college, it was deferred, so if you were rich, you were less likely to fight—quite), so the peace movement grew. The New York Times published excerpts from the Pentagon Papers in 1971, a top-secret overview of US government involvement in Vietnam. These showed that the Johnson administration had been deceiving the American public and many statements made about Vietnam had been a lie. The credibility gap led to more cynicism, and popular support diminished still further. Ultimately it proved impossible to win a protracted war without it. As covered in Cheat Sheet 14, Vietnam was ultimately a loss to America.

  7. The Yom Kippur War (1973)

  This threatened direct conflict between the USSR and the USA for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. American forces hit Stage 3 alert (scary stuff—Stage 5 was when nuclear weapons were launched).

  Egypt and Syria, using Soviet weapons, launched a surprise attack on Israel. Israel fought back with the help of the Americans, and the Egyptians found themselves surrounded by the Israelis in the Sinai Desert. The Soviets threatened to rescue the Egyptians themselves. Kissinger flew into action with shuttle diplomacy, which is what it sounds like. He flew in and out of different countries being diplomatic. Eventually a peace accord was reached.

  8. The Soviet War in Afghanistan (1979–89)

  When all’s said and done, the Soviets’ Vietnam. The USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, with Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev claiming to dubious Americans that Afghani leaders had asked for military assistance. The Americans were concerned about Soviet expansion in the Middle East, so the Carter administration ordered a grain (and athlete—Americans didn’t turn up to the 1980 Moscow Olympics) boycott. The regime propped up by the Soviets was opposed by the mujahideen, which by 1982 controlled 75 percent of Afghanistan. Somehow the mujahideen fighters ended up in possession of American surface-to-air missiles …

  Mikhail Gorbachev took Russia out of the Afghanistan fiasco when he realized what many Russian leaders had been too scared to admit in public—that Russia could not win the war, plus the cost of maintaining such a vast force in Afghanistan was crippling Russia’s already weak economy.

  9. Korean Air Lines Flight 007 and Able Archer (1983)

  Alluded to in the history introduction and occurred during the height of President Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” rhetoric against the Soviets. The Russians were so convinced that America was about to launch a nuclear first strike that they launched the intelligence operation RYAN, to give them due warning. The upshot of RYAN was that the Soviets got increasingly hysterical about the Americans, misinterpreting everything they did as suspicious. As a result, the Russians shot down an off-course South Korean airliner, KAL007, in September 1983. In October, the Americans invaded Grenada. Cue absolute Soviet panic in November with NATO’s training exercise Able Archer—the Soviets misinterpreted it as a potential first strike. The Brits had a double agent, Oleg Gordievsky, who revealed the Soviet mind-set and sent over to the White House a fifty-page paper entitled “Soviet Perceptions of Nuclear Warfare.” Unusually, Reagan read all of it. Tensions cooled.

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  President Reagan of course burst on the international scene talking the talk and walking the walk in the 1980s. He was Mr. Swashbuckler when it came to fighting communism in Central America. And then there was his Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as S
tar Wars. Although the plan—something to do with shooting down missiles using lasers in space—was never fully developed or deployed, it put the fear into the Soviet Union, which was in the midst of economic stagnation.

  As the US turned up the economic, military, and diplomatic heat, the stage was set for one Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. The new leader of the USSR implemented his reforms of reorganization, perestroika, and openness, glasnost. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher identified him as a man she could do business with, and by 1987 Gorbachev and Reagan agreed in principle to an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which for the first time eliminated an entire class of existing nuclear weapons. That was also the year that the American president stood at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and urged, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

  The resulting climate enabled the rise of independence movements in Eastern Europe. In the summer of 1989, Poland became the first noncommunist government in the Eastern Bloc. A wave of peaceful revolutions among the USSR’s satellite states ensued (apart from Romania, and also note that Yugoslavia rapidly ended up in violent civil war). Gorbachev, by choosing not to use force to quell the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe, essentially allowed the Soviet Union to disintegrate. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall, the most visible symbol of the cold war, was destroyed.

  Soviet conservative hard-liners did not go down without a fight. In a coup in August 1991, Gorbachev was placed under house arrest. Boris Yeltsin demanded the arrest of the hard-liners—and the public sided with him. Though Gorbachev was freed, his stature was not what it was. In late 1991 the USSR itself was formally dissolved and Boris Yeltsin became the first president of the Russian Federation. There was more to him than a penchant for vodka, don’t you know.

  Who won the cold war? Well, the United States became the sole superpower. Some Republicans claimed credit for America’s “win.” Democrats were quick to point out that containment was a bipartisan policy invented by the Democratic president Truman. John McCain’s favorite talking point is that Russia is now a “gas station masquerading as a country.”

  The safest argument to deploy here is that nobody won the cold war. The Swahili have a proverb: When two elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets trampled. Although the US and the USSR never squared off directly against each other, the contest cost billions of dollars and millions of lives. The cold war also proved that America might be a superpower, but it doesn’t have superpowers.

  The conclusion of the cold war: uncertainty.

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  WISE WORDS

  Did we win or did the Soviets just lose?

  —Former CIA director Robert Gates on the cold war

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  SOCIAL SURVIVAL STRATEGY

  Argument: “America was the obvious game changer (if late in the day in their arrival) in the world wars; nobody won the cold war.”

  If in doubt, deploy this safe strategy of stating the obvious: There can be no doubt that twice America was the (incredibly late) knight in shining armor to the world. Post the cold war, there has been nothing but confusion.

  Crisp Fact: “During World War I, victory calculations were based on national birthrates.”

  Thanks to technology, World War I warfare reached a new level of brutality. If you’re with a group that could do with a dose of humility, throw in this humbling detail.

  Pivot: “Extraordinary to think how Berlin was entirely surrounded by East Germany during the cold war. Have you been? I found it/hear that it’s fascinating.”

  This will provoke a solid destination discussion. Berlin is one of the most fascinating places to visit in the world—it’s living, breathing history. Everyone you speak to has a story. My German publisher for The Single Girl’s Guide grew up behind the wall in East Berlin; with a family blacklisted by the Stasi, he had little hope to dream of future prospects until the wall came down. Now he owns a publishing company. Berliners’ sense of guilt for their history, for the Holocaust, is palpable. And Berlin is where the politicians and artists live—the bankers are in Frankfurt—so it is made up of an extraordinarily eclectic mix of people.

  CHEAT SHEET 17—MIDDLE EASTERN HISTORY

  I’ve got an admission to make with this Cheat Sheet. I’m writing it last. For some reason, I thought awards season conversation would be less of a challenge. However, I’m trying not to beat myself up too badly over this. After all, I’m not the first and I will not be the last to be in a quandary when it comes to the Middle East.

  Your key reference point almost every time something in the region makes the news or comes up in conversation is this: The Saudis are Sunni Muslims and the Iranians are Shia Muslims. The likely end game of all the current unrest in the Middle East is that you will have a Sunni sphere of influence controlled by Saudi Arabia and a Shia sphere of influence run by the Iranians. How much blood will have to be shed and how long that will take, nobody knows.

  This is a history Cheat Sheet, and in it we will discover that there are two Western countries that you can safely criticize for the present problems in the Middle East. First of all, blame the British. Everyone can actually agree on that. Following on from this, I’m afraid you’re going to need to admit that the United States has in recent times created power vacuums in the region (removal of Saddam Hussein on false intelligence being the prime example), which has contributed to/caused the current chaos. You might also venture that you’re not entirely sure that the US hasn’t misunderstood the Sunni and Shia relationship.

  We will begin by examining the overall history of the region, where we will note that we need to think beyond borders because those in the Middle East do. That is because they are false borders (blame the British). However, since these borders are still consistently referred to, especially in Western discussion about the region, we are utilizing them and will then zero in on some of the hotter hot spots of the Middle East, including Israel and Palestine.

  Unsurprisingly, there are no hard-and-fast rules about which countries are specifically in the Middle East. And of course at the moment they are not all countries. There is no state of Palestine, only territories (the Gaza Strip and portions of the West Bank) controlled by the Palestinian National Authority. At time of this writing, the CIA’s definition of the Middle East (which we may as well use, since whatever they are doing clearly impacts us, whether or not you believe their intelligence is always intelligent) comprises Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Under this umbrella, the CIA separately lists the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but since this is a history chapter, I have put them under the banner of Palestine. Note that the CIA places Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan in the category of South Asia. Egypt and Libya are located in the CIA’s category of Africa.

  Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start, especially in the case of the Middle East, where civilization began. There were the ancient empires including the Egyptians (c. 3000–1000 BC), the Assyrians and Babylonians (c. 1000–500 BC), the Persians (c. 550–330 BC), the Greeks (c. 330–60 BC), and the Romans (c. 60 BC—AD 140). From around 1300 to 1918 we had the Ottoman empire, the focal point of which was Istanbul, which of course is in modern-day Turkey. It was the biggest political entity in western Asia; the Ottoman empire’s territory encompassed much of what we know now of as the Middle East. Meanwhile, for some of that period, the area of modern Iran was dominated by the Safavid dynasty (1501–c. 1722).

  But it wasn’t just about empire. Around AD 600, Islam began in Mecca, in western Saudi Arabia. There was also the tribal factor; many of the Arab peoples of the Arabian Peninsula were organized into tribal groups.

  Arguably the real problems began with the Europeans. Sigh. I’m not talking about the Crusades of the Middle Ages/Medieval period involving Richard the Lionheart, et al. I’m talking the later phenom of colonialism. Which to most intents and purposes in this area means, yes, the Brits
.

  It was actually an American naval officer named Alfred Thayer Mahan who in 1902 first coined the geopolitical term Middle East. It might have previously made an appearance in the British India Office in the nineteenth century, but it was Mahan who was most influential in getting it into the vernacular. Prior to it, the label Near East had been bandied about. You might ask near to whom, but if you think about it, you’ll know the depressing answer. Near to those dreadful Europeans. Far was, of course, in the direction of China.

  The height of the Europeans’ interference came after World War I when the Ottoman empire (which had sided with Germany and co.) was broken up and given over to the Brits and French as a result of the League of Nations. Tribal sensitivity in the division of the lands? Not so much. With scant regard to the local population, political boundaries were drawn. We are still paying the price for these partitions today, for the post–World War I boundaries made no sense on religious or ethnic grounds.

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  NOTEWORTHY NUGGET: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

  • Not just a 1962 film starring Peter O’Toole.

  • Based on the real-life T. E. Lawrence, an illegitimately born British army officer.

  • In 1916 during World War I, with the employment of Lawrence’s diplomacy, bags of gold, and promises of Arab independence, the Brits encouraged an Arab uprising against the Turks (who had sided with the Germans in World War I). Although the Arabs received some territory as a result of the deal, they weren’t best pleased when Western powers, particularly the Brits, later drew borders and created nations with scant regard for the local inhabitants.