The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (103 page)

Unlike those earlier Powers that grappled with the problem of strategical overextension, the United States also confronts the possibility of nuclear annihilation—a fact which, many people feel, has changed the entire nature of international power politics. If indeed a large-scale nuclear exchange were to occur, then any consideration of the United States’ “prospects” becomes so problematical as to make it pointless—even if it also is the case that the American position (because of its defensive systems, and geographical extent) is probably more favorable than, say, France’s or Japan’s in such a conflict. On the other hand, the history of the post-1945 arms race so far suggests that nuclear weapons, while mutually threatening to East and West, also seem to be mutually unusable—which is the chief reason why the Powers continue to increase expenditures upon their
conventional
forces. If, however, the possibility exists of the major states someday becoming involved in a nonnuclear war (whether merely regional or on a larger scale), then the similarity of strategical circumstances between the United States today and imperial Spain or Edwardian Britain in their day is clearly much more appropriate. In each case, the declining number-one power faced threats, not so much to the security of its own homeland (in the United States’ case, the prospect of being conquered by an invading army is remote), but to the nation’s interests abroad—interests so widespread that it would be difficult to defend them all at once, and yet almost equally difficult to abandon any of them without running further risks.

Each of those interests abroad, it is fair to remark, was undertaken by the United States for what seemed very plausible (often very pressing) reasons at the time, and in most instances the reason for the American presence has not diminished; in certain parts of the globe, U.S. interests may now appear larger to decision-makers in Washington than they were a few decades ago.

That, it can be argued, is certainly true of American obligations in the Middle East. Here is a region, from Morocco in the west to Afghanistan in the east, where the United States faces a number of conflicts
and problems whose mere listing (as one observer put it) “leaves one breathless.”
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It is an area which contains so much of the world’s surplus oil supply; which seems so susceptible (at least on the map) to Soviet penetration; toward which a powerfully organized domestic lobby presses for unflinching support for an isolated but militarily efficient Israel; in which Arab states of a generally pro-western inclination (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Gulf emirates) are under pressure from their own Islamic fundamentalists as well as from external threats such as Libya; and in which all the Arab states, whatever their own rivalries, oppose Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. This makes the region very important to the United States, but at the same time bewilderingly resistant to any simple policy option. It is, in addition, the region in the world which, at least in some parts of it, seems most frequently to resort to war. Finally, it contains the only territory—Afghanistan—which the Soviet Union is attempting to conquer by means of armed force. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Middle East has been viewed as requiring constant American attention, whether of a military or a diplomatic kind. Yet the memory of the 1979 debacle in Iran and of the ill-fated Lebanon venture of 1983, the diplomatic complexities of the antagonisms (how to assist Saudi Arabia without alarming Israel), and the unpopularity of the United States among the Arab masses all make it extremely difficult for an American government to conduct a coherent, long-term policy in the Middle East.

In Latin America, too, there are seen to be growing challenges to the United States’ national interests. If a major international debt crisis is to occur anywhere in the world, dealing a heavy blow to the global credit system and especially to U.S. banks, it is likely to begin in this region. As it is, Latin America’s economic problems have not only lowered the credit rating of many eminent American banking houses, but they have also contributed to a substantial decline in U.S. manufacturing exports to that region. Here, as in East Asia, the threat that the advanced, prosperous countries of the world will steadily increase tariffs against imported, low-labor-cost manufactures, and be ever less generous in their overseas-aid programs, is a cause for deep concern. All this is compounded by the fact that, economically and socially, Latin America has been changing remarkably swiftly over the past few decades;
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at the same time, its demographic explosion is pressing ever harder upon the available resources, and upon the older conservative governing structures, in a considerable number of states. This has led to broad-based movements for social and constitutional reforms, or even for outright “revolution”—the latter being influenced by the present radical regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua. In turn, these movements have produced a conservative backlash, with reactionary governments proclaiming the need to eradicate all signs of domestic
Communism, and appealing to the United States for help to achieve that goal. These social and political fissures often compel the United States to choose between its desire to enhance democratic rights in Latin America and its wish to defeat Marxism. It also forces Washington to consider whether it can achieve its own purposes by political and economic means alone, or whether it may have to resort to military action (as in the case of Grenada).

By far the most worrying situation of all, however, lies just to the south of the United States, and makes the Polish “crisis” for the USSR seem small by comparison. There is simply no equivalent in the world for the present state of Mexican-United States relations. Mexico is on the verge of economic bankruptcy and default, its internal economic crisis forces hundreds of thousands to drift illegally to the north each year, its most profitable trade with the United States is swiftly becoming a brutally managed flow of hard drugs, and the border for all this sort of traffic is still extraordinarily permeable.
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If the challenges to American interests in East Asia are farther away, that does not diminish the significance of this vast area today. The largest share of the world’s population lives there; a large and increasing proportion of American trade is with countries on the “Pacific rim”; two of the world’s future Great Powers, China and Japan, are located there; the Soviet Union, directly and (through Vietnam) indirectly, is also there. So are those Asian newly industrializing countries, delicate quasi-democracies which on the one hand have embraced the capitalist laissez-faire ethos with a vengeance, and on the other are undercutting American manufacturing in everything from textiles to electronics. It is in East Asia, too, that a substantial number of American military obligations exist, usually as creations of the early Cold War.

Even a mere listing of those obligations cannot fail to suggest the extraordinarily wide-ranging nature of American interests in this region. A few years ago, the U.S. Defense Department attempted a brief summary of American interests in East Asia, but its very succinctness pointed, paradoxically, to the almost limitless extent of those strategical commitments:

Moreover, this carefully selected prose inevitably conceals a considerable number of extremely delicate political and strategical issues: how to build a good relationship with the PRC without abandoning Taiwan; how to “support the stability and independence of friendly countries” while trying to control the flood of their exports to the American market; how to make the Japanese assume a larger share of the defense of the western Pacific without alarming its various neighbors; how to maintain U.S. bases in, for example, the Philippines without provoking local resentments; how to reduce the American military presence in South Korea without sending the wrong “signal” to the North …

Larger still, at least as measured by military deployments, is the American stake in western Europe—the defense of which is, more than anything else, the strategic rationale of the American army and of much of the air force and the navy. According to some arcane calculations, in fact, 50 or 60 percent of American general-purpose forces are allocated to NATO, an organization in which (critics repeatedly point out) the other members contribute a significantly lower share of their GNP to defense spending even though Europe’s total population and income are now larger than the USA’s own.
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This is not the place to rehearse the various European counterarguments in the “burden-sharing” debate (such as the social cost which countries like France and West Germany pay in maintaining conscription), or to develop the point that if western Europe was “Finlandized” the USA would probably spend even more on defense than at the moment.
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From an American strategical perspective, the unavoidable fact is that this region has always seemed more vulnerable to Russian pressure than, say, Japan—partly because it is
not
an island, and partly because on the other side of the European land frontier the USSR has concentrated the largest proportion of its land and air forces, significantly greater than what may be reasonably needed for internal-security purposes. This still may not give Russia the military capacity to overrun western Europe (see pp. 507–9), but it is not a situation in which it would be prudent to withdraw substantial U.S. ground and air forces unilaterally. Even the outside possibility that the world’s largest concentration of manufacturing production
might
fall into the Soviet orbit is enough to convince the Pentagon that “the security of western
Europe is particularly vital to the security of the United States.”
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Yet however logical the American commitment to Europe may be strategically, that fact itself is no guarantee against certain military and political complications which have led to transatlantic discord. Although the NATO alliance brings the United States and western Europe close together at one level, the EEC itself is, like Japan, a rival in economic terms, especially in the shrinking markets for agricultural products. More significantly, while
official
European policy has always been to stress the importance of being under the American “nuclear umbrella,” a broad-based unease exists among the general publics at the implications of siting U.S. weapons (cruise missiles, Pershing lis, Trident-bearing submarines—let alone neutron bombs) on European soil. But if, to return to an earlier point, both superpowers would try to avoid “going nuclear” in the event of a major clash, that still leaves considerable problems in guaranteeing the defense of western Europe by
conventional
means. In the first place, that is a very expensive proposition. Secondly, even if one accepts the evidence which is beginning to suggest that the Warsaw Pact’s land and air forces could in fact be held in check, such an argument is predicated upon a certain enhancement of NATO’s current strength. From that perspective, nothing could be more upsetting than proposals to reduce or withdraw U.S. forces in Europe—however pressing that might be for economic reasons or for the purpose of buttressing American deployments elsewhere in the world. Yet carrying out a grand strategy which is both global and flexible is extremely difficult when so large a portion of the American armed forces are committed to one particular region.

In view of the above, it is not surprising that the circles most concerned about the discrepancy between American commitments and American power are the armed services themselves, simply because they would be the first to suffer if strategical weaknesses were exposed in the harsh test of war. Hence the frequent warnings by the Pentagon against being forced to carry out a global logistical juggling act, switching forces from one “hot spot” to another as new troubles emerge. If this was particularly acute in late 1983, when additional U.S. deployments in Central America, Grenada, Chad, and the Lebanon caused the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to proclaim that the “mismatch” between American forces and strategy “is greater now than ever before,”
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the problem had been implicit for years beforehand. Interestingly, such warnings about the American armed forces being “at full stretch” are attended by maps of “Major U.S. Military Deployment Around the World”
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which, to historians, look extraordinarily similar to the chain of fleet bases and garrisons possessed by that former world power, Great Britain, at the height of its strategic overstretch.
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On the other hand, it is hardly likely that the United States would
be called upon to defend
all
of its overseas interests simultaneously and without the aid of a significant number of allies—the NATO members in western Europe, Israel in the Middle East, and, in the Pacific, Japan, Australia, possibly China. Nor are all the regional trends becoming unfavorable to the United States in defense terms; for example, while aggression by the unpredictable North Korean regime is always possible, that would hardly be welcomed by Peking nowadays—and, in addition, South Korea itself has grown to possess over twice the population and four times the GNP of North Korea. In the same way, while the expansion of Russian forces in the Far East is alarming to Washington, that is considerably balanced off by the growing threat posed by the PRC to Russia’s land and sea lines of communication with the Orient. The recent, sober admission by the U.S. defense secretary that “we can never afford to buy the capabilities sufficient to meet all of our commitments with one hundred percent confidence”
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is surely true; but it may be less worrying than at first appears if it is also recalled that the total of potential anti-Soviet resources in the world (United States, western Europe, Japan, PRC, Australasia) is far greater than the total of resources lined up on Russia’s side.