The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (89 page)

Not for the first time in history, therefore, there looms today a tension between a nation’s existence in an anarchic military-political world and its existence in a laissez-faire economic world; between on the one hand its search for strategic security, as represented by its investment in the latest weapon systems and in its large-scale diversion
of national resources to the armed forces, and on the other hand its search for economic security, as represented by an enhanced national prosperity, which depends upon growth (which in turn flows from new methods of production and wealth creation), upon increased output, and upon flourishing internal and external demand—all of which may be damaged by excessive spending upon armaments. Precisely because a top-heavy military establishment may slow down the rate of economic growth and lead to a decline in the nation’s share of world manufacturing output, and therefore wealth, and therefore
power
, the whole issue becomes one of the balancing the short-term security afforded by large defense forces against the longer-term security of rising production and income.

The tension between these conflicting aims is perhaps particularly acute in the late twentieth century because of the publicity given to the existence of various alternative “models” for emulation. On the one hand, there are the extremely successful “trading states”—chiefly in Asia, like Japan and Hong Kong, but also including Switzerland, Sweden, and Austria—which have taken advantage of the great growth in world production and in commercial interdependence since 1945, and whose external policy emphasizes peaceful, trading relations with other societies. In consequence, they have all sought to keep defense spending as low as is compatible with the preservation of national sovereignty, thereby freeing resources for high domestic consumption and capital investment. On the other hand, there are the various “militarized” economies—Vietnam in Southeast Asia, Iran and Iraq as they engage in their lengthy war, Israel and its jealous neighbors in the Near East, and the USSR itself—all of which allocate more (in some cases, much more) than 10 percent of their GNP to defense expenditures each year and, while firmly believing that such levels of spending are necessary to guarantee military security, manifestly suffer from that diversion of resources from productive, peaceful ends. Between the two poles of the merchant and the warrior states, so to speak, there lie most of the rest of the nations of this planet, not convinced that the world is a safe enough place to allow them to reduce arms expenditure to Japan’s unusually low level, but also generally uneasy at the high economic and social costs of large-scale spending upon armaments, and aware that there is a certain trade-off between short-term military security and long-term economic security. For countries which have—again, in contrast to Japan—extensive overseas military obligations from which it would be difficult to escape, the problem is further compounded. Moreover, in many of the leading Powers the planners are acutely aware that they have to balance the spiraling cost of weaponry not only against productive investment but also against growing social requirements (especially as their overall population ages),
which makes the allocation of spending priorities a more difficult task than ever.

The feat demanded of most if not all governing bodies as the world heads toward the twenty-first century is therefore a
threefold
one: simultaneously to provide military security (or some viable alternative security) for its national interests,
and
to satisfy the socioeconomic needs of its citizenry,
and
to ensure sustained growth, this last being essential both for the positive purposes of affording the required guns and butter at the present, and for the negative purpose of avoiding a relative economic decline which could hurt the people’s military and economic security in the future. Achieving all three of those feats over a sustained period of time will be a very difficult task, given the uneven pace of technological and commercial change and the unpredictable fluctuations in international politics. Yet achieving the first two feats—or either one of them—without the third will inevitably lead to relative eclipse over the longer term, which has of course been the fate of all slower-growing societies that failed to adjust to the dynamics of world power. As one economist has soberly pointed out, “It is hard to imagine, but a country whose productivity growth lags 1 percent behind other countries over one century can turn, as England did, from the world’s indisputed industrial leader into the mediocre economy it is today.”
²⁰

Just how well (or badly) the leading nations seem placed to carry out this task is the focus of the rest of this chapter. It hardly needs emphasizing that since the varied demands of defense spending/military security, social/consumer needs, and investment for growth involve a triangular competition for resources, there is no absolutely perfect solution to this tension. Probably the best that can be achieved is that all three aims be kept in rough harmony, but just how that balance is reached will always be strongly influenced by national circumstances, not by some theoretical definition of equilibrium. A state surrounded by hostile neighbors will think it better to allocate more to military security than one whose citizens feel relatively unthreatened; a country rich in natural resources will find it easier to pay for guns and butter; a society determined upon economic growth in order to catch up to the others will have different priorities from one on the brink of war. Geography, politics, and culture will all ensure that one state’s “solution” will never be exactly the same as another’s. Nevertheless, the basic argument remains: without a rough balance between these competing demands of defense, consumption, and investment, a Great Power is unlikely to preserve its status for long.

The competing claims of weapons modernization, the people’s social requirements, and the need to channel all available resources into “productive” nonmilitary enterprises is nowhere more pressing than in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which is simultaneously the poorest of the major Powers and probably the least well placed strategically. Yet if the PRC suffers from certain chronic hardships, its present leadership seems to be evolving a grand strategy altogether more coherent and forward-looking than that which prevails in Moscow, Washington, or Tokyo, not to mention western Europe. And while the
material
constraints upon China are great, they are being ameliorated by an economic expansion which,
if it can be kept up
, promises to transform the country within a few decades.

The country’s weaknesses are so well known as to require only a brief mention here. Diplomatically and strategically, Peking has regarded itself (with some justification) as being isolated and surrounded. If this was partly due to Mao’s policies toward China’s neighbors, it was also a consequence of the rivalry and ambitions of other powers in Asia during the preceding decades. The memories of Japan’s earlier aggressions have not faded from the Chinese mind, and reinforce the caution with which the leadership in Peking regards that country’s explosive growth in recent years. Despite the 1970s thaw in relations with Washington, the United States is also viewed with some suspicion—the more particularly under a Republican regime which seems overenthusiastic about constructing an anti-Russian bloc, which appears to nourish a lingering fondness for Taiwan, and which interferes too readily against Third World countries and revolutionary movements for Peking’s liking. The future of Taiwan and the smaller offshore islands remains a thorny problem, and only half-submerged. The PRC’s relations with India have stayed cool, being complicated by their respective ties to Pakistan and Russia. Notwithstanding recent “wooing” efforts by Moscow, China feels bound to see in the USSR its chief foreign danger—and not merely because of the masses of Russian divisions and aircraft deployed along the frontier, but also in consequence of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and, more worryingly, in the military expansionism of the Soviet-supported Vietnamese state to the south. Somewhat like the Germans earlier in this century, therefore, the Chinese think deeply about “encirclement” even as they simultaneously strive to enhance their place in the global system of power.
²¹

Moreover, this awkward, multilateral set of diplomatic tasks has to be managed by a country which is not very strong militarily or economically, when measured against its chief rivals. For all the size
of the Chinese Army in
numerical
terms, it remains woefully un-derequipped in modern instruments of warfare. Most of its tanks, guns, aircraft, and warships are indigenous versions of Russian or western models which China acquired years ago, and are certainly not on a par with later, much more sophisticated types; a lack of hard currency and an unwillingness to become too dependent upon other nations have kept purchases of foreign arms to a minimum. Perhaps even more worrying to Peking’s leaders are the weaknesses in China’s
combat
effectiveness, due to the Maoist attacks upon professionalism in the army and the preference for peasant militias—such Utopian solutions being of little assistance in the 1979 border war with Vietnam, whose battle-hardened and well-trained troops killed some 26,000 Chinese and wounded 37,000 others.
²²
Economically, China appears still further behind; even when amending its official per capita GNP figures in a way which better accords with western concepts and economic measurements,
²³
the figure can hardly be more than a mere $500, compared with well over $13,000 for many of the advanced capitalist states and a respectable $5,000+ for the USSR. With its population likely to rise from a billion people today to 1.2 or 1.3 billion by the year 2000, the prospects of a major increase in personal income may not be large; even in the next century the average Chinese will be poor, relative to the inhabitants of the established Powers. Furthermore, it hardly needs saying that the difficulties of governing such a populous state, of reconciling the various factions (party, army, bureaucrats, farmers), and of achieving growth without social and ideological turbulence will test even the most flexible and intelligent leadership. China’s internal history for the past century does not offer encouraging precedents for long-term strategies of development.

Nevertheless, the indications of reform and self-improvement in China which have occurred over the past six to eight years are very remarkable, and suggest that this period of Deng Xiaoping’s leadership may one day be seen in the way that historians view Colbert’s France, or the early stages of Frederick the Great’s reign, or Japan in the post-Meiji Restoration decades: that is, as a country straining to develop its power (in all senses of that word) by every pragmatic means, balancing the desire to encourage enterprise and initiative and change with an
étatiste
determination to direct events so that the national goals are achieved as swiftly and smoothly as possible. Such a strategy involves the ability to see how the separate aspects of government policy relate to each other. It therefore involves a sophisticated balancing act, requiring careful judgments as to the speed at which these transformations can safely occur, the amount of resources to be allocated to long-term as opposed to short-term needs, the coordination of the state’s internal and external requirements, and—last but not least in a country which still has a “modified” Marxist system—the
ways by which ideology and practice can be reconciled. Although difficulties have occurred and new ones are likely to emerge in the future, the record so far is an impressive one.

It can be seen, for example, in the many ways in which the Chinese armed services are transforming themselves after the convulsions of the 1960s. The planned reduction of the People’s Liberation Army (which includes the navy and air force) from 4.2 to 3 million personnel is, in fact, an enhancement of real strength, since far too many of them were merely support troops, used for railway-building and civic duties. Those remaining within the armed forces are likely to be of higher overall quality: new uniforms and the restoration of military ranks (abolished by Mao as being “bourgeois”) are the outward sign of this; but they will be reinforced by replacing a largely volunteer army with conscription (to give the state access to high-quality personnel), by reorganizing the military regions and streamlining the staffs, and by improving officer training at the academies, which have also emerged from their period of Maoist disgrace.
²⁴
Along with this will go a large-scale modernization of China’s weaponry, which, although numerically substantial, suffers from considerable obsolescence. Its navy is being given an array of new vessels, from destroyers and escorts to fast-attack craft and even hovercraft; and it has built up a very substantial fleet of conventional submarines (107 in 1985), making it the third-largest such force in the world. Its tanks are now displaying laser rangefinders; its aircraft are becoming all-weather types, with modern radar. All this is attended by a willingness to experiment with large-scale maneuvers under modern battlefield conditions (one such 1981 maneuver involved six or seven Chinese armies backed by aircraft—which had been missing in the 1979 clash with Vietnam),
²⁵
and to rethink the strategy of a “forward defense” along the frontiers with Russia in favor of counterattacks some way behind the long, exposed borders. The navy, too, is experimenting on a much larger scale: in 1980 an eighteen-vessel task force undertook an eight-thousand-nautical-mile mission in the South Pacific, in conjunction with China’s latest intercontinental ballistic missile experiments. (Was this, one wonders, the first significant demonstration of Chinese sea power since Cheng Ho’s cruises of the early fifteenth century? See pp. 6–7 above.)

More impressive still, for China’s emergence as a Great Power militarily, has been the extraordinarily rapid development of its nuclear technology. Although the first Chinese tests occurred in Mao’s time, he had publicly scorned nuclear weapons when preferring the merits of a “people’s war”; the Deng leadership, by contrast, is intent upon taking China into the ranks of the
modern
military states as swiftly as possible. As early as 1980, China was testing ICBMs with a range of seven thousand nautical miles (which would encompass not only all of the USSR but also parts of the United States).
²⁶
A year later, one of its
rockets launched three space satellites, which is an indication of a multiple-warhead rocket technology. Most of China’s nuclear forces are
land-based
, and medium-range rather than long-distance; but they are being joined by new ICBMs and, perhaps the most significant step of all (in terms of nuclear deterrence), by a fleet of missile-carrying submarines. Since 1982, China has been testing submarine-launched ballistic missiles and working on improvements of both range and accuracy. There are also reports of Chinese experimentation with tactical nuclear weapons. All this is backed up by large-scale atomic research, and by a refusal to have its nuclear weapons development “frozen” by international limitations agreements, since that would merely aid the existing Great Powers.