THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (15 page)

Many persons hearing these remarks must have asked themselves why the United States was overreacting; and unless the dimensions of the entire conflict are appreciated, the American position seems petulant, absurd. It was in fact, as the perspective of the Long War shows, nothing of the kind, but reflected instead an acute appreciation of the fundamentally constitutional issues at stake. Moreover, there was, lurking beneath the cloak of sovereignty that such a treaty would throw over the East German state, a vexing problem. To recognize the GDR would have been to permit them to control not only access to West Berlin, but access out of East Berlin, as any
state is permitted to do with its own borders. At this time, about 300,000 East Germans were disappearing into West Berlin and thence to West Germany each year. Since 1949 three million persons had gone through Berlin to the West. This continued flow of young, talented, educated, and professional people was damaging in and of itself; it could at any time, however, erupt into a complete hemorrhage. The purpose of the Russian treaty was to stanch this flow, and thus to prevent a greater one. On the night of August 12 – 13, 1961, a concrete barrier up to six feet high and topped with barbed wire was erected in the Potsdamerplatz by communist “shock workers.” Similar barriers of greater height were raised at other points along the boundaries of the Eastern and Western sectors of the city. Building the “Berlin Wall” was a bold move by the Soviet Union and the wall's survival was, as Khrushchev later claimed, a “great victory.”
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This engagement, like the Viet Nam War, must be scored a communist success, even if, as in Viet Nam, the United States could not prudently have done more than it did. The West, though it brought up bulldozers backed by tanks and some infantry, never attempted to breach the wall and confined itself to complaints at the U.N.

Roughly one year later, American photo reconnaissance disclosed that the Russians were in the process of installing ballistic missiles in Cuba with an intermediate range (1, 000 – 1,400 miles). The Cuban Missile Crisis has been widely misdescribed as provoking the United States into a threat to launch nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union if Russian missiles were not removed from Cuba.
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Actually, the president's carefully worded ultimatum stated that if nuclear weapons were used against the United States from Cuba, the United States would retaliate against the USSR, a very different matter, and a position well within the parameters of the tacit U.S./Soviet rules of engagement.
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This ultimatum was coupled with a blockade of the island and preparations for invasion. In that context, the statement was not an ultimatum so much as an invitation to deal, and this is exactly what happened. In exchange for the removal of the weapons, the United States pledged not to invade Cuba; and the United States undertook to remove intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) based in Turkey that were targeted against the Soviet Union. Like the Berlin Wall, this was a tactical success for the Russians—Khrushchev uses the same words in Russian to describe both events in his memoirs
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—but was it not also, like the Berlin Crisis, a strategic calamity for the USSR?

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.
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*
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.
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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
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to Paul Nitze
†
in 1950:

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 American 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,
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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.