Real War (4 page)

—Deng Xiaoping

For more than twenty-five years the countries of the Western Alliance have been preparing themselves against the dread possibility of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. This war, which the strategists have called . . . the Third World War—has never come, and may never come. Meanwhile, the real Third World War has been fought and is being fought under our noses, and few people have noticed what was going on.

—Brian Crozier

World War III began before World War II ended. Even as Allied armies battled Nazi forces to the death in Europe, Stalin had his eye clearly fixed on his postwar objectives. In April 1945, as American and Russian soldiers were embracing at the Elbe River in Germany, Stalin was spelling out his blueprint for a divided postwar world.
“This war is not as in the past,” he said; “whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”

By then, the blacksmith who would later forge the Iron Curtain had already shown how cynically he would ensure that his “social system” prevailed. One of the most heroic chapters of World War II was written by the resistance movement in German-occupied Poland, and in particular by the Polish Home Army. Its members provided intelligence information, conducted sabotage, disrupted rail communications behind the German lines, carried out reprisals for acts of Nazi repression by executing German officials; they even staged pitched battles with German troops. They were Polish patriots, determined to restore and preserve Polish independence.

On August 1, 1944, Polish freedom fighters rose up against the Nazi occupiers in Warsaw as the Soviet army approached, just as French partisans had done when American and British forces neared Paris. But instead of aiding the liberation of the city, the Soviet forces sat outside for week after week and watched as the Nazis threw five divisions against the trapped Poles, finally crushing their heroic resistance after sixty-three days. The Soviet government even refused to allow the Western Allies the use of Soviet airfields to fly supplies to the beleaguered Poles until the uprising had been going on for seven full weeks. At the end of September the Soviet army marched west, bypassing Warsaw altogether. On October 3, cut off and abandoned, the resistance forces surrendered to the Germans. The cream of the Polish resistance movement had been eliminated; the city of Warsaw had been ravaged; the path for Soviet domination of Poland had been cleared. In March 1945 the Soviets followed this up by inviting the commander of the Polish Home Army and several other leaders of the underground resistance to Moscow for political talks. When they revealed themselves to the Soviet agents, however, they were arrested and imprisoned. All this while the war in Europe was still going on, while the Soviets and the Western Allies—and the Polish underground—were still supposedly fighting together to defeat the Nazis.

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World War III has gone on now for a third of a century, since those closing days of World War II. At Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam, as the postwar pattern of Europe was being set, Stalin maneuvered his way toward the advantages that he soon
abruptly seized. The Soviet armies that followed the retreating Germans into Eastern Europe stayed, and the Iron Curtain clanged down across the continent. Locked under communist rule were the people of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, East Germany, as well as those of the once-independent states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. It was a coldly calculated grab on Stalin's part; as he later commented, “The reason why there is now no Communist government in Paris is because in the circumstances of 1945 the Soviet Army was not able to reach French soil.”

World War III has proceeded from the Soviet seizure of Eastern Europe, through the communist conquest of China, the wars in Korea and Indochina, and the establishment of a western hemisphere outpost of Soviet power in Cuba, to the present thrusts by the Soviet Union and its allies into Africa, the Islamic crescent, and Central America. The expansionism has been accompanied by a prodigious military buildup that has brought the Soviet Union to the verge of decisive supremacy over the West.

Korea and Vietnam were battles in that war, as were the coups that brought Soviet satellite regimes to power in places as remote as Afghanistan and South Yemen. So, too, have been the struggles to keep Communist parties from taking control in Italy and Portugal, and to contain Castro's export of revolution in Latin America.

•  •  •

World War III is the first truly global war. No corner of the earth is beyond its reach. The United States and the Soviet Union have both become global powers, and whatever affects the balance between us anywhere affects that balance everywhere. The Soviets understand this. We too must understand it, and must learn to think in global terms.

World War III is also the first truly total war: it is waged on all levels of life and society. Military power, economic power, willpower, the strength of a nation's galvanizing ideas and the clarity of its sense of purpose—each of these is vital to the outcome. So, too, are other intangibles: whether the competitive spirit is honored or denigrated; whether the prevailing ethic is for the individual to do the least he can get away with or the best of which he is capable; whether the next generation are to
be builders and creators or television zombies. It is also the first total war because of the nature of our adversaries: because theirs is a totalitarian system, advancing under the banner of an ideology in which even the minds of its people are the property of the state.

•  •  •

For the past third of a century, when we in the West have thought about World War III, the term has conjured up dreadful visions of a nuclear Armageddon. But while the West casually refers to the absence of nuclear war as peace, the Soviets have assiduously been fighting “a war called peace,” trying to win World War III without risking a nuclear exchange. They know that the object of war is not to obliterate the opponent, but to make him surrender. As the Prussian military strategist Clausewitz observed long ago, the aggressor never wants war; he would prefer to enter your country unopposed.

If we study Soviet actions, they show a clear pattern: not necessarily a “master plan” or a predictable timetable for world conquest, but rather a constant strengthening of military forces and a consistent exploitation of every opportunity to expand their own power and to weaken that of the West. Just as water flows downhill, the Soviets press to extend their power wherever it can reach, by whatever means they calculate can be effective. They are totally amoral opportunists. They
will
carefully calculate cost-benefit ratios, but they will not fret over the sanctity of contracts, the value of human life, or “bourgeois” concepts of justice.

•  •  •

Apologists often argue that the Soviets are really trying to ensure their own security against what they perceive as real or potential threats from abroad, and that once they have sufficient strength to ensure that security, their appetites will be sated. There may be some truth to the first half of that argument, but the trouble with the second half is that the Russian appetite for “security” is insatiable. The more the Soviets acquire, the more they have to protect; and they define “security” only as domination, whether at home or abroad. They have no tradition of compromise, of accommodation, of consensus, or indeed of a rule of law. As long as there is one country or one person who might stand in opposition, they consider their security
in jeopardy. To them, security, like power, can only be total. And so it can only be guaranteed by total elimination of all potential opposition. In the Soviet view, Russian gains in security must come from the losses of others; there is no increase in mutual security. For the Soviets to be secure, in their view, others must be rendered insecure.

The Soviet leadership has no concept of “peace” as we understand it, or of coexistence as we would define it. They do not believe in the concept of equals. An equal is, by their definition, a rival, to be eliminated before he eliminates you.

The Soviet goal is, reversing Woodrow Wilson, a world made unsafe for democracy: a world in which the Soviet state is secure and all others respect Soviet control and pay Soviet tribute. The Soviet ambition has been appropriately described as a desire for
“the capability to control global economic, political, and strategic affairs directly from Moscow.” The Chinese communists accuse the Soviets of seeking “hegemony,” and the word aptly describes Soviet aims.

•  •  •

The meaning of World War III is written starkly and eloquently on the faces of the boat people of Vietnam, who desperately risk death on the high seas, and rejection when they finally reach land, rather than continue to live in the prison that was once their country. Millions from other countries have risked all in their efforts to escape communism, or have abandoned homes, possessions, even families, in sad pilgrimages as their countries were partitioned. As villagers flee the advancing lava from a volcano, these new dispossessed flee the advance of a tyranny that calls itself “liberation.”

Before the communist regime took power in mainland China, Hong Kong was a city of little more than a million people. Today it holds nearly 5 million. Most of that increase is accounted for by the flood of refugees from the mainland, which surged through despite the barbed wire and border guards put in place to halt it.

In my office is a lacquer painting given to Mrs. Nixon when she visited a refugee camp in South Vietnam in 1956. It serves as a constant reminder to me that when Vietnam was partitioned in 1954 nearly a million people fled from North to South.

I spent Christmas Day 1956 at a refugee camp in Austria, near the bridge at Andau. There I talked with some of those who had escaped from Hungary in the wake of that country's brief rebellion, as Soviet tanks were crushing resistance in the streets of Budapest. Their tales of escape were harrowing. Their courage was a tribute to the human spirit, and a measure of the cruelty that triumphed.

In divided Germany the Berlin Wall stands as what West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher has called “a monument to slavery.” Before the Wall, undivided Berlin was an accessible island of freedom in a sea of tyranny. It was an abomination to the communists because it represented choice. Before the Wall was built in 1961, over 3 million people took advantage of that choice, and fled communist rule: five hundred people a day for fifteen years.

Closed borders, barbed wire, walls, guards with orders to shoot on sight any attempting to flee—these are the mark of communist control and the symbols of Soviet advance.

The hundreds of thousands of Jews waiting to get out of the Soviet Union have engaged the world's sympathy. But they are not alone. It is not just anti-Semitism that causes the Soviet government to limit Jewish emigration. If free emigration were allowed, millions of Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and others would leave also.

It is a mark of our times that when one or two persons defect from the West to the East, that is big news. But when thousands flee communist rule, that is merely a statistic. Yet the human tragedy behind such statistics is one of the central dramas of the twentieth century, and the assault on human liberties these statistics represent is one of the defining characteristics of World War III.

To the Soviets, anyone who stands in the way of their supremacy—of their hegemony—is an adversary. The Soviet Union's ultimate target in World War III is its chief rival, the United States. Its intermediate targets are Western Europe and
Japan. Its immediate targets are those vulnerable and unstable areas of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, in which, at relatively little risk and cost, it can gain strategic advantages and place itself increasingly in position to control the world's resources and lifelines.

Stalin highlighted the vulnerability of the West to resource interdiction back in 1921. “If Europe and America may be called the front,” he said, “the non-sovereign nations and colonies, with their raw materials, fuel, food, and vast stores of human material, should be regarded as the rear, the reserve of imperialism. In order to win a war one must not only triumph at the front but also revolutionize the enemy's rear, his reserves.” More recently, Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev confided to Somalian President Siad Barre, then an ally of the U.S.S.R., that “Our aim is to gain control of the two great treasure houses on which the West depends—the energy treasure house of the Persian Gulf and the mineral treasure house of central and southern Africa.”

While the United States is partially dependent on imported oil and strategic minerals, Europe and Japan are absolutely dependent on overseas sources. Half of our oil is imported, but Europe imports 85 percent and Japan 100 percent. As for minerals, Western Europe imports 80 percent and Japan 95 percent. Minor interruptions of imports that would cause inconvenience and annoyance in the United States might create panic in our industrial allies. Thus they have even more reason than we to be concerned about the Soviet drive toward those “great treasure houses on which the West depends.” But we too have a vital stake—both because we are also dependent on those treasure houses for strategic materials, and because the strength and unity of the Western alliance as a whole are essential to meeting the Soviet challenge. What weakens our allies weakens us.

The Soviet leaders have their eyes on the economic underpinnings of modern society. Their aim is to pull the plug on the Western industrial machine. The Western industrial nations' dependence on foreign sources of vital raw materials is one of our chief vulnerabilities. This, as well as the inherent instability of many of the producing nations, dictates Soviet strategy in such areas as the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.