Reinventing Collapse

The arms race is commonly viewed as the key element of the superpower standoff known as the Cold War (one hesitates to call it a conflict or even a confrontation because both sides diligently practiced conflict avoidance through deterrence, détente and arms control negotiations). Military deterrence and parity is seen as the paramount defining factor of the bipolar world that was dominated by the two superpowers. Military primacy between the United States and the Soviet Union was never actively contested and there was quite a lot of inconclusive militaristic preening and posturing. While the Americans feel that they won the Cold War (since the other side forfeited the contest) and are about to start awarding themselves medals for this feat, it is actually something of a success story for Russia.

Beyond the superficial and assumed offensive parity, the historical landscapes that underlie Soviet and American militarisms could not be more different. The United States considers itself a victor country: it goes to war when it wishes and it likes to win. It has not been invaded during any of the major modern conflicts and war, to it, is primarily about victory. Russia is a victim country. It has been invaded several times, but, since the Mongol invasion, never successfully. To Russians, war is not about victory, it is about death. The epithet that Russians like to apply to their country is nepobedimaya, “undefeatable.”

The United States is a country that enjoys bombing other countries. The Soviets, having seen much of their country bombed to smithereens during World War II, had a particularly well-developed sense of their vulnerability. To compensate for it, they devoted a large part of their centrally planned economy to defense. They produced a staggering number of nuclear missiles, nuclear submarines, tanks, bombers, fighter jets, warships and other military junk, much of which now sits quietly rusting somewhere and perpetually threatening to wreak havoc on the environment. The nuclear stockpile continues to pose a particularly nasty problem. Much of this war production was a complete waste and even the object of some humor: “I work at a sewing machine factory, but every time I bring the parts home and assemble them, I end up with a machine gun! “

But they did not get bombed by the Americans, hence victory. The list of countries which the U.S. has bombed since the end of World War II is a long one, from “A” for Afghanistan to “Y” for Yemen (that the list does not run “A” to “Z” is presumably explained by the fact that Zambia and Zimbabwe do not present a sufficiently target-rich environment to America’s military planners). The Soviet Union did not do nearly as much bombing. Czechoslovakia and Hungary received what amounted to a slap. Afghanistan was the one significant exception, playing host to a sustained and bloody military confrontation. Perhaps one positive effect of having one’s homeland extensively bombed is that it makes one think twice about inflicting that experience on others.

And so it is quite a satisfactory outcome that the United States has not been able to bomb a single country within the former Warsaw Pact and to this day has to play careful with Russia and her friends. This is because mutual assured destruction remains in effect: each side has enough nuclear weapons to obliterate the other. Since this is an affront to the American military ego, Americans have continued to preen and posture, announcing a defense doctrine that allows nuclear first strikes and actively pursuing the development of strategic missile defense.

The Russians do not appear to be impressed. “We believe this strategic anti-missile defense system is somewhat chimerical, to put it mildly,” said Sergei Ivanov, Russia’s first deputy prime minister. “One can find a much cheaper response to any such system.” The cheapest response I can think of is simply having Mr. Ivanov periodically stand up and say a few words. Perhaps that is all the response the situation calls for, but Russia sells a lot of weapons, including a new generation of supersonic missiles and torpedoes, against which the U.S. has no adequate defense, and successfully marketing them requires taking a stand in defense of national military prestige. And so we are bound to hear a great deal more about Americans destabilizing the security of Europe, and about Russia countering this threat with some anti-missile chimeras of their own, much cheaper ones.

The United States needs a new Cold War to show itself and the world that it still matters, and Russia, finding the venture not too risky and quite profitable, is willing to hold up a mirror to American militarism. But the whole thing is a farce, and Vladimir Putin was quick to offer an old Russian saying by way of explaining it: “Don’t blame the mirror if your face is crooked.”

Russia has scaled back defense spending considerably after the Soviet collapse, but the defense budget of the United States has kept growing like a tumor and is on course to match and surpass what the entire rest of the world spends on defense. While one might naively assume that the rest of the world is quivering before such overwhelming military might, nothing of the sort is occurring. There is a little secret that everyone knows: the United States military does not know how to win. It just knows how to blow things up. Blowing things up may be fun, but it cannot be the only element in a winning strategy.

The other key element is winning the peace once major combat operations are over, and here the mighty U.S. military tends to fall squarely on its face and lay prone until political support for the war is withdrawn and the troops are brought back home. The United States could not conquer North Korea, resulting in the world’s longest-running cease-fire. It is a stalemate punctuated by crises. The United States could not defeat the North Vietnamese with their underground tunnels and their primarily bicycle-based transportation system.

The first Gulf War was precipitated by a misunderstanding caused by diplomatic incompetence: Saddam Hussein was a generally cooperative and helpful tyrant and all could have been resolved amicably had not April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told him: “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait.” Saddam took her at her word and thought that he could punish the Kuwaitis for stealing his oil. Bush Senior then proceeded to stand poor April on her head, declaring that “this will not stand! “ The ensuing skirmish ended inconclusively, with Iraq humiliated and in stasis for a generation. This was considered a victory, with endless parades and much flag-waving. The U.S. military was said to have recovered from “Vietnam syndrome.” But nothing could hide the fact that it was a job left unfinished.

The more recent Iraq war is a full-blown, complete disaster, like Vietnam, or like Afghanistan was for the Soviets, but actually a lot worse, because Iraq is situated in the region which produces most of the oil. The longer U.S. troops stay in Iraq, the worse the situation there becomes. The longer they wait to withdraw, the worse the situation will be once they do. Iraq started out as a war of choice (a startlingly poor choice) but it is now a war of survival, certainly of America’s status as a superpower, and quite possibly of its economic survival as well. Moreover, it is a war that appears to have already been lost.

The rest of America’s recent military conflicts either consisted of or centered around a bombing campaign, and generally fall into one of two categories: strategic spoiling attacks, and attempts to bolster the presidential manhood. A strategic spoiling attack is a preventive action against a potential enemy who, if left unchecked, might attack you some time in the future. It is more or less a bullying tactic, and, as such, already an admission of defeat on the diplomatic front. One should prefer to live among strong friends, not weakened enemies.

Presidential manhood-bolstering bombing campaigns have come from both sides of the political spectrum (not much of a spectrum, it turns out, since both sides are shades of ultra-violent ). There was the bombing of Panama, ostensibly to punish the apostate CIA asset Manuel Noriega, but really to mitigate against Bush Senior’s so-called “wimp factor.” There was also Clinton’s despondent bombing of an aspirin factory in the Sudan and the bouncing around of some rocks in Afghanistan, ostensibly to punish terrorists for bombing U.S. embassies in East Africa, but really to express frustration over the inordinate difficulties faced by the leader of the free world as a result of procuring oral sex. I feel his pain, but, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a cruise missile isn’t just a cruise missile.

It may appear that the U.S. military is not capable of prevailing over any enemy, no matter how badly armed, demoralized or minuscule. While the Koreans and the Vietnamese were formidable, the U.S. military could not bring to heel even the starving Somalis with their pickup trucks full of narcotic cud-chewing, Kalashnikov- toting youths. Nor could they pacify the Iraqis, even after softening them up with bombs and sanctions for more than a decade. There is one notable exception. If we look at any of the military conflicts that involved the U.S. military since World War II, there is one that stands out as a complete success: the liberation of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. There, valiant American troops dislodged an unsavory and frightening Marxist regime which was supported by Cuba and Nicaragua and replaced it with a democratic, pro-American regime, much to the satisfaction of Grenada’s Caribbean neighbors and cruising yachtsmen alike.

The Soviets never learned their lesson in Afghanistan. The slow, relentless, senseless carnage of that war did much to tarnish the image of the Red Army, which was until then still regarded as the people’s champion for defeating Hitler and for standing up to the Americans. It took the disaster of the two campaigns in Chechnya after the Soviet collapse for the message to finally sink in. Russia eventually got Chechnya under control, through political rather than military means. A military effort alone can never defeat a popular insurgency. The insurgents never have to win, they just have to continue to fight. In fighting them, the military is forced to fight the people of the country, and by perpetuating a state of war it continually thwarts its stated purpose, which is to establish peace. There is no room for victory in this scenario, but only for an ever-widening spiral of murder, hatred and shame.

The lesson that the United States desperately needs to learn is that their trillion-dollar-a-year military is nothing more than a gigantic public money sponge that provokes outrage among friends and enemies alike and puts the country in ill repute. It is useless against its enemies, because they know better than to engage it directly. It can never be used to defeat any of the major, nuclear powers, because sufficient deterrence against it can be maintained for relatively little money. It can never defuse a popular insurgency, because that takes political and diplomatic finesse, not a compulsion to bomb far-away places. Political and diplomatic finesse cannot be procured, even for a trillion dollars, even in a country that believes in extreme makeovers. As Vladimir Putin put it, “If grandmother had testicles, she’d be a grandfather.”

The long sequence of American military failures in its many wars of choice may not be significant in and of itself. People throughout the world may cringe, but it is easy for Americans to consign these unhappy adventures to oblivion. They are skilled at rewriting, if not history, then at least their strangely foggy recollections of it. But at some point a key national interest becomes involved and the military adventure becomes more than just a way for the military to justify having an outsized budget. For the Soviets, this point came when they lost Afghanistan. They were in Afghanistan in accordance with the Brezhnev Doctrine, which stated unequivocally that no Socialist country would be allowed to backslide toward barbarous Capitalism. Once they let go of Afghanistan the tide turned, and the Communists had to let go of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union, and finally Russia itself.

It is common knowledge that the U.S. forces invaded Iraq for no adequately explained reason. What few people realize is that there is an American counterpart to the Brezhnev Doctrine. It is the Carter Doctrine, which states that the United States would use military force if necessary to defend its national interests in the Persian Gulf region. Carter announced it in a State of the Union speech in January of 1980, in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It is in the national interest of the United States to be able to efficiently exploit the oil resources of Iraq and direct the resulting flow of oil to eager motorists back home. The military failure in Iraq (which as of this writing appears complete) is tantamount to a declaration that the Carter Doctrine is no longer in effect. The ensuing backslide will mean more than just the loss of Iraqi oil production; it may force the U.S. out of the entire region. Coupled with other unhappy developments, such as the ongoing devaluation of the U.S. dollar, widespread oil production shortfalls due to oil field depletion and increasing political instability in several oil-exporting countries, this may cause the U.S. to lose access to oil in other regions as well. This will not make motorists back home happy. Moreover, it will spell the end of the American dream of global dominance and the definitive loss of superpower status.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia faced a dilemma. It had stationed a great many troops abroad in Eastern Europe and particularly in East Germany. These troops were not all Russian: some were recruited from the various Soviet Republics, and their allegiance was to the Red Army ‹ an entity that no longer existed. Repatriating and resettling these troops turned out to be a logistical nightmare. There was no housing and no jobs for the returning troops. But this was nothing compared to the problem that will be faced by the United States, which has over a thousand overseas military bases. The vast majority of these serve no vital purpose and are further examples of massive military bloat. In the coming years, starved of fuel and other resources, they will become worse than useless. Liquidating them and repatriating the troops will pose a far greater challenge than that faced by the Soviets. Amid the general confusion, some of the smaller military installations are likely to be simply forgotten, with the troops left to fend for themselves and their weapons going missing.

The last aspect of the superpower arms race worth mentioning is the arms sales race. The U.S. and the S.U. both supplied weapons to their client states. The U.S. conducted their arms trade on better terms, by lending the client state money with which to buy the weapons or by forcing the client state to spend its oil export revenue on weapons systems. The Soviets more or less gave their weapons away to the brotherly peoples they held in their sway. Russia, which inherited most of the Soviet defense industry, has updated its business plan, and is now positioned to surpass the United States in weapons sales. Military defeats do not make for successful weapons marketing campaigns.

Dmitry Orlov. Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. ^{Next Excerpt. © 2008 Dmitry Orlov.}