The Penguin History of the World

It soon appeared, too, that although it could irritate and alarm the superpowers (the USSR especially, because of its millions of Muslim subjects), Iran could not thwart them. At the end of 1979, its rulers had to watch helplessly when a Soviet army went into Afghanistan to prop up an errant Communist regime there against Muslim rebels. One reason why the Iranians backed terrorists and kidnappers was that that was the best (or worst) they could do. Nor, in spite of their success over their American hostages, could they get the former shah back to face Islamic justice. By successfully tweaking the eagle’s tail feathers in the hostage affair, Iran had humiliated the United States, but this soon seemed much less important than it did at the time. In retrospect, a declaration by President Carter in 1980 that the United States regarded the Persian Gulf as an area of vital interest revealed more of the future. It was an early sign of the ending of the exaggerated mood of American uncertainty and defeatism. A central reality of international politics was about to reassert itself. For all the dramatic changes since the Cuban missile crisis, the American republic was still in 1980 one of only two states whose might gave them unquestioned status as (to use an official Soviet definition) ‘the greatest world powers, without whose participation not a single international problem can be solved’. This participation in some instances would be implicit rather than explicit, but it was a fundamental datum of the way the world worked.

History, moreover, has no favourites for long. Although some Americans had been frightened by Soviet strength from the Cuban crisis to the invasion of Afghanistan, there were plentiful signs by the late 1970s that the Soviet rulers were in difficulties. They had to face a truism that Marxism itself proclaimed: that consciousness evolves with material conditions. Two results, among others, of real but limited relaxation in Soviet society were an evident dissidence, trivial in scale but suggesting a growing demand for greater spiritual freedom, and a less explicit, but real, groundswell of opinion that further material gains should be forthcoming. The Soviet Union nevertheless continued to spend colossal sums on armaments (about a quarter of its GDP in the 1980s). Yet these could hardly suffice, it appeared. To carry even this burden, western technology, management techniques and, possibly, capital would be needed. What change might follow on that was debatable, but that there would be change was certain.

However, by 1980, there had grown even stronger the most compelling tie between the two superpowers. For all the huge effort by the Soviet Union to give itself greater nuclear strike-power over the United States, superiority at such a level is a somewhat notional matter. The Americans, with their gift for the arresting slogan, concisely summed up the situation as MAD; that is to say, both countries had the capacity to produce ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, or, more precisely, a situation in which each of two potential combatants had enough striking power to ensure that, even if a surprise attack deprived it of the cream of its weapons, what remained would be sufficient to ensure a reply so appalling as to turn its opponent’s cities into smoking wildernesses and leave its armed forces capable of little but attempting to control the terrorized survivors.

This bizarre possibility was a great moderating force. Even if madmen (to put the matter simply) are occasionally to be found in seats of power, Dr Johnson’s observation that the knowledge that you are to be hanged wonderfully concentrates the mind is applicable to collectivities threatened with disaster on this scale: the knowledge that a blunder may be followed by extinction is a great stimulus to prudence. Here may well lie the most fundamental explanation of a new degree of co-operation, which had already been shown in the 1970s by the United States and the Soviet Union in spite of their specific quarrels. A 1972 treaty on defensive missile limitation had been one of its first fruits; it owed something to a new awareness on both sides that science could now monitor infringements of such agreements (not all military research made for an increase of tension). In the following year talks began on further arms limitations, while another set of discussions began to explore the possibility of a comprehensive security arrangement in Europe.