The Third World War: August 1985

Conflicts which the Soviet Union did not start, but which it studiously sought to sharpen and exploit, have yet to be resolved. Fighting still goes on. The pattern of the successor states into which the USSR seems now to be dividing has yet to be fully determined. There are differences between the countries which, under their former regime, were all members of the Warsaw Pact. There are also differences between each one of them and the member states of the Western Alliance, with which they have so lately been at war. To settle all these differences will take time and will be far from easy. Meanwhile, there is still warfare outside Europe. No doubt it will continue, in one way or another, for some time, with whatever resources (and much material has been left behind by the Russians) the belligerents can find.

The Third World War, however, can be fairly said to have ended with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in late August 1985 and the cessation of direct hostilities between the major powers. We have already taken a brief glance at how the world then looked, and in the concluding chapter we look a little into the future. Something more should now be said about what might have happened and did not, about certain contributory factors to the outcome and about some, at least, of the conclusions that can be drawn from these events.

What especially distinguishes the scene we now see about us — and this is something to which we shall only be able to grow accustomed with the passage of time — is the absence from it of the powerful, restless, baleful, expansive, intractably dogmatic imperialism of Soviet Russia.

The world has come out of another bad dream, just as it did out of the Nazi nightmare. This one lasted rather longer. The myth born in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 persisted, before it was dispersed, for nearly three-quarters of a century. It was the myth of the emergence of true democracy from a proletarian explosion, when what had really taken place was the murderous overthrow of a democratically elected government by a fanatical authoritarian minority.

It is argued by some that the basic contradictions of Marxism-Leninism would inevitably have caused, in time, the downfall of any state built on it. Whatever Karl Marx may have contributed to nineteenth-century thought his political philosophy is held by many today, a century later, to be unscientific, romantic and obsolete, no more useful as a guide to government in the twentieth century than the novels of Charles Dickens as a reflection of life today in England. Indeed, if the revolutionary genius of Lenin had not harnessed to the advancement of Marxism a huge and backward group of peoples accustomed to absolutism — most of them Asiatic and some still semi-savage — it might have been consigned to the dust heap of history long ago, and this particular nightmare might never have occurred at all. The nightmare is now over, and we shall never know if the USSR, given time, would have fallen apart by itself or not, without the war it brought about. There may be other nightmares still ahead.

It has been suggested with some plausibility that in addition to the conjunction of miscalculation and mischance which triggered off the explosion of August 1985 there had long been a growing awareness among the rulers of the USSR of increasing strains within the Warsaw Pact, and within the Soviet Union itself, which could hardly be contained without a signal military victory over the capitalist West. There had also been, among the top people in the regime, a very real fear of Germany. There had even been some fear of the capacity of the Federal Republic to lead the West (and above all the United States) into an aggressive war against the communist East. This was a fear which West German insistence on ‘forward defence’ (whatever that might mean — and it clearly meant different things to different people) did little to abate. It was for all that little but the product of the Soviet Union’s own propaganda.

The real causes of this war between the Eastern and the Western blocs will long be matter for debate. Whatever they were the fighting could not, it now seems, find its resolution (if it did not move into the strategic exchange of weapons of mass destruction, which would have emptied the concept of ‘resolution’ of all meaning) anywhere but in Europe. Its focal point could be nowhere but in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The critical point in the military action was therefore bound to be, at least as far as the battle on and over the land was concerned, in what was designated in NATO as the Central Region of Allied Command Europe.