The Third World War: August 1985

Indeed, the hitherto self-evident asymmetry of the superpower confrontation as it had developed since the end of the Second World War — maritime coalition versus continental colossus — began to be questioned. Between powers of a different nature a modus vivendi could be reached. It did, in fact, exist. When Alexis de Tocqueville predicted of autocratic Russia and democratic America: ‘Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe,’ he did not prophesy war between them. Yet might not the projection of autocracy over the sea, by calling forth the projection of democracy on to the continent, eliminate the differentiation between the respective destiny-swayers upon which their peaceful co-existence, being an agreement to differ, had rested?

Whatever dangers Soviet determinism might hold for the peace of the world, American pragmatism had already compounded the risk by her involvement in the war in Vietnam. The contribution made to her national security by this mistimed, misplaced and misconducted intervention in South-east Asia was almost totally negative. A far more fruitful, less politically sterile and less socially disruptive policy would have been to bring the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean into the orbit of statecraft and naval policy, as urged by Admirals Arleigh Burke, Chief of Naval Operations, and John S. McCain Jr, Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet, in the 1950s. Better late than never, Drew Middleton, the military correspondent of the New York Times, wrote on 20 April 1973: ‘… the strategic interests of the United States and global strategy in general will pivot on the Persian Gulf late in this decade as a result of competition for the area’s oil.’

The rapid growth of the Soviet (and satellite) merchant and fishing fleets throughout the 1960s and 1970s, while not directly associated with the Gorshkov naval expansion, coincided with it. Apart from specialized shipping used for oceanographic research, hydrography and space programme support, the Soviet Union sought, as many a nation had in the past, the political, strategic and economic benefits of self-sufficiency in maritime transportation: prestige, conservation of currency, control over shipping, maintenance of employment in the home shipbuilding industry, and, in addition, a specifically Soviet requirement, the ability to carry economic and political warfare into the capitalist camp. Fishing (and whaling) fleets, operated industrially and on a huge scale, also provided protein to help make good deficiencies in agricultural production.

That a serious contradiction existed near the centre of Soviet maritime policy-making had become apparent during the series of United Nations Conferences on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which took place during the 1970s. While the Soviet navalists were at one with those of the United States and the other ‘traditional’ maritime states in seeking to maintain the freedom of movement so far enjoyed by ships of all nations upon the high seas, and through the straits that connected them, the Soviet foreign relations experts, hoping for political advantage, favoured the claims of ‘Third World’ nations, some old, some new, who wanted to extend their sovereignty over wide expanses of sea and ocean off their coasts, and the sea-bed beneath, thus severely eroding the whole concept of freedom of the high seas. Of course, historically, the freedom of the seas has always been in the gift of the dominant naval power. The granting or withholding of belligerent status and of the rights of neutrals in war, whether declared or undeclared, remained in 1985 something rather more than a folk memory but less than a governing factor in the determination of national and international responses to hostilities at sea. But the Soviet Navy had conducted itself with propriety as it extended the scope and intensity of its peacetime missions. It was not until the shooting started, and political guidance had to be sought from Moscow, that failure to harmonize the political with the operational requirements in taking account of the international law of the sea began to have its effect.