The Third World War: August 1985

Political observers and media commentators were puzzled and divided over the mood of the participants and the prospects for peace or war. Each side had stepped further into the uncharted sea of confrontation than any of their predecessors since Cuba and the Berlin blockade. The point was, did they find the temperature to their liking? Each had found a keen front man — the US in Iran and the Soviet Union in Egypt — but both were aware of the instability of such protagonists. Their more solid supporters were more than usually hesitant. In one respect each had a similar requirement: to be sure of energy supplies from the Middle East until alternative sources could be established. Public opinion in the US still felt that abundant cheap energy was a god-given right of the American people. They had elected Thompson in the belief that he would be better at getting it for them than Carter had been at persuading them they didn’t need so much. Vorotnikov had other preoccupations. The Russian people could be relied on to accept what they were given, but with Eastern Europe the choice was more difficult: either to advance more quickly towards Western consumer standards, or to restore the somewhat eroded dictatorship of the CPSU and enforce acceptance of a lower standard. The former would require more oil, the latter more Soviet troops. Both, with the growing threat from China, might be in short supply. A foreign bogey would, as usual, encourage compliance, but a bogey in the Indian Ocean might be inadequate for the purpose.

After two days of recrimination and brinkmanship, the result emerged — one that should perhaps have been more easily predictable: peace with honour. The standstill was confirmed; the control of oilfields remained as it was, that is, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq stayed with Egypt and the USSR, Iran and the Lower Gulf stayed with the West. There was to be no supply of arms to either side in Africa or Arabia (significantly, there was no reference to Iran, Cuba or Jamaica); mutual notification of naval movements was agreed, with exchange of satellite photographs to confirm it; and there would be a resumption of SALT and negotiations for MBFR (mutual and balanced force reductions).

In fact no one was satisfied with what they had got, but some were more dissatisfied than others. Thompson made much of having snatched peace out of the jaws of war (with a confused memory of a Churchillian antithesis mixed with a phrase of Chamberlain’s), and of the time won to build more ships and develop indigenous oil resources. He did not actually wave a piece of paper from the White House balcony, but the general atmosphere had more than a hint of August 1938.

The Soviet Union started building pipelines and oil terminals to move her new oil north instead of south, its former direction. More important in the short term, the Soviet leaders devoted urgent attention to the means of restoring Soviet authority in Eastern Europe, penetrating the communist parties in Western Europe, and guarding their frontier republics against the growing presence of China. The build-up of Soviet military strength continued.

The Chinese were perhaps the most disappointed of all. In the uneasy triangle of forces so accurately forecast for 1984 by George Orwell they had hoped for much from the sharpening of US-Soviet confrontation in the Middle East and Southern Africa. They feared little from the US. Their doctrines led them to believe in the ultimate victory of their system over capitalism. They could afford to wait for history to produce its inevitable result. But rivalry with another seat of communism was different. There was nothing in holy writ to show how this would turn out. Besides, even in an age of rockets, a land frontier seemed a good deal more vulnerable than several thousand kilometres of Pacific Ocean. The standstill agreement at the US-Soviet summit deprived China of the good fortune which had seemed to be coming its way in an intensified struggle between the two rival superpowers. The ensuing reassessment showed China still a long way behind in nuclear potential and conventional sophistication. Numbers of men seemed hardly to make up for these deficiencies. It was necessary to seek some other way of compensating for the Soviet predominance in armaments.