The Third World War: August 1985

There were 180 governments in the world. As in 1977, at the time of President Carter’s inauguration, only about thirty-five of these could realistically expect their leaders to be replaced by a process of election. The most common way to change a government was by coup d’état or by dictatorial succession.

But the frequency of coups was growing, and they were often bloody. Bureaucrats in some communist countries had reason to fear that the habit might spread to them. The more fearful apparatchiks included some in the Soviet Union, a country which had for so many decades normally changed its government not by violent overthrow but by cosy dictatorial arrangement. China, by contrast, was concentrating on becoming ‘a new Japan’ through economic expansion. There was already talk of a China-Japan co-prosperity sphere.

The new President-elect of the United States, Governor Thompson, was a southern (and therefore conservative) Republican. He had been quite unknown nationally two years before his election in 1984, just as his two-term predecessor, President Carter, had been two years before his own election in 1976.

Mr Thompson had campaigned energetically against the ‘soft-centred international liberalism’ of the Democratic candidate, Vice-President Mondale. The President-elect was, however, worried by his own relative lack of knowledge of international affairs, and called two prestigious advisers in this field down to his South Carolina home the weekend after his election. One adviser was the director of the new United Universities Think-Tank. The other was a previous Secretary of State, always known as the Ex-Secretary.

The two were asked to set down a summary of their views about the main challenges that would face the Thompson Administration over (as it was assumed) the years 1985-93, and to compare these with the challenges that had faced the USA on President Carter’s Inauguration Day in 1977. The Think-Tank’s report was to concentrate on the ‘poor South’ of the world, the Ex-Secretary’s report on the Soviet Union and the ‘rich North’.

During the week after the election of November 1984, and therefore eleven weeks before his Inauguration Day in January 1985, Governor Thompson received these two reports.

The Think-Tank’s report displeased him. It seemed, he told his wife, to be ‘written by a computer with a bleeding heart’.