The Third World War: The Untold Story

These developments, whether disruptive or otherwise, had in common not only the areas in which they took place. They also illustrated a cardinal point of both Soviet and US policy, that whereas their struggle for influence and gain in the Middle East and Africa could be and was waged by proxy, they did not wish themselves as the two principals to become directly and personally engaged in confrontation and conflict. This policy was easier to realize in southern Africa than it was in the Middle East, for although these two areas shared many features in common, there was one very important difference.

Both areas contained a nation at bay, people fiercely dedicated to their own survival, striking out against those neighbours who threatened their destruction, withstanding the pressure of United Nations Security Council resolutions which called upon them to surrender territory in order to move towards peaceful solutions. Both areas were and are of great strategic moment, both were fertile markets for arms dealers, both provoked Soviet troublemaking and Western ambivalence. In neither was the Soviet Union or the United States content to allow the other to gain an upper hand. Indeed it seemed as if the two superpowers looked then on the Middle East and southern Africa as arenas, not for co-operation, but for competition. This last similarity underlined the crucial difference. Whereas in southern Africa the prospects of a direct Soviet-American confrontation seemed small, in the Middle East they had been growing more likely and more dangerous month by month. There were clear reasons for this — the greater strategic prizes of the Middle East, its close vicinity to vital areas of military power already deployed or readily deployable by the two rivals and, perhaps most marked of all, the immense complexity of the Middle East problem.

In southern Africa the situation could be measured in simple terms, in terms, as it might be put, of black and white. The early 1980s in the Middle East told a very different story. There we saw not just the aspirations of developing countries against a background of superpower rivalry attempting to influence policies and events. We saw an Islamic world divided against itself in spite of the strongest possible motive for unity — a shared hostility to Zionism. Some events threw a strong light on this central issue, particularly Israel’s policy of procrastinating over Sinai, colonizing the West Bank, annexing the Golan and surrounding Jerusalem with high concrete buildings. Other events obscured it: Iran and Iraq at war; Syria and Libya supporting Iran, not for sympathy with the ayatollahs, but out of enmity towards other Arab nations; Jordan dangerously linked to Iraq and beginning to lean, like Syria, towards the USSR; Egypt trying to reconcile the irreconcilable by aiming to be on good terms with Israel, the USA and the moderate Arab states; Saudi Arabia, Oman and the smaller Gulf states seeking to pursue policies of moderation in an environment largely given over to extremism; the PLO divided in its leadership and in no mood for compromise; the two Yemens keeping an eye, with Soviet interest in the background, on the main chance. Yet many of these other events arose from the apparent inability of any power, super or not, to get to grips with the central Middle Eastern issue itself, the deadlock over Palestine. Meanwhile the USA seemed to stick firmly to three aims — a Camp David peace, the exclusion of the Soviet Union and an uninterrupted flow of oil. The Soviet Union seemed equally prepared to interfere with these aims.

In short, the very dangers of a world war between the superpowers, because either might miscalculate the other’s intentions and actions in the Middle East, were heightened. Indeed the new phase of peacemaking which began in 1982 did bring the USSR and the USA to the brink of war. At times their very rivalry seemed to impede, rather than advance, their policies. Some of the United States’ activities that were designed to keep Soviet influence away from the Middle East had precisely the opposite effect. The US-Israel strategic agreement, unstable though it was, drew even the moderate Arab states into closer association with the Soviet Union, so that in the end it was the fact of US and Soviet involvement in Arabian affairs that narrowed their respective interests into a common one, the promotion of peace and stability in the region.