To tell the story of the mounting of the United Nations Relief and Repatriation Organization (UNRRO), which soon took over from the United States in the concentration and maintenance of the remnants of Soviet forces deployed in Africa and the Middle East, and then set in hand the long and complex business of getting the men (and women too) back to their homes, is no part of our present task.
The operation still goes on as we write, having had to face many more difficulties than those confronting the United Nations Displaced Persons Organization, set up at the same time in Europe. No history of the time, however, would be complete without reference to one of the least tractable problems to emerge in the immediate aftermath of the war. There will be traces of its impact in Africa and the Middle East for a long time to come. It will be many years, for example, before the last weapon brought by the Soviet Union into Africa and the Middle East in the chapter of the world’s history which ended so abruptly in 1985, ceases in one hand or another to serve a purpose.
The elimination of Soviet support, direct or by proxy, heralded the end of any further external intervention. The security of South Africa was assured by the success of her own armed forces in resisting and defeating tactical attack, with some help from the efforts of the US Navy. These efforts, though aimed directly at the peripheral operations of the Soviet Union, also had the result that both the Soviet proxy fighters and the indigenous guerrillas were largely cut off from the sinews of war. The end to the strategic external battle was far indeed from bringing to an end the only sort of struggle of enduring concern to the Africans — the internal one. Bitter battles between Angola and her neighbours, and within Angola, were matched by frontier incidents in Zaire and a renewal of the disruption of Mozambique. South Africa, though everywhere penetrated, held firm at the core. Her front-line adversaries, while clinging to the idea of confrontation, began to look to their own internal welfare. Far from a Confederation of Africa South coming into being and flourishing, a de-federation of those dedicated to set it up was already in progress.
The impotence of the Soviet proxies in Southern Africa had been demonstrated. The success of Iran in the Persian Gulf and southern Arabia had been such that even before the nuclear exchange in Europe precipitated the end she was already concentrating forces on her northern borders for the invasion of the Soviet Union. The aimless manoeuvrings of the Egyptian Army on the shores of the Red Sea signified little. Soviet initiatives on the outskirts of the main battle had been stifled and a great strategic prize retained firmly in the grasp of the United States. If this success did not in itself ensure that the Western Allies would win the war in Europe against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact it made two important contributions. By stabilizing a situation in the Middle East to the advantage of the West, and securing the oil flow along the sea routes, the US had already gone some way to ensuring that the war, particularly if it were to be prolonged, would not be lost. By setting up a situation in which Soviet initiatives on the periphery were almost from the beginning seen to fail it hastened the general realization that the military might of the USSR was very far indeed from being invincible, and thus added to the growing weight of encouragement to its enemies nearer the centre.
CHAPTER 24: The Nuclear Decision
As the Soviet offensive ground to a halt in Europe and the war at sea emphasized not only the geographical disadvantages of the Soviet Union as a naval power but also the misdirection of its efforts to overcome them, various signs of political instability began to appear, both inside and outside the Kremlin. The purpose of the war had after all been largely political — to exploit the conventional weakness of the West in order to humiliate the US and to re-establish absolutism in Eastern Europe as the only safeguard against dissidence and fragmentation. The very statement of these war aims demonstrated the hollowness and imbalance of Soviet power. The military machine had been built up to an unparalleled size to buttress a political performance which was almost uniformly unsuccessful. The Soviet Union had been unable to take part in genuine detente because the appeal of Soviet communism to the masses either inside or outside the Soviet Union had proved mainly negative. Force, or the threat of force, had been necessary to counter the greater political attractiveness of the West and fissiparous tendencies within the Warsaw Pact. Political cohesion had failed to develop in Eastern Europe. Even the approach to power of communist parties in the West had not increased Soviet influence there; it had merely set an example of dissidence for communist countries in the East.
In 1956 in Hungary and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia Soviet military power had sufficed to restore political situations which were escaping from Soviet control. In 1985 the Soviet military machine proved just inadequate to extend Soviet political control in south-east Europe and over West Germany. One of the major objectives of this effort had been to master the general unease and insubordination of the governments and peoples of Eastern Europe. The attainment of this objective would have required quick and decisive victories in Yugoslavia and in Germany. The check which in fact occurred was enough, even without actual defeat, to allow pent-up political forces to burst out. The leaders of the former satellite countries, and very soon the leaders of the Soviet Union itself, began to realize that military force no longer provided a sovereign remedy for political dissent. Military stalemate would not only allow the greater potential resources of the West to be mobilized; it would also foster revolution in the East, just as it had in 1917.
Foreseeing the dangers of disintegration in the Warsaw Pact and disaffection at home, the Soviet policy-makers split once more: the hawks became cataclysmic, the doves were for return to Mother Russia. The former argued that while the conventional battle had not gone quite according to plan this had always been only one element in the total strategy. The nuclear weaponry remained intact. Better to have some mutual destruction than creeping political decay and forcible decolonization. The very backwardness of large areas of the Soviet Union would allow it to survive better than the USA after a nuclear exchange. Besides, there were enough warheads to target some on China as well and so put off that menace for another generation, with negligible risk of Chinese retaliation. Also, if they were really prepared to go to these lengths there was a good chance of a deal with the United States before the major destruction took place. They could, for example, carry out one or more nuclear attacks on targets in Europe to show they meant business, and at the same time propose to the United States a bilateral status quo and the division of the world into two spheres of influence. The two superpowers had more interests in common than either had with its allies. It would pay each of them for Europe to stay divided and for the Middle East to be kept in order by both, acting together. Either could deal with China, provided the other kept out.