One reason we still read Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War is that he allows us to see the underlying structural features of that conflict. One of these was dissimilar capabilities: the fact that Athens was a naval power while Sparta relied on a land army meant that neither could easily defeat the other. Structures in this ancient war, however, were never completely stable. If one side could master the skills of the other, or if one side blundered into situations that favored the other, then the stalemate could end. This happened when the Athenian assembly approved a land war in Sicily for which its army was ill-prepared, after which the Spartans found ways to harass and then defeat it by sea. Athens never recovered from this reversal of roles - this failure to respect structures that had sustained its power, even as it exposed itselfto those that had favored its enemy.
Something like this happened to the Soviet Union after detente collapsed. At first the United States seemed weakened: Jimmy Carter’s administration found it difficult to devise any consistent grand strategy with respect to the USSR, while that country’s leadership appeared, from the outside at least, to be increasingly self-confident. In retrospect, though, Carter and his critics were debating how to adapt American strategy to the realities of a post-detente era. Brezhnev and his colleagues fundamentally misjudged those realities, with far more devastating consequences.
Soviet leaders now concluded - as if to echo the Americans a decade earlier - that the global balance of power required demonstrations of resolve wherever Moscow’s reputation might be at stake. Following the fall of South Vietnam and the unexpected success of the Angolan revolution, Brezhnev found it necessary to aid new insurrections that claimed to be Marxist in Yemen, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan. History seemed to be vindicating Marx in places Marx had hardly heard of. If the most powerful Marxist state failed to help history along, however, it might lose credibility with more militant Marxists like the Cubans while creating opportunities for renegade Marxists like the Chinese. It hardly mattered that the Yemenis, Ethiopians, and Afghans had only the vaguest idea of Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and even Castroism. Like the Americans in Vietnam - and like the Athenians in Sicily - the aging Brezhnev regime lost the ability to distinguish what was vital from what was not.
Soviet interventions in these countries weakened what little support was left for detente within the United States, even though Carter had hoped to revive that strategy. They left Moscow’s agents at the mercy of forces they did not understand: the analytical categories of Marxism-Leninism were of little use in societies dominated by warlords, tribalism, and deeply held but violently manifested religious convictions. And when the Afghan revolution began to fail, in 1979, Brezhnev ordered military intervention on a massive scale, at great cost to the Afghan people, to the Soviet Union itself, and to its own anti-imperialist reputation. He thereby empowered an improbable coalition that included the Afghan mujahedin as well as Pakistanis, Iranians, Saudis, Chinese, and Americans - who employed the tactics of Ho Chi Minh against Ho’s former superpower ally.
Meanwhile, in another misjudgment of Cold War structures, Soviet leaders had abandoned their long-time policy of isolating Marxist-Leninist countries from the global economy. With the inefficiencies of that ideology having become obvious and with popular discontent growing, they had little choice by the early 1970s but to relax either authoritarianism or autarchy. They chose the latter, gambling that by importing technology and even food from the United States and Western Europe, they could buy the time necessary for yet another attempt at reform at home and in Eastern Europe - this time one that would not get out of control and have to be suppressed.
As it happened, though, Moscow lost control in another way. Capitalist credits left the East Europeans - apart from the enterprising Hungarians - with few incentives to undertake reforms: they simply borrowed the money to finance their imports. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, a major oil producer, was hooked on the artificially high price of that commodity brought about by the 1973 Middle East War, and that too induced complacency. As the decade ended, the Soviet and East European economies were much more closely tied to the global economy than they had been at its beginning. That solved some problems but created others: notably a contraction of credit when the Eastern Europeans found it difficult to repay their loans, and - even more devastatingly for the USSR - a sharp decline in oil prices during the early 1980s.
All of this took place as Soviet military expenditures were soaring, owing to the collapse of detente, the Afghan war, and support for Third World revolutions elsewhere. By some calculations, the USSR was spending as much as 25 percent of gross domestic product on defense - the equivalent figure for the United States, on a far larger economic base, was about 5 percent. Meanwhile, living standards were worse than they had been when Kremlin leaders first decided to reverse autarchy and risk integration into what was still a capitalist world.
The most surprising way in which Brezhnev and his advisers misjudged structures, however, had to do with human rights. The Soviet Union had long sought recognition of post-World War II boundaries in Eastern Europe, and in the spirit of detente persuaded the United States and its NATO allies to sign a formal agreement to that effect at Helsinki in the summer of 1975. In return, and with remarkable short-sightedness, Brezhnev committed his country to the principle that sovereignty could no longer shield brutality - that the manner in which a state treated its own citizens was a legitimate matter for international concern.
He did this in the belief that Soviet and East European authorities could easily contain whatever disruptions the concession might cause: it was more important to get the boundaries recognized. But no one had any intention of challenging boundaries in the first place. Challenging authoritarian rule, however, was now a legitimate enterprise, because Brezhnev’s signature on the Helsinki Final Act formally endorsed the argument that the Soviet Union’s adversaries had been making throughout the Cold War: that the people, not the party and its leaders, had the right to organize, vote, and thereby determine their own future.
Dissidents who had long hoped for reform could now claim it as their right, and within months their demands were sweeping the Soviet bloc. Several circumstances prevented Moscow from crushing these movements as it had in the past. One was the economic dependence on the capitalists that had come with the abandonment of autarchy: any replay of Budapest 1956 or Prague 1968 would cause an immediate cut-off in credits, technology, and food imports, worsening an already deteriorating situation. Another was disproportionate military spending, which left little room - especially after the invasion of Afghanistan - for taking on still greater military burdens. But a third was what Soviet leaders had themselves pledged at Helsinki: a public commitment to respect precisely the processes that were eroding their own authority.
Each of these miscalculations - these failures to respect structures that had sustained Soviet power - became, for Moscow, what the Sicilian expedition had been for Athens: an ill-considered departure from a long-held strategy, with results that overstretched resources, exposed vulnerabilities, and thus handed enemies the means to break a long stalemate.
World History
