The Context between the Super Powers

Part 3 of a three part series: The Cold War in the 1970s.

Twilight Struggle Red Sea is now nearing completion and will soon join the cue of GMT titles ready for printing.  TS: Red Sea is a free-standing, two player card-driven game that builds on the Twilight Struggle system.  The game covers the period between the mid-1970s and the conclusion of the Cold War.  It emphasizes the many proxy wars and revolutions in the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa during this portion of the Cold War.

With a more limited scope and much shorter playtime, TS Red Sea is the perfect way to introduce new players to the Twilight Struggle. Yet this new game maintains all the tension, decision making, and theme of the original classic. 

This is the third of a three article series, introducing players to the history reflected in the game, and providing some example events that illustrate the ties between history and gameplay.

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Détente – isn’t that what a farmer has with his turkey, until Thanksgiving?

Future President Ronald Reagan, 1978 

The 1970s were a very peculiar time for the United States in in the context of the Cold War.  The driving-force behind the Nixon and Ford foreign policies, Henry Kissinger, left with the 1976 election.  Kissinger was an academic and one of the few scholars to be afforded the chance to put his academic theories on foreign policy into practice.  Kissinger wrote “A World Restored” in 1957 based on his doctoral dissertation.  His work focused on the long peace created by the great powers working through the Concert of Europe.  When Kissinger rose to power – attaining near proconsul like authority in the Watergate besieged Nixon Administration – he went about reshaping the global security structure into a triangulation between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China – in his own modernized “Concert of Europe.”   

The formula of “great powers in concert” that maintained stability in Europe from the end of the Napoleonic Wars until World War I, became the centerpiece of US policy.  And whatever its faults, it lead to some incredibly successful foreign policy achievements –rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China, détente with the Soviet Union, the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty, and the Biological Weapons Convention.  However, the problem with great powers acting in concert is that they tend to overlook the interests of regional powers and reflexively escalate every issue to a “balance of power” problem.  This can be dangerous when the actual source of the friction is localized and historical.  So, while Kissinger’s approach was very successful at relieving Cold War tensions among the super powers, many problems were bubbling underneath.  

One of the obvious costs of Kissinger’s reorientation of American foreign policy was the US position in South East Asia.  As long as the United States was fighting a war on the border with the People’s Republic of China, it was difficult to move relations with China beyond the conflict in Vietnam.  So while a hasty conclusion of the exhausting war was an excellent development for improved Sino-American relations, it left rather an unpleasant impression on the American electorate and society at large.  The United States was not, after-all a 19^th Century monarchy, and US foreign policy was not the sport of kings.  Starting and ending conflicts seemingly without principle eroded the bipartisan consensus that had previously been a hallmark of US Cold War policy.  

Additionally, while Kissinger was comfortable with “losing a few pawns” in the global chess match he and Richard Nixon were playing, elements of the American right were incensed.  The American left, by contrast, had never accepted the cynical self-orientation of Realpolitik in the first place. 

So enter Jimmy Carter.  He inherited a country lacking consensus, riven by a decade of domestic unrest and erosion of institutions and trust in government.  While the American right was smarting and embarrassed by American defeat in Vietnam, the American left wanted to put US foreign policy on a moral basis – a return to American exceptionalism – to lead the world by our moral example.  

The Soviet state meanwhile entered its most cartoonish era with the long, seemingly inevitable ascent of Leonid Brezhnev.  The popular western image of a grey, brutal Soviet Union with long lines and endless shortages was really painted with Brezhnev’s brush.  He was the poster child of a Soviet apparatchik.  He rose through the ranks in World War II as a political commissar and then ingratiated himself with Stalin.  During de-Stalinization, Brezhnev was also demoted, but like any great bureaucratic warrior, he found the means to worm his way close to Khrushchev.  At first, he played the Khrushchev’s toady, and then, when the opportunity presented itself, he led the bloodless coup to remove his former benefactor. 

While the United States coped with the limits of power projection in the developing world, the Soviet Union, under Brezhnev, had to contend with internal dissent within its bloc.   Prague Spring in 1968, Romania’s Ceaușescu asserting a nativist independence, and the development of Polish labor resistance all occurred under Brezhnev’s watch.  It is no surprise then, that the ever cautious Brezhnev happily traded Russian living standards for an enormous expansion of the Soviet military industrial complex.  The Soviet army and navy sought to quell with its bristling armaments what Soviet economic policy could not.  

And in the Soviet Union itself, this was the era of the dissident. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel Prize winning author, produced a variety of works critical of Soviet political repression and raised awareness of the gulag system in the West.  Andrei Sakharov, a nuclear physicist and “father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb,” was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for his opposition to the abuse of power and his work for human rights. Yuri Orlov was a particle accelerator physicist who founded the Soviet Union’s chapter of Amnesty International and documented Soviet violation of the recently signed Helsinki Accords.  While the KGB and the Soviet leadership attempted to intimidate and silence the voices of dissent, their message was heard loud and clear in the West.  In retrospect, it is clear that the fraying of the Soviet system found its origin here.

Thus for both powers, there were very compelling reasons to take their foot off the pedal of confrontation and attempt to reach an accommodation.  The resulting dynamic was loosely known as détente.  Unfortunately, the seeds for the destruction of détente were sewn into its construction.  For Kissinger and his Concert of Europe outlook, détente meant that the United States and Russia would address trouble spots in the world together reaching a consensus on the proper outcome – like the European powers of the past pouring over an ill-understood map, and dividing the pie as they saw fit.  For the USSR, détente meant that at last, the United States was conferring on the Soviet Union the status of an equal.  No longer would the Americans condescend and lecture, rather the Soviet Union would have its own sphere of influence, like the US, and be able to pursue its objectives globally, like the US.  The uneasy tension of these ideas would come to a head in the middle 1970s when Carter was elected.  

While the American right was restless under Nixon’s foreign policy, they were not in a position to challenge the White House and the publicly celebrated genius of Nixon’s policy successes.  But as soon as a Democrat took office, the drumbeat to check Soviet expansionism began to beat loudly.  Meanwhile, the Carter Administration – light as it was on foreign policy experience – sought at first to expand on the Nixon successes.  It wanted a more robust second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty; it wanted to divorce itself from Cold War thinking about regional conflicts and build a healthy bilateral relationship with the Eastern Bloc.  Carter’s best laid plans were about to run into a Soviet blade saw in the developing world.

Prior to the 1970s, Soviet adventurism had largely been confined to the Soviet periphery – Korea, Berlin, Hungary.  Its most aggressive foray into the American sphere produced the Cuban Missile Crisis, an embarrassment that helped Brezhnev build a coalition to depose his former patron. But by the late 1970s, things were quite different.  Firstly, decolonization was largely accomplished throughout the world, and these nascent governments frequently sought to distance themselves from their former colonial relationships with the West.  That made the newly emerging states in Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East fertile soil for socialist ideology, and therefore a natural entre point for Soviet diplomacy.  Furthermore, the Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserted that the Soviet Union would use force to prevent socialist regimes from leaving the socialist bloc, guaranteed a more activist Soviet foreign policy.    

So whether it was The Congo, Angola, Vietnam, or establishing Soviet airfield in Somalia, the Soviet Union was expanding the reach of the socialist camp in ways that disturbed Washington.  However, one aspect of this new competition was not fully appreciated by the Americans – the Sino-Soviet split.  China’s bid for leadership of the socialist world, particularly among states escaping the experience of imperialism, also weighed heavily on Soviet calculations.  To ignore the needs of the developing world would also be to cede Soviet preeminence in the socialist bloc.  

Multiple confrontations in the developing world contributed to the end of détente and the renewal of superpower confrontation.  The Yom Kippur War brought the superpowers to the brink of a thermonuclear war.  Sadat’s entreaties to the United States left the Soviet Union on the sidelines as the Camp David Accords were negotiated.  The Jackson-Vanick Amendment inhibited commerce between the United States and the Soviet Union, putting further pressure on the Soviet economy.  The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.  But the Ogaden War, and the resulting shift in the Carter Administration’s foreign policy, is surely one of the critical elements of the demise of détente.   

The particular tipping point happened during a face to face meeting between Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Jimmy Carter in 1978.   The meeting covered a number of topics including SALT II, and other regions of Africa, but the Ogaden War was a particular concern.  US intelligence reported on the presence of a large Soviet military mission led by decorated Soviet general Vasily Petrov, and 15,000 Cuban troops.  Gromyko lied to Carter’s face, denying Petrov’s presence in Ethiopia and claiming the Cuban troop estimates were wildly exaggerated.  Carter was gravely offended, and from then on, Carter began taking more counsel from his hawkish national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski and sidelined his pro-détente secretary of state, Cyrus Vance.   The next year, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, President Carter shelved the START II treaty, détente lay in tatters, and the final aggressive phase of the Cold War had begun.

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Previous Articles:

Inside the History of Twilight Struggle: Red Sea — Conflict in the Horn of Africa (Part 1)

Inside the History of Twilight Struggle: Red Sea — Conflict in the Horn of Africa (Part 2)