There is little doubt that the Western community as a whole can no longer recapture the dynamism that it has shown in the last 25 years. The era of cheap and abundant raw materials is over, and this is specially true of oil. This is David’s world every bit as much as it is Goliath’s.
Since Mr Alastair Buchan wrote his wide-ranging book, The End of the Postwar Era*, and delivered the 1973 Reith lectures which have been subsequently published in book form under the title Change Without War**, the United States has finally been thrown out of Indochina and its own confidence in its ability to act decisively in a crisis has been shaken so badly that President Ford and Mr. Kissinger have found it necessary to tom-tom the rescue of the cargo ship “Mayaguez”, seized by the Cambodians, as if it was a great test of American will. It was nothing of the kind.
Since the awesome might of the Seventh Fleet was available for use against a country with no air or naval power, it did not require much courage to apply it. If anything, the episode has underlined the old doubts regarding the American leadership’s capacity for mature judgement and restraint. Once again it applied excessive force and it bombed the Sihanoukville port town after the Cambodians had broadcast their willingness to release the ship.
But these dramatic events only confirm what Mr. Buchan has written in the books under review. This by itself is, of course, not a great achievement. For, the United States had lost the war in Indochina long before 1973 and it was obvious that the agreement Mr. Kissinger had negotiated in Paris with Mr. Tho could not and would not hold. But it speaks for Mr. Buchan’s perspicacity that he did not allow his long-term judgement to be influenced either by the setback the Soviet Union suffered when President Sadat expelled its military personnel from Egypt in July 1972 or by the demonstration of the US capacity to sustain Israel in the Yom Kippur war or Mr. Kissinger’s skill in arranging the cease-fire and the first disengagement in the Sinai. He said in the first Reith lecture that “we are again in the early stages of a new cycle of change that is structural, quantitative and qualitative.”
It is an irony of history that the United States should have stepped up its direct involvement in the Viet Nam war at a time when, for one thing, there was no justification for it even in terms of America’s own perception of the communist danger – by 1964 even the worst cold warriors could not ignore the fact of the Sino-Soviet split – and, for another, it had begun to lose the competition with its western European and Japanese allies in the economic field. It had to begun to run a trade deficit with them in 1958. But while no one can doubt the lunacy of the American decision to get so deeply involved in Viet Nam, the arrogance of power – Senator Fulbright popularised this expression some years later – was not altogether unjustified.
At the time of President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, the United States was, as Mr. Buchan has put it, “not only the world’s most powerful country … but also its most magnetic society. She had a superiority over her fellow super-power in strategic weapons of the order of ten to one….The United States then produced nearly half the world’s wealth and was the major source of development aid … Her laboratories were the prime forcing house of scientific discovery and technological innovation …. The Soviet Union …. seemed by comparison internally divided and politically static …. The Sino-Soviet alliance …. had ruptured. Japan was only just beginning to become a viable economic state, while in Europe the newly founded Community had got no further than removing some of its internal trade barriers …. ”
The developments in the next decade are too well known to be detailed here. In sum, not only that of its allies, America’s own confidence in itself has been seriously weakened as a result of the Indochina war and the Watergate scandal; its trading deficit reached the fantastic figure of $30 billion in 1971 forcing President Nixon to devalue the dollar; the dollar has not stabilised against strong currencies like the West German mark and the Japanese yen ever since; the Soviet Union today has a larger armoury of long-range nuclear weapons and it is rapidly catching up with the United States in terms of naval power. In other words, the American “century” has turned out to be remarkably brief.
Mr. Buchan is naturally concerned over the decline in America’s power, specially because it has been accompanied by a massive increase in the power of the Soviet Union, which has displayed a remarkable capacity to contain fissiparous tendencies within its alliance system and the world communist movement. But unlike some others, he does not believe that the West can augment its security by trying to exploit the Sino-Soviet split or by drawing closer to China – an approach which the Chinese appear to be encouraging.
Essentially his argument is that the Soviet Union has the capacity to man both fronts adequately and that the introduction of multiple warheads has made it obligatory for the United States and the Soviet Union to establish a sufficiently high level of confidence in each other’s bona fides – neither can monitor the nuclear capability of the other – if they are to avoid a dangerous escalation of the arms race. Clearly the argument is unexceptionable, though the decline in America’s power may well strengthen rather than weaken the element of irrationality in its decision making process.
Like many other leading European commentators Mr. Buchan has no doubt that the American leadership should “convert a position of lonely responsibility for the United States, dominating a group of disparate and much weaker allies, into an interdependent coalition of complementary responsibilities, now that Japan and Western Europe have grown much taller in economic strength.”
But despite his conviction that, unlike the Soviet Union, the United States favours a multipolar world with several independent power centres, he himself does not seem to be wholly convinced that Washington can make the transition. Isn’t that inherently a non- feasible proposition if only for the reason that the United States cannot share with its allies not only the final decision to use or not use nuclear weapons but also the decision to hold out or not to hold out such a threat. Moreover, there is some merit in Mr. Kissinger’s complaint that the Europeans take a narrow regional view – the same applies to Japan – while the United States has global commitments.
There are other problems. Mr. Buchan has acknowledged that economic interdependence within the western world and between it and Japan grew in a time of rising prosperity and it may not be able to stand the strain of a serious and prolonged crisis. Such a crisis had not occurred when Mr. Buchan finalised the two manuscripts, though the prices of oil had risen four-fold in the last quarter of 1973 and it had become obvious that this would aggravate the problem of inflation in the West and in Japan.
Since then stagflation has become a household word. According to the latest OECD study, the output of goods and services in 24 member-countries has fallen three per cent in the first half of 1975 compared with that of the second half of 1974 – the sharpest drop in the postwar period – the industrial production in five leading countries – the USA, West Germany, Japan, France and Italy – has fallen by 10 to 20 per cent in the same period; employment has doubled to reach 14 million and in Britain the rate of inflation has risen to around 25 per cent.
All this may or may not add up to the crisis of capitalism in the sense Marxists and pseudo-Marxists use this expression. But there can be little doubt that the western community as a whole cannot recapture the dynamism it has shown in the past 25 years. The era of cheap and abundant raw materials is over. This is specially true of oil. And whatever some westerners may say, a substitute is not on the horizon.
The industrialised countries and some others, particularly the oil-rich like Iran, propose to build hundreds of nuclear power stations in the coming years. But that will create virtually impossible problems in respect of the disposal of the waste materials and the prevention of leakage, theft by organised gangs and proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Producers of other raw materials are not as well placed as the oil-rich countries. But they, too, are beginning to insist on fair prices. Thus the West and Japan face what Mr. Buchan has appropriately called “a revolution of declining expectations” and inevitably its consequences will be felt in various spheres.
There is much else in the two books which is worthy of study and discussion. But I shall content myself with just one additional point. At a time when American leaders and scholars have spared little effort to popularise the concept of five power centres or at best six, if the Persian Gulf countries are clubbed together for the purpose of this calculation, Mr. Buchan has done well to emphasise the following two facets of the international scene.
“This is David’s world every bit as much as Goliath’s: for the most part small states can now resist the pressure of the big ones even if they have been dependents, witness Malta or Iceland and Britain, Israel and the United States, North Korea and Russia, so that neither unilateral intervention in the developing world nor mutual recognition of each other’s spheres of influence can be accepted as a means of keeping great power relations stabilized.”
And “for most people in the world the intelligible point of identification is still the nation state. The increase in transnational activity is itself a source of political nationalism, especially in the many new states that make up half the totality of nations. There has rarely been a less promising moment in modern history to advocate the disappearance of the nation state.”
* THE END OF THE POSTWAR ERA: By Alastair Buchan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, £4.25)
** CHANGE WITHOUT WAR: By Alastair Buchan (Chatto & Windus, London, £2.25)
The Times of India, Sunday, 8 June 1975