Since the confrontation over Cuba in 1962, no Soviet move has rattled the United States as badly as its military support to the MPLA in Angola and the active involvement of several thousand Cuban troops in that country. The attacks on the policy of detente and its principal architect and advocate, Mr. Kissinger, his own visit to Africa and promise to do all in his power to promote black majority rule in southern Africa are some of the expressions of the anger and nervousness that the Kremlin’s actions have provoked in America.
The timing of the Kremlin’s move was inevitably determined by the date for the transfer of power fixed by the Portuguese government. But it was extremely awkward for the Americans because it shattered the euphoria produced, on the one hand, by Mr. Kissinger’s success in arranging an interim agreement between Egypt and Israel in respect of further disengagement in the Sinai and winning over President Sadat to the US side in the critically important struggle with the Soviet Union for influence in West Asia and, on the other, by the exposure of the weaknesses of Soviet agriculture and Moscow’s massive dependence on American grain supplies.
Even last summer there was some talk in the West of Russia’s growing military superiority, specially in Europe, though it was not as shrill as it has become since. But then it was widely assumed that in view of its anxiety to retain and increase access to western technology, capital, markets and agricultural surpluses, the Soviet leadership would not do anything that would put its detente with the United States at risk. Hardly anyone anticipated last summer that the Russians would intervene in Angola on the scale they eventually did. Mr. Kissinger himself has complained publicly that American intelligence agencies had failed to warn him in advance of the likely magnitude of the Soviet involvement on the side of the MPLA.
Alarmed
The form of Soviet intervention in Angola has also alarmed the United States. Though it itself secured and utilised the services of South Korean troops in Viet Nam, it apparently did not occur to U.S. policymakers, including Mr. Kissinger, that the Kremlin could take a leaf out of their book. They were thus unprepared for the introduction into Angola of several thousand Cuban soldiers for the objective not only of training the MPLA forces in the use of Soviet equipment but also of providing the necessary leadership and stiffening.
The more pertinent point, however, is that the United States could not have coped with the problem even if it had anticipated it. The Ford administration could not have sent in American soldiers in view of the trauma produced by the failure in Viet Nam and the consequent opposition among almost all sections of American public opinion against involvement in other peoples’ conflicts. And it could not have persuaded anyone of its allies to fill the role for the simple reason that the USA’s principal allies have no appetite for such adventures. Doubtless South Africa sent in a battalion or so. But it did so not only in the belief that the United States would back it but also possibly in ignorance of the magnitude of the challenge facing it. At no stage did the South Africans show any desire to join battle with the Cubans. Mr. Kissinger has made a grievance of the Congress decision to cut off covert support for the UNITA and the FNLA. But covert support could not have changed the final outcome.
It is open (o question whether the U.S. administration could have retaliated effectively if, instead of availing of the services of the Cubans, the Kremlin had sent its own personnel to Angola. Indeed, it can well be argued that Moscow could have called Mr. Kissinger’s bluff – President Nixon was then immobilised by the Watergate disclosure – at the time of the Arab-Israel war in 1973 if it had ignored the U.S. nuclear alert and flown in its divisions to help Egypt out of the impossible military position it found itself in as a result of Israel’s violation of the first ceasefire and encirclement of the third army on the eastern side of the Suez. But while this is a matter of speculation, it is self-evident in the case of Angola, that the Soviet leadership employed a strategy which neatly bypassed all risk of direct confrontation with the United States and at the same time demonstrated that its professions of support for national liberation struggles were by no means empty rhetoric.
Overwhelm
In terms of facts such a demonstration was not necessary. For, in the final analysis the highly sophisticated and large quantities of weapons provided by the Soviet Union alone could have made it possible for the North Viet Namese to overwhelm the Thieu regime so quickly last year and for the Egyptians and the Syrians to challenge the Israelis in 1973. But the Americans have had a guilty conscience in respect of Viet Nam and have, therefore, not been keen to emphasise too much the role of Soviet weaponry in determining the outcome of the war. And in West Asia they could cope with the problem by arming the Israelis and by trying to insulate the oil-rich countries around the Persian Gulf from the Arab-Israel conflict. The impact of Angola on American policy-makers has been of an altogether different order because they have no guilty conscience about it and there is no power in the region which they can back and expect to play Israel’s pre-1973 role.
Some of Mr. Ford’s opponents like Mr. Reagan and Mr. Kissinger’s critics like Senator Jackson and Mr. Schlesinger are pressing for increased military preparedness as an answer to the challenge. But when this advocacy is not the result of naivety, it is an expression of bafflement. For, once the Soviet Union had decided to act firmly and on a sufficiently big scale in Angola, the outcome could not have been different, whatever the over-all military balance between the two super-powers. This is, however, less relevant than the fact that Mr. Kissinger himself does not have a convincing alternate to offer.
He continues to talk in terms of rewarding co-operation and punishing intransigence on the part of the Soviet leadership. But this makes little sense for a variety of reasons. First, it is not within the U.S. administration’s power to confer favours on Moscow because the Congress has become too assertive, and it is not within its capacity to deny the Kremlin access to high-level technology because the West Europeans are more than anxious to sell it whatever it needs. This is specially so in the present context of recession when western industries will grab whatever orders come to them in order to keep going. Secondly, Moscow can without much difficulty do without whatever it cannot buy.
Superpower
The plain fact is that as the Soviet Union has become truly a super-power which it was not in the past, no one in the United States quite knows how to deal with it. This is as true of Mr. Kissinger as of his opponents, both on the right and the left. For the Soviet leadership can neither be bought nor frightened. And so long as China does not acquire such military might as to constitute a threat to Russia’s own security – a wholly unlikely prospect in the foreseeable future – erosion of U.S. influence and power must remain the principal objective of the men in the Kremlin.
Surprising though it might appear on the surface view, the Dullesian policy of containment was “viable” only so long as it was irrelevant, that is so long as the Soviet Union was both militarily and economically far inferior to the United States. Similarly, the Nixon-Kissinger policy of so-called linkages could appear viable only so long as the western economy did not face the twin problems of inflation and stagnation and the Soviet Union was negotiating with the West from a position of relative economic weakness and so long as the Kremlin had not disposed of the challenge symbolised by the Prague spring in 1968 and the armed clashes with the Chinese on the Ussuri in 1969.
It does not follow that the Soviet leadership need no longer worry about the possibility of Sino-US co-operation. But it does not have to be unduly disturbed. China clearly faces a prolonged leadership struggle; its progress in the military field remains slow and there are severe limits to what the United States can do to help it. Indeed, the Americans are becoming as unsure of their future relations with Peking as the men in the Kremlin.
Thus the over-all situation is sufficiently favourable to the Soviet Union to enable it to press its advantage in southern Africa. Mr. Kissinger cannot easily find an answer to it because the issue is not limited to what he regards dispensable – the white minority rule in Rhodesia and South African rule in Namibia. At issue is the future of South Africa itself.
The Times of India, 5 May 1976