World Power Trends And U.S. Foreign Policy For The 1980s

Ray S. Cline

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367213831
• eBook ISBN: 9781000010428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This book, based on information consolidated to cover the calendar years 1978 and 1979, assesses the power of nations in the international context as a basis for planning American defense and foreign policy. It suggests a realistic way of thinking about the balance of power in the 1980s.

Part I
Concept and Methodology

Chapter One
Politectonics: Measuring the Strength of Nations

The political and economic structure of international relations has never been more complex than in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Whatever the United States does or refrains from doing abroad materially affects the fate of nations and peoples whose welfare is tied to the fortunes of the strongest country in the world. The question uppermost in most foreign capitals is whether the economy, the military strength, and, in particular, coherence of purpose in the United States are adequate to the challenges ahead. The 1980s present great opportunities but also great dangers for the 20 percent of the peoples on the earth who belong to the Free World as distinct from the realm of Communist one-party dictatorships.

From the vantage point of Washington at the end of the 1970s it appears that the buoyancy and vigor of the U.S. behavior in earlier decades have trailed off into national uncertainty, indecisiveness, and self-doubt. Public confidence in governmental policymaking at the threshold of the 1980s is at its lowest point since before World War II. Americans have not fully recovered from the twin tragedies of the Watergate political disgrace and defeat in Vietnam. Allies of the United States show little trust in American leadership and security guarantees.

We all have to ask ourselves: What is happening in the international arena and the countries in it that has brought about this change, and just where does the United States really stand in the world balance of power? The answer lies in the strength of nations and the clusters of allied nations in terms of global geography, economic interdependence, military capability, and shifting political alignments.

A calculus of the critical elements of power as it is perceived and used in international politics is the only basis for assessing the gradual shift in the balance of power in recent decades among sovereign states. To determine where the United States stands strategically, particularly vis-à-vis the USSR, it is necessary to measure the strength of nations by some systematic method. To describe the fundamentally geographic but also essentially political methodology used in my strategic analysis, I have adopted a new word, “politectonics”, i.e., political structuring. By this I denote the formation and breakup of international power groupings, mainly regional, but also shaped by cultural, political, economic, and military forces that determine the real balance in today’s give-and-take relations among nations. Perhaps “geopolitical-tectonics” would be more accurate, but to go beyond five syllables in a deliberate coinage of a new word is more risky than I dare to be.

There is nothing very new in this approach, despite the new term. It labels a simple formula based on old truths. It is really a signal of a return to basics and the long perspective of historical change as a key to international relations. Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, in 1904, the great British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder wrote an essay entitled “The Geographical Pivot of History” emphasizing the pivotal significance of political control of the human and material resources of the central Eurasian landmass. This emphasis increased as his ideas evolved more precisely down into the period of World War II. As the core of his thinking, Mackinder articulated a crucial concept in international relations by declaring that command of the Eurasian heartland (essentially central Europe and Russia, from the Urals to the Rhine) would lead to command, first of all of Eurasia, by far the largest of the continental landmasses, and eventually to domination of all the world’s resources and peoples. This dictum is based on the fact that Eurasia and land-linked Africa, what Mackinder calls the “world island”, comprises two-thirds of the land surface of the globe. He saw a fundamental difference between the land powers of the world island and the insular nations, such as the United States. He feared a day when Eurasia and land-linked Africa might become a united base of sea power, capable of outbuilding and outmanning the insular bases. The pros and cons of this concept have shaped the core of informed discussion of geopolitical theory ever since.

In part the concept is based on the American view of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who noted that North America, indeed the whole Western Hemisphere, is an island amid the world’s oceans, and that sea power protecting transoceanic commerce has always been a key ingredient of the prosperity and influence of nations on the periphery of Eurasia or, as in the case of the United States, across the seas.¹ The special strategic problems of seafaring countries as compared with the land powers of central Europe and Asia added import to Mackinder’s ideas about history and the future of international life. Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin all came very close to seizing control of the heartland of Eurasia; all showed an interest in the Mideast and Africa, parts of the “world island.” The Soviet Union commands most of the heartland region today. Mackinder and Mahan look more prescient all the time as we search for insights into present international circumstances and conflicts.

There is a striking analogy between political and strategic trends, on the one hand, and the terminology of new scholarly findings in the field of geology, on the other. It now seems that the earth’s surface is made up of a number of separate “tectonic plates”² containing entire continents and immense stretches of the surrounding seabeds and oceans. There is a North American plate, a South American plate, a Pacific plate, a China plate, a Eurasian plate, an African plate, and an Indian Ocean-Australian plate as well as some smaller regional pieces of the earth’s outer crustal shell. These continental plates float on a more fluid inner core, and they have very slowly drifted back and forth over the millennia. Where they meet or pull apart, mountain ranges are thrust up, volcanic and seismic pressures erupt, great oceanic ridges and rifts are formed, and some underwater terrain slips beneath the edge of adjoining tectonic plates and is slowly ground back into the molten core of the earth.

A more graphic picture of what is taking place in a much quicker time frame in the shifting of international power in this century could hardly be found. The strength of nations and of the clusters of nations allied to one another waxes and wanes in conformity with rhythms of economic, military, and political changes, producing either growth and stability or conflict, erosion, and destruction.

No good word is in common use to describe the process of analyzing such structural international changes. The old term, “geopolitics”, which derives from Mackinder’s model for world trends, fell into disrepute largely as a result of distortions introduced in Germany by Karl Haushofer in Hitler’s time, and also because of its tendency to emphasize only the relatively static and unchanging geographical relationships. In its place we now most often hear theorists talk of geometric patterns of power-triangular, pentagonal, etc. - among nations implicitly assumed to be as similar in interests and behavior as the countries of the nineteenth century “concert of Europe.” The analogy is not very helpful in explaining the relations between open societies like the United States and the autarchic dictatorships of the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The structure of international ties and conflicts is based on politics, geography, and economics, but not on any neat pattern of geometry. It is politectonics.

National Power in International Conflicts

In the rhetorical atmosphere of the United Nations all of the 162³ more or less sovereign nations of the world are equal, but everyone is aware that in the real world some nations are much “more equal” than others. Some have tremendous power, others very little. In modern times the nation-state is the main aggregative unit of political force in international affairs.

A nation is a group of people, usually living in a specific territory, who share a common sense of history, customs, and (often) language. A state is nominally a sovereign body politic, although in practice the degree of sovereignty obviously varies. Many modern states are homogeneous nations and many nations are sovereign states. On the other hand, there are many states that are multinational.

In the USSR the dominant Great Russian population constitutes barely more than half of a country that includes many still quite distinct cultural minorities, concentrated in specific regions like the Ukraine or Kazakhstan, that by any normal definition would make up nations in their own right. The United States is a quite different type of nation-state with an astonishing mix of ethnic groups, many of whom deliberately came to North America to belong to a pluralistic body politic of remarkable political, cultural, and linguistic homogeneity.

Within national boundaries in many parts of the world, especially in Asia and Africa, tribalism or ethnic subnational loyalties are strong. Religious minorities and ethnic or linguistic factions battle in Ireland, Belgium, and India, and create agonizing tensions in Cyprus, South Africa, and even in Canada. The melting pot does not always really meld, not even in the United States, as fast or as thoroughly as once supposed. Nevertheless, the nation-state is the decisive political unit of action and responsibility in our era.

From the town meeting to the nation-state, communities of all types and sizes dispense power and privileges insofar as they act as a group. All of them must work out systems for sharing benefits and burdens, as well as for settling disputes among their members. They must also set up some kind of sanctions to enforce compliance with those settlements, sanctions vested in some constituted authority. The authority may be an absolute monarch with his army or a judiciary backed by civil police. Making decisions on all these matters is the business of the political leadership in office at any given time.

At this period of history, there is no single legitimately constituted power for the effective settlement of disagreements about global economic, military, and political conflicts. More important, there is no procedure in international relations which guarantees that sanctions will be applied to enforce compliance with such international settlements as can be agreed upon. The extent to which one country can pursue its international and domestic aims without regard to, or even against, the interests of others, is based in the final analysis on its own national power as compared with that of other nations. Power in the international arena can thus be defined simply as the ability of the government of one state to cause the government of another state to do something which the latter otherwise would not choose to do, or to cause the government of another state to refrain from doing something it wants to do, whether by persuasion, coercion, or outright military force.

Power is a subjective fact; it need not actually be brought into use to arrive at the results desired by those who wield it. A nation’s leaders make decisions affecting foreign policy on the basis of projections of what they perceive their own power to be or of what they think is the power of others. Such projections may not always be accurate; a marked lag often exists between changing facts and perceptions of them, but the perceptions nonetheless determine governmental decisions.

International conflicts of interests, whether political, economic, or military, are played out like games of chess. Perceived power is a decisive factor, even if it only prevents another’s action, as a chessman threatens every square on the board to which an opponent’s piece might move. On an international chessboard the pattern of potential power and counter-power in the minds of the antagonists determines how the game proceeds from move to move and how it will end. Sometimes one nation carries out its aims to complete victory. More often the match is indecisive or flatly stalemated. Superfically nothing may appear to have happened. Only in desperate cases does the struggle move into a true end game, when-in international affairs-other levels of political and economic conflict are transcended and nations at last resort to war.

A study of national power, in the final analysis, is a study of the capacity to wage war, but it is also in the normal run of cases an appraisal of many other kinds of international competition or conflict, where differences are resolved within a political or an economic context. It is important to calculate carefully the capabilities and intentions of enemies or potential enemies, as well as those of allies and potential allies. A given country, seeking to maintain a favorable strategic balance in the world, needs to identify the countries sympathetic to its goals and strong enough to be helpful. It is at this point that moral and political considerations come into play in foreign policy and strategy.

A nation cannot afford to become mesmerized by the power potential of an adversary. An obsessive preoccupation with hos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I CONCEPT AND METHODOLOGY
• PART II ASSESSMENT OF THE POWER OF NATIONS
• PART III U.S. GRAND STRATEGY AND FOREIGN POLICY FOR THE 1980s
• Notes
• Index