Rethinking The Red Menace

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Yet in the West the era of stagnation was seen as one of Soviet ascendancy -- even, in some key and dangerous respects, of Soviet supremacy. Here was a vast, mysterious country on the other side of the globe from the U.S., the Great Geopolitical and Ideological Antipode. It was believed to be possessed of immense and malignant strength, including the self-confidence, prowess and resources for the conduct of all-out war. Even now, with the Pentagon looking for ways to trim its budget, U.S. defense policy includes a caveat: the West must be prepared for the danger that Gorbachev will be overthrown; he might be replaced by a retrograde Soviet leadership that will once again -- that is the key phrase: once again -- threaten the rest of the world with military intimidation if not conquest.

Soldiers are given to cautioning their civilian bosses to judge the enemy by his capabilities, not by his stated intentions. He can deceive about his intentions, or his intentions can change from one year to the next. Capabilities, by contrast, are more constant; they can be gauged objectively; they are harder to change and mask, and once they have truly changed, they are harder to reverse.

And what was this capability that the Soviet Union supposedly had, which the West must, at whatever cost necessary, be prepared to match and thwart? The short answer: the capability to win World War III. And what would World War III be like? Again, the short answer: it would be like the beginning of World War II. The minds and computers of Western defense experts have long concentrated on two dangers, each a variant of a devastating episode that occurred about a half-century ago. One is an armored attack on Western Europe, a replay of Hitler's dash to the English Channel. The other is a nuclear Pearl Harbor, a bolt-from-the-blue attack by Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles that would catch American weapons sleeping in their silos.

These nightmares are the ultimate example of generals preparing to fight the last war. Western strategists arguably must assume the worst about how good the enemy is in his ability to do bad things, how reliable and well-trained his troops are, how swiftly and effectively he could coordinate his attack. But they must also have a plausible answer to the question, Why would the enemy do those bad things?

Scenarios for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe have always had a touch of paranoid fantasy about them. In the late 1940s, when Western Europe was weak and virtually defenseless, the Soviet Union itself was exhausted and overextended. Yes, Joseph Stalin "conquered" Eastern Europe -- Exhibit A in the charge of Soviet expansionism -- but he did so in the final battles of World War II, not as a prelude to World War III. The Red Army had filled the vacuum left by the collapsing Wehrmacht. By the early 1950s, any Kremlin warmonger would have to contend with a Western Europe that was already firmly back on its feet and therefore no pushover, and also with an American doctrine warning that Soviet aggression would trigger nuclear retaliation against the U.S.S.R.