THE INTERNATIONAL ARENA IN THE YEAR 2000

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP87M00220R000100010009-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 50
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 7, 2010
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: April 17, 1985
• Content Type: MEMO

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Routing Slip
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17 April 1985
MEMORANDUM FOR: The Director of Central Intelligence
THROUGH
$ Vice Chairman, National Intelligence Council
FROM Special Assistant for Warning
SUBJECT
-s The International Arena in the Year 2000
1. In the interest of clarity, this venture in long-term forecasting
employs straightforward judgments unencumbered by qualifications and hedges
that are appropriate in estimative intelligence. My purpose is to focus
attention on changing patterns of power relations in the next two decades
and their implications for American interests.
2. I believe the Intelligence Community should devote greater attention
to this elusive but important field. Long-range projections provide a valua-
ble means of testing prevailing assumptions and conventional wisdom. They
are useful in enlarging perspectives of estimates dealing with political
prospects which are usually limited to periods of two years or so. The
short-term focus tends to exaggerate the strength of static continuities
and obscure potential discontinuities. Finally, forecasts of 15 to 20 years
would be a helpful tool in long-range planning in such areas as collection
systems and priorities, resource management, and personnel recruitment.
3. The special requirements of long-range forecasting probably would
be difficult to adjust to existing procedures for producing estimates and
therefore should be managed by the NIC as a separate enterprise. I believe
a very aodest investment would yield increasingly valuable dividends with
the cumulative experience of a few years. The venture would address one of
the most neglected dimensions of the profession. This deficiency has been
well documented in a volume entitled Knowing One's Enemies: Intelligence
Assessment Before the Two World Wars (1984). In distilling the conclusions
of these monographs, the editor, Ernest R. May, observes that "All intelli-
gence agencies performed poorly in making long-term projections useful tor
planning and procurement. They were better at making short-term predictions,
best of all at providing military warning." May adds that despite assumptions
that "intelligence officers...might be supposed to have more comprehensive,
more objective, and more accurate perspectives on long-term developments...,
these historical cases show no instance in which intelligence officers
displayed particular prescience about the distant future."
4.. This forecast is unclassified.
SECRET
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By
STAT
Special Assistant for Warning
April 17, 198b
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Executive Summary
i
The International Environment
1
Soviet Domestic Trends
3
Soviet Foreign Policy
7
Eastern Europe
10
Western Europe
13
West Germany
15
The Middle East
18
Iran
23
East Asia
24
China's Domestic Prospects
25
China's Foreign Policy
26
Taiwan
28
Japan
29
The Koreas
32
The Philippines
33
Central America
34
Mexico
36
South America
37
Cuba
38
Southern Africa
39
Conclusions
40
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARI
The cumulative impact of trends that are now gathering force will
confront the United States with hard cnoices in the next fifteen years
involving major adjustments to a diffusion of world power, a decline of
America's relative economic and political influence, and growing inter-
national economic interdependence. The world distribution of power will
gradually evolve from the postwar bipolar system into a multipolar con-
figuration by the end of the century. The United States, the Soviet Union,
Western Europe, Cnina, and Japan will be the principal powers in the new
pentagonal constellation. Tne ability of the two superpowers to control
developments outside their alliance systems and, to a lesser extent,
within them will diminish. European members of both NATO and the Warsaw
Pact will seek to distance themselves from the Soviet-American rivalry.
Simplistic notions, of containment and zero-sum competition will give way
to greater reliance on a diplomacy of flexible maneuver among shifting
coalitions.
The Soviet Union will not experience anything approaching a genuine
systemic crisis before the year 2000. The system commands sufficient
reserves of social and political stability to enable the regime to ride
out the economic stagnation and civic malaise of the late 1970s and early
1980s. If General Secretary Mikhail Gorbacnev succeeds in reinvigorating
the party's authority, the economy, even without significant reforms, will
resume steady growth rates of four to five percent a year by the early
1990s. The USSR will then be a more assertive competitor in the inter-
national arena than it was during Brezhnev'p last seven years and the
Andropov-Chernenko interregnum. The most important stimulus for change
in Soviet policies and prospects in the next decade will be a sweeping
turnover of leaders and elites. The departure of the old guard will end a
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prolonged period during which policy differences were submerged, and the
new leadership will find it more difficult to maintain a facade of unity.
Soviet foreign policy in the next five years will remain focused on
achieving recognition of the USSR's global political, as well as strategic,
equality with the United States and on altering the geopolitical equilibrium
in Europe t6'M03cow'S advantage. The Soviets will persist in their dual
strategy of waging controlled cold war against the U.S. while promoting
selective detente with Western Europe. They will continue to attach high
priority to advancing an accommodation with China because this policy offers
the quickest and least costly way to strengthen their leverage in dealing
with the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan. Moscow's external behavior and
freedom of action, however, will be constrained not only by the requirements
of protecting the Soviet position in the strategic triangle but also by a
growing need to import foreign technology, industrial plant and equipment,
and grain.
Soviet policy toward the United States will be more active tactically
but it will show little substantive change. The Soviets will see little or
no prospect of concluding arms control agreements in the next five years,
and they believe the potential threat that the Reagan Administration's
strategic modernization program might tilt the balance against the USSR
has been averted for the foreseeable future. Soviet policy will keep the
issue of "space weapons" at the forefront of international attention and
hold agreements on offensive nuclear weapons hostage to a prior accord
banning the "militarization of outer space." The Gorbachev leadership,
however, will keep the door open to expanded economic relations with the
United States in the 1990s and to collaboration in containing anticipated
challenges from an expansionist China and a resurgent Germany.
Western Europe will move toward more independent policies aimed at
avoiding the repercussions of Soviet-American rivalry and at arranging
accommodations with Moscow that would allow increased access to markets
and resources in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The new generation
of West German leaders in the 1990s will alter the Federal Republic's
traditional western orientation in order to promote policies to relax
barriers created by the division of Europe and Germany, with the ultimate
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goal of clearing the way for German reunification.
Trends in the Arab world will be determined by the outcome of
competition between the influence of'economic development and moderniza-
tion, on the one hand, and the rising force of "Populist Islam" or
Islamic fundamentalism, on the other. If the recent decline in oil revenues ?:
accelerates,..popular unrest in the oil producing countries will escalate
and the fundamentalists will become a more dangerous threat to incumbent
regimes. The Palestinian question will gradually be overshadowed in Arab
politics by a new phase in the traditional struggle between a coalition
led by Egypt and a new version of the "Steadfastness Front" headed by Syria.
The balance of forces will be altered to Egypt's advantage after Syria's
power and influence are weakened by domestic strife that will follow the
death of President Hafer Assad. The Israelis will capitalize on Syria's
decline by unilaterally implementing their formula for "full autonomy"
for Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza and by encouraging them
to emigrate to Jordan. The influx of West Bank Arabs will produce an
internal upheaval in Jordan that will lead to the downfall of the
Hashemite dynasty and the replacement of King Hussein by a Palestinian-
dominated regime.
East Asian politics will be increasingly dominated by an ascending
China committed to'becoming the preeminent power in Asia early in the next
century. Within two to four years, Beijing will reopen the issue of U.S.
arms sales to Taiwan as an instrument to compel movement on the broader
question of the island's reunification with the mainland. By the mid-1990s,
the Chinese will move to enforce their claims to the continental shelf in
the Yellow and East China Seas and to islands in the East and South China
Seas. In the late 1990s, China will seek to establish a sphere of preponder-
ant influence in Southeast Asia, draw Japan and the Koreas into relation-
ships of economic and strategic dependence on China, and reduce American
influence and presence in East Asia. In the last phase of its expansionist
scenario, China will confront the Soviet Union with demands for a settlement
of territorial disputes on Chinese terms, restoration of China's primacy
in Mongolia, and major reductions of Soviet military forces along the border.
Japan will shift to n more independent and nationalistic posture, relying
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iv
increasingly on improved relations with the USSR to counterbalance
China's ambitions. If trade wars and Chinese expansionism undermine
Japan's confidence and economic security,: Tokyo will undertake a major
rearmament program, including the development of an independent nuclear
capability.
Central American political dynamics will be driven by a confused and
violent transition from the political-economic order that evolved in the
first half of the century to a new distribution of power. With the
exception of a relatively stable Costa Rica, domestic conflicts will ebb
and flow until monolithic orders ruled by dominant figures or authoritarian
elites emerge. The Nicaraguan regime will settle into a precarious
existence sustained by Soviet and Cuban assistance, and the Sandinistas'
collective leadership will fragment, giving rise to a single dominant
ruler. The conflict in El Salvador will subside within five years without
a formal settlement, and Panama will become the new focus of U.S. concerns
in the late 1980s after an internal crisis prompts its leaders to demand
major changes in the Canal Treaties of 1977. Mexico will enter a period
of upheaval in the late 1990s that will destroy the existing power structure.
The rise of political consciousness among the black majority in South
Africa will lead to civil war in the next five years. This will eventually
bring down the present government, opening the way for a series of truces
and de facto partition of the country, with the white minority relocated
into scattered and shrinking enclaves.
The United States in the year 2000 will command a superior geopolitical
position and immense advantages over its principal competitors in a multi-
polar world. This new configuration of power will require major changes in
the assumptions and priorities of American foreign and security policies.
In the mid-1990s and beyond, the most volatile potential for a U.S.-Soviet
military confrontation will reside in a resurgent Germany's quest for
reunification and preponderant power in Central Europe. The East Asian
periphery of an expansionist China will be the second major focal point-
of possible conflict.
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The International Environment
The world power configuration in the next decade will continue to be*
defined by the present modified bipolai structure, but forces now at work
will gradually evolve into a rudimentary multipolar system by the year 2000.
By the end of the first quarter of the next century, a genuine pentagonal
configuration, composed of the United States, the Soviet Union, Western
Europe,China, and Japan, will be in operation. The unique strengths and
resources of the U.S. and the USSR, however, will continue even then to
confer on tnem the distinction of being the only true global powers. The
other three members of the system will be essentially regional powers.
The term "modified bipolar structure" refers to the reality that the
United States will remain the only authentic superpower until well into
the next century, primarily because its long-standing relationships with
Western Europe and Japan and its economic preeminence will give the U.S.
immense advantages which the Soviet Union will be unable to match. The
USSR in the next fifteen years will not achieve the economic capacity or
global influence necessary to enforce its claim to full political, as well
as strategic, equality with the United States. Nor will it be able to
command a major role in the political management of affairs in any region
outside Eastern Europe. The ascription of superpower status to the USSR
has never been warranted by its strengths, achievements, and influence in
the nonmilitary ingredients of national power. The Soviets achieved putative
superpower status only because of the West's excessive preoccupation with
the military dimensions of East-West competition. Apart from her strategic
capabilities, the USSR will not acquire any of the essential attributes of
true global power in the next decade and a half. Soviet influence abroad
will continue to be restricted by its inability to play a leading role in
an American-dominated international system in which the constant interplay
of economic, political, and military power and presence distinguishes
authentic global status from regional hegemony.
In the 1990s, the ability of the United States and the Soviet Union to
control developments outside their alliance systems and, to a lesser extent,
within them will diminish steadily. Second and third-ranking powers will
become more reluctant to subordinate their separate national interests to
upholding the credibility and vitality of rival alliances
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or to support the global interests of the superpowers. American and Soviet
relations-with allies and clients will grow more interdependent and the
superpowers will have to deal with allies more as partners than as dependents.
This trend will reduce the scope for unilateral initiatives by Washington and
Moscow and make the management of alliances more difficult. European members
of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact will increasingly seek to distance them-
selves from superpower rivalry. The rise of interest in the "Europeanization
of Europe" reflects a desire in both parts of the divided continent to reduce
vulnerability to repercussions from U.S.-Soviet competition and confrontation.
Helmut Schmidt articulated widespread European reactions to U.S.-Soviet
polemics in the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan in his acerbic
comment that "We can afford no gestures of strength and no doughty demonstra-
tions of steadfastness. We've had a noseful of that sort of thing."
As the bipolar balance is gradually displaced by.a multipolar system,
simplistic notions of containment and zero-sum competition in both camps will
give way to greater reliance on a diplomacy of flexible maneuver and to
higher priorities for preserving maximum freedom of decision and action.
The United States will increasingly encounter situationSin which important
friends will be on both sides of a given issue, and it will frequently nave
to perform the role of crucial intermediary rather than one of guaranteeing
the security of allies and defending a rigid bipolar status quo. America's
principal interest in managing a multipolar system will be to protect its
privileged position as the hub ofa shifting network of alignments.
The advantages of the bipolar system--a shared interest in preserving
the central balance, stability, calculability, and clarity of threats to
the system--will be replaced by uncertainties and instabilities that are
inherent in a multipolar configuration. With five principal players, there
will be greater risks of miscalculation, unilateral initiatives, and a loss
of control. The bipolar balance has not. guaranteed stability, but it has
been less subject to abrupt transformations and surprises than the multi-
polar structure will be.
The United States Will continue to have a compelling interest in
maintaining close relations with a more independent Western Europe and Japan
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not only because they will buttress America's superior position in a
pentagonal system but also because they will have the incentive and capacity
to forestall a destabilizing bipolarization into two hostile blocs in which
one side or the other must lose in any confrontation. Bipolarization of a
multipolar system has been the prelude to several major wars, notably the
division of Europe into two rival alliances that collided in 1914. The
dynamics of a multipolar system will center on competition among the
major players for the advantages that will derive from leading a majority
alignment within the five-power arena. The Soviets are already maneuvering
to secure this advantage. Their efforts to arrange an accommodation with
China and to strengthen leverage over Western Europe are aimed in part at
achieving a pivotal role in the coming pentagonal system. Aleksandr Yakovlev,
director of IMEMO, claims to discern a "relative leveling in tae strength
of the three centers of (capitalist) powers the U.S., Western Europe, and
Japan." He contends that "in the historically foreseeable future the
centrifugal tendency in the capitalist world will grow."
As inheritors of the European tradition of Realpolitik, Soviet leaders
would endorse Bismarck's maxim for manipulating a five-power systems "One
must not lose sight of the importance of being one of three on the European
chessboard. That is the invariable objective of all cabinets and of mine
above all others. Nobody wishes to be in a minority. All politics reduce
themselves to this formulas to try to be one of. three as long as the
world is governed by an unstable equilibrium of five great powers." The
grand stakes in the international politics*of the next half century will
largely hinge upon the capacity of American statecraft to preserve the
enormous advantages inherent in postwar relationships with Western Europe
and Japan, and upon the resourcefulness of the Soviet Union and an ascendant
China in neutralizing these advantages by dissolving the majority alignment
and securing the crucial pivotal role in a new majority coalition.
The Soviet Unions Domestic Trends and Prospects
The passing of the old guard will not herald an era of major reforms
in the Soviet political and economic systems. Continuities will prevail
over innovations in the next fifteen years because the successor generation,
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-4-
just as its predecessor, will have to deal with the stern imperatives of
managing and holding together a huge multinational internal empire in an
age marked by the solvent forces of nationalism and modernity. The new
generation of leaders will face the same dilemma of how to modernize
economically without modernizing politically. "
Domestic and foreign policies will continue to be conditioned by the
Kremlin's perennial fear of losing control of powerful centrifugal forces
in the empire. This all-pervasive political-security reality will oblige
any leadership in the next quarter of a century to cling to orthodox
Marxism-Leninism as an indispensable means of legitimizing the Communist
Party's monopoly of power. Soviet elites will support, or at least
acquiesce to, the supremacy of the party because the fear of chaos and
disintegration will far outweigh yearnings for political freedoms and major
reforms.
Since the 13th century, Russia has existed not as a nation-state but as
a multinational empire maintained by formidable military forces and omni-
present police controls. The Soviet regime-with its cant about enlightened
nationality policies has concealed its dread of disintegration far better
than its more candid Tsarist predecessors. Alexander I warned that "The
least weakening of autocracy would lead to the separation of many provinces."
Sergei Witte, finance minister under Nicholas II, declared that "The world
should be surprised that we have any government in Russia, not that we have
an imperfect government. With many nationalities, many languages, and a
nation largely illiterate, the marvel is that the country can be held together
even by autocracy."
In addition to these fundamental historical and institutional barriers
to major reforms that would undermine central control and thus the survival
of the empire, the latitude of the new generation of leaders will be constrained
by the accumulated inertia of the long Brezhnev era. The basic political
problem confronting the Gorbachev leadership will be how to restore the
party's dominant role as the sole policy initiator and energizer of the
ponderous party and state bureaucracies. Gorbachev alluded to this problem
in his "acceptance speech" to the Central Committee on 11 March when he
stressed that "The solution of the complex tasks we are faced with presupposes
a further strengthening of the party and a rise in its organizing and guiding,
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role." Under Brezhnev, the party gradually relinquished its unchallenged
primacy and'drif ted into the role of arbiter among contending claimants to
power and resources. The Brezhnev gerontocracy sought to avoid hard choices
that would trigger disruptive tests of strength with powerful segments of
the military and civilian establishments and threaten the delicate balance
within the Politburo and party Secretariat. The price of preserving an
untroubled status quo, however, was economic stagnation, a large degree of
immobilism in both domestic and foreign policy, and a sharp decline in the
managerial effectiveness of the party, state, and economic bureaucracies.
The entrenched inertia of Brezhnevism will circumscribe Gorbachev's
options in.the next few years. Me will have insufficient authority to do
much more than reinvigorate Andropov's campaign to restore work discipline
and bureaucratic accountability. If (.orbachev, or a successor, succeeds in
recovering the party's unquestioned dominance of policy and management, the
Soviet economy, even without significant reforms, will resume a pattern of
steady growth of four to five percent a year by the early 1990s, and the
Soviet Union will become a more formidable and assertive competitor in the
international arena than it was during Brezhnev's last seven years and in
the Andropov-Chernenko Interregnum.
The USSR will not experience anything approaching a genuine systemic
crisis before the year 2000. The system commands immense reserves of social
and political stability that will enable the regime to ride out the economic
stagnation and civic malaise of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Even if
marginal and incremental changes in economic policy and management do not
overcome stagnation in the next decade, the economy will maintain an average
growth rate of two to three percent--slightly above the growth of the
population. The party apparatus will provide a reliable instrument for
containing dissent and social frustrations. Although there will be growing
labor unrest and more frequent but sporadic work stoppages, these will focus
on local grievances and will not expand into a nation-wide movement. The
fundamental source of the party's authority and control will continue-to be
its effectiveness in coopting successive generations of ambitious and
energetic members of the social and national elites by offering them a
substantial stoke in the system in exchange for their loyalty.
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The Soviet economy, even at annual growth rates of only two to three
percent, will command sufficient- resources to maintain a formidable military
machine and to support an assertive foreign policy. It is the long-term
-implications of economic stagnation that will concern the Gorbachev leader-
ship. The declining growth rate of investment in recent years will eventually '
erode the basis for future growth of defense spending in the late 1980s and
1990s. The reduction in the growth of defense procurement to about two percent
since the mid-1970s.represents only a short-term expedient to avoid even
deeper declines in investment and consumption. The moment of truth for the
Soviets will not come until the late 1980s and early 1990s. If the ratio
of Soviet GNP to that of the United States worsens, the Soviet Union's
capacity to maintain global competition will then come into question.
The most important stimulus for change in Soviet policy and prospects
in the next fifteen years will be a sweeping turnover of leaders and elites.
This process will provide Gorbachev and his supporters with potentially
decisive leverage to overcome the inertia of Brezhnevism. Not only most of
the top party leadership but a large part of the central elite will be re-
placed in the next decade by a successor generation. There is no precedent
in Soviet history for such a massive turnover in a short time-span. The
transition will act as a catalyst to release pressures for change and rejuvena-
tion that have existed for the past decade but have been frustrated by the
Brezhnev gerontocracy.
The rise of so many members of a new generation to senior positions in
the party, state, and military establishments will generate sharp competition
and conflict over power and policy. The departure of the old guard will end
a prolonged period during which policy differences were contained, if not
completely submerged, and the new leaders will find it much more difficult
to preserve the usual facade of.unity. Contention over economic priorities
and defense policy has agitated Soviet politics since the last party congress
in 1981, and these differences will break out in a more acute and open
struggle in the next five years. This contest will reveal the presence of
widespread support for Chernenko's insistence last year that economic develop-
ment and consumer welfare should have higher priority than defense. Although
Chernenko's prescriptions were rejected by the old guard led by Ustinov,
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Gromyko, and Romanov, they command considerable support in the present
Central Committee, particularly among,regional leaders who are more sensitive
to the danger of public unrest than the'remote hierarchs in Moscow. The
departure of the old guard will erode the strength of the defenders of
traditional priorities and enhance the political acceptability of the
policies that Chernenko championed.
The Soviet Union: Foreign Policy Trends and Prospects
In the next five years, there will be no major changes in the foreign
policy strategy that was outlined at the last party congress in 1981.
The Gorbachev leadership's fundamental goals--especially as long as Gromyko
continues to exercise preeminent influence in shaping foreign policy--will
remain centered on achieving general recognition of the USSR's global
political as well as strategic equality with the United States and altering
the geopolitical balance in Europe by exploiting what the Soviets perceive
as growing conflicts between American and West European economic and political
interests. The Soviets will persist in their dual strategy of waging con-
trolled cold war against the U.S. while promoting selective detente with
West European governments. They will continue to attach high priority to
advancing an accommodation with China because this policy offers the
quickest and least costly way to strengthen their leverage in dealing with
the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan. A rapprochement with China, moreover,
will be an indispensable means of protecting the Soviet Union's position
in the "strategic triangle" during the next decade and placing the USSR in
the most favorable position as the multipolar configuration of power begins
to emerge in the late 1990s.
Moscow's international behavior and freedom of action will be constrained
not only by the requirements of manipulating the strategic triangle but by
a growing need to import foreign technology, industrial plant and equipment,
and grain. A trend toward expanding economic relations with the West and
Japan will be irreversible in the next fifteen years if the Gorbachev leader-
ship's efforts to reverse economic stagnation and, in Gorbachev's words, to
"transfer the national economy to the tracks of intensive development" are
to have any chance of success. The new generation will be bound as much as
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the Brezhnev leadership by the fundamental judgment made-in the late 1960s
that imports of grain and technology and jo'nt development ventures with
Western firms are vastly preferable to the risks and uncertainties inherent
in any major restructuring of the Soviet economic and administrative systems.
The Soviets will not abandon this basic, long-term national policy because
they recognize that they cannot revert to a' strategy of greater autarky and
self-reliance.
In addition to these geopolitical and economic constraints, Gorbachev
will avoid provocative and high-risk foreign adventures that might generate
potentially dangerous public unrest and even open resistance in the Soviet
internal empire. He shares the concerns expressed in the last two years by
Andropov and Chernenko that public dissatisfaction, if unattended or mis-
managed, could assume "crisis" proportions. In a speech last June, Gorba-
chev carefully coupled a call for stronger vigilance and defense with an
assurance that "We certainly do not believe that the cause of international
detente has been irreversibly undermined."
Soviet policy ;toward the United States in the next few years will be
more active tactically but it will show little substantive change. Although
the Soviets will not expect any significant modifications in the Reagan
Administration's foreign and defense policies, Gorbachev will agree to a
bilateral summit meeting in the next year, seeing this encounter as a useful
way to strengthen his political standing at home and to advance the Soviet
Union's international pretensions to full superpower equality. The Soviets
will not alter their present negative assessment of prospects for arms control
agreements in the next five years, and their view of economic and political
trends in the United States will lead them to downgrade concerns four years
ago that the President's program for modernizing U.S. strategic forces
might eventually tilt the balance against the USSR. Tney believe this
threat has been averted for the foreseeable future. Authoritative Soviet
commentaries recently have portrayed congressional and public opinion as
turning against the Administration's defense policy and claimed that a
"further increase in military spending is becoming intolerable because of
inconceivable deficits that are placing the prospects for the development
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of the U.S. economy as a whole in question." The Soviets, moreover, antici-
pate a further weakening in the i,.S. international trade and financial position
that will erode.the credibility and effectiveness of American foreign policy.
With this evaluation of a long-term secular decline of America's
relative economic and political power as the basis for their calculations,
the Soviets will perceive little incentive for genuine concessions in
arms control negotiations in the next five years. The Gorbachev leadership
will share Brezhnev's assumption following the failure of SALT II that an
unmanageable arms race can be avoided by manipulating the political atmosphere
and arms control issues to undermine the ability of U.S. administrations
to mobilize a sustained effort to restore America's strategic preeminence.
Constant assurances that the USSR is not seeking military superiority will
be accompanied by ostensibly constructive initiatives for resolving the
arms control impasse. Summit meetings and arms control negotiations will
be used to wage political warfare against the U.S., not to explore prospects
for an accommodation. The long-term nature of the research phase of the
Strategic Defense Initiative and the well-publicized reservations of West
European governments regarding testing and deployment of such a system will
encourage the Soviets to keep the "space weapons" issue at the forefront of
international attention. They will continue indefinitely to hold agreements
on offensive nuclear weapons hostage to a prior agreement prohibiting the
"militarization of outer space."
This scenario for controlled cold war with the United States as a
central element in Soviet foreign political strategy during the next five
years will not be intended to foreclose collaboration with the U.S. on
matters of mutual interest in the longer-term future. The Gorbachev
leadership will wish to keep the door open to expanded Soviet-American
economic relations in the 1990s. By the mid-to-late 1990s, the Soviets
will have growing incentives to arrange a limited accommodation as the
basis for political consultations and cooperation to containing a more
assertive and expansionist China,,a resurgent Germany, and a nationalistic
and ambitious Japan. They recognize that "centrifugal tendencies" in an
emerging multipolar world will confront both superpowers with complex and
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potentially dangerous new problems, and they will want to keep their lines
open to Washington.
Strategy for dealing with a revival of the German question will be the
centerpiece of Soviet foreign and imperial policies after the mid-1990s.
Propaganda about German "revanchism" in the past five years has been a
device to keep restless clients in Poland and East Germany in line, but
the Soviets have no illusions that the stable postwar line of division in
Central Europe will be a permanent condition. When the expected West German
challenge to the status quo matures in the late 1990s, the Soviets will have
only two principal alternatives. They must either accept a potentially
explosive showdown with a "revisionist" West Germany supported in varying
degrees by its NATO allies, or seek early collaboration with the U.S.,
France, and Britain to defuse the threat to East Germany and to the Soviet
strategic glacis in Eastern Europe.
The Soviets also recognize that a rapprocnement with China will not
remove the long-term prospect of Chinese expansionism to the north as well
as to the east and.south, and this will provide another powerful incentive
to avoid an irreversible freeze in Soviet-American relations. If the
leaders in charge of Soviet policy around the turn of the century lack the
political foresight and. resourcefulness to arrange timely collaboration
with the United States in containing a resurgent Germany and an expansionist
China, they will incur grave risks of stumbling into an unwanted war.
Eastern Europe
There is at least a 50-50 chance that crises in Moscow's East European
empire in the next fifteen years will overwhelm its political strategy toward
the West and destroy its capacity to protect its global interests in a
pentagonal world. Crowing conflicts of interest between the Soviets and
their Warsaw Pact allies will be compounded by an emerging Soviet-West German
competition for influence in Central and Eastern Europe that will largely
displace Soviet-American rivalry. As a new generation of leaders assumes
key decision-making positions In -the Federal Republic, the "national question"
will increasingly override Bonn's traditional western orientation in foreign
and security policies. West Germany's changing priorities will stimulate
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more aggressive economic, political, and cultural penetration of East
Gerrany and other Soviet bloc states by capitalizing on their need for
credits, technology, and expertise and their desire for greater autonomy
in relations with the West. -
Resurgent German nationalism and the resulting quest for a solution
to the German problem will seriously aggravate Moscow's dilemmas in
imperial management. In the absence of any effective and durable remedies,
the Soviets will see no alternative but to plunge ahead with heavy-handed
efforts to tighten economic and political controls in Eastern Europe. The
non-remedy of promoting economic integration and specialization of produc-
tion within CEMA will worsen the disease these measures are intended to
cure. The Soviets will discover that the economic and political costs of
this strategy will increase and its effectiveness will diminish. The
policy of tightening imperial controls will cause significant declines
in productivity and living standards, and the soviets will then respond
by pressuring their allies to suppress manifestations of public discontent
and intensify political discipline and mobilization. These and other
simple solutions, however, will no longer work. East European leaders will
protest that the stability and even survival of their regimes depend on
improving living standards and that internal reforms financed largely by
Western credits are absolutely necessary to avert unmanageable threats to
public order.
Poland and East Germany will be particularly vulnerable to the political
consequences of economic stagnation or decline. Their regimes will face
growing pressures for major changes in economic policy and organization
from reformists in party and managerial elites, and this will intensify
frictions in relations with Moscow. In contrast to the crisis in 1980-81
when the Soviets feared that the Polish disease would spread into East
Germany, Moscow's: major concern in the next fifteen years will be that
disarray and instability in East Germany might fuel a chain reaction
reaching into Poland and' Czechoslovakia, as well as invite West German
exploitation. -
East Germany will experience increasing political ferment arising from
the regime's inability to maintain its "consumer communism" which has
contained public discontent in the last fifteen years. The nonofficial
peace movement--the strongest link between the two Germanys--will grow
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in size and visibility. It will be increasingly regarded by the regime
and the Soviets as,a potential political opposition similar to Poland's
Solidarity and as a dangerous source of agitation for the reunification
of Germany.
The Honecker regime will be unwilling to risk severing economic
relations and dialogue with West Germany because these are the only
available means of restraining public unrest. Without access to West
German transit routes and other facilities through the Federal Republic
and to Bonn's financial subsidies and credit guarantees, the regime will
not be able to meet public expectations or keep prices of medical care,
food, and consumer goods at low levels. The Soviets will become more and
more apprehensive about the potential political consequences of Bonn's
growing economic influence in East Germany. Pravda warned last .suer
that Bonn's guarantee of a $350 million bank credit to East ^ermany
would be used as an "economic lever" to "erode the foundations of the
socialist system and to break the postwar peaceful structure in Europe."
The Soviets in the next five years will move to disarm this threat
by increasing pressure on Honecker to reverse his dependence on Bonn.
Soviet fear of losing control of the relations between the two Germanys
will ultimately lead to a showdown with East Berlin. It may be precipitated
by a judgment that growing public unrest had become a serious threat to
discipline in East Germany's military and security forces and thus to the
regime's capacity to maintain public order. If Honecker resists pressure
to crack down,.the Soviets will replace him with a more compliant proconsul.
This blatant interference in East German affairs will trigger massive protest
demonstrations that will be suppressed by Soviet troops.
A repetition of the East German uprising of 1953, but on a much larger
scale, would compel a vigorous reaction from the Bonn government and entail
high risks of rapid escalation. With their entire position in East Germany
at stake, the.Soviets. would be obliged to react to West German demands
on behalf of the East German population in the most forceful manner. - This
confrontation would signal the most serious and potentially fateful crisis
in Europe since 1945. It would also precipitate dangerous public reactions
in Poland that might threaten the survival of the Warsaw regime and force
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Soviet military intervention. Even if hostilities between Soviet forces
in East Germany and West German and NATO. forces were averted or at least
contained, Moscow's European policy and prospects would be shattered.
With nothing to lose in terms of future relations with Bonn and the other
Western powers, the Soviets might move to expel allied forces and West
Rermany's official presence from West Berlin and incorporate the western
sectors into East Berlin.
Any leadership in Moscow will view control of East Germany as the
keystone of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, which in turn is vital to
the preservation 'of the USSR's global geopolitical position. The Soviets
therefore will be prepared to commit any amount of armed force necessary
to defend this stake. Their nuclear and conventional superiority on the
continent will embolden them to believe they could prevail in a test of
strength and nerves with West Germany and the U.S. They would reject the
alternative of a retrenchment of Soviet power in Central Europe through a
negotiated settlement involving the reduction or removal of foreign forces
in the two Germanys and some form of neutralization of both states.
Western Europe
By the year 2000, the political, economic, and military face of Europe
will have undergone far-reaching changes in both the East and the West.
The trend toward increasing contradictions between Soviet and East European
interests as Moscow's clients seek to loosen imperial bonds will be
paralleled by a drift in West European attitudes and policies toward greater
independence within an attenuated Atlantic alliance.
The security interests of the East European regimes will cause them to
remain within the Warsaw Pact without pressure from Moscow, and West Euro-
pean governments will prefer to retain the Atlantic connection. The insti-
tutional machinery of NATO and its integrated military planning, however,
will become little more than a formal facade, and the alliance will revert
to a more traditional type of loose political-military coalition.
Western Europe's gradual evolution into an autonomous, although far
from cohesive, member of the emerging multipolar system will be powered by
three main factors: West Germany's growing preoccupation with the search
for a German national identity; a more pervasive public awareness of the
political and military implications of the Soviet Union's achievement of
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of the American deterrent for Western Europe; and the imperatives of main-
taining domestic political and social stability in an era of economic stag-
nation or, at best, low growth rates. In the next five to ten years, Western
Europe's economic vulnerabilities will be the principal force pushing these
governments toward accommodations with Moscow. Such arrangements will in-
creasingly be perceived as a prerequisite to gaining expanded access to
Soviet and East European markets and resources. This thrust will be greatly
magnified if protectionist measures by the European Community, the U.S.,
and Japan set off a damaging trade war.
Economic necessity will enhance the political attractions of an updated
version of de Gaulle's vision of a "European Europe." In view of the
prospect that Western Europe's unemployment rate will reach 12 to 15 percent
by the early 1990s, governments will not have the option of curtailing
expensive social welfare programs, the cost of which has increased from a
fifth to a fourth or more of the gross domestic product in the last 15 years.
These domestic imperatives will strengthen political incentives to disengage
from the Soviet-American rivalry and to adopt the role of broker between the
superpowers, with the goal of easing East-West competition and facilitating
the integration of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe into the European and
international economic systems.
A gradual transition from the role of dependent allies to that of
autonomous brokers will be feasible for the first time since 1945 because a
majority of West Europeans no longer regard the Soviet Union as the menace
it was perceived to be in the first 25 years after World War II. There is
now much greater public confidence in the West's political, economic, and
technological superiority over the USSR. This change in psychology is
largely the product of demographic change. A majority of West Europeans
alive today were born since World War II, and members of this generation
already hold important second-echelon positions in political parties,
ministries, and parliaments. By the early 1990s, many of them will occupy
senior decision-making offices. Although there will be many divergent,
even incompatible, outlooks among the new generation of leaders--particularly
those in Bonn and Paris--they will generally be unwilling to view major
international issues in a narrow context of East-West competition, and they
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will be much more inclined to act independently of the United States in
promoting accommodationist policies toward the Soviet bloc.
Vest Germany--
The new generation of West German leaders will be in the vanguard of
autonomous European brokers. In addition to sharing their western neighbors'
incentives for accommodation with the East in search of markets and resources,
the West Germans will be motivated by political ambitions to relax the
barriers created by the division of Europe and Germany. Their ultimate
goal will be to bring about a confluence of the two Europes in order to open
the way to a solution to the German problem in the next century.
The Federal Republic is in the midst of a transition from the postwar
western orientation to a more independent, nationalist outlook that will
increasingly dominate national policy after the early 1990s. There is already
a deep gulf in attitudes between the older generation and those born since
1945, with the latter much more favorably inclined toward policy changes
that would expand intra-German relations, cultivate a new German national
identity, encourage a discreet evolution of the East German regime, and
prepare the ground for some form of confederation that would ultimately
lead to a united state. All the West German political parties will be
obliged to respond to this sentiment in tue next decade. Even now, the
Green Party and the extreme right favor withdrawal of the two Germanys
from their rival alliances as the first step in this process. A poll
sponsored by the Schmidt government five years ago revealed that almost
half of the population viewed "military neutrality" of both'German states
as a useful way of safeguarding peace in Europe. Resurgent nationalism in
the younger generation was reflected in a poll two years ago that shoved
that 64 percent of citizens aged 18 to 24 blamed international tensions
on American policies, compared with 41 percent of those in the middle-age
category, and only 29 percent of those 65 or older. The director of the
Allensbach polling organization recently described West Germany as "a
psychological battlefield" in that the gap in values between parents and
children is broader than in any other country in the West.
Pressures to redefine national goals in ways that accommodate shifting
public sentiment are evident in the recent statements and actions of
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current leaders in Bonn. In outlining a future Deutschlandpolitik soon after
the March 1983 elections, Chanchellor?Kohl gave first priority to the unity
of the German nation, declaring that the "present circumstances are not
unchangeable." Two months ago, Kohl ignored objections from his foreign
policy advisers and agreed to address a rally of German exiles from
Silesia in June. Franz Josef Strauss, a vehement critic of past Teutsch-
landpolitik, negotiated major loans to East Germany in 1983 and 1984, and
was greeted on the streets of East German cities with the adulation of a
movie star.
Any government in Bonn in the next 15 years will give much greater
prominence to the obligation, mandated in the preamble to the Federal
Republic's constitution, to work toward peaceful change in European borders
that ultimately will bring territories now held by Poland, Czechoslovakia,
and the'Soviet Union back under one German domain. The Christian Democrats'
Bundestag floor leader, Alfred Dregger, has declared that the partition of
Europe is unacceptable and, in the long term, untenable and that the ultimate
boundaries of Poland will be determined only when the Poles and all the
Germans are free. Last November the CDU's youth organization rejected a
motion accepting the Oder-Neisse line as Poland's western frontier.
Trends in public opinion could make the Bundestag elections in 1987
a historic turning point in West German politics. The decline of the Free
Democratic Party in recent years could lead to its extinction as a political
force and to its replacement by the Greens as the FRG's third party. Were
this to occur, a Social Democratic-Green coalition government would be a
real possibility. The only alternative would be another CDU-SPD "grand
coalition," but sucn a government would be incapable of pursuing coherent
policies if the left wing achieves control of the Social Democrats. Oskar
Lafontaine, mayor of Saarbruchen and a potential SPD candidate for chancellor
in 1987. has called for a West German withdrawal from NATO's military
infrastructure and advocated unilateral disarmament.
Revival of the German question by an energetic and ambitious new
generation of leaders who will not be burdened by the traumas of the Nazi
era will be viewed in Moscow as an ominous challenge to Soviet hegemony in
Central and Eastern Europe and to the postwar. status quo on the continent.
West Germany will become a much more potent pole of attraction in competing
for a larger share of influence in Eastern Europe, and the Soviets will
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deploy the maximum political and military resources to counter this threat.
They will devise new "united front" tactics in appealing to France and other
West European states to join in a common effort to contain German revanchism
and remove the threat of a third world war caused by German chauvinism and
expansionism.
The Bonn government in the 1990s will attempt to neutralize Soviet
political initiatives and threats of military action to defend East Germany
by asserting claims to the unqualified support of the United States and
the other NATO allies. Walther Leisler Kiep, a member of the presidium of
the Christian Democratic Union, has declared that "a change in the current
state of affairs is a historical necessity" and that the task of German
policy now is "to persuade the various governments (of the Western allies)
of the practical value to them in making German unity a central element of
their policies." West German demands for the support of its allies in
advancing the Federal Republic's legitimate national aims will confront
the United States with its most critical decisions since World War H.
Unequivocal support for West Germany will lead to the ultimate test of
strengtn and nerves with the Soviet Union. The stakes will be so high
that Moscow will be unable and unwilling to back down. Unforeseeable
incidents or provocations by one side or the other could quickly escalate
out of control. On the other hand, American hesitation or a forthright
refusal to support the Germans would result in a political upheaval in
the Federal Republic that would bring down the government and alienate
West Germany from the West indefinitely.
Over forty years ago, Nicholas J. Spykman wrote that "A defeated nation
that has not lost its vitality inevitably adopts a revisionist policy because
national pride demands that the symbol of its defeat be destroyed." By
the mid-to-late 1990s, the new generation of West Germans will have fully
restored the nation's vitality and self-confidence, and the symbol of
defeat for them will be the par tition of Germany and its capital city.
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The Middle East
Long-term trends in the Arab world will be shaped by the competition
between two major forces, the outcome of which is contingent on so^many
variables as to defy conjecture. On the one hand, the ongoing process of
modernization and economic development will give most Arab governments
growing incentives to pursue separate national interests and to disengage
from the constraints imposed by the traditional mythology of pan-Arabism
and the "Arab nation." These governments will gradually relinquish the
time-honored game of manipulating the Palestinians as pawns in feuds with
Israel and with rival Arab regimes. The modernizing trend will erode the
political and psychological obstacles to emulating Egypt's example in
coming to terms with the power and permanence of Israel.
On the other hand, the resurgence of "Populist Islam" will pose grave
challenges to Arab ruling elites and reduce their latitude for maneuver
on the Palestinian Issue. Islamic fundamentalism in the 1990s and beyond
will have powerful destabilizing effects throughout the region. it will
increasingly become a vehicle for promoting various forms of revolutionary
nationalism and the frustrated political and social aims of the middle
classes as well as the dispossessed. Populist Islam will not be the
exclusive property of the Shiites or the Iranian revolution; it will
command equal attraction for Sunni Muslims. Fundamentalist movements will
mount potent challenges to incumbent regimes, press for reforms of economic
systems and rigid social structures, and campaign for the expulsion from
the Muslim world of "imperialist intervention." The United States will be
the principal target of Populist Islam because it is viewed as inseparable
from Israel and as the main foreign defender of the status quo in the region
The outcome of this contest between two powerful forces will be determined
to a large extent by trends in world oil prices and consumption and by the
policies of the Western powers in dealing with the Arab-Israeli question.
There will be a direct connection between the fortunes of the oil-producing
states and the power and prospects of Populist Islam. Saudi Arabia and the
Sunni regimes in the six traditional Gulf states have managed to maintain
the stability of their systems because oil revenues have enabled them to
satisfy many of the economic and social demands of their populations.
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If the recent decline in oil revenues accelerates in the next decade,
popular unrest in the oil states will escalate and the fundamentalists
will become a more dangerous threat to the status quo defended by
Establishment Islam. The near-term trend will operate against the status
quo. OPEC's snare of global oil production has diminished from 75 percent
in tue 1970s to less than 35 percent today. World demand is now almost
ten million barrels a day less than it was at its peak in 1979. If present
consumption trends in the industrialized countries continue, OPEC in the
next five years will have essentially lost its capacity to control prices
and restrict production. If these trends lead to the collapse of the oil
cartel,there will be far-reaching repercussions on the economic health and
political stability of its members.
Saudi Arabia's influence in Arab politics, vastly inflated by its role
in the 1910s as the leading source of O.S. oil imports until 1981, will
decline sharply. Its oil income fell from $110 billion in 1981 to below
$40 billion in 1984, and it will decline further in the next five years.
There is at least a 50-50 chance that the resulting economic retrenchment
will fatally erode the political authority of the Saudi royal family and
trigger a power struggle among contending factions. The outcome within
the next decade could be a domestic upheaval, disintegration of the armed
forces, and coup attempts culminating in the collapse of the present regime.
The removal of Saudi Arabia's financial power would destabilize the politics
of the Arab world, thereby affording unprecedented opportunities for Islamic
fundamentalists and Iran's revolutionary regime to expand their power and
influence throughout the region. A collapse of Saudi financial, political,
and military influence would undermine the positions of ruling elites in
the Gulf states and tilt the power balance in the Gulf in favor of Iran.
If economic expansion and a rising curve in oil consumption in the
industrialized states remove or at least postpone these threats to the status
quo, the power potential of,Populist Islam will be tempered and contained.
The opposing trend of modernization and development will wen exercise
greater influence on Arab psychology and national policies unless these
effects are arrested or even nullified by the West's. handling of the Arab-
Israeli dispute. Assuming the challenge of Populist Islam is contained,
the pace and prospects of an evolution in Arab policies toward an accommoda-
tion with Israel in the next quarter of a century will depend to a great
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extent on Western policies. If the United states and the European Community
remain committed to the prescription for, an Arab-Israeli settlement contained
in UN Security Council resolutions adopted 18 years ago, the latitude for
gradual changes in Arab attitudes and policies will be sharply circumscribed
and Arab governments will have no choice but to persist in agitating the
Palestinian cause.
The political-military order in the Middle East that was embodied in
these Security Council resolutions after the Six-Day War in 1967 has long
since been made obsolete by the enormous growth in Israel's military and
political strength, by President Sadat's removal of Egypt from the Arab
coalition in 1977-79, and by Israel's destruction of the PLO in Lebanon
in 1982 as an autonomous political-military force capable of asserting
itself as a quasi-independent power in Arab politics. These developments
fundamentally alter