THE INTERNATIONAL ARENA IN THE YEAR 2000

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP87-00462R000100130030-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 50
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 12, 2010
• Sequence Number: 30
• Publication Date: May 16, 1985
• Content Type: MEMO

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SECRET
THE DIRECTOR OF
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
NOTE FOR THE DIRECTOR
FROM: Herbert E. Meyer
Vice Chairman, NIC
NIC #02541-85
16 May 1985
SUBJECT: The International Arena in the
Year 2000
This piece by Harry is a real tour de
force.
Herbert E. Meyer
Attachment,
As stated
DCI/NIC/VC/NIC:HM:bha
Dist:
Orig - DCI
1 - DDCI
1 - ER
1 - C/NIC
1 - DDI Reg
1 - Each NIO
1 - VC/NIC Chrono
SECRET
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17 April 1985
MEMORANDUM FOR: The Director of Central Intelligence
THROUGH - : Vice Chairman, National Intelligence Council
FROM : Harry C. Cochran, Special Assistant for Warning
SUBJECT : 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 modest 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
25X1
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THE INTERNATIONAL ARENA IN THE YEAR 2000
By
Harry C. Cochran
Special Assistant for Warning
April 17, 1985
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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 choices 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, China, and Japan will be the principal powers in the new
pentagonal constellation. The 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's last seven years and the
Andropov-C-ernenko 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 to Moscow'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 Hafez 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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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. Tne 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 bipolar 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 them 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 Wasnington 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 of a 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 IMEIIO, claims to discern a "relative leveling in the strength
of the three centers of (capitalist) power: 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 formula: 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 Union: 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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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 drifted 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. We 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 stake 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 tnat 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. They 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 u.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 in 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-19903.
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 tie 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 19903, 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. Growing 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
Germany 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 otner
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 nonoffic;.al
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 summer
that Bonn's guarantee of a $350 million bank credit to East Germany
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 tnreat
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
Aermany'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
strateo(C narity- which inav4tnhly hat n,.t 4n n..aer4nn *-ha ..ra.itl.tlt-..
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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--tney 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.
West 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 19903. 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 the 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 showed
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 Deutsch-
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 such 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 II.
Unequivocal support for West Germany will lead to the ultimate test of
strength 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 1970s as the leading source of U.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 then 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 Ctates 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 altered the nature and stakes of the Arab-Israeli dispute.
Western policies, however, have remained anchored to assumptions that were
formulated in the late 1950s, namely, that this dispute is the major cause
of instability in the Middle East that threatens the West's access to
Gulf oil supplies and that the Palestinian question is the crux of the
dispute. As long as the Western powers continue to insist that a solution
to the Palestinian question is essential to an Arab-Israeli settlement,
Arab governments will be obliged to press for unachievable maximalist terms.
They cannot afford to appear less dedicated to the Palestinian cause than
the West. The inability of the United States to deliver on unrealistic
terms for a settlement will continue to provide opportunities for Arab
radicals and the Soviet Union to capitalize on Arab frustrations and
animosities toward Israel and the U.S.
If the United States and the European Community were to disengage from
the futile enterprise of brokering an Arab-Israeli settlement, with a
solution to the' Palestinian question as the centerpiece, the long-term forces
of modernization, economic development, and separate national interests will
gradually move most Arab governments toward de facto acceptance of the
impossibility of reversing the consequences of Israel's military preponderance.
Under these circumstances, the PLO would rapidly lose its remaining, and
highly artificial, status as a serious political force in the region;
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Arab governments, in their own self-interest, would eventually be free to
adopt policies of assimilation of Palestinians in their countries as the
only viable long-term solution. Tne Arab states,. moreover, would undergo
grudging adjustments to irreversible realities, and a new regional order
would emerge in the next quarter of a century not through a grand, compre-
hensive settlement but through incremental accommodations to the requirements
of dealing with a strong Israel in control of the West Bank, Gaza, and a
united Jerusalem.
Even in the absence of change in Western policy, the Palestinian
question will gradually be overshadowed in Arab politics by a new phase in
the traditional struggle for preeminence between a coalition led by Egypt
and a new version of the "Steadfastness Front" headed by Syria. Tnis
renewed rivalry will rule out any prospect of a unified Arab position on
a formal settlement with Israel, and posturing on terms for negotiations
will simply be one of the weapons used in the competition. Iraq will play
an opportunistic role with the usual aims of overshadowing Syria and pro-
moting the ambition of displacing both Syria and Egypt as the preeminent
Arab power. This intra-Arab contest will be inconclusive until the balance
of forces is altered to Egypt's advantage by the death of President Hafez
Assad. His departure will precipitate an upheaval in Syria focused on a
debilitating struggle between Alawites and Sunnis that will sharply diminish
Syria's power and influence in the region.
Syria's reversion to its pre-Assad condition of internal division,
weakness, and rapidly shifting governments will afford Israel a free hand
to proceed with its formula of "full autonomy" for Palestinian Arabs in
the West Bank and Gaza under de facto Israeli sovereignty. The Palestinians
will not be granted Israeli citizenship because if the Arabs in the
"occupied territories" were added to the half million already in Israel,
more than one-third of the total population of the Israeli state would be
Arab. Since the Arab population has been increasing at twice the rate of
the Israeli, the proportion within a decade would be 50 percent.
Political trends in Israel in the next 15 years will increase the
likelihood that the Israelis will deal with this Arab demographic problem
by "exporting" a substantial part of it to Jordan. Israeli politics will
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become increasingly polarized between the Sephardis and the Askenazis, with
both the Likud bloc and the Labor Alignment growing more and more "ethnic."
The prospective erosion of Labor strength and the rise of the Nationalist-
Religious bloc will strengthen advocates of encouraging the emigration of
West Bank and Gaza Arabs to Jordan. A majority of Israelis in the next
decade will come to view Palestinian predominance in Jordan as an appro-
priate "solution" on the ground, as Foreign Minister Shamir has put it,
that "Jordan and Palestine are identical and Jordanians and Palestinians
are one and the same."
The influx of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians into Jordan--either
voluntarily or under Israeli pressure--will produce an internal crisis
that will lead to civil strife and the downfall of the Hashemite dynasty
before the end of the century. The 1.1 million Palestinians in Jordan
already comprise 60 to 70 percent of the kingdom's population, and the
arrival of hundreds of thousands more will tilt the balance decisively
against the traditional Jordanian clans and Bedouin tribes which form
the real base of King Hussein's power.
The advent of a Palestinian government in Jordan dominated by the
contemporary equivalent of the PLO will begin a new phase in the long
war of succession to the British Mandate in Palestine. Israeli govern-
ments will have little choice but to conduct an aggressive strategy of
coercive diplomacy in dealing with the new regime in Amman. The Israelis
will respond to Palestinian subversion in the West Bank by greatly ex-
panding Jewish settlements, expelling large numbers of the Arab population,
and extending Israeli law and administration to the occupied territories.
Repercussions from these events will bring the process of Arab accommoda-
tion to Israel's power and permanence to a halt for a decade or more,
but an eventual truce between a Palestinian Jordan and Israel will open
the way for the consolidation of a new regional order. The Palestinian
question finally will have been resolved, and the emergence of a genuine
inter-state system in the Arab world free of the disruptive grievances of
stateless Palestinians will dissolve the barriers to a modus vivendi.
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The Iranians will continue a war of attrition with Iraq as long as the
Ayatollah Khomeini survives. The initial successor regime will be too weak
and divided to make a settlement, but it will gradually liquidate the war
by arranging tacit cease-fires and minor exchanges of territory. The
fighting will subside in a year or so without a formal peace under con-
ditions that closely resemble the terms of the Algiers Accord of 1975.
Khomeini's death wild remove the only authoritative voice able to
contain disputes among rival factions in the ruling Islamic Republic
Party (IRP). A succession struggle will pass through several stages
before a strong and charismatic figure emerges to impose an internal
settlement. Ayatollah Montazeri, Khomeini's designated successor, will
have neither the strength nor the ability to consolidate his authority.
Contention over power and policy will deepen into sporadic open warfare
between Khomeini's main supporters in the IRP's Maktabi faction backed by
the bulk of the Revolutionary Guard, on the one hand, and a coalition of
the traditional clergy who have never accepted Khomeini's primacy, rival
IRP factions and elements of the Guard, and major segments of the armed
forces, on the other.
After a period of virtual civil war, a stable successor regime will
gain mastery by the early 1990s. At the outset, it will be more "pragmatic"
only in the sense that it will have to represent a broader spectrum of
political interests than the Khomeini regime. In foreign affairs, the
new regime will continue to regard itself as the custodian of an-ongoing
Islamic Revolution with a messianic mission to export the revolution.
It will persist in a hostile stance toward both the United States and the
Soviet Union--the "Great Satan" and the "Lesser Satan"--and it will maintain
the role of champion of oppressed Islamic and Third World nations. In
prosecuting its messianic mission, the successor leadership will rely more
on proselyting, subversion and sabotage than on the overt use of military
force. It will intensify efforts to compel Arab governments of the Gulf
region to acknowledge Iran's preeminent leadership, and it will continue
to host and subsidize revolutionary groups from these countries and other
Arab states.
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The new leadership will achieve a gradual but steady economic recovery
and restoration of Iran's position as the most powerful state in the Gulf.
The Revolution's influence in the Arab world in general, however, will con-
tinue to be limited by the long history of conflict and rivalry between
Persians and Arabs. The unique political personality of Shia rule in
Iran, moreover, will dilute the revolution's appeal even among Sunni
fundamentalist movements which generally dominate Populist Islam in
Arab countries. By the mid-1990s, the revolution will enter a Thermidorian
period in response to urgent economic. imperatives and the ascending influence
of the professional and business classes. The xenophobic, messianic com-
ponent will be tempered, and Iranian politics will partially revert to the
pre-revolutionary tradition of rival domestic forces seeking foreign
support.
East Asia
The far-reaching changes in the political and economic landscape of
Europe will be matched by equally portentous alterations in the East Asian
configuration of power in the next fifteen years. East Asian politics will
be increasingly dominated by an ascending China committed to becoming the
preeminent power in Asia early in the next century. In the mid-1990s,
China will undertake a long-term career of geopolitical expansion that will
coincide with the resurgence of German nationalism and a bid for preponderance
in Central Europe.
China's initial moves to resolve long-standing territorial claims to
the east and south will accelerate an evolution in Japan's foreign and
defense policies toward greater independence and self-reliance. China's
expansionism will cause Japan and the Soviet Union to discover common
strategic, political, and economic interests, and they will craw closer to
each other in order to counter China's challenge. These trends will confront
the United States with hard choices in protecting its position in the
strategic triangle and in managing its relations with a nationalistic Japan
while dealing simultaneously with potentially explosive tensions between
West Germany and the Soviet Union.
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25
Chinas Domestic Trends and Prospects
China's aspirations to become the dominant power in Asia will ultimately
prevail over the potential advantages of collaborating with the West and
Japan in integrating the Chinese economy into an interdependent world system.
In the medium-term future, however, China's economic and military priorities
will ensure a continuation of the opening to the West since the early 19703.
Barring a domestic political crisis triggered by a succession struggle
after Deng Xiaoping's death, Beijing in the next decade will maintain what
it describes as an "independent and self-sufficient foreign policy" in order
to protect access to Western and Japanese trade, credits, and technology
that are vital to achieving the "Four Modernizations" of agriculture, in-
dustry, science and technology, and the armed forces. Deng's departure will
create serious problems since none of his principal lieutenants commands
sufficient authority to perform his unique role in the party leadership.
If Deng dies in the next year or two, there will be a 40 percent chance of
a disorderly succession contest because General Secretary Hu Yaobang and
Premier Zhao Ziyang would not by then have accumulated the power and
support necessary to avert challenges to their leadership. If Deng survives
another five years, however, Hu and Zhao would be in a stronger position to
manage an orderly succession.
Even if China experiences a post-Deng period of political struggle and
confusion, this will not result in sweeping policy reversals or derail the
party's long-term programs for economic reform and the Four Modernizations.
The pendulum will not swing back again to the nativistic and xenophobic
China of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. Deng's designated successors
are acutely sensitive to the volatility of China's politics and they will
manage to avoid another prolonged and costly upheaval. Hu Yaobang bluntly
reminded high-level party officials last January that the party had "wasted
twenty years" since the revolution in 1949 because of "radical leftist
nonsense," and he warned that "We can never again afford internal chaos,
or we will cause our own collapse and poverty."
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Chinas Foreign Policy Prospects
China's geopolitical expansion will pass through four major phases in
the next twenty-five years. 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 reunification of the island with the mainland.
The second phase will appear in the early-to-mid-1990s after China's land,
air and naval capabilities have been strengthened by imports of Western
military equipment, weapons designs and technology, aircraft engines, and
naval propulsion and air defense systems. The Chinese will move to enforce
their claims to the continental shelf in the Yellow and East China Seas and
to islands and shoals in the East and South China Seas that are in dispute
with Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. In
addition to obtaining control of vast reserves of offshore oil that are
believed to lie at exploitable depths in these seas, China will seek to
secure predominance in the strategic passageway through the South China
Sea between the Western Pacific and the straits leading into the Indian Ocean.
In this second phase, the Chinese will proceed on the assumption that the
United States, in the interest of avoiding a disruption of bilateral relations,
will offer no more than rhetorical resistance to their thrusts to the east
and south.
After these objectives have been achieved, the Chinese will be ready
in the late 1990s to launch the third phase of expansion. They will attempt
to break Vietnam's ties to the Soviet Union and establish preponderant
influence in Southeast Asia. They will also maneuver to bring Japan and
the two Koreas into relationships of economic and strategic dependence on
China and to reduce American influence and presence in Fast Asia and the
Western Pacific. Throughout the first three phases, China will seek to
neutralize Soviet power and resistance by cultivating normal and stable
and mutually beneficial relations with Moscow. Beijing will gamble that
the Soviets will concede Southeast Asia as a sphere of Chinese primacy in
order to avoid a test of strength that would deflect China from challenging
American interests in East Asia and the Pacific. China's aims in Southeast
Asia will require the threat and use of major land, sea, and air power to
cow Hanoi into submission and intimidate the-ASEAN states into acquiescing
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in the establishment of preponderant, if not exclusive, Chinese influence
throughout the region.
Beijing's strategy to displace the United States as the preeminent
foreign influence in Japan and South Korea will rely primarily on securing
decisive leverage through offers to supply vast quantities of energy fuels
and raw materials and to expand joint production ventures in China and on
the continental shelf. These initiatives will be reinforced by displaying
superior air and naval power in the Yellow and East China Seas. This
pattern of Chinese leverage was first illustrated in the Sino-Japanese
$20 billion trade agreement in 1978 which provided for an exchange of
Chinese raw materials, especially oil and coal, for Japanese manufactures
and industrial products.
As China's interests and ambitions expand along with her economic and
military power in phase three, she will increasingly collide with American
interests in East Asia and the Western Pacific. The United States will then
revert to its status in the 1950s as China's "principal enemy" because
America will be the only country, aside from a temporarily neutralized
Soviet Union, that has the strength to resist and contain Chinese expansionism.
The Chinese, however, will endeavor to design and control their initiatives
toward Japan and South Korea in such a way as to avoid risking direct military
confrontations which would completely disrupt Sino-American relations and
undercut the Four Modernizations as well as destroy China's chances of
playing the U.S. off against the Soviet Union in the fourth phase of its
career of expansion.
This final phase will appear in the second or third decade of the next
century when China turns the tables on the Soviets, confronting them with
demands for a settlement of territorial disputes in Siberia and Soviet
Turkestan on Chinese terms, restoration of Chinese primacy in Mongolia,
and major reductions of Soviet military forces along the Sino-Soviet border.
China's aims vis-a-vis the USSR will closely resemble its objectives with
respect to the United States, namely, to bring about major retrenchments
in the presence and influence of both superpowers in East Asia, thereby
clearing the way for China to become the unchallenged dominant power in Asia.
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Taiwan
Beijing's intentions toward Taiwan deserve special attention because
the outcome of its initiatives in the next few years will have major effects
not only on Sino-American relations but also on the long-term expansion of
China's power in East Asia. A failure of China's policy on the highly-
charged Taiwan question, moreover, could produce a domestic political
crisis that would strengthen Deng Xiaoping's opponents--primarily senior
military officers and party bureaucrats who remain loyal to Mao's legacy
and stubbornly resist Deng's economic reforms and plans for smaller, more
professionally competent armed forces.
The Chinese have elevated "reunification of Taiwan with the Chinese
motherland" to the position of one of their three top priorities for the
1980s. They will be unwilling to live much longer with the ambiguous
Sino-U.S. compromise of August 1982, and they will soon resume heavy
pressure on Washington to halt arms sales completely, or at least establish
a definite date for their termination.
There is a direct relationship between Beijing's recent initiatives to
improve the atmospherics of relations with the Soviet Union and its plans
to reopen the arms sales issue. The Chinese are confident that the slow
but steady movement toward a rapprochement with Moscow will strengthen
their leverage with Washington on this question. Their initial move will
be to sharpen private and public complaints that the U.S. has neither acted
on its August 1982 pledge to reduce weapons sales nor urged Taiwan authori-
ties to take steps toward negotiating peaceful reunification. The Chinese
may be awaiting another downturn in U.S.-Soviet relations, calculating that
Washington's incentive to avoid damage to ties with China would then be even
greater. They will gamble that the U.S. will be obliged to halt arms sales
if confronted with an ostensible choice between satisfying Beijing's demands
or risking the consequences a disruption of relations with China. In sum,
the Chinese are convinced that the improvement in relations with Moscow has
already enabled them to secure the "swing" or pivot position in the strategic
triangle--an advantage teat affords them greater potential for maneuver than
Washington possesses.
In the next few years, Beijing will feel-growing urgency to induce
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movement on the Taiwan question because of concern that the death of President
Chiang Ching-kuo will trigger a succession struggle in Taiwan in which a
majority of native-born Taiwanese will make a bid for power and independence.
Elderly Kuomintang leaders will soon pass from the scene, increasing the
chances, in Beijing's view, that Taiwanization of the political system will
accelerate so rapidly that China will be confronted with the fait accompli
of a unilateral declaration of independence. The value of agitating the
arms sale issue lies in Beijing's expectation that a cessation of U.S.
weapons deliveries will precipitate a political crisis in Taiwan that will
compel Chiang Ching-kuo to accept China's seemingly generous terms for
reunification as the only way to avert a collapse of Kuomintang power.
If China's scenario proves to have been based on a miscalculation of
its ability to bluff the United States into halting arms sales, or an exaggera-
tion of the impact an arms cutoff would have in Taiwan should the bluff
succeed, the Chinese in a year or two would have to raise the stakes. They
may then bring the reunification question to a head by attempting to entrap
the Taiwan authorities into military actions in the Strait that could be
portrayed as provocations justifying reprisal in the form of a ban on all
traffic from Taiwan to the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu. The
political purpose of this blockade would be to isolate some 100,000 Nationalist
troops on the islands, making them hostage to Taiwan's agreement to negotiate
reunification on Beijing's terms. China's naval and air forces now have the
capability to close the Taiwan Strait and threaten to starve the Nationalist
garrisons on the offshore islands unless Taipei capitulates.
Japan
The reappearance of Great Han expansionism will have profound effects
on Japanese foreign and defense policies. Critical decisions will be made
during a period of generational change in Japan's political and business
elites. The outlook of the successor generation will be similar in many
ways to that of the new generation of West German leaders. As postwar
Japanese leaders leave the stage, public and elite attitudes toward the
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United States, China, and the Soviet Union will undergo significant changes
that will make the U.S.-Japanese relationship much more difficult to manage.
The new generation, having been raised in relative affluence, will carry no
burden of guilt or inferiority expressed through deference and acquiescence
to the United States. A majority of younger Japanese now believes their
nation's economic performance is superior to that of the U.S., an attitude
that will make traditional American practices of wringing concessions on
trade counterproductive. The last decade has witnessed a strong resurgence
of national self-confidence and assertiveness that is reflected in a deluge
of historical revisionism challenging the war-guilt thesis on which Japanese
adults were educated. More than half of the population was born after the
Japanese defeat in 1945, and young adults view the present generation of
political and business leaders as too subservient to American economic and
strategic interests.
U.S.-Japanese relations will continue to be aggravated by Japan's
deep-rooted obsession with maintaining a huge export surplus in order to
finance vital imports of food, fuel, and raw materials. In the last half
decade, exports have accounted for 40 percent of Japan's economic growth
and 22 percent of its GNP. The nation's unique political-economic culture
will preclude significant reductions in this explosive dependence on ever
rising exports. If the European Community and the United States impose
protectionist measures to curb these exports, the Japanese will focus
greater attention on their markets and "export platforms" in Southeast
Asia and seek new markets in Latin America and the Soviet Union. Western
moves to reduce Japanese competition will also cause an emotional public
backlash that will strengthen undercurrents of opinion that are already
pressing for significant cnanges in Japan's foreign and security policies.
If a trade war and its damaging political repercussions can be averted,
the new generation of Japanese leaders will not end the security relation-
snip with the U.S. or abrogate the Mutual Security Treaty, but they will
act to recover full control over the nation's destiny and end what they
view as the subordination of Japan's freedom of decision to American policy.
In the 1990s, Japan's foreign policy priorities will diverge sharply from
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America's, and the Japanese will insist on a free hand in defining Japan's
obligations under the Mutual Security Treaty. The desired freedom to
pursue separate national interests will be expressed in an independent and
more "equidistant" diplomacy that will seek to ensure cordial relations with
both China and the Soviet Union. The growing Sino-Soviet rapprochement will
give Japan more latitude for maneuver vis-a-vis Moscow and Washington,
especially the latter.
As China moves into an era of expansion, the Japanese will increasingly
rely on improved relations with Moscow to counterbalance Chinese power.
Tokyo will be obliged to shelve its demands for the return of the Southern
Kurile Islands as the precondition for a peace treaty and a complete normaliza-
tion of relations with the Soviet Union. The Japanese, moreover, will find
that the political benefits of investments and joint development ventures in
Siberia will override their economic liabilities.
In dealing with sensitive issues arising from growing competition with
China for political influence and markets in Asia and from China's efforts
to bring Japan into a position of economic and security dependence, the
Japanese will try to beat the Chinese at their own game. In order to
secure leverage over China's policy toward Japan, Tokyo will seek to develop
substantial integration between the two economies so that Beijing would
damage itself if it attempted economic blackmail against Japan.
Japan's defense policy in the next fifteen years will jettison the
evasions and euphemisms required by the constitutional prohibition on the
maintenance of land, sea, and air forces and the self-imposed defense budget
ceiling of under one percent of GNP. A substantial rearmament program will
command growing support in a climate of revived nationalism, and the
public will support dropping the war renunciation article in the constitution.
If Japan's confidence and sense of security are threatened by trade wars
or China's external behavior in the next two decades, the program advocated
by aggressive nationalists on the political right will command general
support--a power policy based on a Japanese nuclear force de frappe as the
only reliable means to protect the nation's security, particularly the
long oil lifeline through the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.- Almost
half the public now believes Japan will have-an independent nuclear arsenal
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before the end of the 1980s. A militant nationalism and self-reliance
will also require the removal of American military and naval forces and
bases from the main islands and Okinawa. and abrogation of the security treaty.
The Koreas
A potentially explosive breakpoint in the impasse between North and
South Korea will occur in the next three to five years as a result of
changes in the leadership of both states. The succession processes will
generate power struggles that will not only make intentions and actions
more unpredictable but also increase the chances of miscalculation, provo-
cation, and accident.
In the next three years, President Chun Doo Hwan will face growing
pressure from the new Korea Democratic Party for sweeping liberalization
of the political system, particularly direct election of his successor
and concessions granting the National Assembly a much more prominent role
in public policy. The outcome of the national elections last February in
which the new opposition party demonstrated formidable strength in Seoul
and other cities foreshadows a period of rising volatility in South Korean
Politics-
A crucial turning point will come when Chun Doo Hwan's term expires in
1988. If he tries to amend the constitution that limits the president to
one term or seeks by extra-legal means to designate a successor, violent
protest demonstrations exceeding the riots and virtual anarchy in early
1980 after Chun's seizure of power will be inevitable. In a climate of
political violence and repression, Chun may suffer the same fate as nis
predecessor, Pak Chong-hi, in 1979. The fact that the expiration of Chun's
term will coincide with the Olympic Games in Seoul will make 1988 an even
more volatile year in Korean politics.
In North Korea, the death of Kim Il-song in the next five years will
be followed by a disorderly and violent struggle over Kim's attempt to
ensure the succession of his son Kim Chong-il. The old president's demise
will remove the only force capable of controlling a fractious party elite.
After a period of factional warfare, the high command of the armed forces
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will impose North Korea's equivalent of martial law.
Periods of instability and violence in both North and South will
generate incidents along the Demilitarized Zone and contrived war scares
on both sides, but neither regime will risk major offensive actions against
the adversary. The long-term Korean equation will change, however, as an
ascending China seeks to draw both states into its sphere of exclusive
influence and the Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States move to
counter Beijing's ambitions. This competition will increase the incentives
and opportunities for all these foreign powers to expand their presence and
influence in both parts of Korea. The paradoxical outcome may well be that
contacts and growing mutual interests between the rival Korean regimes
will for the first time since 1945 open genuine prospects for movement
toward some form of limited confederation.
The Philippines
The United States in the next five years will face the kind of dilemma
it experienced in Iran in late 1978: whether to throw full support behind
a friendly authoritarian regime's efforts to suppress a rapidly growing mass
opposition or to disengage from the Marcos leadership in order to protect
American interests during a transition to a new political order. Marcos
will not be able to arrest the erosion of public confidence in his leader-
ship or the decay of his political authority. He confronts the familiar
predicament of entrenched political machines in developing nations: he
cannot implement sweeping economic, military, and political reforms without
undercutting his political base. There is little or no prospect therefore
of effective reform and revitalization of the Philippine armed forces.
There is an equally scant prospect that the political establishment
will have sufficient time or command the quality of leadership necessary
to develop a plausible alternative to the present regime. The authoritarian
system Marcos has installed since 1972 has destroyed the foundations of the
defective but relatively open democratic system that existed in the 1950s
and 1960s.
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The Philippines, like South Korea, will enter a crucial period in the
next two or three years. An election year in 1987 will be a critical turning
point. If the Communist New People's Army (NPA) continues to advance at its
present rate, Marcos or his chosen successor will invoke the sixth consti-
tutional amendment which authorizes the president to rule by decree. This
action will be justified by the threat from the NPA and alleged foreign
Communist support for the guerrillas. Such a strategem will provoke massive
protest demonstrations that will far exceed the scope and violence of protests
in the summer of 1984. These upheavals will afford the NPA and the Communist
National Democratic Front unprecedented opportunities to infiltrate urban
areas and non-Communist opposition groups. Breakdowns in public order will
also precipitate a massive capital flight and freeze foreign investments
and loans, thereby bringing the urban economy to the brink of collapse.
Prevailing trends will facilitate an expansion of the NPA and its
areas of control. Opposition forces will attempt to exploit spreading
public hostility to America's identification with the Marcos regime by
demanding the removal of U.S. bases at Clark Field and Subic Bay, and
guerrilla groups will stage terrorist attacks on these installations.
There will be a 70 percent chance that the Marcos regime or its
immediate successor will fragment and collapse within five years, and a
50 percent chance that a regime controlled by the NPA and the National
Democratic Front will take power largely by default.
Central America
The political dynamics of the region in the next 15 years will continue
to be driven by a confused and often violent transition from the political-
economic order that evolved during the first five decades of the century
toward a new distribution of power. Except for a relatively stable Costa
Rica, domestic conflicts will ebb and flow until the present polarization
of forces is gradually replaced by monolithic orders ruled in the
Bolivarist tradition either by dominant figures or by small elite groups.
Most of these new regimes by the year 2000 will be variants of the pattern
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established by the Mexican Revolution from 1911 to 1929--an authoritarian
elite governing in the name of the whole people. Political- economic, and
social conditions in the next two decades will not provide congenial environ-
ments for the growth of pluralism or pseudo-liberal democracy.
The Sandinista revolution will prove to be a uniquely Nicaraguan
phenomenon, not the wave of the future in Central America. Its messianic
impulses will be neutralized and contained by the regime's limited compe-
tence, by deterrent pressures exercised by the United States and other
states in the region, and by sporadic multilateral efforts by Mexico,
Colombia, and Venezuela to promote regional accommodations. The Sandinista
government will settle into an erratic and precarious existence, sustained
largely by subsidies and advisory assistance from Cuba and the Soviet. Bloc.
Recalcitrant problems of governing in the next five to ten years will divide
the Sandinista Directorate into competing factions, with periodic power
struggles and purges leading ultimately to the rise of a dominant leader
in command of a new monolithic order. This system, like the present one,
will lack the reserves of economic competence and political credibility
essential to a career of exporting revolution.
The Soviet Union and Cuba will retain a substantial presence in
Nicaragua, but Moscow's interest in the region will be confined to demonstrating
its capacity as a global power to exercise influence in any region of the
world, particularly one located in the traditional U.S. sphere of influence.
The conflict in El Salvador will gradually subside in the next three
to five years without a formal settlement. Remnants of the FMLN insurgents
will be confined to scattered and isolated areas along the Honduran border
and they will persist indefinitely in sporadic and largely ineffective
guerrilla activity. Shifting coalitions among centrists in the political
and military establishments will consolidate sufficient authority to provide
tolerable internal order and national administration. The FMLN-FDR will
fragment, dividing non-Communist leftists from hard-core Communist cadres.
Revolutionary nationalism, however, will persist as a potentially decisive
force in El Salvador, as well as in Honduras, Guatemala, and Panama, and a
new incarnation of this force will emerge again in the next ten to twenty
years.
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Panama will become the principal focus of U.S. concerns in Central
America in the late 1980s, overshadowing Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Economic stagnation and explosive population growth will lead to an un-
manageable political upheaval which the government will try to contain
and deflect tnrougn chauvinistic demands that the Canal Treaties concluded
in 1977 be revised in ways that would grant a much larger financial settle-
ment (now $50 million a year) and move forward the date for transferring
canal territory to full Panamanian sovereignty. By the end of the 19803,
the transition to full sovereignty will be only half complete, with a
final transfer only in the year 2000.
Panama's population will increase by half by 1990, and the economic
and social pressures this growth will generate will be well beyond the
government's capacity to control. Public discontent will fuel strong
revolutionary nationalism that will quickly focus on the alleged inequities
of the Canal Treaties. There is already a large reservoir of dissatisfaction
and resentment toward the United States. Nearly one out of three Panamanians
voted against the treaties in a plebiscite staged by the late President Omar
Torrijos seven years ago.
Public chauvinism will escalate beyond control, resulting in attempts
to sabotage and occupy canal locks and other facilities in canal territory.
Closure of the canal, if prolonged, could have a catastrophic effect on
fuel supplies and shipping costs within the United States. Some 70 percent
of all ships transiting the canal have U.S. ports as their destination,
and many of these are oil tankers. The canal, moreover, is a vital lifeline
to Japan and Australia, as well as to countries on the west coast of South
America.
Mexico
In the late 1990s and well into the next century, Mexico will experience
a series of destabilizing social and political crises that may well destroy
the existing power structure. The populist nationalism and patronage system
that are the main legacies of the Mexican Revoution no longer provide
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effective instruments for coping with the consequences of a prodigious
rate of population growth, which now .;tends at 3.5 percent a year--the
fastest among major nations. The current population of 63 million will
have grown by half at the end of the 1980s and duplicated itself by the
year 2000. Almost one of every two Mexicans is under 15 years of age, and
45 percent of the labor force is now unemployed or marginally employed.
Agriculture is in a state of decline and the rate of economic growth has
slowed from the steady 6 percent a year in the past three decades.
The population explosion and high unemployment will produce further
debt crises similar to that in mid-1982, which was caused largely by the
government's policy of financing welfare spending through foreign loans
rather than by taxing the nation's wealthy classes--a choice dictated by
the domestic power structure. This policy was undermined when the world
recession in 1981-82 drastically curtailed revenues from oil and gas sales
that would have serviced the foreign debt. Even in a favorable environment
of world economic expansion, Mexico's oil will only postpone the time of
reckoning unless the decline of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary
Party's (PRI) moral and political authority can be reversed in the next
decade--an unlikely prospect. Electoral defeats during this period and a
growing challenge from the center-right National Action Party will increas-
ingly polarize Mexican politics and force the PRI to tighten authoritarian
methods of control.
The explosive potential of these trends will be compounded by the
uncontrollable problem of illegal emigration to the United States. If
the critical safety valve of emigration should be closed in the next few
years, the result will be social chaos and political upheaval in Mexico as
well as a grave crisis in relations with the U.S. If the problems of
political reform and rejuvenation, public finance, population growth, and
emigration are not brought under control in the brief time-span of the
next fifteen years, Mexico will plunge into a prolonged period of chaos,
with incalculable consequences for American economic and political interests.
South America -
The outcome of measures to manage the foreign debts of Venezuela,
Argentina, and Brazil will largely determine whether these countries will
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be able to avert dangerous political crises in the next two decades. Debt
service obligations will al.;orb large proportions of export earnings well
into the 199Us, and most of these countries will be unable simultaneously
to service debts and provide the high level of domestic growth necessary to
ensure political stability.
A trend toward protectionism in the United States, Europe, and Japan
will undermine Latin America's capacity to service its restructured debts,
and the recent restoration of civilian democratic government in the major
states of South America will be placed in serious jeopardy if they lose
their present access to markets in the major industrial nations. Even
with continued access to world markets, most of these countries will face
growing indebtedness and population increases that will neutralize the
effects of modest economic growth,.such as the 2.6 percent recorded last year.
As long as Fidel Castro remains in power, he will prefer to rely on
Moscow's annual $4 billion subsidy to support his pretensions as the great
exemplar of a new order in Central America and the Caribbean rather than
undertake a serious exploration of prospects for an accommodation with the
United States. Castro's dependence on the Soviet Union, however, will pre-
clude any high-risk ventures to promote his grandiose ambitions in Latin
America. The Soviets will not allow him to jeopardize their global geo-
political imperatives and, in particular, their interest in avoiding con-
frontations with the U.S. in the Western Hemisphere that might destroy
the option of collaboration with Washington in the late 1990s in dealing
with challenges from West Germany and China.
Castro's demise will precipitate a succession contest that will faction-
alize the regime and undermine its stability and authority. The Soviets will
use their leverage to ensure that compliant clients prevail. In the un-
likely but conceivable event that reliable pro-Soviet successors fail to
impose control, an opening would eventually develop for Mexico, other Latin
American states, Spain and France to strengthen their influence in Cuba at
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the expense of the Soviet Union. In the longer-term future, Soviet-Cuban
frictions over divergent foreign policy and economic interests will grow,
and the time may come in the first decade of the next century when Moscow
will be ready to strike a deal with the United States that would involve a
retrenchment, if not a liquidation, of the Soviet stake in Cuba. The re-
quirements of protecting Soviet security in a multipolar world, especially
against emerging German and Chinese ambitions, will bring about significant
changes in the attitudes and policies that characterized Moscow's conduct
in the bipolar era. These changes will open prospects for trade-offs in
superpower bargaining that the Soviets would never have contemplated in
the past.
Southern Africa
Bishop Desmond Tutu was not exaggerating when he warned last fall that
South Africa has already entered "low-intensity civil war." The rapidly
growing political consciousness of the 23-million black majority, spear-
headed by organized black labor, will lead inexorably in the next five
years to a series of confrontations of increasing scope and violence with
the dominant Afrikaners. Neither the ruling National Party nor its rival,
the breakaway Conservative Party, will command the political resources and
leadership necessary to manage evolutionary change that would avert large-
scale?violence. Afrikaner leaders, even if they were disposed to seek a
political compromise along the lines of the Rhodesia settlement, will not
have sufficient time or maneuver room to pursue this alternative.
A widespread breakdown in public order will occur in the next few
years if the government attempts to carry out its policy to move all blacks
into the "national homelands." (11 million are still outside) Even if
the government were to suspend this policy, escalating black demonstrations
and draconian repression by white security forces will increasingly divide
the white leadership elite and population, and this will further erode the
government's capacity to manage a partial retreat from unyielding Apartheid.
The spectacle of mass uprisings on the part of the black majority will
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compel the governments of neighboring front-line countries to provide
grow:ng financial, political, and military assistance and oblige them to
deepen reliance on aid and support from the Soviet Union and Cuba. This
kind of involvement in the struggle in South Africa will provoke Afrikaner
military and economic retaliation, including denial of vital transportation
facilities through South African territory. The Namibian and Angolan
problems will inevitably become embroiled: in this chain of actions and
reprisals, and South Africa will unilaterally grant independence to
Namibia after installing a compliant government in Windhoek. This will
destroy all remaining chances of a regional settlement and prompt Angola
and front-line states to expand assistance to a drive by SWAPO forces to
overturn Pretoria's unilateral action.
In the late 1980s, after several years of inconclusive civil war, a
new Afrikaner leadership, including senior military officers, will replace
the National Party government and, with Western or United Nations mediation,
arrange a series of truces with black organizations. This process will
eventually result in a de facto partition of the country, with the white
population relocated into scattered and shrinking enclaves. Civil war
will inflict enormous economic damage and precipitate a mass exodus of
whites and capital
Conclusions
The United States in the year 2000 will command a superior geopolitical
position and immense advantages over its principal competitors as the multi-
polar era unfolds. The resources available to the Soviet Union and China
will be no match for the formidable assets that have accrued from forty
years of close relationships with Western Europe and Japan and from the
U.S. role as the hub of the international economic system. The only way
Moscow or Beijing could undermine this commanding position would be to
draw Western Europe and Japan away from the American-led majority coalition
into a new majority under their leadership. -
In order to maintain this privileged position, however, American foreign
and security policies will have to adjust to a very different interna-;ional
distribution of power than that which prevailed during the first twenty-
five years after World War II in which basic political and strategic
assumptions were formed. The international arena is now at mid-point in
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multipolar system. The new configuration will be more difficult to manage
and potentially more susceptible to surprise and loss of control because
threats to the equilibrium will be more ambiguous than they have been in
the bipolar world.
On the other hand, a pentagonal balance in which the two superpowers
are flanked on one side by a China and a Japan capable of maneuvering between
them and, on the other, by Western Europe acting as an East-West broker
will have the potential of being a more durable configuration. This
system, moreover, will provide a vital margin of time to temper the
Soviet Union's traditional ambition to overturn what it has long viewed as
an unsatisfactory international status quo and to protect the global equilibrium
from the disruptive influence of an expansionist China. There would then
be at least a theoretical chance in the second quarter of the next century
to move toward a genuinely global international political and economic
system.
In the mid-1990s and beyond, the single most volatile potential for
a U.S.-Soviet military confrontation will reside in resurgent German
nationalism and a quest for reunification and primacy in Central Europe.
Both superpowers will be under enormous pressures to support and protect
their respective German allies. West German efforts to penetrate and subvert
the East German regime could propel the United States and the Soviet Union
into an explosive game of "chicken" in which neither could risk a retreat
without incurring unacceptable damage to its global position.
This potential flashpoint underscores the emerging reality that the
United States in a multipolar age will no longer be free to identify its
national interests and security with the routine management of its alliance
systems, or to assume that there can be no fundamental conflicts between
American interests and those of Germany and Japan. Central Europe, and to
a lesser degree, the East Asian periphery of an ascendant China will be
the main focal points of conflicts of interest that will be particularly
susceptible to loss of control and to maneuvers by West Germany or Japan
to play the United States off against the USSR or China. The greatest
danger in a multipolar world will not be a deliberate initiation of war
but rather a heedless drift into an irrepressible conflict.
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One of the most perceptive American students of foreign policy, Robert
Gilpin of Princeton, has defined the "bottom line" as follows: "It must be
recognized that the thesis that nuclear weapons have made hegemonic war or
a system-changing series of limited wars an impossibility has yet to be
seriously tested. In their many confrontations, the vital interests of
the two superpowers have not been directly at issue. Whereas the existence
of nuclear weapons must be credited for this restraint, the real test will
come if a vital interest of one or the other superpower becomes involved
and events threaten to get out of control. The avoidance of such a situation
must be a major responsibility of contemporary statesmanship."
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