1999 (19 page)

In addition, Congress must create a single joint intelligence oversight committee of no more than eight members, staffed by professionals, to receive briefings on covert activities. In the long term, we must cultivate among the American people the attitude that those who leak secrets should be discharged in disgrace rather than receive a badge of honor, as did Daniel Ellsberg.

While the United States must have those six key capabilities, it must also have the skill to implement a strategy that uses each at the right time. We must understand where and how each instrument should be employed.

Our first task is to distinguish between vital interests, critical interests, and peripheral interests. No country has the resources to defend all its interests with its own forces all the time. Strategy means making choices, and making choices means enforcing a set of strategic priorities. We must react with flexibility in tactics to Soviet threats, but we must do so with a set of priorities firmly in mind.

An interest is vital if its loss, in and of itself, directly endangers the security of the United States. The survival and independence of Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and the Persian Gulf are vital interests of the United States. The loss of any of these to the Soviet Union would imperil our own security. We have no choice but to respond with military force if necessary should the Kremlin attempt to dominate these areas.

A critical interest is one which, if lost, would create a direct threat to one of our vital interests. If Moscow were to achieve domination over South Korea, the Kremlin leaders would be in an ideal position to threaten Japan. If they were able to dominate Pakistan, they could put their naval power on the doorstep of the Persian Gulf. If they were able to consolidate their Nicaraguan beachhead in Central America, they could begin the campaign to destabilize the region as a whole, including Mexico.

We must recognize that the United States often must treat critical
interests as if they were vital because a Soviet move against them could only be a prelude to the main challenge. If Britain and France had done so when Hitler moved against Czechoslovakia—which Neville Chamberlain called “a far away land populated by a people with whom we have nothing in common”—they would not have had to go to war ten months later over the German invasion of Poland. If we wait to oppose Soviet expansionism until Moscow threatens vital U.S. interests, we will soon find those interests at risk—and will have to defend them under the worst of circumstances.

A peripheral interest is one which, if lost, would only distantly threaten a vital or critical interest. While we would not want to see a pro-Soviet government take power in a country like Mali, we cannot conclude that such an event would endanger important American interests or those of our allies.

Our overall strategy must calibrate what we will do to protect an interest of strategic importance. We should not send in the Marines to defend a peripheral interest, but we must not flinch from doing so to defend a vital interest. We must match the level of our commitment to the importance of our stakes in a region. We should then match our capabilities—and the will to use them—to the threat we face.

Our top priority must be our vital interests. U.S. policy-makers often allow themselves to be sidetracked by peripheral issues. While we have more at stake in Canada and Mexico than in any other countries, seldom do they get attention commensurate with their importance. Canada is a member of NATO and our largest trading partner. We should seek to involve the Canadians more actively, not only in the pursuit of greater prosperity through such measures as the recently signed free-trade agreement, but also in the search for greater Western security and global stability. Canada has a great deal at stake in the world—and has much to contribute to the world. It is not in our interest to have Canada stand on the sidelines rather than cooperate with us on our common concerns.

Mexico's economic crisis represents one of our greatest long-term
security threats. We can ignore the problem only at our peril. While the United States cannot solve Mexico's problems, we cannot afford to treat them as a sideshow. Our policies today simply tread water. That eases relations in the short term but courts disaster in the long term. As a result, we must take on the problem head on. Simply rescheduling debt indefinitely only postpones a reckoning and will eventually land the Mexican people in grinding poverty. We must start to develop, with Mexican leaders, a program to get at the root economic problems, rather than improvising temporary solutions to one crisis after another.

As a rule, if faced with a Soviet military threat to its vital interests, the United States must be prepared to employ its own forces in their defense. As long as Kremlin leaders threaten the free world, we must not weaken our security ties with either Western Europe or Japan. But in our competition with Moscow that is not where we should expect the challenges from the Kremlin to arise. In the years before 1999, it will be in the Persian Gulf region that the Soviet threat to vital U.S. interests will be the greatest. It is also the region in which the United States is the least prepared to defend those interests.

In my book
The Real War,
which was published just after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, I called the Persian Gulf the “oil jugular” of the West. I wrote that if control over access to the region's reserves were ever to fall into Soviet hands, the Kremlin leaders could blackmail the West by threatening to strangle its oil-fueled economies. That is still true—and will continue to be true for at least the rest of this century.

Access to Persian Gulf oil is a vital interest of the West. It would be a fatal error to let today's low oil prices blind us to the fact that we depend on oil imports from the Middle East. Oil is still the most important energy source for the industrialized world, and imports account for over half of the oil consumed in the Western industrialized economies. Moreover, Western dependence on imported oil is certain to grow, not diminish, for the rest of this century

In 1973, when the OPEC embargo produced gas lines which stretched for miles, the United States imported a third of its oil. In 1985, after a decade of concerted efforts to conserve energy and reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources, we still bought
27 percent of our oil abroad, while Western European dependence on imported oil stood at 63 percent and that of Japan at 100 percent. Although the United States imported most of its oil from areas other than the gulf, Western Europe imports about a third and Japan about two thirds of theirs from the area. Along the entire 7,000-mile route from the Persian Gulf to Japan, there is one oil tanker every 100 miles bound for Japanese ports.

Without oil imports from the Persian Gulf, our allies would tumble into an economic free fall. They would suffer a collapse that would make the Great Depression look like a mild downturn in the leading economic indicators. No one should mistakenly believe that the United States would escape unscathed—for when oil prices go up they go up for everyone.

Our dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf will almost certainly increase. American oil production will continue to decline, and American oil consumption will continue to increase as our economy grows. Since coal, natural gas, or nuclear power cannot make up the shortfall between supply and demand, we will find ourselves importing more oil. The U.S. Energy Department estimates that in 1995 the United States will import about 50 percent of its oil, while Western Europe will import about 70 percent and Japan 100 percent. Since the countries of the Persian Gulf hold 66 percent of the free world's proven oil reserves, they will supply the lion's share of oil imports of the industrialized democracies in the future.

As long as the Western economies are fueled by oil, the Persian Gulf area and its resources will remain a vital interest of the West. The Middle East had long been the crossroads where Asia, Africa, and Europe met. Now, with oil acting as the lifeblood of modern industry, the Persian Gulf has become the oil jugular of the West.

Kremlin leaders have always understood that fact. Soviet interest in oil has always drawn Soviet interest to the south. Early in World War II, in negotiations to carve up the world with its allies in Nazi Germany, Stalin's Foreign Minister told his counterparts that in addition to its objectives in Europe “the area south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf” was “the center of the aspirations of the Soviet Union.” When Berlin acceded to that formulation, Stalin ordered his general staff to
draw up plans for the invasion of Iran. In its opening pages, the war plan described Moscow's motivation with striking clarity in a quotation from Stalin: “In the final analysis, this is what it is all about: Who will own the oil fields and the most important roads leading to the interior of Asia?”

After Nazi Germany turned its armies on the Soviet Union in 1941, the Kremlin invaded northern Iran to prevent German advances in the region, while Britain and the United States moved their forces into southern Iran. But after the war, as both Britain and the United States withdrew their troops on schedule, Moscow tried to carve off northern Iran by announcing that in the territory under Soviet control the Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan and the Kurdish People's Republic had declared independence from Tehran. The Kremlin immediately granted them formal recognition. Soviet units and Soviet-supported rebel military forces then tried to march on the Iranian capital. Stalin stopped and withdrew only after President Truman—at a time when the United States held a monopoly in nuclear weapons—delivered an ultimatum to Moscow. This critical decision by Harry Truman was as important as his decision to provide aid to Greece and Turkey in preventing Soviet domination over Western Europe.

What is ominous is that Moscow has a greater incentive to push to the south today than it did in 1945. After World War II, Soviet oil fields were still in their prime, with production on the upswing. In the mid-1980s, oil production in the Soviet Union peaked and then began to decline, with little prospect for a recovery. That is why the Soviet Union is pressing forward with nuclear energy despite the Chernobyl disaster. It is also a powerful reason—apart from achieving dominance over Western Europe and Japan—to seek control over the Persian Gulf.

In the late 1970s, the Kremlin deployed a pincer movement against the gulf. One pincer came from the southwest. In 1978, Soviet transports airlifted twenty thousand Cuban troops into Ethiopia, not only to assist its communist government in its war with Somalia, but also to establish military facilities across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia. Later that year, a pro-Soviet group in South Yemen took power, thereby giving Moscow a beachhead on the Arabian Peninsula. South Yemen soon launched an overt military
attack on North Yemen. From South Yemen, terrorists launched operations against Saudi Arabia and guerrillas conducted attacks in a border province of Oman. The other pincer came from the northeast. In 1978, a military coup put into power the Afghan Communist Party, which quickly signed treaties with Moscow. When a popular rebellion threatened to topple the communist regime, the Soviet Union invaded the country, putting its fighter-bombers within reach of the Strait of Hormuz from their newly acquired Afghan bases. From both directions, Kremlin leaders were extending their reach to get their hands on the oil jugular.

From 1953 to 1979, Iran under the Shah served as the principal pillar of Western security in the region. When the British withdrew from “east of Suez” in the 1960s, the United States, with over 500,000 troops in Vietnam, could not step into the breach. It was the Shah who filled the vacuum of power. He undertook a massive program to modernize his armed forces. His navy patrolled the gulf, and his army represented a powerful obstacle to any Soviet thrust. He protected Saudi Arabia and the other vulnerable sheikdoms in the region. He worked with other gulf states to create regional security arrangements. When the Shah's government fell in 1979, it produced a new vacuum of power—at the very same time Moscow was achieving the capability to fill it. Had the Shah survived it is highly unlikely that the Soviets would have invaded Afghanistan.