At this point the Soviet Union began playing aggressive diplomatic and military cards. It had only been in 1972 that Sadat, in a surprise move, had expelled the Soviets from Egypt, and the Soviets saw the war as an opportunity to retrieve their geopolitical position in the Mideast as superpower sponsor of all radical Arab powers. They therefore sought to airlift Soviet commandos into the region.[24]
Oil-supply leverage became a major factor in responses to the conflict. To punish the U.S. and divide it from its pro-Arab allies, the Saudis declared an oil embargo. Only Portugal permitted American planes to land (on the Azores) and only Greece and Italy offered port facilities to the U.S. Navy. The remaining European allies even refused overflights of U.S. military planes. Worse, NATO member Turkey allowed Russian planes to overfly supplies en route to the Mideast.
The Russians had narrowed most of the yawning numerical gap between their nuclear forces and America’s, and perhaps their senior commanders were thinking of Kuznetsov’s promise during the post–Missile Crisis diplomatic negotiations. In the Mediterranean, Soviet ships confronted American ships—including, in an historical irony, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy—while the war approached its climax on land.
The U.S. Sixth Fleet and the Soviet Mediterranean Fleet were in close proximity, the Soviets shadowing the U.S. Sixth Fleet with more ships than usual for several days. Admiral Daniel Murphy sent a message to headquarters at the end of one tense day: “Both fleets were obviously in a high readiness posture for whatever might come next, although it appeared that neither fleet knew exactly what that meant.”
The American goal was, in significant part, to keep Soviet troops out of the Mideast, thus limiting Soviet influence in the region. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev proposed a joint U.S.-Soviet deployment to share the policing of cease fire lines, and in an urgent letter warned President Nixon: “In the event that the U.S. rejects this proposal, we should have to consider unilateral actions.”
The situation was serious enough for President Nixon to put U.S. forces on DEFCON 3 alert status shortly after he received Brezhnev’s harsh note. (DEFCON—defense condition—3 is a midrange alert status, with DEFCON 1 meaning imminent war; DEFCON 2 was declared for the Strategic Air Command during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the highest alert level since the system was inaugurated in 1959.) “You know we were close to a nuclear confrontation this morning,” President Nixon told Henry Kissinger (then serving as both National Security Adviser and Secretary of State), late on October 25, 1973, the day that the cease fire went into effect.
In the end, the Russians decided not to challenge America directly by trying to land troops in the Mideast, but that month of October had been full of dangerous moments. Nuclear use, though unlikely, was not impossible in the crucible of an intense crisis engaging the fundamental foreign policy interests of both superpowers. Fortunately, in the 11 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the two superpowers had established instant communications and worked out protocols for managing crises. Though nothing is foolproof, such safeguards lessened the chances of a crisis escalating to a shooting war.
In the Yom Kippur War’s Mediterranean crisis phase, a Soviet decision to abort a Mideast airlift avoided possible shoot down of one or more Soviet transports. A shoot down would have triggered the first direct conflict between the superpowers since Berlin in 1961—and this time a shooting war instead of a tense standoff.
Militarily, China eventually may become strong enough to believe that in a shooting war close to home it would prevail. Such a calculation would partly be based upon a perception that America would, under the circumstances, pull its forces back. Were Chinese nuclear forces at numerical parity—or even, as was the case with Russia in 1973, nearing strategic nuclear parity—China might decide to take the chance. The Yom Kippur War model suggests that aggressive moves by covetous powers become bolder as military power grows. Nuclear weapons are regarded by such powers as trump cards. We may not see it that way, but they do. Resolute action may stave off catastrophe, as with Cuba in 1962. But of course there is no cosmic law that our luck will always hold.
Military confrontation is a traditional tool by which dictators distract domestic opposition. China’s autocratic leaders, though often temperamentally risk averse, might choose military confrontation if China faces one or more acute internal crises. Gaming the future always entails speculation. “Black swans”—low-probability but especially grave contingencies—have a habit of suddenly materializing. Call it Murphy’s Law of High-Stakes Geopolitics.
On top of growing military leverage, how much economic leverage does China wield, given its huge trade with America and massive U.S. securities and dollar currency holdings? China expert Gordon Chang points out that because China runs a trade deficit with the rest of its partners, its huge surplus with America makes it vulnerable to the consequences of a sharp drop in trade between the countries. In 2011 China ran a record $295.5 billion trade surplus with the U.S., up 90 percent from 2008. Its 2011 surplus was 190.5 percent of its overall net trade surplus, as it ran a deficit with the rest of the world. This factor limits U.S. vulnerability to blackmail by Beijing. Further, huge debtors enjoy a perverse leverage over creditors that small debtors lack. Thus the old adage: “Owe the bank a million, you have a problem. Owe the bank a billion, the bank has a problem.” Add three zeroes for country debtors and the same principle can apply: Owe a country a billion, the debtor has a problem. Owe a trillion, the creditor has a problem. Put simply, huge creditors simply cannot afford to have a mega-debtor go under. If Uncle Sam goes belly up, China’s export-driven economy sells far fewer goods.
China does, however, derive considerable leverage from producing more than 90 percent of the world’s rare-earth elements. This odd series of metallic elements lies just above uranium and plutonium on the periodic table. Half bear names that relate to their discovery in the Swedish island village of Ytterby. They are essential for numerous high-technology applications in computers and specialized equipment. China’s near-monopoly gives it strategic leverage in a future crisis. Though deposits of such elements exist outside China, their extraction elsewhere is more costly. China accepts a level of extractive pollution that Western countries will not tolerate. Were China to put an embargo on rare-earth elements, economies dependent on them—every modern one—would be harmed as rare-earth element prices rose. Their production elsewhere, pollution notwithstanding, would become essential to the West.
America and Australia are now investing in alternate, though higher-cost, supply sources. And because Beijing inflated prices and thus encouraged alternative investment, rare-earth commodity prices are sharply down from their 2010 peaks. Yet because Beijing is potentially in a monopoly position, importing states have strong incentives to continue building alternate facilities, and firms have a strong incentive to seek substitute products where technically feasible.
China and the U.S. are rivals, not mortal enemies. China has too many interests that intersect with American ones to permit real enmity. But China’s yearning to restore the position of power it enjoyed six centuries ago is real. Failure to recognize this and deter Chinese pressure in the western Pacific could lead to a war no one wants. And any shooting war between nuclear powers inherently carries risks of unintended escalation to a nuclear exchange.
24
In their 2007 book