China intended to safeguard American interests in the Pacific, while whipsawing the Soviets and raising questions about China’s reliability as a fraternal socialist partner.
For the first half of the decade, this policy was largely successful. Zumwalt’s slowly modernizing U.S. Navy remained dominant over its Soviet adversary, and American conventional and strategic forces in Europe deterred Soviet aggression. The State Department undertook arms control initiatives that produced arguable results.
Still, a host of factors undermined détente after 1975, resulting in increasing challenges to American power. The post–Vietnam War decline in American military power and the United States’s refocus toward Europe’s central front allowed adversaries to exploit openings in Africa and Latin America. Moreover, the relative economic strength of the United States compared to its allies, particularly Japan, had declined. The period of unquestioned American economic dominance ended simultaneously with America’s military drawdown after the Vietnam War.
Political and strategic reasons dictated the USSR’s decision to increase its influence in Latin America and Africa. Both continents were fertile grounds for postcolonial Marxist and nationalist movements, offering Soviet emissaries ideological access to various governments and rebel groups. Strategically, Soviet military planners recognized that the South Atlantic could influence NATO’s main line of communications. NATO might bottle up Russian submarines and surface combatants in such choke points as the GIUK gap, but Soviet naval forces deployed in Africa and Latin America would, at a minimum, tie down significant American assets in the South Atlantic and hold out the hope of distracting the United States from supplying its fellow NATO members during a central European conflict.
The Soviet Union began by targeting Latin America. Latin American stability has been a major U.S. interest since the 1820s. Putting pressure on the United States in this theater made obvious sense to Soviet strategic planners. Cuba became the linchpin of Soviet activities in Latin America. Cuba’s extensive revolutionary activities throughout the region gave the Soviet Union easy access to multiple guerrilla groups throughout Latin and South America. In return, the Soviet Union funneled huge quantities of arms to Castro’s regime, with arms shipments in 1981 reaching 63,000 tons.10 By 1980, Soviet military aid to Cuba alone was ten times the United States’s military assistance to the entirety of South and Central America.11
Nicaragua served as the other pillar of Soviet regional policy. Throughout the 1970s, the Soviet Union progressively increased its support for the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, or FSLN), a Marxist revolutionary group that sought to topple Nicaragua’s dictator Anastasio Somoza. Beginning in 1978, the Soviet-equipped and -trained FSLN escalated their attacks on government forces, leading to a full-scale civil war between the Somoza regime and the Sandinistas.12 Significant Soviet support allowed the Sandinistas to overthrow the regime and establish control of Nicaragua in July 1979. Not since 1959 had a country in the Western Hemisphere fallen to communist rule. The Soviet Union bankrolled the new Nicaraguan military, enabling it to grow to 45,000 men by the mid-1980s.13 Throughout Latin America, left-wing rebel groups and insurgencies increased their activities, typically with external Soviet backing. By 1980, the USSR supported two major communist regimes, a third friendly regime in Peru, and two insurgent groups in El Salvador and Costa Rica.14
In response to growing Soviet power, President Carter reactivated Operation Condor, the Department of State–Department of Defense–CIA program initiated by President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to train, equip, and finance anti-communist rebels and governments throughout the continent. Nevertheless, instability persisted and grew in Latin America. The Soviets were enjoying a measure of success made possible by Admiral Gorshkov’s increasingly capable navy.
Russian ships operated out of Cuban ports from 1957 onward, and the Kremlin frequently requested that nations—including Peru, Ecuador, and Chile—provide the Soviet navy with basing facilities.15 Soviet ships routinely escorted arms shipments from Russia in and out of Latin American ports. The presence of Soviet naval vessels increased the risk of conflict at sea to prevent arms shipments. Any confrontation between Soviet and American ships had the potential to escalate. Even without direct Soviet combat support, the expanding militaries of Nicaragua and Cuba threatened the heavily used sea lines of communication in the Gulf of Mexico. This factor would significantly complicate crisis planning in the event of hostilities. In Latin America, the Soviet navy clearly influenced and facilitated Soviet foreign policy throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s.
Africa was also identified as a target of opportunity. Postcolonial Africa had become hospitable for revolutionary Marxism, which combined with tribal loyalties and various Pan-African ideologies to encourage political instability. The pervasiveness of left-wing ideology gave the Soviet Union and its Cuban ally an inroad into the continent. In Angola, the Soviet Union and Cuba supported the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), another revolutionary leftist organization with the goal of overthrowing the Angolan government and establishing a revolutionary Marxist regime.16
Wary of being drawn into a multi-factional conflict, especially after seeing the experience of the United States in Vietnam, the USSR restricted itself to financial and technical support of the rebels.17 Throughout the decade, the Soviets attempted to convince the MPLA to allow them to construct a naval base on Angola’s coast. Although this never came to be, during 1978 and 1979 it seemed entirely possible that the USSR could obtain its first international naval base in a strategically critical location. Submarines and surface combatants based in Angola would have directly threatened American shipping and communication in any major conflict. The USSR also supported Ethiopia in its war against Somalia in 1978, to assert its influence in the Horn of Africa.
The Soviet navy played a role in Africa similar to that in Latin America. Russian vessels carried vital supplies to the various Kremlin-backed rebel groups in Angola and operated out of multiple foreign ports. However, the Soviet navy’s actions in Africa were much more aggressive than in Latin America. Soviet ships provided gunfire support to the MPLA in 1976 and attacked Ethiopian rebels in 1978.18 The USSR deployed its modern, long-range cruise missiles to ships operating off the West African coast, increasing the efficacy of Soviet naval fire support. In 1980, the USSR deployed a helicopter carrier and supporting squadron to Mozambique.19 Soviet naval presence was both visible and consequential throughout Africa during the 1970s and later in the 1980s.
Admiral Gorshkov transformed what Soviet rulers initially regarded as an appendage into an effective instrument of national power that generated positive strategic value for the Soviet regime. However, the fleet sailed into shoal waters and went aground as the Soviet Union’s economy collapsed in the late 1980s. The communist regime temporized at first and later began a descent from which it would not recover.
The Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time on Christmas Day, 1991. Russian military spending went into free fall. Fighters and bombers, whose design necessitated far more attention than Western military aircraft, sat on aprons for lack of maintenance and spare parts. Insufficient fuel immobilized tanks, while naval vessels rusted at their moorings. As one consequence, Chechen rebels turned back a large Russian assault in the 1996 battle for Grozny, the capital city of Chechnya.
During the mid-1990s, the Russian military budget dwindled to a trickle. Penury forced operating military units to forage to pay for ammunition and fuel.20 In August 2000 the Russian navy conducted its first major fleet exercise in a decade, in the Barents Sea. An Oscar-class nuclear-powered submarine, the Kursk, which carried anti-ship cruise missiles and torpedoes, experienced a series of explosions and fires that sank the boat, killing all 118 sailors aboard.
But a crippled military was not part of Vladimir Putin’s design for Russia’s return as a major power. Moscow reversed its military spending decline in 1999, when funding for its armed forces reached a nadir of a little
