To the Brink and Back 330 Times

DIPLOMACY To the Brink and Back 330 Times

Send in the Marines!

This ringing exhortation has often resounded when the U.S. has found itself in a sticky international situation.

Only rarely have the Leathernecks actually been ordered ashore. But it has now been documented that the threat to use them or other military units has been made with astounding frequency.

On no fewer than 215 occasions since the end of World War II, the U.S. has seriously threatened to unleash some of its military might--from a single warship to a nuclear strike force--in order to gain diplomatic leverage. In the same period, the Soviet Union has rattled its sabers 115 times. This means that the two superpowers have gone to the brink of war--or made it look as if they were preparing to go to the brink--an average of nearly once a month since 1945.

These are the findings of a 674-page study released last week by Washington's Brookings Institution. According to the report, the U.S. Navy had a role in more than 80% of the muscle flexings, land-based warplanes were involved in 50%, ground combat units in 20% and strategic nuclear forces in 10%. The study's co-authors--Brookings Staffers Barry Blechman (a key member of the Carter Pentagon transition team) and Stephen S. Kaplan--focused mainly on the U.S. Reason: the Soviet Union has become a truly global power only in recent years, and even today its most vital foreign interests are in neighboring Eastern Europe, where 31 Soviet divisions make it superfluous for Moscow to wave the big Red stick very often.

Among the report's main points:

> Threatening force is most successful when its purpose is to bolster existing governments. In backing the Nationalist government on Taiwan, for example, the U.S. has frequently ordered the Seventh Fleet to steam up and down the Strait of Taiwan near the Chinese mainland and has alerted Air Force bombers based in Japan and Taiwan. In 1959 Cuban-backed insurgents who had landed in Panama to overthrow the government were intimidated into retreating when a U.S. destroyer and minesweeper and patrol planes appeared off the Panamanian coast.

> The earlier the U.S. enters a crisis, the greater the chances for success. Because the U.S. proved its readiness to protect West Berlin as far back as the 1948 blockade, later American muscle-flexing quickly persuaded the Kremlin to back down from efforts to instigate crises. In 1961, by rushing U.S. tanks to the Brandenburg Gate and calling up reserve units, President Kennedy forced Nikita Khrushchev to abandon his plans to change the status of the divided city.

> The less ambiguous the show of force, the more likely its success. Mobilizing Army units, for instance, seems to be a more clear-cut demonstration of U.S. determination than deploying warships. Airlifting more than 20,000 troops into the Dominican Republic in 1965 halted a civil war, while dispatching the nuclear carrier Enterprise into the Indian Ocean during the 1971 Pakistani-Indian war failed to discourage India from completing its conquest of East Pakistan. Scrambling land-based aircraft seems to be especially effective. In 1946, the U.S. menacingly flew B-29 bombers along the Yugoslav border until the Tito regime was finally "persuaded" to stop shooting at U.S. aircraft in the area. The most potent demonstration of all is the rare alerting of the nuclear strike force, which Richard Nixon did to prevent the Soviets from intervening in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

Bluff Called. According to Co-Author Kaplan, probably no instance of U.S. saber rattling has been as effective as Washington's full alert of its military forces and imposition of a naval blockade during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The Soviets quickly retreated and withdrew their rockets from Cuba. As for dramatic American failures, Kaplan cites Washington's inability to force the North Koreans to release the U.S.S. Pueblo and its crew in 1968, even though a major American naval task force was ominously massed near North Korea. The stubborn, hypermilitant North Koreans in effect called the U.S. bluff, and Washington was not willing to tighten the screws any further. The study does not cite the disaster in Viet Nam as an example of a failure because the U.S. obviously did more there than merely threaten the use of force.

Because saber rattling could degenerate into a mutual game of chicken that would eventually erupt in a hot war, the Brookings study advises U.S. leaders to flex the nation's military muscles only infrequently. Yet the report also admits: "Discreet uses of the armed forces are often an effective way of achieving near-term foreign policy objectives."

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