The War in 2020

Author's Note

This is a book about nightmares. Its central theme plays on an enduring Russian nightmare. Although the Soviet Union's short-term problems will arise primarily west of the Ural Mountains, the enduring vision of racial and religious apocalypse scorching inward from the south and east haunts the Russian mind. The plot embraces extremes, as fiction demands. A likelier scenario would describe decades of intermittent unrest, often grim enough in local consequence, but with the anger of the common man never sufficiently well organized to weld very different ethnic groups into a militant union. As a Soviet analyst, were I forced to predict the future of Soviet Central Asia, I would describe it as locally unstable, sporadically fanatical and spotted with blood, blighted by disease and economic malaise — and generally far too dull to attract more than a passing glance from the Western news media. We shall hear of occasional massacres, but far less of the hot, dreary, and limited life of the average man or woman. In short, I expect central Asia to be pretty much the same as it has been for countless centuries.

The Russians, like the Mongols, Persians, and the shadowy conquerors who preceded them, will eventually fade into the heat and dust. They will leave their traces, but they will leave. Will it be a matter of years, of decades, of a century? The clocks in Samarkand betray less anxiety than do the digital marvels of Washington — or the timepieces of Moscow, which forever seem to be rushing toward midnight.

Driven by Aristotle and an unquenchable thirst for blood, Alexander the Great crossed the Oxus — today's Amu Darya. And what did he leave behind? Legends and sand. These poisoned deserts swallow history.

But what about the issue of Islamic fundamentalism?

I admire the perfect accuracy of Levi-Strauss's description of Islam as a "barracks religion," and I take a far less complacent view of Islamic fundamentalism than do colleagues for whom the only story of our time is the twilight of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, I see the future of these varied peoples united by a common name for God as condemned to eternal mediocrity. Islamic fundamentalism is an exclusively negative phenomenon. Even more so than its Christian counterpart, it is a struggle against history, a nasty rearguard action against time and the hard material logic that will always dominate mankind and our crippled world. The ferocious Iranian attacks upon the Great Satan America, for instance, are merely manifestations of the collective Persian inability to cope with modernity. God becomes an excuse for personal and national failure.

Only outside enemies, real or imagined, allow the Islamic world to display the odd, fleeting semblance of unity. The destruction of Israel in a nuclear exchange, for example, would be less likely to trigger Islamic unity than to utterly dissolve it. Unable to direct their frustrations at the Zionist devil, the Islamic nations of the Eurasian land-mass would quickly rediscover the holy and delectable mission of slaughtering each other over trivia. Islamic fundamentalism does not offer hope for the future — it simply serves up excuses for regional impotence.

And what of the Russians themselves in this book? Several of the subplots are obviously metaphors for the Soviet Union today. Valya need not wait thirty years for her dose of misery. Her life describes the Soviet Union now. To me the Soviet Union is a land without hope. The only question of relevance to us is this: Will the USSR continue to muddle through, losing a restive republic here and there yet somehow groaning onward, or will the processes of decline and violent confrontation continue to accelerate, ultimately threatening healthier nations beyond the Soviet borders? I see no prospect whatsoever of a Soviet renaissance. Even if all the citizens of the USSR could miraculously begin to pull together and work very, very hard in a spirit of sacrifice, they would, at best, take one halting step forward — while the state's relative decline would continue to accelerate as the United States and New Europe took three or four steps forward and Japan took five in the same time frame.

There is no hope. There will be no vast, prosperous market for Western goods in Greater Muscovy in my lifetime. For the short term, there may be no shortage of good-hearted believers and inept bankers in the West (the same people who brought us the cancer of Third World debt), but, in the longer term, I envision only a landscape of failure, indigence, and misery. The Russians are a doomed people. We must be careful not to let them know.

The Soviet Union needs a new revolution, but it is unlikely to come. The people are too weary. They are good only for short, brutal outbursts. Should some constellation of events trigger a revolution after all, it will be neither kind nor gentle. And, despite the exaggerated Soviet promises on disarmament, they still have many, many nuclear weapons littered throughout a land that is proving impossible to control, if only because of its sheer size.

The vastness that saved "Russia" time and again haunts her now. To become healthy and competitive, the USSR would need, among other things, a network of new roads, rail lines, and telecommunications on a scale so enormous that the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, pooling all of their assets, could not afford to construct it. Stir in a host of ecological problems that are already poisoning the last good earth and destroying the population's health, and the prospects are grim, indeed.

And yet, the Soviet Union continues to attract me like a magnet. Perhaps that has more to do with my nightmares.

Regarding the Japanese themes in the book, they are, obviously, take-offs on a current American nightmare. Again, I chose to exploit extremes for the purpose of metaphor. I do not envision Japan as ever again mounting a direct military challenge to the United States. It isn't necessary. The modalities of warfare have expanded, bringing economic combat increasingly to the fore: We are presently at war with Japan, and we have been for decades. But the formalities of warfare are also changing. Such wars not only do not require a conscious national decision and declaration, they do not even require general awareness on the part of the citizenry. I would never suggest that every Japanese businessman is party to a secret compact drawn up twenty or thirty years ago to economically defeat the United States. But I would suggest that the average Japanese executive is, however inarticulately, more deeply aware of the seriousness of the struggle.

Just another case of trendy Japan-bashing? I hope not. In any case, I find General Noburu Kabata to be far and away the most sympathetic character in the book.

The all-American theme in this book is military unpreparedness. Clearly, as an Army officer and true believer in the historical role of the United States, I am unabashedly biased. As a student of history, I cannot help feeling deep concern over the popular and legislative conviction that, with the Soviet Union in crisis, the Armed Forces of the United States can be reduced to a size that is barely ceremonial. Significant cuts can be made in our arsenal, but we must struggle against the American tendency to overdo everything, to view the world as black or white, either/or. Yes, the Soviet conventional threat has been reduced. But the world remains a brutal, hostile, and jealous place. We must maintain our standing military forces at a level that will allow us to avoid the sort of tragic sacrifices we were forced to make at the beginning of our wars, from 1812 on down to the great wars of this century, when our starved military establishments struggled desperately to buy time and green citizen-soldiers were thrown into battle unprepared. If we cannot afford the military the generals demand, we should nonetheless demand the best military we can afford. To make judicious cuts in our military at the present time makes economic, social, and political sense. Wanton cuts are just plain dumb.

Finally, a note on the subtheme of "Runciman's disease." I have long been fascinated by epidemiology. Had I been a man of profound courage, I might have become a doctor. Possessed of lesser bravery, I became a soldier. I am interested in the influence of disease on history, whether it be the effect of the Black Death on economic systems, or of stomach cancer, hepatitis, and parasites on the political consciousness of the residents of the Soviet territories surrounding the Aral Sea. Spurred by the phenomenon of AIDS — a disease which has had a far greater impact on social consciousness than on mortality figures in the United States — I tried to imagine what effect a really virulent and contagious disease might have today. On one hand, our level of medical care in the First World is stunningly good; on the other, the world has acquired a new porousness, thanks to technology. A disease that once took a decade to two to creep from China to the English Channel can now make the trip in a day. We have a host of new vectors. After all, it was not really homosexuality or fouled syringes that delivered AIDS to the wealthy West— it was the airplane.

This is a shamelessly American book. We are the good guys on its pages as surely as I believe we are the good guys in "real life." When this novel reaches publication,

I will have lived and served abroad for almost a decade in total. Instead of becoming more worldly, I find that I only become more convinced that the United States of America is mankind's most perfect creation to date. Certainly, we Americans are not without our flaws. We have, at times, been mortally foolish. But it is only thanks to us that even a small part of the world may live peacefully and decently today. There has never been a victor more benevolent, nor an ally so generous. Our errors were committed with the best of intentions, and our sacrifices redeemed the grimmest century in the history of mankind. I can only hope that my writing, for all of its many, many failings, serves my country well.

— Ralph Peters