What do they want?
Powers, Thomas
Of several minds: Thomas Powers WHAT DO THEY WANT? WHY GREAT POWERS DO WHAT THEY DO A FEW YEARS AGO I asked a student of political and military affairs what was the source of Russian interest in...
...A base in Angola would threaten Namibia (one of the world's leading diamond producers) and the Congo (an important source of uranium and other minerals...
...In the wake of Vietnam the United States was unable to respond in kind...
...What the Russians want - and what we want - is ultimately the source of the trouble between us, the thing which goes deeper than policy or even history and pushes us toward war...
...But the Jews came in flight, seeking a refuge...
...WHY GREAT POWERS DO WHAT THEY DO A FEW YEARS AGO I asked a student of political and military affairs what was the source of Russian interest in Angola...
...This is what seems to trouble and mystify ordinary citizens...
...For that matter, I had always found it hard to comprehend Portugal's willingness to beggar itself for nothing more than the illusion of empire...
...So what...
...By steady purchases of bullion and futures Hunt and his partners drove the price of silver up from around $12 an ounce to $50, at which point the price collapsed...
...It could have bought the whole of the South Bronx...
...They didn't rise to power by minding the store...
...The puzzling thing about this episode is why Hunt did it...
...Most seem to have no such plan...
...There is no evidence he even liked gambling...
...There is nothing mystifying about the Arab-Israeli wars...
...The cost to Russia of this melancholy chain of events is bound to be billions of dollars, hardship at home, a renewed fear of war...
...It would be easier to understand if the men who struggle for such sums had in the back of their minds something they wanted to do with it...
...The appetite which made a nation get big pushes it on to get bigger still...
...It would provide a sanctuary for black rebels fighting the white regime of South Africa, thus giving Moscow a voice in the fate of an important part of the globe...
...He had long passed the point where more money could have any practical material effect on his life...
...Why should the Soviet Union care about events so far away, promising benefits so marginal, involving'peoples whose vernacular tongues are unknown to all but a handful of Russians...
...Many examples can be found in Matthew Josephson's book, The Robber Barons, but none reveals the pattern more clearly than the recent attempt of the oil millionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt to manipulate the silver market...
...Hatred is easy to understand as a cause of tension and war, and it is easy to understand how injury can lead to hatred...
...A few years ago fierce bidding wars for oil companies dominated the financial news...
...It is the elemental part of what makes us adversaries, the thing which makes us wake up at night, and keeps us busy at the frontiers...
...These explanations all made sense of a geo-political sort - they are the common stuff of debate in world capitals - but still left the central mystery intact...
...The closest parallel to this elemental wanting I can think of - so close it may spring from the same source - is the appetite characteristic of business titans...
...A man can only eat and drink so much...
...It seemed such a remote, useless, God-forsaken spot...
...But the genuine alarm of American officials was probably the result of Russian success as much as anything else...
...They don't want to acquire great business empires for anything...
...But the line of credit simply expired, unused...
...Doubtless he sold out at a profit...
...Why would the Russians risk something which mattered - detente with the United States - for an expensive adventure bound to make enemies and strain their relations with friends...
...Nations seem to be much the same...
...I remember reading that one of the contestants for the Marathon Oil Company - I think it was Mobil - had put together a line of credit of seven billion dollars for the deal...
...Simply having them is enough...
...The "strategic" location of Ethiopia and Yemen, close to the Persian Gulf, naturally concerned policy-makers in Washington, since Europe and Japan are both heavily dependent on Arab oil...
...He secluded himself at the top of one of his hotels, sealed all the windows, worried excessively about germs, and drove the local citizens half crazy with trying to figure out what he was up to...
...And for what...
...What they want and what we want undoes the initiatives of diplomats, it overrides the caution of allies, it poisons understanding, mocks the sentiments of peacemakers, arouses suspicion...
...Steel got Marathon instead...
...And so on and so forth...
...He merely owned it for awhile...
...If the death of detente can be blamed on something anyone did, then it was probably the fault of Russian adventures in Ethiopia, Yemen, and Angola...
...When Russia was only landlocked misery surrounding the wooden cathedrals of Moscow, America was a couple of million people east of the Allegheny mountains...
...It has been this way for ? two hundred years...
...He seems to have had no interest in show girls...
...they just want them...
...If things had worked out differently he might have made a billion dollars, but what can a billion dollars buy which scores of millions cannot...
...That was money enough for a great venture...
...Then ordinary citizens pay the bill...
...What difference does it make who owns Marathon...
...Foreign offices think it quite a matter of course but people of the nations they represent - Russia in this instance, the United States in others - simply don't care...
...it is the whole which is troubling...
...Can it really be that the lives of ordinary people are not just affected but actually determined by everything that happens anywhere...
...This made officials feel helpless and impotent...
...Indeed, the Russian economy is starved for the very funds and attention squandered on foreign adventures...
...And yet there are many men who would like a billion dollars, many who have ruined themselves in the attempt to get it, even a few who have succeeded...
...This is a truly unfathomable endeavor...
...The Russians can make no similar claim of the right of self-defense to explain their prob-ings in Africa, Afghanistan, the Caribbean, Vietnam, and Cambodia, not to mention Eastern Europe...
...If the Russians could get as much out of the working day as the Dutch or the Japanese, who could stand against them...
...Ordinary people can hardly conceive of desire on such a scale...
...We got our size the same way the Russians got theirs - by taking it from weaker neighbors...
...Doubtless their "success" made Russian officials feel good - strong, daring, and effective...
...But there was no puzzlement in Washington...
...It comes as no surprise that the Arabs feel a sense of injury...
...If it's power that Moscow is after, there is vast untapped potential for power at home...
...It is a blind, instinctive thing, overriding doubts and caution...
...It is what goes wrong when things t go wrong...
...In addition, the staggering cost of defense is importantly - perhaps even largely - the result of the fears which these adventures arouse abroad...
...The millions who failed to escape were mostly murdered...
...He was indifferent to stand-up comics and Frank Sinatra...
...The best answer he could find was arcane in the extreme...
...A house can only be so big before you get lost in it...
...They don't want influence, territory, and power/or anything...
...Doubtless the Russians could ask the same of us...
...This elemental wanting is characteristic of big corporations as well...
...the development of over-the-horizon radar, he said, would allow Soviet clients to keep track of shipping traffic around the Cape of Good Hope...
...Hunt was never formally charged with trying to corner the market in silver futures, which is a crime, but most observers think that is, in effect, what he was up to...
...It was enough simply to own it...
...When they meet an obstacle the pressure builds until something gives...
...We can explain each acquisition till the cows come home...
...It was a ridiculous distance from the Soviet Union, it had no natural wealth to recommend it, the climate was unappealing, South Africa was large, close and hostile...
...But U.S...
...There is something nutty in ambition of this kind...
...Sending Cuban troops was a bold act...
...Apparently nothing...
...A billion dollars is a nutty sort of goal, a source of trouble rather than gratification...
...What did he plan to do with Las Vegas...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...Not even the climate, which is spectacular, seems to have attracted him...
...They finished off the spirit of detente, which doomed SALT, which prompted a vast American military buildup, which meant the Soviet Union would have to respond in kind...
...Over the last hundred years a million European Jews have migrated to Palestine and now live where Arabs used to live...
...What did the loser do with the $7 billion...
...Nothing...
...The Russia inherited by the Bolsheviks was the result of long imperial expansion east towards China, south towards India, west and southwest into the Baltic and the Balkans...
...What do the Russians want...
...The real challenge would be to create something new, but a kind of Gresham's Law seems to be at work here...
...The rulers of empires can't seem to help themselves...
...Somebody has to own it...
...Howard Hughes, towards the end of his life, bought a large chunk of Las Vegas...
...Then he grew weary of the venture and departed...
...When yachts grow beyond a certain size you might as well book passage on a ship...
...So far as I know Hughes built nothing in Las Vegas...
...My point here is not to blame the world's current state of tension on the Russians - in the past we have done similar things which scared them - but to ask why great powers pursue their "interests" on such a vast scale...
...Russia has territory, people and resources in plenty...
...It offered further proof of the utility of Cuban proxies...
...By all accounts Hunt had money enough, long before the silver adventure, to do anything a man might want to do, or acquire anything a man might want to acquire...
...The lack of imagination inherent in such bidding wars is breathtaking...
...The acquisitive spirits tend to overwhelm the creative spirits...
...But it's hard to see that these endeavors made sense, even from Moscow's point of view, in the long run...
...My friend was a bit puzzled himself...
...But this only begs the question...
Vol. 110 • February 1983 • No. 3
