Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond

[KingSweden24]

Clark's Constitution​

Depending on which Canadian one asks, Joe Clark was either one of the luckiest idiots to ever stumble into 24 Sussex or one of the most underrated, unassuming and secretly cunning politicians in the history of the Dominion, a backroom player and ruthless operator who would have made Pierre Trudeau in his prime blush. The honest answer is probably neither; Clark's chief lieutenants, such as Duncan Edmonds or Lowell Murray, would have chuckled at the thought of the oft-caricatured and awkward Prime Minister as some sort of secret Machiavelli, but also would likely have acknowledged that he was a much better politician than he often got credit for. Throughout 1981 and into early 1982, Clark was battered by a series of challenges that would have tried any Prime Minister. That he not only survived them, but emerged from them strengthened and well-positioned to lead the PCs into the next general election due by June 1984 with the wind at his back, baffled observers and participants of Canadian politics whether they were his friends, enemies, neutral, or all three depending on circumstance, which in the spring of 1981 described much of the Progressive Conservative Parliamentary majority.

Canada's economy had been badly struck by the late 1970s price shock crisis and lingering high unemployment and inflation, and while several OECD countries started seeing marked improvement by the second half of 1981 in their economic outlooks, Canada was not one of them. Its prime rate would top out at 25%, the highest on record, and its unemployment rate would reach close to 17% in September of that year before beginning its gradual decline in 1982 before dropping off a cliff in 1983. With nearly one in five Canadians out of work, the incumbent Clark government was, understandably, sitting with its popularity in the toilet; a facetious poll asked Canadians if they preferred "Clark or Chlamydia?", and the results were not what one would expect. Despite Canadians having tired of Trudeau's imperious, arrogant and hard-charging attitude, Clark's fresh youthfulness and the energy of change from 1979 now looked more like haplessness and austerity for austerity's sake. The targeted stimulus combined with tax hikes and interest rate increases from the autumn of 1979 had done little to stem Canada's economic depression [1] and Finance Minister John Crosbie seemed entirely out of ideas beyond a free trade agreement with the United States which he seemed to be one of the few proponents of. Clark made a show of pursuing good relations with the new American President Hugh Carey, whom polls suggested Canadians were excited to learn more about after their dim view of the Ford administration, and the two men got along well; however, photo ops at a lake in northern Ontario during Carey's first international bilateral visit to another country made the burly, silver-haired Brooklynite look like a man taking his son fishing, and cartoonists - who were kept ably employed during the Clark years - portrayed Clark sitting on his father's lap with his telltale oversized ears.

The question then was not if but when Clark would leave 24 Sussex and be finally put out of his misery, and that was where his understated advantages began to come to play. There was no shortage of ambitious Tories who wanted the top job, but few wanted the top job in the horrible financial conditions of 1978-82 and it was thus assumed that whoever replaced Clark ahead of an election in either 1983 or 1984 was drinking from the same poisoned chalice - with assumptions in Canada that the decade of high inflation and stubborn unemployment would persist for at least another six or seven years, potentially making the 80s another "lost decade," many potential rivals contented themselves to sit things out and wait for a failed Liberal government that succeeded Clark before making their move. It also helped Clark that the most prominent intra-party personality at the federal level was Crosbie, whose budgets and zealous support for free trade had not endeared him to either the increasingly conservative party rank and file nor the general public and who hailed from Newfoundland, thus severely limiting his political base (to say nothing of the fact that he spoke precisely zero words of French, an issue in a general election contested over potentially swingy Quebec). Crosbie was a media darling thanks to his quotability whether intentional or not but also regarded as a populist loose cannon; it was widely thought that Clark was the only PM likely to keep Crosbie in a portfolio as important as Finance, and a challenge offered Crosbie more risks than upsides. The rest of Clark's Cabinet was full of allies, most prominently External Affairs Minister Flora Macdonald, and despite a minor reshuffle to bring close confidants like former Toronto Mayor David Crombie into juicier ministries Clark had avoided alienating anybody he needed to "keep in the tent" in his first two years, and most of his potential challengers lacked the credibility of government office at the federal level.

Clark's other main antagonist was the telegenic and fellow Red Tory Ontario Premier Bill Davis, who had governed that province for a decade atop his "Big Blue Machine" of the provincial Progressive Conservative Party and had sparred viciously with Clark over the matter of the three-cent gas tax in 1979, and also had a blood feud with Peter Lougheed, the Premier and machine boss of Clark's native Alberta. In this sense, the Clark-Davis divide was even more of a regional split in the party, but one that played to Clark's subtle advantages; Clark was a Westerner, Canada's most alienated political constituency, but his instincts were more moderate, appealing to the Ontarian professional wing that made up Davis's base. He could thus play to Western grievances of one of their own finally reaching the pinnacle only to be cut off at the knees by "the Bay Street Boys," as he termed it in unusually populist terms, while also not alarming Ontarians by actually tacking to the right on policy. Most politicians would have been consumed by such flip-flopping, but a disastrous election result in March of 1981 in Ontario that saw Davis's PCs lose 10 seats and retain a very weak minority government, on the heels of a hugely controversial sweep of gay bathhouses the month before in Toronto that galvanized gay activism in Canada for decades to come, badly damaged his most formidable rival and gave Clark an important breather.

Clark used this fortuitous turn of events to pursue a goal that had eluded the Trudeau government - the Patriation of the Canadian Constitution from Britain. Liberal efforts to secure it had been undone by Trudeau's insistence on unilateral federal powers being included in a Charter of Rights and his belief that Ottawa could simply impose under Confederation its terms on the provinces if a Constitution Act were to be passed. The premiers, to say the least, did not share this view, [2] and it was widely believed that provincial governments - often held by Progressive Conservative affiliates or allies - had dragged their feet during the peak of the 1978-79 constitutional debate in the hope that their bete noire Pierre Elliot Trudeau would lose and the more province-friendly PCs would triumph. Their goal had been met and with the Quebec sovereignty referendum dispatched in humiliating fashion for the PQ, Clark could now act on that promise.

In a speech at Vancouver's Pacific National Exposition's closing ceremony in September of 1981 (a symbolic location to hold it rather than Toronto or Montreal), Clark gave a famous address in which he described Canada as "the community of communities" and gave a "commitment to compromise, but not a compromise on Canadian federalist values." Davis was a strong supporter of patriation, removing a potentially thorny issue between the two of them at a moment when Davis was weak anyways, and Clark had collected a "gang of six" Premiers who wanted some sort of opt-out on certain constitutional provisions if they overrode provincial rights and prerogatives. The eventual nature of this compromise on how amendments could be approved and ratified amongst the provinces became known as the Vancouver Formula, and Clark gave it a full-throated endorsement which brought additional Premiers aboard. [3] The Liberals protested angrily at the "carve-outs" and warned that provinces opting out of constitutional amendments they did not like would badly damage the integrity of Confederation, but with Clark enjoying a strong majority in Parliament and the NDP in support of provincial autonomy - having always enjoyed strength in provincial legislatures, as they had never tasted much power in Ottawa, the left-wing NDP was onboard with a wedge issue they could use against the Grits - the provisions passed in Parliament and went to Britain and the provincial legislatures for approval. Despite being voted down in Newfoundland, and despite brief heartburn that the defeat of the unusually right-wing PC government of Sterling Lyon in Manitoba by the NDP might jeopardize Clark's work, the Constitution won a stunning victory when Quebec's nationalist legislature, humbled and more than a little cowed by their defeat in the May 1980 referendum, voted through what Levesque himself begrudgingly thought was the best deal possible from the very province-friendly Clark, and that Quebec would be smart to accept it before Macdonald's federalist Liberals returned to power.

The patriation of the Canadian constitution in January of 1982 thus reframed Clark's premiership. He had secured a bipartisan goal through negotiation with the provinces and despite testy relationships with Davis and Lougheed seen a Constitution, the most fractious type of debate possible, pass without his compromises collapsing in on themselves. He had stolen a Liberal priority from them and made Macdonald seem even more of a dud and with a quick stroke made the opposition question their leadership more than his own party. The economy would before long start to improve, as unemployment and inflation slowly came down despite 1982's harrowing and concerning international events as the emerging oil glut brought energy prices down (ironically striking his home province very hard), and some small bilateral changes to tariff rules were hashed out with the United States, short of a full free-trade agreement but enough to made the appeal of the Liberals on the issue to its supporters even more muddled. Moderate caution had seemed to win, for all the grumbling on the Canadian right, and Joe Clark didn't need to call another election for over two years with now two big wins over the hated Quebecois nationalists under his belt - and his delivery and sincerity on provincial autonomy, compared to Trudeau, had nonetheless not gone unnoticed to French Canadians, offering the PCs inroads in the province for the first time in a generation and seriously threatening the Liberals in the last province where they had a decisive advantage. [4]

So was Clark just a lucky idiot, or was he shrewder than his opponents in the media, opposition and even his own party ever gave him credit for? It's hard to say, but he certainly made the most of the opportunities he came across...

[1] The early 1980s and early 1990s struck Canada way harder both times around, especially the latter, than the other G7 economies
[2] This is all largely true and also a gross oversimplification of the Patriation debate of the early 1980s, which I'll admit I don't totally understand the nuances of. Needless to say though there's a reason why Trudeau inspired such... passionate responses as a politician from his opponents. (Canadian politics in the 1980s and 1990s is really just an interesting case study in Trudeau and then his proteges like Chretien engaging in blood sport as they fight to their death with intra-party rivals. The research on the shenanigans around OTL's 1983 PC leadership convention between Clark and Mulroney for this chapter alone was something else, like busing in homeless people and middle-schoolers to vote. Not making that up).
[3] Trudeau, to put it mildly, did not
[4] Nothing like what Quebec native Brian Mulroney could offer, but not nothing.

 

[KingSweden24]

Dividends of the North Sea​

The massive ramp-up of North Sea drilling platforms during the 1970s, in part a response to European fears about the accessibility of affordable (and maybe more than affordable, reliable) oil supplies in the long, uncertain shadow of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, was anticipated not just as a geopolitical security feature but also a future economic boon. In the 1980s, for instance, Norway would transform from the poor, redheaded stepchild of Scandinavia to far and away the wealthiest Nordic state, financing its ambitious welfare state goals with the petroleum boon and leaving Sweden and Denmark ruing that they had not agreed to enter into co-development deals with Statoil when they'd had a chance. The gas fields at Groningen in the Netherlands had already proven for nearly twenty years the benefits that flowed to countries in Europe with easily exploitable natural resources in terms of social improvements, and Norway went above and beyond that.

In the UK, the exploitation of North Sea oilfields had thus been eyed as a surefire economic winner for whoever won the last election before the major cash and oil flows began in 1980, which partially explained the acrimony around the 1978 contest Callaghan had called at the most advantageous moment and Tory anger at Thatcher "blowing" it - it was broadly presumed that whoever in Westminster won the 1978 election was well-set to win in 1982 or 1983, when the Dividend, as it came to be called in official government white papers penned by the Exchequer, began really paying. Despite the general admiration the British people had for him and his talent in PMQs, one thing that always bedeviled Willie Whitelaw's leadership in opposition was that the Conservatives had broad internal disagreements on what exactly to spend the Dividend on if they were in power. Labour did not have that issue in government, even if the appearances of Labour unity were just that - appearances.

Many UK political observers had tensed ahead of the spring of 1981 when Peter Shore was due to unveil his first budget. Shore had briefly contested the previous year's leadership contest and been included by Healey as a major and substantive olive branch to the soft-left and even the Bennites, who badly mistrusted him as an austerian thanks to his infamous 1976 budget revisions and agreement to place Britain under IMF stewardship. Shore was a curious character even by the standards of the British left, who had been denied the Exchequer by both Wilson and Callaghan previously due to his unorthodox left-wing views on autarky, limiting the ability of the party to use his brilliant rhetorical skills and sharp wit on the frontbenches. Indeed, Shore had perhaps better been suited for the Foreign Office - Healey's preferred landing spot for him - after his renunciation of his previous support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but his professed belief in withdrawing en toto from the European Economic Union sans referendum mere years after Labour had stuck its neck out on holding a referendum on staying in made that a difficult, and Owen had demanded a return to the Foreign Office as his price for dropping out and clearing Healey's path to Number 10 the spring before.

Shore formed part of what became known in Cabinet as "the Troika" - he, Home Secretary Michael Foot, and Education Secretary Neil Kinnock, the three soft-left champions Healey had appointed to key positions to keep the Tribune Group happy after Benn's ignonimous defeat and their champion's retreat to the backbenches with the likes of Eric Heffer and Dennis Skinner. Thus, he had two very influential friends in important ministries to help him drive what came to be known as the Shore Programme, based off of ideas charted out in his informal budget speech of the previous spring and then unveiled on Budget Day in 1981. Fundamentally, what Shore proposed from the Exchequer fell short of his previous support of autarky, nationalization and protectionism, but nonetheless had a firmly left-wing tint to it. The Dividend was to go into the National Public Wealth Fund, a new sovereign wealth entity, that would lend at fixed bargain-basement rates in three areas - one, inner cities that needed revitalization; two, the "roads, rails and bridges" that needed repair; and third, schools, with Kinnock championing the Bullock Report's suggestions for improving British education. The hope was that targeting unemployment both through jobs programs, expanded welfare programs, and spending on education and infrastructure would "end the loop of misery and despair" and "invest the dividends of our natural resources where they belong, in our human resources."

The debate over the Shore Programme saw a major loss to Labour when Roy Jenkins, a former rising star within the party, very publicly defected to the Liberals shortly after and declared in a tense speech, "A party which took lump after lump to get Britain's fiscal house in order in the Wilson and Callaghan years now abandons its rigor for starry-eyed utopianism!" Shore shot back that nothing in the budget was unpaid for, and mused that Jenkins was simply "bitter that having been rejected for his beliefs by this party, he now needs to find one as irrelevant to modern Britain as himself." The truth was, though, that many in Labour were quietly skeptical of Shore's spending plans, which while not out of the mainstream did have a sense of profligacy to them after the "tough medicine" that had begun in 1967 with the currency devaluation. That there were reports that both Healey and Owen were personally opposed to the budgets did not help, as rumor-mongering spread throughout Westminster.

The televised worldwide spectacle Royal Wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and the visit of President Hugh Carey - a man temperamentally similar to Healey - did help distract from the infighting in part by instilling a broad sense of national spirit and pride, and the budget was quietly passed shortly thereafter. By late in 1981, unemployment had begun to indeed tick down significantly and inflation looked moderately under control, though Labour's lag in the polls behind Whitelaw's Tories still remained stubbornly in the high-single, low-double digits after recovering from apocalyptic numbers the year before. Healey was well-liked but his party was not; Shore was hugely popular with the left, but gave the public pause. Labour had begun to claw its way back from the difficult Winter of Discontent and horrific economy of 1979, but the road to the elections due by September 1983 was long and arduous...

 

[KingSweden24]

A Special Relationship​

Hugh Carey's first foreign visit was, of course, to next-door Canada, and his first overseas visit that followed would be a straightforward trip to the United Kingdom, then Brussels for a NATO conference, and then on to Germany to meet with the rather interesting new Chancellor Franz-Josef Strauss before stopping over in Paris for a quick bilateral with the newly-reelected Valery Giscard d'Estaing and then heading home. The foreign tour was meant to introduce a new era of foreign policy to the three most key European allies and "establish relationships between the White House and our most important partners in the Atlantic alliance." The back half of the tour was fairly unremarkable; like most NATO leaders, Carey was put off by Strauss during their "walk in the park" in Munich, while his time with VGE was polite and boringly constructive.

London proved to be the highlight, both for Carey personally and for the transatlantic alliance. Carey was treated to an audience with the Queen, with whom he came away impressed by, and though a brief jaunt to his ancestral Ireland was not on the cards in this trip, he spoke at a press conference of "my love for the entirety of this island chain, and my intent to spend more time in it." The famously ruthless British press made some mockery of Carey's gruff, stiff posture and compared his thick eyebrows to those of Prime Minister Healey, but on more substantive grounds did pointedly ask the question on everybody's mind - to what extent did Carey sympathize with Irish republicanism, him being a devout Irish Catholic himself? The question of Irish-American attitudes towards "the six counties" was considerably more live in 1981 than it had been when John F. Kennedy visited Ireland twenty years earlier in his own Presidency, with the Troubles having erupted in 1968 and still simmering a decade after their most intense year; indeed, Michael Foot and the Home Office had just through cautious negotiations barely avoided another publicly embarrassing hunger strike by IRA prisoners just weeks before Carey's visit. [1] It was widely known to British policymakers that a fair amount of Sinn Fein's funding came from Irish-Americans romantically attached to their homeland and ignorant about what the IRA actually stood for, and indeed there were more than a few people, even in Labour which was less reflexively Unionist (indeed, Foot privately thought that Northern Ireland should be Dublin's problem rather than London's, and had said as much to his Cabinet colleagues on several occasions) [2] who were actively worried that the election of an Irish-American "hard man" from New York who was very close politically and personally to the three powerful Irish-American Democratic legislators Ted Kennedy, Daniel Moynihan and most importantly Speaker Tip O'Neill meant a wrinkle in the US-UK relationship over Ireland; Francis Pym, the Tories' Shadow Foreign Secretary, went so far as to describe this quartet as "the Four Horsemen of the Ulster Apocalypse."

As such, before the first face-to-face meeting between the occupants of the White House and Number 10, there was tension and mistrust in the air between the two principals. That said, historians have cast doubt on the extent of this. Healey, like Callaghan before him, had got on quite well with Gerald Ford and had been the first foreign leader to call Carey to congratulate him on his victory over Ronald Reagan. Beyond that, Foreign Secretary David Owen - widely thought to be doing everything in his power to set himself up as Healey's successor as Labour leader in four to five years' time, as Healey was not expected to want to serve to the age of seventy and Owen was nearly twenty years his junior - had made a point of becoming good friends first with George Bush and now with Nicholas Katzenbach in a short period of time, coming to dominate the foreign portfolio as he spent nearly every other week abroad on diplomatic assignments as possibly the most hard-charging Foreign Secretary since World War II, which had served to lay a tremendous amount of groundwork for the meeting. In person, though, Carey and Healey hit it off. As old-fashioned men of a similar age who had come of age with the mid-century Old Left, they shared a mutual distaste for the rising "New Left" ascendant in both their parties and Healey openly joked about "all these Trots Tots around us." Carey was impressed by Healey's voluminous knowledge of European figures, and leaned on him and Owen both for their thoughts on how best to handle Strauss, whom nobody in Washington seemed quite sure what to do with (Carey went so far as to jokingly call him "Kraut Nixon.") Healey earned from Carey a key commitment on the matter most personal to him, which was "the peaceful transition of Eastern Europe from Soviet communism to democracy," not precisely a controversial stance in the United States but one that committed Labour to a much more muscular role in Cold War affairs than perhaps the Militant faction and the Bennites just a tick to their right were comfortable with. Beyond concluding that Andropov was best not to be trusted, the meeting did much to cement a positive relationship between two men who were largely aligned politically and whose cooperation and partnership would come to define the US-UK alliance in a way few leaders had since LBJ and Harold Wilson. [3]

The immediate point of agreement both leaders arrived at, however, was pushing forward with securing an end to apartheid in South Africa. The "Free Nelson Mandela" movement had grown dramatically in the course of the last two years, boosted in part by an innovative public relations campaign by OR Tambo in London as well as international outrage still lingering from the Soweto Uprising. That negotiation with South Africa was possible had been proven by BJ Vorster's participation in securing Zimbabwe's Internal Settlement, and though the Muzorewa regime's commitment to democracy was increasingly questionable ever since incorporating the Nkomo faction into government, the "Rhodesia Model" was one both Carey and Healey gave much credit to, in large part as Healey had been instrumental during his time as Foreign Secretary in securing it. Now as Prime Minister, Healey's great desire in international relations was to use the British Commonwealth actively to promote freedom, equality and democracy abroad rather than simply serve as an old clearing house for the former Empire.

It was not as simple as Healey thought, though, to simply copy what had worked in Rhodesia and transplant it to South Africa. The apartheid government was much more sophisticated, internally strong and dogged in its refusal to budge than Ian Smith had been, and Vorster had been toppled internally in a scandal and been replaced by PW Botha, who was a thorough hardliner. Tambo's reputation after a freak poisoning incident that had killed hundreds of ANC members had also declined sharply, and Mandela was twiddling his thumbs on Robben Island. International contempt for South Africa was much higher, too; Mandela was a considerably more sympathetic figure abroad than Mugabe and Nkomo had been, and Rhodesia a more obscure corner of the world, meaning all eyes were on what happened there. In particular, US Congressman Andrew Young of Atlanta had made it his personal mission to secure severe sanctions against Pretoria and personally regarded Rhodesia's Internal Settlement as disgraceful, and opposed any such solution in South Africa. [4]

The pressure was on, then, in the early 1980s for a novel solution to the problem, but both leaders came away from their multi-day meetings in London with the agreement that South Africa, rather than an anti-communist bulwark, was a pariah regime that needed to be brought to heel and that doing so was a high priority for both of them...



[1] So Bobby Sands is alive, IOW. A lot of what drove the second hunger strike was Thatcher's people not coming to the table after the IRA blew up her Northern Ireland hand and good personal friend Airey Neave (one of the few things I actually learned about watching the dreck that was The Iron Lady, good as Meryl is in it) right after the 1979 elections. So between the IRA not blowing up Neave and Mountbatten in 1979, the early 80s are a lot more pacific in Northern Ireland, even though the situation is still pretty tense.
[2] To what extent Foot actually believed this, I don't know, but from what I recall reading this was a point of view ascendant in Labour at the time
[3] Of course Ford and Callaghan had a lot more mutual overlap here than IOTL, but they were not of the same political persuasions
[4] As UN Ambassador, Andrew Young was a big part of sinking the flawed but workable Internal Settlement, paving the road for Mugabe's takeover

 

[KingSweden24]

After the Storm​

Events in South Korea in late 1979 and much of 1980 had been turbulent, to say the least. As street fighting blossomed in Busan, the assassination attempt on Park Chung-hee, while failing, had seen the dictator flee into exile almost immediately thereafter and his government descend into near-chaos, culminating in the ensuing "Hanahoe Revolt" in which a group of political Army officers tried to depose the government of the new President Choi Kyu-hah, new Prime Minister Shin Hyun-hwak and Army Chief of Staff Jeong Seung-hwa. What was left thereafter was a tense country, looking nervously across the DMZ at the North, unsure of what was to come next - a power vacuum, in other words, both inside the ruling Democratic Republican Party of Park that had designed the Fourth Republic's authoritarian constitution and around it. Events in Korea had been so bizarre and concerning that the Ford administration had dispatched a carrier strike group the region and Japanese diplomats were briefly recalled for consultations out of worry that a Northern invasion may be imminent; in the end, the Peninsula had stayed quiet, but for how long was an open question.

Choi had been perfunctorily elected to serve out the remaining three-and-a-half years of Park's term until the next statutory elections in July of 1984, but an assassination attempt in March of 1981, also foiled and believed to have been sponsored by ultra-right-wing opponents of the Choi administration such as Chun Doo-hwan overseas, opened the question of how long he could reasonably last in the role. Almost as soon as he had established himself in office the previous year he had begun to clash both with his allies and the opposition. The DRP had never been much of anything other than a vehicle for Park's authoritarian ambitions but it was largely a civilian outfit underpinning military rule, and so with the collapse of the Hanahoe Clique that may have shifted South Korea in an even more junta-like direction it seemed like the civilians were at last in charge, with the modestly pro-democracy Choi at the head. Choi, in a speech in late 1980, promised pro-democracy protestors genuine reforms, including potentially a replacement for the Yushin Constitution designed exclusively for Park's desire to serve perpetually as President despite promises in the early 1970s to retire. Massive demonstrations upon the death of longtime opposition leader and former general Kim Hong-il in August of 1980 had spurred such sentiments along; the question simply became, now, what exactly things would look like next.

The President had, by all accounts, seemed to have something of a change of heart after the mass protests and government chaos of the last two years, but he was a democrat at the head of a fundamentally un-democratic party and beyond concerns about "communist infiltration" rampant in the party echelons as well as the military, there were a great deal of DRP leaders who were concerned about what a New Democratic Party under its dogged leader Kim Young-sam would mean if it were in power. Kim was not a left-wing firebrand by any means but nonetheless a committed liberal and held the Park regime and all its works in contempt, and many DRP members were terrified of mass prosecutions and anti-corruption campaigns that could target them and the powerful chaebols that had lifted Korea into the status of a "tiger economy" after having been poorer than most sub-Saharan countries just thirty years earlier at the end of the war. Kim's stubbornness had, after all, been why Park had tried to maneuver the less disagreeable Yi Cheol-seung into the chairmanship of the NDP in 1978 to stunt the party's momentum only to see it win the popular vote narrowly regardless and nearly surpass the DRP in seats (the President's ability to appoint a third of the National Assembly of course delivered the ruling party a supermajority). Shin, the Prime Minister, was highly reluctant to risk his newfound position, in part because he suspected that Park loyalists like Kim Jong-pil were waiting to seize the reins of power instead and perhaps invite back a vengeful ex-President, despite Park's failing health; with the support of Army Chief of Staff Jeong, who took the view that the NDP was unreliable on the "Northern Question," he opposed the ending of progressive opposition leader Kim Dae-jung's exile in the United States and encouraged the DRP to rename itself to sever ties with the Park era but to look to Kuomintang-held Taiwan, itself an authoritarian, single-party corporatist state, for inspiration rather than Western democracy or even Japan, with its dominant Liberal Democratic Party. [1]

Choi was well aware of these challenges but also the demands of the Korean street, where rapidly rising living standards were no longer enough to buy off the public from demanding democratic rights enjoyed in other industrial economies. Despite some turbulence with the late 1970s oil crises and then the political crisis of the RoK itself, the Korean economy was still growing strong and many foreign investors indeed saw the end of the thuggish Park era with its cult of personality and mercurial leader as a positive. It was also the case that the Ford administration, perhaps more tolerant of Park and KMT-style managed democracy if it kept Korea secure and growing, was now gone in Washington and replaced by President Carey, who while not particularly personally interest in the Asia-Pacific region was aware of Korea being the lynchpin of the American project in the Far East and was less hesitant to demand answers over human rights abuses. As such, Choi announced after recovering from the gunshot wound to his leg in April of 1981 that in 1984 the electoral college would be abolished and a new constitution would allow the vote for a President under popular vote with a runoff, and that the President would cease appointing members of the National Assembly. However, the "Fifth Republic" of Korea would operate a constitution drafted by a constituent assembly chaired by DRP officials and passed by the sitting National Assembly by supermajority vote, thus meaning that genuine constitutional reforms would not be put into place to guard against future authoritarianism. This constituent assembly would work throughout late 1981 and much of 1982 to forge the new constitution, and street protests continued frequently as they worked in secrecy in the background with little popular input.

As many Park-era officials began to see their fortunes wane under Choi's technocratic administration that committed no new outrages or abuses against its populace but also did little to lift Park-era emergency decrees or release political prisoners (it was widely thought that Choi would wait to release any prisoners until the last day of his Presidency in 1984 in a mass amnesty once the DRP, or its successor party, had secured another term), jockeying behind the scenes began in earnest. Both Yi Cheol-seung and Kim Young-sam were eager to serve as President for the 1984-90 term and neither was keen to see Kim Dae-jung come back from abroad and potentially split the opposition vote, but their rivalry about who would be President and who would be Prime Minister needed to wait to see what powers each office would hold; there was speculation that the Fifth Republic could be Parliamentary in nature at the request of Choi to avoid a future Park (and possibly at the behest of Shin as a deal cut between the men). The "constitutional question" also left men like Jeong needing to hold their own court, leading him to cultivate a very fruitful relationship of patronage with the powerful oligarch Paik Sun-yup, a war hero, longtime diplomat and head of Korea Chemicals who while having been appointed to his positions by Park had never been an insider and thus was viewed by some as an establishment figure who was nonetheless "clean"... [2]

[1] Japan's a democracy, of course, but everybody knows who's going to win, and the real contest is internal.
[2] Hat tip to @CELTICEMPIRE and his KMT TL for the idea of finding use of Paik Sun-yup for something

 

[KingSweden24]

The Elephant at the Crossroads​

In February of 1981, two weeks after the inauguration of Hugh Carey, The Economist released a famous cover issue titled "The Elephant at the Crossroads" with a cartoon elephant pondering what direction to go next, with the article considering what, exactly, the Republican Party of the United States was to do next. This question was indeed very live for the party's grandees and its activists, and the answer would define American politics moving forward, which made its resolution critical. Understandably, this was not a debate that would resolve itself anytime soon, and much of the early 1980s would see intense internecine brawling with most Republican politicians resigned to the fact that it could be as much as a decade before they found their way anywhere close to power again.

The position the party found itself in in the spring of 1981 was dire. While not quite the near-extinction level event that the early New Deal era represented, the GOP in the early 1980s was worse off than it had been after the 1964 LBJ landslide - they were in a superminority in both houses of Congress, had only one-fifth of the Governorships, and were in an even worse position in the state legislatures. While Reagan had kept the results of the 1980 Presidential election somewhat respectable, a few thousand votes going another way in California or the Carolinas would have put him in an embarrassing hole. The road back would be highly difficult, in part because the rift between the increasingly conservative base voters and the needs of the party in a general election were starting to widen.

Comparisons between 1964 and 1980 were inapt. While it was true, as many conservative activists were keen to optimistically point out, that the Goldwater defenestration had been followed by the Nixonian triumph of 1968, that election had come at the back of eight very chaotic years under a Democratic President, and the exhausted and relieved electorate of 1981 seemed unlikely to power such a backlash again by the time 1984 rolled around. It was also very true that the dynamic that Carey had promised - a no-nonsense throwback liberalism and steady hand at the wheel after close to two decades of political chaos and disillusionment - was a world apart from the radical civil rights movement of the 1960s, the anti-war energy of the McGovern insurgency or the moralizing post-politics of Carter, and thus rather than representing the brave new world of New Left impulse it was instead a fundamentally conservative proposition in and of itself.

Understandably, it was William Buckley of the National Review who stepped into the fray as attempting to corral the thinking of conservative intellectualism in response to the failures of Nixon-Fordism and Reaganism in tandem. In one of his first essays on the path forward, he penned a treatise he titled "Beyond the Backlash," in which he positioned the Nixon victories as understandable electoral thermostatic reactions to the implied revolutionary energies of the late 1960s but cautioned the Republican Party that "we must represent more than just the rejection of the new social settlement and the New Deal - we must present a positive, forward-thinking agenda that includes and impresses Americans of all faiths, creeds, races, and classes." Particular energy was devoted to noting that the hoped-for Republican breakthrough in the South had been half-baked; while picking off parts of the coastal South had been a success, efforts to penetrate working-class, unemployment-ravaged states like Mississippi and Alabama had fallen flat with the deep Ford recession of 1978-80. Republican strategists had noted that Midwestern conservatives and Southern rural voters had more in common than different as early as 1928 when Hoover made nudging Black voters aside an implicit strategy; despite the successes of 1964-72, they had succeeded less in building a machine in the South than simply creating occasional swing states.

The group who suffered the most from Reagan defeat were politically minded evangelicals, with Jerry Falwell having particularly bet big on organizing Southern Baptist and Pentecostal churches as a united political force. Between the personally evangelical Jimmy Carter having fallen short in 1976, the various anti-feminist, anti-gay and anti-abortion wedge campaigns of 1977-78 failing to make much headway with the electorate [1], and now the evangelical-friendly Reagan falling short brought into open question to what extent a "Christian Right" could actually have potency. A movement that in the mid-1970s looked to be the leading edge of social conservative organizing had proven in many ways toothless, and Nixon's dismissiveness of them a decade earlier suddenly looked to have been the right bet. By the late 1980s, men like Falwell or his fellow Virginian pastor Pat Robertson had declined remarkably in influence, and though the GOP was in all ways a socially and culturally conservative party then and now, the evangelical politics that had looked nascent in the late 1970s never emerged as much more than a historical curiosity.

That being said, if the reactionary anger of Goldwater and Reagan had proven toxic with the broader electorate even with the creakiness of the New Deal coalition as it entered its sixth decade, one thing the 1960s had proven was that there was even less appetite for Rockefeller Republicanism, whether with base GOP voters or for that matter anyone else. Even moderate creatures of Washington like Howard Baker were staunchly to the right of where the liberal wing of the party had been a decade earlier, and even as early as 1960 the Eastern Establishment had clearly been on borrowed time. What exactly a conservatism for the 1980s should and would look like, then, was an open question.

It was in this nadir of influence and vacuum of powerful, unifying figures that former President Nixon began to rehabilitate himself, at least behind the scenes. Men like Donald Rumsfeld, from retirement as a party grandee in Illinois albeit with an eye towards the future even after the spectacular failure of his 1980 primary campaign, pointed out that Nixon had won a 49-state landslide and his heir, Ford, had scraped out a narrow win in enormously difficult circumstances four years later. "Nixonism without Nixon" was something that perhaps could work, then. This idea found particular credence within the Senate GOP, amongst young, reform-minded Western Senators such as Alan Simpson of Wyoming, Ted Stevens of Alaska and Orrin Hatch of Utah, who all ranged from the center to right wings of the party but got along well with one another and looked upwardly mobile in the Senate leadership hierarchy. They enjoyed close relationships with Midwestern conservatives like Richard Lugar of Indiana or Bob Taft of Ohio, as well as Reagan's close friend Paul Laxalt, who though more libertarian-colored nonetheless kept a close eye on what soon came to be known as the Republican Renewal Project, spearheaded by Simpson. The RRP's program was fairly straightforward - checking the excesses of Democratic patronage politics and clientelism in urban strongholds and appealing to working-class white ethnic voters through shared cultural conservatism (particularly on issues of law and order), budget orthodoxy a la Ford without the obsessive monetarism of his Federal Reserve, and muscular but pragmatic realpolitik foreign policy abroad that would shift away from the more moralistic regimens of both academic left-wing revisionism in vogue post-1968 and the view of the Cold War as a struggle between God and Satan increasingly popular amongst religious conservatives.

Many conservatives were quick to reject this as simply warming over the failures of the Ford years, but there were important differences. The RRP specifically looked not to traditional conservatism as Ford had but rather sought to build on Nixon's Southern Strategy while marrying working-class union voters whom Democrats depended on in a big tent party and looking to the booming suburbs as the backbone of their coalition. Whether it was workable, of course, was an open question, and so the "Renewalists" who got the quiet acquiescence of the movers-and-shakers in the party and insurgents seeking a full throated "choice, not an echo" of Goldwater's promise of the New Right looked ahead to the 1982 midterms as the ultimate contest of who would ascend in the party and who best knew how to speak to the electorate...

[1] Not helped by it being Ford that cracks down on Bob Jones University rather than Carter, and before the 1978 midterms IOTL most (though certainly not all) evangelicals regarded abortion as more of a Catholic issue anyways

 

[KingSweden24]

Pit Viper​

As late spring arrived and summer beckoned, Washington's attention turned to special elections to fill a number of open House seats in the aftermath of Carey's staffing his Cabinet, and the Democrats did fairly well. They held, narrowly, Tom Foley's right-trending seat in Eastern Washington, though it would finally flip Republican in the 1982 midterms, and in Maryland the widower of the late Gladys Spellman, who had slipped into a coma shortly before the election in 1980, won a seven-way primary (including defeating Steny Hoyer, the Lieutenant Governor of the State) before comfortably winning the seat itself. The only result to go south was in Arizona; the 2nd stood empty thanks to Udall's appointment to the Interior Department and the race between Jim McNulty and Jim Kolbe turned heated for the seat anchored by booming Tucson and the Sonoran Desert along the Mexican border. Udall, while certainly no "Pinto Democrat," had been a good fit for his native seat but McNulty came across awkwardly and Kolbe won with a surprisingly decisive six-point margin in a state that had effectively split her results in 1980. Two out of three wasn't bad, and DC Democrats largely chalked the loss up to McNulty's poor candidacy and anticipated a significantly redrawn Arizona map in 1982 that would likely afford Kolbe a safe seat anchored exclusively in the right-trending, suburban-heavy Tucson area. [1]

One reason why Democrats remained optimistic after the special elections went through was that the debate over healthcare reform had only just begun to bubble up, with Ted Kennedy pushing for televised hearings. While the debate would turn somewhat more acrimonious in the fall as it intensified and a target of January or February of 1982 was circled for passing "Teddycare," in whatever form it took, it provided Americans a unique look at the machinery of Congress, for the idea of using C-SPAN to televise committee hearings and floor debates was fairly novel at that time. Though a number of Northeastern Democratic Congressmen were swept up in a corruption sting nicknamed "Abscam" due to the FBI posing as Arab sheiks to hand out bribes, the fact that the majority of those ensnared were from New Jersey seemed to simply be par for the course, and though there were plenty of jokes on late night television it didn't seem to have any particular impact on general perceptions of the party as a whole. [2] But the big news of the summer that gave the Carey White House a spring in its step heading into what promised to be a fall that would be much tougher than the debate around the ESA was not domestic, but rather stemmed from Panama - Operation Pit Viper.

One of the great regrets of Gerald Ford had been that he had never captured either Omar Torrijos or Manuel Noriega following Huele a Quemado and the intervention in Panama that by mid-1981 had claimed seven hundred American lives even as the country was mostly pacified and the Canal back up and running at the start of the year in full, a remarkable engineering feat that was a huge credit to the resources and expertise the United States threw at it. Still, guerilla hit-and-run attacks against both the US and post-Torrijos Panamanian government had plagued the country for three years now, and to many poorer Panamanians, Torrijos remained a populist and nationalist Robin Hood figure, and to the increasingly revolutionary Latin American left he was approaching Fidel Castro's status as secular socialist saint.

That he was captured not in Panama but rather El Salvador in a Delta Force operation codenamed Pit Viper was something of a PR coup for the Americans, then, as was the fact that he was caught with both gold bullion and suitcases of cash totaling together close to four million dollars - quite the man of the people. A brief firefight that saw six of his bodyguards killed ended with Torrijos in handcuffs at an airport near San Salvador where the US had to fend off Salvadoran security forces and rebels fighting in tandem to free him, and "Flight O" was forced to land in Jamaica to refuel as there were rumors that Cuban operatives would have attempted to shoot the plane down upon approach to Guantanamo with surface-to-air missiles on Castro's orders rather than allow Torrijos to stand trial in the United States (it should be said that these rumors ought to be taken with a grain of salt, considering how cautious and tactical Castro generally was about when and how he poked the bear).

While Noriega [3] remained at large, the intellectual and spiritual leader of the great late 1970s left-wing revolt against American influence in the region arrived in Miami on July 28th, 1981, and was handed over the FBI to stand trial on international terrorism and money laundering charges. The Carey administration made a great show, spearheaded by Attorney General Byron White, of the fact that it regarded Torrijos primarily as a criminal rather than as an enemy combatant, and that he would be treated as such and that "the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind very fine, and we will see justice done." It was hard to find many people in America who were not excited about Torrijos' capture; Pit Viper was applauded just as loudly by the New Left in Congress as it was by the New Right.

That was not the case in Latin America, of course. For many, the capture of Torrijos - and the circumstances in which it happened - deflated their energies, while others had a newfound, steeled resolve. It was already the case that the epicenter of anti-imperialist, anti-American violence in the region was shifting south and east out of Panama, Nicaragua and El Salvador and into Colombia, where the FARC and ELN movements had substantially increased their activities throughout late 1980 and into 1981, more than tripling the number of attacks carried out - primarily hit-and-run shootings of National Police officers, violent bank robberies and hostage situations, and kidnappings of prominent Colombians, especially the children of wealthy businessmen or powerful politicians. The FARC and Communists had together formed a new unified movement, the Union Patriotica, headed by Jaime Pardo Leal, a name that would soon be very well known both in Bogota and Washington. The Ford administration had perhaps prematurely drawn down its military presence in Colombia with relative peace in Panama, and now revolutionary cadres growing in power in both Colombia and Venezuela could transit the border at will to and from jungle training camps and hideouts. It became apparent, too, that Noriega was somewhere among them, and Cuban advisors were in the trans-Andean bush of both states. The insurgency in Latin America had not ended, it had simply entered a new stage...

[1] Tucson, like Phoenix, is basically just a giant suburb in the desert after all
[2] Sorry, Garden Staters!
[3] For being a central figure in a very minor conflict (my professor of military history at UW, an active Colonel in the US Army, quipped that Operation Just Cause is referred to inside the armed forces as Operation "Just 'Cuz"), its interesting how many movies in the late 1980s and early 1990s had very explicit Noriega stand-ins and how he rose in American popular culture. Die Hard 2 and License to Kill in particular come to mind

 

[KingSweden24]

Intrigue in Israel​

By the late 1970s, Israel was in a curious position that confounded outside observers. On the one hand, it had survived a remarkable gauntlet of foreign policy crises, both in wars with its neighbors in 1967 and 1973 that it had decisively won (the latter had been part of the trigger for the Arab Oil Embargo that had brought the post-WW2 economic boom to an end across the world) as well as in the Munich Massacre, where the Israeli wrestling team had been held hostage in their hotel rooms by Palestinian terrorist group Black September and then slaughtered before the German police could free them. On the other, though, Israel was increasingly seen around the world, and domestically, as an economic basket case, plagued by chronically slow growth, hyperinflation, and increasingly elevated unemployment, and had been hit hard by the economic earthquakes of the late 1970s, particularly the sharp rise in oil prices beginning in early 1978 and peaking in the summer of 1980. It had a massive debt load, had been forced to devalue its currency, and was heavily reliant on Western direct aid and investment to keep solvent. [1]

This became a key incident in the Israeli elections of 1981, between Menachem Begin's Likud Party and Shimon Peres' Alignment, associated with the dominant Labor Party. Labor had essentially run Israel without interruption since the foundation of the state thirty years prior, which had made Begin's 1977 victory a decisive break from tradition thought to augur a new day in Israel, particularly as Begin had once been regarded as a figure of the hard-right fringe. The 1977 election had essentially boiled down to a question of whether to stick with the establishment Labor, which had won the Yom Kippur War but was now embroiled in corruption scandals and poor economic stewardship, or to roll the dice on the polarizing Begin, who despite suffering a heart attack that sidelined him from the campaign had led Likud to a historic victory. Begin had surprised observers by sealing the Rose Garden Agreement with Egypt, brokered by the United States, contrary to his reputation as a hardline conservative, thus removing Peres' argument ahead of polls in 1981 that Begin was a dangerous maniac, but Israel's economy had in the meantime not improved markedly, and by the end of his four-year term Begin's Likud was just as beset by corruption scandals and disputes with its coalition partners.

The 1981 polls were thus unique in Israel as they were seen as possibly the most competitive in recent history, with both major parties unpopular with key segments of the population and the votes expected to split down ethnic lines - Ashkenazim in support of Alignment, Sephardim in support of Likud, and Mizrahim likely to prove the decisive swing vote, as it had been in 1977. Begin leaned on his reputation as a humble, pious man standing against a corrupt and hapless establishment, taking advantage of the fact that he was by far more popular than anyone else in his party; Peres, after promising the key post of Finance Minister to his intraparty rival and immediate predecessor as leader Yitzhak Rabin [2], ran not againts Likud demagogy or perceived extremism but rather against "promises broken." Electoral violence was not uncommon as both sides attempted to intimidate their opponents and families broke apart into angry arguments; the combativeness of the leaders helped fuel the polarizing attitudes.

Likud's comeback from its polling nadir six months earlier was remarkable, and they gained one seat to end on 46; Alignment, however, ended with 47 after winning fifteen seats from their 1977 drubbing, giving them the first opportunity to form a government with minor parties in the Knesset, which Peres rapidly set about doing, including burying the hatchet with Moshe Dayan, who had been expelled from Alignment for joining Begin's government in 1977 but now ran his own party, Telem. The narrow results left Begin in a position of influence, however, and with Alignment looking over their shoulders for the term to come, particularly as Peres became concerned about keeping his small majority together. As he returned to the PM's office, he was briefed by the ailing Dayan (who would die in October) on a number of issues, including concerns about rising tensions with Iraq, and an operation to bomb its main nuclear reactor at Osirak that had been called off due to Begin's concern about losing key French and American support in the run-up to the election. [3] Peres was informed by Dayan, however, that Begin had intended to carry out the operation post-election and that the Israeli military was in support of an anticipatory attack, and that the view was consensus within the IDF that Osirak, contrary to Hussein's assurances, was capable of enriching plutonium sufficient to build a nuclear weapon, which would dramatically change the balance of power in the Middle East...

[1] Israel's economy looked very Latin American/Third World at this point in time, unlike the bustling tech/pharma knowledge economy of today
[2] A key mistake Peres made in OTL was not including Rabin in a potential Cabinet, splitting the party
[3] IOTL, Iran bombed Osirak first, leaving Israel with key intelligence on it; here, Israel, has no such intelligence, so the bombing is delayed.

 

[KingSweden24]

G7 Number 7​

Joe Clark had a tremendous amount of pride over the fact that he would be welcoming the other leaders of the G7 to Ottawa in July of 1981, and in many ways it would be a remarkable hour - France's Valery Giscard d'Estaing was the dean of the group's leaders, with nobody else having served as President or Prime Minister of their respective country for any earlier than 1979, when Clark himself had been elected - making him the second-most tenured leader in the group, a remarkable statistic, and suggesting that the period 1980-81 was if nothing else a great changing of the guard within the West as a new generation took the reigns to face down the new challenges of the 1980s.

The 1981 G7 conference in Ottawa is famous for its big personalities all getting together in one place - the gruff, old-school labor bruisers Hugh Carey and Denis Healey, who having met for the first time earlier in the spring grew much closer at the meeting; the bright Giscard and his close ally, the EU Commission President Gaston Thorn of neighboring Luxembourg; and the personality everybody was already dreading having to deal with, Germany's bombastic but cunning Franz-Josef Strauss, possibly the most colorful, charismatic and conservative Chancellor of Germany since... well, perhaps best not to mention him. Clark seemed like a minnow compared to these other sharp-elbowed men, but nonetheless impressed with his command of the issues and frequent appearances before the media during the summit. The summit's focus was on resolving issues outstanding between the various members, particularly on the matter of the slow recovery out of the 1978-80 economic malaise and how the G7's collective major economies could facilitate that. To what extent these matters were accomplished was debatable - for as much as Clark got on well with everybody and helped build prestige for Canada with his counterparts, it was lost on nobody the difficulty they had dealing with Strauss and West Germany was, all of a sudden, regarded as the weakest link in the chain for the first time in decades as Bonn's unpredictable new chief made his presence felt.

One issue which went somewhat unspoken at the G7 but still dominated the summer of 1981, though, was the remarkable collapse of the Italian government mere weeks before the fresh Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini had arrived in Ottawa - indeed, Spadolini had been on the job a mere three weeks at the start of the summit. This was due to the what is known now as the "Propaganda Due," or P2, scandal in Italy, which had kneecapped the ruling Christian Democracy and thrust Spadolini into a unity government after the resignation of Arnaldo Forlani, a towering figure of the Italian right from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, after a mere nine months in office.

P2 was a complicated scandal which involved the revelation of a fiercely anti-communist Masonic Lodge within Italy that included the heads of its security services, media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, the Savoyard pretender to the Italian throne, and dozens of other major figures of Italian business, culture and politics - indeed, the whole thing had been uncovered in the first place during a relatively routine investigation of the financier Michele Sindona and his ties to the Sicilian Mafia. Freemasonry had an important role in Italy, having been a key component of both the Savoyard Kingdom's firm anticlericalism and disputes with the Catholic Church and then perhaps uncomfortably cozy with the Fascist government, as had its old rival the Vatican been. After the end of the Second World War, however, Italian Freemasonry had moved in a more conservative, anti-communist direction, especially since the global New Left uprisings of 1968 which hit as hard in Italy as anywhere else and then the "Hot Autumn" of strikes the following year that led to the Years of Lead, a decade-long internal conflict in Italy in which far-left and far-right groups performed assassinations, kidnappings and bombings culminating with the abduction and murder of statesman Aldo Moro in 1978 by the Red Brigades, a violent Communist paramilitary.

Conspiracy theorists found P2 salacious and juicy, understandably, what with its trappings of serving as a "shadow government" of powerful state and media figures as well as its connections to Freemasonry. What it really tipped its hand towards, though, was at least in Italy but increasingly throughout the world a gradual erosion of the fairly consensus-oriented post-WW2 economic and social order, often dominated by single parties that absorbed into them multiple factions in order to suppress the violent politics viewed as having contributed to the disaster of 1939-45. Christian Democracy in Italy was perhaps the most obvious and infamous example of this, containing both right-wing and left-wing factions that, with the party having sat in government unbroken since 1945, were more concerned about battling one another than any extarpartisan threat, which in 1981 was mostly the Soviet-skeptical Communist Party of Italy (PCI) of the ailing Enrico Berlinguer. The scandal brought down the Forlani government and with it the dominance of Christian Democracy over Italy; Spadolini hailed from the Republicans, a liberal part of the center, with the P2 Affair thus coming to be seen as a clear inflection point in Italian postwar history so soon after Moro's death. The age of the ideologically vague "party of government" was starting to come to an end as philosophies and interests became more complicated and sophisticated, in tune with the more culturally and economically sophisticated needs of an increasingly affluent global electorate.

Shockwaves in Italy aside, P2's reach was not limited to the Boot. Argentineans reacted negatively to the scandal what with the "list" of members of the secret lodge including a number of figures of not just the recently-collapsed military junta but also right-wing Peronists active in the paramilitary groups (for instance, the infamous "Triple A") that had destabilized the country in infighting between the Peronist right and left in the 1970s [1] such as Jose Lopez Rega and Rodolfo Almiron, men who had sat at the right hand of Juan Peron and his wife and successor, Isabel, right at the end before the 1976 coup. This opened a number of uncomfortable questions for Argentina's President, Italo Luder, who had briefly been acting President of the country during Isabel Peron's administration for about a month in 1975. Almiron in particular was regarded as the Triple A death squad's most fearsome commandant and the organization was held responsible for murdering perhaps as many as 1,500 persons between 1973 and 1976; Rega and Almiron both were now in the wind, their whereabouts unknown. [2] What, exactly, did Luder know about their activities during the increasing violence that had eventually led to the Videla era in Argentina? The question of potentially trying former members of the junta, Videla in particular, was in the early 1980s a live one in Argentina, and whether Luder would pursue such a case suddenly intermixed with his potentially unsavory ties to Peron-era thugs and led more than a few Argentines to wonder if the collapse of the junta and transition to democracy the previous year really did mark an end to two decades of coups, Peronist restoration and state and paramilitary terror against them...

[1] Really remarkable how many countries - Italy, Argentina, Turkey, etc - had something approximating the Years of Lead in the 1970s
[2] All true, for what it's worth, and why I find a potential Luder Presidency interesting. Argentina, despite being... well, Argentina, was probably much better off with Alfonsin at the helm during the 1980s as a genuine fresh start from Peronism and the junta alike. (And yes, I did just watch "Argentina, 1985." Ricardo Darin is one of my favorite actors!)

 

[KingSweden24]

Author's Note: Apologies for the delayed updates - I'm trying to sprint to the finish line (well, sort of) on Cinco de Mayo before I hit 500 pages and have to switch to the sequel thread, so that's been the focus of much of my attention, plus there's been the aforementioned writer's block on getting a lot of complicated pieces put on the board for 1982 iTTL. Thank you all who nominated this, again, for the Turtledove (I voted for Geronimo by @Iwanh both as a nomination and as my final vote, as I don't believe it's ethical to vote for your own work, and if you haven't checked out that timeline, make sure you do. One of my favorite projects on this site).

Anyways!

The Fog in Poland​

Popular sentiment in the West in terms of the Eastern Bloc - insofar as it thought of the Eastern Bloc separate from the Soviet Union - generally saw the Warsaw Pact countries, and even communist Yugoslavia despite the Tito-Stalin Split having occurred three decades prior, as a faceless morass of Soviet satellite states held down under the oppressive weight of the great Red bear. In many ways, the Eastern Bloc was just as much a colonial empire beholden to a metropole in Moscow as the collapses Western European colonial empires in Africa and Asia. Every twelve years or so - first 1956 in Hungary, then 1968 in Czechoslovakia - the Soviets invaded one of their vassals to put down a local rebellion, usually from an insufficiently pliant new Premier or General-Secretary of the local Communist Party, and then returned to hibernate in their cave having taken a scalp. Right on schedule in 1980 and into the following year, unrest in Poland suggested to many Western observers that the game was afoot again, this time instigated by the opaque but perceptive hardline leadership embodied by Yuri Andropov, the former chairman of the KGB.

The reality was considerably more complicated. While poor by Western European standards, Czechoslovakia and Hungary enjoyed fairly functional economies and a decent standard of living, to the point that Andropov's much-touted economic reforms towards a more rationalized Five-Year Plan focused on improvements in the field of consumer goods had been in many ways inspired by, if not outright lifted from, Hungary's "goulash communism." Conversely, other corners of Communist Europe were, to put it mildly, economic basket cases considerably worse off than their peers, most notably Romania and, by the start of the 1980s, Poland. The previous decade in Poland had started out with promise, as Edward Gierek had taken over after the fall of his more authoritarian and doctrinaire predecessor Wladyslaw Gomulka had violently crushed the 1968 student protests and the December 1970 strike action. Gierek was a modernizer and, by the standards of 1970s communism, a progressive. New highways, rail stations and apartments were built, censorship laws were relaxed, new industrial plants constructed to take advantage of Polish Silesia's ample coal resources and by the end of his tenure, trade unionism had been legalized in the form of Solidarnosc - Solidarity - which rapidly gained members as the only legal trade union in Poland under its controversial and charismatic leader, Lech Walesa. Much of Gierek's economic program for Poland was, unusually for the Eastern Bloc, financed by large loans from Western banks and investors, particularly in West Germany and the United States, which initially worked quite well and triggered a brief golden age in miniature in the early 1970s were the Polish economy flourished and imports of Western consumer goods dramatically changed Poland's standard of living.

The 1973-74 oil crisis, as it did in so many places all over the world, dramatically changed this calculation. [1] Suddenly, the goods on which Poland had over the previous three years come to greatly enjoy were considerably more expensive to produce and thus import, and the lending costs on Poland's ballooning billions in debt went up considerably as well. With the second body blow of the Panama Shock crippling global supply chains and making consumer goods even more difficult to come by and the world economy grinding even harder to a halt, Poland went into one of the most severe recessions in the world, and by early 1981 could credibly be described as being the world's most depressed economy outside of similarly debt-addicted, debt-laden Latin America. Inflation was extraordinarily high and the government was forced to institute rationing to prevent shortages, which only further exacerbated its spiraling popularity, and foreign lenders cut off any more cash that could have been used to buy the loyalty of the people. [2] Late in 1980, with Poland essentially insolvent and with the national income in a state of collapse (as much as 20-25% lower than it had been in 1977), Gierek was forced out, allegedly in some corners at Andropov's behest, and indeed confined to house arrest a mere month after the Gdansk Agreement which legalized Solidarity.

Gierek's replacement was Wojciech Jaruzelski, who uniquely within the Communist world was not some hack or apparatchik from within the murky machinery of the Communist state but rather a longstanding Minister of Defense and general in the Polish Army. The extent of Jaruzelski's commitment to doctrinaire Marxism is debatable, within Poland and without; in many ways, he was a military man through and through who simply painted his personal ambitions for power in the red color of the Warsaw Pact. Even before becoming General Secretary, Jaruzelski had drawn up plans for imposing martial law, dispatched the security services to infiltrate Solidarity and prepared lists of opposition figures to imprison if need be, and presented such plans to Moscow directly. [3] One important distinction between the increasingly dire circumstances in Poland in the early 1980s, however, and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 or Prague Spring of 1968 was that Jaruzelski and Andropov were both much more keenly aware that to invite a Soviet intervention would make things considerably worse.

This was for a variety of reasons - the intense unpopularity of Brezhnev's decision to roll the tanks into Prague in 1968 and depose Alexander Dubcek had badly effected Soviet prestige not just with the citizens of various Warsaw Pact countries but irreparably damaged the opinions of Western leftist intellectuals towards the Soviet Union, an irony as 1968 was in many ways the crescendo of pro-leftist sentiment across much of the West, particularly amongst European students (most famously in Paris in May of that year). While Jaruzelski inviting Andropov to intervene on his behalf was a very different circumstance from the unilateral and external interventions in internal politics of Budapest '56 and Prague '68, comparisons were sure to follow.

The other reason was that after a decade of economic stagnation and rampant corruption under Brezhnev, Andropov was cautious about doing anything that could potentially damage his project to revitalize the Soviet Union's standard of living and national pride as the foundation for revitalizing communism around the world. Detente had been a qualified success for Moscow as the Nixon Thaw had led not just to the signing of the SALT I and II treaties [4] but access to Western machine tools, particularly valuable in the field of agriculture; this so-called "detente dividend" had allowed both NATO and the Warsaw Pact to modernize and reform their militaries through a process of rationalization, though the West still balked at the perceived size and sophistication of the Red Army and this process, which would come to a screeching halt at the end of October 1981 [5], was more about a comprehensive rethink of doctrine and strategic deployment of technology rather than any reduction in readiness other than the limitation in total nuclear arms.

As the situation worsened over the course of 1981, then, the situation in Poland became increasingly foggy. Western observers, most prominently Zbigniew Brzezinski - the Polish-born National Security Advisor to President Hugh Carey - became convinced that the March 1981 WARPAC field exercise was the preemptive invasion of Poland to crush Solidarity [6], and even though the 1981 war games came and went without the occupation of Poland by the Red Army, tensions mounted. Brzezinski and other Polish Americans, such as powerful Illinois Democrat Dan Rostenkowski, began encouraging Carey to take a hard stand on the matter in Poland, which some reports suggested was teetering on the brink of civil war, creating deep uncertainty within a Democratic Party eager to review and reform the Pentagon's weapons development and procurement processes about how far exactly they could go when NATO European forces were seen as woefully unprepared in case of conflict with the Soviet Union.

This murkiness was even more pronounced behind the Iron Curtain, where Jaruzelski began talking himself into the imposition of martial law out of a conviction that Andropov would invade if he did not, not realizing the instinctively hesitant Andropov's own reluctance to pull the trigger or how much his demands for supplies from Moscow were starting to come across to Andropov and his inner circle as borderline extortionate. On the eve of the crisis that erupted out of nowhere in the closing days of October 1981, then, another crisis was already coming to a head within the Warsaw Pact, one which could potentially end with the Finlandization of Poland, an event Andropov was increasingly resigned towards despite the domino effect that it could possibly have across Eastern Europe - provided that somebody else didn't blink first... [7][8]

[1] I keep belaboring this point, but it's hard to emphasize just how catastrophic 1973 was to many poorer emerging economies, on a scale that honestly even 2008 arguably barely reached (many economies reached or exceeded their 2007-level output within years - 2008 badly broke several developed economies for close to a decade, but the developing world bounced back quicker). The mid-1970s were like a second Great Depression for much of the developing world. It is important to view the context of the late 1970s/early 1980s, both OTL and TTL, as being events lying in the shadow of the oil embargo and its chaotic, paradigm-shifting aftermath.
[2] Besides adjusting to account for the Panama Shock, this is all OTL
[3] I'm using a bit of a balancing act here with Solidarity's rise - yes, there is no John Paul II to inspire Polish resistance to Soviet imperialism, but Poland's economy is, if its even possible, even worse off than OTL. It evens out to Solidarity still enjoying its ascendancy in 1980-81.
[4] My thinking here is that a second Ford admin would just keep going with the extant negotiations, which only collapsed OTL because of Afghanistan, which here the USSR has only committed advisors to rather than a full-blown invasion.
[5] Foreshadowing...
[6] The Americans does a good job of portraying this in the Reagan assassination attempt episode
[7] From what I've read, this isn't far from the truth - Andropov did not like Jaruzelski and seemed, apparently, to think that he could come to an accommodation with Walesa if push came to shove, and that unless Poland tried to drop out of WARPAC or something wild like that Soviet interests could be reasonably defended.
[8] Lot of table-setting in this update

 

[KingSweden24]

Brace for Impact - Part I [1]​

The history of Bangladesh had been a sordid and bloody one, with the nation state tracing its immediate origin to the Partition of Bengal in the early 1900s by the British Viceroy Lord Curzon. [2] After the Partition of India, in an effort to form an Islamic Republic of Pakistan united by shared sectarian brotherhood in South Asia rather than an ethnic nationalism or even geographic coherence, the Muslim eastern half of Bengal had been split off from its Hindu-majority west and made the territory of "East Pakistan," united - in theory, at least - harmoniously with the Urdu-speaking West Pakistan with India wedged in between.

To say this arrangement had not worked out would be an understatement; despite being both wealthier and more populous, East Pakistan saw Urdu imposed as the state language, the Western half receive the lion's share of government officials, patronage and direct spending, and for good measure endured contemptuous discrimination as a result while treated little better than an internal colony. In 1968, as in much of the world, unrest erupted from a grab-bag of not just left-wing students but also Bengali nationalists and disenchanted civil servants tired of the ongoing arrangement. Sensing a crisis was brewing, the Pakistani government held elections intended to be equal, which the Awami League of Bengal practically swept, entitling them to form a government, only for Pakistan's aristocratic Zulfikar Bhutto of the populist-nationalist PPP to announce he would boycott the Parliament, thus triggering the Bangladesh Liberation War, in which Pakistan's military dictator Yahya Khan ordered the army to crush the Bengali revolution. India would in time intervene and destroy the Pakistani forces, but only after between five hundred thousand to upwards of three million civilians had been slaughtered in what could credibly be called an intentional genocide of Bangladesh by Pakistan.

The aftermath of the war-torn, devastated country saw the Awami League's populist, socialist leader Sheikh Mujibur "Mujib" Rahman rise to power and consolidate influence beneath himself in fairly un-democratic fashions, much as Bhutto himself was doing to the west in a Pakistan cowed by its disastrous performance and cleavage in two. [3] Mujib rapidly went to work instituting not only much-needed land reform but also crushing his political opposition, nationalizing several industries that quite noticeably did not include those owned by certain Western interests and doling out their ownership to his key cronies. With the economy in tailspin, disgruntled army officers who were not allowed in on the grift eventually staged a coup and slaughtered him and most of his family on August 15, 1975. Western leaders, despite having enjoyed cordial relations with Mujib, were not sad to see him go - he had imposed a one-party state seven months earlier that had failed to quell a simmering Maoist insurgency in the countryside, and had presided over a crippling famine in 1974 in what was already one of the poorest countries in the world.

A chaotic rotation of generals followed the August 15th Incident and subsequent unrest, culminating in General Zaiur Rahman's usurpation of the Presidency in early 1977, which quickly stabilized matters. Rahman allowed Mujib's daughter back from exile, expanded the police forces and military, and quickly set about on an aggressive developmentalist path meant to alleviate Bangladesh's illiteracy, poverty and dependence on foreign countries, most notably India and the Soviet Union. Having won a five-year term in the 1978 elections, Rahman escalated his campaign to improve agricultural productivity and began repairing relations with Pakistan, the People's Republic of China, Iran, and most critically Saudi Arabia. The latter was not just out of an attempt to become closer to Gulf states for access to oil or to improve the prestige of Bangladesh in the Gulf for foreign workers who may pay remittances - though that certainly helped - but rather as a cornerstone of his campaign of re-Islamization in Bangladesh.

Rahman's Bangladesh can be viewed as a vehicle for soft-nationalist, Islamist, state socialist developmentalism, in which Rahman defined small-s socialism as an aspiration for justice and equality that Islam already demanded and specifically and deliberately tied Bangladeshi identity to the state religion rather than purely the Bengali language and culture, which it of course shared with India. An inclusive national identity centered in Islam rather than Bengali nationhood appealed as well to the country's myriad ethnic minorities, and by 1981 the only thing that could - and had, in some corners - damage Rahman's public reputation was his decision to codify indemnity for the assassins of Mujib, earning him the ire of the Awami League and his opponents in the Army.

The failed assassination attempt against Rahman [4] in May of 1981 in Chittagong thus opened the door to a full purge via execution of his internal enemies and Rahman's further consolidation of his status as a hero to his people, despite increasingly heavy-handed behavior by his close associates. As the year progressed, Rahman became increasingly concerned about the security situation in Saudi Arabia, particularly in the Shiite-heavy Eastern Province where so many Bangladeshis worked in the oilfields. To that end, Rahman made a highly-publicized state visit to the Gulf region that autumn, first to Qatar and Kuwait and then to Riyadh, before heading home via Iran and even Pakistan, where he symbolically seemed to bury the hatchet with the ever-autocratic Bhutto. The visit included key one-on-one meetings with American, British, Canadian and French diplomatic personnel in each of those countries, rocketing Rahman up the list of world leaders that the new Carey administration was familiar with as a "friendly face" in the region and boosted Bangladesh's credence in Western circles as a potentially reliable partner as India's heir apparent Sanjay Gandhi seemed to be increasingly idiosyncratic if not erratic and Pakistan continued to increasingly pursue opaque interests clear only to Bhutto and, perhaps, Hua Guofeng and the PRC foreign ministry in Beijing, with whom he was concerningly cozy.

To that end, as Rahman established himself as simultaneously South Asia and the Muslim world's most dynamic, ambitious new leader, New Delhi for its part became increasingly paranoid, feeling boxed in between its archrival Pakistan to one side (whom the Soviets were very friendly with), [5] China across the Himalayas (who Bhutto was also cultivating a strong relationship with), and now an assertive Bangladesh making itself useful and valuable to the West...

[1] Brace for Impact will be three (maybe four) updates taking us around to various parts of the Islamic world, specifically places tight with the US, to set the stage for events in late 1981/early 1982. They won't all be sequential, but I want to make sure each little corner gets its due
[2] Readers of Cinco de Mayo will recognize this name and what a blundering idiot he was
[3] Remember - Bhutto was not overthrown ITTL and has had several more years to consolidate his control over Pakistan.
[4] Successful IOTL, our main butterfly
[5] Purely subtextual, but in my head-canon Bhutto staying in power and being much more amenable to Moscow than Zia ul-Haq is one part of the reason why Andropov never pulled the trigger to go all-in on Afghanistan ITTL, which was a close-run decision with many skeptics as it was.

 

[KingSweden24]

Brace for Impact - Part II​

Of all the countries of the Middle East, save perhaps Israel for its obvious importance in Judeo-Christian tradition, the place that holds the imagination of the West most is Egypt. It is the fabled home of Cleopatra and her doomed romance that brought down the Roman Republic; it is the mysterious desert land of sphinxes, pharaohs and pyramids that so fascinated European explorers, artists and politicians for decades; and, perhaps most germanely to the geopolitical environment of late 1981, it was the first country of the "third world," so to speak, that stood up to Western military and economic might under Gamel Abdel Nasser in the Suez Crisis of 1956, nearly triggering a global war and signaling definitively that the Age of Empire was over, that it was time for Britain in particular to retreat back to her island and that a strange new age was upon the world. Egypt had seemed to be at the center of two of the other most important intrigues of the last decade, those of the 1973 Yom Kippur War which broke the mythos of an invincible, impregnable Israel in the Sinai and led to the epoch-defining Arab oil embargo, and then suddenly six years later the signing of the Rose Garden Treaty, a mutual recognition of peace with Israel that brought Egypt into the Western camp more or less permanently from then on and arguably the greatest achievement of President Gerald Ford's full term in office.

Central to both of these events was the curious figure of Mohammed Anwar Sadat, who upon replacing Nasser as President in October of 1970 had stunned Egypt and indeed the world by making his presence felt not as the near-anonymous puppet vice president he had been viewed as but rather as a force in his own right, ending Nasserism both as a socialistic, Arab nationalist mission and indeed as the centerpiece of Egyptian and indeed Arab foreign policy. He had purged the government of the Nasserists who had once hoped to manipulate him, steered Egypt towards a close alliance with Iran (he was particularly close to Shah Mohammed Reza and traveled to Pakistan for his funeral) and reformed the Egyptian military so it could carry out its remarkable achievements in the Yom Kippur War but then also sought out peace with Israel, which enraged the Arab world and drove Egypt out of the brotherhood of the Arab League but into the eager arms of a generous West which rewarded Egypt with money and investment both in military kit but also economic support, important in the high-inflation and volatile late 1970s. Sadat had maneuvered through the shock of peace with the once-eternal foe of Israel by rewarding Islamist and Coptic figures with support to build a separate political base; Egypt had ditched left-wing, secular, pro-Soviet Arab nationalism from the age of Nasser for a socially conservative but pro-Western and developmentalist Egyptian nationalism.

That was not to say that Sadat's accommodation with Israel was popular with all Islamists, because it most certainly wasn't, and the decision had destabilized Egypt. Sadat took the view that Soviet-backed hatchet men such as Hafez al-Assad in former ally Syria and longstanding Libyan crackpot Muammar al-Gaddafi were behind much of the internal unrest that plagued Egypt in the early 1980s, but Islamist officials and military figures opposed to Sadat were a big part of it, too. Matters came to a head in June 1981, when a failed coup was put down and followed by a mass crackdown that included the shuttering of independent press and mass arrests which only served to make Sadat more unpopular, culminating in a botched assassination attempt on him on October 6, 1981, in which an Islamist sleeper agent in the Army, Khalid Islambouli, fired his machine gun at Sadat's grandstand during the annual victory parade. Sadat was badly wounded, losing his right hand, and his Vice President, General Hosni Mubarak, was killed; [1] also killed that day was the Cuban ambassador and James Tully, the Irish Minister of Defense, shocking both of those foreign lands.

The Muslim Brotherhood, while not directly responsible for the attack, had long been a thorn in the side of Sadat's government as an independent power structure in Egypt, the country of their founding - no more. Upon his leaving the hospital on October 10, 1981, Sadat stood up before a small nest of microphones, held up the bandaged stump where his right hand had been, and declared, "Allah has graced me by sparing my life; Allah forgive me, but I cannot be as gracious as He towards those who have attempted to destroy Egypt!" [2] What followed throughout the autumn of 1981 stunned Egypt and indeed much of the Arab world, as Sadat carried out one of the most ruthless purges of political opponents in any country since Stalin. After torturing as much information out of the attempted assassins led by Islambouli as possible, the captured cell of soldiers were publicly executed by hanging. Figures attached to two groups of potential perpetrators, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group, were next on the list. Those already in prison found themselves facing firing squads in courtyards; those who weren't were assassinated by death squads or simply disappeared. Prominent Islamic polemicists like Aywan al-Zawahiri and Tala'at Qasim were murdered in their homes, while the infamous "Blind Sheikh," Omer Abdel-Rahman [3] who had allegedly given a fatwa to the killers for Sadat's murder, was publicly executed just to make a point. Even more moderate members of the Muslim Brotherhood were given life sentences, tortured and murdered in an orgy of death that lasted deep into 1983 and left organized Islamist opposition to Sadat within Egypt a husk.

It was not only Islamists who found themselves on the chopping block, however; many of the military opponents of Sadat who had attempted to overthrow him in June of 1981 were declared traitors and shot, and prominent Nasserist critics of the regime were arrested and publicly tried. The hope in the West of an open, free and progressive Arab superpower in Egypt had in the space of a year been utterly dashed, but also left Sadat stronger than ever and, conveniently, still very much in the pro-Western camp. The speed, breadth and ferocity of his purge in the wake of his survival had left observers slack-jawed and Iranian SAVAK agents kicking themselves that they had not pulled something like that off themselves; Egyptian "advisors" in Iran became a coming occurrence through the rest of the 1980s to help "steer" Iran's nascent but very much controlled democracy.

Most crucially, an angry Sadat ready to take his pound of flesh off any enemy rather than conciliate was an important wild card as storm clouds started to gather over the Middle East; he was friendly with Israel and Iran, hostile to pro-Soviet states like Syria, Iraq and Libya, and detested Islamists such as the ultra-fundamentalists who were increasingly bringing the viability of Saudi Arabia into question. In other words, he was a ruthless bastard, but exactly the ruthless bastard the United States, United Kingdom, Israel and Iran needed...

[1] Everything up to now is more or less OTL; however, here it is Sadat who is shot in the hand, and Mubarak who dies.
[2] Any Muslim readers are welcome to correct me if this flies dangerously close to blasphemy and would thus be extremely unlikely for a Muslim leader to publicly declare on TV
[3] Zawahiri of course needs no introduction, while Omer Abdel-Rahman was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing

 

[KingSweden24]

To Health and Solidarity - Part I​

Democrats, especially of the traditional liberal New Dealer wing, jaded by the politics of the previous sixteen years had finally found their champion in Hugh Carey. He has not a sunny optimist like FDR or JFK, no, but he was perhaps something more necessary for the bleaker, tougher conditions of the early 1980s, in which the United States was emerging from its worst economic slump since the Depression and a society-cleaving military humiliation in Vietnam followed by the embarrassing debacle of Panama. While the national press was starting to finally catch onto his mood swings that he had papered over well on the campaign trail in 1980, he was a no-nonsense straight-talker who seemed to swivel from strength to strength, having conquered a relatively impressive field of fellow Democrats in the primary, knock out the rising star of the radical right in Ronald Reagan [1], and return the Democratic Party to a position of hegemony with supermajorities in Congress a mere eight years after it had lost a 49-state landslide with only little liberal Massachusetts in its column. The first six months of Carey's first year in office had seemed to be more of the same - he had passed a massive economic rescue package that would develop a straightforward American industrial policy for the 80s, appointed the second woman to the Supreme Court, and successfully captured Omar Torrijos in the successful Operation Pit Viper. As cautiously optimistic economic data was released, the August recess looked to be drawing to a close, and the Labor Day weekend that signified the beginning of fall both for football fans and for political junkies eager to get into the meat of the second half of Carey's first year, the President was riding high on a wave of goodwill and strong approval ratings consistently in the mid-to-high 60s.

Beneath the surface, though, the truth was somewhat more complicated, and the reality was that between the ESA and several pieces of more small-bore legislation passed by Congress in the first hundred days, much of the low-hanging fruit for Democrats had been plucked. The party could essentially be seen as three separate factions united under a big tent that, while cooperative, also often had little in common - there were of course the post-Dixiecrat Southern populist conservatives, who while not the arch-segregationists of yesteryear often had more in common with Republicans on certain social and spending matters than they did their fellow co-partisans; the traditional New Deal liberals, a curious hybrid of unionized blue-collar workers and technocratic administrators; and finally the New Left, a mishmash of young Silents and Boomers who had largely come of age politically in the hot and polarizing days of the late 1960s and then ascended into the gears of politics via the insurgent McGovern campaign or as Watergate Babies in 1974. What made managing these three factions difficult, especially after a decade in the political wilderness for Democrats since their last trifecta, was that they did not necessarily map ideologically cleanly. Among the Southern Democrats you had staunch conservatives like Mississippi's James Eastland and developmentalists like Alabama's freshman Senator Jim Folsom Jr., united only by their neighboring states and penchant for bringing home pork to their home states. Figures associated with the New Left were even harder to pin down ideologically, as it included genuine left-wing firebrands like New York's Liz Holtzman and moderate, technocratic "neoliberals" like Colorado's Gary Hart. In a Congress where Democrats controlled roughly 70% of the seats and many, if not most, of the body's most exciting names had been elected post-1974 in a time when GOP fortunes were in gradual decline and anticipation for the next Democratic ascendancy was high, everybody had new ideas about where to go and what to do with the moment before them.

The debate around labor policy and healthcare thus came to consume Carey's administration as the end of August approached and the promise of Ted Kennedy's "Great Healthcare Debate" in September looming alongside the potential start of a strike of the country's air traffic controllers. As the unforeseeable crisis waiting at the end of October was not yet on anybody's radar, Carey and his chief advisors steeled themselves for what promised to be a difficult few months of contentious domestic politics balancing the needs of organized labor - by far Carey's largest constituency personally - and the dream of Democrats to finally deliver universal health coverage to all Americans. The importance of the moment was punctuated, as it were, by the massive Solidarity Day March on Labor Day weekend in DC, where hundreds of thousands of union members, organizers, activists and others gathered on the mall to demand new pro-labor legislation and a national health care act of some kind. A needle had presented itself to be threaded... [2]

[1] Alliteration!
[2] I elected in this entry to merely set the stage for this debate and split it up, in part because I needed to head to work; more to come.

 

[KingSweden24]

To Health and Solidarity - Part II​

The Carey administration, in later years, was studied and amongst many liberals commended for its approach to wanting to structure legislation around a set "plan" - rather than simply passing legislation and regulations, it formed a focused schedule on which various pieces and components would be passed, designed to keep the various moving parts in the public eye but also time them strategically not just with the media for coverage but also on the Congressional campaign calendar and with an eye towards the shifting tides of the economy. This was a sharp contrast to the approach taken in the New Deal, in which FDR's "brain trust" often just threw things at the wall to see what stuck, but by 1981 the public landscape had dramatically changed to one of mistrust of government and a skepticism that the Democrats were entering a period of unrivalled dominance as they were in 1933, and Carey was himself something of a micromanager and obsessive around discipline and structure. This could cut many ways; on the one hand, it often worked against his public persona of being a tough-talking Brooklyn boxer, but it also forced the entire White House to aggressively keep its eye on the ball both in its internal deliberations and also managing its relationship with Congress, which often fell to Chief of Staff Basil Paterson and his key aide, Andrew Cuomo, who was often sent to deal directly with Southern Democrats who might otherwise take offense to having demands made of them by a Black man.

The White House's legislative agenda from September 1981 through the late spring of 1982 was thus designed to work as a "ratchet," where new bills and acts would be gradually rolled out one by one for maximum effect ahead of the midterms, with the most controversial package, health care reform, intended to be the final crown jewel that would get pushed through ahead of the summer recess as the last piece of the package to campaign on. The two major items ahead of this were also former 1970s initiatives in the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act and the Family Assistance Plan. Together, these were consolidated under a single branding, Carey's New Deal or Great Society as it were, referred to as the "National Contract." [1] One major contrast of the FEA, FAP and health-care reform to the Great Society was that it would be targeted and easily understood - rather than a bevy of programs to collectively lower poverty (successfully, Carey would argue) the National Contract would target unemployment, family dislocation and health scares specifically, all three things that had become areas of acute concern in the wake of the late 1970s depression rather than a push to raise the standard of living for millions of Americans left behind in a time of tremendous economic growth as with LBJ. As the triad of Landrieu, Harris and Klutznick at HUD, DoT and Commerce respectively worked to implement the ESA as aggressively as possible, Carey put Paterson's office in charge of corralling Congress while Labor Secretary Fraser and HEW Secretary Breyer worked on consolidating the three packages.

This was easier said than done. With inflation still stubbornly high and unemployment only just starting to show signs of coming down as the fall advanced, many Southern Democrats and indeed other members of the party balked at these major spending priorities. Furthermore, Fraser's attention was tied up in dealing with PATCO, the air traffic controller union, which was threatening a strike all summer. An issue for Carey was that the labor-management relations had badly deteriorated in the private sector in the late 70s and indeed gotten worse in the first two years of the 1980s, as inflation and high unemployment left the previous relationships strained and union members understandably tired of being asked to sacrifice on benefits and potential pay hikes as the cost of goods skyrocketed; for this reason, labor leaders had been supportive of the Solidarity Day marches and were putting enormous pressure on Carey to not just support labor through men like Fraser taking point at the DoL but also be a full-throated backer of organizer labor "100% of the time, no exceptions." With full repeal of Taft-Hartley unlikely, the administration needed other carrots for labor allies, but this was difficult to do in the case of PATCO - the air traffic controllers were a white-collar union whose demands, unlike beleaugured auto or steelworkers, seemed extreme (including full retirement at 50 and free international travel for life, perks that even the strong UAW would never had dreamed of) and thus were fairly unsympathetic to the public but who became increasingly seen as a litmus test for the administration's relationship with the AFL. Lane Kirkland, the union congress's President for only two years, was careful to offer qualified support for PATCO, but the damage had been done and the quandary set - the administration could either cave to PATCO's red lines, or they could refuse and have egg on their face with the collapse of the air travel system and come across as hostile to labor.

Kennedy was not necessarily a team player on these matters, either. Health care had been his baby going back to the Nixon era and he was of the mind that as the largest, most difficult and controversial component of the National Contract it should be passed first; Breyer, his former chief counsel, agreed, and argued that point vociferously within the Cabinet to the point that Carey began to wonder if Breyer would resign if he did not get his way. Paterson smoothed Kennedy's ruffled feathers by encouraging him to treat the "autumn of action" as a time of "grand debate" on what such a health care plan could look like, keeping to himself that the administration favored the path of least resistance in passing what was essentially an updated version of "Nixoncare" - strong consumer protections and effective hospital price caps, and a government-sponsored "public option," an insurance plan with high copayments and deductibles and mostly-catastrophic and mild preventative coverage but which could compete with private insurance plans and at least create a skeletal program that could be built upon in the future. Many on the left flank wanted something more robust, approximating the United Kingdom's NHS or Canadian Medicare, but Carey had quietly already settled on reviving Nixoncare and was now outlining how to bring everybody, most importantly Kennedy as well as Russell Long and the conservative House Ways and Means Chairman Al Ullman, onboard with that plan.

The balancing act all came to a head suddenly on September 30th, when PATCO walked out of a meeting in which Fraser had proposed to accept much but not all of what they had wanted (while accepting the pay raises and scheduling requests, he balked on the free travel component and early retirement, and had offered a higher pension payment ratio instead) and announced that they had voted for a strike beginning October 2, 1981.

[1] Wherein I steal from my other TL because I couldn't come up with a better name, though the temptation of using "Contract with America" was there

 

[KingSweden24]

To Health and Solidarity - Part III​

The PATCO strike, while perhaps somewhat forgotten today, was inside the Carey White House a moment of intense worry - while Paterson denied that there was "panic," the administration uniformly recognized the intense risk of misplaying the situation. For starters, the strike stepped over the announcement of Humphrey-Hawkins, introduced into the Senate in a floor speech by Walter Mondale with a refrain on his mentor's famous statement, "We are not introducing this act in the hope of creating, as some would say, a planned economy; rather, we are hoping instead to encourage an economy where there is planning." Humphrey-Hawkins was intended to follow up on the specific, enumerated goals of the ESA with a further commitment to driving down unemployment and inflation through all necessary measures, prioritizing first empowering private enterprise to do so but committing the government as a backstop; in tandem with the Humphrey-Hawkins, it was as close as the United States got to setting specific industrial policy and playing footsie with dirigisme, and not only helped push for further coordination by various government agencies as a mandate but also made clear that Congress was, as Senator Marty Russo of Illinois put it in a lengthy and eloquent speech in favor of the bill, "the strongest leg of the three-legged stool of American decision-making," integrating itself with the Federal Reserve and executive branch to coordinate economic, monetary and fiscal policy together.

Carey was more excited out this, arguably, than universal healthcare, and was outraged when the publicity around the priority legislation was overwhelmed by the strike. Republicans immediately sought to take advantage of the situation, with several running to C-SPAN cameras to remind the news that PATCO had endorsed Reagan in 1980. This messaging did not last long; in an interview on the fifth day of the strike, Reagan perfunctorily stated, when asked, how he would handle the strike: "I'd fire every last one of them." While this endeared him to a great many business leaders who remembered why they had backed his campaign, it forced Republicans to either agree with his politically extreme but perfectly legal suggestion, or elucidate their own solution. As the FAA scrambled to piece together temporary employees with modest success despite a cascade of cancelled flights, Carey decided that he was going to attempt a balancing act to split the baby and both act magnanimous for the cameras but also make very clear to both the strikers and the public that he was not going to fold. Unlike some of his more nervous advisors, Carey was confident that the public was generally unsympathetic to PATCO's more outlandish requests; thus, while giving a televised address from the Roosevelt Room to encourage Congress to pass Humphrey-Hawkins on October 11, 1981 - the ninth day of the strike, and the day after a federal court had handed down an injunction requiring the strikers to head back to work - he said the following:

"I should take a moment to comment more specifically here, as I'm sure you have all been hearing a great deal about it in the news, on the strike of air traffic controllers. I'm sure many of you have seen Mr. Bruce Poli, the head of the controllers union, it's called PATCO... now Mr. Poli has said a variety of things on the news this last week, most of them with which I agree, many of them where he and I would have to agree to disagree, and some things which are just plain incorrect. This administration, over the last nine months, has worked day in and day out to find solutions for the very difficult times many Americans find themselves in. In this meagre hour of our Republic's history, we find ourselves needing to engage in some level of mutual sacrifice. Unions all across America which do not enjoy the same protections and perks as federal employees have agreed to wage freezes, to hiring pauses, to reduced health care benefits, all in order to do their part. Many of the men and women in these unions do difficult and dangerous work, at great cost to their body and minds. Now, it is true that the members of PATCO have on average made less in salary, much less, than other organized federal employees over the last ten years. My administration's deal will correct that. It is also true that the FAA in previous years, for whatever reason, elected not to implement many of the safety recommendations or address the serious concerns about being overworked brought to their attention by our nation's air traffic controllers. Many of those recommendations are in process of being implemented as we speak, and once again, the package my administration has offered PATCO sets aside money to hire thousands of new controllers over the next decade to improve staffing, morale, and scheduling to prevent severe overwork and bring down overtime costs.

Now I am sure that many of you have heard about other demands made by Mr. Poli and the rest of the PATCO board, such as retirement at full pension well before any other federal employee, such as free international air travel for life, and a 32-hour workweek, a whole fifth shorter than almost any other worker in this country who is paid a full-time wage. These are all true - and these are points on which my administration has declined, after attempted negotiation, to agree to. The package we have put together will end the imbalance experienced by members of PATCO and make our nation's air traffic control system much safer, but most importantly it is fair. It is fair to the air traffic controllers, it is fair to taxpayers, and it is fair to the hard-working men and women of other unions all across America who would never dream of the kind of non-negotiables put on the table here. There has been a lot of talk in the last month since the marches over the Labor Day weekend about solidarity amongst the working-class people of this country, and perhaps it would do PATCO's members some good to start showing some. We have all done our part, and it is time for PATCO to do theirs. Mr. Poli - it's time to go back to work."

The "Mr. Poli" line at the end had been a riff Carey came up with on the spot, but it hit the mark. The bully pulpit still had some of its power, and while PATCO members would resent Carey for lecturing them condescendingly from the White House on national TV, their position looked to be increasingly eroding. The scabs at various ATC towers were now able to keep about 70% of flights flying, and while Carey had kept mum on whether he would go for the "break glass" option of starting firings of striking members who refused to return, the fact that it was on the table started to gnaw at some strikers who slowly trickled back. On October 18, after a strike of sixteen days, Poli called the strike off in order to come back to the negotiating table for a period of thirty days, but PATCO would wind up simply accepting their new contract, having clearly lost in the court of public opinion and their staring contest with the White House, especially when FAA negotiators made clear that if they walked again the DoT would exercise its ability to sack strikers.

Carey elected to simply move on, and Humphrey-Hawkins looked likely to pass in early November - but an important milestone in labor relations had been reached, one which started to suggest that the efficacy of the strike was dwindling but also that cooperation was still possible. At any rate, just ten days after the strike ended, it was quickly lost to memory by many Americas as events overseas arrived out of nowhere in one of the 1980s' most bizarre, brief and dangerous flashpoints occurred...

 

[KingSweden24]

Whiskey on the Rocks - Part I​

It was hard to say that neutrality had not worked out extremely well for Sweden. The country's wealth was built, in large part, on having been one of the few countries not to be invaded in either WW1 or WW2 and didn't suffer any kind of revolution or civil war in the interwar period; her exports of raw goods, embarrassingly by the mores of the 1970s primarily to Nazi Germany, had filled the country's coffers and helped her industries burgeon even as Swedish diplomats worked around the clock to provide refuge to Jews, even in the belly of the beast in Budapest, such as the efforts of Raoul Wallenberg. Unlike her culturally similar Nordic cousins of Norway and Denmark, which eagerly placed themselves under the NATO umbrella almost as soon as the idea of a North Atlantic Treaty was offered, Sweden had instead pursued its own middle path, dedicated to its position looking at the Cold War from the outside, its neutral posture allowing men like Dag Hammarskjold to rise to the top of the UN while its growing industries, intact in the postwar era, were able to produce cars, steel, ships, and aircraft [1] for European and international markets while building a robust welfare state under the continuous rule of the Social Democratic Party, which had come to power in 1936 and would hold power for the next 40 straight years.

Of course, Sweden's persona as a neutral utopia of social democracy, a warm and inviting land of red-painted cottages with white trim dotting the rolling snow-covered hills inhabited by tall and gorgeous blondes covered up a considerably more complicated society than met the eye. The dominance of the Social Democrats was made possible in part by tactical alliances with the Centre Party, a clientelist agrarian outfit of the peculiarly Nordic variety, and enjoying supply and confidence of the Swedish Communists, who were cordoned out of formal government but could be expected to carry the Social Democratic water if push ever came to shove. They were assisted further by a split opposition, with the Liberals and Moderates (the rebranded Conservative Party of old) as frequently at each other's (and, starting in the early 1970s, the Christian Democrats') throats as they were aligned against the incumbent party. This attracted a great many political figures to the governing party, and meant that there was a significant and tangible split between the party's right wing and its left wing that was sorted out at party congresses and in backroom debates rather than in front of the general public.

The central, indeed epochal, figure of postwar Sweden was Tage Erlander, known as "Sweden's longest Prime Minister" [2] both for his remarkable stature and that he served 23 consecutive years at the head of government, from 1946 to 1969. Erlander built the Swedish welfare state while managing to do it with buy-in from liberal-conservative parties, balancing the creation of robust universal health care, housing and education programs with foregoing any future nationalizations of industry (as in sharp contrast to how Labour, in much more traditionally conservative Britain, went about things), and doing all of it with income tax rates lower than the United States while having the fourth largest military budget on Earth. This was one of the tradeoffs Erlander had made clear was part of the equation - Sweden's neutrality, and indeed its "Strong Society," as he termed it, needed to be underwritten by its ability to unilaterally defend itself. For a time, this included eventually aborted attempts at an independent nuclear deterrent that eventually ran on the rocks of left-faction opposition and, well before that, the refusal of the Eisenhower administration to give Swedish scientists key assistance without the quid pro quo of signing up for NATO, but Sweden nonetheless had a vast military built on the foundation of mandatory universal conscription [3] with the third-largest air force in the world by the late 1960s as its crown jewel.

When Erlander resigned in 1969, he had overseen Sweden's rise from a rural resource-based economy on the periphery of Europe to an urbanizing, wealthy and vibrant society that was the envy of even some of the postwar boom's emerging major powers; indeed, it was the 10th largest economy in the world, a fact that would have been unbelievable just two generations earlier. [4] The Social Democratic Party had just earned an absolute majority in the Riksdag and would soon rewrite the relationship between monarch and government into an even more minute constitutional figurehead. Only the superpowers and Israel, in its famously unfriendly neighborhood, spent more on their militaries and had higher quality kit. It was hard to see, exactly, how the wheels could come off.

But come off they would. Erlander was a straightforward, no-nonsense, pragmatic man in the modest, small-c conservative Scandinavian tradition. His successor Olof Palme was a quarter-century his junior and of a very different generation politically. That Palme's name would come to be associated with radical left-wing politics both in Sweden and abroad was an accident of his youthful travels in the Americas; he was born to a wealthy, conservative and monarchist Lutheran family with deep, longstanding ties to German nobility (indeed he had direct Baltic German ancestry) and his namesake uncle had died a decade before he was born fighting on behalf of the Whites in the Finnish Civil War at the head of an anti-Communist battalion of Swedish volunteers. [5] Having gotten his start in politics as the head of the Social Democratic Youth League, Palme was nonetheless much more similar politically to the left-wing students who, in the spirit of the global uprisings of 1968, occupied the main student union at Stockholm University and who rallied against not just the Vietnam War but capitalism in general. [6] While certainly not entirely anti-capitalist, his chief political theory was that Sweden, having achieved great material wealth through its unique brand of social democracy, had a moral duty to export those duties abroad by leveraging her status as a rising power that punched above its weight economically, militarily and culturally, and one way for Sweden to do so was to emerge as the most prolific proponent abroad of selling a new program of progressive democracy that centered first and foremost on human rights.

This was not to say that Palme was uncontroversial at home - he greatly expanded Sweden's welfare state in the first half of the 70s and his efforts to improve the position of organized labor and job security drew the ire of a business community that had gotten along well with Erlander's more conciliatory rhetorical approach. But he was particularly a figure of scorn in the United States due to his unwavering belief that the superpowers were equally morally culpable for the atrocities of their client regimes in the Cold War; his arrival in office nearly exactly coincided with the Nixon administration, and in Richard Nixon, Olof Palme had found his perfect foil. The enmity was mutual; Palme's comparison of the Hanoi bombings in 1972 to the aerial destruction of Guernica and the horrors of the Treblinka death camp resulted in a formal break of Swedish-American relations, and he likely avoided an election defeat in 1973 thanks to the unfortunate timing of the Chilean coup, which Palme had zero doubts had been directly sponsored by Nixon, occurring mere days before appalled Swedes headed to the polls. [7]

The timing of the 1973 election was fortunate in other ways, as it occurred a month before the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which struck Sweden hard. Palme now had to govern as Prime Minister in the midst of the first genuine economic crisis Sweden had been subjected to since the Great Depression; the "record years" of 1946-73 being definitively over, Palme was now forced to navigate his way through his most difficult period yet, and in 1976 the Social Democrats lost an election for the first time in forty years. [8]

If Palme had worn out his welcome with the Swedish electorate (in no small part from defections of more old-school voters put off by his more socially progressive stances rather than old-fashioned social democratic laborism), Swedes would be treated to a debacle of remarkable proportions with what came next. The three-party coalition of the Centre, the Moderates and the Liberals agreed on little other than their mutual opposition to the tired and long-in-the-tooth incumbents, and Centre - as the largest rightist party - was able to propel its leader, Thorbjorn Falldin, into the Premiership. Falldin was a very different man from Palme; he was quiet and modest, renting out an apartment in Stockholm where he did his own cooking and took his own garbage out while his family tended his farm further north. He was also not the most talented politician, often struggling to manage the divergent personalities and ideologies of his coalition, and he was forced to resign as Prime Minister in 1978 due to the price shock but, probably just as likely, his opposition to nuclear energy (a rare area where the Swedish right and Palme were in strong agreement was on the development of a large and robust nuclear power base for Sweden as a transition from oil, especially post-1973). Ola Ullsten of the Liberals would replace him but after the indecisive general election of 1979, Falldin returned as PM and managed to stay on even after the referendum against nuclear power was defeated, in part thanks to Palme's intervention.

The coalition under Falldin similarly struggled in the face of an acute economic crisis, in which the Moderates argued for sharp tax and welfare cuts with the statement that it was now unaffordable for Sweden to maintain them and several core Swedish industries such as shipbuilding, steelmaking and forestry entering sharp declines. The unemployment rate in Sweden in the early 1980s was close to the European average despite jobs guarantees and its inflation ticked somewhat higher, and for longer, all while the government fought amongst itself, with the Moderates abandoning the coalition seeming imminent with Falldin's refusal to cave to their austerity demands in budget negotiations. Sweden, once a global darling, was flailing politically as its struggled to pull its way out of the economic malaise the whole of the Western world was still feeling in October of 1981.

And then, on the 27th of October, a Soviet submarine ran aground less than ten kilometers from the primary Swedish naval base at Karlskrona. [9]



[1] And missiles, rifles, etc, as Sweden has a robust arms industry going back to the Nobels
[2] This colloquialism doesn't translate perfectly to English, but that's what it is
[3] Lumpen, as its called in Sweden. It is also these days extremely easy to get out of (though post February 2022 may not be anymore) - my dad's allergies got him guarding some supply depot three nights a week, and that was back in the 80s. A lot of people do find their way into careers through it, though, or at least get assignments that interest them. My uncle got into practicing medicine from his time i Lumpen and my mom's cousin discovered his love of cooking working in the canteen on a naval vessel, and he's now a chef in Stockholm.
[4] Such as for those like my grandfather, born in crippling poverty as one of ten kids in remote rural Lapland in 1907
[5] Hat tip to @Zulfurium and his incomparable "A Day in July" (by far my favorite TL on this site) for tipping me off that this guy existed and had the same name as his very different nephew.
[6] Though ironically, Palme was in 1968 not very well-liked by student protestors, indeed he was a target of their ire
[7] I should note here that despite sharing a certain naiveté with other contemporary New Left types about what the North Vietnamese regime and Castro's Cuba were actually like, Palme was a vociferous opponent of Eastern European Communist regimes and was militantly outspoken against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; he particularly hated the Husak regime.
[8] Remarkable the staying power "natural parties of government" of all ideological stripes had post-WW2 from DC in Italy to Canada's Liberals to Japan's LDP
[9] So pretty much everything up to the Falldin government and even most of that material is all OTL Swedish history. This is me in part showing off a bit, as I wrote my senior thesis in college on Swedish neutrality in the Cold War so I'm quite familiar with this subject, and part of it is just giving context to this small part of the world that means a great deal to me and which, for whatever reason, I get a kick out of mildly screwing with in my TLs since OTL is about as much of an absurd Sweden-wank as you can get with a POD after Poltava.
(Also, cats out of the bag - the October Crisis is based on the Whiskey on the Rocks incident that IOTL saw cooler heads prevail but here, well...) special thanks to @Nazi Space Spy for bouncing this idea around a bit with me a few months ago!

 

[KingSweden24]

Whiskey on the Rocks - Part II​

Soviet-Swedish relations were a complicated matter stemming from a complicated history; Russia established itself in large part thanks to a defeat of the Swedish Empire at Narva and relations in the 19th century were largely defined by Russia having stripped Sweden of Finland, which had been part of the Swedish realm for centuries, in 1809 at the height of the Napoleonic Wars due to Stockholm's alliance with London. The national trauma of Finland's annexation by Russia as a semi-sovereign Grand Duchy, and that the consolation prize of Norway would for the next ninety years always have one foot out the door, was a major factor in poor, cold Sweden's choice to pursue a policy of strict armed neutrality from then on, even as the bear in the woods behind its backyard grew stronger and stronger.

It was no secret to the Khrushchev-era USSR that Sweden strongly preferred the United States, and KGB files revealed a relative awareness of negotiations between Stockholm and Washington over nuclear assistance. The massive Flygvapnet - literally, "The Flying Weapon" - was also very clearly not intended to defend against Danes hoping to grab Scania back, nor was the sizable Swedish fleet based out of Karlskrona on the Baltic coast intended to retake Swedish Pomerania. The defensive neutrality was intended to defend almost exclusively against a Soviet incursion, and for good reason - simple geography.

In the event of a war with NATO, Russia's first priority would be to secure access to the North Atlantic, and Sweden lay between Russia, Soviet-aligned Finland [1] and NATO-member Norway. From a purely strategic standpoint, this meant that Sweden's neutrality would have to be violated quickly and overwhelmingly as part of a Soviet press to the North Sea. This was why Soviet submarines were also in the Baltic at the ready, why mapping the Swedish coastline down to the distances between individual trees was the job of spies along the coast, and why the USSR was blase about the rumors of Sweden enjoying some kind of top-secret reciprocal defense arrangement with the United States. It didn't really matter if Sweden was cozier than met the eye with NATO, because if and when the balloon went up, they were a speed bump ahead of the Soviet war machine. Or so the thinking in Moscow went.

Relations between Stockholm and Moscow in the 1970s were not good. As much as the American governments of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford despised Olof Palme, what was often missed in his insistence that the two superpowers were morally equal was that it was just as much of a critique of Eastern communist imperialism as it was the Western capitalist kind. Certain right-wing analysts at the CIA may have regarded anyone to the left of Lyndon Johnson as a Soviet sympathizer waiting to happen but the reality was that Palme's Sweden was no friend to the Soviet Union and indeed part of what had sunk his government in 1976 was a major scandal over a secret intelligence agency known as the Informationbureau that was designed to spy on suspected Communist agents. The election of the center-right government of Thorbjorn Falldin in that year had only made relations worse, even if there was no chance for Sweden to join NATO even with the change over to a more pro-West administration.

The October Crisis of 1981 between Sweden and the Soviet Union was thus partially predictable due to the provocations of Soviet military activities in the Baltic and deteriorating relations, but also something of a surprise. Sweden was content as always to take a defensive but cordial posture towards their neighbors, as they had when said neighbor was still Tsarist Russia, and the rise of Yuri Andropov had, ironically, seen a USSR turning inwards in its economic reforms, anti-corruption campaigns, and efforts to first and foremost strengthen its hold over its Eastern European Communist periphery before engaging in adventurism abroad, such as Andropov's push to limit Soviet involvement in Afghanistan to military advisors and KGB assassins. The goodwill of the 1980 Olympics and Andropov's ambiguous foreign policy had left many, including most Western governments, feeling that detente was holding fast, even as events in Poland deeply concerned them (and the Politburo).

That was the context in which U-157 running aground mere kilometers from the secret passages into Karlskrona Naval Base occurred, a time of modest but slowly relaxing tensions that were little different from what had come before. The Swedish Navy immediately swarmed the submarine and negotiated its captain's surrender; as he was leaving the submarine, however, a Swedish inspector with a Geiger counter got a strong radiation reading that suggested nuclear warheads were onboard and shouted as such to his comrades. A Soviet sailor got spooked and opened fire, and in the crossfire his captain was killed; Swedish soldiers immediately stormed the submarine to secure the crew.

In Stockholm, Moscow, and across the West, telephone lines between intelligence chiefs, defense ministers and heads of government and state lit up...

[1] To an extent... they weren't WARPAC or Communist, after all. The term "Finlandization" exists for a reason!

 

[KingSweden24]

Whiskey on the Rocks - Part III​

It was Falldin upon whom the immediate decisions in the crisis fell. The submarine had been seized and its crew taken with only two losses of life, one of which was the captain. Swedish soldiers now occupied the submarine and were quickly documenting its design, machinery and equipment, most of which the Soviet crew had not had a chance to destroy in the chaos. Thus, the highly-classified specifications of a Whiskey-class nuclear sub, including warheads onboard, were for the time being in Swedish hands.

General Lennart Ljung, head of the Swedish Armed Forces, thus presented Falldin with a list of options as the weather worsened and the Defense Ministry debated whether or not to broadcast the incident to other counterparts around the world. The simple fact was that this could very easily be contained as a Soviet-Swedish matter; they were the only countries directly involved, it was Sweden's responsibility to take care of the captured Soviet sailors and it was Sweden's sovereign waters that had been violated. A quiet return of the submarine after being thoroughly inspected was the most obvious off-ramp. Of course, this could not stay quiet long; spies in the Swedish military were almost certainly leaking to their home countries, both in NATO and the Warsaw Pact, what had happened. Ljung, for his own part, favored a different course of action: telling the West immediately. He was certain that the Soviets, uncertain what the fate of its prized submarine was, would immediately try to send a rescue operation and at minimum attempt to insert a Spetsnaz special forces team near Karlskrona to destroy it before Sweden could fully document the submarine. Having NATO fully aware of the USSR's incursion into Swedish waters would create a fair deal of public and private support for Sweden come what may.

Falldin was sympathetic to the former point of view, but his hand was forced by poor weather that made it difficult to tell what exactly was ongoing out in the Baltic, and Swedish suspicions that Soviet boats were inbound. Coastal batteries were thus manned and the curiously long, straight roads in the wooded Swedish countryside with barns conveniently placed just behind the trees suddenly saw jets armed with anti-ship missiles taking off as Falldin gave the fateful order to Ljung: "Hold the border." With Sweden preparing for an outright military engagement as poor radar visibility suggested several ships near Karlskrona could be the Soviet Baltic Fleet, it was now imperative that the West get involved. Washington DC woke up to frantic phone calls from Stockholm as defense ministers in London, Paris, Bonn and Rome paired communications about a Soviet submarine being captured by Sweden along with its crew of sixty men with their dinners.

Of course, Moscow was watching events unfold as well - on the 27th, it was not the Soviet fleet but rather fishing boats from Germany that Swedish radar had spotted. Andropov's initial instinct upon learning via backchannels that the Swedes had sixty men and were outraged was in fact to stand down. It had been a Soviet blunder, and it was better - and more face-saving - to just quietly accept the mistake and arrange for the return of the sailors. This was not necessarily a popular view within the Politburo, starting with Defense Minister Ustinov, who favored a much more robust response, in part due to events in Poland. His line of thinking was that if Moscow flinched in the face of Sweden, then the Polish opposition would be emboldened there, too. The fact that Sweden could sink much of the Baltic Fleet if they so desired was of course a major difference, but Ustinov's definition of saving face was very different from Andropov's.

Once it became clear that Sweden was announcing to the world what the USSR had done, though, and that the submarine had not been successfully destroyed, Andropov's calculations changed dramatically. Now, the Soviet Union's prestige would be irreparably damaged within the Eastern Bloc if it did not at least formulate some kind of direct response. Andropov swayed the Politburo in meetings late into the night on the 27th that a limited military engagement was the most desirable path as compared to an overwhelming attack that would surely draw a Western response or standing down entirely. The Baltic Fleet was routed towards Sweden and the Air Force scrambled to carry out operations over the Gulf of Bothnia, and Andropov finally, with a fair deal of reluctance, ordered operations to commence in the morning of the 28th, especially as Sweden began to think that the German boats they had identified were all they were going to see.

The brief Soviet-Swedish War - known as the October Crisis in some parts of the West - had begun...

 

[KingSweden24]

The Soviet-Swedish War - Part I​

Contrary to his reputation before the war as a hardliner who was reinvigorating a stagnating USSR and who as early as 1978 Western leaders were incredibly fearful of, Yuri Andropov was not a gambler. He certainly leaned into his public image as a man who brooked no nonsense and suffered no fools, and his much-publicized anti-corruption campaign had been compared, limply and incorrectly, to the Great Purges of the 1930s, but at heart he was a shrewd, cautious man who preferred to build consensus within the Presidium and Politburo for his actions and was loathe to make moves if he was unable to credibly predict what might happen two or three steps down the road. He had been committed to continuing the detente of the Nixon and Ford years, not because of any particularly warm and fuzzy feelings towards the West but because he was well-versed enough with the economic and military data to know that the USSR needed a lull in tensions to restructure its economy (like much of the West, only with much more severe problems) while also maintaining its slight edge in military hard power in central Europe. The decision to attack Sweden after the capture of S-363 at Karlskrona was thus one that Andropov took extremely reluctantly - Sweden, contrary to her image in the West as a fairyland of promiscuous blondes, peaceful forest villages and perhaps most crucially a progressive neutrality, was no pushover, as the Soviets would quickly discover, and the choice to attack neutral Sweden when it was a Soviet submarine that had run aground in restricted areas was almost certain to end detente for good.

Andropov, directed by Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, elected to make the bulk of the raid one driven by the Air Force, out of concern for the safety of the underfunded Baltic Fleet still being sortied out of the Gulf of Finland. At 0515 on the morning of October 28th, wings of Mig-25s (interceptors) and Mig-27s (ground attack planes) were launched from air bases in Estonia, Kaliningrad, and East Germany. Soviet recon over the previous decade had been very strong and they were well aware of what Sweden's capabilities were like in the southern third of their country, and thus each Mig-27 pilot had a list of radar installations, missile batteries and other exclusively military targets to attack in the opening raid. The Soviet aircraft were of good quality but were close to being phased out in favor of the superior Su-27, Mig-29 and Mig-31 - all of which would be introduced formally in 1982 or 1983, making late October of 1981 a uniquely disadvantageous time for Moscow to decide to go on the attack. Nonetheless, Andropov was confident that what he was putting in the air was superior to Sweden's Flygvapnet.

This was not necessarily the case. The Saab 37 Viggen, when introduced in the early 1970s, had been possibly the most advanced jet fighter in Europe, and was the backbone of the Swedish Air Force. While its eventual replacement was in development as the Viggen's design aged and technology became more sophisticated (particularly around electronics), it was no slouch of an aircraft and matched up well with the Mig-25s and Mig-27s streaking into Swedish airspace before dawn on a Wednesday morning. The defense of southern Sweden was largely in the hands of the Scania Wing and Blekinge Wing, both at airbases near Karlskrona; additional support could be provided from Uppsala and Skaraborg. As dozens of contacts appeared across Swedish radar screens (despite best efforts to come low across the Baltic, many Migs were still detected), dozens of planes were scrambled to intercept and defend Swedish territory. Prime Minister Falldin was woken up from his sleep and the whole Swedish Cabinet taken to a secure location outside of Stockholm; King Carl XVI Gustaf and his family, including his young daughter and heir Viktoria, were evacuated from Drottningholm Palace as well.

At approximately 0600, less than an hour after taking off, the first Soviet planes struck at Karlskrona Naval Station, attempting to decimate whatever vessels were still in port and shatter defensive installations in its vicinity, blow Swedish fuel tanks and crater naval aviation runways and access roads. The second wave, after coming in on attack vector, hammered the site where S-363 had run aground, attempting to destroy the submarine entirely. The third wave struck at air bases and even civilian airfields in Gotland and across Scania and Smaland, attempting to break the ability of Swedish aircraft to respond effectively to the attacks and, most crucially, limit their ability to strike at the Baltic Fleet squadron heading out to help establish continuous sorties for air superiority.

The Soviet raid on the morning of the 28th was largely successful in most of its first-order objectives, less so on others. S-363 was entirely destroyed and the Karlskrona Naval Base was badly damaged, as were access roads, runways and radar and anti-aircraft installations across south-eastern Sweden. Total military and civilian casualties in the opening salvo was close to a thousand dead and approximately three times that number wounded. However, the Swedish Air Force was designed for interception in precisely such an event, and dogfights erupted across the Scanian skies as the run rose over Sweden, and the covering Mig-27s were not entirely able to screen their fleeing ground attack craft from Viggens streaking in at Mach 2 to shoot them down. Fourteen Soviet planes were shot down against four Swedish ones, and only four of the Soviet pilots were able to bail out in time against all four Swedish aviators successfully parachuting to safety.

Shortly after 0700, Moscow confidently messaged Stockholm and proposed an immediate ceasefire, describing the raid as a proportionate response to the S-363 incident. Swedish officials, with thousands across Scania and Smaland dead or wounded and having been at the receiving end of a unilateral surprise attack not dissimilar to Pearl Harbor, had a response that is not fit for print.

 

[KingSweden24]

The Soviet-Swedish War - Part II​

Across Europe the morning of October 28, 1981, the feared scenario that leaders had gone to bed worrying about had materialized - the Soviet Air Force had launched precision strikes across southern Sweden, targeting military infrastructure with a particular focus on Karlskrona and her environs, and left perhaps as many as a thousand dead. As midday approached, American leadership was rustled awake early in the morning in DC and Secretary of State Katzenbach put on a plane to Brussels as a show of solidarity with NATO, but it would be hours until he touched down in Europe in the evening. It was immediately unclear what, exactly, Moscow intended to do next.

The uncomfortable truth was that Moscow didn't quite know either. Andropov had had to be talked into the "bloody nose" to begin with and was fuming at Ustinov and, to a lesser extent, Mikhail Suslov for assuring him that Sweden would fold immediately. The Baltic Fleet was now out of port, heading towards Gotland, and an even larger wave of fighters and bombers being fueled and armed to be put on standby in Estonia, Kaliningrad and East Germany. Sweden had very loudly refused to cooperate with Ustinov's vision of a quick strike that would leave them reeling and Moscow looking confident and triumphant, and now it was unclear how, exactly, the two sides would deescalate without grievously losing face. It was the USSR that had snuck a sub into neutral waters and had it run aground, after all, and according to Swedish claims being aggressively announced around the world it had been Soviet sailors who opened fire first while trying to destroy sensitive onboard equipment, and now the Soviet Union had dramatically escalated by bombing merely a day after the incident had begun.

Ustinov proposed an even more aggressive course of action. The Baltic Fleet would attack the Swedish Navy and sink it, under cover of air power that would strike at Flygvapnet bases across Sweden, with particular focus on the Uppland Wing outside of Uppsala [1] that was position to defend the capital at Stockholm and Sweden's chief international airport at Arlanda, roughly halfway between the two major cities, as well as strategic rail and air assets across Lappland, which were to close to comfort to Murmansk. Additional strikes would be concentrated on the island of Gotland, a major point of defense for the Swedish coast, and Ustinov was confident that a regiment of paratroopers could be put ashore there by November 1st at the earliest. Once Gotland was captured, the Soviets would offer its return as a trade for its forty men. Ustinov boasted that the Swedes were soft and would never threaten the physical safety of the captured sailors, and that continued attacks would bring them quickly to heel.

Andropov was less certain. His immediate successor at the KGB, Vitaly Fedorchuk (now Minister of the Interior), and the current chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, were more focused on internal matters but nonetheless had plenty of good contacts across Europe, particularly in France. Of the "Big Three" of Britain, France and West Germany, it was Valery Giscard d'Estaing who was thought of as the most sympathetic to the USSR and thus his Presidential administration, particularly after the hectic election in France earlier that year, that was most sluiced through with Soviet spies; that France was independent of NATO central command authority also left if more exposed to infiltration, as did the massive Russian emigre community in Paris. Andropov had thus over the last eighteen months, particularly after the election of the rabidly anti-communist "Sauerkraut Nixon" of Franz-Josef Strauss in Germany, come to regard his cadre of spies on French soil as a good barometer of NATO leadership's thinking. By the early afternoon of October 28th, his highest-level spy in France - code-named "Paul" and to this day unidentified but believed to be extremely close to Giscard - reported that French political opinion, even amongst the Eurocommunist Parti Communiste Francaise, was firmly against Moscow's attack on southern Sweden. Giscard had apparently already spoken with both Denis Healy and Strauss multiple times over the morning and put French forces on high alert; the Royal Navy was scrambling to move assets to Denmark perhaps as early as the middle of the night.

The attacks on Sweden had badly spooked NATO, which had been watching events in Poland with trepidation as it was. The Carey administration was somewhat less concerned than their European counterparts - even the staunchly Polish-born, anti-Soviet Zbigniew Brzeninski was fairly confident that the action over the Baltic was neither a prelude to World War III or even a Soviet intervention into Poland, even though he was still of the mind that the latter was coming within the next ninety days - but nonetheless, Carey raised the alert level to DEFCON 3 and placed at least interceptors at RAF Lakenheath in England on standby. By early afternoon, after several hotline calls between NATO leaders and with much of the Flygvapnet airborne in anticipation of a second wave, most NATO members had placed their ground and air forces on alert, and the entire alliance stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a clear message: that the USSR's attack on Sweden was an unprovoked act of aggression, and Stockholm may not enjoy the military support of NATO, but it did enjoy its political and, if push came to shove, economic backing.

In Finland, caught between the two warring powers, the crisis struck on perhaps the worst possible day - October 26th was the day that Urho Kekkonen, the country's long-serving and fairly autocratic President, had finally announced his resignation, which would take effect no later than January. Kekkonen's physical and political decline had been clear for some years but it was not until he stared down his Prime Minister Mauno Koivisto, and lost, that it really came about that his resignation would be inevitable. Though he had been on leave since September and Finnish politics was swirling with speculation that he would leave, 10/26/81 had made it official that an era of Finnish history was ending and a newer, hopefully more pluralistically democratic one was beginning. [2] This was important because Kekkonen had always been fairly pro-Soviet, or at least conscientious of Soviet demands in his management of foreign policy, hence the existence of the term "Finlandization." His imminent exit right as Northern Europe plunged into its most severe crisis since World War II created a huge gaping hole in terms of what both Moscow and Helsinki could expect; the Prime Minister Koivisto, and Kekkonen's chief rival and likeliest successor, was a Social Democrat but one thought to be fairly hostile to the USSR, who had recently referred to Soviet-Finnish relations as "nothing to boast about." On his second day as Acting President, Koivisto was suddenly handed a live grenade both in relations with Europe and with Finland's large, demanding neighbor, and he made the fateful decision within hours to announce that Finland's neutral position was "resolute" and that while Finland would not hinder Soviet activities "in any conflict," it would also not "abet them." For Koivisto, such a gamble had major upsides: it established him as his own man in contrast to Kekkonen, it presumed that Moscow didn't want any further escalations with neighboring states, and it got ahead of the nightmare scenario of Finnish politics - a repeat of the Note Crisis of October 1961, exactly twenty years earlier, in which the Soviets demanded security consultations. That said, the message seemed fairly clear to Andropov in a different way outside of the context of domestic Finnish concerns: Helsinki was a potential problem in case Ustinov wanted to send air strikes through Finnish airspace, though to what extent was unclear. Chebrikov was not a fan of such lack of clarity and immediately had KGB agents in Helsinki, who operated with much more openness and impunity than essentially anywhere outside of the Iron Curtain, start feeling out more pro-Soviet politicians and, critically, soldiers in Finland who were not on "the Koivisto Line."

The 28th was thus a day of deep, drawn breaths as the world waited to see what would come next. Soldiers on either side of the fence in Berlin and the German internal border tensed up; troops across Europe wondered if this was "the big dance" they had been dreading for years. Was Andropov really mad enough to launch another attack, having already made his point? Who, exactly, was in charge in the Kremlin? The answer arrived soon enough. Thanks to the reasonable anticipation that many fighters would need to come down to refuel relatively soon after being airborne much of the day, at 1530 in the afternoon NATO reporting stations frantically informed Sweden that Soviet contacts, some above radar level, were over the Baltic Sea again.

The second wave of airstrikes was coming.

[1] My dad's hometown
[2] This is not to say that Kekkonen was a dictator, because he wasn't, but mid-century European politics were a lot more complicated than "Western = democracy, Eastern = communist" binaries. De Gaulle and the multitude of near-miss coups in France is another good example of this.

 

[KingSweden24]

The Soviet-Swedish War - Part III​

Yegor Legachev, Andropov's successor, acknowledged in 1992 during his second six-year term as General Secretary of the Soviet Union that ordering additional airstrikes on Sweden was an "error," a remarkably soft choice of words considering the strategic debacle that the events of late on October 28th and then on the 29th would prove to be for the Soviets and mark an irreparable blow to their prestige that saw their hold over their Eastern European satellites steadily erode into the early 1990s over the remainder of the decade. The second wave of Soviet aircraft, both fighter-bombers and tactical bombers with escorts, that crossed the Baltic from Estonia, Kaliningrad and East Germany was intended to step up the pressure on Swedish forces by not merely attacking the vicinity of Karlskrona but executing what Ustinov had assured his colleagues would be a "decapitating" strike on the vast majority of Swedish military infrastructure with carefully-chosen targets going beyond radar stations and airbases in Scania to include the entire island of Gotland, rail and road bridges across most of Sweden's industrial belt, air bases near Linkoping and Uppsala, and even army commands at Kungsangen near Stockholm and Revingeby near Lund. For the time being, Ustinov elected not to send additional air assets across Finnish airspace to attack Sweden's northern air and army bases or electrical infrastructure carrying power from hydroelectric dams across the mountainous, rugged north, but he did at 1700, just as Soviet planes entered Swedish airspace and prepared to attack, request that the Soviet embassy in Helsinki demand from President Koivisto military consultations within three hours time.

The first wave of Soviet attacks had been small and relatively precise, and had broken through largely thanks to the element of surprise and that much of the Flygvapnet had not yet been scrambled, but also not destroyed yet on the ground. Six hours later when the second wave arrived, however, the third-largest air force in Europe was very much airborne and its pilots furious and ready to prove their mettle. Over the course of the ensuing two hours, the Soviet planes did do serious and genuine damage both to the Swedish planes and to Swedish infrastructure, in particular those flights intended to strike at rail and road chokepoints and bridges, but at an enormous and humiliating cost. In particular, over the skies of Gotland, the Swedish Air Force was supported by the Navy, and in total over thirty Soviet planes were shot down, many into the sea without a visible bailout by a pilot, while the crucial radar installations and frontline runways on Gotland were left largely intact. While airfield and army command infrastructure around Uppsala was badly damaged and one of the runways at Sweden's main civilian airport at Stockholm-Arlanda was successfully cratered, the second wave failed most of its first and second order objectives other than shooting down close to a fifth of the Swedish Air Force, though a disproportionate number of pilots bailed out and survived than on the Soviet side, where somewhere approximating a hundred planes, including heavy bombers, were downed.

The losses for Sweden were, to put it mildly, staggering, but the bloody nose suffered by the Soviets was worse. This was an air force that was intended to support the mighty Red Army in rolling over hapless and supine NATO forces across Central Europe at will should the balloon ever go up; in two fights during the same day, the Soviet Air Force had been fought to an effective draw, if not worse, by little Sweden. As darkness fell over Western Europe and Soviet planes flew home to lick their wounds and regroup, and Sweden's tired pilots were given a temporary reprieve, the Politburo met again to consult and decide on a further course.

Andropov and his allies such as Legachev and, surprisingly, Grishin argued against further attacks. The Soviet Union's point had been proven, Sweden had been thoroughly punished, and it was time to step back and be satisfied. Clear in Andropov's grim advocacy for a stand-down was that the two attacks had clearly not gone according to plan and that the Soviets were embarrassed enough already; it was politically and ideologically inconvenient to admit such a thing publicly, especially after only one day, but everyone in the room in the Kremlin that night understood the subtext.

Ustinov's counter was strongly subtextual in its drawing upon history as well, calling upon those present to "recall Barbarossa was not countered in one day," a hilariously exaggerated accounting of Swedish capabilities. Ustinov pushed for a sustained, round-the-clock bombing campaign of Swedish military installations and critical infrastructure for the next seven days, a suggestion that only Chernenko seconded but appalled most everybody else. The consensus emerged, thus, of another attack the following morning once the Baltic Fleet was in place to act in support, concentrated again on Gotland, coastal installations and this time the considerable network of air hangars and bases across Sweden's isolated north that served as a sort of national redoubt, this time crossing Finnish airspace to do so. Andropov begrudgingly agreed, but it did not escape the back of his mind that one more attack may be all the Soviets were able to muster before NATO became even more involved...