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The People's Republic of China took a flier in the "export of revolution" during the '60s and '70s, when the Peking leadership was still enamored of Mao's idea that global disorder would hasten the Communist millennium. The results ranged from disappointing in Africa to disastrous in Indonesia, where a Peking-sponsored coup d'état backfired, leading to the destruction of the local Communist Party and official hostility toward China that lingers to this day. Partly because of that experience, partly because of their disillusionment with Mao's constant reinterpretation of Marxism, and partly because of their desire to find allies in the non-Communist world against Soviet "hegemonism," the Chinese have largely abandoned foreign adventurism. The only important exceptions have been aimed at Soviet client-states, and therefore indirectly at the Soviet Union itself.
A dramatic irony has overtaken international Communism in the past two decades. Rival states that claim to represent Marxism-Leninism have not only denounced each other for various revisionist and schismatic sins, they have also gone to war. China and the U.S.S.R. fought a border conflict in 1969. Ten years later, China invaded Communist Viet Nam to "teach it a lesson" for Hanoi's attempt to conquer Communist Cambodia. China is currently assisting the Muslim "holy warriors" who are trying to topple the Communist government of Afghanistan.
The irony of Communism's penchant for self-inflicted violence extends in less spectacular but more persistent form to Europe. The only military operations that Soviet forces have actually carried out on the Continent since the Warsaw Pact was formed 26 years ago have been to crush the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring in 1968. Today a considerable portion of Warsaw Pact maneuvers and contingency planning is focused on Poland—the country where the treaty creating the alliance was signed. If Polish troops cannot stabilize the situation, their allies may move in to help. While the Warsaw Pact's principal function is to amass power against the West, the Soviet Union has actually exerted that power in Europe, firing shots in anger, only when invading its fellow member states.
That irony is not entirely consoling to the West. For one thing, even when Communists are fighting among themselves, their conflicts threaten to spread. The ongoing civil war in Cambodia, between the China-backed forces of Pol Pot and the Vietnamese puppet regime of President Heng Samrin could spill over into Thailand. A new outbreak of war between Viet Nam and China could embroil all of Southeast Asia.
Few nightmare scenarios for World War III are more plausible than one in which the opening scene is a border conflict between the U.S.S.R. and China. The U.S. could all too easily be drawn in, now that it is forging an explicitly anti-Soviet "strategic friendship" with China and offering to sell the People's Republic lethal weaponry.
Unquestionably, the squabbles and full-fledged wars within the Communist world have taken a toll on the resources of their combatants that none