We define the Cold War as the diplomatic conflict between the United States
and the Soviet Union after World War II. Note that the conflict is
between the United States and the Soviet Union, not Vietnam or Cuba. Moreover,
it is a diplomatic conflict, not military one, although this vital distinction
would be blurred by using the term Cold War. Note also the Cold War
is relatively recent, since 1945. It was not always there; why not?
Cold Warriors believed
that the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was ideological
in nature, that is, a conflict between democratic capitalism and communist
totalitarianism. This means it had to continue forever until they
stopped being communist totalitarians or we stopped being democratic capitalists.
Moreover, this true Cold Warrior position also makes the conflict unique
in the history of the world. That means one would need new rules
and a brand new diplomacy to deal with it.
Realists, by contrast,
saw the Cold War as primarily a power struggle. It was not a war
to be won but a problem to be managed. Insofar as this is so, it
is not unique in the history of the world, but simply a power struggle,
like that dating back to the ancient Hittites and Egyptians. The
old diplomacy can be used, such as the traditional balance of power diplomacy
characteristic of European history.
Those who argue as
realists pointed out that not all communist countries took their orders
from Moscow; certainly, Tito in Yugoslavia, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and
Mao in China were quite independent. Therefore, no worldwide communist
conspiracy existed, since conspirators by definition would have to work
in unison. Realists further argued that the real issue in the American-Soviet
conflict should be American security, not the piling up of friends with
useless alliances that actually bind the United States more than our allies;
such alliances didn't really protect American national security, but they
do create ever more places in the world where the United States could get
sucked into needless wars. Realists further argue the Soviet Union was
actually following traditional Russian foreign policy, such as access to
warm water ports, access to the open sea, domination of Eastern Europe,
etc. The only difference was that after World War II there was no
other country sufficiently powerful to stop her from activating the foreign
policy of Peter the Greatóexcept the United States. Soviet policy thus
was driven by geopolitical concerns, just as Russian policy had been for
centuries. And paramount among these concerns was fear of invasion,
deriving from the Russian historian experience.
Why was there such
antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union after World War
II? One reason was surely conflicting imperialisms. While many
would argue that the United States was imperialistic from the very beginning,
conquering the native populations and Spanish colonies which stood between
Washington and the Pacific, the age of imperialism for the United States
is usually dated from the War of 1898, which saw Americans jump an ocean,
acquiring colonies in the Pacific at Russia's back door. Russian
imperialism, by contrast, has always been more amoebae like, and of much
longer duration. Less than 50% of the land mass of the Soviet Union
was ethnically Russian, and far less than 50% of the population.
Moreover, after World War II, the Soviets combined what the United States
abhorred most, arbitrary rule and ideological militancy. Many historians
argue that the American empire, following the freeing of the Philippines
and Cuba, was really commercial in nature, while Russia's was essentially
political. In any case, by the early 20th century, two profoundly different
imperialist cultures eyed one another suspiciously at close range in Asia,
a situation which only got worse after the 1917 revolution.
Both Americans and
Russians believed they had a God-given right to control the land they had.
In the United States, this was known as manifest destiny and later missionary
diplomacy, but it started as early as the Puritans with their ìLight on
the Hill,î Boston. By contrast, the Russians considered themselves
the Third Rome (after Rome and Constantinople), a Holy Mother Russia with
a pure pedigree dating back to the Roman empire. Lenin simply reinterpreted
this idea of Russian uniqueness by claiming that what made the country
special was her position in the vanguard of the worldwide socialist revolution
that Marx had declared simply had to succeed. Unfortunately, given
the differing viewpoints of the two countries, both assumed they had a
superior moral right to the areas they controlled, much as Muslims and
Jews now both claim a special right to Jerusalem.
One must not underestimate
the role of domestic politics in creating the antagonism either.
In the United States, fury at and fear of Russia helped create a consensus
in an otherwise stalemated Congress after World War II, allowing the president
to create a working majority to get something done. This was especially
useful for the Republican party which traditionally won elections by stressing
patriotism and nationalism. It was far harder for the Democrats to
seize the issue, until John Kennedy did so with the ìbear any burdenî rhetoric
in his inauguration speech in 1961, a statement that later held Lyndon
Johnson prisoner in his efforts to deal with Vietnam since he did not want
to look ìsoftî on communism. In fact, the United States government
frequently exaggerated the Soviet threat to get money for the military,
a practice that ran out of steam in the Vietnam era; critics questioned
why millions of dollars were required for Vietnam which was over 10,000
miles away, while Cuba, an outright communist satellite, was only 90 miles
off the American coast.
In the Soviet Union,
there was no legal way to come to power or stay in power. With no
real constitution, leaders had to rely on military force to stay in power.
This meant the military got about what they wanted, and to justify their
existence, they were also likely to exaggerate the American threat.
The first Soviet leader to resist military spending significantly was Gorbachev,
who relied more on the KGB, the internal police, than the military to stay
in power, and who was, therefore, less beholden to the Soviet military.
However, until Khrushchev was deposed in 1964, Russian leaders who fell
from power almost always ended up deadóor sent to Siberia. They thus
had a very personal reason for placating the Soviet military.
Itís important
to remember as well how vulnerable the United States felt after Pearl Harbor
and the fall of France to Nazi Germany in 1940; if the oceans and Old World
powers could not defend us against an external threat, what could?
Given such hostility,
why didn't the war become an open military confrontation? Right after
World War II, there were no other effective power blocs besides the United
States and Soviet Union, since the rest of the world was so devastated.
But when such power blocs emerged in the 1950s (like Maoís China, the European
Common Market, the Third World), the Cold War changed. Bipolarity
between the Americans and Soviets made balancing the two camps almost impossible
unless a real balance could be agreed upon, something neither superpower
was likely to allow given eachís desperate fear of falling behind in the
arms race. But once there were more players, balance could be achieved
by combining different powers, and this balance helped to keep the Cold
War cold by encouraging caution on each sideís part.
So did the bomb.
The existence of atomic weapons kept Korea a limited conflict and constrained
American action in Vietnam as well. The risks of all out war fought
with nuclear weapons were simply too high after Hiroshima demonstrated
the awesome power of the bomb. Ironically, this nuclear threat produced
a ìCold Peace.î
Limited natural resources
also prevented an all out war. In spite of what Johnson proclaimed,
one cannot have both guns and butter indefinitely without bankrupting oneself.
The huge deficit now plaguing the United States began when Johnson deliberately
unbalanced the American budget to camouflage how much the war in Vietnam
was costing. The Soviet Union solved the problem of her limited resources
by pouring every ruble into the military and letting her internal economy
fall apart.
The emergence of the
so-called Third World also helped restrain the superpowers. Now both
would have to lead by example, rather than by force. At first, the
Soviets were in an enhanced position to appeal to the newly freed, former
colonies which made up the Third World, presenting the Soviet Union as
a bootstraps operation where a country which had been out flat on her back
after World War I reached great power status within one generation.
The United States, by contrast, suffered from the fact that our most reliable
allies were the former colonialist powers like Britain and France.
The problem for the Soviets was that the Soviet system simply could not
be made to work, and any idea that developing nations would take the Soviet
Union as a model foundered on the reality of lousy Russian economy performance.
Worse, in time, the Soviets would be challenged by China, whose peasant
based communist system actually worked better than did the Russian industrialized
one. Moreover, the Chinese approach better reflected social life
in most developing countries, especially those in Asia, where the population
was overwhelmingly peasant. China was also free to exploit
her Asian ethnicity, appealing to non-Caucasians worldwide to throw off
cultural vassalage to Europe--- and Russia.
Challenges to both
the Soviets and Americans were not restricted to the Third World.
The United States found itself challenged openly by France's Charles de
Gaulle, who refused to see the Soviet Union as the leader of a worldwide
communist conspiracy as the Americans had it, and instead insisted on seeing
her as simply a great power, Russia, under a different name. The
Soviets, on the other hand, faced repeated critiques from Tito in Yugoslavia.
And of course, Maoís China snapped at their heels, criticizing Russia for
straying from real Marxism and accusing her of not being communist enough!
In the Cold War period
since World War II, the world learned to control the big dangers and to
live with the smaller ones. No World War III, let alone a full nuclear
exchange, occurred. But before we explore the outbreak of the Cold War
after 1945, let us take some time to explore the traditional foreign policy
and history of both the Soviet Union and the United States to see what
the background was to the antagonism, and then we will discuss World War
II to see how the alliance formed to stop Hitler broke apart as the war
ended, plunging the Americans and Soviets into the paranoid world of the
early Cold War.
The Soviet Perspective
Traditional Russian
diplomacy is predicated on a simple fact: Russia has been invaded many
times by foreigners throughout her history with catastrophic results.
Following the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, those Russ still left
alive following the fall of Kiev fled north, taking refuge in Moscow which
was chosen not for trade or beauty but for defense: surrounded by swamps
and forests, Moscow could not be attacked by the Mongolian cavalry.
Indeed, the center of Moscow is the Kremlin, a fortress. The Poles,
Lithuanians, and Napoleon, among others, have invaded and sometimes occupied
Russia; Germany did so twice in the twentieth century as a result of which
the Soviet Union lost 10-20% of her population in each World War.
This fact of life for the Russians is a world apart from the American experience,
where Washington D.C. was never chosen for defense (and is almost impossible
to defend militarily) but rather was the result of a political deal, where
the streets and monuments are designed for beauty not for defense, and
where the threat of invasion is highly remote. In fact, the mainland
United States has been invaded only once by a hostile power, back in the
War of 1812.
Ivan III in the 15th
century moved north from Moscow to attack the northern areas of what eventually
became Russia, fearing even then to attack the remnants of Mongol power
to the south. Ivan conquered Novgorod, the center of Viking power
near the Baltic. He thought of himself as the successor to
the Byzantine empire after marrying the niece of the last Byzantine emperor.
Holy Mother Russia was the only legitimate empire, therefore, and stood
in the direct line of descent from the Roman Empire.
Ivan IV in the late
15th century moved south to the old Khanates, adding vast new realms to
the Russian empire. But to do so, he created a terrorist organization,
the oprichniki. The oprichniki was unleashed to wipe out whole
boyar (noble) families, and this bloodshed explains why this Ivan is frequently
called Ivan the Terrible. The tradition of violence in Russian politics
continued under Lenin: within 18 months following the revolution, the Cheka
alone killed more people than the Russian empire had in the previous 80
years!
Russiaís emergence
into the European theater begins really with Peter the Great in the early
18th century. For Peter, Russia was a European country, not an oriental
one; its future was in the West, as it was for the original Caesar, not
in the East. Peterís European orientation, however, created a deep
division between pro-Slavic and pro-western forces in Russia, a division
which troubled the Soviet Union to modern times. The Old Believers
opposed him, arguing that Moscow was a holy city, the center of Holy
Mother Russia. Moving the capital to the Baltic city of St. Petersburg,
Peterís new capital which literally faced west, would be to embrace an
alien culture. The Old Believers and their allies accused Peter of being
too ìGerman.î Like Ivan the Terrible before him, Peter was also willing
to use force; he tortured his son to obtain the details of a non-existent
plot, killing him in the process.
Peter developed a
foreign policy which was continued under later Russian and even Soviet
leaders. Warm-water ports would be needed so Russia could project
naval power twelve months out of every year, and to that end, Peter and
his successors acquired territory standing between Moscow and the sea.
The Czar himself created St. Petersburg on the Baltic, his gateway to Europe.
He pushed south to the Crimea to reach the Black Sea into which emptied
the Danube river; since Eastern European trade traditionally consisted
of big and bulky items requiring shipment by water over the Danube, controlling
the Black Sea gave the Russians a stranglehold on Eastern European trade.
In the Far East, Peter pushed to Vladivostock, Sakhalin, and Kamchaka to
access the Pacific ocean. And he put pressure on Iran and Iraq to
reach the Persian Gulf.
As Peter clawed his
way to these warm water ports, he learned that all, except those in the
Far East, had ìcinch points,î narrow openings where Russian fleets would
be vulnerable to attack and which could easily be closed off in time of
war. The Black Sea, for example, though huge, has the tiny opening
of the Dardanelles before it exits into the Mediterranean, which itself
has the cinch points of the Suez canal on one side and Gibraltar on the
other. The Baltic has the relatively small opening between Sweden and Denmark
before it exits into the North sea, which itself has the tiny opening of
the English channel to contend with. Only in the Pacific, ironically,
could the Russians reach warm water ports which led directly to the immensity
of the Pacific ocean.
The new areas Russia
conquered between Moscow and the sea were absorbed and russified by force.
Thus, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, actually formed an empire of
many ethnic groups held together by force. The use of force, whether
outright violence or the outlawing of native languages and literature,
created a backlash. Ukraine attempted to secede as late as World War II,
and the recent difficulties in Chechniya, as well as the ultimate break
up of the Soviet Union herself, testify to the strong nationalistic resentment
which persisted in spite of the russification. In the 19th
century under Alexander III russification intensified, especially against
Poles and Jews, who left in large numbers in the first decades of the 20th
century, coming mainly to the United States. Most who emigrated were
farmers and small tradesmen, so there was no ìbrain drain,î and they were
allowed to leave. When, however, Jews who were trained scientists
and technicians tried to leave the Soviet Union in the 1970s, the state
forbade them to leave.
The Russian empire
was made possible by a huge standing army. This army was poorly trained,
and placed emphasis on its staying power rather than tactical prowess.
The Russians also relied on their severe winters to deter potential invaders.
(The defeat of Napoleon in his 1812 campaign is a good example.) This Russian
kind of army served as a useful model for Third World countries in the
twentieth century since their armies too were poorly trained. The
Soviets specialized in producing weapons which matched the capabilities
of such soldiers, weapons which were reliable and durable, but which required
little care. The relentless staying power of Ho Chi Mihn in Vietnam was
based to a large degree on the Soviet model, as the Russian AK47 proved
itself almost indestructible while the more sophisticated American-made
M16 frequently jammed in the jungle mire.
During the 19th century,
Britain moved to contain Russian imperialism so as to maintain the balance
of power worldwide. The Crimean War is one example of this British
policy. While supposedly fought over who would control Christian
shrines in Turkey (Russia or France), in fact, the war was a really part
of British policy not to let Russia break out of the Black Sea by dominating
Turkey, the ìsick man of Europe,î and hence the Dardanelles. Britain also
strengthened India and Afghanistan to keep the Russians from reaching the
Indian Ocean or the Persian Gulf. In the Far East, the British even
fought the Opium War against China to warn off the Russians who were building
the Trans-Siberian Railway to extend Russian power to Manchuria on China's
border. The idea behind British policy was to control the cinch points,
and so to block Russian access to open water in the Mediterranean, the
Indian Ocean or the Pacific Ocean. Having been primarily a naval
powers for hundreds of years, the British were likely to see the world
as a series of cinch points where large navies could be blocked.
This long-standing
British antagonism to Russia reminds us there was nothing inevitable about
the Russian-British alliance in World War I and Germany knew it.
Deep suspicion had to be overcome even to obtain the relatively innocuous
1907 alliance, in which the two nations took a temporary breather from
their mutual hostility, and only because both feared a united Germany more
than each other. When Germany was defeated, the antagonism began
anew.
Stymied in her drive
to reach open water, the Russians responded by strengthening their hold
on the land routes, developing into the worldís largest land power as a
result. Without a large army of occupation, the Russians feared they
would not be able to control the newly conquered areas which might otherwise
rebel. Since such a large army was expensive, Russia and later the
Soviet Union also used diplomacy and appeals. Pan-slavism, for example,
was used to woo Eastern European nations, as Russia presented herself as
the great Slavic nation who would defend the rest. After the Russian
revolution, the Soviets presented themselves as the leader of the socialist
camp worldwide, to induce nations to follow her willingly instead of having
to use force.
In the long run, the
expense of the military to reach warm water ports plus the expense of industrialization
to catch up with Europe caused Russians in time to question whether they
really wanted to be a western country with a future in Europe or whether
they should revert to being an eastern, oriental country. The pro-western
forces saw her as a European nation with a need for things the Europeans
already had, such as at least a constitutional monarchy, western civil
rights, and western technology like railroads. By the standards of
western Europe, however, Russia as late as the 19th century was hopelessly
backward. The pro-Slavic forces, on the other hand, saw little good
coming from Europe. Western technology like railroads, they argued,
broke down the close, almost mystical association with the landóand it
also broke down social class differences. Thus Alexander III and
his son, Nicholas II, came to believe Russia needed mystical piety and
despotism to survive.
Czarist views appeared
to have been permanently discarded in the Russian revolution of 1917, which
not only changed the nature of the countryís leadership, but reinterpreted
Russiaís claim to be different and better than everyone else. The
revolution itself was a result of the devastation World War I had wreaked
on Russian society, where 10% at least of her population died and her army
was shown to be riddled with corruption and incompetence. Three revolutions
occurred in 1917, the last of which brought Lenin to power. He promised
to bring Russia out of the war and end the slaughter immediately, and he
promised to engage in land reform at once.
The communists Lenin
headed were a minority in spite of the name Bolshevik (which means literally
majority party). Lenin had engineered the name at a stormy 1903 meeting
in Switzerland, when he drove the more numerous Mensheviks from the roomóand
then took the vote when they had left. In fact, the largest group
of reformers in Russia were the Social Revolutionaries. Thus when
Lenin held elections in 1918, the first before 1990, his communists got
only got 25% of the popular vote; the election was so embarrassing, Lenin
dispersed the assembly by force.
Lenin's thought was
based on Karl Marx, who had predicted a capitalist crisis (which in fact
never occurred), followed by a proletariat revolution. People, thought
Lenin, would have to be dragged into revolution, led by a revolutionary
elite. Thus, Lenin never thought it necessary for the communists
to be a mass party with broad popular appeal as would the Fascists later.
If 200,000 nobles could rule Russia, Lenin wondered, why couldnít 200,000
communists? Moreover, Lenin would keep the revolution going whether
the people wanted it or not. Capitalists worldwide would retaliate
against the new socialist order he would create, however, and to protect
the revolution in Russia, communist revolts would have to occur everywhere.
Very much unlike Mao
in China, Lenin despised the peasants. He built his party on the urban
workers, the proletariat, who were a tiny fragment of the Russian population;
the sickle was definitely the junior partner to the hammer! Furthermore,
Lenin had been uninterested in reform before 1917, claiming such reforms
would simply postpone the revolution he sought to lead. Later, the
Soviet Union would demand that European communist parties refuse to join
any socialist coalition governments on similar grounds.
Lenin also accepted
the need for violence; 15 million people died during the civil war unleashed
by the attempt on Lenin's life in 1918, while another 1.5 million emigrated.
He also thought nationalism was ìretrograde,î and confidently expected
it to die out under socialism as Marx had predicted it would; Gorbachev
in 1990 thought the same thingóuntil the Soviet Union itself split up into
many different nationalist republics.
Lenin lacked the sophisticated
cadres necessary to run a government. Unlike Mao, who had decades
to train the administrators he needed to run a shadow government, Lenin
had to invent a government from scratch following the revolution.
In China, the cadres came first and then came the revolution: in
Russia, the revolution came first and then a frantic Lenin had to build
a state and put his theories into practice. But Lenin was able to
appeal to Russian nationalism, no longer as Holy Mother Russia, but rather
as the leader of the worldwide socialist revolution which Marx had said
absolutely must prevail.
Lenin's economic policy
was developed piecemeal as well. He had no real experience in running
a state, since he had been in exile in Switzerland for decades, and so
he put orthodox communist views into practice in 1918, including maximum
income, abolition of private property and nationalization of industry.
They proved to be a disaster. By 1920, agriculture, for example,
was producing only 38% of what it had in 1913, and industry only 23%.
Five million people died during the famine of 1921, and a naval rebellion
at the Kronstadt naval base threatened to overthrow the regime. Lenin responded
by instituting the NEP (New Economic Program) in 1921, which restored a
measure of capitalism. Small farms and factories would now be in
private hands, but banks and heavy industry remained under state control.
As a result of these measures, farm income went way up. Ironically, the
first man to abandon communism in its purist form was none other than Lenin
himself.
Lenin confidently
awaited communist revolutions abroadówhich never occurred. He then
scrambled to develop a foreign policy, just as he had thrown together a
government. He refused to repay the loans to France and the United
States, claiming they had been made by the czar and not the Russian state,
but in doing so he cut himself off from the necessary credits to rebuild
the country. No one would loan him any more money until he paid of
what was already owed. When the Soviets began rapid industrialization
under Stalin, therefore, they would have to get the money for it by taking
the wealth from the peasants, resulting in at least 10 million deaths.
In September, 1918,
as Lenin struggled to create a government based on communist models and
World War I raged on in Europe, the British, French, Americans and Japanese
invaded the Soviet Union. The British and French were quite clear:
they wanted to overthrow Lenin. The United States, on the other hand,
wanted to keep the Japanese out of Siberia, and sent 10,000 troops there
to keep an eye on the 70,000 men the Japanese stationed in the area. As
far as Lenin went, the United States government said we only wanted to
bring Russia back into the war against Germany (WWI would not be over for
another 2 months). However, since Leninís main claim to fame was
that he had brought Russia out of the war, this American justification
seemed tantamount to saying we wanted to overthrow Lenin. Russians
resented American unwillingness to tell the truth, and this heritage of
suspicion continued and simply got worse during the Cold War.
When Lenin died in
1924, a power struggle broke out between Stalin and Trotsky to succeed
him. Trotsky, the leader of the Red Army, was the grand theoretician
of the revolution, but his conversion to communism was late and many distrusted
him. Stalin, by contrast, was the shrewd peasant and controlled the
party apparatus. He had only spent two weeks of his entire life outside
of Russia, and this may explain his abandonment of world revolution in
favor of building up the power of the Soviet Union. Seizing control of
the party apparatus, Stalin hounded Trotsky out of the party, exiled him
to Siberia from which he escaped, and sent henchmen to assassinate
him in Mexico City in 1940. What happened to Trotsky encouraged caution
on the part of Soviet leaders: if you guess wrong, you not only fall from
power, you die. The struggle between Trotsky and Stalin also demonstrates
that there was no legal way to transfer power from one leader to another;
a leaderís death almost always provoked a mini-civil war, as contenders
jockeyed for position.
Stalinís views differed
remarkably from Leninís. He abandoned Leninís idea of world revolution,
adopting instead the idea of socialism in one country. Like Lenin,
he did not believe the party should be a mass party, but he went to great
lengths to make it appear that it was. To make the Soviet Union a
model for the rest of the world to follow, he began a series of Five
Year Plans which sought to industrialize the country quickly. The
products produced, however, were of mediocre quality and the Russian people
suffered enormously; wages in 1932 could buy only one-half of what they
could in 1928. But by controlling access to the media, Stalin
could and did hide this from the world, which instead praised the Soviet
Union for her successes without realizing the costs.
The most notorious
example of Russian suffering was the collectivization of agriculture in
1928, done so the state and not the people would control the food supply,
and also done to introduce new methods into growing crops. Stalin
himself later told Churchill that 10 million people died when agriculture
was collectivized, although that figure may actually be low. Soviet
historians now believe the gains Stalin finally achieved could have been
achieved without such massive loss of life had the NEP simply been continued.
A series of purges
between 1935 and 1938 were aimed at the old Bolsheviks still alive, designed
to get rid of those who could remember old Russia and how far Stalin had
strayed from Leninís views. 70% of those at the 1934 Communist Party
conference were shot by 1939. The purges left Stalin free to create
a myth of pre-revolutionary Russia to compare his ìidealî new society toóand
they provided scapegoats for his economic failures.
In conclusion, we
note that Russian and later Soviet foreign policy was driven by geopolitical
concerns first enunciated by Peter the Great: breaking out of the Eurasian
land mass, reaching warm water ports, russifying by force those who stood
between Moscow and the sea, and creating a special visionary place for
Russia in world history, first as the Third Rome and later as the leader
of worldwide socialism. But this was a deeply conflicted country.
Was she oriental or truly European? What if the peoples to be russified
refused? What if the resources to accomplish your aims were strictly
limited? And would violence inevitably be part of Russian and Soviet history?
The Soviet state
had to be successful for its propaganda to work without bloodshed. The
problem was the Soviet system could not be made to work: in spite of the
huge costs of industrialization and collectivization, both financial and
personal, the Soviet Union remained an underdeveloped country with a huge,
expensive army and military establishment. She was a medieval country
equipped with nuclear missiles.
American Perspective
Traditional American
diplomacy benefited from our geographical isolation from Europe and Asia.
We let the oceans defend us as Russia used her winter; these oceans could
not be quickly crossed until missiles were invented in the mid-20th century.
The United States also benefited from the international peace established
by Britain, the so-called Pax Britannica, which existed from the fall of
Napoleon in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. When there
had been true ìworld wars,î however, the United States had always become
involved. Thus, what the Europeans called the War of Spanish Succession,
we called Queen Anne's War, and what Europeans called the Seven Years War
we called the French and Indian War. There had not been a true world
war from 1815 until our involvement in what we are pleased to call World
War I, allowing the United States to spend its money for industrialization
rather than war or defense. Thus, our isolationism of the 19th century
was merely a fluke of history.
We also benefited
from the abundance of the American continent. We had both food and
raw materials like coal, water and iron. The railroad created a national
market which in turn led to mass production. (By contrast, the Russians
had almost no railroad track until the very end of the century and therefore
almost no mass production.) In short, the United States had a balanced
economy and more importantly, the ability to move goods quickly and efficiently
from one end of the country to the other.
The United States
pursued a non-moralistic foreign policy through the 19th century.
We got on well with Russia, in spite of the czar; indeed, Russia was almost
the only country to support the Union in the Civil War.
This foreign policy
changed, however, in the Progressive Period. Both internally and
externally, the United States became far more moralistic. When Theodore
Roosevelt said he would make the trusts ìbehave,î or that ìchronic wrongdoingî
on the part of a Latin American nation might cause the United States to
intervene, he was expressing the American belief that we could tell right
from wrongóand that such determinations mattered. The main
areas where the United States became active overseas were Latin America,
where Russia was no problem, and the Far East, where she was. Russia
herself could not really functioned as a market. Wealth there was
so concentrated in so few hands, that Russia was primarily a consumer of
luxury goods. Since the United States produced primarily simple,
common items, Russia's main trading partner was France, not America.
As the Untied States
moved closer to Britain at the turn of the century, the so-called Anglo-American
entente, fears were stirred in Russia. A common thread of British
foreign policy, after all, had been the containment of Russia by blocking
the cinch points. Moreover, the czar was the antithesis of democracy
at a time when Americans celebrated their democratic heritage in Progressivism.
Nicholas I, on the other hand, abhorred democracy as an alien western import
inappropriate for Russia.
American attitudes
came together as missionary diplomacy and collective security under President
Wilson. The United States, he argued, had a mission to bring the
blessings of Anglo-Saxon democracy to the rest of the world. Missionary
diplomacy was profoundly concerned with national self-interest, for if
other countries looked like us and acted like us, we could better predict
their behavior and the world would be a safer place. We therefore
had to create democracies for safety, as the Soviet Union would later create
socialist states for its safety. Collective security, developed by
Wilson at the end of World War I, argued that the security of the United
States depended on the security of the world, so that any upset anywhere
threatened us. No distinction was made between areas vital to American
interest and those peripheral to it: all areas became our concern.
(These viewed were enshrined in the Truman Doctrine after WWII when Wilson
enjoyed a renaissance in popularity.)
Wilson pitched American
entry into WWI as the Great Crusade to make the world safe for democracy,
the war to end all wars, and this in spite of the fact that the real issue
was American security which Germany threatened. By promising a war
to end all wars, Wilson promised what he could never deliver and so prepared
the way for disillusionment.
The Fourteen Points
he developed to end the war were unrealistic to the Europeans. Open
covenants openly arrived at struck Europeans as hopelessly naive.
Negotiating in the open would only mean grandstanding and thus the failure
of negotiations; when negotiations fail, war results, and the Europeans,
having just been through the terrors of WWI, wanted to empower diplomacy,
not kneecap it. Likewise, freedom of the seas sounded fine, but the
whole issue in WWI had been what exactly goes free on the seas, as Wilson
relentlessly increased the definition of neutrality until the Germans could
no longer abide by it and so declared unrestricted submarine warfare in
1917. Popular determinism in Europe would only have created a series
of mini-states warring with one another (as it in fact did in the 1990s
with the breakup of Yugoslavia), threatening European peace.
The Treaty of Versailles
was thus a sort of compromise between Wilson and the Europeans. Self-determination
was agreed to in principle, but German and Turkish colonies were made League
mandates, not freed outright as Wilson had wanted. Freedom of the
seas was agreed to, but not defined, to avoid antagonizing Britain who
depended on her navy to survive. The Europeans directly addressed
their security concerns. They created a demilitarized zone on the
German border with France, the German army was reduced to 100,000 men,
and Germany herself was reduced in size and broken in two to allow a newly
created Poland access to the sea at Gdansk. The Treaty of Versailles
was the third great reworking of the European map in modern times (the
other two being the Peace of Westphalia which ended the 30 Years War and
the Congress of Vienna which ended the Napoleonic period). It was
the first time the United states had played a major role in writing a European
treatyóand the Treaty failed miserably to keep the peace, a fact many Europeans
blamed on Wilson's naive idealism.
When Wilson arrived
back in Washington with the treaty, Senator Lodge raised objections to
it which mirrored many European concerns. Article X of the treaty,
for example bound all League members to ìpreserve the territorial integrity
of all member nations.î What, argued Lodge, if the country has no integrity,
but was only invented a few months ago, like Poland or Czechoslovakia?
Moreover, the United States could easily be outvoted in the League, since
each nation had an equal vote. Who in the United States would declare
war against an aggressor nation: the president; Congress; or the League
ambassador? What if an American ally were targeted by the League;
would the United States be obliged to go to war against an ally?
The Treaty of Versailles
failed to win Senate approval, and the United States instead followed a
very narrow definition of self-interest in foreign affairs. As for
the Soviet Union, American participation in the 1918 invasion poisoned
relations with the Lenin, and we remained distrustful of the Russians.
When the United States finally diplomatically recognized the Soviet Union,
the move was so unpopular Roosevelt announced it in 1933 on the same day
Prohibition ended, pushing recognition to the back pages of American newspapers.
This heritage of suspicion reached new heights in World War II when the
Soviets fought for their very survival.
World War II and the Breakup of the Alliance
The World War II alliance
was forged for the same reason as that in World War I: fear of a
united Germany dominating Europe. Hitler had called for rejection
of the Treaty of Versailles as early as 1924, and by the 1930s, he had
put Germany back together as she was in 1914. He abolished
the Demilitarized Zone, began conscription for the army, denounced reparations,
and threatened the existence of Czechoslovakia and the Polish Corridor.
The Soviet Union signed
a Non-Aggression Pact with Germany in August, 1939. This act shocked
the world, given the antagonism between nazism and communism. But
the Soviets were playing for time, moving factories farther east out of
a German invasion path. The Non-Aggression Pact spelled doom for
Poland, however, for the fact was that only the Soviet Union or Germany
could defend Poland, not the British or the French, who were both hundreds
of miles away and unable to resupply by sea without running the German
blockade. Now the Soviet Union and Germany agreed to divide Poland
between them. They further agreed that Russia would sell German food
and oil at low prices.
Once Germany invaded
the Soviet Union in June, 1940, the same coalition which had fought WWI
reappeared, the primary members being Britain, the Soviet Union, and the
United States. Severe problems dogged this coalition, however.
The United States believed the coalition would continue after the war,
and thus we felt no need to discuss post-war arrangements while the fighting
continued, fearing to do so would only weaken the alliance. By contrast,
both the Soviets and British knew the alliance would break up, as European
alliances usually do. The only glue holding this one together was
fear of Hitler; when he was gone the alliance would dissolve. Thus,
both the Soviets and British were interested in spelling out post-war settlements
while the alliance partners still needed one another. To make
matters worse, the United States believed the main purpose of the war was
to defeat Hitler, and all American decisions were taken with a view to
speeding the end of the war. By contrast, Britain and the Soviet
Union agreed that the main issue of the war was political, that is, what
the European map would look like when the war was over. War to them
was simply diplomacy conducted by other means. The Soviets were trying
to activate their traditional policy (domination of Eastern Europe, access
to warm water ports, etc.), while the British tried to activate theirs
(defense of Greece, no Soviet access to the Mediterranean, etc.).
Deep disagreements
plagued the alliance about wartime strategy as well. The Soviets wanted
an immediate second front in France, not in North Africa which the United
States agreed to at Britainís request. The Soviets wanted more military
supplies to be sent on the dangerous northern route from Iceland, supplies
which the United States could not risk losing to German submarines launched
from Norway. The Soviets wanted more discussion of the post-war balance
of power in Europe than the United States was prepared to give. Especially,
the Soviets wanted to know what the United States intended to do with Germany;
the Soviets wanted to reagriculturalize Germany, removing any industrial
base which would allow her to remilitarize for another invasion.
The United States, on the other hand, was beginning to harken to British
advice that to destroy the economy of Germany would merely be to invite
another Hitler, and that Germany would need to be rebuilt after World War
II as would France. The postponement of post war talks fed Soviet
suspicion that the British and Americans might make a separate deal with
Germany and, together with the Wehrmacht, attack them to topple the communist
state. These disagreements between the United States and the Soviet Union
led to resentment, fear and mistrust, made worse by the appalling losses
suffered by the Soviets. 10% of her population was killed.
Of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, 3 and one quarter million
were Russian. The Russians lost more men at the Battle of Stalingrad
than the United States lost anywhere in the war. This alliance was
bound to break up, therefore.
Some smaller
agreements were hammered out, however. Stalin agreed to recognize
Chiang in China rather than Mao, for example. But as the allied forces
got back onto the continent after D-Day in 1944, Churchill now frantically
attempted to make some deal with Stalin for Eastern Europe. In October,
therefore, Churchill ceded Bulgaria and Rumania to the Soviets, in return
for Britain holding onto Greece. Yugoslavia would be neutral. Roosevelt
was told in advance of this agreement and probably approved it, but he
would not do so publicly before the November elections when he would stand
for an unprecedented fourth term. Stalin thought Churchill had Roosevelt's
blessing, and so he was outraged when Truman, knowing the United States
finally had the atomic bomb, refused to agree to this arrangement at the
Potsdam conference. Stalin had grown up in the Transcaucasus where borders
shifted regularly, and he knew that only 25 years before, the West had
dismembered the Ottoman empire in the Versailles agreement ending World
War I. To him, borders and allegiances were fluid.
At Yalta in February,
1945, the Soviets demanded and got concessions in the Far East as their
price for fighting Japan. Although shocked at the extent of Soviet demands,
the Americans had no choice but to agree, since the best estimates warned
that tens of thousands of American lives would be lost if we invaded Japan
by ourselves. The Soviet Union also agreed to join the United Nations.
The Americans and Soviets agreed to occupation zones for Germany, allowing
each side to deal with its sector in its own way. This willingness
to split the difference, to agree to disagree, could have become a model
for the Cold War, but it did not.
In August, the United
States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, ending the war but frightening
the Soviet Union which had no bomb of its own. In Soviet eyes, the
dropping of the bomb was not strictly necessary, since the Japanese had
already begun negotiations to end the war, and the fire bombing raids on
Tokyo in March had actually killed more people than the atomic bombs did.
Soviet suspicions were further raised because the United States had also
tried to keep the bomb secret from them.
By 1945 if not before,
Stalin believed his main allies were unreliable, potentially treacherous,
and dangerous. He decided to provide for his own defense. Indeed,
the Soviets had fought World War II to be able to demand what they finally
got at Yalta and after. She had so positioned her troops that she
could dominate Eastern Europe, gain access to the Baltic by absorbing the
Baltic states, put pressure on Iran to reach the Persian Gulf and Indian
Ocean, and access the Pacific Ocean. With Hitler gone, the Soviet
Union was in a position to accomplish what the czars had tried to do for
centuries. There was no one to stop her except the United States,
Britain having bankrupted herself financially and emotionally in the fight.
The United States, therefore, stepped into British shoes, taking over her
containment role.
We did so because
American needs were similar to those of Britain. Anyone who could
dominate Europe could freeze out ours as well as British trade, causing
another depression which remained fresh in our memory. The seas had
to be kept free to allow easy trade worldwide. Countries would have
to be strong to trade with one another. Without stability overseas,
wars might occur into which the United States might be drawn. Moreover,
as industry became more complex, the United States discovered she needed
raw materials she could not produce herself, or could not produce in sufficient
quantities, like oil, bauxite for aluminum, and gold. Western Europe
had always made its money by bringing in raw materials, using its highly
trained workforce to turn them into finished products, and then shipping
them out again. And Europe would need to be strong to avoid another
depression and another Hitler.
In the immediate post-war
period, the United States tried to contain the Soviet Union by relatively
peaceful means, such as canceling lend lease and putting diplomatic pressure
on Czechoslovakia. But the Soviets attempted to cash
in on their wartime victory. Stalin sincerely felt Europe would never
recover from the war and that the United States would have a depression
in two to three years. Thus, the Soviets confronted the Americans
in what is otherwise an inexplicable effort, given our nuclear superiority.
Remember the Soviets no long range strategic air force, an ineffective
navy, meager air defenses, and no atomic bomb. The Soviets put pressure
on Iran for oil. They stripped East Germany of movable goods and got 25%
of West Germany's goods. They moved to dominate Poland, the invasion
route from Germany to the Soviet Union, they supported a civil war in Greece
and the Soviet government put even returning Soviet soldiers into forced
labor camps.
Faced with Soviet
intransigence, the United States attempted to block her diplomacy.
The Allied powers had agreed to occupy Iran jointly, but when the United
States and Britain withdrew, the Soviet Union did not. The Soviets
formed a joint Soviet-Iranian oil company, which, however, the Iranian
Parliament rejected under American pressure. The Soviet Union had
pressured Iran to grant autonomy for Azerbaijan and allow the Soviets to
station troops there; when the United States objected, the Soviet Union
backed down because she did not want war so soon after World War II.
Significantly, the Americans worked through the United Nations to bolster
its importance, as they would in Korea. In Europe, the United States
stopped stripping West Germany of its industrial goods to showcase our
difference from the Soviet cannibalizing of East Germany; in response,
the Soviet Union decided to turn East Germany into a supplier of raw materials
to the Soviet Union, so its stripping stopped as well. The United
States insisted the Polish government remain multi-party, although non-Communists
were outnumbered. And, the United States condemned the Soviet treatment
of her ex-soldiers and German POWs.
The Soviet Union responded
with restraint at first. She tolerated multi-party governments in
Eastern Europe, as long as they were non-fascist, and she reduced her army
from 12 million men in 1945 to 4 million by 1947. (The United States reduced
ours from 10 million to 1.4 million in the same period, but of course we
did have the atomic bomb.) The Soviets did not create an eastern military
alliance, knowing the United States and Germany were not threats to her
security at the time. Aware of American economic and military power,
Stalin did not want to provoke us. Instead he would wait for our
system to collapse as he confidently expected it would.
Problems remained.
The United States came to see under British tutelage that Germany would
have to be rebuilt to prevent Soviet power from oozing into Western Europe.
But Germany was very bad off; starvation was a distinct possibility and
political unrest was growing. In fact, Western Europe generally was
in bad shape following the exhaustion of the war. Communist parties
were gaining in strength, especially in Italy and France, in part because
of their popularity as resistance fighters during the war. Western
Europe wanted to buy American goods, a process that would forestall another
depression, but the Europeans were running out of dollars to do so with.
Overarching all concerns for the hysterically suspicious Russians was how
the security of the Soviet Union could be guaranteed without her taking
over all of Eastern Europe as a buffer between herself and Western Europe
which had invaded her twice in this century.
The United States
had frittered away important bargaining chips in the Far East to insure
the Soviet Union entered the United Nations. The UN would now have
to be given an important role to justify all this. The invasion of
South Korea by the North in 1950 seemed a golden opportunity to show the
strength of the new international organization. But long before,
the United States had effectively declared cold war on the Soviet Union
with the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan in 1947.
Declaration of Cold War
While the United States
had moved to contain the Soviet Union before, 1947 saw the double whammy
of the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan which together declared Cold War
on the Soviet Union. The prediction of doom both of these programs
used to pass Congress seemed to come true in the Berlin crisis of 1948
and then Korea. The late forties, thus, saw the freezing of American
ideology of the Cold Waróand gave McCarthy his tools for an attack on American
civil liberties.
In March, 1947, Britain
announced her withdrawal from the Mediterranean; she was simply too exhausted
emotionally and financially from World War II to keep up her overseas commitments.
The United States responded to this announcement by stepping into British
shoes, since our needs were similar to hers. We too wanted to keep
the Soviet Union locked inside the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean was
the highway to the Far East and India through the Suez Canal. Americans
had been watching the Greek civil war since it began in 1944, wondering
what to do. Britain had supported the conservative Greek monarchy
which communist rebels were seeking to overthrow. These communists
were supported not by Stalin but by Tito, who wanted back lands in Greece,
like Macedonia, which he believed belonged to Yugoslavia. The United
States government was prepared to act swiftly and it did.
Truman announced publicly
that we would send economic and financial aid to both Greece and Turkey.
In time, however, the bulk of this aid actually became military.
Tito withdrew from the Soviet bloc in early 1948, following a dispute with
Stalin over the pace of industrialization in Yugoslavia and Titoís attempt
to get rid of collectivized agriculture. Fearing Soviet reprisals
for developing another kind of communism, Tito closed the border with Greece;
communist Greek rebels were thus denied a sanctuary in Yugoslavia and further
arms shipments. Without Tito's support, the Greek communist lost
the civil war by October,1949.
To justify his support
for Greece, Truman put forth the doctrine which bears his name. In
it, he promised to support ìany free people anywhereî attempting to resist
subjugation by armed minorities. It was clearly aimed at the communists
and was designed, in Truman's words, to ìscare hellî out of the American
people.
The Doctrine did not
distinguish between vital and peripheral interests, however. This
was collective security writ large: everything that happened abroad was
vital to American security, resulting in a crushing overseas commitment.
Moreover, the Doctrine was pitched on the basis of anti-communism, but
communism was not the issue, security was. Thus, almost from the
beginning, Americans were taught to react to the word communist rather
than real threats to American security. Truman oversold this communist
threat to get money for both the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan
from an economy-minded, Republican-controlled Congress. Worse, the Doctrine
seemed to justify the idea of a monolithic communist bloc with all countries
taking their orders from Moscow, even though Tito clearly did not and he
was the one responsible for the war in Greece. To show how serious
he was about the communist threat, Truman began creating loyalty files
which were sloppily put together; when McCarthy later demanded to see the
files, Truman refused to give them over on the grounds they were mostly
just hearsay, which was true, but his refusal allowed McCarthy to claim
that Truman was protecting communists in the American government.
For the first time
in the 20th century, the United States had intervened massively in another
country's civil war, and eventually our side won. We chalked up our
success to our intervention, refusing to see that Titoís abandonment of
the Greek communists and Stalinís unwillingness to fight so soon after
World War II were far more important in determining the outcome. Moreover,
the Doctrine was really a blank check which allowed the other side to determine
when and where the United States would get involved overseas. We
lost control over our foreign policy when we announced that everything
was our business. Threats against the western democratic system would
now be explained, not as indigenous to the system, caused by mal-distribution
of wealth or dictatorship, but rather as communist inspired revolts ordered
by Moscow.
The Truman Doctrine
was such a bold statement of Cold War that a few months later in June,
1947, the administration announced the Marshall Plan in an attempt to soften
its rhetoric. Designed to resuscitate the European economy after
World War II, the Plan was based on the idea that a prosperous country
would not be taken over by the communists. The United States had
come to believe that the Soviets would not prevail by armed might, but
by preying on economic instability and chaos, as the Nazis had done during
the depression. Moreover, France was deeply fearful of a restored
Germany, since the latter had invaded her twice in the 20th century; by
linking the French and German economies in the Marshall Plan, French fear
would be reduced and France would get American loan credits rather than
German reparations. The Planís success resulted from the fact that Europe
already had an industrial revolution. American credits and money
were merely resuscitating an industrial revolution, not creating it from
scratch. Pouring American money into other non-industrialized areas
of the world based on the premise that the Marshall Plan could be exported
elsewhere has had only limited success. Nonetheless, Americans ìlearnedî
that throwing money at a problem produced success.
The United States
offered Marshall Plan economic aid to both eastern and western Europe,
including the Soviet Union, but we put in conditions, such as the need
to announce all economic assets, which we knew the Soviets would balk at.
They did not want to publicize their weakness to the world, and besides,
in their system, there was no way to determine the real value of anything.
Moreover, the Soviets saw American conditions as meddling in her internal,
domestic affairs. The Soviets then obliged the rest of Eastern Europe
to refuse American aid as well (and instead created COMECOM in January,
1948, to stimulate and control eastern bloc economies).
The American Congress
was slow to approve the Marshall Plan because of its cost. However,
in February, 1948, when the Czech government tried to get Marshall Plan
aid in spite of Soviet pressure, the Czech government was overthrown and
Foreign Minister Masaryk was killed or committed suicide. March 14,
a few days later, the Senate endorsed the Marshall Plan. Truman appeared
before Congress asking for a resumption of the draft and universal military
training, and the House passed the Marshall Plan in late March, 1948.
The militarization of the Cold War had begun.
Although designed
to be positive, the Marshall Plan was sold to Congress as a response to
the communist threat. Truman was giving McCarthy his tools by oversimplifying
the communist threat and making Americans fear communist subversion in
Europe and at home. Moreover, it is debatable whether peace and prosperity
really rest on economic stability; the desperately poor are just as likely
to produce military dictators as communist regimes. Worse, American
economic involvement first in Europe and then elsewhere was seen by many
as neo-colonialist, hurting American interests elsewhere. And in
the long run, most of Marshall Plan aid, even to Europe, ended up being
military. By 1952, 80% of aid going to Europe was military.
Germany remained a
basket case. The key to German recovery would be to make the mark
convertible into other western currencies, to allow easy exchange for trade.
In June, 1948, the reintegration process began, terrifying the Soviets.
They feared the United States would first rebuild Germany economically
and then rearm heróand then send her against the Soviet Union again.
Thus, the Russians closed off land access to Berlin, provoking the 1948
Berlin crisis.
While it was clear
the United States and our allies were legally entitled to West Berlin,
it was not clear that we were entitled to land access to the city.
Berlin, sitting entirely within East Germany, was hard to defend, and remained
so throughout the Cold War. It was a thorn in our side, where the
Soviet Union could and did ìrattle our chainsî when it suited her.
Truman responded to the crisis by organizing an airlift into Berlin, which
was very successful. Soviet intelligence failed to predict American
reaction to closing land access to Berlin: either their intelligence was
not correct in predicting how the West would react, or Moscow could not
use that information, or both.
The impact of the
Berlin airlift was profound. The Soviet Union appeared aggressive,
thus justifying Truman's appraisal of her to get the Marshall Plan through
Congress. But the American response also terrified the Soviets; when
Truman moved sixty B-29sóplanes capable of carrying nuclear missiles?into
Britain, the Soviet Union feared that the U.S. might use atomic weapons,
of which the Soviets had none. Only in the 1970s did it become known
that these planes were not refitted to carry atomic weapons. In fact,
the United States had fewer than 50 bombs, and only 30 B-29s capable of
carrying them. The Berlin Crisis also had an impact on the 1948 presidential
election in the United States: in a three-way split in the Democratic Party
, Truman was nominated over Strom Thurmond and Henry Wallace, and won the
election in November, although no one had given him a chance.
The Soviet Union exploded
its first atomic bomb in the summer of 1949. She was now convinced
that she could defend herself, and was the equal of the United States.
Knowing the bomb would work, the Soviet Union allowed land access to resume
even before the explosion in September. But then Truman gave the
go-ahead for the far more powerful Hydrogen bomb. He made no attempt
to negotiate with the Soviet Union for control over atomic weapons, however.
For most Americans and for Truman in particular, the United States had
to negotiate only from a position of strength. This meant, of course, that
the other side would have to negotiate from a position of weaknessówhich
meant it would not negotiate. Without discussions, either the problems
continued unresolved or armed conflicts broke out.
With negotiations
deemed impossible, the United States following the Berlin crisis called
forth new plans to reconceive the Cold War, but now far more in military
terms, and with global commitments. This reconception seemed to be
proved correct by events not in Europe, but in Asia.