After the Berlin crisis, the metaphor of war in Cold War was increasingly taken seriously, and the conflict was increasingly seen as a military confrontation.  American actions helped to produce the Soviet reactions.  Primarily these Soviet moves were defensive; she had no power to attack, and we knew it.  The Soviets lacked a modern navy, a strategic air force, deliverable atomic bombs, or air defenses.  But what the Soviets regarded as defensive reactions were treated by Americans as unprovoked aggression which in turn called forth ever more militarized responses from us, which in turn caused the defense minded Russians to react again.  Unilateral Soviet action endangered the delicate compromise in the early Cold War, and it tied the hands of American policy leaders as the public became ever more disillusioned with our former ally.
     The Soviets responded to the Berlin air lift by crushing all multi-party governments in Eastern Europe, fearing that Germany would ultimately be remilitarized and perhaps invade through this area again.  The communists became skilled at maintaining a fictitious foreign threat in order to maintain its legitimacy in domestic affairs. More importantly, the Berlin crisis caused a serious debate in the Soviet Union between the ìdovesî and ìhawks,î a  debate paralleling that in the United States which also sought to develop a long range plan to deal with the adversary.  The Soviet doves, noting the success of Maoís revolution in China and the Soviet possession of the atomic bomb, no longer felt so insecure, and wanted instead to increase production of consumer goods to make the dream of socialism a reality.  The county was worse off now than she had been in the 1920s.  How could socialism appeal if it appeared to be a failure in Russia, the leader of worldwide socialism?  With limited funds, the Soviets would have to choose between spending money on the military or on consumer goods.  They could not have both guns and butter.  To get consumer goods, some decentralization would have to occur, both in agriculture and industry.  As the Soviet Union attempted to beef up the consumer sector of their economy, she was unwilling to challenge the United Sates in foreign affairs.  The Cold War appeared to be calming down.
     Following the Berlin crisis, the German economic miracle began.  With money from the Marshall plan, between 1948 and 1960, German industrial production increased 6000%!  This meant, however, that the gap between East and West Germany began to grow, embarrassing the Soviet Union.  Worse, many East Germans voted with their feet, crossing over to the West at Berlin and claiming political sanctuary.  A massive brain drain began.  West Germany pulled closer to the United States in her foreign policy, under Adenhauer, much to Soviet displeasure.  And the United States came to see Germany as the bulwark against any Soviet attack on the west, meaning that Germany had to be economically strongóand eventually remilitarized.
     The Berlin crisis had revealed that the West could not defend Germany from the Soviet Union without using the atomic bomb.  Even if we used the bomb, however, the question was where to drop it.  If we waited for the Soviets to attack, we would be obliged to drop it on Russian troop concentrations already inside West Germany.  We would have to destroy Germany to save her, a fact that led to an active anti-American, anti-nuclear protest in West Germany.  If, on the other hand, we dropped the bomb on Soviet cities, how exactly would that stop an invasion in West Germany, hundreds of miles away?   Furthermore, no matter how many atomic bombs the United States possessed, the Soviets would build the same number, and thus the advantage would go to the Soviets with their larger conventional forces.  The use of atomic weapons was so fraught with difficulties that Americans searched for a way to avoid having to use them, namely the creation of a defensive alliance for Western Europe dominated by the United States—NATO.  The treaty creating NATO said an armed attack on one would be regarded as an attack on all.  In fact, it was the Europeans themselves, led by Great Britain, who first approached the United States about creating a defensive alliance.  They had been unable to deal successfully with their economic and political problems, reducing their self confidence and making socialism more seductive; they now turned to the United States as their military, economic and political savior.
     But was the Soviet Union really a threat so dangerous a military alliance was called for?  Historical opinion says no.  Stalin had no designs on Western Europe.  But following the creation of NATO in April, 1949, communist parties in both France and Italy lost ground and the Soviets lifted the blockade of Berlin in May.  Thus NATO looked significant, and it became an article of faith that the military alliance had stopped the Soviets from gobbling up Western Europe.  Even worse, it had been an overreaction which focused American concentration on a foreign threat, rather than the strengths of the American system.
     Congress was slow to approve NATO as it had been slow to approve the Marshall Plan.  But when Truman announced the Soviets had in fact exploded an atomic bomb, the treaty creating NATO rushed through with barely a dissent.  Those who before had asked fundamental questions, such as whether the security of the United States was really involved and whether we had enough money to finance a huge military and our industrial revolution at the same time without bankrupting ourselves, were called ìneo-isolationistsî and dismissed.
     NATO was part of a major reevaluation of American policy, condensed into NSC-68.  The NSC, the National Security Council, was made up of both military and diplomatic personnel, charged by Truman to advise him on security matters.  Although technically equal to one another, the diplomatic recommendations inevitably would take longer for their solutions to work than would a quick military fix.  Thus, power on the NSC shifted to the military.  In their 68th paper, the NSC attempt to come up with a grand strategy to explain what the United States should do in a world in which our main adversary now had the bomb.
     The Truman Doctrineís idea of a global threat, that the Soviets and their minions would have to be stopped everywhere, became the basis of this document.  NSC-68 assumed the Soviets were interested in imposing ìabsolute controlî over all areas in their possession.  The legitimate defense needs of the Sovietsówhat concerned them the mostó were never addressed.  We simply asserted we had no intention of invading them, and assumed they would believe it, but following World Wars I and II and the American invasion of 1918, the Soviets refused to trust any westerner.  NSC-68 further assumed that the Soviet Union had to expand her influence infinitely.  Thus, she was not just concerned with Eastern Europe as a possible invasion route to the Soviet Union, but the rest of the world as well.  Moreover, her expected moves worldwide could be countered with the same policies we adopted for Europe, a sort of one size fits all form of foreign policy.  The American government refused to see that major differences existed in other areas of the world making them different from Europe: rising nationalisms, the end of colonialism, the need to improve economically and husband raw materialsóall made the so-called Third World different from Europe and thus required a different foreign policy.
     Two men argued in this way in an attempt to defeat NSC-68, Charles Bohlen and George Kennan.  Both men had intimate experience of the Soviet Union.  They argued that Stalin in fact had no design for world control, and that his attention was focused on the Soviet Union itself and the eastern bloc, not Asia and Africa.  In fact, they argued, Stalin feared the over-extension of his meager resources.  He was basically following the policies of Peter the Great. Further argued Kennan and Bohlen, an open-ended commitment such as NSC-68 entailed would bankrupt the United States, destroying the real basis of our power which was economic, not military.  Our means, too, were limited.
 Instead, Bohlen and Kennan argued in favor of building up the political and economic system of the United States as a response to the Soviets, leading by example and fighting only when necessary.  Only countries whose loss directly affected the American security should be defended.  Those countries were our major trading partners in Europe and Asia and the main supply and trade routes to and from them.  Prestige, they argued, should never be a factor in foreign policy.  Faced with repeated policy failures, the Soviet Union would modify its behavior.
     NSC-68, however, disregarded Bohlenís and Kennanís assertions.  The position paper declared that no negotiations were possible with the Soviet Union, because the United States could not at that time force her to change her policy.  Never was negotiate from strength more baldly stated.  But if we negotiated from strength, the other side would have to negotiate from weakness, which in turn meant no negotiations and instead possible war.  Moreover, if you negotiate from strength, you will need more strength; hence, NSC-68 called for the creation of the hydrogen bomb.  NSC-68 also argued in favor of building up conventional forces as well. The constant need for more ìstrengthî than the adversary implied a never ending arms race requiring vast sums of money.   Taxes would be raised to pay for all this, and Washington would have to create a ìconsensus of sacrificeî to underpin this long struggle.
     NSC-68 involved major problems.  How much strength would be enough?  By increasing the number of threats to include anything that happened overseas, the United States increased infinitely the resources she would need to combat these threats.  A large army would be a drain on the American economy; it would be expensive to pay for even with the draft, and men in the military were not engaged in useful work in the economy.  NSC-68 further glossed over the existence of non-democratic governments in the so-called ìfree worldî the United States was pledging to defend.  Our commitment to protect democracy enshrined in NSC-68 thus sometimes looked silly and self-serving.  Ironically, NSC-68 recommended against negotiations at a time when the Soviet Union was moving towards peaceful coexistence, trying to build up her own consumer sector and deemphasizing the military.  A golden opportunity was lost.
     Truman was aware the recommendations of NSC-68 could bankrupt the United States and certainly draw money from the Fair Deal programs he envisaged.  Thus the president delayed accepting the proposals presented to him in the spring of 1950.   The consensus of sacrifice the NSC-68 paper called for was created not by Truman but by McCarthy, leading to dangerous attacks on American values and civil liberties.  NSC-68 was a policy in search of an occasion to use it.   The Soviet Union was quiet and Eastern Europe was already gone.  Why should so much sacrifice be demanded of Americans if there was no perceived threat?  Then came Korea.

Asia in the Early Cold War

     There are three major powers in the Far East, Japan, China and Russia.  Peace can be maintained there only if a relatively stable balance of power prevails.  But Asia appeared to be a huge market in the eyes of Americans and Europeans, encouraging their intervention in the area.  And it was a goldmine in its own right.  Manchuria had coal and iron which together made steel.  The rice bowl of Southeast Asia and the food from the Yangtze River basin were prizes worth fighting for.   Any country strong enough to dominate Asia and freeze others out would be a direct threat to the American economy and potentially to American security.
     Thus it was in the interest of the United States to keep countries there weak.  In 1899, the American government put forth the first set of the Open Door notes that allowed all countries to trade in every other countryís sphere of influence in China.  Since everyone benefited, the first set of notes was quickly accepted.  But when the Boxer rebellion threatened the lives of Caucasians living in China, the Europeans sent an expeditionary army to rescue them, and seemed to be willing to break up China once and for all.  Thus it was that we issued the second set of Open Door notes that proved dangerous.
     The second set pledged the United States to defend the ìpolitical and territorial integrityî of China.  But what if the country, China or anyone else, had no integrity?  The borders of most countries are artificial and change over time.  China in particular claimed land the Russians thought was theirs.  Would the United States defend what the Chinese said was China or what the Russians said was China?  What if the government were not legitimate, and did not really enjoy the allegiance of the people?  For that matter, what does it mean to be a legitimate government in the first place?  Worse, what if we didn't really mean it?  Although we pledged to defend China, we never sent our fleet, and finally in 1902, Britain, frantic to defend herself against Germany, signed an alliance with the only power in the Far East capable of defending her interests there.  The Open Door made the United States responsible for China without the ability or emotional commitment to make it work, a situation which would be repeated in Vietnam.  Moreover, while the Open Door looked like nation building (defending China), it was actually nation busting (China was weak and carved into spheres of influence).
     Russian policy in the Far East contained a strong, almost racial antagonism to China.  Moreover, she needed outlets to the sea at Vladivostock, Port Arthur and Darien, and she wanted raw materials from Siberia and Manchuria.  In the 19th century, with a weak China divided into  spheres of influence, Russiaís main rival was Japan.  But the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 exposed the real weaknesses of Russia when she lost both her Far Eastern and Baltic fleets to the Japanese.  Russia appeared to be a paper tiger.  Emboldened by Russian humiliation, in 1910, Japan took over Korea, the invasion route by which she would reach mainland Asia or a mainland Asian power would reach her.  This conquest positioned Japan closer to Manchurian coal and iron deposits.  Part of the reason for World War II was Japan's desire to create an Asian empire for herself, as she ruthlessly made up for the deficits in her own economy, going after Manchuria in 1931, the food from the Yangtze valley in 1937, the rice bowl of South East Asia in 1940, and finally the oil in the Dutch East Indies in 1941.   But with Japan destroyed after World War II and China fighting a civil war between Mao and Chiang, the only country that could profit from the Far Eastern situation was the Soviet Union.  This she declined to do, concentrating more on Eastern Europe as we have seen.
     Following World War II, a civil war broke out in China between Chiang and Mao.  Chiang was a representative of the mandarin class, wealthy aristocrats who had ruled China and were determined to protect their privileged position.  Mao, by contrast, found his support primarily among the peasants, the majority of the population.  The United States supported Chiang, mostly because Mao was a communist. We airlifted Chiang's troops north to accept the Japanese surrender after the war, so that Chiang would become the government of China.  This was unfortunate in that Chiang had not fought vigorously against the Japanese as Mao had; Chiang had mostly used the weapons the United States sent him to attack his enemies within China.  Moreover, Chiang would not engage in land reform, since it would destroy the basis of mandarin wealth.   However, as Chiang was unable to curb the raging inflation in the post-Word War II period or to correct a corrupt tax system, in time even the middle class in the cities turned against him.  Truman knew of Chiang's shortcomings but refused to criticize him publicly for fear of strengthening the hand of Mao, a communist.
     In the decades during which Mao had fought Chiang, he had developed new ideas on communism that made him very different from the Russians.  Unlike Lenin, Mao had great faith in the peasants who were the backbone of his movement.  He had trained his cadres during the long period of struggle, unlike Lenin who enlisted his after the revolution had already taken place.  Mao had been in China, physically sharing its troubles, unlike Lenin who had been in the safety of Switzerland.  As a result, Mao had earned the support of the Chinese people, even of the middle class. He provided a new, Asiatic model of socialism, very appealing to other underdeveloped nations which had a large peasant population, especially since Mao was not Caucasian or European, as Russia was.  Mao also developed a new role for guerrilla fighters: they should control bases to which they could retreat and there work the land and be productive.  Instead of a military caste being created which was a drain on the economy and useless, Mao envisioned a military tied closely to the people and sharing its burdens.  In doing so, Mao developed a new theory on how to fight a better armed opponent, where the emphasis was on men rather than weapons.  His theories worked in Cuba and Vietnam.
     China was not like Eastern Europe for the Soviets.  China had traditional links to the West, through Christian missionaries, for example, in a way Eastern Europe had not.  Russia was perceived by the Chinese as an imperialist threat which had not been the case in Eastern Europe, at least until after World War II.  Moreover, Mao had come to power with almost no help from Stalin, unlike the communist parties of Eastern Europe which were held in power only because of Soviet troops.  Thus, neither the Soviet Union nor the United States could control Mao's China, nor was she a major warmaking center in any case.  But with the ìfallî of China to Mao in October, 1949, the only reliable ally the United States had in the Far East was Japan.  But how were we to defend Japan, 10,000 miles away, when Japan was demilitarized after World War II?  To defend Japan, we would have to defend the invasion route to her.  We would have to defend Korea.
     Unfortunately, American policy makers did not at first understand the role of Korea as the invasion route to Japan, and two Americans who should have known better, General MacArthur and Secretary of State Acheson, drew the American defense perimeter to exclude Korea.  Korea had been divided in 1945, when Kim Il Sung, a communist dictator took control in the north while Syngman Rhee, also a dictator, took control in the south.  Rhee was a Catholic in a country 90% non-Catholic, and he had spent World War II in a Catholic seminary in the United States, but he did have the virtue of speaking English. The American government did not trust Rhee, fearing he might invade the north and get into a shooting war with Soviet soldiers, so we did not arm him. The Soviets distrusted Kim's fierce nationalism and withdrew much of their support.  When the Chinese began to provide a role model and some military support, however, the Soviets began giving more aid to Kim to keep the Chinese in their place.  Kim, like other communists became skilled at playing the Soviets and Chinese off against one another.
     Knowing the United States would not defend Rhee because we had said so, and seeing Rhee virtually unarmed, in June, 1950, the North Koreans invaded the South.  There is no evidence that either Stalin or Mao were involved in this invasion, although both would later contribute to it.  Stalin had at first refused Kimís request to support his invasion of South Korea, but Stalin refused fearing a war with the United States.  However, the victory of Mao in China and Soviet possession of the atomic bomb made Stalin feel more secure.  Thus in April, 1950, when Kim visited Moscow, Stalin approved Kimís invasion plans, but the Soviet leader wanted a quick success that would present the Americans with a fait accompli.  Stalin knew an invasion was imminent, but he did not know when, nor did he materially participate in it.  By invading South Korea, Kim gave Rhee something he could never earned on his ownólegitimacy.
     Truman got the support of the United Nations to ìrepel North Korean aggression.î  The Soviets were boycotting at the time and could not cast their veto on the Security Council (one of the best proofs they did not see the invasion coming).  Although the United Nations condemned the invasion, the war was fought overwhelmingly by Americans.  Most of the troops were American and the chain of command bypassed the United Nations and went to the Pentagon. The allies were almost pushed off the peninsula by late summer, concentrating in the southeast portion of Korea in what became known as the Pusan perimeter.
     MacArthur staged an amphibious invasion at Inchon, catching the North Koreans by surprise.  As the North Koreans retreated north of the 38th parallel, Truman gave the order to follow, providing no Chinese troops were spotted. In crossing the pre-war border, Truman was going well beyond the United Nations resolution, for North Korean aggression had been stopped once they were pushed back across the border. China had been trying to warn the United States not to cross the parallel, fearing American presence on her border as much as the Americans feared North Korean or Chinese presence so close to Japan.  However, the Chinese could not communicate directly with us since the United States had broken diplomatic relations with her when Mao came to power. We knew the Chinese were warning us against something, but garbled and incomplete messages made it unclear exactly what.  As American troops pushed north to the Yalu River, Chinese troops entered the Korean conflict in October, 1950, attacking American troops behind the lines and forcing them back to the 38th parallel.
     The Chinese invaded because the United States had connected Korea and the security of Taiwan, by interposing the Seventh Fleet in the Formosa Straits, for example.  The Chinese considered Taiwan part of ìone China.î Moreover, the Chinese were looking for a military victory which would strengthen their claim to the China seat at the United Nations then held by Taiwan.  China did not fear the American atomic bomb; she had few industrial targets to aim at, and Chinese troops were so close to American ones that radioactive fallout from a bomb blast could have killed our own troops.  Mao moreover had a romantic notion of revolution, believing that continuous fighting was necessary to harden a true revolutionary spirit.  And finally, the Chinese would no more countenance an American dominated Korea on their border than we would countenance a Communist dominated Korea on Japanís doorstep.
     The United States had discounted Chinese intervention, because it was so soon after their civil war had ended in April, 1949.  Moreover, when the Soviets signaled that they were distancing themselves from North Korea, Americans assumed that, since all communist countries had to take orders from Moscow as NSC-68 had declared, the Chinese would not intervene if the Russians would not.   And when the Chinese invaded, the United States was totally unprepared for the new guerilla fighting the Chinese introduced.
     The internal repercussions of the Korean War were enormous.  It seemed to prove the American hawks had been right all along, that the communists would stop at nothing to increase their ìabsolute controlî over all areas of the world and that they only understood the language of force. Diplomacy was not even considered in the conflict as a result.  Truman believed he had to fight here, not because South Korea was all that important, but because he had ìlearnedî from the Munich agreement of 1938 that if he did not stop aggression here, it would simply break out elsewhere.
     Korea also increased fear of subversion inside the United States. Alger Hiss had been convicted of perjury in January, 1950, and in February, the British spy ring under Klaus Fuchs had been revealed.  Once the war broke out, it seemed to confirm charges made by McCarthy that communists would operate worldwide, including in the United States State Department.  A new crop of anti-communist senators and congressmen were elected in November, 1950, among them, Richard Nixon.  The election of Dwight Eisenhower as president in November 1952 owed something to the Korean War, as Americans threw in their lot with the great hero of World War II.  Republicans gained control of Congress for the first time in 20 years.
     Korea also raised the issue of nuclear weapons.  MacArthur urged their use on enemy troop concentrations and the use of radioactive materials to stop lines of resupply.  He was fired for suggesting it.  Eisenhower understood that our European allies would not tolerate the use of nuclear weapons against the Chinese or North Koreans, and might in fact desert the cause, exposing the operation for what it really was, an American war.  But all this begged the question of whether atomic bombs would really be helpful.  In the open against troops, such weapons would have been devastating, but they would be much less so against dug in troops.  Nuclear weapons might also have worked against the main supply routes, but the Chinese were not on the main supply routes; they used back roads instead.  Moreover, the Soviets had a bomb of their own; if we used ours would the Soviets use theirs?  If so, she would use it presumably against Japan, the only reliable American ally in the Far East.   And we had the wrong equipment; slow moving propeller planes were actually more effective against the enemy troops, but the United States had been planning to fight the Soviets and so were equipped with fast jets that stayed over target only a few minutes.
     Negotiations to end the war continued while the fighting did.  That meant bloody battles for useless real estate we intended to negotiate away. Frustration grew in the United States with the idea of limited war, especially as casualties mounted. How was it we could win against Germany and Japan and not prevail against the North Koreans and Chinese?  If we used the atom bomb once, why not use it again?
     Once elected president, Eisenhower issued a statement implying the United States might in fact use nuclear weapons in Korea, but it was left purposely vague.  The Chinese, however, were obliged to consider the possibility.  When Stalin died in March of 1953, he left the communist world in turmoil since he had not provided for a successor.  As Russians kept weapons at home for a possible civil war, the Chinese and North Koreans found themselves with insufficient materials to fight the war.  The negotiations impasse was finally broken when China agreed not to force POWs to return to China if they did not want to.  China was reluctant to agree to these terms, because when a military victory became impossible, she had hoped for a propaganda victory which would be impossible if so many Chinese captured troops willingly stayed in the capitalist camp.  Those Chinese POWs who did return home were almost all put into labor camps to be ìreeducatedî where they languished for years.   A Korean cease-fire was finally signed in July, 1953.
     Clearly, the North Koreans had acted independently when they attacked the South, although they would later be supplied by both the Chinese and Soviets who found themselves in a bidding war for North Korean affections.  Stalin had supported Korea as an opportunist; if the North Koreans had already begun the war, he might as well take advantage.  However, the Soviets showed restraint here as they would later in Vietnam, not offering the best weapons they had, nor atomic weapons.  Likewise, the war seemed to justify the repression of civil liberties in the United States.  Since we assumed the Soviet Union was behind the invasion, the Soviet threat suddenly appeared very real.  The war also seemed to justify the military demands of NSC-68; if the Soviets would stop at nothing, including war, to achieve her ends, the United States must get ready to fight her at all costs.  The brutality of the Chinese to American and South Korean prisoners, many of whom were simply executed instead of being interned, led Americans to feel that the Asians were not really human.  Many things were possible against a subhuman enemy that would not have been possible against a ìcivilizedî one.
     The death of Stalin and the election of Eisenhower ushered in a new period in the Cold War in which both the Soviet Union and the United States attempted to step back from the threat of nuclear war.  New issues would be raised: what to do with the developing Third World countries; how to fight a war when one dare not use the most deadly weapons we had; how to avoid a sneak attack from adversaries.  But the early experience of the Cold War had frozen certain concepts in our minds, and these concepts would prevent a thorough, dispassionate discussion of Cold War realities.

Eisenhower and Khrushchev

     By the mid-fifties, a new crop of leaders struggled with the old problems while looking at brand new ones.   This resulted in a redefining of the Cold War, sometimes bringing it to the Middle East and Latin America with unfortunate results.  Methods were also redefined, since military confrontation was too dangerous.  When both sides had deliverable nuclear weapons, the struggle changed from a military to an economic and political one.  A reprioritizing occurred as well: neither side could do everything, so some areas became more important than others. By 1955, the world was effectively divided between two blocs, and the Cold War entered a period of struggle for spheres of influence much like the struggle for colonies had been in the late 19th century.
     Eisenhower unmilitarized the Cold War.   He believed the only way we could lose the Cold War was to spend ourselves to death.  Thus, Eisenhower vastly reduced military spending, cutting Truman's military budget by one third.  He would keep enough nuclear weapons for defense only, not first strike. The president profoundly believed that the only way for the United States to lose the Cold war was to spend itself to death; he saw a greater threat in excessive government spending than he did in the Soviet Union herself.  By locking the Soviet Union within her borders and forbidding her to expand anywhere else, Eisenhower would force her to try to make her system work, serene in the confidence that it could not.  Thus, as the situation in both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe decayed, the Soviets would be forced to deal with Eastern European anger.  Instead of trying to “roll back Communism” from Eastern Europe, therefore, we would just contain the Soviet Union and let time work on our side.
      As Eisenhower concentrated on Europe, he ignored Latin America and the Middle East.  His Eurocentrism caused him to support the old imperialists like the British and the French, making it harder for him to appeal to developing areas of the world who saw these European powers as former overlords. Eisenhower understood these problems, but he could not develop a policy to address Latin America and the Middle East that would work quickly enough without damaging the economies of our European allies, thus weakening the western alliance.  Furthermore, in trying to rebuild the Republican Party, he allowed domestic concerns to intrude on foreign policy.  The president's anti-communist appeals attempted to take advantage of the consensus formed by McCarthy; Eisenhower was working to crack the solid Democratic South to reinvigorate the Republican Party after 20 years out of office.
     The Eisenhower/Dulles relationship was one of equals.  Ike was fully in control of his policy, and he used hardliner Dulles in part to win support of Congressional Republicans who liked Dullesí bulldog, confrontational public style.  Dulles had developed his ideas after being out of power for 20 years.  Thus, his public policy for the ìrollback of communismî was not tested in the crucible of reality.  Dullesí aggressive public statements, however, belied his private willingness to seek compromise, something he shared with Eisenhower.
     The president saw limits on the Americansí willingness to tax and spend for the military, for the communist threat seemed to be receding following the end of the Korean conflict.  Even McCarthy would be in disgrace after the spring, 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings.  The senator was finally censured in December, 1954.  In order to save money, Dulles and Eisenhower decided to rely on the threat of nuclear reprisal; called massive retaliation, the policy claimed that at the first threat, the United States would use nuclear weapons.  Reliance on nuclear weapons would allow Eisenhower to cut the conventional army, which was most expensive; Eisenhower was thus able to cut Truman's military budget by one-third, to $34 billion. 
     Massive retaliation presumed ever more destructive weapons.   We had only nine bombs in 1946, but 48 by 1950. And in November 1952, the United States had exploded the Hydrogen bomb; it was undeliverable, however, because it was the size of a two-story house.  After 1950, there were many technical advances, especially in miniaturization.  Eisenhower gave the go-ahead for the Minuteman missile, a solid-fueled rocket which did not require loading dangerous liquid oxygen at the last minute, and the Polaris missile which could be launched from submarines which would be impossible to track.  Reliance on nuclear weapons was possible for Eisenhower, because he did not intend to get involved in local, conventional conflicts like Korea.  The Guatemalan and Iranian crises (see below) were settled by the CIA, not by the army. The president firmly believed that any war with the Soviet Union would become a total war including the use of nuclear weapons.  Thus, he made American policy so dangerous than his advisors would not try to push hi8m to war but would instead settle for compromise.
      All of this reliance on nuclear weapons plus an every larger and more potent American nuclear strike force frightened the Soviet Union; there was no room for error. If the United States chose to see a situation as a crisis, we were saying publicly we would launch our missiles.  How would the Soviets know if we considered something that serious?  Massive retaliation also frightened our European allies.  If we waited for the Soviets to start a war in Europe, we would be obliged to drop atomic weapons on Russian troop concentrations in Germany, destroying Germany to save her from the communist menace. Naturally, Europeans objected!  To keep them in line, the United States had to threaten to strike first, which we had no real intention of doing, hitting targets inside the Soviet Union.  But this only terrified the Soviets further, since such a strike could come without any warning at all.
     Eisenhower was Eurocentric, and believed that if war started, it would start in Europe; his training encouraged this view, since he had led the European theater forces in World War II.  He was confirmed in this belief by the creation of the Warsaw Pact (a military alliance of the Eastern bloc) in 1955, six years after the formation of NATO.  The Warsaw Pact was a part of what allowed Khrushchev to consider reducing pressure on Eastern Europe in 1956, since he now felt able to defeat an armed invasion from the West.  The Soviets always regarded the Warsaw Pact as a response to western aggression as represented by the creation of NATO
     As a result of Eisenhower's Eurocentrism, there was little money for Latin America.  No one in authority in his administration had any deep experience of Latin America.  Instead, American policy makers saw the region mostly as a global pawn in the superpower struggle between the superpowers.  Latin Americans themselves, by contrast, saw their main problem as the lack of money for development, and they were indignant that the United States had sent money to Europe under the Marshall Plan and not to them, especially after the support they gave during World War II which they had never seen as ìtheirî fight.  Belgium and Luxemburg alone in 1946 got more in aid than all 20 Latin American countries combined.  The United States, however, saw Western Europe as vital to American security, and thus Europe got the money.  While the Eisenhower administration was not prepared to pony up large sums of money for Latin America, it still forced the region to take a strong anti-communist line, creating ill will and resentment.  Such money as did go to Latin America went for military aid, but not enough to allow Latin America to really defend herself.  The military aid simply created a reliable military caste to keep wars of liberation under control.
     American activities in Latin America reached a nadir in the 1954 overthrow of the legally elected Guatemalan government. The United States came to fear that Soviet agents were subverting Guatemala.  Arbenz was elected in 1950, replacing a three-man junta of whom one had been assassinated.   Arbenz considered himself a ìsoldier of the peopleî and so went forward with land reform.  The Arbenz government there was indeed leftist, but its social welfare programs were not radicaló-agricultural land redistribution, for example, did not touch estates up to 670 acres.  But the United Fruit Company owned 550,000 acres, 80 percent of which was uncultivated, and would thus see much of its acreage nationalized.  Moreover, the United Fruit company only grew bananas for export, not staple food crops for the indigenous population.  With 22 times more arable land in export crops than in cereal foods, the Guatemalan people remained malnourished. When a Swedish ship arrived with Czech arms, the Eisenhower administration was convinced Guatemala was falling into the Communist orbit.  Thus the CIA was dispatched to start a revolution in 1954.  The CIA supported Armas, who invaded with 100 to 150 men while the Guatemalan army stood aside, refusing to defend the legally elected government.  Once in power, Armas undid Arbenzí land reform programs, much to the delight of United Fruit.  Other leaders, however, like Castro and the Sandinistas, would learn the lesson: they would make the government and the army part of a single unit so that any attack on the government became an attack on the army, which would thus rise to defend it.  No longer would the CIA be sufficient to overthrow a government.  It would now require a war.
     The Middle East was another area Eisenhower paid little attention to until late in his presidency.  Here, without much thought, the United States supported Israel because she was democratic, anti-Communist, and pro-American.  But this support hurt our appeal to Arab states that regarded Israel as having stolen their land to assuage the guilt of Europeans over the Holocaust which they had not caused. Moreover, the administration believed that oil from the Middle East must continue to flow to Europe to aid in her recovery from World War II, thus creating potential customers for American goods.  In Arab eyes, therefore, the United States was guilty of supporting the old imperialist powers like Britain and France, and this offended their nationalism.
     An example of this American support was the overthrow in 1953 of the legally elected government in Iran. To protect oil supplies to Europe (although not necessarily to the United States which had not yet become so dependent on Middle Eastern oil), the United States supported a coup against the Mossadegh government and the subsequent substitution of the Shah.  Britain, which owned the Iranian oil company, actually had gotten more in money than Iran did in taxes.  The Mossadegh government, however, was committed to social reform measures for the population, and needed this oil revenue to accomplish its aims.  Thus, Iran nationalized the oil company.  Furious, Britain imposed an embargo and the Iranian economy and population suffered as a result.  To create a unified, nationalistic stand against the embargo, the Mossadegh government appealed to a number of political parties in Iran for support, one of which was the Communist Tudeh party.  Eisenhower then authorized the CIA to help overthrow the Mossadegh government and welcomed the return of the Shah.  The latter immediately signed an oil agreement with American companies which would now have 40% of oil revenues, as opposed to the 0% we had had before.  Britain got less in oil revenue than before the coup but much more than what Mossadegh had offered. In the eyes of the Middle Eastern states, this coup looked very much like the United States flexing its economic and military muscle for its own benefit, under the guise of keeping oil flowing to Europe.  We were also accused of interfering unnecessarily in the domestic affairs of a sovereign foreign nation.  Warned that such intervention might damage American relations with other Middle Eastern and Arab states, Eisenhower, given his Eurocentrism, nonetheless chose the coup in order to keep the NATO alliance strong with secure oil supplies.
     One area of the world where Eisenhower did not aid the Europeans was in Vietnam.  During the battle at Dienbienphu in 1954, the president repeatedly refused to send American troops or air power to help the French hold on to their former colony.  While Ike was prepared to aid Europe to survive economically, he was unwilling to perpetuate the French empire that was crumbling in any case.  Thus the French were defeated, and they decided to abandon their former colony.  But the French did not want to simply hand over Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese nationalist and communist who was the leader of the opposition forces.  Thus, at Geneva in 1954, an international conference was called, to which the Americans were not a party, to devise a plan for Vietnam to exit the French empire.  The two main provisions of the Geneva accords were first, a temporary division of the country at the 17th parallel, and second elections in two years.  The division was to allow time for tempers to cool, and everyone understood that when the elections were held both north and south, Ho would win, given his long association with Vietnamese independence.
     However, the United States did not allow these elections to take place, precisely because Ho was a communist.   In an election year, Eisenhower could not allow a country to ìgo communistî and expect to be reelected.  Thus, the United States recognized Diem, a Catholic dictator in a country overwhelmingly Buddhist, to govern the South, and when Diem refused to hold elections, fearing he would be shown the door, the United States backed him up.  When Diem hinted he wanted American troops, however, Eisenhower demurred; he would not get involved in a land war in Asia that he considered would be fighting the wrong enemy, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, in a war he might lose.
     Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union Khrushchev came to power after an intense political struggle following Stalin's death.  Stalin had not provided for a successor.  Worse, he had engaged in a serious purge between 1950-1952 which had terrorized those Kremlin leaders who survived it.  Immediately following the dictatorís death, KGB chief Beria attempted to seize power, but Khrushchev among others thwarted this plot with the help of the military, and Beria was arrested, tried in secret and executed.  The new Soviet leader, Malenkov, attempted to ìbuild bridges to the West,î that is, reduce tensions.   There were no great foreign challenges then facing the country: the Korean War was over, Eastern Europe was completely subjugated, and Berlin was at peace.  But Malenkov got no favorable response from the United States, and so fell from power.  The Americans saw no reason to respond because of our success in Korea, refusing to see the death of Stalin as playing an important role in this outcome.  Instead, we saw fit to believe that it was our threat of nuclear war and our own military efforts that permitted the armistice in July, 1953.
     Khrushchev had become the chief leader by late 1955, but he had rely on the army to stay in power.  Since his government was not legal, it had to rely on force to govern.  That force could come either from the army or from the secret police, the Cheka and KGB. The army was more reliable, having a long tradition of service to the state. (Later, in 1983, Andropov, mentor to Gorbachev, relied on the KGB instead of the army as would Gorbachev later, allowing the latter to seek arms control agreements with the West even though the military objected.) Relying on the army narrowed Khrushchev's options; he had to placate the army with the weapons they wanted and he also had to look tough on capitalists to earn their respect.
     But the most important challenge to his undisputed leadership Khrushchev faced was China.  Chinese socialism was a different kind, based on peasants, and thus more applicable to the Third World.  The Chinese were Asiatic, not European, and thus bolstered race pride among many former colonial nations in a way Russia, with her imperial past, could not. Moreover, China supported wars of national liberation without hesitation.  The Soviet Union did not; partly she wanted to avoid antagonizing the West, and she also wanted to spend her money on her own domestic needs.  The Chinese were quick to point out the Soviets had not supported North Korea massively, nor Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.  But a central reason for Khrushchev's lack of enthusiasm for wars of national liberation was that the Soviet Union herself was an empire held together by force, and Eastern Europe was effectively an area occupied by Soviet troops.  If wars of national liberation were supported elsewhere, sooner or later, someone would use the same message to cause Eastern Europe to revolt, and possibly break apart the Soviet Union herself.
     Khrushchev presented himself as a reformer, closing down Stalinís labor camps and (like Gorbachev) releasing many political prisoners.  This greatly appealed to the young (like Gorbachev).  Khrushchev wanted to divert money from the military to consumer goods to make the promise of socialism come true, for he could only ask for so much sacrifice from the Russian people.  And he had to show the Soviet Union as a more appealing model than China.
     Khrushchevís main concern was Soviet agriculture which was very disappointing in comparison with Western Europe, where fewer people lived on the land and yet produced more food.  The Soviet Union reached its pre-war food production levels by 1953, but the population had grown, and the earlier statistics had been rotten anyway.  Collectivization simply had not worked; five percent of the land farmed privately produced almost 98% of Soviet food.  Khrushchev thus raised prices for farm goods so they would more nearly reflect what they were worth, and so would provide an incentive for farmers to grow more food. The Soviet leader also developed the Virgin Lands Program, bringing new areas (like Khazakstan) into cultivation.  But his program used wrong methods, importing the techniques from the Ukraine to the high plateau of central Russia. Ukrainian soil is different, and when methods suited to the steppes were brought to different soil conditions elsewhere, ecological disaster resulted in the long run.   In the beginning, however, the Virgin Lands programs produced immediate success; Soviet agriculture increased 50% between 1955 and 1958.  Even though prices were higher, the population was willing to go along because it was seeing some gains, like more food at home and greater prestige abroad as a result of Soviet successes in space like Sputnik.  But Khrushchev interfered in 1958 by breaking up the Tractor farms.  Since people did not know how to maintain them, the tractors fell apart.  Moreover, there were not enough tractors to do the job quickly, so crops rotted or were ruined by rain and hail.  When money was diverted from transportation to build new tractors, farmers could not get all the increased food supply to market quickly enough over non-existent or poor roads, and so again, much of it rotted.  Money was also diverted from steel production for structural steel beams to build steel tractors and their engine blocks; without steel enclosures on the treeless plateaus, there were no covered places to keep the tractors in the winter and so they rusted.  Finally, tractor workers were specialists, and they did not want to be reduced to the level of despised farmers; many refused to follow their machines, resulting in even fewer trained mechanics to work on them.
     Such internal problems plus his problems abroad meant that Khrushchevís hold on power was not very secure.  Indeed, he was almost overthrown several times, relying on the military to keep him in power. This insecure hold on power explains his sometimes contradictory policies.
     The development of the so-called Third World, primarily former colonies which were becoming independent at a break neck pace after World War II, pitted the superpowers against one another and increased in the instability of the 1950s.  American officials realized that the prerequisite for all reform was maintaining public order, but the American people and media insisted on countries adopting democracy first, regardless of the consequences for law and order.  Mostly poor, these Third World countries were looking for models to improve themselves, and the Soviet Union looked especially good; she presented herself as an ìup by the bootstrapsî operation.  Moreover, most of these developing countries had no tradition of democracy, so embracing the totalitarian ways of the Soviets was no problem. Finally, with their heritage of colonialism, these countries frequently preferred the Soviet Union over the United States, especially when the latter chose to defend our allies, the former imperialists like Britain and France.
     The United States, however, saw the loss of the Third World countries to neutralism as dangerous.  In our ìfor me or against meî mentality, no neutrality was possible.  In fact, we came to believe that a country which was not ìforî us had to be against us.  The Eisenhower administration, to forestall such slippage, began creating alliances to tally up American friends.  The problem was that these alliances sometimes obliged the United States more than the other countries, since we were promising to defend them all over the world from unspecified dangers.  Inevitably the tail sometimes wagged the dog when such countries demanded the United States make good on its promises. Eisenhower was putting American prestige behind countries not vital to American security, in the tradition of NSC-68 and the Truman Doctrine.  We were accustomed to having success abroad, as in Korea and Greece, and at the very least we had faith in the CIA to accomplish what armed intervention could not.  It did not occur to anyone that the United States might actually have to carry out the alliance agreements we were making.
     Problems thus remained even with new people in office on both sides.  Both the United States and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons, and at least publicly, both were willing to use them for a first strike.  How were the number of such weapons to be limited to avoid a disastrous spending race on arms, and how would the number of such weapons be verified?  If the arms race continued unabated, both Eisenhower and Khrushchev could foresee economic disaster.  If prestige was reckoned in the number of friends, and alliances created, both superpowers might someday have to actually honor these agreements, as the United States would do in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Hungary and Cuba.  Moreover, Eisenhower was slighting Latin America, the Middle East and Asia because he was concerned primarily with Europe.  Worse, he was interpreting their situation (poverty, wars of national liberation, nationalism) according to simple bipolar Cold War terms, at least in part to win Republican support and keep his party in power.  Khrushchev by contrast was trying to rein in the Soviet military on the grounds that the military threat was lessened and the country should be emphasizing consumer goods to make the dream of socialism come true.  But when West Germany entered NATO in 1955, fully rearmed, the Soviet military became very sensitive to the possibility of another German invasion, through Eastern Europe. Even as Khrushchev tried to limit the number of occupation troops in Eastern Europe to save money, he soon faced a dire threat, not from the United States, but from one of his own ìallies.î

Challenge of Eastern Europe

     Eastern Europe was an enormous liability for the Soviet Union.  It was very expensive to keep as many as 25 Russian divisions there, and the nationalism which had afflicted the old Austrian-Hungarian empire now afflicted the Soviets.  Most countries in the area were artificial, made up of many ethnic groups that had traditionally warred with one another. Countries such as Yugoslavia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia were unified only because a strong communist party ruled with an iron fist. By absorbing Eastern Europe against its will, the Soviet Union had actually increased her vulnerability and nervousness, because the area was prone to revolt and bloodshed. The Soviets held onto this area in spite of these difficulties because they feared the West and a western invasion.  The Soviet Union had no cookie cutter plan for dealing with Eastern Europe after World War II and instead developed her policies there by trial and error.  But each country was different, with a different historical experience, and thus required unique solutions.
     Poland is our first example.    Communist success in Poland was made possible by the decimation of the Polish gentry and intelligentsia in World War II.  Before 1939, Poland had been a multinational state, with one third of its population minorities; with the murder of one and a half million Jews in the Holocaust and the redrawing of its borders after 1945, however, Poland became almost completely Polish and Catholic.  Moreover, unlike the party in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, Poland's Communist Party had no popular leaders before or after the war. Thus the Communists postponed elections after the war, elections they knew they would lose.  Most Poles blamed the Soviet Union for the deaths of 15,000 Polish Officers in 1940, a massacre the Soviets had tried to blame on Nazi Germany.  However, regardless of their views on communism and the Soviets, the Poles had become completely dependent on the Soviet Union to protect them from Germany; inside Poland's new borders was East Prussia which had originally belonged to Germany and which sooner or later Germany would want back. But dependency on the Soviets did not imply affection for them.  Poles of all political persuasions remembered that the Soviets had attacked in 1939 when the Germans did, and the ìleader of worldwide socialismî was, therefore, frequently seen as an invader.
     In Czechoslovakia, by contrast, the Soviet Union was seen as a liberator.  Moreover, the Czech Communist Party was a respectable if small party before the war, able to win 10 percent of the votes.    After the war, in May, 1946, the Czech Communists capitalized on their heroic wartime resistance activities to win 38 percent of the Czech vote in the elections.  However, the Communist Party was predicted to lose the election to be held May 1948;  the party's high-handed tactics had caused Czechs to rethink their support for the communists, especially after the disastrous harvest of the summer of 1947 that the government had done little to forestall or relieve.  Fearing a reaction against the communists,  Stalin invaded Czechoslovakia in February, 1948.  The Czech press, universities, civilian and military bureaucracies were then ìpurgedî with a vengeance.  Ironically, in spite of moderate and hopeful beginnings, Czechoslovakia became one of the most Stalinist of Eastern European countries.
     In Yugoslavia, there was no multiparty period as in the rest of Eastern Europe, and instead Titoís communists enjoyed great support for their resistance against German occupiers during the war.   Thus, Yugoslavia was originally more socialist than anyone else in Eastern Europe,  with Tito instituting the usual communist programs like maximum income, abolition of private property, collectivization of agriculture, etc.   Then the economy collapsed.  Tito changed policies by 1950, backing away from pure communism the way Lenin had in 1921 with his NEP.  Only 1,000 of 7,000 collective farms remained, for example.  Stalin warned against Tito's breakneck industrialization, preferring that Yugoslavia stick with agriculture and raw materials, the traditional mainstays of her economy; but Tito argued to do so would reduce Yugoslavia to the status of a colony and refused to acquiesce. This helped cause the rift between Stalin and Tito that led the latter to withdraw from the Soviet orbit and eventually to close his border to communist Greek rebels, allowing the conservative Greek monarchy to win the civil war there in 1948.
     The Yugoslavian government worked hard to hide the fierce ethnic tensions brought to a height during World War II.  Nazi Germany favored the Croats, one of Yugoslavia's 6 nation states, who disliked being governed by what they regarded as racially inferior Serbs.  With Germanyís backing, the Croats exterminated Jews and Serbs, and persecuted Bosnians; the Croats and the German allies together killed one and a third million people, mostly Serbs.  After the war, with the Serbs firmly in control, a deep rift opened between Serbians and the mostly Muslim South, where Tito favored industrialization in capital-intensive industry, not labor-intensive industry; this actually put poorly educated, non-Serb Muslims out of work and created jobs for well-educated Serbs who moved in.  Industrialization thus was part of a program to ìSerbanizeî Yugoslavia, creating pockets of Serbs who might need ìrescuingî later.   The Yugoslav economy was obviously not well-run, but any attempt to fix it exposed the violent ethnic divisions left over from the war and post-war period, divisions which pitted Serbs against Croats and Serbs against Muslims.
     Difficulties in Eastern Europe prompted Khrushchevís famous Kremlin speech in January, 1956 which was not made fully public until 30 years later.  In it, the Soviet leader denounced Stalinist repression in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.  The cult of personality had been wrong, he argued. There were many paths to socialism, the Soviet leader declared, making it possible for Eastern Europe to experiment with non-soviet style communism which might be more appealing to their citizens.  With greater contentment in Eastern Europe, Khrushchev hoped to be able to withdraw troops to save money.  He might be able to bring Tito back into the fold if the Yugoslav leader could be assured that his brand of communism was acceptable to Moscow, and maybe even Albania as well.  Moreover, Khrushchev was determined to show China that Soviet satellite states were happy and prosperous, and that the Soviet Union had no need for force.  This would undercut the Chinese appeal to developing nations which had portrayed the ìleader of worldwide socialismî as a bully.
     In the summer of 1956, Poland took advantage of the door Khrushchev had pushed open a bit to demand changes.  Polish communists had to work fast; they had had a devoted following until 1956, when their promise of equality had proved hollow and the communist economy had utterly failed. Political prisoners had been freed, but workers were rioting over food shortages arising from the unworkable collectivization of agriculture Moscow had imposed on the country.  The Polish communist party wanted to halt collectivization which had proved to be a disaster.  They also wanted peace with the Catholic church, since the vast majority of Poles were Catholics and attacks on the Church merely spread hostility to the party.
     The recently ìrehabilitatedî Polish leader, Gomulka, flew to the Soviet Union, where he was told to stay in the Warsaw Pact, which he agreed to do in exchange for going forward with reform.  Thus in Poland, as in the Soviet Union itself, the struggle remained one between reformers and Stalinists: Poland stayed in the Communist Party, as well as in the Warsaw Pact.  The Soviets in return allowed the Poles to lessen their struggle with the Catholic Church and permitted them to halt collectivization as well.  Agriculture was soon in private hands in Poland, the only Eastern European state to so completely abandon collectivized farming.  But in the long run, the economy did not respond; the high birth rate and excessive centralization in Warsaw hurt the governmentís efforts to increase production, as did the fact that farmers were paid so little for their crops they were unwilling to grow more.
     It was not just agriculture which remained in poor shape, however. The entire Polish economy was full of problems.  Poland borrowed from the West, but she could not repay the loans.  Poland produced little the West wanted.  Most of what she had was of very low quality.   Her raw materials, like hams, and manufactured products, like steel, went to the Soviet Union for below the market value, and Poland was paid in rubles.  But she needed hard currency to repay her loans to western banks, since the United States would not take overvalued Russian rubles.  Since prices could not be raised, there was no incentive to improve, so the quality of materials remained low and administrative costs exorbitantly high.  The Polish economy, like most of those in Eastern Europe, emphasized output targets, not the lowest cost or the highest quality; the Poles were producing vast amounts of products no one wanted.  Worse, western loans were wasted on subsidizing an orgy of consumerism, corruption, and senseless investments.  As in many other areas of Eastern Europe, communist governmentsí emphasis on industrialization distorted non-priority areas like infrastructure and agriculture.
     At the time,  Gomulka was a symbol of liberalism; only later did he became a hide-bound conservative who appealed less to communist idealism than to anti-liberal, anti-Semitics, and the anti-intellectual forces long important in Polish history.   But at least Golmulka had spared Poland the catastrophe which befell Hungary.
      In 1956, Hungary too wanted to halt collectivization, but unlike Poland, she wanted to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and declare her independence from the Soviet Union.  Hungary wanted to be neutral like her neighbor Austria, from which Soviet troops were withdrawn the year before.  Moreover, Hungary was not on the direct invasion route from the West to the Soviet Union as Poland was. The Hungarian leader, Nagy, was a socialist, but he argued that if socialism became associated with the hated Soviet Union, Hungarian communism was doomed.  Without consulting the Soviet Union, therefore, on October 31, Nagy announced Hungaryís unilateral withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.   On November 4, Soviet troops invaded.  Within a few weeks, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 had ended in bloodshed.
 Nagy himself took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy; he eventually came out with promises all would be well, but instead he was arrested, tried in secret and executed.  Nagy was replaced by Kadar, who actually made Hungary freer in the long run.  Kadar developed ìgoulash communism,î  a mixture of socialism and free market incentives which made Hungary the jewel economy of Eastern Europe.  By 1967, 30 percent of the prices in Hungary were subject to market forces, compared to only 5 percent in the Soviet Union.  80 percent of Hungarians leaving Hungary returned voluntarily.
     The invasion of Hungary was a deep embarrassment to the Soviet Union.  Khrushchevís attempt to look good by being more flexible in Eastern Europe backfired; the Chinese roundly condemned the invasion and scored propaganda points in the Third World.  As Hungarians held off the might of the Soviet army, they asked the United States to intervene, but we refused; we were afraid of starting World War III, and we had come to realize Hungary was in the Soviet sphere of influence.  And we were facing problems of our own in the Suez Canal.
     Egyptís Nasser came to power in 1951 after overthrowing King Farouk.  Nasser was interested in non-alignment.  From the East, Nasser wanted weapons, and from the West he wanted technology, like the Aswan Dam, but he did not want to be in either superpowerís camp.  Relations between the United States and Egypt had deteriorated, however, because we set terms for technology transfer which the Egyptians would not meet, like payment in hard currency and American supervision of aid through American military personnel in Egypt (which reminded the Egyptians of British rule).
     In July, 1956, the United States abruptly withdrew our offer to build the dam at Aswan, for several reasons.  According to the Americans, Nasser was falling into the Soviet orbit as he accepted Eastern Bloc arms.  Moreover, the dam would increase the production of high quality Egyptian cotton which would compete in the world market with American cotton.  Eisenhower was wooing the cotton-growing south of the United States in the 1956 presidential campaign.  The Americans also wanted to show that countries that agreed with the us, which Egypt clearly did not, would get more than those who criticized American policy. And Egypt refused to recognize Israelís borders as the United States demanded.
     Nasser retaliated by nationalizing the Suez Canal to pay for the dam, and then closing it to show his disapproval.  The crisis was embarrassing for the United States which had failed to frighten Nasser, but it was catastrophic for Europe, who got all her oil through the canal.  Nasser had gone after the United States by targeting our NATO allies.  He was furious at Britain for decades of colonial rule, and he was upset with France because of her arms sales to Israel.  Nasser also felt NATO was giving preference to Iran, Egypt's traditional enemy.  But to Nasserís surprise, Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt to open the canal by force.  Britain wanted ìherî canal back, since it was the key to India and British colonies of the Far East.  France wanted to hurt Nasser for supporting Algeria in her drive for independence.  Israel claimed Egypt was financing Arab terrorists.
     Eisenhower would not tolerate this invasion.  If he was willing to condemn the Soviets for going into Hungary, he was forced to condemn his European allies for going into Egypt. The president forced Britain out by threatening to charge her tolls on the Panama Canal and by letting the British pound sterling take a beating on financial markets.  Without the British fleet, the invasion collapsed, and Nasser was left with the Suez Canal.  The Soviets threatened a rocket attack, but this was unrealistic given her involvement in Hungary at the same time.  (However, Khrushchev ìlearnedî that threatening rocket attacks caused the West to back down, something he tried to do again in Cuba in 1962 with devastating results.)  Facing down two major European powers gave Nasser credit worldwide; he might not have survived without this incident.  Unfortunately, the United States began reading Egypt in a bipolar Cold War context; division between communist and non-communist was practically useless for predicting Middle Eastern behavior, where tribal affiliations, religious sectarianism, and nationalism provide better clues to future actions.  American foreign policy would suffer as a result.   Finally, the Soviet-built dam Nasser eventually got proved to be an environmental disaster: irrigation water spread disease and left salt deposits on land no longer cleansed by the Nile's annual flooding.
     The simple bipolar system of communist totalitarianism and democratic capitalism was not very helpful, but it was easy to understand.  It lulled the United States into complacency with its power, until a series of events starting in 1957 woke us up.

New Approaches to a Changing World

     As other countries recovered from World War II, the bipolar situation which had existed immediately following World War II began to collapse.  New countries and even our European allies, however, resented past examples of American power and unilaterialism.  Many of these new countries wanted to remain non-aligned, like Egypt, much to American displeasure.  Even Europe was becoming more powerful as a result of her Common Market.  Europeans saw a new role for themselves, as a counterweight to the superpowers, with strong ties to the developing world. Problems existed for the Soviet Union as well: China was an increasing rival, Eastern Europe was restive, and the Soviet economic performance was especially weak in comparison to the booming West.  The superpowers were no longer the only game in town. How would the Soviet Union and the United States deal with this new world?
     One way to get the upper hand in a changing world was through superior arms.  When both countries had the Hydrogen bomb, a race began for delivery systems, including improved bombers and rockets which were cheaper and quicker than planes.  These superior delivery systems rendered the United Statesí oceans useless for defense, since enemies could reach our shores in minutes, instead of days by ship or hours by plane.  Moreover, finding and verifying the number of missiles would be difficult without on-site inspection, inspections neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were prepared to permit.
     Concerns reached a critical stage when the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first artifical satellite, in October, 1957.  Sputnik was not a spy satellite; all it did was beep.  Although it was not dangerous to the United States, the Russian launch was nonetheless embarrassing; the West was supposed to be superior in technology, and yet the Soviets had put the first rocket in space. On the other hand, Sputnik did not mean a sneak attack was possible; with 4,000 nukes at 60 bases, the United States could not lose its entire retaliatory capability in one attack.  But the launching of Sputnik had proved that the Soviets had large rockets capable of carrying huge payloads over long distances.  We assumed no one would launch such a rocket unless it was targetable.  Had it been, the reaction time would have been reduced from a matter of hours using manned bombers to a matter of minutes using rockets.  At the first sign of trouble, the United States would have been forced to launch everything we had to avoid having our missiles destroyed on the ground.  ìUse ëem or lose ëem.î
     Eisenhower refused to panic and build more liquid-fueled rockets that were so explosive they could not be fueled until the last minute.  The United States had been developing solid-fueled rockets that were far safer, but the president had gone slowly with the solid-fueled program because he was appalled at the waste of the earlier program of liquid-fueled rockets.  Eisenhowerís restraint allowed John Kennedy to accuse the president of allowing a missile gap to be created in the Soviet's favor.  In fact, CIA reports showed clearly that the Soviet rocket which had launched Sputnik was not targetable; thus, the age of the ICBM (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) had not yet dawned.  Eisenhower could not release proof, however, without showing the involvement of the CIA and U2 planes.  The latter the president was especially concerned to keep secret; U2s had been flying covertly since 1956 and were invaluable to American strategic planning, since they could read a newspaper headline from 6 miles up.  With information from the CIA and U2s, Eisenhower realized there was nothing to worry about.  In fact, by 1958, the United States had actually launched 34 satellites to the Soviet Unionís three, and three of the American satellites were still in orbit, compared to only one from the Soviets.  Kennedy nonetheless used the idea of the ìmissile gapî to get to the White House in 1960, making Eisenhower and Nixon look foolish for permitting the Soviets to surpass the United States, even though it was not true.  Once elected, Kennedy continued to insist on the missile gap in order to build a huge nuclear arsenal with 4 to 1 superiority over the Soviet Union by 1962.
     Nuclear weapons were cheap, powerful, small, light, easily protected and easily delivered.  The low cost of nuclear weapons was what allowed the Cold War to occur. A second strike (retaliation) was easy and cheap, and a first strike (wiping out the enemyís ability to retaliate) was almost impossible.  But the Eisenhower administration came to believe, as did all presidents after him, that to make nukes credible, one must at least threaten to use them first.   Clearly, such an enormous task would require a huge fleet of nuclear missiles, bombers and submarines, costly billions to produce and maintain.  The American public became disillusioned, hoowever, when their awesome and expensive nuclear power could not produce diplomatic successes, even in their own backyard.
     Eisenhower took Latin America for granted, but his smug self-confidence and assurance of their loyalty and support was shaken in May, 1958, when Vice-President Nixon was spat on by protesters and almost killed in Caracas.  Latin America was nursing a grudge that Europe had gotten Marshall Plan aid instead of her. She wanted to go back to the 1930s Good Neighbor Policy when we only worried about her.  Latin Americans had previously welcomed foreign investment, but now, in the 1950s, felt such investment only left the country in the hands of foreigners.  Instead of getting capital from individuals and corporations, Latin America now wanted money from the American government, as Europe had gotten in the Marshall Plan, but she wanted that money without any restrictions at all.  The United States explained that Europe had had to present a spending plan before receiving American money, but the Latin Americans felt accounting for how they would spend the money infringed on their national sovereignty.
     Latin Americans refused to accept that their chronic poverty was due in large part to chaotic political conditions, inequality of land distribution, and population explosion, as well as the lack of world investment.  To make matters worse, Latin American food and raw material prices were falling due to overproduction, making them even poorer.  They were using American methods designed to produce more with fewer people.  But this resulted in unemployment which forced ex-campesinos to live in dreadful slums surrounding the capitals, and overproduction which drove prices down on the world market, forcing them to produce more just to stay even. Toward the end of his administration, Eisenhower began to emphasize democracy more than anti-communism.  He gave help to Bolivia, for example, even though she had a leftist government; foreign companies were not seized in Bolivia and this was a home-grown revolution which she was not exporting.   To get Latin American help against Cuba, Eisenhower had to underwrite Latin Americaís political, social, and economic institutions.  The InterAmerican Development Bank was established in 1959 with $1 billion, a tiny fraction of the money earmarked for Europe under the Marshall Plan.  Later, Kennedy agreed to spend $20 billion over ten years in Latin America, more on the scale of the Marshall Plan, but the economic gains this investment produced were largely offset by population growth. More important, under both Eisenhower and Kennedy, the bulk of American aid went to police forces or counterinsurgency units, neither of which actually allowed Latin American countries to defend themselves against foreign invasion, and even less so against domestic insurgents.
     The emergence of Castro proved that there really had been a Communist threat in Latin America all along; the United States had not been crying wolf or wasting its money on military aid.  Batistaís brutal attempts to crush Castro had put Eisenhower in a bind; he did not want chaos in Cuba, but he also was revulsed by Batistaís dictatorship. Ironically, in 1959, the CIAís research maintained that Castro was not a Communist, which was probably true at that time, and no one knows why he became such a fierce defender of the faith later.  One reason may have been the harsh economic realities facing Cuba encouraged his move to the political left.  For example, sugar growing, the main crop, used labor only part of the year; the rest of the time people were unemployed.  Cuban wealth in land and investments was concentrated in few hands.  For Cuba to become self sufficient, land would have to be redistributed from foreign owners and the countryís crops diversified, but Castro was too poor to pay a realistic price for these land and goods.  Under Bolshevism, he only needed to seize them.
     In July, 1960, in an election year which saw Nixon and Kennedy in a dead heat, Eisenhower reduced Cubaís sugar quota to zero to express his displeasure with Castroí politics. As Nasser had done before him in another election year, Castro retaliated by seizing American-owned land and industries (Shell and Esso).  Castro offered compensation, but he was too poor to repay the owners the real value of their assets, and certainly not in dollars.  Eisenhower decided that the Cuban leader was setting a bad example for American investment elsewhere in Latin America.  If American companies would not invest there fearing their goods could be seized without realistic payment, Latin America would become dependent on loans from the United States government itself, thus potentially unbalancing the American budget.
     Not all countries agreed with us.  Britain, for example, took what she could in repayment for seized goods and withdrew, warning the United States that if neither of them would sell to Cuba, the Soviet Union would, and Cuba would fall into the Soviet orbit.  But we were not impressed; the Soviet Union, argued Eisenhower, could not buy all of Cubaís sugar crop.  Thus the United States refused reimbursement for seized goods in Cuba unless the amount was realistic and paid in dollars.  When Cuba refused, we slapped her with a trade embargo.
     It was ironic that Cuba ended up accepting the position with the Soviet Union which she had denounced with the United States, that of exporting cheap raw materials for expensive manufactured goods.  The Soviets bought sugar at world prices, less than half of what Cuba had gotten from the United States. Eventually, the Soviet Union sold Cuban sugar on the world market, depressing the price and letting Cuba earn even less. The Cubans had no bargaining position with the Russians, given their complete dependence on them; the Soviets sold oil to Italy for half of what they charged Cuba.
     In March, 1960, Eisenhower began planning an invasion of Cuba to remove Castro once and for all, but the president never gave authorization for its use.  The would-be invaders were trained in Guatemala semi-secretly, in part to curry favor with Cuban exiles in an election year, and so put Florida in the Republican column in November.
     In the Far East, Eisenhower understood the rivalry between China and the Soviet Union, but he could develop no foreign policy to break them apart publicly without alienating the Republican China lobby which abhorred Mao.  The president attempted to drive a wedge between the communist allies by threatening China, thus showing her that the Soviets could not and would not defend her interests.  Hopefully, she would then make some accommodation with the United States.  We could afford to threaten China rather than the Soviet Union, because China did not have nuclear weapons to respond to American provocation.  As part of his plan to badger Mao, Eisenhower supported Taiwan for the China seat on the United Nations Security Council, he would not let China have Quemoy and Matsu, and he also aided Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam. Such policies helped keep the Republican party united on the issue of anti-communism,  and they allowed the president to be tough on communism without risking a nuclear retaliation.
      Great antagonism existed between China and the Soviet Union by the late 1950s, even without American China-bashing.  The Soviets withdrew all military supplies and advisors, but China went on to develop an atomic bomb anyway by 1964.  In spite of Soviet and American displeasure, however, China did not cozy up to the United States.  It was only in 1969, after the United States allowed China to know that the Soviets had asked for permission for a preemptive strike against her, that the Chinese began to distance themselves from the Soviets and helped to end the war in Vietnam by 1973.
     In the Middle East as in China, Eisenhower understood the situation, but felt he had to support his European allies, and so his policies there ended up offending Arab nationalists. The president grasped that Arab nationalism required him to cut his ties to old imperialists like Britain and France who had lorded it over the area for decades.  Eisenhower also knew that the Soviets were taking advantage of these pro-nationalistic and anti-imperialistic forces. But Britain and France were our NATO allies without whom we could not defend Europe, and forced to choose between Arab nationalism and supporting our European allies, Eisenhower chose the allies. 0nly with a strong Europe, fully recovered from World War II, could he make a united front against the Soviet Union and China elsewhere.
     Thus, the Middle East was to remain calm, so as to allow the United States to devote its attention elsewhere. The 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine proclaimed that the United States would give economic and military cooperation, and if need be military forces, to any Middle Eastern country threatened by communist insurgency.  Like the Truman Doctrine, this was a blank check; anybody, usually status-quo regimes, could get American help merely by claiming the Communists were coming.  The Doctrine was used first in 1957, when Eisenhower moved to prop up King Hussein of Jordan.
     The second and more important example is in Lebanon.  In 1957, Chamoun used CIA money to win elections in Lebanon, thus defeating Muslim notables and radicals.  This was unfortunate since the country was about evenly split between Muslims and Christians, who had worked out a delicate compromise constitution, whereby a Christian president would be succeeded by a Muslim one. When it was believed that Chamoun would change the constitution to give himself another turn and block Muslim access to power, the Muslims revolted.  They had no choice; denied access to the legal system by the legal system itself, their only choice was violence.  The United States intervened on the side of the Christians (as we had already done in Korea with Syngman Rhee and in Vietnam with Diem), creating the seeds of disaster.  We had a golden opportunity to create an anti-communist and pro-nationalistic Muslim Arab state, and did not take it.  Down the road, Muslim extremists would maintain the right to use their religion to rule since the United States had used theirs, Christianity, to rule them.
     Europe was now completely recovered from World War II and saw a new role for herself as a balance between the two superpowers with ties to then Third World.  She resented American unilateralism towards the Soviet Union, Middle East and even Korea.  The best example was Franceís Charles de Gaulle.
 In June, 1958, de Gaulle returned to power, determined to revive French and European power.  He saw the Soviet Union, not as the leader of a worldwide communist revolution as did the United States with NSC-68,  but rather as a great power, Russia, under a different name.  As a great power, the Soviets could be reasoned with, something NSC-68 also denied.  De Gaulle helped to form the European Common Market (EEC) in January 1959, to give Europe the economic clout which would make it a formidable diplomatic power as well.  But the EEC represented a split in NATO; not all NATO countries automatically became part of the EEC, most notably not the United States or Britain.  That suited de Gaulle fine, since he wanted the EEC to be a tool to weaken the power of what he called the ìanglo-saxons.î  Thus, repeated British applications to join the EEC were rejected by the French, with de Gaulle claiming the British were too much under American control to be a real part of Europe.  Britain retaliated by forming the Outer Seven in November, 1959, but this organization failed to keep pace with the booming EEC.  As her economy improved, Europe became an important power bloc, changing the Cold War by creating new forces to be reckoned with.  The French went on to build an independent nuclear strike force, not under Washington's control, and aggressively entered the arms race with weapons incompatible with American made materiel. The United States and the Soviet Union were no long the only games in town.
     Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev was still battling the Soviet military for fewer guns and more consumer goods, to improve the Russian economy to combat Chinaís appeal to the Third World.  His successes in space gave the Soviet leader some prestige abroad which he decided to exploit.  Khrushchev took seriously the fears expressed by some Americans like Kennedy that a missile gap favored the Soviets.  In fact, the United States was building solid-fueled missiles and ringing the Soviet Union with them from bases in Turkey and Pakistan.  If a missile gap existed, it favored the Americans.  How the Soviet intelligence community could have missed this fact is mystifying, unless they simply feared telling Khrushchev the truth.  In any case, Khrushchevís missiles were figments of his imagination while those of the United States were very real. With what he thought was the advantage, Khrushchev attempted to challenge the West, but he was forced to back down in Berlin in 1959, Cuba was costing a fortune, and he himself was made to look a fool when he took off his shoe and banged it on the desk at the United Nations. The Soviet leader could not capitalize on the Soviet downing of an American U2 plane in May, 1960, and the summit scheduled with Eisenhower fell apart when the president took full responsibility for the flight.
     Khrushchev found he could not translate Soviet successes and power into diplomatic successes, any more than Eisenhower could.  The West would not budge, and Khrushchev was running out of time to make the dream of socialism come true.  Internal problems in the Soviet Union remained intractable as well; the Virgin Lands program was a bust, there were few consumer goods and those of poor quality, and there was a massive brain drain to the West from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.  Khrushchev decided to wait for the next American president who might be easier to deal with than the implacable Eisenhower.  But when Kennedy was elected in 1960, Khrushchev misjudged him with terrifying results.