As it turned out, a large part of international politics over the following two decades was to concern itself with adjusting to that Soviet-American rivalry, and then with its partial rejection. In the beginning, the Cold War was centered upon remaking the boundaries of Europe. Underneath, therefore, it was still to do with the “German problem,” since the resolution of that issue would in turn determine the amount of influence which the victorious Powers of 1945 would exert over Europe. The Russians had undoubtedly suffered more than any other country from German aggressions in the first half of the twentieth century, and, reinforced by Stalin’s own paranoid demand for security, they were determined to permit no repetitions in the second half. Promoting the Communist world revolution was a secondary but not unconnected consideration, since Russia’s strategic and political position was most likely to be enhanced if it could create other Marxist-led states which looked to Moscow for guidance. Such considerations, much more than any centuries-old drive toward warm-water ports, probably ordered the Soviet policy in the post-1945 world, even if it left open the detailed solution of the various issues. There was, in the first place, therefore, a determination to undo the territorial settlements of 1918–1922, with “roundings-off” for strategical purposes; as noted above, this meant the reassertion of Russian control over the Baltic states, the pushing westward of the Polish-Russian border, the elimination of East Prussia, and the acquisition of territories from Finland, Hungary, and Rumania. Little of this worried the West; indeed, much of it had been agreed to during the war. What was more perturbing was the Russian indications of how they intended to ensure that the formerly independent countries of east-central Europe would contain regimes “friendly to Moscow.”
In this respect, the fate of Poland was a harbinger of what would occur elsewhere, although it was the more poignant because of Britain’s 1939 decision to fight for that country’s integrity, and because of the Polish contingents (and government in exile) which had operated in the West. The discovery of the mass grave of Polish officers at Katyn, the Russian disapproval of the Warsaw uprising, Stalin’s insistence on altering Poland’s boundaries, and the appearance of a pro-Moscow faction of Poles at Lublin made Churchill in particular suspicious of Russia’s intentions; within another few years, with the installation of a puppet regime and the virtual elimination of any pro-western Poles from positions of power, those fears were realized.91
Moscow’s handling of the Polish issue related to the “German problem” in all sorts of ways. Territorially, the westward adjustment of the boundaries not only reduced the size of German lands (as did the swallowing-up of East Prussia), it also gave the Poles an incentive to oppose any future German revision of the Oder-Neisse line. Strategically, the Russian insistence upon making Poland a secure “buffer zone” was intended to ensure that there could be no repetition of Germany’s 1941 attack; it was logical, therefore, for Moscow to insist upon determining the fate of the German people as well. Politically, the support of the “Lublin” Poles was paralleled by the grooming of German Communists in exile to play a similar role when they returned to their homeland. Economically, Russia’s exploitation of Poland and its eastern European neighbors was a foretaste of the stripping of German assets. When, however, it became obvious to Moscow that it would be impossible to win the German people’s goodwill while systematically reducing them to penury, the asset-stripping ceased and Molotov’s tone became much more encouraging. But those tactical shifts were of less importance than the obvious message that Russia intended to have a, if not the, major say in deciding Germany’s future.92
Both in the Polish and the German cases, then, Russian policy was bound to clash with that of the West. Politically and economically the Americans, British, and French desired free-market ideas and democratic elections to be the norm throughout Europe (although London and Paris clearly wished the state to occupy a larger place than the laissez-faire Americans preferred). Strategically, the West was just as determined as Moscow to prevent any revival of German militarism, and the French especially were to worry about that until the mid-1950s; but none of them wanted to see the Wehrmacht’s domination of Europe merely replaced by the Red Army’s. And although both the French and the Italian governments after 1945 contained Communists, there was a deep mistrust of Marxist parties gaining real power anywhere—a feeling confirmed by the steady elimination of non-Communist parties in eastern Europe. Although there were still voices hoping for a reconciliation between Russia and the West, the fact was that their respective aims clashed in all manner of ways. If one side’s program succeeded, the other would feel threatened; in that sense, at least, the Cold War seemed inevitable, until both sides agreed to compromise on their universalist assumptions.
For that reason, a step-by-step account of the escalation of the tensions is not necessary here;93 it would have the same relevance to this analysis of the evolving dynamics of world power as would, say, a detailed account of Metternich’s diplomacy in an earlier chapter. The chief features of the Cold War after 1945 are, however, worthy of examination, since they have continued to affect the conduct of international relations to this day.
The first of these was the intensification of the “split” between the two blocs in Europe. That this bifurcation had not occurred immediately in 1945 was understandable: the chief tasks then for the Allied occupation forces, and for the “successor” parties which emerged out of hiding and exile once the Germans had left, were pressing administrative ones—restoring communications and utilities, getting foodstuffs to the cities, housing the refugees, tracking down war criminals. Much of this led to a blurring of ideological positions: in the occupied zones of Germany, the Americans found themselves quarreling as much with the French as with the Russians; in national assemblies and cabinets being formed across Europe, Socialists sat alongside Communists in the east, Communists alongside Christian Democrats in the west. But by late 1946 and early 1947, the gap was widening and becoming more publicized: various plebiscites and regional elections in the German zones were showing “the political complexion of West Germany … beginning to differ markedly from that of East Germany”;94 the steady elimination of any non-Communist elements in Poland, Bulgaria, and Rumania was mirrored by the internal political crisis in France in April 1947, when the Communists were forced to resign from the government. A month after, the same happened in Italy. In Yugoslavia, Tito’s political domination (in place of the Allied wartime agreements about shared power) was interpreted by the West as a further step in Moscow’s planned advance. These disagreements, together with the Soviet Union’s unwillingness to join the IMF and International Bank, especially disturbed those Americans who had hoped to preserve good relations with Moscow after the war.
It was only a modest leap in assumptions, therefore, for the West to suspect that Stalin also planned to acquire control in western and southern Europe when the circumstances were right and, indeed, to hurry those circumstances along. This was unlikely to occur by outright military force, although the increasing Russian pressure upon Turkey was worrying, and prompted Washington to station a naval task force in the eastern Mediterranean by 1946; rather, it might come about through the ability of Moscow’s minions to take advantage of the continued economic dislocation and political rivalries caused by the war. The Greek Communist revolt was seen as one sign of this; the Communist-supported strikes in France another. The Russian bids to woo German public opinion were suspicious; so, too, if one really wanted to worry about things, was the strength of the Communists in northern Italy. Historians of each of those movements are nowadays more skeptical of how much they could have been controlled by a Moscow-conceived “master plan.” The Greek Communists, Tito, and Mao Tse-tung cared most about their local foes, not a global Marxist order; and the leaders of Communist parties and trade unions in the West had to respond, first and foremost, to their followers’ mood. On the other hand, a gain for Communism in any of those countries would undoubtedly have been welcome to Russia, provided it did not lead to a major war; and it is easy to understand why, at the time, Soviet experts like George Kennan were sympathetically heard when they argued the case for “containing” the Soviet Union.
Among all of the varied elements of the fast-evolving “strategy of containment,”95 two stood out. The first, admitted by Kennan to be negative in nature although increasingly preferred by the military chiefs as offering more solid guarantees of stability, was to indicate to Moscow those regions of the globe which the United States “cannot permit … to fall into hands hostile to us.”96 Such states would, therefore, be given military support to build up their powers of resistance; and a Soviet attack on them would be regarded virtually as a casus belli. Much more positive, however, was the American recognition that resistance to Russian subversion was weakened because of “the profound exhaustion of physical plant and of spiritual vigor” caused by the Second World War.97 The most crucial component of any long-term containment policy would therefore be a massive program of U.S. economic aid, to permit the rebuilding of the shattered industries, farms, and cities of Europe and Japan; for that would not only make the latter far less likely to be tempted by Communist doctrines of class struggle and revolution, it would also help to readjust thepower balances in America’s favor. If, to use Kennan’s very plausible geopolitical argument, there were only “five centers of industrial and military power in the world which are important to us from the standpoint of national security”98—the United States itself, its rival the USSR, Great Britain, Germany and central Europe, and Japan—then it followed that by keeping the three last-named areas in the western camp and by building up their strength, there would be a resultant “correlation of forces” which would ensure that the Soviet Union was permanently inferior. Equally obvious, this strategy would be regarded with profound suspicion by Stalin’s Russia, especially since it included the restoration of its two recent enemies, Germany and Japan.
Once again, therefore, an exact chronology of the various steps taken by each side during and after the “watershed year” of 1947 is less important than the general consequences. The U.S. replacement of the British guarantees to Greece and Turkey—symbolically, a transfer of responsibilities from the former global policeman to the rising one, and as much a part of London’s logic as of Washington’s99—was justified by Truman in terms of a “doctrine” which had no regional limitations. In the European context, however, the open American willingness “to help free peoples maintain their institutions” could be linked to the earnest discussions which were taking place about how to deal with the widespread economic distress, the food shortages, and the scarcity of coal which were afflicting the continent. The American administration’s solution—the so-called Marshall Plan for massive aid “to place Europe on its feet economically”—was deliberately presented as an offering to all European nations, whether Communist or not. But whatever the attractions of receiving that aid may have been to Moscow, it did involve joint cooperation with western Europe, just at a time when the Soviet economy had returned to the most rigid forms of socialization and collectivization; and it took no genius to see that the raison d’être for the plan was to convince Europeans everywhere that private enterprise was better able to bring them prosperity than Communism. The result of Molotov’s walkout from the Paris talks on the plan, and of the Russian pressure upon Poland and Czechoslovakia not to apply for aid, was that Europe became much more divided than before. In western Europe, boosted by the billions of dollars of American aid (especially to the larger states of Britain, France, Italy, and West Germany), economic growth shot ahead, integrated into a North Atlantic trading network. In eastern Europe, Communist controls were being tightened. The Cominform was set up in 1947, as a sort of reconstituted and only half-disguised Communist International. The pluralist regime in Prague was ended by a Communist coup in 1948. While Tito’s Yugoslavia managed to escape from Stalin’s claustrophobic embrace, other satellites found themselves subject to purges, and in 1949 they were forced to join Comecon (Council of Mutual Economic Assistance), which, far from being a Soviet Marshall Plan was “simply a new piece of machinery for milking the satellites.”100 Churchill may have been a little premature in his “Iron Curtain” description of 1946; two years later, his words seemed realized.
The intensification of East-West economic rivalries was complemented at the military level, and once again Germany was at the center of the dispute. In March 1947 the British and French had signed the Dunkirk Treaty, whereby each pledged all-out military support to the other signatory in the event of an attack by Germany (even though the Foreign Office in London held that contingency to be “rather academic” and was more concerned about western Europe’s internal weaknesses). In March 1948 this pact was extended, by the Brussels Treaty, to include the Benelux countries. The latter agreement did not mention Germany by name, but it is fair to say that many politicians in western Europe (especially France) were still obsessed with the “German problem” at this time rather than the “Russian problem.”101 The antediluvian nature of their concerns was to be shaken up as 1948 unfolded. In the same month as the Brussels Treaty was signed, the Russians walked out of the Four-Power Control Council on Germany, claiming irreconcilable differences with the West over that country’s economic and political future. Three months later, in an effort to end the black market and currency chaos in Germany, the three western control powers announced the creation of a new deutsche mark. The Russian response to this unilateral action was not only to ban the West German notes from their zone but to clamp down on movements in and out of Berlin, that island of western influence one hundred miles into their sphere.
If anything brought the extent of the antagonism close to home, it was the Berlin crisis of 1948–1949.102 Already officials in Washington and London were discussing means whereby a grouping of the European states, the dominions, and the United States could stand together in the event of hostilities with Russia. While—as with the Marshall Plan—the Americans wished the Europeans to come forward first with schemes for military security, there was by this stage no doubt as to how seriously the United States took the Communist challenge. A fullblown “Red scare” at home complemented tougher actions abroad. In March 1948, Truman was even asking Congress to reinstate conscription, a request granted in the Selective Service Act of June of that year. All of these moves were boosted by the Soviet blockade of the land routes to Berlin. While the age of air power enabled the Americans and British to call Stalin’s bluff by flying supplies into Berlin for the next eleven months, until the land access was restored, there had been many who argued for sending a military convoy to force its way to the city. It is difficult to believe that such an action would not have provoked a war; as it was, under a new treaty the United States moved a fleet of B-29 bombers to British airfields, a sign of their earnestness in the matter.
In these circumstances, even isolationist senators could be moved to support proposals for the creation of what was to be the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with full American membership—and, indeed, with its chief strategical purpose being the provision of North American aid to the European states in the event of Russian aggression. In its early years, NATO reflected political concerns more than any exact military calculations, symbolizing as it did the historic shift in American diplomatic traditions as it took over from Britain as the leading western “flank” power, dedicated to maintaining the European equilibrium. In the view of the American and British governments, the chief task had been to tie the United States and Canada to the Brussels Pact signatories, and to extend the promise of mutual support to countries like Norway and Italy, which also felt insecure. On the day that the NATO treaty was signed, in fact, the U.S. Army had a mere 100,000 troops in Europe (compared with 3 million in 1945), and there existed only twelve divisions—seven French, two British, two American, one Belgian—in place to resist a Soviet push westward. Although the Russian forces at this period were nowhere near as large or capable as alarmist voices in the West claimed, the imbalance in each bloc’s troop totals was disquieting; slightly later, those fears were increased by the thought that the Communists could sweep over the northern German plain as swiftly as they had crossed the Yalu during the Korean War. This meant that while the NATO strategy increasingly relied upon the “massive retaliation” of American long-range bombers to answer a Soviet invasion, there was a commitment to build up large conventional armed forces as well. In turn, this had the effect of tying all three of the western “flank” Powers—the United States, Canada, and Britain—to permanent military obligations on the continent of Europe to a degree which would have amazed their respective strategic planners in the 1930s.103
The NATO alliance did militarily what the Marshall plan had done economically; it deepened the 1945 division of Europe into two camps, with only traditional neutrals (Switzerland, Sweden), Franco’s Spain, and certain special cases (Finland, Austria, Yugoslavia) in neither one nor the other. It was to be answered, in due course, by the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact. This deepening division, in turn, made the prospects for a reunification of Germany ever more remote. Despite French worries, the West German armed forces began to be built up within the NATO structure by the late 1950s—which was logical enough, if the West really wanted to narrow the gap in troop totals.104 But that inevitably moved the USSR to develop an East German army, albeit under special controls. With each German state integrated into its respective military alliance, it became inevitable that both blocs would regard any future German attempt to become neutral with alarm and suspicion, as a blow to their own security. In Russia’s case, this was reinforced, even after Stalin’s death in 1953, by the conviction that any country which had become Communist should not be permitted to abandon that creed (the “Brezhnev Doctrine,” to use later parlance). By October 1953, the U.S. National Security Council had privately accepted that the eastern European satellite states “could be freed only by general war or by the Russians themselves.” As Bartlett cryptically notes, “Neither was possible.”105 In 1953, too, a rising in East Germany was swiftly put down. In 1956, alarmed at the Hungarian decision to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, Russia moved its divisions back into that land and suppressed its independence. In 1961, in an admission of defeat, Khrushchev ordered the erection of the Berlin Wall to stem the flow of talent to the West. In 1968, the Czechs suffered the same fate as the Hungarians twelve years earlier, though the bloodshed was less. Each of these measures, taken by a Soviet leadership incapable (despite its official propaganda) of matching either the ideological or the economic appeal of the West, simply added to the division between the two blocs.106
The second main feature of the Cold War, its steady lateral escalation from Europe itself into the rest of the world, was hardly surprising. During much of the war itself, there had been an almost single-minded concentration of Russian energies upon dealing with the German threat; but that did not mean that Moscow had abandoned its political interest in the future of Turkey, Persia, and the Far East—as was made plain in August 1945. It was therefore highly unlikely that Russia’s quarrels with the West over European issues would be geographically limited to that continent, especially since the principles in dispute were of universal application—self-government versus national security, economic liberalism versus socialist planning, and so on. More important still, the war itself had caused immense social and political turbulence, from the Balkans to the East Indies; and even in countries not directly overrun by invading armies (for example, India, or Egypt), the mobilization of manpower, resources, and ideas had led to profound changes. Traditional social orders lay smashed, colonial regimes had been discredited, underground nationalist parties had flourished, and resistance movements had grown up, committed not only to military victory but also to political transformation.107 There was, in other words, an immense degree of political turbulence in the world situation of 1945, which could be a threat to Great Powers eager to restore peacetime stability as soon as possible; but this could also be an opportunity for each of the superpowers, imbued with their universalist doctrines, to bid for support among the vast swathe of peoples emerging from the debris of the collapsed older order. During the war itself, the Allies had given aid to all manner of resistance movements struggling against their German and Japanese overlords, and it was natural for those groups to hope for a continuation of such aid after 1945, even while they engaged in jostling with rival contenders for power. That some of these partisan groups were Communist and others bitterly anti-Communist made it more difficult than ever for decision-makers in Moscow and Washington to separate these regional quarrels from their own global preoccupations. Greece and Yugoslavia had already demonstrated how a local, internal dispute could swiftly be given an international significance.
The first of the extra-European disputes between Russia and the West was very much a legacy of such ad hoc wartime arrangements; in 1941–1943 Iran had been placed under tripartite military protection, partly to ensure that it remained in the Allied camp, partly to ensure that none of the Allies gained undue economic influence with the Teheran regime.108 When Moscow did not withdraw its garrison in early 1946, and instead seemed to be encouraging separatist, pro-Communist movements in the north, the traditional British objections to undue Russian influence in this part of the world were augmented, and then rather eclipsed, by the Truman administration’s strong protests. The withdrawal of the Russian troops, soon followed by the Iranian army’s suppression of the northern provinces and of the Tudeh (Communist) party itself, gave ample satisfaction in Washington, where it confirmed Truman’s belief in the efficacy of “talking tough” to the Soviets. The case demonstrated, in Ulam’s words, “the meaning of containment before the doctrine was actually enunciated,”109 and psychologically prepared Washington to react similarly against news of Russian activities elsewhere. Thus, the continuing civil war in Greece, Moscow’s pressure upon the Turks for concessions at the Straits and in the Kars border region, and the British government’s 1947 declaration that it could no longer maintain its guarantees to those two nations triggered off a public American response (in the “Truman Doctrine”) which was already in embryonic form. As early as April 1946 the State Department was urging the need to give support to “the United Kingdom and the communications of the British Commonwealth.”110 The growing acceptance of such views, and the way in which Washington was beginning to link together the various crises along the “northern tier” of those countries which blocked Russian expansion into the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, indicates how swiftly the idealistic strands in American foreign policy were being joined, if not altogether replaced by geopolitical calculation.
It was with this perception of the global advance of Communism that the western Powers also viewed the changes occurring in the Far East. In the case of the Dutch, who were soon to be ejected from their “East Indies” by Sukarno’s widely based nationalist movement, or the French, quickly embroiled in an armed struggle with Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh, or the British, soon engaged in counterinsurgency warfare in Malaya, their response as old colonial powers might have been the same even had no Communist existed east of Suez.111 (On the other hand, by the late 1940s it proved useful in gaining Washington’s sympathies, and in France’s case military aid also, to claim that the insurgents were master-minded by Moscow.) But the shock to the United States of the “loss” of China was altogether more severe than these challenges farther south. From the time of American missionary endeavors in the nineteenth century onward, enormous amounts of cultural and psychological (much less financial) capital had been invested by the United States in that large and populous land; and this had been blown up to even greater proportions by the press coverage of Chiang Kai-shek’s government during the war itself. In more than the religious sense, the United States felt it had a “mission” in China.112 And while the professionals in the State Department and the military were increasingly aware of the Kuomintang’s corruption and inefficiency, their perceptions were not generally shared by public opinion, especially on the Republican right, which by the late 1940s was beginning to see world politics in rigidly black-and-white terms.
The political turbulence and uncertainties which existed throughout the Orient in these years placed Washington in repeated dilemmas. On the one hand, the American republic could not be seen to be the supporter of corrupt Third World regimes or of decaying colonial empires. On the other, it did not want the “forces of revolution” to spread further, since that (it was claimed) would enhance Moscow’s influence. It was relatively easy to encourage the British to withdraw from India in 1947, for it simply involved a transfer to a parliamentary, democratic regime under Nehru. The same could be done in pressing the Dutch to leave Indonesia by 1949, although Washington still worried about the growth of Communist insurgency there—as it did in the Philippines (given independence in 1946). But elsewhere the “wobbling” was more in evidence. Instead of pushing ahead with the earlier notions of a full-blown social transformation and demilitarization of Japanese society, for example, Washington planners steadily moved toward ideas of rebuilding the Japanese economy through the giant firms (zaibatsu), and even toward encouraging the creation of Japan’s own armed forces—partly to ease the United States’ economic and military burdens, partly to ensure that Japan would be an anti-Communist bastion in Asia.113
This hardening of Washington’s position by 1950 was the result of two factors. The first was the increasing attacks upon the more flexible “containment” policies of Truman and Acheson, not only by Republican critics and the fast-rising “red-baiter” Joe McCarthy, but also by newer diehards within the administration itself, such as Louis Johnson, John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk, and Paul Nitze—compelling Truman to act more assertively in order to protect his domestic political flank. The second was the North Korean attack across the 38th parallel in June 1950, which was swiftly interpreted by the United States as but one part of an aggressive master plan orchestrated by Moscow. Together, these two factors gave the upper hand to those forces in Washington which desired a more active, and even belligerent, policy to stop the rot. “We are losing Asia fast,” wrote the influential journalist Stewart Alsop, invoking the homely imagery of a ten-pin bowling game. The Kremlin was the hard-hitting, ambitious bowler.
The head pin was China. It is down already. The two pins in the second row are Burma and Indochina. If they go, the three pins in the next row, Siam, Malaya, and Indonesia, are pretty sure to topple in their turn. And if all the rest of Asia goes, the resulting psychological, political and economic magnetism will almost certainly drag down the four pins of the fourth row, India, Pakistan, Japan and the Philippines.114
The consequences of this change of mind affected American policy throughout East Asia. Its most obvious manifestation was the rapidly escalating military support to South Korea—an unsavory and repressive regime, which must share the blame for the conflict, but was at this time seen as an innocent victim. The early U.S. air and naval support was soon reinforced by army and marine divisions, which permitted MacArthur to launch his impressive counterattack (Inchon) until the northward advance of the United Nations forces in turn provoked China’s own intervention in October/November 1950. Denied the use of A-bombs, the Americans were forced to conduct a campaign reminiscent of the trench warfare of 1914–1918.115 By the time the cease-fire was reached, in June 1953, the United States had spent about $50 billion to fight the war, had sent over 2 million servicemen to the war zone, and had lost over 54,000 of them. While it had contained the North, the United States had also created for itself a long-lasting and substantial military commitment to the South from which it would be difficult, if not impossible, to withdraw.
This fighting also led to significant changes in American policy elsewhere in Asia. By 1949, many in the Truman administration had given up support of Chiang Kai-shek in disgust, viewed the “rump” government in Taiwan with contempt, and were thinking of following the British in recognizing Mao’s Communist regime. Within another year, however, Taiwan was being supported and protected by the U.S. fleet, and China itself was regarded as a bitter foe, against which (at least in MacArthur’s view) it would be necessary to use atomic weapons to counter its aggressions. In Indonesia, so important for its raw materials and food supplies, the new government would be given aid to fight the Communist insurgents; in Malaya, the British would be encouraged to do the same; and in Indochina, while still pressing the French to establish a more representative form of government, the United States was now prepared to pour in arms and money to combat the Vietminh.116 No longer convinced that the moral and cultural appeal of American civilization was enough to prevent the spread of communism, the United States turned increasingly to military-territorial guarantees, especially after Dulles became secretary of state.117 Even by August 1951 a treaty had reaffirmed U.S. air- and naval-base rights to the Philippines and American commitments to the defense of those islands. A few days later, Washington signed its tripartite security treaty with Australia and New Zealand. One week later, the peace treaty with Japan was finally concluded, legally ending the Pacific war and restoring full sovereignty to the Japanese state—but on the same day a security pact was signed, keeping American forces both in the home islands and in Okinawa. Washington’s policy toward Communist China remained unrelentingly hostile, and toward Taiwan increasingly supportive, even over such minor outposts as Quemoy and Matsu.
The third major element in the Cold War was the increasing arms race between the two blocs, along with the creation of supportive military alliances. In terms of monies spent, the trend was by no means an even one, as shown in Table 37.
The enormous surge in American defense expenditures for several years after 1950 clearly reflected the costs of the Korean War, and Washington’s belief that it needed to rearm in a threatening world; the post-1953 decline was Eisenhower’s attempt to control the “military-industrial complex” before it damaged both society and economy; the 1961–1962 increases reflected the Berlin Wall and Cuban missile crises; and the post-1965 jump in spending showed the increasing American commitment in Southeast Asia.119Although the Soviet figures are mere estimates and Moscow’s policy was shrouded in mystery, it is probably fair to deduce that its own 1950–1955 buildup was caused by worries that war with the West would lead to devastating aerial attacks upon the Russian homeland unless its numbers of aircraft and missiles were greatly augmented; the 1955–1957 reductions reflect Khrushchev’s détente diplomacy and efforts to release funds for consumer goods; and the very strong buildup after 1959–1960 reveals the worsening relations with the West, the humiliation over the Cuba crisis, and the determination to be strong in all services.120 Communist China’s more modest buildup was as much a reflection of its own economic growth as of anything else, but the 1960s defense increases suggest that Peking was willing to pay the price for its break with Moscow. As for the western European states, the figures in Table 37 show both Britain and France greatly increasing their defense expenditures at the time of the Korean War, and France’s expenditures still rising until 1954 because of its embroilment in Indochina; but thereafter both those powers, and West Germany, Italy, and Japan in their turn, permitted only modest increases (and an occasional decline) in defense spending. Apart from China’s growth—and those figures also are very imprecise—the pattern of arms spending in the 1950s and 1960s still conveys the impression of a bipolar world.
Table 37. Defense Expenditures of the Powers, 1948-1970118
(billions of dollars)
Perhaps more significant than figures alone was the multilevel and multisided character of the arms race. Although shocked by the Russian achievement of manufacturing its own A-bomb in 1949, the United States believed that it could inflict far more damage upon the USSR in a nuclear exchange than the USSR could inflict on it. On the other hand, as the strongly ideological NSC-68 (National Security Council Memorandum 68, of January 1950) put it, it was imperative “to increase as rapidly as possible our general air, ground and sea strength and that of our allies to a point where we are militarily not so heavily dependent on atomic weapons.”121 Between 1950 and 1953, in fact, U.S. ground forces tripled in size, and although much of this was due to the calling-up of reserves to fight in Korea, there was also a determination to convert NATO from a set of general military obligations into an on-the-ground alliance—to forestall a Soviet overrunning of western Europe which both American and British planners feared likely at this time.122 Although there was no real prospect of the fantastic total of ninety Allied divisions being created on the lines of the Lisbon Agreement of 1952, there was nonetheless a significant rise in military commitments to Europe—from one to five U.S. divisions by 1953, with Britain agreeing to station four divisions in Germany, so that a reasonable balance had been achieved by the mid-1950s, when the West German army was expanded to compensate for reductions made then by London and Paris. In addition, there were enormous increases in Allied expenditures upon their air forces, so that some 5,200 were available to NATO by 1953. While much less is known about the development of the Soviet army and air force in these years, it is clear that Zhukov was engaged upon significant reorganization once Stalin died—getting rid of masses of half-prepared troops, making units much more powerful, mobile, and compact, replacing artillery with missiles, and, in sum, giving them a much better capacity for offensive action than they had possessed in 1950–1951, when the West’s fear of attack was greatest. At the same time, it is clear that Russia, too, was placing the greatest proportion of these budgetary increases upon defensive and offensive air power.123
A second and quite new area of the East-West arms race opened up at sea, although this was also in an irregular pattern. The U.S. Navy had finished the Pacific war trailing clouds of glory, because of the impressive performance of its fast-carrier task forces and its submarine fleet; and the Royal Navy also felt that it had had a “good war,” and one much more decisively fought than the stalemated 1914–1918 conflict at sea.124 But the coming of A-bombs (especially in the Bikini trials against a variety of warships) to be carried by long-range strategic bombers or missiles seemed to cast a cloud over the future of the traditional instruments of naval warfare and even over the aircraft carrier itself. In the post-1945 retrenchment of defense expenditures, and “rationalization” of the separate services into a unified defense ministry, both navies came under heavy pressure. They were rescued, at least to some extent, by the Korean War, which again saw amphibious landings, carrier-based air strikes, and the clever exploitation of western sea power. The U.S. Navy was also able to join the nuclear club with the creation of a new class of enormous carriers, possessing strike bombers equipped with atomic weapons, and, by the late 1950s, with the planned construction of nuclear-powered submarines capable of firing long-range ballistic missiles. The British, less able to afford modern carriers, nonetheless retained converted “commando” carriers for what were termed brushfire wars, and, like the French, also strove to create a submarine-based deterrent. If all western navies by 1965 contained fewer ships and men than in 1945, they certainly had a more powerful punch.125
But the greatest stimulus to the continued expenditure of these navies was the buildup of the Soviet fleet. During the Second World War itself, the Russian navy had achieved very little, despite its large submarine force, and most of its personnel had fought on land (or assisted at river crossings by the army). After 1945, Stalin permitted the construction of many more submarines, based upon superior German designs and probably to be employed in an extended coastal-defense role; but he also favored the creation of a larger surface navy, including battleships and aircraft carriers. This ambitious scheme was swiftly halted by Khrushchev, who saw no purpose in building large, expensive warships in an age of nuclear missiles; in this his views were identical to those of many politicians and air marshals in the West. What probably shook that assumption was the repeated examples of the use of surface sea power by Russia’s most likely foes—the Anglo-French sea-based attack upon Suez in 1956, the landing of U.S. forces in Lebanon in 1958 (thus checking the Russian-backed Syrians), and especially the cordon sanitaire which American warships placed around Cuba in the tense confrontation of the missile crisis of 1962. The lesson which the Kremlin (urged on by the influential Admiral Gorschkov) drew from these incidents was that until Russia also possessed a powerful navy, it would continue to be at a serious disadvantage in the world-power stakes—a conclusion reinforced by the U.S. Navy’s rapid move to Polaris-missile-carrying submarines in the early 1960s. The result was both a massive expansion in virtually all classes of vessels in the Red Navy—cruisers, destroyers, submarines of all types, hybrid aircraft-carriers—and a massive expansion in their deployment overseas, challenging western maritime predominance in, say, the Mediterranean or the Indian Ocean in a manner which Stalin had never attempted.126
This form of challenge could, however, be regarded in traditional terms, as was clear by the many comparisons which observers made between Admiral Gorschkov’s buildup and Tirpitz’s four decades earlier; and even if the Soviet Union appeared committed to a new “naval race,” it would be decades (if at all) before it could match the massively expensive carrier task forces of the U.S. Navy. The really revolutionary aspect of the post-1945 arms race was occurring elsewhere, in the sphere of atomic weapons and long-range missiles to project them. Despite the horrific casualties caused at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there still remained many who saw in atomic weapons “just another bomb” rather than a watershed in the history of man’s capacity for destruction. Moreover, following the failure of the 1946 Baruch Plan to internationalize atomic-power developments, there was the comforting thought that the United States possessed a nuclear monopoly and that the Strategic Air Command’s bombers compensated for (and deterred) the large Soviet superiority in ground forces;127 the western European states in particular accepted that a Russian military invasion would be answered by American (and later British) airborne bombings with nuclear weapons.
Technological innovations, and Soviet advances especially, changed all that. Russia’s successful explosion of an atomic device in 1949 (well before most western estimates had predicted) broke the American monopoly. More alarming still was the construction of long-range Russian bombers, especially of the Bison type, which by the mid-1950s not only were assumed to be capable of reaching the United States but also were (erroneously) supposed to exist in such large numbers that a “bomber gap” existed. While the resultant controversy signified both the difficulty of gaining hard evidence about Russian capabilities and the U.S. Air Force’s tendency to exaggerate,128 it was in fact only to be a few more years before the era of American invulnerability was over. In 1949 Washington had agreed to the production of a new “super” bomb (the H-bomb), of staggeringly larger destructive capacity. This seemed once again to promise to the United States a decisive advantage, and the early to middle 1950s witnessed, both in Foster Dulles’s startling speeches and in the Air Force’s own plans, a commitment to “massive retaliation” upon Russia or China in the event of the next war.129 While this doctrine itself produced considerable private unease within both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations—leading to the buildup of conventional forces and tactical (i.e., “battlefield”) nuclear weapons, as alternatives to unleashing Armageddon—the chief blow to that strategy came from the Russian side. In 1953, Russia also tested an H-bomb, a mere nine months after the American test. Moreover, the Soviet government had devoted considerable resources to exploiting German wartime technology on rocketry. By 1955 the USSR was mass-producing a medium-range ballistic missile (the SS-3); by 1957 it had fired an intercontinental ballistic missile over a range of five thousand miles, using the same rocket engine which shot Sputnik, the earth’s first artificial satellite, into orbit in October of the same year.
Shocked by these Russian advances, and by the implication that both U.S. cities and U.S. bomber forces might be vulnerable to a sudden Soviet strike, Washington committed massive resources to its own intercontinental ballistic missiles in order to close what was predictably termed “the missile gap.”130 But the nuclear arms race was not confined to such systems. From 1960 onward, each side was also swiftly developing the capacity to launch ballistic missiles from submarines; and by that time a whole variety of battlefield nuclear weapons, and shorter-range rockets, had been constructed. All this was attended by the intellectual wrestlings of both strategic planners and civilian analysts in their “think tanks” about how to manage the various stages of escalation in what was now a strategy of “flexible response.” However clear the solutions proposed, none of this managed to escape from the awful problem that it was going to be difficult if not impossible to integrate nuclear weapons into the traditional ways of fighting conventional warfare (it was soon realized, for example, that the battlefield “nukes” would blow up most of Germany). Yet if recourse were had to launching high-yield H-bombs upon Russian and American soil, the mutual casualties and damage would be unprecedented. Locked in what Churchill called a mutual balance of terror, and unable to dis invent their weapons of mass destruction, Washington and Moscow threw more and more resources into the technology of nuclear warfare.131 And while both Britain and France were pushing ahead with their own atomic bombs and delivery systems in the 1950s, it still seemed—by all contemporary measure of aircraft, missiles, and nuclear bombs themselves—that in this field, too, only the superpowers counted.
The final major element in this rivalry was the creation by both Russia and the West of alliances across the globe, and the competition to find new partners—or at least to prevent Third World countries from joining the other side. In the early years, this was overwhelmingly an American activity, flowing from its advantageous position in 1945, from the fact that it already had many garrisons and air bases outside the western hemisphere, and from the equally important fact that so many countries were looking to Washington for economic and sometimes military support. By contrast, the USSR was desperately needing to rebuild itself, its chief foreign concern was the stabilization of its own borders on terms favorable to Moscow, and it had neither the economic nor the military instruments of power to project itself farther afield. Despite territorial gains in the Baltic, northern Finland, and the Far East, Russia was still, relatively speaking, a landlocked superpower. Moreover, it now seems clear that Stalin’s view of the world outside was one overwhelmingly charged with caution and suspicion—toward the West, which, he feared, would not tolerate open Communist gains (e.g., in Greece in 1947); and also toward those Communist leaders, such as Tito and Mao, who were certainly not “Soviet puppets.”132 The setting-up of the Cominform in 1947 and the strong propaganda about supporting revolutionaries abroad had echoes from the 1930s (and even more, from the 1918–1921 era); but in actual fact Moscow seems to have avoided foreign entanglements in this period.
Yet the view from Washington, as noted above, was that a master plan for world Communist domination was unfolding, step by step, and needed to be “contained.” The proffered guarantees to Greece and Turkey in 1947 were the first sign of this change of course, and the 1949 NATO treaty was its most spectacular exemplar. With the further additions to NATO’s membership in the 1950s, this meant that the United States was pledged “to the defense of most of Europe and even parts of the Near East—from Spitzbergen to the Berlin Wall and beyond to the Asian borders of Turkey.”133 But that was only the beginning of the American overstretch. The Rio Pact and the special arrangement with Canada meant that it was responsible for the defense of the entire western hemisphere. The ANZUS treaty created obligations in the southwestern Pacific. The confrontations in East Asia during the early 1950s had led to the signing of various bilateral treaties, whereby the United States was pledged to aid countries along the “rim”—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, as well as the Philippines. In 1954, this was buttressed further by the establishment of SEATO (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), whereby the United States joined Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Thailand in promising mutual support to combat aggression in that vast region. In the Middle East, it was the chief sponsor of another regional grouping, the 1955 Baghdad Pact (later, the Central Treaty Organization, or CENTO), in which Britain, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan stood against subversion and attack. Elsewhere in the Middle East, the United States had evolved or was soon to evolve special agreements with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, either because of the strong Jewish-American ties or in consequence of the 1957 “Eisenhower Doctrine,” which proffered American aid to Arab states. Early in 1970, one observer noted,
the United States had more than 1,000,000 soldiers in 30 countries, was a member of four regional defense alliances and an active participant in a fifth, had mutual defense treaties with 42 nations, was a member of 53 international organizations, and was furnishing military or economic aid to nearly 100 nations across the face of the globe.134
This was an array of commitments about which Louis XIV or Palmerston would have felt a little nervous. Yet in a world which seemed to be swiftly shrinking in size and in which each part appeared to relate to another, these step-by-step pledges all had their logic. Where, in a bipolar system, could Washington draw the line—especially after it was claimed that its earlier definition that Korea was not vital had been an invitation to the Communist attack of the following year?135 “This has become a very small planet,” Dean Rusk argued in May 1965. “We have to be concerned with all of it—with all of its land, waters, atmosphere, and with surrounding space.”136
If the projection of Soviet power and influence into the world outside was far less extensive, the years after Stalin’s death nonetheless saw noteworthy advances. Khrushchev, it is clear, wanted the Soviet Union to be admired, even loved, rather than feared; he also wanted to redirect resources from the military to agricultural investment and consumer goods. His general foreign-policy ideas reflected his hope for a “thaw” in the Cold War. Overruling Molotov, he removed Soviet troops from Austria; he handed back the Porkkala naval base to Finland and Port Arthur to China; and he improved relations with Yugoslavia, arguing that there were “separate roads to socialism” (a position as upsetting to many of his Presidium colleagues as it was to Mao Tse-tung). Although 1955 saw the formal establishment of the Warsaw Pact, in response to West Germany’s joining of NATO, Khrushchev was willing to open diplomatic relations with Bonn. He was also keen to improve relations with the United States, although his own volatility of manner and the by now chronic distrust with which Washington interpreted all Russian moves made a real détenteimpossible. In that same year, Khrushchev traveled to India, Burma, and Afghanistan. The Third World was from now on going to be taken seriously by the Soviet Union, just when more and more Afro-Asian states were gaining independence.137
Little of this was as complete or smooth-going a transformation as the ebullient Khrushchev would have liked. In April 1956, that instrument of Stalinist control the Cominform had been dissolved. Embarrassingly, two months later the Hungarian uprising—a “separate road” away from socialism—had to be put down with Stalinist resolve. Quarrels with China multiplied and, as will be discussed below, produced a deep cleft in the Communist world. Détente foundered on the rocks of the U-2 incident (1960), the Berlin Wall crisis (1961), and then the confrontation with the United States over Soviet missiles in Cuba (1962). None of this, however, could turn back the Russian move toward world policy; the mere establishment of diplomatic relations with newly emergent countries and contact with their representatives at the United Nations made the growth of Soviet ties with the outside world inevitable. In addition, Khrushchev, eager to demonstrate the innate superiority of the Soviet system over capitalism, was bound to look for new friends abroad; his more pragmatic successors, after 1964, were interested in breaking the American cordon which had been placed around the USSR, and in checking Chinese influence. There were, moreover, many Third World countries eager to escape from what they termed “neocolonialism” and to institute a planned economy rather than a laissez-faire one—a preference which usually caused a cessation of western aid. All this fused to give Russian foreign policy a distinct “outward thrust.”
This thrust began in a very decisive fashion in December 1953, by the signing of a trade agreement with India (neatly coinciding with Vice-President Nixon’s visit to New Delhi), followed up by the 1955 offer to construct the Bhilai steel plant, and then by lots of military aid; this was a connection to the most important of the Third World powers, it simultaneously annoyed the Americans and the Chinese, and it punished Pakistan for its membership in the Baghdad Pact. Almost at the same time, in 1955–1956, the USSR and Czechoslovakia began giving aid to Egypt, replacing Washington in the funding of the Aswan Dam. Soviet loans also went to Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Yemen. Pronounced anti-imperialist states in Africa, such as Ghana, Mali, and Guinea, were also encouraged by Moscow. In 1960, the great breakthrough occurred in Latin America, when the USSR signed its first trade agreement with Castro’s Cuba, then already becoming embroiled with an irritated United States. All this set a pattern which was not reversed by Khrushchev’s fall. Having waged a strident propaganda campaign against imperialism, the USSR quite naturally offered “friendship treaties,” trade credits, military advisers, and the rest to any newly decolonized nation. Russia could also benefit, in the Middle East, from the U.S. support of Israel (hence, for example, Moscow’s increasing aid to Syria and Iraq as well as Egypt in the 1960s); it could gain kudos by offering military and economic assistance to North Vietnam; even in distant Latin America, it could proclaim its commitment to national-liberation movements. In this struggle for world influence, the USSR had now come a long way from Stalin’s paranoid caution.138
But did this competition by Washington and Moscow for the affections of the rest of the globe, this mutual jostling for influence with the aid of treaties, credits, and weapons exports, mean that a bipolar world had indeed come into being, with everything significant in international affairs gravitating around the two opposing Schwerpunkte of the United States and the USSR? From the viewpoint of a Dulles or a Molotov, that indeed was how the world was ordered. And yet, even as these two blocs competed across the globe, and in areas unknown to both in 1941, they were meeting up with a quite different trend. For a Third World was just at this time coming of age, and many of its members, having at last thrown off the controls of the traditional European empires, were in no mood to become mere satellites of a distant superpower, even if the latter could provide useful economic and military aid.
What was happening, in fact, was that one major trend in twentieth-century power politics, the rise of the superpowers, was beginning to interact with another, newer trend—the political fragmentation of the globe. In the Social Darwinistic and imperialistic atmosphere that had prevailed around 1900, it was easy to think that all power was being concentrated in fewer and fewer capitals of the world (see above, pp. 195–96) Yet the very arrogance and ambitiousness of western imperialism brought with it the seeds of its own destruction; the exaggerated nationalism of Cecil Rhodes, or the Panslavs, or the Austro-Hungarian military, provoked reactions among Boers, the Poles, the Serbs, the Finns; ideas of national self-determination, propagated to justify the unification of Germany and Italy, or the 1914 Allied decision to assist Belgium, seeped relentlessly eastward and southward, to Egypt, to India, to Indochina. Because the empires of Britain, France, Italy, and Japan had triumphed over the Central Powers in 1918 and had checked Wilson’s ideas for a new world order in 1919, these stirrings of nationalism were only selectively encouraged: it was fine to grant self-determination to the peoples of eastern Europe, because they were European and thus regarded as “civilized”; but it was not fine to extend these principles to the Middle East, Africa, or Asia, where the imperialist powers extended their territories and held down independence movements. The shattering of those empires in the Far East after 1941, the mobilization of the economies and recruitment of the manpower of the other dependent territories as the war developed, the ideological influences of the Atlantic Charter, and the decline of Europe all combined to release the forces for change in what by the 1950s was being called the Third World.139
But it was described as a “third” world precisely because it insisted on its distinction both from the American- and the Russian-dominated blocs. This did not mean that the countries which met at the original Bandung conference in April 1955 were free of all ties and obligations to the superpowers—Turkey, China, Japan, and the Philippines, for example, were among those attending the conference for whom the term “nonaligned” would have been inappropriate.140 On the other hand, they all pressed for increased decolonization, for the United Nations to focus upon issues other than the Cold War tensions, and for measures to change a world which was still economically dominated by white men. When the second major phase of decolonization occurred, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the original members of the Third World movement could be joined by a large number of new recruits, smarting at the decades (or centuries) of foreign rule and grappling with the hard fact that independence had left them with a host of economic problems. Given the vast swelling of their numbers, they could now begin to dominate the United Nations General Assembly; originally a body of fifty (overwhelmingly European and Latin American) countries, the UN steadily changed into an organization of well over one hundred states with many new Afro-Asian members. This did not restrict the actions of the larger Powers that were permanent members of the Security Council and that possessed a veto—conditions insisted upon by a cautious Stalin. But it did mean that if either of the superpowers wished to appeal to “world opinion” (as the United States had done in getting the United Nations to aid South Korea in 1950), it had to gain the agreement of a body whose membership did not share the preoccupations of Washington and Moscow. Chiefly because the 1950s and 1960s were dominated by issues of decolonization, and by increasing calls to end “underdevelopment,” causes which the Russians adroitly espoused, this Third World opinion had a distinctly anti-western flavor, from the Suez crisis of 1956 to the later issues of Vietnam, the Middle East wars, Latin America, and South Africa. Even at the formal summits of the nonaligned countries, the emphasis was increasingly placed upon anticolonialism; and the geographical sitings of those meetings (Belgrade in 1961, Cairo in 1964, and Lusaka in 1970) symbolized this shift away from Eurocentered issues. The agenda of world politics was no longer exclusively in the hands of those powers possessing the greatest military and economic muscle.141
The most prominent of the early advocates of nonalignment—Tito, Nasser, Nehru—symbolized this transformation. Yugoslavia was remarkable in breaking with Stalin (it was expelled from the Cominform as early as 1948) and yet maintaining its independence without a Russian invasion occurring. It was a policy firmly maintained after Sfalin’s death; not for nothing was the first nonaligned summit held in Belgrade.142 Nasser had risen to fame throughout the Arab world after his 1956 clash with Britain, France, and Israel, was a fierce critic of western imperialism, and willingly accepted Soviet aid; yet he was not a puppet of Moscow—he “treated his home-grown communists badly and between 1959 and 1961 a vigorous anti-Soviet radio and press campaign was launched.”143 Pan-Arabism, and especially Muslim fundamentalism, were not natural partners for atheistic materialism, even if local Marxist intellectuals strove to produce a fusion of the two. As for India, long the symbolic leader of the “moderate” nonaligned states, the repeated infusions of Soviet economic and military aid, which rose to new heights following Sino-Indian and Pakistani-Indian clashes, did not stop Nehru from criticizing Russian actions elsewhere and being very suspicious of the Communist party of India. His condemnations of British policy at Suez was due to his dislike of all Great Power interventions abroad.
The very fact that so many new states were entering the international community in these years, and that Russia was eager to wean them away from the West without itself having much knowledge of local conditions, also meant that its diplomatic “gains” were frequently attended by “losses.” The most spectacular example of this was China itself, which will be discussed further below; but there were many others. The 1958 change of regime in Iraq allowed Russia to pose as the friend of that Arab state and to offer it loans; four years later, a Ba’athist coup led to the bloody suppression of the Communist party there. Moscow’s continued aid to India inevitably angered Pakistan; there was no way it could please the one without losing the other. In Burma, an early promising start foundered when that country banned all foreigners. In Indonesia, things were worse; after receiving masses of Russian and eastern-European aid, Sukarno’s government had turned from Moscow to Peking by 1963. Two years later, the Indonesian army wiped out the Communist party with great ferocity. Sékou Touré in Guinea sent home the Russian ambassador in 1961 for involving himself in a local strike, and during the Cuban missile crisis he refused to let Soviet planes refuel at the airport they had specially extended at Conakry.144 Russia’s support of Lumumba in the Congo crisis of 1960 undermined his prospects, and his successor Mobutu closed down the Soviet embassy. The most spectacular instance of that sort of setback—and a major blow to Soviet influence—came in 1972, when Sadat ordered 21,000 Russian advisers out of Egypt.
The relationship between the Third World and the “first two worlds” was always, therefore, a complex and shifting one. There were, to be sure, countries which were persistently pro-Russian (Cuba, Angola) and others which were strongly pro-American (Taiwan, Israel), chiefly because they felt under threat from their neighbors. There were some which, following Tito’s early lead, genuinely sought to be nona-ligned. There were others which, while leaning toward one bloc because it offered them aid, strongly resisted undue dependence. And, finally, there were the frequent revolutions, civil wars, changes of regime, and border conflicts in the Third World which took Moscow and Washington by surprise. Local rivalries in Cyprus, in the Ogaden, along the India-Pakistan border, and in Kampuchea (Cambodia) embarrassed the superpowers, since each of the contending parties sought their aid. Like other Great Powers before them, both Russia and the United States had to grapple with the hard fact that their “universalist” message would not be automatically accepted by other societies and cultures.