The New Cold War Debate
Mini Teaser: Nations, like people, view their past through emotional and psychological prisms. The normal course is for national history to become heroic myth--a saga of obstacles overcome, evil vanquished, national character triumphant.
Books and essays discussed in this article:
Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 689 pp., $19.95.
Bruce Cummings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. I: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947, and Vol. II: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981, 1990), Vol. I, 608 pp., $24.95; Vol. II, 976 pp., $35.00.
Bruce Cummings, "'Revising Postrevisionism,' or, The Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History," Diplomatic History 17:4 (Fall 1993).
John Lewis Gaddis, "The Tragedy of Cold War History: Reflections on Revisionism," Foreign Affairs 73:1 (January/February 1994).
Wilson Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 419 pp., $17.95.
Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 393 pp., $45.00.
David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 464 pp., $30.00.
Thomas J. McCormick, America's Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 273 pp., $12.95.
Nations, like people, view their past through emotional and psychological prisms. The normal course is for national history to become heroic myth--a saga of obstacles overcome, evil vanquished, national character triumphant. Sometimes the opposite tendency emerges, however, towards reproach and even self-hate.
A current example of such opposing caricatures can be found in the Smithsonian Institution's plans to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II with a display of the Enola Gay. The initial script for the exhibit was sharply critical of U.S. actions, declaring that "For most Americans, this was...a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism." But when these plans leaked, the general response was a demand that the atomic bombing be celebrated as a central and defining act in the nation's heroic tradition. Neither camp seemed able to confront the fascinating and complex questions about the subject which a bevy of fine historians has raised.
Americans are particularly prone to such self-praise or blame, because both reaffirm the central fact of our national essence, which has always been defined more by institutions and creed than by such mundane factors as language, ethnicity, or religion. In domestic policy the tension between our ideals and our political practice surfaces in recurring battles over political reform, civil rights, and social equality; in foreign policy, the fights center on whether American actions are pure or self-interested.
International conflicts are so contrary to liberal ideals that we seem able to accept them only as glaring exceptions to normal practice, tragedies forced on an innocent America by the blatant ambitions of others. Every twentieth-century American war has first been defended on such grounds; at some point each has been attacked on these grounds as well. One of the longest-running battles has been fought over responsibility for the Cold War, and it has recently flared up again.
The basic structure of the historians' debate on this issue can be expressed in the old dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The standard version of what happened after World War II--put forward by participants, particularly Acheson and Truman, and backed by historians such as Herbert Feis, Robert Ferrell, and Adam Ulam--is that Stalin's Soviet Union seized Eastern and much of Central Europe, set up miniature Stalinist tyrannies, and started grabbing for yet more territory or at least political control in Europe, Asia, and the Near East. U.S. policymakers tried to cooperate in creating a new and better world order, but were rebuffed and hoodwinked simultaneously; in the nick of time the Truman administration organized a new defense line in Western Europe and East Asia. Eventually, through NATO, the Korean war, massive rearmament, and constant vigilance, the Soviet threat was contained and deterred. Vietnam was a noble effort in this tradition, although perhaps impractical and therefore misguided.
In the 1960s many American scholars--including William Appleman Williams, Lloyd Gardner, Gabriel Kolko, Walter LaFeber, and Gar Alperovitz--advanced a "revisionist" perspective which in various permutations essentially reversed the picture: At the end of World War II the Soviet Union was weak, devastated, and cautious. The United States, on the other hand, was powerful, even hegemonic. Driven by zealous anti-communism and/or domestic economic pressures, we crushed revolutionary movements around the globe and hemmed the Soviets in by establishing capitalist beachheads all around them. They and others had little choice but to defend themselves. Vietnam was the classic expression of U.S. imperialism in action.
Through the mid-1970s American historians tore each other apart over these issues; epithets like "communist" and "fascist" lay just beneath the surface of debate. Meanwhile, certain "realist" scholars--George Kennan, Walter Lippmann, Hans Morgenthau and Louis Halle--had presented a third view from early on, one which saw the Cold War as the inevitable clash of two superpowers with conflicting ideologies, suspiciously confronting each other over the power vacuums left by World War II. This interpretation gained broader acceptance after the flames of the orthodox-revisionist battle had burned down a bit, and by the 1980s a somewhat traditional version could be promulgated by John Lewis Gaddis as the "post-revisionist synthesis." American policymakers, in this view, had not been evil, nor driven to unload surplus goods or acquire new markets; their European counterparts, moreover, had feared the Soviet threat at least as much. Still, although the Soviets clearly wanted to extend their influence wherever possible, they probably did not have a grand plan for world empire. American officials sometimes exaggerated the coherence of Soviet designs and overreacted to them, moreover, and the conflict was marked by many miscalculations on both sides. The Korean War, in this interpretation, was crucial in globalizing and militarizing the conflict; Vietnam was the rote application of containment under different and inappropriate conditions.
A New Round
For more than a decade, the debate simmered on the profession's back burner, as younger and less contentious scholars produced sober, solid articles and monographs on various sub-topics: U.S. policy towards a particular region, say, or a particular issue-area. Recently, however--and stimulated by the need for explanation created by the sudden end of the Cold War--important works have tried to redraw the outlines of the big picture, and in the process have triggered a new round of controversy and vituperation. Some of the new scholarship is revisionist, some traditional, and some post-revisionist; because the last category crosses several faultlines, it has provoked the most confusion, drawing praise and attack from all sides.
Bruce Cummings of the University of Chicago has tried to resuscitate the revisionist enterprise through a massive, two-volume study of The Origins of the Korean War. Beginning with a detailed exposition of Korean politics at the end of World War II, he argues that disastrous superpower intervention precluded a unified settlement on the peninsula and set the stage for the later conflict--which is best understood as a civil war between Koreans with different political visions for their country. The United States, as the world's economic hegemon, was driven by the functional requirements of the global capitalist system; U.S. policymakers carved out an unnatural and un-Korean entity in the South, and then tried to incorporate it as part of an American co-prosperity sphere. Cummings sees Dean Acheson as the evil genius of the period, the one who most clearly understood the rhythms of the international political economy and made sure U.S. policy kept the beat. In this view Acheson did not merely welcome the Korean War, but may well have deliberately provoked it, as a way of maintaining support for containment at home and regenerating the economies of Japan, Western Europe, and the United States. (A similar "world system" perspective is offered by Cummings' soulmate Thomas J. McCormick in America's Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War.)
Cummings is a classic example of a fine mind turned in the wrong direction. He is very smart, has read as much as anybody, and persistently comes up with intriguing interpretations which are utterly wrong-headed. His bizarre conspiracy theories update I.F. Stone's Hidden History of the Korean War (Monthly Review Press, 1952), lingering over marginal shady characters, suspiciously "coincidental" events and "missing" documents. This is Cold War history in the paranoid style, ˆ la Oliver Stone, and one is hardly surprised to find Cummings use Fletcher Prouty--the role model for the mysterious "Mr. X" in Stone's JFK--to explain how the U.S. might have duped the North Koreans into crossing the 38th parallel in June 1950.
If Cummings provides the most sophisticated and detailed revisionist scenario yet seen, other scholars have recently brought new life to the orthodox interpretation. In his excellent study of George Kennan, for example, Wilson Miscamble documents how political rather than economic factors headed policymakers' concerns. He also downplays the coherence and control which allegedly marked U.S. actions, concluding that American policymakers simply struggled to respond to a succession of international crises--Western Europe's political weakness, economic dislocation, and military insecurity; the diverse Communist challenges in China, Italy, and Greece; the conundrum of Palestine; the power vacuums in Germany and Japan; the opportunity presented by Titoism; and the perceived threat posed by Soviet military power and atomic capability. Through addressing these situations a foreign policy emerged...being called forth by circumstances more so than by being imposed on them.
In their recent book Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford University Press, 1993), the international team of Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai may not detail a monolithic communist plot to take over the world, but they leave no doubt as to what happened: The war was Kim Il Sung's idea, launched after he persuaded Stalin and Mao to come on board, with the three tyrants' decision-making marked in equal parts by realpolitik, adventurism, and miscalculation.
The most prominent of the neo-traditionalists, ironically, is John Lewis Gaddis, who burst onto the scene two decades ago as the dominant figure of a quite different group, the post-revisionists. Critics on the left had always charged that his ostensibly "new" work was really only "orthodoxy plus archives." Whatever the truth of those changes, by the 1990s, Gaddis had moved openly toward the most orthodox of positions, blaming the Cold War on Stalin's character and accusing revisionists of being soft on communism. American historians have to stop being "shallow, short-sighted and antiseptic," he now writes, and start being "honest"; they have to recognize that since the Soviet leader was another Hitler, compromise was impossible. "It is really quite difficult...to see how there could have been any long-term basis for coexistence--for getting along--with either of these fundamentally evil dictators." (Picking up on the impossibility-of-compromise-with-Stalin theme is David Holloway's thorough study Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956; it rebuts the soft revisionist school which held U.S. nuclear policies responsible for the arms race.) For his part, Cummings has responded to Gaddis' latest salvo by calling it "an exercise in fiction," arguing that Gaddis' entire oeuvre represents "not a synthesis, but a vain attempt at post-Indochina War consensus, marred continuously by the habits of stigma and exclusion. Fortunately, it has not worked..."
Fear and Power
Amid all the controversy and name-calling, one new book--Melvyn Leffler's A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War--stands out, both because of its intellectual stature and because no one seems quite sure which epithets to throw at it. Leffler's Bancroft Prize-winning work brings together different strands of the debate in new and interesting ways. Thus he argues that the driving force behind the Truman administration's policies was not a search for markets, or anti-communist ideology, or domestic politics, or humanitarian concerns, but rather simply fear of the Soviet threat. And yet the threat policymakers reacted to, he explains, was not immediate or primarily military; it was a potential future challenge to America's broader environment: "Soviet/Communist domination of the preponderant resources of Eurasia would force the United States to alter its political and economic system. The U.S. government would have to restructure the nation's domestic economy, regiment its foreign trade, and monitor its domestic foes" (p.13). Such a future was not inevitable, however, if the United States could develop and maintain a "preponderance of power," beating the Soviets to the punch by promoting and consolidating a vastly expanded American sphere of influence abroad. In sum, American policy during the early Cold War:
was motivated by fear and power: fear that worldwide conditions might circumscribe U.S. influence and tempt another totalitarian state to coopt resources and labor that could eventually threaten the strategic and economic interests of the United States; power in the knowledge that in the short run the United States had the capabilities, if it could generate the will, to thwart those very long-term developments it feared. (p. 51)
Leffler's stress on the Soviet threat (and his denigration of mundane economic concerns) upsets revisionists, while his emphasis on U.S. power, initiative, and material interests makes traditionalists uneasy. This leads to such odd juxtapositions as Cummings lamenting that "the word capitalism barely intrudes Leffler's text," at the same time that the The New Republic castigates the book as "the sacred text of neo-revisionism," furious that it downplays the role of communist ideology and the "moral or humanitarian concerns" of Truman and his advisers. John Lewis Gaddis, on the other hand, has declared it "the best book anyone has yet written on the United States and the origins of the Cold War."
Leffler's book does have flaws: it ignores the domestic political context entirely, the style is somewhat bloodless, and the concluding assessments, while judicious, are obviously subjective. (He finds the Truman team wise in grasping the nature of the Soviet threat; prudent in taking initial steps to counter it; and foolish in overestimating the importance of the Third World.) Its lasting importance, however, should lie in the way it brings a concern with America's changing relative power to the forefront of the Cold War debate. Leffler demonstrates how policymakers' perception of external threats, interests, and opportunities are related to their state's capabilities, thus incorporating in his work some of the best insights of international relations theory. Rather than trying to judge in isolation the "objective" nature of either the Soviet threat or the American response, he correctly focuses attention on the dynamic interaction between the various countries, their goals, and their relative strength.
A Faustian Bargain
How then should we understand the American role in the early Cold War? The answer begins with World War II--specifically, with the disjunction between America's positive and negative goals during that conflict. Viewed from one angle, the American effort in World War II was a fight against the Axis. The Roosevelt administration decided from the beginning to press for total victory over Germany and Japan, and was able to carry the decision out. Viewed from another angle, however, the American effort was a fight for a certain vision of international order: a postwar settlement that would provide the United States and the world with lasting peace and prosperity.
American plans for the postwar era represented what might be called a Wilsonianism of the strong, but one tempered by lessons drawn from the perceived failures of American diplomacy at the end of World War I. At heart was the conviction that making the world over in America's image--liberal, democratic, capitalist--would serve everyone alike. The new order was to have two dimensions: a free trade system working through the imf, the World Bank, and the International Trade Organization; and a collective-security-system-cum-great-power concert, based on a continuation of the Grand Alliance and working through the United Nations. Economically, the United States would lead, in conjunction and competition with Britain and other Western European countries. Politically, the United States would continue to exercise a benign hegemony in the Western hemisphere, while Western Europe would be a British sphere of influence and Eastern Europe a Soviet one; in the Pacific, the United States would share responsibilities with China as European colonialism was phased out. Germany and Japan were to be purged and demilitarized; beyond that their fates were left undecided.
The short- and mid-term planning was left somewhat fuzzy, but American policymakers in 1945 did not foresee much trouble ahead. Other nations, surely, would accept the obvious benefits of a new and improved Wilsonian order, and in any case the U.S. had the power and ability to do the job properly the second time around.
Such wartime diplomacy, however, had a crucial flaw: American policymakers failed to link the "negative" and "positive" sides of the struggles together. They did not appreciate that the defeat of the Axis powers, however complete, could be only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for the emergence of their desired settlement. By contracting out the bulk of the fight against Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union, the Western Allies made a Faustian bargain which resulted in the occupation of Central and Eastern Europe by an undemocratic, anti-capitalist tyranny. The sheer magnitude of devastation stemming from Nazi domination and total war, moreover, led to political and economic chaos across the continent, at the same time that the costs of fighting drained the strength of America's true allies. This situation was hardly conducive to the creation of America's postwar vision; it provided, rather, fertile ground for its opposite--the emergence of radical, Soviet-influenced regimes in the industrial heart of Europe.
If the negative struggle ended in mid-1945, therefore, America's second, positive struggle continued long after V-E and V-J Day. U.S. policymakers after the war faced not harmony, but a new and daunting set of challenges. Leffler puts it well:
Britain was weaker than they thought; European financial problems more intractable; German and Japanese economic woes more deep-seated; revolutionary nationalism more virulent; Soviet actions more ominous; and American demobilization more rapid. (p. 16)
During the period 1945 to 1947, the Truman administration progressively realized just how mistaken previous American assumptions about the postwar world had been, and just how inadequate were the international institutions which had been created. During the same period they grew skeptical about Soviet willingness to help create a stable new order. Leffler gets it right again:
At the end of the war, U.S. officials did not think that they were engaged in a zero-sum game of power politics with the Soviet Union. They wanted to cooperate with the Kremlin. But they harbored a distrust sufficiently profound to require terms of cooperation compatible with vital American interests. (p. 15)
By 1947, they decided that in order to salvage as much as possible of the American postwar vision, the institutional framework so recently and laboriously constructed would have to be set aside, and a new one created based on more realistic, less universal assumptions.
The Cold War, therefore, is best understood as a consequence of the Truman administration's decisions to pursue what remained of the positive goals America fought for in Europe during World War II, in the face of Soviet decisions to follow a comparable course. Given the conflicting visions of order held by these two great powers, and the conditions existing in Europe at the end of the war, such a clash seems inevitable; only one side's abdication of the field could have prevented it. American officials, to be sure, did not plan to embark on a course of permanent, massive intervention abroad; they wanted and expected their new order to emerge without much effort. In the event, however, the combination of America's burgeoning domestic strength and other nations' temporary weakness inexorably pulled America's interests and commitments outward.
The first set of postwar challenges arose from Eastern Europe. Roosevelt had played a double game during the war with regard to the territories occupied by the Red Army, tacitly conceding these areas to a Soviet sphere while denying that he was doing so to the American public (and perhaps to himself). The Truman administration faced the inevitable returns on such a dual policy. In the latter half of 1945, U.S. officials settled on a middle position: the U.S. would accept a sphere of influence, but only an "open" one; the Soviets would be permitted to control their satellites' foreign and security policies, but not dominate their domestic or economic realms. By the end of 1945, therefore, the tensions between the superpowers' conflicting visions of the postwar order had risen fully to the surface, and U.S. officials were made to realize that possession of the bomb would not guarantee that America's will would prevail across the board.
At this point, events in the Near East helped crystallize views regarding Soviet expansion, its sources, and the proper response. In early 1946, the Iranian crisis and George Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow converted many to a new paradigm for U.S.-Soviet relations. Soviet behavior in the Near East seemed to show Moscow's aggressive, destabilizing intentions; Kennan's analysis argued that since those intentions were driven by internal causes, American appeasement would not work; and the eventual Soviet retreat in Iran seemed to show that a confrontational policy was effective.
Late in 1946, the true dimensions of the postwar economic and political crisis in Western Europe became clear. Reinterpreted in light of the new view of the Soviet Union, anarchy in the continent's industrial heartland now appeared as a magnet attracting an opportunistic enemy. The harsh winter of 1946-47 pushed Europe even closer to chaos, galvanizing American officials (after prodding from their allies) into a dynamic response. In addition to dispatching a quick infusion of cash late in 1947, Truman administration officials launched the Marshall Plan, an unprecedented program of massive proportions, to fuel the reconstruction of Western European economies. When Britain sent word early in 1947 that it could no longer afford its commitments in Greece and Turkey, the administration responded with the Truman Doctrine, taking over the commitments as its own and making plain its intention of blocking further advances of Soviet influence, whether direct or indirect. Finally, the Truman administration helped found the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formally committing the United States to the defense of Europe from a Soviet attack.
With these bold and unprecedented steps American officials thus salvaged a portion of their wartime vision, establishing a new set of commitments and institutions to supplement, and in certain important respects supplant, those they had embraced only a few years before. The outbreak of the Korean War, finally, confirmed and intensified the Cold War paradigm.The new order would eventually be maintained with the help of some of the institutions of the "first wave" of postwar planning--the imf, the World Bank, and gatt.
Where does this leave us in the quest for a unified national myth? Traditionalists have trouble accepting an American colossus, even one which restored and protected the rest of the free world. Revisionists have trouble accepting that American power was generally a force for good. Post-revisionists bear the mixed news that American behavior was the product of a unique set of circumstances, in which overwhelming relative strength enabled the United States to act with a freedom it may never achieve again.
It should not surprise us that these topics provoke passionate debates. Yet if there is any period for which the United States need not shy away from a forthright presentation of its national record, it is the 1940s. In Germany we sponsored a new democracy rising from the ashes of Nazi tyranny. America may indeed have been an economic "hegemon," but capitalism is not a zero-sum game: Forty years after being revived with Marshall Plan aid, West Germany was able to spend fifteen times that aid per capita in reviving its own ravaged eastern half.
While American policymakers may not always have been the innocent heroes of the traditional account, they were still less the villains of revisionist demonology. Acting under enormous pressure in extraordinary and unprecedented circumstances, they helped create a political and economic order across much of the globe in which more people could taste freedom and prosperity than ever before. They also made mistakes, attended to their own interests, sometimes lied, and casually ignored the darker sides of anti-communists in many places. On balance, however, it is doubtful if any nation with so much power has used it so wisely and so well. The appropriate way to present such a record is simple: let the full and complex truth be known, and let it speak for itself.