Evidence and Interpretation: Against Historical Triumphalism

Irene L. Gendzier is professor of political science at Boston University. An earlier version of this essay appears in George N. Katsiaficas, ed., After the Fall: 1989 and the Future of Freedom (Routledge, 2001) under the title, “The Saints Come Marching In: A Response to John Lewis Gaddis”.

The Cold War is not over, at least not in the “acacacacademy”, as Beckett put it in Waiting for Godot. Beckett was not writing about the Cold War. Among some of those who are, however, the collapse of the former Soviet Union and Eastern European communist states did not mark the end so much as the continuation of the Cold War, albeit in a different form and setting. Its weapons of choice include a selective reading of archival evidence; its preferred setting, the intellectual venues of the academy and media.

 

For those of a triumphalist persuasion, 1989 represents the vindication of long-held assumptions about the origins and denouement of the Cold War in terms of the role of the Soviet Union and its communist allies.¹ In the orthodox canons of Cold War historiography, what “we now know” is that “they”, i.e., the Soviet Union and its communist allies, made “us”, i.e., the United States and its Western allies, do it. The claim, in short, is that new archival evidence provides definitive confirmation of the Soviet Union’s responsibility for the Cold War and no less definitive confirmation of the reactive and defensive nature of US policies in the same period.

 

On closer inspection it is clear that the question of evidence is not the key to Cold War historiography. The importance of newly accessible archival sources, including those from the former Soviet Union and other communist bloc countries, is not in doubt. Against that must be set the selective exclusion of evidence that does not conform to Cold War orthodoxy, including that based on critical studies of the US record.

 

Writing in defence of the “traditionalist” interpretation of domestic US communism, John Earl Haynes argues that

 

revisionist complaints about triumphalism stem mainly from an unwillingness to confront the damning evidence that has emerged from the long-closed Soviet and East European archives … Unable to refute the new archival evidence, revisionist scholars have taken to attacking the anti-Communists and traditionalist historians instead.²

 

But Haynes’s remarks would apply equally well to many traditionalist historians and political scientists who, unwilling or unable to confront the evidence that has long emerged from US and Western sources, turn instead from an investigation of the subject to a denunciation of revisionist authors and their approach to US and global history.

Archival Indeterminacy

There is nothing surprising in the continuing controversy over the Cold War given the conflict’s scope, significance and global consequences. To judge by the proliferation of monographs, journals and conferences devoted to the subject, the theme remains compelling. But what is equally clear is that the appearance of welcome new evidence has not led to any consensus on the origins and nature of the Cold War. Its very definition remains open to question. Was there, in fact, a single Cold War, or has the term been used to cover, and cover up, many dissimilar conflicts? Does the term really mask an ongoing North–South conflict over resources and power in the Third World, a conflict in which the United States and the Soviet Union played critical if highly unequal roles? What of the Cold War on the domestic front? What of the culture wars? And what of the ideological struggles spun out in US theories of modernisation and democracy allegedly intended for Third World development but manipulated in the interests of US national security and prosecuting the Cold War?

 

To the extent that the current debate on such issues involves newly released archive material, it is reminiscent of the post–First World War period when the Soviet Union released secret agreements entered into by the Tsarist regime and its Western allies. The aim was surely to embarrass the governments concerned by exposing their plans for the partition of Ottoman territory. The Soviet move provoked London and Paris into responding with their own measured releases of state papers to protect their interests and their image. More than seventy years later, the collapse of the Soviet Union led the Russian regime that succeeded it to release and sell former Soviet state archives.

 

Under the very different political circumstances that followed there was no Western parallel to the earlier response. One might argue that the release and publication by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency in Washington of the Venona Papers—thousands of documents said to be deciphered communications from 1939 to 1957 between Soviet intelligence and its American informants—represents a rejoinder of sorts, as indicated by the continuing debate on the role of the US Communist Party, and by the continuing charges of espionage and McCarthyism. The post–Cold War archival controversies, according to Cold War historians, are about scholarship and the respect for archival evidence. In practice, they represent an extension of the debate on the Cold War, on the nature and culpability of Soviet as opposed to US policies in five decades of cold and hot wars whose victims are too numerous to count. The results are revealing, but not so much in terms of the evaluation of new evidence as of attempts to mute existing evidence that ill fits Cold War paradigms.

 

Informed critics have pointed out that the use of newly released Soviet sources is not problem-free.³ There is the question of selectivity with respect to what is released, the sale of some of this data, and the restricted access which remains a reality of research efforts. The release of official sources is by no means universal even in democratic states that insist on the public’s right to know and that subscribe to a policy of regular declassification. US scholars who have worked in the field are well aware of such restrictions.

 

Despite this, the quantity of post-war US foreign policy records in the public domain is formidable. Its contribution to the clarification of the roots and rationale of US foreign policy is indispensable to the analysis of the Cold War period. It may be useful in this regard to cite the publication—albeit under extraordinary circumstances—of the official record of US policy in Asia during the Vietnam War. The forty-seven volumes of The Pentagon Papers (1971) brought to light a level of detail concerning policymaking and the mentality of the “backroom boys” that had not previously been available.

The ‘New’ Cold War History

Such publications have no part in the work of Cold War historians, however, which would lead one to conclude that they are either unwilling or unable to refute the relevant evidence. This applies to We Now Know, the latest and most comprehensive interpretation of the Cold War by one of the major US historians of the subject. John Lewis Gaddis’s study has been seen as setting the parameters for future research on the subject. While hardly indifferent to critical analyses of post-war US foreign policy, Gaddis has no room for them in his own assessment of US policy in this period for reasons that he makes amply clear.

 

Gaddis believes past accounts of the Cold War have been unbalanced, parochial and neglectful of historical evidence. The culprits include “all Cold War historians—whether of orthodox, revisionist, post-revisionist, corporatist, international, cultural, or post-modernist persuasions”. What unites this unlikely assortment of historians is their poor sense of timing and their flawed methodology. They wrote before the outcome of the Cold War was clear; and they seem partial to analyses of interests in their interpretations of US policy. They have, moreover, been indiscreet in their willingness to provide unflattering “clinical detail on the public and behind-the-scenes behavior of western leaders”. They neglected “the fact that two superpowers dominated the post-1945 world; that each often acted in response to what the other had done; and that third parties responded to—but sometimes manipulated—each of them”. Gaddis argues that the history they wrote erred by emphasising “interests, which it mostly defined in material terms—what people possessed, or wanted to possess. It tended to overlook ideas—what people believed, or wanted to believe”. Gaddis describes the above as the “old” Cold War history that represents “an abnormal way of writing history” and was itself a product of the Cold War.⁴

 

Gaddis situates his work in the long post–Second World War decade, a period he sees as dominated by the diabolical manipulations of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who bears total responsibility for the origins of the Cold War. On this account, Stalin’s paranoid personality and his reinforcement of the “authoritarian romanticism” fostered by Marxism–Leninism rendered the prospects of post-war collaboration with the United States entirely illusory.

 

Gaddis is not alone in interpreting Soviet policy as the product of a paranoid leader committed to absolute political control. But contemporary scholars of Soviet policy with access to newly accessible government records have come to different conclusions. Unlike Gaddis, they focus less on Stalin’s psychology than on the conditions and objectives of Soviet planning in the aftermath of a war that left the Soviet Union with twenty-seven million dead.

Benevolent Giant

In contrast with his depiction of the Soviet Union, Gaddis offers a view of the United States as a reluctant hegemon, drawn into the Second World War in response to “malignant authoritarianism” as represented by Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Soviet Russia. As for post-war planning, there was no blueprint for such in Washington, Gaddis argues. To the extent that an overall post-war strategy was forged, it was based less on the analysis of US interests than on the commitment to promote democracy and civility. These are the factors that explain the success of US–European relations and that are relevant to Washington’s policies towards post-war Germany and Japan. They are also the factors that make sense of the uniquely democratic and civil character of US policies outside Europe, according to Gaddis.

 

However, the record that we now know of US policies challenges such positions. Thus, Gaddis claims that US policy in the post-war period was devoid of the pursuit of selfish national interests, if not entirely altruistic:

 

The American President and his key advisers were determined to secure the United States against whatever dangers might confront it after victory, but they lacked a clear sense of what those might be or where they might arise. Their thinking about post-war security was, as a consequence, more general than specific. (P. 12)

 

Nonetheless, US policy included preparedness, the commitment to prohibit the emergence of any hostile power in Europe, and the general support of “Wilsonian principles of self-determination, open markets, and collective security” (p. 13). Gaddis concedes that US policymakers were not averse to the advantages of power. They would not “resist opportunities to reshape the international economy in ways that would benefit American capitalism” (p. 12).

 

In Gaddis’s view, the Marshall Plan was “the peacetime extension of a wartime innovation, Lend–Lease, in which Washington had broadened traditional criteria for calculating profit and loss to include—or so it seemed at the time—the fate of western civilization” (p. 196). The relationship of the Marshall Plan to US domestic politics and its benefits for the expansion of US corporate power do not figure here, although Gaddis recognises the importance of recent critical work on the subject. Nor does the role of the acquisition, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and Pacific, of foreign bases and landing rights for US civilian and military aviation. Of interest in this context are recent revelations that the United States stored some “12,000 nuclear weapons and components in at least 23 countries and 5 American territories during the cold war”.⁵

 

US policy in Europe, according to Gaddis, illustrated Washington’s consensual approach to diplomacy among allies. It was a policy rooted in a democratic tradition, which accounted for the capacity of US officials to engage in “negotiation, compromise, and the balancing of interests”.⁶ The United States consulted with its European allies on the basis of common values. Outside Europe, the United States, even in its treatment of defeated enemies, respected “ the rules of civil society implicit in democratic politics” (p. 287)—unlike the Soviet Union, whose brutality in Germany, including widespread raping and looting, makes the contrast between “civility on one side and its absence on the other” all the more evident. The implications for historians are considerable:

 

Social history, even gender history, intersected with inhumanity to make diplomatic history. What this suggests, then, is that historians of the Cold War need to look quite carefully at what those who saw distinctions between good and evil thought and did about them. (P. 287, italics in original).

 

The obvious implication of moral indifference on the part of dissenting historians raises interesting questions about seeing and observing and what a recent author describes as “states of denial”.⁷ Similarly, Gaddis’s seemingly uncontroversial assertions about the need to respect ideas and beliefs are interpreted in a manner that clearly privileges certain ideas and beliefs as opposed to others. Who decides which are to be respected?

Germany and Japan

Consider the German question, and more specifically the debate on the denazification campaign and its role in US policy. The German issue is pivotal in Gaddis’s text, as it was in the international European politics of the late 1940s. For Gaddis, moreover, it provides a clear opportunity to contrast the civility of US military and diplomatic behaviour with that of the Soviet troops in East Germany, where their violation of human and political rights is a matter of record.

 

Regarding the conditions that influenced official US attitudes towards denazification, Gaddis does not inform his readers that “the CIA, the State Department, and U.S. Army intelligence each created special programs for the specific purpose of bringing selected former Nazis and collaborators to the United States. Other projects protected such people by placing them on U.S. payrolls overseas”.⁸ According to Christopher Simpson, US policy in Germany

 

was led almost exclusively by the corporate and foreign policy elite that had been most active in U.S.–German financial relations during the 1920s and 1930s. The disproportionate leverage of this group, its ability to shape media coverage of foreign policy issues, to influence government policy, and eventually to shift public opinion was dramatically manifested in the realignment of U.S. policy concerning denazification and decartellization in the brief period between 1945 and 1947.⁹

 

The decision to partition Germany is central to the debate on the Cold War. Gaddis attributes the partition less to internal disagreement between the former wartime allies on the future of Germany than to their collective uncertainty as to “what course to follow”. “But,” he adds, “ of course there was a Cold War, and it became the second and more significant reason for Germany’s division.”¹⁰ However, other scholars maintain on the basis of archival research that it was not Soviet policies in East Germany or the anti-communist fears of US military officials that were primarily responsible for developments leading to partition. The brutal Soviet “interference with personal freedom” was not the prime motivation for US policy, according to Carolyn Eisenberg. For those in positions to shape US policy, “partition represented an abandonment of the eastern zone Germans so that they could more effectively direct affairs in the West.” US officials were worried about the “Soviet Union’s obstruction of their plans for German reconstruction” and its “impact on Western Europe”.¹¹

 

The limitations of Gaddis’s analysis are as evident in his discussion of Japan, which extends his view of the democratic character of US policy. Generals Lucius Clay and Douglas MacArthur both “had the faith of missionaries that democracy, if introduced from the ground up, would root itself even in inhospitable terrain”.¹² What Gaddis does not indicate, however, are the severe limits on democracy that US officials imposed in Japan, ranging from the overt destruction of labour unions to covert intervention in Japan’s domestic politics with a view to assuring the dominance of conservative forces.

 

John Dower, pre-eminent historian of the US occupation of Japan, observes that “while the victors preached democracy, they ruled by fiat; while they espoused equality, they themselves constituted an inviolate privileged caste. Their reformist agenda rested on the assumption that, virtually without exception, Western culture and its values were superior to those of ‘the Orient’”.¹³

 

Moreover, recent disclosures have revealed the role played by the United States in influencing the direction and operations of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party for close to forty years. US intelligence sources have admitted that the CIA lavished funds on the Japanese right. The purpose of this expenditure was “to gather intelligence on Japan, make the country a bulwark against Communism in Asia and undermine the Japanese left”.¹⁴ Such policies accounted for the perpetuation of one-party rule in Japan as well as institutionalised corruption.

 

Dower has also uncovered the existence of a “censorship bureaucracy that extended into every aspect of public expression” during the US occupation of Japan.¹⁵ Public discussion and exhibits relating to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were prohibited. Gaddis’s views on the bombings are particularly revealing because they clarify his interpretation of what ideas are acceptable, what beliefs should be publicly acknowledged, and what experiences are legitimate.

 

Gaddis says that the aborted 1995 effort by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum to mount a fiftieth anniversary exhibit on the atomic bombings of Japan “provoked a raucous controversy among historians, veterans, and politicians … but in the end it shed little new light on the actual decision to drop the bombs”.¹⁶ What Gaddis fails to explain is that the raucous character of the controversy was fuelled by the increasing intolerance of discussion of views that have long been part of the public record. Fifty years ago such critical discussion among US military and civilian officials was more commonplace.¹⁷

 

Gaddis warns historians not to impose their views on the past, but rather to seek out “the voices and viewpoints of everyday life”.¹⁸ More specifically, he counsels against those who would “ tell the public what its memories ought to be”. Many historians would agree with Gaddis that the voices and hidden memories of the past should be heard. Major American historians have made them heard. Howard Zinn, for example, has addressed the question of the US atomic bombing of Japan.¹⁹ Yet there is no common ground between Gaddis’s effort to legitimise US policy and Zinn’s questioning of it. The voices and viewpoints that Zinn brings to light are taboo in Gaddis’s eyes, as are those of Joseph Gerson’s With Hiroshima Eyes, which gathers the accounts of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who relate their memories of the bombings.²⁰ But those memories clash with Gaddis’s assessment of US policy. Are they therefore disqualified? And if so, whose memories are legitimate?

Korea and Vietnam

The US record in Korea, Vietnam and more recently the Gulf War, belies Gaddis’s claims concerning the relationship between “the rules of civil society implicit in democratic politics” and “the humanitarian treatment of defeated enemies”.²¹

 

US veterans of the Korean War have reported that in the first weeks of the conflict American soldiers killed hundreds of refugees, many of them women and children, who were trapped beneath a bridge. The charge is currently a subject of major controversy in US military circles. The bridge in question was “near a hamlet some 100 miles southeast of Seoul”. According to a recent published account, Major General William B. Kean in August 1950 “issued an order directing troops to treat civilians as the enemy”.²²

 

Also germane to the evaluation of Gaddis’s claims of superior US conduct is the My Lai massacre, which occurred during the US war on Vietnam. My Lai was part of operation “Wheeler Wallawa”, a campaign in which “over 10,000 enemy were reported killed, including the victims of My Lai”.²³ In operation “Speedy Express”, carried out in Kien Hoa in 1969, the United States imposed its control by “application of the ‘awesome firepower’ of the 9th Division, including air strikes using napalm, high explosives and anti-personnel bombs, B-52 bombing, and artillery shelling ‘around the clock’ at a level that ‘it is impossible to reckon.’” (p. 314). According to Newsweek’s Kevin Buckley, “a staggering number of noncombatant civilians—perhaps as many as 5,000 according to one official—were killed by US firepower to ‘pacify’ Kien Hoa. The death toll there made the My Lai massacre look trifling by comparison” (p. 314). This is what Gaddis describes as part of the “protracted and costly military effort to save South Vietnam”,²⁴ an effort which, as others have pointed out, included “the terror of unrestrained ‘pacification programs’” while the United States saturated the South with more bombs than it dropped on North Vietnam.²⁵ In 1971 an estimated “800,000 tons of bombs were dropped by the United States on Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam”.²⁶

 

The 1991 Gulf War, well beyond the parameters of Gaddis’s analysis, nonetheless provides additional compelling material for consideration. It was reported that an unknown number of Iraqis were killed when “more than three hundred and fifty captured and disarmed Iraqi soldiers, including Iraqi wounded who had been evacuated from a clearly marked hospital bus, were fired upon by a platoon of Bradley fighting vehicles”.²⁷

 

Among the lessons of Vietnam, for Gaddis, is the understanding that it was mistaken to believe “that any single state could dominate so vast a region [the Third World], or that its diverse inhabitants might embrace a single ideology”.²⁸ This belief he terms a bizarre artefact of Cold War thinking. No less bizarre, and equally as useful in the justification of US policy, was the idea that nationalist movements in the Third World were externally controlled, primarily by Moscow. It is little wonder, according to Gaddis, that such a view took hold, given the legacy of imperialism which predisposed Third World leaders to look away from Europe—and by extension, its principal ally in Washington—and towards the Red flag.

 

At first glance, Gaddis appears to take a sceptical view of the importance of the Cold War in determining US behaviour in the Third World. He concedes that it was not a central factor in Latin America or the Middle East, but such concessions are quickly subordinated to a more conventional explanation in terms of the pervasive threat—albeit not always realised—of Soviet influence and expansion. A key to Gaddis’s outlook appears in his claim that

 

had it not been for the shift from a wartime vision of “one world” to a post-war perception of two, Americans might have managed a more comfortable alignment of principles and interests. They could have continued to insist that colonialism was an anachronism without worrying about the implications—for national security, for the international balance of power—of ending it. (P. 157)

 

In short, US policy in the Third World is interpreted as a function of the uncertainties rooted in the Cold War. “Was it all a false alarm?” Gaddis asks rhetorically (p. 186). Was the perception of a Soviet threat entirely unfounded? The answer, according to Gaddis is not in doubt; after all, “things could have gone the other way” (p. 153). Or, as he says in another passage,” the failure of [US] fears to materialize does not establish their immateriality” (p. 187). On one side, then, in Gaddis’s analysis, is the rationality of US fear; on the other, the irrationality of Soviet behaviour. Gaddis remarks critically of US policymakers that they failed to understand “that the very nature of authoritarianism discouraged realism and exaggerated emotion” (p. 187). The theme of Soviet irrationality is further emphasised when Gaddis refers to Brezhnev’s policies in Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, Ethiopia and Afghanistan as being part of “a pattern of geriatric over-exertion” (p. 187).

 

Gaddis views US policy in the Middle East in the 1950s as a function of “bungling”. He justifies US policy in South-East Asia in terms of the threat of communist expansion, and sees US claims of Soviet penetration in Latin America as being largely exaggerated, with the exception of Cuba.

Guatemala

Yet, as Gaddis admits, Washington found no difficulty in co-operating with authoritarian regimes elsewhere in Latin America (p. 177). His analysis of the US intervention in Guatemala in 1954 reveals Washington’s refusal to co-operate with reformist regimes and suggests that US policy was driven by considerations very different from the officially proclaimed “Soviet threat”.

 

Gaddis’s treatment of the US intervention in Guatemala, one of the Eisenhower administration’s covert “successes”, begins with the disclaimer that US concern over Soviet influence was “less than one might have expected”. President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, whom the United States overthrew, was not a communist, though he was supported by local communists. Gaddis says his policies “instituted the most successful land reform program seen in Latin America up to that time—a record the Americans would come to envy” (pp. 177–8). In June 1952, Arbenz announced a programme described by US officials as “constructive and democratic in its aims” and comparable to programmes supported by Washington in Japan and Formosa. It involved the expropriation of unused government and private land that was to be redistributed to peasants in exchange for modest payment. To CIA officials, such action threatened an expansion of communist influence in Guatemala, although as Nick Cullather observes, intelligence officials also feared that the power of feudal landlords would yield similar results.²⁹

 

Gaddis concludes that US covert intervention in Guatemala was “a massive overreaction to a minor irritant. It did little to alter the course of events inside Guatemala, where Arbenz’s regime had made so many enemies among the landowners and the military that it probably would not have lasted in any event”.³⁰ It was fear of the widespread support for the regime, however, that led to CIA intervention on behalf of opposition forces.

 

Gaddis dismisses the impact of the CIA-backed coup on Guatemala, but a report by an independent truth commission, made public in February 1999, stated that “the United States gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed ‘acts of genocide’ against the Mayans during the most brutal armed conflict in Central America, Guatemala’s 36-year civil war”.³¹ As a result of that civil war some two hundred thousand people are estimated to have been killed. Moreover, the commission found that US training of the Guatemalan military in counterinsurgency “had a significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation”. CIA officials are reported to have known of the Guatemalan army’s role in “massacring entire Mayan villages while Reagan Administration officials publicly supported the military regime’s human rights record”.³²

The Middle East

Gaddis admits that the United States also exaggerated the Soviet threat in Middle East. Nonetheless, We Now Know offers an interpretation of US actions there that is well within conventional terms. Among the key factors Gaddis cites are US support for the policies of its European allies, the potential threat Truman’s recognition of the Israeli state posed to US oil interests, and the succession of crises involving nationalist movements in Iran, Egypt and Lebanon. On the question of US relations with European allies, Gaddis is oddly silent about the extent of collaboration between the United States and Britain, as well as the intensity of US–British competition in the Middle East.³³ He gives little indication of the considerable advantages reaped by the United States in exploiting Britain’s military presence in the area in the 1950s, which provided it with “a singularly vital strategic asset: air bases from which to launch the strategic air offensive against the Soviets”.³⁴

 

As for Truman’s support for the recognition of Israel, this ran counter to the recommendations of State Department officials, but Gaddis does not remind us that the US Joint Chiefs of Staff were impressed by Israel’s military performance and judged the Jewish state to be the strongest regional military power after Turkey. US oil interests were not threatened by the recognition of Israel, as Saudi policy confirmed. It was the Palestinians expelled from the new state of Israel who were threatened, not the United States. What was unacceptable and deemed threatening by the United States and Britain was the emergence of nationalist regimes and populist movements demanding a greater share in oil profits. Iran’s nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951 prompted both Western powers to carry out a covert operation that resulted in the fall of the Mussadeq regime in 1953 and its replacement by the shah. That in turn resulted in a twenty-five-year period of US-backed repression in Iran, yet Gaddis maintains that the coup “could hardly have succeeded had the Americans not been seen, in Iran, as a welcome alternative to the British”.³⁵

 

In 1956, President Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal, provoking a tripartite invasion by Britain, France and Israel. Nasser had nationalised the canal in response to Washington’s withdrawal of support for the Aswan Dam project. Gaddis explains the US decision not to back World Bank funding of the dam as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s subtle attempt to promote a Soviet–Egyptian embrace that would ultimately be oppressive and debilitating to both (p. 172). This unlikely explanation serves as a cover for Dulles’s unilateral action, which drew criticism in the US policymaking establishment.

 

In his discussion of the US intervention in Lebanon’s first civil war in 1958, Gaddis offers no indication of US interests in Lebanon, the role of Tapline (a US multinational that obtained a concession to construct oil pipelines from Saudi Arabia through Lebanon to the southern port of Sidon), Lebanon’s consequent connection with the entire fabric of US oil politics, or of Beirut’s importance as a centre of finance and intelligence. Nor does he question why the United States should have “mediated” the settlement of a civil war to which it was not a party, and in which it protected a president with so little popular support that outside assistance was needed to keep him in place. The Iraqi revolution of 14 July, which occurred just hours before the US intervention in Lebanon, explains the timing but not the long-range objectives of that intervention. As for the Eisenhower Doctrine, which mandated US military backing for Middle Eastern countries threatened by international communist aggression, Gaddis does not inform readers that that much-cited doctrine was irrelevant to US policy in Beirut (p. 175).

 

By contrast, US sources are notoriously blunt on the reasons for the US involvement in Beirut. They leave no doubt that it was a function of political, economic and strategic considerations. Beirut the pro-American ally, keeper of the free-enterprise flame in the Middle East, dazzling financial centre to which oil profits were funnelled, transit state for the crucial Tapline project, and the centre for intelligence operations in the region—this Beirut was seen as a key regional asset by US policymakers, including the unsentimental John Foster Dulles. US backing for the status quo in Lebanon was designed to guarantee the power of Lebanon’s pro-American supporters. The consequences of such intervention for Lebanese political development were of no interest to US policymakers.

 

Focusing on the role of the US secretary of state, Gaddis interprets Dulles’s policies in behavioural terms, arguing that his prickly political habits inadvertently led the United States to become the “the new imperial power in the Middle East in what he knew to be a post-imperial age”. Dulles, explains Gaddis, had a “tendency to fret, hover, and meddle—[an] inability to see when things were going well and need not be re-engineered” (p. 176).

A Partial Picture

The record of US policy in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East in the period under consideration is highly abridged in Gaddis’s pages, and US intervention in Africa is entirely omitted. There is no discussion of US intervention in Ghana, or in the Congo. Nor is there an account of Anglo-American policies in Ethiopia and Eritrea in the late 1940s, a matter of some interest in the light of recent developments in that region. The African continent is off Gaddis’s map of the Cold War, much as African countries in the post–Cold War era are summarily dismissed as instances of “failed states”. It is not solely the omission of evidence concerning US intervention that is important, however. Far more troubling is Gaddis’s failure to consider what US records repeatedly demonstrate, namely, the widespread support throughout the Third World for social and political reforms that the United States actively undermined, with devastating results that haunt the post–Cold War world.

Endnotes

1. See, for example, Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992); and the chief focus of the present article, John Lewis Gaddis’s We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Subsequent references to Gaddis’s book are to the 1998 paperback edition.

 

2. John Earl Haynes, “The Cold War Debate Continues: A Traditionalist View of Historical Writing on Domestic Communism and Anti-Communism”, Journal of Cold War Studies 2, no. 1 (2000), pp. 113–14.

 

3. See Melvyn P. Leffler, “Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold War Reopened”, Foreign Affairs 75, no. 4 (July/August 1996).

 

4. Gaddis, We Now Know, pp. 282–3, italics in original.

 

5. Judith Miller, “US Once Deployed 12,000 Atom Arms in 2 Dozen Nations”, New York Times, 20 October 1999.

 

6. Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 52.

 

7. See Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).

 

8. Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), p. xiv.

 

9. Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), p. 262.

 

10. Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 115.

 

11. Carolyn W. Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 11, 12.

 

12. Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 199.

 

13. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p. 211.

 

14. “CIA Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in 50s and 60s”, New York Times, 9 October 1994.

 

15. Dower, Embracing Defeat, p. 405.

 

16. Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 324, footnote 15; another reference to the same exhibit appears on p. 384, footnote 17.

 

17. See Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, “Hiroshima’s Shadow”, Chicago Tribune, 13 August 1996.

 

18. Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 287.

 

19. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), pp. 413–15.

 

20. Joseph Gerson, With Hiroshima Eyes: Atomic War, Nuclear Extortion, and Moral Imagination (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1995), p. 5.

 

21. Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 287.

 

22. “AP Releases Files in Debate over Massacre in Korean War”, New York Times, 16 May 2000.

 

23. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume 1 (Boston: South End Press, 1979), p. 317.

 

24. Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 189.

 

25. Noam Chomsky, Chronicles of Dissent (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1992), p. 316.

 

26. Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, p. 474.

 

27. Seymour Hersh, “Overwhelming Force: What Happened in the Final Days of the Gulf War?”, New Yorker, 22 May 2000, p. 51.

 

28. Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 190.

 

29. Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 23, 26.

 

30. Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 178.

 

31. Mireya Navarro, “Guatemalan Army Waged ‘Genocide’, New Report Finds”, New York Times, 26 February 1999.

 

32. Clifford Krauss, “The Spies Who Never Came in from the Cold War”, New York Times, 7 March 1998.

 

33. See Irene L. Gendzier, “US Postwar Policy and the Middle East”, chapter 2 in Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945–1958 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

 

34. Michael J. Cohen, Fighting World War Three from the Middle East: Allied Contingency Plans, 1945–1954 (London: Frank Cass, 1997), p. 33.

 

35. Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 167.