Containment: Misreading Soviet Russia

Roger S. Whitcomb is a professor in the political science department of Kutztown University, Pennsylvania. His books include An Uncertain Tradition: The American Approach to Foreign Affairs (Praeger, 1998) and The Origins of the Cold War: The Formative Years (Greenwood Press, 1999).

Towards the end of the Second World War, the United States found itself in a virtually unique position in world history. Blessed with unparalleled material resources and human energies, the country was faced with an international situation that afforded it ample opportunity to translate these advantages into benefits not only for its own people but also for the rest of mankind. In the last months of the war, the United States moved ahead confidently with plans to ensure that its citizens would have a more stable and amenable environment in which to prosper—a belief predicated in large part on an effective application of the principles of the Atlantic Charter, institutionalised in the structure of the new United Nations Organisation. Within three years, these hopes lay floundering under the weight of an alarming, rapidly intensifying conflict with Soviet Russia. The Russian–American Cold War confrontation had dawned and would soon metamorphose into a struggle played out on many stages, plunging innumerable peoples into miasmas of death and destruction in a process that would last for some forty years.

 

A consensus quickly developed in the United States as to the root cause of this state of affairs: the perceived threat of Russian-inspired “communist” aggression and subversion. America’s foreign policies were improvised in the late 1940s and early 1950s by people who were convinced that the one real danger to universal peace and tranquillity was constituted by a worldwide communist conspiracy. It was to this threat—believed to have been maintained, in one fashion or another, at a constant threshold of danger—that much of US foreign policy after 1945 was directed.

 

Throughout the Cold War era, the United States’ basic orientation remained constant. Insofar as Soviet Russia and its friends were responsible for the continuing threat of general war, for the constant exacerbation of international tensions, for the failure of the United Nations to keep the peace, then US vigilance had to be kept at a high level so that the United States’ necessarily extensive involvement in world affairs could be successfully carried forward. Only in this fashion would the fundamental values of the American people have a realistic chance of survival in an ever-dangerous international system.

 

Such was the predominant image of the world held by the overwhelming majority of the US decision-making elite throughout the Cold War era. How accurate was this vision? Was this approach to dealing with the Russians at bottom a realistic one, or was it in some sense an ill-advised posture that itself contributed to the very conditions of conflict that the United States was ostensibly trying to avoid?

 

The monolithic nature of the Cold War confrontation that developed between the two giants was not inevitable. Rather, the impasse was a product of mutual antagonisms originating in mistrust of one another’s motives—a situation stimulated largely by mutual misperceptions stemming from each party’s own peculiar historical experiences. In particular, the so-called “containment rationale”, which represented the centrepiece of the US approach to Soviet Russia after 1945, was a misguided approach based on a misreading both of Russian intentions and capabilities. Indeed, the main character of Russian policies throughout the post‑1945 period was misinterpreted by Washington. The United States came to believe that it was only the West’s nuclear superiority and conventional rearmament (symbolised by the militarisation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) that prevented Russia from attacking Europe and occupying every piece of real estate not already under Red Army domination. This was an oversimplification of the complex motives that actually guided the foreign policy of a regime which under both Stalin and his successors was highly cautious and conservative, not prone to gamble or take unnecessary chances.

The Initial Decisions

On 7 December 1941, the United States was dragged onto the centre stage of world history. The era of “effortless security”, as Walter Lippmann put it, was over. The most destructive and dehumanising of twentieth-century conflicts demonstrated that the American people were no longer guaranteed easy security or prosperity by their favoured geographical setting. As the tangled events during and immediately after that conflict required a central US involvement, how the country responded to the manifold challenges confronting it would go far in determining the kind of world that would emerge thereafter. It was in the midst of this strategic sea-change that Russian–American relations would come to play a central role in the history of the next two decades.

 

The US tradition of foreign relations did not serve the country well. Franklin D. Roosevelt and his chief foreign-policy advisers laboured under the twin handicaps of lack of experience and understanding of the proven requirements of Realpolitik. This reality was especially manifest in the moralistic policies adopted towards friend and foe alike after 1939. US moralism led to the assumption of injurious ad hoc postures such as the demands for unconditional surrender, total victory, no appeasement, and the proclamation of the Atlantic Charter—postures encouraged by a long record of self-indulgence fed by the United States’ geographical distance from danger and its enormous technological accomplishments during the war.

 

More importantly, the United States emerged from the conflict without a clear, well worked out conception of the role it would play in the post-war world. In the process of dealing with a series of “crises” arising from Soviet actions in l945–8, US policymakers slowly elaborated a series of “worst case” predictions about Russian intentions. By the end of that decade these predictions reflected what had by then become a fairly widespread set of assumptions about Russian behaviour.

 

The core assumption was that Soviet Russia was a dangerous country—one motivated essentially by the requisites of its official Marxist–Leninist political ideology. Marxism–Leninism itself, as a structured, doctrinaire belief system, was by definition felt to be diametrically opposed to the American way of life. It was historically totalitarian, anti-democratic and anti-capitalist, and therefore regarded as a real threat to the freedom, liberty and economic wellbeing of people throughout the world. Moreover, as a cohesive, monolithic force to which all its adherents were bound in solidarity, Marxism–Leninism was inherently an expansionist, crusading ideology intent on converting the entire world to its beliefs.

 

As the fountainhead and leader of this international movement dedicated to the conversion of the non-communist world, Soviet Russia was inevitably seen as being in control of a great many subservient communist parties and insurgencies on a worldwide scale. A second assumption, consequently, was that any country vulnerable to subversion and contiguous to the Russian sphere of influence was ipso facto assumed to be a target for communist penetration. This perception, it was argued, was fostered by Soviet Russia’s own behaviour and that of its so-called fifth columns, in the Middle East (especially Greece and Iran), in Eastern Europe (most notably Czechoslovakia), in Western Europe (France and Italy), and in Asia (particularly China and Indochina). This was the essence of the “conspiracy theory” explicitly alleged by President Eisenhower early in his administration, but which had already become a guiding premise of US policy in the Truman administration.

 

The United States, however, did not arrive at this view all at once. While Moscow’s behaviour during the war confused and exasperated US policymakers, preoccupation with waging the war and a concern to avoid the mistakes of the past led Roosevelt and his top advisers to believe that something could be worked out with the Russians. As the conflict dragged on, Roosevelt came to realise that Russian power flowing into the vacuum left by the defeat of Germany would have to be accepted as a fait accompli. As George F. Kennan would later write, no one could have denied Stalin “a wide military and political glacis on his Western frontier ... except at the cost of another war, which was unthinkable”. The West could not defeat Hitler without the aid of Stalin, placing the latter “automatically in command of half of Europe”. Consequently, “Roosevelt endorsed the new dimensions of Soviet power, in the hope that it would encourage future friendship with the West.”¹

 

One problem, however, was the universalist ideologies publicly espoused during the war by both the United States and Russia. Whereas in private both countries may well have been prepared to adopt a sphere-of-influence policy involving some acknowledgement of the other’s interests and sensitivities regarding Eastern and Western Europe (if not Germany), that is not what they said in public. Privately, Roosevelt by 1945 spoke the language of spheres of influence, but official US foreign policy was couched in terms of one world, open only to democratic values. Roosevelt and Truman believed the American people would not tolerate the nation’s business being conducted in the language of Europe’s traditional diplomacy. But by encouraging misleading, even utopian, expectations they sowed the seeds of growing public disenchantment with what the Russians were doing, and in the process unwittingly played to Moscow’s suspicions. Roosevelt’s death cleared the way for a revision of strategy he himself would probably have executed in time, but perhaps not in as abrupt and confused a manner as it actually came to be effected.

 

The available evidence indicates that, as the Cold War evolved, policymakers on both sides did not adopt confrontational blueprints in the early stages; rather, there was a gradual loss of faith in the strategy of collaboration. Yet there was nothing clear-cut to put in its place. Over time, the basic assumptions each side had developed about the other were allowed to dictate policy. In the case of the United States, these were to the effect that Russia’s intentions were revolutionary. As for Russia, it assumed a fundamental capitalist antipathy. Consequently, each side’s attitude and approach towards the other underwent significant if not inexorable changes from the summer of l945 through the winter of 1947–8, leading the two countries down the path to all-out confrontation.

Image and Reality

In policymaking, perceptions often dictate behaviour, and realities sometimes count less than beliefs, myths and obsessions. US–Russian relations certainly reflected this fact. The Cold War developed not so much from the actions of the protagonists as from the way their actions were interpreted or misinterpreted. More often than not, the images held by one side about the other did not correspond to reality.

 

In regard to Soviet Russia’s conduct during and immediately after the Second World War, this can only be understood in light of the experiences of its people over many years. While doctrinal demands and neurotic personal ambition certainly influenced Stalin’s actions during these years, the overriding requirement underlying Soviet foreign policy was the need for security and economic reconstruction.² Indeed, the behaviour of Soviet Russia after 1917 was not markedly different from that of tsarist Russia—the same centralisation and authoritarianism, the same conspiratorial approach to international relations, the same profound mistrust of the outside world, the same obsession with secrecy and espionage, the same caution, the same capacity for retreat, the same attempt to push the menacing presence of foreigners back across the Russian border, and the same effort to achieve security by expanding Russian space.³

 

If Russia’s communists were more successful than its tsars, the difference is more readily accounted for by their material power and by the weakness and vulnerability of the world around them than by some new compelling sense of mission. They focused their efforts, after all, on the same areas of proximate geographical interest as their predecessors—Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Far East—with markedly greater success only in the first of these spheres. They would ultimately engage in far-flung adventures in places such as Cuba and Africa, yet, allowing for half a century of transformation in communications and transport, it cannot be said they did anything incompatible with tsarist aims and practices.

 

At the time, the Bolshevik Revolution, of course, appeared to friend and foe alike to have changed everything in Russia’s external relations—proclaiming as it did a global crusade against capitalism, imperialism and war. It launched an international movement of revolutionary parties that, in form at least, acknowledged this mission. And it succeeded in digging a political chasm between communist and anti-communist that significantly coloured the nature of an enormous array of internal changes in countries all over the world. But the US belief that Soviet behaviour after the Second World War was essentially an ongoing attempt to apply Marxist–Leninist revolutionary ideology was mistaken. Rather, the character of Russian foreign policy after the revolution was a dictatorial amalgam of revolutionary rhetoric, internal conservative policies and traditional Russian behavioural orientations. By the eve of the Second World War, Russia was no longer in any sense a revolutionary society.

 

The list of faulty images held by one side about the other was extensive. In the case of the United States, during the war it mistook Stalin’s determination to ensure Russian security through spheres of influence as an unfortunate reversion to power politics—something that the US tradition of foreign affairs had historically rejected, Latin America notwithstanding. After the war, Moscow’s policies in this regard came to be viewed as a renewed effort to spread communism outside the borders of Soviet Russia.

Mutual Suspicion

In 1945–6, Russia’s intransigence and unco-operative behaviour, manifested in its German occupation policies, confused and angered the United States. So, too, did its hardline stance on the Eastern European peace treaties—this despite the fact that the United States’ own conduct in both the Italian and Japanese cases set precedents for Soviet actions. And when the United States came to believe that Germany required economic reconstruction—largely because of the severe economic drain that the occupation was proving to be for both the US and British economies—Washington could not fully grasp how its efforts to rehabilitate Germany, made necessary in its view by Soviet Russia’s intransigence, fed Moscow’s anxieties.

 

Stalin’s “two camps” speech in early 1946, in which he claimed the world was divided into two irreconcilable socialist and capitalist–imperialist camps, the Soviet Union’s infuriating conduct at the various Council of Foreign Ministers meetings during the 1945–8 period, its refusal to co-operate with the Marshall Plan in the summer of 1947, the coup in Czechoslovakia in early 1948, followed by the Berlin blockade in 1948–9, the explosion of a Soviet atomic device in late 1949 and the North Korean attack on South Korea in June 1950, all served to confirm in the American mind an image of Soviet Russia as nothing more than a conspiracy disguised as a state, possessed of a single-minded determination to take over the world. But it is crucial to remember that the United States came to this worst-case scenario piecemeal, and wholly to believe it only in the fullness of time.

 

All of this Soviet behaviour precipitated, according to the United States, an entirely rational and necessary response by the West, led by Washington. The Truman Doctrine in the early spring of 1947, which mandated US military and economic support for countries worldwide allegedly facing communist subversion, the Marshall Plan the following June, the creation of the Western European Union in the summer of 1948, the formation of NATO and the merging of the western zones of Germany in 1949, the response in Korea, the massive arms build-up of 1949–53, the creation of the European Defence Community in 1954 and, with its failure, the inclusion of West Germany in NATO in 1955, were all viewed as appropriate reactions to this long series of Russian provocations and aggressions.

 

Nor was the United States able to comprehend that the Russian communists did not always, everywhere, control events or dictate policies within their own area of hegemony. Thus, for example, Tito’s demands for Trieste, his funnelling of support to the Greek communists and his shooting down of two US transport planes in August 1946 were actions that the Western powers readily but erroneously assumed were orchestrated by Stalin. So, too, Soviet Russia’s culpability for and involvement in the North Korean attack on the South in June 1950 were misunderstood by a United States already looking for an excuse to implement National Security Council memorandum 68 (NSC-68). This document, which called for a vast expansion of US military power to counter the aim of the Soviet Union to “impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world”, laid the foundations for the US policy of containment.⁴ Moscow’s role in Indochina and later in Cuba (the Castro revolution) was likewise misinterpreted. In both instances, Russia’s involvement came after that of the United States and occurred essentially as a function of Moscow’s growing rivalry with the People’s Republic of China for influence in the Third World and of its global competition with the United States, which by the 1950s had taken on a dynamic all its own.

 

As for Russia, it seems to have misread the relationship between Britain and the United States during the Second World War. Guided by its Leninist proclivities, Moscow was too ready to assume the inevitability of Anglo-American discord and to seek ways constantly of exploiting it. The US delay in opening up a second front against Hitler, the failure of Washington to share the atomic bomb secret with Moscow and its exasperating propensity to postpone decisions on a post-war territorial accommodation unquestionably fuelled Russian apprehension and doubt concerning the West’s motives.

 

Anglo-American conduct in the Italian armistice negotiations did not help matters. By refusing to involve the Russians from an early stage, Britain and the United States created a precedent for Russia’s later actions in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. But it was France’s intransigence on the Allied Control Council for Germany that set the tone for much of Russia’s behaviour. From the outset, the French sought to employ the machinery of the council in a vengeful way against Germany. They dismantled anything that could be moved from the zone they controlled in Germany and took it to France. They vetoed many resolutions sponsored by the British and Americans to treat the Germans with some modicum of civility. This behaviour thoroughly exasperated France’s British and American allies, but they did nothing to oppose it. This was duly noted by Moscow and served to encourage its own hardline stance on Germany.

 

The Truman Doctrine, with its unfortunate amalgam of ideological rhetoric and hardline proposals, was read in Moscow as a call-to-arms. The subsequent Marshall Plan thus came to be viewed by Russia as an economic declaration of war and as an attempt to subvert its legitimate role in Eastern Europe. Moscow saw Washington’s atomic bomb policy as a thinly disguised attempt to perpetuate a nuclear monopoly on behalf of an aggressive West, with the ultimate intent of employing it to destabilise Soviet Russia itself.

A Moral Crusade

As the conflict with Soviet Russia intensified and lengthened, many of those “present at the creation” of the United States’ policy of confrontation towards Moscow argued it was time to jettison the naive, utopian and idealistic attitudes of the inter-war period. A new realism was now called for. The “realist” message proclaimed that the impotent moralism long characteristic of US foreign policy was obsolete. Force and policy now had to be integrated, in contrast to what had happened from 1941 to 1945. The ability of force to put an end to the history of force and bring forth an age of harmony could no longer be counted on. The United States could no longer vacillate between isolationism and world utopianism. Farewells therefore had to be said to Kellogg–Briand pacts that outlawed war, to policies of non-recognition without sanctions, and to hopes of international order and legality administered by a world organisation.

 

But what should the new perspective be? The years 1945–8 produced two rather disparate responses. Initially, those entrusted with the responsibility for US foreign policy began to speak of ending the very rivalries and balance-of-power politics that had played such an important role in buttressing the United States’ own security early in its history. In order to sell the new realism to the American people, it had to be presented in moral terms. The Cold War had to be transformed into a crusade. This crusade was doubly moral because it would save the world from the catastrophe that would inevitably occur if the communists faced only procrastinators and weaklings, and because it would gradually provoke the transformation, if not the conversion of the enemy. While the dream of final harmony was postponed, it was not put aside.

 

It was in this context that the elements of a new world order were first presented as contributions to the moral success of the new realism. Aid to underdeveloped nations, support for the United Nations and European integration, were stations on the way to a world that would increasingly resemble the United States. Moreover, the methods adopted in pursuit of the new realism were highly characteristic of American exceptionalism: the United States had the right to build up nuclear forces far beyond the requirements of adequate deterrence, and to undertake covert operations to “destabilise” and “deactivate” potential enemies, because its motives were higher, its ideals loftier, than those of other countries.

 

The evolving Cold War, interpreted as a mortal contest of values in a moral context, seemed to offer endless struggle. The power that this vision came to exert over the American imagination was that it promised an endless peace as the reward for that struggle. When “unfreedom” was finally defeated, the world would come to enjoy that new condition which was the ultimate end of US foreign policies in the first place—a just ordering of society, a world of legality, prosperity, consensus and harmony. Seeing the Cold War as a competition among values thus gratified the old belief in an America above the corruption and compromises of other nations.

 

The new globalism forced Americans to realise that they could no longer escape involvement in an imperfect world. But because the Cold War, like the Second World War, was conceived as a moral crusade, it inflated an involvement that should essentially have been limited and pragmatic into a moral mission. Since Americans were accustomed to victory in battle and were stronger than any nation in human history, they believed that the world’s problems could be resolved if they willed them to be and applied enough power. Thus, US military might, consecrated by the victory of the Second World War and reconfirmed by the development of the atomic bomb, joined with American idealism to inaugurate a policy of global interventionism.

Global Responsibility

The new credo was rationalised and sanctified by the notion of global responsibility. Imbued with a strident missionary zeal, the idea of responsibility came to be a basic assumption of US foreign policy that few effectively challenged. The political rhetoric at the time characterised the US mission in the world as one inspired by philanthropic motives. “Other nations have interests,” Dean Rusk would later pronounce, “the United States has responsibilities.”

 

In accord with this new operational notion of global responsibility, the United States became active in virtually every sphere of international relations. It was the primary sponsor and supporter of the United Nations. It pushed hard for the expansion of foreign trade and the development of new markets abroad for US business. It engineered the creation of a vast complex of alliances and regional institutions, while simultaneously solidifying its hegemony in areas regarded as its traditional spheres of influence. In all of these activities, three common denominators came to be emphasised: the United States has global duties and responsibilities; the United States stands as the doorkeeper of freedom and morality on the world stage; and world peace depends upon the United States’ willingness and readiness to act abroad for the good of all mankind.

 

The ideological rhetoric of the Truman Doctrine, though exaggerated for political reasons, provided a new justification for the evolving policy which then helped shape the American outlook. Containment was the first major policy manifestation of the new approach. But as the strategy of containment gradually developed, so the old Puritan evangelism or world mission came to have an impact. This was reflected in the rhetoric of the Marshall Plan, which Joseph M. Jones described as “infinitely more than a policy of containment of Soviet–Communist expansion”; it was also “a constructive policy of building throughout the free world the conditions not only of peace but of a good life”.⁵

 

As the struggle wore on, many of America’s easy-going beliefs—its innate optimism and above all its confidence in ultimate victory—came to be sorely tested. An apparently expanding series of Russian-orchestrated challenges along a constantly shifting line of containment led to a perception of a worldwide threat against which Kennan’s original notion of the application of selective counterforce was deemed to be increasingly inadequate. The sudden shift in the Truman administration’s understanding of the amount of resources required for containment culminated in the planning goals of NSC-68. It remained for the North Korean attack on South Korea in mid-1950 to push the United States into adopting the definitive integrated response to the communist threat. Once the idea had been internalised in the American psyche that the Russian-orchestrated communist onslaught was wholly international in scope, the way was paved for the acceptance of domino and conspiracy theories. US commitments now became interdependent. If successfully challenged in one area, so the reasoning went, they would inevitably be challenged in others.

 

Combating the threatening, adversarial ideology of communism became an obsession. The varied reasons for US fear and hatred of communism rested on a set of corollary assumptions about “the nature of the beast”. The policy rhetoric urged “sleepless hostility to Communism, even preventive war”.⁶ In short, the world came to be viewed in “zero-sum” terms: what one side won, the other side necessarily lost. Such an outlook almost guaranteed permanent conflict by recognising no virtue in conciliation or co-operation with an ideological foe. Thus, wars of righteousness in which compromise and limited objectives are regarded as treason came to the fore in the 1940s and 1950s—modern counterparts to earlier historical wars of religion. By the time John Foster Dulles took over the US State Department, distinctions between direct action against Soviet Russia and frustrating its “designs” had become blurred beyond recognition.

The Lure of Analogy

Conspiracy, having been linked intimately with containment as a strategic concept, loomed large in the US reading of events. It allowed decision makers in both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to see, through the prism of analogical reasoning, patterns in communist behaviour. The Korean episode, along with increased communist insurgency elsewhere in Asia, was taken to illuminate the writing on the wall, and the earlier US experiences with the Russians in Europe and the Middle East came to be viewed as part of a global pattern of aggression, effected in these instances via internal subversion.

 

Unarmed with any deep historical sense of cause and effect in world affairs, the United States plunged into a vigorous leadership role possessed of the firm conviction that it had now come to understand the object lessons of history. Two earlier events had made a lasting impression on US leaders of the Second World War era, creating strongly held assumptions about what US policy should be after that conflict: the failure of the League of Nations to oppose Japan’s aggression in Manchuria in 1931, and the Munich Agreement of 1938. Thus, in September 1945 Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal dismissed the idea that “we should endeavor to buy their [Russian] understanding and sympathy. We tried that once with Hitler. There are no returns on appeasement”.⁷ Moreover, Russian actions were interpreted in accord with the US conception of totalitarian regimes. If you’ve seen one totalitarian regime, it was said, you’ve seen them all. Repression at home implied aggression abroad. As Truman observed in May 1947, “There isn’t any difference in totalitarian states ... Nazi, Communist or Fascist, or Franco, or anything else—they are all alike.”⁸ Given these views of appeasement and totalitarianism, there was a tendency for US decision makers to focus on those aspects of Soviet conduct that fitted the paradigm—Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, for instance—but not Finland, Iran, Czechoslovakia or Greece.

 

When faced with Russian pressures in Iran, Turkey and Greece in 1946–7, the Truman administration saw these events as analogous to developments in the interwar years (especially the Manchurian, Italo-Ethiopian and Czechoslovakian crises). Policy inferences were drawn from these analogies, prompting the United States to intervene in the three countries with economic and military assistance. Analogies were also drawn between North Korea’s attack on South Korea and the Japanese, Italian and German aggressions prior to the Second World War. These analogies influenced the US decision to counter the North Korean assault. And in the case of Vietnam, a loosely knit mass of inferred historical parallels underlay the escalating US intervention—the “loss” of China, the 1954 French defeat at Dien Bien Phu and communist behaviour in the Quemoy–Matsu, Berlin and Cuban crises.

 

Although it was Czechoslovakia’s strategic location that ultimately led to the Munich betrayal, the latter came to be identified in the United States with the abstract proposition that any aggression anywhere could/would have disastrous results. This simplification would cause Washington to adopt a whole strategic rationale on how to handle Soviet actions, a rationale which was applied fairly indiscriminately. The United States saw object lessons in how not to do things and then began to apply these new prescriptions in circumstances that, from a shallow perspective, they seemed to fit.

 

This approach is tantamount to the application of principle out of context. The assumed remedy is utilised whenever the principle seems to apply. A state’s previous unfortunate experience with a particular type of danger may lead it inadvertently to believe the present situation is like the past one.

 

The notion of conspiracy provided a crude but serviceable strategic framework for decision makers to employ in situations characterised by a high degree of ambiguity. It was extremely difficult to determine ahead of time the strategic value, or relative vulnerability to communist subversion, of individual countries. The conspiracy theory resolved that psychological and political problem by making all regions, and by extension each state within a region, strategically important.

 

The conspiracy theory also gave US decision makers the necessary arguments to cultivate domestic support for the resources needed to operate a global containment policy. It was difficult to explain, let alone justify, the demand for ever-growing resources to expend in areas that seemingly had little or no direct connection to US security. But the allegation of a worldwide communist conspiracy made precisely that connection and thus served to prevent the public, and Congress, from ignoring potential trouble spots that might later lead to dangerous security challenges.

 

Ultimately, the conspiracy notion reflected only too well the United States’ dominant Puritan ethic, pandering on the one hand to the public’s fundamentalist tendencies, while on the other serving to socialise those attentive citizens (and their representatives in Congress) who remained sceptical. By Eisenhower’s first term, the conspiracy idea had gained an incredible momentum of its own because of its usefulness in generating public support for the application of containment worldwide. It came to form the basis of the national consensus in waging the Cold War. A virtually complete consensus on this point, strengthened by the hysteria of the McCarthy period, held for at least a decade, and weakened only slowly thereafter. Unfortunately, it locked the country into a highly inflexible containment strategy.

Containment

NSC-68 was at the centre of this development, epitomising much of what was injurious and destructive in the US tradition of foreign affairs. The goal of NSC-68 was to “light the path to peace and order”. Americans had to “bear witness” to their values. NSC-68 reflected the moralistic appeal to righteousness, the self-image of uniqueness and the fundamentalist conception of a central evil with which Americans had to do battle that feature in several of the key documents and pronouncements of US history: for example, Lincoln’s second inaugural address, Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of war against Germany, Kennan’s “X” article, John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address and George Bush’s justification for war against Iraq. Its primary author, Paul Nitze, argued in NSC-68 that the United States had to take the lead in trying to “bring about order and justice by means consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy”. There is also in NSC-68 a strident statement of militant nationalism. The concept of the evil “other” so assiduously cultivated in that document is central to the vision of US foreign policy—a symbolism one first detects in the Truman Doctrine. NSC-68’s power derived not from any original formulations but from its clever reworking of the powerful tradition of American nationalism.

 

The fundamentalist urge to reduce complex reality to black-and-white simplicity became a dominant feature of the Cold War under Truman and Eisenhower. Over time, the idea of a “Kremlin design” was more frequently employed by US leaders. For Forrestal, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Nitze and Dulles, for example, no debate over Russian intentions was necessary. And because human beings tend to attribute greater logic and coherence to others’ behaviour than actually exists, it was not difficult to take the next step and conclude that Moscow had a clear strategy to conquer the world, and was now beginning to develop the capacity to bring it off. It was necessary, therefore, to move to counteract what the Russians might be capable of doing. A single-minded, persistent emphasis on such an approach would surely bring dividends.

 

Beginning in 1947, the Rio de Janeiro Pact, Truman Doctrine, North Atlantic Treaty, South-East Asia Collective Defence Treaty, Caracas Declaration, Taiwan Resolution, Baghdad Pact and Eisenhower Doctrine all marked distinct but related steps in a policy which appeared unable to articulate any purpose other than preventing a military expansion of the Russian sphere of influence. Numerous palpable opportunities to manage the conflict successfully at lower levels of intensity, if not settle it altogether, were ignored. One can only conclude that the rhetoric of response, that is to say the quantification of means over ends, was allowed in the end to dictate US policy towards Soviet Russia.

 

The spectre of Soviet Russia after 1945 may well have been the most stressful intrusion upon the United States’ political consciousness since the Civil War. The disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991, and with it the Cold War, seemed to vindicate the US approach. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, numerous US political leaders spoke confidently of the “next American century” in which the “rule of law” would prevail as part of a “new world order”. Like Henry Luce fifty years earlier, George Bush led the way in the early 1990s by predicting that the United States’ pre-eminent world role would continue. Only the United States, he said, has the “moral leadership” to preside over the world’s affairs.

 

Bush’s views were echoed by a steady stream of free-flowing rhetoric, reflecting the ageless moralistic component of the US foreign policy tradition and reiterating the notion that the United States has a special duty to create a new world order. Shortly after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, former Assistant Secretary of Defence Richard L. Armitage boasted that “those who so recently predicted America’s imminent decline must now acknowledge that the United States alone possesses sufficient moral, economic, political and military horsepower to jump-start and drive international efforts to curb international lawlessness”.⁹ The United States, once again, was enjoying a “unipolar moment”, with little likelihood in the foreseeable future of any other country being able to rival it.

 

E. H. Carr once said that “the belief that whatever succeeds is right, and has only to be understood to be approved, must, if consistently held, empty thought of purpose, and thereby sterilize and ultimately destroy it”. He added:

 

Any sound political thought must be based on elements of both utopia and reality. Where utopianism has become a hollow and intolerable sham, which serves merely as a disguise for the interests of the privileged, the realist performs an indispensable service in unmasking it. But pure realism can offer nothing but a naked struggle for power which makes any kind of international society impossible. The human will will continue to seek an escape from the logical consequences of realism in the vision of an international order which, as soon as it crystallizes itself into concrete political form, becomes tainted with self-interest and hypocrisy, and must once more be attacked with the instruments of realism.¹⁰

 

For much of the twentieth century, the United States struggled to locate the happy mean between these two lodestars—a search that was greatly complicated by its tradition of foreign affairs. That it has yet to resolve the great dilemmas deeply embedded in its worldview remains most unsettling indeed. The courage to change, however, is something that is learned from experience. In foreign policy, as in life, there is a “time and a season”. Such courage frees a nation from the chimera of a foolish and crippling consistency. It shatters the illusion that every problem is the same as every other problem and puts a premium on political imagination. This was something that the Truman and Eisenhower administrations never really learned or understood. It is a problem that continues to plague the United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Endnotes

1. George F. Kennan, “World War II: Thirty Years After”, Survey 63, no. 3 (winter–spring 1975), pp. 35–6.

 

2. Russia lost one-quarter of its capital equipment, seventeen hundred towns, seventy thousand villages, nearly one hundred thousand collective farms and more than twenty million dead during the Second World War. In 1945, Russia’s steel production had sunk to only one-eighth that of the United States.

 

3. See Louis Halle, The Cold War as History (New York: Macmillan, 1967), chapter 1.

 

4. The National Security Council approved NSC-68 as “a statement of policy” on 29 September 1950, just three months after North Korea attacked South Korea.

 

5. Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (New York: Viking, 1955), p. 240.

 

6. On the policy semantics of the Truman era, see Ernest May, “Lessons” of the Past (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 19–86.

 

7. Ibid., p. 33.

 

8. See John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 36.

 

9. Cited in Michael T. Klare, “The New World Order”, Progressive 51, no. 11 (November 1990), p. 16.

 

10. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 100–1.