IMPERIUM

Since the Second World War, the external order of American power has been largely insulated from the internal political system. If party competition in the domestic arena has rested on rival electoral blocs, combining significant fluidity of contours with increasing sharpness of conflicts, in the global arena such differences are far less. Commonality of outlook and continuity of objectives set the administration of empire apart from rule of the homeland. [1] For the former: ‘Homeland’, nlr 81, May–June 2013. In presidential contests campaign rhetoric will routinely assail incumbents for weakness or mismanagement of foreign policy. Victors will then proceed much as before. In some degree, the contrast between the two is a function of the general distance between the horizons of chancelleries or corporations and of citizens in all capitalist democracies—what happens overseas is of much greater consequence to bankers and diplomats, officers and industrialists, than to voters, issuing in correspondingly more focused and coherent outcomes.

In the American case it also follows from two further local particulars: the provincialism of an electorate with minimal knowledge of the outside world, and a political system that—in strident contradiction with the design of the Founders—has increasingly given virtually untrammelled power to the executive in the conduct of foreign affairs, freeing presidencies, often baulked of domestic goals by fractious legislatures, to act without comparable cross-cutting pressures abroad. In the sphere created by these objective conditions of policy-formation, there developed from mid-century around the Presidency a narrow foreign-policy elite, and a distinctive ideological vocabulary with no counterpart in internal politics: conceptions of the ‘grand strategy’ to be pursued by the American state in its dealings with the world. [2] For the general composition of foreign policy-makers, see the best succinct study of the arc of us foreign policy in the twentieth century, Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half-Century, Baltimore 1995, 2nd edn, pp. 13–15: one third made up of career bureaucrats, to two-thirds of—typically more influential—‘in-and-outers’, recruited 40 per cent from investment banks and corporations, 40 per cent from law firms, and most of the rest from political science departments. The parameters of these were laid down as victory came into sight during the Second World War, and with it the prospect of planetary power.

i. prodromes

The us imperium that came into being after 1945 had a long pre-history. In North America, uniquely, the originating coordinates of empire were coeval with the nation. These lay in the combination of a settler economy free of any of the feudal residues or impediments of the Old World, and a continental territory protected by two oceans: producing the purest form of nascent capitalism, in the largest nation-state, anywhere on earth. That remained the enduring material matrix of the country’s ascent in the century after independence. To the objective privileges of an economy and geography without parallel were added two potent subjective legacies, of culture and politics: the idea—derived from initial Puritan settlement—of a nation enjoying divine favour, imbued with a sacred calling; and the belief—derived from the War of Independence—that a republic endowed with a constitution of liberty for all times had arisen in the New World. Out of these four ingredients emerged, very early, the ideological repertoire of an American nationalism that afforded seamless passage to an American imperialism, characterized by a complexio oppositorum of exceptionalism and universalism. The United States was unique among nations, yet at the same time a lode-star for the world: an order at once historically unexampled and ultimately compelling example to all.

These were the convictions of the Founders. The radiance of the nation would in the first instance be territorial, within the Western Hemisphere. As Jefferson put it to Monroe in 1801: ‘However our present interests may restrain us within our limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our multiplication will expand it beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws’. But in the last instance, that radiance would be more than territorial: it would be moral and political. In Adams’s words to Jefferson in 1813: ‘Our pure, virtuous, public spirited, federative republic will last forever, govern the globe and introduce the perfection of man’. [3] See Robert Kagan’s clear-eyed Dangerous Nation: America and the World 1600–1900, London 2006, pp. 80, 156; for an assessment, ‘Consilium’, pp. 136–41, below. Towards mid-century, the two registers fused into the famous slogan of an associate of Jackson: ‘the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole continent that providence has given us for the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government’. For a land ‘vigorous and fresh from the hand of God’ had a ‘blessed mission to the nations of the world’. Who could doubt ‘the far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness’? [4] John O’Sullivan, coiner of the slogan and author of these declarations, was an ideologue for Jackson and Van Buren: see Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right, New York 1995, pp. 39–42, unsurpassed in its field. The annexation of half the surface of Mexico followed in short order.

Once the current boundaries of the United States were largely reached, the same sense of the future took more commercial than territorial form, looking west rather than south. Lincoln’s Secretary of State exhorted his compatriots: ‘You are already the great continental power of America. But does that content you? I trust it does not. You want the commerce of the world. This must be looked for on the Pacific. The nation that draws most from the earth and fabricates most, and sells the most to foreign nations, must be and will be the great power of the earth.’ [5] Seward did not neglect territorial expansion, acquiring Alaska and the Midway Islands and pressing for Hawaii, but regarded this as means not end in the build-up of American power. What Manifest Destiny and the conquest of Mexico were on land, Commodore Perry and the Open Door could be on sea—the horizon of an American marine and mercantile primacy in the Orient, bearing free trade and Christianity to its shores. With the outbreak of the Spanish–American War, classical inter-imperialist conflict brought colonies in the Pacific and the Caribbean, and full-fledged entrance into the ranks of the great powers. Under the first Roosevelt, Panama was carved out of Colombia as a us dependency to link the two seas, and race—Anglo-Saxon breeding and solidarity—added to religion, democracy and trade in the rhetoric of the nation’s calling.

This was never uncontested. At each stage, eloquent American voices had denounced the megalomania of Manifest Destiny, the plunder of Mexico, the seizure of Hawaii, the slaughter in the Philippines, attacking every kind of racism and imperialism as a betrayal of the anti-colonial birthright of the republic. Rejection of foreign adventures—annexations or interventions—was not a break with national values, but always a possible version of them. From the beginning, exceptionalism and universalism formed a potentially unstable compound. Conviction of the first allowed for belief that the United States could preserve its unique virtues only by remaining a society apart from a fallen world. Commitment to the second authorized a messianic activism by the United States to redeem that world. Between these two poles—‘separation’ and ‘regenerative intervention’, as Anders Stephanson has described them—public opinion could more than once abruptly shift. [6] Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, pp. xii–xiii; it is one of the strengths of this study, which assembles a bouquet of the most extravagant pronouncements of American chauvinism, that it also supplies the (often impassioned) counterpoint of its opponents.

As the us entered the new century, however, such mood-swings were of less significance than the sheer economic and demographic growth of the country. By 1910, American capitalism was already in a league of its own, with an industrial magnitude larger than that of Germany and Britain combined. In an age permeated with social-darwinist beliefs in the survival of the fittest, such indices of production could only mean, for ambitious contemporaries, the coming of a power commensurate with them. As the Civil War felled half a million of his countrymen, Whitman exulted that ‘we have undoubtedly in the United States the greatest military power in the world’. [7] Victor Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony, London 1978, p. 57, which offers a graphic account of imperial imaginings in the ‘Middle Decades’ of the nineteenth century. Yet after Reconstruction, the peace-time strength of the army remained modest by international standards. The navy—marines dispatched for regular interventions in the Caribbean and Central America—had more future. Symptomatically, the entrance of the United States into the intellectual arena of Weltpolitik came with the impact of Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power upon History, closely studied in Berlin, London, Paris and Tokyo, and a touchstone for both Roosevelts, which argued that ‘everything that moves on water’—as opposed to land—possessed ‘the prerogative of offensive defence’. [8] Captain A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, London 1890, p. 87. A prolific commentator on international affairs, adviser to Hay on the Open Door Notes and intimate of the first Roosevelt, Mahan was a vigorous proponent of a martial spirit and robust navalism: peace was merely the ‘tutelary deity of the stock-market’. A decade later, Brooks Adams laid out the global logic of us industrial preeminence in America’s Economic Supremacy. In 1900, he wrote, ‘For the first time in human experience a single nation this year leads in the production of the precious metals, copper, iron and coal; and this year also, for the first time, the world has done its banking to the west and not to the east of the Atlantic.’ In the struggle for life among nations, empire was ‘the most dazzling prize for which any people can contend’. Provided the American state acquired the necessary organizational form, the us could in future surpass the imperial wealth and power of England and Rome. [9] ‘Within two generations’, Adams told his readers, America’s ‘great interests will cover the Pacific, which it will hold like an inland sea’, and presiding over ‘the development of Eastern Asia, reduce it to a part of our system’. To that end, ‘America must expand and concentrate until the limit of the possible is attained; for Governments are simply huge corporations in competition, in which the most economical, in proportion to its energy, survives, and in which the wasteful and the slow are undersold and eliminated’. Given that ‘these great struggles sometimes involve an appeal to force, safety lies in being armed and organized against all emergencies’. America’s Economic Supremacy, New York 1900, pp. 194, 50–1, 85, 222. Adams and Mahan were friends, in the White House circle of tr. But when war broke out in 1914, there was still a wide gap between such premonitions and any consensus that America should involve itself in the quarrels of Europe.

II

With the arrival of Woodrow Wilson in the White House, however, a convulsive turn in the trajectory of American foreign policy was at hand. As no other President before or after him, Wilson gave voice to every chord of presumption in the imperial repertoire, at messianic pitch. Religion, capitalism, democracy, peace and the might of the United States were one. ‘Lift your eyes to the horizons of business’, he told American salesmen, ‘and with the inspiration of the thought that you are Americans and are meant to carry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity wherever you go, go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and more happy, and convert them to the principles of America.’ [10] Address to the World’s Salesmanship Congress in Detroit, 10 July 1916: The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 37, Princeton 1981, p. 387. In a campaign address of 1912, he declared: ‘If I did not believe in Providence I would feel like a man going blindfolded through a haphazard world. I do believe in Providence. I believe that God presided over the inception of this nation. I believe he planted in us the visions of liberty.’ A ‘divine destiny’ was furthermore in store for America: ‘We are chosen and prominently chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty’. [11] Campaign address in Jersey City, 26 May 1912: Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 24, Princeton 1977, p. 443. The route might be arduous, but the bourne was clear. ‘Slowly ascending the tedious climb that leads to the final uplands, we shall get our ultimate view of the duties of mankind. We have breasted a considerable part of that climb and shall presently, it may be in a generation or two, come out upon those great heights where there shines unobstructed the light of the justice of God’. [12] Address to the Southern Commercial Congress in Mobile, 27 October 1913: Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 28, Princeton 1978, p. 52. After sending us troops into more Caribbean and Central American states than any of his predecessors—Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua—in 1917 Wilson plunged the country into the First World War, a conflict in which America had ‘the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world’. [13] Address in the Princess Theatre in Cheyenne, 24 September 1919: Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 63, Princeton 1990, p. 469.

If us entry into the war made victory for the Entente a foregone conclusion, imposing an American peace proved more difficult. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, a hurried attempt to counter Lenin’s denunciation of secret treaties and imperialist rule, were distinguished mainly by their call for a global Open Door—‘the removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers’—and ‘impartial adjustment’, not abolition, of ‘all colonial claims’. Contrary to legend, self-determination appears nowhere in the enumeration. Wilson’s bulletins of democratic deliverance were treated with disdain by his partners at Versailles. At home, the League he proposed to avert future conflicts fared no better. ‘The stage is set, the destiny disclosed’, he announced, presenting his arrangements for perpetual peace in 1919, ‘the hand of God has led us into this way’. [14] Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 61, Princeton 1981, p. 436. After whipping up hysteria against anyone of German origin during the war, Wilson had no compunction in declaring that ‘the only organized forces in this country’ against the Versailles Treaty he presented to the Senate were ‘the forces of hyphenated Americans’—‘hyphen is the knife that is being stuck into the document’ (sic): vol. 63, pp. 469, 493. The Senate was unmoved. America could dispense with Wilson’s ambitions. The country was not ready for an indefinite extension of regenerative intervention into the affairs of the world at large. Under the next three presidents, the United States concentrated on recovering its loans to Europe, otherwise limiting its operations outside the hemisphere to ineffectual attempts to get Germany back onto its feet and restrain Japan from overdoing expansion into China. To many, capsizal to the pole of separation—in the vocabulary of its opponents, ‘isolationism’—seemed all but complete.

The reality was that American entry into the First World War had answered to no determinable national interest. A gratuitous decision by its president, enforced with sweeping ethnic persecution and political repression at home, it was the product of a massive excess of us power over any material goals procurable by it. The rhetoric of American expansionism had typically projected markets overseas as if they were an external frontier, with the claim that us goods and investments now required outlets abroad that only an Open Door could assure. Yet the American economy, with its abundant natural resources and vast internal market, continued to be largely autarkic. Foreign trade accounted for no more than 10 per cent of gnp down to the First World War, when most American exports still consisted of raw materials and processed foodstuffs. Nor, of course, was there any Open Door to the us market itself, traditionally protected by high tariffs with scant regard for the principles of free trade. Still less was there the remotest threat of attack or invasion from Europe. It was this disjuncture between ideology and reality that brought Wilson’s millenarian globalism to an abrupt end. The United States could afford to dictate the military outcome of war in Europe. But if the cost of its intervention was small, the gain was nil. Neither at popular nor at elite level was any pressing need felt for institutional follow-through. America could look after itself, without worrying unduly about Europe. Under the banner of a return to normalcy, in 1920 Harding buried his Democratic opponent in the largest electoral landslide of modern times.

But within a decade, the arrival of the Depression was a signal that the pre-history of the American empire was approaching its end. If the initial Wall Street crash of 1929 was the bursting of an endogenous credit bubble, the fuse of the bank failures that burnt the us economy into the real slump was lit by the collapse of the Creditanstalt in Austria in 1931, and its knock-on effects across Europe. The crisis brought home that, however relatively insulated American factories—farms less so—might still be from world trade, American deposits were not from international financial markets, in a signal that with the passing of London’s role as pivot of the system, and the default of New York as successor, the order of capital as a whole was at risk in the absence of a stabilizing centre. The immediate concerns of Roosevelt’s first term lay in domestic measures to overcome the crisis, prompting unceremonious abandonment of the gold standard and brusque rejection of any coordinated international attempt to manage exchange rates. But by previous standards the New Deal was not protectionist. The Smoot–Hawley Act was dismantled, tariffs selectively lowered, and an impassioned champion of free trade—to American specifications—put in charge of foreign policy: Cordell Hull, the ‘Tennessee Cobden’, becoming the longest-serving Secretary of State in us history.

Towards the end of Roosevelt’s second term, as war raged in East Asia and threatened in Europe, rearmament started to make good the weaknesses (highlighted by the recession in 1937) of domestic recovery, giving the New Deal a second wind. The internal fortunes of the American economy and external postures of the American state were henceforward joined as they had never been before. But though the White House was increasingly on the qui vive to developments abroad, and military readiness stepped up, public opinion remained averse to any prospect of a re-run of 1917–20, and within the Administration there was little or no conception of what the American role or priorities might be should one materialize. Roosevelt had become increasingly alarmed at German and to a lesser extent Japanese belligerence. Hull was concerned above all by the retreat of national economies behind tariff walls, and the erection of trade blocs. At the War Department, Woodring resisted any thought of involvement in a new round of great power conflicts. Beyond conflicting negative apprehensions, there was not yet much positive sense of the place of American power in the world ahead.

2. crystallization

The vacuum of longer-range reflections in Washington would be underlined with the appearance of a remarkable work composed before Pearl Harbour, but published shortly after it, America’s Strategy in World Politics, whose author Nicholas Spykman—a Dutchman with a background in Egypt and Java, then holding a chair at Yale—died a year later. [15] Spykman had a remarkable career, whose early years have aroused no curiosity in his adopted country, and later years been ignored in his native country, where he appears to be still largely unknown. Educated at Delft, Spykman went to the Middle East in 1913 at the age of twenty, and to Batavia in 1916, as a journalist and—at least in Java, and perhaps also in Egypt—undercover agent of the Dutch state in the management of opinion, as references in Kees van Dijk, The Netherlands Indies and the Great War 1914–1918, Leiden 2007 reveal: pp. 229, 252, 477. While in Java, he published a bi-lingual—Dutch and Malay—book entitled Hindia Zelfbestuur [Self-Rule for the Indies], Batavia 1918, advising the national movement to think more seriously about the economics of independence, and develop cooperatives and trade unions rather than simply denouncing foreign investment. In 1920 he turned up in California, completed a doctorate on Simmel at Berkeley by 1923, published as a book by Chicago in 1925, when he was hired by Yale as a professor of international relations. Not a few mysteries remain to be unravelled in this trajectory, but it is clear that Spykman was from early on a cool and original mind, who unlike Morgenthau or Kelsen, the two other European intellectuals in America with whom he might otherwise be compared, arrived in the us not as a refugee, but as an esprit fort from the Indies who after naturalization felt no inhibition in delivering sharp judgements on his host society. In what remains perhaps the most striking single exercise in geo-political literature of any kind, Spykman laid out a basic conceptual grid for the understanding of contemporary relations between states, and a comprehensive map of American positions and prospects within it. In an international system without central authority, the primary objective of the foreign policy of every state was necessarily the preservation and improvement of its power, in a struggle to curb that of other states. Political equilibrium—a balance of power—was a noble ideal, but ‘the truth of the matter is that states are only interested in a balance which is in their favour. Not an equilibrium, but a generous margin is their objective’. The means of power were four: persuasion, purchase, barter and coercion. While military strength was the primary requirement of every sovereign state, all were instruments of an effective foreign policy. Combining them, hegemony was a ‘power position permitting the domination of all states within its reach’. [16] Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, New York 1942, pp. 7, 21, 19.

Such hegemony the United States had long enjoyed over most of the Western hemisphere. But it was a dangerous mistake to think that it could therefore rely on the protection of two oceans, and the resources of the interlinked landmass lying between them, to maintain its power position vis-à-vis Germany and Japan. A detailed inventory of the strategic materials needed for success in modern war showed that Latin America, for all its valuable raw materials, could not supply every critical item missing from North America. [17] Six decades later, in the only serious engagement since with Spykman’s work, Robert Art has argued that his ‘masterful book’ erred in thinking North America was impregnable against military invasion, but vulnerable to economic strangulation by the Axis powers if they were victorious in Europe. The quarter-sphere, Art showed, had the raw materials to withstand any blockade: America could have stayed out of the Second World War without risk to itself. But its entry into the war was nevertheless rational, for purposes of the Cold War. ‘By fighting in World War Two and helping to defeat Germany and Japan, the United States, in effect, established forward operating bases against the Soviet Union in the form of Western Europe and Japan. Having these economic-industrial areas, together with Persian Gulf oil, on America’s side led to the Soviet Union’s encirclement, rather than America’s, which would have been the case had it not entered the war’: ‘The United States, the Balance of Power and World War II: Was Spykman Right?’, Security Studies, Spring 2005, pp. 365–406, now included in Robert Art, America’s Grand Strategy and World Politics, New York 2009, pp. 69–106. Nor was it realistic to imagine unaffected support for the United States to the south. The record of Washington in the region, where ‘our so-called painless imperialism has seemed painless only to us’, precluded that. Nothing like the ‘modern, capitalistic credit economy’ of the United States, with its highly developed industrial system, giant corporations, militant union struggles and strike-breaker vigilantes existed in the still largely feudal societies of Latin America, while the abc states of its far south lay ‘too far from the centre of our power to be easily intimidated by measures short of war’. [18] Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics, pp. 64, 213, 62. Any purely hemispheric defence was an illusion; still more so, quarter-sphere defence confined to North America alone, if the us was to avoid becoming a mere buffer state between German and Japanese empires. American strategy would have to be offensive, striking out across the seas at the two powers now at war—by the time the book came out—against the us on the other side of the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Spykman’s rebuttal of isolationism became conventional wisdom once the us entered the war. But not his wider vision, which in its cool dismissal of American verities that would be recycled by the Administration as war-time objectives remained incompatible with any of the doctrines that came to be formulated in Washington during the conflict. America’s Strategy in World Politics explained that liberal democracy had become a stale myth; laissez-faire led to increasing monopoly and concentration of economic power; free trade was a fiction mocked by state subsidies; at home, class struggle, declared non-existent, was settled by tear gas and violence; abroad, American bayonets taught lesser breeds modern accounting. [19] ‘The whole social myth of liberal democracy has lost most of its revolutionary force since the middle of the nineteenth century, and in its present form is hardly adequate to sustain democratic practices in the countries where it originated, let alone inspire new loyalties in other peoples and other lands’. As for the country’s economic creed, ‘American business still believes that an invisible hand guides the economic process and that an intelligent selfishness and a free and unhampered operation of the price system will produce the greatest good for the greatest number’. Overall, ‘North American ideology, as might be expected, is essentially a middle-class business ideology’—though it also included, of course, ‘certain religious elements’: American Strategy in World Politics, pp. 215–7, 258, 7. For Spykman’s sardonic notations on the Monroe Doctrine, Roosevelt Corollary and the Good Neighbour policy in the ‘American Mediterranean’, see pp. 60–4. Declining to take the standard rhetoric of the struggle at face value, Spykman arrived at conclusions that could only be jarring to the policy-makers of the hour. The us should already be reckoning on a reversal of alliances when the war was won. In Europe, Britain would not want to see Russia any more than Germany on the shores of the North Sea, and could be counted on to build Germany back up against Russia; while in Asia, America would have to build Japan back up against China, whose potential power was infinitely greater, and once ‘modernized, vitalized and militarized’ would be the principal threat to the position of the Western powers in the Pacific. [20] Spykman, American Strategy in World Politics, pp. 460, 466–70. As the Red Army fought off the Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow, and Japanese carriers moved towards Midway, such previsions were out of season. Their time would come.

II

The mental framework of the officials charged with American foreign policy was far from uniform. But central assumptions were widely shared. When European war broke out in 1939, virtually all its possible outcomes filled planners in Washington with alarm. Dire, certainly, would be German success: few had any illusions in Hitler. But a British victory won by statist mobilization, entrenching the sterling bloc yet further, might not be so much better. Worst of all, perhaps, would be such mutual destruction that, in the ensuing chaos, one form or another of socialism would take hold of the continent. [21] For such fears, see the abundant documentation in Patrick Hearden, Architects of Globalism: Building a New World Order during World War II, Lafayetteville 2002, pp. 12–7 ff, far the best and most detailed study of the us war-time planners.Once Washington entered the war, and alliance with London and Moscow was essential to winning it, the priorities of the battlefield took precedence over the calculations of capital. But these remained, throughout, the strategic background to the global struggle. For Roosevelt’s planners the long-term priorities were twofold. [22] The critical war-time group included Hull, Welles, Acheson, Berle, Bowman, Davis and Taylor at State. Hopkins was an equerry more than a planner. The world must be made safe for capitalism at large; and within the world of capitalism, the United States should reign supreme. What would this dual objective mean for the post-war scene?

First and foremost, in point of conceptual time, the construction of an international framework for capital that would put an end to the dynamics of autarkic division and statist control that had precipitated the war itself, of which Hitler’s Third Reich and Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere had been the most destructive examples, but Britain’s Imperial Preference was another retrograde case. The free enterprise system in America itself was at risk without access to foreign markets. [23] ‘We need these markets for the output of the United States’, Acheson told Congress in November 1944. ‘My contention is that we cannot have full employment and prosperity in the United States without foreign markets’. Denied these, America might be forced into statism too, a fear repeatedly expressed at the time. In 1940, the Fortune Round Table was worrying that ‘there is a real danger that as a result of a long war all the belligerent powers will permanently accept some form of state-directed economic system’, raising ‘the longer-range question of whether or not the American capitalist system could continue to function if most of Europe and Asia should abolish free enterprise in favour of totalitarian economics’: Hearden, Architects of Globalism, pp. 41, 14. Concern that the us could be forced in such direction had already been voiced by Brooks Adams at the turn of the century, who feared that if a European coalition ever dominated trade with China, ‘it will have good prospects of throwing back a considerable surplus on our hands, for us to digest as best as we can’, reducing America to the ‘semi-stationary’ condition of France, and a battle with rivals that could ‘only be won by surpassing the enemy with his own methods’. Result: ‘The Eastern and Western continents would be competing for the most perfect system of state socialism’: Adams, America’s Economic Supremacy, pp. 52–3. In 1947 Adams’s book was re-published with an introduction by Marquis Childs, as a prophetic vision of the challenge of Russia to America in the Cold War. What would be needed after the war was a generalization of the Open Door that Washington had urged on its rivals in the race to seize command of markets in China: an all-round liberalization of trade, but henceforward—this was crucial—firmly embedded in new international institutions. Such an economic order would be not only a guarantee of peaceful relations between states, but allow the us to assume its natural place as first among them. From the time of Jefferson and Adams onwards, conspicuous national traditions had been generically expansionist, and as now far the largest and most advanced industrial power in the world, the us could be confident that free trade would ensure its hegemony at large, as it had Britain’s a century earlier. The political complement of this economic order would be founded on the principles of liberal democracy, as set forth in the Atlantic Charter.

From 1943 onwards, as victory came nearer, the requirements of this vision moved into sharper political focus. Three concerns were over-riding. [24] These are the object of Gabriel Kolko’s great work, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945, New York 1968, whose magisterial sweep remains unequalled in the literature—covering overall us economic objectives; the cutting down to size of British imperial positions; checking of the Left in Italy, Greece, France and Belgium; dealing with the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe; fixing up the un; planning the future of Germany; sustaining the gmd in China; and nuclear bombing of Japan. The first was the threat to a satisfactory post-war settlement from the potential maintenance of imperial preference by Britain. Washington would brook no barrier to American exports. From the outset, the us had insisted that a condition of the lend-lease on which Britain depended for survival after 1940 must be abandonment of imperial preference, once hostilities were over. Churchill, furious at the imposition of Article vii, could only seek to weaken the American diktat with a vaguely worded temporary escape clause. The second concern, mounting as the end of the war approached, and fully shared by Britain, was the spread of resistance movements in Europe—France, Belgium, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece—in which variegated currents of the Left were leading forces, just as planners in Washington had originally feared. The third was the advance from the spring of 1944 of the Red Army into Eastern Europe, which soon became an acute preoccupation. If the prospect most immediately present in the minds of American planners at the start of the war was the danger of any reversion to the conditions that had produced Nazi Germany and militarist Japan, as it drew to an end a still greater threat was taking shape in the form of its most important ally in the battle against them, the Soviet Union.

For here was not just an alternative form but a negation of capitalism, intending nothing less than its overthrow across the planet. Communism was an enemy far more radical than fascism had ever been: not an aberrant member of the family of polities respecting private ownership of the means of production, but an alien force dedicated to destroying it. American rulers had, of course, always been aware of the evils of Bolshevism, which Wilson had tried to stamp out at their inception by dispatching an expedition to help the Whites in 1919. But though foreign intervention had not succeeded in strangling it at birth, the ussr of the inter-war years remained an isolated, and looked a weak, power. Soviet victories over the Wehrmacht, long before there was an Anglo-American foot on European soil, abruptly altered its position in the post-war calculus. So long as fighting lasted, Moscow remained an ally to be prudently assisted, and where necessary humoured. But once it was over, a reckoning would come.

III

At the helm during the Second World War, Roosevelt had manoeuvred his country into the conflict not out of any general anti-fascist conviction—though hostile to Hitler, he had admired Mussolini, helped Franco to power, and remained on good terms with Pétain [25] Italy: soon after his inauguration in 1932, fdr was confiding to a friend that ‘I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman’. Asked five years later by his Ambassador in Rome if ‘he had anything against dictatorships’, he replied ‘of course not, unless they moved across their frontiers and sought to make trouble in other countries’. Spain: within a month of Franco’s uprising, he had imposed an unprecedented embargo on arms to the Republic—‘a gesture we Nationalists shall never forget’, declared the Generalísimo: ‘President Roosevelt behaved like a true gentleman’. France: he felt an ‘old and deep affection’ for Pétain, with whose regime in Vichy the us maintained diplomatic relations down to 1944, and matching detestation of De Gaulle—a ‘prima donna’, ‘jackanapes’ and ‘fanatic’. See, respectively, David Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922–1940, Chapel Hill 1988, pp. 139, 184; Douglas Little, Malevolent Neutrality: The United States, Great Britain, and the Origins of the Spanish Civil War, Ithaca 1985, pp. 237–8, and Dominic Tierney, fdr and the Spanish Civil War, Durham, nc 2007, pp. 39, 45–7; Mario Rossi, Roosevelt and the French, Westport 1993, pp. 71–2, and John Lamberton Harper, American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan and Dean G. Acheson, Cambridge 1994, p. 113.—but fear of Japanese and German expansion. Nor, for his class, was he especially anti-communist: at ease with the ussr as an ally, he was scarcely more realistic about Stalin than Stalin had been about Hitler. Though fond of Churchill, he was unsentimental about the empire he upheld, and had no time for De Gaulle. Strategic thought of any depth was foreign to him. Never a particularly well-informed or consistent performer on the world stage, personal self-confidence substituting for analytic grip, his vagaries frequently dismayed subordinates. [26] For concurrent judgements of fdr’s failings as a war-time leader from antithetical observers, see Kennan: ‘Roosevelt, for all his charm and skill as a political leader was, when it came to foreign policy, a very superficial man, ignorant, dilettantish, with a severely limited intellectual horizon’, and Kolko: ‘As a leader Roosevelt was a consistently destabilizing element in the conduct of American affairs during the war-time crises, which were intricate and often assumed a command of facts as a prerequisite for serious judgements’: Harper, American Visions of Europe, p. 174; Kolko, Politics of War, pp. 348–50. Light-mindedness or ignorance led fdr to make commitments and take decisions—over Lend Lease, the Morgenthau Plan, Palestine, the French Empire—that often left his associates aghast, and had to be reversed. But an abiding set of premises he possessed. In the words of the most accomplished apologist for his conduct of foreign affairs, his consistency lay simply in the fact that ‘Roosevelt was a nationalist, an American whose ethnocentrism was part of his outlook’: a ruler possessed of the ‘calm, quiet conviction that Americanism’, conceived as a ‘combination of free enterprise and individual values’, would be eagerly adopted by the rest of the world, once American power had done away with obstacles to its spread. Though proud of the New Deal’s work in saving us capitalism, he was uncomfortable with economic questions. But ‘like most Americans, Roosevelt unquestioningly agreed with the expansionist goals of Hull’s economic program’. There, ‘he did not lead, but followed’. [27] Warren Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman, Princeton 1991, pp. 185, 186, 10, 59. Culturally speaking, Roosevelt’s nationalism had a persistent edge of antipathy to the Old World. The dominant pre-war outlook of his Administration is described by Harper as a ‘Europhobic hemispherism’: American Visions of Europe, pp. 60 ff—‘the record is full of presidential expressions of the anxiety, suspicion and disgust that animated this tendency’. At the same time, imagining that the world would fall over itself to adopt the American Way of Life, once given a chance, Roosevelt’s nationalism—Kimball captures this side of him well—was easy-going in tone, just because it was so innocently hubristic.

The President’s vision of the post-war world, formed as the ussr was still fighting for its life against the Third Reich, while the United States was basking untouched in the boom of the century, gave primacy to the construction of a liberal international order of trade and mutual security that the us could be sure of dominating. A product of the war, it marked an epochal break in American foreign policy. Hitherto, there had always been a tension within American expansionism, between the conviction of hemispheric separatism and the call of a redemptive interventionism, each generating its own ideological themes and political pressures, criss-crossing or colliding according to the conjuncture, without ever coalescing into a stable standpoint on the outside world. In the wave of patriotic indignation and prosperity that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the conflicts of the past were washed away. Traditionally, the strongholds of isolationist nationalism lay in the small-business and farmer population of the Mid-West; the bastions of a more interventionist nationalism—in local parlance, ‘internationalism’—in the banking and corporate elites of the East Coast. The war brought these together. The former had always looked more positively on the Pacific as a natural extension of the frontier, and sought no-holds-barred revenge for the attack on Hawaii. The latter, oriented to markets and investments across the Atlantic threatened by Hitler’s New Order, had wider horizons. Renovated by the rise of new capital-intensive firms and investment banks committed to free trade, each a key component in the political bloc behind Roosevelt, these interests supplied the managers of the war economy. They looked forward, beyond sky-high domestic profits during the fighting, to cleaning up in Europe after it. [28] See the famous taxonomy of interests in Thomas Ferguson, ‘From Normalcy to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition and American Public Policy in the Great Depression’, International Organization, Winter 1984, pp. 41–94. In 1936, fdr could count on support from Chase Manhattan, Goldman Sachs, Manufacturers Trust and Dillon, Read; Standard Oil, General Electric, International Harvester, Zenith, ibm, itt, Sears, United Fruit and Pan Am.

In these conditions, the two nationalisms—isolationist and interventionist—could finally start to fuse into a durable synthesis. For Franz Schurmann, whose Logic of World Power ranks with Spykman’s American Strategy and Kolko’s Politics of War for originality within the literature on us foreign policy, this was the true arrival of American imperialism, properly understood—not a natural outgrowth of the incremental expansionism from below of the past, but the sudden crystallization of a project from above to remake the world in the American image. [29] ‘There is an important qualitative difference between expansionism and imperialism’. Expansionism was the step-by-step adding on of territory, productive assets, strategic bases and the like, as always practised by older empires, and continued by America since the war through a spreading network of investments, client states and overseas garrisons on every continent. By contrast, ‘imperialism as a vision and a doctrine has a total, world-wide quality. It envisages the organization of large parts of the world from the top down, in contrast to expansionism, which is accretion from the bottom up’. Schurmann, The Logic of World Power, New York 1974, p. 6. That imperialism, he believed, was only possible because it rested on the democratic foundations of the New Deal and the leader of genius who sought to extend it overseas in a global order of comparable popular welfare, assuring the us a consensual hegemony over post-war humanity at large. ‘What Roosevelt sensed and gave visionary expression to was that the world was ripe for one of the most radical experiments in history: the unification of the entire world under a domination centred in America’. [30] ‘American imperialism was not the natural extension of an expansionism which began with the very origins of America itself. Nor was it the natural outgrowth of a capitalist world market system which America helped to revive after 1945. American imperialism, whereby America undertook to dominate, organize and direct the free world, was a product of Rooseveltian New Dealism’: Schurmann, The Logic of World Power, pp. 5, 114. In this enterprise, the contrary impulses of isolation and intervention, nationalist pride and internationalist ambition, would be joined and sublimated in the task of reorganizing the world along us lines, to us advantage—and that of mankind.

Schurmann’s imaginative grasp of the impending mutation in the American imperium remains unsurpassed. [31] Schurmann’s formation set him apart from both main currents, radical and liberal, of writing about us foreign policy. Schumpeter, Polanyi, Schmitt, along with Marx and Mao, all left their mark on his thought: see his self-description, The Logic of World Power, pp. 561–5. He was a significant influence on Giovanni Arrighi. But in its idealization of Roosevelt, however ambivalent, it out-ran the time and person by a good margin. The White House still had only sketchy notions of the order it sought when peace was restored, and these did not include bestowing a New Deal on humanity at large. Its concerns were focused in the first instance on power, not welfare. The post-war system fdr had in mind would have a place for Russia and Britain in running the world—even pro forma China, since Chiang Kai-shek could be relied on to do us bidding. But there could be no question which among the ‘four policemen’, as he liked to style them, would be chief constable. Its territory untouched by war, by 1945 the United States had an economy three times the size of the ussr’s and five times that of Britain, commanding half of the world’s industrial output and three quarters of its gold reserves. The institutional foundations of a stable peace would have to reflect that predominance. [32] ‘Roosevelt’s “Four Policemen” notion had the appearance of international equality while, in fact, it assumes a weak China and an Anglo-Soviet standoff in Europe’: Kimball, The Juggler, p. 191. Before he died Roosevelt had laid down two of them. At Bretton Woods, birth-place of the World Bank and the imf, Britain was obliged to abandon Imperial Preference, and the dollar installed as master of the international monetary system, the reserve currency against which all others had to be pegged. [33] Ironically, the architect of the imposition of American will at Bretton Woods, Harry Dexter White, a closet sympathizer with Russia, was in private himself a critic of the ‘rampant imperialism’ that was urging ‘the us to make the most of our financial domination and military strength and become the most powerful nation in the world’: Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White and the Making of a New World Order, Princeton 2013, pp. 40–1. Steil’s account makes clear not only how completely Keynes was outmanoeuvred by White in fumbling attempts to defend British interests in 1944, but how deluded he was in persuading himself that the proceedings of the conference reflected the utmost good will of the United States towards Britain. At Dumbarton Oaks, the structure of the Security Council in a future United Nations was hammered out, conferring permanent seats and veto rights on the four gendarmes-to-be, superimposed on a General Assembly in which two-fifths of the delegates would be supplied by client states of Washington in Latin America, hastily mustered for the purpose with last-minute declarations of war on Germany. Skirmishes with Britain and Russia were kept to a minimum. [34] To offset the entry of his bête noire Gaullist France into the Security Council, on which Churchill insisted, Roosevelt pressed without success for the inclusion of Brazil as another subordinate of Washington, and over British opposition sought to create ‘trusteeships’ to screen post-war American designs on key islands in the Pacific. The veto had to be made unconditional at Soviet insistence. For these manoeuvres, see Robert Hilderbrand’s authoritative study, Dumbarton Oaks. The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security, Chapel Hill 1990, pp. 123–7, 170–4, 192–228. Hull, awarded—the first in a long line of such recipients—the Nobel Peace Prize for his role at the birth of the new organization, had reason to deem it a triumph. By the time the un came into being at San Francisco in 1945, it was so firmly under the us thumb that the diplomatic traffic of the delegates to its founding conference was being intercepted round the clock by military surveillance in the nearby Presidio. [35] For the lavish stage-managing and clandestine wire-tapping of the Conference, see Stephen Schlesinger’s enthusiastic account, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations, Boulder 2003, passim, and Peter Gowan’s scathing reconstruction, ‘us: un’, nlr 24, Nov–Dec 2003.

Roosevelt was in his grave before Germany surrendered. The system whose foundations his Administration had laid was incomplete at his death, with much still unsettled. Neither Britain nor France had consented to part with Asian or African colonies he viewed as an anachronism. Russia, its armies nearing Berlin, had designs on Eastern Europe. It might not fit so readily into the new architecture. But with its population decimated and much of its industry in ruins as the Wehrmacht retreated, the ussr would not represent a significant threat to the order to come, and might over time perhaps be coaxed towards it. Moscow’s exact role after victory was a secondary preoccupation.

3. security

Roosevelt’s insouciance did not survive him. Once the Red Army was entrenched in Eastern Europe, and Communist regimes set up behind it, with mass Communist parties active to the west and north, in France, Italy and Finland, priorities in Washington were reversed. Meeting the Soviet threat was more urgent than fine-tuning a Pax Americana, some of whose principles might have to be deferred in resisting it. Winning what became the Cold War would have to come first. Truman, who had once rejoiced at the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, hoping that each state would destroy the other, was well equipped for the change of direction. [36] Famously: ‘If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible’: speech in the Senate, 5 June 1941. In the White House, he would more than once cite the forged Testament of Peter the Great—a nineteenth-century Polish counterpart of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—as the blueprint for Soviet plans of world conquest. In the severe judgement of his most lucid biographer, whose conclusions from it are damning, ‘Throughout his presidency, Truman remained a parochial nationalist’: Arnold Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945–1953, Stanford 2002, p. 177. Within four days of the German surrender, he had cut off Lend-Lease to Russia without warning. At first insecure, tacking between bluster and joviality, his own temperament and that of his predecessor, once us nuclear weapons had shown what they could do in Japan, he scarcely looked back. By the spring of 1946, conciliatory relations with Moscow of the kind Roosevelt had vaguely envisaged, and Stalin doubtfully hoped, were finished. Within another year, the Truman Doctrine blew the bugle for a battle to defend free nations everywhere from aggression and subversion by totalitarianism, the President relishing his role in waking the country from its slumber. [37] The crudity and violence of Truman’s outlook distinguished him from Roosevelt, entitling him to high marks from Wilson Miscamble’s vehement From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima and the Cold War, Cambridge 2007, whose only complaint is that he did not break fast enough with Roosevelt’s collaboration with Stalin: pp. 323–8. fdr would have been unlikely, in dismissing a member of his Cabinet, to rage at ‘All the “Artists” with a capital A, the parlour pinkos and the soprano-voiced men’ as a ‘national danger’ and ‘sabotage front’ for Stalin. See Offner, Another Such Victory, p. 177.

In the Cold War now set in motion, the two sides were asymmetrical. Under Stalin, Soviet foreign policy was essentially defensive: intransigent in its requirement of a security glacis in Eastern Europe to prevent any repetition of the invasion it had just suffered, no matter what degree of political or military repression was required to enforce this, but more than willing to ditch or hobble any revolution—in Greece or China—outside this zone that threatened to provoke trouble with a West plainly so much more powerful than itself. [38] In the last months of the war, Stalin had been so concerned with maintaining good relations with the allies that he bungled the capture of Berlin when Zhukov’s Army Group was a mere forty miles from the city across open country, with orders from its commander on February 5 to storm it on February 15–16. Stalin cancelled these instructions the following day, for fear of ruffling Allied feathers at Yalta, where the Big Three had just started to convene, and he received no favours in return. Had he let his generals advance as he had earlier agreed, the whole Soviet bargaining position in post-war Germany would been transformed. ‘Towards the end of March, Zhukov found him very tired, tense and visibly depressed. His anguish was hardly alleviated by the thought that all the uncertainties might have been avoided if he had allowed the Red Army to attack Berlin and possibly end the war in February, as originally planned’: Vojtech Mastny, Russia’s Road to the Cold War. Diplomacy, Warfare and the Politics of Communism, 1941–1945, New York 1979, pp. 238–9, 243–4, 261. This would not be his only disastrous blunder, not of aggressive over-reaching, but anxious under-reaching, as World War Two came to a close. The ussr was still only building—re-building after Nazi wreckage—socialism in one country. Stalin never abandoned the Bolshevik conviction that communism and capitalism were mortal antagonists. [39] For a penetrating depiction of Stalin’s outlook at the close of the War, see Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, Cambridge, ma 1996, pp. 11–46. But the ultimate horizon of a world-wide free association of producers—the classless society Marx had envisaged—lay far off. For the time being, the balance of forces remained lop-sided in favour of capital. In the longer run inter-imperialist contradictions would flare up again and weaken the enemy, as they had twice done in the past, shifting the advantage to labour. [40] This was the theme of his speech to the Supreme Soviet of 9 February 1946. Since the first inter-imperialist War had generated the October Revolution, and the second taken the Red Army to Berlin, a third could finish off capitalism—a prospect offering ultimate victory without altering strategic passivity. To the end of his life, Stalin held to the position that inter-imperialist contradictions remained for the time being primary, contradictions between the capitalist and socialist camp secondary. In the interim, it was vital that revolutionary forces outside the perimeter of the Soviet bloc should neither threaten its security by provoking imperialism prematurely, nor question the authority of the cpsu over them.

In doctrine as in power, the position of the United States was altogether distinct. Ideologically, two universalisms were locked in struggle during the Cold War. But there was an ontological difference between them. In Stephanson’s trenchant formulation: ‘Whereas the Soviet Union, representing (it claimed) the penultimate stage of history, was locked in a dialectical struggle for the final liberation of humankind, the United States is that very liberation. It is the end, it is already a world empire, it can have no equal, no dialectical Other. What is not like the United States can, in principle, have no proper efficacy. It is either a perversion or, at best, a not-yet’. [41] ‘If the end of history as emancipated humankind is embodied in the “United States”, then the outside can never be identical or ultimately equal. Difference there is, but it is a difference that is intrinsically unjust and illegitimate, there only to be overcome and eradicated’. These passages come from Stephanson, ‘Kennan: Realism as Desire’, in Nicolas Guilhot, ed., The Invention of International Relations Theory, New York 2011, pp. 177–8. Materially, furthermore, there was no common measure between the rival states as they emerged from the War. The ussr of 1946–47 had not the remotest hope of the ambition on which American grand strategy was fixed: a ‘preponderance of power’ across the world, its annunciation staged over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The initiative in the conflict between the two lay with the stronger party. Its ideological label was ‘containment’, as if the aim of us planners was to stem a tide of Soviet aggression. But the substance of the doctrine was far from defensive. Nominally, it was a counsel of firmness and tactical patience to wear the enemy down, by ‘the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points’, as its originator put it. But from the beginning, the objective was not to check, but delete the adversary. Victory, not safety, was the aim. [42] ‘A battle to the death the Cold War certainly was, but to a kind of abstract death. Elimination of the enemy’s will to fight—victory—meant more than military victory on the battlefield. It meant, in principle, the very liquidation of the enemy whose right to exist, let alone equality, one did not recognize. Liquidation alone could bring real peace. Liquidation is thus the “truth” of the Cold War’: Stephanson, ‘Fourteen Notes on the Very Concept of the Cold War’, in Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby, Rethinking Geopolitics, London 1998, p. 82.

In later years Kennan would represent his conception of containment as a political strategy of limited geographical application—not a call for world-wide armed activity, as charged by Lippmann, a rare early critic—and contrast it as a stance of prudent defence with the adventurist notions of ‘roll-back’ advocated by Dulles, and ‘flexible response’ by Kennedy. Legend has since canonized the image of a sober adviser whose counsels of moderation and wisdom were distorted into a reckless anti-communist activism that would bring disasters against which he spoke out, remaining true to himself as a critic of American hubris and intransigence. The reality was otherwise. Unstable and excitable, Kennan lacked the steadiness of his friend and successor Nitze, but in his days of power in Washington was a Cold Warrior à l‘outrance, setting the course for decades of global intervention and counter-revolution. [43] In the extravagance of his fluctuations between elated self-regard and tortured self-flagellation—as in the volatility of his opinions: he would frequently say one thing and its opposite virtually overnight—Kennan was closer to a character out of Dostoevsky than any figure in Chekhov, with whom he claimed an affinity. His inconsistencies, which made it easier to portray him in retrospect as an oracle of temperate realism, were such that he could never be taken as a simple concentrate or archetype of the foreign-policy establishment that conducted America into the Cold War, his role as policy-maker in any case coming to an end in 1950. But just in so far as he has come to be represented as the sane keeper of the conscience of us foreign policy, his actual record—violent and erratic into his mid-seventies—serves as a marker of what could pass for a sense of proportion in the pursuit of the national interest. In the voluminous literature on Kennan, Stephanson’s study Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, Cambridge, ma 1989 stands out as the only serious examination of the intellectual substance of his writings, a courteous but devastating deconstruction of them. An acute, not unsympathetic, cultural-political portrait of him as a conservative out of his time is to be found in Harper’s American Visions of Europe, pp. 135–232. In later life, Kennan sought to cover his tracks in the period when he held a modicum of power, to protect his reputation and that of his slogan. We owe some striking pages to that impulse, so have no reason to complain, though also none to take his self-presentation at face value. His best writing was autobiographical and historical: vivid, if far from candid Memoirs—skirting suggestio falsi, rife with suppressio veri; desolate vignettes of the American scene in Sketches from a Life; and the late Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations 1875–1890, Princeton 1979. At the outset of his career as a diplomat, he had decided that the Bolsheviks were ‘a little group of spiteful Jewish parasites’, in their ‘innate cowardice’ and ‘intellectual insolence’ abandoning ‘the ship of Western European civilization like a swarm of rats’. There could be no compromise with them. Stationed in Prague during the Nazi take-over of Czechoslovakia, his first reaction was that Czechs counted German rule a blessing; later, touring occupied Poland—he was now en poste in Berlin—he felt Poles too might come to regard rule by Hans Frank as an improvement in their lot. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, he told his superiors that, from Scandinavia to the Black Sea, Russia was everywhere feared more than Germany, and must bear the ‘moral consequences’ of Operation Barbarossa alone, with ‘no claim on Western sympathies’. [44] Under Nazi rule, ‘the Czechs enjoyed privileges and satisfaction in excess of anything they “dreamed of in Austrian days”’, and could ‘cheerfully align themselves with the single most dynamic movement in Europe’, as the best account of this phase in his career summarizes his opinion. In Poland, Kennan reported, ‘the hope of improved material conditions and of an efficient, orderly administration may be sufficient to exhaust the aspirations of a people whose political education has always been primitive’: see David Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of us Foreign Policy, New York 1988, pp. 71–3. For Kennan’s letter on 24 June 1941, two days after the launching of Hitler’s attack on the ussr, described simply as ‘the German war effort’, see his Memoirs, 1925–1950, New York 1968, pp. 133–4, which give no hint of his initial response to the Nazi seizure of what remained of Czechoslovakia, and make no mention of his trip to occupied Poland.

After the war, promoted to Deputy Commandant of the National War College, he declared that if Russian military industry should make faster progress than American, ‘we would be justified in considering a preventive war’, unleashing nuclear weapons: ‘with probably ten good hits with atomic bombs you could, without any great loss of life or loss of the prestige or reputation of the United States, practically cripple Russia’s war-making potential’. [45] C. Ben Wright, ‘Mr “X” and Containment’, Slavic Review, March 1976, p. 19. Furious at the disclosure of his record, Kennan published a petulant attempt at denial in the same issue, demolished by Wright in ‘A Reply to George F. Kennan’, Slavic Review, June 1976, pp. 318–20, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of his documentation of it. In the course of his critique of Kennan, Wright accurately observed of him: ‘His mastery of the English language is undeniable, but one should not confuse gift of expression with clarity of thought’. At the head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, and as consigliere to Acheson, he initiated covert paramilitary operations in Eastern Europe; advocated, if need be, us military intervention in Southern Europe and South-East Asia; urged support for French colonialism in North Africa; supervised cancellation of reforms in Japan; endorsed repression in Latin America; proposed American seizure of Taiwan; exulted when us troops were dispatched to Korea. [46] Taiwan: ‘Carried through with sufficient resolution, speed, ruthlessness and self-assurance, the way Theodore Roosevelt might have done it’, conquest of the island ‘would have an electrifying effect on this country and throughout the Far East’: Anna Nelson, ed., The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, New York 1983, vol. III, pps 53, p. 65. Korea: ‘George was dancing on air because MacArthur’s men were mobilized for combat under auspices of the United Nations. He was carrying his balalaika, a Russian instrument he used to play with some skill at social gatherings, and with a great, vigorous swing, he clapped me on the back with it, nearly striking me to the sidewalk. “Well, Joe,” he cried, “What do you think of the democracies now?”’: Joseph Alsop, ‘I’ve Seen The Best of It’. Memoirs, New York 1992, pp. 308–9, who, with pre-war memories of the young Kennan telling him that ‘the United States was doomed to destruction because it was no longer run by its “aristocracy”’, reminded him tartly of his excoriations of democracy only a few days earlier: pp. 274, 307. Two million Koreans perished during an American intervention whose carpet-bombing obliterated the north of the country over three successive years: see Bruce Cumings, The Korean War, New York 2010, pp. 147–61. Containment was limited neither in its range nor in its means. It was an Ermattungskrieg, not a Niederwerfungskrieg, but the objective was the same. America could hope that ‘within five or ten years’ the ussr would be ‘overwhelmed by clouds of civil disintegration’, and the Soviet regime soon ‘go down in violence’. Meanwhile ‘every possible means’ should be set in motion to destabilize Moscow and its relays in Eastern Europe. [47] David Foglesong, ‘Roots of “Liberation”: American Images of the Future of Russia in the Early Cold War, 1948–1953’, International History Review, March 1999, pp. 73–4; Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956, Ithaca 2009, pp. 6, 29, 180, who observes: ‘There would be no delay: containment and a “compellent” strategy would be pursued in parallel, not in sequence’. In their intention, containment and roll-back were one from the start.

II

A bureaucratic euphemism, containment was too arid a term to galvanize popular opinion for the launch to Cold War. But it could readily be translated into what was henceforward the centre-piece of the American imperial ideology: security. In the critical years 1945–47, this became the key slogan linking internal atmospherics and external operations into a single front, and assuring passage from the New Deal to the Truman Doctrine. [48] It was Schurmann who first saw this, and put it at the heart of his account of American imperialism: ‘A new ideology, different from both nationalism and internationalism, forged the basis on which bipartisanship could be created. The key word and concept in that new ideology was security’: The Logic of World Power, pp. 64–8. The Social Security Act had been the most popular reform of the Roosevelt era, enshrining a new value in the vocabulary of domestic politics. What more natural complement than a National Security Act, to meet the danger, no longer of depression, but subversion? In March 1947 came Truman’s speech warning of the apocalyptic dangers of communism in the Mediterranean, designed by Acheson ‘to scare the hell out of the country’ with a message that was perforce ‘clearer than truth’. Calling his countrymen to battle in the Cold War, Kennan expressed ‘a certain gratitude to Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear’. [49] “X”, ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, Foreign Affairs, July 1947, p. 582. In the same month, the National Security Act created the Defence (no longer War) Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council and—the pièce de résistance—the Central Intelligence Agency. Around this institutional complex developed the permanent ideology of national security presiding over the American empire to this day. [50] For the bureaucratic background to the Act, and the ideology that both generated and crystallized around it, the essential study is Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954, Cambridge 1998: its title a poignant allusion to Bryan’s famous cry, ’You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold’. Forrestal was the principal architect of the Act, becoming the country’s first Secretary of Defence, before personal and political paranoia exploded in a leap to his death from a hospital window. If the depth of its grip on the national imaginary was a product of the Cold War, the fears on which it played had a long pre-history, in alarmist scenarios of us vulnerability to external attack and magnification of foreign dangers, from Lodge through Wilson to Roosevelt. [51] The extensive record of such scares is surveyed in John A. Thompson, ‘The Exaggeration of American Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition’, Diplomatic History, Winter 1992, pp. 23–43, who concludes: ‘The dramatic extension of America’s overseas involvement and commitments in the past hundred years has reflected a growth of power rather the decline of security. Yet the full and effective deployment of that power has required from the American people disciplines and sacrifices that they are prepared to sustain only if they are persuaded the nation’s safety is directly at stake’. Among the results have been ‘the expansion of national security to include the upholding of American values and the maintenance of world order’, and ‘the recurrent tendency to exaggerate the country’s vulnerability to attack’. Masking strategies of offence as exigencies of defence, no theme was better calculated to close the potential gap between popular sentiments and elite designs. The most authoritative study of the Truman Administration’s entry into the Cold War offers a critique of the ‘expanded’ conception of national security that came to take hold in Washington. But the ideology of national security, us-style, was inherently expansionist. [52] For the leading Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis this was, admirably, a long-standing tradition of the country: ‘Expansion, we have assumed, is the path to security’: Surprise, Security and the American Experience, Cambridge, ma 2004, p. 13. ‘There is literally no question, military or political, in which the United States is not interested’, Roosevelt cabled Stalin in 1944, during a global conflict it had not initiated. A fortiori, in a Cold War it had.

The organization of the post-war discourse of empire around security did not, of course, mean that the foundational themes of American patriotism were eclipsed by it. The legitimations of us expansionism had always formed a mobile complex of ideologemes, their order and emphasis shifting kaleidoscopically according to the historical conjuncture. The primacy of security after 1945 altered the hierarchy of appeals, without purging them. Immediately below it, now came democracy—the American gift to the world that security served to protect. What had to be secured—that is, expanded—against the totalitarian threat of communism was a Free World in the image of American liberty. In the struggle of the us with the ussr, the force of the claim to be what the enemy was not, a liberal democracy, was plain: where there was any experience or prospect of representative government, typically a trump card. In private, of course, the managers of national security were often contemptuous of the democracy they were supposedly defending. Kennan, an admirer of Schuschnigg and Salazar, rulers who showed that ‘benevolent despotism had greater possibilities for good’ than democracy, argued on the eve of the Second World War that immigrants, women and blacks should be stripped of the vote in the United States. Democracy was a ‘fetish’: needed was ‘constitutional change to the authoritarian state’—an American Estado Novo. [53] ‘Fair Day Adieu!’ and ‘The Prerequisites: Notes on Problems of the United States in 1938’, documents still kept under wraps—the fullest summary is in Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of us Foreign Policy, pp. 49–55. For a cogent discussion of Kennan’s outlook in these texts, see Joshua Botts, ‘“Nothing to Seek and . . . Nothing to Defend”: George F. Kennan’s Core Values and American Foreign Policy, 1938–1993’, Diplomatic History, November 2006, pp. 839–66. After the War Kennan compared democracy to ‘one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin’, and never lost his belief that the country was best governed by an enlightened elite immune to popular passions. Acheson dismissed ‘the premise that democracy is some good’, remarking ‘I don’t think it’s worth a damn’—‘I say the Congress is too damn representative. It’s just as stupid as the people are; just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish’. [54] Acheson: interview with Theodore Wilson and Richard McKinzie, 30 June 1971. Johnson was cruder still: ‘We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr Ambassador’, he told an envoy, after drawling an expletive, ‘If your Prime Minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitution, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last long’: Philip Deane [Gerassimos Gigantes], I Should Have Died, London 1976, pp. 113–4. Nixon and Kissinger could be no less colourful. Such confidences were not for public consumption. Officially, democracy was as prominent a value in the American mission to the world as in the time of Manifest Destiny.

That destiny, however, had undergone a change. After the Spanish–American War, it had ceased to be territorial, becoming with Wilson all but metaphysical. During the Cold War, it was articulated with less rapture, in a moral-political register occupying a lower position in the ideological hierarchy. But the connexion with religion remained. In his final inaugural address of 1944, Roosevelt had declared: ‘The Almighty God has blessed our land in many ways. He has given our people stout hearts and strong arms with which to strike mighty blows for our freedom and truth. He has given to our country a faith which has become the hope of all peoples in an anguished world.’ Truman, speaking on the day he dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, was equally forthright about the country’s strong arms: ‘We thank God that it [the atomic bomb] has come to us, and not our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His Ways and for His purposes.’ Amid the post-war ruins, the President was more expansive. ‘We are going forward to meet our destiny, which I think Almighty God intended us to have’, he announced: ‘We are going to be the leaders’. [55] John Fousek, To Lead the World. American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War, Chapel Hill 2000, pp. 44, 23; Lloyd Gardner, in Gardner, Schlesinger, Morgenthau, The Origins of The Cold War, Ann Arbor 1970, p. 8. In 1933, Roosevelt could in all seriousness warn Litvinov that on his deathbed he would want ‘to make his peace with God’, adding ‘God will punish you Russians if you go on persecuting the church’: David Foglesong, The American Mission and the ‘Evil Empire’, Cambridge 2007, p. 77. Viewing the destruction in Germany, Kennan found himself ‘hushed by the realization that it was we who had been chosen by the Almighty to be the agents of it’, [56] Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950, New York 1968, p. 429. but in due course uplifted by the awesome challenge that the same Providence had granted Americans in the form of the Cold War. Since then, the deity has continued to guide the United States, from the time of Eisenhower, when ‘In God We Trust’ was made the official motto of the nation, to Kennedy exclaiming: ‘With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own’—down to the declaration of the younger Bush, that ‘Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model for the world’, and Obama’s confidence that God continues to call Americans to their destiny: to bring, with His grace, ‘the great gift of freedom’ to posterity. [57] Kennedy inaugural, 20 January 1961: ‘The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God’; George W. Bush, speech to the International Jewish B’nai B’rith Convention, 28 August 2000; Obama inaugural, 20 January 2009: ‘This is the source of our confidence: the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny’—an address reminding his audience, inter alia, of the heroism of those who fought for freedom at Gettysburg and Khe Sanh. America would not be America without faith in the supernatural. But for obvious reasons this component of the national ideology is inner-directed, without much appeal abroad, and so now relegated to the lowest rung in the structure of imperial justification.

To be effective, an ideology must reflect as well as distort, or conceal, reality. At the outset, as at the conclusion, of the Cold War, the United States possessed few colonies, was indeed an electoral democracy, did confront a socio-political system that was not, and as in the past enjoyed extraordinary natural advantages of size, location and endowments. All these could be, and were, synthesized into an imperial ideology commanding popular consensus, if never unanimity, at home, and power of attraction, if never ubiquitous, abroad. But the ultimately determinant instance in the formation of American foreign policy lay elsewhere, and could receive only circumspect articulation until the Cold War was won. So long as communism was a threat, capitalism was all but a taboo term in the vocabulary of the West. In the us itself, the virtues of free enterprise were certainly always prominent in the national liturgy, but even in this idiom were rarely projected as leitmotifs of the global defense of liberty against the totalitarian danger. The managers of the empire were aware that it would be counter-productive to foreground them. Early drafts of the Presidential speech that would become the Truman Doctrine, prepared by his aides Clifford and Elsey, presented Greece as a strategic line of defence for access to oil in the Middle East and, noting that ‘there has been a world-wide trend away from the system of free enterprise’, warned that ‘if, by default, we permit free enterprise to disappear in the other nations of the world, the very existence of our own economy and our own democracy will be gravely threatened’. This was speaking too plainly. Truman objected that it ‘made the whole thing sound like an investment prospectus’, and Acheson made sure such cats were not let out of the bag. [58] McCormick, America’s Half-Century, p. 77. Business Week could afford to be blunter, observing that the task of the us government was ‘keeping capitalism afloat in the Mediterranean—and in Europe’, while in the Middle East ‘it is already certain that business has an enormous stake in whatever role the United States is to play’. Even free trade, however essential to a Pax Americana, was not accorded top billing as an ideological imperative. But what, for the time being, was least conspicuous in the hierarchy of its legitimations would, as events were going to show, be most decisive in the map of its operations. For the moment, the Cold War had to be won, and the catechism of security was paramount.

III

The Great Contest, as Deutscher called it, is still generally taken as the defining framework of American grand strategy in the post-war epoch. But the exigencies of the struggle against communism, all-consuming as these became, were only one, if protracted, phase within a larger and wider arc of American power-projection, which has outlived them by half as many years again. Since it came to an end, the Cold War has produced an often remarkable body of international scholarship. But this has nearly always remained unseeing of the dynamic predating, encompassing and exceeding it. For all its scope and intensity, the Cold War was—in the words of an outstanding exception to this literature—‘merely a sub-plot’ within the larger history of American global domination. [59] McCormick, America’s Half-Century, p. xiii.

That exception came from the tradition which pioneered modern study of American imperialism, founded in Wisconsin by William Appleman Williams in the fifties. Williams’s American–Russian Relations (1952), Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) and The Contours of American History (1961) argued that the march to the internal frontier within North America, allowing a settler society to escape the contradictions of race and class of an emergent capitalist economy, had been extended across the Pacific in the drive for an Open Door empire of commerce, and then in the fuite en avant of a bid for global dominion that could not brook even a defensive Soviet Union. For Williams, this was a morally disastrous trajectory, generated by a turning away from the vision of a community of equals that had inspired the first arrivals from the Old World. Produced before the us assault in Vietnam, Williams’s account of a long-standing American imperialism struck with prophetic force in the sixties. The historians who learnt from him—Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber, Thomas McCormick, Patrick Hearden—shed the idealism of his explanatory framework, exploring with greater documentation and precision the economic dynamics of American diplomacy, investment and warfare from the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century. The Wisconsin School was not alone in its critical historiography of empire. Kolko’s monumental Politics of War shared the same political background, of revulsion at the war in Vietnam, if not intellectual affiliation.

To the regnant liberalism of the time, and since, this was an aberrant optic for viewing America’s post-war role in the world. It was not requirements of profitability, but of security that formed the guide-line of us foreign policy, set by the conflict of the Cold War rather than the objectives of the Open Door. Leading the reaction was John Lewis Gaddis, who over four decades has tirelessly upheld patriotic truths about his country and the dangers it faced. The Cold War, he explained at the peak of the us bombing of Vietnam in 1972, had been forced on a reluctant American government that did not want it, but wanted insecurity even less. Responsibility for the conflict fell on a Soviet dictator who was not answerable to any public opinion, and so could have avoided a confrontation that democratic rulers in Washington, who had to heed popular feelings outraged by Russian behaviour, could not. The domestic political system, rather than anything to do with the economy, determined the nation’s conduct of foreign affairs. [60] Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941–1947, New York 1972, pp. 353, 356–8, 360–1. In a preface to the re-edition of the book in 2000, Gaddis congratulated himself on his good fortune, as a student in Texas, in feeling no obligation ‘to condemn the American establishment and all its works’: p. x. If there was such a thing as an American empire—perhaps ‘revisionism’, after all, had a case there—it was one by invitation, freely sought in Western Europe from fear of Soviet aggression, unlike the Russian empire imposed by force on Eastern Europe. [61] Gaddis, ‘The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis and the Origins of the Cold War’, Diplomatic History, July 1983, pp. 181–3. American policy towards the world, he insisted a decade later, had always been primarily defensive. Its leitmotif was containment, traceable across successive declensions from the time of Truman to that of Kissinger, in an arc of impressive restraint and clairvoyance. [62] Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, New York 1982, p. viii, passim. Gaddis had by then become Kennan’s leading exegete, earning his passage to official biographer, and the sobriquet ‘godfather of containment’. For the latter, see Sarah-Jane Corke, us Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy: Truman, Secret Warfare and the cia, 1945–1953, pp. 39–42 ff.

Another ten years on, the Cold War now won, Gaddis could reveal what ‘We Now Know’ of its real nature: a battle of good against evil as contemporaries saw it, in which American conceptions of collective security, embodied in a nato alliance inspired by federal principles akin to those of the us Constitution, had triumphed over narrow Soviet conceptions of unilateral security, and in doing so diffused democracy across the world. The nuclear arms race alone had deferred a collapse of the ussr that would otherwise have occurred much earlier. [63] Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford 1997, pp. 51, 199–201, 280, 286–7, 292. But not all dangers to freedom had been laid to rest. In 2001 the terrorists who attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, like the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbour, had ‘given the us yet another chance to lead the world into a new era’, and George W. Bush—the underestimated Prince Hal of the hour—was rising to the challenge of creating an ‘empire of liberty’, in keeping with the nation’s calling as, in Lincoln’s words, ‘the last, best hope of mankind’. [64] Gaddis, ‘And Now This: Lessons from the Old Era for the New One’, in Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda, eds, The Age of Terror, New York 2001, p. 21; Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, pp. 115, 117. For ‘one of the most surprising transformations of an underrated national leader since Prince Hal became Henry V’, prompting comparison of Afghanistan with Agincourt, see pp. 82, 92; and further pp. 115, 117. In due course Gaddis would write speeches for the Texan President.

By the time of these pronouncements, the intellectual climate had changed. From the mid-eighties onwards, the record of the American state during the Cold War came to be viewed in a more sceptical light. Its performance in two theatres of its operation attracted particular criticism in much subsequent scholarship, as overly and unnecessarily aggressive. The first was the role of the us at the inception of the Cold War in Europe, the second its subsequent interventions in the Third World. Studies of these have flowed in turn into a general broadening and deepening of the historiography of the Cold War, enabled by the opening of Soviet and Chinese archives as well as a more critical sense of Western sources. [65] For the successive phases of this historiography, see Stephanson, ‘The United States’, in David Reynolds, ed., The Origins of the Cold War in Europe: International Perspectives, New Haven 1994, pp. 25–48. A shorter update is contained in John Lamberton Harper, The Cold War, Oxford 2011, pp. 83–9, a graceful work that is now the best synthesis in the field. The imposing three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010), a monument to current research, is testimony to the change; and its co-editors, Melvyn Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, can stand as illustrations of the advance the new literature represents, and its limits. Each is author of the finest single work in their respective fields, in both cases deeply felt, humane works of historical reflection: Leffler’s A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War (1992) and Westad’s The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005). Leffler’s massive, meticulous analysis of American doctrines and actions in the first five years of the Cold War left no doubt of Washington’s drive for global hegemony—‘preponderance’ at large—and dismissal of the predictable apprehensions it aroused in Moscow, in the wake of one invasion from Germany and fear of another, as the us divided the country to keep the Ruhr securely within its grasp. [66] For the degree of Leffler’s rejection of Gaddis’s version of the Cold War, see his biting demolition of We Now Know: ‘The Cold War: What Do “We Now Know”?’, American Historical Review, April 1999, pp. 501–24. He had started to question it as early as 1984: ‘The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–48’, American Historical Review, April 1984, pp. 346–81. Westad’s study broke decisively from a conventional focus on Europe, for a powerful narrative of the battlefields of the Third World, treated as the most important single front of the Cold War, and most disastrous for the peoples caught in the cross-fire of American and Soviet attempts to control their fate.

Commanding though each of these works is on its terrain, that remains delimited. In historical scope, neither matches Kolko’s integration within a single compass of the full range of American strategic aims and actions while the Red Army fought the Wehrmacht, with a full sense of popular experiences of suffering and revolt from the Yangzi to the Seine, in the world beyond Washington. [67] In 1990, Kolko added a preface to the re-publication of The Politics of War that extends its argument to comparative reflections on the German and Japanese regimes and their rulers, and the differing political outcomes of French and German popular experiences of the war, of exceptional brilliance. The forty pages of bibliography in the first volume of the Cambridge History contain no reference to The Politics of War, a tell-tale omission. At its best, this literature has produced major works of clear-minded political history. But while no longer apologetic, often dwelling on unwarranted blunders and excesses of American foreign policy that compromised the chance of better diplomatic outcomes after the war, or crimes committed in fear of worse in the underdeveloped world, it has proved consistently unable to come to terms with the matrix that rendered these rational enough for their purposes. The symptom of this inability is the general silence with which it has treated the cumulative work of those us historians who have made that the principal object of their research. Distortions of ideology and exaggerations of insecurity are the acceptable causes of American misjudgement or misconduct abroad. The political logic of a dynamic continental economy that was the headquarters of world capital is matter—at best—for evasion or embarrassment. [68] Tackled by Bruce Cumings for his failure either to address or even mention the work of Kolko, or more generally the Wisconsin School of historians descending from Williams, Leffler could only reply defensively that for him, ‘the writings of William Appleman Williams still provide the best foundation for the architectural reconfigurations that I envision’, since ‘Williams captured the essential truth that American foreign policy has revolved around the expansion of American territory, commerce and culture’—a trinity, however, of which only the last figures significantly in his work on the Cold War. See, for this exchange, Michael Hogan, ed., America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941, Cambridge 1995, pp. 52–9, 86–9. For his part, Westad could write wide-eyed as late as 2000 that ’American policy-makers seem to have understood much more readily than most of us have believed that there was an intrinsic connection between the spread of capitalism as a system and the victory of American political values’: Westad, ed., Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, London 2000, p. 10. Five years later, The Global Cold War contains a few nervous, indecisive pages on economic considerations in us foreign policy, without significant bearing on the subsequent narrative, before concluding with perceptible relief at the end of it, that—as exemplified by the invasion of Iraq—‘freedom and security have been, and remain the driving forces of us foreign policy’: pp. 27–32, 405. A discreet footnote in Kimball informs us that ‘historians have only begun to grapple with the intriguing questions posed by William Appleman Williams’, and taken up Gardner and Kolko, as against ‘the more commonly accepted viewpoint which emphasizes power politics and Wilsonian idealism’ and does not ‘really deal with the question of America’s overall economic goals and their effect on foreign policy’—a topic handled somewhat gingerly, if not without a modicum of realism, in the ensuing chapter on Lend-Lease: The Juggler, pp. 218–9, 43–61. Of the typical modulations to traditional Cold War orthodoxy, McCormick once justly observed: ‘While post-revisionists may duly note materialist factors, they then hide them away in an undifferentiated and unconnected shopping-list of variables. The operative premise is that multiplicity, rather than articulation, is equivalent to sophistication’: ‘Drift or Mastery? A Corporatist Synthesis for American Diplomatic History’, Reviews in American History, December 1982, pp. 318–9.

That was not the case in the early seventies, when the influence of Williams was at its height. At that time, two penetrating critiques of the Wisconsin School appeared, whose clarity and rigour are in notable contrast with the foot-shuffling that followed. Robert Tucker and John Thompson each took aim at the elisions of the term ‘expansion’ in Wisconsin usage, pointing out that territorial expansion across North America, or even the Pacific, did not mean the us economy required foreign markets to thrive in either the nineteenth or first half of the twentieth century, nor that mistaken beliefs by politicians or businessmen to the contrary could be adduced as evidence of any purposeful continuity in American foreign policy, conspicuously absent. Expansion, Tucker readily conceded, there had been. But it was better understood, not as a projection of the socio-economic structure of American capitalism, but of the sheer growth of American power and the dynamics of inter-state competition, accompanied by ideas of a mission to spread American values abroad. For Thompson, any number of beliefs were expressed by Americans as justifications of their country’s foreign policy, and there was no reason to attach a priori more importance to commercial than to strategic or moral or political arguments for them. Considerations of security, often invoked, were among the repertoire. Legitimate up to the mid-fifties, in Tucker’s view, these had become excessive thereafter, abandoning the rational pursuit of a balance of power for the will to hegemony of an expansionist globalism. In that respect, the Wisconsin critique of American foreign policy in the Cold War was sound. ‘To contain the expansion of others, or what was perceived as such, it became necessary to expand ourselves. In this manner, the course of containment became the course of empire.’ [69] Robert W. Tucker, The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy, Baltimore 1971, pp. 11, 23, 58–64, 107–11, 149: a conservative study of great intellectual elegance. Likewise, from an English liberal, John A. Thompson, ‘William Appleman Williams and the “American Empire”’, Journal of American Studies, April 1973, pp. 91–104, a closer textual scrutiny.

4. keystones

Left unresolved in the exchanges of that period were both the general structure of the relations between state and capital in the modern era, and the particular historical form these had taken in the United States. That the pattern of incentives and constraints to which the two were subject could never be identical was written into the independent origins of each. Capitalism, as a system of production without borders, emerged into a European world already territorially divided into a plurality of late feudal states pitted in rivalry against each other, each with its own means of aggression and systems of coercion. In due course, when absolutist monarchies became capitalist nation-states, economic and political power, fused in the feudal order, became structurally separated. Once direct producers were deprived of the means of subsistence, becoming dependent for their livelihoods on a labour market, extra-economic coercion was no longer required to exploit them. But their exploiters were still divided into the multiplicity of states they had inherited, along with the tensions between them. The result, as classically formulated by Robert Brenner, was two-fold. [70] Robert Brenner, ‘What Is, and What Is Not, Imperialism?’, Historical Materialism, vol. 14, no. 4, 2006, pp. 79–95, esp. pp. 83–5. On the one hand, such states could not contradict the interests of capital without undermining themselves, since their power depended on the prosperity of an economy governed by the requirements of profitability. On the other hand, the activities of states could not be subject to the same set of incentives and constraints as those of firms. For while the field of inter-state—like that of inter-firm—relations was also one of competition, it lacked either the institutional rules of a market or the transparency of a price mechanism for adjudicating claims of rationality or efficiency. There was no external counterpart to the internal settlement of the coordination problem. The consequence was a continual risk of miscalculations and sub-optimal—at the limit, disastrous—outcomes for all contending parties.

The aim of capital is profit. What is the comparable objective of the state? In polite parlance, ‘security’, whose arrival as the conventional definition of the ultimate purpose of the state coincided, after 1945, with the universal sublimation of Ministries of War into Ministries of Defence. Nebulous as few others, the term was—as it remains—ideally suited for all-purpose ideological use. [71] For a contemporary adept of the locution, Joseph Nye—Chairman of the National Intelligence Council under Clinton—‘security is like oxygen: you tend not to notice until you lose it’: ‘East Asian Security—The Case for Deep Engagement’, Foreign Affairs, July–August 1995, p. 91. As Lloyd Gardner remarked of Gaddis’s ubiquitous use of the term, ‘it hangs before us like an abstraction or, with apologies to T. S. Eliot, “shape without form, shade without colour”’: ‘Responses to John Lewis Gaddis’, Diplomatic History, July 1983, p. 191. For Gaddis’s elaboration two decades later, that American security has always meant expansion, see note 52 above. Spykman had coolly noted the reality behind it: ‘The struggle for power is identical with the struggle for survival, and the improvement of the relative power position becomes the primary objective of the internal and external policy of states’, for ‘there is no real security in being just as strong as a potential enemy; there is security only in being a little stronger’. [72] Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics, pp. 18, 20. After 1945, even that ‘little’ would become an archaism. Leffler’s study of the Truman years can be read as a vast scholarly exfoliation of Tucker’s incisive conclusion twenty years earlier: the meaning of national security had been extended to the limits of the earth. [73] Tucker’s critique of this inflation was the more radical: ‘By interpreting security as a function not only of a balance between states but of the internal order maintained by states, the Truman Doctrine equated America’s security with interests that evidently went well beyond conventional security requirements. This conception cannot be dismissed as mere rhetoric, designed at the time only to mobilize public opinion in support of limited policy actions, though rhetoric taken seriously by succeeding administrations. Instead, it accurately expressed the magnitude of America’s conception of its role and interests in the world from the very inception of the Cold War’: The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy, p. 107. Conceptually, however, Leffler’s work retained a prudent ambiguity. ‘Fear and power’, he wrote—‘not unrelenting Soviet pressure, not humanitarian impulses, not domestic political considerations, not British influence’—were ‘the key factors shaping American policies’. [74] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, p. 51. Fear and power—the need for security, the drive for primacy: were they of equal significance, or was one of greater import than the other? The title and evidence of Leffler’s book point unambiguously one way; the judicious casuistics of its ending, the other.

In post-war Washington, a ‘preponderance of power’ was not simply, however, the standard goal of any major state—the pursuit, as Spykman put it, ‘not of an equilibrium, but a generous margin’ of strength. Objectively, it had another meaning, rooted in the unique character of the us as a capitalist state not only encompassing far the largest and most self-sufficient industrial economy in the world, but sheltering behind its oceans from any credible attack by rival or enemy. On the plane of Weltpolitik there thus emerged a wide gap between the potential power of the American state and the actual extent of American interests. Entry into the Second World War narrowed the distance and transformed the structure of the relationship between them. The Depression had made it clear to policy-makers that the us economy was not insulated from shock-waves in the world-wide system of capital, and the outbreak of war that autarkic trading blocs not only threatened exclusion of us capital from large geographical zones, but risked military conflagrations that could endanger the stability of bourgeois civilization at large. Thereafter, participation in the War yielded a double bonus: the American economy grew at a phenomenal rate under the stimulus of military procurements, gnp doubling between 1938 and 1945; and all three of its main industrial rivals—Germany, Britain, Japan—emerged from the conflict shattered or weakened, leaving Washington in a position to reshape the universe of capital to its requirements.

The elites of the Great Power that acquired this capacity were closer to business and banking than those of any other state of the time. The highest levels of policy-making in the Truman Administration were packed with investment bankers and corporate lawyers, leading industrialists and traders: Forrestal, Lovett, Harriman, Stettinius, Acheson, Nitze, McCloy, Clayton, Snyder, Hoffman—a stratum unlikely to overlook the interests of American capital in redesigning the post-war landscape. Free enterprise was the foundation of every other freedom. The us alone could assure its preservation and extension world-wide, and was entitled to the benefits of doing so. In the immediate aftermath of the war, when fears of a possible return to depression in the wake of demobilization were common, the opening of overseas markets to us exports—an idée fixe within the war-time State Department—was widely regarded as vital for future prosperity.

The Cold War altered this calculus. Economic recovery of Western Europe and Japan had always been seen as a condition of the free-trade system in which American goods could flow to consumer markets restored to solvency abroad. But the Red Army’s arrival on the Elbe and the pla’s crossing of the Yangzi imposed a different kind of urgency—and direction—on the building of a liberal international order. For the time being, the Open Door would have to be left somewhat ajar, European and Japanese markets more protected than American, or foreseen, if a totalitarian adversary of markets of any kind was to be defeated. There the preponderance of American power over American interests became for the first time fully functional, in the shape of an imperial hegemony. The us state would henceforward act, not primarily as a projection of the concerns of us capital, but as a guardian of the general interest of all capitals, sacrificing—where necessary, and for as long as needed—national gain for international advantage, in the confidence of ultimate pay-off.

It could afford to do so, because after the war, as before it, the measure of American power—now not simply economic, but military and political—was still far in excess of the reach of American banks and corporations. There was a lot of slack available for the concessions to subaltern states, and their ruling groups, essential for the construction of a hegemonic system. Their consent to the new order was not bought only with these: they had as much reason to fear the common enemy as the superordinate state that now became their shield. They too needed the armed force that is inseparable from any hegemony. A new kind of war was under way, requiring the strong nerves of a superpower. The strategic means and ends of the American empire to come were resumed by Forrestal: ‘As long as we can outproduce the world, can control the sea and can strike inland with the atomic bomb, we can assume certain risks otherwise unacceptable in an effort to restore world trade, to restore the balance of power—military power—and to eliminate some of the conditions which breed war’. [75] Letter to Chandler Gurney, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, 8 December 1947: Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries, New York 1951, p. 336. For Forrestal, the struggle with the Soviet Union was best described, more bluntly, as ‘semi-war’, rather than Cold War. In that agenda, restoring the balance of power belonged to the same lexicon of euphemisms as containment: as Spykman had noted, ‘states are only interested in a balance in their favour’. That was understood in Moscow as well as Washington, and in neither capital was there by then any illusion as to what it implied. Capitalism and communism were incompatible orders of society, as their rulers knew, each bent on bringing—sooner or later: sooner for the first, much later for the second—the other to an end. So long as the conflict between them lasted, the hegemony of America in the camp of capital was assured.

II

At the outset, the over-riding task for Washington was to make sure that the two advanced industrial regions that lay between the us and the ussr, and had detonated the war, did not fall into the hands of Communism. Their historically high levels of economic and scientific development made Western Europe and Japan the great prizes in any calculus of post-war power. Reconstruction of them under American guidance and protection was thus the top priority of containment. Stripped of their conquests, the former Axis powers needed to be rebuilt with us aid as prosperous bulwarks of the Free World and forward emplacements of American military might; and the former Allied powers, less damaged by the war, supported in their return to normal economic life. Western Europe, the larger of the two trophies, and vulnerable to land attack by the Red Army as insular Japan was not, required most attention and assistance. This was, Acheson explained to Congress, ‘the keystone of the world’. [76] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, p. 277.

In 1946–47 Britain became the proving ground for the abrupt alterations of American policy demanded by the Cold War. Financially bankrupted by its second struggle against Germany, the uk was forced in mid-1946 to submit to draconian conditions for an American loan to keep itself afloat: not only interest payments against which it protested, but the scrapping of import controls and full convertibility within a year. With American prices rising, the British import bill soared, plunging the country into a massive balance of payments crisis. The Attlee government was forced to suspend convertibility within a few weeks of introducing it. [77] ‘Truman’s signing of the British loan legislation on July 15, 1946 launched the pound sterling on an agonizing yearlong death march’, remarks Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods, p. 309—apt phrasing for the ruthlessness of the American diktat. Hull’s free-trade maximalism had overshot its imperial objectives, and become counter-productive. There was no point in ruining a former ally if it was to become a viable protectorate. A fortiori the more precarious countries of Western Europe, above all France and Italy, yet weaker economically than Britain, and less secure politically. By 1947, the dollar gap between Europe’s imports from the us and its ability to pay for them was yawning, and a change of course indicated. The Marshall Plan funnelled some $13 billion into counterpart funds for European recovery—controlled by us corporate executives and tied to purchase of American goods—dropping insistence on immediate abolition of tariffs and exchange controls, and instead bringing pressure to bear for fiscal retrenchment and European integration. [78] Also, of course, congenial electoral outcomes: ‘The Marshall Plan sent a strong message to European voters that American largesse depended on their electing governments willing to accept the accompanying rules of multilateral trade and fiscal conservatism’, while at the same time sparing them drastic wage repression that might otherwise have caused social unrest: McCormick, America’s Half-Century, pp. 78–9; Offner, Another Such Victory, p. 242. That the actual economic effect of Marshall aid on European recovery, well underway by the time it arrived, was less than advertised, has been shown by Alan Milward: ‘Was the Marshall Plan Necessary?’, Diplomatic History, April 1989, pp. 231–52. What was critical was its ideological, more than its material, impact. The corollary did not wait long. Marshall funds brought economic succour, nato a military buckler. The Atlantic Pact was signed in the spring of 1949.

Germany, divided between four occupying powers, with a third of the country under Soviet control, could not be handled in quite the same way. The Western zone, covering the Ruhr, was too valuable a holding to be foregone in any unification in which Moscow would have a say. In mid-1947 Washington made it clear that Russia could expect no reparations for the vast destruction visited on it by the Third Reich, while the us had been luxuriating in its war-time boom, and that the Western zone was scheduled for separation from the Eastern zone as a new German polity within Anglo-American jurisdiction. [79] See the definitive account in Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944–1949, Cambridge 1996, passim. The case that us reneging on the reparations promised the ussr at Yalta—not only eminently justifiable, but perfectly feasible—was the decisive act in launching the Cold War, is made by Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy pp. 127–32. In his view, the us refusal after mid-1947 to engage in normal diplomacy was the defining element of the Cold War, and must be seen as a ‘development of the concept of “unconditional surrender”, taken directly from the Civil War’, and proclaimed by Roosevelt at Casablanca: see ‘Liberty or Death: The Cold War as American Ideology’, in Westad, ed., Reviewing the Cold War, p. 83. More powerfully and clearly than any other writer, Stephanson has argued that ‘the Cold War was from the outset not only a us term but a us project’. For this, see his ‘Cold War Degree Zero’, in Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell, eds, Uncertain Empire, Oxford 2012, pp. 19–49. But even in reduced form as the Federal Republic, Germany remained an object of fear to its neighbours as Japan did not. Rebuilding it as a bastion of freedom thus required not just American aid and armour, but its integration into a European system of mutual security, within which German industrial might could help revive neighbouring economies, and German rearmament strengthen barriers to the Red Army. Washington was thus from the start a patron of every step towards European unity. Once its most favoured version—the military project of a European Defence Community—was blocked in France in 1954, it brought West Germany into nato. But economic integration remained a key objective, giving State and Defense no reason to quibble over the tariffs set up around the Common Market by the Treaty of Rome, despite protests from the Commerce Department. The imperatives of free trade had not been neglected as the Cold War set in—gatt was signed soon after the Marshall Plan, the Kennedy Round followed in due course—but were no longer the main front. Derogations from them had to be accepted in the interests of assuring the stability of capitalism in the major industrial centres at each end of Eurasia.

Yet more so in the other major prize of the peace. Japan, surrounded by sea, was secure against the risk of Soviet invasion. There, where the us was the sole occupying power, American political control was tighter and economic assistance less than in Europe. Post-war reforms were abruptly cancelled after a descent by Kennan had installed the Reverse Course, preserving the zaibatsu and reinstating the pre-war political class with its Class A war criminals, as was not possible in Germany. The Occupation, he remarked, could ‘dispense with bromides about democratization’. [80] Confident that he had ‘turned our whole occupation policy’, Kennan regarded his role in Japan as ‘the most significant constructive contribution I was ever able to make in government’: Gaddis, George F. Kennan, pp. 299–303. Miscamble—an admirer—comments: ‘Kennan evinced no real concern for developments in Japan on their own terms. He appeared not only quite uninterested in and unperturbed by the fact that the Zaibatsu had proved willing partners of the Japanese militarists but also unconcerned that their preservation would limit the genuine openness of the Japanese economy. He possessed no reforming zeal or inclination’: George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, Princeton 1992, p. 255. The pps paper Kennan delivered on his return from Tokyo called for the purge of war-time officials to be curtailed. The Dodge Plan was more a conventional stabilization programme than a replication of Marshall Aid, and the Security Treaty came a decade later than nato. But amid a much more devastated post-war landscape, where a major labour insurgency had to be crushed, Washington made no difficulty over a model of development based on a high degree of de facto protection and state intervention, at notable variance with the liberal economic order enforced elsewhere. Dirigisme was a small price to pay for immunity to revolution.

Overall, in this advanced industrial zone, American objectives met with complete success. From the outset, these were societies with business elites that were natural allies of the us, extensive middle classes and generally (if not invariably) moderate labour movements, with a pre-war past of parliamentary institutions and competitive elections. When post-war reconstruction released twenty years of fast economic growth and rising living standards, their transformation into thriving protectorates within the American ecumene was achieved with scarcely a hitch. In Japan, where the party that continues to rule the country was put together by the Occupier, significant quotients of coercion and corruption were initially needed to set up a satisfactory regime. In Western Europe, on the other hand, the amount of pressure required to lock local societies into the us security system was never great. Force determined the outcome only in the impoverished periphery of Greece, where the British had led the way for military counter-revolution. [81] From the outset, Roosevelt had backed Churchill’s dispatch of British troops in 1944 to crush the main body of the Greek resistance. Under Truman the country became the Very light for American advance to the Cold War, Acheson telling Congressmen that failure to maintain a friendly government in place might ‘open three continents to Soviet penetration. Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would affect Iran and all to the East’. Nothing less than the fate of ‘two thirds of the area of the world’ was at stake. Marshall was soon instructing the American embassy ‘not to interfere with the administration of Greek justice’, as mass execution of political prisoners proceeded. Twenty years later, with a junta in power in Athens, Acheson instructed locals that there was ‘no realistic alternative to your colonels’, since Greece was ‘not ready for democracy’: Lawrence Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943–1949, New York 1982, pp. 12–3, 71, 145; Gigantes, I Should Have Died, pp. 122–4. Elsewhere—principally Italy and France—covert American funding of parties, unions and periodicals helped the anti-communist cause. Military intervention, though on stand-by, was not required. [82] See, for such contingencies, Kennan’s cable to Acheson, 15 March 1948: ‘Italy is obviously key point. If Communists were to win election there our whole position in Mediterranean, and possibly Western Europe as well, would be undermined. I am persuaded that the Communists could not win without strong factor of intimidation on their side, and it would clearly be better that elections not take place at all than that the Communists win in these circumstances. For these reasons I question whether it would not be preferable for Italian Government to outlaw Communist Party and take strong action against it before elections. Communists would presumably reply with civil war, which would give us grounds for reoccupation of Foggia fields and any other facilities we might wish. This would admittedly result in much violence and probably a military division of Italy; but we are getting close to a deadline and I think it might well be preferable to a bloodless election victory, unopposed by ourselves, which would give the Communists the entire peninsula at one coup and send waves of panic to all surrounding areas’: Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, p. 99. The balance of domestic opinion in each country was favourable enough on its own. Fundamentally, the process was consensual: capitalist democracies freely accepting their place in an imperial order in which they prospered. It was not ‘empire by invitation’, in the fulsome phrase of a Norwegian admirer. [83] Geir Lundestad, The United States and Western Europe Since 1945, Oxford 2003, pp. 2–3, passim. The invitation came from, not to, the empire, and was the kind that could not be refused. Germany and Japan, defeated powers now stripped of their conquests, had little reason to do so: helped back on their feet by the us, and sheltering under its nuclear umbrella, they were freed to devote themselves single-mindedly to their economic miracles. The rulers of Britain and France, victor powers still in control of overseas possessions, would for a time have more autonomy, with its potential for friction. All four, along with lesser European states, were entitled to a measure of diplomatic tact, as auxiliaries in the battlefield of the Cold War. Command remained American.

III

The war was cold, but still a war. The ussr was not just a state whose rulers were committed to the political overthrow of capitalism. That the Soviet Union had been since the October Revolution. It was a formidable military power which had broken Hitler’s armies at a time when America was little more than a spectator in Europe, and now enjoyed an overwhelming advantage in conventional force ratios on the continent. The threat posed by the Red Army had to be deterred with a superior arsenal of destruction. With the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Washington appeared to possess that: a warning to Moscow even before the Pacific War had ended, which Truman hoped would cut off Russian entry into it. [84] There was never any question that America would use its atomic weapons on Japan, regardless of either military requirements or moral considerations: ‘The war had so brutalized the American leaders that burning vast numbers of civilians no longer posed a real predicament by the spring of 1945’. Two months before they were used, Stimson recorded a typical exchange with Truman: ‘I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength’. To this, the President ‘laughed [sic] and said he understood’. Kolko, The Politics of War, pp. 539–40. Jubilant at what Stimson called the ‘royal straight flush’ behind his hand at Potsdam, Truman sailed home on the battleship Augusta. ‘As the Augusta approached the New Jersey coast on August 6, Map Room watch officer Captain Frank Graham brought first word that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Ten minutes later a cable from Stimson reported that the bombing had been even more “conspicuous” than in New Mexico. “This is the greatest thing in history”, Truman exclaimed to Graham, and then raced about the ship to spread the news, insisting that he had never made a happier announcement. “We have won the gamble”, he told the assembled and cheering crew. The President’s behaviour lacked remorse, compassion or humility in the wake of nearly incomprehensible destruction—about 80,000 dead at once, and tens of thousands dying of radiation’: Offner, Another Such Victory, p. 92, who adds that the number of American deaths supposedly averted by the nuclear attacks on Japan, the standard rationale for them, would have been nowhere near Truman’s subsequent claim of 500,000 gi lives saved, or Stimson’s 1,000,000—perhaps 20,000: p. 97. For four years, the us had a monopoly of the atom bomb. Then in 1949, much earlier than American intelligence expected, came the first Soviet test of one. But the Pentagon had not been idle, and by 1952 had tested a hydrogen bomb. This time, the Soviet riposte was even quicker, with a rudimentary explosion in 1953. But the us was still far ahead—the device it exploded over Bikini the following year would be thirty times more destructive than the Soviet counterpart of 1955.

Nuclear weapons had to be not just developed, but delivered. There too, America maintained for twenty years a continuous lead, punctuated by repeated claims that it was falling behind. In the mid-fifties, the legend of a ‘bomber gap’ led to the construction of over two thousand strategic bombers at a time when Russia had no more than twenty. The launching of a Sputnik satellite by the ussr, quickly overtaken by more powerful us rockets in the space race, spurred a large expansion of military spending on the back of claims that Moscow had opened up a ‘missile gap’ in American defences, when there were just four Soviet prototype icbms, and the stock-pile of American warheads was nearly ten times that of the ussr. Soon thereafter, Pentagon development of mirv technology put the us ahead again. By the early seventies, when Russia had finally caught up with America in nuclear megatonnage and number, if not quality, of launchers, and was claiming strategic parity, us warheads were still treble its own.

Nor, of course, was the overall strategic balance ever simply a question of rockets. America was a maritime power in command of the world’s oceans: its fleets patrolling water-ways from the East China Sea to the Mediterranean, the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf, aircraft-carriers cresting the waves, nuclear submarines—five times more than Russia—gliding below them. On land and in the sky, before the war had even ended in 1945 the Joint Chiefs of Staff were planning for a global network of bases and military transit rights covering Latin America, North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, South Asia and the Far East, and by 1946 already had 170 active airfields in operation at overseas locations. [85] Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, pp. 56–9, 135, 171. The planners of 1945 had, of course, not only the ussr in mind. ‘In designating bases in the Pacific, for example, Army and Navy officers underscored their utility for quelling prospective unrest in Northeast and Southeast Asia and for maintaining access to critical raw materials’: p. 56. By the mid-sixties, the United States controlled some 375 major bases and 3,000 lesser military facilities around the globe, encircling the Soviet bloc on all sides including even the impassable Arctic. [86] C. T. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire, Oxford 2000, p. 9. A much poorer and more backward society, the ussr was by comparison a regional power, connected to a set of oppositional movements beyond its borders by a common ideology, where the us was a global power with client regimes in every continent. In the unequal rivalry between them, the vastly greater extent of its strategic empire could be borne at far lower cost by America, as a proportion of its wealth, than its much smaller version could be by Russia. The economic effort required to compete against such odds was enormous.

‘Without superior aggregate military strength, in being and readily mobilizable, a policy of “containment”—which is in effect a policy of calculated and gradual coercion—is no more than a policy of bluff’, declared the authoritative statement of us strategy in the high Cold War, drafted largely by Nitze in the spring of 1950, and calling for a tripling of the defence budget. But more was required than simply amassing military strength. The battle against the ussr was indivisibly political and ideological as well, in an existential struggle between ‘the marvelous diversity, the deep tolerance and the lawfulness of the free society’ and ‘the idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin’. At stake was nothing less than ‘the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic, but of civilization itself’. [87] ‘Our free society finds itself mortally challenged by the Soviet system. No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours, so implacable in its purpose to destroy ours, so capable of turning to its own uses the most dangerous and divisive trends in our own society, no other so skillfully and powerfully evokes the elements of irrationality in human nature everywhere’. nsc–68 was initially rejected by Nitze’s superiors as over-wrought, then ratified by Truman in the autumn, after the Cold War had finally exploded into fighting in the Far East. The document was top secret, an arcanum imperii only declassified a quarter of a century later. Politically, the priority was to ‘place the maximum strain on the Soviet structure of power and particularly on the relationships between Moscow and the satellite countries’, by waging ‘overt psychological warfare to encourage mass defections from Soviet allegiance’, and deploying ‘covert means of economic warfare and political and psychological warfare with a view to fomenting and supporting unrest and revolt in selected strategic satellite countries’. Covert operations against Russia had a pre-history under Wilson, who preferred clandestine to overt means of overthrowing Bolshevik power, and made ample use of them, bequeathing both methods and personnel to their renewal thirty years later. [88] Allen Dulles, one of the products of this experience, would later say: ‘I sometimes wonder why Wilson was not the originator of the Central Intelligence Agency’. His brother was equally keen on the dispatch of operatives to subvert Bolshevism. See Foglesong, America’s Secret War against Bolshevism, pp. 126–9, who provides full coverage of Wilson’s projects, ‘shrouded by a misty combination of self-deception and expedient fictions’: p. 295. Leffler’s exonerations of Wilson’s role in the Russian Civil War—‘he viewed the Bolsheviks with contempt. But he did not fear their power’—appeared before the publication of Fogelsong’s book, which makes short work of the conventional apologies for Wilson in the literature. Leffler’s version of these can be found in The Spectre of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1917–1953, New York 1994, pp. 8–9 ff. Set in place two years before nsc–68 by Kennan, [89] For Kennan’s role in introducing the term and practice of clandestine ‘political warfare’, and launching the para-military expeditions of Operation Valuable into Albania, see Corke, us Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy, pp. 45–6, 54–5, 61–2, 84; and Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, pp. 110–1: ‘Kennan approached covert operations with enthusiasm in 1948 and does not appear to have made apparent any sentiment on his part that covert operations would be limited in extent. Nor did he display any reservations concerning the extralegal character of much of what the opc would undertake’. For the recruitment of ex-Nazis to its work, see Christopher Simpson, Blowback, New York 1988, pp. 112–4. Kennan’s connexions to the underworld of American intelligence, foreign and domestic, went back to his time in Portugal during the war, and would extend over the next three decades, to the time of the Vietnam War. such operations escalated through the fifties, in due course becoming the public objective of a strategy of roll-back, depicted by Dulles as a tougher response to Moscow than containment. By then, the slogan was bluster. When revolts did break out in Eastern Europe—in East Germany and Hungary; later Czechoslovakia—they were left to their fate by Washington. Military encirclement of the Soviet bloc was practicable, political intervention was not. That left ideological warfare. The United States was defending not capitalism—the term was carefully avoided, as vocabulary of the enemy—but a Free World against the totalitarian slavery of communism. Radio stations, cultural organizations, print media of every kind, were mobilized to broadcast the contrast. [90] The front organizations set up by the cia for cultural penetration at home and abroad—the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the like—were another initiative of Kennan, an enthusiast for this kind of work: see Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, Cambridge, ma 2008 , pp. 25–8. In the advanced industrial societies of Western Europe and Japan, where the Cold War could be readily projected as a straightforward conflict between democracy and dictatorship, the battle of ideas was won without difficulty. But what of the world beyond them that was also declared free? What did freedom signify there?

5. perimeters

Securing the industrialized flanks of Eurasia against communism, and building a superior strike-capacity and set of strategic revetments against the Soviet Union, were the most urgent tasks for post-war planners in Washington, dominating their immediate attention. Each was achieved in short order. Though successive false alarms would punctuate the arms race, and shadow-boxing continue over Berlin, the lines of conflict drawn in 1947–48 were soon essentially static, an indefinite war of position setting in. From the start, however, American strategists were conscious that the overall battlefield was wider. Another landscape confronted them across vast territories in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These possessed no centres of major industry, had low levels of literacy, and were far more backward in social structure. At the same time, they were a treasury of the natural resources needed to run advanced economies and develop powerful military technologies—petroleum in the Middle East, tin and rubber in South-East Asia, uranium and cobalt in Central Africa, copper and bauxite in South America, and much more. They also contained the great majority of the world’s population. It was obviously critical to hold them.

That posed a more complicated set of problems than reviving Western Europe and Japan, or upgrading a nuclear arsenal. Looking out from the parapets of Washington as the Cold War set in, the panorama of what would later become the Third World was composed of four principal zones. In Asia, European colonial empires that had been shaken or over-run by Japan during the Second World War confronted nationalist movements—some predating the war, others galvanized by it—demanding independence. In the Middle East, weak semi-colonial states—sovereign but tied to former mandatory or supervisory powers—predominated. In Africa, European imperial authority had been little affected by the war, and nationalist movements were still modest. In Latin America, independent republics older than most European states were long-term us clients. Nowhere was there anything approaching the stable representative systems of what would become the First World.

Across this variegated scenery, it was the colonial empires of Britain and France—much the largest—that raised the trickiest issues for Washington. Both countries had been greatly weakened by the War, and were reminded without ceremony of their reduced economic circumstances by the us, which made it plain it would brook no return to their traditional pretensions. Within the Atlantic community over which America would henceforward preside, mustering the capitalist states of the West against the Soviet Union, they could find a place as favoured subordinates. But what was to happen to their imperial booty in the tropics? The us, though late in the day it had acquired colonies of its own in the Pacific and Caribbean, defined itself ideologically as an anti-colonial power, the ‘first new nation’ to gain independence from the Old World, and had no intention of allowing pre-war spheres of influence or control of raw materials to be restored. Its mastery of the Western hemisphere, where Latin America had long been a satellite zone of the United States, showed the way forward, in principle: formal independence of one-time colonies, informal reduction of them to us clients.

A political century later, however, that might not prove so easy. For now anti-colonialism, no doubt acceptable enough in itself, was all too often contaminated by confused ideas of anti-capitalism, leaving struggles for national liberation prey to communist infiltration. The task for American grand strategy was thus a delicate one. The European colonial powers were loyal auxiliaries of the us in the Cold War, which could not be brushed aside or humiliated too brutally. Moreover, where the nationalist movements they confronted were indeed led by communists, colonial counter-insurgency deserved the full backing of the us. On the other hand, where this threat had not yet crystallized, European imperialism risked, in clinging onto its possessions, provoking just what had to be averted, the radicalization of an eclectic nationalism into an insurrectionary socialism. To stem this danger, the colonial empires would have to pass away, and their legacies be developed under new management. That, inevitably, would require a great deal of intervention—economic, political and military—by the United States, to assure safe passage from European domination to American protection, and with it the common interests of the West.

In the process, the us would have to find effective agents of its design where it could. There was no point in being finicky about these. Oligarchs and dictators of one kind or another, many exceptionally ruthless, had long been staples of its Good Neighbour system in Latin America. Now colonial governors and viceroys, where still in place, might for a time have to be helped. Monarchs, police chiefs, generals, sheikhs, gangsters, latifundists: all were better than communists. [91] In his critique of Kennan’s ‘X’ article, Walter Lippmann had foreseen this landscape from the outset. ‘The Eurasian continent is a big place and the military power of the United States, though it is very great, has certain limitations which must be borne in mind if it is to be used effectively’, he observed dryly. ‘The counterforces which Mr X requires have to be composed of Chinese, Afghans, Iranians, Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Greeks, Italians, Austrians, of anti-Soviet Poles, Czechoslovaks, Bulgars, Yugoslavs, Albanians, Hungarians, Finns and Germans. The policy can be implemented only by recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets’: The Cold War: A Study in us Foreign Policy, New York 1947, pp. 11, 14. Democracy was certainly the ideal political system. Where it was firmly established, in the advanced industrial countries, markets were deepest and business was safest. But where it was not, in less developed societies, matters were otherwise. There, if elections were not proof against attempts on private property, they were dispensable. The Free World was compatible with dictatorship: the freedom that defined it was not the liberty of citizens, but of capital—the one common denominator of its rich and poor, independent and colonial, temperate and tropical regions alike. What was incompatible with it was not absence of parliaments or rights of assembly, but abrogation of private ownership of the means of production. But of the dangers of that there were plenty. In backward societies, not only was the spectre of communism abroad. In the bid to overcome underdevelopment, nationalism itself was subject to statist temptations—arbitrary confiscations and the like, destroying the confidence of foreign investors—against which guard had also to be maintained.

For operations on this uncertain terrain, the us developed a tool-box of policies and instruments specific to the colonial world and its sequels. Conventional land wars, precluded in the First World, lay at one end of the spectrum; purchase of leaders and suborning of opinion—helpful at the outset in the First World, too—at the other. [92] For Gramsci, corruption as a mode of power lay between consent and coercion. Logically enough, therefore, its use has spanned the entire arc of imperial action, across all zones of the Cold War. The worldwide role of the clandestine distribution of money in securing the American empire—Spykman’s ‘purchase’—has tended to be cast into the shadow by the role of covert violence. More discreet, its scale remains more secret than that of resort to force, but has been more universal, extending from the financing of parties of the post-war political establishment in Italy, France, Japan and cultural institutions throughout the West, to renting of crowds in Iran and rewards for officers in Latin America, subsidies for Afghan warlords or Polish dissidents, and beyond. A full reckoning of it remains, of course, to date impossible, given that even the overall budget of the cia, let alone its record of disbursements, is a state secret in the us. In between full mechanized violence and selective corruption, a wide range of other methods for enforcing its will would come to be employed: aerial bombardment, military coup, economic sanction, missile attack, naval blockade, honeycomb espionage, torture delegated or direct, assassination. Common to all these forms, across the spectrum, was resort in one way or another to coercion, in a war of movement shifting rapidly from one geographical theatre to the next. The widespread consent on which American imperial power could rely in the First World was missing in the Third. There, it would mostly have to be extorted or counterfeited. The us would not be without genuine friends and loyal relays among regional elites. There would be many of those. But where popular forces came into play, force and fraud were never far away.

II

The first challenge came in the Far East. There, the impact of the Japanese empire that had conquered Asia from Seoul to Mandalay—supplanting Western colonialism across South-East Asia, and battering the gmd regime in China close to destruction—had by the end of the Pacific War created a unique situation. Over the larger part of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, the most effective form of nationalism had become communism, mustered in resistance movements on the Allied side against Tokyo. Of these forces the most formidable, with the longest history and widest mass organization, was the ccp. Aware of the danger it posed to the gmd regime that Roosevelt had seen as a reliable support of the us, when the Pacific War came to an end the Truman Administration kept Japanese forces in China at the ready under its command; dispatched 50,000 marines to hold the Tianjin–Beijing area for Chiang Kai-shek, and another 100,000 troops to occupy Shandong; air-lifted half a million gmd soldiers to Manchuria to prevent it falling to the Communists; and over the next three years funnelled some $4 billion to prop up Chiang. American arms and assistance gave the gmd an initial edge, but war-time destruction and post-war corruption had rotted Chiang’s regime so far that the tide soon turned. As Communist advances from base areas close to the Soviet Union accelerated, direct American intervention in such a vast country looked too uncertain of outcome to be risked. The loss of China could not be stopped. To planners in Washington at the time, the victory of the Chinese Revolution, heavy a blow as it might be, was still strategically a side-show. [93] Kennan, whose opinions about China skittered wildly from one direction to another in 1948–49, could write in September 1951: ‘The less we Americans have to do with China the better. We need neither covet the favour, nor fear the enmity, of any Chinese regime. China is not the great power of the Orient’: Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 45. There was no doubt an element of sour grapes, along with blindness, in this pronouncement, at which Spykman might have smiled. What mattered was keeping control of the industrial heartlands of the West and the Far East. But Asian communism, unlike European, was on the march.

Korea, the oldest Japanese conquest, would left to itself have been the scene of a revolution before China. After the Japanese surrender, only allocation of the South to occupation by the us and the North by the ussr prevented a victory of Korean communism, the strongest native force to emerge after the war, throughout the peninsula. [94] Not least because of the 75,000–100,000 Korean veterans who fought alongside the pla in China during the Anti-Japanese and Civil Wars; the indigenous culture of the regime set up in the North; and the strength of post-war guerrillas in the South: see Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, New York 1997, pp. 199, 239–42 ff; Charles Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution 1945–1950, Ithaca 2003, pp. 241–4, passim. In November 1947, Kennan lugubriously concluded that whereas communists were ‘in their element’ in Korea, ‘we cannot count on native Korean forces to hold the line against Soviet expansion’: State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, vol. I, p. 135. Division of the country was one of Stalin’s two great timorous blunders in the last months of the War, its consequences more disastrous than his failure at Berlin. Without any necessity, as Khrushchev later complained, he acceded to an American request that us troops occupy the southern half of the country, when none were anywhere near it, and the Red Army could without breaking any agreement have strolled to Pusan. Naturally, Truman did not reciprocate the favour and allowed not so much as a Soviet military band into Japan. Five years later, the regime set up under Russian protection in the North, emboldened by the triumph of the pla and the semi-encouragement of Stalin, invaded the South in the hope of rapidly knocking over the unpopular counterpart set up by the us across the border. This was a direct assault on an American creation, in a more manageable space, with easy access from Japan. At Truman’s orders a counter-attack rolled the enemy up the length of the peninsula, before being checked just short of the Yalu by Chinese entry into the war, and driven back close to the original lines dividing the country, where stalemate set in. Frustrating though the final upshot proved, saturation bombing by the usaf long after a truce became possible destroyed most of the North, saving the South for what would eventually become a show-case of capitalist development, and kick-starting high-speed growth in Japan with a boom in military procurements. Diplomatically, as a us war waged under the nominal banner of the un, it laid down a marker for the future.

In the tropics, the threat came not in the form of regular armies in a civil war, but communist guerrilla forces newly sprung from the anti-Japanese resistance, fighting for independence against Western colonial powers restored to their pre-war possessions. Even where colonial evacuation was swift, they could persist. In the Philippines, rigged elections after independence installed a compliant regime, but the Huks were not put down till 1955. In Burma, White Flag Communists were still in the field twenty years after the British had left. The major dangers, however, lay where the European powers clung on. In Malaya, where tin and rubber wealth ruled out any quick colonial exit, Britain had no little difficulty crushing a Communist movement rooted only in the Chinese minority of the population. Most precarious of all was Indochina. There France was bogged down in a war to reconquer a colony where the Communist party led a national liberation struggle in Vietnam that was not only based squarely on the majority of the population, but could rely on substantial military assistance from the ccp across the border. Funded by Washington, French repression was a losing battle. After contemplating a nuclear strike to save the day, the us drew back, joining France and Britain at Geneva in 1954 to impose division of the country along Korean lines—the best of a bad job, for the time being.

Financing the French war had been cheaper for Washington, and domestically less conspicuous, than fighting it. But the upshot was plainly shakier. If the South had been kept out of the hands of the Vietminh, there was no dmz to seal it off from the North in future. The Republic proclaimed by Ho in 1945, before the French arrived back to reclaim it, had extended throughout the country, and enjoyed a nation-wide legitimacy that the dprk, founded after division in 1948, had never possessed. Elections in the South, supposedly scheduled at Geneva, had to be cancelled in view of the certain result, and a weak Catholic regime in Saigon propped up with funds and advisers against mounting guerrilla attacks by the Vietminh. There could be no question of letting it go under. As early as 1949, Kennan had urged American support ‘to ensure, however long it takes, the triumph of Indochinese nationalism over Red imperialism’. [95] Kennan, ‘United States Policy Towards South-East Asia’, pps 51, in Nelson, ed., The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, vol. III, p. 49. See, on this document, Walter Hixson, ‘Containment on the Perimeter: George F. Kennan and Vietnam’: Diplomatic History, April 1988, pp. 151–2, who italicizes the phrase above. In the same paper, Kennan explained that South-East Asia was a ‘vital segment in the line of containment’, whose loss would constitute a ‘major political rout, the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East and in a then critically exposed Australia’ [sic]. Kennan would later support Johnson’s expansion of the war after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, endorsing the massive bombing of the drv—Operation Rolling Thunder—in February 1965 as a weapon to force, Kissinger-style, the enemy to the negotiating table. Though increasingly critical of the war as damaging to the national interest, it was not until November 1969 that Kennan called for us withdrawal from Vietnam. At home, meanwhile, he wanted student protesters against the war to be locked up, and collaborated with William Sullivan, head of cointelpro, a long-time associate, in the fbi’s covert operations against student and black opponents of the government. See Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan and the History of the Cold War, New York 2009, pp. 221–2—a characteristic exercise in New Yorker schlock, by a staffer who is Nitze’s grandson, that sporadically contains material at variance with its tenor. Within a dozen years, Kennedy had dispatched American forces to help hold the fort. Under Johnson they rose to over half a million, the number sent to Korea. But despite more tonnage of high explosives dropped on Indochina than the us had unloaded during the whole of the Second World War, with a destructive force equivalent to 200 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs; routine massacres by us troops; systematic use of torture by cia interrogators and proxies; and some two to three million killed, the Vietnamese Revolution could not be broken. [96] For documentation, see Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, New York 2013, pp. 11–15, 79–80, 174–91, based on, among other sources, discovery of ‘the yellowing records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group’, a secret Pentagon task force, whose findings lay hidden for half a century, as well as extensive interview material. By the turn of the seventies, domestic opposition had made continuation of the war impossible, and once America withdrew, the regime in Saigon collapsed. It was the heaviest defeat of the United States in its history.

But no domino effect followed. British and French colonialism had perforce both enjoyed unstinting support in South-East Asia, once they were battling communism, the former with ultimate success, the latter—faced with a much more powerful movement—with failure requiring an American relay. For two reasons, Dutch colonialism was another matter. Relatively speaking, beside Britain or France, the Netherlands was a quantité négligeable on the European chequerboard, which could be given instructions without ceremony; while in the Dutch East Indies, unlike in Malaya or Vietnam, nationalist forces put down a communist uprising during the anti-colonial struggle. [97] The presence of communists in the anti-colonial struggle had been cause for acute alarm in Washington—Kennan deciding, in typical vein, that Indonesia was ‘the most crucial issue of the moment in our struggle with the Kremlin’. Its fall would lead to nothing less than ‘a bisecting of the world from Siberia to Sumatra’, cutting ‘our global east–west communications’, making it ‘only a matter of time before the infection would sweep westwards through the continent to Burma, India and Pakistan’: Miscamble, Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, p. 274. As Marshall’s Under-Secretary Lovett gratefully acknowledged, the nascent Indonesian Republic—still at war with the Dutch—was ‘the only government in the Far East to have crushed an all-out Communist offensive’. Six months later, nsc–51 determined it imperative to pressure the Dutch to hand over power to those who had shown ‘unexcelled skill’ in liquidating a revolt instigated by the Kremlin. Within two days Acheson told the Dutch that no Marshall Aid would be forthcoming unless they quit. [98] Robert McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1945–49, Ithaca 1971, pp. 242–4, 290–4. Independence did not, however, quell communism in Indonesia, which within another decade had become the strongest mass force in the country. The tolerance of the pki by Sukarno’s regime prompted an unsuccessful cia bid to overthrow it in the late fifties. But the growth of the party alarmed the hardened Indonesian military no less. Within a few months of us troops disembarking at Da Nang in 1965, the largest Communist party in the Free World was wiped out, half a million of its members and their families massacred by an army which needed little prompting from the cia to do its work, if some assistance in targeting pki leaders. The slaughter accomplished, the Suharto dictatorship received every benefaction from Washington.

The pogrom in Indonesia, a country with nearly three times the population of Vietnam, more than counterbalanced the setbacks in Indochina. With the destruction of the pki, the danger of revolutionary contagion in the zone where communism and nationalism had fused most directly was over. By the end of the war in Indochina, any threat to capital in South-East Asia had been defused. Where the Japanese armies had stopped, there was no comparable tinder-box. In the Subcontinent, the British could transfer power to national movements above suspicion of any radical temptations. In Pakistan, Washington had a staunch ally from the start. In India, Congress might make the occasional anti-American noise, but it could be counted on to give short shrift to communism.

III

The Middle East presented an altogether different scene. There the imprint of European imperialism was shallower. Egypt had been put under British tutelage in the late nineteenth century, though never annexed, and British protectorates managed from India stretched along the Gulf coast. But for the rest of the region the arrival of European colonialism came late, with the break-up of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War; and camouflaged under mandates, was brief. Largely untouched by the Second World War, by its aftermath the whole region was composed of formally independent states, except the British colony in Aden, all ruled by conservative monarchies or emirates of one kind or another, except for Syria, where French colonial rule had been republican, and Lebanon, which the French had succeeded in detaching from it as a separate unit on exiting. Popular risings in Iraq and Palestine had been crushed by the British before the war, nationalist currents had not been steeled in resistance movements during the war, and the influence of communism was generally modest. So far, so good. But the region was close to the Soviet Union, as South-East Asia had not been. It contained the largest oil reserves on earth, whose Saudi fields were early designated by Hull ‘one of the world’s greatest prizes’, [99] Hearden, Architects of Globalization, p. 124. Hull’s over-riding concern was to keep Saudi petroleum out of British hands: ‘the expansion of British facilities serves to build up their post-war position in the Middle East at the expense of American interests’. As early as February 1943 Roosevelt issued a finding that ‘the defence of Saudi Arabia’ was ‘vital to the defence of the United States’: see David Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of us Foreign Oil Policy, 1941–1954, Baltimore 1986: ‘the idea that the United States had a preemptive right to the world’s oil resources was well entrenched by World War II’: pp. 37, 208. Such was the spirit in which fdr told Halifax: ‘Persian oil is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it’s ours’. In August 1945, Ibn Saud granted Washington its first military base in the region, in Dhahran. But it was still British bases in the Cairo–Suez area that counted as the Cold War got under way. ‘From British-controlled airstrips in Egypt, us bombers could strike more key cities and petroleum refineries in the Soviet Union and Romania than from any other prospective base in the globe’: Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, p. 113. their ruler courted by Roosevelt on his way home from Yalta. It now further contained a state that owed its existence to Truman, who had steam-rollered a partition of Palestine through the un for the creation of Israel. But in Washington there was no overall scheme for the region. Roosevelt had made the Saudi connexion. Truman bequeathed the Israeli. In the cartography of American power, these were still scattered bivouacs between the great emplacements of Eurasia.

But if in the first phase of the Cold War, while not a blank zone, the Middle East had relatively low salience for the us, one country was a concern from the beginning. Iran was not only the world’s second largest petroleum producer. It abutted directly onto the ussr, and harboured the only communist movement in the region with a significant following in the aftermath of the war. There in 1951 the Mossadegh government nationalized the British-owned and controlled oilfields in Abadan. In London, Bevin wanted to dispatch the Royal Navy to repossess them. For Washington, this could only worsen matters, inflaming a Persian nationalism already subject to contagion from communism in the shape of the local Tudeh Party. [100] Kennan was indignant, arguing in 1952 that the us should give full support to a British expedition to recapture Abadan. Only ‘the cold gleam of adequate and determined force’ could save Western positions in the Middle East. ‘Abadan and Suez are important to the local peoples only in terms of their amour propre . . . To us, some of these things are important in a much more serious sense, and for reasons that today are sounder and better and more defensible than they ever were in history’, he wrote to Acheson. ‘To retain these facilities and positions we can use today only one thing: military strength, backed by the resolution and courage to use it’: Mayers, Kennan and the Dilemmas of us Foreign Policy, pp. 253–5. Kennan went on to deplore the Republican Administration’s opposition to the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, and applaud its landing of troops in the Lebanon. The solution was not gunboats, but covert action. In 1953, the cia and mi6 orchestrated a military coup to oust Mossadegh, installing in power the young Pahlavi Shah, whose regime made short work of the Tudeh. [101] Of the coup, the cia could record in its secret history of the operation: ‘It was a day that should never have ended. For it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is doubtful if any other can come up to it’: see Lloyd Gardner, Three Kings: The Rise of an American Empire in the Middle East after World War II, New York 2009, p. 123. For a recent neo-royalist attempt, by a former functionary of the Shah, to downplay the role of the cia in the coup, on the grounds that Mossadegh had aroused opposition in the Shi’a hierarchy, see Darioush Bayandor, Iran and the cia: The Fall of Mossadeq Revisited, New York 2010, and successive rebuttals in Iranian Studies, September 2012. For its services, the Eisenhower Administration forced a reluctant Whitehall to give the American oil majors a cut of the British stake in Abadan.

Where there was no direct communist threat on the ground, there was less need for collaboration with older empires, whose interests might conflict with us objectives. Three years later, the potential for tension between these exploded when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. The us had no time for Nasser, who had rejected its insistence that he enter secret talks with Israel and give Moscow a cold shoulder. But it feared that any overt military assault to regain the Canal might align the entire Third World against the West in its battle with the Soviet Union. [102] Should Britain and France send in troops, Eisenhower cautioned Eden on September 2, ‘the peoples of the Near East and of North Africa and, to some extent, of all of Asia and all of Africa, would be consolidated against the West to a degree which, I fear, could not be overcome in a generation and, perhaps, not even in a century, particularly having in mind the capacity of the Russians to make mischief.’ Counselling patience, us policy-makers believed the crisis could be resolved by diplomacy and covert action. ‘The Americans’ main contention’, Eden remarked on September 23, ‘is that we can bring Nasser down by degrees rather on the Mossadegh lines’: Douglas Little, ‘The Cold War in the Middle East: Suez Crisis to Camp David Accords’, in Leffler and Westad, eds, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. II, Cambridge 2010, p. 308. Furious that Eden ignored his warnings, Eisenhower brought the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt to an abrupt halt by cutting off support for sterling, leaving London high and dry. The real position of its European allies within the post-war American order, normally enveloped in the decorous fictions of Atlantic solidarity, was made brutally plain.

But there was a cost to the operation. Having defied the West, Nasser’s prestige in the Arab World soared, fanning a more radical nationalism in the region, with fewer inhibitions about close ties with the ussr. After getting rid of Mossadegh, the us had sought to create a cordon sanitaire against communism with the Baghdad Pact, putting together Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. In 1958 the scheme collapsed with an Iraqi Revolution that overthrew the monarchy, and brought to power a military regime well to the left of Nasser’s, supported by what was now the strongest communist movement in the Middle East. In response, the us landed 14,000 marines in the Lebanon to defend its Maronite President from the spectre of subversion. Five years later came the putsch that first brought the Baath to power in Baghdad, of which the cia was given advance knowledge, supplying in return lists of Iraqi communists to be killed in the slaughter that followed it. None of the military regimes of the time—Syria was now under Baath control too—could be trusted by Washington, however, since no matter how they treated their own communists, they were no friends of free enterprise or foreign investment, and all alike not only welcomed arms and assistance from Moscow, but menaced reliable neighbouring dynasties.

In this unsatisfactory scene, the Israeli blitz of June 1967, wiping out the Egyptian air force in a few hours and seizing Sinai, the Golan Heights and the West Bank in less than a week, struck like a political thunderbolt. Nasser, whose bungled support for a Yemeni republic that was feared by the Saudi monarchy had long been an irritant, was now a busted flush in the Arab world, while Israel emerged as overwhelmingly the strongest military power in the region. After the Tripartite attack on Egypt of 1956, France—along with Britain—had helped Israel to become a clandestine nuclear power, as part of the secret pact between the three that launched the Suez expedition, and for a time Paris had been Israel’s closest ally in the West. But the spectacular success of the Six-Day War altered all calculations in the us, where the Jewish community was buoyed with new enthusiasm for the homeland of Zionism, and the Pentagon saw a prospective regional partner of formidable punitive strength. Henceforward, American policy in the Middle East pivoted around an alliance with Israel, confident that the Arab oil kingdoms would have to put up with it.

There remained the problem of the flow of Soviet arms and personnel to Egypt and Syria, stepped up after the Arab disaster of 1967, and viewed in Washington as the spearhead of Russian penetration of the Middle East. To win American favour, Sadat expelled all Soviet advisors from Egypt in 1972, and a year later launched a joint attack on the Israeli gains of 1967 with Syria and Jordan. This time a massive airlift of us tanks and aircraft saved the day for Israel, whose counter-attack was only stopped from crossing the Canal and annihilating the Egyptian army by last-minute American dissuasion. The 1973 war yielded a near-perfect result for Washington, demonstrating that no amount of Soviet armour could compete with combined American and Israeli capabilities in the region, and putting the Egyptian military regime into its pocket as henceforward a us dependent.

IV

Remote from the Soviet Union, clear of European empires, unscathed by the War, Latin America was home territory for Washington, the province of the Monroe doctrine and Olney’s famous corollary: ‘The United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition’, since ‘its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation’. From the last years of the nineteenth century to the Great Depression, the us had dispatched troops and warships to crush strikes, put down risings, oust rulers or occupy territories in the Caribbean and Central America, with uninhibited regularity. Since then there had been no obvious call to do so. The us had made sure of the allegiance of a Latin American cortège—numerically the largest single bloc—in the un before it was even founded, with the Act of Chapultepec in early 1945. The Rio Treaty of Inter-American Defence followed in 1947, capped by the formation of the Organization of American States, headquarters in Washington and expressly devoted to the fight against subversion, in 1948. Two years later Kennan, warning against ‘any indulgent and complacent view of Communist activities in the New World’, made it clear that ruthless means might be required to crush them: ‘We should not hesitate before police repression by the local government. This is not shameful since the Communists are essentially traitors’, he told us ambassadors to South America summoned to hear him in Rio. ‘It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists’. [103] See Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, New York 1993, p. 109. On getting back to Washington, Kennan hammered his message home: ‘Where the concepts and traditions of popular government are too weak to absorb successfully the intensity of the communist attack, then we must concede that harsh measures of repression may be the only answer; that these measures may have to proceed from regimes whose origins and methods would not stand the test of American concepts of democratic procedures; and that such regimes and such methods may be preferable alternatives, and indeed the only alternatives, to communist success’: see Roger Trask, ‘George F. Kennan’s Report on Latin America (1950)’, Diplomatic History, July 1978, p. 311. The Southern hemisphere, in Kennan’s view, was an all-round cultural disaster zone: he doubted whether there existed ‘any other region of the earth in which nature and human behaviour could have combined to produce a more unhappy and hopeless background for the conduct of life’.

At the time, with the notable exception of Perón’s regime in Argentina, virtually all Latin American governments, a medley of conservative autocracies of one kind or another—traditional dictators, neo-feudal oligarchies, military juntas, single-party rule—with a sprinkling of narrowly based democracies, were more or less congenial helpmeets of us business and diplomacy. Living standards, however low for the majority of the population, were nevertheless on the whole somewhat higher than in South-East Asia or the Middle East. In the first years of the Cold War, the region offered fewer reasons for alarm than any other in the post-colonial world.

The election of a left-wing government in Guatemala, nationalizing land-holdings of the United Fruit Company and legalizing the local Communist Party, changed this. Mounting a land invasion by mercenaries, backed by a naval blockade and bombing from the air, the cia ousted the Arbenz regime in 1954, the New York Times exulting that this was ‘the first successful anti-Communist revolt since the war’. [104] In 1952, Truman had already approved a plan developed by Somoza after a visit to the President for a cia operation to overthrow Arbenz, countermanded at the last minute by Acheson, probably out of fear it would fail: Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States 1944–1955, Princeton 1992, pp. 228–31. Richard Helms, promoted to Chief of Operations at the cia the following year, explained to Gleijeses: ‘Truman okayed a good many decisions for covert operations that in later years he said he knew nothing about. It’s all presidential deniability’: p. 366. Six years later, when the victory of the Cuban Revolution brought expropriation of American capital to the doorstep of the us, [105] At which the overthrow of the regime in Havana rapidly became ‘the top priority of the us government’, in the younger Kennedy’s words: ‘All else is secondary. No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.’ Kennan, consulted by the elder Kennedy before his inauguration, approved an invasion of Cuba, provided it was successful: Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, p. 172. the Kennedy Administration attempted without success a larger cia invasion to crush it, and then imposed a naval blockade to stop Soviet missiles arriving in the island, whose withdrawal had to be exchanged for abandonment of further military action against Cuba. With this, Latin America moved to the top of the Cold War agenda in Washington. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, guerrilla movements sprang up across the continent, while the us touted an Alliance for Progress as the liberal alternative to their radical goals, and armed counter-insurgency campaigns in one country after another—Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala—to root them out.

But the traditional forces of the Latin American right—the army, the church, latifundists, big business—were quite capable of taking the initiative to destroy any threat from the left, with or without it taking up arms, in the knowledge that they could count on the blessing, and where need be, material backing of the us. In 1964, the Brazilian military staged the first of the counter-revolutionary coups against an elected government that swept the major societies of the continent, while the aircraft carrier Forrestal and supporting destroyers hovered offshore in case help was required. [106] McGeorge Bundy to the nsc, 28 March 1964: ‘The shape of the problem in Brazil is such that we should not be worrying that the military will react; we should be worrying that the military will not react’: Westad, Global Cold War, p. 150. On April 1, Ambassador Lincoln Gordon could teletype Washington that it was ‘all over, with the democratic rebellion already 95 per cent successful’, and the next day celebrate ‘a great victory for the free world’, without which there could have been ‘a total loss to the West of all South American Republics’. For these and other particulars of ‘Operation Brother Sam’, see Phyllis Parker, Brazil and the Quiet Intervention, 1964, Austin 1979, pp. 72–87. A year later, us marines waded into the Dominican Republic to repel an imaginary communist danger, Brazilian troops returning the favour in their train. In Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, whether popular hopes for an alternative order took shape in urban guerrillas, populist labour movements, socialist or communist parties, all were crushed by ferocious military dictatorships, acting with the support of the us. By the mid-seventies, the Cuban Revolution had been isolated and the continent was armour-plated against any further challenge to capital.

As a theatre of the Cold War, Latin America saw the widest breadth of political forms and energies pitted against the American imperial order, and least connected—ideologically or materially—with the distant Soviet state. To Cuba, Moscow supplied an economic life-line without which it could scarcely have survived, but strategically it was at variance with Havana, deploring its revolutionary activism throughout. The letter of the Olney Corollary no longer held—the juntas in Brasília or Santiago were not mere subjects of the us, and Cuba could not be retaken. But its logic was still in place. To all appearances, in the first quarter of a century of the Cold War, nowhere was American victory so complete.

6. recalibration

In the history of the post-war American empire, the early seventies was a watershed. For twenty years after the onset of the Cold War, the alternation of incumbents in the White House scarcely affected the continuity of the strategy laid out in nsc–68. At the turn of the seventies, however, deep changes in the environment of us global power coincided with a presidency less committed to the pious fictions and policy fixations of its predecessors, capable of pursuing the same ultimate ends with notably more flexible—if also, where required, yet more ruthless—means. As no American ruler before or after him has been, Nixon was an innovator. But his departures from the handbook for running the Free World came from the opportunities and constraints of the conjuncture. On all three fronts of us grand strategy, the years 1971–73 saw dramatic changes.

The first came where everything had hitherto gone most smoothly. The reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan, the highest American priority after the war, had been a resounding success. But after two decades, the former Axis powers were now—thanks to us aid, access to us markets and borrowing of us technology, combined with reserve armies of low-wage labour and more advanced forms of industrial organization than the us possessed—out-competing American firms in one branch of manufacturing after another: steel, auto, machine tools, electronics. Under this German and Japanese pressure, the rate of profit of us producers fell sharply, and a us trade deficit opened up. [107] For this development, the indispensable account is Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, London and New York 2006, pp. 99–142. Compounding this relentless effect of the uneven development of capitalism during the long post-war boom were the costs of the domestic reforms with which Nixon, like Johnson, sought to consolidate his electorate and tamp down opposition to the war in Vietnam, itself a further drain on the us Treasury. The upshot was escalating inflation and a deteriorating balance of payments. To cap matters, France—under De Gaulle and Pompidou, the one Western state to regain, for a season, real political independence from Washington—had started to attack the dollar with increasing purchases of gold. The latitude of American power over American interests, the remit of the imperial state beyond the requirements of national capital, was for the first time under pressure.

Nixon’s response was draconian. The principles of free trade, the free market and the solidarity of the free world could not stand in the way of the national interest. Wasting no time on diplomatic consultation, in a four-minute television address to a domestic audience he jettisoned the Bretton Woods system, cutting the link of the dollar to gold, imposed a tariff surcharge on all imports, and decreed a wage and price freeze. In the short run, devaluation restored the competitive punch of us exporters, and in the long run, delinkage of the dollar from gold gave the us state greater freedom of economic manoeuvre than ever before. The real structure of the liberal international order projected in 1943–45 stood momentarily revealed. But this impressive success in the exercise of national egoism could only mask for a limited spell the irreversible alteration in the position of the United States in the world economy, of which Nixon was aware.

A month before delivering the American quietus to Bretton Woods, Nixon had startled the world with another, no less drastic reorientation of us policy, the announcement that he would shortly be travelling to Beijing. The victory of the Chinese revolution had been the worst blow Washington had ever suffered in the Cold War. Regarding the ccp as a more bitter enemy even than the cpsu, it had refused to recognize Mao’s regime, maintaining that the real China was its ward in Taiwan, and ignoring the split between Beijing and Moscow that became public in the early sixties and worsened steadily thereafter. Nixon now became determined to capitalize on it. Still mired in Vietnam, where the drv was receiving assistance from both Russia and China, his aim was to increase his leverage on both powers, playing them off against each other to secure a settlement that would preserve the South Vietnamese state and American military credibility in South-East Asia. In February 1972 his cordial reception by Mao in Beijing marked a diplomatic revolution. The two leaders agreed on the threat posed by the Soviet Union, laying the basis for a tacit alliance against it. Having obtained this understanding, Nixon proceeded to Moscow three months later, where—reminding Brezhnev of the potential dangers from China—he signed the first salt agreement, amid much celebration of détente. The treaty did not halt the arms race, and the atmospherics of détente were of less effect than intended in neutralizing domestic opposition to the war in Indochina. But the basic strategic gain of Nixon’s turn was enormous, and would last. The Communist world was no longer just divided. Henceforward China and Russia would compete for privileged relations with the United States.

What this transformation of the dynamics of the Cold War could not deliver was Nixon’s immediate objective, a stalemate in Vietnam. Though Moscow and Beijing both urged another Geneva-style arrangement on Hanoi, they were not in a position to impose one. A further massive American bombing campaign failed to buckle the drv. In January 1973, accords had to be signed in Paris for a withdrawal of us troops from Vietnam in sixty days, sealing the fate of the southern regime. But the inglorious end of the long American intervention in Vietnam was rapidly recouped elsewhere. In September the Allende regime, the most advanced, freely elected socialist experience in South America, from whose example capital had most to fear, and whose fall Nixon had demanded from the start, was destroyed by the Chilean military. [108] The Director of the cia cabled its station chief in Santiago on 16 October 1970: ‘It is firm and continuous policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October, but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure towards this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that usg and American hand be well hidden.’ See Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, New York 2003, p. 64. In dealing with Chile, Kissinger was true to Kennan’s recommendations two decades earlier. In 1971, Kennan remarked: ‘Henry understands my views better than anyone at State ever has’, and eight days after the coup in Chile wrote to Kissinger, who had just become Secretary of State, ‘I could not be more pleased than I am by this appointment’: Gaddis, George F. Kennan, p. 621. A month later, the Egyptian army was routed by the Israeli offensive across the Canal, and the Arab nationalism embodied by Nasser’s regime was finished, leaving the United States diplomatic master of the Middle East.

II

Nixon’s departure was followed, after a brief interim, by a tonal and tactical reversion to more standard styles of American Weltpolitik. In a typical bout of domestic positioning, détente soon came under Democratic attack as an unprincipled sell-out to Moscow. In late 1974 the Jackson–Vanik amendment blocked the granting of mfn status to the ussr for obstructing Jewish emigration from Russia to Israel. A year later, salt ii was dead in the water. Nixon had not held high enough the banners of the Free World—in particular the cause of human rights, picked out by Jackson and blazoned by Carter in his campaign for the White House, which henceforward became an ideological staple of all regimes in Washington. The Cold War was not to be waged as a mere power-political contest. It was a moral-ideological battle for civilization, as Nitze had seen.

Strategically, little altered. Nixon’s legacy was not discarded, but substantively consolidated. There would be no return to benevolent American indifference—let alone assistance—to the economic rise of Japan or Germany. The First World had become a clear-cut arena of inter-capitalist competition in which us predominance was at stake, to be assured where necessary without compunction. Nixon had cut the dollar free from gold, and shown scant respect for laissez-faire totems at home or abroad, but the oil shock of 1973 had compounded the underlying economic downturn in the us with a steep burst of inflation, which the floating exchange rates instituted at the Smithsonian in 1971 did little to improve. By the end of the decade the temporary boost to American exports from the 1971 devaluation was exhausted, and the dollar dangerously low. With Volcker’s arrival at the Fed under Carter, there was an abrupt change of course. Interest rates were driven sky-high to stamp out inflation, attracting a flood of foreign capital, and putting massive pressure on dollar-denominated Third World debts. But once the dollar strengthened again—us manufacturers paying the price, the trade deficit widening—the Reagan Administration did not stand on ceremony. After ruthless arm-twisting, Japan and Germany were forced to accept enormous revaluations of the yen and the Mark to make American exports competitive once more. [109] Brenner, Economics of Global Turbulence, pp. 190, 206–7; The Boom and the Bubble, London and New York 2002, pp. 60–1, 106–7, 122–3, 127. The Plaza Accords of 1985, clinching the relative economic recovery of the us in the eighties, left no doubt who was master in the liberal international order, and intended to remain so.

Beyond the First World, Nixon’s two other great legacies each required completion. In the Far East, China had been wooed into an unspoken entente with America, but there were still no diplomatic relations between the two states, Washington maintaining formal recognition of the gmd regime in Taiwan as the government of China. In the Middle East, Israel had been handed victory, and Egypt saved from disaster, but a settlement between the two was needed for the us to capitalize fully on its command of the situation. Within a few months of each other, unfinished business in both theatres was wrapped up. In the autumn of 1978 Sadat and Begin signed a us-monitored agreement at Camp David returning Israeli-occupied Sinai to Egypt in exchange for the abandonment by Egypt of the allies who had fought with it, whose territories Israel continued to occupy, and of empty promises to the Palestinians, promptly discarded. A deluge of us military aid to both countries followed, as henceforward interconnected, if incommensurate ramparts of the American system in the Middle East: Israel an ally more than capable of independent action, Egypt a pensionary incapable of it.

In the Far East, China was easier game. Some tractations were needed to finesse the problem of Taiwan, but once Beijing made no case of continued American commercial and material support for the island, provided Washington withdrew recognition of the roc, the way was clear for the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the two powers on the first day of 1979. Two weeks later, Deng Xiaoping arrived in the us for a tour of the country and talks at the White House, aiming not only for a compact with America as a strategic counter-balance to Russia, as Mao had done, but integration into the global economic system headed by the us—an Open Door in reverse—which Mao had not. The entrance ticket he offered was a Chinese attack on Vietnam to punish it for having overthrown the Pol Pot regime, a protégé of Beijing, in Cambodia. The us, still smarting from its humiliation in Indochina, was happy to accept it. The Chinese invasion of Vietnam did not go well, and had to be called off with heavy casualties and little to show for it. But it served its political purpose, blooding China as a reliable us partner in South-East Asia, where the two powers joined forces to sustain the Khmer Rouge along the Thai border for another dozen years, and entitling the prc to the full benefit of American investors and American markets. Carter—human rights a better magic cloak for Pol Pot than Chicago economics for Pinochet—had proved an effective executor of Nixon.

III

Further strengthening of positions in the Middle and Far East was no guarantee of security elsewhere in the Third World. The late seventies and eighties saw not a contraction, but an expansion of danger-zones for the us into areas hitherto little touched by the Cold War. [110] Though, of course, never entirely out of sight in Washington. There is no better illustration of how imaginary is the belief that Kennan’s doctrine of containment was geographically limited, rather than uncompromisingly global, than pps 25 of March 1948 on North Africa, which—after remarking that ‘the people of Morocco can best advance under French tutelage’—concluded: ‘The development of the us into a major world power together with the wars that have been fought by this country to prevent the Atlantic littoral of Europe and Africa from falling into hostile hands, the increasing dependency of England upon the us and the situation brought about by the rise of air power and other technological advances, have made it necessary that a new concept should be applied to the entire group of territories bordering on the Eastern Atlantic at least down to the “Bulge” of Africa. The close interflexion of the French African territories bordering on the Mediterranean must also be considered an integral part of this concept. This would mean, in modern terms, that we could not tolerate from the standpoint of our national security the extension into this area of any system of power which is not a member of the Atlantic community, or a transfer of sovereignty to any power which does not have full consciousness of its obligations with respect to the peace of the Atlantic order’: Anna Kasten Nelson, ed., State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, vol. II, pp. 146–7. Africa had long been the continent least affected by it. The Algerian Revolution, the one mass armed struggle of the late fifties and early sixties, had caused some anxiety, but the rapid capture of power by an introverted military regime with few ideological ambitions allayed these. Elsewhere, there was no comparable scale of European settlement, with the exception of the white racist stronghold of South Africa, which could look after itself. In between, French and British colonies run by a handful of administrators, undisturbed by any war-time radicalization, covered most of the vast sub-Saharan spaces. There, decolonization could be handled without much difficulty, with a controlled transfer of power to generally moderate elites still highly dependent, materially and culturally, on the former metropoles.

There were two other colonial powers, however, of lesser size and self-confidence, who in opposite ways flubbed this process, putting Washington on the alert. Belgium, having for years made no effort to prepare a suitable post-colonial landing in the Congo, granted it independence overnight in 1960. When amid chaotic conditions following a mutiny of the ex-colonial gendarmerie against its white officers, Lumumba—elected leader of the country—appealed for Soviet aid, the cia was instructed to poison him. After this came to nothing, the us—in effective control of the un operation ostensibly sent to stabilize the situation—orchestrated a seizure of power by troops under Mobutu, a cia asset, ensuring Lumumba’s death par pouvoir interposé, and the dictatorship in the Congo of their parachutist commander for thirty years. [111] The un bureaucracy and the us secret state were in full agreement, Hammarskjöld opining that ‘Lumumba must be broken’, his American deputy Cordier that Lumumba was Africa’s ‘Little Hitler’, and Allen Dulles cabling the cia station chief in Leopoldville: ‘In high quarters here it is held that if [Lumumba] continues to hold office, the inevitable result will at best be chaos and at worst pave the way to Communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous consequences for the prestige of the un and for the interests of the free world generally. Consequently we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective.’ In Washington, Eisenhower gave a green light to the disposal of Lumumba, and an emissary was dispatched to poison him. The best documentation of his fate is Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, London and New York 2001, pp. 17–20 ff and passim. The Congo operation was much more important in setting a benchmark for subsequent use of the un as an instrument of American will than its function as an international fig-leaf for the war in Korea.

Portugal, itself a dictatorship dating back to fascist times, whose identity as a European power was inseparable from its African empire, had no intention of relinquishing its colonies, and by outlasting France and Britain on the continent for over a decade, created the conditions for a radicalized anti-imperialism looking for aid and inspiration to the ussr, otherwise present elsewhere only in South Africa. When, after a dozen years of armed struggle, a metropolitan revolution finally brought decolonization, the richest Portuguese possession of Angola was divided between three movements for independence, two of the right, backed by the Congo and the prc, and one of the left, backed by Russia. Alarmed at the prospect of this last winning the contest between them, in 1975 Washington supplied its opponents with funds, weapons and officers in a covert cia operation from the north, while inciting South Africa to invade the colony from the south. Before Luanda could fall, Cuban troops ferried from the Caribbean in Soviet transports arrived in strength, clearing the north and obliging the South African column to withdraw. For the us, defeat in Angola was consignment of the country to communism, and in the eighties it stepped up support for the rival force remaining in the field, led by Pretoria’s ally Savimbi. A second South African invasion, assisted by Savimbi, was halted thirteen years later by another Cuban expedition, larger than the first. In Angola, by the time Reagan left office, America had been worsted. [112] See the fine account in Westad, The Global Cold War, pp. 218–46, 390–2.

The only African arena to have escaped European colonization prior to the First World War, and then been only briefly conquered after it, predictably became the other proving ground of the last phases of the Cold War, as a feudal kingdom overdue for explosion. The Ethiopian revolution that toppled the archaic local dynasty in 1974 became steadily more radical as the group of junior officers who took power underwent a series of convulsive purges, ending in a regime that not only called for Soviet military assistance, but—rather than talking vaguely of African socialism, as many others had done—proclaimed the goal of creating a society based on scientific socialism, Soviet-style. Imperial Ethiopia had, traditionally, been a plaque tournante of American strategic dispositions in the Horn. When it appeared to have capsized into communism, the us instigated an invasion by Somalia in 1977 to reclaim the Ogaden region. As in Angola, the incursion was beaten back by a combination of Cuban troops and much more Soviet armour and oversight, a bitter pill for Washington to swallow. At the helm of the nsc, Brzezinski declared the death of détente in the sands of the Ogaden. Success in the Congo had confirmed the value of the un as a cover for us operations in the Third World. Setbacks in Angola and Ethiopia offered lessons in how better to run proxy wars.

Across the Atlantic, South America had been so scoured of threats to capital by the late seventies that the military regimes which had stamped them out could withdraw, their historical task accomplished, leaving democratic governments in place, safe from any temptation of radical change. Central America, however, lay in a different political time-zone. Long a political backwater, home to some of the most benighted tyrants on the continent, its brief episodes of insurgency quickly snuffed out, most of the region had remained quiet during the period of high revolutionary activism to the south. The overthrow by Sandinista rebels in 1979 of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, whose rule under American patronage dated from the time of Roosevelt, brought the country into the full glare of us counter-insurgency. [113] Somoza, to whom Stimson had taken a liking on a visit during the second us occupation of Nicaragua in 1927, became the first head of the National Guard created by the Marines as Roosevelt took office. After murdering Sandino in 1934, he was in due course welcomed to Washington in unprecedented style by the President: ‘Plans called for Roosevelt, for the first time since entering office in 1933, to leave the White House to greet a chief of state. The vice-president, the full cabinet, and the principal leaders of Congress and the judiciary were all scheduled to be present for the arrival of Somoza’s train. A large military honour guard, a twenty-one gun salute, a presidential motorcade down Pennsylvania Avenue, a state dinner, and an overnight stay at the White House were all part of the official itinerary’, with ‘over five thousand soldiers, sailors and Marines lining the streets and fifty aircraft flying overhead. Government employees released from work for the occasion swelled the crowds along the procession’: Paul Coe Clark, The United States and Somoza: A Revisionist Look, Westport 1992, pp. 63–4. The Nicaraguan revolutionaries were closely linked to Cuba, and in 1981 their victory set off an insurrection in El Salvador that developed into a civil war lasting a decade, and a briefer uprising in Guatemala—where guerrillas were an older phenomenon—broken by all-out repression. Local oligarchs and officers reacted to the wave of regional radicalization with death-squads, disappearances, torture, massacres. In these two countries, the Carter Administration supplied American training and assistance. Reagan, no less determined to hold the line in El Salvador and Guatemala, decided to tackle the root of the problem in Nicaragua itself.

From 1982 onwards, the us assembled an army of counter-revolutionaries, well funded and equipped, in Honduras and Costa Rica to destroy the Sandinista regime. Cross-border raids and attacks multiplied, with widespread sabotage of communications, destruction of crops and economic installations, and assassination of civilians, in a campaign under direct American control and design. Without being able to hold large swathes of territory, the Contras put the country under siege. Privation and fatigue gradually weakened popular support for the Sandinista government, until at the end of the decade it agreed to elections if the Contras were stood down, and was defeated by the candidate of the State Department, who alone could deliver an end to the American embargo impoverishing the country. Central America was not Africa. The us could fight a proxy war against a small opponent to complete success—rounding off its grip on the region with an invasion of Panama straight out of the twenties, before Nicaraguans even went to the polls, to get rid of an unsatisfactory strongman. [114] ‘Between the onset of the global Cold War in 1948 and its conclusion in 1990, the us government secured the overthrow of at least twenty-four governments in Latin America, four by direct use of us military forces, three by means of cia-managed revolts or assassination, and seventeen by encouraging local military and political forces to intervene without direct us participation, usually through military coups d’état . . . The human cost of this effort was immense. Between 1960, by which time the Soviets had dismantled Stalin’s gulags, and the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. In other words, from 1960 to 1990, the Soviet bloc as a whole was less repressive, measured in terms of human victims, than many individual Latin American countries. The hot Cold War in Central America produced an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. Between 1975 and 1991, the death toll alone stood at nearly 300,000 in a population of less than 30 million. More than 1 million refugees fled from the region—most to the United States. The economic costs have never been calculated, but were huge. In the 1980s, these costs did not affect us policy because the burden on the United States was negligible’: John Coatsworth, ‘The Cold War in Central America, 1975–1991’, in Leffler and Westad, eds, Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, pp. 220–1.

IV

Much more was at stake in the other zone to open up as a front in the last decade of the Cold War. Between the Arab world and the Subcontinent lay two states that had never been subject to European mandate or conquest, though each had been the object of repeated intrusion and manipulation by imperial powers. Since its installation by us and British intelligence in the fifties, the royal dictatorship in Iran had become the linchpin of American strategy in the region surrounding the Gulf, recipient of every kind of favour and assistance from Washington. In Afghanistan, the monarchy had been terminated by a dynastic cousin seeking to update the country with Soviet aid. In January 1978, massive demonstrations broke out against the Pahlavi regime, long a byword for tyranny and corruption, and within a year it was finished, the Shah fleeing into exile and the Shi’a cleric Khomeini returning from it to head a revolutionary regime of unexpected Islamist stamp, equally hostile to the Iranian left and to the American superpower. [115] On the last day of 1977, Carter had toasted the Shah in Teheran—‘there is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship’—as a fellow-spirit in the cause of ‘human rights’, and a pillar of stability in the region, upheld by ‘the admiration and love your people give to you’: see Lloyd Gardner, The Long Road to Baghdad, New York 2008, p. 51. When the us embassy in Teheran was seized by students two years later, Kennan urged an American declaration of war on Iran: Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove, p. 278. In April 1978, Afghan communists targeted for a purge hit back with a coup that put them in power overnight. Though not equivalent, both upheavals were blows. Afghanistan might have semi-lain within Moscow’s diplomatic sphere of influence, but the establishment of a Communist regime there was another matter, a threat to Pakistan and unacceptable in principle. But the country was poor and isolated. Iran, double in size and population, and one of the world’s largest oil producers, was neither. In itself, no doubt, an Islamic regime was less dangerous than a Communist one, but its anti-imperialist fervour could prove the more destabilizing, if unchecked, in the Middle East. The us embassy was seized and its staff held hostage in Teheran, not Kabul.

Fortuitously, the problem of how to deal with the Iranian Revolution found a happy solution within less than a year of the overthrow of the Shah, with the all-out attack on Iran launched by Iraq in September 1980, in the belief Teheran was much weakened by a Khomeinist regime still preoccupied by repression of a range of internal oppositions. Saddam Hussein’s bid to seize the oil-rich, predominantly Arab, province of Khuzestan unleashed the second-longest conventional war of the twentieth century, with undercover us encouragement and assistance. [116] See Bruce Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982–1990, New York 1994, pp. 42–8. Calling on every reserve of Iranian patriotism, the Khomeinist system survived the assault. But for American purposes, the war was cost-effective. Without the commitment of any us troops, or even cia operatives, disabled within the country, the Iranian Revolution was pinned down within its own borders for nearly a decade, and its external impetus largely exhausted by the struggle for defensive survival. When the war finally came to an end in 1988, the clerical regime was still in place, but it had been contained, and with the proclamation of the Carter Doctrine and its implementation by Reagan, the Gulf converted into a military walkway for us power in the region.

Afghanistan could be tackled more ambitiously than Iran, along Central American rather than Southern African lines. If Baghdad was an arm’s length Pretoria, Islamabad would be a close-range Tegucigalpa, from which the us could mount a proxy war against Communism with an army of Contras who, however, would become more than mercenaries. As early as July 1979, before the monarchy had collapsed in Iran or Soviet tanks were anywhere near Kabul, the us was bankrolling religious and tribal resistance to the Saur Revolution. When Moscow reacted to fratricide in Afghan communism with a full-scale military intervention in December, Washington saw the chance to pay the ussr back in its own coin: this would be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. Under the benevolent awning of the Zia dictatorship in Pakistan, massive transfers of money and advanced weaponry were funnelled to mujahedin fighters against atheism. Divided from the start, Afghan communism had tried to compensate for the weakness of its basis in a still overwhelmingly rural and tribal society with the ferocity of its repression of opposition to it, now superimposed with the ponderous weight of an alien army. In these conditions, the us had little difficulty sustaining hi-tech guerrilla attacks on it for over a decade, irrigated with cia and Saudi funding, but grounded in passionate religious-popular sentiment. Dependent for military survival on Soviet air and land power, the regime in Kabul was politically doomed by it.

V

In their long contest with the United States, the rulers of the Soviet Union believed by the mid-seventies that they had achieved strategic nuclear parity, and therewith recognition by Washington of political parity as a superpower of equal standing at large. Détente, in their eyes, signalled its acceptance of these realities. So they saw no reason why the ussr should act with less freedom than the us where the frontiers between the two blocs were not, as in Europe, fixed fast by mutual agreement. Central America was within the hemispheric domain of the us and they would not interfere. But Africa was a terrain vague, and Afghanistan a borderland of the ussr in which the us had never been greatly involved. Military power-projection in such regions was not a provocation, but within the rules of the game as understood by Moscow.

These were illusions. What Brezhnev and his colleagues believed was a strategic turning-point was for Nixon and Kissinger a tactical construction. No American administration had any intention of permitting Moscow to act in the Third World as Washington might do, and all had the means to see that it would come to grief if it tried to do so. The apparent Soviet gains of the seventies were built on sands, brittle regimes that lacked either disciplined communist cadres or nation-wide mass movements behind them, and would fall or invert in short order once support from Moscow was gone. The ultimate disparity between the two antagonists remained as great as it had ever been at the dawn of the Cold War, before Mao’s victory in China altered the extent of the imbalance for a time. Even with lines of communication as short as those to Afghanistan, Moscow was trapped as Brzezinski had intended. The Red Army had no remedy against Stinger missiles. To demoralization beyond the perimeters of Stalin’s rule was added fraying within them. Eastern Europe had long been off-limits to the us, which had stood by when East German workers rose in 1953, Hungary revolted in 1956 and Czechoslovakia was invaded in 1968. But détente, which had deluded Soviet leaders into thinking they could act with less inhibition in the Horn or the Hindu Kush, where it had no bearing for Washington, allowed the us to act with less inhibition in Europe. There the Helsinki Accords, where Moscow paid for formal recognition of territorial borders that were never in real dispute with formal recognition of human rights that eminently were, had changed the coordinates of the Cold War. This time, when Solidarity erupted in Poland, there could be no Iron Curtain. American subventions, sluiced through the Vatican, could not be stopped, nor a rolling Polish insurgency broken.

Along with military wounds and political troubles came economic pressures. In the seventies, rising oil prices had compounded recession in the West. In the eighties, falling oil prices hit Soviet trade balances that depended on hard currency earnings from the country’s energy sector to pay for medium-tech imports. If the origins of the long downturn in the oecd lay in the dynamics of uneven development and over-competition, its consequences could be checked and deferred by a systemic expansion of credit, to ward off any traumatic devalorization of capital. In the ussr, a long economic downturn began earlier—growth rates were already falling in the sixties, if much more sharply from the second half of the seventies; and its dynamics lay in plan-driven lack of competition and over-extension of the life-span of capital. [117] Vladimir Popov, ‘Life Cycle of the Centrally Planned Economy: Why Soviet Growth Rates Peaked in the 1950s’, cefir/nes Working Paper no. 152, November 2010, pp. 5–11—a fundamental diagnosis, showing that in effect the Soviet economy suffered from its own, much more drastic, version of the same problem that would slow American growth rates from the seventies onwards, in Robert Brenner’s analysis. In the thirties, Trotsky had already observed that the fate of Soviet socialism would be determined by whether or not its productivity of labour surpassed that of advanced capitalism. By the eighties, the answer was clear. The gnp and per capita income of the ussr were half those of the us, and labour productivity perhaps 40 per cent. Central to that difference was a still larger one, in reverse. In the much richer American economy, military expenditures accounted for an average of some 6–7 per cent of gdp from the sixties onwards; in the Soviet economy, the figure was over double that—15–16 per cent.

Since the fifties, American grand strategy had classically aimed to ‘put the maximum strain’, as nsc–68 had enjoined, on the Soviet system. The Reagan Administration, mauling its flanks in Central Asia and infiltrating its defences in Eastern Europe, also piled on economic pressure, with a technological embargo striking at Russian oil production, and a quadrupling of Saudi output that lowered oil prices by 60 per cent. But its decisive move was the announcement of a Strategic Defense Initiative to render the us invulnerable to icbm attack. Originating in an evaluation of the Soviet threat by Team B within the cia that rang the alarm at a ‘window of vulnerability’—yet another avatar of the bomber and missile gaps of the fifties and sixties—which Moscow could use to obliterate or blackmail the West, sdi was a technological scarecrow whose putative costs were enormous. That it could not actually be built was of little importance. What mattered was that it intimidate a cornered Soviet leadership, now flailing about in bungled attempts to revive the economy at home, and increasingly desperate for Western approval abroad.

Aware that the ussr could no longer hope to match so costly a programme, Gorbachev travelled to Reykjavik to try to deliver his country from the crippling weight of the arms race altogether. [118] Gorbachev to the Politburo in October 1986: ‘We will be pulled into an arms race that is beyond our capabilities, and we will lose it, because we are at the limit of our capabilities. Moreover, we can expect that Japan and the frg could very soon add their economic potential to the American one. If the new round begins, the pressure on our economy will be unbelievable’: Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, Chapel Hill 2007, p. 292. As Reagan candidly recalled: ‘The great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism—money. The Russians could never win the arms race; we could outspend them forever’: An American Life, New York 1990, p. 267. There us officials were stunned as he made one unilateral concession after another. ‘We came with nothing to offer, and offered nothing’, one negotiator remembered. ‘We sat there while they unwrapped their gifts’. [119] ‘Secretary Schultz, not then deep in nuclear matters, nevertheless caught the drift. We had triumphed’: Kenneth Adelman, The Great Universal Embrace, New York 1989, p. 55. Adelman was Arms Control Director under Reagan. But it was no dice. sdi would not be abandoned: Gorbachev came away empty-handed. Two years later, a ban on intermediate-range missiles was small consolation. It had taken thirty years for the Soviet Union to achieve formal nuclear parity with the United States. But the goal was over-valued and the price ruinous. American encirclement of the ussr had never been primarily conceived as a conventional Niederwerfungskrieg. From the start, it was a long-term Ermattungskrieg, and victory was now at hand.

Amid a continually worsening crisis of material provision at home, as the old economic system was disrupted by addled reforms incapable of giving birth to a new one, withdrawal from Afghanistan was followed by retreat from Eastern Europe. There the regimes of the Warsaw Pact had never enjoyed much native support, their peoples rebelling whenever they had a chance of doing so. In 1989, emboldened by the new conjuncture, one political break-out followed another: within six months, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania. The signal for the upheaval came in the spring, when the Hungarian government was secretly paid a billion Deutschmarks by Kohl to open its border with Austria, and young East Germans started to pour across it. [120] Harper, The Cold War, p. 238. In Moscow, Gorbachev let matters take their course. Making no attempt to negotiate Soviet exit from the region, he placed his trust in Western gratitude for a unilateral withdrawal of the 500,000 Red Army troops stationed in it. In exchange, Bush Sr offered a verbal promise that nato would not be extended to the borders of Russia, and declined to supply any economic aid until the country was a free market economy. [121] ‘Disappointed by the failure of his personal relations with Western leaders to yield returns, Gorbachev tried to make a more pragmatic case for major aid. As he told Bush in July 1991, if the United States was prepared to spend $100 billion on regional problems (the Gulf), why was it not ready to expend similar sums to help sustain perestroika, which had yielded enormous foreign-policy dividends, including unprecedented Soviet support in the Middle East? But such appeals fell on deaf ears. Not even the relatively modest $30 billion package suggested by American and Soviet specialists—comparable to the scale of Western aid commitments to Eastern Europe—found political favour’: Alex Pravda, ‘The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1990–1991’, in Leffler and Westad, eds, Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, p. 376. His call for Europe to be whole and free was met. For the ussr itself to become free, it would have to be divided. Gorbachev survived his unrequited pursuit of an entente with America by little more than a year. What remained of the Soviet establishment could see where his conception of peace with honour was leading, and in trying to depose him, precipitated it. In December 1991, the ussr disappeared from the map.