pa3

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’.