The Post-Modern Praetorians
“The Post-Modern Praetorians” (TPMR) contains Alex Olteanu’s reflections and comments on topics touching on his “War in the Modern World” M.A. studies at King’s College, London, UKArchive for Cold War History
Worlds in Collision: New Evidence on the Role of Ideology in the Origins and Early Development of the Cold War
The Resurrection of A Russian Hero…
As Stalin’s rehabilitation proceeds with renewed vigor in popular, academic and official circles of Putin’s Russia, the Soviet dictator is invariably re-presented as a great modernizer, war leader and international statesman – a true “vohzd” who industrialized Russia, defeated Hitter’s Nazi scourge and negotiated on an equal footing with Roosevelt and Churchill. Yet this latest re-incarnation of the “Red Boss” as the ultimate realpolitiker, whose principal aim was always Russia’s grandeur, security and recognition as one of the two equal superpowers of the post-World War Two world is, at best, a misleadingly incomplete narrative of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy during the Stalin Era. The opening of the archives of former Communist countries in the wake of the implosion of Communist rule in Europe resulted in a substantial amount of new research focusing on the critical role played by ideology in shaping Soviet foreign policy in general, and the origins and early course of the Cold War in particular.
Stalin and government in 1938, with head of NKVD Nikolay Yezhov far right
The predominant weight of evidence presented by these findings points to a fresh understanding of the causes and development of the Cold War, which emerges as the most likely outcome of a strategic confrontation between the foreign policy epistemic communities of the leading proponents of two mutually exclusive views of the constitutional structure of global order. Its determinant cause thus becomes the conscious refusal of these foreign policy elites to subordinate their respective paradigm of the moral purposes of the state to their adversary’s “horizon of experience” – defined as “the deep-seated ideological assumptions that lead states to formulate their interests within certain bounds, making some actions seem mandatory and others unimaginable”.
This essay will interpret the most representative findings of this new research through the prism of Christian Reus-Smit’s innovative holistic constructivist framework emerging out of his historically-grounded sociological comparison of four distinct societies of states: ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, absolutist and modern Europe. Each such society of states was structured around a different understanding of the moral purpose of the state, unique conceptualization of the organizing principles of sovereignty, and particular systemic notion of procedural justice, resulting in four “coherent ensemble[s] of metavalues, defining the terms of legitimate statehood and broad parameters of state action”. We will focus on three critical series of events which best assisted historians to reassess the causes, outbreak and early development of the Cold War: the foreign policy process of the USSR in the 1940s, the impact of the 1947 Marshall Plan on US-Soviet relations, and the re-organization of the Communist bloc between 1947 and 1950.
Stalin’s Soviet Foreign Policy in the 1940s
Despite the wealth of new evidence from former Communist states’ archives which has come to light since 1989, controversies regarding the role of ideology in Soviet foreign policy and its impact on the origins and development of the early Cold War have by no means been settled. A detailed analysis of even the most important lines of argument and the various debates they generated among historians is well beyond the scope of this essay. We will therefore focus on key points of agreement between them and on the actual evidence on which they based their arguments. We will thus develop a new understanding of this “hinge” period of the Twentieth Century: the transition between the Second World War and the Cold War.
Perhaps the most important such point of agreement is the critical role played by Stalin in determining not only the foreign policy of the USSR during this period, but that of the entire Eastern bloc. Zubok and Pleshakov have best described his role as the wielder of a “revolutionary-imperial paradigm” representing a marriage of Russian imperial geopolitics with Marxist-Leninist revolutionary idealism, resulting in a more or less skillful and successful exploitation of both the strategic attributes of the former Russian Empire’s territory and of the emotive power of Russian nationalism to safeguard and expand the Communist revolution as directed by the CPSU elites by means of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” literally embodied in the person of the “Boss” himself.
Blum’s conceptualization, at the agency level, of a hierarchical, tri-partite belief system of core, intermediate and peripheral beliefs in examining evolution and change in Soviet foreign policy from Stalin to Gorbachev, which mirrors Reus Smit’s “generative structure” of modern international society at the structural level, based on constitutional structures, fundamental institutions, and issue-specific regimes, will both help us to situate Stalin’s role and the impact of the revolutionary-imperial paradigm on Soviet foreign policy throughout the 1940s. Stalin’s core level of beliefs, personified in the dominant role he created for the CPSU and its General Secretary in the governance structure of the USSR by sidelining both the original Soviets and the more traditional state functions of President and Ministers in favor of an inner circle he could direct and control, is based on his formative years as a revolutionary and his unstinting, if not always sophisticated, belief in and adherence to the Marxist principles of global revolution arising out of the inevitable conflict between the major capitalist countries promoting the interests of their respective national forces of monopoly capital. This core set of beliefs, on which the entire ideological, structural and operational framework of the Bolshevik Party, the CPSU and the USSR was constructed by Lenin himself even before the October 1917 Revolution, represents Stalin’s “horizon of experience”, from which everything else in his belief system is ultimately derived.
The imperial-revolutionary paradigm, corresponding to Blum’s intermediate set of beliefs, constituted a flexible framework of foreign policy decision-making and control of his closest collaborators, which Stalin employed to advance the revolutionary cause both within and outside the USSR. Its two key axes, one gravitating between a national / imperialist pole and a communist /revolutionary pole, and a second oscillating between a technocratic command state and a repressive militarized state, gave rise to four distinct foreign policy approaches: great power politics, most compatible with the Western society of states defended by the USA and the UK, and best illustrated in the diplomatic activities and writings of Litvinov and Maisky; cooperative internationalism as exemplified in positions taken by Beria and Malenkov both before and after Stalin’s death; aggressive imperialism, evident in the Soviet identification of security with continuous territorial expansion; and global revolutionary, emphasizing the inevitable conflict between major capitalist powers and the enlargement of the Communist society of states at their expense.
However, these approaches should not be equated with US foreign policy paradigms, each with their own core group of supporters, vying to supplant its respective competitors in steering US foreign policy. Rather, they are best understood as policy options whose best mix and use at any one time was determined solely by Stalin himself, depending on the manner he perceived the international threats and opportunities he faced. By surrounding himself with “Team Stalin” -collaborators and subordinates who represented, on his instructions, one or the other of these approaches and who he “conceived… collectively as his instrument, not a consultative body”, Stalin could shift his foreign policy stance quite dramatically by discarding or replacing such personnel and still maintaining internal authority and external credibility with both his great power counter-parts and communist supporters in Europe. This flexibility of his tactical actions, corresponding to his peripheral beliefs, enabled Stalin to move from a virulent anti-Nazi stance in the mid- to late 1930s and attempts to conclude some form of alliance with the UK and France, with Litvinov as Foreign Affairs Minister, to the entirely unexpected Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, after Litvinov’s replacement by Molotov, to the war-time alliance with the USA and the UK culminating in the Teheran and Yalta Conferences and the creation of the United Nations, to finally an increasingly “hot” confrontation with his former Allies leading to the Berlin blockade of 1948 and the Korean War of 1950, by which time Molotov himself had been replaced by Andrei Vyshinsky.
Although historians continue to argue about the effectiveness of Stalin’s foreign policy throughout this period and the extent to which he wanted, and planned for, a Cold War, Gaiduk best summarized a line of general agreement between most historians who have researched the archives of the former Communist countries:
“No one would argue against Stalin’s belief in and adherence to the idea of world Communist revolution. But at the same time he apparently regarded this revolution as an ultimate goal, desirable though it was, but realizable only in the distant future. He was therefore prepared to postpone its advent, even to disregard it in favor of more pressing problems. He could afford this, since he had accomplished the first stage of this revolution: he had built its bastion in the form of the Soviet Union, he had created an example of its eventual success for all other countries and peoples. Then, before and after World War II, he was apparently more preoccupied with strengthening and defending his child, guaranteeing its security and peace. He was hardly prepared to sacrifice it for attractive but nevertheless ephemeral ideas of the victory of communism all over the world. But he always kept this idea at the back of his mind and was eager to test capitalism whenever and wherever possible by political, ideological, and even military means.”
Stalin’s core belief that the moral purpose of the state he built was the subordination of individual freedom to the historic requirements of an inevitable world-wide triumph of a communist society of states structured hierarchically around the leading role of the USSR and its “vanguard”, the CPSU, is best illustrated by a brief analysis of new documents shedding light on two key events marking the transition from war-time cooperation to Cold War: the Marshall Plan and its impact on the relations between the Big Three, and Stalin’s reorganization of the Communist bloc from the 1947 Szklarska Poremba Conference to the start of the 1950 Korean War.
From Cold Peace to Cold War
A second point of agreement between historians revolves around the critical role played by the Marshall Plan as the “tipping point” of the Cold War. Stalin’s refusal to allow Poland and Czechoslovakia to participate in the 1947 Paris conference, after summoning their leaders to Moscow and dictating his terms to them –which caused Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk to comment bitterly that “I went to Moscow as the Foreign Minister of an independent sovereign state; I returned as a lackey of the Soviet government”, must be understood through the prism of the now famous “Novikov long telegram” of September, 1946. This document, carefully edited by Molotov and reflecting in the end the Foreign Minister’s thinking rather than just that of the Soviet Ambassador to Washington, DC, Nikolai Novikov, stated that the US had abandoned its pre-war tradition of isolationism, was now ready to “assume the role of the most powerful force in resolving the fundamental questions of the postwar world” and was determined “to limit or dislodge the influence of the Soviet Union” by means of “enormous shipments of goods and importation of capital into countries hungry for consumer goods”.
As Stalin had explained to Yugoslav communist leader Milovan Djilas in 1945 when discussing the outcome of the Second World War, “[t]his war is not as in the past, whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system… It cannot be otherwise”. The Marshall Plan, as seen through the prism of the Novikov telegram and Stalin’s core set of beliefs in the inevitability of a global conflict between the communist and capitalist camps, convinced him that the USA was reneging on the Yalta agreements and was attempting the take-over, by economic means, of his richly-deserved Eastern European chasse gardée. The inevitable result was the abandonment of any semblance of inter-Allied cooperation and an accelerated consolidation of the Communist bloc under Soviet rule –thus marking the beginning of the Cold War.
The Conference of Szklarska Poremba, in Poland, held in September 1947, was the direct result of Stalin’s latest foreign policy shift. Organized by Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s heir-presumptive, then in charge of relations with Communist parties throughout Europe, it led to the creation of Cominform, the deepening of the Stalin-Tito split and, most importantly, the notion -presented in Zhdanov’s report on the international situation- that the world was henceforth divided into “two camps” where no neutral parties could exist and where each Communist party throughout Europe could only choose, in the words of Jacques Duclos, a French Communist leader, “to subdue [to Stalin’s dictates] or to break off”. As Zubok and Pleshakov clearly explain,
“Stalin’s decision to boycott the Marshall Plan meant for the Soviet Union the end of a wait-and-see attitude toward neighboring countries and, for the transitional regimes in Eastern Europe, a death sentence. Seemingly, Stalin faced a simple choice –to create a bloc using either formal diplomatic or “formal-ideological” instruments: proclaiming a Warsaw Pact in 1947 or restoring the new Comintern. He did neither. Instead, he chose another route that fit his needs remarkably well: he used the common ideology of Communist parties to organize Eastern Europe as a “security buffer” for his state.”
Zhdanov also asserted renewed control over the Western Communist parties, in particular the French and Italian Communists, by berating them for their failure to fight back against American imperialist aggression and destabilize their respective governments and countries. However, Zubok and Plekhanov miss the mark when they assert that “in 1947 the revolutionary-imperial doctrine was back”: Stalin had, in effect, never abandoned it. He was now simply shifting his foreign policy stance from one based predominantly on the Great Powers Politics approach to one relying primarily on the Global Revolutionary approach.
It is in this context of a renewed centralization of all Communist parties under the leadership of the CPSU and hence, of Stalin himself, and their succession to power in all Eastern European countries within the next year, that must be understood the dictator’s reorganization of the Far East. His initial reluctance to support Mao’s Communist revolution in China was based on his fears that Mao would not accept the leadership of the CPSU and of the “Red Boss”. After 1950, with the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty and China’s entrance in the Korean War, Stalin felt confident enough in the CPSU’s primacy throughout the Communist bloc, from Berlin to Beijing and Pyongyang, to exclaim to Mao, who was raising concerns about the possible interference of the Sino-Soviet treaties with the decisions of the Yalta Conference: “To hell with that! If we make a decision to revise treaties, we must go all the way. True, we will have to struggle with the Americans, but we have already reconciled ourselves with that fact”.
The hottest phase of the Cold War was about to begin: Stalin was now prepared to fight the Americans to the very last North Korean and Chinese soldier…
Soviet Ideology and the Moral Purpose of the State
The evidence and research discussed above present us with a consistent long-term attempt on the part of the CPSU ruling elites to create an anti-hegemonic society of states diametrically opposed to the western Allies’ modern society of states, whose moral purpose of the state was not the augmentation of individuals’ purposes and potentialities but rather a subjection of individuality to a reified, utopian future social order; whose organizing principle of sovereignty was not the liberal notion of equality between nation-states but rather a neo-feudal, hierarchical paradigm of a “sovereign USSR” surrounded by “vassal” communist states; whose systemic norm of procedural justice was not legislative justice deciding like cases alike in accordance with the rule of law, but rather instrumental justice where rulings were made subject to the needs and whims of the Communist party apparatus; and where the fundamental institutions of the entire system were not contractual law and multilateralism, but rather unequal, hierarchical relations between the CPSU and national communist parties of semi-dependent states.
In 1945 the western Allies where striving to renovate the modern international society of states emerging out of the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, which itself had marked a purposive change from the old, absolutist European global order. In contrast, the Soviet Union’s long-term strategic goal was to establish a society of states entailing a configurative change of the constitutional structure of global order based not only on a shift in the moral purpose undergirding the system of rule from individual empowerment to individual subjection, but also a change in the organizing principle that governed the distribution of authority between states from the liberal sovereignty of equal nation-states to the neo-feudal relationship between the Soviet Union “sovereign” and satellite “liege” states. The evidence emerging out of the former Communist countries’ archives and the research it generated have built a powerful case supporting the conclusion that it is within this clash of two incompatible ideological “horizons of experience” and each side’s refusal to subordinate their own Weltanschauung to that of its adversary that can be found the true origins of the Cold War and the explanation of its early development. It is only when a generational change in the governing elites of the CPSU brought with it a collapse of the Soviet rulers’ fundamental belief in the generative structure of Soviet ideology that the Cold War could truly end.
“The Road Not Taken”: Reassessing the Cold War In light of NSC-68 and the Korean War
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
David Frost, The Road Not Taken
“A détente is beginning. a modus vivendi. It started already in Korea. The dangers of war at present are less and less. The decisive point in Korea was the quarrel between MacArthur and Truman. This showed that the United States did not want war. After Truman said no to MacArthur’s proposal to attack China, [world] war was excluded… These are the imponderables that make for a modus vivendi…; it is an armed peace.”
General Charles De Gaulle
I. The Critical ‘Conjoncture’ of the Cold War and Resulting Pathway Dependencies
NSC-68 and the Korean War combined to create a critical ‘conjoncture ’ in the early Cold War that crystallized the terms of debate, the means of confrontation and the rules and arenas of engagement of the global, militarized conflict which constituted the central dynamic of the bi-polar world system of the next four decades. Most importantly, it militarized the Cold War, transformed Asia into the central military battlefield between the two camps, and created a US foreign policy consensus in aggressively opposing communism by any means necessary not only in Europe, but throughout the emerging Third World.
The analytic part of this paper concentrates neither on the ‘macro’ (structural/systemic) nor on the ‘micro’ (individual/agency) levels of social analysis, but rather on the ‘mezo’ level, where various institutionalized epistemic communities interact and create ‘path dependencies’ which open up specific avenues of inquiry, decision-making, action and development whilst simultaneously closing off others . Thus, we will focus on the evolving paradigms and interactions of the US, Communist bloc, and Western European foreign policy networks before and during the Korean War.
The explanatory part will then examine the consequences of the ‘conjoncture’ analyzed above, in both space and time. We will briefly highlight its effects and the path dependencies it generated in the central, secondary and peripheral arenas of the Cold War over the short, medium and long term.
II. Dynamics of Foreign Policy Networks Before the Outbreak of the Korean War
Three critical foreign policy networks dominated the first decade after the end of World War II: one centered in Washington, DC, the second in Moscow, and the third in key West European capitals. The internal dynamics of each of these networks, and the interaction between them, provide us with a better understanding of both the origins and the consequences of NSC-68 and the Korean War on the Cold War.
1. Western Europe: Always Fighting the Last War
Although the Marshall Plan was coming to an end, a true Western European economic recovery had not yet taken place by 1950; the threat of powerful Communist parties capable of exploiting this situation with the help of the Soviet Union was therefore still very real, especially in Italy and France. In addition, the three major European powers seemed unwilling to coordinate their foreign policy aims and strategies. NATO remained a paper alliance; the French proposal for a European Defense Community was designed to preclude West Germany from joining NATO and re-establishing its own armed forces ; West Germany under Adenauer insisted to join NATO as an equal partner and be allowed control of its own Army ; while Great Britain, slowly recovering from the post-war slump, still dreamt of re-shaping the British Empire into a “Third Force” comparable, if not equal, to the USA and USSR .
2. The Communist Bloc: “Team Stalin”
All national communist party leaders of the Communist bloc (Yugoslavia’s Tito excepted) acknowledged Joseph Stalin’s unquestioned leadership, particularly in foreign policy matters. Throughout his rule, Soviet foreign policy approaches had been defined by two variables: an ideological one, gravitating between a national/imperialist pole and a communist / revolutionary pole ; and an administrative one, oscillating between a technocratic command state and a repressive militarized state. Unlike in the USA, however, there were no factional divisions between “Team Stalin”’s members: only the Boss himself could decide what the right mix of the four resulting paradigms would be the correct one at any given time and accordingly, which members of his team would belong to his inner circle -and which would not .
New documentary evidence shows us, however, that relations between “The Boss”, China’s Mao and North Korea’s Kim Il Sung were rather more complex by 1950 . Despite Stalin’s reluctance to engage in a war that might lead to an unwanted direct confrontation with the USA, Mao’s military romanticism and Kim’s impatiently aggressive nationalist push to reunite the Koreas into a viable state under his rule played decisive roles in the former’s final acquiescence to direct logistical and indirect military support of the June 25, 1950 invasion of South Korea . In turn, Mao’s promise to assist Kim should he require military support after the start of hostilities was motivated by his fear of encirclement by the USA from its Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese and Vietnamese bases , by internal Chinese political reasons aiming to radicalize and thus consolidate the still young Chinese Communist revolution ; and by his desire to finally obtain Stalin’s approval as the leader of a true Communist revolution and Party – and not be thought of as potentially “just another Tito” .
3. USA: “The Great Debate” and the Korean War
By 1950, the “Great Debate” splitting asunder the US foreign policy establishment combined two sets of dichotomies -between “American Exceptionalism” and the fear of its replacement by a “Garrison State”; and between the “Welfare State” and the “Warfare State” . This resulted in four foreign policy approaches –each with its own supporters and detractors:
Until 1947, the majority US foreign policy view was that of cooperative multilateralism, based on three pillars: an effective UNO; collaboration with the USSR; and reliance on Britain to manage the international system as an equal partner . By 1948, these pillars were failing. The Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, National Security Act and NATO laid out the political and institutional foundations of a new US foreign policy. However, President Truman opposed for both political and ideological reasons the substantial increases in the US Defense Budget which would give the United States the means to implement its professed policies.
The 1949 Soviet explosion of the atomic bomb and Mao’s Communist victory in mainland China convinced Truman that a re-examination of US national strategy was required . The ascendant State Department foreign policy team led by Secretary Acheson and Office of Policy and Planning Director Nitze drafted NSC-68 and submitted it to the President on April 14, 1950. However, because of its dramatic budgetary implications, as well as anticipated opposition in Congress, President Truman did not act on these recommendations, asking instead for further details and specifications.
After June 25, 1950 NSC-68 provided President Truman with a legitimating intellectual lens though which to view and understand what he considered North Korea’s unprovoked and unexpected aggression on South Korea , and with a means to both build up support for his multilateral containment foreign policy and discredit its main competitors: traditional isolationism and aggressive unilateralism.
The MacArthur-Truman conflict personified, internally, a clash between the very notion of civilian control over the US armed forces and the rise of a true Garrison State ruled by a military elite ; and externally, a conflict between Truman’s policy of multilateral containment and a likely direct confrontation between the USA and the USSR combined with a probable disintegration of the US-European alliance network. The confrontation reached its peak then faded away after Truman relieved MacArthur of all his commands in April 1951. The presidential election, in 1952, of Republican Dwight Eisenhower, who essentially pursued the policy of multilateral containment embodied in NSC-68, established a cross-party foreign policy consensus in the USA that was to last virtually until the end of the Cold War.
III. Consequences of NSC-68 and the Korean War on the Cold War
The aggregate impact of NSC-68 and the Korean War on the three foreign policy networks discussed above, and hence on the conduct of the Cold War, was not only dramatic in the short term, but also significant in the medium- and long-term.
Although the Cold War had started since at least 1948, by 1950 the European, Soviet bloc and US foreign policy networks were still largely turned inward, focusing primarily on issues deeply embedded in the historical experiences of their own states and regions. The Korean War propelled them together and connected them for the very first time in a truly global adversarial governance network articulated by the Manichean conflict between freedom and tyranny as described in NSC-68.
The three key short-term consequences of NSC-68 and the Korean War were a massive militarization of the Cold War, not only in the United States but also in Western European countries; the jumpstarting of West European and Japanese economies as they scrambled to supply the vast needs of the UN-sponsored troops fighting up and down the Korean Peninsula; and the establishment of a wide network of US-centered alliance systems designed to contain and perhaps even roll back the communist threat: General Eisenhower was appointed NATO’s first SACEUR and given as mandate to transform the alliance into the world’s first truly multinational military organization; a peace treaty was signed with Japan in 1951, just as ANZUS was being ratified; and SEATO and the Baghdad Pact were established in 1955. Perhaps most remarkable, France decided to abandon its historical enmity with Germany and acquiesce, however reluctantly, to its rearmament and entry into NATO as an equal partner.
In the medium term, drawing on the lessons learned in Korea that nuclear weapons could hardly be used as offensive weapons on the battlefield, but only as a means of deterring larger conflicts between the two super-powers , the US adopted a dual strategy of a global nuclear arms race with its main rival, whilst fighting low-intensity wars in Asia designed, in its view, to “free (its peoples) from age-old forms of social and ideological oppression” . From Korea though Indo-China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia and Vietnam, Asia became the central battlefield of the Cold War for the next two decades.
Within the Soviet Bloc, although the Korean War cemented in the short-term the sino-soviet alliance, China’s ability to stand up militarily to the United States during this conflict had the dual effect of solidifying the Communist regime in China and establishing its reputation internationally, especially among the existing and emerging Third World states, thus sawing the seeds both of the sino-soviet split and confrontation of the 1960s and 1970s, and of the proliferation of revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America -which the US saw it as its duty to confront by both direct and covert means.
Finally, in the long term, “[t]he Cold War provided an extreme answer to a question that had been at the center of US foreign policy since the late eighteenth century: in what situations should ideological sympathies be followed by intervention? The extension of the Cold War into the Third World was defined by the answer: everywhere where Communism could be construed as a threat” . Korea was its first true battlefield –and the military, political, economic and ideological competition whose nature and rules of engagement it largely defined would play no small part in Ronald Reagan’s view of the “Evil Empire” and his “Star Wars” program, in the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and, finally, in the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the peaceful implosion of the USSR two years later.
Was the Cold War an inevitable outcome of World War Two?
If we are to determine whether the Cold War (which I would define as the global ideological, political, economic and military conflict between the capitalist-democratic and the communist-totalitarian blocs short of direct mass warfare between the USA and the USSR) was indeed an “inevitable outcome” of WWII, I suggest we should start by outlining the key features of the international system in 1945-1948 which obtained directly as a result of that conflict. For our purposes, I would argue that the most important were:
Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946
1) an utterly devastated continental Europe, with a shattered economy and a population on the brink of starvation;
2) an unprecedented power vacuum in Europe, northern Africa the Middle East and Asia-Pacific due to the collapse of France, Germany, Italy, Japan and (by mid-1947) the significant abdication of the UK of most if its positions in these areas;
3) the military breakthrough of an economically exhausted USSR to the heart of Europe -and Germany;
4) the willingness of the USA to exploit politically and ideologically its dominant economic and military position in the international system; and
5) the geographical collision, in Europe and Asia, of the US and the USSR -embodying two discrete systems of governance, each with universal ambitions and mutually exclusive on the political, economic and ideological levels.
The question to be answered, therefore, is whether these specific consequences of WWII rendered the Cold War inevitable.
In brief, I would argue that the cumulative effect between 1945 and 1948 of these five key outcomes of WWII rendered the Cold War (as defined above) “inevitable” indeed. By “inevitable” I mean that, given the “macro” features of the international system described above, the “mezo” nature and composition of the foreign policy networks of the USA and USSR which determined the dynamic evolution of the policies of these war-time allies with respect to each other between 1945 and 1948 would have led, sooner or later, to a Cold War between the two irrespective of the existence or actions of any individual personalities occupying positions of leadership in Moscow or Washington, DC. Four possible counter-arguments deserve particular attention:
Ideology: Gaddis does indeed state that no Cold War resulted between the USA and the USSR after WWI, despite identical ideologies; however, “the correlation of forces” at the end of WWI was entirely different from that after WWII:
1) with the important exception of north-western France and the BENELUX countries, Europe ( and in particular Germany, Central Europe and the UK) were not devastated economically;
2) no power vacuum obtained in Europe, the Mediterranean, or Asia; to the contrary, France, the UK and Japan expanded their colonial empires and Germany retained most of its national territory;
3) the USSR had suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the German Empire, ratified in the Treaty of Brest-Litowsk which (ironically!) reduced the former Russian Empire to the frontiers of today’s Russia; the Versailles Treaties reversed these losses but only partially and established a “cordon sanitaire” of approximately 12 countries between its western border and Berlin, Vienna and Istanbul; not only was the USSR NOT at the heart of Europe militarily, but it was isolated and fighting for its survival until 1921;
4) failure of the US Senate to ratify the League of Nations Treaty and Wilson’s subsequent stroke resulted in a return of the USA to an isolationist position for the next two decades, thus failing to take advantage politically or ideologically of its dominant economic and military position in 1919; and
5) for the reasons stated above (and with the exception of some ill-prepared and ultimately futile US and allied attempts to quell the Soviet revolution in Russia) no direct geographic collision of the USA and USSR took place at the end of WWI.
In sum, the different macro outcomes of WWI as compared with WWII explain the failure of a direct and sustained ideological confrontation between the USA and USSR, and not the fact that these ideologies were somehow capable of establishing a peaceful global cohabitation in spite of their irreconcilable differences and “ways of life”.
Realpolitik: As Zubok and Pleshakov explain in light of recent Soviet archive materials, the foreign policy paradigm of the Soviet foreign policy establishment (therefore not only of Stalin, but also Molotov, Litvinov, Maisky and Zhidanov) adhered to the same revolutionary-imperial paradigm resulting in a definition of security in primarily territorial terms. This paradigm resulted in Stalin’s failure to hold free elections in Poland and other East European countries, as he had committed himself to, and pushing his cards to the limit in Iran, Turkey, the Mediterranean and Central Europe -thus forcing a US foreign policy establishment -which had remained at least until February 1947 generally lenient towards the demands of the USSR- to radically shift its analysis of Soviet aims from those of a traditional great power to those of an ideologically-driven revolutionary state bent on global domination. Although Stalin’s personality and paranoia played an understandably important role in this process, there is no documentary evidence to assume that, had he died or been replaced at the same time with Roosevelt and Churchill, the ultimate long-term outcome would have been any different.
Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin at the Yalta conference, February 1945
Personal mistrust: any level of “trust” between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt established during WWII was largely based on their forced cooperation to defeat a common enemy. Although Roosevelt did indeed think he could “handle Uncle Joe”, before his death he realized that the Soviet dictator could not be trusted; on March 24, 1945 he stated, angrily, that “Averell [Harriman] is right; we can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” (R.J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis, p. 11). A few days later (April 6), he cabled to Churchill: “I am very pleased with your very clear strong message to Stalin… Our armies will in a very few days be in a position that will permit us to become “tougher” than has heretofore appeared advantageous to the war effort” (Ibid, p. 12). Stalin’s actions were in fact in flagrant contradiction with the terms of the Atlantic Charter regarding freedom, self-determination and democracy of all nations and the fact the Churchill and Roosevelt had given priority to the defeat of Nazi Germany and tolerated Stalin’s violations of his promises until the end of the war by no means implies that they would have continued to do so after the conclusion of the hostilities. In fact, at the end of April 1945 Churchill was writing to Stalin in the following terms: “There is not much comfort in looking to a future when you and the countries you dominate, plus the Communist countries in many other states, are all drawn up on one side and those who rally to the English-speaking nations on the other. It is quite obvious that their quarrel would tear the world to pieces… Even embarking on a long period of suspicions, of abuse and counter-abuse and of opposing policies would be a disaster hampering the development of world prosperity for the masses” (A. Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, Fontana Press 1993, p. 973). As to Stalin, who never really trusted Roosevelt and Churchill for both personal and ideological reasons but was willing to accommodate them to the extent necessary to accomplish the common aim of defeating Nazi Germany, Zubok clearly shows that at the very latest after the explosion of the US atomics bombs in Japan in 1945, he reverted sharply from a more conciliatory attitude towards his “friends” (now disappeared from the political scene) to his traditional revolutionary-imperial paradigm of foreign policy pushing him to grab as much as he could as long as he could – in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
"The Big Three" Summit in Potsdam" Attlee, Truman and Stalin, July 1945
The irreversible tipping point from difficult cooperation to Cold War took place, on the US side, in early 1947, before Truman’s speech to the US congress asking for financial aid for Greece and Turkey and outlining his “Truman Doctrine” -when Under-Secretary of State Acheson, heretofore willing to overlook Soviet actions as those of a normal great power, shifted his position in light of Stalin’s demands in Iran, Turkey, Libya and Europe to see the USSR’s policies as a determined global offensive of an ideologically-driven enemy which had to be contained and rolled back, and played a key role in the drafting of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and their ratification by the US Senate; whilst on the Soviet side, the tipping point occurred when Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov walked out of the Paris Marshall Plan Conference, in July 1947.
President Truman addresses the US Congress and outlines his famous “Truman Doctrine”, 1947
Although these specific events and dates were contingent on individual actors and discrete decisions, any one of which were not in themselves inevitable or determinant, the Cold War itself, as defined above, was indeed an inevitable outcome of the five key factors discussed previously which arose as a consequence of WWII.
The US Arms Control Epistemic Community under Eisenhower and the Emergence of an International Arms Control Regime
November 12, 2008 at 7:58 am · Filed under Article Commentary, Cold War History, Military History and tagged: Arms Race, Cold War, Eisenhower, Military-Industrial Complex
Commentary on Emanuel Adler, The Emergence of Cooperation: National Epistemic Communities and the International Evolution of the Idea of Nuclear Arms Control , International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 1, (Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination), Winter, 1992, pp. 101-145).
The author’s main thesis is that the US arms control epistemic community, made up of scientists, strategists and academics of the late 1950s and early 1960s, became aware of the vulnerability of US nuclear weapons and concerned about the reciprocal fear of surprise attack, and predicted that both US national security and avoidance of a nuclear war would be enhanced by persuading the superpowers to collaborate in stabilizing the nuclear balance though arms control. Just as importantly, this epistemic community was then able to reach into places where decisions were made and influence the minds of the people who made them, and even, in time, joined their ranks, thereby turning their ideas into widespread national security policy and practice. Their understanding of the nature and uses of such a prudential association arms control international regime was eventually diffused and accepted by the Soviet Union and became the foundation of US-Soviet cooperation not only over the 30 years from 1960 to 1990, but even beyond the end of the Cold War.
President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, January 17, 1961 (Part 1)
The innovation process of this group was fueled, according to Adler, by their realization that nuclear deterrence had become unstable and that a catastrophe could occur against the wishes of adversary states, as well as by a number of events such as Soviet ICBM testing in 1957, the launch of Sputnik in the same year, and the Gaither Committee Report proposing an across-the-board military buildup which alarmed Eisenhower and made him more receptive to arms control ideas.
So, if we accept that the selection process of such arms control ideas which best fit the interests of policy makers and passed the test of public opinion started not only under the Kennedy/Johnson Administration, but was already evident under Eisenhower, then “by the time Kennedy entered office significant trends were under way” (Adler 1992, at 125): a framework of negotiations and a policy on which to build; emerging arms control concepts as legitimate foci of policy debate; government personnel and organizational structures with a vested interest in arms control. Thus, the pioneering work accomplished under the Eisenhower administration played a critical (although not sufficient!) role in the adoption of stable deterrence and arms control notions by the Kennedy / Johnson administration.
This transition from disarmament to arms control, eventually accepted by both US and Soviet policy makers and at the basis of their relationship from 1968 onwards, once the USSR achieved party with the US in terms of nuclear missiles, meant that bureaucracies in both countries “had to go through a process of adjustment and conceptual evolution” (Adler 1992, p. 128). Stable deterrence and arms control eventually became a salient paradigm of national security in both the US and USSR and gave rise to arms control agendas and political coalitions capable to carry them out (Adler 1992, p. 133).
The end result was the creation of an international regime of arms control between two powers with widely divergent goals and values, but at the same time with shared interests in these specific areas – in other words, a “prudential association” regime. “Thus, once arms control ideas became embodied in domestic and international procedures and institutions, the domestic and international games were irrevocably changed. Each new generation of leaders had to make its (rational) decisions on the basis of an inherited intellectual code of international arms control ideas which, with the passage of time, was enlarged, refined, and taken for granted… And since the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, arms control has also become a means for enabling the transition to a new European order” (Adler 1992, p. 140).
President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, January 17, 1961 (Part 1)
If Adler’s analysis is correct, as I think it is, then Eisenhower’s “new thinking” regarding nuclear weapons as well as his foreign policy becomes even more complex than already assumed. The immediate, short-term image he projected was that of a Republican Cold-Warrior President who was determined to use the US nuclear arsenal not only for deterrence, but also compellence purposes (Korea in 1953, Quemoy and Matsu Islands in 1954 and 1958); in the medium-term, his “New Look” policy purporting to see nuclear weapons as the first line of defense in any war was designed to actually avoid the possibility of any war; in the long-term, his openness to the ideas of the strategic arms control epistemic community shows in a new light his “Open Skies” proposal, his “Atoms for Peace” proposal and even his U-2 surveillance program as they acquire an entirely new meaning and no longer leave the beginning of the Test Ban Treaty Negotiations in 1957 as an isolated moment in his administration.
In effect, at the time Eisenhower took power, the rules of the game for the use of nuclear weapons had not been established, and there was, as Crockatt states, a virtual absence of a negotiating culture” between the US and USSR (Crockatt 1995, at 153). Eisenhower carefully combined the rhetoric of compellence for internal political purposes, with that of a “New Look” policy for both internal budgetary reasons and external deterrence of any wars, whilst beneath these two layers, playing a critical role in encouraging the development and establishment of an entirely new set of rules based on the ideas of the strategic arms control epistemic community which were to establish the fundamental parameters of a prudential association international arms control regime that was to become the corner-stone of US-Soviet relations for the next thirty years and the best guarantor of the “Long Peace” of the second half of the 20th Century between the two rival superpowers. Eisenhower wasn’t playing poker, nor even bridge, but rather three-dimensional chess…
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