The Cold War

The Great Powers and their Allies

J.P.D. Dunbabin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317875208
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Cold War offers a brief but detailed treatment of one of the most complex eras of the 20th Century.

In this fully revised second edition, J.P.D. Dunbabin, drawing on international scholarship and using much new material from communist sources, describes a world in which covert operations could be as important as outright diplomacy, 'soft' power as influential as 'hard', and in which competing ideologies ruled the hearts as much as the heads of the leaders in power.

Dunbabin's account is global in scope, taking into account the importance of players beyond the superpowers, and shedding light on the proxy conflicts such as those in Africa and the Middle East that, if not caused by the continuing stalemate between the great powers, were used as weapons within it.

PART 1

Overview

CHAPTER 1

The Cold War: an overview

US–Soviet rivalry dominated post-war international relations, and drew into its orbit many initially unconnected issues (like the Arab–Israeli dispute, in which both countries at first supported Israel) – so much so, indeed, that commentators often spoke rather glibly of a ‘bipolar world’. Once firmly established, the system proved deep-rooted and slower to change than observers often hoped. One development that might have ended the Cold War would have been the emergence of a new external challenge great enough to give the USSR and USA overriding common interests. Something like this has indeed happened in other contexts: early in the twentieth century the challenge of Imperial Germany did much to end Franco-British rivalry, while Franco-German reconciliation after the Second World War was helped by the perceived Soviet threat. But the emergence of new Powers does not necessarily drive old ones into the arms of their former enemies: both Hitler and Stalin hoped in vain that Britain would so respond to the rise of the United States.

Since 1945 only two Powers have so far emerged with a fraction of this capacity for realignment – Japan and China. By the 1980s Japan had the world’s second largest economy, and its trade imbalance with the US sometimes strained relations and led to forecasts of more serious consequences. But the Japanese challenge was purely economic, and Japan still adopted a low profile in international politics. China is the world’s most populous country. In the early 1960s its official position was extremely militant, and both superpowers were seriously concerned as to what it might do when it had acquired nuclear weapons. A decade later it was the USSR that worried about China’s long-term intentions and its capabilities should the West be foolish enough to help it modernise. One of Kissinger’s aides has argued that Brezhnev’s detente policy was largely directed at isolating China: hence ‘the many overtures … attempting to lure us into arrangements whereby we would acquiesce in China’s destruction. When it became clear that we would not go along with this … Brezhnev’s interest in detente may have flagged as well’.¹

Although no individual Power emerged capable of bringing about a Soviet–American realignment, theoretically a coalition might have done so. The 1950s saw the growth of a ‘non-aligned movement’ (anxious both to keep out of East–West quarrels and to stop them monopolising the political agenda) and of an overlapping Afro-Asian one. In the 1960s much of Latin America, too, was drawn into the so-called ‘Group of 77’, which sought reforms of the international economic system. Its high point came in 1974–5 when, encouraged by the 1973 success of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in raising the price of oil, it demanded the negotiation of a New International Economic Order. To some commentators ‘North–South’ issues seemed to have eclipsed ‘East–West’ ones – one 1976 article was subtitled ‘From Non-alignment to International Class War’ – and, though the Communist world, economically far less important than the industrialised Western states, managed to stand largely on the sidelines, it did share some interests with the other ‘Northern’ countries. But the ‘South’, though not wholly unsuccessful, proved unable to keep its demands at the centre of ‘Northern’ consciousness; nor, with the occasional exception of OPEC, did it appear to the North as a serious threat. New issues did not render East–West antagonism obsolete; so it worked itself out according to its own intrinsic dynamics.

The causes of the Cold War: rival interpretations

So dominant and so long-lasting a development as the Cold War is unlikely to have had only a single all-purpose explanation; and oceans of ink have in fact been devoted to its interpretation. Some approaches – like the view, shared by Pope John Paul II (a leading player in the East European developments of the 1980s), that it represented in large part the working out of the prophecies of Our Lady of Fatima – demand a particular mindset.² But commentators are perhaps most usually grouped, following an article by John Lewis Gaddis, into ‘orthodox’, ‘revisionists’, and ‘post-revisionists’.³

‘Orthodox’ ‘traditionalists’ see Stalin’s wartime and post-war policy as expansionist, and his aspirations as extending to a communist takeover, in one form or another, of at least the greater part of Europe. Had the United States, clearly the stronger power, moved at a sufficiently early stage in the war to restrain him, he might have accommodated himself to such constraint as he had accepted the status quo for most of the inter-war period. But he was first apparently given a green light by the West so that his power, opportunities and appetite all grew, then, at the end of the war, criticised and interfered with, but for a goodish time not effectively countered. Only gradually did the USA come to see the need to organise a rival coalition – not to contest the gains the Soviet Union had already made, but to ‘contain’ it by preventing further expansion. That the USSR was expansionist and had to be contained was the official view of the NATO alliance, and was almost unchallenged until the 1960s. Politicians like Churchill and Eden sought in their memoirs to build a record as having perceived the need to contain Soviet expansion fairly early in the war, but as having been thwarted by Roosevelt’s naivety and the general American inexperience in foreign affairs. Opportunities were therefore missed and costs unnecessarily incurred, but eventually the Truman Administration came to see the light.

In the 1960s much of this came under ‘revisionist’ attack. The real expansionist power had been the United States. This was driven by an economic need for markets, and by a ‘universalist’ ideology that legitimated both their pursuit abroad and the suppresssion of the leftist and communist tendencies at home that had spread in the Roosevelt era to the alarm of big business, the churches and conservatives generally. The US monopolised the occupation of Japan, excluded Russia from influence in Italy, and soon gave up trying to work with her in Germany. But while thus acting unilaterally in its own sphere, it would not accord Stalin the right to do likewise in his. For the USA misperceived as expansionist moves that sought only to secure for the USSR (after its catastrophic experience of two major wars with Germany) a limited defensive glacis; and America’s ideology impelled it to foster in Eastern Europe and elsewhere a political and social system incompatible with Soviet security. One inspiration of such criticism was a European ‘Gaullist’ recognition that the American ‘hegemony’, like the Russian, imposed constraints, and that the institutions of the post-war Western world, drawn up at the height of US power, were well adapted to the spread of American business, economic and cultural influence – as, indeed, the Soviets had always maintained.⁴ But the principal motor of revisionism was an American domestic disenchantment that became increasingly strident as the Vietnam War turned sour. ‘Universalism’ and the ‘arrogance of power’ had led to worldwide involvement, often on behalf of very shady clients and with disastrous consequences both for the local population and for the domestic society of the United States. And all for no good reason, since there either never had been a threat to the USA, or (if there had) it had come about only because the US had first taken the offensive. Such views were basically isolationist, though sometimes cast in a loosely Marxist guise.

Some of the extreme ‘traditionalist’ and ‘revisionist’ contentions are untenable: Stalin did not have a ‘blueprint for world revolution’; and the primary purpose of dropping atom bombs on Japan was not the intimidation of the Soviet Union. Equally both the USSR and the USA would seem to have been expansionist, albeit in very different ways. So it is not surprising that a degree of convergence eventually came about between the two historiographical traditions – as Gaddis observed in 1983, that ‘is the way history usually gets written’. For what he saw (or advocated) as the new synthesis, Gaddis coined the term ‘post-revisionism’. This caught on, to the point where most historians came to describe themselves as ‘post-revisionist’. But Gaddis’s detailed suggestions as to the content and concerns of the new approach were less influential.⁵

‘Post-revisionism’ is accordingly a very broad church. But it inclines to see the Cold War as the natural outcome of a situation where there were now only two first-class Powers, both drawn into the power vacuums created by the defeat of Germany and Japan, the exhaustion of most of Europe and the decline of the British Empire. In terms of international relations jargon, this is to explain the Cold War ‘at the level of the international system’: in the circumstances of 1945, any two superpowers would have been drawn by their perceived security interests into a contest, through a process of action and reaction, almost regardless of their nature and the personalities of their leaders (‘state’ and ‘sub-state’ level factors). Such a view fits squarely into the ‘realist’ tradition of international relations thinking; and indeed rivalries – like those between Rome and Carthage, Habsburg and Valois, France and Britain, and (despite, it is interesting to note, a good deal of reluctance on both sides) Britain and Germany – have run through much of history. Soviet–American antagonism can be seen as a sequel on a global scale.

An early, and remarkably perceptive, prophecy of the Cold War along these lines was that of Adolf Hitler, in April 1945:

With the defeat of the Reich and pending the emergence of the Asiatic, the African, and perhaps the South American nationalisms, there will remain in the world only two Great Powers capable of confronting each other – the United States and Soviet Russia. The laws of both history and geography will compel these two powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the fields of economics and ideology. These same laws make it inevitable that both Powers should become enemies of Europe. And it is equally certain that both these Powers will sooner or later find it desirable to seek the support of the sole surviving great nation in Europe, the German people.⁶

By the ‘laws of geography’ Hitler would have understood the view (derived from Mackinder and Haushofer) on which he had himself acted, that control of the area between the Rhine and the Caucasus would, in the long run, carry with it dominance of the world. As he knew to his cost, the United States had twice intervened to prevent the establishment of such control. Already in 1900 Theodore Roosevelt had written privately that ‘If England should fail to preserve the European balance of power, the United States would be forced to step in and re-establish it …’ Franklin Roosevelt deployed similar arguments in public:

At this moment [December 1940], the forces of the states that are leagued against all peoples who live in freedom are being held away from our shores … [But] If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the high seas – and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere.⁷

Should the Soviet Union ever be perceived as mounting another threat beyond the power of Britain to contain, it would be wholly in character for the United States to step in again.

This is the view taken by the eminent historian of the Truman administration, Melvyn Leffler. He accepts that the USA was strongly anticommunist, but does not see this as an important cause of its international actions. It had been equally anti-communist between the wars, but had largely ignored the USSR (even during Stalin’s murderous rule in the 1930s). For the Soviet Union had then been too weak to constitute a threat. After 1945 it was, if not necessarily correct, at least reasonable to see it as such. Truman reacted to this perception – and not, Leffler insists, either to distaste for Stalin personally or to concern for his violations of human rights – by building a ‘preponderance of power’, an external coalition sufficient to prevent the United States being left face to face with a communist Eurasia and responding by metamorphosing into a garrison state quite alien to its former liberal traditions. In so doing, Truman harnessed, or at least collaborated with, US anti-communism. More reprehensibly, in Leffler’s opinion, Truman’s successor, Eisenhower, continued to fight the Cold War in the same fashion, instead of responding to the overtures from Stalin’s successors to soften or end it.⁸

Though Leffler’s principal focus is on US determination to maintain ‘a preponderance of power’, it will be seen that his interpretation allows a role for ideology in respect of the repugnance with which US leaders regarded the prospect of a ‘garrison state’. Others go further, suggesting that it was only by invoking anti-communism that a domestic consensus could be maintained for foreign involvement. Such invocation was not simply manipulative; by and large, most leaders themselves believed it. Mutatis mutandis, this was true also of their Soviet counterparts – as Mastny puts it, ‘the thinking of insiders [as it emerges from the archives] conformed substantially to what Moscow was publicly saying … There was no double bookkeeping; it was the single Marxist-Leninist one’.⁹

There has therefore recently been an attempt to reinstate ideology as a major component of the Cold War.¹⁰ Unsurprisingly, one would have thought. For the central ‘realist’ tenet is that states seek security against threats.¹¹ But these threats must be perceived: after 1945 the US had a physical capacity to harm Britain far greater than that of the USSR, but it was not perceived in the same way; nor indeed has the United States ever encountered the coalition of lesser powers to restrain it that classical ‘balance of power’ theory would predict. Threats may, admittedly, be perceived in the absence of ideological differences – these were, after all, not that great as between (say) Austria and Russia in 1914. But perceptions of friends and enemies often guide beliefs, thus intertwining ideology and security. The process is well exemplified (albeit with special reference to ‘Communist China’) in a 1965 US memorandum:

China – like Germany in 1917, like Germany in the West and Japan in the East in the late 30s, and like the USSR in 1947 – looms as a major power … The long-run US policy [to contain it] is based upon an instinctive understanding … that the peoples and resources of Asia could be effectively mobilized against us by China or by a Chinese coalition and that the potential weight of such a coalition could throw us on the defensive and threaten our security. This understanding o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Editorial Foreword
• PART 1 Overview
• PART 2 East–West relations 1945–1991
• PART 3 Europe West and East, and the Sino–Soviet split
• PART 4 Conclusion
• Guide to further reading
• Index