Faces of Power

Constancy and Change in United States Foreign Policy from Truman to Obama

Seyom Brown

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231538213
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Gobierno estadounidense

Seyom Brown's authoritative account of U.S. foreign policy from the end of the Second World War to the present challenges common assumptions about American presidents and their struggle with power and purpose. Brown shows Truman to be more anguished than he publicly revealed about the use of the atomic bomb; Eisenhower and George W. Bush to be more immersed in the details of policy formulation and implementation than generally believed; Reagan to be more invested in changing his worldview while in office than any previous president; and Obama to have modeled his military exit from Iraq and Afghanistan more closely to Nixon and Kissinger's exit strategy from Vietnam than he would like to admit. Brown's analyses of Obama's policies for countering terrorist threats at home and abroad, dealing with unprecedented upheavals in the Middle East, preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and containing new territorial expansion by China and Russia reinforce the book's "constancy and change" theme, which shows that serving the interests of the most powerful country in the world transforms the Oval Office's occupant more than its occupant can transform the world.

Praise for previous editions: "Systematic and informative... [Brown] has a gift for clear analysis that makes his book a useful contribution to the Cold War literature."— The Journal of American History "Comprehensive and clear... thorough without ever becoming dull, providing detailed analysis of decisions while never neglecting the environment within which they are made."— International Affairs "An excellent reference for those interested in United States foreign policy.... Well-written and well-researched, it is appropriate for use in both undergraduate and graduate courses."— International Journal "An analysis with difference—an important difference. Seyom Brown discusses United States policy from the perspective of how decision makers in the United States viewed their adversaries and the alternatives as those decision makers saw them.... Well worth the effort of a careful reading."— American Political Science Review

PART

I

THE TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION

Do not be deceived by the strong face, the look of monolithic power that the Communist dictators wear before the outside world. Remember that their power has no basis in consent.

—HARRY S. TRUMAN

The course we have chosen … involves building military strength, but it requires no less the buttressing of all other forms of power—economic, political, social, and moral.

—DEAN ACHESON

1

THE SHATTERING OF EXPECTATIONS

Force is the only thing the Russians understand.

—HARRY S. TRUMAN

UNITED STATES OFFICIALS PRESIDING OVER the end of World War II, even before nuclear weapons were used against Japan, stood in awe of the terrible physical power humankind had developed. They had little confidence, however, in the capacity of nations still existing in a basically anarchic interstate system to exercise the self-control required to channel their tremendous power into constructive purposes. Throughout the government there was wide consensus that the survival of civilization required the strengthening of international institutions and also the eventual reduction of the amount of destructive power in the hands of individual nations. Yet this would require the kind of statesmanship that in the past had run afoul of strong American attachments to the values of self-reliance and national sovereignty. Thus, remembering the fate of Woodrow Wilson’s sponsorship of the League of Nations, U.S. delegations to the founding conferences for the United Nations were carefully selected on a bipartisan basis to ensure that influential Republicans as well as Democrats would have a stake in the development of the world organization.

But in a more geopolitically oriented posture than Wilson’s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt regarded the wartime cooperation of the United States and Britain with the Soviet Union against the Axis powers as the embryo from which postwar patterns and organs of international cooperation would have to evolve. The premise of continued U.S.-Soviet cooperation had two faces: its internal, government aspect, where it was viewed as a necessary condition for managing the postwar world; and its public aspect, where the premise was viewed as a prediction that the presumed harmony would last. Characteristically, upon returning from his February 1945 conference in Yalta with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, FDR in his speech to a joint session of Congress sounded remarkably like Wilson, proclaiming that the structure of peace being built “ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.”¹

The popular myth that Harry S. Truman, upon assuming the presidency on April 12, 1945, at the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, inherited a set of idealistic beliefs from the Roosevelt administration about Soviet-American postwar cooperation is not borne out by historical research. Rather, FDR, in negotiating with Generalissimo Stalin at the Big Three wartime meetings in Tehran and Yalta, operated from premises very similar to the realpolitik notions of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Despite differences in style and nuance between the Briton and the American, both viewed Stalin as interested primarily in the security of the Soviet Union but also in exploiting opportunities for an expansion of Soviet control in the direction of the Mediterranean and the Near East. Both Western statesmen sought to relieve Stalin’s paranoid fears—of wartime Anglo-American collusion to weaken Russia and of postwar capitalist encirclement—by granting the Soviet Union a sphere of predominant influence in Eastern Europe and special awards in the Far East (including the Kurile Islands and lower Sakhalin from Japan, an “independent” outer Mongolia, and partial control or leases of key railway networks and ports in northeast China). In return, Stalin was supposed to accept British and American spheres of predominant influence outside these areas. The basic bargain having been struck, the Big Three could then manage other conflicts over secondary issues through consultation, since none of their vital security interests would be threatened. The new UN organization, with its veto procedures in the Security Council, was designed to work on the basis of this essential East-West modus vivendi.

At his Big Three meeting with Stalin and top British statesmen at Potsdam in the summer of 1945, Truman did little more than endorse this basic realpolitik deal worked our earlier with Stalin by FDR and Churchill.² But there was soon to be a major shift away from the Churchill/Roosevelt spheres-of-influence approach and toward what became known as “containment.” This took place at the top levels of the Truman administration a good year before being revealed to the public in the Truman Doctrine in 1947. Yet during the first two postwar years the general public got its ideas on the administration’s assumptions about international relations from the official rhetoric, which for the most part conveyed a set of more optimistic expectations:

1. That important international disputes would be settled by reasoned debate leading to an expression of majority will through the United Nations

2. That in important international disputes the Big Five (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China) usually would find themselves on the same side—the veto thus being an exceptional rather than a frequently used device

3. That any required sanctions against international lawbreakers would be organized by this international community

The actual premise of East-West tension as well as the shift away from FDR’s view that “we can, and must, do business with Uncle Joe” to Truman’s more pessimistic perspective of 1946 that “force is the only thing the Russians understand” was kept from the public.

In less than a year as president, however, Truman had come to believe the Soviets would expand as far as they could, were highly motivated to dominate the world, and would aggressively exploit all opportunities to enlarge their sphere of control unless effective countervailing power was organized to stop them. Yet before 1947, Truman felt that a candid presentation to the public of the internal government perception of the Soviet drive for power ascendency might shock the country into total abandonment of the laborious effort to build up international institutions. This would be tragic, since such institutions, if strengthened by support of most of the peoples of the globe, were truly regarded as the best long-term hope for peace. Yet without such candor, the public and their representatives in the Congress would probably not approve the stopgap military and economic measures that might be necessary to induce the Soviets to keep their end of the postwar bargain to become constructive participants in the building of a world order acceptable to a majority of nations.

The effort by Truman’s subordinates to reconcile the president’s fear of shattering public expectations with his belief that standing up to the Russians now might be a precondition for the eventual realization of these expectations is the central story of the Truman administration’s early gropings toward a coherent foreign policy.³

Truman recalls that during the first weeks of his presidency he gave much weight to the analysis of Soviet policies conveyed to him by Averell Harriman, at that time the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Harriman was urging a reconsideration of our policy toward the Soviet Union, fearing that to some extent the existing policy might be the product of illusions that the Soviets shared our commitment to an international order based on peaceful national self-determination.

As recounted in Truman’s Memoirs, the gist of the Harriman analysis as of April 1945 was that Stalin was misinterpreting our generosity and our desire to cooperate as a signal that the United States would do nothing to prevent the extension of Soviet control over its neighbors. The Soviets, reported Harriman, had no wish to break with the United States, because they needed our aid for their program of postwar reconstruction, but Stalin would not hesitate to push his political frontiers westward if he felt he could do so without serious political challenge. We had to disabuse Stalin of his illusion of American softness, counseled Harriman. We could be firm with the Soviets without running serious risks because they could not afford to alienate a critical source of aid.⁴

Truman claims to have bought this evaluation and was disposed to follow Harriman’s advice that the way to exert a positive influence on Soviet policy was to be tough with them on specific postwar issues as they arose. The assumption was, as Truman put it, “anyway the Russians needed us more than we needed them.”⁵ The Soviets, because of their economic needs, had more to lose than to gain by the collapse of amicability between the great powers. We wished to preserve an atmosphere of United States–Soviet cooperation because this was the key to an effective universal collective security system, which in turn, it was hoped, would induce more responsible Soviet behavior. It was not yet considered necessary or desirable to be able to force a general showdown with the Soviet Union over any specific issue by pointing explicitly or implicitly to the military power at our disposal.

When Truman had his first high-level “confrontation” with the Soviet diplomats Vyacheslav Molotov and Andrei Gromyko at the White House on April 23, 1945, and used language that, according to Admiral William Leahy, was “blunt” and “not at all diplomatic,” he was evidently still leading from a perceived position of economic leverage. In his Memoirs, the president recalls the Soviet foreign minister responding, “I have never been talked to like that in my life,” to which Truman shot back: “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.”⁶

THE BOMB

The day after Truman’s confrontation with Molotov, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote an urgent note to the president, requesting “a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter. … It … has such a bearing on our present foreign relations … that I think you ought to know about it without much further delay.” The secretary of war met with the president on April 25 and told him of the nuclear development program and that in four months a completed weapon would be ready. The discussion with Stimson, reports Truman, centered on the effect the atomic bomb might likely have on our future foreign relations.⁷ The bomb was henceforth to be very much a part of Truman’s overall calculus of the international balance of power, for ending the war with Japan, and for bargaining with the Soviets over postwar arrangements.

If the bomb could bring about the surrender of Japan quickly, the lives of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers would not have to be risked in the invasion planned for the fall. It is not clear from memoirs and the archival records whether the president shared the belief of Secretary of State James Byrnes and other advisers that using it in early August might preempt the promised entry of the Soviets into the war and thus obviate the need to share the occupation of the Japan with them, avoiding the complications that were emerging in Germany.⁸ The historical evidence does show, however, that various of Truman’s advisers felt that the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might not have been necessary to get Japan to surrender before the planned costly invasion of its home islands.

The popular version of Truman’s moment-of-truth dilemma and choice—either I put some one million U.S. soldiers directly in harm’s way on Japan’s beaches or I use the superweapon against Japan’s cities—turns out to be a gross simplification. So is his own memoir recollection: “Let there be no mistake about it. I regarded the bomb as a military weapon and never had any doubt that it should be used.”⁹

First, the president was apprised of the intelligence findings in mid-summer 1945 that, militarily, Japan was approaching the brink of complete collapse. The Joint Intelligence Committee of the Combined Chief of Staff reported that “effective air attacks can be directed against all important areas under Japanese control.” Also, the Home Islands were being basically strangled—blockaded at sea by U.S. mining, submarine, and aerial activities against both sea traffic and seaborne communications. “On the continent the Japanese are now forced to depend upon inadequate and vulnerable land communications.”¹⁰ Truman was also receiving reports based on MAGIC intercepts of Japanese coded messages that the Japanese high command, fearing the impending Russian entry into the war, was seriously contemplating suing for peace. Thus, the purpose of using the atomic bomb (in addition to continuing the devastating incendiary bombing of Tokyo and other population centers) was mainly psychological and political: to shock Japan’s government into complete capitulation, no deals—only the “unconditional surrender” of Japan, which had been proclaimed repeatedly as the U.S war aim.

Second, Secretary of War Stimson, along with other officials in the administration, tried to persuade the president to modify the unconditional surrender demand so as to let Japan keep its emperor. There was a severe split over this issue at the highest levels of the Truman administration, with Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes adamantly opposed to Stimson’s effort, plus division within the departments themselves as well as among the military.

The argument came to a head and compelled Truman to take sides over the effort to get such a provision inserted into the proclamation demanding Japan’s immediate surrender, which was to be issued at the forthcoming summit meeting in Potsdam. The proponents of permitting the emperor to stay on, at least as spiritual head of the nation, claimed that without such an allowance, Japan’s military, and even its ordinary citizenry, would fight on fanatically to their deaths, but if Japan could retain the emperor, an early pre-invasion surrender would not be as humiliating to the regime in Tokyo or to the people. Moreover, if it was their emperor who called on the military to stop fighting, the nation as a whole would be much more willing to accept its defeat and cooperate with the American occupation regime. But Secretary of State Byrnes and other proponents of unconditional surrender prevailed with the president on the grounds that the American people would not take kindly to any reneging on the promise to totally smash and forever remove the perpetrators of Pearl Harbor from power and that any backing off from the unconditional surrender demand would signal to Japan that America’s will to fight was weakening.¹¹

So the joint declaration issued at Potsdam on July 26 provided no exception for the emperor at all in its demand that “there must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest.” The document was explicit that nothing less than...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Introduction: Constancy and Change Since WWII
• Part I. The Truman Administration
• Part II. The Eisenhower Era
• Part III. The Kennedy-Johnson Years
• Part IV. Statecraft Under Nixon and Ford
• Part V. The Carter Period
• Part VI. The Reagan Era—Realism or Romanticism?
• Part VII. Prudential Statecraft with George Herbert Walker Bush
• Part VIII. Clinton’s Globalism
• Part IX. The Freedom Agenda of George W. Bush
• Part X. Obama’s Universalism Versus a Still-Fragmented World
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index