Chapter 1
The Second World War and the destruction of the old order
Explanations for the onset of the Cold War must begin with the Second World War. A conflict that ranks, by any conceivable measure, as the most destructive in human history, the Second World War brought unparalleled levels of death, devastation, privation, and disorder.
‘The conflagration of 1939–45 was so wrenching, so total, so profound, that a world was overturned,’ notes historian Thomas G. Paterson, ‘not simply a human world of healthy and productive laborers, farmers, merchants, financiers, and intellectuals, not simply a secure world of close-knit families and communities, not simply a military world of Nazi storm troopers and Japanese kamikazes, but all that and more.’ By unhinging as well ‘the world of stable politics, inherited wisdom, traditions, institutions, alliances, loyalties, commerce and classes’, the war created the conditions that made great power conflict highly likely, if not inevitable.
A world overturned
Approximately 70 million people lost their lives as a direct result of the war, fully two-thirds of them non-combatants. The war’s losers, the Axis states of Germany, Japan, and Italy, suffered more than 3 million civilian deaths; their conquerors, the Allies, suffered far more: at least 35 million civilian deaths. An astonishing 10 to 20 per cent of the total populations of the Soviet Union, Poland, and Yugoslavia perished, between 4 and 6 per cent of the total populations of Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Japan, and China. If the exact toll of this wrenching global conflagration continues to defy all efforts at statistical precision, the magnitude of the human losses it claimed surely remains as shockingly unfathomable two generations after the Second World War as it was in the conflict’s immediate aftermath.
At the war’s end, much of the European continent lay in ruins. British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, in characteristically vivid prose, described post-war Europe as ‘a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate’. US President Harry S. Truman, in a radio address, described the devastated German cities he encountered in the summer of 1945 as places where ‘women, and children, and old men were wandering over the highways, returning to bombed-out homes, or leaving bombed-out cities, searching for food and shelter’. Berlin was ‘an utter wasteland’, observed correspondent William Shirer, ‘I don’t think there has ever been such destruction on such a scale.’ In fact, many of the largest cities of central and eastern Europe suffered comparable levels of devastation; 90 per cent of the buildings in Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg were gutted by Allied bombing, 70 per cent of those in the centre of Vienna. In Warsaw, reported John Hershey, the Germans had ‘destroyed, systematically, street by street, alley by alley, house by house. Nothing is left except a mockery of architecture.’ US Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane, upon entering that war-ravaged city in July 1945, wrote: ‘The sickening sweet odor of burned human flesh was a grim warning that we were entering a city of the dead.’ In France, fully one-fifth of the nation’s buildings were damaged or destroyed; in Greece, one-quarter. Even never-occupied Great Britain suffered extensive damage, principally from Nazi bombing, while losing an estimated one-quarter of its total national wealth in the course of the conflict. Soviet losses were the most severe of all: at least 25 million dead, another 25 million rendered homeless, 6 million buildings destroyed, and much of the country’s industrial plant and productive farmland laid to waste. Across Europe, an estimated 50 million of the war’s survivors had been uprooted by the war, some 16 million of them euphemistically termed ‘displaced persons’ by the victorious Allies.
Conditions in post-war Asia were nearly as grim. Almost all of Japan’s cities had been ravaged by relentless US bombing, with 40 per cent of its urban areas completely destroyed. Tokyo, Japan’s largest metropolis, was gutted by Allied firebombing that levelled more than half of its buildings. Hiroshima and Nagasaki met an even more dire fate as the twin atomic blasts that brought the Pacific War to a close left them obliterated. Approximately 9 million Japanese were homeless when their leaders finally surrendered. In China, a battleground for more than a decade, the industrial plant of Manchuria lay in shambles, the rich farmland of the Yellow River engulfed in floods. As many as 4 million Indonesians perished as a direct or indirect result of the conflict. One million Indians succumbed to war-induced famine in 1943, another million people in Indo-China two years later. Although much of Southeast Asia was spared the direct horrors of war visited upon Japan, China, and various Pacific islands, other parts, such as the Philippines and Burma, were not so fortunate. During the war’s final stage, 80 per cent of Manila’s buildings were razed in savage fighting. Equally brutal combat in Burma, in the testimony of wartime leader Ba Maw, ‘had reduced an enormous part of the country to ruins’.
The vast swathe of death and destruction precipitated by the war left not only much of Europe and Asia in ruins but the old international order as well. ‘The whole world structure and order that we had inherited from the nineteenth century was gone’, marvelled US Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Indeed, the Eurocentric international system that had dominated world affairs for the past 500 years had, virtually overnight, vanished. Two continent-sized military behemoths—already being dubbed superpowers—had risen in its stead, each intent upon forging a new order consonant with its particular needs and values. As the war moved into its final phase, even the most casual observer of world politics could see that the United States and the Soviet Union held most of the military, economic, and diplomatic cards. On one basic goal, those adversaries-turned-allies were in essential accord: that some semblance of authority and stability needed to be restored with dispatch—and not just to those areas directly affected by the war but to the broader international system as well. The task was as urgent as it was daunting since, as Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew warned in June 1945: ‘Anarchy may result from the present economic distress and political unrest.’
The immediate roots of the Cold War, at least in broad, structural terms, lay in the intersection between a world rendered prostrate by a catastrophic global warfare and the conflicting recipes for international order that Washington and Moscow sought to impose on that pliable, war-shattered world (Map 1). Some degree of conflict invariably results whenever a prevailing international order and its accompanying balance of power system are overturned. One would certainly expect no less when the overturning occurs with such shattering suddenness. The tension, suspicion, and rivalry that came to plague US–Soviet relations in the immediate aftermath of war was, in that elemental sense, hardly a surprise. Yet the degree and scope of the ensuing conflict, and particularly its duration, cannot be explained by appeals to structural forces alone. History, after all, offers numerous examples of great powers following the path of compromise and cooperation, opting to act in concert so as to establish a mutually acceptable international order capable of satisfying the most fundamental interests of each. Scholars have employed the term ‘great power condominium’ to describe such systems. Despite the hopes of some leading officials in both the United States and the Soviet Union, however, that would not be the case this time. The reasons why go to the heart of the question of Cold War origins. In brief, it was the divergent aspirations, needs, histories, governing institutions, and ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union that turned unavoidable tensions into the epic four-decade confrontation that we call the Cold War.
Map 1. Central Europe after the Second World War.
American visions of post-war order
The United States emerged from the wreckage of the Second World War with relatively moderate losses. Although some 400,000 of the nation’s soldiers and sailors gave their lives in the struggle against the Axis powers, approximately three-quarters of them on the battlefield, it bears emphasizing that those numbers represent less than 1 per cent of the war’s overall death toll and less than 2 per cent of the losses suffered by America’s Soviet partner. For most US civilians, in stunn
ing contrast to their counterparts across Europe, East Asia, North Africa, and elsewhere, the war meant not suffering and privation but prosperity—even abundance. The nation’s gross domestic product doubled between 1941 and 1945, bestowing the wonders of a highly productive, full-employment economy on a citizenry that had become accustomed to the deprivations imposed by a decade-long depression. Real wages rose rapidly and dramatically during the war years, and homefront Americans found themselves awash in a cornucopia of now-affordable consumer goods. ‘The American people’, remarked the director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, ‘are in the pleasant predicament of having to learn to live 50 per cent better than they have ever lived before.’
In August 1945, newly installed President Harry S. Truman was merely stating the self-evident when he commented: ‘We have emerged from this war the most powerful nation in the world—the most powerful nation, perhaps, in all history.’ Yet neither the economic benefits conferred on the American people by the war nor the soaring military power, productive strength, and international prestige attained by their nation during the struggle against Axis aggression could lessen the frightening uncertainties of the new world ushered in by the war. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor decisively shattered the illusion of invulnerability that Americans had enjoyed ever since the end of the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. The obsession with national security that became so central a motif of US foreign and defence policy throughout the Cold War era can be traced back directly to the myth-puncturing events that culminated with the Japanese strike of 7 December 1941. Not until the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington 60 years later would Americans again experience so direct, and so wholly unanticipated, an assault on their homeland.
Military strategists took several lessons from the bold Japanese strike, each of which carried profound implications for the future. They became convinced, first, that technology, and especially air power, had so contracted the globe that America’s vaunted two-ocean barrier no longer afforded sufficient protection from external assault. True security now required a defence that began well beyond the home shores—a defence in depth, in military parlance. That concept led defence officials of the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman administrations to advocate the establishment of an integrated, global network of US-controlled air and naval bases, as well as the negotiation of widespread military air transit rights. Together, those would allow the United States to project its power more easily into potential trouble spots and to stifle or deter prospective enemies long before they gained the power to strike at American territory. A sense of how extensive US military base requirements were can be gleaned from a 1946 list of ‘essential’ sites compiled by the State Department; it included, among other locales, Burma, Canada, the Fiji Islands, New Zealand, Cuba, Greenland, Ecuador, French Morocco, Senegal, Iceland, Liberia, Panama, Peru, and the Azores.
Second, and even more broadly, senior American strategists determined that the nation’s military power must never again be allowed to atrophy. US military strength, they were agreed, must form a core element of the new world order. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations were, accordingly, insistent upon maintaining naval and air forces second to none; a strong military presence in the Pacific; dominance of the Western hemisphere; a central role in the occupations of defeated adversaries Italy, Germany, Austria, and Japan; and a continued monopoly on the atomic bomb. Even before the eruption of the Cold War, US strategic planners were operating from an extraordinarily expansive concept of national security.
That broad vision of the nation’s security requirements was reinforced by a third, overarching lesson that US policy-makers drew from the Second World War experience: namely, that never again could a hostile state, or coalition of states, be allowed to gain preponderant control over the populations, territories, and resources of Europe and East Asia. The Eurasian heartland, as geopoliticians were fond of labelling it, ranked as the world’s greatest strategic-economic prize; its combination of rich natural resources, advanced industrial infrastructure, skilled labour, and sophisticated military facilities made it the fulcrum of world power, as the events of 1940–1 made painfully clear. When the Axis powers seized control over much of Eurasia in the early 1940s, they gained the wherewithal to wage protracted war, subvert the world economy, commit heinous crimes against humanity, and threaten and ultimately attack the Western hemisphere. If such an eventuality came to pass again, US defence officials worried, the international system would once again be badly destabilized, the balance of world power dangerously distorted, and the physical safety of the United States put at grave risk. Moreover, even if a direct attack on the United States could be averted, American leaders would still be forced to prepare for one—and that would mean a radical increase in both military spending and the size of its permanent defence establishment, a reconfiguration of the domestic economy, and the curtailment of cherished economic and political freedoms at home. Axis dominance of Eurasia, in short, or control over Eurasia by any future enemy, would thus also jeopardize the political economy of freedom so crucial to core US beliefs and values. The Second World War experience thus offered hard lessons about the critical importance of maintaining a favourable balance of power in Eurasia.
The military-strategic dimensions of world order were, in American thinking, inseparable from the economic dimensions. US planners viewed the establishment of a freer and more open international economic system as equally indispensable to the new order they were determined to construct from the ashes of history’s most horrific conflict. Experience had instructed them, Secretary of State Cordell Hull recalled, that free trade stood as an essential prerequisite for peace. The autarky, closed trading blocs, and nationalistic barriers to foreign investment and currency convertibility that had characterized the depression decade just encouraged interstate rivalry and conflict. A more open world, according to the American formula, would be a more prosperous world; and a more prosperous world would, in turn, be a more stable and peaceful world. To achieve those ends, the United States pushed hard in wartime diplomatic councils for a multilateral economic regime of liberalized trade, equal investment opportunities for all nations, stable exchange rates, and full currency convertibility. At the Bretton Woods Conference late in 1944, the United States gained general acceptance of those principles, along with support for the establishment of two key supranational bodies, the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), charged with helping to stabilize the global economy. That the United States, the world’s leading capitalist state and one that was producing an astonishing 50 per cent of the world’s goods and services at the war’s end, would surely benefit from the new, multilateral commercial regime so vigorously endorsed by the Roosevelt and Truman administrations and the US business community was a given. American ideals here were inextricably interwoven with American interests.
In a December 1944 editorial, the Chicago Tribune captured the buoyancy and self-confidence of American society when it proudly proclaimed that it was ‘the good fortune of the world’, and not just the United States, that ‘power and unquestionable intentions’ now ‘went together’ in the Great American Republic. ‘American arms and ideals have triumphed in the most severe test this country has ever faced,’ added the Saturday Evening Post. ‘The leading democracy of the world has proved again that it knows how to fight as well as how to live. It is only natural that there should be exultation in our hearts.’ The New Republic labelled Washington ‘the newly created World-Capital-on-the-Potomac’ while declaring it America’s destiny to reorder the world. Such convictions about the righteous destiny of the United States tapped deep roots within American history and culture. Elites and non-elites alike accepted the notion that it was their country’s historic responsibility to bring about a new, more peaceful, prosperous, and stable world. US leaders betrayed few doubts about the ability of their nation to effect so momentous a transition
; nor did they acknowledge any potential conflict between the global order they sought to forge and the needs and interests of the rest of humanity. With the hubris of a people who had known few failures, Americans thought that they could, in Dean Acheson’s choice words, ‘grab hold of history and make it conform’. Only one significant obstacle loomed. The Soviet Union, cautioned Life magazine in July 1945, ‘is the number one problem for Americans because it is the only country in the world with the dynamic power to challenge our own conceptions of truth, justice, and the good life’.
Soviet visions of post-war order
The Soviet blueprint for post-war order was also refracted through the filters of history, culture, and ideology. Soviet memories of Hitler’s surprise attack of June 1941 were just as vivid—and far more terrifying—than were American memories of Pearl Harbor. It could hardly have been otherwise in a land that had endured such staggering losses. Of the fifteen Soviet Republics, nine had been occupied in whole or in part by the Germans. Hardly any Soviet citizens remained untouched personally by what they came to sanctify as The Great Patriotic War. Nearly every family lost a loved one; most sacrificed several. In addition to the millions of human lives cut short by the conflict, 1,700 cities and towns, more than 70,000 villages and hamlets, and 31,000 factories were demolished. Leningrad, the country’s most historic city, was decimated in a prolonged siege that alone claimed over a million lives. The German invasion also wreaked havoc with the nation’s agricultural base, destroying millions of acres of crops and resulting in the slaughter of tens of millions of cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, and horses.
The Cold War Page 3
