The Cold War

by Robert J. McMahon

  Given Stalin’s oft-stated concerns about the revival of German power, those Western policy initiatives virtually ensured a vigorous Soviet reaction, as US officials anticipated. ‘What the Soviets feared most,’ notes Russian scholar Vladimir O. Pechatnov, ‘was that Eastern Europe would fall under the West’s economic hegemony and that Germany would become integrated into a U.S.-led orbit.’ In September 1947, at a conference in Poland, the Soviets established the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) as a means of tightening control over both their satellite states in Eastern Europe and the communist parties of Western Europe. Decrying the Marshall Plan as part of a concerted strategy to forge a Western alliance that would serve as a ‘jumping-off place for attacking the Soviet Union’, chief Russian delegate Andrei Zhdanov said the world was now divided into ‘two camps’.

  A Soviet-sponsored coup in Czechoslovakia, in February 1948, followed. It led to the dismissal of all non-communist ministers from the government, and left respected Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk dead in its wake—in highly suspicious circumstances. Along with heavy-handed repression of the non-communist opposition in Hungary, the Czech coup heralded a much tougher Soviet stance within its ‘camp’ and helped crystallize Europe’s East–West split.

  Then, on 24 June 1948, Stalin threw the hammer down. In response to the Anglo-American-French rehabilitation and consolidation of West Germany, the Soviets suddenly halted all allied ground access to West Berlin. By isolating the western enclave in that divided city, located 125 miles within Soviet-occupied eastern Germany, Stalin aimed to expose his adversaries’ vulnerability, thereby derailing the establishment of the separate West German state he so feared. Truman responded by initiating a round-the-clock airlift of supplies and fuel to the 2 million embattled residents of West Berlin in one of the most storied, and tension-filled, episodes of the early Cold War. In May 1949, Stalin finally called off what had turned into an ineffectual blockade—and a public relations disaster. The clumsy Soviet riposte succeeded only in deepening the East–West split, inflaming public opinion in the United States and Western Europe, and destroying whatever shred of hope still existed for a German settlement acceptable to all four occupying powers. In September 1949, the Western powers created the Federal Republic of Germany. One month later, the Soviets established the German Democratic Republic in their occupation zone. Europe’s Cold War lines were now clearly demarcated, the division of Germany between west and east mirroring the broader division of Europe into American-led and Soviet-led spheres.

  A number of top Western European diplomats, none more determinedly than British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, believed that the burgeoning European–American connection could only be cemented through a formal transatlantic security agreement. Towards that end, the burly former labour leader became the prime mover behind the formation of the Brussels Pact of April 1948. That mutual security agreement between Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, Bevin hoped, could serve as the basis for a broader Western alliance. What he sought was a mechanism that would simultaneously draw the Americans more fully into Western European affairs, assuage French anxieties about the revival of Germany, and deter the Soviets—or, as a popular saying crudely but not inaccurately put it: a means ‘to keep the Americans in, the Soviets out, and the Germans down’. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) met the needs identified by Bevin—and by a Truman administration intent upon adding a security anchor to its developing containment strategy. Signed in Washington on 4 April 1949, NATO brought together the Brussels signatories, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Portugal, Canada, and the United States, in a mutual security pact. Each of the member-states consented to treat an attack on one or more as an attack on all. This commitment represented a historic reversal for the United States of one of the defining traditions of its foreign policy. Not since the alliance with France of the late 18th century had Washington formed an entangling alliance or merged its own security needs so seamlessly with those of other sovereign states.

  The sphere of influence, or ‘empire’, that the United States forged in post-war Europe stands as a product of its fears more than its ambitions. It was a product, moreover, of a convergence of interest between US and Western European elites. Indeed, the latter deserve recognition as co-authors of what historian Geir Lundestad has termed America’s ‘empire by invitation’. Important distinctions obtain, in this regard, between a Soviet empire that was essentially imposed on much of Eastern Europe and an American empire that resulted from a partnership born of common security fears and overlapping economic needs.

  Although an undeniably crucial development in the onset of the Cold War, the division of Europe into hostile spheres of influence forms only part of our story. Had the Cold War been restricted to a competition for power and influence in Europe alone, that story would have played out very differently from how it ultimately did. Chapter 3, consequently, shifts the geographical focus to Asia, the Cold War’s second major theatre of the early post-war era.

  Chapter 3

  Towards ‘Hot War’ in Asia, 1945–50

  Asia became the second major theatre of the Cold War—and the place where the Cold War first turned hot. Europe, of course, generated more controversy and received far more attention from the United States and the Soviet Union, emerging as the principal focus of tensions between the former allies in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Each identified interests there that appeared vital both to its short-term and long-term security needs and economic well-being. The development and hardening of an American sphere of influence in Western Europe and a corresponding Soviet sphere in Eastern Europe forms the very essence of the Cold War’s opening phase, as Chapter 2 has argued, with Germany serving as ground zero of the Cold War. Yet open conflict between East and West was averted in Europe—in the late 1940s and throughout the four decades that followed. Asia, where Washington and Moscow also had important, if decidedly less vital, interests, proved not so fortunate. As many as 6 million soldiers and civilians would ultimately lose their lives in Cold War-related conflicts in Korea and Indo-China. It was the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, moreover, that precipitated the first direct military showdown between US and communist forces and, as much as any other single event, turned the Cold War into a worldwide struggle.

  Japan: from mortal enemy to Cold War ally

  The Second World War catalysed far-reaching changes across the breadth of the Asian continent. Japan’s stunning string of conquests in the war’s early months—in Singapore, in Malaya, in Burma, in the Philippines, in the Dutch East Indies, in French Indo-China, and elsewhere—capsized the Western colonial system in East Asia, at least temporarily, while simultaneously puncturing the myth of white racial superiority on which Western rule ultimately rested. ‘The British Empire in the Far East depended on prestige’, observed an Australian diplomat at the time. ‘This prestige has been completely shattered.’ The ensuing Japanese occupation of British, French, Dutch, and American colonial possessions, rationalized by the effective, if self-serving, ‘Asia for the Asians’ slogan, accelerated the growth of nationalist consciousness among Asian peoples. It also set the stage for the nationalist revolutions that would erupt at the war’s end. The vacuums of power left by the precipitous surrender of Japan on 14 August 1945 gave aspirant nationalists the time to organize, mobilize, and win popular support for the indigenous alternatives to Japanese, and Western, dominance that they hurriedly sought to construct.

  The epic struggles for national freedom and independence mounted by Asian and African peoples in the aftermath of the Second World War rank among the most powerful historical forces of the 20th century. Those struggles, it bears emphasizing, were quite distinct from the temporally overlapping contest for power and influence being waged by the United States and the Soviet Union, and doubtless would have transpired with or without a Cold War. Yet the latter conflict did occur, and its totalizing character inevitably shaped the temper, pace, and ul
timate outcome of the former. Decolonization and the Cold War were fated to become inextricably linked, each shaping and being shaped by the other, in Asia as elsewhere.

  As the post-war era dawned, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union seemed to recognize that the old order in East Asia had been fatally undermined by the Pacific War or to appreciate the extent to which the nationalist currents it unleashed would fundamentally change Asian societies. The Soviets initially pursued a characteristically opportunistic yet cautious policy in East Asia, one wholly consistent with their actions in post-war Europe. Stalin sought to reclaim all territory once held by tsarist Russia, to re-establish economic concessions in Manchuria and Outer Mongolia, and to ensure Soviet security along the 4,150-mile Sino-Soviet border. Those aims pointed towards the need to keep China friendly but weak—and preferably divided—to avoid any major clashes with the Western powers, and to restrain the revolutionary impulses of local communist parties. For its part, the United States advanced a more wide-ranging and ambitious foreign policy agenda, predicated upon defanging Japan, turning the Pacific into an American lake, transforming China into a dependable and stable ally, and fostering a moderate solution to the colonial problem.

  First and foremost, though, US planners considered it imperative that Japan never again be allowed to threaten the peace of the region. To that end, Washington was determined that it, and it alone, would oversee the post-war occupation and restructuring of Japan. The American goal was as straightforward as it was ambitious: to use its power to remake Japanese society by destroying all vestiges of militarism while helping to foster the development of liberal, democratic institutions. To a remarkable extent, the United States succeeded. Under the supervision of the imperious General Douglas MacArthur, the American occupation regime spurred a wide-ranging set of reforms: extensive land reform was initiated, labour laws passed that provided for collective bargaining rights and the establishment of unions, educational improvements enacted, and equal rights granted to women. The new constitution of May 1947 formally renounced war, prohibited the maintenance of armed forces, and laid down the principles for a system of representative, democratic governance under the rule of law. It was, in the words of one historian, ‘perhaps the single most exhaustively planned operation of massive and externally directed political change in world history’.

  Unlike the case of Germany, which was governed directly by four different powers and divided among them for administrative-political purposes, the occupation in Japan was dominated by a single power that ruled indirectly, preferring to exert its will through close collaboration with the pragmatic Japanese governmental bureaucracy. Japan, of course, also in contradistinction to Germany, was left fully intact as a sovereign national entity.

  Yet, for all those salient differences, US officials essentially treated Japan, especially after 1947, as the Asian analogue to (West) Germany: a nation whose advanced industrial infrastructure, skilled workforce, and technological prowess made it both the indispensable engine of regional economic growth and a Cold War strategic asset of incalculable value. As East–West tensions in Europe mounted, the US occupation regime in Japan shifted from a concentration on reforming and demilitarizing a former enemy state to a preoccupation with facilitating its rapid economic recovery. A stable, economically vibrant, pro-American Japan was judged by US strategists to be just as essential to overall US policy objectives in post-war Asia as a stable, economically vibrant, pro-American Germany was to overall US policy objectives in post-war Europe. In each case, geopolitical and economic goals were woven into a seamless web. American experts considered Japan the most important nation in Asia because of its potential as the engine of East Asian economic recovery and because of its intrinsic strategic value. From 1947 onwards, the Truman administration’s overriding Asian policy goal was to orient a stable, prosperous Japan to the West. If Tokyo fell under communist influence, the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned Truman, the ‘USSR would gain, thereby, an additional war-making potential equal to 25% of her capacity’. In December 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson similarly framed Japan’s strategic importance in terms of the overall power balance between East and West. ‘Were Japan added to the communist bloc’, he emphasized, ‘the Soviets would acquire skilled manpower and industrial potential capable of significantly altering the balance of world power.’

  In view of the enormity of the perceived stakes, US officials were agreed that protecting Japan from any external communist threat and simultaneously inoculating it from any possible internal contagion stood as America’s cardinal regional priorities. Yet, despite the noteworthy early successes of the occupation, they remained apprehensive about the future, fearing in particular that developments across the China Sea might undercut the prospects for a revitalized Japan anchored firmly to the West. As the Chinese communists gained the upper hand by the late 1940s in China’s ongoing civil war, US analysts fretted that Japan’s traditional reliance on China as its principal overseas market might over time draw it into the communist orbit. After all, as Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida put it: ‘Whether China is red or green, China is a natural market.’ The orientation of Japan and the future of China were problems not easily separated.

  The communist triumph in China

  The proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949 represented not just a monumental personal triumph for Mao Zedong (see Figure 3) and the other leaders of a Chinese communist movement that had been routed, hunted, and nearly extinguished by Chiang Kai-shek’s ruling Guomindang Party two decades earlier. It also signified a fundamental shift in the nature and locus of the Cold War—with weighty strategic, ideological, and domestic political implications.

  3. Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.

  During the Second World War, the Roosevelt administration had bolstered the Chiang regime with substantial amounts of military and economic assistance, though never enough to satisfy the demanding generalissimo. Roosevelt wanted to turn the Chinese military into an effective anti-Japanese fighting force and the Chiang regime into a reliable American ally, one capable of assuming a stabilizing and balancing role in post-war Asian affairs. To further those objectives, Roosevelt met with Chiang at Cairo in 1943, before and immediately following the Big Three summit conference at Tehran to which the Chinese leader was not invited. During their Cairo discussions, the American president flattered Chiang by symbolically elevating China to great power status; Roosevelt subsequently talked about China as one of the ‘Four Policemen’ that, along with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, would help maintain peace after the war. He boosted China in this manner partly to cement Sino-American ties, partly to compensate for the additional material assistance that Chiang requested but Washington was unable to provide, and partly to keep China in the war, thereby precluding the possibility of a disastrous separate peace between China and Japan. But neither Roosevelt’s symbolic gestures nor the military and diplomatic missions he dispatched with some regularity to the Guomindang’s wartime capital in Chongqing proved sufficient to coax a meaningful military contribution from Chiang’s troops.

  By 1944, American diplomats on the scene increasingly disparaged the long-term prospects for a regime mired in corruption, venality, and incompetence. For its part, the Guomindang, or Nationalist, government was convinced that the chief threat to its existence emanated not from the Japanese, whom their American allies would surely defeat with or without significant Chinese help, but from the Chinese communists. Under Mao’s capable leadership, the latter had blossomed into a formidable military and political force during the years of Japanese occupation, and had gained control of vast portions of northern and central China. Rather than expending men and matériel battling the Japanese invaders, Chiang and his inner circle chose to husband precious resources for what they expected to be an inevitable showdown with the communists after the war.

  At the Yalta Conference, in February 1945, Roosevelt lo
oked to an unusual source for a solution to America’s policy dilemma in China. Thoroughly disillusioned by Chiang’s unwillingness to fight, he sought and gained a Soviet commitment to enter the war against Japan within three months after the end of hostilities in Europe. Stalin’s price for that gesture—Roosevelt’s promise to help the Soviets regain tsarist-era concessions in Manchuria and Outer Mongolia—proved acceptable to a US president who attached great value to minimizing the loss of American lives in what was expected to be the extremely bloody denouement of the Pacific War. On 14 August, Chiang assented to those Soviet concessions in the officially entitled Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Assistance in return for Moscow’s recognition of the legal sovereignty of his government.