4. Hungarians protest against the Soviet invasion, November 1956.
Turmoil in the Third World
For several reasons, the developing nations of the Third World, most just emerging from decades, if not centuries, of Western colonial rule, became a focal point of Soviet–American competition during the 1950s. In this book, I use the term ‘Third World’, as it was commonly used during the Cold War, to denote most of the nations and peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The term derived from the Cold War notion that this huge geographic area stood apart from the First World (the United States and its principal allies in Europe) and the Second World (the Soviet bloc) both economically and politically. Scholars and policy-makers also frequently applied the term ‘developing world’ as a kind of synonym or substitute for ‘Third World’ (along with the more derogatory ‘underdeveloped world’). Since the end of the Cold War, scholars and journalists have increasingly applied the term ‘global South’ to this part of the world. I have decided to use the terms Third World, developing world, and global South interchangeably in this book.
‘What was at stake in the Third World’, contends political scientist Robert Jervis, ‘was nothing less than each side’s view of the rightness of its cause, the universalism of its values, and the answer to the question of whose side history was on.’ In the broadest sense, Washington and Moscow each saw the pace and direction of change in the global South offering confirmation, in the words of historian Odd Arne Westad, of ‘the universal applicability of their ideologies. … Each saw a specific mission in and for the Third World that only their own state could carry out.’ More concretely, US national security planners recognized that the resources and markets of Third World areas were essential to the health of the world capitalist economy, the economic recoveries of Western Europe and Japan, and America’s own commercial and military needs. The West, in fact, derived much of its economic-military vitality from its links to the developing world; the critical importance of Middle Eastern oil to Western Europe’s peacetime needs and NATO’s wartime requirements serves only as the most obvious case in point. The Soviets, especially after the death of the doctrinaire Stalin and the rise to power of the more diplomatically adroit Khrushchev, made a concerted bid for friends and allies among the Third World’s uncommitted nations in order to dilute that aspect of Western strength. Utilizing diplomacy, trade, and generous development loans, the Kremlin sought to gain influence and access to resources and bases, especially among the Afro-Asian nations, while weakening the hold of the West. The Marxist-Leninist development model appealed to many Third World intellectuals and political leaders, who were impressed with the Soviet Union’s leap from backwardness to the status of a military-industrial giant in a mere generation.
That fact facilitated the Kremlin’s bid for friends and support, much as the taint of Western imperialism, racism, arrogance, and continuing control over indigenous resources complicated the task of American diplomats. US policy-makers became convinced during the 1950s that the outcome of the struggle over the periphery could well tip the balance of global power towards—or against—the West. The ‘much enlarged’ Soviet effort in the developing world, Secretary of State Dean Rusk announced to the Senate in February 1961, demonstrated that the Soviet–American struggle had shifted ‘from the military problem in Western Europe to a genuine contest for the underdeveloped countries’. He warned that ‘the battles for Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, [and] Asia are now joined, not on a military plain in the first instance, but for influence, prestige, loyalty, and so forth, and the stakes there are very high’.
The Iranian crisis of 1951–3 encapsulates nearly all of those larger themes. It was born of a struggle between an indigenous nationalist regime determined to regain control over its economy and a Western power unwilling to renegotiate the terms of a highly lucrative oil concession. Ardent nationalist leader Mohammed Mossadeq precipitated the crisis when he nationalized the oilfields and refineries of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) in the spring of 1951. The Iranian prime minister was seeking to wrest greater profits for his nation from the vast petroleum reserves that constituted Iran’s most valuable resource, a resource that had long been monopolized by the giant, British-owned AIOC. Great Britain’s adamant refusal to negotiate in good faith with the Mossadeq government and its subsequent resort to a boycott of Iranian oil produced rising tensions that soon took on strong Cold War overtones. Although sympathetic at first to what it, too, viewed as an unwelcome challenge by an upstart Third World regime to the unwritten rules that had long governed commercial arrangements between the industrialized and the less developed nations, the United States spied a much more serious threat in Iran’s opportunistic neighbour to the north. The Truman administration offered its services as a mediator principally because it feared a destabilizing confrontation from which the Soviets seemed sure to benefit. The British refusal to compromise blunted American mediation efforts, however, and prompted Mossadeq both to welcome Soviet aid and to turn for internal support to the pro-Soviet Tudeh Party. In response, the Eisenhower administration launched, with the British, a covert operation that helped topple Mossadeq while restoring the pro-Western shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, to power as a royal autocrat.
Although the origins of the Anglo-Iranian dispute had nothing to do with the Cold War, it was US fears of Soviet adventurism—however exaggerated—that drove American policy. Behind its covert intervention in Iranian affairs lay the two central preoccupations of America’s Middle Eastern policy during the early Cold War: a determination to contain the Soviet Union, and thus deny to it influence over the region’s emerging post-colonial states, and a determination to protect Western Europe’s access to vital oil supplies. ‘An adequate supply of oil to Western Europe ranks almost equal in priority with an adequate supply for ourselves,’ Eisenhower remarked to an adviser after Mossadeq’s fall from power. ‘The West must, for self-preservation, retain access to Mid-East oil.’
A second dispute with heavy neo-colonial overtones, that between Britain and Egypt over who would control the mammoth Cairo–Suez military complex, also bedevilled American efforts to forge a stable, pro-Western Middle East. It led indirectly to the most serious international incident of the decade, the Suez Crisis of 1956. The roots of that crisis lay in Egypt’s refusal to enlist in any of the anti-Soviet defence organizations that the Americans and British sought to assemble in the early and mid-1950s. The bitterness engendered by the dispute with London disinclined the Egyptians to cooperate with a West they associated with continuing imperial machinations. With Egypt and most other leading Arab states refusing to enter into a collective security agreement with the Western powers, the Americans and British gravitated towards the alternative ‘northern tier’ concept. In February 1955, consequently, Britain, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq signed the Baghdad Pact, a loose mutual security agreement intended to extend the containment shield to the Middle East. Although American pressure, along with promises of military and economic largesse, was instrumental in the negotiations leading to the agreement, Washington chose not to participate directly so as to avoid unduly alienating Arab states with whom it was still cultivating friendly relations (Map 3).
Map 3. The Middle East, 1956.
Yet that initiative actually spurred the very regional instability it aimed to quell. The creation of the Baghdad Pact struck Egypt’s nationalist strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser as an act of open hostility since conservative Iraq, the pact’s sole Arab signatory, was Egypt’s traditional rival within the Arab world. In the autumn of 1955, Nasser signed an arms deal with Czechoslovakia in order to counter an Iraq now bolstered militarily by its formal association with the Western-sponsored Baghdad grouping. Alarmed by Egypt’s seeming drift towards the Soviet camp, the Eisenhower administration, in December 1955, offered a carrot: generous funding for the Aswan Dam project, the centrepiece of Egypt’s ambitious development plans. But Egypt’s support for commando raids into Israel, i
ts continuing neutralist line in foreign policy, and its recognition of the People’s Republic of China in May 1956 aroused American ire. On 19 July 1956, Secretary of State Dulles abruptly announced that the United States was rescinding its Aswan Dam financing offer. ‘May you choke to death on your fury,’ a defiant Nasser railed at the United States. World Bank President Eugene Black warned Dulles that ‘all hell might break loose’.
On 26 July, Nasser proved Black prescient. In a bold and wholly unanticipated move, he nationalized the Suez Canal Company, an Anglo-French concern, vowing to operate the vital international waterway efficiently and to use the revenues it generated to finance his high-priority dam project. After desultory negotiations, in which Dulles laboured assiduously to find an alternative to open conflict, collusion between Britain, France, and Israel led to their joint military action against Egypt in late October 1956. To the shock and dismay of its allies, the United States forcefully condemned their invasion, terming it a blatant and unjustified act of military aggression that violated the rule of law. When, on 5 November, the Soviets denounced the attack on Egypt and bumptiously threatened retaliation against Britain and France if they did not immediately cease their aggression, the Suez crisis suddenly metamorphosed into a potentially grave East–West confrontation. Persistent US pressure on its allies helped to produce a cease-fire, thereby defusing the danger posed by what the Americans judged to be an empty, but still disturbing, Soviet bluff.
In the aftermath of the Suez crisis, the United States assumed even greater responsibilities in the Middle East. Eisenhower’s greatest fear was that the Soviet Union would move into the vacuum created by the waning of British and French power in the region. As he told a group of Congressmen on 1 January 1957: ‘The existing vacuum in the Middle East must be filled by the United States before it is filled by Russia.’ The so-called Eisenhower Doctrine, which the president proposed to Congress on 5 January, created a special fund to provide economic and military assistance to pro-Western regimes in the Middle East. It also threatened the use of military force, if necessary, to stop ‘overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism’. The vague doctrine certainly made manifest the deepening American commitment to a region that US strategists now imagined on the front lines of the Cold War. It also provided the pretext for Eisenhower’s dispatch of US forces to Lebanon the following year, after a bloody coup in Iraq toppled the pro-Western monarchy there and called into question US credibility within the region. Yet the deepest sources of regional instability—the Arab–Israeli dispute, deep-seated resentment among Arabs at the legacies of Western imperialism, and the appeal of radical, pan-Arab nationalism—remained impervious to US troop deployments, economic enticements, diplomatic schemes, and mediation proposals.
Southeast Asia emerged at this time as another region of intense Cold War contestation. American policy-makers worried that the unsettled conditions prevailing in an area beset by enormous economic difficulties, a tenuous and incomplete transition from colonialism to independence, and still-raging colonial conflicts in Indo-China and Malaya made all of Southeast Asia ripe for communist penetration. The stakes struck US analysts as alarmingly high. Declared Charles Bohlen, one of the State Department’s top Soviet specialists: the ‘loss of Southeast Asia’ to communism would exert so profound an impact on the overall balance of power that, if it occurred, ‘we would have lost the Cold War’. In mid-1952, Secretary of State Acheson struck a similar note, exclaiming to British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden that ‘we are lost if we lose southeast Asia without a fight’ and hence ‘we must do what we can to save Southeast Asia’.
If the prospect of the Soviet Union exploiting regional ferment to gain a foothold in the Middle East proved the foremost American fear in that region, the prospect of China employing outright military aggression to achieve expansionist ends ranked as the predominant American fear in Southeast Asia. In a policy paper approved by Truman in June 1952, the National Security Council spelled out Washington’s overriding concern. The defection of any single Southeast Asia country to the Sino-Soviet bloc, it warned, ‘would have critical psychological, political and economic consequences’, and ‘would probably lead to relatively swift submission to or an alignment with communism by the remaining countries of the group’. In short, a domino effect could be expected in which communist control over one country would, without prompt and vigorous counteraction, led to communist control over the entire region—and possibly well beyond. Such an eventuality would exert highly detrimental economic effects on both Western Europe and Japan, deny critical strategic resources to the West, strike a blow at the credibility and prestige of the United States as a world power, and lend weight to the notion that the momentum of history lay with communism and not with the Western democracies.
Indo-China, where the communist-led Viet Minh insurgents had, since 1946, been thwarting all French attempts to suppress them, thanks in part to invaluable Chinese military and logistical support, appeared the most likely place for a communist breakthrough. It served as the focal point, accordingly, of America’s containment efforts in Southeast Asia. Beginning just prior to the Korean War and increasing progressively over the next few years, US military aid essentially underwrote the French war effort. By early 1954, however, the French people and government had grown weary of a conflict that had proven costly, protracted, and deeply unpopular. Rejecting American counsel, they sought a graceful diplomatic exit. A great power conference on Indo-China, consequently, convened at Geneva in May 1954. It was followed quickly by a decisive Viet Minh triumph over the embattled French garrison at Dienbienphu in remote, north-western Vietnam. Together those developments hastened the end of French rule in Indo-China. Unable to win at the conference table what had been lost on the battlefield, the Western powers accepted the temporary division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel, awarding the northern half of the country to Ho’s Viet Minh. The Vietnamese leader’s Soviet and Chinese allies pressed him to settle for the proverbial half a loaf, to his great frustration, because they wanted to avoid provoking the Americans and risking another military confrontation with the West so soon after the Korean cease-fire.
For its part, the Eisenhower administration sought to salvage what it could from an outcome that represented not just a humiliating national defeat for France but a global, Cold War setback for the United States. In an effort to draw the line against further communist advances in Southeast Asia, the Americans took the lead in forming the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September 1954. It brought together the United States, France, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan in a loose, and rather toothless, anti-communist alliance intended to signal resolve to the Chinese and Soviets. Eisenhower, Dulles, and their associates also moved immediately to supplant French influence with American in South Vietnam, pouring US dollars, advisers, and matériel into the fledgling Republic of Vietnam in order to prevent its being absorbed by North Vietnam, either through force of arms or via the ballot box. Certain that the all-Vietnam elections scheduled for 1956 would result in a resounding victory for Ho Chi Minh, pro-American Premier Ngo Dinh Diem cancelled them. Vietnam thus joined Germany and Korea as another nation divided by Cold War tensions that made unification too risky.
In the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, and throughout the Third World, the United States turned with increasing frequency to covert operations during the 1950s to achieve its foreign policy objectives. Indeed, the CIA became a favoured Cold War instrument for American policy-makers since it promised efficient, cost-effective actions that precluded the need for conventional armed forces and could plausibly be denied if the veil of secrecy were breached. Between 1949 and 1952, the number of CIA personnel grew exponentially, along with the agency’s budget, and the number of overseas CIA stations expanded from 7 to 47. In 1953, as already noted, the CIA played an instrumental role in the overthrow of Iran’s Mossadeq. The next year, it played an equally instrumenta
l role in the ouster of Guatemala’s leftist leader Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. The latter’s nationalization of the US-owned United Fruit Company, together with his tolerance for Guatemala’s tiny communist party, labelled him, in US eyes, as a dangerous extremist who might give the Soviet Union the opening it needed to establish a Western hemisphere foothold. Although American assessments of both Mossadeq and Arbenz as proto-communists were way off base, as the bulk of recent scholarship has demonstrated conclusively, the interventions in Iran and Guatemala demonstrate the depth of US fears about the direction of political change in the Third World. The CIA’s successes in Iran and Guatemala shrouded the agency in an aura of mysterious near-invincibility, and probably encouraged Eisenhower and his successors to employ covert means in an oft-times counterproductive manner. Covert intervention against an anti-Western regime in Syria backfired in 1957, for example, as did a wildly reckless paramilitary effort to unseat Indonesia’s Sukarno the following year. Both were exposed, and did more harm than good to the American cause. The growing addiction to covert action proved difficult to break, however. It derived partly from the lure of easy, cost-efficient success—from the same budgetary pressures, in fact, that made the United States so reliant on nuclear weapons to achieve foreign policy goals.
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