The Cuban Missile Crisis also had an impact on the Western alliance. Some of America’s NATO partners, particularly France and West Germany, drew the unsettling lesson that Washington would always act in its own interests in any confrontation with the Soviet Union, even if it was European lives that lay on the front lines. Although standing four-square with the United States throughout the crisis, and exulting in the easing of East–West tensions that followed, they were unnerved by the Kennedy administration’s decision to inform, rather than consult, them about US actions. French President Charles de Gaulle feared that France might some day face ‘annihilation without representation’ (Box 4). Convinced that his nation’s security, and that of Europe as a whole, would be better served by a more independent French foreign policy, he moved to develop an independent French nuclear force, distanced France from the American-dominated NATO military structure, and cemented the connection between Paris and Bonn. All those trends carried profound implications for the triangular relationship between the Soviet Union, the United States, and America’s loyal but restive European allies. So, too, would the longest, bloodiest, and most controversial conflict of the entire Cold War era.
Box 4 Charles de Gaulle
The French general who headed the Free French government-in-exile during the Second World War, de Gaulle served as president of France immediately following liberation, returning to power again in 1958. As president of France from 1958 until his retirement in 1969, the prideful, arrogant, and intensely nationalistic de Gaulle strove to develop a leadership role for France within Europe that would be independent of the Anglo-American axis. The January 1963 Franco-German treaty of cooperation, mutual support, and strategic coordination, which he initiated, served as the centrepiece of de Gaulle’s plans for an invigorated continental bloc. In 1966, he withdrew France from NATO’s integrated command structure—but not from the alliance itself.
Vietnam: the Cold War’s tragic sideshow
The Vietnam War presents the student of the Cold War with a great paradox. On the one hand, the United States and the Soviet Union seemed to be moving towards a more stable and much safer relationship in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cold War glacier truly seemed to be melting. Yet, at the same moment that the process of incipient détente was unfolding, the United States was inching closer to war on the distant Southeast Asian periphery—for self-professed Cold War reasons. By the time of Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, the United States had sent 16,000 military advisers to South Vietnam, permitted those advisers to participate in combat operations against Viet Cong insurgents, initiated covert operations against North Vietnam, and significantly deepened its commitment to preserve a non-communist regime in South Vietnam. By the time Lyndon B. Johnson left office five years later, over half a million US troops were stationed in South Vietnam, bogged down in a ferocious war of attrition against a determined and elusive foe that was receiving diplomatic backing and material support from both Moscow and Beijing. The Johnson White House faced by then not only an American polity that was profoundly divided about the efficacy, and morality, of the Vietnam War but a ‘Free World’ alliance system that was similarly divided. By the late 1960s, in some cases much earlier, such key allies as Canada, France, Great Britain, West Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Japan openly questioned the relevance of America’s costly exertions in Indo-China to common Cold War interests and policies.
The underlying reasons behind Washington’s fateful decision to intervene in Vietnam with massive military force, however misguided they might appear in retrospect, are not difficult to discern. They lie almost entirely within the realm of Cold War fears, fears often inflamed by partisan politics. In the broadest sense, US intervention derived from a determination to contain China and to prove simultaneously, for the sake of allies, adversaries, and domestic audiences, the credibility of American power and the sanctity of American commitments.
By the early 1960s, China had in many respects supplanted the Soviet Union as America’s most feared adversary. Of the two communist giants, it appeared far the more militant, hostile, and belligerent. The post-Cuban Missile Crisis period, which produced a thaw in US–Soviet relations, brought no respite to US–Chinese tensions. Indeed, China’s initiation of a brief border war with India in October 1962 just reaffirmed US suspicions about Beijing’s aggressive proclivities. National security planners of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were convinced that the increasingly virulent Sino-Soviet split had just emboldened Beijing’s leaders, making them more, rather than less, aggressive, adventuristic, and unpredictable. American leaders made explicit, on numerous occasions, the connection between China’s presumed expansionist tendencies and the need for US intervention in Vietnam. ‘Over this war—and all Asia—is another reality,’ Johnson declared in an important April 1965 speech: ‘the deepening shadow of communist China. The contest in Vietnam is part of a wider pattern of [Chinese] aggressive purposes.’ Defense Secretary McNamara, in a background session with the press that same month, remarked that the alternative to fighting in Vietnam was a Chinese-dominated Southeast Asia, which would mean a ‘Red Asia’. If the United States withdrew from Vietnam, he warned, a complete shift would occur in the world balance of power.
The determination of the United States to demonstrate its credibility as a power that met aggression with steely resolve and honoured its commitments to allies merged seamlessly with the anti-China strand in US policy. In a typical assessment, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy warned Johnson in early 1965: ‘The international prestige of the United States, and a substantial part of our influence, are directly at risk in Vietnam.’ Johnson and his top advisers, like a whole generation of American Cold Warriors, were convinced that US credibility must be preserved at almost any cost. It was the indispensable glue holding together America’s entire Cold War alliance system as well as the principal deterrent to communist aggression.
Political imperatives also influenced policy decisions. Early in his presidency, Kennedy confessed to a journalist about the deteriorating situation in Vietnam: ‘I can’t give up a piece of territory like that to the communists, and get the American people to reelect me.’ Both JFK and LBJ worried that the loss of South Vietnam to communism would ignite a political firestorm at home that would paralyse the country—and destroy their respective presidencies. According to political adviser Jack Valenti, Johnson was convinced that Republicans and conservative Democrats together would have ‘torn him in pieces’ had he failed to hold the line against communism in Southeast Asia. He worried as well that his ambitious domestic reform programme could be derailed in Congress should a humiliating defeat in Vietnam transpire under his watch.
If the forces propelling the United States towards war in Indo-China were strong, they were by no means irresistible. The Johnson administration, which crossed the Rubicon in early 1965 with its twin decisions to inaugurate a full-scale bombing campaign against North Vietnam and to dispatch US combat troops to South Vietnam, could have opted instead for a negotiated settlement, as the Kennedy administration did in Laos in 1961–2. Powerful constituencies at home, especially within the Congress and the establishment media, as well as leading voices in allied capitals, urged exactly such a course on first Kennedy and then Johnson. In August 1963, French President de Gaulle publicly called for a neutralized Vietnam, offering the United States a face-saving salve. Neither Kennedy nor Johnson, however, would accept a diplomatic alternative that they equated with defeat—and any negotiated settlement would almost certainly have meant communist participation in, if not outright domination over, the South Vietnamese government. American leaders portrayed their stubborn resolve in South Vietnam as fully consistent with previous Cold War commitments. ‘The challenge we face in Southeast Asia today’, Johnson insisted in an August 1964 speech, ‘is the same challenge that we have faced with courage and that we have met with strength in Greece and Turkey, in Berlin and Korea, and in Lebanon and China.’ The
defence of Saigon, Secretary of State Dean Rusk frequently stressed, was just as important to the security of the ‘Free World’ as the defence of West Berlin.
From the first, key NATO allies dissented. Most did not consider the prospective victory of communist forces in Vietnam in the same apocalyptic terms as their American partners. In contrast to policy-makers in Washington, they viewed Southeast Asia as peripheral to Western security, downplayed the existence of the Chinese regional threat that so exercised the Americans, and disputed the relevance of a South Vietnamese regime mired in corruption and incompetence to the overall position of the West in the ongoing Cold War. America’s allies mocked, though rarely in public, the US effort to make the defence of Saigon synonymous with the defence of Berlin.
For their part, North Vietnam’s leaders proved as determined and resolute as they were tough-minded. Their commitment to the reunification of Vietnam under communist rule remained unbending. ‘If the United States dares to start a [larger] war,’ Premier Pham Van Dong told Mao in October 1964, ‘we will fight it, and we will win it. But it would be better if it did not come to that.’
It did. Haunted by fears about the consequences—strategic, psychological, and political—of defeat in Vietnam, Johnson and his top advisers quite consciously chose war over the diplomatic accommodation urged by many of the USA’s allies. Between 1965 and 1968, the Johnson administration poured resources and men into South Vietnam in a fruitless effort to crush a popular insurgency while trying simultaneously to prop up a succession of unpopular and ineffectual governments in Saigon. Moscow and Beijing countered by providing Hanoi with critically needed military aid and matériel, thereby further complicating the American task while lending an unmistakable East–West cast to the conflict. North Vietnam in turn matched the US escalation with an escalation of its own: infiltrating hundreds of thousands of regular forces into South Vietnam while recruiting and mobilizing countless irregular fighters from the southern countryside. As the war dragged on inconclusively, the ranks of the dissidents swelled—within the United States and abroad—and the Cold War consensus that had sustained US overseas commitments for the previous two decades began to fracture. The enemy’s massive Tet offensive of early 1968 baldly exposed the contradictions of US military strategy in Vietnam—and, even more fundamentally, the limits of American power.
The decade bracketed by the Taiwan and Berlin crises of 1958 and the Tet offensive of 1968 marked a major transformation in the Cold War. The East–West struggle arguably reached its most hazardous turn between 1958 and 1962, culminating with the epochal Cuban Missile Crisis. Thereafter, Soviet–American relations experienced a thaw, only to be rocked again by US escalation in Vietnam. Yet, despite the Vietnam War, the United States and the Soviet Union managed to avert another major confrontation throughout the mid- and late 1960s while maintaining at least some of the positive momentum engendered by the post-Cuban Missile Crisis rapprochement. By 1968, the superpowers were actually inching towards a historic agreement on the limitation of strategic arms. The changing nature of the Cold War’s domestic dynamics—in both West and East—helped to make such a breakthrough possible.
Chapter 6
Cold wars at home
The Cold War exerted so profound and so multi-faceted an impact on the structure of international politics and state-to-state relations that it has become customary to label the 1945–90 period ‘the Cold War era’. That designation becomes even more fitting when one considers the powerful mark that the Soviet–American struggle for world dominance and ideological supremacy left within many of the world’s nation-states, the subject of this chapter. Every major development that transpired between 1945 and 1990 cannot, of course, be tied to the Cold War. By the same token, so much was influenced and shaped by the Cold War that one simply cannot write a history of the second half of the 20th century without a systematic appreciation of the powerful, oft-times distorting repercussions of the superpower conflict on the world’s states and societies.
Its domestic repercussions have received much less systematic attention from scholars than the Cold War’s international dynamics. This chapter offers simply a very general, broad-brush survey of this enormous topic. It suggests some of the ways in which the Cold War affected the internal constellation of forces in the Third World, Europe, and the United States.
The Third World: decolonization, state formation, and Cold War geopolitics
The emergence of dozens of newly independent nation-states across the breadth of the Third World, together with the occasionally bloody, invariably conflict-ridden, process of decolonization that brought them forth, not only coincided temporally with the Cold War but was inextricably shaped by that same Cold War. Indeed, it was the all-encompassing struggle for global power and influence between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies that gave birth to the very term ‘Third World’. A convenient political catchphrase that rather loosely lumped together the predominantly poor, non-white, and uncommitted areas of the planet, Third World originally connoted an arena of contestation between West and East, the so-called First and Second Worlds. Cold War pressures sometimes exacerbated, on other occasions facilitated, the transition from colonialism to independence. Although the particular impact of the Cold War varied greatly from one end-of-empire struggle to another, the superpower contest loomed always as a key external variable. Any history of decolonization would be incomplete if it failed to examine the manifold ways in which the superpower conflict impinged upon the process—from the South and Southeast Asian freedom movements of the mid- and late 1940s, which opened the decolonization era, to the resistance of Africans to Portuguese colonial rule in the early and mid-1970s, which brought it to a close.
The formation of new, post-colonial states throughout much of Asia, Africa, and parts of the Caribbean also unfolded against the ever-present backdrop of the Cold War. The shape, cohesion, and vitality of those states; the internal configurations of power within them; their ability to command international attention and prestige; their leaders’ prospects for securing external resources, capital, and technical assistance to meet economic development priorities or for garnering military assistance to bolster defence needs—all were affected significantly by the Cold War. In so many respects, the history of post-Second World War state formation in the global South—like the history of decolonization—simply cannot be written without paying careful, systematic attention to that key external variable.
The Cold War presented aspiring Third World leaders with a complex range of problems, challenges, and opportunities. This initially became evident during the anti-colonial struggles in early post-war Southeast Asia. Ho Chi Minh and Sukarno each appealed to the United States for assistance immediately following Japan’s surrender, framing their requests in terms of America’s historic support for self-determination. Yet each was quickly disheartened to learn that the Truman administration’s commitment to its Cold War allies in Europe took precedence, foreclosing, at least initially, any diplomatic or material commitment to their respective independence movements. Ho, a veteran Comintern agent and founding member of the Indochina Communist Party, turned to the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China for backing, which he began to receive early in 1950. Sukarno, on the other hand, proved his anti-communist bona fides by suppressing an internal communist bid to gain control of the larger Indonesian independence movement. By suppressing the Madiun rebellion of 1948, Indonesian nationalists demonstrated the moderate character of their movement; that forceful action formed part of a quite conscious strategy aimed at courting Western, and especially American, backing. The strategy ultimately succeeded insofar as the Truman administration pressed the Netherlands the next year to grant independence to what it judged to be a relatively reliable and firmly anti-communist Indonesian leadership.
The radically divergent trajectories of the comparable bids for national self-governance mounted by Vietnamese and Indonesian nationalists illustrate cle
arly the importance of Cold War dynamics inside Third World societies. These cases also illuminate the different choices available to indigenous statesmen as they tried to navigate the treacherous shoals of great power politics. At the extremes, these leaders could court American backing by demonstrating or pledging their anti-communist convictions, moderate character, and pro-Western leanings; or, alternatively, they could bid for Soviet or Chinese support by highlighting their revolutionary, anti-Western credentials.
In the essentially bipolar world that all Third World independence movements from the mid-1940s through to the mid-1970s faced, the pressure to line up with one or the other ideological camp cum military alliance system was hard to deflect—especially since concrete benefits could flow, or be blocked, as a result of the choice made. The more contested the bid for independence, the greater the need of the independence-seekers for support from one or the other of the two blocs. When anti-colonial coalitions fractured, moreover, such as in the Congo in 1960 and Angola in 1974–5, the temptation for competing factions to draw support from different superpower patrons proved irresistible. The particular visions that nationalist leaders had for the future, which often encompassed far-reaching socioeconomic transformations within their native lands, further complicated the choices forced on them by the pressures of the superpower conflict. Decamping in the Western power bloc, with its deep-seated suspicions of those inclined to march to a socialist drumbeat, could constrict certain domestic political and development paths, compromising the freedom of choice that founding national elites invariably crave. Decamping in the socialist bloc, on the other hand, would surely minimize, if not preclude entirely, the option of coaxing dollars and support from the world’s richest and most powerful nation.
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