In both the CIA’s pro-Nasser activities and the State Department’s active anti-Nasser policies, the ones getting hurt were Britain and France, the two bystanders. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles hoped to see Nasser eliminated someday, but felt no urgency about it; their preference was to do nothing for the moment, and perhaps remove the Egyptian dictator from the scene at some later point when nobody was looking.
France (because of Algeria) and Britain (because of Jordan) had decided to overthrow Nasser even before the nationalization of the canal company, which they took as their excuse. But the nationalization alerted the world to the possibility of an Anglo-French riposte. Eisenhower strongly cautioned Paris and, above all, London not to use force.
Misunderstanding was mutual. Ike and Dulles told each other, and Eden, that if Britain and France attacked, the United States would not assist them—but never so much as hinted that America might actually oppose them. Deputy Undersecretary of State Robert Murphy, a special envoy from Eisenhower, cabled Washington from London that Eden and Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan “said British government has decided to drive Nasser out of Egypt. The decision they declared is firm. They expressed simple conviction military action is necessary and inevitable.” Murphy went on to quote the British leaders as saying they hoped the United States would support them, but would understand if it chose not to do so. For whatever reason, the Eisenhower administration seems to have believed this was merely a proposed course of action and that London and Paris would not actually launch a military operation without first advising Washington.
But then—as the U.S. government continued to bombard Downing Street with advice to avoid the use of force—on social occasions Europeans stopped talking when Americans entered the room. It became evident they were planning something but not saying what. They put the scheme into operation in late autumn (U.S. intelligence figured it out only just beforehand), and it turned out to be a plan too complicated to work, covered by a story too transparently false to be believed.
Israel, which had suffered border attacks from Egypt for years, was secretly invited by France to invade Sinai and drive to the Suez Canal. By prearrangement, France and England then announced that they were sending their armies to the canal zone to separate the two antagonists and protect the maritime passageway. The Israelis advanced too quickly, and the Europeans too slowly; then the Soviet government issued threats suggesting that it would bomb England and France unless they withdrew.
Eisenhower and Dulles were enraged—not by the Russians, but by the British, French, and Israelis. Recently released records suggest that they were animated even more by a personal sense of betrayal than by policy considerations. Reasonably or otherwise, they felt they had been lied to by people they had regarded as trusted friends. At a guess—and it is no more than that—Eisenhower, who as Allied and NATO generalissimo had been accustomed to issuing orders to Britain and France for fifteen years, was angry that his counsel to them in this case had not been taken as more in the nature of a command.
Eisenhower and Dulles took the position that the United States must be seen by the Third World not to stand aside—which was something they had suggested beforehand—but to actively oppose the European invasion. They wanted the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America to be shown that America was against imperialism. But they employed the wrong tactics to realize such a strategy: instead of seeming to take sides against Britain and France, while in reality not harming them, the Eisenhower administration did it the other way around. There should have been speeches and gestures: appearances, not realities. Instead, the United States acted invisibly but with paralyzing effectiveness to halt their allies by financial maneuverings of which the public was unaware.
Treasury Secretary Humphrey cut off the financial support that alone enabled Britain to prop up the value of her currency. The British Treasury suddenly was faced with the prospect of financial disaster: a run on the pound, the collapse of sterling, a plunge into chaos. Yet only a handful of people understood that such was the case. Until Macmillan, the British equivalent of secretary of the Treasury, told them, even his colleagues in the British cabinet did not know it. Macmillan had favored the Suez expedition, but now effectively stopped it. The United States had defeated the Europeans—but in secret.
The short-term consequences for the United States were disastrous. The Third World public to which the administration suddenly attached such importance believed it had seen the last desperate venture of imperial Europe defeated—not by the United States, but by the Soviet Union. Russian influence in the Middle East grew. America’s principal allies were weakened. France, shocked into a realization that U.S. backing could not be relied upon, began work on building her own nuclear arsenal.
But although neither Eisenhower nor Dulles had reason to believe it would happen, the long-term results were those the United States had wanted to bring about for two centuries: persuaded, finally, that America would not support them in playing an imperial role, the powers of Europe, unable to pay for their empires on their own, set out to divest themselves of their colonies. Macmillan, taking Eden’s place as prime minister, set the program in motion in London. De Gaulle, when he returned to power at the end of the 1950s, did the same in Paris. Belgium, Spain, and others followed suit, as Portugal did later for reasons of her own. Perhaps it would have happened in any event, even had there been no prodding by the United States, but it seems unlikely it would have happened so quickly.
The American Revolution of 1776 had come to fruition. Its goals had been fully achieved at last. The era of European world domination had come to an end. It was perhaps the most important happening of the twentieth century. In the year Eisenhower was born, nearly half the land surface of the earth was ruled by either the British queen or the Russian tsar. Now the countries of the world were given back to the peoples who inhabited them. An international law periodical published in 1982 reported that “since 1945, Britain has relinquished 5,200,000 square miles of colonial possessions with some 800 million inhabitants.” And that was Britain alone; it took no account of what France, Belgium, and others had surrendered.
THE UNITED STATES HAD OTHER, but less focused, ideas of the changes Europe should make in herself. Many of these involved the formation of some sort of pan-European union. By eliminating tariff and other customs barriers, the countries of Europe could create a market large enough to support industries that could play in the same league that American businesses did. By establishing one army, Europe, with a population larger than that of the Soviet Union, would be able to defend herself. By transcending nationalisms, the peoples of Britain and the Continent could solve the problem of Germany being too powerful for her neighbors.
Yet Europeans would not always travel in the directions the United States pointed out to them. France blocked American-backed initiatives such as the European army. In the Eisenhower years, it looked very much as though de Gaulle’s vision of a “Europe of fatherlands” would prevail. Then, and for years afterward, it seemed that American reasoning had been superficial; it had taken no account of history. André Malraux, man of letters and politics, remarked that Europe “does not exist and never has. It is the last of the great myths.” In the Middle Ages, he said, it was decided “that there was a Europe because there was Christianity. Christianity was serious. Europe is a dream—for Europeans but also for others. I would like to know how serious the American dream of Europe was. Did the leaders of America really ever believe in it?”
The Americans did believe in it; and in the end de Gaulle, who had summoned up French nationalism to block it, said it was his conception that was the dream. After leaving office, he told Malraux: “I held up the corpse of France in my arms and I made the world believe France was living. And I, General de Gaulle, I knew she was dead.”
As of this writing, European unity is far from achieved. But the links, however loose, are there, including the various institutions of the European Community, and what has co
me into being is at least somewhat like what the United States proposed decades ago. As with so many American objectives, it has taken far more time than Truman’s and Marshall’s and Eisenhower’s generation expected. But in the end, the Continent has moved in the direction pioneered by the United States.
THE GIS WHO LIBERATED EUROPE held an unthinking belief that teaching people to play baseball and drink cola and eat hamburgers helped to spread Americanism. Somehow they were right. Again, it took decades. But the coming of the consumer society and the communications revolution to Europe and the rest of the world did accomplish what Wilson’s political children set out to do: make the rest of the world more like the United States. Now in all corners of the globe people dress, eat, drink, and dance like Americans; they listen to American-style popular music, see Hollywood movies, get their news from Cable News Network, and hire Washington political-media firms to manage their election campaigns.
The rest of the world took its issue-oriented politics—and its issues as well—from the United States.† The environment (“conservation,” as it was called when Theodore Roosevelt invented it as a political program), antitrust regulation, securities and stock exchange laws, the women’s movement: all were invented in America. Once they were the politics of the New World; now they are the new politics of the entire world.
The American theory was that defeated enemies, Germany and Japan, should not be destroyed but reoriented: restored, but taught to channel their resources into achieving economic rather than military or political hegemony. It was a road that Walter Rathenau and other German civilian leaders had pointed out to their countrymen in the early days of the century, but that they had not taken, either then or in the 1930s. Yet the American victors in the Second World War had given Germany a third chance.
Events so far suggest that the bet placed by the Truman administration was the right one: that rebuilding Germany and Japan, and trusting the willingness and ability of their peoples to change their militarist outlook to a civilian one,‡ was the course to take—rather than sentencing them to a Carthaginian destruction, as FDR would have done at least with Germany.
But history is never over. Truman’s bet continues to ride—and the fate of much of the world continues to ride with it.
EISENHOWER AND DULLES continued the containment policy outlined by George Kennan and amended by Paul Nitze during the Truman administration, but only grudgingly, and in default of having any workable alternative. They were impatient with containment because they wanted quick results—which seemed not to be forthcoming.
Like Acheson, Dulles believed that the Soviet system, though inferior to America’s in many ways, held certain advantages in the long run. In early 1959 he told congressmen that because of the regimented nature of their societies, communist countries had “possibilities for economic growth which we do not possess in a free society.” The contrary view ascribed to Bernard Baruch and Joseph Kennedy—that Americans should encourage Russia and all other rival countries to be communist because communism is such an inefficient system that the United States could keep on beating them—was regarded as a joke rather than a serious theory.
Dulles did see Kennan’s point that Soviet Russia might collapse someday as a result of internal contradictions; and he saw, too, that should a split between Russia and China occur, their rivalry could neutralize the danger either of them posed to the United States. But Dulles, who in 1955 said that such a split might be a year or even “some years away,” in 1956 remarked gloomily that “[t]hese natural rivalries might take 100 years to assert themselves.”
IN FACT, the rivalry between the two great communist powers began to evidence itself in the 1950s, during Dulles’s lifetime, and the internal collapse of the Soviet Union took less than half a century.
The cold war was a disagreement about the settlement of the Second World War, which ended in 1945.§ In 1989 the Soviet Union began the process of surrendering the sphere in central and eastern Europe that FDR, Truman, and their successors had been unwilling for Russia to have. That was what the argument initially had been about, and the Kremlin gave it up. Then came the almost incredible headlines: Russia dissolved the Soviet Union and gave up communism.
It was one of the most astonishing things in history, both in itself and in that it completed the accomplishment of the seemingly impossible American program of remaking the world. When Woodrow Wilson proclaimed his goals in 1917, he had given no practical thought to how they could be achieved. And since, in the circumstances of the time (and indeed in any circumstances then foreseeable), they would have been impossible of realization, a foreign policy realist in 1917 would have had to believe either that the President was indulging in meaningless rhetoric or that he was out of his mind. But in the 1990s what Wilson proposed had come to pass—partly because the world had changed greatly and in ways he could not have foreseen, but also as a partial result of purposeful actions by the generation that he had educated and brought into politics.
What seemed so far-fetched as to border on craziness was Wilson’s further belief that somehow America’s victorious allies, too, could be changed by the United States: forced to give up their empires and their frontiers, and to move toward some sort of federation. Wilson could not explain (because he did not know) how victor countries could be forced to do anything against their will. Yet without intending to, Eisenhower and Dulles at Suez managed the accomplishment of defeating America’s allies after first defeating most of her enemies.
THE FINAL CONTEST to be resolved was America’s continuing battle with Russia—part one thing, and part the other: the country that in both world wars had started as an ally and ended as an enemy. What was remarkable was that in the conflict with the Soviet Union, the United States pursued a rational strategy that worked. History is the story of ironies: of moves meant to achieve one purpose that instead achieve another. Here was the extraordinary exception. Kennan’s theory, adopted by the American government, was that if the United States held the line long enough, the Soviet Union would collapse from within—and that is what actually happened.
In the First World War, Wilson had inspired people Franklin Roosevelt’s and Harry Truman’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s age to go out and change the politics of the rest of the planet. It took nearly a century; it was by no means entirely of their doing, and for the most part they did not realize where the forces would lead that they were putting in motion—but, in the end, they did it.
* Eventually Allen Dulles became disillusioned with Nasser.
† Which, to be fair, learned from England.
‡ Lessons have been learned. Paradoxically, Japan, which started its wars in the first half of the century in order to capture natural resources, was enabled to become an economic winner in the second half by not having any of her own: she was free to buy raw materials at the cheapest price available in any market, and thus become a low-cost manufacturer.
§ But in a sense it did not end until August 31, 1994, when the last Soviet troops left Germany and the Baltic republics.
EPILOGUE:
TALES OF THE AMERICAN AGE
IT WAS A FAST and unexpected finish. Coming only a half-century after the United States seemingly solved the problems of German and Japanese expansionism, and less than forty years after America helped to push the countries of Western Europe into releasing their overseas colonies, the sudden and dramatic collapse of the last remaining empire—that of the Soviet Union—was so tidy and satisfying as an ending that it is tempting to think that it was one: that history is a novel, and this its last page. For someone trying to make sense of what happened, the challenge is to tell what the plots and subplots were: what the stories were, in other words, that led to the end of empires and the emergence, for the time being, of the United States as the sole global power.
AFTERWARD, people tend to see a certain inevitability in events. In the era of Roman triumph, Virgil in the Aeneid pictured the evolution of a small and rustic republic into the imperial mi
stress of the Mediterranean world as foreordained. Now there is a fast-expanding literature on the rise of the United States suggesting that it, too, was no accident.
America’s rise to world power can be told as the story of a small but ambitious rural eighteenth-century republic restlessly expanding its territories, its markets, and its power until, at the end of the twentieth century, it dominated the planet.
There is even some truth in that account. The early Republic was expansionist, and aimed to take possession of as much as possible of North America—preferably all of it. To the post–Civil War United States, Central America and the Caribbean islands proved tempting as well. But that was the end of it. The generation with which this book has been concerned was content with the country’s existing frontiers. The fever of imperialism that raged at the time of the Spanish-American War died down quickly. And the quantum leap—the great expansion of the United States in the twentieth century from merely hemispheric to global power—was neither planned nor intended. It was not even desired.
Isolationism—the insistence on remaining within the Western Hemisphere and avoiding engagements in or with Europe—was so completely the dominant mood of the American people and leaders alike during most of the political lifetime of the FDR generation, that it is the key to understanding that generation’s history. That FDR and his contemporaries were burdened with this obsolete tradition—an anachronistic way of thinking and feeling—was the challenge they had to confront; that they overcame isolationism is the thing that they did.
This is one reason why the ascent of the Americans to supremacy is not—like the rise of Alexander’s Greeks or Genghis Khan’s Mongols or Süleyman the Magnificent’s Turks—a tale of empire wanted and achieved. Empire (in the usual sense) had never been the Americans’ dream; even in their expansionist phase, they had wanted only to possess more land, not rule more people. Nor was it empire that they were given, or that they were willing to accept: the most they would take was the leadership of countries whose independence the United States not only respected but shored up.
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