Wearied by his futile mission, when General Eisenhower, his successor as army chief of staff, sounded him out about becoming Truman’s secretary of state, Marshall replied: ‘Great goodness, Eisenhower. I’d take any job in the world to get out of this one.’12 After being appointed on 8 January 1947, Marshall had to weigh up much conflicting advice on China, which did not help matters. The new NSC afforded service chiefs considerable influence over foreign policy.13 This tipped the balance in favour of those in the military and State Department who felt that the fate of China was unimportant relative to that of Europe. The newly founded CIA also warned that it would cost the US $2 billion to intervene in the Chinese civil war, while noting that aid to a Communist China would be a drain on the Soviets’ already depleted resources, leaving them with fewer options to intervene elsewhere while perhaps stoking Chinese resentments. At no point did the administration seriously analyse what a Communist China might mean beyond construing it as just part of a monolithic bloc. It was as if imaginations ceased whenever the term Communism was used, to the neglect of how far China’s long imperial history might impact on its international stances, not to speak of how its many proud nationalists might baulk at Soviet tutelage, the latest example of interference by foreign devils. Confessing that ‘I have tortured my brain and I can’t now see the answer,’ Marshall opted for aid but nothing more. He told a session of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in February 1948 that underwriting the Nationalists ‘would involve obligations and responsibilities which I am convinced the American people would never knowingly accept’. He added that ‘the magnitude of the task and the probable costs thereof would clearly be out of all proportion to the results to be obtained’. Chiang got an economic and military aid package of $400 million, but without the benefit of deeper US involvement or supervision of how it would be spent. The important thing, Marshall said, ‘was to do this without getting sucked in’. According to a Gallup poll in late 1948 this decision was fully in line with US public opinion, despite the clamorous efforts of the China lobby.14 But not getting involved militarily in China was not the same as ‘losing’ China, as if it were a high card in America’s hand rather than an old and great civilization in its own right. That loss would come as a very powerful shock and finally confirm the belief that the US was facing a global Communist conspiracy.
The View from Red Square
On 24 June 1945 Generalissimo Stalin watched his legions tramp across Red Square, clattering captured Nazi standards on to a vast red, black and white pyre of Gothic lettering, eagles and swastikas. This was how the collective racialized fantasy of German industrialists, professors, soldiers and workers met its nemesis, their country a ruined wasteland a mere seventy years after its unification under Bismarck. Even reunited, German power has never recovered; it may be an economic giant in Europe, but it is a pygmy in world affairs, of less moment nowadays than India or Brazil. Attempts to congratulate Stalin on Hitler’s demise were rebuffed and the closest he came to praising his own people was an oblique reference to the toiling ‘little cogs’.15 The following month, attired in splendid white uniform, he travelled by special train to the Potsdam Conference with Churchill and the new US President Harry Truman. He arrived late, intentionally.16
Honouring his promise at Yalta to the dying President Roosevelt, Stalin had set the Red Army in motion to launch a massive attack on Manchuria as soon as the Germans surrendered. In the event the Japanese capitulated sooner than expected following the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August, but Truman could not be sure the bombs would work when, on 24 July, he told Stalin that the US had tested a weapon of ‘unusual destructive power’. Truman recalled that Stalin did not seem surprised. ‘That’s fine,’ he replied. ‘I hope you make good use of it against the Japanese.’17 His nonchalance was due to Soviet intelligence penetration of the Manhattan Project.18
Had the welfare of his people mattered to Stalin, the Soviet Union should have devoted its entire energy to domestic reconstruction. When Eisenhower flew low to Moscow, he surveyed a wasteland, but not the twenty million dead. However, Stalin correctly perceived that foreign policy was the key to the survival of the Soviet regime. Not only had he extended the boundaries of the Russian Empire far beyond the limits reached by his tsarist predecessors, but he was also deeply committed to Marxist-Leninist universalism. Traditional Russian security concerns and imperial objectives readily fused with the Bolshevik mission to bring the Communist version of modernity and revolutionary social justice to the peoples of the world. From the beginning relations between the Bolshevik regime and the West were characterized by justified paranoia. How could the Soviets trust powers that had intervened to smother the Bolshevik Revolution at birth? The diplomacy of the 1920s and the mass murders of the 1930s perpetuated this mistrust, culminating in the August 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which allowed Stalin to grab the Baltic States and half of Poland.19
Stalin was no less brutally realistic once the Germans had swarmed across his new borders. The global revolutionary aspects of Soviet foreign policy had been abandoned and the international revolutionary Comintern organization liquidated long before it was formally dissolved in May 1943. Despite the sentimentality displayed at both public and private occasions whenever ‘Uncle Joe’ and his brave legions were mentioned, in reality Soviet relations with foreigners of all kinds remained poisonous and the Russian intelligence services redoubled their efforts to penetrate Western governments. As the war ended Stalin believed that the victorious Western powers might fall out, as inherently unstable capitalist powers were bound to do, leaving him in a good place, with millions of his troops on the ground, to leverage the Soviet Union’s position through diplomacy, guile and force.20
In 1943 the British Post-Hostilities Planning Committee, chaired by Labour leader Attlee, was already discussing the Soviet threat, and by August 1944 the American OSS had three dozen experts assessing ‘Soviet intentions and capabilities’, co-opting the Italian military intelligence service (SIM) to spy on Russian officials even as the war in Italy ground on.21 Along with the rest of Europe, Britain’s exhaustion would result in the subordination of its security to that of the United States, which would emerge as the defender of the democratic and capitalist free world. But before this had hardened into established fact, domestic isolationist reservations in the US about assuming such responsibilities, and hopes that the United Nations would resolve all international problems, created a window of opportunity for Stalin to realize ambitions that had thwarted the tsars. Like a burglar he tried every door, hoping to find one unlocked: in Greece, Iran, Turkey and even western Libya, where he sought a toehold in the British-dominated Mediterranean as his rightful share of the Italian war in which he had not participated. His hopes for a piece of Japan as the reward for smashing the Japanese armies in Manchuria were limited by Truman’s Far Eastern proconsul MacArthur to recovering the southern half of Sakhalin Island, lost in the war of 1905. MacArthur also infuriated Stalin by treating General Kuzma Derevyanko – the head of the Soviet mission in Tokyo – ‘like a mere piece of furniture’.22
Stalin enjoyed the public aura of a god but, like Churchill, his health had suffered from the colossal strain of directing an existential war. He reminded one senior US diplomat of a battle-scarred tiger. Aged sixty-five in 1945, Stalin had seen off Roosevelt, and in July Churchill was replaced by the seemingly meeker Attlee. ‘Mr Attlee does not look to me like a man who is hungry for power’ was Stalin’s comment when Churchill left Potsdam to hear the shock result of the elections, which Stalin would have preferred Churchill to win.23 Any pretence at formal government in Moscow collapsed into a weird regimen involving cinema shows, followed by late-night bacchanalia at his Kuntsevo dacha. The inner cronies of the Politburo were obliged to attend these glum festivities.24
A hundred million people fell under Stalin’s sway after 1945, with a further eighteen millions directly incorporated into his inner Red Empire. Using
the tried and trusted method of coalitions or ‘fronts’ to satisfy the democratic proprieties of the West, Stalin installed his thoroughly winnowed Marxist-Leninist clients in Eastern Europe, who then systematically culled their democratic allies of convenience. The myths of the Great Patriotic War added indirect lustre to Communism in Western Europe too. In the Far East Stalin was the de facto arbiter in the Chinese civil war, sticking with Chiang Kai-shek because he was unconvinced that Mao could dominate much more than a region. He drew a few key lessons from history, using external tensions with the West to tighten his domestic grip. In 1945 many Russians similarly hoped that their wartime sacrifices were going to be rewarded; the novelist Boris Pasternak felt sure that ‘so many sacrifices cannot result in nothing’.
Such hopes were dashed. Stalin tightened control, starting with all those he imagined had been contaminated by even the briefest brush with the freedom and prosperity of the West. Nearly three million repatriated Red Army troops were interrogated by the secret police, and half of them were consigned to the gulags. Any signs of cultural liberalization were crushed in the process known as the Zhdanovshchina, named after Stalin’s henchman Andrei Zhdanov; the poet Anna Akhmatova was sent to mop floors while the composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich were told to write music proletarians could whistle as they worked harder than ever.25
It is not hard to see that there were many internal reasons for the Soviets to welcome the Cold War. Anti-Western paranoia helped to perpetuate the extremities of wartime mobilization, needed to rebuild the Soviet economy without relaxing the grip of the Communist Party. Stalin also took the opportunity to realize a traditional tsarist quest for spheres of influence in a post-war situation where it was no longer checked by other European imperial powers. Behind it all lurked a profound ideological suspicion of the West, and the belief that war was inevitable because of the ultimate, systemic irreconcilability of capitalism and Communism. On that Stalin was clear even as the war was ending: ‘We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years, and then we’ll have another go at it.’26
Domestic recovery was sacrificed to military imperatives. The wartime defence budget had been halved by 1948 and the Red Army shrunk by three-quarters, but following the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Soviet defence had vaulted back to pre-1948 levels by 1953. In between those dates, however, Mao had surprised Washington and Moscow alike by winning the Chinese civil war with ease. The Sino–Soviet Treaty of February 1950 gave Stalin a priceless ally and the realistic prospect of an entirely Communist Asia, while freeing up the resources the CIA had hoped would be tied down in the Chinese civil war, to the detriment of the balance of forces in Europe.27
US leaders had the perennial problem of determining whether Stalin’s belligerent rhetoric was largely for domestic consumption or a credible external threat. When he spoke in especially challenging tones in early February 1946, vowing to triple expenditure on armaments, the liberal Supreme Court Justice William Douglas saw it as a ‘Declaration of World War III’.28 That Russia was increasingly acting unilaterally, making major geopolitical changes to the map of Europe and beyond without consulting its former allies, should not have been in doubt – yet the American hands-across-the-caviar set were always willing to deny reality in favour of sentimentality about the Soviets. There was also the no less perennial distortion of equating manifestations of alien cultures to those with which US leaders were familiar. Thus Truman insisted that Stalin’s belligerent speech was akin to the more demagogic tones any democratic politician adopted before an election.29
Like his august predecessor, or for that matter Chamberlain with Hitler, and Churchill with Stalin, Truman was susceptible to the tempting illusion of the personal breakthrough. Stalin could be candid, charming and emollient, as well as shockingly brutal, as many foreigners discovered. Having invested so much in propagandizing a benign Uncle Joe, even US presidents yearned to discover such a being, despite all the evidence to the contrary. ‘If we could only get Stalin to unburden himself to someone on our side he could trust, I thought we could get somewhere,’ explained Truman hopefully. At Potsdam the President marginally preferred Stalin’s laconic grunts to the flattery with which Churchill smothered him, for, as Truman astutely remarked, it hurts when soap gets in one’s eye.30
The Glorious Loser
By the end of the war the world’s largest imperial power was bankrupt, owing £1,321 million to India and even £400 million to Egypt. Britain anticipated a gradual cessation of US aid, but the atomic bombs dropped on Japan abruptly terminated hopes of a decent interval in which to reconvert the British economy to peacetime production. Lend-Lease to Britain was halted even as it was extended to Nationalist China. Britain experienced other strains. The cost of maintaining 18.6 per cent of the country’s manpower in the armed forces was prohibitive, not to speak of the men it subtracted from post-war reconstruction and Labour’s quest for a New Jerusalem of cradle-to-grave welfare socialism. Many of these troops and airmen were demoralized and restive because of the slow speed of demobilization and repatriation. Nor could the military resources of India, which had underpinned the empire in the East, be depended on. In early 1946 there was a major mutiny in the Royal Indian Navy after a British commander insisted on calling his ratings ‘black buggers’ or ‘coolie bastards’. Trouble spread to the Indian Air Force and police too.
What a moment it might have been, with Germany and Italy reduced to ruins. France, its liberation entirely attributable to what the French call the Anglo-American disembarcation, was grudgingly readmitted to the top table only at Churchill’s insistence. But at the end of the war Britain was both triumphant and prostrate. In 1945 the British (and their white Dominions and colonies) celebrated victory in a war whose high point had been its own dogged survival until the crushing might of its two major allies was brought to bear on Nazi Germany. Although only one in ten of the troops who fought the final battle for Germany were British, at Potsdam Churchill acted as if there were no fundamentally changed international realities. Field Marshal Alan Brooke, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, recorded Churchill’s response to Truman’s news about successful tests of the US atom bomb:
we now had something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians! The secret of this explosive, and the power to use it, would completely alter the diplomatic equilibrium which was adrift since the defeat of Germany! Now we had a new value which redressed our position (pushing his chin out and scowling), now we could say if you insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Kuibyshev, Kharkov, Stalingrad [sic], Sebastopol etc etc. And now where are the Russians!!!31
A few days later, in one of the most dramatic elections of modern times, Labour won the general election in a landslide, winning 393 seats to the Tories 213, which translated into a 146-seat majority in the House of Commons. Churchill was not the man to carry through the fundamental reforms so many British people yearned for, and which were envisaged in the 1943 Beveridge Report that he had commissioned. He did global strategy rather than free dentures. By contrast with Churchill, voters saw Clement Attlee as a reassuring schoolmaster. British servicemen voted for him in droves, identifying the Tories with the armed forces hierarchy.32
At Potsdam Stalin and Truman found themselves sitting across from the laconic ‘Little Clem’ flanked by his tough Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, who Stalin instantly realized was not one of life’s ‘gentlemen’. Truman simply thought Bevin boorish. Even so, in many respects there was less fundamental change than there seemed. Most Labour politicians subscribed to the same delusions of great power that animated the Conservatives, with the added interest their industrial-worker constituents had in defence jobs. Labour’s many Scots were always suckers for tough talk about national security. Worse, they sought to combine the enormous costs of global strategic overstretch with the creation of a domestic New Jerusalem, paid for by huge US loans th
at might instead have been used – as they were intended – to give the creaky economic legacy of the first industrial revolution a thorough overhaul. The Germans eventually spent more on welfare, but only after their economic miracle had taken off in the late 1950s.33
The decline of a nation is seldom abrupt, and always far more nuanced than professional Cassandras imagine, usually in the cause of stiffening the sinews and girding the loins in the present. In 1945 the British ruled over 457 million people, with vast tracts of every schoolboy’s atlas still coloured imperial red, as they had been from the 1880s onwards. Britain had enormous military and naval bases in such locations as Mombasa and Simonstown, Suez and Singapore. It had a very substantial army, and a large navy and air force, the continuance of conscription being one considerable cost of pretensions to being a global power.34 Already in September 1944 the Treasury economist John Maynard Keynes had warned: ‘We cannot police half the world at our own expense when we have already gone into pawn to the other half.’35 But it was wholehearted British investment in Truman’s Cold War, rather than the needs of imperial defence, that saw defence spending rise from an interwar norm of 3 per cent to 7.7 per cent in the late 1940s, and to 12 per cent by the time of the Korean War. This meant that Britain was massively overspending each year, burning through the $3.75 billion US loan to support dubious global commitments as well as the new welfare state, which increased domestic spending by a comparatively modest 50 per cent.36 The vast sprawl of commitments maintained around the world lacked strategic logic, for with India independent in 1947 what was the point of the ‘vital’ linking presence in the Middle East? It was all about global ‘influence’, ‘prestige’ and ‘status’ rather than about how to defend Britain itself and its immediate north-west European neighbourhood.37
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