The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  The biggest source of domestic conflict, however, was not race but Vietnam, the location of one of those many civil wars that were blown out of all proportion by the Cold War. From a military point of view, the war was not unwinnable, but from a political point of view it was already lost before Nixon took office, because of waning popular support. Nixon knew he had to end the war; from an early stage, it was the key to his strategy for re-election in 1972. But he did not want to end it on North Vietnamese terms. He therefore adopted an elaborate strategy of carrots and sticks. The carrots were American troop reductions. The sticks were strategic bombing raids on a scale that ultimately matched the combined efforts of all the air forces in the Second World War. Unfortunately, the more carrots Nixon offered, the more the North Vietnamese became convinced it was worth holding out, no matter how many explosive sticks he threw at them. It was time to change Cold War tactics; to abandon the strategy of war by proxy in favour of great-power diplomacy.

  During the spring and summer of 1969, US government officials had watched the ideological and political split between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China escalate into fighting on the border in Manchuria – proof that this region remained as prone to strategic earthquakes as ever. There was a real possibility that the Soviet Union might launch attacks on Chinese nuclear weapons facilities. But to Nixon and his National Security Adviser, the Harvard historian Henry Kissinger, this was not a crisis, but an opportunity. Kissinger had never wholly accepted the idea that the world since 1945 had been divided into two mutually antagonistic blocs. In reality, he believed, the twentieth century was, for all its polarized political rhetoric, not all that different from the nineteenth. Others might see the Cold War as a crude game of chicken. To Kissinger, it was more like classical diplomatic chess. Just as Bismarck had sought to enhance German power by playing the other powers off against one another, Kissinger now sought to improve America’s position by exploiting the Sino-Soviet antagonism. ‘The deepest rivalry which may exist in the world today’, he declared in September 1970, ‘is that between the Soviet Union and China.’ It had been one thing for Yugoslavia, Romania or Albania to break away from the embrace of Moscow. None counted as a great power and, as long as their dictators stuck to the principles of one-party rule and the planned economy, the Soviets could afford to shrug their shoulders. China, with its vast population, was a different matter. It was not so much that Kissinger expected the Chinese to bale the Americans out in Vietnam; rather, he believed an opening to Beijing would force the Soviets to listen to American proposals for a Strategic Arms Limitation agreement. Detente was Kissinger’s watchword: a reduction in superpower tension aimed at halting the increasingly burdensome nuclear arms race. Both sides now had enough warheads to obliterate each other’s populations several times over. First strikes were out because both sides were clearly capable of retaliatory second strikes. What was the point in building ever more numerous, ever more lethal missiles?

  The problem was that this plan meant doing business with China, where no American official had set foot since 1949. Nor did this seem an especially opportune moment to re-establish diplomatic ties. In the late 1960s China was in the grip of a second wave of Maoist radicalism, the Cultural Revolution. Officially, this was an attempt by Chairman Mao to resist bureaucratic tendencies and revive revolutionary fervour. In reality it was a lethal power struggle at the top of the Communist Party which unleashed a ghastly generational conflict. Formed into Red Guards and later Revolution Committees, young militants were encouraged by Mao to subject their teachers and other figures of authority to beatings, torture and ritualized humiliation. In the summer of 1966, more than 1,700 people were beaten to death in Beijing alone. Some victims were killed by having boiling water poured over them; others were forced to swallow nails. More than 85,000 people were exiled to the countryside, where they were forced to work in ‘reform-through-labour’ camps. At Beijing University during the ‘Cleansing the Class Ranks’ campaign of 1968, suspect teachers were forced publicly to confess their ‘problems’ and to denounce each other. Those identified as counter-revolutionaries were subjected to investigation by so-called zhuan an groups, which often involved torture. Teachers were held in an improvised jail called the niupeng (ox shack). The teachers themselves were referred to as niuguisheshen (‘ox ghosts and snake demons’). Many were driven to suicide. Pan Guangdan, a professor of anthropology and translator of Darwin’s works, told a friend: ‘I used to follow a three S’s strategy: surrender, submit and survive. Now I added a fourth S: succumb.’ At least twenty-three faculty members at Beijing University were ‘persecuted to death’ in this way. (The Red Guards referred to suicide as ‘alienating oneself from the Party and people’.) In 1970, during the campaign against the ‘Four Olds’ (old ideals, culture, customs and habits), around 280,000 people were labelled as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ or ‘capitalist-roaders’ and arrested. All this was done in the name of and at the instigation of Mao, who was revered as a god. In the morning and evening, people had to line up in front of his portrait and chant: ‘May the great leader Chairman Mao live ten thousand years’. They sang songs like ‘Chairman Mao is the Sun That Never Falls’. In all, between 400,000 and a million people are believed to have died in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. In the words of William Buckley, a Republican journalist close to Kissinger, rapprochement with Beijing meant dealing with murderers who put South American dictators in the shade. Indeed, Mao’s totalitarian regime was now clearly on a par with Stalin’s Soviet Union when it came to persecuting its own citizens.

  To Kissinger, such considerations had to be secondary; in the great chess game of diplomacy, the imperative was to check the red king, not to worry about the pawns he sacrificed. In February 1972, the ground having been painstakingly prepared by his National Security Adviser, Nixon set off for China. This time he did not come to boast about the superiority of the American way of life, as he had done in Moscow in 1959. On the contrary, he was perfectly ready to conceal his deep-seated distaste for Communism. ‘You don’t know me,’ Nixon opened, inadvertently sounding once again like a salesman, ‘but anything I say I deliver.’ Those in Washington who still lamented the ‘loss’ of China to the Communists could only gape in amazement as Nixon cheerfully swapped toasts with Premier Zhou Enlai. The handshake with Mao, the photo opportunity on the Great Wall, the sound of a Chinese military band playing ‘America the Beautiful’ at a banquet in the Great Hall of the People – even in his wildest imaginings, Nixon could not have wished for more. What was more, the rapprochement between China and America succeeded in bringing the Soviets to the negotiating table, just as Kissinger had hoped. Within three months, Nixon and Brezhnev had signed two arms control agreements. It was a resounding triumph for diplomacy – and for Nixon’s campaign for re-election. Kissinger, the grandmaster of greatpower chess, was duly promoted to Secretary of State.

  But were he and Nixon in some sense chess pieces on someone else’s board? They had assumed that Mao wanted three things: to boost China’s international standing, to move closer to annexing Taiwan and to get the United States out of Asia. This was to underestimate the other side. The farewell banquet was awash with liquor and American goodwill – goodwill that the Chinese used to secure all kinds of concessions. Yes, Taiwan could now be marginalized, its seat in the United Nations handed to Beijing. But that was not all; with the United States now so wedded to the idea of good relations with the People’s Republic, China could bully its neighbours into satellite status with impunity. Tibet, which had been annexed by the People’s Republic in 1951, could now be forcibly colonized by ethnic Chinese. And not just the United States but also the Soviet Union could be kicked out of Indo-China. That had implications for Vietnam that were very different from the ones Nixon and Kissinger had in mind.

  It turned out that nothing, not even the Machiavellian genius of Henry Kissinger, could salvage American honour from the wreckage of Vietnam. Yet it was not failure overseas th
at destroyed Nixon’s presidency. Rather, it was that enthusiasm for domestic gadgets which had so irked Khrushchev back in 1959. Nixon was not the first American president to tap phones and tape-record conversations, but none of his predecessors had done so quite as compulsively. By a rich irony, it was tapes of his own conversations, recordings he himself had requested, that revealed the extent of Nixon’s complicity in the Watergate scandal, and forced his resignation. Still, even as he announced his fall from grace on August 9, 1974, Nixon clung to the idea that the opening to China had secured his place in history. As he reminded viewers:

  We have unlocked the doors that for a quarter of a century stood between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. We must now ensure that the one quarter of the world’s people who live in the People’s Republic of China will be and remain not our enemies but our friends.

  But what kind of friends had Nixon actually made in Beijing? As far as the Chinese were concerned, American weakness presented China with an opportunity to settle two historical scores: one with the Soviet Union, whose leadership of the Communist world Mao wished to challenge; the other with North Vietnam, which had dared to turn to Moscow rather than Beijing for support in its war with the United States. The brunt of this score-settling would be borne by the small state of Cambodia.

  Used by the North Vietnamese as a sanctuary and supply route for Vietcong guerrillas, Cambodia had been the target of a supposedly secret bombing campaign ordered by Nixon. The country’s ruler, Prince Sihanouk, had tried vainly to play both sides off against one another. On March 18, 1970, Sihanouk was overthrown in a coup led by the pro-American Lon Nol; determined to win back power, Sihanouk joined forces with the Cambodian Communists, the Khmer Rouge. The early 1970s offered the perfect opportunity to the Khmer Rouge. The North Vietnamese forces were able not only to elude American incursions, but also to get the better of Lon Nol’s inferior army. The Americans stepped up their bombing, but the resulting civilian casualties merely helped the Khmer Rouge to win new recruits. When the North Vietnamese withdrew, the days of Lon Nol’s regime were numbered. The man who would oust him was Saloth Sar, a failed electronics student who had become a Communist while studying in Paris and went by the nom de guerre of Pol Pot. Struck by his leader’s cold demeanour and his utter ruthlessness towards their enemies, one of his comrades once compared Pol Pot with a Buddhist monk who had attained the ‘third level’ of consciousness: ‘You are completely neutral. Nothing moves you. This is the highest level.’ Just what Pol Pot was capable of doing in this transcendental state became apparent immediately after the capital, Phnom Penh, fell to the Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975. He and his stony-faced army ordered the immediate and total evacuation of the entire city.

  Pol Pot’s regime repudiated the very idea of economic progress, seeking to transport Cambodia back into a pre-industrial, pre-commercial, pre-capitalist utopia. ‘Year Zero’ was proclaimed. The towns were to be emptied. All markets were to be abolished. There would be no money. Everyone would now work in agricultural cooperatives, where there would no private property. They would dress only in black. They would eat communally. The aim was to produce ‘Kampuchea’: a pure communist agrarian state. Every form of Western contamination was to be eradicated, even modern medicine. And as far as the Khmer Rouge were concerned, it did not much matter how many people died in the process. As they told the bewildered city-dwellers, the so-called ‘New People’ who had not been on the right side during the civil war: ‘To preserve you is no gain, to destroy you is no loss.’ Destruction was indeed Pol Pot’s only forte, since his sole venture into construction – a complex of new canals and dams intended to rival the temples of Angkor Wat – ended in abject failure. The main supporters of the previous regime were executed in short order, along with their families. Anyone who questioned Angkar – ‘the Organization’ – was treated in the same way. Even to be ill was to betray a ‘lack of revolutionary consciousness’. As in China’s Cultural Revolution, teachers were viewed with suspicion, but so too were students and university graduates. The Khmer Rouge were short of bullets, so they used axes, knives and bamboo sticks. Children selected for execution had their heads smashed against banyan trees. Executions were often carried out with a pickaxe in the rice paddies – the so-called killing fields. The Toul Sleng prison became an ‘extermination centre’, where some 14,000 people were tortured to death, many of them Khmer Rouge cadres who had fallen under suspicion. Some victims were publicly disembowelled, their livers cooked and eaten by their executioners. It was not unusual for a revolution to devour its own children; only in Cambodia were they sometimes literally devoured. In all, between 1.5 and 2 million people died as a result of execution, maltreatment or starvation, out of a total population of only seven million.

  The fate of Cambodia exemplifies how very far from cold the Cold War was in those parts of the world where crumbling empires and proxy wars created opportunities for fanatics. Yet Pol Pot’s was not simply a class war. As in Guatemala and other Cold War sideshows, it also had an ethnic dimension. The Khmer Rouge were as committed to the notion of racial purity as to Communist fundamentalism. ‘In Kampuchea there is one nation and one language… From now on the various nationalities… do not exist any longer in Kampuchea.’ Hostility to the Vietnamese minority within the country had already manifested itself before Pol Pot came to power. Under the Khmer Rouge, however, the violence was systematized and extended to all the country’s ethnic minorities. Around 100,000 ethnic Vietnamese were executed. Perhaps as many as 225,000 ethnic Chinese and 100,000 Muslim Chams – roughly half of each minority community – are also thought to have died as a result of disease, starvation or execution. Also vulnerable were the numerous Cambodians in ethnically mixed marriages, for here too the lines between the different groups were far from impermeable. Nor were even ‘pure’ ethnic Cambodians safe. The regime also targeted Buddhist monks for persecution as well as the inhabitants of the country’s Eastern Zone, who found themselves on the wrong side of infighting within the Organization and were accused of having ‘Vietnamese minds’. It was as if all the hatreds of the twentieth century – class, religious and ethnic – had been distilled into one toxic movement that was incapable of anything other than savage cruelty.

  What ultimately destroyed this maniacal regime was the war it launched against Vietnam in 1977. This was a war with an explicitly genocidal intent. ‘So far we have attained our target,’ government radio announced on May 10, 1978: ‘Thirty Vietnamese killed for every fallen Kampuchean… So we could sacrifice two million Kampucheans in order to exterminate the fifty million Vietnamese – and we shall still be six million.’ Here was a bizarre fulfilment of the American aspiration to exploit discord within the Communist bloc. Two Communist regimes, and two peoples, at war with one another, one backed by the Soviet Union, the other – Pol Pot’s – backed by China. Yet precisely the Sino-American rapprochement that Nixon had negotiated led Cold War realpolitik into the realm of the absurd. After the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, the United States sided with the Khmer Rouge, which had now retreated to the hills to wage another guerrilla war.

  The Cold War, then, was only partly a struggle between two rival economic systems. It was only partly a game of chicken between the American and Soviet strategic forces. It was only partly Kissinger’s game of chess between the great powers. On the ground, the Cold War was a host of civil wars, many of them sponsored by the superpowers, few of them entirely under their control. Some of the most egregious episodes of genocide were scarcely related to the superpower conflict at all. That was certainly the case in Pakistan in 1971, when the military regime of Mohammad Ayub Khan waged an authentically genocidal campaign against the people of East Pakistan in a vain attempt to prevent their secession by ‘reducing this majority into a minority’. And it was true in Iraq in 1988, when Saddam Hussein launched the so-called Anfal (Spoils) campaign against the Kurds, using (among other weapons) poison gas to wipe out whole villages. Realpolitik meant
dealing with repugnant leaders like Ayub Khan and Saddam Hussein; turning a blind eye to their violations of human rights, for the sake of some small advantage over the other superpower.

  In the end, there could be only one winner in the economic rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, even if it seemed far from certain throughout the 1970s that the winner would be the former. The game of chicken could end with no winner at all. But the losers in the Third World’s War – which raged out of sight while the grandmasters of Washington, Moscow and Beijing played their chess – could be counted in millions.

  THE WORLD REORIENTATED

  We like to think of the revolutions of 1989 as the twentieth century’s grand finale – the moment that marked the triumph of the West and an ideological happy ending. With the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and then, two years later, the break-up of the Soviet Union itself, many people concluded that the Western model of capitalist democracy had won the day. Some people looked forward to a new world order; others spoke of the end of history. It seemed as if all the problems of the century were at last being solved. The process of international economic integration seemed unstoppable; free trade and free capital movements were the order of the day. The warfare states and welfare states of the mid twentieth century were weakened by a surge of international economic liberalization, pioneered by Margaret Thatcher’s government in Britain. Western Europe had shown since the war that economic integration would bring peoples together and terminate old military rivalries. Now that seemed to be happening on a global scale. The extreme ideologies of communism and fascism were also defunct. Meanwhile, the science of genetics was revealing that race was a meaningless concept, while some societies – notably that of the United States, but also the United Kingdom – did seem to be moving towards genuine racial and ethnic integration. The great-power conflicts that had rent the world apart were over too. The Soviet empire was suddenly gone. The United States had won the Cold War, all the while protesting that it had no imperial pretensions of its own. With a little encouragement, optimists hoped, the world would spontaneously adopt the Western model of capitalism and democracy. It seemed, in short, as if the War of the World was finally over.