The World in a Funhouse Mirror
When the Reagan Administration took office in January 1981, U.S. policy in Central America underwent a change. A situation which Carter officials had described only weeks before as the result of...
...Support for Israel against UNDERTWO RAG BATCHELOR, NATIONAL REVIEW Egypt, meanwhile, would have lessened the opportunities for expanded U.S...
...CONTAINMENT AND THE THIRD WORLD 1. The New York Times, September 27, 1983...
...Poland is not only a question of honor, but of life and death.'" Washington and London declared themselves willing to acknowledge Soviet security interests, but they expected the post-war governments to preserve pre-war social structures, capitalist institutions and close relations with Western Europe and the United States...
...Dulles died...
...He was former General Dwight D. Eisenhower, an internationalist, a strong believer in containment and the defense of Europe...
...Instead of containing the Soviets along a perimeter line, the United States should fortify the "strong points...
...Whom were we containing anyway...
...domination over Latin America derive from the Monroe Doctrine, set 10 NACLA ReportNov/Doc 1983 1 troops stationed in Europe, and rumors were rife of their imminent arrival...
...Though it accepted detente as useful and necessary, it criticized the Kissinger approach to the world for concentrating on "power politics" at the expense of economic questions...
...foreign relations...
...Stalin wrote Truman in April 1945: "I do not know whether a genuinely representative government has been set up in Greece or whether the Belgian government is a genuinely democratic one...
...All territory this side of the line would be America's "new frontier...
...The most promising was a wartime holdover called covert action...
...The dominant institution in this new order would be the transnational financial and industrial corporation...
...Yet there was one tradition of imperial management upon which policymakers could draw, and that was Latin America-the US...
...the transformation of local crises into East-West surrogate wars, with each being viewed as victory or defeat for one side or the other in the superpower confrontation...
...Dtente as Containment The Nixon Doctrine was in some ways the most vivid statement of the post-Vietnam reality...
...public opinion...
...It came in Korea...
...As Europe, Japan and the Third World discovered to their cost, any crisis affecting their relations with the United States was invariably subordinated to the obsessive vision of containment...
...4 NACLAReood...
...The Washington Post, June 16, 1983...
...2. Peter Willets, The Non-AlignedMovement: The Origins of a Third World Alliance, (New York: Nichols Publishing Company, 1978), p. 29...
...In the rebuilding of Europe, Germany needed special attention...
...His defense secretary, Robert McNamara, a management whiz from the Ford Motor Co., strengthened the mutually beneficial relationship between the government bureaucracy and the high technology arms industry...
...Soviet tanks rolled in, and the fighting left 7,000 Soviet troops and 30,000 Hungarians dead...
...and they cannot be happy and prosperous unless they maintain order within their boundaries and behave with a just regard for their obligations toward outsiders chronic wrongdoing which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society may . force the United States, however reluctantly to the exercise of an international police power...
...Twice in the last thirty years, our enemies, the Germans, have passed through this corridor...
...troops...
...influence in another part of the world-the Middle East...
...It had, however, sustained terrible losses-20 million dead, billions of dollars of destruction...
...Truman acted swiftly...
...According to the Geneva peace treaty ending French involvement in Vietnam, elections would be held to unify the country...
...In 1954 in Vietnam, French colonial rule was defeated by a guerrilla movement led by the Vietnamese Communist Party...
...The Soviet Union, meanwhile, has reW? 10W L FGHT{I 61 CO!TtJNUES TO06HIT IM NEW YORK HARGEM...
...support, Eisenhower and Dulles agreed that this was another advance of the Soviet/communist threat...
...THE MONROE DOCTRINE...
...Instead of accepting the fact and responding to Vietnamese pleas for U.S...
...strengthened its own armed forces and developed its own nuclear capacity...
...Historians regard it as probably the key foreign policy statement of the post-war period...
...Each superpower believed that it had a special mission to transform the world in its own image...
...A situation which Carter officials had described only weeks before as the result of local poverty and injustice had become by late February "a textbook case of communist subversion...
...strategy in Vietnam...
...prestige (symbolically brought home by the first Russian space satellite) and spoke of the need to restore world dominance...
...In a grand strategic vision, Kissinger set out to link these talks to agreements on trade, security and Soviet involvement in the Third 131...
...For Harriman, the Soviets represented "the barbarian invasion of Europe...
...business learned the techniques for penetrating the local economy, suborning public officials, repatriating profits...
...Douglas MacArthur, supreme allied commander in the Pacific theater in World War II...
...On March 12, Truman went to the Congress to declare what would be called the Truman Doctrine and to ask for $400 million in economic and military aid to Greece...
...NOT MUCH HELP, BUT IT'S NICE TO HAVE COMPANY JENSEN, CHICAGO DAILY NEWS NACLAReportg Exponents of roll-back came from the vehemently anti-communist wing of the party-McCarthy, Nixon, the Chiang Kai-shek lobby...
...pre-eminence in military and economic spheres was a further temptation to be tough...
...influence by passing a resolution pledging economic and military aid to any Middle Eastern country which requested it and authorizing the "employment of the armed forces of the United States to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of [Middle Eastern] nations requesting such aid, against...
...Militaristic containment has tended to divide the world into two spheres of influence, U.S...
...It broke with the traditional assumption that the axis of international relations was controlled by U.S./ Soviet hostilities and replaced it with a "multipolar" perspective...
...As the term implies, the strategy calls for rolling back Soviet influence from areas which it presently controls...
...Kennedy, an aggressive, vigorous and elegant leader, would put words and action together...
...It would not, however, be the exclusive preserve of the West: through arms control and trade deals, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China would be enticed into the new global framework, as would certain Third World countries whose wealth and influence were growing...
...6. Cuadernos del Tercer Mundo, Guia del TercerMundo 1981, (Lima, Peru: DESCO, 1980), p. 485-486...
...styles of Containment Over the years, as this article will demonstrate, containment has come in a variety of packages, but with the same objective: to limit the international influence of the Soviet Union and convince its leadership that it is mistaken in believing that Russia's national security depends on "restructuring the outside world along Soviet lines...
...Faced with the threat of the bomb and the new NATO alliance in Europe, it had * THE EISENHOWER DOCTRINE...
...The Birt)h of Containment With the worsening of U.S./Soviet relations came the need for a strategy of confrontation...
...Interpretation is all...
...president, Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman, was inexperienced in foreign policy and anxious to fill the oversize shoes of his predecessor, Roosevelt...
...Justus, The Minneapolis Star Plans to aid Europe met strong resistance from a Republican-controlled Congress weary of European wars...
...THE JOHNSON DOCTRINE...
...By 1945, the Soviets controlled Eastern Europe...
...His first gesture of support to the South Koreans was economic aid...
...It came to this new responsibility with little preparation, having adhered for 170 years to the principle of "no entangling alliances" enunciated by George Washington...
...In Vietnam, nationalism had embraced Marxism and proved a powerful tool for mobilizing ordinary people...
...3 89lc eD/veN 11NACLA Report "WHERE ARE WE...
...Reagan's secretary of state continues: "We take as part of our obligation to peace to encourage the gradual evolution of the Soviet system toward a more pluralistic political and economic system...
...and Soviet...
...The new phenomenon after World War II of confronting a real, primary adversary set in motion o -He MEA"AE1T4 T60V6R)ON6M6T OF I"RAtHAS AS)NoVtC69 PLJS TO ROP OOQ6 THOUSAhP PARATROOPS It)TO TH6 oRouV5fH OF BRCORQLY AMIP BRO X TO PROTECT HOUSES OF WORSHIP EH LA06 EWS ROCH V6RSE:As A 0 2Nov/Dec 1383 3 a worldview which was fundamentally flawed...
...Why, the Russian leader asked, is there "no attempt...
...Quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism, p. 180...
...To that end, the United States secured the inclusion of a provision in the U.N...
...power-the first since the Vietnam War-President Carter announced that the Persian Gulf was a "vital security interest" and that the United States was prepared to defend it militarily...
...In its heyday, roll-back referred specifically to Eastern Europe and China...
...Ibid., p. 30...
...Containment Triumphant and Expanded The liberation of the captive peoples of Eastern Europe had been a constant refrain of rightist Republicans for four years, but in 1956, rollback invective met the real world and lost...
...3 80lc eD/voN 78 such notions were far from conventional wisdom...
...The United States, said Truman, would not survive...
...Militaristic containment marked the later Truman years and lasted through the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations...
...he could not risk splitting what was already a minority party...
...declared that no nation should create colonial interests in China...
...At the Allied Powers' Conference at Yalta in 1945, Stalin appeared to agree on elections in Poland which, based on pre-war power structures, would probably have brought forth a proWestern government...
...1 3 Any failure to defend a position would demoralize U.S...
...Quoted in Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment, (Boston: South End Press, 1983), p. 24...
...The shift from Carter to Reagan was real and abrupt, yet beneath the differences lay a common concern, and one which has obsessed the foreign policy establishment since World War II: a fear of the political and military challenge posed by the Soviet Union to U.S...
...Was it possible to maintain domestic prosperity and extensive military spending...
...Werner, The Indianapolis Star be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure...
...Nasser responded by nationalizing the Suez Canal and turned to the Soviet Union for help with the dam...
...heightened political tension...
...The CIA was headed by Allen Dulles, John Foster's younger brother...
...Ngo Dinh Diem, a wealthy landlord, became the U.S...
...In a dramatic extension of U.S...
...Who started it is open to debate...
...The Latin American laboratory taught U.S...
...administrations developed the use of local police forces and armies to protect U S. interests: this was the testing ground for the periodic show of force, the interventions, covert actions and invasions...
...It flowed from Russian history, Marxist-Leninist teaching and the years of clandestinity of the Soviet leadership...
...Instead, in September 1954 the United States began military assistance to the South Vietnamese government...
...Ike, in turn, espoused much of their rhetoric...
...On the WOW 1983 3891c eD/roN10 A.ARjr familiar pattern of post-war peace settlements, Vietnam was partitioned, with the North under Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and the South under Emperor Bao Dai...
...If he failed to sell this new worldview, it was in part because its advocates did not precisely understand its implications and the complexities of its management...
...He rebuffed those who urged a bigger military buildup and warned of the danger of turning America into a garrison state...
...Working through bribery, intrigue, assassination and infiltration, it would fall to the new Central Intelligence Agency, formerly known as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS...
...With Western-supported attacks in the years immediately after the revolution a bitter memory, and with fresher scars from Hitler's invasion, security questions were uppermost in the minds of Soviet leaders...
...Both public and government sentiment in the United States expressed outraged betrayal, decrying Stalin's demand for a security perimeter as paranoia and denouncing him for seeking world conquest...
...Right withstood him, and he remains high on their hate-list...
...champion and received pledges of large-scale economic aid...
...It would later appear-signed anonymously by "X"-in Foreign Affairs...
...This would of course be extremely costly, but NSC-68 argued that "the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a higher standard of living.'"" Encouraged by Keynesian economists, it went further: defense spending, though it would cause short-term deficits, could increase demand and stimulate economic growth...
...Kennan did not feel that a Soviet invasion of Europe was likely...
...TODAY'S SPECIALTY, WITH TRUMAN DOCTRINE DRESSING Smith...
...whatever the facts, the Truman Administration used the crisis to advance the objectives of NSC-68...
...But there were laws in this ambition...
...Though Kennan would later question his for- mulation, it became the structuring principle of post-war foreign policy discourse...
...no more than a policy of bluff...
...Rearming Germany was especially controversial as evidence of Nazi atrocities came to light...
...Eighty years later, when the U.S...
...the zero-sum logic of East/West confrontation dominates every situation in the world from relations with Europe to Central America...
...leaders, Poland was "the outpost of European civilization...
...Their efforts were headed by Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller, and their vehicle was called the Trilateral Commission...
...It envisioned an increase in the standing army, new technologies of war and expanded covert operations...
...l His secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, viewed the world in starkly Manichean terms...
...And there was no one else to stop it: on February 12, 1947, the British Embassy in Washington delivered a note to the State Department warning that Great Britain, the world's dominant imperial power for over a century, could not meet its responsibilities to the Greek government...
...9 Kennan's particular concern was Europe, whose industrial-military plant, raw materials and lines of communication defined it as a "strong point...
...The core of the rebellion was an angry peasantry frustrated by years of economic exploitation and political corruption...
...For U.S...
...Their conclusions bore the colorless title, The Report by the Secretaries of State and Defense on United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, April 7, 1950...
...5. Quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism, p. 102...
...THE WORLD IN A FUNHOUSE MIRROR 1. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 48...
...His vision reflected the new analysis emerging from the Trilateral Commission...
...One chief victim of the war was the elite consensus around foreign policy, whose collapse contributed to the failure of U.S...
...All that this country desires is that the other republics on this continent shall be happy and prosperous...
...Both sides wanted a compliant government in Poland...
...OOPAlTIOM OF FFTY FRJC-CH R6STAORAMT5 OI TH6 IS&AMIP OF MAUJRATTAM U)MT1L ALW- PZSOPMELT ARE 9VACUAT6P...
...Instead, he would talk of arms control, human rights and the problems of the Third World...
...Claiming a weapons gap, he ordered a dramatic increase in military spending and a new nuclear missile program to contain the Soviets in Europe...
...And this was only one of a host of critical economic problems-balance of payments and trade deficits...
...The Carter Doctrine, as it would be called, laid the basis for the full restoration of militaristic containment...
...To carry out the aggressive "internationalist" policies advocated by Kennan, President Tru- man had to convince a war-weary populace that the Soviet threat was real...
...7. Ibid., p. 488...
...The United States would cope with the nuisance wars of the Third World through the use of specially trained troops and technological advances in land warfare...
...Henceforth, in the Middle East, the United States would be the decisive power...
...It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent without endangering our peace and happiness...
...8. Quoted in John Spanier, American Foreign Policy Since World War II, 9th Edition, p. 26...
...The result was the Rio Treaty and the Organization of American States, assuring the United States its traditional sphere of influence within the legal framework of the post-war world...
...Even the face of the enemy became blurred...
...By their logic, perimeter defense made neither economic nor political sense...
...The defense budget is up dramatically...
...So successful were the new techniques that they were replayed the following year in Guatemala to oust the elected reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz, which had proposed to nationalize idle United Fruit Company lands...
...3. Ibid...
...The U.S...
...5 But there would be no deal over Poland...
...But the months dragged by...
...And NSC-68 saw the threat as global, not restricted to the industrialized "strong points...
...NSC-68 shared Kennan's belief that the Soviets were implacably hostile: ". .. the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world...
...Neither brinksmanship nor covert action proved of any avail...
...Nov/Dec 1983 Truman, then, demanded elections in Poland "because of the effect on U.S...
...The United States will defend access to the Persian Gulf...
...The analysis of NSC-68 relies heavily on this very fine book...
...leader...
...Monroe went on: "The political system of the allied powers is essentially different from that of America...
...NACLA Report 6Now/Doc 19837 U.S...
...The only serious challenge to containment in the post-war era has been the concept of "rollback," a doctrine which enjoyed a certain rhetorical influence in the Eisenhower Administration and remains today a fundamental tenet of the U.S...
...Kennedy took militaristic containment to the outer limits of NSC-68, beyond Europe, Asia and the Middle East...
...to consider the interests of the Soviet Union in terms of security as well...
...Kennan's analysis of the character of the Soviet government and his recommendations for a U.S...
...And So to Reagan "Our policy, unlike some versions of dtente, assumes that the Soviet Union is more likely to be deterred by our actions that make clear the risks their aggression entails than by a delicate web of interdependence...
...Ibid., p. 245...
...the political system which threatens is "essentially different...
...The new U.S...
...Henry L. Stimson, Truman's war secretary, told a close aide, "I think that it's not asking too much to have our little region over here which has never bothered anybody...
...it cannot be crossed without risking U.S...
...The new order met powerful opposition within the United States...
...At the same time as Washington came to terms with the reality of Soviet power in Hungary, new opportunities opened up for the expansion of U.S...
...SOONER OR LATER T d McKensie, New York Library Picture Collection...
...The United States entered no mutual defense treaty until it created NATO in 1947...
...The Carter Administration decided to "out-hawk the hawks," seeking large increases in the defense budget...
...But none came...
...NSC-68 was not satisfied with the bomb alone as a military guarantee of security...
...Even more serious, the cost of the military buildup required by roll-back threatened that most sacred of Republican principles, the balanced budget...
...Without superior aggregate military strength .. a policy of 'containment' is...
...Some said it represented a complete break with containment-and there was some truth in that argument in the early days of Carter's term-while others saw it as a new and more subtle form of that tried-and-true doctrine, more reminiscent of Kennan's notion of shoring up the "strong points" and using diplomatic incentives...
...Charter which would allow regional security groups...
...sphere of influence and saw a renewed Anglo-French presence as a threat to their plans...
...response became the talk of Washington...
...post-war reconstruction aid...
...True, the Soviet Union had not demobilized after the war...
...Kennedy's special contribution to the arsenal of containment was counterinsurgency warfare and the Green Berets...
...Far from forcing a reduction in Soviet military power, the strategy of encircling the Soviet Union with nuclear missiles had merely spurred Moscow to a position of nuclear parity for the first time in history...
...6 The advisers also detected real Soviet weaknesses-eventually, they assured Truman, Stalin would capitulate out of the need for U.S...
...It was a time, he said, to assert" as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents by the free and independent condition that they have assumed, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers...
...To manage the threat, each successive U.S...
...The Department of Defense had become without question the biggest industrial management operation in the world...
...strategy prepared under Truman in 1950...
...Could the United States continue to play the role of world policeman, exercising global militaristic containment without the help of its allies...
...Kissinger's proposals were broadly accepted as part of the necessary new realism...
...imperial strategy: not to establish a colonial political structure but to assure maximum economic penetration...
...under its stimulus, its economy had pulled out of the depression...
...greater emphasis on Soviet economic weakness and increased use of economic incentives...
...In late 1949, Truman authorized an ad hoc committee of State and Defense Department staff under Paul Nitze,* head of the Policy Planning staff at State, to prepare a single compre*Chief negotiator at the intermediate START talks in 1983, Nitze is one of the most important and least known foreign policy figures of the post-war era...
...These characteristics of Soviet policy, like the postulates from which they flow, are basic to the internal nature of Soviet power and will be with us...
...All rights reserved...
...Roll-Back and the Republicans According to the victorious Republicans in 1952, it was time to get tough...
...Fear of the Soviet threat has the quality of obsession, and its roots are a fit theme for metaphysical debate...
...In a world of nuclear weapons, its implementation risks Armageddon, a fact that has discouraged its serious consideration...
...far right...
...Quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism, p. 137...
...Quoted in John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 91...
...THE CARTER DOCTRINE...
...In part, he owed this success to his own remarkable skill at manipulating the press and dazzling the foreign policy establishment with his intellectual gymnastics...
...7 In 1947, the bomb seemed to ensure that this would be-as Time magazine had proclaimed-"The American Century...
...noted foreign policy strategist George Kennan, and was practiced from Nixon through Carter...
...This we pledge...
...The new president was not, however, of the same breed...
...world dominance...
...At stake for Truman was not just Korea, not just NSC-68, but his whole presidency...
...5. Peter Willets, The Non-AlignedMovement, p. 20...
...How It All Began The Soviet Union emerged from World War II with a powerful army and the industrial capacity of a major power...
...What Truman needed now was another one...
...Mao Zedong drove Chiang Kai-shek to Formosa, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal committed suicide...
...flag) led by Gen...
...References to the first Cold War abound-the Truman Doctrine, a Marshall Plan for Latin America, even talk of "partitioning" Central America along the Nicaragua-Honduras border...
...All the weapons of militaristic containment had "THOSE KIDS ARE JUST PLAIN IRRESPONSIBLE," failed there: nuclear weapons, which for humanitarian/political reasons were never used...
...America had won the war...
...forth by James Monroe in his annual message to Congress in 1824...
...response, calculating and cold-blooded, was to abandon its wartime allies and back Egypt...
...Covert action was, government officials hoped, an inexpensive way for a budget-conscious administration to manage its global responsibilities...
...The United States will intervene in any country of the Americas where communists are likely to take power...
...Soviet military capability, the document warned, though not yet equivalent to that of the United States, was "in excess of need...
...on government contracts...
...But, in addition, Churchill was applying pressure, and domestic opinion was running high...
...It is likely that in the near future issues of war and peace will be more a function of economic and social problems which have dominated international relations since World War II...
...Dulles procrastinated and then refused aid...
...Historically, they have served to define areas of the world over which the United States would be prepared to go to war...
...in the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary we can glimpse the seeds of containment: a the United States protests that its aim is "freedom and independence" for the region...
...policymakers wanted the Middle East within the U.S...
...More than a policy toward the Soviet Union, containment has been the spinal column of U.S...
...After World War II, the country had been partitioned, with the United States and Soviet Union both occupying part of Korean territory...
...Its thesis was straightforward: Soviet hostility was a constant...
...In the United States, too, a new generation of political leaders was in the wings-Democrats like Kennedy, Johnson and Humphrey who worried about the loss of U.S...
...In a rare moment in U.S...
...They wanted the landlords, the Church and the factory owners to remain...
...Massive retaliation had proved particularly ineffectual in dealing with wars of national liberation in the Third World, which Kennedy identified as the new arena for East/West encounter...
...A highly vocal sector, called "isolationists" by administration supporters, opposed a war with the Soviet Union and thought the Europeans should fend for themselves...
...2 2 In that statement by George Shultz, there is even a suggestion-the first from a U.S...
...MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES AND EMPIRE "Number One World Power" is a title that this country has borne for only about 40 years, since it replaced Great Britain after World War II...
...Only the ideologues of the U.S...
...Over the next year, Truman reintroduced the draft, submitted his $50 billion defense budget, increased aid to Greece, pushed ahead with H-bomb production and rearmed Germany...
...and it was the proud possessor of the most awesome weapon in history-the atomic bomb...
...And what were the ultimate circumstances which could justify unleashing the ultimate weapon...
...leaders, fearful of the example of communism, had to destroy it...
...aggression from any nation controlled by international communism...
...Nov/Doc 983 34 NCARor future of Eastern Europe, and specifically over Poland...
...A rebel victory might threaten vital Mediterranean sea lanes and endanger the new U.S...
...As we children of the Cold War are told, it was the Soviets, Reagan's "evil empire," with their insatiable lust for power...
...Shortwave radios issued dramatic appeals to U.S...
...A fear invoked more for domestic consumption than as a basis for foreign policy, it can secure mass backing for foreign adventures by plumbing the deep reservoirs of anticommunism in American culture...
...Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any "VALTMAN, " HE HARTFORD TIMES hardship, support any friend, oppose any foes, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty...
...officials how to rationalize their claims to the region's resources, markets and investment opportunities...
...Even Eisenhower later admitted that Ho Chi Minh would have won elections held on the Geneva timetable...
...For traditional economists, defense spending lowered living standards and increased taxes and government controls...
...the United States will not tolerate European influence in the affairs of Western Hemisphere countries...
...The U.S...
...Echoing the 1952 Republican platform, he condemned containment as "negative, futile and immoral," because it left "countless human beings to a despotism and Godless terrorism...
...Local conditions are only relevant in as far as they represent opportunities for the Soviets and their clients to exploit...
...unless we are willing to help free people to maintain their institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes . . . I believe it must BUT HE DOESN'T WANT TO SWALLOW IT...
...Although the United States talked of collective security through the United Nations, it maintained a stranglehold over Central and South America, usually through client military dictatorships...
...The Soviet Union was not involved when those governments were formed...
...So the Eisenhower Administration gradually evolved a policy of militaristic containment, glossed with the rhetoric of roll-back...
...imperial laboratory...
...On both sides, nuclear arsenals were enormous...
...Though Communists were present in the leadership of the resistance movements of both countries, the United States and Britain had supported rival leaders who promised to return to the pre-war system...
...Intervention in Greece and the Marshall Plan had won support because the administration had painted the situation as an emergency...
...He advanced the art of covert action with sabotage against Cuba and mobster-planned assassination plots against Fidel Castro...
...This was roll-back...
...containment was "immoral...
...until the nature of Soviet power is changed...
...The logic of roll-back suggested war, which the general population still rejected...
...the only non-expansionist doctrine, it declared that the United States had to share global police responsibilities with regional powers...
...Dulles dedared that elections would be deferred until Diem had been given time to prove himself to the Vietnamese people...
...A new policy was proposed: to contain the Soviets, the perimeter of U.S...
...Truman, they charged, had sacrificed China, Poland, all of Eastern Europe to the communists...
...2 1 External events including the fall of the Shah in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan shook elite enthusiasm for a new vision...
...It was a view that substituted trade for guns and recognized the limits of U.S...
...In 1904, President Roosevelt set out a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, applied specifically to a crisis in the Caribbean Basin...
...foreign policy, doctrines are an assertion of imperial intent...
...then came troops (under the U.N...
...12Nov/Do 1983 All were part of a new doctrine called "limited response," an alternative to brinksmanship...
...1 6 Korea: The Next Pretext Fifty billion dollars would be needed to implement NSC-68, as against Truman's budget of $13.5 billion...
...hensive statement of foreign interests, threats and responses...
...Despite the most modern technology, the United States had been beaten by a peasant army...
...an increased nuclear and conventional arms buildup...
...Like Reagan, Kennedy saw the United States as the last hope of the world...
...It declared, in effect, that although the United States would continue to honor its treaty obligations, it would no longer act as lone global policeman...
...Easy access to strategic raw materials could no longer be taken for granted...
...With Reagan, there is a return to that style, with policies that recall the recommendations of the National Security Council document (NSC-68), an internal study of U.S...
...But they rejected the option of committing troops, and were left with a single and totally inappropriate weapon to prevent a French defeat-the bomb...
...Carter and Global Interdependence In a speech at Notre Dame University in 1976, newly elected President Jimmy Carter sounded a note never heard before from the lips of a U.S...
...None, however, can deny the fact that after World War II only an adversarial Soviet Union had the military, political and economic power to challenge U.S...
...FOREIGN POLICY DOCTRINES In U.S...
...Accordingly, Kennan emphasized the need for economic recovery...
...The Truman Administration was in a ferment of debate over how to respond...
...Instead, the United States should reclaim the captured areas and topple the Soviet system...
...Carter's experience and political skills proved inadequate to the awesome tasks of implanting the new analysis, let alone convey it to the general public...
...America's leaders hoped that through the judicious use of financial credit and the veiled threat of the bomb, the United States could shape the post-war world...
...Many warned that a depression would follow the war and discouraged conversion to a peacetime economy...
...1 2 It agreed with Kennan too that world order could best be preserved through a balance of power, but where Kennan had stressed economics and diplomacy, NSC-68 put the emphasis on military pressure...
...To the Third World he offered new aid programs and openly competed with Soviet and Chinese influence...
...Some historians suggest that the North Korean incursion may have been provoked by Syngman Rhee's army...
...THE OVEORIMb 0T OF THE UUIT69 STATe4 HAS FL60 A STROtiG PROTGT 4WITH THC 6OVEwMl6T OF GHAUA CAIH/W&G THAT IT ACTI2 IL6-ALL-Y I0) 192FATCHIMG TWO THOUSAK/D MARIUF6 TO PROTct TH7e HOTeL TH-RESA NPD OTHMR SCA1TE&IC P.JTS Ik) 7I1 COHMUtIITVJ mained the principal enemy, the constant of elite discourse, directly or indirectly involved in every crisis which besets the United States internationally...
...And though the amount was small, it opened the doors for a massive aid program to rebuild Europe: the Marshall Plan...
...For our Soviet counterparts, U.S...
...The megalithic transnational corporations, with operations in every corner of the globe, demanded a world order that would guarantee stability and increase trade in what they viewed as a globally interdependent economy...
...The few Washington policymakers who sought to break the mold during the Carter years recognized the complex interdependence of the world, but foundered on the difficulty of managing such complexity...
...Stalin hoped to rely on the precedent established by the Western powers' liberation of France and Italy: whoever occupied a country would dictate its social system...
...In retrospect, conflict was inevitable...
...6. Ibid., p. 100...
...From their concern emerged a fresh variant on containment...
...Ibid., p. 99...
...A third crisis tested the limits of both brinksmanship and covert operations...
...Truman's key advisers, Soviet experts like George Kennan and Averill Harriman, were genuinely appalled at Stalin's refusal to honor the Yalta agreements, and regarded Soviet communism as a denial of basic Western values...
...Containment by diplomatic, political and economic means follows the tradition of the IM F)RHR V6V6EOPME rS FRIKXH PARATROOPS HAV' REFUSP -TO WITHlP.RA "THE...
...NSC-68 and Global Militarism The halcyon days of the American Century were short-lived...
...A passive populace at home had risen in harsh opposition to a war whose purpose could never be explained...
...economy was out of control...
...Embassy in Moscow, sent an 8,000 word telegram back to Washington...
...The Nixon Doctrine shifted emphasis away from perimeter defense and confrontation, downplaying ideological conflict and appealing to the nationalism of the Soviet Union through diplomatic, economic and political pressure...
...And varying local conditions could mean that a given policy in one part of the world could appear inconsistent in another...
...hegemony for more than a century, the continent slipped smoothly into the post-war mold of global management...
...Ibid., p. 97...
...In 1950, Left forces made significant gains in elections urged by the United States and pushed for unification with the North...
...In breach of the accords, Stalin failed to include pro-Western politicians in the Polish government, suppressed civil liberties and made no move toward elections...
...And Vietnamese communism seemed remarkably unresponsive to pressures from either the Soviet Union or China...
...covert action, counterinsurgency, U.S...
...Unable to explain his policies, Carter was driven on to the defensive by a powerful and well-organized lobby led by the Committee on the Present Danger, agitating for a return to fullblown militaristic containment...
...In Latin America, the United States had evolved a new style of imperialism owing little to European colonialism and its complex layers of bureaucracy...
...1 Since World War II, there have been two discernible styles of containment: one favoring military pressure, the other diplomatic, economic and political pressure...
...However you analyze the causes you end up in one camp or the other-Cold Warrior, revisionist, proU.S., pro-Soviet...
...Only in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Panama Canal Zone did it practice more traditional colonial administration, though still with interesting mutations...
...Under U.S...
...On March 9, 1957, Congress officially endorsed this expansion of U.S...
...and British forces to the west...
...This increased military power would allow Moscow to "back up infiltration with intimidation...
...Too much accepted wisdom had been proved wrong, and intense self-doubt racked the foreign policy establishment...
...There was a welcome modesty and realism about the Carter vision of the early years...
...Nor did it claim the right to interfere in those matters, because it realizes how important Belgium and Greece are to the security of Great Britain...
...Hence the name of the new policy -"brinksmanship...
...In both cases, the Dulles brothers saw the tentacles of international communist conspiracy in situations which historians now agree were examples of radical nationalist regimes trying to control their own natural resources...
...To anyone reading the newspapers, it is now evident that militaristic containment is the order of the day...
...The immediate causes of U.S./Soviet rivalry lie in the closing days of World War II.2 Their unusual wartime alliance broke down over the OPS Atu C(1965, Jules Feiffer...
...influence with other Arab states...
...The United States, Carter declared, was no longer driven by its "inordinate fear of communism...
...The assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and in the context of the present polarization of power, a defeat for free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere...
...For the first time since World War II, the U.S...
...Secretary of State George Shultz, June 16, 1983...
...THE NIXON DOCTRINE...
...Elite lobbying too urged harshness...
...peacetime intervention in the affairs of any nation outside the Western Hemisphere...
...He was under incessant attack from Republicans for the "loss of China" and the abandonment of beleaguered Republican favorite Chiang Kai-shek...
...Ibid., p. 187...
...It sought assistance above all from the European and Japanese allies and from certain emerging Third World powers such as Iran and Brazil...
...Others see it as the conflict of two irreconcilable ideologies embodied in nation-states whose leaders pursue the triumph of their visions with messianic purpose...
...Eastern Europe would provide their security perimeter...
...1973 was the year for recognizing new economic realities: the Arab oil embargo and the emergence of the commodity cartel...
...Nazi Germany had fought the war on two fronts, against the Red Army to its east and the U.S...
...They were joined by political and business leaders from Europe and Japan...
...But nuclear war was, to say the least, an extreme solution, and policymakers sought other weapons...
...Presented as a memorandum of the National Security Council, it became known as NSC-68...
...In 1950, RUDE AWAKENING C- -nsoemaKer, thicago Daily News...
...an increasingly obsolete and uncompetitive industrial plant, recession, soaring inflation...
...Rather than allow the tensions arising from competing demands upon limited resources and markets to degenerate into a dangerous and destructive conflict, a new world order should be constructed, dominated politically and economically by the United States, Europe and Japan...
...The same demand was being made by the North Korean government of Kim II Sung, head of the Korean Communist Party...
...But Churchill and Roosevelt remained deaf to Stalin's demands for a quid pro quo over Poland...
...Those factors alone would have dictated a hard line...
...efforts to reduce tension by moderating rhetoric (what Kennan called "good form...
...Today the administration persists in depicting events in Central America as a plot hatched in the Kremlin...
...For the origins of the Cold War, see especially Ambrose, Rise to Globalism, Chapter 4. 3. Quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, Riseto Globalism, p. 97...
...Syngman Rhee, a petty dictator, was elected president in the U.S.-dominated south...
...Few contemporaries missed the implications of Monroe's remarks...
...Despite losing half a million soldiers, the nation and its leaders were riding a wave of self-confidence...
...Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was a radical nationalist leader, who, in search of funds for a large dam project, had turned to the United States...
...arms control initiatives...
...The younger Dulles sent Kermit Roosevelt (Teddy's grandson) to Iran where CIA covert activities toppled Mossadeq and installed Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as the Shah...
...Even before the fall of Saigon in 1975, the United States had lost the war in Vietnam...
...The United States will intervene in the Middle East to prevent instability and the spread of international communism...
...President Johnson's fear of raising taxes to finance the war had provoked galloping inflation...
...Fearing that their access to the canal would be jeopardized, the British, French and Israelis attacked Egypt, anticipating support from Washington...
...The United States, meanwhile, had escaped this physical devastation...
...influence in the region...
...had the power truly to implement these principles, the intent was much clearer...
...In the end, Diem was given nine years, until Washington-frustrated by his corruption and lack of popular support-gave its blessing to his overthrow in 1963...
...Truman would say that his doctrine and the Marshall Plan were "two halves of the same walnut...
...Eisenhower's tough rhetoric, said Kennedyites, had not been backed with tough action...
...The new doctrine did not abandon containment or the overall hegemony of the United States as its goal, but it asserted that other regional and sub-regional powers would have to play their part in the defense of the capitalist world...
...Eisenhower responded favorably to the talk of "peaceful coexistence" emanating from Moscow...
...4. Ibid., p. 20., quoting Belgrade Conference of Heads of State or Government ofNon-Aligned Countries, (Belgrade:Jugoslavija Publishing House, 1961), p. 270...
...It got the first chance to flex its muscles in 1953 in Iran, where the government of Mohammed Mossadeq had incurred Western ire by proposing to nationalize its BASTIAX, SAA FR.\C.IS( O (IRO\IC ( L extensive British and U.S.-owned oil fields...
...Kennedy and Global Containment The Cold War grew less chilly in the waning years of the Eisenhower Administration...
...7. Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism, p. 112...
...His opportunity came in Greece...
...I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way...
...2. Two useful and quite different accounts of post-war history upon which this analysis has relied are Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy, 1938-1980, 2nd Edition, (New York: Penguin, 1971, 1976, 1980) and John Spanier, American Foreign Policy Since World War II, 9th Edition, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983...
...America's defense perimeter ran from the Elbe in Germany through the Third World to the 38th parallel in Korea...
...a tendency to treat local conflicts as local and downplay the win/lose, zero sum character of the encounter...
...retaliation...
...American political leade, s soon found that the bomb was no guarantee: exclusive control of the technology could not last...
...On May 15, 1947, Congress gave Truman the $400 million...
...The transnational business community was worried...
...military force...
...strategy of containment had fed the very fear of attack and encirclement that Kennan had explained was the cause of Russian hostility...
...Suddenly in 1949, the first postwar recession shook the United States...
...supremacy...
...In November, advisers arrived to train the South Vietnamese Army...
...It was the first U.S...
...THE OPEN DOOR POLICY...
...In practice, the more broadly defined "communism" is easier to live with...
...The advocates of militaristic containment pressured for a return to the old days, complaining of a "neo-isolationist" mood among the elite and a "Vietnam syndrome" among the general populace...
...worst, the Soviet Union detonated its own A-bomb...
...STEP ON IT...
...For the least subtle, the contest is between good and evil...
...President Reagan declares in a press conference that the cause of the crisis in Central America is external...
...the use of summits and forums such as the U.N...
...It was here that U.S...
...The Sino-Soviet split had subverted notions of communism as a monolith...
...4. Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism, p. 94...
...Its characteristics are a greater European role in the balance of power calculus...
...For Kennan, ". . . the secretiveness, the lack of frankness, the war suspiciousness and the basic unfriendliness of purpose...
...allies, and eventually "by gradual withdrawals under pressure...we [shall] discover one day that we have sacrificed 'vital interests.' "" 1 4 Containment had to be global...
...history, leaders of industry and finance assembled in a glare of publicity to address the economic crisis in tandem with the national security dilemmas of the post-Vietnam era, and to find global solutions...
...with Poland under Soviet domination, it was the bulwark of containment...
...In that year, rebellion broke out in Hungary...
...Nixon and Kissinger then opened up talks with the Soviet Union on nuclear arms limitations...
...World...
...Ibid., p. 186...
...For the Right, Ike's war hero image was an asset for convincing voters that the Republicans were no longer the party of the rich and the Great Depression...
...Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate...
...To confront the Soviet threat, Eisenhower chose to rely on an expanded nuclear capability...
...We must replace balance-of-power with world order politics," said Carter...
...20 John F. Kennedy's loyal biographers and the moderation of his two brothers have obscured the fact that he was probably the foremost postwar advocate-until Ronald Reagan-of militaristic containment and Cold War confrontation...
...As if repetition makes it so...
...On February 22, 1946, a diplomat named George Kennan, attached to the U.S...
...a large and apparently permanent armaments industry, wholly dependent...
...9. Ibid., p. 27...
...Truman chose to intervene, seeing the Marxist-led insurgency as an example of Soviet expansionism (though Soviet support was only lukewarm...
...Roll-back rang through his campaign speeches: "We can never rest until the enslaved nations of the world have in the fullness of freedom the right to choose their own path, for then, and then only, can we say that there is a possible way of living peacefully and permanently with communism in this world...
...5NACLA Report Greece: The Guinea Pig The major resistance to Nazi occupation of Greece had come from insurgents led by the Greek Communist Party...
...power must be militarily defended...
...From the earliest days of the Cold War, the foreign policy establishment has found ways to coexist with Marxist governments-first in Yugoslavia, later in China...
...8 And the strategy to change the power?-'"Longterm, patient but firm and vigilant containment...
...A line is drawn...
...the United States has the moral right to act as policeman: its standard shall be the standard for the New World...
...historian William Appleman Williams argues the Open Door Policy expresses the essence of U.S...
...Distinct from this "Soviet threat" is the broader and more nebulous "communist threat...
...Ibid., p. 93...
...After 1945, that resistance swelled into a popular insurgency that threatened to topple the British-backed Greek government...
...Thus began the long, entangling commitment to try and create a government not dominated by the Vietnamese Communists...
...The situation exploded on June 25, 1950, when North Korean troops crossed into the South...
...The United States would meet any Soviet adventure with nuclear retaliation, going to the brink of destruction to prevent the spread of Soviet influence...
...ready military force was necessary to show "seriousness," but the Soviets' main challenge was political...
...In the words of one supporter, Truman left behind "an enormously expanded military establishment beyond anything we had ever contemplated in time of peace...
...Joseph Stalin put the Soviet case this way: "Throughout history, Poland has been the corridor through which the enemy has passed into Russia...
...We were losing Asia, cried Joseph McCarthy and others, because of "Communists in the State Department...
...The fundamental principles of U.S...
...1 9 Yet from rhetoric to reality was a big step...
...The world was to be divided into mutually understood spheres of interest, within which each side would effectively agree to contain itself To accomplish this, Nixon and Kissinger took an extraordinary step: they ended World War II, recognizing East Germany and working out agreements on Berlin, accepting the territorial boundaries of Eastern Europe and returning Okinawa to Japan...
...Polish-Americans were angered, and Catholic voters were stirred by the anti-communism of the church hierarchy...
...administration in three decades-of a return to roll-back...
...For the trilateralists, the world economy called for more active management...
...so did Stalin, and a new Kremlin leadership denounced his abuses...
...Since world events could not ne14L Rpr P iNOV/Doc 1983 1 cessarily be ascribed to Soviet influence, a greater familiarity was required with each local crisis...
...It was, in Kennedy's phrase, time "to get America moving again...
...But fiscal conservatives ruled Congress, and the general public was still reluctant for another war...
...The foreign policy journals dubbed it "interdependence...
...Without a strong Germany between the rest of Europe and the Soviet Union, Poland was expected to play the role of buffer against the Red Army...
...See Jerry W. Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis, Chapters 6 & 7. 22...
...administration since 1945 has premised its foreign policy on an identical strategic principlethat of "containment...
...In the notorious White Paper, the State Department traced a trail that ran from El Salvador, through Managua, via the capitals of Eastern Europe and side-trips to Ethiopia and Vietnam, before arriving at the supposed command center: Moscow...
...only if Russia's enemies were defeated or changed would there be security...
...Vietnam would be the testing ground...
...Each reinforced the belief in a hostile outside world...
Vol. 17 • November 1983 • No. 6
