Olympian View of the Cold War

...To what extent can it be said that the oversimplified dichotomy between "spheres of influence" and universal principles of international order served to becloud the possibilities for more qualified and circumscribed resolution of the difficulties stemming from the redefinition of U S and Soviet territorial interests...

...Writers & Writing OLYMPIAN VIEW OF THE COLD WAR BY MARSHALL D SHULMAN So many books on the cold war have been written in recent years that the appearance of another one might provoke but a yawn from the audience we like to call "the attentive public " The price we pay for such catch-words as the "cold war" is that they begin to bore the public before the phenomena they refer to are really understood Fashions change in catch-words as m neckties and hemlines For the moment at least "cold war" is out and "detente" is m, but next month it could be the other way around And yet, although the subject of what the cold war was or is about, and how it began, may seem old hat to many, a great deal remains to be discovered about those fateful five years following the close of World War II, they continue to be very much worth serious investigation For one thing, new materials are becoming available Regrettably, this is still largely unilateral, since the Soviet Union has limited itself to a few histories and documents of uneven quality In the United States, new memoirs have been appearing, and it is to be hoped that the State Department archives and the Presidential papers for this period will soon be made available--as should have been done long ago What cries to be done is at a more profound level than the question of who is to blame, posed by revisionist historians While there is something to be learned from the revisionists, it is unfortunately true that the writers of this persuasion have often weakened their argument by sloppy scholarship and by simplistic notions of how foreign policy is made Given the complexities of the relevant issues and processes, rigorous scholarship is called for, informed on Soviet as well as American materials, sophisticated in its insights into the machinery of government This would not only improve our understanding of the reasons why events took the course they did m the early postwar years, but even more important would mark some progress m our efforts to think systematically about international politics As a case study of the interaction between nations, the period of heightening Soviet-U S tension--from 1945 to, say, 1950--is likely to be enormously instructive The possibilities can be suggested by a few illustrative questions How did the principal American participants arrive at the perceptions they held about the extent of the Soviet involvement in the Greek civil war--perceptions which were to have such fateful importance in the formulation of the Truman Doctrine...

...To what extent did that shallowness of understanding make the United States vulnerable to unmeasured responses as the real depth of the problems involved were revealed...

...I have cited only a few of the questions requiring study They do not even begin to open up the equally interesting uncertainties on the Soviet side, which may have to wait for further information from that quadrant These thoughts are prompted by the appearance of a new work by the distinguished diplomatic historian Herbert Feis, who has contributed so much to our knowledge of the events associated with the Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences, and the conclusion of the war with Japan In From Trust to Tenor The Onset of the Cold War, 1945-1950 (W W Norton, 428 pp , $10 00), Feis retells the narrative of those years, folding into the material he had previously assembled additional msights gathered from interviews and memoirs more recently available To the young college or high-school student born after these events transpired, Feis' account will offer a readable and useful base of information for thinking about this period and its influence upon the present, he has dealt skillfully with the separate threads of the story, and woven them into a comprehensible pattern To those awaiting Feis' response to the questions raised by revisionist critics of his earlier works, the book will be unsatisfying For Feis has chosen to ignore his critics, only in passing oblique references does he give disdainful notice to some of the points they have raised On many of the moot issues concerning the policy choices during this period, Feis merely hands down some brief obiter dicta, rendering his judgments without elaboration For example On the Polish issue at Yalta, he offers the summary verdict that it would have been better to have risked a break with Stalin, in the expectation that "Stalin would have given m slightly" The position is respectable, but without further argumentation, this simple expression of opinion does not advance our thinking much In a brief footnote, Feis expresses support for a "spheres of influence" division of Europe, challenging a position expressed by George Kennan m his Memoirs--and thus whetting our appetite for an interesting examination of this important question that is not offered On the matter of the U S rejection of the Soviet application for a loan as a factor m the cold war, Feis presents his "definite opinion" that this supposition is "ill-founded and superficial," and returns the subject "to others who think it more important than I do " Even those who support Feis' view on this point would wish for more than a statement from on high about it In discussing James Forrestal's argument for building up U S ground forces to defend Europe, Feis asks "Did the Secretary of Defense, in his zeal, forget about the atomic bombs9" The implications of this question, which are not elaborated, leave one startled The author concludes a section about Berlin with a sentence expressing support for the idea that the city should be made a neutral, international center under the UN--a tenable position perhaps, but surely not a self-evident one As for the argument that the United States was influenced m its use of the atomic bomb against Japan by the desire to bring pressure upon the Soviet government, Feis descends to a "guilt by association" footnote by linking the idea with "a British scientist of Communist persuasion " One may agree with the author's conclusion and deplore the lack of a more substantial rejoinder Herbert Feis once made the point that "without the Soviet documents and memoirs, all accounts of the cold war must be lopsided " This is unfortunately a problem with From Trust to Terror, too The author's main source for documenting the Soviet position is the New Tunes, a journal prepared for foreign circulation that is more heavily devoted to propaganda exegesis than the organs intended for internal circulation As suggested earlier, additional Soviet materials have become available, many m English translation I trust it was not just professional sensitivity that caused me to wince at Feis' reference to students of Soviet developments as "those scrutineers of the sayings and doings of the Russian Government--called Kremlinologists" The remark is fairly characteristic of the style of the book, Olympian in its derision for the folly of men No doubt the tragic period merits some harsh judgments, but if we are not to repeat our follies, we need the depth of analysis that will help us to understand why things turned out the way they did...

...How did President Roosevelt's impatience with the encumbrance of the State Department machinery contribute to the inadequately-informed U S negotiating positions regarding Central and Eastern Europe during the War and after...

...How did the need for legislative support affect operational concepts in the Executive Branch about Soviet behavior and intentions regarding Greece, and result in the sweeping response reflected in the President's message on the Greek-Turkish Aid Program, or, to take another example, in our movement toward the rearmament of West Germany after the outbreak of the Korean War...

...In turn, how much did these unmeasured responses contribute to a stimulation of the narrow and dogmatic tendencies present within the Soviet leadership...