U.S. Global Policies During the Cold War

President Franklin D. Roosevelt held out hope that a personal relationship with Premier Joseph Stalin, together with the guarantees of democratic elections secured at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, would mean continued friendly relations.

Having learned from the First World War that a harsh peace agreement harms both the vanquished and victor, Roosevelt and Churchill eventually adopted a more integrative line based on free trade and reconstruction. The famous economist John Maynard Keynes was a fierce critic of the treatment of Germany at the hands of the Allies after World War I, seeing it as destabilizing the world economy. Instead, prosperity for all meant peace for all.

“[The United States] must continue to expect that Soviet policies will reflect no abstract love of peace and stability, no real faith in the possibility of a permanent happy coexistence of the Socialist and capitalist worlds, but rather a cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and, weakening of all rival influence and rival power.

Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a former isolationist, advised Truman that Republicans would support him, but to get the support of the public, he needed to “scare the hell out of the American people” (Goldman, 1961: 59). This, the Truman Doctrine did. The speech implied that America was the unrivalled leader of the free world
and with it came an obligation to support any government threatened by communism.

Korea served as a salient warning to both America and Japan how its postwar occupation might turn out if a peace was not concluded quickly. Japan surrendered six days later. In China, the uneasy peace between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and Mao Tse-tung’s communists quickly dissolved as the Japanese threat dissipated.

The deteriorating situation in China had a profound impact on occupation policies in Japan during the late 1940s. General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, overseeing the occupation of Japan, sought to eliminate its war potential as well as turning it into a Western-style nation. MacArthur drafted a new constitution for Japan, tried war criminals, initiated land reform and to eliminate castes.

The Korean War, more than any other conflict of the time, showed the rare willingness of China and the Soviet Union to coordinate and support (albeit secretly) North Korea’s aggressive upturning of the status quo. In 1947, the United States and Great Britain called for free elections throughout the Koreas, but the Soviets refused. This led to two separate governments: the Korean Democratic Peoples Republic (North Korea), and the Democratic Republic of Korea (South Korea). Both sides were willing to use force to unify the peninsula; however, the United States was unwilling to provide heavy weaponry to South
Korea to check their aggression (Merrill, 1989: 181). North Korea’s invasion on June 25, 1950 caught South Korea and President Truman off guard. As troops flooded south, Truman moved quickly, appealing to the Congress on June 27, and the UN on June 28. The Soviet Union’s boycott of the UN Security Council over not recognizing the People’s Republic of China meant the loss of a crucial opportunity to use its veto. 

Clearly, the Vietnamese had a vision for what relations with America could be. Ho also quoted the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, laying bare the chasm between its ideals and the reality of colonial rule:

The Declaration of Human and civic Rights proclaimed by the French Revolution in 1791 likewise propounds “Every man is born equal and enjoys free and equal rights.” These are undeniable truths. Yet, during and throughoutthe last eighty    years, the violated the integrity of our ancestral land and oppresed our  countrymen. Their deeds run counter to the ideals of humanity and justice (Porter, 1979).

Gulf of Tonkin Controversy - McNamara points out there were actually two incidents – one on August 2, which was a true attack the destroyer Maddox, as the shell fragments were North Vietnamese, but this did not elicit a response from Johnson. On August 4, sonar men confused clutter to be torpedoes. McNamara was not convinced that even the August 2nd incident was evidence that the North Vietnamese were escalating the war to draw in the United States.

Colonial Jacobo Arbenz was the second democratically elected president of Guatemala, coming to power in 1951. He carried out two progressive reforms that spooked the United States: 1) He permitted communists to hold office;     2) He began a land reform program, taking undeveloped land from large landowners, compensating them at the value they had listed on their taxes, and redistributing it to the poor.

In 1970, the election of a Marxist in Chile, Salvador Allende, stunned the Nixon administration. Nixon considered an immediate coup, but did not have the time or infrastructure to carry it out. Thus, Allende ruled for the next three years, continuing the policies of his predecessors of fully nationalizing the copper industry and expropriating land and redistributing it among the poor. Copper was the primary U.S. investment in Chile. When the industry was fully nationalized, the Allende government reduced America’s compensation because of “excessive
profits” or “poor investments” from the past. The Nixon Administration wholeheartedly supported the removal of Allende and used the CIA to undermine his presidency.

Perry Anderson in American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers makes a disturbing comparison:

“[from 1948-1990], the U.S. government had secured the overthrow of at least twenty-four governments in Latin America, four by direct use of US military forces, three by means of CIAmanaged revolts or assassination, and seventeen
by encouraging local military and political forces to intervene without direct US participation, usually through coups d’état… The human cost of this effort was immense. Between 1960, by which time the Soviets had dismantled Stalin’s gulags, and the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and East European satellites."

The important thing for the student of history to remember is that when atomic weapons first appeared, they were considered another weapon in the arsenal,
albeit very powerful. The destruction of entire cities did not make the weapon novel, as Americans had fire-bombed 67 Japanese cities in the last months of
World War II. The March 10, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo killed 105,000 civilians – more than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.  Curtis LeMay, head of strategic bombings over Japan, once quipped that if America had lost the war, his office would have been tried as war criminals (The Fog of War, 2003). 

In 1962, U2 flights over Cuba revealed that the Soviets were building medium range missile sites on the island. The United States set up a naval quarantine around the island as Soviet ships carrying missiles approached. After Kennedy’s failure at the Bay of Pigs, he could not afford to look weak. His joint chiefs of staff, General Curtis LeMay, called for the obliteration of Cuba. LeMay thought a nuclear confrontation was inevitable, so have it while the U.S. still had nuclear superiority. Conflict seemed imminent. Then one evening, Kennedy received two separate messages from the Soviets – the first conciliatory, the second hawkish. Kennedy’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, described the first letter as coming from someone either drunk or under extreme stress. The second,
from a separate group of hardliners. 

In February 1945, Roosevelt on his way home from the Yalta Conference detoured to the Middle East to visit with various regional leaders. Anchored in the Suez Canal, Roosevelt was to meet aboard the USS Quincy King Ibn Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia was still a poor, largely desert, pastoral kingdom. The Americans had discovered oil there only seven years before. Even in those first years, the Roosevelt administration recognized the potential of a Saudi alliance. Lieutenant Colonial William Eddy, Roosevelt’s translator, gave a fascinating account of their meeting--a true cross-cultural encounter.

The questions of Zionism (Jewish resettlement in Palestine) forced an intractable problem on first the Ottoman Empire, then the British, to which there were no good solutions. The UN partition in 1948 of Palestine into a Palestinian and Jewish state did not resolve the issue, but it did fundamentally change its character. Britain’s contradictory positions over the years underscores the difficulty of the issue. In the closing months of the First World War, Palestinian territory fell from the Ottoman hands to a British mandate. In 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, guaranteeing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Following the 1936-37 Arab revolt, the British government acknowledge that the local Palestinian population should have
been consulted.

The split of oil profits between foreign corporations extracting the oil and the source country served as a symbolic indicator of the relation between the West and the Middle East. If oil supplies tightened, it could be weaponized as an economic bludgeon. Roosevelt’s secretary of state Cordell Hull, referred to Saudi Arabia as “one of the world’s greatest prizes.” Now it was in American hands. The second largest producer, Iran, was in British control. Only 16 percent of the profits went to Iran, the rest to Britain (who used much of it to develop Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil).

Arab nationalism, as well as Islamic fundamentalism, only grew more intense with the humiliating defeats of the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Prior to the SixDay War, Egypt and Syria intended to attack Israel and deny them access to the Suez Canal. Israel preemptively struck and quickly defeated the Arab League. Following the Six Day War, Israel took possession of the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, West Bank and the Gaza Strip—names all familiar to us still. The war led to hostility not only against Jews, but the West and the Arab monarchies who supported the West. Taking a page from Israel’s playbook, the Egypt and Syria pre-emptively attacked Israel on the day of Yom Kippur. The Soviets supplied the Arab League with weapons. The United States responded by sending the Israelis military aid. The Arabs were repelled. With that, the Arab countries decided to act in unison – monarchs and nationalists alike – to use oil as an economic weapon.

Nixon and Kissinger bypassed the State Department and set their own foreign policy course. Their priorities were two: 1) disengage from Vietnam, but with honor; 2) reengage with China to exploit their tension with the Soviet Union to secure agreements both favorable to the United States. Twenty years earlier, Secretary of State Dean Acheson recognized the same opportunity, but the political climate created by Nixon, amongothers, made negotiations unimaginable. This is why Nixon shocked the world in February 1972 when he announced a visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Presidential foreign policy doctrines help us to not only track the vision, but also constraints, of the United States at given times in its history. Through Kennedy, presidents still embraced unbridled containment when he proclaimed, “we shall pay any price, bear any burden… oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty” (Kennedy, 1961). By 1972, the Nixon Doctrine tempered such high expectations with the need for compromise and negotiations, as well as relying on other countries to share the burden. America was to support, not replace, local fighters. However, Nixon and Kissinger’s triangulations reeked of amoral, self-interested maneuvering. Watergate cemented the image of an administration without a moral compass. In 1975, President Gerald Ford secured from the Soviet Union an agreement to respect human rights in return for official recognition of Eastern European and Soviet boundaries.