From Hot War to Cold War

Ah, my poor students.

This week their "qualifying paper" was due. What is a qualifying paper? you ask. At least if you are an American, you might ask this, as did I.

Apparently here in Norway's universities, the "traditional" European model of graded student work is followed: students take an exam at semester's end, and that is the basis for their grades. That's it. No midterms, no points for class attendance, no nothing else. A bit scary, yes? One bite of the apple is all they get.

However, there is one wrinkle here. Midway through the course, students also write this qualifying paper. It does not count toward their course grades. All they need to do is earn a passing grade - or, since there are no grades for the paper, write a paper that would earn a passing grade if it were really graded - in order to continue in the course and take the ultimate examination.

It took me a little while to figure this out.

Anyway, my students submitted their papers yesterday, and since we have no class next week, I get to spend time with them only vicariously, through their written work.

Yesterday we also began a new phase of this course on America and the world, since the topic of the week was the beginning of the Cold War. We had a good bit of reading on the docket for this week, including the opening chapters of Robert McMahon's outstanding volume on the Cold War in Oxford's "very short introductions" series, a real winner. But since the paper was due yesterday before the start of class, I did not assume, as an graybeard teacher with many years in the classroom under his belt, that students would have found time also to do the assigned reading. (There is next week's break to catch up!) So I came prepared with plenty of material.

(One aside: At my home institution, I normally teach class sessions that are three hours and twenty minutes long, once per week for each class. The weekly sessions here in Oslo are one hour and forty-five minutes. So I have had some adjusting to do. I sometimes have too much material. Well, honestly, I always have too much material. But it's all good. A bit under two hours seems like only half a class session to me. But my suffering Norwegian students are desperate for a break after about fifty minutes - build some stamina! - and when I am feeling kind I accommodate them.)

I started by asking students if they could tell me what the Cold War was. There were some smart responses, but these answers also had some curious holes in them. Here's what I mean. One student said the Cold War was a contest for power between two superpowers who fought "proxy wars" with each other in the Third World. I thought this was quite sophisticated, and said so. Another student said the Cold War was a struggle between two ideologies. Which ideologies? Communism and "liberal capitalism," he said.

Ah. Here we see some basic differences over how to think about the forty years' struggle we call the Cold War, as I explained. Was it a power struggle between two great powers - different only in scale and scope from great-power conflicts of earlier times? Or was it a death-struggle between rival ways of life, ideologies, and values? I quickly informed the class that there is no consensus on this question among scholars. I don't know if students took comfort from this revelation or not. Another serious debate (I said) occurs among those who think the Cold War was an ideological struggle: not everyone agrees about what names to give those ideologies. Was the USSR an exponent merely of communism - or was its "side" the broader cause of socialism? A lot of socialists have hotly disputed the notion that communism is simply a stronger version of socialism, although others on the left, not all of them Communists, have been quite comfortable saying that the Soviet side - or, if you like, the anti-US side - of the Cold War was "the socialist camp." There are complexities within complexities here. But perhaps a more overt and passionate disagreement has come over what to call the American side in the Cold War. Was America's cause the cause of political democracy or the cause of capitalism? Like my thoughtful student, you can merge these two ideas into the cause of "liberal capitalism," but that does kind of sidestep the question of whether the Cold War was primarily a struggle between different political systems or different economic systems. As I told my students, the rhetoric of the United States, throughout the Cold War, sidestepped this question by simply naming the US cause "freedom." The free world, etc. All you had to do to qualify as part of the free world was to side with the US against the USSR. You certainly didn't have to be a political democracy - as my students clearly were aware - and you didn't have to be an enthusiast of laissez-faire capitalism. The question is, what kind of freedom was this fight about? An endlessly debatable question (the fun kind).

Funny, but in all the responses I got about what the Cold War was - and there were others - there was something missing. I suggested to students that they really go down to the basics, and imagine they were explaining to a visiting space alien (who, miraculously, could understand English, or Norwegian) or to a twelve-year-old child (this could happen someday to all of them, I warned) what the Cold War was. They seemed puzzled. But no one to that point had named the antagonists! Who were they? I asked. Oh, America and Russia, everyone said. Or the Soviet Union. Whatever. Not really sure why this was so hard to drag out of them. Perhaps they were somehow afraid of offending their American professor?

Then I asked the million-dollar question: Who is to blame for the Cold War? Who started it? Students in general seemed content to spread the blame around, or basically to split it between the US and the USSR. They both broke promises, one student said (Stalin broke his Yalta pledge to have an inclusive Polish government - I actually had cautioned students not to take that one very seriously; I think FDR and Churchill were just getting a fig-leaf from Stalin to hide the Polish shame, clearly a fait accompli in 1945, but that's just me - and America and Britain misled Stalin about their willingness to open a major second front in western Europe in 1942). Well, OK. Other students saw more blame on one side than the other - some seemed to share this view a bit sheepishly. We talked about the "He started it. No, he started it!" quality of some of the recriminations over the Cold War's origins. Childish, perhaps. In most seemingly intractable conflicts (think of Israel-Palestine) there is this tendency by each side's advocates to locate the original sin on the other side, and hence disputes are endless over when to date the conflict's beginning. It seems like you can always find some anterior offense on the other side, if you're willing to go back far enough.

Apparently NRK, Norway's national public television service, broadcast Oliver Stone's ten-part history of the United States last year. The student who mentioned this, a rather leftish sort, said he thought it let Stalin off a bit easy. So that says something. Haven't seen it myself.

Here are some of our leading cast members for this week. These were two of Harry Truman's four Secretaries of State. (Yes, bonus points for naming the other two, please don't use Wikipedia.) On top, General George Marshall, not yet in mufti, looking a bit dour. But didn't he always? I love the story about him meeting Truman for the first time, after Truman became president - maybe this isn't true, but it's a great story, I sure hope it's true. Truman said, I hope I can call you George. Marshall said, Call me General. You gotta love this guy. Below is Dean Acheson, the original stripey-pants diplomat with a fake British accent - credit to Joe McCarthy for that description (more on this next time). If anyone authored America's Cold War, it was Acheson, I suppose, with an assist from Marshall. But then, perhaps we really should credit Truman, who chose both these men.

Did America merely react to Soviet aggression in the late 1940s? Is that why the wartime alliance of odd ideological  bedfellows broke down? Did the United States wish to withdraw within its own borders in 1945 - it did demobilize its uniformed person-power quite rapidly after war's end, after all - or did American leaders actually have big plans for a global role and a far-ranging security perimeter in 1945? I do think these questions matter, and historians don't all tell the tale in the same way. McMahon does an exemplary job of summarizing the important insights of different interpretive camps. He points out that the US, beyond emerging as by far the stronger of the two great powers in 1945 in virtually all essential ways, had very big plans for an expansive, indeed global, security role for itself in the postwar period. Both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were to be American lakes, and that was just for starters. Yet other authors persist in depicting the US as almost entirely reactive in its foreign policy in the late 1940s. Grasping the reality, the nature, and the extent of aggressive plans and moves by both US and USSR in these years is crucial to a clear understanding of why the Cold War broke out. Stalin was definitely aggressive. But it is also true that Soviet aggression was geographically limited, basically to a belt of countries that had land borders with the USSR (plus a couple more further away, Czechoslovakia primarily). Lots of land borders.

Consider this map:

Now, I'm not sure what this highlighted stretch of territory from Bangladesh to Scotland is supposed to convey, exactly. But it is handy for my purpose, which is to show Iran, Turkey, and Greece on a map, along with the larger geographic context of Europe, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Central Asia. The first three Cold War conflicts came in 1946-7: in Iran - where Stalin had an army camp out and refused to leave, as he had pledged, until diplomatic pressure got him to withdraw; in Turkey, where Stalin tried to threaten Ankara into renegotiating a treaty governing Russian rights in the Dardanelles, which gave the Soviet navy access to the Mediterranean; and in Greece, where Stalin kept out of the civil war between monarchists and Communists, just as he had promised Churchill he would, but where Yugoslav aid to the Greek Communists had Britain and the US badly worried about a victory by indigenous Communist forces. The Turkish and Greek crises led Truman to go to the Congress and ask for money for a global fight for "freedom" after the British told the US that they were out of money and couldn't continue as the sugar daddies for the Greek monarchists and the Turkish government. Then it was off to the races.

Consider the location of Iran, Turkey, and Greece on the map. Contiguous countries, together they have a geographic integrity that is rather suggestive. Or is it just a coincidence? Each of these three conflicts was quite distinct, even if to some Americans (probably not to those in government) they formed a single crisis brought on by Soviet aggression.

Consider this map, of the British dominion between the world wars:

If you could zoom in on the right-hand side of this map, what pattern would you see? The British imperium, or much of it, ringed the Indian Ocean basin - the Indian Raj, of course, but also Burma and Malaya, then Australia and New Zealand to the southeast; in the other direction, various bits of Arabia and the Levant - I also might have shaded Saudi Arabia in red, frankly - along with much of East Africa. Before the First World War, the Ottoman Empire had been known as "the sick man of Europe." It was running on fumes, its days were numbered - its territories were ripe for plucking. After the war, Britain and France did the plucking, at least in the Asian provinces. Well, wasn't Britain the new sick man of Europe in 1945? Despite Churchill's lingering imperial pretensions, his country was soon to give up most of its empire, fighting to keep it only in Kenya and Malaya. The Greece-Turkey-Iran tier appears as a gateway to the petroleum deposits of the Middle East (as my students volunteered). It also separated the USSR from Britain's vital control over the eastern Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, its gateway to its eastern colonies. In a broader sense, this zone of immediate postwar conflict was the buffer between the USSR and Britain's Indian littoral empire, which was near to toppling right after the Second World War. What if the Soviets could move in on Britain's empire the way Britain and France had moved in on the Ottomans'? Hence, perhaps, the full strategic importance of this first zone of conflict.

Oh, and by the way - there are two essential things to understand about the Truman Doctrine, which Truman announced in order to justify his request for Greek and Turkish aid.

#1. It meant that the United States was willing to intervene in other countries' civil wars. (Recall the deep reluctance to do so in Spain during the 1930s, when it was a question of a rightist insurgency against a legal left-wing government.)

#2. It meant that the United States was claiming a global role for itself. It didn't mean that the US would intervene everywhere around the world. But it meant that the US might intervene anywhere in the world.

The stage was set for an expansion of the new conflict between the newly ascendant powers. Some observers, notably Walter Lippmann, thought as early as 1947 that the Cold War should be declared over. Europe was divided between a US and a Soviet sphere of control and influence, that wasn't going to change, and the two superpowers should reach an understanding that would insure peace. The face-off could be confined to Europe.

Didn't happen. More on that in two weeks.

(Answer to bonus question: Edward Stettinius and James Byrnes.)