Week 10: Slicing It Up

This week I began by offering a brief provocation about detente. But first a couple of pictures, because I just can't resist.

There's a Chinese restaurant (sort of Chinese-Thai) near my home in Minnesota that features a campy picture on some of its menus that, while it is not this exact picture, is pretty close:

That's Henry the K, Henry Kissinger - either the architect of US foreign policy in the early 1970s or merely Richard Nixon's instrument, depending on your view - with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing in 1972. "Nixon went to China." You've heard this one, yes?

Kissinger stuck around when Nixon had to resign in 1974 and Gerald Ford became US president. Ford and Kissinger did their best to continue the Nixon policy of relaxing tensions and finding common ground with the Soviet Union. Nixon's opening to China (i.e., the People's Republic, not the Republic of China - Taiwan - which Nixon sold out, as they said on the Republican right) was intended partly to make the Soviets really, really want to make progress on relations with the US on a strictly bilateral basis, lest the US and the PRC gang up on the Soviets. Triangular diplomacy. Simple idea. It worked, too.

Here is an at-least-equally great shot of Ford in The Ultimate Presidential Fur Coat, along with Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and Kissinger in Vladivostok in 1974.

What could have been so compelling that it would lead the pride of Grand Rapids, Gerry Ford, to fly halfway around the world and dress up like a pimp for the cameras? That brings me back to my provocation.

Lovely idea, detente. A relaxation of tensions. I believe it was a metaphor for...the physical relaxation of tension in the string of a longbow. As the US-Vietnam War ground on to its inevitable conclusion in US defeat and Vietnamese victory (and no, with all respect to Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda, it was not a tie), Nixon built on the initial diplomacy of President Lyndon Johnson to move toward a mutual accommodation in the strategically important US-USSR relationship. This entailed placing some limits on the nuclear arms race. More intangibly, tensions were truly relaxed. The atmosphere of ceaseless crisis that had enveloped international affairs for 20-25 years lifted in the 1970s, for a time. People in the US and the USSR (and elsewhere) felt that a nuclear war, too horrible to contemplate really in very specific and realistic terms, became much less likely.

Is there another way to think of detente? Yes. Instead of an "East-West" process, simply a change in the superpower relationship, you can think of it in "North-South" terms. Were the US and the USSR not agreeing to a sort of superpower condominium - dividing up the world into sectors or spheres of influence, agreeing there was no reason to fight? There was plenty for them both.

Nixon and Brezhnev, looking awfully pleased with themselves. How would detente have looked from, say, Cuba or Chile? Hm.

This took us back to the American war in Vietnam, as well as various interventions, overt and covert, within the Western Hemisphere in the 1960s and 1970s. At the very same time that detente was springing forth from Washington, DC, the United States continued to muck about in the Third World. As did the Soviet Union, in its own, more geographically limited way. But since the US took the initiative in detente, it's perhaps a tougher and more important question to ask:

Why still with the interventions? Really, how do you make sense of the "two Nixons"? He ran for president in 1968 saying there was a "new Nixon." But the Old Nixon and the New Nixon occupied the Oval Office at the same time. Old Nixon destabilized Salvador Allende in Chile any way he could think of and green-lighted the golpe against Allende by Augusto Pinochet in 1973. (Extra credit question: On what date in the calendar was Allende overthrown?)

Let's consider the US-Vietnam War and how it ended again. It ended with terrible scenes like this one, as US citizens and those who had worked with them in their counterrevolutionary, nation-building effort in "South Vietnam" (see last week's post for my fixation on those quote marks) tried like hell to get out of the country in 1975.

There are only so many seats on the helicopter. Really not good.

I asked my students, What were the results of the US defeat? A new sense of realism in US policy, said one, meaning that the US now thought about the limits of its power to intervene militarily with success abroad. The Vietnam syndrome, another offered. Also a good answer. Calling it a "syndrome" was a masterpiece of propaganda if ever there was one. A syndrome is a disease, something you surely wish to be rid of. Most people who "suffered" from this syndrome thought it was a fine thing. They were a lot more reluctant to see the US make war in the Third World than they had been before Vietnam. Bully for them.

So. If the Vietnam War led to a new realism in US foreign policy, a new focus on what US strategic interests really were and were not - which, essentially, meant rolling back the globalizing tendency in the Cold War that got its start rhetorically in the Truman Doctrine and took concrete shape starting with the Korean War - then why in the world continue to overthrow reformist regimes in the Caribbean and Latin America? What was so important to the US about the Dominican Republic that Lyndon Johnson invaded it in 1965 to keep Juan Bosch, who had been elected and overthrown there, from returning to power? Why support a golpe in Brazil in 1964? And why Nixon's fixation with Allende (an avowed Socialist, unlike the others overthrown by the US or with US support in this period, but surely committed to Chile's democratic and constitutional system)?

Students were puzzled. So, perhaps, is Stephen Rabe, whose rich accounts of these events students have read. Rabe emphasizes the US determination, under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, to see "No more Cubas" in the Western Hemisphere. But he doesn't probe much deeper about US motives in this period. Even if US policymakers were afraid of democratic regimes leading to revolutionary regimes (does it ever really work like that?), you need to ask what strategic threat a second Cuba in Latin America would have posed to the US, in a new age of realism. And did JFK, LBJ, and RMN really, truly believe what they said about the likelihood of more Cubas? I don't know, honestly. Possibly intervening in the Western Hemisphere, at least after the Vietnam War really went bad, was some compensation. At least the US could still flex its muscle in its "backyard." Sad to think it could have come down to this. Students were a bit skeptical of such a psychological explanation, god love 'em.

 Answer to extra credit question: 11 September. Until 2001, when people mentioned "11/9" (as they would, putting the date first and the month second, everywhere outside the US), they were talking about Allende's overthrow. The latest scholarship seems to indicate that, after Pinochet's forces bombed and overran the presidential palace in Santiago, Allende killed himself rather be taken alive.

Weeks 8-9: The Challenge of Nationalism - Success and Failure

I decided to blog about the past two class sessions at once, since they form a kind of diptych. First we explored the successful U.S. covert operations that overthrew elected governments in Iran in 1953 (that one in cooperation with Britain) and in Guatemala in 1954 (all ours). That was last week. This week - failure. Cuba and Vietnam.

Of course this is supposed to be provocative. One country's success is another's failure, and vice-versa. No one seems to have any difficulty understanding that. But from the U.S. perspective, the lessons of 1953-54, when the new Eisenhower administration acted boldly and aggressively, were that the United States could decide who would rule in countries around the world, that it could do so with quite a low investment of resources, and that it could do so while effectively denying that America had overthrown anyone. It was the Iranians and the Guatemalans! Think about how confident Eisenhower must have been in 1955, specifically about the Third World. We could handle that. No problem.

You might smile too if you were him. All upside, no downside, minimal expense. That's how it looked to Ike.

To Iranians? Well, maybe not so good. Goodbye, Mossadegh.

Welcome back, Shah. Sorry you skipped town for a short while.

And Guatemala? Even grislier. Hundreds of thousands ultimately killed by the regime inaugurated by the U.S. coup there.

And, really, why? My students agreed that, in a way, these regime overthrows seem a little puzzling. Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran were nationalists who were supported by Communists in each country - but no one even seems to claim today that they were Communists themselves. Did Eisenhower truly fear that they would welcome Soviet influence? Or was the U.S. simply hostile - really, really hostile - to Arbenz's redistribution of fallow land and Mossadegh's nationalization of Iranian petroleum? We read in Peter Hahn's book on the U.S. in the Middle East during the Cold War, Crisis and Crossfire, that the U.S. was willing to countenance a new, more equitable split of the proceeds from Iranian oil with the Iranian government - after getting rid of Mossadegh. And, according to Hahn, this is probably what Mossadegh was after in the first place. So...why take the radical step of overthrowing him? An interesting question.

We had a stimulating class discussion about whether it is socialist or revolutionary for a government to nationalize its precious resources, e.g., oil. I learned a thing or two about the Norwegian government's relationship to Statoil, the Norwegian oil company. But, long story short, students here in Oslo don't seem to think it's all that radical, and certainly not so unreasonable, for a government to assert national sovereignty of some kind over its oil. Now, of course, this is Norway. But I'm guessing this is a fairly common view in a lot of countries with oil and gas. We talked about whether the U.S. is the outlier on this issue of public vs. private control. But I noted that the U.S. government does own an awful lot of land and the resources under it, especially in the western states.

Perhaps Eisenhower didn't think through all that carefully why he found it so all-fired important to get rid of Mossadegh and Arbenz. And perhaps there is another, rather simple - if shocking - reason why Eisenhower overthrew these two governments.

Because he could.

Does this sound ridiculous? Maybe. Then again, the U.S. in the mid-1950s was feeling its oats. It really was. Eisenhower saw the CIA just sitting there, ready for action, he saw these nationalists - one in the "American lake," i.e., the Caribbean Basin, the other sitting on top of huge oil deposits - acting kind of uppity, and maybe he thought, Why the hell not? I don't need to come to terms with these people. Low cost. Potentially big upside.

Whatever you think the true reasons were, the result was an even greater sense of U.S. confidence that Washington could just decide who would rule in almost any place it chose to exert itself in the Third World. Americans were getting used to thinking of themselves as responsible for political outcomes everywhere, such that it could become politically effective to argue for armed intervention (overt or covert, publicly or only within government offices) by charging that if we did not intervene, we were responsible anyway for the outcome, possibly for an outcome we would not like. Action and inaction were equivalent. This was the ethical logic of global "responsibility," as it was called by theologians of empire like Reinhold Niebuhr (sorry - that's how I see him). And yes, it is still with us today.

Now, did this lead to Vietnam? Of course it did. Eisenhower made the most fateful decision of any U.S. president in the whole sorry history of that American war when he resolved, in 1954, to prevent the implementation of an international agreement to unify Vietnam under a single government. It would have been a Communist government. But no one would have expected America to have prevented this, since the U.S., while it had funded the French War in Vietnam that ended in 1954, had not been fighting the war. Eisenhower had to do absolutely nothing - just sit still and let the Geneva Accords take effect - and the U.S. never would have fought a war in Vietnam.

Easy to say in hindsight, eh? To be sure.

Ike did not, surely, foresee what would come in Vietnam. This was right after Iran and Guatemala. Why the hell not? Send in a small CIA team, find a guy we can support, try to lop off half the country permanently as a pro-American bastion. A small investment. Low cost. Potentially big upside. What's the worst that could happen?

Well, there he is, Ngo Dinh Diem, the Miracle Man of Asia, our man in Saigon. He really was U.S. policy up until John Kennedy decided to get rid of him in 1963, just before Kennedy himself was murdered.

I asked students this week, after they had read a very good, detailed summary of the US-Vietnam conflict in Arc of Empire by Hunt and Levine, if they found anything especially surprising.

Right off the bat: Didn't realize JFK was so gung-ho on the whole Vietnam thing.

(Sigh.) I've heard it many, many times. Some students thought Kennedy wanted to get out of Vietnam (some had seen Oliver Stone's JFK), while others just hadn't realized the US was so involved there so early in the 1960s. Yup. Not much different than the reactions I would expect from American students.

Kennedy, of course, ran hard against Richard Nixon in 1960 from Nixon's right on foreign policy issues. The Communists are stealing a march on us in the Third World, he said. We need to take the fight to the enemy, not just sit back and stockpile nuclear weapons. Why haven't you done something about Cuba ("Cuber")?

If there was anything Kennedy was more obsessed with than scoring a victory in Vietnam (I try to avoid saying "South Vietnam," since there was never any such country; I explained to students that, in Vietnam as in Korea, there were two rival regimes, each of which laid claim to sovereignty in the whole country), it was getting rid of Castro.

That didn't work out as Kennedy planned (although he very smoothly spun the Missile Crisis into a triumph of his leadership).

Let's step back a little. If the US succeeded in overthrowing governments in the Third World in the 1950s, why did it fail in Cuba and Vietnam in the 1960s? (In the case of Cuba it was trying to oust Castro, just like Arbenz; in Vietnam, it was trying to do something rather different, push Diem in, but it was still trying to defeat the revolutionary nationalists in half the country).

I put this question to my students. They came up readily with a couple of answers. One: the Cuban and Vietnamese regimes had stronger popular support than Mossadegh and Arbenz. Two: the Cubans and Vietnamese, and especially the Vietnamese, had important outside support that Mossadegh and Arbenz lacked.

Both reasonable answers. Take them in reverse order. Outside support: Hunt and Levine stress the importance of Chinese and Soviet support for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Overall, taking Korea as well as Vietnam into account, they sometimes seem to equate China's rise with America's declining power in East Asia (as they depict it). When you compare Vietnam and Korea to the US war in the Philippines and all the subsequent counterinsurgency warfare in the latter country, you see a sharp contrast in terms of outside support. The Filipino insurgents, whether in 1899 or 1946, really had none. The isolation of an island nation meant that even if they'd had outside sympathizers, getting material support to them would have been a challenge. But the main thing is there wasn't any on offer. The DRV had a secure rear border with China and had solid back-up from China as well as, at least intermittently, the Soviets. Not that the DRV got a lot of material support from outside in the early going after 1945, but it did grow with time. And the US clearly was well aware, especially after Korea, of the dangers of greater Chinese involvement in a US-Vietnam war. The Chinese sent the US warnings about this through intermediaries. And, basically, all you needed to do was look at a map to realize the possibilities. This points up all the more clearly Eisenhower's - and Kennedy's - hubris in jumping into Vietnam feet first. And no, I'm not letting Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon off the hook. But I never can get over my feeling that it would have so much easier for Kennedy or Eisenhower to have made a different choice in this matter. Really, who would have cared? But I'll climb down off my soapbox.

What about the first factor mentioned - popular support? Mossadegh and Arbenz had plenty of support in their countries. But they weren't revolutionaries, and they weren't leading revolutionary states. Their peoples were not mobilized in the way Cubans and (revolutionary) Vietnamese were in the 1960s. The kind of near-total mobilization of a revolutionary state, putting society on a permanent wartime footing, is an essential dimension of what it means to live in a revolutionary environment. Arm the people, keep them ready to repel an invasion. These were some of the lessons that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara took from the coup against Arbenz, as Stepen Rabe points out clearly in The Killing Zone, which my students also have been reading, an excellent, very detailed history of US-Latin American relations during the Cold War. The DRV, of course, was mobilized from their 8-9 years of war with France. I'm sure they were anguished beyond words at the thought of going through that all over again with the Americans. But they knew how. It would take more than a CIA-funded mob in the capital to depose a government, or install one, in these cases. Some things had changed in various parts of the Third World. Washington, unfortunately, had difficulty recognizing how much had changed.

Week 7: The Cold War Goes Global

Yeah, global a-go-go. All kidding aside, the Cold War - goes the argument - could have been contained, pun intended, to Europe by 1949. The US-allied and USSR-controlled blocs there had gelled, through force and local desire both, and were stable. From the US point of view, the danger of the Italian elections had passed, with lots of covert (or barely covert) American involvement, and the attachment of a unified West Germany to the emerging NATO alliance was looking good. From the Soviet view, Poland and Czechoslovakia appeared well under control, and what we came to call East Germany was some small consolation, at least, for their West German losses (see Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line for all the details you could want). Stalin was no longer pushing in Iran or Turkey.

Why did the Cold War at just this time escalate into an - at least perceived - world conflict of terrible urgency and increasing danger? Could it not have deescalated into a great-power understanding at exactly this time? This was the question for this week's class.

Before going further: I distributed midterm course evaluation forms at the end of this week's class session. This works differently in Norway than in America. Characteristically, there is a far more casual attitude toward student confidentiality in Norway. The forms (produced by the department staff) ask just a few obvious, open-ended questions about the course and instructor. Students will do further evaluations at semester's end. But I do not, as in the US, deputize a student to collect the anonymous forms in an envelope, which said deputy seals and deposits in a locked box somewhere on campus. No, I just collect the forms from the students. I did tell them not to sign them, and I left the room for a short while to give them a comfortable, professor-free environment in which to record their thoughts.

So I was able to read the forms right after class. The take-away? Students like the class. (Yay!) But the most common suggestion for improvement: More time for discussion. Less me, more them. (Although students do like the PowerPoints.)

So, next time - less me, more them. I'll try to keep my own presentation shorter. As I suspect many who teach this course know, when you get to the start of the Cold War, there is an awful lot of material you feel you need to cover. Next week, a little more relaxed. But I will try to start afresh here and not go on for too long.

OK, back to the question. Why the expansion and escalation of the Cold War into what appeared a global death-struggle around 1949-50?

I'd say there are two answers to this question. One focuses on the surface, the other on deep global forces. Here's what I mean:

The surface answer: It's very important. I don't mean this is a superficial answer. But it concerns things that every sentient adult in the United States probably knew about in 1950. In 1949, The USSR detonated an atomic bomb. That same year, the Chinese Communist party achieved victory in their country's civil war, driving the defeated Guomindang, allies of the US, to Taiwan (or Formosa as Americans often called it). These were the events that led Joseph McCarthy to say that there were traitors within the US - only the assistance of such American turncoats could explain such achievements by Russian or Chinese Communists. That's what McCarthy said. He was kind of a johnny-come-lately to the whole Communists-in-government issue (long story). But he put on a good show, and he summarized the charge of conspiracy pretty sharply.

These were serious blows to American perceptions of the world situation and America's place in it. The Communists actually beat our guys in China?  Even that nice lady who is friends with Clare Booth Luce? Yeah, they did. And the loss of the US atomic "monopoly," however much it was hastened by espionage and however inevitable it was regardless of exactly how long it took, was disturbing. You can say it wasn't as meaningful strategically as it seemed, since the US wasn't about to attack the USSR in 1948 - and the US proved willing to go to war elsewhere, even against forces supported by the Soviets - so the deterrent effect of the Soviet bomb maybe wasn't such a big deal, really. But you can see how it would seem like it was.

Then, in 1950, Kim Il Sung's forces in the DPRK ("North Korea") invaded - or should I say "invaded," since, as Bruce Cumings writes at some length, neither the US nor anyone else recognized the 38th parallel as an international border - the ROK ("South Korea").

That's Kim on the right. In this case a poster is better than any photograph could be, don't you think? On the left is Syngman Rhee, Kim's counterpart in the ROK.

Did Harry Truman and Dean Acheson overreact by taking the country quickly to war over Korea? It's easy to say "yes." Everyone and his cousin knows that Acheson had said only recently that Korea wasn't important to US national security. Of course people said after the "invasion" (OK, last time for the quote marks) that Acheson had caused Kim's aggression with his statement - which probably made him and Truman feel like they really needed to do something. But go to war? Oy. 38,000 Americans dead, hundreds of thousands of Koreans and Chinese. And no, I do not think that life in the DPRK has ever been a picnic. But there is more to the story. I guess I can't get into it in detail. But suffice it to say that most Americans, I'd wager, didn't even know in 1950 that the United States Army had ruled "South Korea" from 1945 to 1948. There was a good deal of conflict and repression during that time in the South.

Let's cut to the chase. Korea immediately became a test of US credibility. That's right - the argument of last resort came out quickly. Once the Korean war was fully on, and once it was Americans versus Chinese on the ground, with Russians pretty involved (even flying fighter jets) - well, it was the first full-scale proxy war of the Cold War, in East Asia, and it put both that part of the world and the Cold War in a new light. Everything was illuminated, everything was global.

The second, deeper answer to the question of why the Cold War went global was: decolonization. How was the US going to respond to the unstoppable wave of political independence that was sweeping South and Southeast Asia beginning in the 1940s? How would the US view the nationalists taking power from Pakistan to Indonesia to Korea? Unfortunately, the Cold War provided a too-ready lens through which to view these historic changes and the attendant conflicts.

I do want to keep this brief. What did the Cold War lens do to American perceptions of world events? A few answers:

1. It DID NOT make Americans see Communist aggression where there was none. There was Communist aggression, certainly in some places and times. You can quibble about whether to call it that, but it's descriptive enough.

2. It DID make Americans exaggerate the strategic significance of conflicts that had little relevance to US national security. Korea, case in point. You can make a moral argument for going to war if you like, but that's a separate issue. American leaders, given the global framing they gave to the Cold War starting about 1950, really seemed almost to have no capacity to make distinctions between vital theaters of conflict and peripheral theaters.

3. It DID make Americans filter out complications. Aggression by our own allies? The legacy of colonialism? The local sources of conflict and radicalism? Fuggeduboudit. None of that matters. It's all because of the Soviets, and maybe the Chinese too. If it weren't for them - no "problems" in Korea, not "problems" in Vietnam. You get the idea.

OK, that's the bottom line. Next week, less talk, more listen.

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