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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